Unborn (17 page)

“Excellent, because I was starting to get the notion that you were not going to be very forthcoming with me, which would lead me to all kinds of crazy conclusions . . . like you being on someone else’s payroll, perhaps. Someone more important than me. But you and I both know that that would be suicide, don’t we?”

“Yesss, it would.” The two eyed each other in the darkness for a moment before Azriel continued. “We learned about the uprisssing with the Breathersss only days ago. It appearsss that sssomething brought about a change in them. Sssomething powerful enough for them to no longer sssee reassson.”

“Interesting, but I’m not here for what you’ve deduced about the situation. I’m here for what you
know
,” Casey cautioned, stroking the head of the statue lightly, like a favored pet, just before he crashed the butt of his weapon down upon it, shattering it like a thin pane of glass. As the pulverized stone settled on the floor in a layer of dust, Casey snatched Azriel by his thick and muscular throat, then dragged him off the
ground. Their faces were dangerously close as Casey’s eyes bore threateningly into the gargoyle’s. “You are an informant, are you not? And who do you think you are to keep informed?” He stared the beast down as though he was already obtaining answers, even in silence. When he looked faintly satisfied with what information he’d obtained, he leaned in closer. “You’ve forgotten your place, old one. Mistakes like that are costly.”

“There wasss talk,” the beast choked out against Casey’s crushing grip. “Talk of sssomething in Detroit that ssshould not be.”

“I’m listening,” Casey replied, still holding the gargoyle’s throat.

“The nessst you found . . . they had been trying to track it down.”

“What ‘it’ are you referring to?”

“The Unborn.”

Silence hung heavy on Casey’s tongue, not allowing him to reply. The mask of darkness that seemed ever-present in his expression shifted slightly, something else flashing in his eyes for the briefest moment. It came and went before I could fully recognize it.

“What did you just say?”

“I sssaid, they were sssearching for the Unborn,” Azriel repeated, his wide, inhuman eyes looking to me.

“And whaty"> align="j do they want with it?”

“It isss not what they want to do with the Unborn that you ssshould be concerned about.” He hesitated slightly before continuing. “It isss who they were to bring the Unborn to that ssshould be feared.”

“You are trying my patience with your riddles, Azriel,” Casey growled.

“I do not know hisss name or what he isss, but the Unborn callsss to him, a sssweet sssong that cannot be ignored or essscaped.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I do not know,” he hissed sharply, fearing that Casey would not tolerate his ignorance any longer.

Casey’s face twisted in anger as he breathed his orders into Azriel’s face, his words little more than a whisper.

“Then you will dispatch your underlings and find out where he is and report back to me and me alone. You will say nothing of the Unborn to anything in this city—with or without a pulse. Insubordination would not be a wise course of action, Azriel. Nor would failure,” Casey warned. “I’m in a particularly forgiving mood this evening. I would not count on such generosity in the future.” To emphasize his authority, Casey tossed the gargoyle across the room, scattering his minions in the process. “You have until tomorrow night.”

We looked on as they dispersed themselves through the room, all climbing down through the various cracks in the floor. I knew that Azriel was lucky to still be breathing.

“Where are they going?” I asked, wondering why creatures with wings would seek escape below the building.

“The sewers.” His words were clipped, frustration marring his tone. I did not expect him to elaborate on his response, but he did. “To answer your earlier question, we came to this particular run-down building because underneath it is one of the largest connections to the city’s sewer system. That’s where they live. This,” he said, indicating the room we stood in, “is where I go to find them.”

“And they will do as you ordered? They will find this one who seeks me?”

“If they know what’s good for them,” he replied gruffly. “Gargoyles are good for one thing and one thing only: information. It’s their currency.” He looked down at me, the light of the moon swallowed whole by the black of his eyes. “And they better pay up.”

I followed my brother back out of the building without concern of retaliation from the gargoyles. Casey had made it clear that they were little more than bottom-feeders in the supernatural hierarchy. To attack us would have meant annihilation for them, hence the fear I saw in their eyes when they first approached us. Casey was truly something to behold. He was ruthless, cunning, and perfectly bred to do whatever necessary to carry out his mission.

The thought brought a curiosity to mind. If each of the women Ares bedded was clearly chosen for a purpose, precisely who had he bedded to create Casey? The answer was suddenly of utmost interest to me.

“Fucking goyles,” Casey muttered under his breath as we broke out of the building and into the silvery-blue light of the full moon.

“They are little more than a nuisance to you, are they not?”

“Nuisances that have forgotten themselves.”

“It seems you have made your point. Assassinating one of their own before their eyes was an excellent strategy and a highly effective motivator. They will not forget again.”

For once, he eyed me keenly, as though I had said something interesting for terand the very first time.

“You have seen this tactic before.” His words were not a question.

