Deadly Descendant (Nikki Glass)

by Jenna Black

  Jamaal’s knee was bouncing, which worried me. He’d seemed relatively calm in the week since he’d unleashed his death magic, but I didn’t think the fidgets were a good sign. Kerner said the killings had calmed his death magic, and his one-per-week schedule seemed to suggest the calming effects lasted for about seven days. Which might mean Jamaal was creeping back toward his usual dangerous edge. Then again, he was drinking coffee, so maybe he just had a caffeine buzz going.

  “If Kerner was in Georgetown killing Phoebe,” Jamaal said, “then how did he create the diversion at Fort Totten Park?”

  No one had an answer to that.

  “If it was a diversion engineered by Kerner,” I said, thinking out loud, “then either he has an accomplice with a bunch of dogs, or his jackals can cover a hell of a lot of territory without him being nearby.” That was not a thought that put me in my happy place.

  “Or he can travel between cemeteries a lot faster than human beings can,” Anderson suggested. We all turned to him with varying expressions of inquiry.

  “I’ve known some death god descendants who’ve been able to use cemeteries as gateways to the Underworld,” he continued. “When they leave the Underworld, they can reenter our world anywhere there’s a cemetery or burial ground. They need to draw power from the dead to open the gateway. It’s a rare power, but it does exist. And I suspect our man has it.”

  “You’re telling me he can teleport from cemetery to cemetery whenever he wants?” I asked. I wondered if this was something Anderson could do himself. After all, he was Death’s son.

  “Something like that. It would explain how he’s getting around.”

  “So what do we do now?” Logan asked. “How do we stop Kerner without getting a bunch of innocent people killed?”

  “We don’t.”

  Everyone turned to look at Emma, who rarely participated in these little staff meetings of ours. I didn’t get the feeling she cared about much of anything, and she certainly wasn’t eager to talk to anyone except Anderson. Though she yelled at him more than she talked to him.

  “Emma …” Anderson said in a warning tone, which she completely ignored.

  “If he wants to take out the Olympians, I say more power to him.”

  Anderson looked pained. “I’ll admit, they’re not good people, but—”

  “But nothing!” she snapped, eyes flashing. “Anything Kerner does to them, they deserve. And I quite like the idea of Konstantin watching as his people get savaged one by one, knowing what’s coming and unable to stop it.”

  She was dead serious and had a fanatical gleam in her eyes that reminded me a little of Kerner. She’d moved away from the doorway, finally interested enough in the subject matter to join in. As far as I could tell, the only thing she truly cared about was getting her revenge.

  “We’ll talk about this later,” Anderson said with quiet authority, but Emma wasn’t finished.

  “No, we’ll talk about it now! It’s past time you get off your ass and avenge me! You don’t want to go to war with the Olympians because you like your status quo so much? Fine. But if there’s another Liberi out there willing and able to go get that pound of flesh, then you’re damn well not going to stop him!”

  Everyone in the room must have overheard snippets of this argument before. It wasn’t like Anderson and Emma were quiet when they fought. But they’d usually at least made a show of keeping it private.

  Emma stalked through the assembled chairs toward Anderson. The anger that radiated from her was palpable, and I don’t know about the rest of Anderson’s people, but I wanted to get the hell out of the room before things went any further. But I don’t think any of us wanted to draw Anderson’s attention or Emma’s ire, so we sat still and silent, unwilling witnesses to what could soon become something truly ugly.

  Anderson rose slowly as Emma approached, his full attention on her. “Konstantin deserves to suffer for what he did to you,” he said. “But not like this. Not when innocent lives are at stake.”

  Emma snorted and tossed her hair. “Innocent lives! There’s no such thing as an innocent Olympian. The only way more innocents get hurt is if you insist on playing the fucking hero and Kerner decides to make you pay.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Considering Emma was in complete battle-ax mode, Anderson was remaining impressively calm. In fact, he looked more sad than angry.

