Chapter 22

I folded my hand over his. “Then what happened?”

He stared down at them. “Is that a yes to dinner?”

“It’s not a no.”

He smiled impishly at me.

“Tell me the rest of the story.” A particularly strong gust blew in through the window and I shivered.

Ezra grabbed one of the blankets that had fallen when he overturned the mattress and carefully tucked it around me before holding my hand again. “I became the Crimson Prince. About a year later, I found out my father had ordered a hit on one of the Authority Council.”

“Secretary Pederson?” The one who’d authorized his carte blanche on our murdered half shedim case.

“Got it in one. I flushed out when the attempt was to occur, then I showed up and killed the assassin.”

“If Natán attempted to kill a Maccabee before…” I searched for a kind way to put this.

“Why was I so stunned that he’d killed Roman? My father never learned I’d outmanoeuvred him. I’d have known,” he added bitterly. “But I stupidly thought that with Pederson alerted to this attempt, he’d back off the Maccabees for good.”

“Was that why you joined us?”

He clamped his lips together and looked away, but a moment later he gave a resigned nod. “Partially. It was pretty easy after that to convince Pederson that I’d be an asset to the organization. In exchange, I was given clearance on everything relating to my parents. But our deal was to be kept secret so no one found out how vulnerable she’d been.”

“You didn’t just spy for us. You killed for us. Humans too.”

“They were evil pieces of shit, but yes. I told you I had.”

“I didn’t believe you. You spied, you assassinated for two different organizations, and you made yourself into a very public figure so that no one, on either side, could take you out without you being missed.”

“I don’t want your pity,” he said sharply.

“It’s not pity,” I said. “You were hiding in plain sight. You think I don’t understand what that feels like?”

He was silent, but he squeezed my hand.

“When did you actually stop being Natán’s enforcer?” I asked.

“About a year ago.”

“And when you had nothing left to learn from the Maccabees, you jumped ship. Literally. You came here where you had different sources of intel to ply.”

He looped a finger around a strand of my hair and gently tugged. “That, and I hoped that leaving would keep you and Silas safe from any blowback from my actions.”

“Yeah, well, the Maccabees are every bit as ruthless as the mob.”

“You want to talk about it?” he asked quietly.

“Silas’s arrest wasn’t enough for you?” I shook my head and released his hand. “I should get back.”

I reluctantly stood up. Even with all the wreckage strewn around us and all the truths that had come out, this interlude had been an oddly cozy bubble that I was loath to leave.

Ezra walked me to the portal that he’d opened in his living room.

“Not making me come and go through the portal downstairs like the rest of the chumps?” I teased.

“Exclusive status for esteemed matchmakers only.” He gallantly moved the chess table he’d knocked over out of my way. “Marvel at your good fortune.”

I laughed.

We stopped in front of the portal in a weirdly formal tableau, like a boy from the 1950s walking his date to her front door.

“I realize you want to question Natán,” he said, “but he won’t give anything up. We’ll have to figure something else out, but…” His lips turned down.

“You need time to grieve him being part of all this. Part of something else horrible, besides whatever happened with your mom. I get it.”

“Yeah,” he said softly. “You do. About dinner? May I please take you out?”

I planted my hands on my hips and gave an aggrieved sigh. “Fiiiine. It must be mockingly pricey and feature a wide array of award-winning desserts.”

“Challenge accepted,” he said.

“I’ll have dinner with you but that’s all I’m promising.”

“Understood.” He lowered his lids halfway. “May I kiss you?”

My heart hammered in my throat. He’d laid himself bare to me. The truth wasn’t pretty, but it had been freely given. I could kiss him, I could have him any way I wanted him, yet I preferred to wait. I liked being friends again, texting and joking like we had when things were easy. I wanted that to feel more solid before we complicated things with romantic intentions. If that was even in the cards for us.

“We’ll see if you rock the dessert challenge,” I teased.

He pumped his fist in the air. “I’m totally getting that kiss.”

“You’re impossible,” I groused.

He brushed a hand across my cheek. “I’ll contact you about the reservation, but in the meantime, be careful out there.”

“You too, Zee.”

His face lit up like my use of that old nickname was better than any birthday present he’d received. Jeez. I hadn’t seen other children in Babel. Had Ezra ever had birthday parties with friends? I shook off the melancholy thought and, with a small wave, left the Copper Hell.

