“Hey, bud,” it said. “Mission accomplished. You necromancer buddy demanded his phone call about half hour after you left. He talked to a woman named Kimberly Donavon. From the sound of things, she’s definitely the one who hired him. Normally, we’d go after her ourselves right away, but I figured you might want first stab, so I put it off until Wednesday. Nick is back in solitary, so she has no idea you’re coming. I texted you her address.”
I called him back and thanked him, making sure that I still had the rest of the weekend before OtherOps made their move. I did.
Maggie returned, dripping, a half hour later. I was half asleep when she dropped none-so-gently into my lap.
“Ow!” I said.
“Oh! Sorry about that.” She grinned at me. “I haven’t been swimming for five centuries, Alek. Five centuries!” She leapt back to her feet, throwing her hands in the air. The wind whipped off the Atlantic, but she barely seemed to notice the spring cold.
“Sorry we’ve blown through most of your anniversary,” I said, glancing at the clock on my phone. “What do you want to do for the rest of it?”
“You sure you don’t need a hospital?” she said, sobering.
“I think I can get through another six or seven hours.”
“Good. Let’s get shit-faced and spend the rest of the morning in a hammock.”
“That,” I said, “is the best idea I’ve ever heard.”
Epilogue
The three-story, white stucco house sat on a quiet, old-moneyed street in Cleveland Heights, just a stone’s throw from my favorite Thai place in Coventry. It was the type of hundred-year-old house I used to dream of owning someday, back when I went on ride-alongs with the old reapers as a kid. I stood in the street outside, leaning against my rental while Maggie took stock of the place.
I don’t sense anything out of the ordinary, she said. No wards, no sorcery, no bodyguards. There’s one lady in there, probably in her midfifties. She’s watching soap operas.
It was four o’clock on Monday afternoon. I’d managed to get back from South Carolina without passing out, and I’d spent most of Sunday in the hospital. The ghoul had cracked pretty much everything in my body, but Ada’s personal doctor had given me a bunch of heavy painkillers and told me that my troll blood would heal it all within a month or two, which didn’t seem all that useful to me.
We’re good, Maggie concluded. Either she’s so goddamned powerful that not even I can sense her sorcery, or she’s just an ordinary person.
Why would an ordinary person hire a necromancer to kill me?
Because they can’t do it themselves? Technically, she hired the necromancer to bring her my ring. There was menace in Maggie’s voice.
Let me take care of this, I told her.
She snorted.
I walked up the short drive and knocked on the door, listening to the soap opera playing through the living room window. I was wearing a Valkyrie Collections hoodie over my flak jacket, the hood pushed back, one hand ready to reach for my gun. I saw a curtain shift, then heard footsteps inside. The door opened to reveal a blonde-haired woman with crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes and a heavily made-up face. She looked more tired than menacing, and she gave me a single glance before letting out a sigh. “It’s you,” she said.
“Hi.” I managed a smile, even though I didn’t feel like it. “Kimberly Donavon?”
She glanced past me, into the street. Her jaw tightened, and she lifted her chin toward me. “You going to kill me?” she asked.
I tongued at the torn-up gums of my bottom canines. “Can we talk inside?”
“Might as well,” she said with a shrug, turning and walking away.
I followed her inside, shutting the door behind me and heading into the living room, where she turned off her soaps and dropped into the couch. Despite the exhaustion in her face, there was an edge of defiance. “Well?” she asked. “Get on with it.”
I looked around the living room. Everything about it screamed upper-middle-class family home, from the baby grand piano centerpiece to the big-screen TV over the fireplace to the expensive-looking suede couches. There was no hint of anything out of the ordinary. No sign of the Other. “Get on with what?”
“Whatever you people do to people like me.”
I took a deep breath. “What do you think I am?”
“I have no idea. All I know is that fool kid Nick couldn’t bring me what I paid for and landed himself in an OtherOps lockup.” She scowled. “How did you find me? They trace the call? I figured they’d do that the moment I hung up the phone. Been waiting all weekend for someone to show up. So what’ll it be? Torture? Maiming? Death? I assume you’re friends with some pretty powerful people to keep Nick locked up.” She spoke a thousand words a minute, one sentence bleeding into the next, barely stopping to take a breath.
Jesus, Maggie said. She is an absolute mess. There was actually a note of sympathy in her tone.
I noticed Kimberly’s eyes flick down to Maggie’s ring. I turned the armchair away from the TV and sat down across from her, lacing my fingers. “I’m not going to kill you,” I said gently.
“Why not? I tried to kill you.”
“You tried to steal from me,” I corrected her. “The fact that your errand boy decided to make things violent wasn’t your fault.”
“It was,” she insisted. “I told him to get me the jinn at all costs. I wouldn’t have batted an eye if he’d killed you.”
“You’re not very good at poker, are you?”
“What?”
“Never mind.” I drummed one fingernail against a lower canine. “Why do you want the jinn?”
A flurry of emotions crawled across Kimberly’s face: guilt, anger, relief, hatred, revulsion. She had a million different things bottled up in that head of hers. I couldn’t imagine what had caused them. Her eyes moved to Maggie’s ring again. “Is that it?” she asked. “Her vessel?”
Oh, no, Maggie suddenly said.
My attention split between the two. I covered the ring with one hand and said to Maggie, What’s wrong?
I just figured out who this is. Look at the picture on the piano over there.
Instead of answering Kimberly’s question, I got up and casually paced the room, letting my eyes play across the photo Maggie had pointed out. The quality wasn’t great – probably taken fifteen or twenty years ago. It showed a well-dressed man in his midthirties leaning against a tree, laughing. Who is that? I asked Maggie.
She fell silent. Across from me, Kimberly shifted on the couch, her face twisting into a grimace. “I wanted the ring for revenge,” she said.
It was my turn to be caught off guard. I turned away from the piano. “Revenge for what?”
She sniffed and got up from the couch, crossing to the photo. She stood beside me, plucking it from the piano and practically shoving it into my hands. “For him. For my baby brother.” I looked at the photo, wondering if I was supposed to be getting all of this. Maggie wouldn’t speak up, which meant I was the only person in the room completely in the dark.
“She killed him,” Kimberly said.
“Who?”
“That creature in your ring. She turned him inside out and left his corpse to rot in the gutter.”
“Wha…” I didn’t know what to say. Maggie couldn’t do that. I was pretty sure I knew the limitations of her powers from within the ring. She could set people on fire with her sorcery at close range, but turning them inside out wasn’t on her list of tricks. “How the hell do you know any of this?” I asked. “Who are you?”