THE MEPHISTO COVENANT

  Melanie was still less than a foot from her, close enough to punch, close enough to see the glue sticking her fake eyelashes to her real ones. She leaned in just a little and whispered, “Go on, I dare you. I can see you want to.”

  “So you can have me arrested?” Sasha pinged back. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  Melanie turned on her micro heels and left the room, shoving Tim as she went.

  When she was gone, he said, “Get dressed and we’ll go out for lunch.”

  Food was Tim’s answer to everything. Sasha felt bad for him, so she nodded.

  “What are you reading?”

  From a side chair, Jax watched Phoenix walk into the library and take a seat on the low leather sofa in front of the fireplace. “What are you, the book police?”

  “I take it, then, that you’re reading something you’re embarrassed about. So what is it? Harry Potter? Eragon? Lord of the Rings? Or are you going through another childhood phase, where you read books for little kids? Is it Old Yeller? James and the Giant Peach?”

  He may as well fess up. Phoenix would drive him nuts until he did. Holding up the book, he showed it to his brother and waited.

  It didn’t take long. “How to Win Friends and Influence People. Now that’s just fascinating, but maybe you should read the Sons of Hell edition, How Not to Scare the Shit out of People and Alienate Everyone You Meet.”

  “They were out of that one, so I settled.”

  “And?”

  “It’s geared toward salespeople, but it fits, I guess. I’m trying to sell myself as a regular guy. If I do what this book says, I should have people eating out of my hand.”

  “What does the book say?”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere. Remember to say people’s names, because they love to hear it. Ask them what they’re up to, make it all about them. Show genuine interest in them and their life. Make like you think they’re the only person on the planet.”

  “Okay, I’ll buy it, but what about before all that? How do you get close enough to show interest, genuine or otherwise?”

  “M got me some contact lenses, made out of glass because the plastic ones melted. They do an okay job of making my eyes look normal, but I’m going to wear shades as much as I can get away with. I’m working on thinking about pleasant, positive things, so maybe I won’t come across like a psycho. But my ace in the hole is Brody. He’s going with me, posing as my twin brother. Fraternal, since we look nothing alike. We’ll hang together, and maybe the vibe he gives will counterbalance mine.”

  “That’s pretty brilliant. Did you come up with the idea?”

  “In a roundabout way. I told Key that I wouldn’t do this, that he had to find someone else to go to school and spy on Bruno. I suggested Brody, since he was nineteen when he crossed over and looks like he’s seventeen. Key said no, that it has to be one of us, and he’s hell-bent on it being me. So I said I’d go if Brody goes with me.”

  “The girls will be all over him like syrup on pancakes, and what happens if he finds one he likes extra special? Under the Lumina rule, he can’t date a human, or expect to bring her here. Maybe you should pick a Lumina who’s already mated.”

  “He’s a geek. Okay, so he’s a Lumina and people are naturally attracted to him, but these are teenagers, Phoenix. His being a nerd will override his being a Lumina.”

  “Says you. I predict disaster, unless you keep a close eye on him.”

  “We’ll be together all day. No worries.”

  Phoenix stood and went toward the doorway into the front hall.

  “Are you going out to the shop?” Phoenix built choppers as a way to pass the time, to have something to occupy his mind so he wouldn’t think about Jane so much. Jax didn’t think it worked out like that, but his brother did spend a lot of time out there. He’d built a bike for each person on the mountain. Some had two.

  “No, I’m jonesing for bangers and mash.”

  “London?”

  “Where else?”

  Standing, Jax tossed the book to the library table and followed his brother. He didn’t really want bangers and mash, but whenever Phoenix went to England by himself, it was because he was feeling Jane. He’d visit her grave, and bad shit was sure to follow. Last time, he went in a pub and picked a fight with a big bruiser of a guy. Nearly killed the man, hurt several others, including a couple of bobbies, and the damage to the pub was in the thousands of pounds. M had punished him with six months of solitary on Kyanos.

  “You don’t have to go with me.”

