Fury of the Demon

Thin relief went through me. I placed the pan in the sink, nodded. “My thought as well. So, the good news is that she’s probably not dead.” I set one of the plates and a fork in front of Ryan. “The bad news is they almost certainly have Idris’s cooperation.” I grabbed my plate and a fork and thunked down into the chair across from him, mood suddenly bleak over our lack of progress. “Now I know why Idris told me to stop looking for him.”

“You like him a lot,” he observed.

I squirted ketchup onto my eggs, ignored Ryan’s wince as I did so. “He’s like a kid brother. A seriously talented and really great kid brother.”

“I’m sorry. This must suck for you.” He forked some eggs into his mouth, gave me an approving nod.

“It does.” I offered him a slight smile. “You’d like him too.” I paused to eat. “Mzatal loves him,” I said after a few minutes. “Like a son.”

Ryan leveled a deeply skeptical look at me. “Mzatal? Like a son?”

“Yeah.” I started to dump sugar into my coffee, then remembered Ryan had already fixed it the way I liked it. “Crazy, I know, but he really does. Mzatal hasn’t stopped looking for Idris since he was taken.” I took a long sip of coffee, then lowered the mug and gave an evil smile. “And Mzatal slammed Jesral after he and Asshole sent Idris to Earth. It was fucking beautiful.”

Ryan let out a bark of laughter. “I bet.” He scooped up the last of the eggs. “Thanks for breakfast.”

“Anytime.” I finished my own then stood and cleared the plates. “Should I call Pellini and let him know we have an ID?”

“Yes, and tell him we’ll send over details shortly.”

Ryan returned to the basement to finish his report. I retrieved my phone, thumbed through the address book to Pellini’s name, and pressed call. It rang half a dozen times before he picked up.

“Pellini,” he rasped in a sleep-clouded voice.

“Hey, it’s Gillian. Wake up.”

I heard some mumbling and scuffling, then, “Yeah. I’m here. You got something?”

“An ID on our vic,” I told him. “Garner and Kristoff will be shooting the details your way shortly.”

“This just come down? Who is she?”

“Found out in the last half hour. Her name’s Amber Palatino Gavin from Seattle.”

“It’s a solid ID?”

“Unfortunately, yeah.”

“Unfortunately?” he asked, puzzled.

“Turns out she’s the sister of a friend of mine. A guy I’m trying to find.”

He blew out his breath. “Coincidence?”

I hesitated, unsure how much to tell him or how to frame it in a way that didn’t sound weird.

“Kara? You don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you?” He sounded tense, but his tone held none of its usual belligerence or mocking. “Look, anything you can tell me is more than I got now. Maybe we can meet to talk about it? I’ll buy you a beer. Or lunch.” His words tumbled over themselves. “There’s this Italian place that’s pretty good and not expensive. I mean, like a business lunch. Work.” He spoke the last in a rush as if to be absolutely certain I knew it wasn’t a date-type thing.

Good god, an offer of a date from Pellini would put me right over the edge.

“Um, my schedule’s pretty packed right now,” I demurred. “Here’s the info I have.” I gave him a rundown of the basics with Idris, that he was missing, family name, vitals, told him we’d stumbled across the ID on Amber while researching Idris’s family. Everything I told him was true, but guilt nagged. I knew a lot more that I wasn’t telling him, but I couldn’t do so without delving into demons and lords and general weirdness.

He listened, asked a few questions. When it was time to hang up, he didn’t. “Maybe when your schedule clears up we can get a beer?”

“Uh,” I said in a brilliant delaying tactic. “Sure. We’ll talk about it then.” I disengaged quickly and hung up, more than a little weirded out by his persistence. Was it because I was in better shape now, or was the reason more sinister? Then again, his desire to be friendly could just as easily be completely benign. Last year, after a particularly ugly incident, Ryan had influenced both Pellini and Boudreaux to lighten up and not be such assholes to me, and since then the two had been far less hostile. Perhaps Ryan’s little tweak had started a chain reaction of don’t-be-a-dick.

I was drying the last of the breakfast dishes when Ryan emerged from the basement, dressed for work, empty coffee cup in hand. “We’ve sent the info on to Pellini and Boudreaux.”

“Thanks. Pellini will be glad to get it,” I said then scrunched my face. “He wanted me to meet him for lunch.”

Ryan let out a snort of laughter. “Lunch with Pellini? That’s a first.”

“He wanted to talk about the case, but I gave him the non-demon facts over the phone. There’s not all that much.” I shrugged, frowned. “He’s acting a little weird, though he’s not being a total asstard the way he used to.”

“Maybe he’s a pod person,” he suggested as he poured more coffee into his cup. “Anyway, I’ll be downstairs for a while if you need me. We’re working on the safe house and the Farouche info, then have a meeting at nine.”

I nodded. “I’m going to listen to Idris’s call a few more times. He may have used that emphasis technique somewhere else. Right now it’s our only source of clues.”

“I’ll let you know if we come up with anything else,” he said and then departed down the basement stairs.

I grabbed the recorder and a set of headphones then settled on the sofa, this time listening for nuances in emphasis and timing. On the third time through, I stopped it at the end, ran it back about ten seconds. Listened to it again. And again.

Tell Mzatal I still have his ring, and I haven’t forgotten gheztak ru eehn. So leave me be. You don’t want to start a fire you can’t put out.

Start a fire.

Except he hesitated for the barest instant before and after “start,” mumbled the “a” and hesitated again after “fire.”

There were two options. Either my imagination was working overtime, or Idris had told me who had him: StarFire.

Ryan dashed up from the basement, laptop in hand, when I hollered. “You have something new?”

“I think so.” I played the end of the recording, but to my disappointment he simply responded with a puzzled look. “Listen to it,” I urged and played it again. “Start a fire. StarFire.” I scowled at his dubious expression. “I know it’s a little crazy but I hear it now. I can’t not hear it.”

To his credit, Ryan didn’t shoot me down in flames. “Play it one more time.” I did so, and this time he rewarded me with a slow nod. “It’s possible,” he admitted. “If that’s for real, Idris is one clever guy. That’s a hard thing to pull off.”

“He’s super smart,” I said. “And that’s why I believe it’s a real clue.”

“StarFire, huh?” He opened his laptop on the kitchen table and sat. “I was actually on my way to show you what I came up with on Farouche. Basically, he’s a fucking saint. Gives tons to charity, bought new computers for every public school in St. Long Parish, even arranged for bulletproof vests for the Sheriff’s department K-9 units.”

“He got vests for the dogs?” I blinked in disbelief. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack,” he said as he scrolled to another page. “Married twice. Two kids, boy and a girl, with the first wife. They divorced seventeen years ago,” he winced, “two years after their five-year-old daughter was abducted in broad daylight from in front of her school. Never found.”

“Shit,” I breathed. “I remember that. It was a couple of years after my dad died, and all the schools and parents were freaking out about security.” I gave a wry grimace. “A few days later I missed the bus home because I was out behind the gym trying pot for the first time. Tessa thought I’d been kidnapped too, and ripped me up one side and down the other. Grounded me for a month.”