Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

PIPER

As the car bumped along the cracked and pitted streets of Brinford, Piper held the briefcase from her father’s office firmly in her lap. Lyre was behind the wheel, and Ash was in the back seat beside the tote of food Lyre had collected, hungrily devouring a few snacks.

Impatience buzzed through her, making her twitchy, but she resisted the urge to open the briefcase. She would mix up the files trying to read them in the car, and she couldn’t risk sabotaging her only chance to find out who’d kidnapped her father.

However, she may have already met his kidnappers—those haemon weirdos who’d tried to abduct her. They’d claimed they could take her to her father, and it was suspicious that they knew he was missing. At the same time, “I know your parents” was the oldest child-napping trick in the book.

They could’ve been lying, but the chance that they’d been telling the truth was tormenting her. Should she have tried to question them or find out their identities? That would’ve been difficult considering how badly they’d outnumbered her and Lyre.

Sporadic streetlamps cast flickering shadows over the crumbling asphalt as Lyre navigated into a cluster of nearly identical apartment buildings, each one ten stories tall with rows of matching windows and water streaks down their weathered concrete exteriors. Only a smattering of windows were lit, while others were boarded up, covered from within, or shattered.

Lyre turned the car in to a parking lot. Garbage littered the pavement and overflowed from a pair of graffiti-covered dumpsters at the far end. Four anonymous figures in dark clothing huddled beneath the overhang of one apartment’s entrance, and Piper was glad when Lyre parked in front of a different one.

“A daemon I know owns a place here,” he said. “He won’t mind if we use it.”

The inside of the building was as drab and rundown as the outside. They took concrete stairs up to the eighth floor, where Lyre tapped on a unit’s door before opening it. If it had been locked, it must’ve been with magic and not a bolt.

While Lyre headed straight for the bathroom for a shower, Piper carried the briefcase to a dusty kitchen table barely large enough for two people. Ash sat in the rickety chair opposite her as she carefully unclasped the briefcase and lifted the lid. The mass of files looked even bigger crammed in the tiny square.

“What’s all this?” Ash asked with clear displeasure. He either wasn’t a fan of reading, or he wasn’t a fan of hundreds of pages of boring Consulate paperwork.

“There was a lot of stuff in the safe.” She eased the first three folders off the top. “I didn’t have time to go through it, so I grabbed all of it.”

She set the stack in front of him. His look of discontent intensified.

Selecting three more folders, she sat in her chair. “We should skim through the folders to get an idea of what each is about, and sort them into piles based on how useful they might be.”

Ash unenthusiastically opened the first folder.

“Do you ever have to do paperwork for your… jobs?” she asked as she thumbed through several pages of financial records. Why had her father put these in the safe? Not helpful.

Ash closed his first folder. “No. Where do you want the useless pile?”

She pointed to a corner of the table. “Never? How do you keep track of things?”

“I have to complete a job before getting another. It isn’t hard to keep track.”

“Hm.” She peeked at him through her lashes. “Where do you ‘get’ jobs?”

“They tend to fall into my lap.”

A subtle, harsh edge of sarcasm in his voice contradicted his stony expression, but she wasn’t sure what to ask next—or whether she should ask anything.

He pushed his chair back. Eyebrows rising, she watched him cross to the only window in the unit and shove it open. A cool wind gusted inside, and with a sweep of dark wings, Zwi soared through the opening and landed on Ash’s shoulder.

Piper squinted at him. How had he known Zwi was outside? How had Zwi known which window to fly to?

With the dragonet curled around the back of his neck, Ash took his seat again. Piper skimmed her second folder, which contained a list of suppliers and contacts. This she could understand her father keeping in the safe. Resources were hard to find.

Her next folder was huge and contained a list of daemons banned from Consulates across the continent, with a short description of them and what they’d done to get banned. She hesitated over it, then pushed it to the other side of the table to start a pile of potential suspects.

