“She asked me to kill her. She wants out. She thinks it’s safer, and I agree.” Cain felt Luc stop moving, so he did, too. He knew he could get his brother on his side if Luc knew it was the witch’s request.
“So why isn’t she dead yet? You’ve had plenty of time alone with her. You didn’t take the opportunity to take her?”
“I did.” Yet again he was glad for the invisibility that cloaked them. He couldn’t tell anybody this if they could see his face.
“And she’s not dead because....” Luc seemed to be taking Cain’s decision to kill her well, especially since she was Anna’s best friend. In the end, Luc could be a pragmatist if need be, and he was always interested in the greater good. And they were brothers. Despite their differences, there were some issues they were one on.
Cain fought with himself over whether to share the next bit, but the need to tell somebody won over the inner voice that urged him to keep quiet. “Lucien, she’s two thousand.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Nevermind.”
They both materialized, hidden behind a copse of trees a few blocks from the small town Montana crime scene.
“No, tell me what this is about,” his brother said.
Cain looked off into the distance. “She’s just unique, all right? And she’s strong. Did you know she can resist my thrall even with her shields down? Not a lot, but enough to make snarky commentary.”
Luc laughed, the pieces coming together. “You want to keep her.”
“No! I do not want to keep her. She’s the enemy. I’m not you. I don’t fall for my food. I don’t get involved with witches. I’m just... not bored with her yet. She can’t come in and demand I release her from what she is. I don’t get that option. Why should she? Why should she get to do some magic of her own free will that makes her immortal and not have to deal with those consequences? I should torture the hell out of her for even asking.”
Luc snorted. “Please. She’d drop your ass with that energy ball magic she does. You can’t take her if she doesn’t want to be taken, and you like that. I know you. You like a challenge.”
“Can we please stop psychoanalyzing me now? I shouldn’t have said anything.” He couldn’t imagine spilling his guts to one of the other demons, not even Daria or Jackson. Daria would just blab. That succubus could be such a gossip.
Luc clapped a hand on Cain’s back. “No, I’m glad you confided in me. It makes it feel more like old times between us—before I was trapped in the house, I mean. Not old times when we were human.”
The demon leader laughed, the memory of their human days fuzzy by now. “I don’t know why I cared so much what the man upstairs thought about me. You know if it was down to him and you again, I’d pick you.”
“I know.”
“Don’t tell Anna about any of this. That’s an official order.”
Luc’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have to give me an official order. I won’t say anything.”
With that off his chest, Cain went invisible again. Luc followed suit, and they made their way through the trees to the house with the police tape around it. A group of reporters had gathered and were furiously taking notes, their cameras recording.
Cain moved around the perimeter far from the mechanical eyes. Sometimes human cameras caught things—not a full demon, but moving streaks or balls of light, or what humans who were into ghost hunting liked to called orbs. Who knew why a demon should show up as light on a human camera? One would think it would be puffs of dark smoke or something else sinister, but if this thing was going where the TV reports he’d seen so far suggested, they didn’t need more clues to fuel the fire.
The two of them passed through the wall into the house from the back, and made their way to the room where the body had been. The investigators were in the hallway.
“Great, the body’s already at the morgue,” Luc said, not at all happy about it.
“Probably not much of interest on the body, anyway. Let’s just search here. We might find something to give Anthony at the meeting tonight.” He hated working with a half-breed. Hated it. But the winds were changing. It felt as if something dramatically bad was about to happen. As much as he loathed the idea, he couldn’t afford to be too good to work with a vampire.
The investigators in the hallway talked for a few more minutes, then went outside to face the reporters, locking the doors behind them. When they were gone, the demons materialized.
“I’ll check this room,” Cain said. “You check the rest of the house.”
Luc gave a curt nod and went into the hallway. Cain was glad for the peace. Maybe telling his brother had been a mistake. Of course, Luc was going to see it differently from how he meant it. He didn’t even know how he meant it. If he’d waited, in a week Tam would be dead. Nobody would have had to know about any of it. But it was lonely keeping everything to himself. Luc was the one demon he could confide in without feeling weak.
