Hearts of Darkness (9 page)

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Authors: Kira Brady

BOOK: Hearts of Darkness
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“Adam—” Caroline said.
“You and me and Caro, we're on the low end of the totem pole. No one cares about you as long as you keep your head down and stay out of the way. But once you throw in your lot with either team—the prudish, but powerful animal gods, or the dangerously seductive soul stealers—then your clock is wound and the timer set.”
“That would be the Kivati and the Drekar?” Kayla asked.
Caroline drew in a sharp breath. “The squeaky wheel gets the ax,
Adam
.”
“Exactly.” He offered Kayla the pipe. “So join us. Open your mind. Watch dead musicians through the smoke. Search the horizon at dusk for unnaturally large flying birds. But it's good to be seen as delusional. You know how these things go, don't you?”
Kayla refused the pipe. “Not really.”
“My old man calls me a pothead, and I'm okay with that,” Adam said. “I don't have a leg to stand on. Because I am a nobody, I'm not a threat. I like my little pleasures on this side of the Gate.”
Someone might kill her if she asked too many questions, was that it? Is that what had happened to Desi? “Can you tell me about my sister?”
“Desiree,” Adam said. “We're all a bit jealous of her. With Norgard as a tutor, she's getting a damn fine education. She'll be big someday, you can count on it. Kiss ass and live forever.”
Present tense. Kayla took a deep breath. “I'm sorry, you must not have heard. She's dead. She died almost two days ago.”
Adam gave her a long look and drew another breath from the pipe. He must have known already. He let it out slowly. “Did she now?”
Caroline slapped him on the arm. She turned to Kayla. “Sorry for your loss. May her spirit rest peacefully on the other side.”
“Thanks.” Kayla wondered if Desi had been afraid to die. Death frightened Kayla. Perhaps that's why she had studied medicine, to seek some control over life and death. Useless, really. Modern science had found ways to postpone death, but couldn't put it off forever. Perhaps Desi had found comfort in the supernatural, because it meant death wasn't an ending. It was only a change of status. Kayla wasn't sure she believed that yet, but these kids obviously did. Hart, too. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Who her best friends were? Who she might have gone to if she had a problem? A professor, maybe, or—”
“Norgard,” Caroline said. “She was always talking about him. He knows everything. He's got the power to fix any problem she might have had.”
Kayla needed to talk to Norgard. The man had answers. But if Desi had been running from him, he wasn't going to be forthcoming. “Anyone else?”
Adam settled back against the booth, his limbs relaxed, his eyes half closed. “There was a girl she mentioned once or twice. Was teaching her Norse mythology, I think. What was her name?”
Caroline took the pipe from Adam's limp fingers. She tapped it against her lips. “I saw her once, but her face was shadowed. Short. Had a cat following her.”
Kayla filed that information away. A short girl with a cat. Why couldn't anything be easy?
Adam seemed to have fallen asleep. Caro's heavy eyelids indicated she would soon follow. Kayla turned to go.
“Adam's wrong, you know,” Caroline called after her.
Kayla stopped and glanced back. “About?”
“He's a cynic, because it's cool. It doesn't take great magic or wisdom to cheat death.” She blew another smoke ring. The opium lamp lit her face from the bottom. Her eyes suddenly looked older, and a bit sad. “‘For love is immortality.'”
Kayla gave her a brief smile. Desi had been a romantic too. All clues seemed to point to Norgard, and his reputation was growing bigger by the minute. She wondered if Desi had loved him.
She didn't find anyone else who knew her sister. She needed a break, and found her way to the ladies' room. The lavish powder room was surprisingly empty—a welcome respite from the noise and heat. A brass, nine-headed dragon statue stood at one end of the room. It was serpentlike, but with glittering wings that stretched out to the ceiling. She recognized the hydra from Greek mythology. Each head arched over a shell-shaped basin. The mouths were closed, but when she drew in front of one, the jaws snapped open with a small whir and steaming water poured out.
