Chapter 24

“What was so urgent that you dragged me out of a perfectly warm living room?” My mother, wearing warm leather gloves, handed me a takeout cup, her other hand resting on the top of her open car door.

The wind picked up, blowing away a cloud to reveal a sliver of moonlight.

I shivered against the breeze skittering down my neck, clasped my freezing hands around the cup, and inhaled. “Hot chocolate?”

“You’ll be up all night if you drink caffeine now,” she said. “Besides, you always clamored for hot chocolate on cold nights. Remember when we’d ride the train at Stanley Park to see the holiday light displays? We always bought some right after.”

Because my nose would be numb from the cold. I’d take that first hot sip, feeling my insides heat up, then blow like a dragon to see the white puffs get thinner and thinner under the warmth of the chocolate.

“I didn’t realize you remembered that,” I said.

“I remember more than you give me credit for,” she said briskly. “So, what’s the emergency?”

I pulled the silver lock out of my pocket and handed it to her.

“Okay.” She flipped it over a couple of times. “And?”

“Hear me out before you say anything.”

She sighed. “All right, but let’s at least get in my car where it’s warm.”

Her Mercedes had heated seats, so I wasn’t about to argue.

Once we were comfortably settled, Michael listened to my theory, her expression an unreadable mask. For all that my sister was the champion poker player, I suspected that my mother could outbluff her in a heartbeat.

My words filled up more and more of the car’s interior, until I wondered if we’d both be crowded out by the enormity of it.

“The plus code led me to this overpass.” I pointed out the window, then fell silent, waiting to see what she made of all the information.

Michael placed her takeout cup in one of the holders. “Was Silas your informant about the employment agency?”

I nodded.

“Would you have told me about Chandra’s murder if it weren’t for the demon magic on the lock?”

“The Authority wanted answers, not more dead bodies. Dmitri had a hard-on to crucify me for my personal connections, and Silas, a vampire charged with corruption, had pointed me to Chandra. I didn’t report the murders because I didn’t dare let any official body know I’d been there, even anonymously. I was too paranoid that my good deed would not go unpunished.”

“That’s a no, then. How did you see the magic on the silver lock?” Michael narrowed her eyes.

My stomach twisted and I swallowed a metallic tang, adrenaline making my mouth go dry.

She was going to blow a gasket when she heard my answer. I marked the time on her car’s console: 8:39PM. The moment my relationship with my mother was destroyed for good.

I formulated a dozen lies on the spot. I was good at that. But on some level, hadn’t I called Michael because I didn’t want to use them?

I notched my chin up. “I used my blood in conjunction with Sire’s Spark.”

My mother’s flinch was delightful. Then she gave an incredulous laugh. “You stole it out of my safe and replaced it with a dummy artifact.” Her admiration was a million times more satisfying than her surprise.

But it was also infuriating. “How can you act all proud when me stealing it, hell, when my entire life all comes down to you forcing me to hide what I was?”

My mother scrubbed at an invisible speck of dirt on the leather cover of her steering wheel. “I trained you to keep yourself safe.”

I took an extra-long swig of hot chocolate, hoping the flavor would overpower my bitterness that all those years of treating my shedim side like a dirty secret were nothing more than training to her. However, I hadn’t come here tonight to fight with her about a thirty-year-long hurt.

“The night of the drug bust,” I said, “Bratwurst Demon claimed she didn’t want to go back. That means wherever it was, she’d been there before, and it was so terrible, she preferred death. At her own hands.” I fiddled with the window lock but didn’t press the button. “Is it possible that Maccabees can’t kill shedim?”

“Possible? Yes, for Eishei Kodesh. I suspect vampires do destroy shedim. They must, otherwise the demons wouldn’t even appear to die. Nothing would happen at all and yet it looks identical to when we do it.” She tapped the pillbox on her Maccabee ring. “Vampires don’t have these rings, so the magic cocktail must mimic what they’re doing.”

“Do you agree that shedim would brag about Maccabees’ inability to kill them if we were sending them to the demon realm?” I said.

“Absolutely.”

“Is it possible that our magic sends them to some kind of gulag demon prison?”

