The Sweetest Burn

“Are they stronger than the ones that were at the campus chapel?” he asked at once.

I sent my senses out as I followed that inner sensor to the far side of the rubble that marked the main house. “No,” I said at last. Then I pointed to an overgrown section of weeds that looked out of place even for abandoned ruins. “From what I’m feeling, that’s where the chapel used to be.”

Adrian looked back and forth between the weeds and the crumbled wall next to it. From his expression, he was restructuring how the house used to look when it was whole, and part of me wished I could’ve seen what was in his mind’s eye.

“I remember it now,” he finally said. “It’s unbelievable that it wasn’t destroyed by the fire, too.”

The chapel had been located right next to the main house, which hadn’t survived the blaze, yet somehow, it had. “Something must have saved it,” I said quietly.

That “something” had to be divine intervention, although I didn’t say it out loud. I might have conflicted feelings about the Great Being, but I had no doubt that He wouldn’t let a fire destroy one of His famed, destiny-fulfilling weapons.

I bent down and touched the section of ground where the pulses were the strongest. The supernatural version of red alert that seemed to follow the staff was there, and it was stronger than in France, but...it still felt like echoes compared to touching the wall in the crypt beneath the campus chapel.

“Unless its casing has been spelled to mute its effect, the staff isn’t here,” I said with a heavy sense of disappointment. “I think it used to be, though. I can feel traces of it.”

And if I went by my time-lessons-the-effect theory, then the staff had followed the migration of the chapel, first being in France, then here, and then at Marquette University. Why had someone bothered to ship it along with the disassembled chapel to all of those places? They must have known how valuable the staff was to go to such trouble. Most important, if it wasn’t in any of the previous three “holy homes” it had resided in before, where was it now?

“Maybe there’s another tablet or clue underneath this slab,” I said, choosing to be optimistic that we hadn’t come all the way here for nothing. “Or maybe the staff is here and there’s a reason why I don’t feel it. I say we dig and make sure that the staff’s supernatural vibes aren’t being muted with symbols like they were back in the Marquette chapel.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

MY OPTIMISM PROVED, well, too optimistic. Brutus dug until he could have buried himself in the hole he’d made, but the site beneath the former chapel’s location yielded nothing except dirt. Adrian gave him the contents of the cooler for his efforts, which turned out to be thirty pounds of raw meat. Brutus gobbled it up in much the same way I’d devoured my dinner earlier. Then Adrian gave him instructions to follow us until we reached the city. Once there, Brutus was free to fly around at will. Once more, I was grateful for the Archon glamour that made him look like a seagull to everyone except me, Adrian and Archons. Otherwise, a gargoyle flying around New York City would garner international headlines.

As we headed back to the hotel that Adrian told me we were staying at, I was torn between feeling tired, frustrated and out of ideas. My moodiness didn’t make for much conversation. The tablet was our only clue to the staff’s location, but we’d been to every “holy home” that it had referred to, and turned up nothing. Now what?

“Maybe we missed something at the Milwaukee campus,” I announced after almost an hour of silence. “What if the tablet wasn’t the only clue stuck inside the crypt’s walls? Of course, now it’ll be a nightmare to go back and give the crypt another look-see. The place must be crawling with every government agency possible after an obvious supernatural attack—”

“You think anyone who doesn’t already know about demons is going to have any idea what happened there?” Adrian interrupted.

I stared at him. “Demons and minions were coming out of realm tunnels and dragging people right back into them. This was too big, too public, to be swept under a rug.”

Adrian gave me a jaded look as he pressed a button and a TV screen came down from the roof of the limo. “Demons have minions placed in positions of power all around the world. They’ll have come up with an explanation that has nothing to do with the truth, believe me.”

When the TV powered on and Adrian picked a news channel, he was proved correct. “Chemical weapons attack on campus!” read the graphic behind the news anchor. “Mass causalities after domestic terrorism. Government vows retaliation.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said in disgust. “Where are all the cell phone videos that could prove what happened?”

“If they don’t get confiscated, they’ll be explained away, discredited or, most likely, never make the airwaves,” Adrian replied. “It might end up online on one of those conspiracy sites, but who pays attention to that stuff when it’s paired next to photos of Bigfoot, Nessie and Chupacabra?”

I was stopped from commenting about that when the limo pulled up to the Waldorf Astoria. I was surprised when the driver opened our door and we got out. Adrian seemed to know where he was going, and he led me inside a jaw-droppingly extravagant lobby decorated in gold and white, with marble floors that looked like they belonged at the Vatican in Rome.

He’d said that his friend in the city was a hotel manager. “Is this where your friend works?” I whispered, dazzled.

Adrian led me to the elevators, a little smirk hovering over his lips. “Yes, and he’s also the only one who knows who the real owner of this hotel is.”

“Who’s that?” At Adrian’s single arched brow, I stared at him in disbelief. “You? No way.”

The elevator doors opened and we went inside. He swiped a card in the slot and then pressed the button for the Towers.

“You’ve heard of people selling their souls for money,” he said in a conversational tone. “Sometimes, that really happens. Take the former owner of this hotel. He sold his soul to a demon decades ago, but then like they all do, came to regret it.”

“You don’t say?” I muttered, still trying to take this in.

“I told you that when I stopped believing all the lies demons had told me, I turned to drugs to ease my guilt over what I’d done. That’s when I met Trent. He was also hitting the chemicals because his time was almost up. We got to talking, and when he told me who he owed his debt to, I told him I’d fix the problem.” He paused to give me a sardonic smile. “Trent was my first stab at redemption.”

“But you can’t kill demons. Only Archons, other demons or one of the three hallowed weapons can. So how did you fix it?”

Adrian shrugged. “I made sure that the demon who was coming to collect his soul got killed. As you said, I couldn’t kill him myself, but I made it worth another demon’s while to take him out for me. Then I came back and told Trent that he was free. He was so grateful, he started the paperwork to sign his hotel over to me. Took a few years since we had to make it look like an overseas corporation bought it so Demetrius and other demons wouldn’t find out and ruin it as a safe space for me.”

I was still having a hard time believing this, not that it was the craziest thing I’d heard tonight, let alone ever. “And you actually let him give you this hotel?”

Adrian laughed outright, coinciding with the elevator doors opening. “Of course. For one, Trent said that he was done with money because of what it had driven him to do. For another—” the grin he flashed me was wicked “—I really liked this place.”

He led me over to a set of doors marked Historic Suite with a comment of “The Presidential Suite is already occupied.”

“Then I insist on going home,” I replied flippantly. Then I didn’t say anything at all as Adrian opened the doors and I got my first glimpse of the room, or rooms to be more accurate.

The first room looked like a foyer on extravagant steroids, and it opened into a full dining room with crystal stemware that would’ve sent my mother running over in rapture, if she were still alive to see it. After that was a living room with a wall-to-wall Oriental rug, a fireplace and furniture that looked too expensive to actually sit on. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">