“You know,” the brunette said, “I’ve used a lot of male virgins over the years. And tsk, tsk, tsk, not like you’re thinking. They were necessary for a private, non-sexual purpose—which sadly is no longer applicable—”
“You need me alive.” Mae coughed. “Because I summoned the Book. You need me to get the Book.”
The brunette looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowing. “I wouldn’t be so cocky, honey. I have other sources for that.”
“Then kill me. Right here and now—”
Mae let out a scream as the pressure became unbearable, the bones in her face threatening to collapse flat, her ribs squeezing her heart and lungs, her pelvis nearly cracking. And just as she began to black out, at the moment she felt herself slipping away, she was able to drag some air down her throat.
As her eyes started to clear a little, the brunette was right in front her again. No longer angry, but pensive.
“Tell me how you did it,” she said.
“Hmm?” Mae wheezed.
“Look at you. You’re not bad-looking, but you’re hardly worth crossing the street for. You have no style, no personality, nothing to recommend you, and no experience in bed. And yet . . . that male. He’s so fucking into you. I don’t get it.”
As the brunette went silent, Mae put some strength in her voice. “That’s what you want the Book for. Isn’t it.”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
The brunette’s glare was a promise of misery. Infinite misery. “And you can kiss my fucking ass.”
All at once, the pain and suffocation returned, and Mae knew she’d overplayed her hand.
It was the last conscious thought she had.
Out on a rural property that had a lot of junk on its grounds, Erika ducked her head as she entered a dilapidated trailer. Inside, there was mess everywhere on everything, pizza boxes, crumpled cigarette packs, and empty booze bottles choking out the details of the galley kitchen, the floor underfoot, the ragged furniture. Unsurprisingly, there was also a collection of bongs, syringes, plastic baggies, and bricks wrapped in supermarket bags.
The body was over on a couch that was so stained it looked like it had started its life a muck brown. Victim was a male, somewhere in his twenties, and he was sprawled back against the worn cushions, his face frozen in a stare-ahead, the single execution-style bullet wound nearly dead center in his forehead.
As her eyes went down to the front of his chest, as opposed to the red wash on the wall behind his skull, she heard her sergeant from back late in the afternoon.
You need a night off, Saunders. You’ve been going too hard for too long—
We’re short-staffed after Pam went on maternity leave and Sharanya moved. What else can we do—
—and that’s how mistakes are made.
I haven’t made any. And I won’t—
This is not a request, Erika. I can’t remember when your last break was, and neither can you.
“The father called it in,” one of the uniforms—the younger of the two—reported. Because the older one was on the phone. “Poor man. Nobody wants to see their son like this.”
Erika leaned down and checked out the bullet wound in the forehead. No gunpowder residue, so it hadn’t been a point-blank kind of thing. The shooter had been back some distance.
“Professional shot,” she murmured.
The uniform continued, “The victim’s name is David Eckler and he’s got a record. Mostly selling stolen property, but he has a number of drug charges, two of which were just dropped on technicalities. Detective de la Cruz took the father down to the station to talk.”
Outing her penlight, she looked around at the mess on the floor. “Here’s a shell.”
She bent down to put a marker on it, and before she straightened back up, she found herself going eye level with an off-kilter coffee table that had had one of its legs replaced by a milk carton. In the midst of its clutter? A leather box about a foot long and five inches wide. Unlike everything else in the trailer, the thing was of fine construction and without dust or scratches.
“Surprise, surprise,” she murmured as she peered through its glass top.
The lineup of watches inside were big names even someone middle class like her would know: Rolex. Piaget. Okay, fine, she’d never heard of Hublot.
“How’d you even say that,” she said. “‘Whoo-blot’?”
“Huh?”
And that was when she saw it. A little wink in the far corner off to the side of the couch: A lens that had caught her flashlight beam.
“We have security,” she announced.
“You mean a dog chained in the yard? I didn’t see one—”
“No, as in a camera.”
She leaned in and carefully inspected the recording unit. Then she followed the wires around the back of the sofa—avoiding the victim—to a cupboard. Inside? A laptop that was shiny new and plugged into a surge protector. The thing was running.
“Thank you, baby Jesus,” she muttered.
“Aren’t you supposed to be off?”
Erika straightened and looked at the uniform properly for the first time. “Dick?”
“Rick.” The fresh-faced guy pointed to his badge. “Donaldson. I’m still on the beat, but I hope to transfer to homicide soon.”
“I’m Detective—”
“Oh, I know who you are. And I thought you were supposed to be off tonight—”
“How do you know my schedule?”
The guy looked around like he was hoping someone else would answer that. Unfortunately for him, the older officer was still on the phone.
“Ah . . . everyone knows your schedule, Detective.”
As headlights washed the front of the trailer, slices of illumination speared into the interior.
“Well, you’re in luck.” Erika clicked off her flashlight. “I’ll see you in the morning. I’m going home to get some sleep.”
