The Mephisto Covenant (4 page)

She wished Alex would go back to Russia and get lost in Siberia. She hoped God could forgive her for hating him so much. “Mom, what did he want that you wouldn’t give him?”

Her mother looked up at her. “When my grandfather was head of the KGB, he collected personal information about all kinds of people—heads of state and other key political figures from around the world. My father continued the tradition when he was a senior administrator in the Russian Security Council. He was a rich man with many friends, and he gathered information about all of them. He made copies of private letters and memos, took pictures of them in compromising positions, recorded their private conversations. He and my grandfather saw this not as an invasion of privacy, but as insurance for the future. Favors, they called them, but it was only a nice name for blackmail. If they needed something—classified information, or the name of an arms dealer, or even a restaurant reservation in Paris—they called up these favors. When my father died, he left me all of the information. It’s in a safe deposit box in Geneva, and I intend to die without ever seeing it again. The number of the box and its contents will be buried with me.”

“Why does Alex want it?”

“He said his supervisor in the Russian Security Council found an old file of my father’s with a list of the contents of the lockbox. He wants it and sent Alex to get it.”

“Why didn’t you give it to him, Mom? What could be in that box that’s so important, you’d risk everything?” Sasha was unaware she was crying until tears splashed against her hand.

Her mother stood. “I wasn’t willing to hand over detailed, personal information about important people to anyone, least of all his boss, who is a bully and a criminal. Even if I’d known what would happen, that Alex would accuse me and I’d be deported, I wouldn’t have given him the box number. Some things are bigger than ourselves, Alexandra. Doing the right thing always comes with a price.”

“I’m glad you feel so virtuous, Katya,” Tim said, sounding bitter. “Maybe if you weren’t selective about when to be noble, everything would be different.”

Sasha wondered what he was talking about. Her mother looked like she’d just been punched, shock and pain reflected in her expression. She opened her mouth as if she would say something, but instead, she stormed away to the kitchen, cursing in Russian while she slammed cabinet doors.

What had happened to make them hate each other this much? Sasha wanted to ask, but Tim was red in the face, his breathing very labored, and she was afraid he’d have a heart attack if she upset him further.

She swiped at her tears and wondered what it would be like to live in Russia. Could she finish high school there? Just the thought of being a new kid in a school where she barely spoke the language made her dizzy with anxiety. “Where will we live?” she asked Tim. “Moscow? St. Petersburg?”

It was a little while before he said in a quiet voice, “You can’t go with her, Sasha. You’re a U.S. citizen, so you have to have a visa to enter Russia.”

Her dizziness moved closer to a full-on panic attack. “How long does it take to get a visa?” Tim looked away from her, c
learly uncomfortable. “Not that
long, but there won’t be a visa for you. Not yet, anyway. As much as the United States doesn’t trust Katya, the Russians are angry with her for defecting. Until she has a feel for how things are, it’s too dangerous for you to be with her. Kasamov’s boss still wants the contents of that lockbox, so he could use you as leverage to get Katya to turn it over. It’s not a risk Katya wants to take.”

Fear nearly ate her alive. “Will he do something to Mom?”

“It’s possible. I won’t lie, Sasha. The next few months are going to be very difficult for your mother. The best thing you can do is stay here, out of harm’s way, so at least she doesn’t have that worry on her shoulders.”

“I guess I can stay with a friend until it’s safe for me to go.”

“No, Sasha. That’s why I’m here. For now, you’re going home with me.”

She blinked. That sounded just terrible. “Where do you live?”

“In Colorado. Telluride. Your mother will get things sorted out, and in the meantime, you’ll live with us and get to know your aunt and your cousins. I have two boys, close to your age.”

A couple of teenage boys and a stranger who had bad blood with her father wasn’t going to make being separated from her mother okay.

Tim sighed again. Or maybe he was just sucking in deep breaths because of his size, because it was hard for him to breathe.

One thing was sure—he didn’t look like a spy. “You work for the CIA, which is part of the State Department. Can’t you help Mom?”

“I’m not CIA anymore.” His scowl was hard to recognize, his face was so flabby. “I quit after your dad was killed and they tried to pin it on me. They thought I was the one who ratted him out. There wasn’t a shred of evidence, because it wasn’t true.” He cleared his throat and dropped his gaze to the floor. “He was my best friend, until I married his sister. Melanie always resented Mike, but I didn’t realize how much she hated him until . . . later.”

He didn’t say “until it was too late,” but Sasha heard it in his voice. Her aunt sounded like a witch. And she was going to have to live with her. “Did Dad hate her?”

