Sin & Lightning (Demigods of San Francisco Book 5) Page 25

  Kieran nodded and turned away, excusing Henry for the moment. There was always some suspicion amongst Demigods, even between allies, but Kieran had to be careful not to go overboard. He didn’t want to cause offense, and he certainly didn’t want Lydia to guess he suspected any of her possible plans. If she changed things up, the few hints he’d gleaned so far would be rendered useless.

  Lydia sauntered through the lounge, headed his way, her bright pink dress blowing in an unseen wind, her mostly exposed chest layered in diamonds and pearls, and her arms clad in fishnet-type gloves decorated with multicolored gemstones. She glittered and sparkled, and even if he hadn’t checked up on her holdings, he would’ve guessed that the extreme show of her wealth hinted at sagging finances. Old-school Demigods weren’t hard to read when you knew the signs, and it seemed this one hadn’t changed much with the times. Her financial ego was incredibly fragile, another thing people must talk about behind closed doors.

  “Demigod Kieran, you’re looking almost good enough to eat.” Lydia’s smug and sultry smile was all for Alexis, trying to get a rise. Alexis stared at her blandly, and it was clear she was bored and waiting for all this to end.

  He stifled a smile. “Demigod Lydia, those jewels are fabulous.”

  “Why, yes, thank you.” She lifted a hand, turning it as she did so, letting the light shine and sparkle as it hit the various gems, before stroking her extravagant necklace.

  She took a moment to shoot Alexis a look, clearly taking note of the simple strand of pearls at Lexi’s elegant neck, her formfitting dress without any frills or embellishments, her sparkly flats, and her mostly natural face. She’d put on only enough makeup to enhance her already striking beauty, just like when he’d first met her. Alexis hadn’t put in half the effort Lydia would’ve expected, but instead of making her look lesser, it made her natural beauty shine. Her somewhat unruly hair created a halo around her angelic face, and her simple but well-made dress accentuated her perfect curves, at the same time athletic and feminine.

  “Hello,” Alexis said, as though completely oblivious to the scrutiny.

  Lydia’s pencil-thin eyebrows dipped. She huffed, barely perceptibly, before turning for the dining room. The doors opened from the inside, allowing her to stroll in.

  “How do you feel now compared to this afternoon?” Kieran asked Alexis, hesitating before they followed their hostess.

  “Like we’re being watched.” Alexis scanned the baseboards of the room. “I can’t figure it out…”

  “It isn’t a Demigod in spirit form?” Kieran turned toward her, like he was stealing a quick kiss. He hadn’t expected that answer.

  “No. I’ve seen this before, but at the time I didn’t know my magic well enough to suss it out. Forms appear in the corner of my eye, but when I turn, they scamper beyond the veil before I can catch more than a passing glance. They aren’t normal spirits. They’re shadows, but with even less substance than a Demigod. More wraithlike. I don’t know what they are, but they’re adept at staring when I’m not looking and zipping away right before I turn. It’s driving me nuts.”

  Kieran ran his lips across her chin, his gaze darting around the shadows and into the corners. With his ability to see spirit, he might be able to see them too. “Keep your senses open.” He straightened and ran his fingertips down her cheek. “What about the way the servants are treating you? Lydia?”

  “The servants earlier today treated me quite a bit differently. Lydia’s behaving exactly like she did yesterday. Exactly. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me.”

  “You’re beautiful and elegant—you’re competition. She doesn’t seem like a woman that savors competition.”

  “She doesn’t seem like a woman who is playing her cards where everyone can see them.”

  Truer words had never been spoken.

  Kieran turned and slipped an arm around her waist.

  Lydia was cunning and devious, and if her enterprise was flagging, even a little, maybe she was also growing desperate. After living in wealth for hundreds of years, the most experienced Demigods could be thrown by even a gradual decline in fortune. When you lived many lifetimes, there was no such thing as too much money. Eventually, if you lived long enough and mishandled your territory, you could find yourself without a penny.

