Kingdom of Lies (Imp Series Book 7) (26 page)

I nodded. “We need to talk about Avarnak, the demon who killed your two Grigori. Did Beatrix tell you his message?”

“’It’s all mine’? Yes, I heard. Sounded eerily like that dragon I just killed.”

“I don’t know what the gem’s spell did to him, but he’s definitely not mid level any more, and his greed seems to have morphed beyond any demon’s reasonable expectations.”

“So how do we find him? Is there a specific area of this world he is going to want to lay claim to first?”

Damned if I knew. I had no idea what ‘it’s all mine’ meant. Did he want to just come and go unhindered from Hel? It’s not like he could really stick an entire planet in his pocket. What did ownership mean to a greed demon? A war demon, I’d understand. But greed? What did he want? Gold? Gems? An island in the Caribbean?

“I need Terrelle. I know you want her to stay with Sauriel and help with the gates, but she might know this demon and be able to give us some indication of where he might be.”

Gregory leaned back in the chair, running a hand through his hair. “Okay. I’ll bring her back.”

Good. Now there was something else I wanted to address. “I want Beatrix to stay here for a while. I don’t think she should go back to guarding the gate.”

Anger flared in the angel’s eyes. His fist curled around the food container, crushing it. “She needs to finish her duties here then return to Aaru. She’s an angel. She’s strong enough to bounce back.”

“She was pinned to the ground—pinned by her wings. The two enforcers were ripped to bits pretty much in front of her, and the demon left her trapped in an empty demolition-site of a mall. She’s a wreck. At the very least, she needs a break. You can’t put her back there after what she’s gone through.”

“Do you want everyone to see her as a weakling? As a guardian angel, she has a hard enough time getting the others to respect her. Relieving her of her duties won’t do her any favors.”

“And she won’t give a shit about others’ opinion of her if she’s broken beyond repair. Give her a few years off, then assign her a different gate, or find something else for her to do. At the very least, don’t send her back there until she’s ready.”

Gregory sighed, rubbing his face. “Okay. I will find a temporary replacement for her for now, and re-evaluate things in a few months.”

“Will you send her back to Aaru?”

“If she wants, although it might be better for her to stay here. We can say she is on special assignment, so she can save face.”

That pretty much took care of
that
prickly topics. “So... are we good?”

He smiled. Finally. “Right. Harpies, brownies, and one, or possibly ten dragons. More gateways than we have angel and demon pairs to close. And now two dead angels at the hands of a supposedly mid-level greed demon. We’ve got a way to go before we’re good.”

We were most definitely good, no matter what the universe threw at us.

“I don’t know exactly how powerful Avarnak is anymore. I guess pretty powerful if he shredded two angels and killed an ancient demon.”

“He killed an ancient?” Gregory frowned.

“I’m not sure how much the element of surprise played into that,” I admitted. “It would be like a Low showing up at my house and bitching me out. I doubt I’d take the threat seriously until my head was rolling across the ground.”

“Hmm.” Gregory focused on the takeout containers as if they held the answers to the universe. “Still, I’d expect an ancient to be able to know there was something off before his head and body parted ways.”

I snorted. “Don’t worry. You can take him down; it’s just a question of how much damage is he going to do before we catch up with him.”

The angel reached over and yanked a lock of my hair. “I do worry. I worry about
you
trying to take him down before I can get there to save your rear end.”

“Uh, no. I’m totally yielding the floor on this one.” I told Gregory about being caged and skewered by obsidian.

“Ah, dragonglass. Wish I’d had some of that handy a few hours ago.”

“Well, it was pretty effective on me. I can imagine it would work just as well on a non-demon dragon.”

“So Avarnak killed an ancient? Which one?”

“Pamersiel.”

Gregory shrugged. “He wasn’t much three-million years ago; I doubt he’s increased his power levels to any significant degree after being banished to Hel. Honestly I’m surprised to hear he was still alive.”

Phew, that was a relief. Knowing Avarnak had killed a ‘lesser’ ancient was reassuring.

The angel tapped his chopsticks on the edge of the container. “How many ancients are there in Hel? You said there weren’t too many of them left.”

