Thom planted his butt in front of the door to prevent curiosity from overtaking me. Smart move for a cat, even a demonic one. I was human enough to admit—okay, so I wasn’t human—but I was still willing to own up to my failings. Yes, I wondered what the big deal was about Miller’s demonic form. And yes, some part of me burned to prove to him I could handle his truth.
But a niggling voice whined in my head. What if he was right? What if I couldn’t handle another major shock on top of all the others? He would read any fear as rejection. I would hurt him, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. He deserved better than that from me.
“Someone ought to write one of those dummy guides on how to befriend demons,” I told the cat.
Thom rustled his wings, and a feather drifted to the carpet. Tail flicking, he pounced on it, batting it in the air and kicking his hind legs to keep it in play, chomping on the vane when it tickled his nose. When at last he had sufficiently murdered it, he spat the wet clump out on the floor then started grooming himself.
A heinous grinding noise caused Thom’s fur to stand on end. Metal screamed. The ground shook. A low reptilian hiss slithered under the door, tickling my hindbrain, and I inched back a step on instinct. The cat glared at me as if to say See? This is why you weren’t invited to the party. Properly chastised, I resumed my position and waited. A perfectly human Miller opened the door not too long after, pale and shaken, his chest rising in hard pants.
“I can’t be in here.” The raw, deep voice he projected belonged on a man five times his size. “The meat is too . . . fresh.”
The blood drained from my face in a cold rush. “Go wait in the car,” I snapped out the order to refocus his attention, which kept skipping from me to the gaping hole. He wet his lips, hungry, his fist clenching on the doorknob until it crumpled in his palm. “I’ll check out the shelter, and Thom can watch my back.”
“Mmmrrrrpt,” the cat said in agreement.
I exchanged places with Miller and shut the door behind him, waiting until his footsteps thumped past the closed garage door before unhooking a battery-powered lantern from the pegboard and braving the opening. Even built to hold up to a dozen people, the space was compact. I didn’t have to step down to see inside, and what I found curdled my stomach.
Angel Claremont sat strapped to a wooden chair borrowed from the kitchen. Her pink-rimmed eyes rolled in her head. Duct tape restrained her arms behind her back, the wide silver bands wrapping across her stomach for added security. I brought my wrist up to my nose, but it didn’t help. The reek of urine, feces and rot caused my eyes to water. A mass of soiled bandages wrapped her hip where her left leg should have been. Blood and other fluids mingled on the floor under her. Her right leg bounced up and down, up and down.
“Angel?” I called to her, fumbling my phone out of my pocket and dialing 911. “Can you hear me?”
A whimper escaped her mouth, the only part of her left unbound. No. I saw the shine of tape around her throat. She had chewed through her gag at some point. The noises she made were inhuman, the wildness in her eyes pure animal instinct.
“911, what’s your emergency?” a cheery voice asked.
“This is Officer Luce Boudreau. I’ve located Angel Claremont. I need an ambulance dispatched to this location.” I rattled off Martin’s address. “The girl’s case is being handled by Special Agent Kapoor with the FBI.” I paced while wrapping up the pertinent information then ended the call as wailing sirens grew louder. “I’m going to meet the first responders,” I told Thom. “You need to be gone when I get back—” I turned a slow circle. “Thom? Where did you go?”
Spry for his size, even without the use of his wings, the big cat leapt out of the shelter onto the foam square where I stood. His fur was too dark to show stains, but his muzzle was damp, and he was licking his chops. That was when I noticed the girl had stopped crying. Thom’s narcotic saliva had dosed her so well her head hung forward, chin resting on her frail chest.
“Thanks for easing her pain.” I tasted acid in the back of my throat when I leaned down and patted the tip top of his head, careful to avoid the blood. “She’s earned her rest.”
Leaving the cat to let himself out, I placed my borrowed weapon on one of the work benches, sent up a prayer that the firearm was properly registered since it was covered in my fingerprints, then gripped my badge. I walked to the front door with my hands held up at shoulder level, ID visible from a mile away. A dusty patrol car screeched onto the curb and spilled out two officers with their hands on their guns. Their wary expressions melted at the sight of me, and they jogged up the walkway.
“The house is clear.” I waited three or four more seconds, until an ambulance screamed into the subdivision, before guiding a tour through to the garage. “Angel Claremont is down there, and she’s in bad shape. I’d let the EMTs handle her.” The cops examined the buckled metal, and their eyes rounded. “I had to—” I fumbled for a believable explanation, “—use the winch on the front of my Bronco.”
Neither asked too many questions after that. Not where I had parked the Bronco, or why I was at Martin’s house in civvies. Or why I was there at all. There was too much work to be done, and I had never given them a reason not to trust me. When I finally extricated myself from the bustling scene, turning it over to the senior officer, it was to text Rixton and then Dad updates. Acting casual, I moseyed to the SUV and let myself in on the passenger side.
Miller glided away from the curb in silence, navigating through the parked vehicles and rubberneckers.
“Are you okay?” I asked once it became clear he had no intention of initiating conversation.
“It will pass. It always does.”
The ghosts in his eyes kept me from prying further.
“The lab emailed their findings while you were inside.” He indicated a slim laptop wedged between the seat and the console. “I don’t know how much good the results will do us at this point.”
He turned onto Peace Street and parked in the lot of a boarded-up fast food restaurant.
“Martin and War are MIA. We need to catch a break. Maybe this will be it.” I wiggled the laptop free then set it up on my thighs. “Password?”
“Your birthday.”
I punched in the numbers, and sure enough, the lock screen dissolved. “Any particular reason why you chose those digits?”
