by Dakota Banks
“You can call him the Great Pumpkin if you want. Where he is, names aren’t needed.”
Amaro Reese, another of Maliha’s assistants, was a computer specialist. She’d saved his life and his sister Rosie’s life when they were in danger from a gang in Rio de Janeiro. Amaro discovered that he had a knack for working with computers, and now had a business breaking into the supposedly secure computer systems of large corporations and governments. They paid him to find the weaknesses in their systems, and Amaro never disappointed them. Or maybe he did disappoint them by the ease with which he penetrated their computer security. Amaro was a world-class hacker.
“You get some rest, and I’ll start checking out Arnie. Maybe Amaro can come up with something on the key,” Hound said.
“Is he staying here?”
“He’ll be here in two or three days. Oh, and Jake’s called several times. He left a message that he’ll be traveling for a few days.”
“Working?”
“Yes.”
Maliha sighed. It seemed like there was nothing to do for a while. She and Jake had a pact that there was no return contact when one person was working because of the dangerous situations that might be interrupted. Since Jake was Ageless, she didn’t worry about him when he was out of touch—he should be able to handle anything that came up in his work.
Lately, time for reflection hadn’t been bringing her peace. She’d been missing workouts, too. She’d been hoping Jake would be available to talk and bring her dinner.
Hound hugged her, avoiding touching her sore back. He didn’t release her right away, and she felt a hardening in his groin pressed against her. She pushed him back.
“How’s Glass doing?”
“Off on a food drop in Africa someplace. She won’t be back for another three weeks.”
“I see. You think we can fool around because she’s on a mission.”
“Crossed my mind.”
Maliha pulled away. “Good night, Hound.”
“Jesus, woman . . .”
Maliha closed the door to her suite, cutting off Hound’s lament. In her private, soundproofed area, she opened her weapons case and spread everything out on the bed. Each blade was inside a locked case. She inspected everything carefully, and all were freshly oiled and gleaming. She was satisfied.
Skipping a shower to keep Hound’s treatment of her back dry, she got in bed and pulled fresh, cool sheets up to her neck.
I’d rather be out there with Hound. No, scratch that. I wouldn’t want to hurt Glass. This “good girl” business doesn’t come easily.
She sighed into the darkness. Good girls sleep alone. Where’s Jake when I need him?
Just before falling asleep, she remembered the box that Chick had given her. She retrieved the box, got a knife, and cut its well-taped edges. Inside was Arnie Henshaw’s service cap, with the shiny black brim. There was blood, lots of it. Her eyes fastened on the note pinned to it: The first one rests in peace. Or is that pieces?
She slipped on a robe and called Hound into her bedroom.
“Change your mind?” he said. “You’re not wearing anything under that. . . .”
“Oh, shut up. Arnie’s dead.”
She held out the box with the cap. He took it from her and examined everything, including the note.
“Nothing like a murder to spoil the mood,” he said.
“It’s terrible. Why send this to me when it’s too late for me to do anything to help Arnie?”
“Fuck. I guess Arnie was considered expendable to send you a message.”
“That’s what I think too. But what’s the message?”
Chapter Three
It was hours later that Maliha made it back to bed, after she and Hound put together a plan to investigate Arnie’s death. She tried to set aside the sad event and instead started thinking of Jake. She pulled his pillow over and hugged it, thinking she could at least imagine his presence. A vague scent of her Ageless lover remained on the pillow, and she drew in a deep breath to hold it inside her. It was comforting and drew her thoughts further from Arnie’s seemingly senseless death.
Jake Stackman was an immortal assassin beholden to the demon Idiptu, but he claimed that Idiptu had long ago lost interest in giving Jake assignments. That contrasted sharply with Maliha’s demon, Rabishu. In Jake’s case, he had no reason to rebel, since he had all the advantages of being Ageless without a demon interfering in his life. She talked to Jake about it, and he made it clear that he wasn’t going to walk the mortal path with her for the sake of some point of ethics. He enjoyed his immortality, great speed, and nearly instantaneous healing, and he argued that he might be of more use to her in her quest with his abilities intact. She had to admit there was logic to that.
