“Do you have to leave?”
Rose.
Caia stopped and peered around the corner of the hallway to see Lucien standing in the threshold of Rose’s bedroom.
He chuckled. “I’ll be back in five. I just need to order some food. You guys don’t get it delivered to these parts.”
“Show off, with your fancy room and fancy room service.”
She sounded as exhausted as Caia felt. Caia shook her head. Rose should never have been in that fight.
“Yeah, well, tomorrow I go back to the pack so the special treatment ends.”
“Lucien... I…”
“What is it?” He moved back inside, leaving the door open. Caia crept forward. She could see through the crack between the wall and where the door was hinged to it. Lucien bent over Rose as she sat propped up in bed, her hand in his, concern for her clearly shining in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I was... thinking... maybe... maybe I could come back with you.”
He bent forward and pressed a soft kiss on the corner of her mouth, an action that sent Caia stumbling back down the corridor. She fled towards the elevator, an image of what she had just seen and heard filtering down from her mind to land like ash on her tongue.
Hitting the right button, Caia refused to let go to more tears. She stiffened and gazed into the mirror in the elevator, her eyes drinking in the sight of her fragile paleness. The time for heartache had to end. How many times did she have to keep admonishing herself before that sunk in? She had a witch and a war to obliterate.
Alone.
“Caia!” Phoebe called to her impatiently, and she hurried over to the lykan as she waited by a portal. By now the sickening travel of a portal was something she was getting used to and they stepped out into the Parisian night with a little more ease. Caia exhaled as she straightened up from behind the wall they had come out at, and gazed up and over it to the steps that led up to Notre Dame.
“Oh my goddess,” she breathed, the smells and sights of the city tingling her senses.
“Caia?”
Ignoring the hunter, she began walking towards the gothic cathedral that rose up out of the Left Bank as surreal as the Center she had just departed from. Her lykan eyes danced over the misshapen gargoyles that perched upon the side of the cathedral, their presence there only adding more drama to the enigmatic atmosphere of the place itself.
“I can’t believe this,” she heard Phoebe mutter, and then she was taking a hold of Caia’s wrist in a painful grip. “We’re not here to sightsee, Caia.”
“But I’ve never been to Paris before, aren’t you amazed?”
Phoebe snorted and began dragging her away towards the streets of the Latin Quarter. “I’ve killed two lykans here in the past three years. I’ve seen all of Paris I’ll ever want to see.”
With that wonderful dose of harsh reality, Caia forgot about not having the opportunity to see Paris as a tourist and began leading the way towards the jazz club. They were silent together as they strode through the narrow streets, passed excited tourists, and ignored obviously suggestive looks and gestures from men, young and old. Caia realized, as they approached the club, that she and Phoebe were comfortable in each other’s company precisely because neither of them had a penchant for talking.
“Is this it?” Phoebe nodded towards the ground floor of a block of what, with their little windows and potted flowers sitting on ledges edged with quaint wrought-iron railings, had to be apartments. The opening came out on to the street like black wings, with the words Jazz Club written on them vertically, in French and English. The double doors that were built in off the street were boarded over with a large padlock thrown on for good measure.
“Anyone watching?” Caia asked softly, approaching the padlock and boards.
After a moment, Phoebe gave her the go ahead and she pressed her hand against the padlock, her magik seeping out of her skin to engulf it. In a second it quietly popped and dissolved into water. With her lykan strength the boards snapped away from the door with ease. A moment later Phoebe followed and pulled the doors shut behind her without a noise.
Both of them could see through the shadows of the darkened room, passed the little round tables and the bar up ahead, and passed the stage off center to the left.
“Behind there,” Caia whispered, pointing to the right side of the bar where they could see a dark opening. “There’s a hallway there that leads to the door to the storeroom. In there is the door to the basement. Mr. Daemon is in the storeroom covering the basement trapdoor.”
Not saying a word, merely offering a resolute nod, Phoebe removed her clothing quickly, neatly folding it up as she went.
“Wait,” Caia whispered urgently.
“What now?”
“I’m going to put a shield up to cloak the sounds of your change.”
Phoebe’s eyes widened. “Good idea,” she whispered back.
It felt like forever, waiting for her change to be complete, the knowledge that the daemon hadn’t heard them not lessening her anxiety.
She didn’t like daemons.
Caia found it prudent to keep the shield up around Phoebe as they moved through the club, afraid that her claws would make a loud clicking noise against the concrete floor and ruin ‘the element of surprise’ part of their plan that was kind of crucial to it going smoothly.
Together they stood outside the door to the storeroom and Caia could feel the thing on the other side, standing vigilant upon the trap door in the floor that opened up to the basement.
