Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A silent conversation passes between Bellamy and Fox as they exchange a look. As awesome as I am at reading people, the only thing I get from their exchange is that they both know what we need to do now, and thank heavens for that.
Without a word, Bellamy unlocks his phone, taps it a couple of times, and lifts it to his ear.
After a moment, he speaks with a subtle sort of affection in his genteel voice.
“Hello, Darcy.” I can’t tell what the voice on the other end of the connection says, only that it’s deep.
“Just fine…Yeah, you heard right…I’m not sure yet…
True. We need a tracker at Santanos’ home…
I’m aware…It’s bad. Really bad…Broken council magic bad…
Thank you.” He ends the call and looks between me and Fox.
“Darcy’s a tracker. He’ll be here shortly.
I suggest Calssandr and Haigan leave. Darcy isn’t Santanos’ biggest fan. He will be antagonistic.”
Calssandr scoffs and shakes her head, guiding her apprentice out without actually speaking words.
Bellamy shuts the door behind them and studies the room with a grim frown.
“He’ll get his accoutrement and pop in, since the wards aren’t working and he can track me.
He’s…” he pauses, considering his words before continuing, “unreserved. He dislikes Santanos because they’ve clashed a number of times. ”
A pop crashes through the air as a tiny man of Asian descent appears, his spiked up, bottle-blond hair making him look like an anime character.
He’s several inches less than five feet tall and skinny like he could stand to eat several years of decent meals.
The man is gothed-out with black make-up, a worn metal band shirt, more steel chains than any one person really needs, and a utility belt with satchels and tools hanging from it along with bulging pockets.
He wears a worn black leather jacket over skinny jeans that display his assets prominently.
Dude is hung and unashamed to show it off.
He sneers at the room before his eyes land on Bellamy and a grin spreads on his raven-black lips.
“Stepped in it this time, didn’t ya, Red?
” The voice on him matches his dick, so deeply bass it’s a shock to hear it out of the tiny man, and it is as thickly country as an accent can get without coming straight out of the Ozarks.
Actually, it might come from the base of the Ozarks.
“You know me,” Bellamy hums, trying so hard not to eye-fuck the man.
Blinking to clear the obvious lust on his face, he turns with a sweep of his arm.
“This is Romily Butcher, Harbinger for Arlington Fox.” He presents us both then uses his other hand to present his friend-he-wants-to-fuck.
“This is Darcy Hellspinner, the best tracker to walk through the immortal realms.”
“And that’s no exaggeration,” Darcy agrees, shaking first Fox’s hand and then mine with a wink.
Fox studies the man for a moment as he pulls me under his arm, holding me close to stake his claim. I do so love his alpha possessiveness. “It isn’t? I’ve never heard of you.” He asks it matter-of-factly, not questioning the truth, merely curious why he doesn’t already know Darcy.
“I try to stay out of council cock-ups,” Darcy explains. “The problem with being the best is that everyone wants to own a piece of ya, and I value my independence too much to bend over and let the council fuck me.” He gives Fox a salacious wink. “You on the other hand…”
The corner of Fox’s lips twitch like he’s suppressing a smile and his arm around me tightens just a miniscule amount. “I see. You came here to help us find Santanos. What do you think?”
Darcy’s fists land on his hips as he spins to take in the room, switching to professional mode in a blink.
“I think you got yourself a major fucking problem. Smells like death magic and hero-complex in here. You got yourself a necromancing Nephilim, and it ain’t going to be an easy slide into a welcoming cunt to find him.
I see where your necro-bastard portaled in and there’s some shreds of his death magic up there where he tore through the ward,” he points up to the ceiling and we all look up, but I immediately regret it because it’s the Sistine chapel of porn where every face is Santanos’s.
Gross.
“I didn’t see that,” Fox murmurs, staring up at the ceiling.
Bellamy glances up, but he looks just as disgusted as I am and quickly looks back down. “I can’t see magic,” he whispers to me, “and I wish I hadn’t seen that.”
