“Never suggested they did.” He quirked an eyebrow. “And that wasn’t actually a question I asked.”
Perhaps not out loud, but it was nevertheless implied. And I didn’t have to be psychic – although, technically, given my somewhat unreliable clairvoyant abilities, I was – to predict his next question.
“It does, however, force me to ask – did you kill him?”
I didn’t pull my gaze away, didn’t react, even if my insides were churning so badly it felt like I was about to throw up. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s possible, and I’d like to know why.”
I considered my options, weighing honesty – and what that might mean – against the knowledge that I still needed his help. Probably more so now than ever before thanks to the fact that I’d pushed Azriel away.
And yet, it was no more right to draw Jak deeper into this whole mess than it was to involve Ilianna or Tao.
“It’s possible,” I said eventually, “that Lucian died the way he did simply because that’s the exact same way he killed my mother.”
Jak blinked. “Lucian killed your mother? Why the hell were you fucking him, then?”
“Why do you think, asshole?” I spun around and stalked toward the elevator.
He took several quick steps and grabbed my arm, stopping me. “Look, I’m sorry, but you’ve got to admit, it’s an obvious question.”
I drew in a deep breath, though it did little to calm the rush of anger – anger that was aimed just as much at myself as at him.
“Do you think I haven’t agonized over the fact I was having sex with my mom’s murderer? It makes me want to puke every time I think about it.” I pulled my arm from his and continued on to the elevator. “And the worst of it is, that wasn’t the end of his crimes. It was just the beginning.”
Jak fell in step beside me. “What else did he do?”
“Just about everything.” I punched the Call button. “He was working with the sorcerer who stole the keys, and he was reading my thoughts during sex to keep up-to-date with everything we were doing to find them.”
“Wow,” Jak murmured. “Even I wasn’t that much of a prick. At least when we were making love, I concentrated on the business at hand.”
A reluctant smile touched my lips. “Oh, I don’t know about that. There were definitely occasions when it seemed your thoughts were elsewhere.”
“If my thoughts were elsewhere, you can bet it was because I was trying not to come. You, my dear, can sometimes make a man a little too quick on the trigger.”
My smile grew. “I did notice you had a tendency to fire off a little too soon —”
“It didn’t happen that often,” he said, nudging me with his shoulder.
“If you say so,” I murmured, amused. The elevator door opened and I stepped inside.
He followed close behind. “What floor are we heading to, and why?”
“Top floor, to what would have been Lucian’s apartment. I’m looking for clues.”
He punched the appropriate button. “Clues for what?”
I grimaced. “I wasn’t Lucian’s sole bed partner. Not only was he bedding a dark sorceress, but we’re pretty sure the two of them were partners in crime with the sorcerer who stole the keys.”
“Well, speaking from experience, the man had to have superman’s stamina if he could cope with more than you in his bed.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You and I are over, so you really can stop with all the compliments.”
“Hey, throwing a compliment doesn’t mean I want back in your bed. I mean, yeah, I’d love it, but I’ve come to accept it’s not going to happen.” He paused, then added more seriously, “So we’re looking for something to pin down the sorceress?”
“No, because we know who she is. However, we’re not looking for anything. I’m looking. I don’t believe you were invited to this particular party.”
“Unfortunately, you’re stuck with me. I mean, considering the options and all, what choice do you have?”
“That sounded like a threat, and really? That’s not a place you want to go.”
“It wasn’t so much a threat,” he murmured. “Not considering you could probably get your uncle to throw my ass into jail or erase my memory.”“Then what the hell was it?”
“More a… reminder. I know what I know, simply because I have the contacts. Contacts you still need.”
I should have been annoyed, but the reality was, he was right. I’d gone to Jak in the first place because of those contacts, and I still very much needed them.
But given the fact that everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, I at least owed him the chance to back away. Not that I thought he would – not when the scent of a story was in his nostrils.
“Jak, the people who want the keys are threatening the life of everyone I care about.” I met his gaze again, hoping he’d see that I was totally serious. “The more you attach yourself to this quest, the more likely the chance of you becoming one of its victims.”
