Bound by Shadow (3 page)

He wished he could talk to Dominic the way he did in the good old days, when his brother had worked OCU right next to Creed.

Riana gave Andy a hug at the front door, then turned to Creed. He offered his hand and expected her to shake it again, but she took it and used it to pull him close instead. Before he knew what was happening, she wrapped her arms around his neck.

The shock of her warm, soft body against his electrified Creed. He put his hands on her waist, reflex more than conscious action. The firm curve of her hips, the press of her breasts against his chest, that intoxicating blend of rain and lavender—the woman was killing him. She had to be doing it on purpose. She had to know. Any second now, his erection would rip through his jeans.

Instead of smiling and kissing him on the cheek as she had done with Andy, Riana stood on her toes and rubbed seductively against the hard swell of his cock. His back was to Andy as Andy headed down the outside steps, hiding the progress of Riana’s hand—the one with the mysterious tattoo—as it traveled down, down until her long fingers brushed the notable bulge. Her green eyes sparkled with appreciation and a deep, almost disturbing amusement.

“Nice,” she said, one eyebrow raised, and gave his cock an intimate, mind-blowing squeeze. At the same time, she pressed her lips against his ear. The heat of her breath and the unbelievable feel of her hand made his gut tighten with helpless need.

Just then, her fingers moved again—this time in a sharp, painful backward thrust.

His breath left in a rush and his eyes watered from the agony of her sudden forceful grip on the most tender parts of his manhood.

“I don’t know what you are,” she whispered sweetly, her exotic accent taking on fresh menace, “but if you hurt Andy or anyone else, I’ll kill you. Do you understand me?”

Creed nodded to save his life and his balls.

Over her shoulder, he saw Cynda and Merilee smiling at him with that same horrifying sweetness as those infernal bronze pipes over his head chimed and chimed.

Riana let him go, and he made himself walk slowly out the door, which slammed behind him. He heard the distinct clink and rattle of locks sliding into place.

When he joined Andy on the street corner, trying not to walk funny because of the miserable ache between his legs, she grinned at him.

“I think Riana might like you, partner.”

“Yeah,” he grumbled as the light changed. Andy started into the crosswalk, and he hobbled along behind her. “She might like me, all right. Dead in a display box, with little pins through my wings.”

2

Riana’s triad sisters made it to the window before she did. Cynda and Merilee both spoke at once, so fast she could barely discern who said what.

“Goddess, he’s delicious. Did you see those
muscles
?”

“Look at that ass in those jeans.”

“Was his cock huge?”

“I bet it was huge.”

“I love a dark-haired man in jeans and leather.”

“I love a man with a gun.”

“But who is he, really?”

“
What
is he?”

“Not an Asmodai. He could talk and his features were too stable.”

“Hush.” Riana put a hand on each of them and watched Creed Lowell’s departure through a tiny slit in the lace curtains. “We’ll probably have to stick a dagger through his heart.”

The man—or whatever he was—cut a figure, even limping with a bad case of bruised balls. Riana had meant to intimidate him, she had tried to intimidate him, but her fingers still tingled from touching him so intimately.

Definitely
not an Asmodai.

In all of her years of fighting the man-made demon servants created by members of the Legion, she had never encountered an Asmodai with normal male parts. The demons were solid enough, but without definition. More like life-sized clay models of humans, built from an element, a talisman, and energy generated in perverted rituals.

Creed Lowell was gutsy. She had to give him that. He had realized she spotted him, knew something was off about him, but he still entered her home, her most protected zone. He still let her put her hands on him—
it,
she reminded herself.
The creature.
Something she’d likely have to kill without mercy when the time came.

But damn, did that creature ever have a hard body, never mind those gorgeous eyes. Onyx filled with dark fire, like the flame of a black candle burning in some hot, sweaty underground ritual. She especially liked the way the sun glimmered off his midnight hair. It was longer than cops usually wore it, just above his shoulders, but pulled back at his neck.

Like some Celtic warrior. Goddess help me.

