bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (20 page)

I felt the sharp pinch of relief in my gut. He wasn’t mad. “Sorry Raoul, it couldn’t be helped. I got myself into a jam that involved those things we were gonna’ talk about last night. I’m on my way to the Church of the Twined Hands now. Do you think you could meet me there?”

DD Raoul looked down screen as if he were checking his solar watch. He frowned. “I have a meeting in 10 minutes, it shouldn’t take long. Can I meet you there in about 40 minutes?”

I nodded gratefully. “Thanks, DD. I owe ya one.”

His dark face split into a weary grin. “Oh, no Astra. You owe me at least two. Lunch at my favorite restaurant might be the only way you can pay off your debts.”

I frowned. “I don’t see how your buying me lunch will settle my accounts, but if you insist, who am I to deny you.”

He laughed. “I’ll see you soon.” His face faded from the screen with a soft crackle.

~SC~

Bridge Street was busier than usual. Of course I’d only really been to the church in the dead of night before, when most sane people are locked safely in their cozy abodes. For a few minutes, I sat in the Viper and watched people come and go from the various buildings on the street. Then, when the street was pretty much empty, I got out of the Viper and climbed the well-worn stone steps to the front door.

The door was locked and the building looked sad and deserted. However, I wasn’t fooled. It had also looked deserted when I’d had my little coffee klatch with the evil Rayanne and her drooling minions the night before.

Glancing around to make sure no one was looking, I shot my thief’s laser into the keyhole and let myself in. Natural light shone through the gold-tinted round windows, which were set high in the stone walls and illuminated the staircase. I climbed swiftly, hoping the evil dark Barbie and her hairless, cranky pets weren’t still hanging around upstairs.

I followed the hallway to Deaver’s office and let myself in. The police tape had already been shredded away from the door, which had probably been locked at one time, but which currently stood open, its frame splintered and pulled away from the wall where the lock had been. Two inches of an old-fashioned deadbolt lock jutted away from the inside edge of the door. I briefly wondered what kind of strength would be needed to rip a deadbolt right through solid, age hardened oak like it was paper. I decided I didn’t want to know.

Naturally, the office was a mess, but it was the kind of mess that would have been left behind by the Strange Death squad rather than an intruder. Which made me wonder why the door had been bashed in.

Deaver’s desk was locked. I used my handy dandy laser again to remedy that little problem. Inside the large, shallow drawer in the center of the desk, I found a lot of lint and discarded writing utensils and not much else. The deeper drawers on the side were filled with old sermons and personal as well as church correspondence. I ruffled through these with little hope of finding anything useful. Then I turned to the information unit sitting on top of the desk.

The system was old and had only the most basic security layer in place, which I was able to bypass without even breaking a sweat. I quickly found the address log and Deaver’s assistant’s address within it. “Copy file.” I waited for the ancient machine to copy Susan Cooper’s address and personal information onto the cylindrical memory bar I’d inserted into it. While I waited, I did a visual scan of the office.

On the surface the room appeared to be unchanged from the day Deaver had met his brutal end there. However, I sent out my sensing power and quickly picked up the residual aura of some kind of dark presence. Surprisingly though, the evil was overlaid with a bright light that would indicate the other side had also visited recently. I frowned and jumped when the unit announced completion of the data transfer. Pulling the cylinder from the unit, I dropped it into my coat pocket and, looking at my watch, decided to dig around a bit more before DD Raoul showed up to spoil my fun.

It took me only a couple of minutes to find the records Deaver had been keeping on Prince Nille’s captivity. I began to scan the file, which was written in diary form, apparently from Deaver’s point of view. Just for grins I retrieved the memory bar from my pocket and re-inserted it into the unit. “Copy file.” The unit whirred as the information in Deaver’s diary file started to duplicate onto the memory cylinder:

Year 2096, eighth month, day five

I know I should not trust him, but somehow I do. He begged me again today to save him. His pale eyes filled with tears as he told me once more of the nightmares he’d been having. He said that “they” were responsible for the dreams and that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out.

