Captive Soul (18 page)

She was letting off steam.

Literally.

No flames broke into life along her shoulders or arms, and the smoke didn’t last long, but still, it had been there, and not in the depths of some life-or-death battle or because she’d used the dinar to magnify her abilities.

The surprise lingered even as Dio plunged ahead. “So, who is this Ona character? She’s not even in the Archives of the Mothers.”

“She’s not a Mother.” Camille was still looking at her elbows, at where the smoke had been, amazed that she had actually seen it. Despite the leftover haze, the alcove seemed so much brighter all of a sudden, like it was fresh and full of new energy.

“Ona has to be a Mother,” Andy said. “She’s—well, she’s really, really old.”

Camille scooched around on the couch until she got her legs up under her, relaxing as much as she could now that the worst had passed. “She may be the oldest Sibyl alive, but she’s always refused to take the title or duties of Mother.”

Bela’s eyebrows came together. “Why?”

“No idea,” Camille said. “She just sort of appeared in my life when I was younger, showed up in a tunnel one day and spoke to me. Later, she made the older girls knock off pounding on me, but I don’t even know why she did that.”

“Maybe because it was the right thing.” Bela’s fingers curled into fists, and she smacked one of those fists against her knees. “Damnit, the other Mothers should have taken care of that for you.”

“They thought all the conflict might, you know, spark me or something.” Camille shrugged even though the gesture felt a little too casual for how much all that had pissed her off and wounded her when she was a kid. “They thought it might make me tougher.”

“Or run you off,” Dio said.

Andy was shaking her head. “I still don’t get why she’s not a Mother.”

“Because when I was your age, I learned I didn’t have the constitution for it. Nor did I deserve the honor, then or now.”

Ona’s voice made them all jump. Camille and Bella and Dio had to turn to see her where she was standing, in her usual black breeches and matching tunic, right in front of the swinging kitchen door. The swinging door wasn’t moving.

Andy, however, had been staring straight at Ona when she did whatever it was Ona did with the channels.

“How do you
do
that?” Andy pointed toward the hardwood at Ona’s feet, which still had a sort of puddly look, though it was drying up fast. “I swear I saw you this time. You came through the floor.”

Ona’s tone and expression stayed unreadable, except for the slightest twitch of her mouth as she averted her gaze from Andy’s. If Camille hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Andy’s presence startled Ona or bothered her.

“Your eyes deceived you,” Ona said, and now Camille knew she
was
bothered. Ona never deferred to anyone for any reason, but her tone sounded absolutely submissive.

“They did not.” Andy’s face flushed, and one of her hands clenched into a fist.

“You saw what you saw,” Ona told her, still not looking her straight in the face. Her words were confrontational, but her voice was literally shaking. “Your interpretation wasn’t correct.”

And Ona was gone. Back through the floor, or into thin air, or whatever the hell she did. Camille had been looking at her intently, paying attention, and she still had no idea where Ona went.

Andy jumped to her feet like she was about to stalk down to the lab.

“Give it up.” Camille waved Andy back to her seat. “She could be back in Ireland—and she’s always like that with questions. That’s why I don’t know much about her. She only tells me what she wants to, when she wants to.”

“What do the other fire Sibyl Mothers say about her?” Bela asked, still gazing at the spot where Ona had been.

“Not much.” Camille watched as the hardwood went back to looking like hardwood again. “To stay away from her. That she’s trouble. I think they’re scared of her, especially Mother Keara.”

Bela, who was very close to Mother Keara in an adversarial love-your-best-enemy sort of way, grinned when she heard this. “Then I think I like Ona. She can stay.”

Laughter popped out before Camille could hold it back. “Good, because if you wanted her out of here, I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Gradually Bela shifted her full attention back to Camille, and when she did, she asked, “Are we finished with secrets?”

Camille swallowed, relieved that her words didn’t take a quick hike again. “I think so.”

“We need to be,” Bela said without changing her expression from its usual calm kindness. “I’m to the point where I need your word on that.”

“You have it.” Camille lifted her hand like she was pledging to the flag. “I promise I’m not holding anything else back. Nothing I’m aware of, anyway.”

Bela accepted this, then looked briefly worried. “And you trust us enough to tell us if anything else comes up?”

“Yes. I promise.”

