Dark Descent Read online

  “Nyx, I was hoping I would find you here,” she said. Her normally flirty smile had been replaced by a serious look.

  “How can I help?” I asked. I didn’t flatter myself that a naiad as good-looking as Aspen had to come to the rough side of town for a little action. Men would set themselves on fire for a night with her.

  The bell above the door jingled as Elizabeth came into the pawnshop. For a minute, I forgot to be angry that she’d betrayed me, forgot the breakup, forgot to breathe.

  She looked so much like Amalie, my dead first love. I was too consumed by memories to remember those pertinent details, let alone that I’d been flirting with the naiad only seconds before.

  “You changed your hair again,” I said. Elizabeth was a bit of a chameleon—gorgeous, but she had the ability to try on personalities the way other people tried on blue jeans.

  She’d been blond when we met, but her hair was currently a shade of pink only found in a digestive aid.

  “It’s for a role,” she said.

  My head snapped up. “What kind of a role?” We’d met when my aunts had blackmailed her into breaking my heart. She’d hidden the fact that she was an actor then, but she’d certainly embraced it since.

  “Drama class,” she said. “What did you think?” She attended a fancy private college, but I wasn’t sure if she’d been drawn into another one of my aunts’ schemes. I didn’t tell her that, though.

  Conversing with the ex was difficult and it wasn’t just because she was the only ex I’d had who’d actually survived the aunties. So far.

  “How’s Alex?” I’d rescued her brother, but he had been in bad shape when I’d found him.

  “Better,” she said. “But he still has screaming nightmares.”

  “What about you?”

  “My acting teacher says I have real promise,” she said.

  “You’re a great actress,” I replied. She’d done a bang-up job of fooling me into believing she loved me when, in reality, she’d been working for my aunts.

  “That doesn’t sound like a compliment the way you say it.” She moved away and crossed her arms over her chest.

  And I thought I’d been careful to keep my voice neutral. It hadn’t been a compliment. More like an accusation.

  I thought I’d worked through the betrayal and was ready to see her again. I had loved her, once, after all. Hadn’t I? But now, she seemed like someone I could pass in the street and not even recognize.

  “Was any of it real?” It took an effort, but my voice was steady.

  “I think I should go.” Her voice was trembling.

  “No, stay,” I said. “Tell me the truth, Elizabeth.”

  “Nyx, I like you,” she said. “But I don’t…”

  “You don’t love me,” I said flatly, but the anger managed to seep in somehow. “You were just acting, to get me to do want you wanted. What the Fates wanted.”

  Finally, true emotion flashed on her face. She was angry, but it was something. “You’re emotionally constipated,” she shouted.

  “And you’re a liar,” I said.

  Her throat worked, but she didn’t deny it. She sucked in a breath. “Nyx, I never meant to hurt you.”

  “But you did.”

  There was no sense arguing about it. Part of me wondered why she’d waited so long to tell me the truth. It was long after I’d rescued Alex. In the end, it didn’t matter. She’d finally told me what I’d secretly feared: She didn’t love me and never had.

  I cleared my throat. “Why did you come here?”

  “A play at the college,” she said. “And my professor says I have real talent.” Elizabeth was pursuing a drama degree at a posh private college. My education was spotty at best. Just another way we weren’t suited.

  She held up three paper tickets. “These are for you.”

  I didn’t touch them. Why was she offering them to me? She’d made it pretty clear that we were over.

  My confusion must have showed on my face. She held them out again. “They’re from Alex,” she said. “I told him…” She glanced at Aspen and then looked away. “I told him that you probably couldn’t make it, but he insisted.”

  I frowned. Alex was fragile, still out of tune with the real world since his kidnapping. “Is he okay?”

  “He wants to talk to you,” Elizabeth said in a low voice. “But he doesn’t want you to come to the house.” Her tone made it clear that she wasn’t keen on the idea either.

