Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  “What in the hell is a superfluity?”

  Carmelita snorted. “A group of nuns. It appears the Harvesting Souls Church has a dichotomy as far as what roles men and women may fill.”

  “I would think you were familiar with that,” I said.

  “That doesn’t mean I like it. I swore off the idea of a life in the Church when I discovered that nuns weren’t ninjas. My father has forbidden me to talk to my uncle the archbishop beyond hello, goodbye, and thank you.”

  “Feminist.”

  “Guilty, your honor.”

  “Let’s plan a trip down to Kensington. What else do we have going on?”

  “A couple of mass murders, the lovely and charming Queen of the Coast, a war that the Council that pays our salaries seems to think is important, and it’s New Year’s Eve. Other than that, not much. By the way, unless you have more magikal powers than I’ve seen so far, I’m off tonight and tomorrow, and I don’t plan on answering my phone.”

  “You’re as insubordinate as Luanne.”

  “It’s part of the office culture. We take our cues from the top.”

  “Got a date tonight?”

  “Sizzling.”

  “See you on Thursday?”

  “If I don’t get a better offer.”

  I laughed. “Thursday it is.”

  She waved and walked away. Pulling out my phone, I noticed that I had at least a dozen messages. Luanne, Whittaker, Kirsten, Aleks, Mary Sue, and my grandmother. At first, I tried to tell myself that it was nice to be wanted. Then I faced reality. I cared only about two of those messages. Out of a sense of duty, I called Kirsten first.

  “Where the hell are you and why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  “Downtown, and I’ve been busy.”

  “Nine o’clock at Aleks’s apartment. New Year’s Eve party. Or have you forgotten?”

  “I think I have an engagement at my mom’s place.”

  “That’s tomorrow. You forgot what day it is, didn’t you?”

  I briefly considered lying to her, but she would see through it.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re hopeless. Belvedere. Six o’clock for dinner.”

  “I thought you said nine at Aleks’s.”

  “That was on your calendar. Something you were supposed to pay attention to. Dinner is something new.” I heard her sigh. “I suppose it’s too much to ask that you dress girly and sexy for a fancy dinner on New Year’s Eve.”

  I checked my implant. I did have time to go home and change. “I have a message from Aleks. Should I call him?”

  Pause. “Oh, hell. Why give him hope? Just try and show up for dinner. Surprise all of us.”

  Kirsten hung up.

  Chapter 16

  There were times when driving a cop car was useful. As soon as I reached the freeway, I took the car airborne and cut at least half an hour off my trip home. That gave me time to shower, wash my hair, and use the magitek hair dryer I’d given Kirsten some years before.

  I never used much makeup, just a little mascara around the eyes and lipstick. Then I took a dive into my closet. It was too bad Courtney had burned all the fancy dresses my grandmother bought for me over the years. I did have a couple of them at my home, but when I tried to put one on, I remembered how old it was. It was a little depressing to realize that in spite of the exercise I did, my ass was larger than it had been twelve years before when Kirsten and I bought the house. On the bright side, my bust was a little larger, too, but on the downside, so was my waist. A long look in the mirror confirmed that while mages aged slower than normal humans, the process had started. At least I didn’t get carded at every bar like Carmelita did.

  But I did have a couple of nice-looking dresses I’d bought in a moment of madness at a witchy clothes shop run by a friend of Kirsten’s. In addition to fitting and looking great, they were also spelled to repel knives and bullets, not to mention demon claws. Since I was going downtown on New Year’s Eve, that was probably a good thing.

  I debated between heels—my tallest heels were two inches—or flats. I had a lot of pretty flats. Aleks and I were the same height, so I chose a pair of flats. I also chose an ankle-length coat with a magitek heater that my mom had sewn into the collar.

  Then I drove back downtown and parked my car at Police Headquarters.

  The walk to the Belvedere Hotel was only a mile, and parking near the hotel was almost non-existent. It was dark already, and below freezing, but my coat kept me toasty warm, and I kind of liked the brisk air.