Since when has logic been an element of love? Or am I so out of practice I don’t even recognize love anymore?
Maliha had been married once, over three hundred years ago in the American colonies. Then she’d been accused of witchery and treason, and given the special punishment of being burned at the stake. In the Salem witch hysteria, witches were hung, but in her case, she was also accused of planning to kill her husband to use his blood in her heinous practices. Lies, all of it. But the townspeople, her good friends, and even her husband turned against her in a trial during which she was gagged to prevent her from uttering curses.
Tied to the stake with the fire snapping at her toes, a demon’s offer of immortality was too good to resist. After that, she’d taken up the Ageless way of life, killing on demand, gathering wealth, and enjoying sex on her whim and her terms with men, from kings and sheiks to the blacksmith who shod her horse. If her partner grew too attached, she moved on. Lasting love wasn’t in her behavioral repertoire.
After rejecting the demon’s control, Maliha became a mortal with benefits. It took her fifty years to learn how to reach out in friendship. Falling in love with a man was a lot harder.
Not so much the falling part, just the trusting part. I love Jake, at least I think I do. But . . . there’s always some worry in the way. He still kills, according to his moral code, which he won’t clearly explain. He won’t give up immortality—isn’t that selfish? There are things he won’t talk about, and all he’ll say is that they have something to do with his moral code. Can I live with that? I’ve already trusted him with my whole story but there might always be things hidden from me. He can keep his job secrets at the DEA. They’re not what are bothering me.
And then there’s Lucius.
Bits of their brief time together flitted through her mind. The crossbow bolt Lucius shot through her shoulder . . . the shimmering of his armor in the moonlight . . . their first kiss in a dark alley after he’d saved her life . . . the bloody heart outline he’d carved on a tree for her in the wilds of Ethiopia. She’d thought he was her true soul mate. Lucius was in his demon Sidana’s private Underground. Even if she collected all the shards and destroyed the demons, she had no idea how to retrieve a person from a demon’s fortress in hell. Wasn’t it likely that when she snuffed out a demon, everything the demon possessed would disappear with him in a puff of smoke?
Sidana owns Lucius for eternity. I love Lucius as my one true love, my soul mate. But he’s a shadow now, a dream I can’t touch. No soul mate for me here in the Great Above, but there’s Jake. As long as I keep Lucius locked inside my heart . . . Why not? I could be normal with Jake. He talks about a house in the mountains and kids. . . .
She hugged the pillow to her chest and let the tears flow, and was finally able to sleep.
She woke just a few hours later with the rest of the condo quiet. Hound was either gone or resting, so she took some time to work on her latest book in the Dick Stallion series, Hot and Bothered. The books were something she’d taken up to have a visible means of support. Maliha had accumulated wealth over quite a few normal lifetimes: precious metals and gems, art, collectible items, and investments. Still, she liked to have a job that explained away at least the tip of the iceberg of her v
ast wealth. The Dick Stallion books were designed like pulp detective fiction from the 1930s, down to the garish covers and the cheap, yellow paper. To her surprise, they became wildly popular, and she couldn’t write them fast enough to keep up with the demands of her agent and publisher.
In this passage, Dick had gratuitous sex with an airline attendant somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, unaware that the attendant was a recruiter for an international sex ring of bored housewives. She reported him to the Guiltless Orgasm Society as a candidate. After deplaning in Paris, he proceeded with his improbable adventure of saving the kidnapped daughter of a fabulously wealthy philanthropist while evading the Paris chapter of GOS.
Later, she removed Hound’s bandage and took a shower. She adjusted the spray as hot and hard as it would go, sending liquid needles into her injured back. It was painful but in a good, cleansing way. Then she turned her face up to the water and accepted the pummeling for unspecified sins past and future.