  What did Alex want to talk to me about? There was only one way to find out. I took the tickets. “I’ll bring Talbot.”

  “You can bring whoever you want.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “So you’re in this play?” I asked Elizabeth. We didn’t have anything else to talk about, but I hoped we might be friends. Eventually.

  Her smile brightened. “I have a lead role,” she said. “And the professor is in it, too.”

  “You like this professor?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice neutral, but Elizabeth was no fool.

  “You’re jealous,” she accused.

  “I’m not jealous,” I said. “I’m cautious.”

  Aspen shifted on her feet and I realized I’d forgotten her the second Elizabeth had entered the premises.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t introduce you two,” I said. “This is Aspen.”

  “How did you two meet?” Elizabeth had a tone in her voice.

  “Aspen is a friend, Elizabeth,” I replied.

  “How nice for you both.” Definitely a tone, one verging on jealous.

  “We work together at Parsi,” I clarified.

  “Parsi?” Elizabeth asked. She gave Aspen a genuine smile. “Did you know my brother, Alex?”

  “Of course,” Aspen said. “Your brother is a genius. We miss him.”

  There was an awkward silence. “Aspen, you wanted to talk to me about something?” I prompted.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I’ll leave you two alone. See you on Monday.”

  “What was that all about?” Elizabeth asked, after Aspen left.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  Elizabeth made an excuse and left soon after Aspen. What had Aspen wanted to talk to me about?

  I didn’t realize that it would be the last time I saw Aspen alive.

  Chapter Five

  The mood was somber when I arrived to Parsi on Monday. The human resources manager didn’t even bother with her usual pointed glance at the clock when I walked in a couple of hours late. I checked the time for her and noticed it was almost noon, which was pushing it even for me.

  Employees were talking in hushed tones and a few even held balled-up tissues to their eyes.

  My aunt Nona hadn’t checked in yet, which was becoming more and more common since her husband’s murder. Lately, she’d spent more time drinking away her sorrows than I did.

  Naomi was in her mom’s office, head cradling the phone while she talked and tapped on an adding machine at the same time. Her eyes were puffy and she seemed preoccupied, but she held up a finger to signal for me to wait.

  “What’s going on?” I asked her when she finally hung up.

  “Didn’t you hear? Aspen was murdered last night.”

  “Murdered?”

  She nodded. “Everyone is freaking out.”

  “She came by the store this weekend. I liked Aspen,” I said. A thought occurred to me, which must have shown on my face.

  “Nyx, her death had nothing to do with you.” My cousin wasn’t a mind reader, but she was a Fate-in-training.

  I gave her a sharp look. “What do you know, little witch?”

  “There have been others,” she said.

  “Other murders? Why haven’t I read about it in the paper?”

  She put her chin on her hand. “All of the murders have been females from the House of Poseidon,” she told me. “The Houses have managed to keep it quiet, at least in the mortal world.”

  The door opened and Talbot stuck his head in. “Re
ady for lunch, babe?”

  He looked at our faces. “Am I interrupting something?”

  “One of our employees was murdered,” Naomi explained.

  “Where is she?” I asked. I wanted to see the body.

  Naomi frowned, but she scribbled an address on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “You can head to the morgue tonight. Ask for Baxter, House of Hades. He works the night shift,” she clarified.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “You’re not going to like him.”

  “He’s a flesh eater,” Talbot explained. “And he’s tricky.” I didn’t know he knew anyone tricky. I knew plenty of tricky individuals, but Talbot was a straight arrow.

  “He eats people?”

  “Just the dead ones,” Naomi replied.

  “Oh, that makes it so much better,” I said.

  “Do you want information or not?” she said. She gave me a severe look. “Just to make sure you’re on your best behavior, Talbot will go with you.”

  They headed for lunch and I spent the rest of the day brooding.

  Around midnight, I knocked on Talbot’s apartment door. “You ready?”