Indeed, he does seem to be in a fragile state. He says the dreams are so real that he wakes up imagining that his flesh has been ripped apart. I promised him I was still searching for the key to his prison. He seemed so sad, as if he knew I would fail.

Year 2096, eighth month day six

He seemed stronger when I arrived this morning. He even managed to smile at me. He spoke to me of his world and told me that there were forces of good and evil at work that would soon change both the spirit and human worlds beyond return. He told me the Devil Court had been fractured for nearly two thousand years and would soon be forged into one Royal Court. The battle he found himself at the center of was for control of that ultimate ruling body. He seems to have no loyalty to his own people, indeed he seems not to trust them. I left him with my usual promise that I was making progress. I need to talk to Susan...

I scanned the next several entries, which were pretty much the same, to the last two.

Year 2096, eighth month, day twenty-eight

Today, when I took him his food, I found him lying in a pool of blood. He barely raised his head to look at me as I said my prayers for him. He wouldn’t speak. I fear he won’t last much longer. They had visited him again. I heard his screams from my office. My prayers don’t seem to be helping. Perhaps my God will not help him. I fear for his soul. I have decided to contact the woman, the halfling. She is my last hope.

Year 2096, eighth month, day twenty-nine

I had a dream last night. An angel of God spoke to me and told me how to break Nille’s prison. I sensed fear in the angel’s manner and asked him what he was afraid of. He told me the forces I was dealing with would prove too much for me, that I would die, but that I would have a place in Heaven if I could save this one soul. My dream was shattered when something dark flew at the angel and the two spirits, the dark and the light, spun away in a horrendous struggle. I woke in a sweat, sure that my dream had been purely symbolic. But I will try what the angel told me to try. I have nothing to lose.

~SC~

I heard the heavy door at the front of the church slam shut and jumped. DD Raoul’s footsteps sounded heavy and slow on the staircase. He called out to me as he reached the second floor hallway. “System off, remove previous entry from memory.” I quickly stood up and walked away from the information unit, hoping I didn’t look as guilty as I felt. I called out to him, “In the office.” I met Raoul at the door.

He whistled and gave the door a once over. Crouching down, he ran his hand over what appeared to be claw marks on the wood doorframe, a couple of feet from the floor. I hadn’t noticed those. “Looks like our friends came back.”

I nodded. “I ran into them upstairs last night.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Them? More than one? And you survived?”

“Don’t ask.”

He gave me a long, measuring look and then a slow smile. “You are amazing, Mx. Phelps. Now, you can buy me lunch and we’ll talk about what you need from me.”

I frowned as I flipped off the light and followed him out into the hall. “Whatever happened to you buying me lunch?”

DD Raoul wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gave me a friendly squeeze. “Now you know it’s your turn, Astra. I bought last time.”

“That didn’t count, it was a rapid restaurant.”

He merely shrugged. “Rapid or not, I paid. It counted.”

I shivered as we left the church and he glanced sideways at me. “You cold?”

“Yeah.” I didn’t want to tell him I’d felt a current of evil as we’d closed the door and started down the steps. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something shimmer and turned my head. A human-like form was standing in the shadow made by one of the tall, stainless steel buildings as it towered over its squat, stone neighbor.

The figure in the shadows was tall and slim and held itself stiffly, as if in pain. It was only there for a second, but before it faded away I saw its eyes. They were pale blue and filled with pain. I’d seen those eyes only once before. They belonged to my lost Prince.

I ran toward the spot where the shadow had been, but Prince Nille had already shimmered away by the time I got there. DD Raoul pounded up behind me as I closed my eyes and threw out my sensing power.

A blast of arctic air hit me full force as I opened my senses to the aura in that shadowed spot. Although Prince Nille had gone, there was magic in the air where he’d appeared, I could feel it. Concentrating hard, I extended my arms and probed the core of my power, pulling it outward. The power surged away from me in electrically charged fingers to saturate the atmosphere around my body. On some level, I heard DD Raoul gasp and felt him move outside the sphere of power, but I was beyond the physical plane and couldn’t respond to him.

