[M__M 03] Misery Loves Company (12 page)

My heart pounded. I suspected he was closer to that goal than he might realize if my reaction tonight was any indication. Sitting still, not touching him was torture.

Lucen straightened with a smile. “So what else do you want to know about me that you don’t already?”

I reached for my wineglass with an unsteady hand. “I want to know how you’re planning to do that. Exactly how you’re planning to do that.”

“I don’t think you want to have that conversation here. I’m too close to being successful.” Lucen touched my hand again, proving the point as my eyes closed. “We’ve covered the basics. I’m obviously brilliant, which is why I’m on Dezzi’s council. I make a damn good martini. And I like you on top so I can see you all the better when we fuck. So next?”

I choked on the overpriced wine. “You also know how to take a sweet and sexy moment and ruin it with your arrogance. Moving on then. You’re always chiding me and saying things like ‘if I ever bothered to know you better,’ so that’s what I’m trying to do.”

“Interview me.” He held open his arms.

I pretended to crack my knuckles, but I was still recovering from a serious case of horniness. “We’ll start with your name.”

“You know my name.”

“I meant the name you were born with.”

Lucen stared at me a moment, his fingers tracing the stem of the wineglass. “Why does that matter? It’s not my name anymore.”

“A name says a lot,” I replied as our server brought over our dinners. My scallop concoction smelled wonderful, but food was far from my mind. My tongue, like the rest of me, was hungry for other things. “A name gives a clue about a place or a time—your where and when.”

Lucen assured the server we were fine. “Where and when I was born originally aren’t important if you want to know more about me. You’d be better off asking, say, if I chose Lucen for my new name. That would be more telling of my personality.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Then why bring it up?”

“It was an example.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine. Then share the most telling thing about your personality with me—did you choose to become a satyr?”

Lucen refilled our glasses with the remains of the wine bottle. I had the sense he felt he needed the alcohol to deal with my questions, but I didn’t understand why. Why poke fun at me for not knowing everything about him, then get defensive when I asked questions? He was lucky he had other good qualities that made up for him being so frustrating.

After he finished drinking, he went back to studying me. “Does that matter? It’s all in the past. Any decision old me made is old.”

“It’s a very telling decision.”

“Is it? Without knowing the circumstances surrounding it, your conclusions might be completely false.”

“Well, if you told me the circumstances instead of telling me they don’t matter…”

“But they don’t. That me is dead. The decision would tell you nothing about me now.”

I frowned, confusion turning to irritation. “It would tell a lot, I think. It would tell me whether you chose to prey on innocent people.”

“This again? Jess.” He sighed. “Better to be a predator than prey, don’t you think?”

“So you did choose this?”

“Is that what I said? What I’m saying is—it doesn’t matter. We’re all predators, every single one of us.” He pointed at my plate with his fork. “Something has to die in order for you to eat. At least as a so-called pred, nobody has to die to feed me. People even enjoy doing it. You were, just a couple minutes ago, if you’ll recall.”

I said nothing, but suddenly my scallops didn’t smell so appealing. I pushed them around on my plate before deciding on more wine.

Lucen’s hand landed on mine. “You hate what was done to you because you didn’t have a choice. I get it. But don’t keep hating yourself for what you are.”

“That’s not it.” I wasn’t sure what
was
it, but I didn’t think I hated myself.

“Then don’t hate me for what I am, or because I can’t give you what you want. Whatever I decided or didn’t decide, it was a long time before I met you. And if I could turn off being a satyr to make you happy, I would. But I can’t stop needing to feed any more than you can.”

I wrapped my fingers around his. “I believe you.”

“Good.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “Then can we go back to talking about happier things? I’ll tell you my favorite movies and discuss politics, and we can make fun of the other diners, and I’ll whisper the twenty different ways I intend to serve you up as dessert later.”

“Do any involve whipped cream?”

“They do if you want them to, although I love the taste of your skin just the way it is.”

I smiled, concentrating on his touch, letting it burn through the last of my annoyance. “Then tell me about that. Tell me more about this goal of yours.”

“Happily.” He released my hand, but before he could get out another word, my phone rang.

It was too loud to ignore, so I got it out, intending to shut it off, but I hesitated when I saw the caller ID. “Shit. It’s Bridget.”

I shouldn’t have picked up. But like when you’re about to do something stupid, such as touch a hot oven, I watched my finger swipe the screen and answer the call even as I willed it not to.

Date, interrupted. Since I’d gone ahead and done it, I put the phone to my ear. “Hi, Bridget.”

“I hope I’m not interrupting you. I thought I’d leave a message if you were busy.”