I nod my whole-hearted agreement.
“Alrighty, let me get set up and we’ll back-trace the death fucker, and if that leads to nowhere we’ll follow the portal jumps, but that’s not my first option.
I’d rather see if we can find where he’s been; might get lucky and find his homebase or at least something with enough of him seeped into it I can scry. ”
Darcy shakes out his arms and legs and pulls out a pointy athame that drips with that same gray ethereal smoke I saw during the demon fight.
I pull out my phone and my boys immediately follow suit, making me smile as I type into our group chat.
What’s the gray smoke?
I’m guessing some kind of magic that makes the blades special somehow. It’s a half point kind of guess, but I’ll round up if I’m even in the same hemisphere as correct.
Fox follows my gaze to the athame and explains.
“It’s the magical pollution the blade filters out of the wielder.
The blade can only use a certain kind of magic, and in the hands of a hybrid, it filters out the magic it can’t use and purifies the magic it can.
My blade filters out all the natural magic it takes from me and leaves only my demon magic. ”
“I’m not inherently magical, but mine draws the magic I absorb through my work and filters it down to earth magic,” Bellamy adds.
Darcy shoots us a wicked smirk as he uses the athame to slice his wrist open. “Mine uses blood magic, but it has to filter out the hearth witch and fire dancer to get to the good stuff.”
I really need a dictionary of species for this job. Is he talking about actual fire dancing like what you see in those Hawaiian performances on YouTube?
I’ve only seen it one time when one of the other kids in the home I was in showed us all a dance competition that included fire dancers.
“Human fire dancing evolved from shaman rituals,” Bellamy answers.
Darcy looks between the three of us but doesn’t say anything as he starts drawing a circular array of symbols around him in his own blood.
Not a little blood, and the fat drops from his wrist don’t appear to bother him; they cause the symbols to run and bleed—laugh at my punniness! —as he turns in a circle.
Once he finishes, he waves us over to him with that mischievous smirk on his lips. “Come on then, once I activate it, it’ll move us along the traces of the necro magic. Brace yourselves, I’m not cleaning the puke off my shoes. First person to lose it will get that privilege.”
I grimace, following my men into the circle with Darcy.
Fox pulls out his sword, Bellamy hands me his gun case and unsheathes his machete, and Darcy throws some glitter into the air.
Ok, it’s probably not glitter, but I don’t know what it actually is, and as soon as it reaches the zenith of its upward trajectory, the world suddenly lurches.
Or rather we lurch upward, standing on a platform made of light held together by the magic of the array.
Panic jump starts my heart as we rush the ceiling, but before it can fully form we pass through to the room above and then the roof. We fly so fast the scenery blurs. My stomach revolts, so I slam my eyes shut, surprised to find that as long as I’m not looking, it feels like I’m standing still.
After a few minutes, Bellamy and Fox both take in a sharp breath, and of course, I stupidly open my eyes.
We’ve slowed down in front of a familiar high-rise, and then we zip back to the brownstone, then all over the city.
The most remarkable thing is that we keep going where we’ve already been, places where Fox has killed people, back to the brownstone several times, retracing our steps from the last few days, though not perfectly.
It’s like we’re taking the scenic route sometimes and the direct route others.
We end up at the high-rise and the brownstone most often, but when we end up outside of Sybillant, the restaurant where Fox and I had our first date, I smack Darcy’s arm a couple of times to stop the ride.
Darcy doesn’t interpret me fast enough and we’re already retracing the path Fox and I took that day, ending up at the apartment complex where I was squatting before Darcy stops the spell.
I glare at him and type a quick message.
Now we’re an hour and a half from home and I figured it out in front of Sybillant. You’re paying the cab fare back home.
Darcy scoffs and the world slides out from under us, moving us to the sidewalk in front of the brownstone. “I’ll pay for a cab when the lake of fire burns out.”
“Why did we come home?” Bellamy asks as I walk up to the gargoyles guarding the gate.