“No, but he avoided her because she became so angry and hostile whenever he was around. After we married, I thought I could help mend fences and invited him to meet us for dinner in D.C. Big mistake. It ended in a loud, embarrassing fight, and she stood up and accused him of trying to ruin my career. It got around, because things like that always do, and when he was killed, I was the first person they looked at. I was in Russia at the time, had been doing some recon on Yuri Andreovich, but there was nothing they could find that proved I was the snitch.”

“If it wasn’t you, then who was it?”

He met her gaze, his small eyes hard with anger. “If I knew, I’d do everything in my power to bring that person down. I’d take away everything important to them.” His voice shook with passion and rage. “I’d make them wish they were dead.”

Something crashed to the floor in the kitchen. “Mom? Are you okay?”

Her answer was another string of Russian curses.

Sasha stared at the television, trying hard not to fly into a million pieces. In the middle of her total freak-out, she saw Missy’s face on the screen, followed by Amy Lee, then David Hollister. Casey Mills. All the Ravens, one by one, with a line at the bottom that read: Fourteen local teens drown in sailing accident. She leaned forward, straining to hear the newscaster.

“ . . . aren’t sure why they were out so late, on a stolen sailboat, but a Coast Guard spokesman says they were involved with a secret club at St. Michael’s prep school known as the Ravens. None of the fourteen was wearing a life jacket when the Coast Guard answered the mayday.”

---

By the time Jax and his brothers were done with the Ravens, it was close to six in the morning in California, seven in Colorado. Along with his brothers, he transported back home to the Mephisto Mountain, to the grand hall of the house. The scent of food, particularly bacon, was heavy in the air.

“I’m starving,” Phoenix said. Everyone but Jax echoed him and walked toward the dining room, shrugging out of their trench coats as they went. Halfway there, Phoenix stopped, turned, and looked at him expectantly. “You planning to eat, bro?”

“Not yet. I want to call Mallick and see how it went with Sasha.”

“You have to eat, Jax. You’ll run out of energy, and it’ll be that much longer before you can see her.”

“I’ll eat as soon as I talk to him.” Phoenix turned away while Jax
pulled out his iPhone. Mallick
answered on the second ring. “How did it go?” he asked, without preamble. His impatience was killing him. He wanted to go right then, wanted to see Sasha again. He was still floating on a cloud of euphoria, still stunned that he’d found an Anabo, one meant for him, still fighting the overpowering instinct to snatch her up, bring her here, and never let her go.

Yeah, he got the purpose of free will. It was what they lived for, what they fought for, but at the moment, he wished there was no such thing. They were forbidden to interfere with free will, so he’d have to win Sasha like any other guy, which wasn’t going to be easy. He knew as much about romance as he did about knitting, which was exactly zero.

“She’s still asleep,” Mallick said.

Jax frowned, his eyes on the portrait of Jane, the only other Anabo they’d found, hanging close to the front door of the mansion. He was concerned that Sasha had stayed asleep this long. “No movement?”

“None. Seems strange. You put her under, right?”

“Yes, at about midnight. Unless I’m close by to keep her under, she should have woken within a couple of hours.”

“Maybe she’s just really tired,” Mallick said. “Or her body’s forcing her to rest because of what she went through.”

“But I healed her. She shouldn’t have any need to recuperate.”

“You healed her body, Jax, not her mind. It’s pretty horrible what those kids did to her. I think her brain is working to process it.”

Mallick was a smart guy, one of the finest among the people who worked with the Mephisto. Since the beginning, they’d recruited humans to help, always on the lookout for the best of mankind. They had found Mallick in the mid-1700s, the only holdout on a ship full of Eryx’s followers. After Jax and his brothers took the lost souls and the Skia to Hell on Earth, they asked Mallick if he would accept immortality, become a Lumina, and join them in their never-ending war against Eryx. He agreed and turned out to be one of their best recruits. Jax trusted him completely, which made him the logical choice to watch over Sasha, then follow her home to find out where she lived. But he couldn’t do that if she didn’t wake up.

“I’ll be there as soon as I knock back an energy drink,” Jax said. “I’m running on empty.”

Mallick didn’t say anything. “Hello? Mallick? You still there?” “I think she’s about to wake up. Hang on.” “Are you cloaked so she can’t see or hear you?” “Of course. Hold on, Jax.” Jax paced the perimeter of the circular hall while he waited.

“She’s blinking. Now she’s sitting up, looking around at the stones and candles. She sees the blood. She’s confused. It’s all coming back to her. Poor thing looks scared to death.”

“Dude, you’re killing me.”

“She has to work it out, Jax. I think now she’s wondering why they left her here, why they didn’t finish her off. Okay, she’s realizing someone might come back. I gotta go. She’s running now, into the main warehouse, toward outside.”