While Dick-Rick-whoever Donaldson looked relieved, like someone had spared him a trip to Target on Black Friday, Erika hit the broken door. It took every ounce of self-control to step out of the trailer, but the reality was, the crime scene folks were going to need four to six hours to clear everything, and it was now, what—? She checked her watch. Three a.m. Perfect. She could be in her bed at home in forty-five minutes, with her teeth brushed, her feet in fresh socks, and her head wrapped in a blanket to cut the noise of the early-risers who lived in the apartment above her.
Totally living the high life, she thought as she started her unmarked and waved at the crime scene investigators.
She would be back in the proverbial saddle no later than eight in the morning. And then the sergeant couldn’t have a good goddamn thing to say about her shift work. Nailed it.
Besides, as long as there was a heart still in that victim’s chest? She was okay turning the case over to someone else.
• • •
When Syphon was finally resting quietly, and the folks in blue scrubs with the ticker-listening necklaces were satisfied he was going to be okay, Balz was the first to beat feet out of the training center. And he once again looked casual—or tried to appear that way.
Inside his skin, he was screaming.
At the far end of the underground tunnel, he stepped out from under the mansion’s grand staircase and then dematerialized up to the second-floor sitting room. As he went down to his own bedroom, he moved silently, like the thief he was, and prayed he ran into no one. In his suite, it took him under a minute to change into his all-blacks, and not much longer than that to cinch a double holster around his waist.
Whispering back out into the hall, he looked left and right. Voices bubbled down from the second-story sitting room, so he went the back way, taking the servants’ stairwell on a fast descent. At the bottom, he made all kinds of deflections to the doggen who were getting Last Meal ready in the kitchen. Then it was out through the garage and back-dooring it into the battened-down-for-winter gardens behind the mansion.
Closing his eyes, he dematerialized without a struggle, which surprised him given the scrambled eggs he had for brains, and as he traveled in a scatter away from the mountain, he headed for downtown.
Balz re-formed on the Commodore’s rooftop.
No more gentlemale’s rules of engagement for this infiltration. He opened the steel door by the HVAC venting systems with his mind because its dead bolt had no copper in it, and he would have ghosted down the concrete steps, but he couldn’t be completely sure whether there would be debris or any fire doors in the way.
Three floors down, he made no sound as he entered the carpeted hall. Skirting past the doors of five or six condominiums, he came up to the elevators just as one set of doors was opening.
The two women inside were standing together, their chic clothes and good haircuts suggesting that they had both disposable cash and the taste to know what to do with the shit properly. Just to be safe, he froze them, scrubbed their memories . . . and sent them back down to the lobby.
Tap . . .
Balz stopped and looked over his shoulder. But he knew there was no one behind him.
No, it was where he was going that he needed to be wary of.
The entrance to the triplex gave way on his approach, and as he went inside, he disarmed the security system with a whacker programmed with the code he’d lifted from the alarm’s database.
Tap. Tap . . .
A quick inhale revealed no scents. Guess the happy couple were once again not at home.
It wouldn’t have mattered if they were.
Nothing mattered.
Well . . . one thing did.
Tap. Tap. Tap . . .
As his chest got tight with emotion, he proceeded through the viewing spaces, revisiting the bat skeletons, the Victorian surgical instruments—as well as one full of taxidermied animals that he’d missed during his first trip through.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap . . .—
All at once, the room with the shelves and the books presented itself in front of him, sure as if it had been doing the walking, not Balz.
Staring down at his shitkickers, he halted just inside of it, and for a brief moment, his heart pounded with terror that he was wrong. Then it skipped beats because it was terrified he was right.
Finally, he looked across the beautiful parquet floor.
“Shit,” he whispered. Because there was no question.
This was the Book.
And it had called to him. It was calling to him.
Tap . . .
As the final tap traveled over to his ears, it was so soft, like a sigh. And even though he didn’t want to, Balz went forward—not with reverence, though. Not with the thrall he’d been stuck in back at the psychic’s, either. There was resignation to his stride—a sense of inevitability.
Everything had been leading up to this.
When he stopped in front of the display box, the ancient volume of God only knew what vibrated on its stand, a puppy wiggling with happiness. And then, as if its joy could not be contained, it jumped and flipped itself open. Pages flew in a rush, too fast to track—yet when they stopped, it was with a decisive halt, as if the particular passages exposed had barged through the movement and taken over.
Balz leaned down.
At first, he couldn’t decipher the lines of writing. But then he rubbed his eyes, and as he dropped his hands, everything was in English. Plain, casual English, the kind you’d find on a flyer for a garage sale. With modern slang.
Given the age of the parchment and the wear-and-tear on the cover, he couldn’t reconcile how “NSFW” would appear at the top of any page in the binding. But he was not going to argue with all the whatever. He wasn’t arguing with anything.
Reaching out, he lifted the Lucite cover off the display case, and though he anticipated resistance, there was none. The protective cube came up like the thing was levitating, and as he went to set the thing aside, it felt light as a feather—