Unearthed (18 page)

“A priest from Houston, Texas,” Hendricks said. It was true in literal fact, if a bit loose with the full circumstances. “He spent fourteen hours blessing it through some complicated ritual—”

“Really?” Her face knit up in disbelief, eyes rolling. “Can you smell the bullshit as it spills out of your mouth or are you too busy trying to pretend it’s just words? You’re lying, Hendricks. You have someone else behind you, hand up your ass and choosing your direction. Someone pushed you into town here, and we all know you’re still talking to them from time to time—”

Hendricks felt a surge of rage that made him want to leave, but he forced it down. “Because I had someone who mentored me once upon a time? Who drew me into the world of demons and showed me what was what? You think that results in some kind of divided loyalties?” He tried hard not to look at Arch as he said all this, acutely aware of the severe dissonance that was ripping at his mind at the moment:
Archibald Stan is the man who will bring about the end of the world
, he heard in his head, clear as the voices of those speaking to him right now.

“Because you’re holding out on us,” Alison said, hugging herself even tighter. “Because you’re having a little pissy fit like a spoiled toddler at Duncan for not telling us every single thing he knows while you’re clutching onto a big damned secret of your own like it’s a life preserver and you’re in the middle of the ocean.” She looked at her husband, then at Hendricks. “We’ve all got secrets—”

“What?” Arch asked, looking at each of them in turn. “I don’t have any secrets. What secrets are you keeping?”

“Not now, sweetie,” Alison said quietly. “Point is, we’ve all got pasts. We don’t have to sit down and have a share-a-thon and dump out our whole life stories on the table if we don’t want to. I don’t need to know about what happened with your wife in order to work with you on this. I don’t expect you to take emotional laxative and drip your feelings out everywhere you go in order to kill demons with me, and asking Duncan to tell us his whole life story is an invasion of privacy, just the same as it’d be if I was demanding you tell me everything about how Renee died.” Hendricks felt the burn of that one, saw the light in Alison’s eyes as she said it. She held it there just long enough to make her point, like a lit cigarette against his flesh, then pulled it away before it could leave a permanent mark. “I know you enough to know we’re on the same side. You can’t tell me you don’t know enough about Duncan to see he’s down for killing demons and helping us fill in gaps we can’t fill for ourselves.”

Hendricks waited a minute before speaking, waiting for the sting, that pride-struck humiliation to fade a tinge. “I don’t trust him. We make a move on her, he’s gonna come at us. And he’s been in our blind spot for a while now. Imagine if I’d taken a run at her and got her before he came into the room last night. By his rules, he would have had to kill me, wouldn’t he?”

There was a pause at that. “Maybe,” Arch said slowly, like he was admitting to something he didn’t want to. “This duchess—she’s just another demon, you know. Why are you so fixated on her?”

Hendricks looked from him to Alison, saw her nod of understanding. “She’s the itch he can’t scratch,” she said. When Arch looked at her, she went on. “Ever have someone tell you, ‘No, you can’t do that’?” Hendricks just kept his mouth shut. Let them think that if they wanted to; it was better than any explanation he could have come up with shy of the truth.

“I’m a cop,” Arch said. “Or was.” There was some consternation there. “My job was to tell people that and to slap their hand or drag them away when they did it anyway.”

“I don’t like being told what to do,” Hendricks said, letting his fingers drift up to feel the scruff on his cheeks.

“Funny sentiment coming from a Marine,” Arch said.

“I don’t have to take orders anymore,” Hendricks said. “I got a bad feeling from this lady, even absent Starling’s warning. I feel a compelling desire to stab her in the belly and watch the black vortex do its thing.” He looked at the weathered and warped floorboards of the porch. “This thing—it’s gonna blow up, mark my words. If he’s sworn to his duty, and we fall on the other side of that by accident, it’s gonna be a problem. He told me himself he’s on the game board from a different side, and we all forgot that because we were happy to have the help.” He looked up at both of them in turn. “It’d be real smart for us not to forget that again. Because as much as I’m a fan of getting help, I’m not a real big proponent of getting knifed in the back.”