When Riana had tracked Andy Myles to her health club, joined it, and intentionally struck up a friendship with the woman a year before, she had planned to gain the detective’s trust enough to get a little information on OCU cases. Riana had hoped Andy’s work would lead the Upper East Side triad to a few real supernatural villains.

But Andy’s partner?

Not in the plan.

In the months Andy had been in Riana’s life, she had become one of the best friends Riana had ever known. Riana put her hand over her crescent pendant, which had been a gift to her from one of the Russian Mothers—one of the ancient women who trained her to be a warrior—on the day she was chosen to form her triad. Her group of fighters. The only people she truly cared about—other than her friend.

She would
not
let that creature harm Andy.

As always, Cynda was the one to start putting dark thoughts into words. “Did you see that signet ring on his right hand? Was it really a coiled serpent?”

“It was,” Riana confirmed as Creed and Andy disappeared into their Crown Vic across busy Fifth Avenue. “Like the ones I’ve seen on ancient coins. I’m sure of it.”

Behind the car, the trees of Central Park swayed gently in morning breezes. Merilee’s fingers dug into the windowsill. “Then he could be one of those bastards who make the Asmodai! Finally one of the Legion—and we let him walk away?”

“We can get him back,” Riana said with more confidence than she felt. She had a sense that Creed, that the creature, had survived for many years among humans, and he hadn’t done that by taking foolish chances. “Besides, we couldn’t very well trap him, grill him, and execute him in front of his police-officer partner, could we?”

Merilee’s angry hiss put a question mark on that assertion.

For a graduate of Motherhouse Greece, the training facility most known for its peaceful, academic approach to the powers of the air, Merilee could be surprisingly violent.

Wind is made from air,
Riana reminded herself.
And tornados
.

Merilee hissed again. Air gusted through the brownstone, randomly ringing the communication chimes.

“Hurricanes, too,” Riana said aloud.

“What?” Cynda glanced up at her, bright fire in her green eyes. Real fire that threatened to break across her freckled skin. It had happened before. A lot, actually.

“Nothing.” Riana sighed. “Enough spying. We have a lot of work to do.”

The two younger members of the triad followed her back to the table without arguing. Merilee spread out a detailed street map of Manhattan as she mumbled a repetitive prayer to the old gods of Olympus, something about patience and perseverance. Riana didn’t know the words for sure. Her Greek was rusty.

Cynda sang a folk tune about a cutty wren and John the Red Nose. No doubt she learned the song in a pub in Connemara, the town nearest Motherhouse Ireland. In time with the lilting tune, Cynda retrieved the diagrams and maps she had shoved off the table so casually, to hide the papers from their guests. Soon, schematics of the Metropolitan Museum were once more laid out on the tabletop, resting across the carved, lead-lined indentation that marked the table’s edge.

Riana chose an old Russian song to help her focus and relax. She had learned the tune at the oldest and grandest of the three Motherhouses, the one near Volgograd in Russia. As she sat and spread the autopsy photos in front of her on the table, she hummed the comforting melody, letting the words unfold in English in her mind.

Dark eyes, passionate eyes, burning and so beautiful eyes
—

Merilee snickered, then laughed outright. “Isn’t that one about grief in the soul and sacrificing everything for ardent eyes?” She moved her compass and used a blue pencil to trace a pattern on a piece of paper she had slipped over her map. “Bad choice.”

Cynda let out a snort of agreement as she compared pamphlets, lists on ancient papers, and the museum’s floor plan.

Merilee pushed one of her papers forward. “The Met and Senator Latch’s residence are too far apart to make it likely the same Asmodai was involved with both crime scenes.”

“Is there a third point on the map?” Riana looked up at her pretty Greek triad sister. “An origin point?”

With a flourish of warm air, Merilee held up a second piece of paper. “The only equidistant point would be the U.N. headquarters. Possible, but not likely. Maybe Grand Central?”

“Grand Central’s big, but I don’t know if there are enough private places to do the ritual it would take to make an Asmodai.” Riana chewed her lip for a moment. “I’m betting my tests will show that the boy was killed with a ceremonial blade—maybe from the robbed exhibit?”