“Again, yes to possible. And yes, this explains why they aren’t using our failings to demoralize us. The demons don’t realize we don’t kill them until they end up in that prison. And they don’t usually get out.”

“You jumped ahead to the next question,” I said wryly.

“You’re a bad influence,” she said.

I bit back my snarky retort that that was my shedim side. “If I’d been correct about sending them to the demon realm,” I said, “then I could buy that only a few Maccabees knew the truth.” I’d left out my friends’ involvement in that conversation. “But a prison system requires massive amounts of resources. Guards and an actual facility. The prison’s got to be huge, if there’s even just one.”

“You’re thinking of it like a human jail with cells and three square meals a day,” Michael said. “This is a place that horrified a demon . It doesn’t even have to be in our pocket of reality.”

We both looked at the silver lock lying on the console between our seats.

“Come on, that’s batshit insane,” I said. “That padlock isn’t a demon prison like some kind of TARDIS and bigger on the inside.”

“Maybe it’s gruesomely small,” Michael said. “No light, no space, just the shedim contorted into it for all eternity. You said the runes were scorched. That would neutralize the shedim magic, just like opening a cell door, which is how the shedim at the drug lab was released. As for how she got in there in the first place and her refusal to ‘go back’ when you were about to use your ring? Our magic cocktail must send shedim directly to an empty lock. No vehicular transport, large facilities, or guards necessary. The demons then take these locks, hide them in plain sight, and track them with these plus codes.”

“It would explain the shedim’s contempt for the gold padlock,” I said. “A basic lock, even a warded one, is nothing in comparison.”

“Is this where you ask me whether Maccabees are keeping this a secret since we developed the magic in our rings to begin with?” Michael said dryly.

“Dr. Olsen and Dmitri Kozlov threatened me if I didn’t explain how Jasmine found the shedim. And Kozlov is fanatical about what should happen to people who collude. Why do that if they were in on such a heinous secret?” I shook my head. “Besides, Trad cops don’t hide the fact that they incarcerate criminals. Even if Maccabees don’t actually kill shedim, we still shouldn’t conceal that the best we can do is imprison them. That’s an accepted part of law enforcement. We wouldn’t tell the general public because they don’t know about demons, but operatives could know the score without feeling disheartened. So why don’t we?”

I lowered the temperature on the seat heater because my butt was starting to bake. “There’s also Chandra’s murder,” I said. “She was killed by a demon, not an operative, and there’s shedim magic all over this lock, not an Eishei Kodesh ward. All that leads me to believe that the magic cocktail in our rings was designed with the purest of intention—to kill demons, but somehow that magic was perverted.”

“All sound reasons.” Michael nodded. “In which case, traces of demon magic should be present in our rings’ magic.”

“Does the Authority have a way to do that?”

“Not at present.”

I was silent. Sire’s Spark might work but that would mean bringing it to the Authority’s attention. It would be easy enough to explain how we’d gotten it, but I didn’t want anyone to possess the means to detect half shedim. I bit the inside of my cheek. Perhaps Michael was justified not promoting me to level three if I wasn’t willing to do that right thing, no matter what the personal cost.

“Something you want to share?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Okay, then. I’ll call another meeting with Dr. Olsen and Dmitri. We’ll present your findings at that time, starting with the shedim’s actions on the night of the drug bust and including this nameless informant of yours, but with one exception. Should anyone ask, Chandra told you about the shedim magic on the lock before she was killed.”

Michael’s certainty about sharing all this eased that one sliver of doubt deep in my core. “I didn’t realize until right now how badly I needed to hear you say that Maccabees weren’t complicit.”

My mother gazed out the window. “We’ve made thousands of batches of that magic cocktail since it was first developed back in the 1600s,” she said. “As a Yellow Flame, I was fascinated with the underlying magic that held the five magic color types together and allowed them to work in conjunction with each other. I did a lot of research on the subject back when I was a Maccababy, but I never got a satisfying answer. Later, when I became director and had a deeper clearance level, I revisited the topic.”

I was enthralled almost as much by the idea of a young Michael and her curiosity as this story. “What did you find?”

