by E. A. Copen
I offered him mine, which he took eagerly. “You’re saying Georgie’s death was orchestrated?”
“Of course, it was. You ever known a mobster to die of old age?” He pulled up one knee and let his forearm rest against it. “Anyway, Christof is on lockdown and will probably have to be smuggled back into the country, if he comes back at all. Otherwise, Alexi will have him killed. Bastard pulled a coup and then went on clean-up.”
“None of which explains what he wants with you?” I pointed at Niko. “Because I doubt it’s a secret. What happened? Did you refuse to fall in line? That doesn’t make sense. He’d want you dead if that were the case. No, he needs you for something, and he needs something you’ve got. Something small. Question is, what?”
Niko didn’t answer. He just sat there on the bathroom floor, smoking his cigarette like he owned the place.
A drop of sweat trailed down his hairline next to his ear and traced a damp line over his neck. I focused on it, trying to will my mind to be blank so I could read him better. Instead, all I could think about was that dream, the way he’d draped that second skin over my shoulders in it. He’d whispered into my ear, and I swore I could almost feel him there now, asking me again, “Do you like it?”
I wiped a hand over my face as if I could wipe away the memory of the dream. “If you’re not going to tell me, maybe I should just hand you over to Mirren. Or I could give you to Alexi, maybe foster a little goodwill and get the target off my back.”
He met my eyes, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe. It was like staring into two burning black holes, an endless depth I couldn’t help but gravitate toward, even as it threatened to rip me apart. “Then why don’t you?”
I pushed myself up to stand. “Whatever the fuck you’re doing, stop it. Right now.”
He blinked. “I’m not doing anything.”
“But you were in my head. I know you were. Don’t try and deny it.”
He closed his eyes and rolled his head back, leaving his throat exposed, an animalistic gesture of surrender that stirred my predatory instincts more than I liked. “You know, it’s a misconception that oracles can see the future. Time doesn’t really work that way. Instead of one thread, there are hundreds, thousands. Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, I can see all of them, look along them for certain points and find the answers to whatever people want to know. Other times, I’m just as blind as anyone else. But no matter what I see, or how often I look, there will always be points where every possible future converges to a single unavoidable moment. An inevitability. Even if I told you what it was I saw, or what I still see, you would dance along the wire, thinking you were avoiding it only to run right into it.”
“I mean it, Niko,” I said gesturing to him. “Stop fucking with me. Give me answers, or I swear on my mother’s grave, I will turn you over to Alexi.”
His eyes opened, eyelids hovering at half-mast. “Your mother’s not dead. She’s in Australia. A big white house with tall green shrubs.”
A chill like ice trickled down my spine. There was no way he could know that. Only a handful of people knew she was alive, and I paid them well enough not to speak of it. It was me, two nurses, an angel, and my father, none of which Niko could’ve spoken to.
I crossed the bathroom and grabbed fistfuls of Niko’s shirt to pull him to his feet. “Why does Alexi want you? What’s he looking for? Why did Mirren hire me to find you?”
He turned his head to the side, eyes fixated on the mirror. “You need to cover that up.”
That’s right. All the mirrors in his place had been smashed, just like the one we’d found at the murder scene. Could be there was a connection there, but what? I pulled him away from the wall and slammed his back into it hard enough to tell him I meant business. “What do you know about a murdered woman in a warehouse? What’s it got to do with all these broken mirrors? Tell me, Niko.”
He licked his lips and stared at me, those coal-black eyes drilling into my soul. What was it about the way he looked at me that made me feel so naked and exposed? It was as if he could see right through me, and it made me want to choke the life out of him.
Niko blinked hard and his pupils shrank slightly, trembling in place as he fought whatever drug was working its way out of his system. “I’ll tell you everything I know. But first, you have to do something for me.”
I let him go. Even after taking a half-step back, we were too close. I could smell the cold sweat rolling off him, the sick, woozy scent of tainted fluid working its way out through his pores. “What do you want?”
