Blood Frost (The Half-Demon Rogue Trilogy Book 2) Page 4

  I began to ask who it was from, but the flowery handwriting and heart at the end of the “S” in Kalos told me all I needed to know. Sliding my finger along the lip, I opened the envelope and shook the contents out.

  A small card bounced on the table.

  Downing the rest of my coffee in a single gulp, I reached for the card.

  “She say anything when she left it?”

  “Ziva? No. I didn’t see her,” Argos said.

  “Didn’t exactly have your watchdog hat on when I got up.”

  “The girl moves with the quiet of nature,” Argos said, climbing on to the chair to face me. His lip curled in annoyance. “You didn’t notice her last night until you almost ran into her.”

  “About that,” I said, turning the card over in my fingers. “How did you guys get me back? She can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds.”

  “Can you read the card?” Argos said, his eyes focused on the black invitation.

  “You tell me how she got me back here, and I’ll look at the card.” I flipped the Journal of Annihilation open and tapped the well-worn leather cover. “And whatever you found last night.”

  “Fine.” His tail swished against the chair rungs. A low growl came from his belly, his brown eyes flashing with increasing irritation. “An animation spell of Druidic origin. Perhaps from the 5th century B.C., although the incantation was older.”

  “Glad you’ve kept up with your studies.”

  “Don’t interrupt, jackass.” Argos cleared his throat and continued, now in his element. “I couldn’t recognize the language. But it was powerful enough to animate a few of the young spruce trees and create a mobile stretcher.”

  “The trees literally hugged me,” I said, bristling at the thought of being saved by nature.

  “In a manner of speaking, yes,” Argos said. “But it troubles me, not knowing the language.”

  “I didn’t understand it either, buddy. And I’m older than you.” That about confirmed my first impressions about her aura. The girl was old. Way older than 5,000 B.C.E., which was around when I came on the scene.

  He looked down his snout. “I’ve read more books in the past year than you have in a thousand.”

  “And I’ve killed more smartass creatures than you’ve met.”

  There was a protracted silence while we stared at one another. Neither of us breathed.

  Finally, Argos said, “It’s really good to have you back.”

  “You have no idea.” I cracked an easy smile. His tail thumped like a metronome. Then I turned serious. “About the book. Seeing as how my chest might explode soon.”

  “Whatever’s on that invitation better be worth it,” Argos said with a grumble. “You think that’s why Isabella decided to kill you? She knows about the Journal of Annihilation?”

  “Pretty good motive,” I said. Like dangling raw meat in front of a hungry wolf, the allure of absolute power and mythical destiny would be too much for Marrack and Isabella to resist. “Athena’s blood drug is still on the streets. Someone’s gotta be distrubuting the last of the supply.”

  “Part of the town has been overtaken by vagrants,” Argos said. “They’re referring to it as Haelstrom, now.”

  “Catchy.” I swallowed hard, feeling a slight twinge in my chest. “Maybe they’re making more.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Argos said. “Gunnar and myself, we acquired some of it—”

  “You know that shit’ll kill you.”

  Argos stuck out his pink tongue like I was some kind of moron. “Yes, warn the one person in the room who actually understands the difference between science and magic.”

  “Technically you’re a dog, not a person—”

  “Even so, the chemical properties suggest that it requires a very powerful creature to manufacture. With a lot of know-how. Athena would be on the shortlist.”

  “And Marrack the Asshole wouldn’t?”

  “Catchy,” Argos said, “But no. I’m pretty sure a new batch won’t hit the streets.”

  “So someone’s offloading the rest of the supply.” I leaned back in the chair and stared at the water warped ceiling. Excellent. I had returned from an exile caused by this very problem…and the problem wasn’t even resolved. “Fuck.”

  I stood up so quick that I almost knocked the table over. Argos teetered on top, still gunshy from his early-morning fall. He eyed me warily as I paced around the small apartment, making the rounds like a hyperactive meth-head.

  “Too much coffee?”

  I flipped Argos the bird and leaned against the wall. Never mind that I looked the part of a raving lunatic, clad in my boxer shorts and undershirt, black hair askew. The realization had come to me as most did—after continually banging up against dead ends to the point of exhaustion.

  “My destiny and the book,” I said. “They’re intertwined.”

  Argos groaned and slumped down wearing a pitiful expression. “Now you sound like Charon. And you still haven’t told me what the card says.”

  I glanced at the fancy invitation, which I’d crumpled up in my excitement. Allowing the ruined card to tumble to the floor, I leapt forward. Argos didn’t share my enthusiasm.

  “Marrack was right.” A pain flared through my chest, forcing me to hold the chair for support. “At the gas station, Marrack and Isabella both referred to my destiny. Apparently there is something about it in some book, somewhere. Those were his exact words. That’s gotta be why they’re trying to kill me.”

  “I don’t know, Kal.”

  “He didn’t believe it either,” I said. “He called me a wretched thief afterward, and dismissed the notion that I could be important.” I leaned over, so my eyes were only a couple inches from Argos’. “So the question is simple.”

  I allowed the silence to build for a few seconds before I said, “Why are they afraid of my destiny now?”