  If that was the issue—and Kieran didn’t know that it was—would it be so far-fetched to assume Lydia would risk grabbing Lexi, breaking her from Kieran, and trading her to Magnus for some large political favor? Perhaps the servants’ reverence this morning was all part of the plan—butter Lexi up in the hopes she’d leave willingly.

  Kieran blew out a breath and tried to school his expression.

  No, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that Lydia had gotten stars in her eyes with a legendary Soul Stealer so close at hand. Someone who could maybe tilt the earnings back toward an upward trajectory.

  Kieran could only hope Lydia knew how foolish any of that would be. He could only hope she was still in her right mind.

  29

  Alexis

  Echoes drifted through spirit, tickling my ears but taking no shape. A feeling of urgency pushed at me, imploring me to do something, to get moving. But where would I go? What was needed?

  Ghastly faces swam through my dreams, gaunt, hollow-cheeked, eyes milky and sightless through a layer of glass. Their bodies bowed, even young people looking old and weathered, their vitality gone. Their will to live dried up.

  Only they weren’t alive. They were dead, all of them. They solely existed in spirit, but they were trapped as surely as the spirits Valens had imprisoned.

  The Line pulsed, sending a surge of power through me.

  The feeling of urgency persisted. It drummed through my body, matching the beating of my heart, as the horrible faces swam toward me, greedy fingers pulling at my clothes and scraping across my skin.

  I sucked in a breath and jerked up to sitting, a strangled scream caught in my throat. The dreamscape cleared away in a flash. Sweat plastered hair to my forehead and my whole body shivered uncontrollably.

  “What is it?” Kieran sat up beside me, sleep evaporating from his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  I pushed my hair out of my face. “Yeah. Just a bad dream.” I willed more spit into my mouth, trying to keep my tongue from sticking to the roof of my mouth. “It’s fine.”

  It took me a moment to realize the Line pulsed within the center of the room. Its power filled me, and just as in the dream, it held a strange sense of urgency. Something danced across my magic. Daisy stirred, in the bedroom next to ours, before getting out of bed. A tapping against my magic caught my attention next, in a different place than the odd dancing.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  I jumped, a scream escaping my lips.

  “It’s the door,” Kieran whispered, and laid a hand on my back. “It’s the outside door of the suite. Can you feel who it is?”

  My heart thundered in my chest, and I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress. “I don’t recognize the soul, but I do recognize the two animal souls with the person. What the—”

  Daisy met me in the living room area, staring at the door. “Something feels off in here,” she said, rubbing the goose-pimpled flesh on her arms. “It feels like when you have a bunch of spirits hanging around.”

  I frowned at her. She’d never mentioned feeling a certain way when I had a bunch of spirits around, although it wasn’t uncommon to feel spirits. Most people did, whether they realized what they were feeling or not.

  “We’re protected from spirits in here.” My magic lined the perimeter of the suite. I stopped by the door, waiting for Kieran to catch up. He had on a robe and slippers, provided by Lydia, of course, and handed a set to me.

  “I’ll get it,” Kieran said. “What’s out there?”

  “A person and a pair of cats.”

  “A pair…” A crease formed between his eyebrows as another knock sounded at the door, muted and respectful.

  Kiera
n opened the door to a man in a colorful tux and gloves, his face a mask of confusion and a note in his hand. Two enormous cats waited beside him, the green-eyed male sitting and licking his front paw, and the luminescent bronze-eyed female staring at me expectantly.

  “What are they doing here?” Daisy asked, peering around me.

  Kieran took the proffered letter. “It’s from Sodge. He says they are of better use to us here than at the house.”

  “He…shipped the cats to us?” I asked in utter confusion, my question directed at the staff member, who was looking at me for answers. “What help could a couple giant cats be? Also, and I know I’ve asked this before, but why are they so giant? The mom and dad were regular cat size. Their siblings were regular cat size. Seriously, it’s been two days—are they even bigger? What grows that…”

  I lost the thread of what I was saying as I glimpsed what was happening behind our late-night messenger. People ambled through the hall, slow and aimless, dragging their feet as though they couldn’t be bothered to lift them up. Some hunched or stooped, some curled to the side a little, some just let their heads loll. They looked like zombies, but they didn’t have bodies.

