He had methodically alienated himself from his host’s former life in all ways except the financial and business aspects. Those he kept afloat, albeit from a distance, by using others to manage the day-to-day affair of maintaining a steady flow of income.
Because as powerful as the Templars were, they could not simply conjure the means needed to buy them the land which sheltered and secluded them or the food they needed to sustain their hosts.
“Your pardon, my lord.”
Kamen looked up sharply, seeing a hesitant acolyte standing just outside of the doorway. He had given strict instructions that no one was to cross the threshold into Odjit’s chamber—aside from himself and whomever was chosen to wait upon them. They also should know by now that he was in a perpetually surly mood and would remain as such until Odjit returned to them in her full glory.
Perhaps not even then.
Damn this never-ending existence, he thought heatedly.
“Well? You’ve come this far to test my patience. I suggest you speak with more alacrity.” He shut the compendium in his lap and moved it onto the table. It was heavy and quite old and needed to be treated with a great deal of care.
“I think we have found him, my lord.”
The heat of instant fury raced through him. His immediate thought was that by “him” the acolyte meant the nameless, as yet untraceable human who had mutilated their mistress. Then he recalled that he had not set that task to the Bodywalkers, but instead to humans. He had sketched the face of the Latino man to the best of his ability and had presented it to three different private detectives, two of whom lived in the area where the attack had taken place. As natives, they had to be able to find some clue as to who this man was. He was not a ghost after all.
“Menes,” Kamen said quietly when he realized the actual “him” that was being referred to. “Where? New Mexico I take it.” He had been hoping to get a shot at the Politic bastard while he was weak and still in the Blending process. If he was already in his stronghold with Ramses and his contemptible, traitor bride to protect them, there was no point in making an attempt on him while Odjit was so indisposed.
“No,” the acolyte corrected him gently. “It turns out he’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.. Sybelle the chantress has seen it clearly, although she is not of equal power to our great mistress—”
Chantresses were powerful spiritual women, also known as prophets—or a human might call them psychics. They could see things beyond normal ken. The future. Danger. Sometimes messages from the gods themselves, although it was rare for anyone in Templar ranks other than Odjit to lay claim to such a power. Odjit was easily threatened by anyone who harbored the potential to outgun her.
“Where is he?” Kamen demanded, cutting away the effulgent praise the acolyte was about to heap onto Odjit.
“Saugerties. New York.”
“Get Thorn. And my lead Gargoyle.”
“Of course, my lord,” the acolyte said, bending to enter a deep bow, as if the depth of his ability to bow before Kamen were equal to the amount of loyalty to be expected from him. But Kamen was no fool. If there was one thing he had learned in his many lives, it was that no one could be trusted.
No one.
The acolyte turned, but Kamen halted him with a sharp snap of his fingers.
“Fetch Chatha to me,” he said darkly. “I have a special task for him.”
The servant paled by three shades and his fingers almost instantly began to tremble. Kamen watched him with genuine curiosity. Would the acolyte brave Kamen’s wrath by refusing the request, or would he brave the unpredictability of the psychopathic killer? It was an intriguing contest.
The repeat of a deep bow gave him his answer, and just like that the moment of fascination was gone. Like all the moments before it, fleeting and ephemeral and nothing. Always such vast nothingness.
He glanced at Odjit.
Nothingness. But there was going to be a price to pay for this nothingness. And like anything else, he knew no one source could be trusted to complete the task, so it was best to sic all his best dogs on the problem at hand. Kamen walked over to his mistress, his fingers reaching down to brush over her forehead and over the fading scars at her throat. He knew that if he set a dog like Chatha on the trail of Odjit’s would-be killer that he would go after the quarry with rabid delight, but only for as long as it amused him to do so. Kamen’s job would have to be to make the process as entertaining for him as possible.
Someone had taken the last vestiges of light from his world …
… and that someone was going to pay.
Leo Alvarez opened his eyes to utter darkness and the smell of musty perfume.
“Shit,” he grumbled under his breath as he fumbled for his watch, trying to do it as gingerly as possible. The owner of the perfume, not to mention the bed, was asleep against him, snoring a little on every breath.
