Diana Read online

She looked around the kitchen as though searching for an excuse to disobey, then came and sat across the table from him, braced and fragile.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I burned down paradise,” she said.

  He waited. There weren’t any more words, so he started trying to make sense of the ones he had to work with.

  Gave up.

  “Nope,” he said. “Not a clue.”

  She swallowed.

  “The paradise plane in my head,” she said. He folded his hands, waiting. He was a bit touchy about it, but he didn’t want her to know it; he’d never been on that side of the boundary, and that she could just hop back and forth whenever she wanted, well it bothered him. She licked her lips. “I kind of control reality there. It’s a hybrid, a space I imagine but one that exists anyway. I don’t know. It’s existential.”

  He raised an eyebrow at her, and she spread her hands helplessly. That was the best he was going to get. Fair enough. He gave her a twitch of a shrug and she went on.

  “I torched it,” she said. “When Justin died. Burnt it all to ash. And…” she paused, closing her eyes. “It’s still gone,” she said. “It’s coming back, but it’s so slow.”

  He considered the meaning of that for a long time, taking a break to eat eggs and bacon. Because they were there. Samantha waited.

  “Is that why you’re testing?” he asked. Her eyes flicked away. Yeah, he noticed. He wasn’t that dumb and she wasn’t that clever. Not even close.

  “No,” she finally said. He pushed his plate away and crossed his arms, waiting.

  “I know,” she said. “It didn’t even occur to me until a couple of weeks ago, but… I know so much.”

  He couldn’t disagree there. She’d left, a passionate but naive student of the paranormal and the supernatural, and she’d come back fluent in dozens of languages, a graceful executor of angelform swordplay, and a savant with a diverse class of magics. But he suspected that wasn’t what she was talking about.

  She knew the rules.

  He know enough about the rules to know what was going to happen to him when a demon lucked into killing him, one of these days, but she’d studied with the saints and the angels. She knew the rules.

  “You think if you screw up, you’re going to hell,” he said. She pressed her lips between her teeth. Yup. That was it. He shrugged.

  “You know better than I do, Sam. That’s between you and your so-called benevolent deity.”

  There was a spike of temper and then she turned her head away. Too on the nose. He was giving himself points for that one.

  “Get it together,” he said. “What you did after he died was magnificent. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it’s over. The henna’s about gone and your break from reality is done. You need to learn how to cope like the rest of us suckers.”

  She looked at him, searching his face for something. Irony? Humor? Forgiveness? He didn’t know what. He did know she didn’t find it. There wasn’t any way to soften it. Reality sucked, and she’d given up heaven for it out of some…

  He hadn’t let it sink in until that moment.

  She’d walked out of heaven in the hopes of doing something important on his behalf.

  Biggest sucker of them all.

  He folded his hands again.

  “You can’t live a perfect life,” he said.

  “I can try,” she said, her voice sounding strangled. He nodded.

  “Do what you have to. We’re going after the demon who splashed Justin, and I need you at full form. You got it? You get yourself together, or I’m leaving you here tied to the wall.”

  Something in her snapped closed, just the way it was supposed to, and she glowered at him.

  “I’d like to see you try.”

  In point of fact, so would he, but that was the Samantha he needed back, right now. He nodded.

  “All right,” he said. She nodded.

  “All right.”

  He got out his samples and he started work.

  Nuri’s people had done most of the cleanup at the house where Justin’s family had gotten splashed. Carter had no idea what the police thought had happened, and he didn’t much care. This wasn’t the kind of thing that they managed to do anything with. They hadn’t been in touch - presumably because they either didn’t know about Samantha or had no idea how to find her - and he kept carefully separate from them as a practice.

  He had his memory of the place and the samples he’d taken to work with, which wasn’t a lot, but it was usually enough.

  Samantha stayed on the couch that day, dozing in and out of sleep as he worked, running tests on bits of blood, bone, and dust. There were results, but nothing that was definitive. Late that evening, he sat at the table looking at a smear of blood on a blue stone.

  “What’s that?” Samantha asked. He discovered her standing behind him.

  “Blood,” he answered.

  “I know that much,” she said. He nodded.

  “It’s strange. Got an odd power on it I haven’t been able to figure out, yet.”

  “Can I help?” she asked, sitting down. He shook his head.

  “I know who I need to help me.”

  She raised an eyebrow, expecting the backhanded blow, but he shook his head. It wasn’t intended as an insult.

  “Going out,” he said. “Come on.”

  He stood, sliding the stone into his pocket and went to the door, then, changing his mind, went back to his room. He put his hands to the wall, focusing power, and slid open the wall, revealing four epic blades there, and the slot where Bastard lived. He put her back and looked at the others. There were more, other places in the apartment, but these were the best of them. He took Regent and slid her into the sheath on his back, under his jacket, then went back to the door.

  “She was bothering me,” he said as he went past Samantha. She didn’t answer, though he suspected she had made a face of some kind. He didn’t care.

