Winged Passion, page 7
part #3 of Heaven's Heart Series
Right. She doesn’t believe in magic.
If she did, she’d know that there was truth behind every legend.
Seraphina cleared her throat. “I have information that indicates a replica was made in ancient times.” She may be able to sense a lie, but it didn’t prevent her from telling one, although it did leave a sour taste in her mouth.
“If it was made in ancient times, then that makes it an artifact. What do you want with it?” Rowan crossed her arms over her chest.
“I believe it has been stolen.”
“And why would you want to find it?” Suspicion laced her words.
“To return it.” Again, a lie.
“The original owner would be long dead.”
Possibly. Or maybe not. It depended on whether that owner had been human or not.
“Their family won’t be.”
She was going to need to eat a mint after this.
Rowan settled back. “If it’s real, you need to hand it back to the people.”
“Rowan! We do not dictate to our clients,” Dora chided.
Fire flashed in Rowan’s eyes. “I did not spend seven years at university, and become a doctor, to help people steal artifacts!”
“You’re a doctor as well?” Seraphina asked. She thought it would have taken longer than that to become qualified in two such diverse fields.
“I have a PhD in archaeology.”
“Oh, so not a real doctor, then.”
Rowan glared.
Seraphina saw Dora suppress a smile.
“I am not interested in thievery,” Seraphina said, flicking her hand dismissively. Truth. “I just want a description of the spear so I can help locate it.”
Also truth.
She was beginning to understand how easily Paschar was able to hide his true motivations. A little bit of truth here, a little there, and let the recipient fill in the rest.
“Rowan—” Dora began.
“Fine. I’ll make some calls. Come back in a week.” The redhead made to stand.
“No good,” Seraphina said, shaking her head. “That is too long. I need the information now.”
“I said a week.”
“And I said that’s no good. I need it by tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Disbelief flashed across Rowan’s face. “It’s the weekend.”
“So?”
“So, people don’t work on the weekend.”
She looked down at herself, then at Rowan. “I am. You are.”
“I’m helping Gran out.”
“I am working,” Dora pointed out.
Rowan groaned. “Fine, I’ll make some calls today. And I’ll go the library tomorrow. Okay, Gran?”
“Why can’t you go to the library today? What if you need to go to more than one?”
“Fine! I’ll go now.” With an annoyed glare, Rowan stormed from the office.
“How old is she?” Seraphina asked.
“Almost thirty.”
“A baby, then.” That explained the tempestuousness.
“By your standards, I guess she is. By ours, she’s an adult. I apologize for that display. She has become cantankerous of late.”
“Her temper is of no consequence.” Working with demons had taught her the real definition of temper tantrum. “Do you think she will be able to find something?”
“Rowan has a…knack for finding the almost impossible. She won’t credit it herself, but she has found everything I have ever asked for.”
“Magic?”
Dora nodded. “Quite possibly a latent ability.”
“A handy person to know,” Seraphina murmured.
“If only she believed in magic.”
Chapter 14
Trick scowled at Baal. He couldn’t think of the god as Laird, even though he was trying to. Names were important, after all. Chosen ones especially so. But Laird just didn’t suit the guy. Baal did.
“I am not going to give you shares in the guild.” Trick shook his head. He could see where this was going.
Come in hard, then pretend to settle.
It was one of his preferred negotiating skills. Less so when it was used against him.
“I need to get something out of this. If I give you information that leads you to the artifact, and Lucifer discovers it came from me...”
Baal tapped a long elegant finger on Trick’s desk, which was covered in paperwork.
“You’re untouchable, you know that. Besides, what if your information is useless?” he asked. “This deal will only work if you give me something that directly leads to the prize.”
“That is too subjective.” Baal shifted on his chair. When it had become apparent that Trick wasn’t about to bring a seat for the god to sit on, he’d simply teleported in his own, despite Trick’s wards.
That said a lot about the deity’s power.
Trick was expecting another visit from Hades as a result.
So he can give me another impossible task to achieve.
He liked deadlines, but one week?
Only six days left. They were three-quarters through day one already.
“You don’t need shares in my business,” Trick said.
“I don’t need anything. But Satan found a loophole in the contract regarding my role—and its level of associated protection—a bare month ago and hired three guilds to attack me. If not for Sylvester, I would be dead right now.”
“And you got Sylvester through me. As part of a favor to Hades. Remember that.” Normally, Trick would have kept well away from a job that involved another Hell-lord, but Hades had asked ever-so-nicely—that’s to say, he’d demanded it. “Plus, word is that the loophole has been sewn up.”
“That one has, yes.”
“As if you didn’t get any others fixed in the meantime. The six other CEOs would have been throwing money at their lawyers as well. They would have been sweating bricks at seeing you attacked.”
The CEOs of the recruitment agencies were meant to be exempt from Hell’s politics, and untouchable by the three Hell-lords, unless they broke their own contracts, which Baal hadn’t done. He’d simply arranged for Asha Himm to be employed by Hades. Satan hadn’t been happy about that arrangement, and had spent ten years plotting revenge.
