“Thank you. Call me Les, please.”
Mariel wore a loose floral dress and coordinating blue sweater, which gave her a casual and approachable air. Her wild flame-red hair, however, was pure seduction, but Les didn’t appear to be affected as most single men were.
“You know Abel, of course,” she said.
Les extended his hand to Reed. “Yes, of course. Welcome, Abel. It’s an honor to have you here.”
Reed accepted Les’s handshake, noting the strength and confidence conveyed by the mal’akh’s grip. Les was blond, his skin darkened and weathered by the sun, his appearance arrested to look as if he was somewhere in his midforties. Grief weighed heavily upon his broad shoulders and bracketed his mouth and eyes with deep grooves of strain. Such physical manifestations of emotion were rare in mal’akhs and were only caused by the loss of a beloved. Les’s Mark had meant a great deal to him.
Affairs sometimes formed between Marks and their handlers, since they shared a connection that transcended the physical. A Mark could share fear and triumph and a handler could reassure and offer comfort across many miles. Also conducive to work-related romance were the isolated lives led by Marks and the lure of their Novium, which was brought on by the thrill of their first hunts. Even mal’akhs weren’t immune to a Mark awakening to full power.
“We appreciate you taking the time to answer our questions,” Reed murmured, thinking of Eve and his own growing connection to her. God help him when her Novium hit, which would happen soon after she finished training and began hunting in earnest.
He glanced at his Rolex. It was early evening in California. She would be in Monterey now. By the end of the week, she would be three weeks away from graduation.
Les’s jaw tightened. “I’ll do anything necessary to catch that demon. I’ve never seen anything like what happened to Kimberly. I pray I never see anything like it again.”
“Did you see the Infernal?” Mariel asked in a soothing voice.
“Yes.” A haunted look came to the handler’s blue eyes. “It was built like a brick shithouse. Nearly six meters in height and two meters wide at the shoulders.”
Reed looked at Mariel with both brows raised. She had described the demon far differently.
The high-pitched whistle of a teakettle came from the back of the house. Les motioned them to follow him.
“Come along.” His booted steps thudded heavily across the hardwood floor. “We’ll talk in the kitchen.”
They settled around a scuffed linoleum-topped table. Les turned off the gas stove and poured boiling water into a waiting teapot. His domesticity contrasted starkly with his rugged appearance—worn flannel shirt, faded jeans, and large belt buckle.
“The Infernal I saw,” Mariel began, “was a little over seven feet tall, nowhere near as large as the one you describe.”
Les set the pot on the table, then returned to the counter to retrieve a paper bag. He shook the contents—scones—onto a plate.
“Well, here’s the thing.” He glanced over his shoulder at them. “It wasn’t that big before it killed my Mark.”
Reed’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He withdrew it quickly. He normally kept the damn thing off, but with Eve in training he wanted to be accessible. Glancing at the caller ID, he cursed silently. Sara. He hit the button that sent the call to voicemail.
Sarakiel was both an archangel and his ex-lover. She helmed the European firm, her flawless angelic features fueling the sales of the multimillion-dollar Sara Kiel Cosmetics empire. She was also on his shit list, so he had been avoiding her calls for the last few weeks. That wasn’t going to change right now.
“You’re saying the Infernal grew in size?” Reed asked, returning his full attention to the conversation.
“Yes.” Les set out three teacups, then pulled out a spindle-backed chair for himself.
“Did you witness the attack?” Mariel asked.
“Just barely. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. The blooming thing was fast. Impossibly fast. It rushed at Kim in a blur. Ran on all fours—fists and feet to the ground. Almost like an ape, but graceful like a canine. Kim screamed and the Infernal leaped into her open mouth, just disappeared inside her. I couldn’t believe it. By the time I figured out what happened, it was over.”
“What did happen?” Reed asked the question, but he already knew the answer.
“She . . .” Les swallowed hard. “She exploded. But it was wrong. All wrong. What was left behind . . . there wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough of her. No bone, no blood . . .”
“Just muscle and skin,” Reed finished, declining Les’s silent offer of tea.
“Yeah, that’d be right. So where does everything else go?” Les poured two servings of tea, his hands visibly shaking. After he set the pot down, he looked between Mariel and Reed. “I think the Infernal absorbed the rest. That’s how it grew.”
Mariel accepted the cup Les handed to her. “Were you responding to a herald?”