“Good,” Andy muttered. “Because I can’t take much more of this serious meeting crap. It gets on my nerves.”

The chimes above her head gave a soft ring, then a harder, jangling warning.

Camille’s heart surged, and she was on her feet with everyone else before she fully registered the message. “Friendlies. OCU. Nick sent the message, but he’s not coming. He’s meeting an informant in Central Park. It’s Saul Brent and—”

She stopped, feeling flickers of surprise. “And Jack Blackmore.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Andy flopped back down in the leather chair under the Motherhouse Ireland mirror. “Just what I need to make my fucking day. Another meeting, and with the world’s biggest puckered asshole.”

“Come on, Andy,” Dio said as she took her seat again, too. “Tell us what you really think.”

Bela looked tense, but she went to answer the door as Camille once more took up residence on the end of the couch closest to Dio.

“If she starts a tidal wave,” Dio whispered to Camille, “lend me whatever energy you can and I’ll try to keep him from breaking any bones.”

Camille nodded and snuck a peek at Andy, who was rubbing her eyes with her thumb and forefinger like she was warding off a migraine.

With Blackmore and Andy in the same space, even after a year of separation, rogue waves were a distinct possibility. The two had only known each other a few weeks before Blackmore went on sabbatical at the Motherhouses—but it was a few weeks too many.

The first man through the door was Saul Brent, wearing jeans and a Giants jacket like he usually did. He was so frigging tall he had to duck to get inside, and his long brown ponytail was loose and flyaway from the cold fall breezes. Saul looked a lot rougher than his older brother, Cal, thanks to years working undercover in narcotics. Cal was clean-cut, polished, and professional, while Saul had gorgeous brown eyes full of humor—and a lot of tattoos. The ones Camille had seen were way sexy, and she was willing to bet he had more under his clothes. She had always liked the tribal markings on his hands, and she could just make out the top of the Greek cross on his neck.

“I should get more tattoos,” she said out loud, mostly to break the tension, but also because she thought it might suit her, that it might help her break out of the mold she had set for herself so long ago when she started failing at Motherhouse Ireland. “Maybe a Celtic knot—or what about a Greek cross like Saul’s?”

“Do the barbed-wire armband,” Andy said, pointedly keeping her attention off the doorway. “I dare you.”

Jack Blackmore came in after Saul, and Bela closed the door behind him. Camille studied him from top to bottom. Coal black hair, nearly black eyes—yep. Not much different there. He was also wearing “the suit,” as Andy called it, a dark ensemble that could have escaped from the set of
Men in Black
.

Doesn’t that just scream Fed
? Andy had been fond of asking last year, usually followed by her favorite epithet, Flaming Bunch of Idiots, even though Blackmore wasn’t really FBI.

Right now, Andy just flicked her gaze toward Blackmore, looked briefly at the ceiling, and went back to staring at Camille.

Blackmore, however, let his gaze linger on Andy.

Camille twitched on the sofa.

Poor guy was probably weighing the odds that he’d get back out of the brownstone without having to go to the emergency room.

Yeah. Good luck with that, big guy. Or maybe I should say, big mouth
.

She almost greeted with Blackmore with
I’m so surprised nobody in Ireland killed you
, but Bela’s nervous expression made Camille hold her tongue.

Even Dio looked squirmy and uncomfortable, totally out of character.

Camille tensed, waiting for Blackmore to instantly say or do something stupid to piss Andy off, which he could usually manage in a few seconds.

He cleared his throat, nodded to all of them, Andy included, and addressed himself to Bela. “Duncan told me to get over here, but he wouldn’t tell me why. Said I had to hear it—and see it—for myself.”

Bela nodded. “Nice to see you,” she said to Saul, but she didn’t offer Blackmore the same courtesy. She just gestured to the end of the sofa where Camille wasn’t sitting. Both men eased their tall frames onto the leather cushions, Saul closest to Camille—and Blackmore without arguing or bitching about not having time.

Dio’s right eyebrow lifted as she glanced at Camille.

Camille shrugged.

Maybe Blackmore’s time with the Mothers had taught him some manners. Camille found herself wondering how many wolf bites, burn scars, and wind-related shrapnel injuries he had taken. She was pretty sure Blackmore hadn’t dared show up on the beaches at Motherhouse Kérkira this last summer to aggravate Andy. The fact that he was still alive was pretty much proof of that.