Cain went through doors and closets, shuffled through some papers on the dresser, and took in the room in general. A Victorian-style lamp had been knocked over. Blood coated the bed. He moved closer. Something was off.
“Luc!”
The other demon yelled from down the hallway, “Yeah?”
“She wasn’t killed here. It was somewhere else, then she was transported.” In this neighborhood, how would he have accomplished it? It wasn’t as if the house were isolated. Some type of cloaking spell or glamour maybe? “I’m going to talk to the neighbor next door. You keep looking here.”
Cain dematerialized and went back through the wall where he’d come in. The investigators didn’t seem to realize the body had been moved. The difference in how the scene would appear was subtle, but he’d seen thousands of years of human barbarism. Given the ritualistic nature of the killing, the blood patterns would have been different. It was a good misdirect, though. It would fool a human.
The killer had brought her in, arranged her, then messed up the room to make it look like the struggle had happened here. Given how convincing the scene was, who would assume a second location? The more locations, the more chances of getting caught.
Depending on time of death, anything that had happened more recently at the house might not have been considered important—assuming the police had worked their way through canvassing the neighborhood. Since they’d just finished with the house, interviews may not have started yet.
He slipped over to the house next door, noting the investigators dealing with the media out front. Cain rang the doorbell.
An older woman, maybe mid-seventies, answered and looked past him, confused by her empty front porch. “H-hello?”
The demon pushed into the house, his hand clamping down over her mouth. “Shhhh, I’m not going to hurt you.”
But his words did no good. Who wouldn’t be terrified of an invisible being grabbing them? When the door was shut, he materialized and put the whammy on her. It was better than a polygraph test.
“Are you alone in the house?”
“Yes. I live by myself since Joe died,” she said, relaxed, her eyes glassy and unfocused.
“Has anyone been by to question you yet?”
“Only you.”
Good. “Did you see anyone next door at any point today?”
“A delivery man. I was going to check my mail, but something made me stay inside. I looked out the window and there he was. He scared me for some reason, so I didn’t go out.”
Perfect. Cain couldn’t read minds exactly, but the vampires could. Anthony could go directly into her mind and practically get a photograph of The Cycler. If that was the delivery man’s true identity. They could ask Tam for a description, of course, but Jack had no doubt changed his look over the years. What the woman had seen would be most accurate.
His eyes fixed on the old woman’s. “You will sleep until I come for you. You will not wake up otherwise, no matter what happens.”
The woman went unconscious, and the demon caught her before she hit the floor. He took her back to her room, laid her on her bed, and locked the front door before going back to the crime scene.
“Cain? Is that you?” Luc called from downstairs.
“Yeah. You won’t believe my luck. I found a possible witness...” As he spoke he moved toward his brother’s voice.
A door popped open with stairs leading down to the basement. Luc’s eyes were wide when they met his. “I hit the mother lode.”
Cain followed his brother downstairs. It wasn’t an exaggeration. The basement was filled with magical accoutrements of all sorts and an impressive array of books, some of them clearly from other dimensions. A few looked like some Cain had in the libraries of his own dimension.
“When I first got down here, it was just a musty old basement, but then this all appeared. Who do you think put up the glamour?”
“It had to be The Cycler,” Cain said. “Any glamour done by the deceased would have dropped as soon as she’d died.” Glamours took a lot of energy to maintain. It seemed a waste of good magical energy for the occupant of the home. “Why would Jack bother if he wants to reveal the truth to the world?”
Luc’s eyes lit with excitement. “Because he’s having two different conversations. He left this clue for us. Maybe not us specifically, but someone from Anthony’s group. I’d put money on it.”
In the center of the room, on a weathered wooden table, was a rolled out scroll of parchment. A magic book at the top and bottom of the scroll held it open and flat. It was a list of the members of Jack’s coven with a line drawn through each name and a date beside it. The names were listed in the order they’d been killed, with the newest addition at the bottom: a woman named Naomi.
Underneath Naomi’s name were the names of the two remaining cyclers besides Jack. The last name on the list was Tamar. Little hearts had been drawn beside Tam’s name in blood—no doubt blood from the latest victim. Cain growled. Why were hearts beside Tam’s name?