“A beer and some food would be nice. And a shower.” He leaned forward, practically brushing against me as he jerked a towel down from the rack. I didn’t breathe again until he turned away and tucked the towel into the top of the medicine cabinet so it draped over the mirror. “You need to cover every mirror and reflective surface in this place. Breaking them would be better.”
“Harmony would rip my balls off if I broke her mirrors.” He gave me a questioning look so I quickly explained, “This is her place. I thought it’d be safer here than in my hotel room.” Though now that I’d said it out loud, it didn’t make much sense. Why would Harmony’s apartment be any safer than a hotel room? It was instinct that had brought me back here, and the hope that someone would be waiting.
Niko nodded as if he understood. He turned and opened a cabinet, pulling out more towels and handing them to me. “Every mirror, Josiah.”
I almost told him where he could stuff his instructions. Whatever he wanted me to cover the mirrors for, he could’ve told me. I should’ve made him. I’d stuck my neck out for the bastard and nearly gotten killed more than once now. He owed me an explanation at the very least. But he wasn’t offering it.
He turned on the water to the tub and slipped off his borrowed shirt while I stood with the towels in my arms like an idiot. In person, the tattoo on his chest was a little more impressive. It wasn’t just letters but featured the image of a black scorpion just above it in the center.
“You keep staring at me like that, one of us is going to blush.” Niko grinned at me and offered a wink.
Somehow, that made the urge to choke him even stronger. “Fuck off,” I growled. “I’ll cover the bloody mirrors, but you’d better have some answers for me after.” I stormed out of the room, slamming the door hard behind me.
Chapter Twelve
KHALEDA
The second murder was worse than the first. They’d killed her in her bed, meaning there were no neat pools of blood and body parts on the floor. Instead, half the room looked like someone had splashed red paint everywhere.
Glass crunched into the carpet as I walked into the room. Another broken mirror, this one hanging from the ceiling. Bits of silver glistened in the light like bloodstained ice. She wore shards of it throughout her body, embedded in her eyes, her exposed intestines, the legs practically detached from her body…
I stared at the empty frame hanging over the bed. Only two kinds of people put mirrors over their beds: hookers and exhibitionists. Question was, which one was the dead woman?
I closed on the corpse. They’d left her arms intact. She’d been dead long enough that they were stiff, fixed above her head, elbows bent, and fists clenched. Faint dotted purple lines colored the inside of her wrists, two per arm. They were too far apart to indicate standard handcuffs. I guessed they were two, maybe two and a half inches apart. Just the right width to match leather wrist restraints. She’d strained against them, but not as they were being put on. If she’d fought getting them on, there’d be more indications of a struggle in the room. This woman, whoever she was, was in good shape and had a .45 sticking out of the end table.
“Find anything?” Petra asked, crossing her arms behind me.
“She was into kinky sex.”
Petra’s growl was barely threatening. “Something we didn’t already know.”
I leaned in, my face hovering inches from hers. She’d died with her eyes open, perfect he
art-shaped face relaxed, pale lips parted as she focused on some far-off point within the mirror perhaps. I brushed some blonde strands of hair away from her waxy forehead and spied dark roots. “Who was she?”
“No ID, just like the last one.”
But she would’ve had one. This wasn’t some crappy hotel where they took cash and didn’t ask questions. She lived here. Evidence of that was all around in the dirty laundry she’d tried to hide in the closet, the paperback tucked in the drawer with the handgun, the faint garlic scent of cooking from several nights ago lingering in the air.
The room was tossed, the lamp smashed. It was meant to look like a robbery gone wrong, but whoever had tried to make it look that way didn’t know what he was doing. He took her wallet but left the black lockbox sitting on the top shelf in her closet. I walked away from the corpse to retrieve it only to find it was one of those cheap models. Almost any key would open it. “Anybody got a hairpin?” I looked to Petra who shook her head. “Safety pin? Comb? Anything with a tiny sharp point?”