“Good thing he doesn’t carry a knife, then,” Alison said. She stood in place another moment before turning away back to the barn, presumably to talk to Duncan.

Hendricks waited until she was almost there before he spoke to Arch again. “You know we can’t trust him anymore, right? Not a hundred percent, at least.”

Arch just stared past him, eyes on a point in the distance, somewhere beyond the worn and hanging wooden siding on the house. “I don’t know if I fully trust anyone anymore, now that all this has happened,” he said. He cast a quick look back at Alison’s retreating back. “Except my wife, of course.”

Hendricks felt an uncomfortable buzzing in his stomach at that, a sense that he should shut up, which he promptly ignored. “I don’t know that I’d even trust her all the way,” he said and stepped through the open door into the house. “After all, she did just say she had secrets.” He let the door slap shut hard, not really wanting to see what kind of impact his words had had on Arch.

Kitty was lounging on the fainting couch, keeping one eye on her new pet, which was moving—not quite slithering, but not quite crawling—across the floor in the parlor, a strange sight if ever she’d seen one. It was a severed arm, after all, and watching it move of its own volition was a disturbing sight even for her—and she’d opened up the innards of humans and thrown them in the air like confetti on more than one occasion. Just because.

Rousseau arrived presently, silver tray in his hand with a cup atop it. The silver tray wasn’t strictly necessary, but there were standards to observe, formalities and expectations to cater to. There were certain ways to deal with a duchess, and bringing her drink on an entire tray was one of them.

“You have a visitor, madam,” Rousseau said in that ratty, classless accent of his.

“Here?” Kitty asked, taking the cup from the table where Rousseau had set it. She sniffed; it was a blend of tea that demons preferred, something rich and earthy that would probably kill a human. She should test that when next she had one. “Someone’s come to see me here?”

“Word is spreading of your arrival,” Rousseau said, dipping low. “Locals and visitors to town are looking to curry favor, make acquaintance.”

“How tedious,” she said, looking back to see the hand grasping at a bookcase to try and ascend it. “And now they’ve taken to inviting themselves into my home.” This was not unexpected, really, but it was annoying. She had things to do, after all, tea to drink, dismembered arms to watch; and having to converse with some freshly enshelled grellnar was a torturous proposition.

“This one comes bearing a gift,” Rousseau said, in a voice that she recognized as him trying to entice her.

“Well, that’s a start,” she said, taking a sip of the tea. It was still hot. “Tell them I’m very busy preparing for something, but I could certainly spare five minutes. Emphasize the time limit.”

“Of course, madam,” Rousseau said, bowing his head slightly. “Back in a moment.”

She waved him off, though it was unnecessary. She always made those motions, as though it were her way of controlling her world, or seeming to. She’d examined herself in some detail over the years, come to many conclusions about herself and what she wanted and how she chose to operate. It didn’t even bother her to think about how much she enjoyed shifting the pieces around, even through obvious gestures like that one. It was a simple command, a test of authority that she always relished.
You, go over there.
And they followed. She never tired of it, not even after all this time.

Rousseau returned shortly, a demon with hard lines on his face in tow. The man was dressed in a suit, impeccably tailored. New money, she figured, looking for old credibility. She didn’t particularly care for this type, but they had their uses. This man had deep wrinkles in his shell, so deep under his eyes they almost looked like scars.

“Duchess Elizabeth,” he said, speaking with a very continental accent, “I greet you and welcome you to the state of Tennessee.” He bowed his head appropriately, though she preferred her men to kneel at almost all times. This was all right, though; she always drove them down eventually, and once they’d bowed properly, they never really came up again.

“I thank you,” she said, not bothering to get up from where she sat. She raised a hand, her command for him to look up at her, and he followed it. More of the same, she thought. Perhaps she did tire of it. Perhaps half the fun was in breaking the will, asserting the power. She’d seen that with the humans she’d worked on; every once in a while one came back at her with a failure to obey. Those were always the greatest joys. She did like a challenge every now and again. “What brings you to my doors, Mister …?”

