Reed’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He withdrew it quickly. He normally kept the damn thing off, but with Eve in training he wanted to be accessible. Glancing at the caller ID, he cursed silently. Sara. He hit the button that sent the call to voicemail.
Sarakiel was both an archangel and his ex-lover. She helmed the European firm, her flawless angelic features fueling the sales of the multimillion-dollar Sara Kiel Cosmetics empire. She was also on his shit list, so he had been avoiding her calls for the last few weeks. That wasn’t going to change right now.
“You’re saying the Infernal grew in size?” Reed asked, returning his full attention to the conversation.
“Yes.” Les set out three teacups, then pulled out a spindle-backed chair for himself.
“Did you witness the attack?” Mariel asked.
“Just barely. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. The blooming thing was fast. Impossibly fast. It rushed at Kim in a blur. Ran on all fours—fists and feet to the ground. Almost like an ape, but graceful like a canine. Kim screamed and the Infernal leaped into her open mouth, just disappeared inside her. I couldn’t believe it. By the time I figured out what happened, it was over.”
“What did happen?” Reed asked the question, but he already knew the answer.
“She . . .” Les swallowed hard. “She exploded. But it was wrong. All wrong. What was left behind . . . there wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough of her. No bone, no blood . . .”
“Just muscle and skin,” Reed finished, declining Les’s silent offer of tea.
“Yeah, that’d be right. So where does everything else go?” Les poured two servings of tea, his hands visibly shaking. After he set the pot down, he looked between Mariel and Reed. “I think the Infernal absorbed the rest. That’s how it grew.”
Mariel accepted the cup Les handed to her. “Were you responding to a herald?”
A herald was an instinctive cry for help from Mark to handler that was so powerful it was sometimes felt by mortals. A sixth sense, some called it. The sensation that something was “off,” something they couldn’t put their finger on.
Les shook his head. “I didn’t wait for it. I’d sent her after some Patupairehe faeries that were causing trouble for tourists. They were her specialty, so when I felt her fear, I knew something was wrong.”
Reed leaned back in his chair. “Raguel didn’t say anything about the Infernal growing larger.”
“He doesn’t know.” Les broke off a piece of a scone. “Uriel wanted to keep the news to himself until he could figure out what to do with it.”
“This is not the time for the archangels to be territorial,” Mariel protested.
“My thoughts exactly, which is why I’m telling you. There is something else.” Pushing away from the table, Les twisted around in his seat and collected an item from the counter behind him. He set it down in front of Mariel.
She picked up the zippered sandwich bag and examined its contents. “It looks like there’s blood on this rock.”
“There is. Open her up.”
Mariel did as directed. Instantly the honey-sweet smell of Mark blood filled the air. It was unusually robust and Reed found himself breathing through his mouth to diminish the potency of the scent.
“Your Mark’s blood,” she noted. “Why are you keeping it?”
Les’s lips thinned. “That’s the Infernal’s blood. I put a hole in the thing when it came at me.”
“If your scene is anything like the one I saw,” Reed muttered, “that could be Mark tissue. There was nothing within three yards that wasn’t completely covered with gore.”
“I shifted some distance away before I discharged my pistol,” Les said. “That blood didn’t come from my Mark, because we were at least a kilometer’s distance from where she was killed.”
“How did the Infernal know where you were shifting to?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it, mate? My theory is that the Infernal absorbs not only the blood and bone of the Marks it kills, but also some of the connection to the handler. I’m guessing it’s only temporary. Before I finished emptying my clip, it became impervious to the bullets. Could have been some kind of warding or could have been acquired vulnerability from my Mark that faded when the connection did. The Infernal certainly had no idea I was going to shoot it.”
“Even temporary is too long.” Reed’s foot tapped against the floor. “How much information can it absorb? How long does it retain what it learns? We need to know if your theory is right.”
