I nodded at Cross after checking the signatures. Everything was in order.
Her eyes flooded with relief as Cross dropped the sword from her throat.
Lucille rubbed her uninjured throat. “You and he are—”
“Leaving,” I said, grabbing Drake’s map—quite real, unlike the sword we’d just pawned off on her—from the wicker table. I nodded at Cross. “Right?”
“Nice doing business with you, Lucy.” Cross flashed a cocky smile as the goddess bristled from the nickname. “Don’t pick up that sword until we’re far away, yeah?”
Lucille clearly resented being told what to do, but she nonetheless abided by his instructions.
I followed him to the bike, my heart pirouetting in my chest.
He got on the back, and I gunned it out of there.
Four miles away, I cut the engine and turned to him, looking into his golden-flecked eyes.
“How long until she figures out the sword’s a fake?”
Cross said, “Doesn’t matter. She signed a contract for a sword. Not the Sword of Damocles. You know what they say, Eden.”
“What’s that?”
“Alcohol’s a hell of a drug.”
“No one says that.”
“Maybe they should. Because we just pulled off the heist of the century.”
My joy melted into a nervous unease my confidence in our con dissipated. “You can never be sure with a goddess.”
I felt his hand slide up my back, and I shivered. He came away with the map. “I’ll be keeping an eye on this from now on.”
When I tried to grab it back, he dodged my hand, and we both fell off the bike, me on top of him.
He said, “If I didn’t know any better, Eden, I’d think you were trying to kiss me.”
“Keep dreaming, buddy.” I pushed hard against his rib cage to get up. He let out a small oomph. Then I gave him the finger and said, “Hope you like walking.”
Then I sped off, leaving him in the wilderness.
Maybe after that, his penance would be complete.
To me.
Tamara was another story.
He’d have to sort out his past on his own—just like the rest of us.
46
The hospital’s pungent ammonia aroma brought back bad memories, but I sucked it up as I sat in the lumpy vinyl chair by Kai’s bedside. He’d made it through surgery and was now recovering—slightly doped up on meds.
A goofy grin clung to his normally staid lips as he slept.
I’d spent the past hour reading the Phoenix Protocol. It made for some interesting reading.
Interesting as in absolutely fucking terrifying.
The general rub, for those who’d like to be spared a PhD in forensic history—which should have been everyone, as far as I was concerned—was this. There had been a few documented cases where a phoenix had been stuck in the Elysian Fields.
When a guardian perished, it set off a lengthy vetting process for their successor. According to the historical record of previous guardian deaths—which totaled a whopping four since the invention of the written word—that process could take up to forty years. Normally, a phoenix from a neighboring region would take over duties while the usual phoenix was “indisposed” in the Elysian Fields.
But that wasn’t feasible due to Atheas’s remote location in the South Pacific. That left us on our own to deal with an overflow of undead bodies. In a couple rare instances, the sheer volume of bodies had overwhelmed the poor birds’ ability to ferry all the souls to the afterlife.
Normally, they could bring up to fifty for processing at one time.
During an epidemic, however, that limit became a big problem.
The example outlined over about ten pages was quite ugly: The Black Plague of 1346.
Apparently, the relentless pile-up of corpses—and corresponding souls—over the next seven years, when Europe’s population dipped by almost sixty percent, created a massive bottleneck. And the rise in lawlessness and criminality—such as the infamous plague riots—while historically attributed to general fear and panic, had a different root cause.
When all those people came back to life, hysteria ensued. Not just because the dead rose. But because they had been changed. Good people were unpredictable at best, violent and deranged at worse. But the truly corrupt?
Well, Deadwood was a prime example of that type of thing.
Making matters worse, the problem compounded at a relentless rate. Bad deeds led to more bodies, which led to more revived, crazy people.
Eventually, the insanity had spiked to such a level that the gods and goddesses in the Elysian Fields had practiced an extreme form of triage.
They’d torched entire plague areas.
When someone was ash, they couldn’t rise from the dead.
Hence the immolation tactic for times of extreme crisis. Atheas was nowhere near that, but Lucille wanted to be decisive. The revivals piled up on an approximately one day to one month basis. As in, for every day that passed without a phoenix present, a month’s worth of dead rose from their grave.
After two weeks, you were looking at roughly a year’s worth of resurrected corpses shambling around.
Stage one of the protocol was simple enough: Decapitate or burn the revived dead. If that became overwhelming, lock them in basements, prisons, and other sturdy locations until the phoenix returned to ferry their souls back to the afterlife. If things got out of control in the meantime, then immolation was the default end game.
A narrowly avoided end game, I might add.
Kai stirred, and I closed the file. “Hey. How you feeling?”
“Did we get them?” Always about the job, even after having his torso shredded.
I nodded. “Want me to fill you in?”
I’d been briefed by a pair of agents in the waiting room, since I’d shown up while he was still in surgery.
A grimace painted his lips when he tried nodding back.