  “Maybe something can help.” Argos blinked, his soulful brown eyes looking at me. “If you let me speak, I could tell you what I found in the Journal of Annihilation.”

  I backed up, realizing I had hogged the spotlight. This is what happens when you live alone in a trailer for two months. Stir crazy didn’t begin to describe it.

  “Show me.”

  “Tell me what’s on the invitation first.”

  I looked at him incredulously, then I shrugged. “Black tie fundraiser auction at Tina Chen’s Austin mansion. 9 PM tonight.”

  “Your lawyer?” Argos said, his eyes growing wide.

  “Guess we’re gonna be party-crashing,” I said with a grin. “But not if I’m dead.”

  Argos got up—no trace of a limp, the lying bastard—and pushed the Journal of Annihilation toward the table’s edge.

  “Next to last page, Kal.”

  “It’s blank.” I flipped through the book to confirm that it had always been blank—the last two pages, in fact. I figured whoever had written this thing had been out of ideas and decided, well, fuck it.

  “Seriously?” Argos said.

  “Look.” I shoved the empty page right in his snout, so close that he was practically eating it. “Blank.”

  “Cool it, demon.” Argos backed away with a wolfish smirk. “There’s a minor cloaking spell on it.”

  “All right, smartass. Reveal it.”

  “There’s a potion in the fridge. I made it with Gunnar’s help a couple months ago, when I suspected the pages were cloaked.”

  I went into the kitchen and grabbed the only thing I could find—an old milk carton containing a black substance with the consistency of chocolate syrup. When I returned, I slid it toward Argos.

  “Your call, buddy.”

  “If I’m correct,” Argos said, cocking his head to examine the page once more. “Then—”

  “Wait, so we’re just gonna pour motor oil on a priceless and irrepla
ceable artifact?”

  Argos bristled. “It’s a potion with acidic properties. The writing has been obscured beneath a cloaking layer that emulates the consistency and appearance of parchment.”

  “You think.”

  “Just open the bottle.”

  I twisted off the plastic cap and tossed it aside. An aroma resembling battery acid and old pants flooded the room. “This better work.”

  “No time like the present,” Argos said.

  I dumped the contents out on the ancient page. The paper sizzled like a flank of beef on a summer grill, smoke trailing off. I covered my mouth as the black liquid ate away at the paper. As the popping stopped and the liquid began to dry, ancient ink, from centuries—perhaps thousands, tens of thousands of years past—began to reveal itself.

  Javier Santos’ family destiny had been to bring me this book and the gauge. It stood to reason that the answers to my own fate would be discovered within.

  “This is what destiny means?” I said when the potion was finished. “My destiny?”

  “You do look better in the picture,” Argos said, peering at the drawings. “Although something’s different.”

  Because unless I had suddenly changed genders, the Journal of Annihilation had nothing to do with my destiny at all.

  6

  Glancing up from the page, I shot Argos a quizzical look.

  “You said this would shed some light on my destiny.”

  “I didn’t promise anything of the sort,” Argos said. “You’re just drunk on self-importance, Kal.”

  So this page of the book wouldn’t help me figure out why Isabella and Marrack had suddenly decided to dispatch me. That was okay. Taking the barb in stride, I refocused my attention on our new discovery. I drummed my fingers against the yellowing, ancient paper and pored over the illustration. Illustrations, rather. There was one thing I recognized amongst the images: the essence gauge, in all its thermometer-esque glory. The sketch resembled a rough work of the great masters, like something from the margins of Da Vinci’s notebooks. Its detailing was exquisite—down to the ess script and notches along the gauge.

  An added annotation, however, shed some light on its purpose: max, with an arrow pointing at the very top of the gauge. And an additional arrow pointing to the figure beside it.

  A glorious, naked woman, her facial features obscured by long hair that swept across her eyes. Lean musculature rippled across her toned body.

  The Remkah Talisman was embedded in her right cheek.

  The Carmine Chain around her neck, its ruby amulet fused against her sternum.

  The Sabre of Immolation was flush against her right leg, as if her own skin was its scabbard.

  The King’s Statue stood nearby, emanating energy from the lion’s flowing mane.

  But still no mention of the fifth, and as-yet-undisclosed final artifact.

  “It’s like she’s…” I scratched my head, unable to find the right words. In my travels, I hadn’t come across anything quite like this.

  “It’s like the next step of magical evolution,” Argos said. “Both essence and the magical items are seamlessly fused to the creature’s being.”

  “And this woman’s gotta max out on the essence gauge.”

  “Precisely,” Argos said.

  “You have the gauge handy?” I glanced up from the dusty tome. Argos leapt off the table and rushed to the bedroom. After a couple minutes of rustling, he returned with the stainless steel instrument, delicately holding it in his jaws so that the sharp point at the end remained level.

  He stood next to me, cradling it with great care. Unable to speak, he growled.

  “What? Get up on the table.”

  Argos shook his head and glared. I shrugged and reached down, taking the essence gauge. After it was free from his mouth, Argos barked twice and said, “You know how sharp that thing is? Like running with scissors.”