Petra just glared at me.
“Never mind. I’ll do it myself.” I opened the closet further and searched through the victim’s things, eventually finding an unopened kit of hair curlers and bobby pins, the latter of which I used to jimmy open the lock in seconds. Inside, I found a roll of cash in twenties, a small bag of white powder—presumably cocaine—and a cheap composition book. I opened the book and frowned, dragging my finger over lines of text.
“Wasn’t much of a bookkeeper. It’s a sort of appointment book, but really disorganized. Mostly just client notes, all under aliases. No dates or times. But, based on this, it looks like she was a working girl who pulled in a fair amount of cash. She must’ve been pretty good.” I snapped the book closed and handed it off to Petra. “But she didn’t work alone.”
“What makes you say that?” Petra slipped the notebook out of my hands and passed it to one of her flunkies.
“Because she wasn’t tracking the money, just client preferences. That means someone else was doing the finance side of things. Your victim had a pimp.”
“You think he’s involved?”
I glanced back at the dismembered bloody mess on the bed. “At the very least, he saw who came in here last and took his cut of the money, meaning you’ve got a witness.”
“A witness we don’t know how to find.” She sighed and pinched her nose. “It doesn’t really matter. We still don’t know what the broken mirrors are all about.”
“Josiah does.” I squatted and picked up a bloody shard, turning it in my fingers so it caught the light.
He’d mentioned before that mirrors could be used as a doorway to let something through, though he said it wouldn’t be used to summon a demon. He was right about that. My experience with demons said they needed a vessel to come through, no mirrors involved. You wouldn’t need a ritual unless you were going to call on someone powerful.
There were a lot of powerful entities in Hell, not all of them demons. My father had been the only one cruel enough to keep them all in check. The earls of Hell, the lords, and the princes… Before my father appeared and declared himself king of the land, they all held onto tiny plots of power warring against each other, fighting like dogs for scraps. He organized them, handed out titles and jobs that kept things running smoothly. Whatever I wanted to say about my father, I couldn’t say he was a poor ruler of Hell overall. It was in his foreign relations that he failed.
Of all the earls, generals and princes, none I knew of relied on mirrors to cross over, though some did ask for human sacrifices.
What if it’s not a demon at all? I dropped the shard of glass and glanced over my shoulder at Petra who stood a short way off, arms still crossed defiantly, a frown plastered on her face. No, not an angel either. I didn’t know how to summon one of those, but Josiah did, and he would’ve been giddy if he could finger an angel for a crime.
But there was a creature between a demon and an angel, caught halfway between Heaven and Hell, both blessed and damned. A monster even Lucifer feared and kept a short leash on.
“How many Fallen are there?” I stood and wiped my hands clean on my pants.
Petra’s face went blank. She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, suddenly on alert. “No one really knows for certain. Tradition says one-third of our forces defected that day, but we were fewer in number then. As the years have progressed, more and more of us have Fallen, allowing their numbers to grow.”
“My father employed many of the Fallen as personal guards,” I said, pacing to the end of the bed. “They were eager for vengeance, which he promised them in scores. But they didn’t always follow him. He told me a story once, of when he fought his great battle to win the throne. Back then, he wasn’t the only contender. One by one, he defeated those who rose to claim the power, all but for one.” I paused, trying to imagine my father as the war hero he claimed to be. It wasn’t easy. In all the years I’d known him, deception had always been his greatest weapon. Not once had I seen him raise a weapon in his own defense. That’s what I was for.
“His name was Remiel, and he styled himself King of the Fallen.” I turned away from the body to meet Petra’s eyes. The angel didn’t hide that the name had shaken her. She knew him, or knew of him. But not like I did. “Whenever my father spoke of Remiel, it wasn’t like he spoke of his other enemies. They were all stupid, weak, pathetic. Not Remiel. Lucifer feared Remiel might escape more than anything, which is why he sealed him in the deepest darkest hole in Hell, a place known as The Pit.”
