Chapter 14

More precisely, it was about the demon suicide I’d witnessed.

“Aviva?” Ezra prompted, his drink halfway to his mouth.

I picked up a bottle but toyed with the label instead of opening it. “I didn’t kill the shedim. It ended its own life after saying it refused to go back somewhere.”

Sachie sighed. “Not this again. We agreed?—”

“It was a fuck-you, or I’m not remembering it right, but I am and it wasn’t. I’m not stuck on this because I was hit with the demon secretion either, Sach. There’s something wrong with this picture, and people keep dismissing me when I bring it up, but what else has the Maccabees so wound up that they arrested Silas? His vamp connections and hacker abilities that made him perfectly placed to unearth?—”

“Are you hearing yourself?” Sachie spread her hands wide. “How paranoid you sound?”

Ezra swirled his drink. “That doesn’t mean she’s wrong.”

She glared at him before turning to me. “Say you’re correct. The only people you told were Michael and me. That detail isn’t in the initial report. You think she phoned someone and put all this in motion?”

“No.”

“You think I did?”

I waved that preposterous idea away. “Of course not.”

Sach lost the tension in her shoulders and leaned forward. “Then how would anyone else find out? Explain it to me, Avi, because all I’m hearing are conspiracy theories.”

“The Maccabees aren’t the bastions of nobility you’d like to believe,” Ezra said.

“Neither is the guy who dipped to go party on a demon boat.” She whirled on him. “I’d like to believe that I’ve spent the past few years risking my life and my relationship with my family for something worth believing in!” She raised her water bottle like she was about to wing it across the room and only the fact that it was glass had her lower it again.

I dropped my gaze to the carpet. Sachie’s feelings were valid, but so were my instincts. I just wasn’t sure how to reconcile the two without one of us feeling hurt. More hurt.

“Let’s play this out,” Silas said calmly. “If Aviva heard the shedim correctly, where didn’t she want to go back to? Demons are worse than hissing cockroaches for staying alive when you plain don’t want ’em to be. Why not at least try and escape?”

“She was weak,” Sachie said. “She could come and go from her cage at will but didn’t.”

“That tracks.” Silas nodded. “I buy her ending her life on her terms. Dead is dead, but she goes out with dignity.”

“Unless dead isn’t dead,” Darsh said slowly. “What if Maccabees killing shedim sends them back to the demon realm but if they kill themselves, it’s truly the end?”

I wrenched off the bottle cap with a sharp crack, churning through the horrific implications.

Shedim had haunted our world for centuries, wreaking havoc on innocent lives. We had dedicated ourselves to eradicating them, believing that each time we vanquished one, it was gone forever.

If we were essentially in a video game where demons had infinite lives, that would mean our attempts to rid the world of them weren’t just pathetic.

They were useless.

The idea was terrifying, but it didn’t mesh with other things I knew about demons. “When we kill shedim, they shrivel into a whorl of skin or crack apart, or die in one of a dozen other pretty definite not-coming-back-from-this ways.”

I’d killed enough shedim to have my own data, though everyone except Ezra would assume I knew this from our lessons during Maccabee training. One day, I’d live as a proud, out half shedim, but until I changed people’s minds about infernals, my fellow operatives wouldn’t benefit from my firsthand knowledge.

I took a sip of water. “What they don’t do is open a portal and get sucked through to the demon realm. Or regenerate.”

“Well, they don’t do either of those things in ways we can see,” Darsh said, combing his nails through his blond wig, “but we don’t see them come through from their realm to earth in the first place. We don’t even know how that happens. Who’s to say what else we’re missing?”

Between Eishei Kodesh, vampires, and shedim, the latter was the group that Maccabees had the least information on. The general public wasn’t aware of their existence, and we didn’t have demon informants out there assisting us. Maccabee policy was to hunt and kill them, not have heart-to-hearts.

We didn’t usually bring them in for questioning either. Imagine if they exerted their demonic influence in a chapter filled with dangerous, skilled operatives? Hard pass. Any demon encounter was painstakingly related back to HQ by the Maccabees involved, and that information added to the records to help mitigate future damage.

Maybe our vamp operatives had heard something? Cécile was only in her forties, but Nasir was close to seventy and Darsh was way older than that. How old, we weren’t sure, but I’d bet he’d been around at least three hundred years.

