“What’s wrong?” Riley asked, trying to see what had spooked her.
“Necromancer,” the witch whispered.
“It’s no biggie. They come and go all the time,” Riley replied, and took another sip of wine. Maybe Ayden could come tomorrow night with more. It made all this sitting around totally bearable.
A tornado of leaves whirled down the path and stopped short of the lighted circle.
“Oh, it’s just him,” Riley said, shaking her head.
“I see we’ve added a witch to the mix,” the necro said as his body appeared. He was dressed as always, cloaked with staff in hand.
How does he know Ayden’s a witch?
Riley took another sip of wine, boosting her courage, then struggled to her feet. It took a lot of effort. “Look, I’m getting tired of this. Who are you?” she demanded. “And why all this Dark Lord crap?”
She heard her friend suck in a sharp breath, like she’d done something unbelievably stupid.
“The little witch understands that remark wasn’t wise, but you’re too ignorant to know who you’re playing with.”
“So tell me already.”
The hood fell back. Riley half expected to see two burning red eyes in a bleached white skull. Instead, it was a pretty normal face, an older one with winter white hair that reached his collar. His eyes were deep black and an arcane symbol glowed gold on his forehead. It didn’t look like one of those you bought and stuck on yourself. No, this one was embedded in the skin.
“I am Ozymandias,” he said. “Does that help?”
“Nope,” Riley said. “Not a bit.”
“They don’t teach you anything in school, do they?” He leaned on the oak staff like he was tired of explaining things to simple people. “ ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ ”At her blank expression he added, “Percy Bysshe Shelley?”
“I don’t do dead poets.” She plopped down on her blanket; the wine definitely getting to her.
“The dead ones are the only ones that count,” the summoner replied. Their visitor shifted his attention to Ayden. “So little witch, why are you here?”
“Keeping the trapper company,” Ayden replied coolly.
“It is best if your kind stay out of the matter. If not, there will be difficulties.”
“Warning noted,” she said evenly. “And returned.”
So much for the warm-fuzzy approach.
“I am surprised you’re bothering with a dead trapper,” Ayden said.
“I have no need to explain myself to your kind.” Ozymandias shifted those bottomless eyes to Riley. “You don’t fear me. That is a mistake I shall rectify.”
Riley waited for him to turn into something repulsive, slam himself against the circle, be infinitely creepy. Instead, the leaves swirled off into the night and then vanished in a brilliant flash of light.
That was far scarier than anything else he’d ever done.
“I’ll get you my pretty…” she murmured, and then hiccupped.
The witch wasn’t smiling.
“Man, has he got issues. So what’s with him?” Riley asked. “Why does he want my dad?”
“I really don’t know. He only summons the dead to gain knowledge. That’s why he’s the most powerful of the summoners.”
“Master trappers know stuff the rest of us don’t. Maybe that’s why.”
Ayden shrugged. “Ozymandias controls not only the dead, but the living. He works the dark magics, and it is said he knows the paths between the worlds and walks them without fear. He wields the—”
“Stop! In English, okay?”
After a steely glare, the witch dumped the rest of the wine into her glass then took it down in one long gulp.
“In English?” she asked, throwing the empty wineglass into the picnic basket.
Riley nodded.
“You’re in serious shit.”
THIRTY-TWO
Riley forcibly extricated herself from her car, wincing on a cellular level.
“This is so wrong,” she mumbled, rubbing her temples. If anyone could brew wine that didn’t give you a hangover, shouldn’t it be a witch?
Apparently not. Morning had brought a thumping head, dry eyes, and a desperate desire to curl up and die.
The aspirin will kick in. Yeah. Any. Minute. Now.
She groaned and made herself take a gulp of bottled water. Maybe that would help. Shuffling inside, she found Simon hosing down the concrete under the cages.
When he saw her, he turned off the water and gave a low whistle.
“Ouch,” he said. “Hurts to be you.” She nodded. “Anything exciting happen last night?”
You mean other than pissing off the most seriously evil necro in the entire city?
“It was really quiet.”
Simon eyed her long black skirt, the result of not doing laundry for over a week. “You’ve got ankles,” he jested. “Who knew?”
“I’m not in the mood,” she said. “Too much of Ayden’s witchy wine.”
“Could have warned you. I’ve heard the witches’ brew is stronger than most.”
“That’s an affirmative. So what’s up today?” she asked. “Please tell me it’s a lot of sleeping and no shouting.”
Simon coiled up the hose in a tight circle before he answered. “We’ve got a Three running wild in Piedmont Park. Apparently it tried to eat some lady’s dachshund.”
No way did Riley want to confront a dog-eating demon today.
As if he’d read her mind, Simon added, “You’re not on the run.”
“Thank God.”
“Harper wants to you to clean out all the plastic recycling. I’ll show you how to do that. It’ll blow most of the day.”
“Then tonight’s the Guild meeting, and then I have a date with Dad.” Before he could ask, she replied, “T minus three nights and counting.”
“Almost there,” he said, nodding his approval. “Oh, and Beck called to check in on you. He said to stop ignoring him, it isn’t going to change his mind, whatever that means.”
