Brighid's Mark (5 page)

Maeve stood in the center of the binding circle, letting shadow and light alike fade. “And now you are trapped, more so than I. The best part is,
cousin
, it was you who sprung it.” And with a bright, tinkling laugh of wicked delight, she was gone.

An instant later, the rum bottle shattered against the nearest moss-hung tomb.

The iron railing clasped tight in Callie’s right hand was cool and dry, the wild green scent of the courtyard below reaching her past the city’s unique blend of
eau de Carré
.

Smell notwithstanding, she liked the feel of New Orleans—the buzz of it in her blood, its humidity on her skin. It made her feel alive, vital. Like Liam’s eyes on her face, his hands on her skin. She reveled in the pulse of the city beating around her in the form of laughter and life and music.

She wondered at her gut-jump reaction when Maeve reached for Liam—a reaction that couldn’t entirely be explained by her anger. She touched the fingers to her lips, where his unexpected kiss lingered like the stain of hard liquor not easily removed, or put aside as one of those things, part of an often-strange job.

From some of the things he’d said, Callie gathered he was probably as old as she, if not older. He was the Loa’s chosen protector of the city. He was Marked.

He was like her. But was he the exception of her self-imposed rule, borne of necessity? The idea made her a little breathless.

The door behind her slid open with a muffled scrape. Callie looked over her shoulder as Liam came through with his hands full and nudged the door closed again with an elbow. He’d divested his expensive shirt and shoes, leaving him barefoot in dark slacks and one of those white shirts that used to be considered underwear pre-Marlon Brando. His Marks vined up his left arm in seemingly random patterns and crept beneath his shirt.

He set his burdens on his balcony table. “Let’s see that hand.”

Callie had nearly forgotten the dull throb in her palm, wrapped tight in Liam’s snowy white handkerchief. A Rorschach blot of blood marred it. “It’s not necessary, really,” she said, turning away. “I heal fast. But thank you.”

“Humor me.” Liam gestured her over with feigned joviality.

“I’m sorry,” she answered, voice soft with the distance of her wandering thoughts. “I haven’t lost my temper so spectacularly in quite some time. I’ll send Donny out for a fresh bottle to replace the one I broke.”

“I keep a case.” He shrugged. “You and Maeve—that was quite a show. It wasn’t a game of cat and mouse so much as it was a game of cat and cat. I still can’t decide who won.”

Callie exhaled, returning from her mental wanderings. “Neither can I, to be honest.”

Liam proffered a hand with a smile, and she relented with good grace. He picked apart the knot in his handkerchief, unwound it from her hand. “I couldn’t help but notice she failed to answer our questions, yet managed to vanquish herself without any help from us.”

“Ah, but she did—answer our questions, I mean. There’s no rule compelling her to give us a straight answer, of course.” She leaned against the railing. “The vanquishing was my fault—I interfered by stepping into the circle.”

Liam swabbed the gash in her palm with witch hazel. “Care to let me in on the secret?”

She shrugged, watching his lovely hands mend the damage she’d done. “We’re dealing with a demon of unrequited love, for one.”

“Is it me, or does that sound a little…”

She smiled up at him, pleasantly surprised to find his dark eyes watching her as closely as she’d watched him. She admitted she liked him looking at her. She’d
really
liked him kissing her, even if it meant his possession by Legba guaranteed he wouldn’t remember. She wondered if Legba kissed like Liam, or vice versa.

She cleared her throat, heat flooding her face and making her a little lightheaded. “Soft? Unlikely. Wholly non-threatening and just a little silly? Sure. Until you put it in the perspective of the extreme. Unrequited love can easily turn to obsession, a need to possess. Unrequited love can play havoc with inhibitions, shade the black and white of what’s right, what’s clearly wrong, to gray. You know the saying that love is blind? It’s not too far from ‘the devil made me do it.’”

Liam nestled a soft square of gauze into the hollow of her palm and started wrapping it securely in place with a roll of bandage, expression thoughtful. “But why summon a demon?”