“Has the squad discussed shedim deaths?” I said.

“No,” Darsh said. “It was just the shedim’s choice of words when you were about to kill her. ‘Go back.’ My mind supplied ‘to where she came from.’ Shedim have agendas. Missions, so to speak. Suppose they do end up back in the demon realm when we dispatch them. I doubt they’re getting a ‘better luck next time’ speech.”

“The demon realm is probably all kinds of suck ass—” I said.

“Flaming Flapjacks sounds okay,” Sachie said with a shrug.

I startled, having expected her to keep fuming and remain silent, then squeezed the water bottle tightly. One dumb tour and she was buddy-buddy with Delacroix? A demon she knew had threatened and harmed me multiple times?

Including at that very restaurant? Flaming Flapjacks existed in some demon realm–lite place. It was still creepy and they served things best not examined too closely along with short stacks, but I wasn’t forced against my will to bust out my full Cherry form.

A fact that had probably saved my life.

“The waffles looked good.” I placed the water bottle on the table so I didn’t smash it to vent my anger and frustration. “Everything you’re saying makes sense, Darsh, but I really hope that’s not the case. We already had to update Maccabee intel that staking doesn’t kill Primes.”

Maccabees clung to certain givens in our fight to keep humanity safe, the two most important being: Eishei Kodesh flame types presented in consistent, expected ways, and vampires were killed when staked.

Let’s just say that after Darsh filed the case report with that new information about Primes, Michael had come out of a lot of unscheduled calls with the Authority looking grim and had shoved an extreme by-the-book adherence down our chapter’s collective throat for weeks.

Sachie, Darsh, and I, as the ones who’d confirmed Primes’ deviation from the norm, became those kids in the cafeteria looking for a table to sit at and just getting a lot of backs and cold shoulders. It had sucked and we were only just coming out of our freeze-out.

My friends’ downcast expressions said the two of them remembered this all too clearly.

“This isn’t the same,” Silas said. “The more demon intel, the better.”

“You sure?” I shook my head. “The sum total of all born vamps currently in existence is exactly one, so telling the Authority the truth about staking him shouldn’t have been a big deal, but they all freaked out.”

“It’s a big deal to me,” Ezra said blandly.

“Sorry.” I backpedaled hard, because staking a Prime trapped them in their body, alive, aware, and incapacitated. “Of course it is.”

“I’m just messing with you,” he said.

I glared at him.

Ezra raised an eyebrow. “Too soon?”

Silas shook his head at his friend. “Continue, Aviva.”

“Even the relatively few shedim here on earth are too many.” I faced Sachie and Darsh. “You really want to be the bearer of bad news again? This bad news?” I crossed my legs and gave a breezy wave. “Hey, Authority Council, heads-up. You know the thousands of demons we’ve killed since our founding way back when? Well, they’re not actually dead. They’re chilling in the demon realm, regenerating from a sprout like Groot. It might take two thousand years or twenty minutes, but all those shedim we assumed were the same type? Nope. They’re actually the same demon. Good luck.”

“You’re assuming they don’t already know,” Ezra said.

I groaned and buried my head in my hands. “A gift basket is not in our future.”

A heavy silence settled as we contemplated their reaction.

I finally raised my head. “Is it horrible that part of me hopes we’re correct?”

“It depends why,” Silas said.

“You didn’t see the victims at the lab. God, Edward…” I faltered at the memory of his bleak stare, pressing my hands against my eyelids. But those kinds of images were never so easily blocked out. “Shedim victims never truly get justice, but if we’re sending the fiends back to be tortured, to be at the mercy of demonic creativity for inflicting pain, then part of me is all for it.”

Darsh raised his hand, smiling brightly. “When you put it like that, so am I.”

“You’re the oldest one here,” Ezra said. “How likely do you think this is?”

Darsh thought about it a moment, then shook his head. “My first instinct is that if Maccabees were simply sending shedim back to their home realm, the demons would rub it in our faces. What happens in the demon realm stays in the demon realm, and for all we know, they get a lovely vacation when they return. We have no proof they’re tortured, and thus there’s no reason not to tell us how ineffective we are should they return. So why haven’t they?” Darsh twirled a lock of blond hair around his finger.

Silas tracked the hair twirl.