  “Yeah, I do.” In the front hall, they asked Deacon to bring their trench coats, and two minutes later, they were standing at the foot of Jane’s grave, in the dark. It was eight o’clock at night in Yorkshire.

  One minute after they arrived, Eryx materialized at the head of Jane’s grave. He placed one booted foot on the stone marker and looked at them, a sardonic expression on his face. “I always thought it was touching how you planted Jane outside of holy ground so you could visit her without burning to a crisp. Wonder if her parents ever figured out they were visiting a weighted casket over in the St. Stephen’s churchyard?”

  Phoenix kept his eyes on the headstone, never acknowledging Eryx was there.

  Jax turned his collar up to the cold and damp, noticing when it began to snow. He didn’t ask Eryx why he was here, or what he wanted. He didn’t care.

  Eryx made a few more remarks about Jane, hoping to get under Phoenix’s skin, but when he failed even to get him to look up, he sighed and dropped his foot to the ground. “One of my immortals, who you took out last week, bought a painting for me in San Francisco. I sent someone to collect it from his possessions, but it wasn’t there. I need to know if you took it.”

  Mildly curious now, Jax said, “What the hell would we want with another painting? We have hundreds already.”

  “If you have it, if you’ll give it to me, I’ll return the favor.”

  A favor? This was a first, making all kinds of alarms go off in his head. Eryx wanted it bad enough to offer a favor, and Jax wondered why. “You’re outta luck. We don’t have anything of Kasamov’s.”

  “He bought it from a Russian woman who’s since moved back to Russia. She insisted, even under specific questioning, that she didn’t sell it to him, but she doesn’t have it. And the painting wasn’t in his things.”

  Specific questioning meant she’d been tortured. It had to be Sasha’s mother. She was Russian, had just moved back to Russia, and she’d gone out with Kasamov. Jax had wondered if she took the oath, and had sent Mallick to find out. He’d returned early this morning to report that no, she hadn’t, but things were pretty bad for her. The Russian Security Council had her quarantined, pending reentrance to the Russian population. She must have been released and immediately picked up by one of Eryx’s goons.

  Then Eryx said, “There’s a child, a daughter, who may know something about it.”

  In a thousand years of trapping unsuspecting lost souls and Skia, Jax had perfected the ability to mask his emotions. He shrugged indifferently while inside he was losing his mind. Was someone there, right now, questioning Sasha about this elusive painting? Did she know anything about it? Would her interrogator torture her, as her mother had been tortured? Would he see her birthmark?

  His face remained impassive when he glanced at Phoenix, who was still staring at Jane’s headstone as if he had no clue what was going on around him.

  “Since when are you such an avid collector?” he asked Eryx.

  “I don’t give a damn about art. The painting is significant because of the subject matter. Kasamov described it, and I want to see for myself if what he said was accurate.”

  He wished God would break his promise not to interfere and kill Eryx right now.

  Instead, their father’s first son once again set his foot on Jane’s headstone and leaned over to rest a forearm on his knee. “Maybe you’ll find it as intriguing as I do. Kasamov claimed the painting renders God and Lucifer working in
tandem with each other. There is an Anabo receiving the darkness of Lucifer, transforming her to Mephisto.”

  “We’ve known that can happen since we started.”

  “The Mephisto in the painting receives God’s blessing, which would suggest he’s redeemed. You’d have to agree that’s intriguing, Ajax. If you were redeemed, God could hear you, you’d have a chance of Heaven when he decides to call it a day, and you could stand on holy ground. If all the Mephisto had that ability, you’d win this little war we’ve been waging for a thousand years, and that’s something I can’t allow. I want that painting, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to get it.” He stood straight again and disappeared.

  Panicking to the point of hysteria, Jax was about to return to Colorado, until Phoenix grabbed his arm and said in a fierce whisper, “No! Stay!”

  “I’ll kick your ass if you don’t let go of me.”

  “It’s a trick,” his brother whispered to the ground. “Just stay here for five minutes.”

