Conspiracy of Angels (17 page)

This is what I’m missing sleep over
, I thought bitterly. Irritated, I closed out of the “History” folder. I almost clicked out of the whole thing. What had I expected to find, anyway? All my answers tucked neatly in one place? Fat chance that would happen. Not the way my luck was running.

I hovered over the mouse button, deliberating. Swallowing against a sudden tang of adrenaline, I clicked the file labeled “Anakim.”

This was the heart of the “Silent_War.” Dossiers on scores of Anakim spread before me. Out of about a hundred names, more than half of them—including the primus—were labeled “missing.” The files were exhaustive, tracking individuals over the centuries. There were painted portraits, countless aliases, places of residence noted in sequential order, even scans of old documents from more than a dozen different countries. All the faces were eerily similar. Not identical, exactly, but the “family” resemblance was unmistakable, even in the old portraiture.

Every entry supplied birth and death dates, followed by what could only be
rebirth
dates. Sequential immortality. I tried wrapping my head around the concept, but in my current state, it fit poorly. The files showed a pretty clear cycle—a cycle abruptly truncated in every Anakim marked as missing. Most of their dates cut off in the 1800s, though a few made it to the twentieth century.

“We’re time lords without the TARDIS,” I muttered.

If I understood it all correctly, my tribe didn’t live forever, but if we died, we came back. Except for when we didn’t. So what was happening to the other Anakim to take them out of the game?

I thought about my own situation. Immortality didn’t mean much if you couldn’t remember all those other lives. Maybe the missing ones weren’t dead, just empty. Everything they knew stripped away.

That was a bleak consideration.

I clicked open the folder for the Nephilim. Maybe the answers were there. I looked for names from the cipher, clicking the primus first.

Go big or go home.

It contained a single JPG—no aliases, no birth or death certificates, no other notes. The picture file opened to reveal a bas-relief that was Old Kingdom Egyptian, clearly a part of some museum’s collection. The lone figure in the artwork wore a pendant with an elaborate Eye of Horus. Among the hieroglyphs carved alongside the figure, I had circled one cartouche. Scribbled to the side of the cartouche was my translation of the name:
Nefer-Ka
. Beneath that, in quotes, I’d written, “Beautiful Soul.” It wasn’t much of a stretch to go from Nefer-Ka to Neferkariel. I wondered if “Beautiful Soul” was just another way of saying “Voluptuous One.”

“Still doesn’t tell me shit to sort this mess,” I muttered. I clicked out and went for Dorimiel. The cipher said
Neferkariel’s Eye in Dorimiel’s hand
. Hopefully, the file could explain.

I opened to a list of names—Darren Harrow, Dorian Hartleigh, Dean McCormick. All were file names attached to JPGs. I clicked the picture files, advancing rapidly through each. An oil painting, a portrait in miniature, a water-damaged photo in black and white. My sight skittered off the images as recollected visions surged within my mind—that blasphemous temple and its fanged abomination. Vengeance sworn even as I drove home my blades.

Stripped of every other memory, I would still know those eyes.

You and all your tribe.

Now I knew his name.

Mouthing the threat of his words, I memorized every iteration of Dorimiel’s face. New York in the 1920s—that was the photo. The miniature hailed from Napoleonic France. The oldest was the oil painting. Eighteenth-century England. Nothing at all suggested the ancient temple from my vision, nor any connection to the missing Anakim, but certainty shivered through me, chilling and absolute. Other memories started welling to the surface, but they were abortive and incomplete. Water. The chittering of cacodaimons. Lailah’s name in ancient letters, carved on a clay surface with a pale length of bone.

That gnawing not-pain burned within the marks upon my chest. Each hammer-stroke of my pulse sent it singing through my skin. With unsteady fingers, I closed out of the folder, hiding Dorimiel from view. I stared at the screen blankly, struggling to quash the sick waves of fear threatening even now to pull my thoughts into some darkness I shrank to perceive. I ticked my eyes away from the names on the folders, seeing but not seeing the data in the other fields—type, size, modification date. All the letters smeared.

My pulse leapt again, vision focusing abruptly on the dates.

None of the files for the Nephilim had been altered in the past three months.

None—except Saliriel’s.