By the time Lyre joined them, she and Ash were halfway through the briefcase. Standing beside Ash, the incubus plucked a folder from the briefcase and perused the first few pages. His eyebrows crept up.

“This is fun.” He waved the folder. “I didn’t know Consulates compiled information like this.”

“Like what?” Piper asked.

“It says ‘high risk’ daemons. There are profiles on all sorts of unsavory individuals.” Lyre opened the folder again, flipping past a few pages. “Ooh, I’ve heard of this guy. You’ve run into him a few times, haven’t you, Ash?”

“Who?”

“The daeva spy.”

Ash scowled without looking up from his folder. “Oh, him.”

“What’s he like?” Lyre inquired curiously.

Ash thought for a moment. “Dangerous.”

Piper and Lyre exchanged looks of annoyed disappointment at that unilluminating response.

With a sigh, Lyre turned a few more pages. A derisive pfff escaped him. “What’s this loser doing in here?”

He turned the page to show Ash, and Piper glimpsed a photo of a blond-haired, golden-skinned, flawlessly beautiful young man. Her limbs locked, her breath sealed inside her lungs.

Lyre shook his head. “Micah lowers the collective reputation of incubi by merely existing. He’s a bottom feeder. Why would anyone add him to a list of legitimately notorious daemons?”

It took Piper a moment to realize Lyre’s question wasn’t rhetorical and was, in fact, aimed at her.

“Uh.” She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. “I’m not sure. He was hanging around the Consulate a lot last year. Maybe that’s why.”

Lyre studied her for a moment, then glanced at Ash. The draconian was also watching her. Did these two have some kind of built-in radar that triggered the moment she evaded a topic of conversation? Seriously, she did not need this right now.

“Add that folder to this pile here to look at again later,” she ordered stiffly. “We’re just sorting them right now, not reading them.”

Lyre did as she’d asked, and the three of them powered through the rest of the briefcase’s contents without any further detours.

Their potentially useful pile contained six folders. The first three included the list of banned daemons, records of current and former consuls from all Consulates across the continent, and the profiles for “high risk” daemons that included a page on the incubus Micah.

The last three files were about groups the Consulate was keeping an eye on. One was a small band of Overworld daemons—seraphim, specifically—who’d come to Earth to gather worshippers. Seraphim strongly resembled depictions of angels, with white-feathered wings, pale hair, and ivory skin, and their heavenly auras had fooled several hundred human followers. Quinn had assigned Consul Wade to find out what the seraphim were really up to, which Wade had attempted, but he hadn’t been able to figure out whether the seraphim were delusional about their supposed holiness or just really enjoyed having humans fawn over them.

Another was about a human establishment that offered free services to daemons—services of a personal nature. Piper remembered eavesdropping on Uncle Calder’s meeting with two of the group’s organizers. The women had come to ask if they could advertise their establishment to Consulate guests, pointing out that extra haemon babies meant more potential consuls in the future. Calder had practically thrown them out. Not only was a haemon breeding service super messed up, but Calder—and Piper—suspected their real motive was something other than increasing the Consulates’ talent pool.

The last file was about the Gaians, a sect of haemons who opposed daemon interference on Earth. They claimed to be fighting for human rights, but the notes—written in her father’s sharp scrawl—said their real motivation was banishing daemons so that haemons could become the most powerful beings on Earth. For one generation, at least. With no daemons, where would Earth’s future haemon overlords come from?

Chewing her lower lip, Piper tapped on the Gaian folder. “This is the largest group by far. Haemons who don’t want to be consuls don’t really have any other options. Humans don’t like them, and daemons…” She scrunched her nose. “Daemons think haemons are all weaklings and won’t include them in anything daemony.”

“Of course not,” Lyre drawled. “Daemony activities are for daemons only. It’s an exclusive club.”

Ash snorted. “The real issue is haemons think they’re one step down from daemons when they’re barely one step up from humans.”