Mariel carefully closed the bag. “Can we go to the scene? I’d like to take a look for myself. I’m the only one who’s seen all the locations of attack. I would like to see if a usable pattern emerges.”
“Of course.” Les drank his tea in one swallow. “The area is remote. Stick close during the shift.”
He disappeared.
Glancing at Mariel, Reed stood. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 4
Reaching around Izzie—who refused to move—Eve set a large bowl of salad on the makeshift dining table. They had combined three folding card tables into one larger table in the men’s dining room. Seating was still cramped, but Gadara insisted they eat together. Eve understood that he was trying to foster a familial connection between the Marks, but after three weeks of sharing lunches at Gadara Tower, she couldn’t see why it would work now when it hadn’t before.
“I hate tomatoes,” Laurel griped, looking into the bowl. “Couldn’t you have kept them separate?”
“Feel free to help,” Eve retorted.
Gadara entered the dining room from the adjacent kitchen. He carried a fresh-from-the-oven pan of lasagna—without the safety of gloves.
Glaring at Eve, Laurel tossed her strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder with a practiced flick of her wrist. She was in her early twenties, her skin freckled in a becoming way, her eyes a pretty cornflower blue. She was a couple of inches taller than Eve, slightly more slender and less athletic, and gifted with the ability to complain about nearly everything. Eve had no idea how that proclivity had gone over in her homeland of New Zealand. Here in America, Laurel’s charming accent softened the annoyance factor some. She was one of the classmates Eve wondered about. What could Laurel have done to end up marked? Her self-preoccupation was annoying, but otherwise she struck Eve as innocuous enough. And she seemed like the type who needed a lot of friends, not a loner.
Gadara looked at Eve with a questioning glance and she shook her head, silently telling him not to worry about it. She was having a hard time adjusting to the new image of the archangel she was forming. Before she’d been marked, she had held Gadara in high esteem for his secular talents. Donald Trump aspired to be Raguel Gadara when he grew up. As an interior designer, Eve had applied to Gadara Enterprises for a job, hoping to be a part of the redesign of his Mondego Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Now, she was working with him—just not in a way she could ever have imagined.
Of course, their association wasn’t happenstance. Alec swore nothing was a coincidence and everything followed a divine plan. If that was true, the loss of her virginity to Cain and her subsequent marking had both simply been a matter of time. Therefore, working for Gadara had also been inevitable.
To her, the whole thing was wack.
Richens appeared from the kitchen. He skirted Gadara and set a plate of store-bought garlic bread on the table. “I’m starved. Let’s eat.”
“Who will say grace?” Gadara looked at Eve.
Her brow arched.
“I will.” Claire stood, towering over the table.
The Frenchwoman’s brown hair was super short and looked as if she had cut it herself. Her skin was porcelain perfect, her lashes thick and dark behind cute black-framed glasses that were worn for aesthetic reasons only—the mark cured myopia and every other imperfection. She was so beautiful it was hard not to stare, yet she didn’t pay much mind to her looks. She wore no makeup or hair products. However, she did have a weakness for clothes. For this short trip, she had brought a duffel almost as big as she was.
The moment the short prayer was finished, the group settled elbow-to-elbow at the makeshift table and began passing the food around. It wasn’t gourmet cuisine, but it was still pretty good. For a while, everyone was too busy shoveling food to talk—sating the need to refuel often and in large quantities—then excited discussion about the week’s upcoming events kicked into high gear.
Eve ate mechanically, feeling disconnected from the boisterous atmosphere by a fuzzy sensation she called a “brain cloud.” She felt as if she was coming down with a nasty cold. She was exhausted and suspected she was running a mild fever. Since the mark prevented illness, she was more than a little concerned. As soon as she had a moment alone, she planned to call Alec about it. She didn’t feel like discussing any weakness in front of the others.
“So what’s on the agenda for tomorrow?” Ken asked, always ready to leap in headfirst.
“My training plans are a closely guarded secret, Mr. Callaghan,” Gadara said, smiling. “Besides, in actual field conditions you will have to think on your feet.”
