Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) (6 page)

“I appreciate that, but I have a feeling the crap hasn’t even hit the fan yet,” I said. “If Gervais found Sarah and made his move to reclaim her, he has to have plans for her. Archfiends are always scheming, but when they put the wheels in motion... that isn’t good for anybody.”

“I’m with you on that one. Look, you have my cell right?” I nodded. “I’ve got to call this in, get these bodies identified. People might have thought they were crazy, but they still had families, and maybe somebody has missed them.”

“What are you going to tell them?” I asked.

He looked around, his face blanching at the scene. “Gas leak, explosion, whatever I tell them is what they’ll believe. The mojo is funny that way. The good news, if you can call it that, is a bunch of vagrants die like this, we’ll identify the bodies, and we’ll contact next of kin, but that’ll probably be the end of it. The media isn’t interested in stuff like this, so it should be easy enough to make it go away.”

“Maybe for them,” I replied. Sarah was gone. I needed to get her back. “There’s a USB drive at my place at the Belmont. It’s got a lot of transaction data on it, money in and out. I think the numbers make a pattern, and the pattern makes a message. If you want to help me, look at the data and see what you can find. Just wedge the door again when you leave.”

Obi pursed his lips, considering my request. I knew he would do it. Like he had said, when times got rough he was nothing if not loyal. “Got it,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

I looked over at Izak. “I’ve got to get Sarah back before Gervais can do whatever it is he aims to do with her. My fiend and I are going to take a trip to the City of Light.”

I didn’t waste any time getting topside, running back through the tunnels and up through the manhole, onto the street next to Obi’s squad car. Izak was following behind me, a little bit further back because he had stopped to grab his shirt and coats. As soon as I reached the surface I pulled the smartphone from my pocket and swiped over to my contact list. I scrolled down to Rachel’s name and hit the call icon.

It rang six times before her answering service picked up. “Rachel,” I said, after the beep, “can you arrange two tickets from JFK to Paris, France for me, and call me back with the flight number?” I hung up.

Izak pulled himself to the surface, one hand still gripping the sword. He had only put one of his grimy down jackets back on, and had lost the snow cap. He was going to have to do better than that.

“Izak,” I said. “Homeless time is over. I can’t take you on an airplane like that.” I could have glamoured him to the mortals, but it was going to be tricky enough to get through the airport without having to worry about that detail. Not when the demon could take care of it himself.

Izak grinned at me. His eyes danced with fire, and his appearance shifted like sand until the person standing in front of me no longer resembled the meek vagrant the fiend had been hiding behind. Instead, I was confronted with a middle-aged, wealthy playboy, with slicked back salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. He was dressed in a fine Italian suit under a long wool trench, which he used to hide his blade.
 

“Better,” I said, focusing and changing my own dress to better match the fiend’s. It was like a bizarro Rain Man. I pointed to Obi’s car. “Let’s go.”

I had just slid in behind the wheel when Obi climbed up out of the sewer. When he saw Izak sitting shotgun, his face fell.
 

“Come on, man,” he cried, staring at us.

“It’ll be at JFK,” I shouted. “Tell them it was stolen.”

He shook his head. “It is stolen,” he shouted back. “Have you ever even driven before?”

“I’ll be careful,” I replied, swinging the shifter to drive and pulling away a little bit roughly. Growing up in the city, I hadn’t had much need to drive, but I had played games at the local bowling alley. How different could it be?

I watched Obi in the rearview mirror as he pulled out his portable radio and called for backup. I knew he wouldn’t mention his missing car until later.

“How could Gervais have found her?” I asked Izak while we drove. He shook his head in reply.

She had been safe because she believed she was safe. She had insisted she would be able to sense her father coming from miles away, and would be able to either hide or summon me way before he could ever snatch her. I had believed her, I had no reason not to; not after the other things I had seen her do. But something had changed. There was a vampire running around killing children, a vampire who had taken an Awake child, and they had never known he was there. A vampire that didn’t give off a Divine signature. I knew the trick, but it couldn’t be done without having access to both angel and demon sources of power. Or could it?
 