I mentally kicked myself. “It’s fine. I’ve got a minute.”

Across the table Lucen’s expression silently contradicted my words. I mouthed
Sorry
for all the good it did.

“Good,” Bridget said. “I wanted to give you a heads-up and let you know I need you in by ten tomorrow morning for a meeting. This case got bigger. There’s lots to discuss.”

“Bigger? What happened?”

Lucen looked up sharply.

“I don’t have all the information yet, but Marshall does not appear to be our only victim. Not any longer. I just got back from meeting with another family who experienced the same thing you did on Sunday. We’ve got a goblin, or possibly goblins, going crazy out there.”

I swore and reached for my wine. “So this might not have anything to do with Eric trying to break his contract after all?”

“Too early to say, but it’s definitely something we need to investigate. Hold on.” In the background, I could hear someone talking to Bridget, but not their words. Then she was back. “We’ve got another call. Be here at ten tomorrow.”

I didn’t want to ask, yet I knew I should. “Do you need me now?”

Lucen dropped his fork with a clatter. Even if Bridget said yes, his face said no way in hell was he letting me go.

Luckily, Bridget declined. “No, we should handle this part. I’ll fill you in tomorrow. I’ve got to go.” Then she hung up.

So did I, and I stuck my phone away, feeling guiltier than before for leaving early, and helpless too. On one hand, another victim might provide another lead. On the other, it might distract the Gryphons from finding the goblin who’d ruined Eric. Especially if, as Bridget suggested, they were two different goblins.

I stabbed a scallop, also feeling guilty for not enjoying my expensive dinner as well as it deserved.

“What was that about?” Lucen asked.

“That case I’ve been helping out with.” I chewed slowly, trying to remember how much I’d told Lucen about it. “It blew up.”

“Blew up how?”

The scallop landed in my stomach like lead. “How much did I tell you?”

“That Steph’s cousin was magically attacked. You were rather vague on the details.”

“Right.” Shoving my plate away, I gave Lucen a rundown of the specifics. “Bridget was calling because someone else got drained the same way. Maybe more than one someone. Something came up that caused her to hang up on me quickly.”

I expected Lucen to shrug it off or tell me to leave it alone and let the goblins police themselves, but instead he stared thoughtfully at his empty wineglass. “Two people? That’s odd, and yet I’d bet it’s two different goblins. It’s unlikely whoever did that to Steph’s cousin could have used up his soul so quickly. Then again, it seems odd that Gunthra would have two goblins acting so strangely. And so nasty.”

Lucen’s voice was laced with disapproval, and it surprised me. “What do you mean by nasty?”

“Just that. I know you think all of us are cruel, horrible people—”

“I do not.”

“Fine,
most
of us.” I started to protest, but it was true enough, and I wanted him to get out his information so I let it go. “But this is not good. It’s not the sort of behavior any decent person would approve of.”

“Any decent pred, you mean?”

He frowned. Lucen hated being called a pred as much as any pred did, but it was an easy way to distinguish them from humans. Nonhuman was too broad a term because it could include the magi, as well. “Yes, any decent pred does not approve of creating ghouls for obvious reasons. And for sucking someone dry like that—the magic that would have to go in to storing that soul, it wouldn’t be pretty.”

“You’re speaking in riddles to those of us uneducated in the ways of magic. From everything I’ve seen, magic is never pretty. What’s so much worse about this?”

“Degrees of badness. I can’t give you the specifics because I don’t know myself exactly how you’d make a container to store that much power. I’m only basing this on what I’ve heard.”

“And what you’ve heard is?”

Lucen ran his hands through his hair. “You know that to create a spell requires using ingredients that relate to the spell’s purpose.”

“Like how a love charm requires pieces of satyr?”

“Exactly. A charmed container, like the sort you’d need to store a human soul, would therefore require some human magic. And like how the soul would have to be taken by force, the spell ingredients would have to be too.”

And spell ingredients were rarely pretty. They weren’t things that would be easy to take by force or otherwise. “But something taken by force could be anything, maybe nothing more than snipping off a strand of a Gryphon’s hair?” I doubted it, but I made the suggestion anyway for my own sake.

“Could be. Or it could require Gryphon blood. I don’t know. I can just tell you, based on how magic works, that something like that must be involved. Chances are, this isn’t the sort of spell that most people are going to be able to work on their own. It would be extremely tricky.”

The scent of my remaining dinner was making me sick. I had to get out of this restaurant soon before the seafood aromas made me hurl. But Lucen had just given me an idea too. “If it’s tricky and something most people couldn’t do on their own, they’d have to buy it. Right?”