6 p.m.. Or 8 a.m. Tasmania time, which is where he’d just spent two weeks routing out the remains of a drug cartel that had been in hiding on the otherwise harmless Australian island. Depending how you looked at it, he had either overslept or was waking just in time to start his day. He groaned softly when pain shot through both the back of his skull and his eyes. No doubt a recollection of the tequila he’d been pounding back, trying to drink some fricken lumberjack under the table last … yester … ah f**k it. He just took pleasure in the idea that the lumberjack was probably still throwing his guts up. Luckily the lady of the stale perfume hadn’t cared whether of not Leo was drunk, she’d brought him home anyway. Which was good last night, but not so good this morning … evening …
“I f**king hate time zones,” he grumbled under his breath.
Now the trick was to find a way to extricate himself from woman and bed without waking her up. In his favor were vague memories of her drinking pretty heavily herself the night before. Odds were she was down for the count. He also seemed to recall some heavy-duty drunken sex in there somewhere. Actually, he was pretty damn proud of himself for it. Performance under the influence of alcohol could be a hit-or-miss situation. Especially that much alcohol.
He had danced through more than one bottle of Jose Cuervo Especial during this particular contest. And if he remembered correctly, he’d won a fuckton of money when Mr. Lumberjack went down like a felled tree, the wooden floor of the bar shuddering with the impact. People could be so predictable, he thought. They figured the man with the height and girth was going to handle his liquor better than a man half an inch over 5’10” with lean, whipcord strength and no fat to help absorb the tequila.
They had figured wrong.
Unfortunately, there was a price to be paid for being right. Actually, it was more like a steep cover charge. Number one, a hangover. Not a bad one because he’d remembered to drink a lot of water along with his shots and he’d taken aspirin before finally falling asleep. Number two, slipping out of bed without waking his hostess. Luckily this was something he’d had a lot of practice in. Infiltrating and extracting, without his targets being any the wiser. Honestly, they had both known this was going to be a straight out tumble and nothing more, but he wasn’t interested in any pillow talk. She had already run through a lifetime’s worth of beauty-shop drama from where she worked, with the occasional segue to toss some serious venom her ex-boyfriend’s way. It was a good thing he’d been so hammered or he might have developed momentary discretion, looking for someone who had less juvenile drama in her life. Of course, those kind of woman were either A) taken or B) wouldn’t be caught dead in the seedy joint he’d sauntered into. And since he’d had no desire to juggle the difficulties of a better class of woman, this one had more than served her purpose.
And it wasn’t as though he’d used her with no regard for her needs. He’d made her pretty damn happy. And to be honest he hadn’t originally planned to bed her. He’d been really wiped out from the flight back to New York from the land of Oz. But when a woman puts her hand down the front of his pants, what’s a guy to do? She’d have been insulted if he’d turned her down.
Leo gingerly moved over her since his side of the bed butted up to the wall. She didn’t so much as stir as his catlike movements kicked into autopilot, years of training to move with silence and efficiency doing him some justice.
As he pulled his jeans on he looked around, trying to remember what he’d done with his sidearm. Under the pillow. Of course. He sighed, making a note to lecture himself on the all-around foolhardiness of his actions these past twenty-four hours. He quickly pulled on his boots, resituating the dagger sheath in his right one so it wouldn’t chafe him. Then he snagged his shirt and headed for the door, making his way out, and shutting it quietly.
Once he was out in the open air and the last fading light of the day, he scrubbed a hand through his hair and shrugged into his shirt. It wasn’t until he was off the porch steps that he realized he didn’t have his truck.
“Slick move, jackass,” he muttered to himself. Faced with the choice of going back inside or hoofing it, he started to walk.
Chapter Four
Marissa looked up from her conversation with the missing boy’s mother to see Jackson and Sargent running along the edge of the woods set back behind all of the properties on the street. Even as inexperienced as she was, she could see that Sargent was serious about whatever it was he was tracking. If Jackson went into the woods she would lose the chance to give him her impressions on the situation. She looked down at her shoes, wincing inwardly. She wasn’t wearing stilettos, but there was a good two inches on the heels of the shoes. Her only consolations were that they were a sturdy pair of wedges and that they weren’t exactly a favorite pair.
“Excuse me, Becky,” she said gently to the mother.