I may or may not have worn a dopey smile all the way over to Express Recruitment to question the matchmaker who’d paired Jasmine up with Bratwurst. Though I put on my best game face once I entered the office from the building’s second-floor corridor.

Heh. This matchmaker versus matchmaker battle began now.

The bell jangled and a man with terrible posture and an obnoxiously green tie looked up from the reception desk. “Can I help you?”

Beyond him was a single main room with three desks, two printers, multiple filing cabinets, plus an office with a glass wall, and another door that presumably led to a back area or restroom.

“Hi.” I held up my gloved hand in a half wave. “Is Chandra Nichols in?”

“Sure.” He hit a button on his phone to let her know there was someone here to see her.

A moment later, an older woman with a bright smile and hard eyes stepped out of the office and walked briskly toward me. “I’m Chandra.”

“Elyse Samuels.” Should Chandra check, Elyse had served time for drug trafficking and superficially resembled me. “My friend Jasmine Bakshi recommended you.”

Chandra’s smile didn’t flicker, nor did she look at her coworker. Either he was in on it, or she was one cool lady. Probably the latter, considering her side hustle. “How is Jasmine?” she said.

Majorly fucked. But props to me for calling that relationship correctly. “She had to take a leave from the business and asked me to step in.”

She extended a hand toward her office. “Let’s discuss your particular needs.”

Only one of the desks was staffed, the female employee going over some career testing results with a client.

I didn’t bother taking off my second-best pair of gloves or coat when I got into Chandra’s office. All the better to hide my Maccabee ring, though I did slide into my synesthete vision in preparation for questioning her.

Chandra shut her office door and settled herself in her leather desk chair. “What are you hoping I can do for you?”

Not a single vital sign presented as in distress.

“We require a replacement employee,” I said.

“That’s a shame.” She straightened one of the three piles of papers on her desk and set the large stapler she’d been using on top of the middle one. “However, Jasmine was on the waiting list for a qualified worker for some time. Individuals with those special skills don’t just pop up on a regular basis.”

I filed that interesting tidbit away.

Nothing about this conversation made Chandra nervous, nor did she get any particular thrill out of it. Her heartbeat remained steady, she didn’t sweat, and I didn’t detect any brain activity suggesting she was attempting to lie or stall.

I leaned forward insistently. “There’s got to be something you can do. I have vendors with expectations. I’m willing to pay to jump the line.”

“That won’t help.”

“Then I’ll find someone else who’s capable of getting what I need.”

While Chandra’s body language didn’t change, a swath of blue shot across her brain and pulsed along her ribs.

Pissed you off, did I? Good. Now we were getting somewhere. There were subtle differences in the physiologies of anger and fear, one being that had Chandra been scared, she would have been breathing much faster. Fear also showed as a pulsing blue dot in the stomach, whereas Chandra’s was clear.

“Good luck finding someone else who offers my particular service,” Chandra said icily.

I stood up. “I’ll ask my vendors to connect me with one.”

“In which case, you’ll have to tell them you can’t make quota.” She brushed away a slug’s trail of dirt that had fallen from a ceramic planter onto her desk. “And the type of people you’re in business with aren’t big on giving extensions.”

“They also aren’t big on defective product,” I sneered. “The so-called skilled employee you gave Jasmine was incapable of doing their job.”

Her expression remained impassive, but while her fingers tightened on her pen, she still didn’t present any signs of fear in my synesthete vision.

“You have a choice,” I said in a hard voice. “You can go down with me.” I ticked the items off on my fingers. “Get me an actual skilled employee asap, or direct me to the person who actually found the shedim, since we both know you’re just a middleman.” I paused. “And middlemen do not do well in Sector A.”

My guess that she’d know about that prison landed.

Chandra set down her pen, her eyes colder than a penguin’s feet, and slowly stood up.

Suddenly, blue spiked through her so hot and bright that I was blinded.

Glass shattered with a sharp snap.

I dove to the floor.

Chandra collapsed, crumpling like a rag doll. A crimson ribbon streamed from the single bullet hole in her head.

I scrambled behind her desk and pushed it over a split second before bullets slammed into the thick wood. Splinters arced into the air.

An assassin trumped any concerns of being outed.