  My route took me through one of my favorite parts of the city. Most of the buildings along North Charles Street were hundreds of years old. I passed the Basilica, Walters Museum, and Peabody Institute, through Mount Vernon Place and the Washington Monument, and past historic mansions and townhouses. Although the old homes had been repurposed repeatedly over the years, Kirsten and I had always loved fantasizing about what life in them had been like for their original owners in the nineteenth century.

  I wondered if my grandmother and her mother had done the same. They had certainly tried to recreate an aristocratic nineteenth century lifestyle—an incredible mansion, lavish dinners and parties, with hordes of servants catering to their every whim.

  Of course, often evening strolls in downtown Baltimore were a little more exciting than a girl walking alone might wish for. Perhaps I was simply being oblivious to my surroundings, but demons had a habit of seeming to appear out of thin air.

  Seven feet tall, as broad as a garage door, burgundy red, with claws and teeth as long as my fingers, the naked demon was indisputably male. Whether he cared about my gender, or only about how I might taste, I didn’t care to know. I pulled my Raider out of my purse and pointed it at him.

  “Metropolitan Police! Stand aside!”

  He was either hard of hearing or not the law-abiding sort of demon. He leaped at me, arms and claws outstretched. I stepped to the side even as I pulled the trigger twice. The incendiary-explosive bullets threw his trajectory off, and he sailed past me, landing on the sidewalk and sliding into the feet of another demon who could have been his twin brother.

  I didn’t wait to see if the second demon was friendly or not, but aimed and put a slug in his head.

  Frantically looking around to see if there were more of them, I also reached into my bag, pulled out the airshield box, and activated it.

  Sure enough, there was another demon. Besevial. Thankfully, he was dressed. And thankfully, he was about thirty feet away.

  “Danica James. I believe Happy New Year is tonight’s appropriate greeting. Have you thought about our previous conversation? I still expect you to return my property.”

  “What makes you think I have something of yours?”

  An image of the statuette appeared beside him. Or rather, an image of the creature the statuette was crafted after. She had the body of a woman—a human woman—with the head of a dragon. Sharp ridges ran from the top of her head, between her horns, and down her back to the tip of her tail, which twitched like a cat’s.

  When she appeared in my dreams, she was huge—Besevial’s size. But the image was much smaller, shorter than Besevial, no more than a few inches taller than I was. Her red eyes were hypnotic, holding me frozen like a rabbit. Her snake-like tongue flicked out.

  “Akashrian’s avatar is not for a human to hold,” Besevial said. “She is not pleased that you have touched it.”

  The image turned its head and appeared to speak to Besevial.

  “Her patience is not infinite,” he said, “and neither is mine. And although you may be beyond her reach, someone you hold dear is not.”

  Both the image and the demon lord disappeared. An icy cold feeling passed over me and I shivered. The two demons I had shot were also gone.

  Someone I held dear. That could mean my mom or Kirsten, but my thoughts immediately went to my father. Who else was within Akashrian’s reach?

  It was the first time—other than my dreams—that I had any ind
ication that my father might be still alive. The only other explanation was that I was descending into madness, with my nightmares becoming waking delusions.

  I practically trotted the rest of my journey to the Belvedere.

  Somehow, I showed up on time. Kirsten and Mychal were waiting by the elevators.

  “What’s wrong?” Kirsten asked. “You look a little flustered.”

  “Oh, no big deal. I just had to fight my way through demons to get here.”

  “Are you okay?” Mychal asked, taking a step past me toward the outer door.

  “I’m fine. Just a little shook up. Is Aleks coming?”

  “Yes,” a voice behind me said. Arms snaked around my waist and pulled me backwards into a body with a familiar smell. He nuzzled my hair. "You look incredible," he whispered into my ear.

