Songs of Love & Death (45 page)

A soft chime signaled the door behind her opening. She swiveled again, expecting Quin, who’d gone in search of some meat tea for himself and coffee for her.

She saw Nic instead, hands shoved in pants pockets, mouth grim.

Her heart sank. But at least they hadn’t locked him in the brig. Yet. She rose. “I told them you saved our lives. But they”—she waved her hand toward the empty chairs as if the DIA officers were still there—“didn’t seem to care. There must be someone else I can talk to. Someone higher up. I’ll do anything I can, Nic. Just tell me what you need me to do. I’ll do it.”

He stepped up to her as the door closed behind him. “I need your ship. And I need you to lose your cargo again.”

“You what?”

“Jonas had Filar pulling cargo forfeitures so that when he hired Quin and sent him to Jabo, the
Pandea’
s ‘accident’ wouldn’t stand out. But Filar had no idea that Jonas’s plans involved murder. That’s why he’s cooperating so willingly with DIA interrogators right now.”

“But the station’s cannons—”

“Have never destroyed a ship. They’re set to disable, and the drones tow you back in.”

“Then how was Rez going to kill Quin?”

“There was a bomb in one of the containers Filar was supposed to leave onboard, but, Filar being Filar and being greedy, took them all. Jabo Station just informed us that one of the Bruisers found it while taking inventory. The bomb was set to detonate while you were trying to get a loan. Evidently Jonas never meant to kill you.”

Serri collapsed back into the chair. She realized her mouth was hanging open. She closed it. “But why do you need the
Pandea
?” They had Filar and his confession. They’d probably have Rez Jonas in custody very soon. The DIA was not something you could easily run from.

“Because someone’s still pulling cargo thefts on other stations and in some dirtside ports. We thought that Jabo Station was part of that larger crime ring. It’s not. So we need to do this all over again, but
this
time”—he eased down into the chair next to her and clasped his hands together, on his knees—“we don’t want to lie to the ship or her captain. It’s not worth the risk.”

“Quin—”

“Is calling it a ‘grand adventure.’ The director hasn’t been able to get more than a few words in edgewise.”

“So you’re not in trouble?”

Nic sighed. “Oh, I’m in deep trouble.” He splayed his hands. “The director, though, is willing to—eventually—forgive me. But you’re the one I’m really worried about. You’re the one who really matters.”

“Nic, I—”

“Serri.” He folded her hands in his, and she was surprised by how badly she
needed his touch right now. “I made a huge mistake six years ago. I kept silent when I shouldn’t have, believing it was the right thing to do. And I almost made that same mistake again.” He shook his head. “I knew Jonas was cheating on you. But I was afraid that if I told you what was going on, you’d reconcile, because Jonas could always talk his way out of anything before. I needed for it to get to the point where you wouldn’t take him back. Ever. I just waited too long. Because by the time that happened, you hated me as much as you hated him. And I’d lost the chance to tell you how much you mean to me, how much I love you.”

Shock, confusion—and hope—swirled through Serri. “You… were in love with me?”

A wistful smile played over his mouth. “Still am.”

“But… we were friends.”

“I hope we still are.”

“Nic—”

“Tell me it’s impossible, that there can never be anything between us, and I’ll go away. I’ll get the director to assign another agent to the
Pandea
. But if it’s not impossible, I’d like that chance I wanted, and lost, six years ago.” His fingers tightened on hers.

Shock and confusion dissolved. There was only hope. And there was Nic. Her best friend. A man she could trust. A man she could love.

“Are you applying for the position as the captain’s lover, Special Agent Talligar?”

“I am.”

She leaned forward until their lips almost touched. “You’re hired.”

New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
bestseller Mary Jo Putney is a graduate of Syracuse University with degrees in eighteenth-century literature and industrial design. She is the author of thirty-six books of historical romance and fantasy romance, including
A Distant Magic, The Spiral Path, Dancing on the Wind, The Rake and the Reformer, Silk and Shadows, Lady of Fortune,
and many others. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including two RITAs for best novel, four consecutive Golden Leaf Awards for best historical romance, and the
Romantic Times
Career Achievement Award. Her most recent books are
Loving a Lost Lord
and
Never Less Than a Lady.

