Chapter Five #2
As he stripped, he watched the entire vid sequence, collected by the stairway cam, at quarter speed, then again in ultra slo-mo.
The disk exploded, shrapnel shooting everywhere, damaging the iced wall of the stairwell.
Denting the steel door. Naked, he stopped, socks in hand, watching the explosion again in extreme slow motion.
Angie could have been killed.
Or Walter, when he picked up the disk.
At the moment, EJ was assuming that the cold of the air and of Walter’s T-shirt and his cold undead hands had kept the disk from exploding the moment it was touched, also assuming the containment chamber of the disk had been activated when Londyn placed the amulet in the pot.
The warrior he had once been hated assumptions.
Maybe the amulet had been primed for a warm touch to set it off, not a vamp-cold one.
Or the touch of magic energies. Londyn wouldn’t have wanted to kill a curious human, would she?
A human death would have brought down the presence of the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of whatever national enforcement or military department they were under now.
So…Londyn had intended the disk and the demon for his hand or Angie’s?
A detonator that detected the presence of magic?
That would make sense. Maybe the bombmaker had known of their null sticks.
Perhaps their enemies had even known of Angie’s null staff.
The staff, though null magic, was still magical energy.
They may have been watched more thoroughly than he had realized.
Or an enemy had obtained access to Ojos, or the queen’s computer servers.
Damn. Too many unknowns to make a hypothesis.
Walter had been through a course in improvised magical explosive devices—IMEDs—yet he hadn’t recognized the collection device as a bomb, which meant it had been spelled to make anyone seeing it want to pick it up.
EJ had never seen a weapon like the one on the camera footage.
It looked like a hockey puck made of stone.
Someone had created a weapon that was an extraterrestrial, extradimensional, sentient-being collection chamber, an explosive charge, a null-sensitive, magic-sensitive, or maybe heat-sensitive detonator.
Maybe the amulet had had a multi-reactive detonator.
If so, then that detonator was a completely new kind of device, and a very dangerous one.
Figuring out the detonator was problematic as there was nothing left of it.
The temporary containment vessel that had kept the EEB trapped, had shattered against the cement brick walls of the stairwell when the detonator blew and the demon was freed.
The working itself had disappeared along with the demon. Where had Angie put the Bes after the explosion? She too had to have access to a containment vessel. But surely, she would have told him if she did.
Where was the demon?
And that staff. Hell, Angie had been working on that thing for years, claiming she had been unsuccessful with whatever it was supposed to do.
She called it a null staff. He had touched it, and the damn thing had nearly ripped his magic out of his heart, it was so strong.
He’d had to wear null gloves to handle the null staff, which was ironic.
He hadn’t questioned his sister about her staff project, which was stupid on his part, clearly. The staff had done…what? Why would his sister lie about it being just a null staff? Null energies didn’t bind or remove EEBs of any size or energy signature.
But the demon hadn’t possessed her. Or Walter.
Or him. It wasn’t possible. Yet the Bes wasn’t free.
He had heard the broken cymbals and tortured screaming signature sound of demon energies.
Then silence. There had been no sound since it disappeared.
Where had Angie found—and hidden—a containment vessel to keep it until it was needed?
His feet were cold. His body was mottled with bruises, which he had treated with his mother’s healing herbal and magically powerful ointment. His skin was sticky and smelled like weeds in spring, bitter and sweet at the same time.
EJ pulled on his socks and briefs, working through the timeline, potential motivations, and all possible intended targets.
The questions the demon bomb created were complex: Why had Londyn brought it?
How had she gotten it? All identified and recognized, inhabited collection containers from the war were kept under constant guard by the military in a level five containment facility twenty stories belowground.
EEB demon collection devices/weapons were impossible to obtain legally and the cost on the black market was unimaginable.
Londyn wasn’t from a wealthy family, so where had she acquired the bomb?
Owning a containment vessel that imprisoned a demon was treason.
If it was intended to collect on Angie’s bounty, the cost of using the device became counterproductive. A million-dollar kill fee (if you happened to get away with it without being killed by counter–bounty hunters) was a nice chunk of change, but didn’t go as far as it used to.
