Unearthed (26 page)

Trinculo made a muffled scream into her hand, and she poked him in the nose hard enough to leave a centimeters-deep gash in the tip. It hung off, just in front of the nostrils, like damaged plastic. “Don’t do that,” she said, and pushed the knife past the hole she’d made where the nipple had once been. There was essence visible there, a roiling storm just beneath the surface. “Should I jab you in the heart? End it now, quick?”

He made a muffled sound, and she relaxed her hand, pulled it from his mouth. “You … you can’t … I’m royalty!” It was plaintive, it was fearful, it was …

… delicious, really.

“What were you going to do to me?” Kitty asked, shifting her knee to rest right on his groin. Trinculo grimaced, and she relished the pain. “Be honest. Don’t let the fact that I’m about to start amputating your more prized pieces sway you into thinking lying will save you.”

Trinculo’s eyes got bigger. “Prized … pieces …?” It was horror, sweet, pure and simple, that colored his expression.

“Where’s your segment of the Rog’tausch?” she asked and smiled. She dangled the knife lower and lower, and his eyes got bigger and bigger as she honed in on what mattered most to him.

“Swear I hear something,” Duncan said, staring at the hallway. “Like a distant … like someone’s carrying one of those runes, but what’s going on is loud enough to just barely be heard around it.”

“Primal scream type stuff, huh?” Hendricks asked. He could still smell the buffet table. He was getting hungry now.

“Yeah, like that,” Duncan agreed.

“From the duchess’s chambers?” Alison asked.

“I think so,” Duncan said.

“Maybe you should go take a look,” Hendricks said.

“I go in there while a viscount and a duchess are in there, Home Office won’t even spare a second before holding my feet to the fire,” Duncan said. “That’s a literal fire.”

“But figurative feet?” Alison asked with a smirk.

“Well,” Hendricks said with a shrug, “I could go take a look. I don’t mean the duchess any harm, after all.” He clutched his cane and smiled at Duncan.

Duncan just gave him a wary look. “You want to walk into a room with six demon guards and two royals? Do you think you’ll walk out of it under your own power again?”

Hendricks stared at his cane, let it rattle around, the blade striking its inside. “I don’t hate my chances.”

“I hate your chances,” Duncan said. “They’re terrible odds with humans—eight on one. With these bastards? They’re like having cancer of the everywhere, all at once, mixed with blood poisoning and crunching five cyanide capsules for pain relief. It’s not even gonna be a pretty death.”

Hendricks just smiled, letting it keep the bitterness from bubbling out. “You’re not swaying me.”

Duncan seemed to think about it. “She’ll cut your dick off and feed it to you.”

Hendricks blanched. Couldn’t help it. “Maybe I’ll uh … wait and see what happens for a bit.” Ouch.

“Why … are you … doing this?” Trinculo asked, quietly weeping. Kitty had taken away her hand for him to get it out, and, to his credit, he wasn’t loud in the asking.

“A little for fun,” Kitty said, opening up the rather sizable hole she’d made in his chest with a couple slow, controlled cuts that drew little more than squeals from Trinculo. She liked looking into the storm within, to stare inside and watch it roll. “A little for what I want.” She stuck the blade of the knife down inside him, watched essence swirl against the holy blade, recoil from the touch of the metal. “And the rest is about power.” She withdrew the blade from his chest and rubbed it across his cheek, leaving another rubbery wound there, devoid of blood. “Who do you think has the power here, Trinculo?”

He looked at her with the eyes of an animal that had been struck so many times it had lost the will to live. “You.”

Feeding even a demon his own balls, one at a time, had that effect on them. “You’re damned right.” She drew back the blade, pointed it at his heart. “Goodbye, Trinculo.”

His eyes sprung back to life. “Wait, you can’t kill me—I’m royal—”

She jabbed him and jerked the blade around, ripping and tearing at the heart of the storm within him. It was aptly named; roughly the size of a human heart. His face contorted in glorious pain as she did it, and then he started to seep energy, quietly, the light leaking out of him as he was consumed, wholly, the Plasticine skin disappearing in a wave of dark light.

She stood as Rousseau re-entered the room with a bowl in hand. “I take it we won’t be needing the big bowl of cocaine, then?”