  We rode up the elevator to the penthouse restaurant on the thirteenth floor. My grandmother said there had been a bar or a restaurant in that space since the hotel was built at the start of the twentieth century. The building was converted to luxury condominiums before the wars, but the front of the building still said, ‘Belvedere Hotel.’ The restaurant had consistently been considered one of the top five in the Metroplex, with prices to match its reputation. Needless to say, it was not one of Kirsten’s and my regular hangouts.

  But when you’re dating scions of fabulously wealthy Families, I figured it would be rude to mention that the hors d’oeuvres cost more than my monthly motorcycle payment, or that the total bill—including wine and champagne—was more than Kirsten and my monthly mortgage. It did make me uncomfortable, though, and reminded me that the basic HLA gripes about the Magi were well-founded. I knew that the cost never crossed the minds of either Mychal or Aleks.

  When our meals came, I looked at Kirsten and raised an eyebrow. She grinned and passed a charm over each of our meals.

  “They’re clean,” she said, tucked the charm back in her bag, and picked up her fork.

  After dinner, Aleks called for a limo to take us to his place, and we arrived shortly before the first guests. The caterer had everything ready to go, from booze to canapes to music. At least Aleks hadn’t gone completely crazy, and the waiters were robots instead of humans.

  At midnight, the champagne corks popped, and the fireworks display over the harbor was clearly visible from the wall of windows on the south side of his living room.

  But the grand finale was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. As the sky lit up with the final barrage, a three-hundred-foot high magikal image—projection, hologram, I didn’t know what to call it—of a woman with a dragon’s head appeared. Her clawed feet seemed to stand on the surface of the water. The image was as clear as though she really existed, and stayed for almost five minutes before fading away.

  During that time, there was total silence in the room. Other than a collective intake of breath when she first appeared, no one uttered a sound. We stood and stared, completely entranced, completely frozen in place.

  “What in the hell was that?” Aleks broke the silence as the image faded. Kirsten and I shared a wide-eyed look, but neither of us said anything.

  Chapter 17

  In the morning, miracle of all miracles, I didn’t have any messages from Whittaker or Dispatch reporting that half of the city had been murdered by Rifters. Mychal and Kirsten had stayed over in one of Aleks’s spare bedrooms, so she and I walked to get my car in the morning. Nothing like a brisk early morning winter walk to alleviate a hangover.

  We went home and changed from cocktail dresses into something more elven—leggings and tunics sewn and embroidered by my mom—and drove up to my mom’s house.

  Along the way, I told her about my encounter the evening before.

  “And you think that projection over the harbor was aimed at you?” she asked.

  “Hard to think of it as being anything else. I got a warning, then a more emphatic warning. I’m sure if Besevial knew where the statuette was, he’d go after it. But the wards we have set on it are blinding him.” I hadn’t told her about the threat. I never spoke of my father, or my dreams about him, to anyone. But I couldn’t interpret the threat against ‘someone you hold dear’ in any other way.

  The elves who had come with my grandfather from Iceland a couple of months before showed no indication they planned to go home. In fact, the military camp surrounding Loch Raven Reservoir was becoming larger and more permanent. I remembered one of the elven warriors telling me that he enjoyed Maryland because of the trees. One thing for sure, there were even some children living in the area.

  “I thought elves celebrated Solstice as the beginning of the new year,” Kirsten asked my mom after we shed our coats and followed our noses into the kitchen.

  “Oh, they do,” she replied with a grin. “But never let it be said that an elf squandered an excuse to party. There will be another celebration for the Chinese New Year as well. They are absolutely delighted that humans have so many celebrations.”

  She enlisted us to help her load up the back of her pickup truck with baked goods, and we drove a couple of miles up the east side of the lake. It took me a few minutes, but I quickly realized we were driving on a dirt road that hadn’t existed a couple of months before.

  “This is a new road.”

  “Yes, sort of,” Mom replied.

  “Sort of?” Kirsten asked.