I swallowed past the panic making my limbs heavy and my blood run in icy sluggishness, and reached for Cherry. For the first time ever, I slipped her on like a favorite sweater, dissolving any mental barrier between us. It was as if a river of crimson and toxic green stardust shot into the marrow of my bones, its heat fueling me. I tossed off my coat, praying my armored scales protected me from guns.

The glass from the shot-out window crunching underfoot was my sole heads-up that the assassin had stepped into the room, since I was behind the desk, blocked from view. I mentally mapped the rest of the office, cataloguing all the furniture and any potential weapon. I grabbed the stapler first, but it was disappointingly light despite its size. The ceramic planter had a much nicer heft.

I popped up and hurled it.

It flew into the man who’d raised his arm with catlike instincts to block his face, knocking his baseball cap askew.

A shower of soil cascaded down his front and the planter hit the carpet, a jagged chunk breaking free.

I charged the man, my head into his gut, and bowled him over.

His gun and aviator glasses went flying. At the sight of my shedim self, his eyes widened, and he shoved me off him.

I grabbed the broken planter and swung, shattering his nose. My attacker howled and I inhaled, the tantalizing scent of hot copper filling my nostrils.The metallic aroma encompassed a world of emotions and sensations, but most of all, it made me feel brilliantly alive.

I slammed the planter into him again.

Snarling, he grabbed it and tossed it away, smashing his other fist into my kidneys.

I laughed, barely feeling it. The frosted edges of my scales darkened, and my short horns pulsed. Catching his fist, I jammed the fleshy part of his palm down onto one of the tips.

He screamed, the cry ending in a squeaky little croak when I viciously tore my horn free.

The air along his neck shimmered. The veins in his throat thickened, curling under his red flesh like gnarled tree roots, while the fist I still held now showed two more fingers than was polite.

I dropped his hand like I’d been burned.

His eyes were two red slits, and his mouth was a snarl of jagged teeth set in a pointy red face made of raised scarred points like a malevolent pincushion.

Shadows erupted from the man, flexing against me with the sharpness of a cat’s claws. Thin ribbons of inky corrosiveness drilled into me through my scales.

I screamed, bound in darkness and pain. My nerve endings were on fire, my blood boiling inside my veins, but I latched on to my determination to survive before I was swept under the rapids of my agony.

My pain flowed away from me into part of a unified dreamy wash to the world where Chandra’s dead body, the carpet crushed under my knees, and my desire to destroy this demon—all were swells in a stormy ocean.

I erupted into a flurry of fists, teeth, and horns. I bit, punched, and stabbed any part of him I could find.

His shadows finally fell away, the darkness, burning pain, and my bloodlust clearing enough to see he lay bruised, bloodied, and unconscious.

Another swell to drift away.

A door slammed in the hallway outside the agency office. I flinched and swung toward the noise with a glare before catching myself with the stern reminder that other people being happy and untouched by this death and violence was a good thing.

The shedim had come in using a human glamor. Hard to say whether he’d locked the door, and it was a miracle that no one heard the gunfire, even with the silencer, but still. It was time to leave.

Chest heaving, I wiped his blood from my gloves onto his sweater and retrieved Maud’s Maccabee ring from my jacket pocket. I raked a clinical eye over the demon, determining the base of his throat where his skin was markedly thicker as his kill spot.

Next, I swiped a finger clockwise over the five tiny gemstones embedded in the ring to activate the magic cocktail and determine if my guess was correct. Sure enough, a white circle flared brilliantly in time with the blue gemstone.

Next up was the red gemstone’s time to shine. It blazed a thin stream of magic into the kill spot for a few seconds.

The shedim’s entire body deflated. The orange stone glowed next, sucking all the heat out of the shedim. His spiky facial protrusions twisted and snapped like pretzels while the demon’s body rolled up like a Swiss log cake.

I sat back on my calves against a rush of disappointment when the white gem went to town on the demon’s emotions. The shedim was still unconscious so there was no enjoying the broken, haunting dirge of his fear.

Cherry chuckled in my head.

Last, but not least, the yellow gem shone like the sun, extinguishing the shedim’s powers with its cleansing magic.

The shedim curled tighter and tighter until there was nothing left of him and all five gems on my ring went dark.

It wasn’t justice, it wasn’t satisfying, and it certainly wasn’t closure. The demon may have been vanquished, but the questions he left behind prevailed.