Becky was watching Jackson now, too. And Marissa hesitated just long enough to see the woman start biting on the inside of her lower lip. The nervous gesture only confirmed what she had suspected all along. In a way she felt bad about suspecting the mother. She could always be wrong and it was a terrible thing to accuse an innocent mother of. But statistics didn’t lie. An overwhelming percent of child disappearances and deaths were from the violence or nefariousness of a family member or close friend. It could just be that she had a form of Munchausen’s, where she thrived off of the attention she received through the plight of her child. It didn’t mean necessarily that she had had anything to do with it. But it was enough of a suspicious behavior to mark how she wanted to approach this search. The more efficient they could be, the better. Especially since Jackson was, at present, the only dog handler in the area. Every hour that passed would make the situation bleaker and bleaker for the child, provided he was still alive.
She moved toward Jackson hurriedly, but not so much as to alert the mother of her suspicions.
“Officer Waverly!” she called out just as he was bending down to unhook Sargent from his leash.
“I think he’s got something,” Jackson said. “And don’t call me that,” he said with a frown. “We’re a little beyond official titles, wouldn’t you say?”
The remark paralyzed her throat momentarily, causing her to stare at him openmouthed for a good five seconds.
“I don’t see why—”
“I don’t see why everything needs to be an argument,” he cut her off, regaining his full height, the leash still attached to Sargent’s harness.
“Jackson please,” she said, frustration lacing her voice.
“There. Was that so hard?” He grinned, completely pleased with himself, the infuriating ass. For a moment she seriously thought about committing cop-icide … or something like it. No. Better yet, something really juvenile like putting motor oil in his coffee. The smug bastard.
Then again, knowing what the station coffee tasted like, he wasn’t likely to notice the difference.
“I came to tell you that I don’t think the mother is telling us the whole story,” she said icily. “Not to get poked and teased and have you pull my pigtails like some bully in the school play yard!”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” he said grimly. Then he looked at her with amusement. “Pigtails, huh? I bet you wore pigtails, didn’t you? Cute little red-haired girl with scabby knees from falling while playing jump rope, freckles on her nose …”
“I did not have freckles!” she hissed in a low voice when a pair of cops walked past them. “Do you see any freckles?” She gestured with the blade of her hand at her eye-line, over her nose. “It’s not like they magically disappear you know.”
“You never know, what with the miracle of makeup and all.” His voice dropped as well. “So you’re thinking foul play by the mother?”
Because as powerful as the Templars were, they could not simply conjure the means needed to buy them the land which sheltered and secluded them or the food they needed to sustain their hosts.
“Your pardon, my lord.”
Kamen looked up sharply, seeing a hesitant acolyte standing just outside of the doorway. He had given strict instructions that no one was to cross the threshold into Odjit’s chamber—aside from himself and whomever was chosen to wait upon them. They also should know by now that he was in a perpetually surly mood and would remain as such until Odjit returned to them in her full glory.
Perhaps not even then.
Damn this never-ending existence, he thought heatedly.
“Well? You’ve come this far to test my patience. I suggest you speak with more alacrity.” He shut the compendium in his lap and moved it onto the table. It was heavy and quite old and needed to be treated with a great deal of care.
“I think we have found him, my lord.”
The heat of instant fury raced through him. His immediate thought was that by “him” the acolyte meant the nameless, as yet untraceable human who had mutilated their mistress. Then he recalled that he had not set that task to the Bodywalkers, but instead to humans. He had sketched the face of the Latino man to the best of his ability and had presented it to three different private detectives, two of whom lived in the area where the attack had taken place. As natives, they had to be able to find some clue as to who this man was. He was not a ghost after all.
“Menes,” Kamen said quietly when he realized the actual “him” that was being referred to. “Where? New Mexico I take it.” He had been hoping to get a shot at the Politic bastard while he was weak and still in the Blending process. If he was already in his stronghold with Ramses and his contemptible, traitor bride to protect them, there was no point in making an attempt on him while Odjit was so indisposed.
“No,” the acolyte corrected him gently. “It turns out he’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.. Sybelle the chantress has seen it clearly, although she is not of equal power to our great mistress—”
Chantresses were powerful spiritual women, also known as prophets—or a human might call them psychics. They could see things beyond normal ken. The future. Danger. Sometimes messages from the gods themselves, although it was rare for anyone in Templar ranks other than Odjit to lay claim to such a power. Odjit was easily threatened by anyone who harbored the potential to outgun her.