Here she conjures up a deadly confrontation with a creature so seductive that it’s almost impossible to resist. But one that you’d better resist, if you want to stay alive!

I studied the homeless man’s corpse. He was the fifth I’d seen this day. Ragged clothes so dirty they’d clog a washing machine. A battered and long out-of-date Tennessee driver’s license giving the poor sod’s name and age. And a great big smile on his lined face.

My partner, Jamal Johnson, shook his head. “I can’t believe how all these guys died smiling, Dave. I suppose it’s some new street drug.”

“Maybe,” I said, but I didn’t believe it. Besides being a New York City detective, I’m a Guardian, from a family that has the kind of powers that used to be called magic. Witch burnings a few centuries back persuaded Guardians to live under the radar. Most of us lead normal lives, gravitating to work that suited our magical talents.

Me, I’m a Guardian hunter. I’m very, very good at tracking people down, especially criminals. Equally good at dealing with them after I found them. Not surprising that I ended up a cop.

My boss is a hardass New Yorker who would scoff at the very idea of magic, but he’s learned to send me out to the weird deaths, like this one. Five smiling corpses. No signs of violence.

It could just be coincidence—street people aren’t the healthiest cohort—but my Guardian instincts were screaming. “Have you noticed that they’ve been getting younger? The first guy must have been in his seventies. Each has been a few years younger than the one before. This poor devil is in his late fifties.”

Jamal considered. He’s no Guardian, but he’s a damned good cop. “Probably coincidence, but if some dealer has been going around handing out high-dose samples, they might be taking out the weak more quickly.”

“It will be interesting to see the tox report.” I checked my watch. It was midevening, and technically I should have been off duty two hours ago. Maybe after we cleared up this scene, Jamal and I could grab some Tex-Mex at the restaurant down the block.

I was about to get back to work when a very, very bad feeling struck me. The kind where you drop everything and
run
.

I didn’t quite do that, but I said, “Jamal, I have to be somewhere else ASAP. Can you wrap up here and get a ride back to the station with one of the uniforms?”

He gave me a quizzical glance, but said only, “Sure. See you tomorrow.”

We’ve been partners a long time. No need to explain things. I pivoted and headed for my car, wondering what could have set off such loud alarm bells.

I
PARKED RIGHT
in front of my East Side destination—a Guardian talent that’s useful in New York is being able to find parking when needed—then took the steps of the neat brownstone three at a time. I felt as antsy as if I were the only one who could save a room full of kindergartners from certain death. Instead, I was responding to the silent distress of Bethany Sterling, one of my favorite people in the world.

Bethany swung the door to her apartment open before I could knock. No surprise there since she’s also a Guardian. She looked her normal self—petite and straight-backed despite her years, her silver hair pulled into an elegant twist. But her deep-set blue eyes showed the anxiety that had brought me running.

Giving thanks that she seemed all right, I asked, “Lady Beth, what’s wrong?”

She smiled wryly as she stood back and ushered me in. “Apparently I wasn’t shielding my worries as well as I thought. You always could read me better than anyone else.” She closed the door behind me. “You’re worried, too. Tell me about it while I make a nice pot of tea.”

Briefly I described the dead street people while Bethany filled her electric kettle. It’s one of the British types that serious tea drinkers use because it heats water to boiling in seconds. After pushing the on button, she stood on tiptoe for the tin of my favorite Darjeeling tea. I reached over her head to take it from the shelf.

She isn’t a lady in the sense of an English title, but she was named for an ancestor called Lady Bethany Fox, so my brother, Charlie, and I like to call her Lady Beth. Not only was she English born, but the title suited her classy nature.

She warmed the teapot, then added tea leaves and poured boiling water on them. “I suspect our worries are related, David. Early this morning I sensed a strange, menacing energy sweeping into the city, and it’s getting stronger. Something is very wrong.”

“And I have the corpses to prove it. Any idea what the cause might be?”

She set out two teacups and produced a cookie jar filled with her rich, crumbly scones. As she set them on a dainty china plate, she said, “I think a demon has come to New York.”