Scowling, Piper jabbed the folder again. “If the Gaians learned about the Sahar, they’d want it. Not only to keep it out of daemon hands but also to make themselves more powerful.”

“They wouldn’t be able to use it,” Lyre pointed out.

“Neither can daemons,” she reminded him. “Didn’t you say the mere potential for unlimited power matters? The Gaians want to challenge daemons, and the only thing daemons respect is power.”

A painfully familiar voice shouting those same words echoed in her memory.

Ash’s gray eyes swept across her face. “What makes you so certain the Gaians would want the Sahar?”

Dragging her teeth over her lower lip, Piper let out a slow breath. “My mother… thought the Gaians had a point. I think she was initially investigating them, but then she started to sympathize.” She grimaced. “I overheard my parents arguing about it before she left for good. I don’t know how involved she was, though. She died less than a year later.”

Lyre and Ash were quiet, watching her.

“Anyway,” Piper said quickly, “the Gaian group is the largest, and if the file is right about their real ambitions, they’re crazy enough to attack a Consulate for a chance to get the Sahar for themselves.”

Ash rolled his shoulders. “But how would an anti-daemon group have set a choronzon on the Consulate?” He was quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t all fit, but it seems likely that the Gaians are involved somehow.”

She blinked. “You agree with me?”

He nodded. “You said the haemons at the Consulate tried to abduct you. If your mother had ties to the group before she died, they might think you’re a potential sympathizer.”

Remembering the haemon at the Consulate telling her she “belonged” with them, Piper shuddered. “So we need to find them. The file doesn’t say anything about a location.”

“We could go back to the Consulate,” Lyre suggested dubiously, “but I doubt they’ll still be there. Plus, news about the Stone will have spread even farther and more daemons will be descending on the Consulate. Not my thing. I like small, intimate get-togethers, not huge bloodbath parties.”

Ash shrugged like either worked for him.

“So what, then?” She turned to Ash. “Do you know anyone we could ask? Someone from your… line of work?”

Lyre snickered at her delicate phrasing.

Ash leaned back in his chair. “Anyone who knows me will know I might have the Sahar. But there’s one daemon I could ask.”

Lyre arched his eyebrows curiously. “Who are you thinking?”

“Lilith.”

“Please, no,” the incubus groaned.

“Who’s Lilith?” Piper asked impatiently.

“She’s the only daemon I know who wouldn’t go out of her way to get the Sahar.” At Piper’s questioning look, Ash added, “She has everything she wants already.”

“Yeah,” Lyre grumbled. “A nightclub full of sex-crazed humans. She’s the happiest succubus on the planet.”

A succubus? That explained Lyre’s lack of enthusiasm. According to consul wisdom, it was a bad idea to let an incubus and succubus in the same building, let alone allow them to interact. Piper didn’t know if it was an inter-caste rivalry or something else.

She fidgeted with the edge of the folder. “What makes you think Lilith will know about the Gaians?”

“It’s in her best interests to stay informed about everything going on in Brinford,” Ash said. “I’ll see her tonight and find out what she knows.”

“ We’ll see her tonight,” Piper corrected firmly.

“No.”

“Bad idea, Piper,” Lyre said. “You don’t want to set foot in the Styx. Besides, Ash works better alone.”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not. My father’s life depends on what we find out. I’m not staying behind by myself.”

“By yourself?” Lyre asked. “Were you planning to lock me in a closet?”

Ash frowned at her. She met his cool stare and didn’t flinch. There was no way he was going without her. No. Freaking. Way.

He pushed his chair back from the table. “Fine.”

She watched him cross the tiny apartment to the bathroom, her eyes narrowed. He’d given in too easily, and it made her uneasy.

The ring box was safely lodged in her shirt, its corners digging into her breasts. He didn’t know she had the Sahar. If he did, he’d already have stolen it from her. He wanted to find the Gaians for a chance at the Stone, and nothing else.

Somehow, she couldn’t convince herself it was that simple.