  Then he sprung up on the table as I examined the instrument, glancing back and forth between the illustration and the real deal. It felt cool in my hands, clinical—the magical equivalent of a scalpel. The fluid at the bottom rocked gently, looking like a mixture of molten gold and silver.

  “I melted down my entire haul to kill Athena,” I said, staring at the spike at the gauge’s top. “What do you figure I’ll register?”

  “You were pretty powerful before, Kal.” Argos kept his distance in the center of the table. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Stumped the wonderdog, huh?”

  “I don’t know everything, dick.”

  “How should I do this?”

  “Jab the point into your eye, maybe,” Argos said, still annoyed.

  I stared at the spike—like a particularly nasty looking needle—and then shrugged. “Here goes nothing.”

  “Wait, I was—”

  I plunged the tip into the crook of my arm, finding a vein. Blood flowed freely around the wound. Inside, the metallic-like compound bubbled, slowly rising. Grimacing slightly from the draw, I monitored its progress.

  The gauge hit the hallway point, then stopped, leveling out.

  “I think it’s broken,” I said, shaking the instrument lightly.

  Argos stepped closer, apparently confident now that the thing wouldn’t explode. Peering at the reading, he said, “It looks right.”

  I took the gauge away from my arm, blood dripping down to my wrist. Tossing the ancient thing on the table, I pondered how the hell that was possible.

  Millennia of artifacts. Good stuff, too. No one in the world had access to essence—raw or stored within objects—like that.

  And I had only hit halfway.

  “That’s a lot of essence.” I watched the gauge drift back down to zero. “You want to test yours?”

  Argos puffed out his chest. “Yeah, yeah, we all know who the badass is around here, Kal.”

  I flipped to the next page of the Journal. It remained blank. A letdown after the bombshell reveal. I thumbed through the rest of the leather book, glancing at the figures and ramblings I already knew intimately.

  “The last page is cloaked too,” I said.

  Argos shook his head. “It has a different kind of spell cast on it.”

  I furrowed my brow. “And you know this how?”

  “If you study aura as much as I have, you would know, too.”

  “Okay,” I said, running my fingers across his ears, “then tell me, genius, what it is.”

  “I don’t know. No one does. It’s a spell I haven’t seen before. Anywhere.”

  Not answering, I peered at the blank page, which apparently held the final answers to this question of destiny that had followed me around since Charon had saved me on the banks of the River Styx. Or maybe it was the answer to someone else’s destiny—this mysterious woman who I didn’t know.

  The cracked paper remained blank.

  A sharp pain rushed up from my gut, causing me to buckle over the table. I’m not the humblest guy, but I didn’t think my destiny was to be struck down by a jealous ex-lover’s hand. But the pain now causing my spine to convulse suggested otherwise. Argos yipped with concern, but I pushed myself up from the pitted surface by my knuckles.

  Teeth clenched and breathing heavily, I shut the Journal of Annihilation and smiled grimly at my loyal companion. The pain dissipated to an unpleasant but steady ache around my breastbone.

  “You know what this means, right buddy?” I said.

  His tail plunged between his legs when he saw the seriousness of my look. “Demon Kal.”

  “No Demon Kal,” I said. Not yet, at least. That was for emergencies only. “It’s time to put in a claim for my personal effects at Inonda PD.”

  Because two could play this game.

  Destiny might not have offered me a defense against witches, but I sure as hell had one waiting. There
was a vial of Isabella Kronos’ blood somewhere in the evidence lockup. That would be my ticket away from literal heartbreak and back on the Talon of Frost’s trail.

  Whatever the hell that was.

  Since as of right now, I didn’t have a damn clue. Which was unfortunate, since Sam Reynolds’ good will would run out if I didn’t make some progress soon.

  7

  Argos and I had both had our fill of the Journal of Annihilation, so I left him with an assignment to dig up as much as possible on the Talon of Frost. He was happy enough to help, and, I think, to get rid of me for a few hours. Our first day back together had been a little tense. Not that I was at risk of being replaced by Gunnar on the totem pole. We both just needed a little time to adjust.

  And maybe some time to decompress.

  My phone rang. Three in the afternoon. I squinted to check the caller ID.

  “I’m a little busy, Sam,” I said, answering the call. Apparently good will was already running out. That didn’t take long.

  “Meet me at the Cold Shot,” Sam Reynolds said, the line crackling.

  “I’m chasing down some leads.”

  “We need to have this conversation face to face.”

  “Give me a reason it’s worth my time.”

  “Kalos.” A breathy sigh buzzed over the connection. “The client is always right. I know you’ve heard that expression.”

  “Rings a vague bell,” I said.

  “The Cold Shot, then. Drinks are on me.”

  “I’m working.”

  “Then have a fucking club soda.” I detected the faintest hint of desperation. This meeting had to happen, and there was no avoiding it. The precinct would have to wait.

  “I’ll clear my social calendar just for you.”

  “You do that, Kalos.” There was a long pause. “And hurry.”

  I stroked my chin as I put the phone away. Sam Reynolds had a point—I owed him. If other things on the list got bumped, so be it. I rubbed my aching chest and grimaced. Probably should keep that little bit about Isabella to myself. If he found out I was damaged goods, he might pull the supportive rug out from beneath my feet.