  They went to the elevator and down to the basement of the apartment building he owned, where she chose a car - a Mustang he didn’t think he’d seen before - and started the engine with a self-satisfied roar and burble. He stood outside of it for a moment, then got into the front seat. She looked at him but didn’t say anything.

  Smart, that girl.

  She drove to the exit of the underground parking lot and waited. He pointed out the window and she pulled into traffic, following silent directions to a section of town where they didn’t normally spend a lot of time.

  “What is this?” she asked as she circled, looking for a parking spot.

  “Gray,” he said. “Just another set of them.”

  She raised an eyebrow, looking around. In fairness, the place did look an awful lot like a bohemian neighborhood more than an enclave for magic users.

  Finally she parked and he got out, looking up and down the sidewalk. The people here split to one side and another going around him. Samantha stood next to the car, watching. He clearly didn’t belong here in his black suit with his dress shoes. At the same time, these were a community of people that had an energy that was familiar to him, like a song remembered from childhood.

  Deep magic.

  “This way,” he said after another minute, taking the middle path down the sidewalk as people passed him on either side. He sensed more than checked that Samantha followed behind him.

  The shop he was looking for was down a block and on another street, its windows full of glass trinkets and brightly colored cloth. He pushed the door open to a tinkling bell and went to a glass display of stones, waiting.

  He heard Samantha browsing behind him, touching this or that and creating the same gentle noise of glass against glass. He shook his head.

  He did not belong here.

  “We welcome all money,” a woman said. He turned.

  “Bella.”

  “Carter.”

  He turned his head.

&nbs
p; “Sam, Bella. Bella, Sam.”

  “One hears such odd stories from the belly of the beast. I didn’t know what to believe,” Bella said. She smiled, a knowing expression that had an awful lot more wisdom than humor in it.

  “Hi,” Samantha said after a pause. Carter wondered what question she’d swallowed and how long she could hold off asking it. Shaman. She had to know.

  “You heard what happened?” Carter asked Bella, going to lean against the customer side of the counter where she’d stopped.

  “I’d rather hear it from your own mouth,” Bella said. He nodded.

  “Someone splashed a family that they should have assumed was under my protection,” he said, taking the stone out of his pocket. “There’s an energy trapped in the blood that I need to know about.”

  “And the mighty Carter can’t figure it out on his own?” Bella teased, holding out a hand. The older woman was a head shorter than he was, settling further and further as the years wore on, but she had wicked blue eyes that bespoke a youth full of adventure and a mind full of wit.

  “It reacts to blue gypsum,” he said. The teasing smile dropped off her face and she took the stone in against her chest to look at it through her bifocals. Samantha came to stand next to Carter, waiting.

  “If you’re waiting for me to chant and tell your fortune, I’ll do it,” Bella said. “Otherwise, get out.”

  He gritted his teeth, not liking the authority of the command, but gave Samantha a quick nod and turned for the door. The shop pressed on him like a bright light, a pressure he couldn’t escape or ignore. He wanted to get out.

  “Gypsies,” he muttered as the door fell closed behind him.

  “What?” Samantha asked. “They’re real?”

  He gave her a withering look and she reeled it back in.

  “Clearly they’re real,” she said. “They’re real people. But the stories… palm reading and telling fortunes…?”

  “Everything you know about gypsies is a myth,” he said. Except that it wasn’t. So much of it was more than true. Samantha looked like she was ready to shove him into a building and shake a finger in his face until he spilled at least a little bit more. He smiled, looking over his shoulder back at Bella’s shop.

  “What do you actually think you know?” he asked.

  “Esmerelda and Quasi Modo?” Samantha asked. Carter sighed.

  “Fail. You know about the Romani?”

  “Okay,” Samantha said. “I know that word, yes. Is she Romani?”

  He laughed.

  “Hardly. Gypsy is just a word,” he said. “Means nomad. Some of ‘em are proud of it, and some of them would hit you in the mouth if you called them gypsy to their face. Bella is a Makkai gypsy. Magic runs deep with the Makkai, and best I can tell, they invented crystal magic. Demons hate them, even if they don’t seem to have any particular power against them.” He looked over his shoulder again. “Give me the creeps, too.”

  Samantha turned to walk backwards now, intrigued. This had been a mistake.

  “Why haven’t I ever heard of them?” she asked.

  “More things on heaven and earth than even a Shaman is ever going to know about,” Carter said. That would drive her crazy, which made him happy.

  “So what is she going to do?” Samantha asked.

  “Hell if I know,” Carter said. “That’s why she booted us. Gotta go do some of her mystic arts out of sight of the outsiders.”

  “Samantha frowned and Carter nudged her to the side to keep her from running into someone. Normally he’d have put her in the way, and the look on her face told him she though it, too, but he didn’t want her bringing home even the residue of that magic. Makkai gypsy magic. He really was desperate.

  “You went to see the gypsies and you didn’t bring me,” Abby complained, standing as they got off the elevator. Carter took a moment wondering if he preferred she lay ambush in the apartment or out here in the hallway like this. He was going to have to put a hook on the door so that she could get in. It didn’t please him, the idea of her getting in on her own, but it was the safest place in the city for her, and in light of Butterdough kidnapping her last year, he was a fool to keep her locked out like this.

