Harper’s shoulders lowered slightly, and she let out a long breath. “I need a drink.” Or a bottle. Maybe then her nerves would finally fully settle.
Keenan pulled his flask out of his pocket and offered it to her. “Here.”
She didn’t even take a cautious sniff. Just chugged it down. And nearly choked as her throat and the roof of her mouth started to burn like holy hell. She coughed. “Jesus, what is that? Battery acid?”
The incubus smirked. “Everclear vodka with a little something mixed in.”
Deciding she didn’t want to know what that little something was, Harper handed him the flask, still coughing. Knox rested his hand on her nape and gave it a comforting squeeze.
Staring down at her, Tanner said, “You weren’t kidding.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“You can in fact be terrifying. And no, I’m not teasing you.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to ever again deal with shit from the Primes, Harper.” Levi moved the chair back to its spot near the wall and hooked the rope over it. “It’s fucked up that this gained their respect, but if that respect and fear keeps them from messing with you, that can only be a good thing.”
Keenan knocked down a huge gulp of that vodka, the weirdo. “You still plan on playing a clip of Malloy’s slow-death throughout the Underground?”
“It’s the only way to be sure that the Horseman and any minions he might have will get our message,” said Harper. “Besides, everyone needs to be sure exactly what happens to those who go after my family.”
Larkin nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll get on it.”
With his hand still on her nape, Knox led her out of the boathouse and into the fresh, open air. Harper inhaled it greedily, needing to drown out the scents of blood, pain, and hate that seemed to be clogging her nostrils and lungs.
“Are we all thinking that the Horseman was Alethea’s ‘reliable source’?” asked Tanner as they walked back to the house. Mansion. Whatever the beautiful monstrosity should be called. “That he told her she was a target to scare and manipulate her?”
“It seems likely,” said Knox. The others nodded. “We can cross Dion off our list of suspects. The incorporeal said it intended to find and hurt him once it had earned its freedom.”
Levi twisted his mouth. “That leaves us with Thatcher, Dario, and Jonas.”
Holding the laptop against her chest, Larkin sighed. “It’s a crying shame that the only clues Malloy gave us about Alethea’s partner in crime are that he wears a cashmere coat, smokes tobacco, likes Cirque du Soleil, and that the encantada trusted his word.”
“The only person I can imagine her investing any trust in is Jonas,” said Tanner. “But I saw her face when she realized that Jonas wanted an alliance with Lou. If the siblings were working together, would it really have bothered her that he wanted such an alliance? It makes more sense that she suspected Jonas would betray her and try to have the incorporeal destroyed or banished back to hell, just like he claimed. Also, I’ve never known him to smoke. Nor Dario, for that matter. Never smelled tobacco on them.”
“I’ve seen Jonas smoking a time or two,” said Knox. “I’ve also seen Thatcher with the occasional cigar at gatherings, but I got the feeling he only smoked them to look distinguished.”
Larkin drummed her fingers on the closed laptop. “Malloy was one of Thatcher’s demons. He could have turned Alethea’s attention her way—pulled her strings, so to speak. But I don’t think he’s the Horseman. I mean, if he is, he would have just asked Sherryl for the info himself; he wouldn’t have done it through Alethea.”
A thoughtful silence fell. After a long moment, Harper broke it. “The Horseman’s not very hands-on, is he? He likes to use people. And it makes me wonder if he was pulling the strings of the other Horsemen. Sitting back and letting them take all the risks and do all the work.”
Knox’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You think he was their ringleader? That he might have even been the one who brought them all together?”
Harper shrugged. “It’s just a theory.”
“It’s a good one,” said Knox.
Levi rubbed at his nape. “If we go with that theory, it would suggest that Dario isn’t our guy. He campaigned to be Monarch, like Isla. That’s not ‘sitting back’, is it?”
“No, it’s not.” Knox frowned, still feeling like there was something he was missing.
“Where do we go from here?” asked Larkin. “Malloy didn’t exactly give us any useful clues, did she?”
“Maybe she did,” mused Harper, coming to a standstill as something occurred to her. “She said that she and Alethea only communicated through telepathy. It’s an ability that pretty much all demons possess, but it’s not always strong. Some don’t have a very wide telepathic range.” She turned to Knox. “You’d known Alethea a long time, you must have some idea of how wide her range was.”
Knox thought about it for a moment. “It couldn’t have been very wide. There were many occasions when she called my cell phone. Especially when she was out of the country, which was often.”
“What about when she was inside the country?” asked Harper. “I’m sure you were often invited to her home here, but maybe there were times when she called to say she was near one of your offices and wanted to know if you were interested in hooking up?”
“Yes,” he remembered. “There were also occasions when she called to say she was near the estate.”
“Hoping you’d grant her entry and she could wangle her way into your bedroom, even though you never ‘shit where you slept’, as you once so aptly put it.” Harper snorted. “Okay, and where were you at the time of these calls?”
“Various places. I was rarely ever home. I worked a lot.” Knox searched his memories, eyes narrowed. “I remember I once agreed to meet her in the bar of a hotel on the strip. I was running late, so I tried telepathing her to let her know. I couldn’t reach her, so I had to call her.”
Harper took a small step toward him. “And where were you at the time?”
“In a hotel further along the strip. Four kilometers away, at most.”
“Then her telepathic muscle didn’t stretch very far,” Harper mused. “But she was in regular contact with Sherryl Malloy, who lived smack bam in the middle of North Las Vegas.” Which meant that … “Motherfucker, Alethea must have been hiding in North Las Vegas all that time—the last place anyone would think to look for her.”
Levi bit out a harsh curse. “So close yet so fucking far. If she was relying on Malloy for info, she wasn’t getting out of her hideout much. She holed herself up somewhere.”
Keenan nodded. “Still, she would have caught someone’s attention. She was a sex demon. Encantadas easily entrance humans.”
“I should get my family on this,” said Harper. “They can show her picture to people and ask around. We may just be able to find out where she was staying.”
“The Force can do that,” said Knox.
“Yes, but my family knows the area better than they do.” Pretty much all of the Wallis imps lived there. “People are more willing to talk to them than they are to any of our lair.”
Knox inclined his head. “We’ll still have our Force make enquiries. The more people working on this, the better.”
Harper gave a satisfied nod. “The odds are good that he cleaned wherever she was staying of anything that could implicate him, but someone will have seen something. People mind their business in shady areas, but they stay alert, too. If they saw a stranger walking around, they’d have gotten a good look at them.”
Feeling a tingle of optimism, she wasted no time in telepathing Jolene and bringing her up to speed as she walked back to the house. Her grandmother offered to assist in questioning people in the area before Harper even got the chance to ask. With the combined efforts of their lairs, they would surely learn something important.