  “What…” I stepped out of the door, joined by Kieran. The staff member stepped back, confused.

  “See if you can find some cat food,” Kieran told the man. “And a couple of bowls of water. We have no choice but to keep them here. My house man sent them.”

  He walked away, but my gaze had already shifted back to the spirits. An older man down the way raked his fingers against the wall, ricocheting off my spirit repellent. A younger woman, probably barely more than eighteen, patted the wall on the other side of the door. She, too, hit my magic and was pushed away.

  The Line filled the hall with its ultraviolet colors, illuminating yet more spirits, barely more than wisps, their clothes holey and haggard and their skin translucent. They had hardly any energy.

  “Why are they all here?” Kieran asked, stepping in front of me.

  I wasn’t sure what he thought he’d do. Scare them with his stare?

  The Line pulsed, beckoning. None of the spirits so much as glanced at it. It pulsed again, and again, beating that drum, calling its spirits home. I’d never seen this kind of insistency. I’d never felt this severe of a tug. Yet none of the spirits so much as glanced up from their directionless wandering.

  This is my job—I have to help.

  A Spirit Walker didn’t just take lives—Harding had taught me that. We could save lives. It was also our duty to help spirits find rest, wherever possible, something I’d been doing all my life. The sudden appearance of the Line, in addition to the way the spirits were clustering around me, made it perfectly clear that it was time for them to go home. Whatever Lydia was doing to keep them here, it was shitty.

  A shape appeared at the edge of my vision. I turned my head, but it zipped away, moving beyond the veil—only to return on the other side of me. Or was that a different one? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t feel it specifically.

  The second I flicked my eyes or turned my head, the bugger took off. A strange sort of awareness fell over me, like at dinner. I was being watched. This felt different from the Demigods who’d shown up at my house in spirit.

  Those shapes had shown up before, like I’d mentioned to Kieran. I remembered seeing them back when I first started learning my magic, usually when I was heading into or escaping from danger. Part of me wondered if it was Harding. He liked to watch me work. Was sending spiritlike wraiths as spies in his wheelhouse?

  The writhing spirits in front of me reminded me that I had work to do. Power pumped through me, and I pulled Kieran back. I grabbed a couple of spirits at a time, just to see if any would rouse and talk to me. None did, and over they went, one by one, shoved as far beyond the Line as I could possibly get them while remaining firmly on this side of reality. While I worked, I watched out for any souls creeping up on me, stuffed in mice or whatever else. I waited for a Demigod’s spirit to appear out of thin air, or to grab me from the beyond, yanking me in after the spirits I was sending over. All was quiet.

  After the last one sailed over, the Line gave one final pulse of power, re-energizing me, before its colors seeped from the hall. I stood panting, staring, a little amazed.

  I’d never interacted with it like that. Although I’d been using its power for some time, it had never seemed like an entity in and of itself. And yet it had acted like it was looking out for those spirits. Like it wanted me to be its ally in saving them.

  “I might’ve just picked a really big fight with the resident Demigod,” I said, wiping my brow. One of the cats purred loudly, and I realized they were lying on either side of me, like sentinels. “I’m not even a cat person. I think this is Harding’s idea of a joke. Somehow he did this, he must have.”

  “The spirit world is just as much your domain as it is Lydia’s,” Kieran said, leading me back into our suite. “Your magic makes it so. This house might be hers, but the souls in it do not belong to her. The spirit world is not hers to claim. You have every right to exercise your ability freely.” He grabbed me a bottle of water from the snack fridge. “But yeah, that will probably really piss her off. So we have that to look forward to.”

  I laughed, though it wasn’t really funny. I could’ve just created a problem. At the same time…the Line had basically asked me to. I didn’t know what its deal was, but I was pretty sure that it was best to do what it wanted.

  I heaved out a sigh, ushered Daisy back into her room, and let Kieran wrap me in his arms.