  “They tortured Sasha’s mother. If he sends someone to see Sasha, they’ll—”

  “Realize she doesn’t have the painting and leave.”

  “What if she does have it?”

  “Then she’ll give it to them. Or not. If you show any anxiety about that painting, it tells Eryx there’s some merit to what he was told by Kasamov, who probably didn’t buy the painting—he just saw it.”

  “I don’t care about the painting. I’m only worried about Sasha.”

  “You should care about the painting. Unless Kasamov was lying, or misinterpreting what he saw, the painting depicts the Mephisto Covenant. If Eryx discovers we can be redeemed through an Anabo, he won’t stop at trying to abduct and kill the ones we find. He’ll have every Skia and lost soul on the planet actively looking for them. We’d never have a prayer of finding one again.”

  “If such a painting exists, why would Sasha’s mother have it?”

  “We can’t be sure she does, but we need to find out. And we will, but not until we’ve stayed here a while longer. I guarantee Eryx is watching us, right now. If we leave too soon, he’ll follow. Do you want to lead him right to Sasha? Just stay calm and wait a few more minutes, then we’ll go home and get a Lumina to check on her.”

  Jax waited, but it was the longest five minutes of his life. At one point, he said, “What would happen if I just took Sasha to the mountain and told her she has to stay?”

  “You’d pay the price for interfering with free will. Don’t think Lucifer will forgive you for breaking the rule, just because he wants this to happen between you and Sasha. Not to mention, she’d hate you for sure, and if you two don’t hook up, it’s all pointless anyway. I understand the temptation, but don’t go there, Jax.”

  “Can we leave now?”

  “We can leave as soon as you shut up and let me say goodbye to Jane.”

  Turning on his heel, Jax walked away, toward the old elm Key had planted after Phoenix found Jane. He said when it was very tall, he’d put a big swing in it for their children. Looking up into the naked, gnarly branches, none of which supported a swing, Jax remembered Jane’s smile, her blue eyes, her musical voice, and the last thing she said before she died.

  When they rushed in to rescue her, she looked toward Phoenix, her beautiful face bruised and bleeding, Eryx’s dagger just above her heart, and called out to him, “Bring me back! Bring me to life!” Phoenix was already running and caught her before she hit the stone floor.

  Eryx watched, and when it was obvious she was gone, that Phoenix couldn’t bring her back, he said, “She doesn’t respond because she no longer carries your mark. She has mine. Only I can gift her with immortality. Maybe I should, and she could give birth to my sons.”

  With cold fury on his face, Phoenix stood, Jane cradled in his arms, and disappeared from the ancient castle Eryx called home.

  Looking toward his brother now, seeing his slumped shoulders and bowed head, Jax clenched his jaw, an old familiar frustration settling over him. Over one hundred years had passed, but it was still all Phoenix thought about. So many things they hadn’t known when he found Jane, and their worst ignorance was the rules of the Mephisto mark. They didn’t know Eryx could read it as they could, didn’t know he also had the ability to mark an Anabo. He’d raped Jane, leaving his mark in place of Phoenix’s. It was horrific enough to live with her death, but burying her with Eryx’s mark still inside her body elevated Phoenix’s crushing guilt and grief to helpless rage.

  Finally, when Jax didn’t think he could stand waiting even one more second, Phoenix turned and said, “I’m ready.”

  After lunch, Tim drove Sasha and Chris back to the house. He went immediately to his recliner to watch football, and Chris said he was going to a friend’s house to play a video game. Brett and Melanie were gone, so Sasha decided to stay in her room and work on her college essay.

  Until she got to her room. It was like a war zone, minus the shrapnel and dead bodies. Every drawer had been emptied onto the floor, and all the clothes she’d hung in the closet were strewn across the room, along with bedcovers and sheets. Her sketchbook had been ripped to shreds, and the MacBook she’d gotten for her birthday last April was in pieces, the screen separated from the computer, both sides smashed and broken. So much for her essay.

