Demon Marked

she often invested for nostalgic reasons. I think she really liked Barbies and Disney, especially the fairy tale movies. And she invested in an abnormally high number of companies that had unicorns in their name or logo. I won’t have any of that baggage.”

Taylor pressed her fingers to her lips, shoulders shaking. After a moment, she looked up and wiped her eyes. “Maybe we can get Khavi to help out, too.”

Ash had heard that name before: a Guardian who could see into the future. She frowned. “What would be the fun in that?”

“With Khavi’s help, you’d be surprised. Really, you would,” Taylor said. “Not always in a good way.”

“With Khavi’s help, the quickest way to make a small fortune would be to start with a large one,” Lilith said, and looked at Ash. “Which is what I want from you. You’ll still be training, so it’d have to be during your off-hours, but I want Special Investigations monetarily self-sufficient within ten years. Right now, we’re operating on government cash, and so far, they’ve only asked for stupid little things, like telling us to ship a nosferatu to one of their research facilities rather than slaying it. Or asking us to register the names and addresses of vampires we know. I’ve been able to put them off or ignore them—and if the requests stem from concerns about public safety, I give them what I can. But at some point, there’s going to be something that we can’t put off and can’t ignore, and that won’t necessarily be about safety, but about forwarding some other agenda. When that day comes, we need to be able to disappear off their radar, but still be functional.”

Excitement had already begun sparking through Ash’s veins. Now that was one hell of a challenge. “All right. I need your current budget, so that I know what I’m aiming for.”

“You’ll have it,” Lilith said. “A few Guardians have pulled antiquities out of their collections, and those are going up for auction soon. We expect that you’ll be starting with four to five hundred million dollars.”

Ash suppressed her shudder of ecstasy. God. She was pretty sure she hadn’t had a shiver like that since Nicholas had licked her fangs. “I can work with that.”

“And spread it out. Don’t become some visible megalith. We just want to quietly turn an asston of money into a fuckload.”

She would. “Any limits? Anything I shouldn’t invest in?”

Lilith pursed her lips. After a few moments, she came up with, “Sex trafficking.”

Ash nodded. Yes, that would be bad.

“And I’ll have a few more to add to that list,” Taylor said dryly. Her focus shifted beyond Ash’s shoulder, and her gaze flattened. “Hey, there are you are now. Nice of you to finally show up.”

“Yes. Well, the sign said ‘all-you-can-eat,’ but they still kicked me out. So where else did I have to go?” The harmonious voice froze Ash’s heart for two beats—so much like Lucifer’s, like a Michael-possessed Taylor’s—but the fear slowly let her go as the woman continued, “Plus I need to show the markings on this vase to Alice, so I hoped she’d be here. So now I ask Jake: Where’s your wife?”

“Where’s my wife?” Jake’s jaw clenched. “Well, Khavi. Last week, she asked me to teleport all of her spiders back to Earth. You’ve seen some of these things, haven’t you? How big they are? And you know I have to touch something to teleport it, right? I had my shirt off and those things all over me, so that she could focus on the Archives.”

Taylor shuddered. “You really do love her.”

“You think?” Though Jake snapped the reply at her, he still focused on Khavi. “So if you’re looking for Alice, you’ll find her and about six novices in the library, cataloguing all of the Scrolls, and putting them into indestructible, floating containers, just in case the goddamn building falls around their heads and the whole place sinks.”

“Why is she doing that?”

Khavi sounded baffled. Not an emotion Ash expected to hear from someone who could see the future.

“Because we can’t carry the Scrolls through the Gates, and because no one but Michael can vanish them into their cache.”

“Taylor can.”

Taylor’s brows shot up. “I can?”

“Of course you can. They are written in his blood—and part of you is written in his blood, too. You can vanish the Scrolls or carry them through the Gates.”

Jake wasn’t mollified by that new info. “Oh, so now we know. Would have been nice earlier. Where the hell have you been the past two months?”

“Eating. Like I said.” The woman was frowning. With her black hair in neat rows of braids that marched back into an uncontrolled tangle and an air of leashed ferocity, Khavi was as slightly built as Taylor but possessed none of the other woman’s fragility. Her gaze touched Ash for a brief moment, before she asked, “So Caelum’s already falling apart? Where’s Lyta?”

“With Alice,” Jake told her. “Apparently chasing her own tail with one head, and slobbering all over the Scrolls with the others.”

“I’ll get her, then, and return shortly.”

“Oh, no. Nononono.” Suddenly tense, Lilith looked down at Sir Pup, who stood at attention, ears pricked. “You can’t bring her here. You can’t bring her to Earth. He’ll run around the world, sniffing her out.”

The hellhound’s big body quivered, and he emitted a chorus of pleading whines.

“You can’t,” Lilith told him. “You’ll kill her. You ate your way out of your mother, remember? So if it results in babies, you can’t do it.”

Sir Pup’s heads drooped. With a sympathetic sigh, Lilith crouched and began scratching his ears.

“I’ll find a place for her first, then—” Khavi broke off, glanced at Ash again. Her eyes widened. “You.”

“Whoa.” Jake sat forward, as if ready to teleport between them. “Oh, yeah. Khavi, here’s Ash. She’s a good demon.”

“And she can bring Michael out of the field,” Khavi said.

The warehouse seemed to fall silent. Then deafening again, as hearts began to pound—with Taylor the most silent and the loudest of them all.

Ash touched the tattoo on her face. “With this spell?”

That seemed rather careless of Lucifer, didn’t it?

“No.” Khavi began to circle her. “That is to open the Gate. The key to the frozen field is hidden somewhere else.”

Ash looked to Lilith. “Did you see it?”

“I might have. But reading the symbols and knowing how Lucifer makes spells of them are two completely different things. Sometimes it’s clear, like the spell on your face, where open and Gate overlap—yet even that spell is crowded with many more symbols that I can read, but I have no idea why they are arranged as they are.”

“It is all arrangement and intention,” Khavi said. “And I need to see the symbols to know what he has done. Take off your clothes.”

Ash vanished them.

Jake choked. His face fiery, he edged toward the door. “Ah, okay. Alice probably wouldn’t care that you’re here, all naked like that. But I do. So I’ll see you.”

He disappeared. Nobody left in the room seemed to notice.

Khavi stopped circling, touched a series of symbols along Ash’s ribs. “Here. This is how he unlocked the field, brought you out of it in exchange for another.”

“He brought Rachel out,” Ash said. She had never gotten out. Not all of the way. A part of her memory still lay frozen there, tortured, and leaving her sick with fear at the mere mention of the field. “What kind of exchange?”

“Probably a traitor. Someone who’d broken his vow to follow Lucifer. There are many tortured in the Pit or in his throne tower. It would have been nothing to sacrifice one.” In a long, sweeping motion, Khavi’s cool fingers traced one of the vermillion tattoos. “But it is not just the symbols—the power of that spell is still in you, your release from the field written into your blood, embedded as deeply as your name. That is why we can take him out.”

Lips compressed, Taylor paced away from the desk, making a tight circle around Lilith and Sir Pup before turning back. “All right. You know, I want him out more than anyone, but we can’t forget that he’s down there