Magitek (The Rift Chronicles Book 1)

by BR Kingsolver

  Out of curiosity, I asked, “You don’t happen to know the Johansson power structure, do you?”

  Osiris rolled his eyes. “Joseph Johansson was his father’s second in command, and I assume he takes over as Family head. There really isn’t anyone to challenge him.”

  “Where do his latest wife and daughter fit in?”

  “They don’t. I think she gets a mansion in Italy and a monthly maintenance allowance as long as she stays out of Joseph’s way.”

  I doubted that Martin Johansson’s wife knew about his sexual activities but made a note to interview them before they were shipped out of town.

  Chapter 35

  The first place I went the following morning was the morgue located in the subbasement of the police station. Kelly Quinn looked as though she hadn’t had much sleep.

  “Late night?” I asked.

  She glowered at me and downed a large swallow of her coffee.

  “I was hoping to get some info on the guys who tried to kill me the other night,” I said, purposely projecting an upbeat, cheerful mood I really didn’t feel. But for some reason, I felt the need to torture her. Usually it was me who had a hard time coexisting with morning.

  “Well, one was charred to a cinder, one was electrocuted, and the other one had two large holes in him. Which one would you like to start with?”

  “The guy with the holes.”

  She led me to one of the storage boxes along the wall and slid a corpse out of one.

  “Shot twice with large-caliber explosive-incendiary bullets,” she said, pointedly looking at the Raider strapped to my leg. “Lower left abdomen and right chest. There’s also this burn mark on his right cheek, indicating a third bullet just missed.”

  I figured my first shot hit him low, then the recoil of the pistol caused the next two shots to rise to my left. It was either lucky shooting or good marksmanship. Whatever, it had been effective.

  “Personal effects?”

  “Yeah, and his fingerprints match his identification. It’s all in the computer.”

  “Was he carrying a phone?”

  She held up a clear plastic bag with a phone in it. “Yes, and so was the other guy whose body is intact. Although, considering the electrical charge that killed him, I’d be shocked if the phone still works.”

  “Are they logged into the system?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great. I’ll take them.” I snatched it out of her hand and picked up the other phone she had pointed to. “Thanks.”

  Before she had a chance to object, I took off for the elevator and my office.

  Once I reached my desk, I logged on to the computer and used magik to unlock both phones. Kelly was right, one phone was fried. Checking the name on the other phone, I brought up his records. I ran the numbers from his calls, sorted through them, and had fifty or so to check. I gave those to Novak.

  I checked the records for the other guy I’d shot, the one still in hospital. He was listed as working for himself as a freelance bodyguard, and a deeper dive showed that he had done a significant amount of work for the Moncrieff Family. I checked all of the attackers’ addresses and found they lived in the same general area.

  A pattern was starting to develop. I was willing to bet they all hung out in the same bar. Novak already had the living guy’s phone, so I unlocked it and ran the same scan on it, then added the numbers to Novak’s list.

  One thing for sure, if a demon hired them, he hadn’t used a phone, or a computer, or any method other than meeting face-to-face. I ran a list of demon-owned bars. Based on the profiles of the men I had identified, I eliminated high-end places such as Lucifer’s Lair. Then I separated those remaining into strip bars and places that served food. I tabbed two detectives whose caseloads looked sparse and handed them the two lists and pictures of our suspects. Being a lieutenant had some nice benefits.

  Having a little time on my hands, I knocked on Whittaker’s door and updated him on the investigation’s progress.

  When I finished, he said, “That all makes sense. Did you check on other bars that Ashvial owns, either wholly or in part?”

  I stared at him, then was forced to say, “No. I didn’t think of it.”

  “Also check ownership by the Akiyama, Johansson, and Moncrieff Families. You may find that bars run by demons aren’t necessarily owned by them. But you can rule out the Leprechaun’s Den.” He winked at me. “I own that one, and the djinn who manages it wouldn’t dare broker a hit on a cop.”

  It turned out that David Moncrieff, an uncle of mine, was a silent partner, along with Martin Johansson, in a bar near one of our suspects’ address. A check with the labor department showed that most of the employees were Rifters.

  I left Novak with the rest of the lists I’d run and took off to check out the Devil’s Reef. The bar was located on the border between a human slum and a demon slum—the kind of bar where low-level minor demons with mud for brains beat each other up and ripped each other off.

  To my surprise, the place wasn’t a total dive. It wasn’t the kind of place I would normally frequent, but it was reasonably clean, and the people in the place at three o’clock in the afternoon smelled like they had bathed in the past couple of days. Any semblance of respectability was destroyed, however, when I discovered the bouncer was a ghoul.

  I spotted two lust demon waitresses—one a lilith, the other a succubus—and a female devil tending bar. I sat down on a barstool and waited for her to notice me.

  “What’ll you have, sweet buns?” she asked when she sauntered over.

  “Beer. Whatever’s on draft,” I said.

  She pulled me what looked like a light lager and set it down. I paid her, but instead of turning away, she stood there giving me a good stare before asking, “Who are you looking for?”

  “What makes you think I’m looking for someone?”

