Harsh Gods (19 page)

I leaned with my shoulders propped against the desk, giving up on being anywhere but on the floor until the room stopped spinning. My head pounded like an army of maniacal gnomes had launched a tunneling mission through my frontal lobe. They gave fuck all about the Advil I’d taken.

Scavenging a wad of napkins from a drawer, I used them to wipe some of the blood from the lower half of my face. As far as I could tell, my nose had stopped bleeding, though I could still taste copper at the back of my throat. It was a familiar tang, and I tried not to think about it.

Mostly I succeeded.

As soon as it seemed like I could stand, I levered myself to my feet. I didn’t have the luxury of time—and neither did Halley. With every death, Terhuziel grew stronger. Stronger was bad. If I understood all I’d gleaned from Terael—both the details he’d volunteered and the stuff that had spilled wildly between us—the girl had a bigger problem than mere possession.

And I thought the Nephilim had a creepy way of cheating death.

For the moment, Terhuziel was able to reach her through whispers, but didn’t have enough strength to claim her outright. Crippled by his punishment in the wars of the distant past, he was still recovering. If I could locate his base of operations before he built any more power, there was still a chance I could save the girl.

That brought me back to Bobby’s murder investigation. How close was that to Halley’s home in Little Italy? Both houses were in the Third District, covered by the Chester Station, but that didn’t exactly narrow down a location—the Third District ran from the east bank of the Cuyahoga all the way to Shaker Heights. I needed more information on that house.

The Rephaim fed on sacrifice—the more precious, the better. The father of that four-year-old girl was still missing. I hated myself for thinking it, but if the souvenir-collecting physician hadn’t died protecting his family, there was a high chance he had been the one to kill them.

A whole family. That was some precious blood to spill upon the altar.

I checked the time, debating how much I could spare for an Internet search.

Seven forty-two.

Barely ten minutes had passed since I’d let Terael into my brainspace. It had felt like hours. One of the benefits—if you could call it that—to working at the speed of thought.

A bright, fat drop of blood splashed onto my desk blotter. I dabbed my nose—and then reached for another wad of napkins.

“Fuck.”

The nasal sound robbed the word of its usual punch.

Still holding the napkins to my face with one hand, I righted my office chair. The swivel mechanism gave an alarming shriek as I dropped heavily into it. I wheeled closer to the desk and stabbed the power button to boot up my computer.

“Let’s say Ter-hoo-ha started off at this doc’s house,” I said, as if Terael was standing there. “The guy collects artifacts, and he just got back from Syria. He must have checked in with the black market before he crossed the border.” The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the dad was the killer. “The cops have been all over the place for the past couple of weeks, so he can’t have stuck around, but that’s still ground zero for the first serious sacrifices. From there, I should be able to get a good feel for Terhuziel on the Shadowside, maybe track him to his new domain.”

My resident Rephaim made no response. I couldn’t even tell if he was listening.

“I’m pretty sure Bobby meant for me to see that house number,” I mused out loud. “If I can narrow down the neighborhood where the murders happened, I bet I can find the street that goes with it.”

That got a reaction. Above me, Terael contracted upon himself, lingering as the barest tremor in the air.

“You all right?” I asked.

No.

A soul-sick feeling of misery spilled through the windowless office. I made a weak attempt at reinforcing my mental barriers. I really couldn’t handle a repeat of earlier.

“Still think I’m a traitor?” I asked cautiously.

No
, he said again, though he didn’t seem as certain.

“Well, that’s at least a start.”

I Google-whacked Cleveland, murders, four-year-old-girl, and Doctors Without Borders. Set the date range for anything appearing over the past month. As it turned out, the murders were all over the news. I clicked the top link.

With her death, the Blood Wars truly begin again.

Terael meant Halley, but it was little Kaylee’s face that flickered to life in the ghostly light of my computer screen. Her last name was Kramer.

“I’m not killing Halley,” I said reflexively. My mouth was dry and the taste of blood clung thickly to my tongue. “I’ll cut Terhuziel out of her head the same way I cut him out of mine. Then I’ll hunt the bastard down. No more sacrifices.”