  “He may mean what he said,” Anderson continued, “or he may not. Either way, I don’t trust him, and if you were thinking straight, you wouldn’t, either.”

  I thought for a moment Emma was going to hit him. She looked that pissed.

  “I’m thinking perfectly straight,” she said in a low growl that reminded me of an angry cat. “Even if there turns out to be some collateral damage, it would be worth it if Konstantin dies.”

  Anderson gaped at her like he couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Maybe whatever she’d been through at Konstantin’s hands had warped her beyond recognition, because I had a hard time believing Anderson had married someone this cold and vindictive. I hated Konstantin for what had been done to my sister on his orders, but it would never have occurred to me to let innocent people suffer in order to hurt him.

  “You can’t mean that,” Anderson said weakly.

  “Yes, I can.” She lowered her voice, attempting to sound calm and reasonable. It would have worked better if there weren’t so much insanity and hatred in her eyes. “I don’t understand why you’re so dead set against it. If you don’t care enough about what he did to me, then surely you care about all the hundreds of others he’s hurt and killed in his lifetime. If he dies, it will save untold innocent lives. You know that.”

  She was probably right. Konstantin and his Olympians were a scourge, wiping out whole families of Descendants and taking whatever they wanted without a thought. But there was no great conviction to her argument, no sign that the saving of innocent lives meant anything to her whatsoever. She was merely looking for the angle that would convince Anderson to do what she wanted.

  “Everyone out,” Anderson said without taking his eyes off Emma. “I need to have a private conversation with my wife.”

  The haste with which the rest of us jumped to our feet and stampeded toward the door might have been funny in other circumstances.

  Despite the coffee, I was dead tired. I could hear Emma’s and Anderson’s shouting voices behind me, and I suddenly realized I had had all I could take of them, of this house, and of my new and not improved life. For the last two weeks, I’d lived and breathed the Liberi and their troubles. I had not once stopped by my condo, nor had I even thought about spending the night there. I was letting myself get drawn in more and more deeply, letting the life I had once known slip through my fingers.

  While the rest of the Liberi trooped upstairs to get some sleep, I found myself heading out the front door. I might have thought someone would try to stop me or at least ask me where the hell I was going at oh-dark-thirty, but either they were in too much of a hurry to get out of earshot of the argument, or they didn’t give a damn. I assumed the latter and felt sour about it.

  I let out a breath of relief as I drove through the front gates and pointed my car toward Chevy Chase. I wasn’t free of the Liberi, not by a long shot, and I still had a lot to do in the fight to stop Kerner. In a few hours, I would be back at the mansion, hard at work. But maybe for a precious few hours, I could take a mental vacation from the turmoil.

  The air in my condo felt stale when I let myself in, but I was pretty sure that was just my imagination. I walked from room to room, reacquainting myself with my things, waiting for the tightness in my shoulders to ease, waiting for my body to acknowledge that I was home.

  Maybe I was just too tired and stressed to relax, but being surrounded by my own things in my own home didn’t have the soothing effect I’d hoped for. The apartment felt cold and empty, oppressively quiet, and although it wasn’t unwelcoming, it didn’t feel like mine anymore. It r
eminded me of spending the night in my old bedroom at my adoptive parents’ house: I still felt emotional ties to the place, the bond formed from years of memories, but that was all in the past. I was just a visitor now.

  More disturbed than I’d have liked to admit by the direction of my thoughts, I slipped between the sheets of my no-longer-familiar bed and tried to sleep. It took me far longer than it should have.

  I hadn’t kept the kitchen stocked, so when I woke up in the morning, I had to go out for breakfast if I wanted anything to eat. I wanted to stay longer, to give myself an extended time-out, but staying in my apartment wasn’t giving me the kind of boost I’d been hoping for. Just the opposite, in fact. There was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I feared the life I was trying to cling to had passed me by forever.

