Chapter 11
GRIFFIN
“But it can’t be,” Elaine breathed, sitting between us in the back seat of Julian’s car. “It just can’t be. Oh, Bradley—if it’s true that the Hive exist, then I should be so happy for you. Mother and Father and me, but—it feels wrong. This means that the threat is real, too.”
From the passenger seat, Brigette coughed quietly into her fist, too polite or too rigid to interject with an insult. Sitting behind her, Bradley stared daggers through the headrest. He could have bored a pair of holes right into the back of her skull.
And Elaine wasn’t wrong. Mixed emotions all around. I’d had to harden myself, be strong for both of us when Bradley had crumpled into my arms outside MEA HQ. But I was worried, too. Scared, even. Most of all, I was angry. Those pictures from Nicoletta’s office—JA Williams had to pay for his crimes.
Elaine had agreed to—no, actually insisted on joining our motley crew.
I could hardly deny her. I mean, Bradley certainly couldn’t.
Brigette didn’t seem too thrilled by the prospect of finding herself in the company of both the Brooks siblings.
Julian didn’t care either way. He had Cora, and he had his car.
God, his car. Windows down because the AC wasn’t working, though I had doubts that it ever had.
It was clean enough for someone in Julian’s line of work, free of blood or even more sinister supernatural fluids, just the occasional half-drunk bottle of water or empty carton of french fries littering the floor.
But that was too much for Brigette, who sat perfectly still with her hands folded on her lap.
She’d very cleverly made a beeline for the front seat, while Elaine had wedged herself between me and Bradley, talking at top speed and maximum volume as she processed recent revelations.
And Julian and Brigette still hadn’t exchanged a single word.
We’d somehow slotted ourselves into the most awkward possible configuration. Great start. Go, team.
“Thanks, Elaine,” Bradley said, genuinely grateful for his sister’s support.
“But could you imagine how I felt? All these years being told I was wrong, delusional, only to discover it was real all along. Which meant that the killings were real, too. The total destruction and havoc the Hive wrought on Earth, the utter terror.”
“With all due respect, Brooks,” Brigette said crisply, without even turning her head. “There’s still no evidence that these locusts of yours ever existed.”
My fingernails dug into my jeans. Not a day or two ago, I’d thought Bradley was delusional, too, but here I was, already so eager to leap to his defense. If only they saw the things we’d seen.
“You can believe it or not, but I know what I saw,” I said. “We were there at the oracle encampment, saw it with our own eyes. The Hive were trying to break through, using the oracles as vessels. JA Williams cracked the code and slapped it on those helmets.”
“All because of me,” Bradley muttered.
I lowered my head, seeing that he’d lowered his own, trying to catch his eye. Too awkward to reach behind Elaine’s back or across her lap to hold his hand or give his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“You couldn’t have known,” I told him.
“But now we do,” Julian said, “and now we have a lead. If there’s one thing I know, it’s swords. And armor. Okay, two things. You’re saying Gallows over here shattered one of them helmets with a single punch? Must be shoddy craftsmanship.”
I scowled into the rearview mirror. “Hey!”
“And that means that those helmets couldn’t have come from a proper blacksmith. Not someone in our world, at least. Enchanted helmets don’t just split in half when you sneeze on them too hard.”
I crossed my arms and shook my head, grumbling under my breath.
“Which means that the helmets are of mundane make. My take on it? Williams has someone unwittingly engrave these glyphs onto them, easy enough for any metalworker to do. Then he hands the helmets off to someone with proper enchanting experience to finish the spell work.”
Her chin resting in her hand, Elaine nodded slowly, absorbing Julian’s theory. “And do you suppose we can find this mundane metalworker you speak of?”
Julian flashed one of his heartbreaker grins and tapped the end of his nose. “That’s where we’re headed right now.”
Brigette finally turned her head, her lashes fluttering as she gave Julian a quick once-over. The tiniest smile curved her lips. Old Julian’s roughshod research had impressed our ice queen.
“See?” I told Bradley, leaning forward and tapping the side of my head. “Street smarts. That’s how we do things in our world. Bounty hunter brains in action. Merc work.”
Elaine pursed her lips in a smirk, looking straight ahead through the windshield. Bradley rolled his eyes, but I got him to crack a little smile. Good enough.
We pulled up to a squarish building not far from the city’s industrial district. A converted warehouse, Julian explained, fitted to work as a combination smithy and showroom for the mundane craftsman in question.