Phoebe turned to look up at her, her huge wolf eyes telling her she was ready. Caia nodded and pulled back with her energy, before pushing it back out and blasting the door off its hinges. Phoebe took off before the door was even gone and lunged at the daemon before it even knew what was happening. She knocked it off its feet and managed to cling on to its dirt red skin, even as its ungraceful fall sent crates of bottles smashing down and around them. Caia shot in after her and blasted out a tube of water as it punched at Phoebe’s sides, desperate to unclamp her jaws from his neck. As the hunter held him distracted, Caia forced the tube down his throat and held it there until he fell unconscious. Phoebe wasn’t taking any chances. She chewed and masticated until his head rolled away from his body. She backed up off of him, making a hacking sound from the back of her throat that reminded Caia of her own daemon take down and how she had retched from decapitating him. Once Phoebe was clear of his body, she thought of the daemon who had wounded her that night in the mall lot, and more usefully she dragged up the memory of Sebastian dying in her arms. Just like that the white heat began building inside of her. Taking a hold of its reins she focused it on the daemons body and watched as it obliterated it into ash, leaving just a dusty trace of it ever having been there. Phoebe made a sound from the back of her throat and Caia turned around to see the wolf watching her, and even in her lykan form her expression seemed to say, “You’re kind of scary, you know that.”
Caia shrugged. Yeah, she did know that.
“Stay back.” Caia pointed towards the hallway and the lykan grudgingly padded away. She stared at the trap door, thoughts of the marble one in Gaia’s altar determinedly pushing their way to the forefront of her mind. How could Marita justify what she was doing? Marita hated Midnights and everything they were about... and yet wasn’t what Pierre had done exactly the same as her own crime? At the impatient sounds Phoebe was making from the hallway Caia shook the thoughts off. The trap door lifted easily and a set of very unstable looking stairs descended into darkness. The smell flooded her nostrils immediately and she gagged, pressing her shirt to her nose to block its entry. Phoebe whined from the doorway. That smell was enough to make every small move after that one filled with trepidation. There was no mistaking the stench of death – mixed with an obvious array of chemicals. Taking off the backpack Marion had given her, Caia found the flashlight and dipped its light down into the basement, leaning over to get a better look at what she was going to be walking into. It seemed safe enough.
Safe perhaps physically, but emotionally...?
Swinging the torch from lab post to lab post, her shirt still covering her nose and mouth, Caia willed away the emotional reaction her body was so ready to give into. There were five morgue slabs in the room, each with a decaying lykan sliced open in varying manners upon it. The vile stench was emanating from their exposed innards. Metal chains were still wrapped around their limbs from when they had been alive and chained down. She didn’t even want to think of a lykan being awake and aware during such experiments, such torture. Moving away from them she swung the beam of the torch towards the end of the room where a row of cages sat, some empty, some housing more dead lykans.
Memories of another basement and other cages threatened to overwhelm her.
“I have to find the liquid,” Caia reminded herself softly and made to move back towards the end of the basement behind the stairs. Sure enough, a glass cabinet was placed against the wall, rows upon rows of vials of liquid gold inside.
Now all she needed to do was destroy it.
Silently, making her way back out of the basement, Caia pulled another gift from Marion out of her backpack. To her it appeared to be a large crystal with a gold stopper plugged into the top. She wasn’t quite sure of its mechanics but apparently it was an expensive member of Daylight arsenal.
“Just pull the stopper out and drop the crystal into the basement. The device will go off within five seconds of landing. You’ll hear a soft pop.”
“What does it do?”
“Don’t worry, it can’t hurt living things. It merely cleans up the mess around us.”
Caia did as Marion had instructed, closing the door after it.
“Wait, I wanted to see!” Phoebe hissed as she marched into the storeroom in human form.
As Caia stared into the lykan’s angry face a sound like an ear popping at high altitude could be heard from the other side.
“Sorry, it’s too late.”
“Well, what was down there?”
She could tell her the truth, about the atrocities those two Midnights had committed with the help of humans. She could describe that reprehensible scene and wave goodbye to a potential ally. If Phoebe had seen it with her own eyes there would have been no way to convince her that not all Midnights were bad. Describing it would just be another nail in the coffin of Caia’s plan.
“But this is a war Caia, and we have to sacrifice a part of our soul to win it.”
“It was just a lab. Chemicals, test tubes... that sort thing.”
I am so going to Hades.
“What about that goddess-awful smell?”
“Sewage,” she lied, “Guessing from the daemon.”
“Ugh, charming.”
Confident that she had convinced the hunter, Caia pulled at the trap door. Together she and Phoebe leaned in as she opened it, their torches illuminating the darkness. There was nothing there.
“What...?”
Eyes wide, she trembled her way down the stairs and swung her light around.
“What do you see?” Phoebe called down to her.