  Walking through the mess, she realized her clothes weren’t just thrown all over the floor. They’d been ripped, cut, and torn, completely destroyed. She went to the bedside table to look in the drawer, not at all surprised to see the plastic tube was missing.

  “Sasha, can you come downstairs? There’s someone here to see you.”

  Shaky and close to tears, she stumbled across her ruined clothes and went to the hall, then down the stairs. A skinny guy with dark hair and geeky glasses stood in the foyer, smiling at her. Tim said, “Why don’t you take Brody up to your room where you can visit? I wouldn’t want to bug you with the game.”

  Which was his way of saying, Don’t bug me while I’m watching the game. “Sure, Tim.” She waited until he was back in the family room before she turned to her visitor. “Do I know you?”

  He shook his head. “Jax sent me.”

  She didn’t recognize him from the family portrait she’d seen in Jax’s room, but asked anyway, “Are you one of his brothers?”

  “No, I work for them. I just need to ask you something, if you have a minute?”

  Maybe he was a hard-core nerd, but there was something about him she liked immediately. He had the kindest eyes, and he seemed so calm. She could use some calm right now. Still, she wasn’t big on trusting strangers at the moment. “How do I know you’re who you say you are?”

  He flipped out a cell phone and dialed a number before handing it to her. Jax said, “Is she okay?”

  She met the eyes of her visitor and said, “She’s fine.”

  “Sasha? Is Brody there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re okay?” He sounded positively panicked.

  “I’m okay. What’s going on?”

  “Talk to Brody, and I’ll be there in just a little while.”

  She ended the call and handed the phone back to Brody. “Come on up.”

  At the doorway to her room, she stopped and waited for him to catch up. “We went to lunch about two hours ago and had just gotten home before you came.”

  He took one look and said, “Is anything missing?”

  “I had a plastic tube with a pencil sketch portrait of my mother inside, and it’s gone.”

  He walked into the room, stepping over the piles of clothes. “Looks like you’ll be doing some shopping.”

  She closed the door, went to the closest bed, and sat on the bare mattress. Brody took a seat on the other and pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. He told her a story about Eryx, and Alex Kasamov, and a painting he had supposedly bought from her mother. “Jax is concerned a Skia may show up, looking for the painting, and you might be questioned in a way that would hurt.”

 
“You mean, like, tortured?” She swallowed before she glanced at the curtain rod, then focused on her MacBook. “Would someone torture me just to find out about some old painting?”

  “Eryx wants it bad. We don’t know why, or what it means, but he’s really anxious to get his hands on it.”

  “Does he want the painting so he can sell it?”

  “No, he doesn’t need money.” Brody reached down and picked up a small strip of paper that had a sketch of an eye. “You said you’ve been out for a couple of hours. Do you think whoever did this was looking for the painting? Because I’m not sure someone in a hurry to find something would take the time to destroy all your stuff.”

  “I think my aunt did it, because she hates me. And she probably took the tube just to be extra mean. She knew it had a portrait of my mother inside, and she hates my mom even more than she hates me. She said if I took the picture out of the tube, she’d burn it.”

  Brody gazed at her with sympathetic eyes. “I’ll do all I can to help you get things set to rights, but first, it’s really important that you tell me the truth. Do you have the painting?”

  She glanced away and said, “No.”

  Just then, Jax appeared in front of the windows.

  Her heart sped up, and she wished she didn’t feel this happy to see him. He hadn’t shaved, and the dark stubble made him look older, more masculine, more dangerous. He immediately focused on her, his concern obvious. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, but my stuff is toast. I think Melanie did it.”

  He looked around the room, his body tense, hands clenched into fists.

  “If one of Eryx’s people came looking for a painting, why would they stick around long enough to mutilate my clothes, rip up my sketchbook, and smash my computer? She’s the only one who’d be this personal about it.”

  “Since Melanie lives here, she was the one chosen to search, and she went a little crazy.” He glanced at the MacBook. “Or a lot crazy.”