Wrapped in a thick cotton robe, Maliha went into the kitchen. She hadn’t eaten in a long time. There was a bag on the counter full of fresh croissants from Watson’s Bakery in the lobby area of her building.
“Thank you, Hound!”
“Hound didn’t bring them.”
“Yanmeng?”
“Guilty.”
She made some tea for the two of them and brought several croissants and a couple of plates over to the table.
Xietai’s blood is on my hands.
She picked up a croissant and began to eat it in her favorite fashion: by pulling off one tip and then gently unraveling it. No butter or jam. Watson’s Bakery made their croissants from scratch rather than using frozen ones, and the only thing wrong with these was that they were already an hour or two out of the oven.
“I’m sorry about the loss of your friend,” Yanmeng said.
Maliha nodded. She didn’t want to talk about it now.
“Yanmeng,” she said between mouthfuls, “do you believe in unconditional love?” It was her indirect way of asking how he felt about his son’s death at Maliha’s hands.
Yanmeng’s method of eating croissants was to bite them straight through, one end to the other, no mercy. He had a few flakes of pastry caught in his white moustache. The corners of Maliha’s lips turned up, until she remembered that this was a solemn conversation.
“No.”
There was an awkward silence. She’d hoped for more from him.
“You told me once that you loved me,” Maliha said. She’d been riding a camel at the time and had nearly fallen off, until Yanmeng made it clear he wasn’t talking about romantic love. “What did you mean by that?”
“I meant that you have earned my love, my respect, and my loyalty. I have given myself over to your cause. I would die for you.”
Maliha lowered her head. She couldn’t take the intensity of the look that Yanmeng was giving her, a look like an X-ray reading her inner truth. “Wouldn’t you consider that unconditional love, then?”
“No, because if you return to the service of the demon Rabishu and assassinate at his will, I would be betrayed.”
“You have my word I will never do that,” Maliha said.
“You are a worthy person, regardless of your past,” he said.
A few minutes passed during which Maliha unraveled another croissant. All of sudden it struck her that this was Yanmeng she was sitting with, Yanmeng who could already walk different planes of existence, Yanmeng who was on his way to joining the god Anu in the highest plane. She viewed his aura and was stunned at the beautiful white and gold light radiating from him. He’d progressed far since the last time she’d looked.
With a gasp, she bowed her head. “You honor me.”
He waved his hand. “We’re just two friends talking. And cut out that aura viewing. My wife Eliu says I already have a big head.”
“I killed your son.” Duh. He already knows that.
“You removed a scourge of evil from the world. Xietai betrayed Eliu and me a long time ago. What kind of son turns his parents in for death sentences to gain favor for himself with the government? Our love was broken!”
“Thank you for saving my life. I brought home something of his, a knife. Do you want it as a memento?”
Mixed emotions played across Yanmeng’s face. In spite of his words, pain showed in his eyes. “No. We’re finished talking about Xietai. Hound mentioned that you had some scraped skin on your back. I’ve got just the thing for it, some salve my grandmother used to make. Let’s take a look. I hope he didn’t mess anything up.”
The stars sang of adventure and Maliha’s ears were tuned to them. It had been three days since her arrival home, three days during which Hound and Yanmeng had alternated treating her back. The wound was healed enough by her standards, yet Yanmeng kept putting on gray gooey stuff that smelled like fish, and Hound kept washing it off in favor of antiseptic cream. Finally she mutinied and declared that no one would attempt to heal any part of her, ever.
Hound had nothing definitive to report about Arnie Henshaw.
“Arnie made few phone calls, most of them for food delivery. He’d purchased a one-way ticket to Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean. The building management said he’d given written notice two weeks before his disappearance, saying that he was retiring to some peace and quiet, no forwarding address given. Then he’d taken accumulated vacation days for the two weeks of his notice, so the day his resignation letter came in was the last day anyone saw him,” Hound said.
“I wonder what the rush was. If he’d been planning this retirement for a while, he could have worked the last two weeks,” Maliha said.