“Maybe a dozen or so, but those are the active ones. There are probably a few hundred inactive.” I saw Gregory’s puzzled expression and went on to explain. “They sleep or go into some kind of trance or something. The ones that are over a billion years old don’t do a lot. They’re old, you know. Old spirit beings do that—take lots of naps, drink prune juice to stay regular, sit on the porch and yell at kids to get off their lawn.”

Gregory raised an eyebrow.

“Present company excluded, of course,” I added hastily. “The active ancients don’t run around as much as we young ones do; even they tend to sit around and brood a lot. The inactive ones pretty much do that all the time. I wouldn’t want to wake one up, though. The ones who sleep... well, they’d kick my ass without raising a finger.”

I thought of Ahriman and how powerful he’d been. The sleeping ancient ones were like Gregory. Maybe not as old, but old enough to lay down some serious hurt.

He nodded. “Like you said, the big issue will be catching up to him before he does whatever demonic evil he is planning. I’ll go fetch Terrelle for you, and hopefully we can run him down in less than twenty-four hours.”

I reached a hand into the pouch around my neck as soon as he vanished and felt the hard, smooth planes of the gem. Gregory knew about Avarnak, and he was better suited to dust the demon than I was. I let him take the lead on this, then after those twenty-four hours Gregory had predicted, I’d be free to help him with the gateways. It was only fair after all he was doing to help me with my project.

But... I felt the gem, oddly reluctant to try to destroy it right now. Plus, I wasn’t quite sure about Gregory’s casual confidence about Avarnak. I remembered the fight up on Devil’s Paw. I needed to be there. We were stronger as a pair than individually, and I had a nagging urge to make sure Avarnak was the one who wound up dead, not Gregory.

That decided, I wandered back into the living room. Nyalla sat on the couch, looking through fashion magazines. She looked up and smiled at me, and my heart squeezed in my chest. What an awesome woman she’d become. From a scared ex-slave who cringed at every noise to a woman who killed a ghoul, who rescued a pregnant woman from an angel, who whacked Distructo Kitty with a golf club to keep me from getting burnt to a crispy. She’d come up with the catnip idea. She’d been quick to use the restraining collar on the angel, and her gift to take down the ghoul. My heart swelled with pride, although I knew I played only a tiny part in her transformation. I’d set the stage, but Nyalla was the one who had done all the heavy lifting.

“Okay. You win. You can be my sidekick, like the pie-eating brother in that TV show.”

The fashion magazine flew across the room, and Nyalla slammed into me.

“Thank you! I’m so excited, Sam. What’s my first assignment?”

“Beatrix is going to have a little break from her gate guarding. If she decides to hang out here, can you take care of her?” I figured I’d put her in the bedroom with Nils. They were both angels. It’s not like I had to keep them separated or anything. I was running out of bedrooms, and the addition wasn’t anywhere close to being done. If things got dicey, they could always put a sword between them or something.

“And?”

I looked down into Nyalla’s happy face and smiled. “Give me some time to handle a few things then I’ll give you a good assignment. I promise.”

She saluted. “Just let me know what you need. I’m ready to serve, Sir!”

Silly girl. A flash of light appeared off to the side. I turned, expecting Gregory. What I saw was an angel... and an elf. Eloa to be exact, and the elf she held tight in her grasp could be none other than Swiftethian.

E
loa shoved the elf forward, and he fell to his knees before me. “I am absolutely disgusted by the negative evolutionary path the elves have taken since their decision to live in Hel. This one in particular has an abysmal vibration pattern.”

She sounded so much like Gabriel that I had to choke back a laugh.

“Where did you find him?” I’ll admit I was curious. Wyatt was looking. A few of Gregory’s angels were looking. Had the elf tried to slip through a gate? Had he been hit by a bus again and dragged by an angel from the hospital?

“Jail.”

Well. That was unexpected. Eloa tossed a paper-clipped stack of papers at me. I caught them and quickly paged through. They included a paid-in-full deed of trust for a house and three-hundred acres in Kentucky.

“What has this got to do with an elf in jail?”

“It’s fake. He showed up at the address on the deed and tried to forcibly evict the human ‘squatters’. They called the police, and the po-po hauled Mr. Pointy Ears off to jail.”

I had a love-hate relationship with Eloa. Right now we were edging towards the love end of things. Po-po. Angels talking street always did it for me.