“Of course. Such strategies are often used to keep order in the Underworld. A necessary evil, as it were.”

“You didn’t even flinch when I crushed the cretin’s skull,” he said, stepping closer than was comfortable. “And you had no reaction the other night when we eliminated those Breathers. Just how desensitized to our way of life are you, sister?”

I met his stare as I had the day I met him—with utter indifference.

“I am well adapted to survive violence, Casey,” I explained, my tone low and even to match my brother’s. “If I was not, I would be dead. The Underworld is no place for a tender, sensitive soul. I do not react to death and brutality because I was steeped in it from such a young age that I know little else. What you perceive as desensitization, or deadening of emotion, is nothing more than who I am. I have lost no part of me, but grown to be a direct expression of my environment, and rightly so. I do not see myself as you do—damaged. Would I have turned out differently had I been raised under the care of someone else? Possibly, but not certainly. I have always seen things for what they are and not what I hope them to be. The world for me is as direct and literal as I am, Casey. What you see as a fault, I view as an asset.”

“I said nothing about your indifference being a fault, Khara. Quite the contrary. It might very well be the one thing that kept you alive down there.”

“And what of you, brother? Is your callous nature due to your upbringing, or is your soul truly as black as your eyes?”

His dark orbs narrowed tightly in response.

“For me there was never hope of turning out any other way. Ares had that in mind when he fucked my mother.” There was a trace of disdain in his voice, which led me to believe that, on some minute level, Casey did not want to be that which he so absolutely was. At that moment, something became clear to me. Casey was a creature of the darkness—a son of the Underworld.

What I was bound to by magic, he was bound to by birth.

“Which one was she?” I asked abruptly, ignoring Kierson’s earlier warnings about Casey’s mother.

His eyes flashed wide momentarily before he regained composure.

“Which one?” he asked, feigning ignorance. “One of who?”

“Which one of the Underworld’s women was she?”

He paused only slightly before answering.

“Hecate, goddess of magic, ghosts, and necromancy.”

“I know her well. She is an inescapable fixture in my father’s domain and Persephone’s personal companion when she returns for her time with Hades.”

“She is a whore who spread her legs for another one of Ares’ breeding experiments, though it did not yield what he had hoped for. He realized early on that I was not invincible. It seems that only Sean captured that quality, though I’m not convinced that you have not inherited that trait as well. It seems that no one is willing to test the theory on you as Ares did on me.”

“I am not invincible, Casey. It is unnecessary to carry out whatever scheme you have concocted in your mind. I have had more than my share of brushes with death. You need not provide me with another.”

“If you insist.”

He turned to walk away from me, but my next question stopped him in his tracks.

“You were not raised there, were you? In the Underworld?”

“No,” he managed to reply through gritted teeth. “I was not afforded that opportunity like you were.” Bitterness laced his words, and I found his response confounding. Most wanted nothing more than to avoid my father’s realm at all costs, but Casey seemed slighted because of his inability to stay there.

“You are angry that she gave you up.”

“I’m angry that I could not stay where I belonged,
sister
,”
he snapped, whirling around on me in an instant to cram the harsh angles of his face into mine. “The dead call to me—are a part of me. I feel unbalanced here on Earth. I crave the darkness and depravity that the Underworld surely boasts, and yet I can no more return there than you. Few can traverse that which separates the living from the dead, and, even given my birthright, I am not one of them.”

“Then why does Ares keep you here? Surely he would know a way to return you if that is what you wish—”

“He keeps me here for the very reason I want to be in the Underworld—the dead call to me. And Detroit has no shortage of them.”

He looked at me with curious eyes, as though assessing whether or not I could put the pieces of the puzzle together. Wondering if I was bred to be as shrewd as he.

“And the Breathers—the Stealers—both are forms of the dead, aren’t they?”

“Bravo, sister. Bravo,” he replied, his evil smile creeping slowly across his face, though never reaching his eyes. “I was kept here for my ability to find and police them specifically, amongst other reasons. Apparently, I have not done that job very well.”

“But up until this point they had done nothing to require such strict regulation, had they? No need to aggressively hunt them?” I countered. “There are so few of you here in a city so large with much ground to cover. I fail to see how any one man could police the Breathers over such a vast area without the possibility of failure. It would take an army.”

“I
am
an army,” he rumbled, still hovering closer to me than was comfortable.

“Why does this single oversight vex you so? You care for no one, especially not the humans. Protecting them is your charge, not your desire. If their lives are lost, you will not mourn them. Essentially, you have failed at nothing—lost nothing.”

Heat from a fire deep within Casey, kindled by his fury, rolled off him and warmed my face. I knew what was to come next. I awaited the blow stoically, not flinching as his jaw flexed wildly and his fists clenched.