“What should we do to prepare?” Eve asked.
“Dress in layers. It is chilly in the morning here and depending on how well you progress tomorrow, we may be out until evening.”
“That is when the ghosts come out and play,” Izzie said in a deliberately affected low and dramatic tone, followed by a bwa-ha-ha bark of laughter that sounded even funnier with a German accent. “Maybe they will visit us tonight.”
“Don’t make jokes,” Claire muttered. “Real Infernals are bad enough.”
“Who says I’m joking? I watched a television show on this place just last week. One of those ghost hunter series.”
Richens nodded. “We have similar programs in the U.K.”
“What are you talking about?” Claire asked.
“There are people,” Edwards explained, “who go to allegedly haunted locations and try to find proof of supernatural activity. They record their activities for television.”
“Vraiment?” Claire’s brows rose. “With what type of equipment do they search?”
Ken laughed. “A camcorder and a torch. Mostly all you see is screaming in the dark.”
“Yes,” Izzie agreed. “That is what I saw. It was strange that they waited until the middle of the night to ‘investigate.’ They deliberately turned the lights off, too. What is the reasoning behind doing that? If there are Infernals in the place, they don’t give a shit if the lights are on or not.”
“Torches?” Eve asked.
“Flashlights,” Gadara explained.
Claire frowned. “What is the purpose?”
“Entertainment,” Richens muttered.
“For whom? The persons screaming in the dark? Or the television viewers?”
“I don’t get it either,” Eve said, figuring she could contribute at least that much to the discussion.
Everyone looked at her, then resumed speaking.
“So are there truly Infernals in this place?” Claire asked. “Or just overactive imaginations?”
“There are Infernals everywhere,” Gadara reminded. “But what fuels these shows are rumor and conjecture. However, if there are Infernals nearby when the shows are filming, they sometimes play along for their own amusement.”
Eve pushed back from the table and stood, taking her plate with her. “I need to make a call before it gets too late.”
“To Cain?” Laurel’s smile was brittle.
“Who I call is none of your business.”
“You are fortunate to have someone to answer you,” Romeo murmured, rubbing his fingertips up and down Laurel’s spine.
Eve knew her situation was rare. She couldn’t decide if that was a blessing or not. Did her lingering connection to her family mean she didn’t have many indulgences to earn to gain her freedom? Or was her connection to Cain so valuable that her family ties were worth overlooking?
Setting her plate on the counter by the sink, Eve exited out the kitchen door and sat on the cement stoop. Above her, the sky was a gorgeous midnight blue. An inordinate number of stars twinkled between rapidly moving clouds. In her hometown, pollution created a charcoal gray night that hid much of the universe’s celestial beauty, but Eve would gladly trade being there for here.
She punched in Alec’s number. As the phone rang, Eve brushed her hair back from her damp forehead. She became dizzy if she moved too quickly, and her breathing was coming fast and shallow. The mark only allowed such reactions when arousal or a hunt was involved. Stress and illness weren’t factors.
So what the f**k is wrong with me?
Her physical acclimation to the mark had been screwy from the get-go, fading in and out like someone twisting the volume knob on a radio.
“You’ve reached Alec Cain. Leave a message or call Meggido Industries at 800-555-7777.”
The sound of Alec’s voice made Eve’s throat tight. “Come back in one piece,” she told his voicemail. “And call me when you can.”
Feeling in need of some fussing, she speed-dialed her parents and waited impatiently for one of them to pick up. They would check the caller ID first, since they never answered calls from numbers they didn’t recognize—
“Hey, darlin’.”
Eve smiled at the sound of her father’s familiar drawl. “Hey, Dad. What are you doing?”
“Watching television and telling myself to go to bed. How about you?”
“I’m up in Monterey.”
“Oh, that’s right.” The smile was evident in his voice. “Your mother told me you had some work up there.”