No such luck. George yanked the bedroom door open. “Someone is banging on the door.”
“Then open it.” I answered. “I’m comfy.”
“It’s a van with packages in it.” He looked like a kid on Christmas morning.
“Fuck.” I got up, put on jeans, wiped the gunk out of my eyes stumbling down the stairs. “Who is it?”
“Special delivery for Mr. Cim.” A voice yelled from the other side of the door.
Opening the door, I saw two vans parked in the driveway. “From who?”
“The Chief. Jesus, you guys are strange.” It was a plain-clothes police officer. The van had police markings on it.
Behind me, I heard George mumble an apology.
“Sorry, Officer. George here has been taught never to open the door for strangers.”
“He looks like he could handle himself.” The officer noticed.
It was not the way I wanted to wake up but there were no bodies or body parts to be seen. “Yeah, but sometimes you can’t take the skinny kid out of the muscles.”
“Tell me about it.” He nodded to a large pimply kid who looked like a teenager on steroids.
They unloaded a number of boxes large enough to hold refrigerators. I called Wretch and got his voicemail. “We got a huge delivery from Mike. Get here or I’ll try to put whatever it is together without reading the instructions.”
I had the cops put the boxes on the back porch. It was closest to the basement entrance just inside the kitchen door.
Wretch and Angie appeared in the kitchen after they left. “Looks like he ordered me all new equipment.” She peeked inside.
I took the coffee George offered. “We’ll get it downstairs. You can unpack and play all day if you want.”
Her eyes lit up. “Thank you.”
It took us two hours to get the tables downstairs. The rest of the equipment we could carry. Angie set up shop fast.
She grabbed the drill and started hanging her tools on the brick wall from hooks. “This place is drab.”
“It’s a basement torture dungeon,” Wretch said not getting it.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a window. Doesn’t the basement usually have a few even if they are along the ceiling?” Her lights dimmed by the darkness of the area.
She was right. We found four along each sidewall and two along the back. It took moments to open them with our hammers. The added light was nice. Wretch put time marks on the wall. A habit from cave living days.
“Primitive?” George asked.
“As am I,” he replied.
“Never thought about it that way, it’s kind of cool.”
Wretch rolled his eyes. He picked up the latest generations manner of speaking, as we all did for survival, but his first love was old English. He watched Shakespeare’s plays performed live in London. He can still recite every one of them by heart and with correct inflection. Every now and then, he uses it to impress people. My old English sounds garbled since I grew up in Mexico. My Spanish remained perfect even if I didn’t speak more than a few sentences a month.
“This is perfect.” Angie assessed the changes. “An underground lab with George and Cim living upstairs offers protection.”
George’s stomach growled and I swear I felt it. “This gorilla needs food.”
Mine joined in. “I’m right behind you.”
We went up to the kitchen and left them downstairs.
George even closed the door after we heard a suspicious moan. “I don’t want to hear that.”
“Me either,” I agreed. “But don’t close it completely. If she shoots him again, I want to hear it.”
He laughed. “Steak and eggs for breakfast. I’m the cook here since you are letting me live free. Let me know what your favorite foods are, and I’ll make them.”
“My own personal chef? I like that idea.” He would more than cover his rent with the added help catching demons, but I wouldn’t argue with him.
“Go get cleaned up. I’m sure the two of you have things planned for us after breakfast and sex.” He nodded at the door.
“I’m sure Wretch has ideas. We’re still dealing with members of his family. All I want to do is find the doctor, rip his head off, and send it to Obsidian.” Sounded so easy when I said it.
“That’s a plan I like. When do we leave?” He asked the question while putting on an apron.
“After breakfast, unless there are objections. I’d be surprised if Brun wasn’t still in the area.” I started thinking aloud. “He knew Patrick was here, and Angie and Donna ran DNA tests on him. However, Angie didn’t mention any of her other records were missing. So he doesn’t know about Greg’s test results.”
He opened the fridge pulling out steaks and eggs. “She didn’t get my DNA yet so he doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Although if anyone mentions they saw a gorilla shifter, he will know.” His presence would trigger suspicion.
“I won’t shift unless you guys are around until we get rid of him.” Smart man.
“Thanks. It will make it easier. Now, we have to figure out who the next targets could be.”
“All of this runs back to Obsidian, doesn’t it?” He asked.
“Yes. It appears now that even Nitha’s removal of powers might’ve been faked to convince us to stop looking at her. Her killing sprees were never laid at her mother’s feet, but the Court did keep a closer eye on her until things calmed down. They had ten years to plan this. We stopped watching Nitha the way we used to.”
“Was that a problem before?”
“We knew when she shit for a few years.”
“I’m cooking here.” He held his nose.
I laughed. “You really aren’t tough.”
“I’m aware of that. I played football in high school so I am used to tackling people. It’s what I did to Obsidian. If I hadn’t had that training built in, I don’t know if I would’ve been able to body slam her into the wall.”
“Nice to know that.” I went back to musing aloud. “Her mother had to hide her abilities from the Court for years. I took ten years off, and there was no escalation here. Laythe moved her headquarters to Atlanta around the same time. Only her bodyguards went missing. One of her human guards was used as a puppet by Narran, but nothing for a decade. What the hell happened for ten years?”
“Mind if I interrupt?” George flipped the steaks in the pan.
My hunger started to blur my thinking. “Not at all.”
