Chapter 3

Garroting Bratwurst Demon with the broken Zen Zapper’s wires was a great way to work out tension. Cherry even cheered in my head—and assured me that my scales would keep me safe.

I had to trust her because choking the demon out this way was a close-contact sport. With a grunt, I twisted the wires tighter by one last death-inducing millimeter.

The wires slid cleanly through the demon’s neck. Or rather the section of her sausage body approximating that part.

Her skin smoothed back into place; the shedim was uninjured.

I stared dumbly at the wires in my hand.

She grabbed my forearms and flipped me to the ground, propelled by a rage-fueled adrenaline rush. Her repeated kicks to my ribs were no piece of cake to endure, and her long toes gripping my side briefly with each strike made me shudder, but I wasn’t compelled to aid and abet her in my own destruction, so there was that.

I rolled to my feet, danced in close, and planted a swift right hook to her side.

She undulated and stumbled sideways.

I pressed my advantage, following up with two swift jabs between her eyes that made her jiggle like a bowl of jelly.

The shedim hissed and curled her long fingers into fists, but her arms were still stumpy, and it was like watching a T-rex go two rounds. She tried, bless her, she really did, but she’d never met a fight move that she didn’t telegraph, and I easily avoided her clumsy attacks.

I wailed on the fucker, pouring out my fury at the pointless deaths. Those damn snowshoes I’d been forced to endure were also worth venting about. The drug producers could have plowed the single dirt road leading to their property, but nooooo. We had to do the trek from hell, while the criminals would get a nice, cushy helicopter ride back to HQ.

The shedim smashed her forehead against mine and I stumbled backward, coshing my skull. My ears rang, the room swinging nauseatingly around me.

I slammed the heel of my boot into what would have been the Achilles of a person, nodding in satisfaction when the demon crumpled to the ground, trying to protect that spot from further assault. Methinks I found her kill spot.

I debated using the Maccabee ring that I’d liberated from a half shedim on a previous case. Its owner, Maud Liu, turned out to be my slightly younger half sister. She’d requested the deathbed token from her Maccabee godmother under false pretenses, intending to use it to kill our father.

You know, the demon with whom my ex was running the Copper Hell, a dangerous gaming hall located on a megayacht.

The Brady Bunch, we weren’t.

I’d used the magic cocktail in Maud’s ring twice, with two more doses available, but this was an official Maccabee assignment. Better to use my ring now since refilling it wouldn’t raise eyebrows and save Maud’s stash for hunting demons to feed Cherry.

I flung an arm out for balance because neither the ringing in my ears nor the dizziness was subsiding. If this damned shedim had given me tinnitus, I’d?—

What? Cherry asked in amusement. Hunt her down and kill her twice?

Maybe , I thought petulantly. I ground my knee into Bratwurst’s hip and readied my strike. The magic in my Maccabee ring would confirm the Achilles as her kill spot and end her.

She screeched and threw me off before I could activate it, causing me to bash my hip against the cage, and snatched up Edward’s discarded knife.

I tensed, ready to block her lunge and strike, however clumsy it might be.

“I’m not going back!” She plunged the knife into the back of her foot.

Right into her kill spot.

I’d had many emotionally intense moments when time seemed to slow down: through anger, terror, even passion. Not once had disbelief been on that list, and yet I’d swear reality ground to a snail’s pace. Every detail was as clear as if it was allowed its own moment in the spotlight: the blade sinking halfway into the shedim’s foot, her mouth pressed tight in determination or pain, the cracks spiderwebbing across her sausage-casing skin.

Time snapped back like a rubber band. The shedim exploded, brown bits hitting the ground like crispy pork fat before being sucked up by the dirt.

I toed at the spot where she’d made her last stand, my brows furrowed. There wasn’t even a stain to commemorate her existence, so expecting answers was a stretch.

How about just one answer, universe? To one very perplexing question.

Since when did shedim commit suicide?

Yeah, her fighting skills were laughable, and she hadn’t been able to compel me into hurting myself and weakening me, not even to boost her own strength, but still. She should have given her all to a last-ditch attempt to stay alive, because when it came to self-protective instincts, shedim had the market cornered.

With the threat gone, I returned to my human form, my ears ringing and my head throbbing.

A demon suicide unnerved the shit out of me. Their behavior was unpredictable, but in a consistently violent, chaotic, or at least mindfucky way.

Unassailable truth number one: they hurt others. Not themselves.

And what was with her final words? Where didn’t she want to go back to? Okay, two questions, universe. Get on that .

I hurried over to Jasmine, who remained in shock but alive, and helped her to her feet. Through a combination of verbal encouragement and taking most of her weight, I half walked, half dragged her out up the stairs into the kitchen, her cuffs jangling with each step.

