40. Syrus #2
Because yes, Hodges gave me his bed and has spent weeks sleeping on the floor without complaint.
Every night, we’ve been side by side, if on different levels, and if my hand sometimes hangs off the edge of the bed and brushes his in the dark…
and he doesn’t pull away but reaches his fingers up to twine with mine… then that’s between us.
It’s just been us two, in our own little world, unobserved and unjudged—aside from his mother, who seemed very comfortable turning a blind eye once Hodges explained my situation. But our solitude up to now means I’ve not needed to get good at hiding what his crooked smile and stupid jokes do to me.
What he means to me.
“I still can’t believe they just handed over the keys to you,” I say, trying to distract us both from the subject of Hodges.
“Me neither. I mean, they made me sign a few things, but that’s all it took. It’s all mine now, apparently.” She climbs the steps to the front door. “Thanks for coming with me. I didn’t want to do this alone, but if I’d asked Syrus, we probably would’ve just gotten into another argument.”
I nod like it’s nothing. Personally, I would be terrified at the idea of arguing with the demon lord, but Leah told me all the details yesterday, and it sounds like their disagreement was surprisingly domestic.
He wants to go back to Infernum; she wants to stay here.
They’re both so insecure about their relationship that they’re afraid what that contradiction means for them.
I suppose a demon and a nephilim together was never going to be simple. Definitely more complicated than an ephilium and a human. That’s the whole reason nephilim exist right? It wouldn’t be, like, crazy for a couple like that…
Filippa, says a scolding voice at the back of my mind, you’re not going to make this about you.
Leah is unlocking the door now, revealing a long, dark hallway that feels—quite frankly—pretty creepy.
It doesn’t help that the house shows signs of not being lived in for months, with dust on the windows and the scent of stale air lingering in the entrance hall.
As we step inside, my gut twists, and I keep my eyes open, studying every detail.
“Does it feel like someone’s…”
“Been here?” Leah says, knowing what I’m getting at. “Yes. Someone must’ve been, because Hathwell’s body was found in the river,” she levels me with a serious stare. “And that’s not where I left him.”
“Right,” I exhale. She’s explained about Hathwell being involved with the Order of Sycorax, a group of crazed humans who’ve tried to kill her multiple times. She also implied last night that she’d taken care of her husband when he attacked her—she didn’t say it was in this house, however.
“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” I say eventually. As I’d hoped, a little of the tension drops from her shoulders, and she gives me a weak smile.
“As long as you don’t try to sacrifice me as part of some fucked-up blood ritual, I think you’ll be okay.”
Neither of us says anything else as we move deeper into the residence, falling into the hush of the building. The silence remains unbroken until Leah makes a beeline for a specific room on the first floor, opening the door to an office.
“Hathwell didn’t want me coming in here,” she says as she shoves a desk aside. “I know now it was because he was hiding order stuff…down there.” She pushes up the corner of a rug to reveal a trap door. Then Leah just stands there for a while, looking at it.
“Er, Leah, why are we really here?” I ask. She’d said it was so she could look around the house she now owns, but something else is obviously preoccupying her.
She chews her lip. “I thought maybe there’d be some clues here. Now that we know the Order is after me, there’s got to be some evidence of that lurking around here, right? Maybe we can find something that shows us what they’re up to?”
“Makes sense,” I say. “Although you could’ve just led with that when you suggested we come here.”
She smiles sheepishly. “I thought it would be easier to convince you to join me for a casual house tour.”
“Are you kidding?” I say, moving around the desk. “As if that’s more interesting than hunting down proof of a black magic cult?”
“You’re right, I should’ve known better.”
“Let’s start down there,” I say, pointing to the trap door.
Seeing the sacrificial chamber makes Leah’s story about her wedding night feel dreadfully, sickeningly real. But it’s mostly a bare stone room now, with very few places to hide away any sorcerers’ secrets.
“They’d cleaned it up last time I was here,” Leah says, eyeing the room. She’s acting normal enough, but there’s an edge to her voice that tells me being down here brings back too many memories.