  “Are you sure you’re up for this?” he asked. “I know you and Aspen were friends.”

  “Let’s just get it over with,” I said. “I’ll drive.”

  We headed to the medical examiner’s office downtown.

  “How does he manage to eat flesh and not get caught?” I asked.

  “He only eats from the bodies that are scheduled to be cremated,” Talbot said. “And he’s very careful.”

  The morgue was in the basement behind a door with only a number on it. The room was only remarkable because of the bad lighting. It smelled terrible, which was only minimally masked by strong antiseptic.

  I’d expected a slug of a man with breath like a corpse, but I was wrong.

  “Nyx, this is Baxter Lamos,” Talbot said. Talbot’s acquaintance was tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair and eyes.

  My cousin was right. I didn’t like Baxter. Talbot had warned me that he was a flesh eater, but I didn’t expect to see the evidence right in front of me.

  There was a pile of limbs on a plate next to him. “I’m on my lunch break,” Baxter said. A bit of gristle dangled from the corner of his mouth. “Gotta fuel up. I’ve got a date later.”

  I tried not to throw up. He was a bottom-feeder, but we needed him.

  “Do you know anything about the naiad deaths?”

  He grinned. “I had a bite,” he said.

  “Listen, you little cockroach,” I said. “Tell me what you know. Now!”

  “Say please.” He chortled at my reaction and my fists clenched.

  Talbot laid a restraining hand on my shoulder. “Baxter, quit being a pain in the ass and tell us what you know. Please.”

  “Two of the naiads came in as Jane Does,” Baxter said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “What do you mean?” Talbot asked.

  “They looked like they’d been split open from the inside out,” Baxter replied. “It looked like something inside of them just exploded.”

  There was a closed expression on his face. He knew more than he was telling us.

  “You said you’ve never seen anything like it?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “But you do know something,” I pursued.

  He remained stubbornly mute until I slammed him up against the wall. “The last victim was a friend of mine. So if you know anything, anything at all, now is the time to spill your guts. Before I do it for you.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “No need for violence. My theory, and it’s only a theory, is that someone or something was trying to gain possession of the naiads.”

  “Possession?” Talbot repeated. “The House of Hades banned possession over fifty years ago. Too much bad press,” he added for my benefit.

  “Nobody’s seen Hades in over two hundred years,” Baxter said. “His House is crumbling.”

  Baxter was a scumbag, but he didn’t strike me as a stupid scumbag. I didn’t know much about possession. I had a long night of hitting the books ahead of me.

  “What happened to the bodies?” I asked.

  He licked his lips. “Still here. Most of ’em, anyway.”

  “You’re disgusting, you know that?” I said.

  Baxter laughed again. “Son of Fortuna, you are so holier-than-thou. And so young.”

  “You’re older than I am?”

  He met my gaze and something ancient and primal slithered behind his benign brown eyes. “You have no idea.”

  Talbot cleared his throat. “I hate to interrupt the pissing contest, but what about the newest naiad? She would have been brought in sometime yesterday.”

  “Her name was Aspen,” I said.

  Baxter jerked his head toward a white body bag on the slab. “Help yourself.”

  Talbot unzipped the bag and the stench of dark magic filled the room.

  “You forgot to mention the magic,” I told Baxter.

  He shrugged. “You didn’t ask.”

  “Have you seen magic like this before?” He was going to make me play twenty questions. “And if so, when?”

  His smirk disappeared. “I have never in all my years, seen anything like this before. It is the darkest of black magic. Not something for wet-behind-the-ears necromancers to tangle with.”

  “I’m not a necromancer,” I said.

  “I never said you were,” he replied smoothly. “Nice athame, by the way.”

  The guy was jerking me around. Talbot took one look at my face and saw that the situation was deteriorating. He slid a business card over to Baxter. “Call us if you get any more.”

  “And don’t eat them,” I commanded. “Not even a nibble.”

  Baxter grunted his assent. “The last one gave me indigestion anyway.”