Why the everlasting hell had Londyn tried to kill him? Because he hadn’t gone to dinner with her? The absurdity of that was dumbfounding. He had never chosen a chick who had been capable of hiding such unhinged feelings, thoughts, and behavior.
He stopped, the Heat-Keep silk undershirt half on.
His sister had been attacked last night. Was this connected? Some kind of plot?
Londyn wasn’t smart enough to plan a long-range kidnapping. He dated only empty-headed women for a reason.
That thought brought him up short. He had never thought about his dating choices. There were reasons but…It made him a shallow, empty-headed man to date only what amounted to intellectually challenged gorgeous women.
Something in the back of his mind suggested that it was easy to seduce and then walk away from a woman he didn’t admire and consider worthy of…friendship? Respect?
“Well, fuuuu—” He stopped. There were demons about. One did not curse in the presence of demons. There could be fatal repercussions.
Yeah. He was empty-headed and shallow. A horndog. He tucked that theory into a pocket of his mind to contemplate later.
For now, nothing about the attack in the parking lot of Kegs, nothing about the demon attack by Londyn, and nothing about the case they had accepted from a woman who wasn’t what she appeared to be, made any sense.
While he finished dressing in the layers neatly laid out on his sofa, he glanced often at the staff he had taken from Angie while she was having her concussion discussion with herself and Mom.
He had studied the null staff, pressing the small blue stone Angie seemed to have pushed with her thumb.
He had risked, and deactivated, an amulet, testing the device, but that was solely the effect of the powerful null energies in it.
The psychometric magic energies in his amulet had vanished while in contact with the staff, yet the amulet had been easily rechargeable afterward, similar to the effect of any null instrument on magic.
Otherwise, nothing had happened. The stick, in his hands, didn’t seem to have any abilities beyond being a powerful null weapon. Which Angie had implied didn’t work.
The staff wasn’t a traditional military bo staff.
She had crafted something a scholarly mage from fiction or even Merlin might have carried, with a narrow tip on one end, about an inch and a quarter in diameter, tipped with silver alloy, and a bigger diameter on the other end, shaped for Angie’s grip.
That end was capped with a labradorite stone that glowed when she held it, and when she pressed the blue tigereye trigger…
It sucked up a demon?
How the hell did the thing work?
After glancing at Angie on the screen to make sure she was okay, EJ pulled on a layer of silk knit Heat-Keep leggings for warmth.
He tapped open the results of the DGFR programs. Once the pics had been through the deglamour program, the facial rec software had spit out a name.
Chancy’s real name was Cennet A. Campbell-Baines.
EJ unfolded another small screen on his unicom tablet and transferred the image to the wall screen. He studied her face and her info. Cennet was forty-nine, blonde and blue eyed, and had a long connection to vampires, including Angie’s ex, Karson Marrazzo, aka Asshat.
“Well, well. That’s an interesting relationship since Asshat was at the party where Ivyanna, who also had a relationship with Asshat, disappeared. Chancy/Cennet, why didn’t you tell us you knew Karson too? Why are you keeping so many secrets?”
Asshat had originally appeared to be Angie’s prince charming, and Angie’s marriage had kept Asshat in everyone’s good graces.
When he revealed himself as a rabid viper and she walked out, divorcing him, all of Karson’s hopes for a powerful future went with her.
His grandiose plans and machinations had been destroyed by his boss, Lincoln Shaddock, Master of the City of Asheville and Surrounding Hunting Territories, aka, their grampa on their mother’s side.
Even if Asshat hadn’t been stupid, he had hurt Shaddock’s granddaughter. Karson was an idiot bloodsucker.
Asshat’s invitation to the royal reception had been an opportunity to make things better for himself.
Instead, Karson had stupidly squandered it by going over Shaddock’s head with an appeal to the emperor himself for a critical and prominent status upgrade.
Grampa had not been at all happy with his not-so-loyal scion.
Eddie the Great had been royally pissed.