So I rehashed the details of the case, him mostly listening—occasionally interjecting with a slightly doped-up huh. It was up for debate how much he’d remember, but I’m sure he’d be wading through paperwork for weeks after this shitshow, so it wasn’t like he’d miss out on critical details.
They’d caught Williams in her sedan. After a brief standoff, where she’d threatened to unleash the crows, she’d stumbled out of the car—delirious and exhausted—and surrendered, begging them not to hurt their daughter. The FBI had managed to get through the magical wards at Johns’s house—with Samantha Williams’s reluctant cooperation—and the basement had confirmed the rest of the story.
The short version of why they had done this was a sad tale.
Thomas Johns and Samantha Williams had been going out for a long time. She’d been a promising apothecarial sorceress, but had been derailed by a life of petty crime and drug abuse. Five years ago, they’d been busted. The jailhouse physical had shown she was pregnant. They had a daughter, Myra, and cleaned up their act. The white picket fence, all that.
Four months ago, the fairytale had ended. A tabloid reporter, blitzed on cheap whiskey and even cheaper cocaine, ran a stop sign after school. T-boned their car. Myra hadn’t made it.
They’d fallen apart, and she’d kicked Johns out after a month—and he’d moved to a bad part of town as punishment. But, a month later, during a night of drinking at the local watering hole, he’d run into Ferdinand Hall, who, after a few too many beers, had spilled about the Phoenix Protocol.
And now Johns had a way to get their little girl back.
Johns had gone to his now ex-girlfriend. It hadn’t taken any convincing; she was hurting too, and would do anything, consequences be damned. She’d located Deadwood through old magical contacts. They’d bought the rest of the Phoenix Protocol—studying every character on its seventy-three pages—and the syringes capable of holding the Turncoat Curse from Hall.
That they’d read each page perhaps a dozen times, and still decided they were justified
, chilled my blood. The ruthlessness didn’t track with their sweetly sad yearning for a second chance.
But I didn’t have kids, so maybe I couldn’t understand.
They’d tracked the guardian’s movements for weeks, waiting for the perfect time.
They’d even paid some faceless guy at the local PD a couple thousand bucks to scrub any record of their daughter, or their relationship, from the official file. It had worked: Kai and I had only discovered the link between them because of the matching theft charges.
And after everything was over, it would help them disappear back to the mainland—and live a normal life.
Deadwood had plunged the needle into Anya, but she managed to kill him before he could inject her with the entire curse. Realizing what had happened, she’d tied the same rock she’d used to beat him to death around her ankle, then leapt off the cliff.
Normally, an immortal being couldn’t die. But with the Turncoat Curse in her veins, the power of the deicide arcana was enough to make her vulnerable.
And she’d drowned.
Their plan had succeeded, but Deadwood had been killed out on the steppes and the guardian’s body had been discovered by the FBI before they could recover it. That had caused some complications, not least of all because Deadwood had come back a little crazy. But they’d decided to use him to solve another problem: their daughter’s mental state.
The protocol warned about such things, and they wanted to be prepared. A favor from a goddess could cure it, but there was a rumor—unsubstantiated, as with most underground magic—that a deity’s soul could craft a tonic capable of curing the effects.
Hence why, when Deadwood had returned to them, they had sent him after me. In pursuit of the guardian’s soul, which they—rightly—assumed I had reaped. After dropping Deadwood at the Golden Rabbit, they had returned to the outskirts and watched the proceedings. Seen the blood on my hands.
It was easy to connect the dots.
But things hadn’t gone as planned, and Deadwood had turned on them. With the walls closing in, they’d decided to leave the island and try to cure Myra on the mainland. She’d woken up hours before they’d ventured to the carnival.
Originally, they’d planned the event to happen in Johns’s warded basement. But they’d bolted—so it’d happened at some fleabag motel. Right after, Samantha left for the carnival to retrieve her magical stash. She didn’t keep it all in one place, in case of emergency. When shit hit the fan, though, she needed to pick up the valuables. They could be bartered in exchange for a healing potion.
Deadwood had interrupted. Johns had rushed over, Myra in tow, to protect his recently reunited family from any other unforeseen obstacles.
The ensuing carnage had been a scene for the ages.
A million plus in damage, some broken arms and legs, but—amazingly—no fatal injuries at the carnival.
Well, besides Thomas Johns. And Samantha Williams’s life was over, too—she was looking at a lengthy prison term. Their revived daughter was in the Feds’ protective custody, in a motel. Confused, somewhat delirious. But alive.
And she’d stay that way. I’d gotten word from Lucille that everything had been taken care of.
When I was finished, I smiled at Kai, genuinely happy he was still alive. He returned the expression with a goofy grin.
“How do you look so much better than me after getting shot, Eden?”
“All right, Casanova, calm down.” I reached over and turned down his morphine.
He caught my hand gently and turned my injured wrist over. The hospital’s nurses had redressed the wound. “I guess mine is worse.”
“Marginally.”
Kai winced as he sat up in the hospital bed. Gray light streamed through the room’s only window. A repeat soccer match played on the old television hanging from the ceiling.
The smile dissipated. “Almost feels bad solving this one, huh?”