She glanced back at him, sheathing the knife under her coat, where she kept it. “Leave it. I’m in a mood to do some.” She looked down at the scorch marks on the floor, the unmistakable sign of passage of a greater. “And make the call. It’s time to elevate our game a little.”

Reeve was enjoying his night, for once. It had been a peaceful enough day, no shit splattering all over the place for him, no deaths reported, just that little party thing that he’d coped with in the morning and that was it. Couple false alarms later, 911 calls that didn’t pan out into anything serious. He couldn’t even blame people for calling at the drop of a hat. He would have, if he’d been one of them. With all this nuttiness come to town? Couldn’t be too safe.

He was leaned back in his recliner, listening to the game on TV kinda half-assedly between naps, shutting his eyes and dozing. Dinner had settled good in his belly, a warm spot right in his middle. It was nice to close the eyes every now and again for a little bit, come back and check the score before snoozing out again for a stretch. The Braves were winning anyway, and it was the bottom of the ninth.

The ringing of the house phone was a discordant jangle that seized him out of a perfectly good mini-nap, winched his eyes right open and back into the dim light of his living room. He looked straight up into the eyes of the ten-point buck he’d mounted about a decade ago. They were dull and glassy because they were glass; his own eyes, he was certain, were dull and glassy for entirely different reasons.

He swung his head around, felt the soft cloth of the recliner on those last vestiges of hair that ringed the back of his head, the final reminder of the glorious mane he’d had once upon a time, and swiped for the phone that lay atop his table. He managed to get it in one, hauling it off and slapping it to his ear without injuring himself. He did let out a hellacious yawn, though. “Hello?”

“Sheriff Reeve?” The voice was a tight, professional-sounding woman with call center noise in the background. He’d gotten a million solicitation calls, and they all raised his blood pressure. Why couldn’t these fuckers just leave a man alone? He almost hung up before he realized that he couldn’t do that just yet. She’d called him by title and name, after all. Which meant this call was—

“Yeah, this is Reeve,” he said, listening to his own words slur with grogginess.

“Sir, we fielded a 911 call to your office a few minutes ago,” she said. “An unidentified male reported some sort of party and fight at the Venus Plantation. The address given was—”

“I got it,” Reeve said, yawning again. “I know where it is. I’m only about five minutes away.” He slid the footrest down, dragging himself upright. “Okay, Venus Plantation, some sort of fight. Is the caller still on the line?”

“No, sir,” the lady said, still all professional. “He was disconnected without warning.”

“Okay, then,” Reeve said, dragging himself to his feet and feeling the phone cord drag against his pull. He needed a cordless, but he’d had this particular phone forever. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” the lady said. “Should I have any additional 911 calls forwarded to your mobile number?”

He paused, catching a glimpse of his work trousers draped across a chair across the room. He wondered if he’d hung up his shirt. Nope, there it was, puddled on the floor. Goddammit. That was the last reasonably clean one, and he’d worn it all day. “Please do,” he said and then hung up before she could ask any other perfectly reasonable questions. He dialed a number by memory and it was answered on the third ring. “Fries, call Harris, tell her to get her ass to the Venus Plantation. We got a party or something that’s out of hand. Sound familiar?”

“Ah, yep. I take it you want me there, too?” Ed asked.

“No, I called you because I couldn’t be bothered to dial Erin’s number,” Reeve said as he tried to put on his pants with the phone cricked against his neck. It didn’t feel great. “Yes, I want you there, dumbass. Move it.” He tried to hang up the phone and almost fell over, his pants not quite halfway on. “Shit.”

“You still there, boss?” Ed asked.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Reeve said, fighting with his pants. It wasn’t exactly their fault; he was standing on the legs, and that made it hard to pull them up. “I’m on a corded phone, okay, and I’m trying to put my pants on. I can’t just walk over and hang up the phone right now.”

“You … want me to keep you company until you’re done?”

Reeve just stared straight ahead for a moment and felt his eyes close. “No, I want you to call Erin and get a damned move on to the Venus Plantation. I’ll meet you there.” He waited for a click. “Ed?”

“Yep?”

“Are you gonna hang up?”

“Well,” Fries said slowly, “I gotta wait for you to hang up first.”

Reeve felt his head shake involuntarily as he tugged once more on his pants. “What the fuck do you mean you gotta wait for me to hang up first?”

“Well, I can’t hang up on you,” Fries said, “that’d be rude. I gotta wait for you to hang up first.”