Shrill, probing whispers of air swirled around me, touching me with icy tendrils that coated my power and muted it. From somewhere in the midst of the swirling tendrils a voice was emerging. At first, the words were overwhelmed by the whispering sounds and were hard to understand. They danced in the swirls of icy wind like sheets of loose paper in a storm and finally emerged one by one, filled with pain and fear.

“...save... spirits flown... must intervene... power... much power... I have failed... lost...”

Though the words emerged in a disjointed and scattered fashion, I could easily read the message of despair they carried.

The tendrils suddenly disappeared and the frigid air that had contained the vision leached away until the natural warmth of the day touched my flesh again. I regained my sense of reality on a frantic gasp. In that first instant of return, I found myself struggling to breathe.

DD Raoul grabbed my arms, holding me up as my knees buckled. “Lean on me, Astra.” He led me to the stone steps of the church and helped me sit. The steps had gathered the heat of the sun into their concrete pores and seemed eager to share it with me as I sat there shivering. After a few minutes my flesh started to regain its natural warmth and I could think clearly again. “Shit.”

Raoul was sitting next to me on the steps, rubbing my arms and staring into my face with worried eyes. “What the hell happened there, Astra?”

I turned to look at him and shook my head. “Hades if I know, DD. But I think I just communicated on some level with a missing devil prince. And I’m afraid he might have been dead.”

~SC~

DD Raoul followed me and the Viper home to make sure we made it all right and then followed me into my food service area to make sure he got some of the strong, black coffee I was going to make.

We sat companionably sipping for a while until some of the color returned to my face and then he acted like a good Detective and started asking questions. I didn’t have a lot of answers for him about what had happened outside the Church of the Twined Hands, but I did tell him about my strange encounter with the evil Barbie and her brain-dead fan club the night before. I left out the part about not knowing who’d tucked me safely into my bed. I didn’t think I could stand another of those raised eyebrow events right at the moment.

Then, when guilt started to set in, I told him about the entries in Deaver’s electronic diary I’d illegally accessed.

DD Raoul leveled his hard, brown cop’s eyes on me and said nothing as I explained how I’d breached security on the information unit and read the files. He didn’t speak when I admitted I’d gotten Deaver’s assistant’s name and address from the unit and copied it so I could find her. He simply stared at me until I gave up babbling and offered him my arms, palms up. “Okay, just take me in now, Raoul. I broke the law. I’m guilty. Arrest me.”

Having made his point with nary a spoken word, he lowered his eyes and went back to sipping his coffee.

“So are you gonna help me find this Susan Cooper woman?”

He flicked a spilled drop of coffee off his dark blue uniform jumper. “Oh yeah.”

I grinned. “Great!”

He looked up then and what I saw in his eyes ripped the grin right off my face.

“No, it’s not great, Astra. It’s not great at all. You see, your Mx. Cooper, or what’s left of her, is piled up in a drawer at death central right now, with a crematorium tattoo on her left foot.”

I felt my brief affair with hope leave me as my stomach clenched. “Shit.” I thought about it awhile longer and then slammed my fist on the table between us. “That just sucks.”

He drained his coffee and stood up, arcing a dark eyebrow at me and nodding. “Yeah, I’m sure Mx. Cooper would agree wholeheartedly with that assessment.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Tuck and Roll

The silvered wings did whip her face, until it was quite red,

And then the gilded Angel of God, did pop her on the head.

It turned out that, among the horrible holograms DD Raoul had been looking at that morning, had been one showing the tattered remains of Mx. Susan Cooper. Mx. Cooper, it seemed, had been unfortunate enough to be in a well-known demon nightclub when things went a little sour and a fight broke out. According to Raoul, one of the club’s younger demons, who got his kicks out of terrifying the clientele, let his mask slip just enough to send a pretty, young woman running for the exit, screaming for her mommy in language only a sailor’s mother would appreciate. The demon that’d started the ruckus didn’t seem to like having his date escape him so easily and had gone after her. This caused several of the non-demon male clientele to come to her rescue and the place exploded into a party mix of teeth, fists, claws and various flying bodily fluids.