“Sentimentality,” he replied. “The date represents more than your rebirth. It marks ours as well. We’ve had fifteen years of freedom, of peace.” He drew in a long breath. “It was a good day, one worth remembering.”
“Peace seems unlikely with someone named War on the loose,” I said gently. “Freedom—that’s your right. Slavery was abolished here. It hasn’t existed in my lifetime, and I’m not about to usher in the second coming. You’re free. You all are. Live your life on your own terms.”
The look Miller turned on me was fond, if indulgent. “You are unique in all the terrenes, Luce Boudreau.”
“Aww.” I twisted my finger in his chest. “You’re not so bad yourself.” A grin slipped his leash, and I patted myself on the back for lightening his mood. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.” A few clicks downloaded the preliminary reports. “The blood Cole found on the sidewalk at the school is a positive match for Maggie.” I released a shuddering exhale. There was knowing, and then there was knowing. “There’s a second attachment here.”
The samples taken at the dump site were moot at this point. The leg had belonged to Angel Claremont.
“Looks like the sand Portia scraped off Jane’s heels matches the sand Cole and I collected at the Upton house. There were traces of nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus.” I clicked over to Google and double checked my memory. “Those are common fertilizer components. Makes sense. The Uptons laid new sod a few weeks ago. They basically offered to show us their baby’s first fertilizer pics while we were there.”
“The tracks already linked War to the property,” he reminded me.
“The blood samples I scraped off their driveway must still be baking.” The chances of those results breaking new ground were slim too. “The odds are high the prints were made with her blood. She attacked us in her base form while we were in the SUV, Thom creamed her, then she limped off to lick her wounds. She must have cut through the Upton’s yard on her way to the marsh.”
“That never made sense to me. A head-on collision with an SUV wouldn’t kill War, but it would still hurt like hell. It was careless. I see no benefit.” He gazed across the road, lips pinched in thought. “The bruises had already alerted us to the high probability she had breached in full possession of her faculties. Why keep up the act?”
As opposed to me, who had been suffering from brain damage since “birth”.
“Traipsing through the subdivision was foolish and flashy.” I had to agree with him there. “What if the reason why it doesn’t fit is because it wasn’t part of her calculated strategy? What if the accident was her attempt at causing a distraction?”
“You think she kept two caches?” he wondered aloud. “One for each victim?”
“It’s no different than when dealers hide their product in multiple locations to lessen the chance of one police raid robbing them of their livelihood.” Minus the fact we were talking about living, breathing people. “We found Angel Claremont, and maybe War didn’t care at this point if we did. She had time to move her and didn’t bother. She had to know once we uncovered Martin’s involvement, his home would be searched. It makes sense she would hide Maggie in a more secure, less obvious location.”
“Any theories on why she’s escalating now?”
“I failed her in some way. She was testing me with the Claremont girl, with Maggie, and I didn’t pass.” I shut the laptop. “She’ll take her disappointment out on Maggie if we don’t find her first.”
Miller gazed out the window, lips mashed into an unforgiving line as he sorted through the evidence.
“The leg was a taunt. She wanted me to wonder if it belonged to Maggie.” Had I not known my best friend so well, it would have worked. It had worked up until I saw the pictures. “She would have kept divvying up Angel until she ran out of parts or the DNA results came back.”
“Why abandon the charade?” Miller glanced at me, scratching his chin. “War must have spent months learning about you to pull this off, yet she burned her identity as Jane within days of initiating contact.”
“Her injuries were the tipping point. She had to know those would raise questions, and she couldn’t play Sleeping Beauty forever. Yet she still risked returning to the hospital one last time.” I kept circling back to the night of the crash. Maggie had just gone missing. So why would War . . . ? “Maybe we’re giving her too much credit. The more people involved in a plan, the greater the risk of it going wrong. What if she had to choose? Maintain her Jane identity or cover her tracks with Maggie?”
“If those were her only remaining choices, that would mean she hid your friend nearby.” He let his head fall back against the seat and uttered a disgusted noise. “This is not good news, Luce. It means she’s been here longer than any of us realized. The only way that gambit could succeed was if she provided the distraction while someone else secured Maggie.”
“Robert Martin is still at large.” I mirrored his position. “It seems unlikely he would handle both victims at both locations, though. It would double his chances at being caught. What about her husband? Where does he fit into the hierarchy?”
“War wouldn’t waste a powerful resource like Thanases unless she had no choice. He’s her right hand. That means there are more of them than we realized.” He angled his chin toward me. “She must be growing her coterie.”
That sounded decidedly not good. “How does that work?”
“Conquest is a collector. The rarer, the more beautiful, the better.” His gaze sharpened. “War cares only about brute strength, cunning and skill. With the exception of Thanases, her coterie are all lesser demons. Most of them are her offspring with Thanases. They can’t manifest in the flesh the way most of us do.”
The most of us qualifier didn’t stop relief from gliding through me. “Not manifesting sounds good.”
What kind of monster bred her own demon army? How could War, my blood sister, view her children as expendable when Portia had sold herself to Conquest for the promise of vengeance for her unborn babes? Clearly, not all demons were created equal. Not that I’d had many illusions about my sibling to dispel at this point.
“The atmosphere in many foreign terrenes is toxic to nonnative demons. That’s why we take on skins. We study the wildlife, determine the hierarchy and then emulate the highest tier of life. If her coterie isn’t strong enough to manifest their own skins, they’ll bargain humans out of theirs.”
Meaning a deal had been struck. Martin was no longer fully human. Or he might not be in there at all.