Callie went back to watching his hands. They were mesmerizing. “There’s a point where obsession crosses the line into hate.”

Liam held onto her hand, though he was finished bandaging it. He tucked away the tail end of the wrappings with care. “So Donal and Chase tear apart my library, in search of a demon of unrequited love. That doesn’t answer the question of who summoned it.”

Callie followed the twining of his Marks, anything but look into his eyes again. “Maeve didn’t have to put a name behind the demon, because it was an answer we already have. We just didn’t know it.”

Liam stepped closer. Her fingertips touched the Marks on his arm, and his breath hitched. “Because you know who it is, just not specifically.”

“Maeve was quick to gloat how personal Yshotha’s presence here is. That means it could only be Chase or Donny responsible. One of them had Eva killed to bring me here.” Her voice shook, but she continued to trace the inky patterns over lithe muscle and warm skin, hardly noticing Liam’s stilled breath. “And that’s why they’re in there, and I’m out here.”

“This demon came to my city,” he pointed out, lifting her chin with his fingers. “It could just as easily be me.”

“Yes,” Callie agreed, not believing it for a moment. She inhaled the faint tang of whiskey on his breath as her eyes drifted shut, and the jump in her pulse echoed in the burning cut on her hand. “It could.”

The door opened again. “Callie?”

Callie’s eyes flew open. They both turned, more than a little out of it, but didn’t step away from each other. It took a moment for Callie to focus on Chase, for reality to solidify around her.

Chase’s eyes shifted between the two of them. The corner of his mouth turned up, and Callie felt like she’d been caught kissing the neighborhood bad boy by her pain-in-the-ass brother.

She arched an eyebrow, unaccountably irritated. “Yes?”

“There’s good news and bad news. We’ve figured out which demon it is,” he said, never losing his smile.

“And the bad news?” Liam prompted, taking the bait.

“Donny wants to summon it.”

Donal spun a small, thick, dusty tome around on the paper-strewn library table and slid it across to Callie. “Yshotha,” he said, with grim satisfaction.

“Yshotha?” Callie stretched over the table and lifted the open book, leaning on her forearms and balancing on the balls of her feet. Liam wasn’t sure how the physics worked, but he was as appreciative was he was fascinated. As annoyed as he was with Chase’s impeccable timing—he’d been within an inch of kissing Callie, magnetized by those whiskey eyes. Disappointment thundered in his chest.

“Based on Liam’s description and Maeve’s reference to unrequited love, this is the bugger we’re after.” Donal’s eyes sparked with satisfaction.

Callie pushed the book in Liam’s direction and swiveled to her elbows, long limbs on riveting display. “What do you think?”

Liam smoothed the crackling page. He was slowly growing accustomed to having people in his space, their things underfoot and littered across every flat surface. It made his fingers itch, but he managed to restrain the urge to follow everyone with a laundry hamper and a dust cloth. Only that morning Chase had left a wet towel on one of his antique leather upholstered chairs, and Liam was almost positive the demon hunter had done it on purpose.

Speaking of demons, there it was—the horns, the fiery eyes, the lava-run crags in inky woodcut detail. He would have said medieval demonologists possessed too much imagination and too many lonely nights for their own good if he hadn’t seen the damned thing for himself.

“That’s it.” He raised his eyebrows at Donal. “And you want to summon this thing?”

Chase smirked. “That’s how we hunt. If we can’t track it and bring it bay, we trap it. Provided we have the right bait.”

Callie returned his smile. “Meaning me.”

“What?” Donal blurted out.

“What?” Liam echoed, half a beat behind.

“Are you certain you want to put yourself up for this?” Donal scowled. “Eva was bait, and it got her.”

“It won’t get me.”

“How do you know?” Liam demanded. Of course it would get her. She would be utterly destroyed. How could she not be?

Then he remembered her eyes when she faced down Maeve, and doubted his own judgment.

