Like the other demons he went naked, except for a belt, from which dangled a coiled black whip. He couldn’t keep his hands off it either. Played with it during the entire assembly.
I didn’t understand the talk, so Raoul translated for me. Since he thought he was watching a court proceeding, the words hardly ever matched the actions, but it ended up making an odd sort of sense. Especially when their most animated conversation conjured strong mental images that needed no translation.
Whip dude sauntered over to the last empty rock, which stood taller and flatter than the rest, and took a seat. “Who summons the court and its Magistrate?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest, although he still kept one hand on the whip.
Up jumped Skeletal Woman, the one who’d been the first to emerge from the pit. “I do,” she said.
“State your name and case.”
She wrung those bright red claws and blinked her eyes. The third one was out of sync with the rest, and the lack of an eyeball flipped my stomach sideways. Which surprised me. I’ve seen splatted brains, headless torsos, and spines glistening through the fronts of bodies. I really thought I’d reached my gross-out limit. Now I understood hell was going to slam those boundaries till they shattered. The realization made me want to curl up into a ball and tuck myself into Raoul’s pocket until it was time to go home.
“I am Uldin Beit. My mate was murdered. I wish to Mark his killer.”
“For the record, what was your mate’s name?”
“Desmond Yale.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. I could see his loss had devastated her. I shook my head, amazed that even evil soul-snatching scumbags could find somebody to love.
“And what was the nature of his death?” The Magistrate kept throwing out the professional questions, but he smiled gleefully as she forked over the gory details.
“He was shot through the soul-eye at the direction of a woman named Jasmine.” Her words were accompanied by a visual of Yale with a gaping wound in the middle of his forehead. Several of the demons tittered. Uldin Beit resolutely ignored them. She said, “I witnessed this. The rest is information Sian-Hichan was able to gather when I brought him Desmond’s body.” She gestured to one of the seated beasts, who was covered with yellow, fist-sized warts.
At a nod from the Magistrate, she sat down and Sian-Hichan stood. “As you would expect in cases like this, I followed protocol and immediately probed Yale’s mind to see if I could retrieve any vital information.” That’s sure not what Sian-Hichan’s facial expressions and hand gestures were conveying, and his audience found his description damn entertaining. The reason, I gathered from the mental images he projected, was that he’d also put the corpse through a series of calisthenics in order to win a bet. Something having to do with rigor mortis. Geee-ross. Uldin didn’t seem to appreciate it much either.
I wished I could trade hells with Raoul. His seemed so much more precise and refined. Then I thought better of it. He was still crouched in a bottomless pit of doom and despair. His was just better organized than mine.
Sian-Hichan went on. “Jasmine seems to be a code name for a reaver hunter named Lucille Robinson. Yale lost two apprentices to her and fought her himself twice before being killed by
her
student. Yale’s gravest concern was that Lucille Robinson had gained the Spirit Eye.” His speech brought forth an image of me. Not as myself — an underweight redhead helping a legendary vamp assassin eliminate threats to national security despite my mind-bending past. This me was bigger than life. A windblown supermodel standing on a summit surrounded by a crackling crimson aura, tricked-out gun in one hand, great-great-granddad’s blade in the other.
I’d thought the Spirit Eye would be an orb. Maybe a gigantic version of one of the Enkyklios balls. Maybe an actual eye, floating above my head like a halo. But I realized now it was more integral. An inner flame that burned away preconceptions and prejudices until I could really know, really see through the mask to the evil writhing underneath. The aura, I decided, must be its exhaust.
Even in my version of hell, impressed courtroom murmurs circled the ring. The Magistrate didn’t have a gavel. Didn’t need one. All he had to do was jerk his head and the demons quieted down. “If she has the Spirit Eye she will be more than a match for your Mark,” he told Uldin Beit.
“The Eye is only partway open,” Sian-Hichan told the Magistrate.
“Ahh.”
The Magistrate nodded his agreement with this collective comment, his mane of hair sweeping elegantly across his shoulders as he moved. “Are you prepared to pay, then?” he asked, stroking his whip so fondly I actually had to make sure his hand hadn’t moved elsewhere.
Uldin Beit did a sort of full-body twitch. Then she nodded.
“And who is your sponsor?”
“Edward Samos.” As soon as she spoke his name I received a mental image of him. An impeccably dressed businessman, his Latin heritage provided him with the flashing brown eyes, bronze skin, and shining black hair that had, no doubt, brought Vayl’s ex to her knees. Uldin’s memory of him had included a conversation where his personality had burst into full bubble, like a bottle of fine champagne. He’d sat back, laughing with genuine humor, his mouth wide open so you could see the fangs. But the threat you always felt with bared fangs, even Vayl’s, Samos managed to refute by the simple I’m-your-pal look in his eyes. No wonder he was so hard to resist. I could feel the lure of his charm even through Uldin’s imagination.
I wasn’t surprised Samos had involved himself in her revenge project. He’d sponsored Yale as well. But damned if the news didn’t steam me. I was so sick of fighting his underlings I could literally lean over and puke any time I thought of them. And the victims. Lord, the list read like a Civil War memorial, so extensive you wondered where to begin. Maybe at the end — with his last known kill — a tailor whose shop he’d used as a rendezvous point for important meetings. He’d hung the man up and gutted him like a deer. And now he’d set his sights on me.
“Jasmine, are you all right?” Raoul whispered.
“Sure? Why?” He nodded to his arm. Without thinking I’d dug my nails in so deep I’d made purple marks. I immediately moved my hands up to his biceps. “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“You did see Samos just now, yes?” asked Raoul. “That must be worth the sacrifice you made to come