That had all been in the debrief.
Damn Sylvester and his selective sharing.
Trick grabbed a pen, then tapped it against the papers. “You want Sylvester to have shares in the guild.”
Surprise surged in Baal’s eyes before vanishing again, buried away. “You assume much.”
“I am currently on a deadline, I have a guild to run, a fallen angel to manage, and I haven’t eaten in a good eight hours, apart from some scotch and a couple of pieces of candy.” Trick dropped his pen. “I don’t have time to be given the runaround. Do you want the shares in Sylvester’s name or not?”
“Yes, I want them in his name.” Baal sighed. “You like to suck the joy out of life, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I should have been a lawyer.”
Baal laughed, but sobered quickly. “Thirty percent.”
“No fucking way. Five.”
“Five?”
“This is a flourishing business. And being a guild master comes with certain...perks. I am not going to just hand over my hard work for a little piece of information that may nor may not be helpful.”
“Thirty.”
“Five.”
He wasn’t about to budge on this. Enslaving souls in Hell gave a person power. The more slaves, the more power. Trick could teleport, cast his own spells and heal from almost all wounds; he was a hair’s breadth from being classified as a sorcerer. It was why he preferred to enslave rather than employ, even though he treated all his blood slaves as if they were employees. He let them have their free will, even if it cost him, like it had with Dru. And many of them stayed on as actual employees when their contracts expired. If they survived to the end of them, anyway. Assassination was a risky business.
“How about you text Sylvester and ask him what he would settle for?”
“I don’t need to text him.” Baal sniffed.
Right. Murmur demon. They had the whole telepathy thing going.
It was a good thing Trick had a natural shield.
“He says thirty percent.”
But Trick knew Baal was lying. Smiling, he whipped out his cell and dialed. “Sylvester. Just the man I wanted to talk to.”
*
Trick was scraping the last piece of steamed tapioca pudding off his plate when Seraphina found him. Annoyance tinged her expression, but she was still breathtakingly beautiful. Unfortunately. His fingers itched to trace over the midnight darkness of her skin.
Errant, Trick’s sex-addicted demon administration officer, paused in his recap of the guild’s current finances. He stared at the fallen angel with a slightly open jaw. “She really is an angel.”
“What? You thought I made that part up?” Trick asked.
“Shut your mouth, Errant, or you’ll start drooling.” Opal, a Radiato demon and assassin, slapped Trick’s bookkeeper on the shoulder. Errant jerked forward, almost face-planting into his untouched serving of pudding. Despite her skeletal appearance, Opal was strong.
“Are you going to eat that?” Trick pointed his spoon at the bowl. Monica—a Foraci demon with exceptional culinary skills—was on cooking duty and he had a closet sweet-tooth.
Errant scowled. “It is filled with tiny eyeballs. Or eggs. I have yet to determine which.”
Tiny eye—
“They are tapioca pearls.” He held out a hand. “Give it to me.”
“They are pearls?” Errant held the bowl up to his face. “Why did you let Monica raid the treasury to make a dessert? I will have to add this to this month’s outgoings...”
Trick ran a hand over his face.
Really?
Seraphina’s low, sensuous laugh wove through the room. She sat down at the table with her own bowl of pudding. “They are not real pearls. They are starch balls.”
“Starch? As in a carbohydrate?” Metcalf, the guild’s only Reynard’s Imp, had arrived. The small gray-skinned demon was vicious, psychotic, and had a problem with vegetables—like they were a personal affront to his character. He’d also been avoiding Trick since Peony’s departure. The imp had valued her as a friend. Go figure.
Then again, the imp liked Sylvester, and they weren’t exactly two peas in a pod, either.
“As in a carbohydrate,” Seraphina replied. Trick couldn’t gauge her reaction to the demons in the room, but she seemed unfazed by them.
Considering her former role in Heaven, this should have been close to torture for her. There was a Foraci demon, a Renyard’s Imp, a Pestula demon, and so many others that were classified as ‘kill on sight’ for angelic warriors. But there she was, eating her dessert with a look of amusement on her face.
At least she isn’t annoyed anymore.
And thankfully she was wearing her lipstick again.
Some of the demons here, like Monica, could see magic, and would have noticed Seraphina’s slave mark.
Really should have thought about that more.
Ah well. He’d just have to change it.
Even though it meant touching her.
That wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?
Considering he’d vacillated from wanting to have his hands all over her, to not wanting to touch her at all—for the sake of his mental health—he figured it would be a bad thing.
“I really don’t understand what you humanoid types see in carbs. Don’t you know they go straight to your thighs?” Metcalf tapped his chin, his eyes narrowing as he considered Seraphina’s bowl. “On second thoughts, keep eating them. More on your thighs means more on my dinner plate later.”
A knife appeared suddenly under Metcalf’s chin, Seraphina’s hand steady as she held the blade out. “I will never be on anyone’s dinner plate. Got it?”