  “Well, it officially doesn’t exist. And you can’t see it from the air.”

  I laughed. “And since outsiders for the most part can’t get within miles of here anymore…”

  Mom laughed. “I always said you were smarter than people give you credit for.”

  I knew Kirsten couldn’t see the village we were driving through. Partly because she didn’t know what to look for, and partly because she couldn’t see through the elven spells covering the structures and pathways. I didn’t have much, if any, elven magik, but I could see through the veils.

  “Mom, is there a charm or spell or something you can do so Kirsten can see the village?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  “What village?” Kirsten asked.

  Mom almost drove off the road, then hit the brakes, and brought the truck to a skidding stop.

  “You folks have the whole reservoir area spelled,” I said. “I think she can see the people, but that’s probably all.”

  Kirsten looked totally confused. “I see elves walking around, and some of their trucks, but village? You mean like houses and stuff?”

  The expression on my mother’s face was priceless. For the first time in my life, I was in a position to tell her to use her head, but I bit my tongue.

  “Oh, crap.” Mom waved her hand and sketched a couple of runes, reached out and touched Kirsten’s forehead, then said a Word.

  Kirsten stared, her head whipping back and forth. The area to the east of the southern end of the reservoir was thick forest without any roads. But since the elves had moved in, they had created homes, sheds, workshops, and a meeting hall about a hundred yards in front of us that was large enough to hold all five hundred members of their community. Of course, they didn’t want their enemies to know they were there at all, so the area around the lake was shrouded behind a veil.

  Mom started up the truck again, drove to the meeting hall, and parked. We helped her to unload all the stuff she’d brought, and took it inside. Kirsten still had a gobsmacked expression on her face, staring at the buildings around us.

  “Hey,” I said, punching her in the arm. “You look like one of the tourists down at the harbor.”

  “How did they build all this in just a couple of months?” she asked.

  I chuckled. “They didn’t. They grew it using magik. This building? It’s a living organism.”

  “Actually, twelve living organisms,” Mom said. “Twelve trees we planted in two rows. Yews they brought over from England.” She hesitated a moment, then said, “They’re toxic, by the way. The inside of the hall is spelled, but be careful about touching the outside. Druids u
sed to plant them around their settlements as a first line of defense.”

  “And you trained them to grow in the shape of a large church? In just a month?” Kirsten gasped. The inside of the hall, with its arched ceiling, did sort of resemble a church.

  “Oh, much quicker than that. We used it for Solstice.”

  I was surprised that Mary Sue showed up. Then I saw her greet the elf who invited her. The way they said hello to each other left little doubt about how friendly they were.

  “Hey, Cuz. Got some business to go over with you before you head out of here,” she said. “When are you leaving?”

  “We’re staying the night. Can we do it in the morning?” Driving after an elven party was not something anyone with a survival instinct would contemplate.

  “Oh, yeah, that’ll work. Do you know Callon?” she asked, indicating the tall elf she was hugging.

  “I think we’ve seen each other around,” I answered.

  What followed was ten hours of eating, drinking, dancing, singing, and general debauchery. The Magi had nothing on the elves as far as throwing a party. The nicest thing about an elven party, though, was that drunken elves never got mean or aggressive. I caught you kissing my boyfriend? He kisses well, doesn’t he? Let’s drink to that.

  Kirsten, Mom, and I left Mom’s truck at the meeting hall and stumbled home together. And I had less of a hangover the following morning than I had after Aleks’s party. Probably the difference between elven wine and human champagne.

  Mary Sue showed up for breakfast with a portfolio full of papers.

  “Can’t we just make a rubber stamp with my signature?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you when your bank account turns up empty and I’m nowhere to be found.”

  Mom and Kirsten thought that was funny.

  “But,” Mary Sue continued, “you still have to read the stuff I give you to read, and you still need to work on the stuff that needs to be designed. The big thing this week is, we’re going to be rich. Someday. Maybe.”