The elf in question glared up at me, stubbornly mute in the face of these accusations. What the fuck would an elf want with a house in Kentucky? The dude didn’t speak any English, had no marketable job skills that I was aware of, didn’t understand vehicular right-of-way. I get that he was banished by his elven buddies, but to choose this world over Hel where he might have a chance of forgiveness and reinstatement into his kingdom? Why would he want a house here, where everything was so foreign to him?

But there was another burning question I had to ask. “Jail? Human police officers managed to restrain an elf and contain him inside a jail cell?”

Humans had no magically enhanced bars or nets. Any elf worth his lineage should have been able to charm the humans, or wrap them in poison oak vines. Somehow they’d managed to subdue him? And a jail? Head-on with a bus hadn’t kept this fucker down; how had lockup in the county detention center managed to do it?

Eloa shrugged. “I’ve got nothing. Took me two seconds to break him out. I can only assume his vibration pattern was so degraded, what with the theft of human property and all, he was unable to pick a simple lock.”

Sheesh, cut it with the fucking vibration shit and all. I had a crappy vibration pattern, as I’d been told repeatedly, and
I
could still get out of a human jail. Whatever.

I turned to Swifty and pulled the gem from my neck pouch, juggling it back and forth from hand to hand. His eyes widened. “How did you...?”

“I’m an imp. I’m also the Iblis. You figure it out.” I wasn’t about to tell him one of my Lows stole the thing while the demon owner was distracted. It would have ruined the effect and seriously damaged the reputation I was attempting to build here.

He narrowed his eyes. “That doesn’t belong to you.”

“Nor does it belong to you. Word on the wire says you stole this from Sorcerer Freeman Gareth.”

“It was a joint project. He refused payment, so I took possession.”

Well, this was a completely different slant on the situation than Gareth had conveyed. I tried to read Swifty, but elves were tricky when it came to my falsehood detection skill.

“Really? And paid a demon to come across the gates only to sell the gem to another demon? All of that could have been easily accomplished in Hel without any risk of getting hit by a bus.”

He winced and rubbed a hand along his hip at the reminder. “The demon buyer insisted the transaction be conducted here.”

Right. So he could immediately return to Hel and enact his revenge upon Pamersiel. My Spidey senses were tingling. Elf or not, this was one big, fat whopper of a lie.

“So why didn’t you return to Hel? Why stay here and harass some humans in Kentucky?”

Swifty clamped his lips together, and I backtracked.

“Gareth still owns half of the proceeds of that gem. Did you intend on duplicating his crime by denying him payment?”

Eloa glowed at the suggestion, and Swifty cringed. “No! I was going to share with him. The moment I returned to Hel, I was going to give him half.”

Half. I looked down at the deed of trust. It was a remarkable forgery. If I hadn’t spent the last forty years dealing with the purchase and rental of residential housing I would have been fooled too. Property transfer among the humans was more convoluted than some of the regulations handed down by Aaru, and that was saying a lot. Each state had specific laws concerning documentation requirements and lien releases, and that was further muddied by specific county laws. These regulations were subtle, and I wouldn’t have expected a demon such as Avarnak to know the details as well as I did. And Swifty? Fuck, he probably could have given the elf a page out of a coloring book and he wouldn’t have known the difference. The dude didn’t even know the language, let alone the details of land ownership.

I waved the stack of papers at Swifty. “And what exactly did Avarnak pay you for this gem?”

The elf cringed at the demon’s name, clearly realizing I knew a lot more than he’d hoped.

“Eight thousand coin.”

He’d made the amount believable, but I knew better. Taking a few strides forward, I smacked the elf as hard as I could across his face with the deed of trust. “Try again, asshole.”

“Eighty thousand coin, one hundred thousand in human currency, and that property.”

I blinked. Fuck, that was a lot. Way more than popping up a few levels would warrant. I’d deal with that issue later, though. “Why the property? Elves haven’t crossed the gates ever. Even exiled from your elven brethren, why would you choose here over Hel?”

An odd expression flitted across his face as I mentioned exile, quickly hidden beneath a stoic glare. “We were wrong to live among the demons in Hel. Here, among the humans, I can be of service. They’ll benefit from my experience and knowledge, guided into positive evolution through my example.”