“I’d think, although this isn’t the sort of thing your average charm maker is going to sell. Like I said, it’s a nasty business in many ways. We’re not all evil. A decent charm maker wouldn’t sell such a thing because it has no good purpose.”

Maybe, maybe not. One reason humans risked bargaining with preds for magic was because they wanted items that were illegal or simply too immoral for the magi to create. Usually that meant curses, but evil objects made from evilly obtained ingredients didn’t sound all that different to me.

Lucen’s eyes bore into me though, so I refrained from asking if he could think of any likely suspects. Odds were, he couldn’t unless they were a satyr, and I’d get nowhere with him if that were the case. And if it
were
the case, Lucen would bring up the matter with Dezzi, and they’d talk to the satyr in question themselves. The only way I’d find out about it is if I were a member of Dezzi’s council.

Which you could be.
I pushed the thought away.

“I think I’m ready to go,” I told Lucen.

“I hope this hasn’t ruined your appetite for dessert, little siren.”

“Honestly, I’m feeling a bit queasy at the moment, but maybe some fresh air and a car ride home will help.”

“They’d better, or I’m going to have even more reasons to hate the Gryphons. They ruin dates too.”

He was smiling, so I neglected to mention that it wasn’t the Gryphons going around sucking people’s souls dry. Then again, it wasn’t a satyr either.

Probably.

Lucen was right—not all preds were the same, and it wasn’t fair to hate him for what he was. I just wished he’d had been more forthcoming about what he was before he was a satyr.

Chapter Fourteen

“Three more,” Bridget said the next day.

We were gathered in the meeting room. Besides Brian and Wes, seven other Gryphons spread out around the table. Two had been part of the group that went to Gunthra’s with us. The other five were unfamiliar, and no one introduced me to them.

That was fine. The people here weren’t important. The three Bridget had just mentioned however—that was a different story.
Three
more people turned into ghouls? In one night? Shit.

Bridget directed a laser pointer at the photos hanging on the wall. Eric’s photo was there, along with more unfamiliar faces. “They all were drained within hours of each other.” She named off the victims as well as their locations.

“And those might not be the only ones,” Brian interjected. “We know about their attacks because other people were with them when it happened and called us. The police could have an epidemic of missing person reports coming in soon as addicts who were alone at the time of the attack never arrive home, or never show up to work, or what have you. We won’t know for a while. We might never know.”

One of the unfamiliar Gryphons cleared her throat. “Of the three we do know about, what about their masters? Any way to find out if it was the same goblin?”

Bridget took a sip from her tea before responding. “We’re not that lucky. Their masters weren’t even all goblins. We haven’t figured out who Chen’s master was yet, but O’Connor and Klees were vanity addicts.” She circled the two photographs in the center with her laser.

Great. Vanity addicts—sylphs. I felt the collective groan of unhappiness that went around the table.

“The good news,” Bridget continued, ignoring the muttering and swearing, “is that the sylphs involved were less devious than the goblins. They left us a paper trail. We have the contracts and we know who they are.”

Brian pushed back his chair and stood. “Which means you’re all going to pay them visits today. Agent Nelson will lead one group, Agent Riley will lead the second. Gear up and head out ASAP.”

Someone flicked on the lights. Amid the squeaking chairs and jumble of voices, I snagged Bridget’s attention. “You want me to go too?”

“Only if you want to be a part of it. It could be dangerous.”

“I’m in.”

“Good. Let’s get you a weapon.”

I rubbed my hands together with fake glee. “Oh, I knew there was a reason I wanted to go.”

Not ten minutes later we were suited up and ready to leave. For me, that meant putting on my Gryphon jacket and taking the knife Bridget offered. For the others, it meant adding charms to their uniforms, as well as swords.

We left in four cars. Two for us and two for Riley’s team. Dumped in the backseat of one of them, I sat on my hands to keep from fidgeting. All the nervous energy my companions were attempting to hide from each other was impossible to hide from me. The citrusy, minty flavor of fear and anxiety was irritating.

It was also seeping into me. I hadn’t had any qualms about coming along when Bridget asked, but as we pulled out of the Gryphon’s private lot, my mood shifted. I was fairly certain the sylphs hated me on general principle, yet they’d been keeping their distance because of what I’d done to the furies last month. But after this, they’d start hating me with good reasons and possibly stop with that distance-keeping business.

I knew it was a bad idea to choose an apartment above a sylph’s barbershop.

