Chapter 26
I crouched down next to Troy’s corpse in the woods behind Linda’s home. His lifeless eyes seemed to stare back at me, holding secrets I wasn’t sure I wanted to uncover.
The man’s body was contorted, his limbs twisted at unnatural angles and his charred, blackened skin split and peeled to reveal scorched muscle and bone. His face was a half-ruined mask of gruesome agony, his mouth agape in a silent scream over empty sockets.
He’d died from an intense burst of heat from an Orange Flame, because had a Red Flame torched him, the forest would have caught fire as well.
The attack was so intense that wisps of acrid smoke still drifted off the body, even hours later, carrying the sickening stench of burned flesh.
The metal case with the prison locks was nowhere to be seen.
“Fuuuuuuuuck!” My scream sent two crows winging away from a cedar tree.
Silas placed his hand on my shoulder. “If I’d found Troy two hours sooner, then…” My friend shook his head, bleary-eyed with exhaustion.
“Then you might have been killed as well. Vampires are just as flammable as humans.” I stood up, looking past the tree line to Linda’s fire-wrecked ruin of a house. “Was orange flame magic responsible for that too?”
Silas nodded at one of the forensic techs speaking with Darsh by the plastic fencing that had been erected around the home. “That’s what Gaitan believes, but Malika is on her way over to examine the body.”
I paced the muddy forest ground. “Jared’s attack by another Orange Flame wasn’t a coincidence. The same person is responsible for Troy’s murder.”
Silas nodded. “I suspect they burned down Linda’s home to flush Troy out and when he showed, killed him.”
“And took the metal briefcase.”
Silas frowned down at the corpse. “Now that I’m less sure of. The amount of magic that was poured into Troy? It’s like his killer was furious and vented on him. Likely they would have eliminated Troy even once they got the metal case, but not this brutally.”
I rubbed my pounding temples. “Could Linda have gotten the metal case back from Troy?”
“There’s no body and no evidence that she died in that fire,” Silas said. “So maybe.”
“Which our Orange Flame suspect may very well know.” I sat down on a fallen log, avoiding a patch of moss.
“Michael has been trying to reach Linda since the fire,” Silas said. “But she hasn’t answered and her mailbox is full.”
“Just fucking great.” How was it possible that we now had a corpse on our hands, plus a missing person, and two demon prisons complete with occupants still out in the wild?
Silas went to speak with Darsh and Gaitan and I phoned Rukhsana.
“Aviva,” she said. “I was just about to call you.”
“Troy’s dead,” I said curtly. “Did you find anyone who’d seen him in the last couple days? Anyone who helped him while he was on the run?”
“No one. He was very cautious.”
Not cautious enough. “Is that what you meant to tell me?”
“No,” she said. “Mois Aviyente snuck back into the country.”
The Trads didn’t know that yet or I’d have heard, but it didn’t surprise me that Rukhsana had the information before we did.
Mois had ample money to procure an alias and a fake passport we knew nothing about. With Linda missing, her house burned down, and Troy dead, the older man would be operating at high alert paranoia.
“Is he with Linda?” I said. “Do you know where they are?”
Rukhsana tutted me. “My question first, chère. Those dangerous artifacts of Troy’s that you mentioned, are they demonic?”
“Where did you hear that?” I said blandly.
“Fool.”
I planted a hand on my hip. “I beg your pardon?”
“Not you. Mois Aviyente, and I’m not outing my source.”
“Give me more than that, Rukhsana.” I stood up. “Things are serious.”
“I heard he was trying to trade some artifacts to shedim for his life.”
“And his daughter’s?” I crossed my fingers, hoping she was alive.
“No idea. But it’s a stupid plan and it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
There was a long, weighty pause. I checked my screen, but the call was still connected. “Rukhsana?”
She exhaled hard and then my phone chimed.
I opened the photo she’d sent me and flinched. Her stomach was covered in angry raised scars. Rukhsana had a healer in her contacts, which meant these scars defied magic mending.
“Demons lie about making deals,” she said bitterly. “I was very, very lucky to escape with my life. Mois shouldn’t count on the same. You have to find him.”
“Thank you for telling me, but…why did you?” Rukhsana was not one to share vulnerabilities and this one was a whopper.
“I’m tired of Vancouver. I want to start somewhere fresh with a few of my crew and you’re going to help me.” She named an outrageous sum.
