He regarded me with a pitying look then reclaimed his chisel and tapped the stone around her ear. “So Delatte wants to take your living soul and deliver it to Baron Samedi,” he said.
“The ti-bon-ange, he called it.”
“Yes.” He nodded slowly. “The part of the human soul that contains the source of personality and accumulation of a person’s knowledge and experience.”
“You know a lot about voodoo.”
“I make it a practice to understand all types of magic in this realm,” he said blandly.
“He said something unusual, that he could only contain a soul, but I could taste it.”
His hand stilled. He placed the chisel on the workbench. “Bokors have to perform rituals and sacrifices in supplication to the evil source you mentioned, so they’ll grant him power. He can take a soul, but it remains external to him.” He smoothed more dust off the ear. “Necromancers can take living souls and absorb them.”
I unstuck my tongue from the top of my mouth. “Absorb a soul?” My knee-jerk reaction surprised me. Not righteous denial, not a vehement—never!—but a dangerous curiosity. I had to pinch my lips with my teeth to stop myself from asking for more. He continued, anyway. He understood me better than I dared to understand myself.
“You strip the soul from a live person. The body remains an empty shell until the necro restores the soul.” He paused, regarding me for a long, thoughtful moment before resuming. “It was a way, in the beginning, for us to enter the human realm—the first demon possessions, so to speak—before we made the portal. Once the demon left the body, the necromancer returned the soul to its rightful owner. Of course, the longer the body lies without a soul, the more it decays.”
His explanation left me astounded. Demons had used necromancers to gain access to the human realm via possession. It was incredible. Why did no one ever tell me these things? They let me flop and flounder like a fish out of water. “How did necros learn to absorb souls?”
“Demons exchanged essence with the first necromancers . . . the Oracles.”
I stopped him with a raised hand. “Exchanged essence?”
“Malthus never explained demon essence?”
“No.”
He arched his brow in an expression of supreme annoyance. “Demons are born with and derive various types of essence. It gives us our power. For example, Portia can extract essence from pain. We can exchange it, give it to others, store it in vessels, bind it with other types of essence for different purposes. When the Oracles successfully assimilated our essence, we discovered it gave them the ability to remove souls from humans. Something we could not do.”
“What kind of essence did the necromancers assimilate?” I asked softly, fascinated and frightened by his explanations.
“Death.”
Of course. “Let me guess. The Death Cult, to which you belonged, was responsible for exchanging death essence with the Oracles who became necromancers. Is that what my power is? Death essence?”
He shook his head. “Necromancer power resulted when death essence combined with the supernatural powers of the Oracles. After we discovered what had happened, that we had essentially created necromancers, we also discovered that some of the more powerful ones could make more death essence from the living souls.”
He paused and a frisson of frightening realization shivered through me. Finally, important information. But if I pushed this door open, was I ready to cross the threshold?
Xavier stared at me for a brief moment, assessing my reaction. I gave him a nod to continue. “Our cult had essentially run out of death essence. We were a dying faction of demon society, and some would have preferred it that way. When we discovered that the human necromancers could generate new death essence from living souls, it changed everything for us. We could increase our power and, potentially, our population. Death essence also augments a necromancer’s power, allowing you to accomplish otherwise impossible feats.”
He stopped for another long moment. “You look pale,” he said, giving me a sympathetic smile.
“You’re basically telling me I come from a demon petri dish.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it, but not entirely untrue. The Oracles were supernatural beings. They could commune with the dead, but, yes, when we mixed in our death essence, it did give rise to a new supernatural species.” He bent closer to me. “You sure you’re all right?”
I opened my mouth, but all I could manage was a lame, “My head hurts.” Which it did.
He placed a hand on my head in a gesture of comfort, but suddenly, as if remembering something, he pulled back and turned away from me. “Our aims were pure, but some of the necromancers and demons developed a taste for the souls, and the death essence they transferred.”
“Did that include you?”
“The essence generated by the souls admittedly provided an addicting power rush, but I was more interested in the new supernatural beings we had created. I wanted to protect the human necromancers because I knew, once the other more traditional demons discovered your existence . . .”
“They would try to kill us. But it happened anyway. The genocide.”
“Yes, some necros and demons decided to harvest more souls, including supernatural ones.” He carefully folded the tools into a black cloth, then settled back on the stool, his gaze fixed on the bust of Colette. “Once the harvesting was discovered, a faction of demons allied with some of the supernaturals, like the vampires, to lead the genocide.”
He narrowed his eyes into distinctly sullen slits. “All this is inconsequential. Some in the demon realm used the genocide as an excuse to punish their enemies, fuel their pious crusade, whether they had engaged in harvesting or not. They viewed necromancers as perversions.” He pointed at my arm. “That’s why they marked you.”
I touched the small indentation on my shoulder. “Ivo?”
He nodded.
“Could he be the mastermind?”
His lips twisted into a smile. “Ivo enjoys his role as high inquisitor, but he is a fool. A dangerous fool, however.”