But the blow never came. Instead, Casey turned and stormed away from me, muttering something barely intelligible under his breath.
Nothing yet.
I quickly recognized those as the words he spewed into the black night that framed his dark silhouette. It was then that my brother, as soulless and depraved as the worst of the Underworld, showed me that he cared for something.

It appeared that something was me.

“Drew,” Casey barked into his phone from a few paces in front of me. “We’ve got problems. We need to meet. Where are the others?” He paused momentarily, awaiting the answer to
his question. “Yeah, we’re down by the Masonic temple . . . yes, Khara is with me. No, don’t you fucking start with me. You can be pissed later,” he snapped into the phone. “Mhe ah, weeet us at the Heidelberg Project. It’s close, and it’s abandoned. Be there in five.” He hung up the phone abruptly and shoved it into his coat, where he had also again concealed his shotgun. “Time for a family meeting, sister. There’s a shitstorm heading our way. We need to head it off at the pass.”

“We can do nothing until you hear back from your lackeys,” I replied, confused as to what could possibly be gained from meeting with the others without any specific information.

He gave me a wary glance before he opened the car door.

“I’m not convinced that we have that long.”

18

We pulled into a seemingly vacant neighborhood, full of brightly colored and oddly adorned houses. They were unlike anything I had ever seen. I felt Casey’s eyes upon me as I stared out the car window at the bizarre sight.

“Some of the neighborhoods in Detroit became so run-down over time that everyone essentially left,” he explained without provocation. “This one has been taken over by artists who seem to think that painting the abandoned homes like clowns and nailing baby doll parts and other tchotchkes to the buildings somehow makes this shithole neighborhood look better. I think it’s a fucking joke, but . . . humans are strange beings. If they feel better about their decaying city because they’ve turned it into a cartoon, so be it.”

Unable to find the appropriate words to comment on what I was seeing, I just continued to stare until we pulled up in front of a particularly strange-looking edifice. The entire exterior was covered from the ground up with dots of every shade and size. In the vacant lot beside it was what Casey referred to as the “Vacuum Graveyard,” where there were hundreds of those devices lined up in meticulous rows, all bearing a cross of some sort. It was utterly fascinating.

When I finally was able to peel my eyes off the peculiar sight, I saw the others coming toward us from behind the spotted house.

“Explain,” Drew demanded as he stormed toward us.

“I got bored. We went out,” Casey replied casually, as though Drew wasn’t about to flay him alive. “Not important at the moment, though.”

“What is so important that it could not wait until we were home?” Drew snarled as he came to stand before us.

“Bad guys, what else?” Casey was unfazed by Drew’s hostile tone. “Listen, I paid a little visit to my sewer-dwelling friends.”

“And?” Drew pressed, looking uncharacteristically annoyed.

Casey cocked his head as though Drew’s agitation was amusing to him.

“And it seems like the Breathers are the least of our worries. Turns out that Pierson was right about them tracking Khara. They want her. Badly. But not for themselves.”

“Badly enough to get themselves whacked in the process?” Kierson volleyed, his hand flexing around the hilt of his dagger. “That’s a ITAL move for sure and would require a lot of motivation. Besides, who would use them to get her, especially if that individual wanted her intact? All the Breathers wanted to do when they saw her was feed on her . . . maybe worse.”

“Yeah, well, whether or not they were the right henchmen for the job, I have a sneaking suspicion that they aren’t the only ones out there that are trying to find her,” Casey continued. “Whoever or whatever it is that seeks her knows precisely what she is. Azriel referred to her as the U metines onborn.”

“Fuck,” Kierson spat. “So now what? Are you telling me that every questionable supernatural in this city not only knows about her but is also after her? Is there a bounty on her head?”

“That’s what I inferred from the gargoyle. He wasn’t nearly as forthcoming with his information as I would have liked,” Casey said with a downturn of his mouth. “I’m not sure he told me all he knows . . . even after I killed one of his own in front of him. That didn’t seem to loosen his lips at all. If I’m wrong about this, then I guess I owe him a fruit basket. If I’m not, then there’s someone roaming this city who’s after Khara that has Azriel leveraged tightly enough that he would rather face my wrath than give him up.”

“Fucking gargoyles . . .” Kierson grumbled. “They’re loyal to the highest bidder and no one else.”

“Who is powerful or malevolent enough to have them willing to walk into a slaughter rather than talk?” Drew asked, trying to rationalize the gargoyle’s seemingly irrational behavior.

“The Dragon is,” Kierson offered.

“But the Dragon isn’t around,” Casey replied with amusement. “He and I had a . . .
discussion
of sorts the last time I saw him. I’m pretty sure he’s back in Europe, attempting to find someone to take care of the little problem I gave him.” Drew shot Casey a curious look that was met with pure malice. “He won’t be back around here for a while. Besides, girls aren’t really his thing.”