Rousseau could have announced him, of course, but Kitty didn’t care to accord anyone who wasn’t royalty that particular honor. If they were low, they could announce themselves when she told them they could. “I am Detmar Lawrence,” the demon said, bowing his head again, only briefly this time. Those sort of flourishes were an unnecessary affectation. She felt her eyes narrow as the desire to bend him to her will rose. She held it in check, though. “I come from San Francisco, though obviously I have been residing in Midian for a few weeks now.”

“And do you come for the ambience, Mr. Lawrence?” Kitty asked. She was already bored of him.

“I come for the same reason you do, Duchess,” Lawrence said and waited for her nod to continue. “Power, of course.”

She studied him with disinterested eyes. Yes, definitely bored of him. “I suppose everyone needs a hobby.” She meant it as a slap, a slam against him for insinuating that perhaps she didn’t have enough power as it was. Her, for fuck’s sake. Did he not know who she was? Whose fucking place she had challenged, once upon a time?

“I have heard yours recently includes digging,” Lawrence said, and he stared at her with dusky eyes. Humans thought they were the windows to the soul. She’d ripped more than a few out and found that this maudlin nonsense had no basis in fact. If they were windows at all, they were opaque and merely kept one from looking at the bone in the back of the eye socket.

“The search for the past is a noble pursuit, is it not?” Yawn.

“I can think of none better,” Lawrence said, and she was preparing a half-hearted riposte when he snapped his fingers and two rag-clad servants came from behind him. She hadn’t taken notice of them because—well, because they were servants. They carried between them the promised gift. When she saw it, she stood.

It was a wooden box with black hinging to hold it all together. It was longer than the last one, almost five feet long, in fact, and deeper. It took two of them to carry it without looking awkward, and they passed Lawrence and paused ten feet from her, waiting only a second before she beckoned them forward hurriedly. They came and placed it upon the granite tile at her feet, and Kitty dropped low without regard for dignity or reputation or how it looked. Her fingers worked at the edges, pulling them apart with pure strength and her fingernails. She almost had the lid off before she paused to utter the words, “
Et-esh-komn-bah et-anyana-seer-la-oranlee
.” Then she ripped it open to find it exactly as she had hoped.

It was a leg, long and wide, the same skin color as the arm that was now crawling over to the box from where it had lain by the bookshelf. The sound of it scratching against the ground as it hurried toward her faded into the background as she stared down at her prize, then looked up to see Lawrence on one knee, lower than she was. His servants were facedown upon the floor, prostrate. Perhaps he didn’t need to be broken, after all.

“Where did you get this?” she asked, meeting his eyes.

A smile lit his dark features, making those lines below his eyes seem even more like scars. “I undertook a digging project based on some pages that came into my possession.”

She felt a hard breath of impatience come out like a snort, but there was fury in it as well. “Is that so?”

“I mean you no disrespect, my Duchess,” he said, bowing his head lower again. “Once I heard that this task had become your quest, I came most eagerly to relinquish everything I have to you. I have additional research and notes, done and annotated by scholars who have looked into this matter at my request.” He smiled at this. “I feel also compelled to mention to you that in my search I had … competitors, shall we say, that have retrieved at least two more of the pieces that you seek, though they, ahh …” His eyes danced over to the hand, which was now clutching the edge of the box, trying to pull itself in with the leg, “… remain mere display items, unopened, for obvious reasons.”

Kitty felt a searing fury build inside. Others already had what she was looking for? That was unacceptable. “Who are these competitors?”

“I have written their names in a book with all the research,” Lawrence said, waving a servant forward. He got up and shuffled forward on all fours, sliding an old leather-bound volume six inches thick along the tile. It had pages sticking out of it in various spots. “An original edition of the Pergamum Codex. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

She’d heard of it, all right. She’d scoured the whole damned world looking for a copy and come up empty in her search. “And this is a gift?”

“Along with all my insight, if you would wish it,” Lawrence said. Now she wished the man would stop bowing his head. “My competitors are perhaps not aware that you have come into the search. One of them is a person of no station, like myself. The other …” He hesitated. “Well, let us say he is no duchess. They could both surely be persuaded to part with their acquisitions for the right reasons.”