“Maybe she did lose her powers, and it took them that long to figure out how to break the spell?”
“Sounds right to me.” Wretch appeared.
“How do you do that?” George jumped but covered it well.
Wretch pretended he didn’t see it. “It takes centuries to learn, but we can partially materialize, just enough for our senses to check out the situation, before we’re visible to human eyes. Some shifters can see us at that point. All shifters can smell us. It’s a survival skill.”
I was thinking ahead. “We have to assume there’s a logical plan, even with your family. It took ten years to break the spell against Nitha. How would they do that?”
“It would take a lot of time. Each time she did anything to trigger the Courts attention she would need to stop and play magically dead for two months to make sure it wasn’t noticed.” Wretch opened up the fridge drinking a half gallon of milk from the carton.
“That’s a long time.” George scowled at Wretch while flipping the eggs.
“The Court doesn’t move fast. Its members are all immortal. No need to rush and they investigate thoroughly.” I informed him. “Where was I? Oh yes, Nitha gets her powers back bit by bit. The safest place for her to do that would be in Narran’s house. He wouldn’t have reported her, and Obsidian scared him.”
“She hadn’t been seen the entire time you were on vacation?” George plated one steak and two eggs for me.
Cleaning up could wait. The food smelled amazing. I poured myself some coffee sitting at the table. “Traveling Europe by cruise ship, hiking the Alps, safari’s in Africa, all of that was done, I suspect, to make sure she was seen in public while using human transportation. There were a couple of incidents during her African safari where they suspected she fed a demon to a lion. They didn’t investigate further. No evidence left.”
Wretch vanished, and we heard him downstairs with Angie.
“I take it he doesn’t like his family,” George said.
I swallowed hard. “They don’t like him either. Except for Laythe. His mother was the middle daughter, Laythe older, Nitha younger, and she had an affair with a dragon. Obsidian insisted she abort Wretch, but they were genuinely in love. As soon as he was born his parents were killed and Obsidian named him Wretched Spawn. Laythe fostered him moving him all over Europe for centuries until the anger went away. I met him four hundred years ago when Nitha was about to kill him.”
“Thanks. I was getting confused. My parents were human. I didn’t know about the Court until I started working for you.” He joined me at the table leaving enough for Wretch and Angie on the stove.
“So Nitha traveled the world pretending to be normal, or as close as she could, while Obsidian and Narran worked to break the spell keeping her powers hidden. Then she shows up back here last week with her husband and kids. They start killing and dismembering humans to create their own version of Frankenstein’s monster—” I finally got the big picture. “Wretch, get up here, bring Angie.”
They appeared sitting down to eat and as everyone started, I explained my conclusions. “The human they were building was to be another of Dr. Brun’s subjects. If they could use parts harvested from live or recently dead humans they could avoid adding demon DNA to a missing person whose family was looking for them.”
Wretch nodded in agreement. “The parts could be animated and spelled to function as one unit and if the DNA transformation worked they would be able to create their own demons. Each time the created demon shifted forms it would become more solid, the DNA would mix thoroughly and they would be untraceable with barely any residue of the donor’s DNA left.”
“Do I want to ask why?” George asked.
“It’s pretty simple. Wretch’s family disgusts most demons and, other than Nitha, none of them has had children. No one wants to co-parent with any of them. To expand the perverted family, they have to create it.” Or to create an army.
“It’s alive!” Angie exclaimed. She joked, but the look on her face told how afraid she was of the possibilities.
“Exactly,” I said. “Wretch refuses to have children to prevent the craziness from spreading. They tried to pressure him into it with an old fashioned arranged marriage a number of years ago.”
Angie’s looked up from her plate, “How did that go?”
He smiled at her. “I had to kill her when she came after me with a butcher knife.”
She agreed. “Well, of course.”
“She wanted Cim. Imagine that. She preferred a dragon.” It bothered him, still.
I winked at Angie. “She was crazy, proud of it, and could’ve been Nitha’s pet project if he’d gone through with it. The desire for me, I think, was planned so you would kill me out of jealousy.”
“Not a chance. No real woman would choose you over me.” He meant it, and we’d seen enough proof to back it up.
As we finished eating, Angie asked George for a DNA sample. He let her scrape his arm with a scalpel, and she headed downstairs to check his results with Greg’s and Patrick’s. The DNA I’d pulled from him earlier was still at the warehouse, forgotten.
George pushed us out of the kitchen. “I’ll clean up here and head to the club. I actually miss the chaos.”
Wretch and I went upstairs to my new room.
“We need to check out Patrick’s apartment. Maybe Brun left something there to let us know where he went,” I said. “He’s not looking smart right now and desperate demons leave clues.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me?” He asked.
I’d moved past that particular puzzle. But I’d indulge him. “How Angie’s plastic head ended up on my front lawn and Donnas’ on the back porch? How did we not notice they were fake heads covered in paint?”
“Go ahead.” He grinned sitting on one of the couches.
“He didn’t know the heads were fake. There are local thugs and demons here that will promise to take someone’s head off for you. Whoever it was, played Brun, and never told him the heads were fake. Our reactions, because we didn’t check to see if the heads were real, if he watched, bolstered the charade. I never got close enough to smell paint, or the lack of blood. I’m assuming you were in too much shock to notice the lack of iron smell. I feel rusty after ten years away. Let’s get over to Patrick’s.” I didn’t want to focus on our failures giving Brun more time to get away.