Bloodlines (Demons of Oblivion) (19 page)

“She didn’t tell you, her ‘husband?’” she asked.

For barely a second, Nate’s gaze passed my way, then returned to Heaven. Expression stony and guarded, he shook his head.

Heaven took in a deep breath, then expelled it loudly. “A few weeks before you first came to our home to steal, Zara, Mishka turned sixteen. It was then she started noticing certain...‘gifts’ emerging.”

Oh god, it was like a bad paranormal novel. “Gifts?”

“Magical abilities,” Heaven clarified. “Ones she wasn’t expecting and wasn’t prepared to handle. We used to be so close...” Her voice came close to breaking and I hoped she didn’t get into another crying fest, or else we might be waiting all night. “Naturally, she told me about it and I finally had to tell her why.”

Although I’d criticized Nate for witches not understanding drama the night before, it was clear they got the concept of
melodrama
. “And the reason was...?”

A full minute ticked by in silence, just the beating hearts of the witches sounding in my ears.

“Her bloodline,” Heaven finally said. “It was because of who her father was.”

“So Jeffrey had some kind of—”

“No,” Heaven said. “Not Jeffrey.”

My jaw dropped. Literally—it fell wide open. I gaped at her for a moment as she cast her eyes downward and fidgeted. Jesus Christ, of all the parent-bashing Mishka did, she had never once suggested anything like
that
. This was like a fucking soap opera! If she brought up coma babies or evil twins, I was grabbing some popcorn. “So who was her father?”

Heaven licked her lips, stared at the coffee table. Her face flashed crimson, embarrassment an almost palpable tension in the air around her. “Jeffrey was sterile. He knew it, though I don’t think he ever completely believed it. I wanted a child, so I resolved to use whatever means necessary.”

Right, so she banged the hot gardener. “You really don’t have to justify your affair to me. Just tell me who Mishka’s father was.”

“It wasn’t an affair—”

Oh my
god
, I was going to kill her in a minute. “Cut to the proverbial chase, Heaven. Who was he?”

“We don’t...” She chewed the words around for a moment. “...speak his name.”

“Why? Is it ‘Candyman’ or something?”

Her green gaze, so much like Mishka’s, snapped my way; power flared in her irises. “This isn’t a joke.”

“Well, it’s still pretty funny.”

“Take your pick of names then—” she whispered finally.

“Fine, then I’m calling him ‘Fred.’”

“
But
the demonologists know him simply as Lo.” She closed her eyes and bowed her head.

Nate took in a sharp breath. I waited for a few moments, looking from him to Heaven, but no one gave me any indication of what that meant. Heaven kept her head down, shoulders trembling like she might be crying.

“Lo?” I asked. “Anyone going to tell me what that means?”

Nate cleared his throat, still staring at Heaven. “It’s short for
Lord
of
Oblivion
.”

“Wouldn’t that technically be ‘Loo?’” They both ignored me, so I continued on anyway. “And isn’t that a pretty lame name?”

“It’s the closest translation into English,” Heaven said.

“Lo doesn’t exist,” Nate insisted, eyes still fixed on Heaven. I couldn’t completely place the emotion in his voice but it sounded like...
fear
. He’d had a
lot
of shit lately to be afraid of and usually brushed it off, so this had to be a big deal.

“And that non-existent person is...?”

“A myth,” Nate answered. “Said to be the only mortal son of one of the most powerful, highest ranking demons in the other realms.”

“Highest ranking...so you mean like the real life equivalent of Lucifer or something?”

“Lucifer was a story to keep people in line. True evil is something humans can’t even comprehend.”

I rolled my eyes. I’d done plenty of evil things—I
knew
evil. “So this Mr. Loo is his son?”

“
Her
son, but it’s only a myth.”

Heaven’s voice dropped to a whisper. “No, he’s not. You must have friends who know about these sorts of things, Nathan. Ask them.” At last she gazed up at us and tears streamed down her face.

“But Lo was supposedly born two millennia ago,” he said.

“He currently exists in another dimension,” she replied. “And has been there for most of those two thousand years.”