The toilets were, thankfully, more traditional. While she was in the stall, someone else entered the room, shoes
clickity-clacking
on the tile floor. Whoever it was slammed the stall next to her and commenced vomiting.
Kayla exited her stall and washed her hands in the sink. She wondered if she should assist. Alcohol poisoning was a serious danger. She'd seen her share of deaths in the ER. After a minute the sounds tapered off to dry heaves.
She tapped on the door gently and asked, “Can I help you?”
“Go away,” came back the slightly breathy voice. “Ugnh.”
A teenage girl with pin-straight apricot hair and a black leather miniskirt that barely covered her butt stumbled out a moment later. She was classically lovely, with an oval face, wide cheekbones, and large blue eyes. Her nose was perhaps a trifle too long. Fishnet stockings covered her impossibly long legs. Her cute high-heeled half boots jingled with small bells at the ankles.
“Ohhh, I feel gross,” she moaned. “I'm quite drunk.”
That much was obvious. The girl's eye makeup had smudged circles below her eyes. She clutched the shell washbasin to hold herself up. With her free hand she cupped water from the spewing dragon and rinsed out her mouth.
“You want me to call someone for you?” Kayla asked.
“No!” The girl straightened and wobbled. “No. No-no-no-no-no. They'll find me soon enough. I don't wanna go back yet. I'm not done being terribly improper.”
“Improper?” If she were back home, Kayla would probably find the bartender and discuss the medical and social ramifications of underage drinking. But this wasn't Philly. This was a strange place with strange rules.
The girl nodded with the earnestness of the very drunk. She lunged toward Kayla and threw an arm around her shoulders. “You'll be my friend, right? Friends don't turn friends in. I haven't been this amused in
aaaaages
.”
“Sure. Why don't you drink some more water? How many alcoholic drinks have you consumed?”
“It was just tea. Very proper. But I think he spiked it. He keeps pouring me another. Don't have to pay for a thing.”
“Let me call someone for you—”
“No!” The girl let go of Kayla and fell against the sinks. “You promised.”
Kayla hadn't, but it seemed rather irrelevant.
“Want some chocolate?” the girl asked. “I just
llllove
chocolate.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small box covered in gold foil.
Kayla's stomach rumbled painfully. When had she last eaten? A day ago? She hadn't felt like eating, not when grief clawed its way through her gut. Suddenly, she felt a bit faint.
“He doesn't look evil,” the girl mused, popping a chocolate in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. “He's too pretty. Pretty. Pretty. Pretty. Don't you think?” She held out the box. The chocolates lay temptingly in gold foil. Each one heart-shaped with six red dots decorating the top.
Kayla politely refused, though she was starving. She didn't accept candy from strangers.
“You sure? Persephone's Delight. They're shpecial. Special.” The girl laughed. She picked up a fine linen towel embroidered with a B, wet it in the sink, and rubbed at the smudges around her eyes, but only succeeded in spreading them farther over her wide cheekbones. “I didn't ask to be the Crane Wife, you know. Didn't want to. I thought Crow, yeah, or Eagle. My parents are birds, you see? But not a
Crane
.”
A Kivati
, Kayla realized. She tried to imagine this slight girl turning into a giant bird, and failed. No one had ever accused her of an overactive imagination. On the bright side, at least this delusional person wasn't over six-feet and packing heat. This was her chance to get data without getting her head blown off.
Pumping a drunken teenager for information. She stooped to new lows. “What's wrong with a Crane?”
The girl made a face. “What thirteen-year-old wants to be engaged?”
“You're thirteen?” Kayla asked, horrified.
The girl—who was too filled out to be thirteen—laughed. “Nooo, no. I Changed then. Changed into a Crane. Lady be damned.”
“You Change first at puberty?”
“Duh.” The girl grew solemn, her moods shifting like the wind. “Only a few more weeks till the wedding. Eighteen. Happy birthday to me.”