  “We’ll see how it goes tomorrow,” he said, then planted a kiss on my head. “If things remain this strange, I’ll take offense and we’ll leave, cats and all.”

  I chuckled and shook my head. “What the hell was he thinking, sending those cats? They don’t even have names.”

  “I have no idea. More importantly, who did he get to help him, because he doesn’t have the authority or control to get those cats here. The whole situation is incredibly strange. But as long as it doesn’t get dangerous, it’ll be fine. For now.”

  The next morning, I didn’t bother with a dress. I pushed my heels to the side with the toe of my running shoes. I had on stretchy leggings that looked like jeans, a knife strapped to my ankle, a shirt that said, “I’m your huckleberry,” and a can-do attitude. I didn’t know what was going on in this monstrosity of a house, but today I had a mission. I would seek out more of those spirits, see if any would talk to me, and then send them across the Line. There was bound to be a somewhat fresh one coherent enough to spill the beans.

  “My, my, don’t you look tired.” Bria was peeling a banana in the living room of the suite when I walked out.

  I told her what happened during the night. As I was finishing, both cats trotted out of my bedroom.

  “They tried to sleep on the bed,” I said. “The bed is big, but those damn cats are bigger. Look at them!”

  “They’re huge, yes. Their eyes don’t seem like the eyes of a normal cat anymore. They kinda…glow.”

  I gestured at them, mouth hanging. “Nothing about them is normal.”

  “They smell like normal cats,” Mordecai said, twitching his nose. “I hate that smell.”

  The male cat made a sound like a growl deep in its throat.

  “It’s probably time for us to name them.” I checked the battery on my phone before slipping it into a small cross-shoulder bag. “Why do you think Sodge sent them? Did one puke on the carpet or something?”

  “He sent them because I told him to.” She flicked off the coffee pot. “Kieran gone already?”

  “Wait, what? You told him to? Have you lost your mind?”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t Harding say you should bring them? That guy has not steered you wrong so far. I figured I’d help push the envelope.”

  “You’re fired, number one—”

  “Don’t work for you.”

  “—and he hasn’t steered me at all. He’s done a good jo
b training me, sure, but he has a weird thing about those cats. It’s madness. Sending them here like this is crazy. I mean…it’s crazy!”

  “Yeah, sure. What about Kieran?”

  I stared at her, wanting more than an offhanded assent. After a moment, it was clear I wouldn’t get it.

  “Where did I go wrong with my life? He left at nine.” I checked my watch. Ten o’clock. If nothing happened today, it would still be a long day. I was not looking forward to it. “We’re going to go spirit hunting.”

  “Awesome.”

  The door to the suite opened, revealing Dylan and Red.

  “No Jerry today?” I asked, heading for the door. I shouted for the kids to hurry up and finish getting ready.

  “He’s mostly useless here, so they sent the trainee.” Bria followed me. “How do you feel about skulls, Dylan? I hear the skull room is open now. I got a special invite from her ladyship, who likes you so much. I had to trade you, though. I hope you don’t mind. She requested you wear leopard print. Any time is good—she will be up all night.”

  “Pick on the new guy? Is that the hazing style around here?” Dylan asked as the kids came into the living room. We all left the suite in single file.

  “It’s a new tradition.” She evened up with me and held out her banana peel, still chewing. “Why didn’t I throw this away when I had the chance?”

  “Anyone bring the map?” I asked, continuing the same way we’d gone yesterday.

  “Yup.” Red pulled it out. “Are we really bothering with the skull room? Because yesterday that looked like a regular, nondescript room, and all the other stuff was in halls and had big to-dos.”

  “It is where we’re going, yes,” Bria said, “and I was just kidding. I didn’t get a special invite. We’re going rogue. We’ll trade Dylan if we get caught.”

  “What is your fascination with the skull room?” Mordecai said.

  “You need to turn here…” Red pointed.

  I ignored Red, heading straight instead, wanting to wander a bit to see if I could find another soul or two. I didn’t remember seeing any on the way to the skull room.