I wanted to rail against her for making this awful drug to begin with, never mind bringing a demon into the production chain for the worst version imaginable, but she was suffering and I couldn’t harden my heart to her plight.

“Francesca? Paul?” I assisted Jasmine into the living room.

Whelp, I had my answer as to why the rest of the team hadn’t come to our assistance.

Paul had used his orange flame magic to suck the heat out of Francesca’s body. She was as blue as a Smurf, her teeth chattering, and her body bowed, but while she was down, she wasn’t out.

She’d taken the creative route and reverse engineered her healing abilities to break Paul’s right leg, which he dragged limply along. One of his arms was also twisted and bent at a grotesque angle.

Kaden was dead. Either Francesca’s healing magic hadn’t been enough, or she’d aborted the attempt when she became lost to those demonic urges herself.

I sat Jasmine down on a ratty sofa. She was so far beyond registering my presence that it was like moving the limbs of a doll, albeit one that now hummed “Only You” along with the radio.

“Hey, gang.” I turned the radio off.

Jasmine began shrieking, so I hit the power button again, turning up the volume until she calmed down. Ooookay, no radio silence for this one.

Neither of my teammates reacted to the commotion. Francesca sluggishly prodded Paul and held up her hand.

The temperature around us plummeted and I coughed on the freezing air, my breath coming out in white gusts.

I sprinted toward them.

Paul forced the heat of the room into my team leader’s fingers so suddenly and with such force that they shriveled like wieners left to burn.

How nice. They’d teamed up to better achieve their insane desires of inflicting maximum damage on their own persons.

I stepped forward then back, loath to hurt them further, but even more loath to let them finish each other off. Edward was dead; the rest of my team was getting out of here alive. And with my Zen Zapper a useless paperweight down in the root cellar, I had no way to stun them out of their compulsion.

Choking it was, a move that was more reliable than trying to punch them unconscious. I’d simply put each person in a sleeper hold to cut off the blood flow on either side of their neck and prevent oxygen going to their brains.

Risking that they’d be too far gone to notice my scales, I once more armored my hands and arms. Then I sidled up behind Paul, put my foot into the back of his knee, and lowered him down to my level. I tightly wrapped my arm around the front of his neck, grabbing my shoulder to secure the grip, and flexed my arms to begin oxygen restriction. My other arm got pressed behind Paul’s throat, leaving no gap in my chokehold.

Confident there was no way for him to break free, I squeezed from the sides of my chest, arms tightening, while leaning slightly forward.

Paul coughed. Three seconds later, he was out cold.

Judging by Francesca’s non-reaction to her subordinate choking out a team member, I could have taken my sweet time.

I lowered Paul to the floor.

Francesca prodded him with her toe, giving an annoyed growl that he wasn’t keeping up his end of their mess-each-other-up arrangement. The new friends with benefits.

A moment later, I had two unconscious team members at my feet.

Was nearly asphyxiating your teammates mandated Maccabee training? Hell no. Darsh had taught Sachie and me these moves. A vamp was the perfect person to practice choking on until we were positive we could do it properly. We’d also executed the moves on each other to make sure.

Not fun.

I sprinted for the comms in our backpacks outside, along with a couple more pairs of nulling cuffs for Francesca and Paul, and some latex gloves for me to prevent any physical contact because I had to lose the shedim scales. At least that happened fairly quickly and easily.

The wait for our air evac rescue was interminable. I’d insisted on speaking to healers at HQ the second I sent my emergency request for assistance, and they talked me through all I could do with the first aid kits in the backpacks.

I split my time between Jasmine, and Francesca and Paul, who’d regained consciousness. All three were in shock and unable to process or respond to anything, save for Jasmine clinging to those golden oldies on the radio, humming along with empty eyes.

It was like sitting in a room full of zombies, set to an oddly nostalgic soundtrack.

Thankfully, none of the Eishei Kodesh tried to hurt themselves further.

When they were as stable as I could make them, I dragged Edward’s body upstairs to be with the rest of us. I owed it to him, though I positioned him behind some curtains, out of sight of the others. They were traumatized enough.

I left the two other mangled corpses downstairs. Maccabee HQ was sending a helicopter with fresh meat to deal with the cleanup.

Cherry chuckled. Nice phrasing .

I winced, but I was too tired to feel bad. I slid down a wall onto the floor, gripping a half-empty bottle of water. My clothes stuck to me in cold, sweaty patches, my back throbbed, and my stomach was so knotted up in grief and worry that the power bar I’d been commanded to eat while waiting for the helicopter was nothing more than cardboard lumps in my belly.

I zoned into a loop of grim thoughts, examining every second of this mission for all the places where we should have made different choices. By the time the cavalry arrived, the whir of the rotor blades slicing the air, all I wanted to do was crawl into my bed and pull the covers over my head.