“Would you believe it’s like a sourdough starter? Maybe more like a self-replicating virus. The team that initially created the cocktail created a foundational magic strain that we keep in a special regenerating vault. The cocktail is created at a single facility, with every batch using this strain as its basis. While the recipe is a highly guarded secret?—”

“With eleven herbs and spices?”

Michael snorted. “There’s no documentation on the underlying strain.”

“Why not? We love records.”

“Right after the very first batch of our magic cocktail was produced, shedim stormed the original facility.”

“They destroyed everything?”

“Almost everything. A tiny batch of the foundational strain survived. Just enough to allow the self-replication. The records were gone. That didn’t matter for the rest of the cocktail recipe, since the surviving members were able to reproduce it, but this foundational strain was so complex that its survival was hailed as a miracle on the scale of the Hanukkah flame.”

“Why weren’t we taught this story in training?”

My mother smiled wryly. “And admit that we allowed shedim to get the jump on us before we even had a chance to use this magic formula? That we almost lost it—and any fighting chance along with it? The story isn’t a secret, but it’s not widely repeated either.”

“Point taken,” I said. “So shedim attacked us, using it as a cover to bake their magic into that foundational vector and divert demons into these prisons. Do you think that without the corrupted magic, our rings would have worked as advertised?”

“I’m hoping their attack is proof that it would have.” She picked up the silver lock. “Demons aren’t incarcerating their own without a reason. One that is not in humanity’s favor.”

“And Bratwurst got out. Or was let out.” She’d been weak at first and I was grateful that it had taken time for her to reach full strength, because had we not been at the drug lab that night, who knows how pervasive the carnage might have been? “How many others have been set free to further some demon agenda?” I took the lock from her and sealed it up in the evidence bag again. “I’ll gather any other evidence I can to support this discussion before the meeting.”

Michael rested her head against her seat. “What do you think happens when people in the government and the military who’ve been briefed about shedim learn about all this? The ones who make sure we get money and resources to kill demons in addition to policing Eishei Kodesh?”

I swore softly. “If we’re not killing shedim like we claim, what’s to stop governments or the military from taking over and cutting us out?”

“Right now, Maccabees have power, respect, even adoration.” Michael’s echo of Ezra’s words to me about vampires took on a mocking edge. “And those in the know will do anything to keep it that way. The Authority isn’t complicit,” she said, her voice thick with disgust, “but out of arrogance for our own infallibility, laziness, or just plain willful ignorance, we fell for the longest con in history, and I’m not sure they’ll have the balls to face that.”

We hadn’t discussed our mother-daughter relationship, but for the first time, the director had treated me like an operative she respected, sharing insights and opinions with me. She’d found it hilarious that I stole Sire’s Spark too.

For all I accused Michael of reducing me to one thing, perhaps I’d done the same, placing her into some narrow definition. Tonight, I’d seen a new side of my mother, one who found humor in surprising situations and who had geeky fascinations.

It would be easy to blame her for never showing me those sides of her, but I wasn’t a child anymore. Perhaps I’d just never cared to look.

I said goodbye softly and got out of her car.

The Authority’s decision to act on this new information would come down to how strong their faith in making a difference was. Whether their hope that we mattered in this fight and had to do whatever it took to stem the tide of evil would prevail, even at the expense of admitting mistakes or not looking heroic and powerful.

My hand went to my purse with Sire’s Spark inside. Not handing the crystal over to the Authority to detect demon magic on the locks was the right decision because it could also be used to hunt people. Any half shedim who broke the law had to be given the opportunity to be tried and convicted within the justice system, same as any other person.

I started the engine, having mostly convinced myself, but as I pulled away from the pedestrian overpass, I glanced in my rearview mirror.

Michael had dropped her head in her hands. For the first time in my life, her larger-than-life essence was diminished. She looked fragile, struggling under the weight of her authority.

I almost hit the brakes.

However, she’d see comfort as pity and that was the last emotion she’d tolerate. Especially from me. The person who kept ripping the scales from her eyes.

But even with everything we discussed, I was stuck on a single thought as I drove away: my mother hadn’t asked me to give Sire’s Spark back.