“I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Ezra does,” she said flatly. “Convince him.”
“How—”
“Did you think batting your boyfriend’s eyelashes at me would butter up poor, old Rukhsana?”
Intellectually, I’d always appreciated the Frenchwoman’s reputation and how she’d gained such power in the relatively short time she’d lived in Vancouver, but right now was the first time I felt it in my bones.
“You got me.” I cradled my phone between my chin and shoulder and threw up my hands. “You’re young, hot, powerful, and clearly a totally pathetic human being. So yeah, I brought Ezra around to foreplay you up before the paid main event.”
She actually chuckled. “Get me the money.”
“You know you’re supposed to negotiate before you show your cards. I could refuse.”
“You won’t. You care too much. Even about a criminal like me.”
She was right. I did.
While I didn’t plan to hit Ezra up for the cash, I agreed to the amount, giving my word that she’d have it once Mois was found.
Let the Maccabees pay for catching Mois. One of the privileges of being a level three was my ability to authorize stuff like this, though I wished it wasn’t necessary because the paperwork was still a nightmare.
Silas waved me over.
Malika had arrived, along with a few of her team, and they were zipping into protective suits.
With our deal in place, Rukhsana bid me à bient?t. I headed to my friends, greeting Malika and the new Maccabee arrivals.
They tromped off to examine Troy’s body, the coroner issuing directives to her people while she tucked her headscarf more securely under the hood of the suit.
I shared what Rukhsana had said as Silas, Darsh, and I hurried back to our cars. “It might be a long shot, but will you follow me to the Lions Gallery?” I said. “Mois has the money for them to hole up anywhere, but this is Linda’s home turf, and I’d want to be somewhere familiar.”
“We’ll be right behind you.” He and Darsh peeled off to the rented SUV.
I barreled through traffic with the gas pedal floored and a liberal use of my horn, parking in a restricted spot down the block from the gallery and slapping my Maccabee permit on the dash.
The operatives who’d been watching the business had been replaced by Trad officers. That was less interesting to me than the heavy security bars on all the windows that hadn’t been there the night of the exhibit opening.
God, was that really only last Thursday? Three days ago?
The officers reported that the bars had been in place the entire time they’d staked out the building.
Silas and Darsh arrived to hear that.
I did a thorough walk through of the entire front of the gallery, pulling up short when I reached the doors.
Someone had installed a mezuzah on the frame.
I sprinted into the alley, where, sure enough, another one was on the back door with a sticker bearing the name of the security company. “The deal with the shedim wasn’t because Troy died. He took off with the case because the deal was in place. It was set up already.”
“Who are these shedim?” Darsh asked.
“Either the demon who was partnered with Chandra connecting prisoners with Eishei Kodesh criminals or the owners of the prison locks themselves.” My stomach twisted and I glanced at my hands but the wound from the cactus heist was gone.
“What is it?” Darsh laid a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. “Easy,” he said.
I couldn’t tell them about the brain here. We were too exposed. “I’m worried about Linda and her dad hanging on to those locks. Chandra must have had them in her possession when she was killed, and for whatever reason, her family couldn’t get to them until recently, while Mois was out of the country.”
“Then he knew about her matchmaking gig.”
I nodded. “I’d say so. As did Linda.”
Silas and Darsh wrenched on the bars securing the back door.
“They’re too strong for me to break,” Silas said, “and the front door was also reinforced to defy vampire strength. Add in mezuzah wards and nothing supernatural is getting in there.”
“Nothing human either,” I said. “Our only hope is for Mois and Linda to come out.” I pounded on the alley door, calling the gallery owner’s name.
Silas and Darsh glanced at the high narrow window, then Darsh jerked his chin to the barred glass.
I stepped directly under it. “Linda, please listen to me. You can’t trust shedim. If you and Mois won’t cancel the meeting, then let me have operatives in place to protect you.” I rose up on tiptoe, attempting to peer in through the glass. “Linda?”
“Whoever was there is gone,” Darsh said.
I dialed the number on the sticker for the security company but held my cell out to Darsh before I hit call. “Can you compel someone over the phone?”
He eyed it thoughtfully. “I haven’t ever tried it.”
“But you’re old enough to compel so give it a shot.” I shook the phone at him.
“That’s not a good idea,” Silas said. “Call and ask like a normal person.”