  “She knows about them?” Samantha asked, offended. “How does she know about them and I don’t?”

  Carter walked past, opening the door and going into the apartment.

  “They’re so pretty,” Abby gushed. “All the colors and the crystals.”

  “How do you know about them?” Samantha asked.

  “I don’t,” Abby said. “Not really. They’re the most consistently warded people I’ve ever seen. It’s like watching in a mirror, trying to get a picture of what their lives are like. They’re really neat, Sam.”

  Carter snarled to himself, going to get a granola bar out of the cabinet and leaning against a counter to eat it.

  “What do you know?” Samantha asked. “Tell me everything.”

  “Too busy for that,” Carter said. He didn’t want to sit through a dissertation on them right now, and he was willing to invent something to get out of it, because if Samantha had her way, she’d winnow every bit of information that Abby had out of her. Abby raised an eyebrow at him.

  “You just got home,” she said. Spur of the moment, he shook his head.

  “Sam has work to do,” he said.

  “What?” Samantha asked.

  “What do you know about hellsgates?” he asked.

  He stood in the back lot of the building. He’d purchased the building behind it along with his own and demolished the old structure that had been there. He looked around at the debris there.

  “I don’t remember all of this being here,” he said.

  “It’s mostly mine,” Samantha said. He raised an eyebrow at her and she shrugged.

  “It takes tools to work on cars,” she said.

  “These aren’t tools.”

  She gave him a sly smile.

  “But once you have the tools, you might as well use them to do other stuff.”

  “Stuff like what?” he asked. She shrugged.

  “I’m teaching myself metalworking.”

  “Show me.”

  She went to a bench and picked up an aluminum frame, holding it out.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a workbench,” she said.

  “So what’s that?” he asked, indicating the wooden surface it had been on.

  “A workbench,” she said. “But I made that one.”

  “Out of aluminum.”

  She blinked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You do anything in iron?”

  She frowned.

  “Iron’s a lot harder, Carter. You can bend aluminum with your hands, if it’s thin enough, and most tools will bend it if you know what you’re doing and buy the right stock.”

  “That’s the point,” he said. “Aluminum, hellside, is only slightly firmer than water here. Iron, though…”

  “What are you asking?” she asked, crossing her arms in a pose he saw in the mirror most days.

  “I want you to make things,” he said. “Out of iron.”

  “What things?”

  He shook his head.

  “Things.”

  “Birthday cards? What?”

  Birthday cards. That might have been funny, if he’d been someone else.

  “You know what a hellsgate is?”

  “I do,” she said. “It’s a series of posts in a configuration that centralizes dark power and makes it possible to poke a hole in the boundary between the planes and thereby cross.”

  “You read that in a book,” he said. “You actually know anything about them?”

  She paused.

  “No.”

  He nodded.

  “Learn. I want to have one here. I want a thin spot. I want a summoning circle and a blackout zone and a three-piece marking easel.”

  “I don’t kn
ow what those are,” Samantha said. He nodded again.

  “Learn. If you’re going to have a talent for magic, I plan on using it. Someone in my position should have a hellsgate, anyway.”

  He looked back up at the building. Most of the warding on it was magic. It was going to need an upgrade, if he was going to let her play back here on anything interesting.

  He didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  “I need to go put in some orders,” he said.

  “I need to go to a library,” Samantha answered. He grimaced at this, the idea of letting her loose on that much information paining him, but he couldn’t argue. He certainly didn’t want to teach her the intricacies of building a hellsgate, himself.

  “You get it wrong, you blow everything up,” he said. “That’s the only warning you’re going to get.”

  “Define blow everything up,” she said.

  He looked up at the building.

  Definitely going to need a remodel.

  She drove him to the artisan sector, where demons worked alongside humans in buildings converted long ago from residences, their clients coming and going alongside human clients who never knew the types of work going on in the other workshops.

  He had a demon in mind that he wanted to see, and he dismissed Samantha when he got there.

  “Go see Nuri and tell her that you’re looking for access to her library. And that I said I’ll pay for it.”

  She cocked her head.

  “You don’t want to have a contract set, first?”

  She was learning. He had to give it to her.

  “It’s a set price in solid cash,” he said. “It’s fine, even if she decides she wants to gouge me.”

  There would be favors involved, but access to a demonic library was pretty standard fare. Most of the information there was massaged to be just-this-side of true, and deceptive in clever ways.

  “I want to look around first,” Samantha said.

  “You can do anything you like, but you aren’t coming with me,” Carter said.

  She took this more easily than he would have expected, disappearing into a shop as he walked. He didn’t look back.

  It would be nice to have a day out without her, though the sleep was beginning to wear on him. He didn’t need a lot of sleep, but some of a human’s power came from being well fed, well watered, and well slept, and he needed to keep it at a minimum level just to be safe. He’d go home without her and sleep later this evening. Go out before the sun came up, just to mess with her.