What if the vampire was no vampire at all? It wouldn’t be hard for a demon like Gervais to make it look like a vamp had done the dirty work. Or, he could have Commanded it. I slammed my fist on the steering wheel of the car in frustration, accidentally blaring the horn. I waved off the driver in front of me when he flipped me the bird.

The traffic was heavy through the midtown tunnel, and never really opened up as we headed along the Long Island Expressway. I had the urge to hit the sirens and lights more than once, but I didn’t want to draw extra attention to the borrowed car. Instead, I looked up at the overcast sky, jealous of the angels one more time for their ability to get from place to place without having to deal with such pedestrian things as traffic. Even the demons had me beat there, with their ability to create and share transport rifts to locations around the world. They hoarded the locations of the rifts like diamonds, and no amount of negotiation or torture had gotten me any closer to mapping them. There was one under the Statue, but it was useless without knowing a connecting address, and Charis had destroyed the one on her end sometime after I had met her.

So I was left on the ground, slogging along like a mortal. Dante had said I couldn’t fly, but I wasn’t so sure. The problem was that it would draw an exponential sum of energy, and I couldn’t be assured that the flux wouldn’t have catastrophic consequences. Not to mention, I would likely burn out and drop from the sky in a coma, with no assurances that I would ever wake up. It was sobering to think about the chaos I could potentially create if I chose to, albeit at my own expense.

We had crossed the Grand Central and were doing twenty on the Van Wyck when my cell rang. I pulled it out of my pocket without my hands and air-tapped the pickup icon.
 

“Rachel,” I said. “What’s the flight?”

She sighed loudly on the other end of the phone. “I don’t know why I do these things for you, Landon,” she said.
 

“It’s about Sarah,” I said. I had never told her who or what Sarah was, only that she was important to me. That was all she needed to hear.

“Air France 7760,” she said. “It leaves in four hours. Are you going to make it?”

Even at this pace, we would be at the airport in less than an hour. “We’ll make it.”

There was a moment of silence as Rachel waited for me to elaborate. When I didn’t she spoke again. “Well, I hope everything works out,” she said. “I’m not going to get in trouble over this, am I?”

“If everything works out, you’ll be in better standing,” I replied. I couldn’t imagine Heaven not applauding her for helping me take out another archfiend.

“Okay then. Good luck.” The phone clicked as she hung up.

“Thank you,” I said, a little too late.
 

I left the car stopped in the center of an aisle in the long term parking garage, and Izak and I made our way to terminal One. It was going to be a little suspicious for the two of us to be taking an international flight without any luggage, so I created a small fire under the wheels of a parked taxi and made off with a couple of suitcases while the mortals around us were distracted by it. Izak gave me a toothy grin in response to the maneuver, and we headed to the desk better equipped to travel.

“Can I help you sirs?” Monique asked. She was a perky older woman who looked like she was overmatched by most of the luggage that she had to toss onto the belt behind her. Her name badge was pinned neatly to her breast.

 
“Yes,” I said. “I believe my secretary called in a reservation for my associate and I on Flight 7760 to Paris. The name is Joshua Meyer.” Rachel had given me the moniker the first time I had left the country.
 

Her fingers clacked along her keyboard. “Ah yes, here we are. Two first class tickets, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Smith. I’ll just need to see each of you gentleman’s passports, and then I can take your luggage and you can head off to gate D7.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a plain piece of printer paper, which I tore in half and handed to Monique. She never saw me tear it, she only saw two passports open to the picture. She took each and ran them under the scanner, verifying the identities. Getting into that database had been an awful month of social engineering and brute force hacking, but I had a nice supply of fake passport information to make use of as a reward.

“We’re all set,” Monique said, handing me back the paper and struggling to move the luggage onto the belt.
 

“They should have someone do that for you,” I said.
 

“It’s no problem,” she replied, her breathing heavy. “It keeps me in shape. You two gentlemen have a great flight.”

“We will,” I said.
 