“That’s my biggest stumbling block with this theory,” Darsh said. “Shedim would absolutely use that to undermine our confidence in this fight against evil.”

Silas nodded. “I concur. Regardless of whether the Authority Council knows or not, the demons wouldn’t keep silent on that score.”

Sachie tapped her finger against the pillbox compartment on her Maccabee ring. “Then it’s exactly like I said in the first place. There’s nothing nefarious to this suicide and the Authority isn’t keeping any secret because there’s nothing to hide. Our magic kills them. End of story.”

Darsh and Silas wore the same “matter settled” expression as Sachie, but Ezra had a tiny crease between his brows.

Should I accept that I was reading too much into it and drop it? What if this theory was correct though? Did it change anything? Maccabees had spent hundreds of years finding the magic cocktail to get us even this far in the fight. If we had no way to kill shedim, then we were doing the best we could. Was that enough?

“Not being a Maccabee anymore, I have no skin in this game,” Ezra said. Was it really that easy for him to walk away and change allegiances? Maybe, if his only allegiance had ever been to himself?

Everything here is an act . Ezra had risked his life to save Silas and would do the same for any one of us in this room. He let this fiction about his all-consuming self-serving motives stand because it was another mask he could hide behind to keep himself safe. Didn’t he ever get really lonely always being someone other than himself? Even though I hid Cherry, I could at least always be me.

“But I think,” Ezra continued, “that it’s always better to have all the information.”

“Once a spy,” Darsh said dryly.

The corner of Ezra’s mouth tugged up. “Aviva, it was your suspicion. Are you convinced otherwise, or do you want to keep digging into this until you’re positive one way or the other?”

I stood up and walked to the window, looking out over the ocean. The magic in our rings let people aware of shedim sleep at night, knowing we had a means of fighting them.

Hope was a powerful motivator.

What was worse? If I found proof, spoke up, and stole other operatives’ hope for a happy future where they made a difference, but allowed us to solve this problem? Or let their hope stand as a lie that sustained them?

At the end of the day, there might not be anything to find, just like Sachie kept insisting. I’d already gotten Silas arrested and the Maccabees had implicated Sachie and me as his pawns.

Why keep digging and get all of us into worse trouble?

I wiped a smudge off the glass with my sleeve, unable to get the image of Zaven’s grinning son out of my head. Why extinguish anyone’s hope?

“I’m convinced,” I said. “Vamp mobs aren’t working with shedim. I can put that into my report. The only end to tie up is how the Eishei Kodesh drug makers found the demon and I’ll interview Jasmine for that answer.”

“Silas can stay with me until this all dies down,” Ezra said. “He can work on clearing his name from the safety of the Hell.”

“‘Safety of the Hell,’” Darsh said. “Is that an oxymoron like friendly fire?”

Sach snickered.

“What if we need to contact Silas?” I said.

“Already ahead of you, partner.” Silas checked our phones for any bugs, then set up encrypted chats with Sachie and me.

Sachie yawned. “Now that everything’s settled, which way out?”

Ezra pointed at the double doors, which now had mesh netting woven across their entrance. Have portal, will travel.

“Later, Cardoso.” She strode through the portal.

Darsh strutted out after her, his hips swaying. He threw a single look back over his shoulder.

“One last glance for the road, Rapunzel?” Silas said.

Darsh slitted his eyes, huffed, and sashayed through the portal.

Ezra nudged Silas. “You’re so fucked, chamo.”

His bestie was adorably flushed, but he smirked at Ezra. “Because ‘mi cielo’ is a real puddle at your feet.”

I barked a laugh, loving this teasing side of Silas.

He winked at me.

Still, my chest ached, and I hugged Silas like I could bundle him far from the devastation to come with Darsh. He hugged me back, albeit with a confused wrinkle in his brow.

Ezra escorted me to the portal. “What, after running around Tokyo illegally and heisting my best friend, I don’t get a hug?” he said dryly.

I tossed my hair. “You’ve had enough excitement for one night.”

As I walked away on his laughter, a strange mix of emotions flooded my heart. Our encounter had been tumultuous as always, yet I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something momentous was about to happen.

Hopefully it was the kind that ended in public accolades, and not torture, unemployment, or further heartbreak, but I was nothing if not deeply cynical.