With my luck, one of the sylphs we were after
was
the barber. I’d checked the two names on Bridget’s list, but neither was familiar. My involvement in their arrests, though, would be recognized, and no doubt it would be spread throughout Shadowtown. I wondered what Dezzi would think of that.

We arrived at our destination as I mused. Bridget parked behind the other SUV, along a mostly residential side street. I took a good look around as I got out. Narrow row houses fronted by tiny yet tidy yards slept in the pre-noon sun. Not a tacky piece of lawn furniture could be found, nor an untended flowerbed or any untrimmed foliage. I’d say it was the result of the very appearance-conscious sylphs, but all of Shadowtown was like this. The only aspect that could possibly be attributed to the sylphs in particular was the bright paint on the shutters and trim. That alone wasn’t enough to throw off the aura of darkness that pervaded Shadowtown and gave it its name, but it was more colorful than anything I was used to seeing.

Bridget pointed out the house in question, and silently as the street, we split into groups. Two Gryphons crept over the grass, blades drawn, heading for a back door. I tailed behind Bridget and the fourth Gryphon to the front one. Standing several feet down the path so I wouldn’t get in the way, I searched the windows for any sign of movement. Not a drape fluttered nor a shadow moved.

Bridget knocked twice, two hard
thwaps
in the stillness. I circled in place, checking for hints of life in the vicinity. Dreadfully early though it was for a pred, someone had to be up and watching us. Even now a sylph was likely to be on the phone, calling their Dom.

I’d spun all the way around as Bridget knocked again. When nothing happened, she gave a signal to the other Gryphon to force the door open. Swallowing, I removed my hands from my pockets in case I needed them.

He managed to get the door open quicker than I was anticipating, and the noise rattled me to my bones. Bridget and the Gryphon rushed inside the house. She had her sword drawn. He had a gun. I left my hand on the knife’s hilt and followed a few seconds later, not expecting I’d need it.

Sure enough, I was right. Nobody was home. I heard the “all clear” signal being given as I entered. Lucen and the satyrs derided the sylphs as being the least intelligent pred race, but this one had the good sense to get the hell out of town after ripping off some poor addict’s soul.

Of course, if the sylph had been more clever, he might have destroyed his addict’s copy of their contract first so we couldn’t have found him.

I meandered through a living room so tastefully decorated and bland it could have served for a catalog shoot. Back through a stainless-steel kitchen, Bridget had thrown open a set of sliding doors to a tiny patio. As she checked in with the other team, I climbed the stairs to a balcony-style bedroom and listened in to the conversations below me.

Up here there was evidence of hurried packing. Several drawers were partially open, and the bathroom had been cleaned out of the usual supplies like a toothbrush or shampoo.

“Nothing, damn.” Bridget paced below me in the living room, talking to Riley. “Make a thorough search of the place. If there’s any hint of where they got to, we need to find it.”

She assigned us the same task, but a couple hours later, we emerged from the house with empty hands, no new leads and still four souls in need of recovery.

Even Bridget was cursing as we left. “Let’s question Assym,” she said as we got in the SUV. “I want to hear his excuses. Jess, you in?”

Assym was the sylph’s Dom. He had white hair, a pointed nose and a wicked stiletto that he’d once almost slit my throat with. Although he couldn’t touch my soul anymore, I’d just as soon not be in the same room as him.

“Actually, I think I want to follow up on a conversation I had with a goblin the other day.”

Bridget was pleased to hear I was working my Shadowtown “contacts”, so I opted not to enlighten her any further about my plan. She offered to drop me off, and I gave her the address of my apartment building.

I leaned forward in the car so I could talk to her. “I didn’t get a chance to mention it earlier, but I also had a conversation with a satyr last night that could be worth checking out. He was telling me about the containers that would be required for storing all that stolen power.”

Bridget wasn’t driving, so she twisted around in her seat. “What about them?”

“He thought the magic involved in creating them would be difficult, and the preds who are using them would probably need to buy them from a master charm maker.”

“Good to know. We’ll follow up on that. He didn’t say who made them, did he?”

“No. He claimed not to know.” I unfastened my seat belt as my building approached. “You can drop me off here.”

I waited until the SUV disappeared down the street before heading up to my apartment. While I hadn’t been lying to Bridget about my intentions, it was too early for the conversation I planned. Pounding on Gunthra’s door while she was in bed wasn’t likely to win me any favors.

After I dumped my Gryphon windbreaker, I took out the cheap thumb drive I’d bought yesterday and copied Tom’s files onto it. Then I passed the time by hanging more decorations and planning my goblin attack.