You speak as if there is a choice, but that choice was forfeit long ago.

I ignored him, finding new resolve to wall away my mind.

Kaylee Kramer was a beautiful child of African descent, her dark, curly hair caught up in two puffy pigtails at the top of her head. She had bright hazel eyes and skin the color of polished teak. The easy smile she wore in the photo—a smile the world would never see again—gutted me. According to the article, she had two older sisters, Alana and Leah.

Paydirt.
The father’s name was Alan. I did a White Pages search for Dr. Alan Kramer. Terael fretted around the edges of my thoughts, tentative but questing.

Even should you drive off the Thunderer of the Northern Hills, war will come and seek us. Elder Blood is too precious. It has driven us mad before.

“You keep saying things like you expect me to recognize them. I don’t.”

He didn’t bother to elaborate.

Gritting my teeth, I focused on the screen. There were seven Alan Kramers in the Greater Cleveland area. Only one had a street address that matched the numbers I remembered from Bobby’s photo. Whitethorn Road in Cleveland Heights. I grabbed a sticky note and jotted it down.

You are not ignorant of the Blood Wars, my brother.
His rising note of accusation made me worry.

“I don’t recall specifics,” I snapped.

Blood Wars
, the Rephaim said again.
Wars of Blood. All the precious children of the tribes slaughtered, in order to rob us of their power.

That got my attention.

“I thought we called them Blood Wars because the Nephilim were involved. They’re vampires—”

No.

He threw the word like a slap at my face.

Wars among immortals can have no end, my sibling, but our children and our families—once stolen, such precious treasures could never be regained.

“Elder Blood,” I murmured. In retrospect it seemed obvious—and my anger rose in proportion to my obliviousness. I glowered at the air above my desk. “Let me get this straight. You want me to kill an innocent girl, because that’s what we’ve always done—killed one another’s children.” Anger climbed toward fury. “How fucked in the head are you?”

Terael recoiled, and for an instant it felt like he took all the oxygen with him. Blood thundered in my ears.

“You don’t solve death with death,” I bellowed. “And we sure as hell won’t fix the past by repeating it.”

It is a game of numbers, Zaquiel.
He was so damned matter-of-fact.
One girl dies, or many. Her life is fated to disaster. Death would be kind for such a one as she.

“Don’t you even start,” I threatened. “The kid has challenges. That’s no reason to take her life from her.”

If you do not, then another will. She bears too much danger in her birthright.

“How can you even be certain? I met her mother—the woman’s as normal as khaki pants and cardigan sweaters. What if the girl’s just a psychic? A garden-variety mortal with a spooky way of seeing my wings—”

You saw it in her. You saw, and you yourself considered the solution.

He was right—and I raged against it.

“That’s not a fucking answer!” I was out of the chair and pacing, shouting into the air. “We deal with Terhuziel. He’s the problem. I cut him out of her head, I smash the token—assuming I even find one—then I track him down to his domain. We fight. I kick his ass. End of problem.”

It almost sounded easy.

We are immortal. That cannot be the end. If he knows, others will come.

As I drew breath to voice my objection, a subtle itching crossed my palm. My next few words snagged in my throat—halted either by the oath or my own gut-twisting shock at the thoughts that itch inspired.

The Eye of Nefer-Ka could fix everything.

All I had to do was get my hands on Terhuziel. With my tie to the Nephilim icon, I could scoop the memories of Halley straight out of whatever served as his brain.

No.

I curled my hand into a fist, clenching my fingers until the nails bit deep into the tingling scar. Terhuziel was insane, a blood-thirsty monster, and he had already cut a swath of destruction through my city. Halley had suffered. I could probably add little Kaylee and her sisters to that list, and who knew how many others. Could that much death justify doing to Terhuziel what had been done to me?

Dorimiel had felt justified.

I knew all too well what he’d been thinking—I’d spent time inside of his head. The shadow-touched Nephilim had believed himself righteous—heroically wreaking vengeance upon the zealous Anakim. Before that, we’d killed everyone in his temple—
everyone.
Guards, servants, even the children. That was one memory he’d made certain to leave to me. It didn’t matter if they fought us, didn’t matter if they were too young to know better. They were his, and they were tainted.