“Silas,” I said with forced patience, “no employee will be allowed to divulge when they installed these bars, and I don’t have time to go through proper channels. If this security was planned before Troy’s death or the house fire, then maybe Rukhsana was wrong about meeting up with shedim. But if it was a last-minute addition, it’s verification. That means we have a chance to stop the demons and get that case. Besides, we’re not compelling the employees to divulge their innermost secrets.”
“It’s not right,” he insisted.
“Fine.” I whipped an elastic band out of my pocket and yanked my hair into a ponytail so hard that my scalp burned. “Go sit in your car and pretend it’s not happening.”
A gleam flashed in Silas’s eyes, a cold and calculating darkness that sent shivers down my spine. He radiated an aura of menace, every muscle in his face taut with an unsettling intensity.
I took a step back, fighting my overwhelming urge to bust Cherry out, but before my heel even struck the ground, the expression had disappeared, replaced by a hurt look. I could almost believe I’d imagined it, because this was Silas, the vamp who didn’t even fight back when he was arrested.
But I hadn’t.
A monster of a creature, big as an oak, with hair of fire and the face of an angel, who feasted on our blood and our flesh, and laughed while he did.
Silas, my copper-haired friend, telling me about the darkness in his head…
“You—you’re the Ashbishop,” I whispered.
“That’s not funny, Aviva,” Darsh growled. He blinked at Silas, who’d gone as white as a ghost. “Tell her she’s wrong.” His voice was questioning and demanding at the same time.
“I…” Silas hung his head.
A sound like a wounded animal punched out of Darsh, bouncing off the trees and feeling like a net trapping the three of us in this unthinkable new reality.
Darsh locked eyes with Silas. “Say it.” His voice was low and deadly.
I edged behind Darsh, my pulse racing, my mouth filled with a metallic taste and my chest tight.
“Darsh.” Silas held out his hand, then suddenly stiffened.
“Say. It.” Darsh strode toward Silas in slow, measured steps.
“He’s dead.” Blood trickled out of Silas’s tear ducts and nostrils.
“Say it!” Darsh screamed and punched Silas, knocking the larger vampire backward.
His legs buckled and he crashed to the dirty concrete. His mouth twisted in pain and his ears bled along with his eyes and nose. “The Ashbishop is all on me.”
Darsh pounced, landing to straddle Silas. He locked one hand around his throat.
Silas closed his eyes, accepting his fate, but his so-called confession didn’t make sense. Did I have this wrong?
Darsh’s grip tightened, his fingers leaving white marks against Silas’s skin.
“No!” I ran at the pair, pulling Darsh off.
He swung his wild eyes to mine. “Don’t make me compel you.”
I dropped my hands and stepped away from him. “You almost pulled Silas’s brains out through his nose with your compulsion, yet he didn’t admit to being the Ashbishop. Silas,” I pleaded, “explain what you meant.”
The vamp opened his eyes, his face etched with sorrow, but he remained silent.
I’d set something awful in motion, but if Silas wouldn’t clear this up and Darsh wouldn’t listen, I didn’t know how to stop its inevitable tragic conclusion. “Please.”
Darsh ground his knees into Silas’s arms. “Did you get a thrill fucking me after what you did?”
Silas jolted up, pushing Darsh off him. “What are you talking about?”
Darsh laughed mirthlessly and snapped his fingers. “Right. You killed so many people that my brother’s death wasn’t even memorable.”
“Patrin?” Silas reached for Darsh, but at his flinch, held his hands up. “I never met him.”
“You’re lying.”
“Then compel me, but I swear to you, Darsh, when you showed me his photo the other day, that was the first time I laid eyes on him. And if you’d said that the Ashbishop killed him, I’d have set you straight.” He wiped the blood off his face, his injuries already healing. “I’m not that vampire,” he said softly, “but I’m the reason he exists. All that death, it’s all my fault.”
“How so?” I said.
“I created that monster.”
Darsh dropped his head into his hands and bent over double, sitting there on the ground like he no longer had any strength left in his body.
Silas rolled a pebble under his finger. “I was changed almost two hundred years ago.” His Southern accent had grown stronger, either in distress or because he’d reverted to a past version of himself in order to tell this story. “Notarized consent wasn’t required. Vampires hunted and fed, and sometimes they left their victims alive, even making them companions.”
“You were angry that you were changed,” I said.
“No, I loved it,” he said sadly. “I didn’t have much of a life as a human, but as a vampire? The world was this glorious, magical place.” His boyish face lit up.