I don’t get fed up with my disability often, but as soon as I realize that I have no way of knowing if the gargoyles can read, I make a frustrated noise in my mouth, typing out to the group message what I need someone to ask the gargoyles.
Ask them if they know where Belaphor hangs out when he’s not driving me.
Someone tell me who to ask for his contact information, especially his employment information.
Belaphor is the only person besides me who took a bunch of those routes, and he’s transported me to every jobsite we went to twice under Darcy’s spell.
“The cabbie,” Fox growls, putting a hand on one of the gargoyles.
Church bells ring out from the gargoyle then Bellamy pulls me over to Darcy, phone ringing on speaker.
The phone clicks, but no one speaks, and Bellamy starts talking.
I guess he trusts that someone is listening.
“Belaphor Betelgeuse, ID number four-two-eight-four-white. Home address and a map of his pings in the last week overlapped with Arlington Fox’s and Romily Butcher’s.
Urgent. If you have a ping on him right now, I need it. ”
There’s some typing, then a robotic voice responds. “No ping. Information incoming.”
Bellamy hangs up his phone, in full professional mode.
He checks his email when it chimes and pulls up the map of Belaphor’s location pings from the last week.
The majority of the dots from the three of us overlap starting the day I was chipped, and before Fox hired me, Belaphor’s pings overlap with Fox’s; Belaphor was at the diner and the library. Damn.
I look up the only other place he pinged at regularly and discover it’s the taxi garage.
I’m not sure that’s helpful unless he has a blackhole there he can step into when he’s not driving his cab.
I mean, the garage is kind of a blackhole; every day between four and five it opens up and swallows the taxis and then shoots them back out.
It’s kind of a crazy phenomenon, so it might be the center of some paranormal mystery.
I show Bellamy my phone and he cusses. “Hell. That’s Santanos’ garage. Yeah, let’s go there.”
Fox strides back to us with stress around his eyes. “They noticed him around, but assumed the depot sent him to be your personal driver. They weren’t overly concerned with him, but they’re spreading the word now; if any gargoyle around the city sees him, they’ll let us know.”
I send a grateful smile and wave to the gargoyles, then show Fox the garage where we need to head.
Would the depot make one of Santanos’ cabbies my driver?
Fox vocally grumbles. “Yes. The cabs are owned by Annette and Santanos on paper, but they have to follow the rules of neutrality the council has set. Same for the depot. They would not have considered who he worked for as a reason not to assign him as your driver, especially if he requested the position.”
I press a chaste kiss to his lips because I don’t know what to say about that.
“Y’all are sweeter than honey pie, but if you don’t mind, could we just pop on over to the garage?
If we can find anything that he’s touched, I can track his magic through any dimension or realm.
There’s nowhere he’ll be able to hide from me.
And add me to your fucking text conversation.
And next time lead with ‘the Harbinger is mute,’” Darcy interrupts, punching Bellamy’s arm.
I wag a stern finger at Bellamy as he adds Darcy to our chat thread with a middle finger emoji.
Next time lead with “My papa is mute.”
Darcy chokes as Bellamy, my red-headed adoptee, turns the color of a tomato under his freckles. “That is never happening,” he rasps, nearly squeaking.
Fox chuffs next to me. “It just occurred to me that I’m going to have a red-headed step-child.” He turns to me with amusement twinkling in his dark hazel eyes. “I’m probably going to marry you just so I can say that.”
I nod, completely understanding where he’s coming from.
I’d do the same.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Darcy laughs, bending at the waist to slap his leg.
Bellamy turns a deep shade of red, fisting his hands before letting out a slow breath and clearing his expression. “You are the most embarrassing pseudo-parents ever.”
Thank you, son.
Bellamy shakes his head. “That was not a compliment, Papa .”
Darcy sniggers, leaning on Bellamy and holding his stomach. “Oh gods. Y’all.” He shakes his head without completing that thought, stands up, composing himself in a single moment, and looks up at all of us. “Ready?”