“It’ll be okay,” Ellie promised.
But it really, really wouldn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Drowning
I had to get myself showered and cleaned up. No pride left so I didn’t let myself care too hard about everyone seeing me break down. I’d punch the next person who said something to me about it and they probably knew it, so they kept their breadth when I left for the long dark hall and shower.
I left my clothes in a heap by the tub; my jeans were streaked with dirt and blood, and stank of gasoline still. Instead I stole a terrycloth bathrobe that was probably Nic’s given the length, my curves busting out all over when I tied the sash tight. Running a towel through my hair, I padded back to the guest bedroom.
Ellie sat on the end of the bed waiting for me.
I rolled my eyes. “Is this the lecture portion of the evening where I’m chastised for trying to kill a kid?”
“Nope.”
Huh. I passed him, tossed the towel from my hair on the end of the bed, and dragged out my duffel bag. It was next to Nate’s, which I gave a cursory glance before kicking it under the bed so I didn’t have to fucking look at it, then pulled out a T-shirt, jeans, and underclothes from my own bag. “Why are you here then?”
He shrugged. “You’re...sad.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. “I’m fine. Get out—I’m about to get naked and your nun girlfriend won’t like it.”
Hands clamped over his eyes and he turned his back, bedspread whispering under him.
Whatever. I jerked open the robe, tossed it, and slipped on my panties. “I’m going to throw you out of here as soon as I have pants on, so hurry up and say your piece.”
“I...don’t really have a piece. Just, y’know. I’m here if you want to—”
“Okay,” I slipped on my bra and fought the hooks at the back, “do you people think I had a fucking personality transplant or something? Is Stepford-Zara wandering around, wanting to talk about her feelings?”
“That’s good! Rant! Get it all—”
“If I get it any more out, I will kill each and every one of you. It’s in your best interest not to push this matter.” I got my T-shirt on—next were jeans, and then he was gone.
“You feel like you’re drowning.”
I paused with one foot sliding down the leg of my jeans. Sighed. Dropped to sit on the edge of the bed.
I was drowning. I was slipping farther and farther down and I didn’t know which was up, which was down—knew nothing but the cold blackness and the certainty that I wouldn’t make it out again. I wanted to let all of this just...roll off of me. Like it normally would’ve. But the last few years waiting for him to wake up, wondering if I’d made a monumentally bad decision, left me getting more and more insecure and weak. Now I couldn’t even think of anything funny to say about my predicament which just made it all suck even more.
I rubbed at my eyes. “You don’t want to have this conversation with me—it will hurt you. I cut someone’s throat today, Ellie. I threw my lover out a window into the sun. I nearly killed a kid and terrified him so bad he pissed himself.”
“Yeah, see, I know all that. I know because no matter how much whiskey I drink—and there was a lot tonight—you’re just...loud. All this stuff is coming at me.”
He could see through a killer’s eyes and, well, I was certainly that. “Then you should get the fuck away from me.”
“Probably won’t make a difference.”
Ugh. I yanked up my jeans and hauled up the fly. “Go away and I’ll get therapy. I’ll talk to Nic or something. Ugly cry on her shoulder.”
“They’re not gonna get past you planning to kill Nate’s kid.”
Fuck. “And you are?”
A shrug, his back still to me, hands clutched over his eyes. “You’re hurt. And I guess I’m neutral, or weird, or something, but yelling at you isn’t going to stop you from killing that little boy.”
“Neither is talking.”
“Maybe not. But what you do or don’t do doesn’t negate the fact that you’re...sad.”
I crossed my arms at my chest, chewed on the inside of my mouth, tried to shove out any feelings of gratitude or empathy or anything human like that creeping up. “So what’s the point of this again?”
At last he peeled his hands down, glanced over his shoulder to see I was dressed, and turned around fully. He looked up at me through that fringe of red hair, like a fucking Irish sheepdog or something. “So you know someone’s here and I’m not judging you and you’re not alone.”
Not alone.
He’d come back for me. Over and over. He found me and dragged me out of the dark place, never leaving me alone.
I blinked as water boiled in my eyes again and averted my gaze, crossing the room instead to pluck an elastic from the dresser to bind back my hair. “I’d rather talk about my new shoes.”
“Okay. What kind are they?”
Jesus, no one ever wanted to hear about my shoes. “Manolo Bahlik. They’re wine-coloured silk crepe pumps. Four inch heels. Gorgeous.”
“We should totally have a party. With karaoke. I think you should sing ‘Carry On My Wayward Son.’”
“I’d probably be better off with ‘Bad Romance.’ Exactly how drunk are you?”
“Uhhhh...” His eyes rolled upward as he thought. “Very, very. Very. Ryann and Abel brought books for you and liquor for me.”
Poor kid. I must’ve been coming off the rage because I felt a twinge of guilt—my very presence could set him into a seizure. “C’mon. Keep trying to talk to me, and I’ll tell your girlfriend we had wild sex.”
He giggled like a little boy and rose unsteadily on his feet.
And fuck me silly, I was sort of grinning. I put a quick stop to it and wiped at my eyes before following him out into the hall, fingers swiftly moving through the last of my braid, which I wrapped the elastic over.