So they died, and we felt just in killing them.

So incredibly, brutally
just
.

Justice lay in the minds of those who dispensed it. That was why Anakesiel and his lieutenants were still sitting in their jars, even though I knew how to release them. I couldn’t bring myself to loose more monsters on the world.

One of those monsters was the head of my tribe.

No
, I told myself again.
Some powers come with too high a price.
For a moment, the pulse inside the scar rose to a thunder that shook my whole world. Then, abruptly, it subsided.

Oblivious to my internal struggle, Terael continued his argument.

Our brother knows, and even if you best him he will return. Others will come. I have had too much of war, Zaquiel. I do not wish to see this city fall. Not for the price of one mortal child.

Still rattled, I played the asshole card.

“You’re not going to win this argument, Terael. You’re stuck in here. I can leave.” The Rephaim chewed the air, but I didn’t give him a chance to frame a response. “I’ll figure out some way to fix this, and I’ll do it without killing the girl.”

With that, I popped through the Shadowside, despite how wrecked I felt, and marched from the museum.

To my amazement, he let me.

Full dark had settled on the city. The cars along Euclid Avenue traced a river of light through the gloom. I walked toward where I’d parked on East Boulevard, reminding myself each step of the way why it was a bad idea to consider using the Nephilim icon.

There was no denying the lure of the icon. It offered such an easy fix to everything. The fact that it tugged at me was unnerving, though, and that was putting it lightly.

Scenarios whirled through my brain—backtracking through one of his followers, grabbing Terhuziel long enough to steal his powers. But would my shields be enough to protect me, once I set foot in his domain? The threat of another mental assault unnerved me almost as much as the siren’s song of the Eye.

If not the Eye, there was always the Stylus. What about a binding? It wasn’t like Anakesiel could object from his snug little jar.

“The damned things were buried for a reason,” I reminded myself as I drew close to the Hellcat. I didn’t realize I’d said it with my out-loud voice, though.

“I take it things didn’t go well at the museum?”

That jolted me out of my reverie, and I jumped. Lil lounged against the driver’s side of the Hellcat, her long spill of russet hair wild in the wind. She smiled, showing all her teeth.

“What, you didn’t see me?”

Numbly, I shook my head.

She’d changed her clothes, and was sporting khaki cargo pants with a rust-colored V-neck that clung to her lavish curves. She’d traded the sable coat for a brown leather jacket with a sophisticated military cut, wearing it open despite the cold—the better to show off the way the shirt beneath hugged her chest. The jacket had a decidedly steampunk look, though it was a safe bet Lil didn’t even know what that was.

Motioning her away from the door, I pulled out my key fob and thumbed the button. Nothing happened. I scowled at the little piece of black plastic, turning it over in my hand.

“How’d you even know this was my car?” I asked.

She rolled her shoulder languidly. “Smells like you.”

“I have a smell?” I jammed my finger against the button to unlock the doors—again to no effect.

She nodded. “Leather. Cedar. Rose pepper. Something warm I can taste at the back of my throat.” She trailed the tip of her tongue along the edge of her teeth for emphasis.

“I’m sorry I asked.” I gave up on the key fob, and decided to unlock the car the old-fashioned way.

Lil threw her head back and laughed maddeningly as she canted her hips to the right, almost but not quite covering the lock with her butt. Eyes bright with mischief, she watched me fumble with the key.

“The way you blush amuses me,” she said. “You never would have blushed before.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said. “Your amusement gives my life purpose.” Finally she danced nimbly out of the way, and watched me from the empty street. She pointed at the fob.

“Those things have batteries, you know. You probably killed it on one of your Shadowside jaunts.”

“Is there a reason you’re taunting me?” I asked archly. Though, honestly, it was a welcome distraction from the welter of my thoughts. I got the car open and slid into the driver’s seat. Lil darted forward and caught the edge of my door. I tugged to shut it, but her grip was immovable. She leaned down till her eyes were even with my own.