Nate stood abruptly and paced, hands clenching into fists and back stiff. “Then how is it possible he’s Mishka’s father? If he’s off in some other realm—”

“It’s possible if you know how to summon him,” she said quietly.

“And
how
could you know how to summon him? Records of his existence have been purged, destroyed. Grimoires with the rituals burned years ago—”

Heaven gave him a cold stare. “European magic isn’t the
only
magic, Nathan. Don’t be a snob. Others have summoned him before. It’s more than possible.”

“Maybe, if he actually existed, but he doesn’t.”

Great—Heaven was crying, Nate was pacing, and I was as confused as ever. “Since I lack the Ivy League witchy education, someone’s going to have to start explaining this to uneducated Miss Vampire over here. Why is it so impossible?”

Nate paused his wandering for a moment and I was sure the carpet he’d been wearing down rejoiced. “The particular demon that supposedly bore him would never actually be able to do it because mortal genes are too weak to meld with hers. That’s the problem with a lot of demons—even among their own kind, it’s difficult to procreate. Mortal genes are pretty easy to blend with, however, provided the demon isn’t all that powerful, but for Lo to exist... No. It’s just not possible.”

“There’s been how many gazillions of mortals over the years?” I said. “Seems to me that it’s at least a little possible that she found someone whose genetics were to her liking, though unlikely.” I couldn’t get out of my head a vision of a giant demon woman surrounded in fire singing Heart’s “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You.”

“Even if he did exist—which I’m not saying is true—but if he did, the odds that not only Heaven was capable of summoning him, but that her genetics and his melded to produce a perfectly healthy child that didn’t flat out die in the womb is just...”
And
back to pacing.

Heaven buried her face in her hands once more and sobbed, while I was still confused.

“So Mish was like second generation antichrist,” I said, breaking the silence.

No one responded.

“Okay, let’s say I buy that,” I said. “I mean, she was a bit of bitch, so it’s possible. But this is significant to our current situation how?”

“Perhaps it isn’t,” Heaven offered in a soft voice. “Maybe it means nothing...”

Nate stopped next to the couch. He ran a hand back through his dark hair and sent his cold blue eyes over to me. “But maybe it means everything.”

Chapter Twenty

No Biting Among Friends

I couldn’t get either of them to say anything else. Nate simply started for the door, and with Heaven in a near comatose state, I decided to follow him. During the entire drive back to my apartment, he remained mute. I posed a variety of questions, asked for further clarification on the demon-y aspects of what we had talked about, but he offered nothing.

It was possible he still had his boxers in a twist after the night before. Now he knew that not only was his dear wife Queen Lying Liar Lie-a-lot, but that she was part demon. It looked like neither one of us had really know Mishka Thiering at all.

Perhaps because I wasn’t a witch, I couldn’t fully understand the gravity of the situation. To me, the revelation of Mishka’s paternity seemed about as useless as everything else we had learned thus far. It didn’t explain why she married Nate, or subsequently wanted him dead. It didn’t explain who had attacked all the covens. And it certainly didn’t help with why someone would be abducting vampires.

It
did
explain why she was such a fucking bitch, though. Antichrist genes would probably do that to a girl.

Once in my apartment, Nate went to change the dressing on his gut. I figured it was probably healed over, but didn’t make mention of it. Sure enough, about two minutes later he called from the bathroom, “You’re sure you didn’t vamp me?”

“Quite certain.”

Nate padded back out to the living room, black button down shirt open at the top and untucked from his pants. He forsook a seat on the couch and took a spot on the floor; he’d done that all the night before after changing. Just sat there and meditated. It was irritating, so I’d retired to my room for the night and tried calling more contacts. Okay, I
might’ve
also played The Sims for three hours.

Since he was talking to me now, though, I opted to sit across from him on the carpet. “You don’t just need to be drained of blood—I would have to consume it, so the parasite in me could specially mutate itself to inhabit you. It’s a very fascinating process, or so I’m told.”

“You’ve never turned anyone?”