Bela didn’t wait for any uncomfortable silences to extend themselves, or give Blackmore too much of a chance to step in muck right away. She explained quickly and succinctly about John Cole’s spirit surviving the events in the alley a year ago, and the fact that Camille had inadvertently helped him take another body. “We don’t feel certain of everything yet, so we’re watching, and John’s allowing that. If something goes wrong, I think we’re all ready.”

Camille’s entire essence ached at the sound of this, but she kept her mouth shut.

Nothing bad will happen. He’s not really a demon hybrid. It’s not the same
. And it wasn’t—yet it was.

Contradictions. Camille held back a sigh. That pretty much defined John, didn’t it?

“Whose body did you give him?” Jack Blackmore asked Camille, and she was surprised by the undisguised happiness in his dark eyes. The scowl he usually wore had faded away, too, leaving a handsome, almost relaxed-looking and eager man waiting for an answer.

Saul Brent was smiling, too. Camille didn’t think Saul really knew John, but Saul knew Duncan—and all the OCU officers were always glad to gain a powerful new fighter.

Camille hated to complicate things by spilling this next part, but truth was truth. “John got Strada’s body. Well, his human-form body.”

Blackmore’s expression became more troubled even though he seemed to be trying to keep himself in some sort of Zen state. “The Rakshasa leader. You … put John in demon skin?”

Camille kept herself from glaring at Blackmore, but it was a near miss. “It wasn’t like I had a choice. This was an accident. Happenstance. Strada’s body was there, so that’s the body John got.”

“And Strada?” Saul asked. “What happened to his insides? His … spirit, or whatever a demon has?”

Camille’s hand moved to her heart. “We call it essence. Strada’s dead, but his essence isn’t. Not completely.” She did her best to explain about the remnant energy, finishing with, “As far as we can tell, as long as John’s not exposed to extreme projective energy or knocked out or impaired in some other complete way like that, he’ll keep control.”

Blackmore’s eager happiness had definitely been tuned down a few notches, and that scowl Camille remembered so well was trying to sneak back across his face. “So he could turn demon. He could lose control and let that monster loose.”

“As could any of the demon hybrids allied with the OCU.” Bela’s voice remained icy calm, but her eyes communicated mistrust of this man, who’d once tried to take Duncan Sharp to a laboratory to more or less study him to death. “My husband has a monster inside him, too, but he does pretty well with it, don’t you think?”

Blackmore seemed to consider this, and Camille figured he was thinking about Duncan, and maybe also the three Lowell brothers—two part demon and one full-blooded—not to mention all the other creatures who had cast their lots with the NYPD’s Occult Crimes Unit. Similar alliances and partnerships had formed all over the world with different paranormal crime units during the years the Sibyls spent defeating the Legion cult. Now the Dark Crescent Sisterhood had thrown down against the Rakshasa, and anybody who could help in that fight was welcome.

“New enemies,” Andy said to Blackmore without the roaring force of water behind her words. “New allies. That’s how it goes in any war.”

“I think the Rakshasa might be trying to build alliances of their own,” John said from the front door, and everybody turned to stare at him.

Camille’s eyes darted to the chimes over the table—the chimes that hadn’t given the slightest ring when he approached. They hadn’t even heard him opening the door. He was wearing a clean pair of jeans and an army-green sweatshirt, and he was carrying the demon packet Dio had written up for him. The pages already looked crinkled and well read. In his other hand he had what looked like a big gym bag.

Camille realized he probably had bags here and there in different cities—bus terminals, safe-deposit boxes, other hiding places, maybe even rented rooms or apartments that might still be his, technically, if the rent or payments had been made. As long as he had the keys, nobody would ask any questions. In his previous life, John had never known when he’d have to leave or where he’d have to go—or how fast.

Both Blackmore and Saul gaped at the image of Strada standing so close to them. Camille knew how disconcerting that could be, but she realized she had already stopped seeing the demon and started seeing only John. There were differences in the body from when Strada used it—subtle but definite. The posture. The facial expression. The energy around him, especially. This man standing before them, he was John Cole, and though he bore a strong resemblance to the former demon leader, he was becoming his own person again, inside and out.