“Where is he?” Kamen demanded, cutting away the effulgent praise the acolyte was about to heap onto Odjit.
“Saugerties. New York.”
“Get Thorn. And my lead Gargoyle.”
“Of course, my lord,” the acolyte said, bending to enter a deep bow, as if the depth of his ability to bow before Kamen were equal to the amount of loyalty to be expected from him. But Kamen was no fool. If there was one thing he had learned in his many lives, it was that no one could be trusted.
No one.
The acolyte turned, but Kamen halted him with a sharp snap of his fingers.
“Fetch Chatha to me,” he said darkly. “I have a special task for him.”
The servant paled by three shades and his fingers almost instantly began to tremble. Kamen watched him with genuine curiosity. Would the acolyte brave Kamen’s wrath by refusing the request, or would he brave the unpredictability of the psychopathic killer? It was an intriguing contest.
The repeat of a deep bow gave him his answer, and just like that the moment of fascination was gone. Like all the moments before it, fleeting and ephemeral and nothing. Always such vast nothingness.
He glanced at Odjit.
Nothingness. But there was going to be a price to pay for this nothingness. And like anything else, he knew no one source could be trusted to complete the task, so it was best to sic all his best dogs on the problem at hand. Kamen walked over to his mistress, his fingers reaching down to brush over her forehead and over the fading scars at her throat. He knew that if he set a dog like Chatha on the trail of Odjit’s would-be killer that he would go after the quarry with rabid delight, but only for as long as it amused him to do so. Kamen’s job would have to be to make the process as entertaining for him as possible.
Someone had taken the last vestiges of light from his world …
… and that someone was going to pay.
Leo Alvarez opened his eyes to utter darkness and the smell of musty perfume.
“Shit,” he grumbled under his breath as he fumbled for his watch, trying to do it as gingerly as possible. The owner of the perfume, not to mention the bed, was asleep against him, snoring a little on every breath.
6 p.m.. Or 8 a.m. Tasmania time, which is where he’d just spent two weeks routing out the remains of a drug cartel that had been in hiding on the otherwise harmless Australian island. Depending how you looked at it, he had either overslept or was waking just in time to start his day. He groaned softly when pain shot through both the back of his skull and his eyes. No doubt a recollection of the tequila he’d been pounding back, trying to drink some fricken lumberjack under the table last … yester … ah f**k it. He just took pleasure in the idea that the lumberjack was probably still throwing his guts up. Luckily the lady of the stale perfume hadn’t cared whether of not Leo was drunk, she’d brought him home anyway. Which was good last night, but not so good this morning … evening …
“I f**king hate time zones,” he grumbled under his breath.
Now the trick was to find a way to extricate himself from woman and bed without waking her up. In his favor were vague memories of her drinking pretty heavily herself the night before. Odds were she was down for the count. He also seemed to recall some heavy-duty drunken sex in there somewhere. Actually, he was pretty damn proud of himself for it. Performance under the influence of alcohol could be a hit-or-miss situation. Especially that much alcohol.
He had danced through more than one bottle of Jose Cuervo Especial during this particular contest. And if he remembered correctly, he’d won a fuckton of money when Mr. Lumberjack went down like a felled tree, the wooden floor of the bar shuddering with the impact. People could be so predictable, he thought. They figured the man with the height and girth was going to handle his liquor better than a man half an inch over 5’10” with lean, whipcord strength and no fat to help absorb the tequila.
They had figured wrong.
Unfortunately, there was a price to be paid for being right. Actually, it was more like a steep cover charge. Number one, a hangover. Not a bad one because he’d remembered to drink a lot of water along with his shots and he’d taken aspirin before finally falling asleep. Number two, slipping out of bed without waking his hostess. Luckily this was something he’d had a lot of practice in. Infiltrating and extracting, without his targets being any the wiser. Honestly, they had both known this was going to be a straight out tumble and nothing more, but he wasn’t interested in any pillow talk. She had already run through a lifetime’s worth of beauty-shop drama from where she worked, with the occasional segue to toss some serious venom her ex-boyfriend’s way. It was a good thing he’d been so hammered or he might have developed momentary discretion, looking for someone who had less juvenile drama in her life. Of course, those kind of woman were either A) taken or B) wouldn’t be caught dead in the seedy joint he’d sauntered into. And since he’d had no desire to juggle the difficulties of a better class of woman, this one had more than served her purpose.