Thank goodness. A young woman, not a child. Still, too young to be married. Too young to be drinking, for that matter. She seemed resigned to her fate. “They can't make you marry someone you don't want to marry.” At least it was true for humans.
“What planet are you from?”
“You can declare independence at eighteen,” Kayla suggested. “The courts won't allow your parents to marry you off.”
“Shhh. He's got spies everywhere.” The girl lowered her voice and glanced furtively around the bathroom. They were alone. “There are no courts. The Raven Lord makes the laws. He is the law.” She dropped the towel in the sink. Her lower lip trembled. “I don't wanna marry him. He frightens me. Have you seen him? Frightening. He only wants my ovaries anyways.”
This girl knew the Raven Lord, the mysterious figure listed on the business card Desi had left behind. Finally, after hours of searching, a clue landed in Kayla's lap in the bathroom of all places. Did the girl know about the key? Kayla tried not to let her sudden, desperate excitement make her smile too sharp.
Slowly
, she warned herself. She couldn't scare the girl off. She offered her hand to shake and tried to keep her tone light. “Sorry, let me introduce myself. Kayla. What's your name?”
The girl looked startled, then delighted. “You don't know who I am? That's splendid. Splendid. Call me Lucy, my friends do.”
“Pleasure.”
“Have a chocolate?”
“I don't know—”
“Come on. We're celebrating.” The chocolate box shook in Lucy's hand.
Kayla hesitated. There was a knock on the powder room door.
“Who's it?” Lucy called out.
“Lucia, my darling,” a man's voice said. “Come out and play.”
Lucy—or Lucia—giggled. “He thinks he's so dashing, but I know his shecret. Secret.” She wrapped her arm around Kayla and led her to the door. “He just wants to screw me to spite the Raven Lord,” she whispered conspiratorially. “And for that stupid prophesy. No one wants me for me.”
Lucia swept Kayla out of the ladies' room and into the dark club. Beneath the red lights the walls glittered like rubies. A towering blond man waited for them. His elegant midnight-black suit and shiny high boots would have looked ridiculously over the top on anyone else, but he pulled them off with an elegant old-world charm that was somehow Regency rake and Viking marauder all rolled into one. A strange lens surrounded by brass gears covered his right eye.
“Would you do me the honor of an introduction?” he asked, the perfect gentleman.
“Regent Norgard, may I present Kayla,” Lucia said with a sudden show of manners. “Kayla, may I introduce Sven Norgard.”
So this was the infamous Sven Norgard. Hart's boss. Desi's lover. The probable father of her unborn niece or nephew. He seemed larger, somehow, than she had imagined him. Strikingly beautiful with sleek blond hair and high, sculpted cheekbones, he had a compelling smile and an intense, appreciative gaze. She could see how Desi had fallen for him. If Norgard turned on the charm, it would take a stone-cold heart to be immune.
He ordered both Lucia and Kayla drinks at the dragon-carved bar. There was a definite theme to his décor; Norgard was either in love with dragons, or he was one.
Thanks for the heads-up, Hart
. She shivered and watched the bartender pour tea into two green porcelain cups. She was usually a coffee drinker—four cups at day, minimum—but it didn't seem to be on the menu. Unexpected, given what she knew of Seattle.
“Sugar?” Norgard offered.
Stalling, she took one lump, stirred, and took two more. The tea had a floral aroma, with hints of chocolate and vanilla. She didn't want to drink any. She didn't trust what was in it.
“Try it,” Norgard said. “I promise you'll like it.”
He smelled really good. No sooner had the thought passed through her mind than she found herself swallowing a mouthful of the tea. How had that happened? But he was right; it tasted delicious.
Kayla watched Norgard flirt with Lucia. He was heartbroken over her sister's death. Obviously. Perhaps Norgard had swept Desi off her feet, but he hadn't loved her. Kayla concentrated on maintaining her social smile, while inside her anger rose. Maybe things had ended badly between them before Desi ran off with his necklace. Maybe he hadn't wanted the baby. Maybe he had killed Desi himself.

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