Huntress

TWELVE

When we returned to the house on Upper Brook Street, Ginny met us at the door, her face ashen. Warren stood behind her, looking grim.

“He was here,” Ginny said.

I grasped her by the shoulders. “Michael? Are you hurt? What happened?”

She shook her head. “No, we’re both fine. I never even saw him but … well, you’d better come look.”

We followed her up the stairs to the door of my bedroom. She paused with her hand on the knob.

“After dinner we went through the house, just like you said to, and checked the doors and windows again. When I looked in your room, the window was open. And—”

She swung the door open. The window was closed now and all of my things were just as I’d left them. The writing on the wall, however, was new. Painted in blood above my bed were the words “I love thee not, chaos is come again.” It was part of a line from Shakespeare. And it was in Michael’s handwriting.

“What does it mean?” Ginny asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said numbly.

“It must mean something,” Grady said. “Else why would he have done it?”

Just to torment me, I thought, imagining the man I loved writing such words to me.

“It’s from Othello,” Devlin added, saying what I already knew.

Justine walked into the room and ran one finger over the letters. The blood was still fresh enough to come away on her skin.

“It’s human,” she said.

“Didn’t Othello kill his wife?” Warren asked softly from the doorway.

Everyone fell silent, uncomfortably waiting for my response.

“Ginny,” I finally said, “could you please clean that up as best you can? If it’s stained the wall, Devlin and Justine can rearrange the furniture for you. Put the wardrobe over it. I don’t want Michael to see it when I bring him home.”

I turned to go, but Devlin caught my arm. “Where are you off to?” he asked, his dark eyes filled with concern.

I held up the silver ring that Grady had stolen from Barbara’s room. “I’m going to the library to cast a location spell.”

He looked at me like he didn’t believe me, but he let me go. In a daze I walked down the stairs and entered the library. Shutting the door behind me, I leaned against it and closed my eyes. All I could see was Michael scrawling those words above our bed. I love thee not. I love thee not. I love thee not.

“Stop it,” I said to myself. “It’s not Michael. It’s the demon. Michael loves me. He always has and he always will. I am the other half of his soul and he is the other half of mine.”

It was something he said to me often. I had to remember that.

Crossing the room, I cleared the scattered books off the big table and retrieved a map of London from the bookshelf. I unrolled it and used four silver candlesticks to hold down the corners. The map was old, but it would do. I didn’t even bother to take my coat off. This shouldn’t take long.

I placed the ring on its side at the edge of the map, and then I laid my palms flat on the oak table and took a deep breath. Spellcasting wasn’t easy for me, but location spells were fairly simple. Clearing my head as well as I was able, I thought of what I wanted. The ring would tell me where Barbara was. If Sebastian had anything to do with summoning this demon, she was part of it too. I centered myself and called up my magic.

“Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, that I won’t find where you abide,” I called out.

The ring began to move, rolling across the map to the north. It stopped just inside the city but it didn’t fall, which meant that she was still moving. I pulled up a chair and waited. After what seemed like hours, the ring finally tipped on its side and lay still, coming to rest on the other side of Whitechapel, near Shadwell. That made sense in regard to the human murders. He would want to hunt in an area near his base, yet not in his own backyard.

I slipped the ring into my pocket and exited the library just as Grady was coming down the stairs, carrying a bucket of pinkish water.

“Grady, is your carriage still out front?” I asked.

“It should be,” he replied. “Jensen knows to take the horses around the block if they get restless, but I told him to wait for me.”

“Good, come with me,” I said and started for the door.

He set the bucket on the floor and looked uncertainly over his shoulder. “Don’t you think we should tell the others?”

Justine would happily go with me, but Devlin would never approve of what I was about to do. Somewhere in the back of my mind that thought set off warning bells. I was going to do something that was probably foolish. If it had been anyone else’s idea, I would have been the first to object. But that demon had been in control of Michael’s body for nearly twenty-four hours and I had to know that he was all right. I wasn’t ready to fight him yet, but I had to see his face.

I opened the front door and turned back to Grady. “It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission,” I said.

“But not necessarily wiser,” Grady mumbled.

THIRTEEN

The area of London where the ring led me was filled with brothels, pubs, and opium dens. It was dark, dirty, and dangerous. No respectable person would ever walk these streets. It was exactly the sort of place I would expect to find a woman like Barbara. I reached up and knocked on the roof of the carriage, and it rolled to a stop.

“Do you know which building?” Grady asked as we got out.

“No,” I replied. “But it will be somewhere in this block.”