  I left the apartment as soon as I was showered and dressed. I drove through McDonald’s for an elegant breakfast, then headed back to the mansion. I parked in the garage and walked to the front porch, where I found Jamaal lighting one cigarette from the butt of another.

  It was none of my business if Jamaal was chain-smoking, but I found my footsteps slowing as I climbed the front steps and ventured onto the porch. He stared at me with neutral eyes while he took a deep drag on the fresh cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs before letting it slowly out. It was then that I realized he wasn’t smoking one of his usual clove cigarettes.

  “You’re smoking pot?” I asked, surprised. It was something I’d never seen him do before.

  He shrugged and took another drag, then held the joint out to me.

  For all my rebellious ways, I’d never been into drugs. Of course, if the Glasses hadn’t taken me in when they had, I’m sure I’d have headed down that road as a teenager. Luckily for me, the Glasses had cured me of the need to act out in self-destructive ways.

  “Um, no, thanks.” I boosted myself up onto the rail that surrounded the porch, trying to read Jamaal’s face without being too obvious about it. “Everything okay?”

  He laughed a cloud of smoke. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “You know what I mean. You seem to be getting edgy again.” And there was a reason he’d graduated from cigarettes to joints.

  He took another drag, then stubbed out the joint, putting the remains in a little tin, which he then slipped into his jeans pocket.

  “This is normal for me,” he said, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Releasing the death magic made it better for a little while, but I can feel it building up again. Just like always.”

  “But it wasn’t like this when Emmitt was around,” I said tentatively, always afraid to bring up his friend’s death. The death I’d caused. Emmitt had possessed some death magic of his own, and he’d been teaching Jamaal how to control it, apparently with some success.

  Jamaal moved over to the porch swing, dropping into it like he was bone-tired. Maybe he was.

  “It was better then,” Jamaal admitted. “We’d kind of … vent the death magic together. Send it at each other to ease the pressure inside.”

  I shivered. “You sent death magic at each other? Wasn’t that kind of dangerous?”

  He shrugged. “It wasn’t like we could do each other any permanent harm. And our magics tended to cancel each other out.” His eyes had a faraway look to them, and there was a faint smile on his lips.

  Guilt niggled at me for the umpteenth time. If only I’d listened to my common sense that night, or if only I hadn’t gone so fast on that icy road, Emmitt would still be alive today. I’d still be mortal, with no idea that the Liberi even existed.

  “Why can’t you just do the same thing with someone else?” I asked. “It’s not like you can kill another Liberi.”

  “Yes, I can. Emmitt’s magic canceled mine out, but it would kill any other Liberi. They wouldn’t stay dead for long, but people seem strangely reluctant to try it. Would you like to volunteer?”

  “You know, that sounded almost like a joke. If you’re not careful, I may start suspecting you have a sense of humor buried somewhere deep down inside.”

  “Who says I was joking?”

  His voice was completely deadpan, and his face revealed nothing, so I don’t know what it was about him that told me he was kidding. It was something, though, because no shiver of fear passed through me, despite the very real reasons I had to be afraid of Jamaal.

  I didn’t respond, instead thinking about the mysteries of death magic. Was it something specific to being a descendant of Anubis that allowed Kerner to channel his death magic into phantom jackals the way he did? Obviously, the jackals were specific to Anubis, but …

  “Isn’t there any other way you can vent the death magic? Kerner thinks creating the jackals is helping him keep in control. At least, as in control as a psycho can be.”

  “I can’t make it manifest itself physically, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Have you ever tried?”

  He blinked at me like the thought had never occurred to him. “No, but—”

  “Then how do you know you can’t? My powers didn’t come with an instruction manual, so I see no reason to assume yours did.”

  He dismissed my question with a shake of his head. “If we believe anything Phoebe told us, Kerner hasn’t been Liberi a tenth as long as I have. If I had a power like that, I would have figured it out by now.”

  I swung my feet between the balusters like a little girl, hoping the small movement would both help me stay warm and help me follow my own train of thought.