He shook his head and smiled at me, and something in his expression made me shift in my stool. Then he again looked at his creation. “You remind me of her. Your empathy for the dead, your beauty, your strength. Not all necros have the power born in them to acquire souls.” He gave the stone a gentle, loving caress. “I suppose it remains to be seen if you’re like all necros.”
Chapter Fourteen
I WALKED FROM Xavier’s place to the demon lair. It was a good half hour trek, but it gave me time to process what Xavier had revealed and prepare myself to face Malthus and Ewan with the truth.
I was basically a demon experiment.
Xavier and the Death Cult were the necromancers’ Prometheus, and when the necros went all soul crazy, Ivo decided to play Zeus. Every new explanation confused more than clarified and led to a whole new set of equations. Unfortunately, I sucked at algebra. And Colette. Holy shit. My mind was bouncing back and forth, trying to fit the puzzle pieces to form a coherent picture.
I might have the power to take a person’s living soul and make death essence. Whatever that meant.
Xavier’s explanation of demonic possession shed a comical light on religious and fictitious bile-spewing exorcisms. Some demons might have shared a good laugh when making their hosts speak demon to scare off a Spanish Inquisitor or Catholic priest, especially when possessions had nothing to do with satanic evil, but represented demonic expeditions into the human realm. The demons had rarely overstayed their welcome in the human’s body, but all that went to shit when souls became the new delicacy.
But what was Malthus’s role in the tragedy? As always, Xavier had held back, and usually everything hinged on those omissions.
I turned down the block dominated by the demon Victorian. When I climbed the front steps
to the lair, steering clear of the gargoyle, Gus opened the door before I knocked and ushered me upstairs, adding, with pointed nonchalance, that I’d find Ewan in the study. I thanked him with a small smile. Gus had definitely grown on me, especially after seeing his true demon form. His decrepit exterior no longer baffled me. He’d stuck his neck out by taking me to the demon realm, and I was glad to find him with it still attached to his wingless body.
I moved to step into the study and halted. My heart jumped erratically when I saw Ewan alone, sitting on the couch, tapping away on a laptop. He looked up from the screen and gave me the same sexy smile he’d offered me ages ago—or weeks ago, before the death, betrayals, and demon punishments. I smiled back. We had a long way to go before we could patch up the seeping gashes we’d clawed into each other. A sexy smile was a start. We continued to stare at each other, allowing ourselves to enjoy the moment, empty of pain or regret, before Malthus slid past me and sat next to Ewan on the couch.
I steeled my jittery nerves and plopped on the chair across from them. “The good news is I found Olive, and she’s no longer undead, just dead.” I tapped on the arm of the chair. “The bad news is I found out why I lost control of Olive.”
I paused to regard Malthus. He squeezed the leather cushion of the couch, a clear sign of worry. I was learning how to interpret his occasional blink, squeeze of hands, the almost imperceptible nod, giving me invaluable ammunition in dealing with him. I gave them the rundown on the Columbarium, and Ewan’s casual demeanor extinguished with the first curse. Even Malthus made no attempt to temper his reaction, clenching his fists and sending his power to buffet, causing a small wave of irrational panic to swell in me. “You went after her alone? After I warned you?”
“I know. I should have called you for backup, but I honestly didn’t think I’d wind up in one of Dante’s as of yet undiscovered circles of hell,” I said.
“No, you just go walking into a fucking cemetery with a zombie and expect what? Wine and cheese, maybe some soft music?” Ewan was fit to be tied, and Malthus lifted his palm in warning after he’d calmed down himself.
“We do care about what happens to you. This isn’t all about politics. We’re your family now,” Malthus said. He stood and poured a drink. “You need to start trusting me,” he continued, softening his voice, layering it with concern, which wedged a tiny seed of emotion in my heart.
Tears welled, but I held them back and waited the few moments for the seed to dry up. I just couldn’t give in to him. It would break me to pieces.
“And Olive’s body?” Ewan asked.
Ohhhh. I glanced at him. There was no good way to recount how I’d turned to Lysander in my hour of need. Might as well just suck it up. “When I escaped from the Columbarium, I called Lysander, and he went after Delatte, but everything was gone, including Delatte.”
Ewan stared at me without blinking, the hurt and frustration in his expression blinding me.
I focused my attention on Malthus. “The bokor had attacked him, and he deserved an opportunity to catch him and take the proof back to the vampires,” I said. My on-the-spot justification actually made a hell of a lot of sense, to me anyway.
“Delatte said one of the voodoo gods, Baron Samedi, summoned him to San Francisco. Is voodoo magic related to demons, like with necromancers?” I asked, effectively squashing any more talk of Lysander.
Malthus and Ewan exchanged another one of those long, mysterious demon looks. I’d decided not to relate what I’d learned from Xavier in the hopes Malthus would reveal the tidbits Xavier had left out. I might be a late bloomer when it came to demon chicanery, but I learned fast.
“Please, explain. Just this once?” I asked.
“I assume Cora explained some of our history in this realm?” Malthus asked.
I gave him a half shrug. Before my mother killed herself, and I basically excommunicated myself from the supernatural community, Cora had schooled me on some aspects of the supernatural races. Some, but not everything, I suspected.