We walked in silence for a while, until I caught sight of a man crossing the street at the end of the block. I grabbed Grady’s arm and pushed him back against the building. Flattening my back to the wall, I watched. The man wore a long coat and a hat pulled down low over his eyes, but it was definitely Michael. I knew it by the way he walked, the way he moved. Even at a distance I would know him anywhere.

He didn’t seem to sense our presence, so Grady and I slowly followed. At the corner, I stopped and peered around the edge of the building. The road was long and narrow, cramped with shops and tenements, and littered with refuse. Barbara stood outside the door to one of the shops, feeding on a human. She held the man with his arms pulled behind his back as her teeth pierced his throat. I knew she hadn’t bothered to bespell him because he was struggling to pull free of her.

I heard Michael’s voice say something to her, but I couldn’t hear what it was. She looked up, blood staining her full lips, and smiled. Then, with such practiced ease that I jerked back in surprise, she snapped the neck of the man she had been feeding from. It wasn’t often that someone committed an executable offense right in front of me. When you were the executioner they tended not to do that.

Michael entered the building and Barbara followed him, dragging the body of her victim behind her. Slowly I walked down the street, Grady following me. When I reached the solid, windowless metal door they had used, I paused and placed my hand on it, listening. I could hear muffled human voices from within, but no sound of Barbara or Michael.

As quietly as possible, I pushed the door open. When I didn’t sense any vampires in the immediate area, I walked inside. The large, dimly lit room was crammed with rows of cots, nearly all of which were occupied by a human man or woman. Insensible, they lay there, either unconscious or muttering words that had no meaning except in their clouded minds. I wrinkled my nose. Barbara’s victim had been dumped unceremoniously just inside the door, and the entire place reeked of unwashed bodies and opium.

“What is this place?” I asked Grady.

“It’s an opium nest,” he replied. “Vampires purchase the opium and the humans come here for the drug.”

“And then the vampires feed from them,” I said.

He shrugged. “Human blood laced with opium is quite a sensation, they say. The High King has declared opium nests to be illegal, but it’s hard to put a stop to them. You close one down and they just reopen another elsewhere.”

I looked around, noting a door at the opposite end of the room. “I’ll be back shortly. You stay here in case any vampires decide to drop by for dinner. I’m sure, as a known warden, you won’t have any problem deterring them from coming in. I don’t want to worry about the possibility that one of these opium-laced vamps might be loyal to Barbara or that demon and alert them to my presence.”

“Cin?” Grady asked. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Not remotely, I thought. All I knew was that the man I loved was in this building. The demon might be in possession of his body, but Michael was somewhere inside, trapped. It was reckless and irresponsible, I realized that, but I was drawn to him like a moth to the flame. I just needed to know that his body, at least, was unharmed.

There was a dark hallway beyond the door. Empty rooms opened off either side of the hall, but it was the big metal door at the end that beckoned me. Cautiously I crept up to it and listened.

“I have not fulfilled the terms of my summoning,” Michael’s voice said, and I stifled a sigh of relief that he was all right.

I should have left then, but Barbara’s next words stopped me.

“He doesn’t care about that,” Barbara insisted. “All he wants is her dead. He says you’re to kill her tonight.”

Michael sighed. “I grow weary of this conversation.”

There was a rustling of fabric and then Barbara said, low and throaty, “Then perhaps there are other ways I can convince you. I do love the feel of this body.”

Before I was even aware of what I was doing I’d thrown open the steel door and strode into the room. Barbara was standing with her thin body pressed against my husband’s. She turned her head in surprise and then smiled.

“My, isn’t this convenient?” she said.

Michael was wearing the same clothes he’d had on the night before, but his shirt was open and the talisman gleamed against his skin. Barbara’s hands moved inside his shirt, boldly caressing the rigid muscles of his chest. I wanted to grab her by the hair and slam her face into the wall. I did neither of those things, though. I just stood there, realizing too late what a stupid thing I’d just done. Michael cocked his head to one side.

“The females of your species seem to be unusually attracted to this form,” he said.

That was an understatement. Michael had the face of an angel and a body many women would walk through hell to possess. And Barbara was about to get the opportunity to put that to the test if she didn’t get her hands off of him. Unfortunately for her, she was as stupid as she looked. Instead of stepping away, she turned and pulled his head down to hers for a kiss.

Michael’s eyes watched me as she ground her lips against his before her tongue slid inside. I felt the tears well up in my eyes and my stomach rolled in revulsion. Michael pulled away from her, still watching my face.

“Oh, look,” Barbara said. “She’s jealous.”