I clicked on the folder. The entire file had been wiped at noon yesterday.

While my short hairs tried crawling up the back of my scalp, a sound in the hallway made me jump to my feet so suddenly that I sent the computer chair crashing to the floor. In the strained silence following its explosive clatter, I distinctly heard someone—or some
thing
—moving out in the hall. Standing there bare-chested and in nothing but my jeans, I prepared to defend myself. I called power to my hands. At least, I tried to.

Instead of a brilliant coalescence of light, it looked more like I was holding damp sparklers. The blue-white energy sputtered weakly, and I quickly discovered that maintaining even that sad show of strength made something in my chest feel unpleasantly hot and tight.

Even so, I braced myself. It wouldn’t be pretty, but if I was going to go down, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

T
he door to the computer room swung open, and I moved to launch myself at the intruder. A shout formed in my throat as I began invoking the power of my name—then I nearly choked on it when I saw Remy.

“Goodness,” he exclaimed, taking half a step back. “A little jumpy, aren’t we?”

“Shit,” I breathed. “You ever think about knocking?”

An ironic smile tugged at his pale lips. “My house, remember?”

I shook the power out of my hands and picked the chair up, flopping down onto it.

“Yeah, well, I’m kind of tense right now,” I said, sagging with exhaustion. Even that pathetic show had left me feeling spent. I needed to get some sleep, and damned soon.

“So I see,” he observed archly, “but at least you look less like a vagrant.” He pushed the door the rest of the way open, leaning a shoulder against the jamb. His long fall of hair was pulled back in a neat braid and he wore unrelieved black from head to foot—jacket, slacks, shirt, and tie. A hat that matched his suit and looked suspiciously like a fedora was tucked lightly in the crook of one arm, a newspaper folded beneath it. “I was in the neighborhood making funeral arrangements with Alice’s parents. I thought I’d drop in and check on you.” With a tilt of his head, he added, “You seem awfully pale, Zaquiel. Have you been feeding properly?”

“Hunh?” I grunted, grinding the heels of my palms into my eyes. I’d been staring at the computer screen too long. Absently, I said, “I’ve tried eating. Can’t seem to keep anything down, what with bouncing around the Shadowside and everything.”

“No, I mean—” he started, then cut himself short. I looked up in the intervening silence to see a mortified expression cross his face. “Oh,” he breathed. “You don’t understand, do you?”

“Understand what?”

“Where the power comes from,” he replied delicately.

I shrugged. “I still don’t remember everything clearly. I mean, I’ve worked out most of the details. I focus it with my name, there’s this kind of inner fire, then I’m moving between two halves of reality. Sometimes I can step through completely,” I added with an unconscious shiver, as I recalled how close I came to getting stuck just that morning.

He shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean. Just look at you. It’s obvious. You’ve been throwing it out there—rather copiously, I might add—but you haven’t replenished anything, have you?” It came out as an accusation, but his bright blue eyes shone with genuine concern.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You need to take some back in.” He seemed to be struggling with a concept he either couldn’t put into words or was reluctant to do so.

“Remy, what does that mean, exactly?”

“Take it in, Zaquiel,” he said with a quirk of one brow. “From people. You take it from people.”

“Now wait just a damned minute,” I said. I’d have gotten in his face if I’d felt like I could stand without falling over. Instead, I settled for gesturing angrily from the relative comfort of the chair. “I’m not the vampire in this room, Remy. I’m Anakim. You said it yourself—I’m not like you.”

His preternaturally blue eyes glittered coldly.

“In light of your current predicament, I’ll set aside the fact that you’re insulting me under my own roof. While it’s true that we are
not
of the same tribe, it’s equally true that we both rely on people—each in our own way. Mine is a little more obvious, yes, but if you’re going to cast aspersions, you had best consider how they apply to you.”

I started to tell him where to stuff his aspersions, but felt so shitty that I didn’t even bother.

“All of us?” I asked instead.

He nodded. “In one fashion or another. For you, it’s the pulse of a crowd, the little currents left behind everywhere the mortals move. You can take it more directly with a touch, though.”

Self-consciously, my hand strayed to cover the livid bruises on my bare chest. I’d been blaming Dorimiel for that, but he was Nephilim. Wouldn’t he have just bitten me?