A herald was an instinctive cry for help from Mark to handler that was so powerful it was sometimes felt by mortals. A sixth sense, some called it. The sensation that something was “off,” something they couldn’t put their finger on.
Les shook his head. “I didn’t wait for it. I’d sent her after some Patupairehe faeries that were causing trouble for tourists. They were her specialty, so when I felt her fear, I knew something was wrong.”
Reed leaned back in his chair. “Raguel didn’t say anything about the Infernal growing larger.”
“He doesn’t know.” Les broke off a piece of a scone. “Uriel wanted to keep the news to himself until he could figure out what to do with it.”
“This is not the time for the archangels to be territorial,” Mariel protested.
“My thoughts exactly, which is why I’m telling you. There is something else.” Pushing away from the table, Les twisted around in his seat and collected an item from the counter behind him. He set it down in front of Mariel.
She picked up the zippered sandwich bag and examined its contents. “It looks like there’s blood on this rock.”
“There is. Open her up.”
Mariel did as directed. Instantly the honey-sweet smell of Mark blood filled the air. It was unusually robust and Reed found himself breathing through his mouth to diminish the potency of the scent.
“Your Mark’s blood,” she noted. “Why are you keeping it?”
Les’s lips thinned. “That’s the Infernal’s blood. I put a hole in the thing when it came at me.”
“If your scene is anything like the one I saw,” Reed muttered, “that could be Mark tissue. There was nothing within three yards that wasn’t completely covered with gore.”
“I shifted some distance away before I discharged my pistol,” Les said. “That blood didn’t come from my Mark, because we were at least a kilometer’s distance from where she was killed.”
“How did the Infernal know where you were shifting to?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it, mate? My theory is that the Infernal absorbs not only the blood and bone of the Marks it kills, but also some of the connection to the handler. I’m guessing it’s only temporary. Before I finished emptying my clip, it became impervious to the bullets. Could have been some kind of warding or could have been acquired vulnerability from my Mark that faded when the connection did. The Infernal certainly had no idea I was going to shoot it.”
“Even temporary is too long.” Reed’s foot tapped against the floor. “How much information can it absorb? How long does it retain what it learns? We need to know if your theory is right.”
Mariel carefully closed the bag. “Can we go to the scene? I’d like to take a look for myself. I’m the only one who’s seen all the locations of attack. I would like to see if a usable pattern emerges.”
“Of course.” Les drank his tea in one swallow. “The area is remote. Stick close during the shift.”
He disappeared.
Glancing at Mariel, Reed stood. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 4
Reaching around Izzie—who refused to move—Eve set a large bowl of salad on the makeshift dining table. They had combined three folding card tables into one larger table in the men’s dining room. Seating was still cramped, but Gadara insisted they eat together. Eve understood that he was trying to foster a familial connection between the Marks, but after three weeks of sharing lunches at Gadara Tower, she couldn’t see why it would work now when it hadn’t before.
“I hate tomatoes,” Laurel griped, looking into the bowl. “Couldn’t you have kept them separate?”
“Feel free to help,” Eve retorted.
Gadara entered the dining room from the adjacent kitchen. He carried a fresh-from-the-oven pan of lasagna—without the safety of gloves.
Glaring at Eve, Laurel tossed her strawberry-blond hair over her shoulder with a practiced flick of her wrist. She was in her early twenties, her skin freckled in a becoming way, her eyes a pretty cornflower blue. She was a couple of inches taller than Eve, slightly more slender and less athletic, and gifted with the ability to complain about nearly everything. Eve had no idea how that proclivity had gone over in her homeland of New Zealand. Here in America, Laurel’s charming accent softened the annoyance factor some. She was one of the classmates Eve wondered about. What could Laurel have done to end up marked? Her self-preoccupation was annoying, but otherwise she struck Eve as innocuous enough. And she seemed like the type who needed a lot of friends, not a loner.
Gadara looked at Eve with a questioning glance and she shook her head, silently telling him not to worry about it. She was having a hard time adjusting to the new image of the archangel she was forming. Before she’d been marked, she had held Gadara in high esteem for his secular talents. Donald Trump aspired to be Raguel Gadara when he grew up. As an interior designer, Eve had applied to Gadara Enterprises for a job, hoping to be a part of the redesign of his Mondego Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Now, she was working with him—just not in a way she could ever have imagined.