I experienced a moment of severe cognitive dissonance at the contrast between the sweet silver-haired widow and the words she’d just said. But though Bethany Sterling was indeed sweet, she was a Guardian hunter like me, with special abilities to track the ungodly and enforce justice.

I glanced across the kitchen at the old photo that hung over the neat computer table. It showed a young Bethany dressed in parachute gear early in World War II. She’d trained as a secret agent and parachuted behind Nazi lines in France, single-handedly freed a jail full of Maquis, and done a lot of other heroic things.

But she hadn’t managed the rescue that mattered most—her equally young husband had been a Guardian healer, like my brother, Charlie, and he died in a prisoner-of-war camp, treating fellow prisoners right up to the end.

So Bethany Malmain Sterling was one formidable woman even at her present advanced age, though she refused to divulge the actual number of her years. She’d also, in her youth, been one very hot babe, with cool blond hair and dangerous blue eyes. I wish I’d known her then. But I’m damned lucky to know her now.

“A demon,” I repeated. “This is new? The city has plenty of them, starting on Wall Street.”

“This isn’t a joke, David,” she said with mild reproof. “The—entity—is no metaphor, but a malicious noncorporeal being. A demon that feeds on human energy. Have all the victims been male?” When I nodded, she said, “So it’s a succubus.”

“A succubus,” I repeated. “Ooooo-kay. At least that would explain why the men were smiling.”

She judged that the tea had steeped long enough and poured the steaming liquid into the mugs. Then, knowing me, she added a dollop of rare and expensive Highland single malt to my tea. “There are worse ways to die, but I imagine that most of the creature’s victims would prefer to live.”

I took a long, appreciative swig of tea and whiskey. “Is there any way to get rid of this demon, or will it keep feeding indefinitely?”

“I don’t know. I was about to do a search on magematrix.net when you thundered in here.”

“Good idea.” I took my mug and the plate of scones and followed her to her desk.

She opened her laptop and used her fingerprint ID to enter magematrix.net. The site is a very, very private database and social network for Guardians, who are spread all over the world these days. I don’t think there is a better source of information on magic and impossible events anywhere—though I’m not sure.
Any equivalent stash of knowledge would be just as secret.

Lady Beth typed “succubus” into the search engine, then scrolled through the results. “Not a very large entry,” she murmured. “Some of this data goes back centuries.”

I peered over her shoulder to read. The oldest entries had been translated into modern English, with links to the original text if someone wanted to consult that. “So these demons steal human life force through dream sex until they become powerful enough to acquire physical bodies.”

She clicked through to a section of original text. “This seventeenth-century report claims that sex demons are escapees from hell. They long to acquire human bodies because that makes the pleasure of their wickedness so much more powerful.”

“How do we get rid of this one?”

“A sufficiently powerful mage might be able to dismiss a sex demon from the body it’s taken over, but there are no details.” Bethany started clicking links at the bottom of the page to see if they led anywhere interesting.

“So maybe we could do an exorcism, if we knew how. This is beginning to sound like a low-rent horror film.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” she murmured. “The earliest account says that when the demon is dismissed from the body it inhabits, it’s sucked down to hell forever.”

“No way of checking that part, of course.”

Lady Beth leaned back in her computer chair and eyed the computer thoughtfully. “Our ancestors were happy to assume that demons came from hell, but today we want different explanations. These beings are quite rare. Are they space aliens? From another dimension that lies alongside this one? Or have we been watching too much
Star Trek
?”

“Probably,” I said pragmatically. “A parallel dimension is just as much jargon as saying that these critters are from hell. Let’s bag this one before we worry about tagging it.”

Her silver brows arched. “Time to scout out the demon?”

“The sooner the better,” I agreed.

Bethany nodded and swiveled her chair to face me so we could hold hands. We always did this for particularly difficult cases. As I touched her thin, slightly arthritic fingers with mine, I felt energy spark between us. It’s been amazing to work with Lady Beth. Certain Guardian talents follow gender, and most hunters are male. But Bethany could hunt with the best of us.

I closed my eyes and visualized a map of the city. The mental image was like an aerial photo, enhanced by my own experience of many of those streets.
When I had visited the scenes of the suspicious deaths, I’d picked up traces of disturbing energy, and with Bethany’s help, that came sharply into focus. “There’s a nasty, twisted red energy spike not far away. Can you feel it?”