“So you’re saying I can grab people, and suck the life out of them with my bare hands.” The very thought made me grimace.

Remy threw his head back and laughed, exposing his delicately pointed canines.

“Nothing quite so dramatic, Zaquiel,” he said when he’d recovered.

So who—or what—had left the marks on me, and on the couple in the alleyway? Had Dorimiel learned a new trick over the centuries? I fell silent, and it quickly got awkward. After a few moments of that, Remy pulled out the newspaper that was tucked under his arm.

“I owe you an apology, Zaquiel.”

“Oh? What for?”

He held the paper out to me, folded to an inner page. I took it and looked. My own face stared back at me—and it wasn’t a police sketch. Standing next to me was a woman, and she looked way better than I did in a suit. The caption read, “Two Missing. Former CWRU Professor Zachary Westland and Dr. Lailah Ganjavi.”

“What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s the museum incident you came into the club shouting about—not yesterday. The last time—Tuesday. The article was buried in a back section of the
Plain Dealer
.” He scowled. “There’s no way we could have known. I swear to you. There were no reports on this until today.”

“When did it happen?”

“Monday. Just as you claimed.”

Lailah’s face stared out from the photo, beautiful and accusing.

“This makes no damned sense,” I said, slamming the newspaper onto the desk. “This says I went missing that night, along with Lailah. We both know that’s not true. And there’s nothing about the Rockefeller Park shooting. How can I be a missing person
and
wanted for murder?”

Remy’s brows ticked a notch. “Are you talking about the police bulletin you mentioned at Heaven last night? You didn’t say it was for murder.”

I faltered, uncertain how much I should share.
Fuck it
, I thought. Remy’s eyes tracked my face, as if reading the thoughts as they played out. He shifted slightly at the door, leaning once more against the jamb.

“I left messages for Lailah at my apartment,” I admitted. “One about the shooting. I didn’t say murder, exactly, but I sounded guilty as hell. Is that what I do? Shoot people that get in my way?”

“Not every time,” Remy responded. His tone was light-hearted. I found no humor in it.

Venting a wordless growl of frustration, I smacked the desk. The crack of my palm against the polished wood echoed through the room.

“Whatever you did, the incident at Rockefeller is easily handled,” Remy soothed. “I’m surprised the sketch made it as far as the television. Your people are getting sloppy.”

“My people?” I opened my mouth to launch an argument, then remembered the rest of the message on the answering machine. I’d mentioned someone named Bobby, exactly as if I’d expected him to run damage control on the shooting. I thought uneasily about Lil’s shocked expression when I’d objected to her proposed mercy killing of the battered couple in the alley. What kind of guy was I?

“Read the article,” Remy suggested gently. “Perhaps it will jog your stubborn memory.” With exaggerated nonchalance, he fussed with his hat—it was, indeed, a fedora.

With an irritable huff, I reclaimed the paper.

“Two guards dead, another in the hospital,” I murmured unhappily.

“Head trauma,” Remy confirmed. “I made some inquiries. He’s not waking up any time soon. Otherwise I’d suggest that we go question him.” He paused, and then added, “This woman, Dr. Lailah Ganjavi. Odd that you’ve never mentioned her. It’s clear from the article she was your colleague at the museum. Is she why you quit Case to work with the art recovery agency?”

I thought back to the things at my apartment—the photos, the toothbrush, the bra.

“I think we were dating,” I said.

Remiel made no attempt to hide his surprise. “Even stranger, then, that you said nothing about her when you barged into the club on Tuesday. The only thing you concerned yourself with at the time were the demon jars you accused our tribe of stealing.”

“Demon jars?” I choked.

“Oh, come on, it’s right there—second paragraph from the end.”

I skipped ahead, frowning. “According to this, they were forgeries—early 1800s,” I replied. “Why would anyone steal bogus artifacts?”

“You know better, Anarch,” Remy said pointedly, and he leaned in. “You were keeping demon jars at the museum. Why didn’t you share that information before the break-in?”

“I don’t remember, and you know it,” I said. He gave me a significant look, like there was more I should be saying. “Come on, Remy,” I continued. “Demon jars? Don’t tell me they had real demons in them. Unless you mean the cacodaimons…”