“And tomorrow I could die crossing the road,” he said, with a shrug.
“Jak, I’m not kidding —”
“I know.” He squeezed my arm lightly, his fingers warm against my skin. “I don’t mean to downplay the danger, but it’s a danger I’ve faced before. I’m a paranormal and occult news investigator, remember?”
“You’ve never faced this sort of danger before,” I muttered, glancing up at the floor indicator as the elevator came to a bouncing halt.
The doors swished open. “Perhaps not,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t alter the fact that I always do whatever is necessary to get my story.”
And one of those necessary things was hooking up with me to get a story on my mother. While I knew not everything about our relationship had been faked, it had certainly been more real to me than it ever had been to him.
The elevator opened directly into what Lucian had planned to be the living room of his penthouse apartment. It was still filled with building debris, although many of the plastic sheets that had defined the different areas the last time I was there were gone. But the new walls hadn’t yet received a coat of paint and cables hung everywhere, looking like a network of intertwined snakes.
Snakes were better than spiders, I thought with a shiver. And then wondered whether that was clairvoyance or merely paranoia speaking.
“Wow,” Jak said, looking around. “This place is huge.”
“And this is just the living area.”
“Obviously, Lucian wasn’t lacking in cash.”
“No.” I picked my way through the building rubbish, heading for the newly constructed doorway into the kitchen area. “But considering he’d had centuries to accumulate it, that’s no real surprise.”
“Centuries?” Jak said, surprise in his voice.
“At least.”
I paused just inside the doorway, quickly scanning the vast kitchen-dining area. It still held the remnants of the old kitchen – an oven, a fridge, and the bare bones of two small counters – but the framework for the new kitchen was in place.
The folding chairs we’d briefly used the time I’d met Lauren here were propped up against an outer wall. I’d asked her – against Azriel’s warnings and my own misgivings – to create a spell that would nullify the device the Raziq had placed in my heart. She’d subsequently presented me with a cube designed to prevent magic escaping its boundaries. The idea, supposedly, was that once the cube had been “tuned” to my aura, it would prevent the device in my heart activating. But the cube hadn’t been created from the magic of this world. It hadn’t even been created from blood magic. That, perhaps, I might have risked, even if only as a last resort.
The source of the cube’s power had come from hell itself. While I might have made some very stupid mistakes lately, and had often placed too much trust in entirely the wrong people, even I knew better than to use a device created by a woman who not only considered it natural to play in hell’s fields, but perfectly normal to draw on its energy to create her magic.
It was certainly one of the few decisions I didn’t regret. Unlike all the time I’d wasted with Lucian…
I shoved the thought aside and continued looking around the room. But aside from the fact there were now doors dividing this room from the bedroom area, little else had changed.
And yet, something felt different.
An odd sense of wrongness crawled across my skin, and that was usually a precursor to me walking into a shitload of trouble.
“I don’t suppose you have any weapons, do you?” I studied the doorway leading into the bedroom. If any clues were going to be here, they would be found in the place where he’d made so many conquests. Like most Aedh, he’d been able to charm the pants off any woman he desired with just a kiss, simply because an Aedh’s kiss was designed to sweep aside objections and fuel lust.
And Lucian had certainly been more than willing to employ the power of it. Maybe it had been his way of passing time – when he wasn’t plotting his revenge, that was.
Jak glanced at me, expression sharp with concern. “Why would I? And why would you be asking something like that?”
“Because I have a very bad feeling we could be walking into trouble.”
And along with it came a very bad desire to reach for Azriel. Not so much for his protection, but simply because I felt stronger – more capable of coping with the weird shit that kept getting thrown at me – with him by my side.
I don’t want to do this alone. And that, right there, was a truth I might not have any wish to face, but one I inevitably would. Because no matter how angry I was, no matter how determined to prove that I could do this alone, the truth of the matter was, I really didn’t want to.
I’d banished him in anger and confusion and grief, and it wasn’t just that he’d made me Mijai and ended any possibility of me being reborn and seeing my mother again. It was that he’d destroyed our one sure way to end this key madness and keep everyone I cared about safe.