Cynda kept a finger on the Metropolitan Museum schematics as she studied Merilee’s colorfully marked plot. “How much are we going to tell Andy? I hate holding back on another woman who fights evil the best way she knows how.”

Riana shook her head. “Andy’s not trained.”

“So that makes it okay for us to use her,” Cynda grumbled.

Riana thrust out her arm and let her tattoo show. “We protect her.”

Cynda started to snap back, seemed to think better of it, and hung her head instead. After a few moments, she studied her own tattoo. Merilee did the same.

Broom, mortar, and pestle—the sacred triad in flight across a dark crescent moon.

The mark of the Dark Goddess.

The triad tattoo was the sign that identified the Sibyls, member of the Dark Crescent Sisterhood, female warriors with a lineage almost as old as time, not to mention years of training in a Motherhouse. Riana was proficient in seven languages, seven different styles of traditional hand-to-hand combat, and all known close-proximity weapons. The women she had chosen to complete her triad—Cynda, the pestle, and Merilee, the broom—had skills to complement her own.

Andy could use a gun, sure, and she had excellent law-enforcement instincts. But without the powers of a Sibyl passed down through generations and controlled by training, Andy could never stand against
real
supernatural foes.

Cynda scooted the Met schematic in front of Riana. “Motherhouse records don’t show a ceremonial dagger as part of the traveling Volgograd collection, but there is mention of a mortar and pestle, one of those six that might have belonged to the Dark Goddess. It’s not on the museum manifest, and not listed in the exhibit, but it could have been there.” She pushed forward a snapshot of the destruction left behind when the collection was wrecked. “Whoever broke in did so much damage, we may never know. It could be dust on the floor.”

“It was an Asmodai,” Merilee said. “It had to be, to trip no alarms until it knocked down an entire wall. Look at all that char. The thing was probably made of fire.”

“It could have been made out of air,” Cynda countered. “A powerful fire-Asmodai would have burned down the whole building and split the stones.”

Riana raised both hands. “The Asmodai could have been shaped out of earth, air, fire,
or
water. There could have been more than one, from more than one source. That’s not the issue. We need to know if it took an object of power.”

“My instincts say yes,” Cynda said at once. Merilee nodded.

Riana checked the sensations in her own mind, in her own belly, that subtle but accurate intuition granted to her by her heritage and training as a Sibyl, and she had to agree. The Asmodai, whatever form it had taken, had managed to steal an object of power from the Metropolitan Museum and carry it back to its creator.

She pulled together Cynda’s diagrams and Merilee’s maps and stacked them beside the autopsy photos. “So, we have Asmodai activity at the Met, to steal an object of power. And we have Asmodai activity at Senator Latch’s house, to murder a child. By timing and location, they’re unrelated—but we can’t be sure of that.”

“The Legion usually ignores contemporary politics, and they hardly ever attempt a public crime like that museum theft.” Merilee leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. “Why the Met? Why that kid?”

Cynda frowned. “And did somebody try to protect the boy with that circle—or just trap him to make the Asmodai’s task easier? Do they have human dabblers working for them now, or has the Legion begun to expand?”

Riana found her master notebook and wrote down the lingering questions. She tried to remain calm, practice the detachment she had learned from the Mothers, but her stomach churned no matter what she tried. Her mind kept flashing startling images of the dead boy, the utter devastation of the museum exhibit—and a pair of dark, burning eyes filled with confusion and pathos.

Is Creed Lowell one of the Legion?

Did I let the only chance we’ve had to stop these bastards just walk out our front door?
Damnit.
I have to get him back.

She chewed the tip of her pen. Sibyls used pen and paper instead of computers to help their thinking process through the meditative act of writing. Also, notebooks couldn’t be hacked from distant locations—and supernatural energy tended to play hell with electronic devices anyway. Low tech just worked better, except for Internet searches and retrieving other public-domain information.

Cynda leaned over and smacked her arm. “Quit eating the equipment.”

Riana dropped the pen on the table next to three or four other previously chewed pens and pencils. “Okay. Action. Merilee, we need current information on Senator Latch. Everyone in his family. Everyone he knows.”