By three, my apartment was starting to look like a home, but I was no closer to figuring out how to handle Gunthra. Since I’d gotten by with her before on my wits, that would have to be good enough. I pocketed the thumb drive, strapped Misery to my hip and left.

Gunthra’s servant seemed tempted to slam his mistress’s door in my face when I showed up, but he let me in with his customary disdain when I explained the purpose for my visit.

“Are you like this with all visitors or just anyone who’s not a goblin?”

I almost said “with anyone human”, and I barely caught my error in time. I didn’t like that. It suggested that I was starting to get comfortable thinking of myself as a nonhuman. Lucen might be happy, but I wasn’t.

The goblin sniffed. “Rumor is you raided the houses of a couple sylphs this morning.”

“Damn. Rumor travels fast, but those weren’t raids. We were there to arrest those sylphs.”

“The sylphs are our allies.”

In my pocket, I wrapped my fingers around the thumb drive. “Your people and your allies are breaking legal contracts, making ghouls and probably violating a hundred other laws I don’t know about.”

And when I thought about it like that, why was I turning this information over to Gunthra again? Ugh. Deals with preds were deals with the devil. In fact, if there was a devil, he was most likely a pred himself.

This time the goblin butler didn’t bother to respond. He opened the doors into Gunthra’s parlor and admitted me. “My lady will be with you shortly. You should have made an appointment.”

“Give me her secretary’s phone number and I will next time.”

Given the displeasure on the goblin’s face, I thought for sure he was reaching for a weapon to hit me with, but instead he pulled a business card out of his jacket pocket and thrust it at me. Well, then. Guess I’d been told.

Once he left, I slipped the card away because it really might be useful to call ahead.

Hoping Gunthra wouldn’t keep me waiting forever, I wandered around the room, inspecting her impressive collection of porcelain vases, jade and glass boxes, and gaudy wall hangings of every style.

The doors opened as I came to the framed dead butterflies over her mantel, which meant Gunthra must have registered the shivers they gave me. “Still wishing you were a mere caterpillar, Miss Moore? Or have you come to terms with what you truly are?”

I swallowed down my memories of our conversation about the butterflies. “You mean an abomination?”

“Are you?”

“It’s what you called me.”

Gunthra sat in her favorite spot and gestured for me to follow suit. “It’s what you are to me. It doesn’t mean that’s how you should view yourself. Should I see myself as a monster because that’s what humans think I am?”

“It depends. Are you doing monstrous things like allowing your people to drain away more lives?”

Gunthra’s self-satisfied smile faltered. “I told you. I’m looking into the matter.”

“At a caterpillar’s pace.” I sat, removing the thumb drive from my pocket, and smiled back at her.

“I appreciate that you expect I alone am capable of fixing this unfortunate situation faster than you and that massive Gryphon organization can, but you give me too much credit. I am but one person.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I think I’m crediting you just enough. You’re not alone. You have a council at your disposal for help.”

Gunthra had a couple books open on the table between us, and a drawing on one of the pages caught my eye. It was nothing special, just a pen-and-ink sketch of a bowl, but the books themselves reminded me of the book Tom had given me. Old and decaying. Although Gunthra’s books appeared to be textbooks instead of a journal.

Still, everyone, it seemed, was doing research, and I wondered why.

Gunthra caught wind of my curiosity and shut the books. “You have the information you promised.”

I set the thumb drive on the table slowly and deliberately, trying to catch either of the books’ titles on their spines. All I managed to note were the words
history of
. “This is everything I was able to get on the furies’ behavior around the time of the Aubrey case. I read through it myself, and I have to admit, I have no idea why you’re interested in this.”

“Why I’m interested isn’t your concern.”

I seriously wondered about that, so I plundered on. “I’m sure, but there’s nothing much there that you can’t possibly already know.”

That was a bit of a bluff. What Gunthra might know or not was nothing
I
could know. But if I kept babbling, I hoped to push her into talking and get her to explain what she wanted from these files. I didn’t like handing them over in the first place, but I especially hated it when I didn’t have a clue what her game was.

Gunthra set the thumb drive on top of her books and stacked the two volumes so that their spines faced away from me. “Perhaps you’re not reading carefully enough, Miss Moore. Or perhaps you’re not reading to discover the correct information.”

“Or perhaps whatever you want isn’t there. If that’s the case, I’m not going back for more. I couldn’t without you being more specific about what you want to find.”

“Understood.”

I took a deep breath. “Then our deal has been fulfilled.”

Gunthra held out her hand. “Assuming what is on this drive is what I asked for, it is fulfilled.”

“It is.” As she should damn well be able to tell since she could sense if I were lying.