“That’s our demon,” Lady Beth said, all cool, focused hunter. “And she’s become very powerful. Let me see if I can learn more…”

I felt my partner’s energy stretch out as delicately as a budding flower—and faster than thought, her probe was seized like a swimmer chomped by a killer crocodile. Lady Beth tried to yank free, but the scarlet energy roared hungrily along the trail and stabbed into us like a lightning bolt. Bethany screamed and I blacked out, every cell in my body shocked, as if I were being electrocuted.

I regained awareness to find that we’d both been blasted to the floor. Bethany lay beside me, her face paper white and blood splashed around her. “Lady Beth!”

As I scrambled up, I saw that the blood was pouring from a vicious slash in her left arm. I grabbed a tea towel and turned it into an impromptu tourniquet. At the same time, I gave a furious mental shout.
“Charlie!”

My younger brother, Charlie, is my best friend, except for Lady Beth. He’s also the most powerful Guardian healer in New York, and he works as an ER resident in a hospital only a few blocks away.

My mind touched his and I felt his fatigue. He was just leaving work after a twenty-four-hour shift, and more than ready to get home to his apartment and his gorgeous Guardian fiancée. But he came alert when we connected. Sensing his question, I shot back,
“Lady Beth, her place. She’s hurt bad!”

It wasn’t really telepathy, and not really words, but we knew each other so well that he understood the gist of it.
“On my way!”
echoed in my mind.

Most Guardians have at least a little healing power, and I’m no exception. I used what talent I had while desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood. Bethany was cold and shocky, and it looked like a sizable chunk of flesh had been torn out of her arm. Was the demon an eater of human flesh?

Her lashes fluttered up. She looked so damnably frail. “Don’t worry, David,” she whispered, her voice scarcely audible. “I’ve had a good life.” It sounded perilously like dying words. “We’ve made a good team.”

“Damn it, you can’t die on me, Bethany Sterling,” I swore. “Don’t you
dare
die!”

Luckily, Charlie arrived then. Like me, he had a key to Bethany’s house since we’re the closest thing she has to family in New York. He’d brought a backpack of first aid supplies with him, but his first move was to drop to his knees by Lady Beth and put one hand on her wounded arm and the other on her forehead.

I could feel the healing energy like a tidal wave of white light. At first it was a struggle, light against dark. I sensed the moment when his healing drove off the shadow of death. He gave a ragged sigh and sat back on his heels as he reached for his backpack. “What happened?”

I gave him a quick rundown of the situation while he cleaned and bandaged the wound. “Nasty,” he said. “We’re lucky Lady Beth is still with us. I want to check her into the hospital overnight at least. At her age, this is a dangerous injury.”

“Nonsense, Charles,” Bethany said in a surprisingly strong voice. “Hospitals make me ill. I’ll stay here, thank you very much. A cup of tea will fix me up quite nicely.”

I put an arm around her shoulders to gently help her to a sitting position. Her bones were as delicate as a songbird’s. “Maybe we should take you there, just in case.”

There was nothing wrong with her willpower. She fixed my brother with a basilisk stare. “I’m in better shape than you, Charles. You saved my life, for which I’m suitably grateful, but you’re so tired you’re a menace to society until you get at least twelve hours’ sleep. Now give me some nice drug to dull the pain and go home.”

Unlike me, Charlie knows when argument is pointless. “Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly. “But I want you to stay with her tonight, Dave. Just in case.”

“Will do.” Not that he needed to ask. No way would I leave Bethany alone after an attack by a demon.

Charlie zipped up his first aid gear. His scrubs were bloody, and not just from Lady Beth’s injury. Wearily he got to his feet, almost falling. I caught his arm. “I’ll call you a cab.” He didn’t argue about that, either.

I helped Bethany onto the sofa and refilled the electric teakettle. Since Charlie was gray with fatigue, I carried his backpack outside. “Thanks for coming,” I said as we reached the sidewalk. “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

“Lady Beth won’t be with us forever, Dave,” my brother said quietly. “She’s very old. If you hadn’t bandaged her up and called me, we could have lost her tonight.”