  “C’mon. You’re not a hooker, and you’re certainly not our usual clientele, so you’re either here to meet someone, or you’re a cop.”

  I glanced around and saw what she meant. The women in the place consisted of obvious hookers, bikers’ honeys, overage and overweight divorcees, and a few slutty-dressed girls who might or might not have been of age.

  “You got me. I’m your boss’s new girlfriend.”

  She barked out a laugh. “I don’t think so, but if you really get off on screwing an ifrit, his office is down that hall.”

  I thanked her, tossed another bill on the bar, and wandered on down the hall.

  Ifrits were probably the most human-looking demons, but their personalities left something to be desired. Maybe they just got a bad rap, but their reputation as sexual and emotional sadists didn’t really appeal to me. Even other human-looking demons, such as the devil bartender and the lust demon waitresses, steered clear of ifrits.

  I didn’t expect to have trouble with the ifrit—I expected a demon who ran a human bar to be reasonably socialized—but just in case, I cupped my little lightning box in my left hand.

  I walked past the restrooms, assumed the solid door was a janitor’s closet, and knocked on the door with a clouded-glass window.

  “Yeah? What the hell do ya want?”

  The voice sounded like the hiss of a snake combined with a cement mixer. Bracing myself, I turned the knob and pushed the door open. The being sitting behind the desk did look very human, if you didn’t worry about the orange hair and skin. Little piggy eyes squinted out of a fleshy face, and his mouth was twisted in a permanent sneer. It had never occurred to me that a demon could get fat.

  “Mr. Gecid?” I held up my badge. “I’m Lieutenant James, Metropolitan Police. I’d like to ask you some questions about some of your customers.”

  “I’m not responsible for my customers.”

  I held up a face picture of the guy I’d shot. “Do you know this man?”

  He peered at the photo. “He might come in here. I don’t pay attention as long as they pay.”

  It was difficult to inte
rpret demon body language and facial expressions. In addition, if a demon opened its mouth, you had to assume it was lying. I decided to force the issue.

  “Well, he says that you hired him to kill me. I’m sure you understand that—” I never got to finish my sentence because he stuck his hand in his desk drawer, pulled out a pistol, and fired.

  His shot missed. Mine didn’t. In the vids, the good guy always manages to wound the bad guy or shoot the gun out of his hand. In reality, I hit him near the right collarbone, and damned near blew his head off. So much for getting any information out of him.

  I didn’t spend time worrying about it. I secured his weapon, then checked the rest of the office to make sure no one else with murder on their mind was hiding in the filing cabinet or under his desk. The office wasn’t large enough to hide a human, but imps came in a variety of compact sizes. And who knew what other kinds of small demons there might be.

  That didn’t take long.

  I stuck my head out into the hall and heard nothing. Cautiously making my way down the hall, I came to the bar’s main room. It was empty. Not a single patron remained. The waitresses, bouncer, and bartender were also gone. As a testament to the type of clientele the place attracted, almost every glass and bottle sitting out was empty. You had to hand it to people whose first instinct when the shooting started was to drain their beer before stampeding toward the door.

  I called dispatch to report a shooting, but I shouldn’t have bothered. The detectives tailing me stuck their heads—and their pistols—through the front door while the phone was still ringing. Sirens I could hear in the distance seemed to be getting louder, so I hung up.

  “He’s still alive,” someone said. I was standing in the bar talking to Novak and Whittaker. Curious as to who was being discussed, I walked back down the hall to Gecid’s office and peeked in. Three EMTs were working on him.

  “Who’s alive?”

  “This guy. One of his carotid arteries is intact, so the heart on that side is still supplying blood to the brain. If we can get him a transfusion in time, he might survive.”

  They loaded him on a gurney, and I got out of the way as they hurried him out to the ambulance parked in front of the bar. I knew demons were damned hard to kill—having two hearts was obviously a survival trait—but I was sure Gecid had bit the dust.

  After they were gone, I went into his office, pulled on a pair of plastic gloves, and started going through his paper records. There was an awful lot of blood in the vicinity of his desk, but it was clean inside the drawers and filing cabinets.

  “So, you never did tell me why you shot him?” Whittaker’s voice came from the office doorway.

  “He pulled a gun and tried to shoot me. I asked if he hired anyone to kill me, and his response was to reach into his desk drawer for a weapon.” I gestured to the hole in the wall by the door. “He just happens to be a lousy shot.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I’m trying not to think too hard about that, if you don’t mind.”

  A piece of paper in one of the desk drawers caught my attention. Fine stationary with a delicate flowered border. When I picked it up, I discovered it had a faint floral scent. Not at all like the other paper I’d found, and not something I would associate with a demon. In their world, the flora was as voraciously carnivorous as the fauna.

  An address was written on it in a woman’s hand. My address. I held it up for Whittaker to see.

  “Well, I guess that explains his happy trigger finger,” my boss said.

  “Yeah. Guilty as hell. Hey!” I called to one of the forensics guys. I held out the page. “Bag this and see if you can find any fingerprints or DNA on it.”

  He held up a plastic bag, and I slipped the piece of paper in.

  “Find anything else interesting?” Whittaker asked.