Everyone was still in the living room and I tipped my head in a nod to the tall, well-built black Demon Hunter, Abel. I liked him in a way I liked few humans: he was smart, capable, and useful. Never trying to manipulate or gain anything, he was disillusioned with his organization and the world in general, and proved quite useful to me. Hopefully his Padre wouldn’t figure out where he went, as I had less use for him if he wasn’t working on the inside for me.
There was still no front door—I wondered if that was the kind of thing they had a spare for, or what the hell would happen to me and Nic come morning.
“Okay, let’s see these accounting books, and if anyone brings up what went down half an hour ago, I will break your face.”
Abel was sitting on the L-shaped couch and pulled each of the books out of a black bag, straight to work and not bothering to care about our current drama—not like Nic, Peri, and Ryann who all stared at me. Ellie flopped on the end of the couch, grinning at his girlfriend, while the other two hadn’t moved from their station at Nic’s computer.
“Dates put these in the mid-nineteenth century.” Abel laid out the ledgers, three of them. “If this organization has been funding the church for a while, I thought non-computerized records might have details.”
Jesus. It was fucking brilliant. I lifted the first one from the coffee table. “That’s a nice idea, but we don’t really know how long they’ve been in bed with the Veil.”
“Except I also found this, which is why I picked these dates.” He withdrew a final volume, this one a small book the size of a journal with a musty smelling leather cover. “They have all the old journals of former superiors. This is Father Jacob. Most of his writings are prayers, letters to God, discussion of day to day life at the school, but...” He cracked it open, shifting thick yellowed pages with care, until he came to a spot near the end of the book.
I accepted the book, letting the ledger fall on my lap, and glanced over it. Cursive writing I could barely read covered the pages, bits and pieces in Latin.
“He mentions his superiors from Europe heading over and
bringing him to meet with several men. He traveled for hours, southwest from St. Michael’s.”
Which more than likely meant Macamigon—or somewhere around here.
I flipped to the next page—it wasn’t writing at all, but drawings. Quick sketches, ink smeared here and there. “What’s this?”
“He said he saw...paintings. At this house he went to.” Abel reached over and pointed to the rough, humanoid figures. “Two were done and they looked like they were in the same series with the same figures. He didn’t look at them for long but went with his superiors to an office where a ‘ghastly’—” Abel flipped a page for a moment and pointed out the passage in question, “—man with eyes like hell was directing an artist on a third painting.”
Eyes like hell... Could be Lachlan? I looked back at the drawings. Thin lines of ink except for smudging, proportions and angles a little off—the guy was clearly not a professional—but they looked like old school occult sketches to me, complete with a horned devil rising and witches or something. “Charming, but—”
“He says they tell a story. Two women, the Earth opening up...”
Oh, hell. “Prophecy by painting?”
“Looks to be.”
Gears got shifting in my pretty little head. “And there are more?”
“At least one more.”
The others were moving, crowding around the couch and gazing at the book as well. Two figures, definitely female, one on the left and the right. The ground dipped in the middle where the earth went jagged, some creature climbing out—classic devil looking thing.
The second drawing was different, sky splitting instead of the ground, a hand or something reaching through.
“Anything else?” I asked.
Abel shook his head. “Not in the journal.”
“The ledgers?”
The journal was cast on the table and he lifted one of the other books. “These are transactions from around the time of the journal. There are a lot of accounts and names, not to mention shorthand.”
Great. Research. I much preferred the job when it involved killing things. “Distribute the books and start making notes, I guess.” As he passed the ledgers around, I eyed the journal and its yellowed pages once more.
At least one thing was clear: We needed to see the rest of the paintings.
And a second thing is clear: At least I feel temporarily on solid ground again.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Ethics
The ledgers were divided amongst the others along with notepads where they copied out any names they found. Even Abel stuck around to help, working from one of the ledgers. I didn’t have my head on straight for numbers, though, so I kept the journal and read through, parsing together what I could from bits of Latin, French, and English.
“So far it’s a lot of transactions for food and supplies,” Nic said.
I didn’t look up from my book. “We want money coming in.”
“There’s a lot of that too.”
“It’s called tithing. Church likes its money.” Ry was probably glaring at me but I ignored her. “I guess just take all the names and we can follow up.” And see who’s alive after two hundred years. It wasn’t so impossible, as I was still alive after all that time. And Adrian Lachlan—yeah, I figured he had a few more years on him than was immediately obvious. A ghastly man with hell eyes directing the paintings in the nineteenth century? He was a likely candidate.
“A lot of references to ‘The Valley’,” Ryann said, a thoughtful frown pulling at her brows. Ellie scribbled it down for her. “Large sums.”
Nic’s phone chirped and she set the ledger down to reach for it, rubbing at her eyes and yawning as she did. “Hmm.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Hmm?”
“Someone just wired a million dollars to one of your offshore accounts.”
Hmm indeed. “I’m not expecting any payments, am I?”
“I’ll check the books,” she mumbled, drawing her long giraffe legs up to sit cross-legged on the swivel chair and tapped both thumbs against the phone—which suddenly rang. Another glance at me and she answered. “Hello?”