She pushed the blade until blood seeped from a tiny wound.
The imp nodded, deliberately pushing the blade further into his skin. Rather than the rage Trick expected, Metcalf gave Seraphina a toothy smile. “Got it.”
Fucking psycho.
But this episode reminded him that he had a little more paperwork to sort out after assigning Sylvester seven percent of the guild’s shares.
He had a new heir to name; he refused to give Sylvester the entire business anymore.
Who will it be?
Chapter 15
Trick closed his MacBook with a click, and then sat back on his throne, throwing one leg over the armrest and leaving the computer lying against his belly. It was his usual pose; he thought it gave off a certain casual disrespect that he liked. Seraphina watched him with laser focus from a seat near one of the hearths, and he sent her a small mocking wave. She’d been staring at him for the past twenty minutes or so, trying to get his attention, but Trick had been busy working on Halcyon Guild admin duties; obligations that never seemed to end.
He was responsible for the lives of forty demons and one angel. Just because his life had a one-week expiry date, didn’t mean that he was about to shirk his responsibility to his guild’s members.
Don’t go telling anyone that or they’ll think you care.
His phone beeped and he fished it out of his pocket, juggling the MacBook in the process. It was from Sylvester and read: GOT IT. CHECK UR EMAIL. It was followed by an emoji of an eggplant and a smiling face with its tongue sticking out.
Ugh. Shortened text speak and emojis. Trick hated both, which is precisely why Sylvester would have used them. The guy just liked to irritate him. At least he does know how to spell. Some demons actually thought ‘UR’ was correct.
Why do I think of him as a friend, again?
Trick placed the cell on the throne’s armrest, then opened his MacBook up again, giving a low whistle as he read the email.
Seraphina was by his side in an instant. “What is it? Is it related to our job?”
“Sure is,” he replied, eyes skimming the text. He opened one of the attachments and grinned.
“Show me!” She reached over to grab the laptop, but he moved it away, lightning-fast.
“I don’t think so.”
“But it’s about our job. You should share the information.”
“Just like you told me about your trip to the Cat on a Broomstick? Plus, you didn’t say the magic word.”
“Your computer is locked with magic?”
“No, it’s not locked with magic. You didn’t say ‘please’—that’s the magic word.” And he thought his knowledge of colloquialisms was subpar. She clearly had been living under a rock. Her head has been in the clouds, literally. Warrior angels would have had very little to do with humans and their sayings—they were trained to fight demons and only that. So, she, at least, has an excuse. You don’t. Your hatred of emojis blinds you to new information.
A frown formed on her face. “Wait. You had me followed?”
“I don’t need to.” Trick ran a finger over his lips. “I have other means of knowing where you are.”
Her eyes followed his movements. “You put a tracking spell on me?”
“Sure did.”
“Do you do that with all your slaves?”
“No, you’re special.”
Since Z had vanished from his cell—and Trick hadn’t been able to track him down using the angel’s slave brand—he’d changed his policy on new slaves. Every new member of the Halcyon Guild would get a tracking spell along with their brand. He’d been complacent once before, never again.
Trick had thought that there was no way Z could escape; only three people knew of his location, and the angel had been so weak and emaciated from previous torture, he would never have made it out on his own. But Dru had somehow worked out where Z was and freed him the day she left.
How she’d gotten him out, Trick still didn’t know.
I should ask her the next time I see her. He was still in the process of stitching up the security flaw. It wasn’t like Dru had been on speaking terms with him until now.
And even if he hadn’t decided it would be a good idea to track all his new slaves, he’d wanted a little extra information about Seraphina and her whereabouts. All he’d had to do was include a dash of additional magic in her brand and voila!, he could now track her whenever he wanted.
“Here, work out what the emojis mean. If you do that, I might let you see the email.” He handed her his phone.
She took it and stared at the screen for a few moments, frowning. She gave it back soon after, not even having tried to scroll up and read the previous messages between him and Sylvester, or sneak a look through other message windows. She earned some serious brownie points for that.
No. You’re meant to be thinking of the bad things about her, not the good.
Right. He should make a list of the negatives, so he could focus on those, rather than wondering if she still tasted as amazing as before, and if her lips were really as soft as he remembered...
Bad things.
Right.
She doesn’t know the magic word
She’s too beautiful
She murders demons
He had a feeling that number three should really be in the number one position.
“I’ll message Yael and ask him about the emojis.”
She plucked her phone from her pocket and typed rapidly. It vibrated in response.
“That’s cheating.” An ugly green emotion rose in his gut. “Who’s Yael?”
“He’s another member of the Falling Star.”
“Right.” Another damned angel. And just because she knew him, it didn’t mean they were sleeping together.
Not that it matters if they are.
“I think he’s still mad at me,” she said.
“Why would he be mad at you?” Trick asked. Please do not be a lovers’ quarrel.
“For selling my soul to you.”