  We went back to the Caddy. I started it and then said, “You’re right.”

  “About what?” Talbot asked.

  “I didn’t like him.”

  “But he did give us something to go on,” Talbot said.

  “Not much,” I said. “We’re going to have to check your dad’s library. Maybe there’s a mention of something like this in one of his older books.”

  “It’s going to have to be pretty old, if Baxter’s never seen it,” Talbot said. “He’s the oldest House of Hades member I know of.”

  “We’ll keep looking until we find the answer,” I said.

  “Maybe you can take a peek into the House of Fates book,” Talbot said. “That’s the oldest book I know of.”

  “You think the aunties will just hand it over?” I snorted.

  That shut him up. But Talbot had a point. I needed to take a peek at the book, but the aunts didn’t need to know about it.

  Chapter Six

  I spent the rest of the night reading, but I didn’t come up with any leads. I gave up around three, but my dreams were blood drenched.

  In the morning, I drank an entire pot of black coffee and then took the key I’d found at Gaston’s to a lock shop to see if they could identify it. I checked PO boxes and safety deposits at banks, but no one could tell me what the key unlocked.

  It was dark by the time I made it back to my apartment. Now what? I took the key out again and examined it under a magnifying glass. Three symbols were engraved on the thickest part of the bow. It was the Tria Prima, which made me think that Claire had gotten tangled up with Hecate followers somehow.

  I finally caught a break in the search for my cousin. I knocked on Talbot’s apartment door but wasn’t surprised when Naomi answered it.

  There was a bottle of wine and a half-finished pizza on the coffee table in front of the couch. Talbot sat up and buttoned his shirt while I looked away.

  “Claire’s gone to the land of the dead,” I said. I held up the brass key. “And this is a key to one of the gates.”

  “Where did you
get that?” Naomi asked.

  “Gaston’s,” I told her. “I knew he was holding out on the Fates. It was probably just in case he got caught. He needed a bargaining chip.”

  I wasn’t sure the information was reliable, but it was the only thing I had to go on.

  Naomi said, “You don’t know what Hecate will do to her.” Hecate: keeper of doorways and crossroads, badass goddess of the underworld, and my aunts’ worst enemy.

  “How did the Fates manage to imprison Hecate in the first place?” Talbot asked.

  “The Fates drained Hecate of her powers,” Naomi said, “and then turned the underworld into a permanent prison.”

  “What did they do with the powers?”

  “I don’t know,” Naomi said. “But, Nyx, you have to rescue Claire.”

  “Rescue her? How am I going to do that? I don’t even know where the gates are yet.”

  “You are a necromancer,” Talbot butted in.

  “No,” I said. “You assume I’m a necromancer, just because of the knife.”

  “Athame,” Naomi said helpfully. “I didn’t know you had one.”

  I glared at Talbot. “That was the general idea.”

  He glared back. “Do you have any better ideas? Claire’s life is at stake. Elizabeth’s, too.”

  “Even if it is a necromancer’s knife,” I said, “I’m not a trained necromancer. In fact, I don’t know the first thing about it.”

  “I do,” Naomi said. “I caught Mom throwing out some of”—she gulped and then bravely continued—“some of Dad’s stuff, so I hid it. You can have it all.”

  Gaston had killed her dad, and then I’d killed Gaston. Or at least tricked him into cutting his own thread of fate, which was the same thing.

  “I don’t know that I want it,” I said.

  “You’ll need it,” Talbot said. “How else are you going to find a way into the underworld?”

  “What’s the real reason you’re hesitating?” Naomi demanded.

  Talbot and I exchanged glances. Was it possible she didn’t know about the prophecy? “He, born of Fortune, shall let loose the barking dogs as the Fates fall and Hecate shall rise.”

  Her next words disabused me of that notion. “Don’t be such a wimp,” she said. “Don’t tell me you believe that moldy old prophecy?”