“Because we have a connection to the Loa. We’re meant to take it down.” She leveraged up onto both feet and returned the book to Donal. “What’s it going to take for a summoning?”

Donal’s fingers trailed across the page as he read. “These demonologists didn’t half make things complicated, did they? We’ll need a field enclosed in iron—a big one. Also, there’s a reference to where ‘fire has taken lives, created ghosts of hearts and souls.’”

Liam scrubbed his face with both hands. “You just described most of the city. The older parts, anyway. Do you have any idea how many Great Fires we’ve had?”

Donal did the math and conceded the point. “I imagine it’s referring to some symbolism as to unrequited love.”

“What else?” Callie asked.

Donal returned his attention to the book. “A lot of live obsidian, and the blood of the unrequited. Heart’s blood.”

Callie raised her eyebrows. “Which unrequited? The object of unrequited love, or the unrequited themselves?”

“Doesn’t say.” Donal snapped the book shut with a dusty, papery
poof
.

Chase grunted. “I don’t think it matters. Unrequited is unrequited. Let’s get this show on the road already.”

Callie gave a fatalistic shrug. “At least I won’t have to lay open my sword hand.”

Liam marveled at her, not for the first time. “You really think a sword is going to take this thing down?”

She grinned. “We’ll find out, won’t we?”

Liam turned to Donal. “What does the book say?”

“The usual drill—abandon all hope, all ye who enter here, et cetera.”

“A grand thing it is,” Callie drawled in an exaggerated brogue, “the ability to read Latin. I knew I should’ve stuck with it in school.”

“It’s what you pay me for,” Donal returned. “However measly it is. Regardless, there’s no record I can find of anyone managing to vanquish Yshotha, let alone destroy it all together. And this is the most complete library of texts I’ve seen in a month of decades.” He shot a look at Liam. “It’s a little creepy.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to collect,” Liam pointed out.

“From what I gather this Yshotha is one of the more powerful weapons in Lilith’s arsenal,” Donal concluded. “An honest-to-goodness Greater Demon.” He sounded half-fascinated, half-horrified.

Callie pondered the maps on the table. Liam got the impression she wasn’t actually seeing them. “Right. Donny, you’re on reagents. Chase—”

“Location scout. I know the drill.” His eyes found Liam, narrowed. “What about him?”

“He’s with me. It’s going to take the two of us to figure a way to vanquish this thing.”

Blue bedroom eyes silvered to steel. Without a word, Chase went to one of three duffels on the library floor and unzippered it. He dug around a moment, then threw radios to Donal and Callie. Donal nearly dropped his in surprise, but managed to keep hold of it.

“Military radios?” Liam asked.

“Phones don’t work here,” Chase pointed out. “These will.” He watched as Callie set hers on the table. “They’re set to the usual frequency.”

Callie waited until they left. Only then did she sag bodily against the table, spine bowed. “I’m a coward.”

Liam approached her on soft feet. “Why would you say that?”

“I’m a coward,” she repeated, slightly louder, “because I don’t want to know which one of them betrayed me.”

“Look at the bright side,” he tried. “It still might be me.”

She shook her head, but couldn’t help smiling. “No.”

“How can you be so certain?”

“Maeve said it herself. This was a trap. The connection is between Eva and me, being Brighid’s Keepers. Personal.”

Liam leaned back against the table. Her neck was still bowed, face half hidden by her unruly Halloween wig hair. “I don’t see it. You all seem so close.”

“We are. That’s the problem.” She pushed herself upright with a deep sigh. “I’ve lost all perspective. Stepping back—stepping away—scares me senseless. I’m afraid of what I might see.”

“But what would their motivation be?”

She sat back on the table, bare feet swinging. “Donny was first. He fears death. Like a full-on phobia in terrifying Technicolor. He encountered the Angel of Death when he came for the girl he was in love with ever since he was a child. The young woman died, because a Keeper couldn’t save her.”

“You?”