The others had put down their tasks to watch her and wait, as if the everyday work of my secretary was much more important than averting the end of the world. Amateurs.
She held the phone away a moment later. “It’s a Maximilian Vasquez.”
Maximilian...? “Oh, related to that chick I killed?”
“I presume. He sent the money. Wants to have a video conference with you.”
Huh. I wondered if he was cute. I shrugged, set down the journal, and rose. “Let me get cleaned up.”
“You look—”
I interrupted her with my finger thrust in her direction. “My self-esteem is quite low at the moment, thank you very much. I need my fucking kohl and some red lipstick or I refuse to be seen.”
She sighed and returned to the call while I jogged back for the bedroom. My hair I let out of the braid immediately and it fell in still-damp black waves, then I swiped kohl liner around my eyes, a bit of smoky eye shadow, splash of blush on either cheek, and crimson lipstick that matched my nails before they’d been all chipped scrapping with Mishka and Nate.
Nate.
His name was still a pinch every time I thought it, every time I pictured him. A flick of pain pressing on a bruise, and only then because I’d been shoving him far, far back, distracted by everything else. If I gave in and thought in detail about the bastard, I’d be a wreck again.
Nope. No way. I was going to have a video conference with a boy who just randomly sent me money. Maybe my warning bells should be going off, but the fuck if I cared.
A rap at the door and I saw Nic standing there, arm outstretched with the phone. She offered me a smirk that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You look hot.”
I sighed. “I know. I’d do me.” When I took the phone from her, she stepped back and footfalls faded for the living room.
An invitation popped up for some face time so I accepted and sat on the end of the bed, holding the phone up. A man’s face appeared. A very, very pleasant face, with short dark hair, dark eyes, and faint stubble on a square jaw of olive-toned skin. I’d put him in his late thirties to early forties. The crisp white collar of a dress shirt showed at his neck and I could easily picture him late at night at some home office with a glass of brandy.
I approved.
“Mr. Vasquez, I presume.” I tried a glittering smile but my heart wasn’t in it. Probably because I didn’t have one anymore.
“Miss Lain.” His voice was deep and rich, like the coffee humans seemed so fond of. “I’d like a few words with you.”
“You’re having a few right now.”
Lights cut above him and something thumped. “Just a quick drive around the block is all I ask.”
Huh?
Two seconds later Nic rapped on my open door again and stuck her head in. “There’s a Hummer limo out front and a man at the door asking for you.”
Sonovabitch. I glanced back at Vasquez where he had a soft, knowing smirk. “I take it that’s you?”
“My driver. As I said, just a drive around the block and feel free to be armed. I wish you no harm.”
I’ll bet. I hung up and stared down at my clothes. Fuck this—business meeting with a hot guy meant I should be presentable. I set the phone down on the dresser and glanced at Nic. “Tell him five minutes.”
Five minutes later I’d pinned my hair messily up with half a dozen clips, wore my new lace cocktail dress and expensive heels, and carried a gun.
Because I like to make an impression.
I stepped out of the house, past the trampled begonias and lawn where just hours ago I’d—
Stop thinking about him.
The Hummer limo was like the size of my fucking living room and stark white; if any of the handful of neighbors on this street looked out their windows, it would have tongues wagging even worse than Mishka blowing open the front door. Vas
quez’s driver held the door open for me and I slipped inside the air conditioned vehicle. The interior was cool gray, a bar to the right offering a variety of liquors. I settled one long leg over the other, rested the gun on the seat at my side, and smiled easily at my host across from me as the door closed.
Maximilian Vasquez smiled back in a charcoal business suit and, sure enough, swirling a glass of brandy. Silver threaded through the hair at his temples and while I didn’t normally do older types—though I looked to be in my late teens, they invariably hit on me—he was the sort I’d make an exception for.
Pebbles crunched under tires as the SUV moved and I kept the moving scenery in my peripheral vision; I’d shoot him if it looked like we were moving anywhere beyond the previously agreed upon parameters.
I kept my hand on the butt of the gun. “And the video conference was for...?”
“To ensure your identity and presence in Mademoiselle Levesque’s home before arriving. You received my payment?”
At least he was to the point. “Yes, and while I’m not opposed to large sums of money being sent to me, I don’t like being indebted to anyone.”
“No debt.” His smile was easy but cold, and still sexy as hell. “Payment for services. Seems you took care of a problem for me.” He took a sip from his glass of brandy.
Ding ding went the bell of realization over my head. “Yoana, your sister. You’re the one who sent Headless Craig to hire me.”
A small line cut between his brows as he frowned. “Yes. His attempt at moving up in the company didn’t go well.”
Putting it mildly. “You pointed me to Myra Swinney. How’d you know I was looking for her?”
“Your associates were quite...loud in their attempts to shake information from Mr. Laurent.”
That, I didn’t doubt. “And you sent me flowers.”
“I hoped they were enjoyed.”
Did anyone ever actually enjoy flowers? I mean, they just sit there. They can’t shoot anything or bring you pie, but whatever. “Well, you can have your cash back. It was a freebie—she fucked with me on a bad day so I put a bullet in her head.”
Exhumed Page 22
