jinn 01 - ember (19 page)

Her eyes flickered over the table and passed over Femi, but they widened slightly as she slowly looked back.

Femi winked at her and went back to her phone. Maggie just stared with her mouth gaping. After several attempts, she finally said, “What are you?”

Femi set her phone to the side and turned those catlike eyes to Maggie. She assessed her for a moment before leaning back in her chair, balancing it perfectly on two legs. “I’m your typical bounty-hunting descendent of the warrior goddess who kicks ass and makes no apologies for a living.” She flipped her long golden ponytail and the chair landed with a thump that made Maggie jump. Femi stabbed the last bit of food on her plate with her claw-like fingernail and held it up to inspect it before plopping it into her mouth, clearly enjoying this. “Feel free to bow, puny human.”

Maggie’s jaw dropped open.

“Thanks, Femi,” I said.

“No problem, champ.” She flashed a grin at us then looked back to Holden. “What’s our next move? We sit here any longer and I’m going to take a nap.”

“We need to figure out what a Balit is and where they are looking for it. Hopefully they don’t have it yet.”

“I think we need Olivia for that,” Femi said.

“Not necessarily,” I said, and everyone looked at me. “I know people.”

“What people exactly?” Holden asked.

I just smiled. You didn’t live this long without being privy to one or two secret organizations. They might not even recognize this ugly mug anymore. If it meant saving the angel’s skin, then I would at least give it a shot.

“You know what? I don’t even care. I’m coming with you,” Holden said. “Femi, see if you can find their new headquarters. I imagine they will abandon the church. Quintus, check with your guardian. Make sure Liv’s mom is okay and see if you can figure out where this game is going to take place.”

Everyone stood up except Maggie. “What about me?” she asked.

Holden looked down at her as if he had forgotten she was here. “What do you want to do?”

She shrugged. “Help, I guess, though I have no idea what’s going on or who you people are.”

He looked at me.

“She can’t come with us,” I said to Holden before shifting to her. “Sorry, doll, but it’s not the place for someone like you.”

“Someone like me?”

“Frail,” Femi said, leaning against the wall with her arms crossed.

“So I am just supposed to go home and pretend like none of this happened?”

“No. You can’t go home.” Holden rubbed his hand over his forehead. “The warehouse. She can go there.”

That was a good idea. One I wished I’d thought of. Nothing should get through those wards, and if it did, one step in the wrong room and it was trapped until we got back.

“What’s the warehouse? What am I going to do there?”

“Wait for Olivia,” he said. Then he started for the door, not really giving her a choice. We all filed out of the apartment behind him. Holden was definitely happiest with the angel, but whether or not he liked doing it, he was good at being the leader.

BAKER LED ME through a maze of dark freight tunnels beneath the city. Rats scurried beneath our feet as we silently moved through. Baker’s knowledge of the city and really all things supernatural was useful, but it also made me suspicious. We turned down a narrower and crumbling tunnel I hadn’t even seen until he’d disappeared into it. He came to a stop in front of a door made out of heavy wooden planks. A faint line glowed from the bottom of it.

“Where are we?” I asked.

He started to gesture like he was going to speak. Then he stopped and started up again. “You see, boss, I used to be a…member here.”

“And what is here?”

He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “The Abyss isn’t as autonomous as one might believe.” Discomfort poured off of him. “I’m not exactly their favorite person, but just follow my lead.”

I gestured toward the door. Baker took a deep breath and knocked three times in the center of the door, paused, and knocked three more times to the left. The door opened and we walked through. Gas lamps lit the cool, damp room. No one appeared to be in the room. It was no bigger than an eight-by-twelve cell with no furniture or dark corners to hide in, just an old-fashioned phone hanging on the wall. I hung back, watching as he moved toward the phone. It was a rectangular oak box with two bells at the top, a long, protruding mouthpiece, and a black, handheld speaker attached with an ancient cord on one side and a crank on the other. Baker lifted the speaker to his ear and began to crank. He stopped and hung up the phone.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we wait,” he said.

Moments later, the bells on the phone began to jingle. He lifted the earpiece again. “Hello,” he said into the mouthpiece. “I know…I understand that, but—I have information you might be interested in.”

He smiled and gave me a thumbs up.

“The jinn are going to be freed.”

My jaw stiffened. Who in the fuck was he talking to?

“I’ll tell you more when you tell me what I want to know.” He listened a moment. “What is a Balit? And where can I find one?” He waited. “That’s it? That’s all you have?” He shook his head. “No, I’m not telling you anything else until you have something useful for me.” He hung up the phone and walked back across the room. “It’s a whip of fire. That’s all they know.”

I took a deep breath. “Baker, you don’t get me information by telling my affairs to other people, do you? Who are these people?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Well I wouldn’t say I do that exactly. Sometimes you have to give a little to get what you want though.”

“And who is on the other end of that phone?”

“Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.” Back in the tunnels, he began speaking again. “You see, the Abyss is large, and while the different factions do rule themselves, there has to be someone who keeps tabs on everything that is happening here or we would have been exposed a long time ago.”

“And who are they?”

“I can’t tell ya, boss. Look, they’re immortal and there are only a few. Their existence has to remain secret or there would be chaos, squabbling, and power struggles everywhere you looked.”