Yeah, well, that was not to be, because the second the chopper landed in the faint pre-dawn light on the roof at HQ in Vancouver, I was whisked inside for a debrief.

First, though, a level three Maccabee forensic tech divested me of my jacket, snow pants, and gloves, wanting to test for any traces of the demon secretion. If this shedim was the same type as the one who’d originally created Crackle, we were screwed because there was very little information on that first demon in our records.

It made a dangerous drug. Maccabees found it. Maccabees killed it. In hindsight, they should have taken the time to question the demon, but twenty-twenty and all that.

Our Maccabee tech would get fuck all from my clothing since I hadn’t worn the jacket or gloves during that gong show, though I claimed to have had both on until after the demon was dead.

I’d worn latex gloves from the first aid kit while triaging the others, which kept me from making skin contact and being affected once I lost my scales. The gloves were in an evidence bag, which I also handed over.

Edward’s blood was on my snow pants. I told the tech they could keep them.

A healer was also present to check me out. Her treatment of my mild concussion was worse than the injury itself, and I was almost grateful when Director Michael Fleischer showed up to personally take my report, given the gravity of the situation.

Michael led me to one of the interrogation rooms—supposedly because it was closer than her office.

Riiiiight.

I had no doubt that she’d listened to the medical emergency details I provided when I first contacted HQ, but despite me hanging half-off the hard metal chair in exhaustion, she had me take her through every step of the events multiple times. To be fair, that was standard procedure and I recited everything as honestly as I could.

Emphasis on “as I could.”

Finally, she stopped the recorder.

I yawned, then covered my mouth with an apology, but I was so ready for bed.

Michael clicked her silver pen, studying the yellow legal pad she’d made notes on. “Just a couple of clarifications.”

“Sure.”

There were more than a couple, but there was only one point she kept circling back to, slipping her reframed question in at different points like it would catch me off guard.

I should have caught on immediately when she took us off the record. There was a shedim involved, and a straightforward mission had ended in tragedy. I blamed fatigue for my taking so long to clue in.

“You’re really fascinated by the durability of my clothing, Michael.” I crossed my arms. “Looking for some advice for your next extreme winter sport adventure?”

She tucked a strand of silver hair behind her ear, her makeup impeccable and nary a wrinkle on her suit, despite the early hour. “I was thinking of doing some backcountry skiing on my next trip up to Whistler. Do you think the gloves you wore while fighting would be suitable for the conditions or would I need protective gear not traditionally found in stores?”

I leaned back with a tight smile. “Would it matter what you used so long as at the end of the day it kept you healthy and whole?”

“No, but if the rest of my party suffered from exposure, and I walked out unscathed, there’d be questions as to how I survived. Especially if one died.”

My expression hardened. “I tried to save Edward.”

She actually blinked. “I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.”

“No.” I laughed bitterly. “You just meant to imply a whole host of other things, none of them being ‘Thank goodness my daughter is okay.’”

She opened her mouth, but I held up a hand to cut off her protest.

“Sorry,” I said. “‘Thank goodness my operative is okay.’ I know you don’t like to be familiar at work.”

There had been a short period of time on a case a couple of months ago where my mother believed I’d been killed when my car exploded. The first time she’d seen me afterward, I’d merited an entire shoulder squeeze. Apparently, that underwhelming gesture was supposed to speak volumes about her relief.

She didn’t chide me for my snarky comment. But she didn’t disagree either.

“To answer your question,” I continued, shoving down the familiar flare of anger that she induced, “most people would chalk my well-being up to training and intelligence and leave it at that.”

“Perhaps.” She drummed her pen against the bolted-down metal table. “But I’m not most people. I’m responsible for everyone, and it’s my duty to understand every element so I can make sure nothing like this happens again.”

“I didn’t make skin contact,” I said blandly. “Not much else I can say.” I failed to stifle a yawn. “With all due respect, Michael, Francesca and Paul will be out of commission for the foreseeable future, so you can grill me on protective gear, or you can let me go home and get some sleep so that I can start investigating why the shedim killed herself.”

Michael wrote a final note on her pad. “What does a demon taking themselves out of the picture matter?”

I groaned. The one crucial piece of evidence and she wasn’t picking up on it. “Because that’s not how shedim behave.”

“If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, Aviva, do not anthropomorphize demons. She was badly wounded, correct?”

“Correct,” I said stiffly.

“Was there any possibility of her escaping?”

I clenched my fists, my mother’s patently patient voice setting my teeth on edge. “No.”

“There you go. The shedim had no way out. She no doubt chose to die on her own terms than at the hands of a human. One last effort on her deathbed to assert power and sow chaos. What matters is that a credible threat is gone.”