  “I knew from a records search before I came down here that Johansson and David Moncrieff actually own this place. The main thing I’ve learned since I got here is how lucrative owning a bar is. They are raking it in.”

  Whittaker grinned. “Better investment than the stock market, and more secure. They’ll hire a new manager before the end of the week, and the patrons will show back up as soon as they reopen.”

  He sobered. “Johansson was dead when you were attacked. This puts Ashvial right back in the frame.”

  “Yeah, but if you were him, would you hire vampires and mages to carry out a hit?” I asked. “Think of all the creepy, crawly, nasty creatures he could sic on me. Did you know, the demon world has a snake that can spit a corrosive poison fifteen feet? Almost instantly lethal.”

  “Yeah,” he said, scratching his neck, “I had a case once where that was the murder weapon. Their version of vampire bats are pretty nasty, too, although sex demon assassins seems to be their method of choice. Not an option to use on mages, though.”

  “Don’t bet on it. There are a lot of kinky mages out there. You don’t have to be lured to be stupidly horny.”

  Chapter 36

  The lab tests on the paper with my address came back before I went home that evening. I went down to the lab on my way out of the office.

  “Partial prints, but nothing definitive,” the technician told me. “DNA shows one human and the ifrit you shot.”

  “Is the human DNA in our database?” I prompted.

  “Not exactly. I found some family ties.” She seemed very tentative, holding a page of paper as if it was too precious to show me.

  “Hell, let me see that,” I said, snatching the printout from her hand. There were more than a dozen names on the list. I was one of them. The DNA analysis of the note writer included gene sequences from the Findlay and Benoit Families. My Great-grandmother Genevieve was a Benoit. Someone in my extended family was trying to kill me. Of course, that narrowed it down only to about two or three dozen people. To my surprise, I discovered that I wasn’t surprised. It was kind of a relief to know that my paranoia about my family was justified.

  I compared the analysis of my DNA and the woman’s who wrote the address. We shared some Findlay genes. She was an electrokinetic, but that wasn’t surprising. Electrokinesis was the major Family talent.

  “I have a lot more relatives than this,” I said.

  “Our records are incomplete. We don’t have samples for most of the Hundred,” the tech said, “especially the older generations. More of the younger people have been arrested or had their DNA taken in hospital at one time or another.”

  Mine was on file because I was a cop, and it was required. I couldn’t imagine my grandmother’s reaction to anyone asking her for a DNA sample. Personally, I wasn’t in the mood to get fried.

  Of course, there was a database of the Findlay Family DNA, and that of all the other Families. It just wasn’t public. The Families kept scrupulous breeding records. The physical deformities of our great-great-grandparents’ generation still cropped up occasionally, and they tried to avoid that. Enhancing or combining talents was also a priority, and any marriage negotiation included the exchange of genetic profiles.

  Lurid rumors circulated about the Families’ breeding programs, and I knew that artificial insemination using carefully selected fertilized ovum was common. The biggest scandal inside the Findlay clan had been the unplanned pregnancy of my single cousin Karolyn and her refusal to divulge the name of the father.

  As to the note writer, the obvious candidate was my Aunt Courtney, but she was a little too obvious. Although we didn’t get along, I didn’t think she hated me enough to put out a hit on me. But that begged the question, why would anyone care enough to spend good money on my demise?

  Scanning the list, I realized that I couldn’t just consider my immediate extended Family. My Great-great-grandfather Oliver Findlay had four brothers and sisters, all of whom had procreated. There might be a hundred or more people who I shared Findlay DNA with, some of whom I had never met. And I had no idea if any of them had ever married a Benoit, which was at least as large a Family.

 
I thanked the tech and left the lab. Who to share this information with? Whittaker would probably get a copy of the tech’s report, but I decided to put off a conversation with him. The only person I could really trust at Findlay was my grandmother. If one of Granduncle George’s kids or grandkids was the guilty party, I shouldn’t expect Osiris to be forthcoming about it.

  Kirsten and I had just finished dinner and were relaxing with an after-dinner cordial on the back deck when someone knocked on the front door. One of our many bodyguards answered.

  “Danica! There’s a demon out here wants to talk to you,” Arnie yelled.

  I found a standard demon on the front porch that I’d never seen before, practically surrounded by Findlay guardians.

  “Danica James?” he asked.

  “Yes, that’s me.”

  Without another word, he handed me a sealed envelope with my name written on it in a very florid script. He didn’t wait for me to open it, just turned and walked away.

  “We should scan that,” Arnie said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Please. Who do you think designed your scanners?”

  Going back inside, I grabbed a magitek scanner off the table by the door and passed it over the envelope. No poisons, explosives, or biologicals. I tore it open and found a folded formal invitation card inside.

  I have information about Sarah Benning. Ashvial.

  A human would have called or sent an email. A demon, of course, sent a courier with a handwritten letter. I took it back to where Kirsten waited and handed it to her.

  “Are you going over there tonight?” she asked. “Might be better to do it in the morning when his energies are at a lower ebb.”

  “I don’t think it matters. I doubt if meeting a demon lord on his worst day would give me any advantage.”

  Kirsten nodded. “Probably right. Well, want me to come with you?”