Chapter Twenty #2
“Mason’s my best pal these days. I saved that wolf’s life—again.” I shook my head, laughed humorlessly as I repeated, “You’ve got an enemy. Someone who knows what you are. But the thing is, I didn’t even know what I was when Mason and Bronwyn showed up in town. How could the Org have known?”
“We have connections.” He clambered to his feet. “Get out. You can’t just break down someone’s door. There are laws against this, you know.”
“Laws. That’s rich, coming from you.”
“Get out of—”
“échate.” I flicked my hand, putting power behind it, and Miles went down on his ass on the worn carpet, cursing me the whole way. “How long?”
“How long what?”
“How many years have you been working for him? Decades? Centuries? Geological fucking epochs?”
Miles’s pale face shone beet red. A trickle of sweat rolled down his temple.
I planted my feet on the stained carpet. “I’m going to summon him, Miles—we both know that’s not your real name—and it’s only going to get worse for you from there.”
“Not my real name? Damn you to the feet of Lucifer, woman. What are you talking about?”
My demon and witch sides stood at the ready. Magic from the soil simmered in my veins. I was a loaded weapon anticipating a target—a dark one.
“Lord Bertrand Sexton, I summon thee.”
The temperature in the overheated room plummeted.
I flexed my jaw to keep it from stiffening in the cold and squared my shoulders.
From the outside, I might’ve looked brave, but I was scared to the cells of my body.
Vapor in the air formed frozen needles in my lungs, and when I cleared my throat, I coughed up ice crystals that I crunched with my back teeth.
“Hello, granddaughter.” His greeting was warm, even if his presence was arctic.
“Grandfather.”
He loomed behind me. I didn’t turn around, wasn’t ready to look him in the eye just yet.
“You are in danger? You require my assistance?” His voice carried a self-righteous quality. Satisfaction weaved through the spaces between every word.
I didn’t entertain his charade by responding to his questions. “Why’d you do it?”
There was a second where I thought he’d play dumb. He surprised me.
“You needed to accept your demon side. Had I not interceded, you would already be dead—or insane.”
“So, we’re sticking to the lies,” I said.
Not-Miles watched the conversation with haunted eyes. There was real fear there, and it lent credence to his human act, but I wasn’t fooled.
I reached into my pockets with both hands, withdrawing a handful of soil and palming a salt stick. Another Cecil original, it was made up of finely pulverized and compressed salt and Siete Saguaros soil. It crumbled easily—a negative on a hard surface but ideal for use on carpet.
Not-Miles eyed the soil as it steamed into my skin, as he was meant to. With my other hand, I dragged the salt stick in a circle on the carpet around him. It ended up less a circle than a puddle, the sides irregular, but unbroken and connected.
I still hadn’t faced Sexton.
“Mercurio.” I threw magic into it. “Fuego.”
Quicksilver flames danced in the soil on the lines, avoiding the salt. I kept them banked but visible. Mercury’s poison, as it was called in the other realms, was one of the few things in the universe capable of killing a demon. Permanently.
“Lucifer’s horns, not this again,” Not-Miles muttered. “I hate witches.”
“I bind you to this circle, Gnath, servant of iniquity, commander of the second brigade of malfeasance, demon of Highway 86. Here you will remain until I am done with you.”
With a wet, wrenching squelch, Miles’s form separated from the demon’s much smaller, green-skinned, noxious one.
The man fell to the demon’s feet vomiting air and trying to scream.
I’d unbound him from the possession with all the finesse of someone ripping a bandage from a weeping wound. It had to have hurt.
“You can leave the circle, Miles, but don’t break it,” I said. “The flames won’t hurt you.”
The pale man crawled over the fiery salt line. Gnath didn’t try to stop him—he just wrapped his nasty little arms around himself and stayed as far from the mercury flames as he could.
“I didn’t know.” Miles pushed to his feet using the bed as a prop. Meeting his gaze was like staring into a black hole of despair. “I didn’t know what it would be like. My gods, the darkness. The unending darkness.”
Moving stiffly to the nightstand, he pulled a duffel bag from beneath it. The bag held clean sweatpants, a wrinkled white T-shirt, and shower shoes, which he quickly put on, leaving his soiled clothes in a foul-smelling pile on the carpet.
I didn’t blame him for changing. No one could stand smelling like Gnath for long.
“How long had he possessed you?” I asked.