“But—”

“But nothing.” Michael flipped the pages of the legal pad closed and set the pen on top, her expression inscrutable. Not for the first time, I wished that my mom was an open book, free and easy with her praise and with her sorrows. If she wore her heart on her sleeve, I wouldn’t have half the problems I did with her. Then again, she wouldn’t be the intelligent role model who, for all her parental failings, I admired the hell out of.

She’d used her yellow flame purifying magic to root out a decades-long systemic corruption here in Vancouver and became one of the youngest Maccabee directors, with a reputation for being a bastion of righteousness, fighting the good fight on every front.

Sucked for me that I was included in that last part.

“One of my operatives is dead, as are three other people,” the director said. “The only thing I care about is gathering as much information as possible to mitigate any deaths in similar situations.” She looked at me expectantly.

“Was this the same type of shedim as the one who originally made Crackle?” I ticked items off on my fingers. “How specifically were the victims affected? How did the Eishei Kodesh find the demon to imprison her?”

“Exactly. We’ll have to wait until Jasmine is cleared to be interviewed for that last point. Hopefully it won’t be long because the Authority will want her transferred to Sector A.”

I shivered at the mention of the maximum-security jail where people who colluded with demons or rogue vamps were sent. Its location was secret, as was its existence from the general public—and to Maccabees below a level two status. Yeah, achieving that goal had come with a hell of a shock with this new information.

Jasmine had been taken to the healers to treat her shock and injuries. She’d seen me as Cherry, and me as me , and I hadn’t figured out what lie to spin to make her believe the first part hadn’t happened.

I had to do something, however, in case one operative’s deepest secret was a fair trade to make her life in Sector A more palatable.

“I’ll follow up with her as soon as possible,” I said.

“You’re not pursuing this.”

I fell back in my chair in disbelief. “You can’t seriously think I wouldn’t!”

My mother’s voice softened. “You’ve been through a lot tonight, Aviva. You need to go home, rest, and then have a session with Sarah.”

It was standard procedure for Maccabees to see our top psychologist and be cleared for duty after a traumatic event, but I wasn’t going to be sidelined. Not on this. The drug bust had spiraled so far out of my control and resulted in so much death and panic that I had to do something. If I walked away now, I’d always have nightmares about today. But if I could put an end to this, then maybe I’d be able to sleep properly again.

Maybe.

“Don’t take me off this. I need answers. Need closure,” I amended. “See what Sarah says after our session tomorrow, but if she’s good with me continuing, then don’t take this away from me.”

“All right. Provided Sarah signs off, you can work with Cécile to close this case. Shedim are the Spook Squad’s jurisdiction, and we’ll wrap up the case faster with two of you on it.”

The Québécois vampire was the senior member of Vancouver’s Spook Squad, and yes, this should go to her, but I was raw and flayed from tonight’s shitstorm, and I wanted to work with someone I was close to. Not someone my mother was foisting on me as a babysitter.

“Can I have Sachie?” I fiddled with the hem of my shirt, trying to keep a brave face and not sound like I was begging, but I didn’t have it in me to act tough right now. I wanted my best friend by my side. “Please,” I said quietly.

She finally nodded. “Meantime, I’ll have Louis type up what you’ve told me. When you have the other answers, you can complete the report.”

All in all, that wasn’t one of our more fractious interactions. I’d gotten my partner of choice, and I hadn’t come clean about Cherry’s appearance.

I made it as far as the door before Michael spoke again.

“Don’t overtax yourself.” There was the tiniest pause before “overtax.”

Any bystander would hear a show of concern from a leader for her team member or a mother for her child, but I was fluent in every tiny flicker of Michael’s gaze, each minuscule stress of a syllable, and every weighty hesitation.

“I won’t.” I nodded, playing it like I took her words at face value, even though inside I was seething, a lifetime of her teachings playing on repeat in my head. Don’t expose your shedim side .

Don’t expose me.

I’d seen how far she’d go to make sure Cherry’s existence was never revealed.

My mother had stolen Sire’s Spark, a magic artifact rumored to possess powerful healing abilities, from a Trad gallery hosting an exhibit including debunked supernatural items. All the items had been found and returned, save for that one, which was currently hidden in my mother’s safe. Though not for much longer.

The more insidious ability I suspected the crystal capable of? Sussing out half shedim, placing us at the mercy of those who sought to use us—or kill us. Had she taken it out of fear, or perhaps a desire to protect me? Maybe, but it was hard to reconcile either of those motivations with how quickly and insistently she’d ordered me not to investigate who was truly behind the deaths of some murdered half shedim. Or, in her own words, “No one cares about infernals!”

I tamped down a mean little smile as I left the room. We’d see just who cared about infernals by the time I was through.