Airport security for mortals was a general nightmare, with long lines, crying children, juggling bags and coats and shoes and being exposed to questionable levels of radiation; not to mention the full body scanners. I hadn’t flown much while I was mortal. I had flown a lot as a Divine. Getting past the TSA was as simple as walking right by, but that didn’t mean that the airport was without its complications. There would be other Divine here, watching out for incoming mortal agents, keeping tabs on the general populace, and just waiting to be able to report that they saw me passing through. If I was lucky, they would leave me to my business and spy from the shadows.
 

I knew having Izak along was going to make things more complicated. No sooner had we walked unheeded past the metal detectors and backscatter machines than I sensed a pair of angels among the crowds waiting at the end of the terminal. They wouldn’t have been able to recognize me from that distance, but they did notice Izak, and were moving towards us before we could take a dozen steps.

“Just let me handle this,” I said to Izak. He held his left hand out and waved me forward in reply, and then stopped walking alongside me.

The angels were still out of view when I got my first smell of them. I knew one of them, and I knew he was no threat. Thomas. I stopped walking and motioned Izak to join me to wait for their approach.

The other angel was unfamiliar, a younger female with short spiked golden hair and a seraph runed ring through her nose. They both looked like they were better equipped for a stage show at Lollapalooza than an airport. When Thomas’ companion saw Izak she reached back under her long leather coat to grab her sword. Thomas placed his hand gently on her forearm to stop her, and then looked at me and smiled.

“Greetings, fellow,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder as soon as he was close enough to reach me.

“Careful, Thomas,” I said. “The balance is even. You can get in a lot of trouble for fraternizing.”

He laughed. “I’ve been in plenty of trouble since I met you,” he replied. “Although the powers that be have been pleased with the results of our arrangement. You kept your word to restore the balance, and now we can at least breathe a little easier while we figure out how to get you out of the picture.”

I appreciated the young angel’s candidness. I had no doubt that Heaven was working non-stop to figure out how to get me someplace where they could put me out of commission. The problem for the good guys was that they had to do it within their moral code. When you couldn’t resort to trickery and lies, it made for a tough assignment.

“Leave me to the demons,” I said. “That’s your best chance.”

He sighed. “Except if we focus too much on good works and killing demons, you come around and set us back again.”

“You heard about Silas?” I asked.
 

He nodded. “I’ve prayed to stay above getting angry for the things you do. Sometimes you don’t make it easy.”

I wasn’t going to apologize. I had my reasons. I glanced over at the other angel. She was deferential to her elder, but it was clear she didn’t approve of the conversation.

 
“Who’s your new partner?” I asked.

“Initiate Melody. We thought airport duty would help her break in slowly. I didn’t imagine we’d be running into you, although it was your companion who piqued my interest.” Thomas looked over at Izak now, trying to gauge the demon’s importance.

“Trust me when I tell you that you’ll need a lot more backup to handle this one,” I said. “In any case, he’s helping me out with a complication that I need to clear up.”

“Does the fiend speak for himself?” Melody asked, opening her mouth at last. Her name befitted her voice, a sweet tone with proper British inflection.

“Melody,” Thomas said. “Mind yourself.”

Her nostrils flared, her face reddening. “We have explicit orders not to let any demons out of the airport. Nobody said ‘except if they’re accompanied by the bleedin’ diuscrucis’.”

“Melody,” Thomas said softly. “Our orders did not need to specify what we should do if Landon came through. If you want to survive, you
will
mind yourself.”

I don’t know if it was youthful exuberance, loyal zealotry, or plain stupidity that led Melody to pull her sword and try to stab Izak with it. The whole motion happened in the smallest fraction of a second, an impressive move for such a green seraph.
 

She needn’t have bothered. The tip of the blade had only begun to emerge from the front of her coat when Izak stepped nonchalantly to the side, reaching down and putting his hand on the seraph’s arm as the sword whistled through the unoccupied space. Her hand spasmed open at the touch and the blade clattered to the ground. Melody shifted her eyes and looked at Izak in fear, the rest of her body paralyzed.