I looked around the alley as if seeing it through his eyes, somewhere wondrous, alive with color and texture and scent and sound.
“I fled my parents’ farm.” He gave a small self-deprecating smile. “I rode trains for the first time. I traveled the world. It was a wonderful life.”
“So what happened?” I said.
“A century is a long time,” he said. “I felt stuck in an endless night, without purpose. I went to Ireland to drink my way through Dublin and ended up attending a philosophy lecture on existential crises. It was like the professor was speaking directly to me. Fintan had the gift of gab, he did.” He snorted. “I approached him after, and one beer turned into dozens of conversations. Fintan not only became my best friend, he was my brother and only family. One day, I showed him what I was, and he was fascinated. He kept asking questions and…”
Darsh still hadn’t looked at Silas, though he’d turned his head slightly to listen. I took it as an encouraging sign.
“He asked you to turn him,” I said.
“I didn’t do it right away, I kept making him think on it, so he wouldn’t have any regrets.” He winged a stone against the alley wall.
Darsh’s head jolted up at the sound, his shoulders tense, but he didn’t move.
“Best laid plans, right?” Silas said. “Fintan’s change was difficult and I braced myself to lose him, but he survived. He viewed it as a curse from the devil.” He raked a hand roughly over his short hair. “Fintan now believed the religious dogma he’d eschewed in life.”
A blazing red dragonfly fluttered past.
Silas followed its flight with an almost pained expression. He tentatively reached a hand out to it and the insect flew off. “In Fintan’s opinion, his humanity had been burned to ashes. His bones were barbed wire, their marrow replaced with vengeance. Since he was now soulless, condemned to an evil existence, he’d embrace that. He unleashed the Ashbishop on the world.”
“You created a killer, then you stood passively by,” Darsh said viciously. “Just like you always do.”
“I tried to help him see his life differently. I believed I’d helped him find peace with this.” Silas flexed his hands against the pavement as though drawing strength from the earth itself. “But it was a ruse. Fintan escaped my watch and butchered his first village. I hunted him down but he stayed one step ahead of me, collecting others as twisted as himself.”
“The more the merrier,” Darsh said snidely.
“Is he dead or not?” I said.
“He is.” Silas shook himself out of his reverie. “I loved him, I turned him, and in the end, I killed him. Darsh, if Patrin’s death?—”
“Don’t say his name.” Darsh pushed to his feet.
It was fair that Darsh needed time to process all this, but it wasn’t fair to put the Ashbishop’s sins on Silas.
“You found Rylan and put him in Seaside to be healed, didn’t you?” I said. “You’ve been supporting the survivors of the original Ashbishop’s attacks. It’s why you intended to sell part of your art collection. Money to keep supporting them.”
“I could donate the proceeds of the entire collection, hell, spend my life financing every single Seaview clinic, and it wouldn’t be enough.” Silas stood up. “But I don’t know what else to do for the people Fintan harmed.”
Darsh pressed his hands against his eyes for a brief moment, then blurred out of the alley.
I sighed. “Does Ezra know?”
Silas shook his head, his gaze trained on the mouth of the alley, but Darsh didn’t return.
I wouldn’t be angry with Ezra for keeping that secret from me; my worry was how he’d take the news.
“Tell him,” I said gently. “Darsh needs time, but Ezra should hear this from you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have told you before.”
I squeezed his hand. “I’m the last person you need to apologize to for keeping secrets. And nothing that monster did is your fault. Stop paying penance.”
“Yeah,” he said with absolutely zero conviction.
I shook my head. “I do have a question though. You brought Rylan to Seaside decades ago. In all that time, did you ever hear about them working on vampire procreation?”
“Not Seaside,” he said, “but their umbrella company owns other medical franchises around the globe. One of them is a fertility clinic. I don’t remember the name, but it’s human fertility, not vamp.”
“At some point could they have worked with vampires?”
“I never heard that, but who’s to say?” Silas scrubbed a hand over his face. “I can’t lose him.” He didn’t specify if he meant Darsh or Ezra, but it didn’t matter.
“You won’t,” I said firmly. My curl of excitement about this fertility clinic possibility fizzled out hard with my next breath, because the thought of Ezra brought an awful hypothesis with it. “I’m coming with you to the Hell.”
I desperately hoped I was wrong, but if I wasn’t? Ezra had to hear this from me.