So much for that plan. She turned her phone on. Five voice messages, all from Backwoods Boy. She deleted them.
With a creak of the recliner springs their master appeared in the doorway to his office. “About damned time you got here,” he said, glaring at Riley. Then he saw her skirt, huffed, and shook his head in disgust.
Not going to apologize.
“Come on, I’ll show you what you need to do,” Simon said.
The task wasn’t exciting, just tedious. First she had to sort all the plastic Holy Water jugs and bottles by size then by batch number and enter that information on a form.
“At least it’s better than scooping demon droppings,” Simon remarked. He seriously failed to hide the relief that someone lower on the totem pole was taking over the scut work.
Riley gave the ginormous mound of plastic a dubious glower. “Why would the city care which bottles are going to the recycling plant?”
“They don’t, but Harper does. If you’re a recycling center, you have to keep records.”
There was more to it than that. “He gets paid for these, doesn’t he?”
“Fifty cents apiece.”
I knew it. It always came down to cash.
“Let’s get a move on!” their master called. After another withering glare in her direction, Harper stomped out of the building followed by his senior apprentice.
He must sleep on a bed of nails. There has to be a reason he’s such an asshat.
The weather was chilly, but her head didn’t pound as badly in the fresh air, so Riley lined up all the jugs and bottles like plastic soldiers in the fenced lot behind the building. She made sure to keep a respectful distance from Mount Demon Manure and all the dead roaches.
Eighty-seven gallons, seventy-three quarts, and forty-nine pints. That would be over a hundred bucks in Harper’s booze fund.
“Yeah, this is what trapping demons is all about,” s
he groused. “Lucifer’s gotta be freaking in his boots.”
Thumbing through the sheets on the clipboard she found that her boyfriend had last performed this operation three weeks ago, then roughly at the same interval over the last eight months. The pages before that were written by Jackson, now a journeyman. Someday another apprentice would be looking at her sheets and dreaming of the day they made journeyman.
And hating on Harper with every breath.
Clicking the pen, she filled in a new form line by line. It wasn’t easy as some of the labels were hard to read. It was on the tenth gallon she hesitated. There were a number of bottles from the same batch, but they should always have the same consecration date. The one in her lap was a problem. It had a different date than another of the same batch.
Brain fog. She took a bathroom break, swigged more water, and then returned to the work. “Somebody made a mistake,” she said. Slapped a label on the wrong bottle. It could happen, especially if they had a raging hangover like hers.
By the time Riley worked through all the plastic containers she’d found forty-two that had mismatched batch and date information. One pint said it’d been blessed a week ago, while another from the same batch was ten days old.
She flipped back to Simon’s sheets. No problems there. Same with Jackson’s pages. Whatever had happened was during the last three weeks.
“Why me?” She knew who was going to be blamed for this, even when it wasn’t her fault. “Would they split the batches, consecrate them separately?”
Her gut told her no, and she had a way to prove it. Dropping the clipboard, Riley hiked to the car to retrieve her father’s papers, the sheets that listed all the batch numbers from the last six months’ production. If Celestial Supplies had split the production run it’d be on those sheets.
Right before she slammed the trunk she saw the pint bottle of Holy Water she’d bought at the gun shop. She picked it up. The label was hard to read after being soaked in her father’s duffel bag. This pint had been blessed on the twentieth, one day before she trapped her demon. The gun shop dude hadn’t lied to her; the Holy Water should have burned like liquid fire.
“But it didn’t.”
Riley closed the trunk and leaned on the car, wondering if it was time for more aspirin. Leafing through the pages she finally found the batch number that matched the bottle in her hand.
“What the…?” She retraced her finger across the page to ensure she’d read the right date. The company’s records said this particular batch had been produced and consecrated in mid-September, four months earlier.
“No, no, no!” she said. “This can’t be happening.” Trappers always chose their Holy Water by the date it was blessed.
If this stuff is four months old … No wonder her thigh had gone septic. She swallowed, twice, to ease the pressure in her throat. It did no good. “What have I gotten into?”
Riley trudged back to the battalion of bottles and scowled at them as if they were personally responsible for this mess. She began a new sheet, this time listing the company’s “blessed on” date and the ones she was finding on the recycled bottles. Most of them matched perfectly, but the forty-two suspect ones did not.
On a hunch, she took one of the proper pints to the bathroom and ran water on the label. No reaction, even when she purposely tried to smear it. Apparently the ink was sealed in some way. She repeated the experiment with three of the suspect bottles. The ink blurred on all of them.
Riley slumped up against the wall with the bimbo poster, trying to get a handle on this. Why hadn’t anyone else figured this out? Was this one of Harper’s sick jokes? Could he be tampering with these bottles?
Much as she’d love to believe that, he didn’t have a thing to do with the Holy Water she’d bought for her trip to Demon Central. This was a bigger issue.
“Someone’s screwing with this stuff,” she said. “And they almost killed me doing it.”