“They, as in the sorcerers?”
“Who else?” She shrugs. “They obviously came back to move Hathwell’s body too.”
“So they’re used to working as a group,” I say, turning the fact over in my mind. “One human would struggle to move a body alone, and I’m assuming it wasn’t a simple clean-up job after the…um…sacrifice ritual, either?”
Leah blows air out through her teeth. “Yeah, it got messy. I can’t see one person dealing with all that.”
She looks drawn and pale, clearly reliving whatever awful mess she witnessed. Lingering in this place likely isn’t helpful.
“Let’s go back upstairs,” I suggest, and she quickly agrees.
“But now that I think about it,” I say as we climb back into the office, “if they’re used to working as a group, it’s strange that Roseingrave attacked you on her own during the party.”
“Well, she drugged me,” Leah points out, “so she knew I wouldn’t be able to fight back.”
“Still, if she wanted to move you without anyone noticing, she’d need help. So why would she—oh.”
I turn around to look at Leah. “Unless she wasn’t alone.”
Leah’s brow knits. “You think there were other Order members at the party? That makes a lot of sense. But there wasn’t anyone who helped her as far as I could see…” She trails off, obviously trying to remember the night in detail.
So much for trying to get her mind off bad memories. Clearly, I need to work on my distraction techniques.
I scan the office, looking over the various bookshelves and side tables. “Do you want to start in here or the other rooms?”
“I already looked in here once,” Leah says with a shrug. “Let’s start somewhere else.”
We search the house, room by room, and find an impressive load of nothing.
Not so much as a single rune. What we do find is absence—empty spaces on shelves where it looks like books might’ve once sat, dust patterns that indicate a removed ornament, and boxes stowed away in armoires with nothing in them.
“Well, I’m sorry they tried to kill you, cousin,” I say as we trudge down the stairs after a fruitless few hours. “But if you can look past the murderous intent and the dark, twisted magic, you have to admit their thoroughness is pretty impressive.”
Leah shakes her head. “I should’ve expected this,” she huffs. “They had too much time to cover their tracks.”
We make our way back to the office, but it’s the same in here too. The desk holds several bundles of letters tied up with string or ribbon, but several bindings are too loose for their stack, suggesting that some have been removed from the pile.
We flick through them anyway. The letters all seem innocuous—some from Hathwell’s parents, some from acquaintances and business partners. There’s not a single gossipy note from a friend or flirty message from a lover—nothing incriminating in the slightest.
“Wait,” Leah gasps. “I think they missed one. Look,” She taps the end of a line on the parchment she’s holding.
…shouldn’t underestimate the value of commercial property, particularly your units in Sawton.
I take the paper, scanning what seems to be a discussion about anti-guild sentiment in the city before moving on to the mention of properties. I glance at the bottom of the page before handing it back to her. “There’s no signature,” I say.
“Weird, isn’t it?” she says with a grin.
“But what’s Sawton got to do with the Order?” I squint at the paper, trying to see where her excitement is coming from.
“Hathwell owns some old workshops that used to be part of Reed Mills—the lawyers mentioned them in passing. They said they were technically owned by a side company of his father’s and after the mill moved, they weren’t associated with the main business anymore.”
“So the link between them and Hathwell wouldn’t be obvious,” I supply.
“I can see why that would be useful to the Order, but an off-the-books property could be useful to Hathwell for other things too. Maybe he kept his mistress there or ran a drug den or something. How can you know it’s tied to the sorcerers? ”
“Because I’ve been there with Syrus. It’s an industrial area near the river. We found evidence of demons being killed there, and Hathwell admitted the Order was behind those murders.”
I turn this over in my mind. “Even if the Order were thorough with pulling anything incriminating from the house, it’s possible they were getting rid of stuff in a hurry. Maybe they missed this one because there’s nothing obviously Order related in it and no name to identify the writer.”
Leah studies the letter hard, like it might spill out its secrets if she stares long enough.