Chapter Twenty #3
“Copy that,” Peg said, “rerunning boring stuff.”
He had trained with Alex and was fluent with all the programs used by the queen.
And now he was fluent with Ojos. He had spent most of the time since the unit had been at The Firm, out of sight, obviously syncing Ojos with the queen’s software and protocols.
Even more of our independence vanishing.
Someone else had access to our cameras and security system.
Probably always had, I thought bitterly.
The reception line moved forward. Ivyanna did her meet and greet.
Heart hurting, I asked, “Can we see the handshakes again, at four-times speed? Maybe a few more times before we follow her away?”
The screen blinked as the recording reset. The bob and handshakes repeated, jerky, fast, shaky. It played again and then again.
“Right there,” I said. “Just as she turns from Eddie the Great. That flash at her middle.”
“I see it,” EJ said.
“Has Ivyanna had any health issues in the last year?” I asked, knowing the answer was central to…everything.
EJ tapped on his unicom. On the top right of the screen, a health report appeared. It was Ivyanna’s, from last year, part of her blood servant contract at the time.
I went chilled and sat tall, my spine straight as a sword. “Ivyanna was pregnant. Lost the baby. For some reason she didn’t get a vamp to heal her. While she was in the hospital something happened. What is that?” I pointed. “That coded line. Line three.”
“Hang on,” Pretty Thang said. “I’m in the system. Adding hospital codes into Ojos.
“That,” he said, a few seconds later, “is the diagnosis code for treatment of a burn.”
The chill flooded through me. The knowing. “What kind of burn?”
EJ swiped through the reports.
One caught Pretty Thang’s attention. “That one,” the medic said.
EJ enlarged the code on the screen.
“She suffered an in-hospital accident,” Pretty Thang said, “postsurgically, following her admittance for abnormal bleeding.”
“Convenient timing,” EJ said, of the burn wound.
“Is there a pic of the burn?” I asked.
“Hang on,” Peg said. “I’m hitting HIPAA privacy walls. Raccoon, Pretty Thang, help me here.”
A full minute passed. The room was silent. Comms silent. My precog hovered just out of reach. Frustration and unease blended together inside me, creating a new emotion, one I had no name for.
A picture of a small wound appeared on the screen. Raccoon enlarged it and spun the pic. A fresh burn was on Ivyanna’s upper hip at what would have been her bikini line, on the front.
The burn looked like—
WY.
Ivyanna had been branded. Like Walter.
“Why?” EJ breathed. “She’s human. Why brand a human? Ivyanna has no magic.”
I said, “What if…” I reached for the gift and it flitted near then away, too fast to catch.
Pretty Thang said, “The magic is in the brand and the branding iron. Like, the geas in the burns requires that particular iron and that specific working.”
I turned startled eyes to the guard. The silence in the room went deep, profound, unbroken even by human breath.
Pretty Thang looked around, his eyes wide. “What,” he demanded. “What’d I say?”
Raccoon said, “I’m thinking you just delivered the missing piece of this whole damn puzzle. Why couldn’t you say that sooner?”
Pretty Thang’s face creased. “I thought it was obvious.”
“Son of a witch,” EJ muttered. “Brand and branding iron. Both.”
“We have an elixir that, when drank by a vampire, and maybe drank by a human, allows that vampire to control a demon,” I said.
“The last demon in the collection chamber, the most powerful one I’ve ever heard of, wasn’t trying to get away.
It was trying to get into the apartment building. I want to see—”
“You know something,” EJ interrupted, his eyes on me. “Spitball it.”
“Grizz?” I said.
The guard said, “One of the two vampires trying to get to Walter had another vial of the elixir. They were trying to pour it down Walter’s throat.”
“The leviathan was supposed to possess Walter,” I said, “attracted by the brand and the geas. They would have hauled off Walter for whatever purpose they had for a possessed vampire who could control the demon.”
“And Ivyanna?”
“Test subject?” I questioned, ice in my veins.
“They had to find out if the brand would attract a demon. Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t.
No one has seen Ivyanna since the party.
Maybe they discovered a demon needed to possess a vampire, that a human didn’t work, or a human couldn’t control it after it possessed her.
Or maybe they needed a Rule of Three and it didn’t matter if the people were vampires. Too many unknowns.”
The Rule of Three was the mathematical rule that three witches could do much more complex magics than just one or two. Of course, a full coven with balanced elements—that was the most powerful working.
“I need to see all the other vids at four times normal speed,” I said.
And then I stopped. This wasn’t a knowing.
It was simple deductive recognition. “The color of the magic on Ivyanna’s hip matches multiple threads of the working in Walter’s brand.
It also matches the color of Nyoka beneath her shadow invisibility working while hiding in the corner at the reception.
We assumed the color on the vids was Nyoka’s jewelry. What if she was branded too?”
“Fu—” Raccoon stopped. “She was in Willim’s power on the ship to America.”