Miles shook his head as if to clear it. “Right after Operative Hartman went missing, I think. I received a call to meet an informant who claimed to have information linking you to Hartman’s disappearance. By the time I realized the informant was a demon, he’d already taken control of me.”
“Buddy, if you believe that’s the first time, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Hades to sell you,” Gnath muttered.
I silenced the demon with a look and turned back to Miles. “Are you sure about the timing?”
“I’m not sure of anything.” He asked in a weak broken voice, “May I leave now?”
“Go.” I’d have Mason track him down later. There were more important matters to deal with.
Miles hugged the duffel to his chest and shuffled out of the room, his rubber shoes slapping the soles of his feet as he walked out and gently closed the door behind him.
I pressed my back to the wall and did a half-circle turn by the room’s particle board dinette set to bring the two remaining creatures in the room in my line of vision.
Demon Grandpa was again dressed in the black robes he’d worn at our meeting in Ronan’s bar.
The robes were less upsetting than his slacks and windbreaker attire. I was tired of the games.
The gauzy robes, which seemed to move in a microclimate entirely their own, shifted, revealing a pair of abnormally long feet encased in navy and white running shoes. New Balance sneakers.
He’d kept the old man shoes.
I had the weirdest fucking life.
“Bravo.” Gods damn him, he was smiling. “I am pleased, granddaughter. You are wise and powerful and unafraid. Deadly. Your father would be proud—is proud.”
“My father is dead,” I said.
Sexton nodded. The information wasn’t new, and he likely didn’t understand why I’d mentioned it. Past, present, and future tenses didn’t hold much meaning for his kind.
“Would you like an Agatha Christie denouement? Tell you how I figured it all out, Miss Marple style?” I asked.
He lifted a hand, and one of the dinette chairs flew to him. In between blinks, he’d seated himself and crossed his legs.
“You tipped your hand when you had Demon Betty question the strength of my earth magic. Witch Betty figured it out pretty quickly, but I was too angry to listen when she spoke up.”
“What did she say?”
“She reminded me that you were a demon. That time barely affects you, and you can do what you want. Including getting past my protection spell on the park.” I glanced at Gnath before turning back to Sexton.
“You’re clever, but you aren’t human, and you don’t always understand the way we see things. ”
“That is correct,” he said. “Humans are both stupidly simple and delightfully complicated.”
His arrogance annoyed me, but reacting to it would get me nowhere.
“The timing clinched it. Your visit, Trey’s appearance on Ida’s porch, Rory’s disappearance from Floyd’s house.
The latter two happened so close together as to be nearly simultaneous.
Trey still believed Rory to be in that basement room when he died. ”
He said nothing, simply listened, his robes moving creepily.
“For a being like you, time is an abstract concept. You’re experiencing this conversation with me, the ones you had with my mother, and the life you lived with Rose Chevalier simultaneously.
On some level, everyone you’ve ever cared for is alive and dead.
You are both crowded and alone in every moment. ”
His smile faltered. “You are correct, granddaughter, but understand that I am here as I am there. My attention is yours.”
“Not entirely—it’s not possible.”
“Entirely.”
I sighed. Discussing time with Sexton was like writing a letter in a rainstorm on paper made from cotton candy. “For a human, one who experiences time in line with the hands on a clock or the movements of the sun in the sky, time is meaningful.”
His neck creaked. He was listening.
“Floyd accused me of using magic to kidnap Rory. Mason said she’d been in Floyd’s basement earlier but had gone missing before I arrived. Ronan didn’t have her, or he’d have told me. Who else could it have been?”
He steepled his long fingers in front of his lips. Listening.
“The Org connection was tougher to figure out, but Demon Betty was surprisingly informative. You were the one who tipped them off about me. The only people who knew what I was when the Org came to town were you and my batshit, murder-obsessed cousin. It could have been him, but I don’t think so. Was it you?”
“Yes.” The corners of his mouth creaked into a barely there smile. “So, she is sharing information with you. Wonderful.”
I suppressed the urge to scream.
“Miles was supposed to be a truthseeker, yet there were times when he could’ve used those abilities to his advantage but didn’t.
I mean, why not just track down one of Floyd’s wolves and question them?
Or corner me, if he really thought I had him.
You were controlling him. The fake, wimpy wolf shifters were convincing, and Gnath as Bloody Mary was, too. I didn’t suspect a thing.”