“Nope.” Sitting about a foot away from him, I leaned back on my hands. “Not once. Of course, I could make a helluvalot of money from it. Some people will pay serious cash for immortality, but then you’re stuck taking care of them once they’ve changed and stuff. New vamps tend to go pretty batshit crazy if someone’s not there to retrieve them and help them become well-adjusted, contributing members of society. Plus, you’re bound to run into them every few decades or so and I’ve yet to find someone I could tolerate being around on an eternal basis.”

Maybe he felt entitled to some probing questions after me bugging him last night—he wasn’t giving up yet. “Never even considered it? Not one of your friends? Not lovers?”

My hackles rose and I leveled him with the coldest gaze I had in my arsenal; the one that usually stopped a mortal in his tracks. “The only person I ever ‘loved’ was my husband.”

“And what happened to him?”

“I disemboweled him with my bare hands. What’s with the twenty questions?”

“Just curious, that’s all.” He shrugged. “Peter said he had heard of you.”

Peter? The demonology expert? “I should be pleased, but I don’t see how that’s possible. Vamps are the lowest of the low to you people, remember? There are far more interesting demons to study.”

A smile curved his lips—the type that made my undead heart thump a bit harder. “So you’re nothing special? You don’t secretly go out and help the helpless on a quest for redemption?”

“I did, once upon a time during my idealistic phase, but I grew out of it. And during my rebellious days, I viciously massacred people, and then I felt bad for it and tried to redeem myself.”

“But?”

“But when you’ve been alive as long as I have, you get bored. Right now I’m an assassin because, quite honestly, I don’t have anything better to do.”

He regarded me with a half-smile and steady gaze that made me start to squirm. “That sounds...depressing.”

“Welcome to my world. When you’ve done basically everything, you start to see how meaningless life—or unlife—really is. The trick is to lose yourself in whatever you do. In my case, for the past ten years I’ve been stealing. Now I’m an assassin. Generally it’s pretty easy work, but it’s fun. I fucking
love
the twenty-first century, though, because video games. That gives me something to do. If I’m really looking for a challenge, I take jobs tracking down and killing Hunters, or do something really nasty to have the top ones come after me.”

“You’ve taken on
Venatores
Daemonum
?”

“Uh, yeah, and I’m insulted that you seem so surprised. Been outrunning—and killing—them for centuries. So you see, I really have done it all, even faced every vampire’s worst nightmare.”

“You’ve experienced everything but the annihilation of prominent covens and kidnapping of vampires,” Nate pointed out.

“True,” I agreed. “You’ve got me there. This is all pretty new. Oh, and my good friend of the past eight years turned out to be the daughter of the antichrist, and in turn the granddaughter of an even worse big bad demon. That was certainly different. Are you going to tell me any more about it?”

“There’s little to tell. I still have trouble believing Lo exists, but I highly doubt Heaven would lie about something like that. Though there are any number of people who might want the Lord of Oblivion’s only known child dead, it still doesn’t explain everything else.”

“Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, instead of questioning
who
has the motive, why not question
who
had the resources to pull all this off.” I wasn’t used to actually brainstorming with another person; perhaps I should hang up a whiteboard or something. And we could take notes.

Nate nodded his understanding. “That probably is the better question, but most of the people I know with that kind of money are all very much dead right now. Peter might know something, though.”

I tried to keep my tone casual. “You know, Mishka told me you weren’t very powerful.”
That totally failed at “casual”
.

He shrugged. Said nothing. Forced me to press harder.

“Was she aware you can stop time and teleport and Goddess knows what else?”

Whether he genuinely weighed the question or was stalling, I couldn’t say. At last he said, “I believe so.”

I waited, but he didn’t continue. Fuck, talk about pulling teeth. “The other night when you used the barrier spell to keep the guards out of your father’s room, you acted as though it wouldn’t hold.”

Again, he nodded his head slightly without offering anything else.

“I’m gonna keep bugging you until you explain.”

Another shrug, expression guarded. “There’s little to explain. I don’t use magic often and I’m out of practice, but recent events have called for it.”

“What else can you do?”

He looked up toward the ceiling. “You blacked out your skylights.”