“He was within the letter of the regulations to pull that trick, but it was the act of someone not concerned about getting a good reference for his next place of employment. Someone retiring and leaving the country and his former life behind. Human Resources was concerned that they had no place to send his last paycheck.”
“They do know he’s dead, right?”
Hound sighed. “The police aren’t certain of that. Now they say it looks like Arnie needed to get out of the country fast and wanted people to think he was dead.”
“Meaning somebody was after him and he sent the hat and note to me himself. I can’t believe he wouldn’t have asked me for help if that was the case.”
“You might have it wrong. Maybe the bad guys made it look like you were the one after him. Arnie was too scared to approach you. He didn’t know who to trust.”
Maliha shook her head. “We’ve got to find him, if he’s still alive. Whatever his problem is, we can . . .”
“Make it go away?”
Maliha nodded. “Or find out who killed him and why.”
“One more thing. Arnie’s financial holdings were liquidated and sent to a private Swiss bank account.”
“Interesting. Maybe he really is out there, living off the grid,” Maliha said. “I’d sure like to think so. That note creeped me out, though. ‘The first one rests in peace.’ The only way I can interpret it is that there would be more deaths. Why would Arnie write that if he was behind this?”
Hound shrugged. “Who knows? To make a convincing disappearance. Say he was trying to make it look like a sociopath had written the note.” Hound latched onto a thought, his brows furrowing. “Maybe he is a sociopath.”
“Oh, I can’t believe that.”
“I’d be happy to hop down to Antigua to look around for him.” His face took on a hopeful look.
“I’m sure you would.” Hound’s smile disappeared. “Did Arnie actually board that plane or just buy a ticket as a ruse? Amaro’s coming in later. Let’s see what his electronic approach turns up.”
When Amaro arrived later that day, he brought news on the key Lucius had given her—the one that supposedly led to the hiding place of the third shard. The three friends pounced on the search for Arnie and the latest about the key, and that left Maliha with time on her hands until there was something actionable.<
br />
She decided to make herself useful.
She dressed wanting to be prepared for anything and opted for her leathers. She tied her hair in a thick braid, with a black silk scarf wound around her head. Flexing the skintight black gloves on her hands, she moved toward her weapons collection.
The cache was in a small room that served as an armory for the team. In her private haven, nine floors up, there was an entire wall devoted to displaying weapons openly. With the possibility of visitors down here, the goodies were locked out of sight.
She ran her hands over knives, swords, guns, and axes. The gleam of the two sai caught her eye. They were three-pronged edged weapons with the middle prong longer than the other two. She’d made leather sheaths for when she didn’t want to wear them tucked through her belt. Strapping them on her back, she was pleased that the handles didn’t show over her shoulders. From the front, she looked like an unarmed, though oddly dressed, woman.
Maliha was all curves and sharp edges, like a sexy porcupine. She went out through the main lobby faster than any human could run. Chick, if he was still on duty, would have to be broken in slowly to the idea of her leaving at night in this type of garb. Maliha slowed her pace as she ran along the lakefront. It was Friday night, a good time to visit nightclubs near Division Street. Her scene wasn’t the clubs, but the dark alleyways where muggers could lurk.
The temperature was mild for a December night, probably in the upper forties. It was 1:30 A.M., and the district was pulsing with life. Cabs turned the street into a traffic jam, accompanied by the shouts and gestures of cabbies with their windows open. The target of their animosity was generally the suburbanites who’d driven their cars downtown, but sometimes they railed at each other as one cab slipped in front of another with an inch to spare. Music poured from the crowded bars and bouncers managed velvet-roped lines. Maliha wouldn’t mind dancing, and she’d gone to a few of the clubs with her friend Randy Baxter. Randy was Maliha’s window into normality, a twenty-something friend who knew nothing about Maliha’s background. But Maliha only drank on rare occasions and almost never to the point of intoxication. The stakes were too high. She didn’t want a stupid accident or a slow response to land her in Rabishu’s hell forever, her quest overcome by a few giant margaritas.