“The fuck?” Reeve wanted to slap his own forehead, but he didn’t have a free hand. “You don’t have to wait for me to hang up. We’re not in a tenth-grade relationship, Ed. You can hang up on me, and I won’t break up with you. Fucking call Erin, please.”

“I don’t know …”

“Goddammit!”

“Okay, okay,” Fries said, “I’m … I’m …” He sounded a little tentative. “Okay, I’m gonna do it.”

Reeve waited a minute and heard nothing. “Ed?”

“Yeah, boss?”

“Why haven’t you hung up yet?”

“I don’t think I can do it, Nick.”

Reeve fought the last three inches of his pants and felt his feet burst out the legs, tugging them up and buttoning them quickly. “Let me help you with that,” he said and walked the receiver over the base and slammed the phone down. “My kingdom for a competent, non-weird, non-drunk deputy.” He paused, staring at the phone on the hook. He’d had one of those not that long ago, and look how that had turned out. “And fuck you for leaving me in the lurch, Arch.” He zipped his pants and fastened his belt, then hurried over to pick up his cleanest dirty shirt to put on.

“That was weird, right?” Belzer asked a few minutes later. They’d watched the parade of pomp and circumstance roll through, and Lauren felt like it should have had its very own forty-three-piece orchestra to accompany it. Things had been quiet after that. The party was in full swing, and even the fashionably late had arrived by now.

“It looked like something out of a fairy tale,” Lauren agreed. “Fancy and shit. Maybe the car used to be a pumpkin, I dunno.”

“The mice became the pistons in each cylinder,” Belzer agreed.

“That guy needed a better fairy godmother,” Lauren said, “because his shoes were expensive, but not glass.”

“Glass shoes always sounded uncomfortable to me,” Belzer said.

Lauren shrugged. “Once you learn to walk in five-inch heels, the idea of inflexible soles just doesn’t hold the same fear anymore, I guess.”

Belzer kinda stared at her. “You walk in five-inch heels?” He gave her a glance that went to her legs, then came back up. “For real?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Not really, anymore.”

Belzer went back to the binoculars, and she couldn’t quite ditch that feeling of discomfort. She was, after all, still sitting in a car with a man she barely knew and didn’t really like all that much. Weird, right? “Maybe we should try and go in now,” he said.

Her eyebrows went higher, which she hadn’t thought possible. “Say what?”

Arch was still watching the curtains, but they weren’t even moving a little now. “Anything, Bill?” he asked.

“Not a thi … wait, what’s this?” It started out normal, but by the end, Bill sounded … panicked?

Kitty didn’t bother with a line, she just put her head down and drank the cocaine straight through both nostrils at once. The barrier was supposed to be thin there, kind of like the nominal respiratory system that demons had faked. Smoking or snorting worked just fine. Injections were mostly out for the lessers, after all, unless the needle was holy and the desired result was ending one’s time on earth. A greater could do it that way, but for Kitty's money, coke was the thing. She came up and felt the powder drift and fall, watched it turn into a subtle cloud in front of her face. The world moved in slow motion, and she blinked her eyes as it hit her all at once, a head rush like her entire essence had just been shoved up into the space behind her eyes.

“I feel the need,” she breathed, “the need for speed!” She slapped a palm against a bookshelf, breaking it and sending a cascade of heavy volumes thumping to the floor.

“Yes, madam,” Rousseau said.

She ran fingers over her nose, dabbed at it, and came away with a thick layer of powder on the tips. “Did you make the call?”

“I was standing right here when I did it,” Rousseau said, eyeing her. “You were listening.”

“Oh, right,” Kitty said, giggling. Coke made her giggly. “Okay, good. Gather the pieces.” She waved a hand then thought better of it. “Wait, no. I’ll gather the pieces. You make the announcement.”

Rousseau gave her a quick nod, smiling ever so slightly. “Yes, madam.”

“And Rousseau?” She caught him just as he was about to walk out the door.

“Yes, madam?”

“You should do some of this before we go,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the bowl filled with powder. “I mean, I’m gonna do most of it, but I don’t want to—ah, fuck it, I’m gonna take it in the car.” She picked it up, cradling it in her arms like a baby. “Never mind. Fuck off, will you? You’ve got work to do.” She dismissed him with a wave of the hand.