And it wasn’t as though he’d used her with no regard for her needs. He’d made her pretty damn happy. And to be honest he hadn’t originally planned to bed her. He’d been really wiped out from the flight back to New York from the land of Oz. But when a woman puts her hand down the front of his pants, what’s a guy to do? She’d have been insulted if he’d turned her down.
Leo gingerly moved over her since his side of the bed butted up to the wall. She didn’t so much as stir as his catlike movements kicked into autopilot, years of training to move with silence and efficiency doing him some justice.
As he pulled his jeans on he looked around, trying to remember what he’d done with his sidearm. Under the pillow. Of course. He sighed, making a note to lecture himself on the all-around foolhardiness of his actions these past twenty-four hours. He quickly pulled on his boots, resituating the dagger sheath in his right one so it wouldn’t chafe him. Then he snagged his shirt and headed for the door, making his way out, and shutting it quietly.
Once he was out in the open air and the last fading light of the day, he scrubbed a hand through his hair and shrugged into his shirt. It wasn’t until he was off the porch steps that he realized he didn’t have his truck.
“Slick move, jackass,” he muttered to himself. Faced with the choice of going back inside or hoofing it, he started to walk.
Chapter Four
Marissa looked up from her conversation with the missing boy’s mother to see Jackson and Sargent running along the edge of the woods set back behind all of the properties on the street. Even as inexperienced as she was, she could see that Sargent was serious about whatever it was he was tracking. If Jackson went into the woods she would lose the chance to give him her impressions on the situation. She looked down at her shoes, wincing inwardly. She wasn’t wearing stilettos, but there was a good two inches on the heels of the shoes. Her only consolations were that they were a sturdy pair of wedges and that they weren’t exactly a favorite pair.
“Excuse me, Becky,” she said gently to the mother.
Becky was watching Jackson now, too. And Marissa hesitated just long enough to see the woman start biting on the inside of her lower lip. The nervous gesture only confirmed what she had suspected all along. In a way she felt bad about suspecting the mother. She could always be wrong and it was a terrible thing to accuse an innocent mother of. But statistics didn’t lie. An overwhelming percent of child disappearances and deaths were from the violence or nefariousness of a family member or close friend. It could just be that she had a form of Munchausen’s, where she thrived off of the attention she received through the plight of her child. It didn’t mean necessarily that she had had anything to do with it. But it was enough of a suspicious behavior to mark how she wanted to approach this search. The more efficient they could be, the better. Especially since Jackson was, at present, the only dog handler in the area. Every hour that passed would make the situation bleaker and bleaker for the child, provided he was still alive.
She moved toward Jackson hurriedly, but not so much as to alert the mother of her suspicions.
“Officer Waverly!” she called out just as he was bending down to unhook Sargent from his leash.
“I think he’s got something,” Jackson said. “And don’t call me that,” he said with a frown. “We’re a little beyond official titles, wouldn’t you say?”
The remark paralyzed her throat momentarily, causing her to stare at him openmouthed for a good five seconds.
“I don’t see why—”
“I don’t see why everything needs to be an argument,” he cut her off, regaining his full height, the leash still attached to Sargent’s harness.
“Jackson please,” she said, frustration lacing her voice.
“There. Was that so hard?” He grinned, completely pleased with himself, the infuriating ass. For a moment she seriously thought about committing cop-icide … or something like it. No. Better yet, something really juvenile like putting motor oil in his coffee. The smug bastard.
Then again, knowing what the station coffee tasted like, he wasn’t likely to notice the difference.
“I came to tell you that I don’t think the mother is telling us the whole story,” she said icily. “Not to get poked and teased and have you pull my pigtails like some bully in the school play yard!”
“I had a feeling you were going to say that,” he said grimly. Then he looked at her with amusement. “Pigtails, huh? I bet you wore pigtails, didn’t you? Cute little red-haired girl with scabby knees from falling while playing jump rope, freckles on her nose …”
“I did not have freckles!” she hissed in a low voice when a pair of cops walked past them. “Do you see any freckles?” She gestured with the blade of her hand at her eye-line, over her nose. “It’s not like they magically disappear you know.”
“You never know, what with the miracle of makeup and all.” His voice dropped as well. “So you’re thinking foul play by the mother?”