“Call me as soon as she gets home.” “Done.” The call ended. Jax slipped the iPhone into h
is pocket and strode toward the
dining room, where he wolfed down a plate of food in record time. The oldest of them, Key, the de facto leader, was eyeing him with that big brother look on his face.

“May I suggest you take your time with this, Ajax? A plan seems in order, instead of your running off half cocked.”

Around a huge bite of biscuit, Jax said, “When you find your Anabo, tell me how patient you feel, how interested you are in waiting for a plan.”

“If it meant the difference between keeping her forever and losing her because I rushed in without a clue what I was doing, I’d wait.”

“Of course you would, Kyros. If only the rest of us were as perfect as you.”

Key frowned and returned to eating his eggs. “Fine. Go now. But don’t come crying to me when it all goes south.”

Jax wiped his mouth, tossed his napkin to the table, and stood. “I’m outta here.” He wanted to take a shower and put on some clean clothes before Mallick called. He didn’t plan to talk to her today. Just follow her around to see where she went to school, what she did, who she hung out with. He needed to decide how best to approach her, so a little reconnaissance was in order.

As he walked toward the hall, his brothers yelled out random advice. Zee said, “You should give her a present. A piano would be nice.”

Ty said, “Take her a puppy. Or a kitten! Girls love little animals.”

“No way,” Denys, the youngest, said. “You should give her a pair of shoes. Colin Firth did that in a movie and the chick loved it.”

“I suggest a tree,” Key said. “You can take one of my dogwood saplings, if you like.”

Jax wasn’t absolutely sure, but he suspected Sasha would be underwhelmed by all of their suggestions. From what he saw in movies and on TV, girls seemed to enjoy getting jewelry, not pianos and trees. Maybe Phoenix had some ideas, since he’d had Jane for a little while, but as usual when it came to females, he said nothing.

Just as Jax reached the dining room door, the emergency alarm began to blare, its wailing siren resounding through the great hall, all through the mansion, all across the mountain. Jax froze in the doorway. Didn’t it just figure? He was minutes from leaving, and now this. No telling what the alarm was for, but it was never sounded except in serious crisis. He had no choice but to stay until he knew if he was needed. Sucking in a deep breath in a vain attempt to corral his frustration, he popped down to the basement, to the war room, where he found Brody, the newest Lumina, looking very freaked out.

As soon as all the brothers were there, Brody said, “On my way to Denver, I stopped in Ridgway for gas, and while I was filling up, I saw Boggs climb out of the back of the Land Rover and take off.”

Denys was still eating a biscuit. “Who’s Boggs?”

Key, ever the calm leader, said patiently, “Frank Boggs, from Boston. He’s the Purgatory that came to us a few days ago. His son murdered him and is now spending all of Boggs’s money. He must have hidden beneath the blankets in the back when Brody left the mountain.”

Jax’s frustration boiled over. “Why the hell did we get another Purgatory? We all decided not to take on any more! Babysitting pissed-off ghosts is not what we’re about, not what we’re here for.”

“We didn’t all decide,” Key said, scowling at him. “You got mad, just like you are right now, and you decided there’d be no more Purgatories. As usual, you failed to notice nobody agreed with you.”

“How about if I skip the search?” Key immediately shook his head. “You know the rules, Ajax. We all go, or no one goes. That’s not an option, because the guy’s headed for Boston to get his revenge and kill his son. Then he for sure won’t make it to Heaven. Our father will immediately take him to Hell.”

“This is exactly why we need to stop accepting Purgs. If Boggs had been sent to Purgatory, instead of here, he’d never have had the chance to escape and be in the real world again. I don’t remember the last Purgatory who didn’t manage to escape. They all do it, and we spend way too much time hunting them.”

With his hands clenched into fists, Key was close to losing his temper, which was rare. They all walked a thin line between the dark side they inherited from Mephistopheles, and the purity of their mother’s Anabo soul. Dealing with M was difficult at times, impossible at others. A long time ago, Lucifer intervened and told M to stay out of what they did, to provide doppelgangers and let his sons take care of hunting the lost souls. But he was their father, and even if he was a dark angel, he was compelled to give advice, offer help, tell Key what to do.

Key was still glaring at him, visibly trying to get a handle on his anger. Before he could say anything to Jax—before they could get into a fight—Ty said, “Whether we take on any more Purgatories is a moot point right now. We need to get going.”

Key nodded, even as he gave a hard look to Jax. “Let’s head out front.” As one, they transported outside, to the steps that led down to the drive. The Luminas, all
122 of them, stood in kneehigh
snow, waiting to hear what the emergency was. Key told them quickly, and Phoenix gave instructions and directions for the search. Within five minutes, everyone except the remaining Purgatories were gone from the Mephisto Mountain.