I nodded. I could believe that. Why should only a few act as puppeteers for the rest of us? How did they control all the different races without anyone knowing about them? I also could understand the need to keep our world on lockdown from the human world. We had too much crossover as it was. Any more and they would have to be blind not to see it. “How do you know about them?” I asked.

He shrugged one shoulder. “I know my onions.”

Christ I hated slang. I gave him a look.

“You know, like you hear things, meet people, if you live long enough. Who do you think Sy works for?”

I hadn’t thought about it. That made a little more sense. They were using the bounty hunters to police the Abyss. Interesting, but not really relevant to what we were doing now. A whip of fire—that was what we needed to focus on. Since Baker and I had come up empty-handed, we really had no choice but to ask Olivia. Better yet, we had to ask the angel, which meant we needed her to come forward and talk to us. In my experience, the angel hadn’t been all that forthcoming with information and only revealed herself when she wanted to. There was only one way I knew of to get her to come out and play. “We need to find a jinni.”

“Why?” Baker asked.

“To tempt Olivia’s angel into helping.”

Baker nodded. We walked in silence for a while, but he kept glancing back at me.

“What?”

“Sorry about the whole Maggie thing, boss.”

There were too many more important issues weighing on my mind to devote any energy into caring about what he’d done or the type of danger he had put her in. Maggie might have been blood, but that didn’t make her family—meeting her had proved that. Olivia and Marge were my family. Their pain was my pain. She was no more than a stranger. I hadn’t see my brother when I looked at her. I hadn’t felt anything toward her. The idea of Maggie was far more sacred than her life would ever be. I liked knowing a piece of my family could live on apart from me, but beyond that, that person was on her own. “Just don’t let it get in the way of what we need to do.”

“Not a chance. I’m not about to handcuff myself to her.”

My thoughts immediately went back to Olivia. She was wrong. Baker wasn’t in love. I may not have known as much about love as she did, but from nearly the moment I met Liv, I would have and pretty much did, as Baker would say, handcuff myself to her. Olivia saw love wherever she looked because that was what she wanted to see. Temptation, however, was something I knew all about. Baker liked Maggie, and he probably liked her more because he knew she was supposed to be off-limits. Either way, none of it really mattered. Liv should have been back by now, but she was still absent from my mind.

When we were back above ground, I sent Baker to the warehouse and transported into Phoenix’s office at Xavier, where he was talking to a young jinni in a tight shirt and skinny jeans. He sighed when he saw me. “I thought we agreed you would call,” he said.

The kid turned to look at me and his eyeliner-covered eyes grew larger in his hipster head.

“Is he important to you?”

Phoenix shrugged.

“Good. I need him. Meet me around back.”

The jinni looked back at Phoenix, who nodded to him to go. “Holden,” he said before I could transport. I looked at him. “Will he be back?”

“Wouldn’t count on it.” I transported to the back of the building, where the kid nervously paced while trying to look cool. “Follow me,” I told him.

“Where are we going?”

I ignored him and walked. Olivia finally popped back into my mind. I let her know to meet me at the warehouse because we still needed to question Maggie. The jinni lagged behind the entire trip, but he still followed all the way to the warehouse. He gave me a wary expression when I finally turned around.

“Is what they say true?” he asked me.

I raised an eyebrow.

“You’re free.”

I nodded once.

He glanced around. “What are we doing here?”

“I need you to go in there and say you are looking for Olivia.”

He took a couple steps toward the door then stopped. “Why?”

“Just do as you’re told.”

I couldn’t be positive she wouldn’t kill him. This was as much of a test for her as anything. She needed to learn to control the angel, but at the same time, we also needed to talk to the angel. If this kid had to die to make that happen, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. It was also a sacrifice Olivia would hate—if she remembered it.

“What’s in there?”

I sighed. “I don’t have all day.”

The jinni slunk to the door. Then, raising his shoulders and letting them fall into his customary slouch, he went through. I counted to five before I followed after him. Olivia stood in front of him, hands shaking and face strained as she fought to hold back the angel. The jinni looked like he was caught somewhere between wanting to run away or fight back and froze.

“I need to talk to the angel, Liv.”

“She’ll kill him,” she said through clenched teeth.

“I’m willing to take that risk.” Her eyes met mine and she let go.

The angel charged forward, ready to destroy the evil before her. I caught her arm, using the weakness of her physical form against her. “What’s a Balit?”

Her cold stare turned to me. “It is a myth.”

“Not according to Hell.”

“Filth and lies.”

“Why do they think they could find an angelic weapon in the Abyss?”

She stopped trying to pull her arm away from mine. For a moment I thought Liv was back in control, but the angel’s inhuman eyes still stared unblinking back at me. “When Kushiel fell from grace, it is said that his whip of fire, the Balit, slipped from his grip and sank into oblivion. Kushiel became one of the presiding angels of Hell, but his whip remains lost.”

“So it could be here?” I asked, letting her go.

“It is gone. If the Balit were here, Lucifer would have found it by now.”

I nodded. Just like Olivia, she was too confident in matters she had no control over. They might not have had the weapon yet, but they were following a trail.