  “But you haven’t needed to figure it out. Kerner had been buried alive. He had a desperate need to do something to get him out. You know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.”

  Jamaal arched an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting you’d like to bury me somewhere and see if I can make my magic dig me out?”

  “Why are you being willfully obtuse about this? If you’re so unhappy about the effects of your magic, maybe you should try doing something about it instead of just whining.”

  Jamaal rose slowly to his feet, eyes locked on me with simmering fury. I’d been treating him like a regular guy, allowing myself to forget just how terrifying he could be when he was angry. And how easy it was to set him off.

  I held my hands up in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so abrasive. I’m just trying to help.”

  The apology did nothing to appease him. “I don’t need your help. I don’t want your help.”

  So much for any sense of calm the joint might have given him. A smart woman would have retreated in the face of Jamaal’s Mr. Hyde, but no one’s ever accused me of being smart where men are concerned.

  “You need to smoke like five packs a day to keep from completely wigging out, and you gave in to the death magic last week at the cemetery. I’d say that means you need help.”

  I slid off the railing and straightened to my full, but decidedly inadequate, height as Jamaal stalked closer. There was too much white showing around his eyes, and his pupils were little black pinpricks in a sea of chocolate brown. His nostrils flared like those of a predator who’d scented his prey. All very bad signs. Signs I chose to ignore as I held my ground.

  “Are you really going to give in to it this easily?” I asked as my heart drummed frantically and my sense of self-preservation begged me to shut the hell up. “You’ve fought it for so long. And you’ve gone through so much to keep from being turned out of the house. Don’t fuck it all up just because someone tries to help you.”

  Jamaal blinked in surprise, and I almost smiled. Amazing how much more effect an F-bomb has if you don’t make a habit of using them. He stared at me a little more, and I watched the anger fade from his eyes until he took a deep breath and lowered his head.

  “Why would you want to help me?” he asked so softly I could barely hear him. “You have every reason in the world to hate me.”

  There was a wealth of pain and loneliness in his words. He was not someone who was used to forgiveness. I
’d explained to him numerous times by now that I’d forgiven him for his actions when I’d first become Liberi, but there was no sign he’d believed me.

  I stepped a little closer to him. My feminine instinct was to reach out and touch him, give him a little human contact to anchor him in the now. But I knew he didn’t like to be touched, especially by me, so I resisted the urge.

  “You know I don’t hate you,” I said, picking my words carefully. “You and I are too much alike.”

  Amusement lit his eyes, and his lips twitched with a smile. “Yeah, we have a lot in common.”

  He meant that sarcastically, but he was right.

  “You saw my file, saw how many foster families I went through. I didn’t get bounced around like that because I was Miss Sweetness and Light. I spent years lashing out at people. I remember what that need felt like, remember what it was like to try to keep it buried and have it explode out of me at the least provocation. If the Glasses hadn’t seen past all that crap and adopted me, I don’t know where I’d be today. In jail is as good a guess as any.

  “I got lucky, Jamaal. That’s the only reason I don’t have serious anger-management issues anymore. Maybe it’s my turn to see past someone else’s crap now.”

  Chocolate-brown eyes met mine, warmer than I’d ever seen them, and I thought maybe I was getting through to him. Then, before I had a chance to get my hopes up, his expression clouded.

  “You were just a kid when that shit happened,” he said. “And you didn’t have death magic beating down your barriers. I’m glad you were able to get help, but it’s too late for me.”

  He started to turn from me, and I knew he was planning to retreat to the house without another word. I couldn’t let him do that, couldn’t let our conversation end on such a hopeless note. So I reached out and grabbed his arm.

  He whirled on me, braids lashing through the air like whips. I stood my ground, refusing to let go as he glared down at me for daring to touch him. His biceps were as hard as marble, well defined, and almost completely devoid of fat. He could have broken my grip easily, and the fact that he didn’t gave me the courage to hold on.