It’d been cold and musty there, too, but I didn’t dare let him see me shiver. I was defiant, but only because I didn’t know what was coming.
“Nice and tight,” Lucifer commanded the demons, fixing the enchanted chains around my wrists. “We don’t want her falling.”
He paced to the edge of The Pit and put his hands behind his back, peering down.
How deep it went, only Lucifer himself knew, since he was the only one who claimed to have gone all the way to the bottom. It was a black hole, a bottomless well, a place neither light nor sound could penetrate.
It had always been Father’s ace, the one punishment he reserved only for the worst crimes, or so he claimed. I’d never seen him use it. Everyone was too afraid of Lucifer Morningstar to defy him. Everyone except for me. I’d tried to kill him.
The chains tightened around my wrists, secured by one of his demons. I forced myself not to wince. “Is this supposed to scare me?”
Father turned away from The Pit and stood sideways. Firelight from behind me lit up the profile of his face while shadow licked at the other side. In a flash of movement and green flame, he was in front of me, gripping my chin tight in his palm. “Defiant to the last, are we, dear daughter? I gave you everything and yet you conspired against me. With the Horseman I was trying to turn, no less. And for what? So eager to rule Hell, are we?”
I jerked my chin free and spat in his face. “You can take your crown and shove it up your ass sideways. I don’t want anything to do with you or this place. I never did. If you weren’t so blind—”
He backhanded me hard enough that it knocked me to the ground. I spat blood and glared up at him as he flexed his fingers. Blood oozed from his knuckles. He frowned at it.
That’s right, bastard. Your body is your weakness. Your soul might be powerful, but the body you’re in is as mortal as they come.
Something reverberated up out of the Pit, a ripple of power that might’ve been sound when it began. The demons nearby shrieked and scampered back a step. Father’s posture stiffened, and his eyebrows drew together. Whatever was down there, even he feared it, which meant I might be able to use it to get to him.
“What’s down there?” I jerked my chin toward the edge of The Pit.
Father ran his hands through his long, dark hair. “You’ll see, soon enough.” He gestured to someone behind me.
The chains that held me pulled tight. A few more cranks and I dangled in the air, f
eet hanging.
Father gripped the chains on my ankles and inspected them before looking up at me, his face blank. He drew a hand tenderly over my calf until I tried to kick him. Then, he stepped back. “You’ve brought this on yourself.”
The chains swung and, with a mechanical click and whirr, lowered me into The Pit.
The temperature plunged as the light faded. Still, I sank into The Pit, deeper and deeper, going down slowly, until time no longer held any meaning. That deep, the darkness came alive and pressed in like a living thing, crushing the breath from my lungs.
Suddenly, wings fluttered beneath me. A few at first, and then thousands of feathery wings beating so loud it threatened to deafen me. Cold, slimy appendages raked at my feet, slicing through skin and bone, all while a chorus of a thousand horrible voices sang hymns that made my ears bleed.
I threw my head back and screamed, but there was nowhere for sound to go.
I took a deep breath and pushed the memory away, ignoring the way it made my hands shake.
Petra’s face blanched. “You don’t think… No. Impossible. Remiel was destroyed. I was there when God Himself decided to smite his kingdom. No one, not even Remiel, could’ve survived that.”
“I hope you’re right. I really do, Petra. Because if you’re wrong, and he is still out there, and someone is trying to bring something like that through into this world, we’re basically fucked.” I looked down at thousands of copies of my own reflection staring back at me from the broken shards on the floor. “I need to talk to Josiah.”
“Please do.” Petra swallowed the fear so present in her voice just moments ago. She tried to hide it, but I hadn’t missed it. Remiel frightened her, and little should’ve been able to shake an angel with an army at her back.