* * *
Riley paused in front of the Holy Water vendor’s tent in the market. She needed evidence, bottles that hadn’t been opened so no one would say she’d tampered with them. Maybe there was some way to test the stuff, find out if it was the real deal. She’d leave that up to the Guild. All she needed to do was let the trappers know they had a big problem.
Going on the assumption that easily damaged labels equaled bad Holy Water, she picked up a random pint and did the wet-finger test. It was kosher. A bit more hunting found two pints that didn’t pass muster. Grumbling under her breath at the expense, she dropped money on the counter and stuck them in her messenger bag. It dug into her shoulder with the increased weight.
“That it?” the salesman asked. It was the same guy in the blue suit.
“Not quite.” She removed a couple of Harper’s recycled gems out of a paper bag at her feet. “Batch numbers should have the same consecration date, shouldn’t they?”
The salesman cocked his head. “They always do.”
She handed him the pints. “These don’t.”
The man twitched an eyebrow, but he didn’t bother to look at the labels.
“Look kid, I know what you’re up to,” he said gruffly. “You think you’re going to sue us or something. We’ve seen all the games. We’ve got lawyers to deal with your kind.”
Get in this guy’s face or back down? Retreat sounded good right now. She’d got what she’d come for.
“Sorry,” she said contritely. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I thought you might give me a free bottle or something.” As she reached for the empty bottles he grabbed them up.
“I’ll hang on to these. You’re not pulling this scam with anyone else.”
Fine. I have more in my trunk.
“Now get out of here, kid,” he ordered. “Do your shopping somewhere else from now on.”
Riley walked one tent away, then ducked behind a rack of fruit. From between two stacks of apples she spied on the salesman.
Come on, act guilty.
The guy mopped his brow, look around cautiously, then fired up his cell phone. He spoke too quietly for her to hear him over the market din.
When a customer came near he stalked outside the tent, closer to her location. Suddenly he barked, “I told you, we’ve got a problem.”
Riley allowed herself a smug grin as she scooted out the other side of the fruit tent and into the heart of the market.
Her crazy discovery had just been validated.
“You guys are so busted.”
* * *
Still glowing from her triumph, Riley made her way to the tent that sold secondhand clothes. A mound of denim called to her, and she began her search for a decent pair of jeans to replace her demon-nuked ones. Most of the nicer pairs were several jumbo pizzas away from her size.
“Not good,” she muttered, tossing aside another pair that had held promise.
“How about these?” a smooth voice asked. A pair was offered. Without looking up, she checked the label and then gave them a look-over.
“Nice. Good condition. And the right size.” Then she glanced upward.
It was Ori. He wore a long gray leather duster over black jeans and a turtleneck. Her heart did a little flutter kick, making her feel like she was twelve or something.
How can one guy look that good?
“Thanks,” she said, her mouth refusing to go in gear enough to say anything witty.
“Thought I should help out. You seemed to be on a holy quest.”
“A quest for jeans,” she said, smiling. “I like that.”
He smiled, and it made his eyes seem even deeper.
“You gonna take those?” the vendor asked, causing her to jump. She nodded, handed over the ten, and got her change.
“How’s about some hot chocolate?” Ori asked. “We can get some at a tent down the way.”
Ah,” she began. This was the third time she’d run into this guy—twice in the market and once on the street near the coffee shop. That wasn’t just coincidence. He didn’
t feel like a psycho stalker, but you never knew.
“I’ll buy,” he offered.
They’d be in a public place. What was the harm?
Riley checked her watch. “Okay, but I’ve only got half an hour and I have to leave for class.”
“Plenty of time.”
They’d taken their hot chocolate to go and wandered toward her car at a leisurely stroll. Riley couldn’t help but notice her escort was attracting a lot of notice, especially from other girls. He had that eye-candy effect.
“You look good in a skirt,” Ori said.
“Thanks,” Riley replied. “I need to do some washing, you know?”
He laughed, making the dimple in his chin more noticeable. “Is that why you were questing for jeans?”
“Yeah. My last pair got holes in them when I was trapping.”
“At the library?” At her puzzled expression he added, “I read about that in the newspaper.”
“Oh.” She felt an intense desire to change the subject. “Are you from Atlanta?”
“No. I’m here on business.”
Which didn’t tell her where he was from. Mysterious had to be this dude’s middle name. His voice didn’t give her a clue—no accent to speak of. His clothes pegged him for someone with money, but that wasn’t much help either.
Definite need for more info here.
“What do you do?” she pushed. They weren’t going to get anywhere if she couldn’t get simple information out of him.
They’d reached her car at this point. He hesitated, looked around them as if worried someone might overhear their conversation, then leaned close to her. He smelled different than other guys. Not different in a bad way, just different. Like a crisp fall breeze.
“You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“Are you, like, a spy or something?” she asked. That’d be awesome.
“No. I’m a demon hunter,” he replied.
He was one of the elite teams Rome sent around the world to destroy Hellspawn.
“From the Vatican?” she asked, incredulous. Maybe the television show wasn’t too far off after all.
Ori shook his head. “Most certainly not Rome. I’m freelance.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize there were freelance hunters. Why not work for the Vatican? Get the benes?”