They continued to throw out names and classes of supernatural beings until they appeared to have exhausted their list. Frustrated and without answers, Drew ran his hand through his hair, tugging it roughly. Then he stopped suddenly, frozen in place. Slowly, he turned back toward me, staring at me with fearful eyes.

“There is someone else . . .” His words were quiet and drifted off into the cold night air. He continued to look at me as though his stare was enough to communicate what he was unwilling to say aloud. When enough time had passed, and he realized that I yet again was not following him, he grudgingly and quietly whispered the name that sent chills up my spine.

“Deimos.”

The others looked completely bewildered at what appeared to be a random accusation. Judging by the confusion in their expressions, Drew had still not told them of our conversation in the car a few nights earlier.

“Deimos?” Kierson repeated, equally quiet. “Where did you pull that name out of, Drew? He’s a scary motherfucker, but he’s not exactly lounging around Detroit. Why would you think—”

“Because Khara said that he would come for her once he knew that she had been taken.”

A collective silence fell over the group as they processed Drew’s words. It was obvious that they too knew enough of Deimos to be wary of him and were not thrilled about the possibility of him being the one who was after their sister.

“Drew,” I said calmly. “He would not make a production of my abduction. He would not use lackeys to seek me out. He would come for me himself and take me. There would be no pomp and circumstance. Though he is one that would inspire fear in virtually any being, evil or otherwise, I do not believe he is behind this. It is not his style.”

Kierson let his breath out heavily beside me while Pierson and Casey allowed themselves to move for the first time since the mention of Deimos. While living in the Underworld, I knew he was feared by all, including myself, but I had no way oI hCasey allf knowing that his reputation in the world above was as terrifying. Regardless, it was warranted.

With the elimination of Deimos from the suspect list, Drew resumed his pacing amid the cemetery of vacuum cleaners.

“So we’re essentially no further than we were ten minutes ago,” he barked. “All we have to go on is what Azriel said, Casey, and you’re not convinced he was even telling the truth.”

“I don’t trust him, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Casey sneered. “I don’t like the feel of this. Something is off.”

“The whole fucking thing is off,” Kierson shouted, throwing his blade at the adjacent house. It stuck firmly into the bottom half of what had once been a baby doll, affixed to the wooden siding. “I just want something to stab . . . something to kill. I hate all this waiting around. I want to do something now.”

“We have to assess what information we do have, brother,” Pierson said calmly. “We need to determine precisely what end this being is after. If we knew what the desired result was, we could work back from that to more concretely identify the person who seeks Khara.”

“How?” Drew demanded. “She’s an unprecedented being, Pierson. There is no book that you can bury your face in to ascertain such information. It doesn’t exist. Period.”

“I think that if I—”

“Hold on,” Drew interrupted, preventing Pierson from expanding on his theory. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone, giving it a wary look. He pushed a button, then pressed it to his ear. “Oz, what do you—she’s right here. Why?” His expression tightened further as he listened. “We’re in the Heidelberg Project.” Drew pulled the phone away from his ear, looking at it curiously before putting it back into his pocket.

“What the hell did that asshole want?” Kierson snarled as he made his way back to the group, having retrieved his knife. “He never calls us.”

“I know,” Drew replied soberly. “He said not to go anywhere—that we should be safe where we are—and he needed to meet up with us right away.”

“Sounds ominous,” Casey growled. The thought seemed to appease him slightly. He, like Kierson, seemed to be itching for a fight.

“We should know momentarily. He said he was only a couple miles away.” Drew reflexively surveyed his surroundings, suddenly on high alert. “We need to move inside,” he stated calmly, though the tension in his body betrayed him. “We’re too exposed here.” He pointed to the spotted house beside us and motioned for us to go inside. He no longer spoke, giving directives with hand signals only, his eyes forever tracking something in the distance that did not appear to be there.

Without giving me a choice in the matter, Kierson snatched my arm, ready to drag me to the front porch and inside the house, but Pierson clamped down on my shoulder before he could. His eyes were pinched closed, his body unmoving. Then, only seconds later, Kierson’s grip on me tightened, his eyes wide and wild. But it was Casey who broke the silence amongst us, interrupting the visi
on Pierson and Kierson were sharing. It seemed that he, too, had inside knowledge of what was headed our way.

“It can’t be,” he whispered, his sharp eyes falling beyond the houses to the east of us. “They’re back . . .”

“Casey?” Drew pressed, searching for the impending danger as he quietly demanded an explanation.

But there was no time for one.

Agn=searchill I heard was the drawing of Casey’s blades from the leather strap across his chest before Pierson screamed a war cry, signaling the incoming battle. It startled the others into action as well. The word “Stealers” echoed through the abandoned neighborhood until the wall of evil approaching us at inhuman speed swallowed it whole.

The agreement had been most egregiously broken.