“Sorry, Luther, I’ve been told to move along.” I shrugged. “Got to go. I’ll call you if anything. Oh, and, Andersen, if you’re still having trouble with that bug up your ass, let me know. I know a guy—he’ll pull it right out.”
I turned to the Jeep. Just in time, too—Andrea started walking toward me, focused on Shane like a bird of prey. Time to get the hell out of here.
“It’s a shame about your being kicked out of the Order, Daniels,” Shane called. “Losing your home like that, too. I always thought you were capable. I know people who could’ve helped. If you’d just come to me, I could’ve made things easier on you. Life is tough, but at least you wouldn’t have to prostitute yourself to that creature.”
“Dude,” Luther exhaled.
Andrea picked up speed, her eyes furious. I had to get her out of here now. She was barely holding on to the edge of reason as it was. If she pulled her gun on him, she’d go to jail, and not even the Pack lawyers would get her out.
“Being in the Order doesn’t make you untouchable, Shane.” I kept walking.
“Women sell themselves because they’re starving, because they’ve got kids to feed, because they are addicted,” Shane said. “I don’t condone it, but I understand it. You sold yourself for four walls on Jeremiah Street. Was it worth climbing into bed with an animal every night?”
I ran into Andrea. She tried to push past me and I blocked her. “No.”
“Step aside.”
“Not now, not here.”
“Hello, Nash,” Shane called. “You want me to box your guns and send them to your apartment? Save you the shame of coming to the chapter?”
Andrea gripped my arm.
“Later,” I told her. “Too many people now.”
Andrea clenched her teeth.
“Later.”
She turned on her heel and we went back to the Jeep. I slid Hector back into the traffic.
“That bastard,” Andrea squeezed out.
“He’s a loudmouth who likes talking shit. There is no law against being an asshole. Let him hide behind his shield for now. That’s all he can do.”
Andrea squeezed her hand into a hard fist. “If I still had my ID . . .”
“You would be the best of friends.”
She glared at me.
“It’s true,” I told her.
She didn’t answer.
The first ten years of her life, Andrea was the punching bag of her bouda clan. She’d spent the last sixteen making sure she would not feel powerless again. She had never walked the street without the added weight of the Order’s ID. She was used to being a good guy, respected and even admired for what she did and who she was. She was never pushed around by anyone with a badge, because she carried one. But every choice had consequences, and now these consequences were hitting her right in the face.
“We can’t even do anything to that worm,” she ground out.
“Not now.”
She turned to me. “I don’t think I can do this.”
“You can,” I told her. “You’re a survivor.”
“You don’t know what it’s like.”
I laughed. It sounded cold. “You’re right, I have no idea what it’s like to take shit from people I could kill with my eyes closed.”
Andrea exhaled. “Okay. Sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I just . . . Argh.”
“In the end, Shane doesn’t matter,” I said. “As long as you avoid him and don’t give him an opportunity to hurt you, he’s powerless to do anything except lather up some spit. However, if someone were to do something stupid, like shoot at him from some roof one night, we’d have real problems.”
“I was a knight,” Andrea said. “I’m not just going to start shooting every dickhead who mouths off to me.”
“Just making sure.”
“Besides, if I shot him, I’d do it so nobody could trace it back to me. I’d shoot him somewhere remote, his head would explode like a melon, and they would never find his body. He would just vanish.”
This would be a long climb uphill, I just knew it.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER WE MADE IT TO THE OFFICE and met Teddy Jo, who was waiting with the freezer in the parking lot. I gave Teddy his down payment, we wrestled the freezer into the back room, and then I spent an hour chanting preservation spells and laying down wards just in case de Harven decided to rise in the middle of the night and have himself another ant party.
It was eight o’clock by the time I turned off the highway to the narrow dirt road leading to the Keep. I was tired and dirty, my leg hurt like a sonovabitch, and I hadn’t eaten all day. You’d almost think I was back to working for the Order or something. Except I was working for myself.
I could relate to Andrea. My life had been much easier with the Order ID, too; I could bully people into answering my questions, I had access to criminal records, and if I did end up with a body full of ants, the Order would take care of it for me.
Still, I wouldn’t trade my small office for anything in the world.
We had a lot of evidence, and none of it made much sense. De Harven had dropped the sleep bomb. That much we knew. The kava kava residue on his hands confirmed it, and we found a gas mask in the corner of the workshop.
He’d deployed the sleep bomb and gone into the workshop. Then something had happened that concluded with his death and Kamen and the device disappearing. Perhaps de Harven had tried to steal the device or harm Adam, and Adam had retaliated by killing him. Except Adam Kamen looked like he would have a hard time baiting a fishhook, while de Harven was a trained killer.
Suppose Adam did somehow best de Harven. Why take the time to sacrifice him? Besides, Adam’s résumé had ‘magical theorist’ written all over it. Guys like him built complex devices. They wouldn’t urinate on the walls, turn the flesh of their attacker into ants, and then disappear into the night with a device weighing upward of three hundred pounds. Pulling off that kind of magic meant complete dedication to the deity to which the sacrifice had been offered. Devotion meant constant worship, and worship required ritual. The guards had never even seen Adam pray.
The cut on de Harven’s stomach bothered me. An inverted crow’s foot. It had to be a rune. There was no anatomical reason to cut the body that way, and runes were associated with neo-pagan cults and often employed in shamanistic rituals, which was consistent with the magic at the scene. Runes predated the Latin alphabet. Ancient Germanic and Nordic tribes used them for everything, from writing down their sagas and foretelling the future to bringing the dead back to life.
Runology wasn’t my strongest suit, but this particular rune I knew very well. Algiz, one of the oldest runes, associated with sedge grass, and Thor, and Heimdall, and a number of other things depending on who you asked and which runic alphabet you used. Algiz had a universal meaning: protection. As a ward, it was completely reactive. It served as a warning or provided a defense, but in any case, Algiz wasn’t going to do anything to you until you messed with it. It was the most responsible way for a runic magic user to protect his property, because Algiz would never attack first.
Why put it on a body? It didn’t protect the body; it didn’t warn anyone of anything. I’d been breaking my brain against it since I had seen it, and I’d come up with nothing. Zip, zilch, zero. And none of the gods from the Norse pantheon were strongly associated with ants.
Something was going on here, something bigger and uglier than it appeared. The fear in Rene’s eyes bothered me. It started as a mild concern when I first saw it, getting worse and worse as the day progressed, and now it had matured into a full-blown anxiety.