“What ancient cultures revered as gods were actually our people visiting the human realm via the portal. We became the Greek and Roman gods. Even our creatures became the medusas and griffins of lore. They worshiped us, told stories about us, until religion condemned us as demons, and later science rendered us obsolete.”
“And the supernaturals born in the human realm resented what they perceived as your interference in this realm.” I added my own slice of knowledge. “They went so far as to support religious dictates that denied the pagan gods.”
“Mostly the vampires, yes. But going back, some of the demons chose to visit other cultures. In Africa, for example, they brought life to the gods of the vodun.”
“What about before the portal? Did the demons cross to our realm?”
He seemed surprised by my question and took a moment to respond, as if weighing his words carefully. “You understand before the social structure we have now, demon society was composed of different cults that excelled in a particular skill or practiced a certain belief. These cults loosely composed the whole of demon culture.”
I nodded. I’d pried that information out of Ewan back when we were dealing with Cael.
“What cult did you belong to?” I asked. I’d thought hard on the way here. The smothered animosity between him and Xavier could only stem from the most deeply-felt betrayal. The fiercest enemies were often once the fiercest friends.
“Catair Hovac. The Death Cult,” he answered in time to my own voice telling me what I’d already guessed. Despite my own suspicion, the admission hit me hard.
“We made contact with human mediums, the Oracles, and discovered a way to possess human bodies and spend limited amounts of time in the human realm,” he said, staring at me.
“So you transferred death essence to the Oracles, giving birth to necromancers?” I said quickly then cringed inwardly, remembering he hadn’t told me that part. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
He dipped his chin and regarded me with a very pointed look. Who was I kidding?
“How did you know about death essence?” he asked slowly.
“I spoke to Xavier before coming here.” I lowered my eyes, not wanting him to peer that deeply inside me, although his stare was drilling pretty deep right now.
His lips thinned. It took a moment for him to school his expression. “What else did Xavier say?” he asked finally. I could tell it had taken him great effort to keep his voice even.
He cracked my attempt to stare blandly into his eyes, and I had to look away. “He repeated a lot of what you said, but he rivals you for the cryptic demon award.”
Malthus laughed, surprising the heck out of me.
“One of the reasons I’m asking is that Delatte had babbled on about soul stealing. Is that what the Big Bad, or possibly Baron Samedi, wants? To harvest souls?”
“What else did the bokor say? About souls and his attack on Lysander?”
“Just that he was gathering souls for Baron Samedi, including mine.”
“What?” Ewan interrupted a little too loudly.
“He planned to suck it into a little, very ugly voodoo doll that looked nothing like me and had no hair,” I said mournfully.
Ewan smiled. “Vain about your voodoo doll?”
“I’d laugh . . . if it hadn’t been so fucking macabre.” I hugged myself. The exchange had lightened the heavy conversation for a second before I saw Malthus’s very hard expression.
He crossed his arms across his chest. “Why didn’t you mention this before? When I withhold information, it’s for your protection. Maybe you should trust me.”
“Like I did with Cael?”
He paused. “Fine. I deserved that. What did Xavier say about Delatte?”
“He told me to leave Delatte to him.”
“Good. He agrees then that you s
hould lay low, not do anything to agitate the chagur.”
“I can’t lay low, for the very reason you state—this fucking thing on my arm that you sanctioned. It’s hard enough navigating past all this bullshit without you holding back on me.”
He closed his eyes. When his eyelids finally fluttered open, his expression had regained its steely resolve. “Enough.”
I softened my tone. “Do you suspect someone? Someone who could be our Big Bad?”
He stood suddenly, his way of ending the conversation. “We must prepare for tomorrow. Who knows, maybe we’ll discover something to help us,” Malthus said.
“What’s happening tomorrow?” I asked, surrendering to his abrupt steering of the conversation away from the Big Bad.
Malthus arched a brow. “Don’t tell me you’re not prepared for the ball?”
The supernatural ball. Damn. I’d forgotten. More likely, I’d been hoping the supes would have forgotten or cancelled it. But they wouldn’t. They loved the annual soiree. I wasn’t sure why when all they did was hassle each other, but maybe that was the point.
“Do you have an adequate dress?” Malthus asked.
“Yes. I have an adequate dress,” I said. I didn’t, but I wasn’t going to admit it to them. “So what time do the festivities begin?”
“Seven. Ewan will escort you,” Malthus said.
I whipped my head up from checking my phone calendar, finding I hadn’t entered anything for tomorrow. “No.”
“This is not up for discussion. He will protect you.”
I snorted. “Do you think someone is going to take me out in front of all the supes?”
Malthus didn’t respond, only kept his lips clamped in a tight line.
I chanced a glance at Ewan, but found his expression impassive. For once, he seemed annoyingly quiet. Having Ewan as my escort would provide a good buffer against the other supes, but how would we spend an evening together without our emotions souring our martinis? “How can you do this when—” Argh. “I don’t need . . .”
“You must find a way to cope with these tragedies because there will be many more to come. If you can’t cope, they will crush you,” Malthus said on his way out.
The Necromancer's Betrayal Page 15