“I worked things out.” I stretched my legs. The vinyl squeaked as I got up from the chair. It’d been a long story, and my butt was slightly numb from all the sitting.
“One question,” Kai said, watching me as I headed toward the door. “Why the hell did Deadwood kill Hall?”
“He was losing it at that point,” I said. “Just completely paranoid. Thought his associates were turning on him. Launched a preemptive strike.”
“Eden?”
“What?”
“Are you sure that little girl’s going to be okay?”
The unspoken question hung in the air along with the smell of bleach and sick. Would someone come to take her back to the dead? I said in a soft voice, “I took care of it.”
“And what did that cost you?”
Being honest for once, I said, “I don’t know.”
“Eden?” His voice was growing sleepy.
“What?”
“Thanks for saving my life.”
I burst out laughing, which wasn’t the appropriate reaction, but it struck me as funny. “Yeah, I guess you owe me dinner or something.” My ears turned hot when I realized what I’d actually suggested. “Uh, I gotta go.”
But Kai was already snoring.
47
I exited the hospital room. More like charged out of it, really—and I almost barreled into Rayna Denton in the hallway. As usual, she looked like a runway model. Maybe even better.
I smelled a press conference lurking somewhere.
I said, “You look pretty good for a drunk.”
Rayna glowered and said, “Where are you running off to, Hunter?”
“I was thinking about some light reading. Got this great journal I picked up recently.” I leaned in, dropping my voice to a whisper. “Just between you and me, the author’s kind of a bitch, though.”
She avoided the topic, although her burning eyes betrayed her true feelings. “I see the island is still standing. Barely.”
I refrained from saying, No thanks to you. “Kai’s recovering pretty well. You should go hang with him.”
“The phoenix returned.” Rayna raised one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “Know anything about that?”
Lucille worked fast.
I swallowed hard, thinking about how fast she’d move once she found out we’d ripped her off.
Probably the instant she sobered up.
On the plus side, that could be a while.
I said, “Guess Pebbles figured shit out.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. I gotta run.” I pushed past her, passing a row of half-empty vending machines.
Rayna called after me, “You can’t keep secrets from me, Hunter.”
But we both knew that wasn’t true.
Secrets and lies might not have been why the FBI had hired me.
But they were what had always kept me alive.
And damned if I’d throw that out for Rayna’s benefit.
Besides, watching her squirm was too damn fun.
When I got a chance, I’d have to snag a copy of her mugshot. That’d be one for the ages.
I shoved my hands in my jeans, feeling the perfect autumn night wash over my face. Everything was quiet.
I knew it couldn’t last.
But, for the first time in my life, I’d enjoy the tranquility until it disappeared like a wave drifting back to sea.
Nah. Who was I kidding?
I needed the excitement as much as I needed to breathe.
I texted Danny, asking if I could get in on a poker game at the Golden Rabbit.
After all, I’d never gotten that soul—at least not from him. Which meant he owed me a favor for catching that cheater.
I got the text back and smiled.
Game on.
Epilogue
I sat on my worn leather couch, surrounded by twenty-five grand and change. Rayna’s clinically boring but empirically useful journal was propped open to the second page, buried beneath the pile of cash. I’d tried diving into it, but one question distracted me, keeping me awake well past three
in the morning.
What the hell had Aldric been up to? Clamoring to get the souls early, warning us away from Ferdinand Hall. I’d cut the deal with him for the Phoenix Protocol drive, then radio silence.
Not that he’d keep me in the loop, but I’d also heard nothing from my network about any strange events on the island.
Which made me even more uneasy.
Shame Hall’s corpse had been turned to ash courtesy of Deadwood. If I could’ve grabbed the undertaker’s thumb, I would’ve rooted around the waterfront manufacturing facility for answers.
Because, as of right now, I had zero.
My phone buzzed on the ground.
It was a text message from Aldric.
A lone flame emoji.
Bizarre from a vampire warlord.
I stared at the little orange icon, trying to divine its secrets.
I received the explanation a minute later. But not from him.
Lucille breathed heavily into the phone as timbers cracked in the background of the call. “You have fucked with the wrong goddess, Reaper.”
“Remodeling?” I asked, my blood plunging a few degrees from the lethal edge in her voice. “You should really read your contracts better.”
This wasn’t about Cross and I ripping her off, though.
It was much worse.
Lucille unleashed an ear-shattering scream and then said, “You have burned everything I love. And for that, I will return the favor.”
The speaker beeped as the call ended.
I slowly removed the handset from my ear, putting the pieces together.
Aldric looking for Hall. Telling us to lay off. Wanting all the souls mere hours after the phoenix had disappeared from the island.
He had been making contingency plans of his own to protect his precious fiefdom from immolation.
And, if the sounds in the background of the ended call were any indication, Aldric had focused all those resources on one thing.
Burning down the Department of Supernatural Affairs’ headquarters.
An act of war, if there’d ever been one.
A jaguar bellowed in the chilly night, and I shivered.
Soul Fire (The Eden Hunter Trilogy Book 2) Page 23