“An artisan blacksmith,” Julian said, sneering like he had a wedge of lemon in his mouth. “There’s good ones out there, sure, but this guy? Just in it for the money. Lowest common denominator.”
I waited for everyone to file out, then closed the car door behind Elaine before falling in step with Julian. “How can you already tell?”
He sniffed, nodding at the warehouse. “You’ll see for yourself. I ran a check on him, scoped out his profile, picked up some pretty choice information.”
“So you visited his studio’s website.”
Julian frowned. “This is why nobody likes working with you, Gallows.”
Patently untrue, but I’d already won the battle. Best to let it go. I caught up with Bradley, squeezing him on the waist like I’d been wanting to, receiving a grateful grin for the effort.
ArKane, said the wrought iron letters installed above the entrance, the capital letter K sticking out in the middle of the word like a sore thumb. Interesting choice of name for a mundane business, but maybe he didn’t know any better.
Very spartan finish, barely any changes made to the interiors, just a lot of concrete and wood. Urban chic, some might say. Some might say it was also the cheapest and therefore most profitable option. No need to modify, just sweep in and gentrify.
One step into the showroom half of the building, and I could already understand what Julian was trying to tell me.
Cheesy metal sculptures lined either side of the warehouse, chandeliers and candelabras much too twisty and ornate to be of any practical use, elongated stick figures that were meant to gather dust in the homes of the rich and tasteless.
But what the hell did I know about art? I was just a guy with some shadow puppets and a set of brass knuckles crafted from an ancient cannon.
Sure, maybe I was hired to retrieve shit, and maybe some of that shit was priceless works of art, but that didn’t mean I buried my nose in a library book to learn about any of it.
From somewhere past the back wall came the sounds of hammering and clanging. Now that I was actually interested in, never mind that Julian said this guy couldn’t make swords to save his life.
The sculptures covered enough of the floor to show that the artist was indeed very prolific, but also enough to show that he ran a brisk, successful business. Half of these things were marked “sold” already. Very clever. Artful, actually, in every annoying way.
“Kane Smith,” Elaine said, bent over as she read from the plaque on a particularly tacky specimen. “If that even is his real name. Oh, but that explains the sign above the shop.”
“ArKane,” Brigette said with a shudder. “Ghastly. It’s almost offensive.”
“No security,” Bradley said. “Not even any staff to watch the showroom.”
Julian tapped the side of his nose. “Don’t really need security when you’re one of JA Williams’s pets,” he whispered. “Besides, who’s going to walk out of here with a whole chandelier? Shit’s heavy. All of it.”
I waved a hand around the showroom. “This is kind of a long shot, Julian. How are you so sure that we’ve got the right guy?”
“Is it?” Brigette asked. She pointed at the sculptures. “Look over there. Suits of armor. Breastplates, helmets, and all. And some swords, too. Perfect for a tacky gothic mansion. The man knows what he’s doing, though not quite enough to make helmets that can stand up to a stiff breeze.”
Julian snorted. Brigette smirked. What the—were they ganging up on me now?
“Let’s just get this over with,” I grumbled.
Curious and confident, Elaine led the way toward the back half of the building, following the banging and clanging. Bradley tailed her closely but kept checking over his shoulder, as if to make sure we were still there. I smiled at him, nodding reassuringly.
Brigette, meanwhile, was actively scribbling in a tiny notebook. I peered over her shoulder, blinking hard when I saw the bizarre array of indecipherable glyphs on the page. And were they moving, too?
“Taking notes for later?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” she replied. Brigette never slowed her pace, never looked up from the page, the sleek black shaft of her pen gleaming as she scritched away.
As we reached the back of the showroom, I caught a glimpse of a security monitor and did a double take. I didn’t recognize any of the five people on the screen, but the man whipping his head frantically between the monitor and the closest security camera was mimicking my body language perfectly.
Was this Brigette’s doing, the thing with her notebook? The shifting glyphs, the shifting of our faces and bodies—damn. Instant disguises. This was almost better than that little trick I could pull with my shadow puppet.
Shameful to admit that I’d had my doubts at the start, getting another bookworm when I’d asked for a thief, but Bradley had made the right choice recruiting her. Knowing he’d set aside his pride for the sake of the mission made it even hotter. Smarter? Never mind.