The Mephisto Kiss (The Redemption Of Kyros)

  The instant he landed in the front hall, he saw blood. Rivers of it. “Deacon, what’s the meaning of this?”

  “Ask me no rhetorical questions; I will give you no nonsensical answers.”

  Handing the Moor his portfolio to hold while he slid out of his blue wool overcoat, he asked a different question. “Why here? Training is in the gym.”

  “It would seem this Anabo sets her own rules.”

  He gave Deacon his coat, then turned toward the library. As usual for midafternoon, Phoenix was sprawled in one of the leather wingbacks in front of the fireplace, reading. He looked up when Key came in. “Did you find something?”

  Unbuttoning his suit jacket, he nodded and took the opposite chair, then loosened his tie and leaned back. “Is she okay?”

  Phoenix set his book aside and sat up. “Define okay.”

  “I’m going up to see her in a minute. What should I expect? Is she mad, sad, hurt?”

  “All three. She was slow to attack, but Jax pissed her off enough that she finally went after him. She has a competitive streak a mile wide, and I think she really thought she could beat him. When she didn’t, it bothered her, and she wanted to keep going, but as you can see from the front hall, neither of them was in very good shape by the end. Mathilda was so worried about her, she failed to get mad about the mess. She hustled her off to her room, and I suppose she’s dressed her wounds and put her to bed.”

  Key stared across the library at dust motes in the beams of sunlight coming through the west window. “She isn’t what I expected.”

  His brother didn’t respond right away. They sat with only the crackle of the fire and the tick of the grandfather clock in the corner to break the silence. After a while, Phoenix said, “Jane wasn’t what I expected.”

  Jerking his attention away from the dust motes, he saw Phoenix staring at the clock. “You never said so.”

  “I thought I’d find a girl who was strong and independent, who liked to ride as much as I did, who had a spirit of adventure and would go with me to places like the Himalayas, or the pyramids in Egypt. Instead, I got Jane, who couldn’t walk and was afraid of horses. She was shy, reserved, and a homebody.” Phoenix shifted in his chair and rubbed an invisible spot from the brown leather armrest. “Looking at it from her side, she thought she’d marry an aristocrat who would be as passionate about social change in England as she was, who could take her to church. Instead, she got me.”

  “Who healed her so she could walk. That had to rank higher than social change.”

  “Not to Jane.”

  Key was floored. “I thought you and Jane were crazy about each other.”

  “We were.”

  “But you just said—”

  “All that was in the beginning, Key. Once I really knew her, I didn’t care so much about the pyramids. She could be funny, which isn’t something I ever considered important. She had quirks, like hiding dime novels inside her hat so she could sneak away from parties and read. You don’t think about things like that while you’re waiting. You build up this perfect girl in your head, but she doesn’t exist. What you get instead is a real human being, and if you’re lucky like me, she’ll be a million times better than what you imagined and expected.”

  “In her hat? Really?”

  Phoenix nodded and reached for his book. “She loved scary stories.”

  Key got to his feet and walked to the doorway into the front hall, then stopped and said over his shoulder, “Do you ever imagine another girl?”

  “All the time, but now, instead of a girl who’s into pyramids, she’s always Jane.”

  He walked out and saw Mathilda and two other Purgatories scrubbing the marble floor. She looked up at him as he made his way toward the stairs. “Ye’ll find her in yer greenhouse, Master Kyros. Said she wanted to practice traveling, so she popped there and here for a while, but the last time, she didn’t come back.”

  He stopped walking, and a nanosecond later was inside the greenhouse. He saw her right away, sitting cross-legged on the glider, staring ahead at a bank of daylilies. She turned her head when he appeared and said, “Do you ever have regret?”

  Taking a seat next to her, he moved the glider back and forth while he considered his answer. “I wouldn’t call it regret. More like a lesson learned.”

  “What difference does it make to learn the lesson? It’s not like you get a do-over.”

  She was dressed in a red hoodie and pair of black pants that were more like tights, with thick gray socks and no shoes. Her hair was loose, shiny, and clean. Below the scent of bluebells, he smelled shampoo. “Are you healed already?”

  Tugging her hoodie up, she showed him her belly. He stopped the glider and stared. The wounds were almost gone, with only small red marks to indicate where they had been, but there were so many, he felt ill. “Holy hell, there must be a hundred.” Jax had let things get way out of hand.

  As if she could read his thoughts, she said quietly, “Jax looks just as bad.”

  “What happened? It was supposed to be an introductory training session, not a gladiator match.”

  “He called me a princess and said it was my fault my friend committed suicide.”

  “That explains why you jumped in, but why did he cut you so many times? Jax doesn’t have accidents, which means every one of those was on purpose.”

  She didn’t answer for a while, her concentration on his tie. Finally, she said, “I wanted to get inside his head, like he was in mine, but all I really know about him is that he has Sasha.”

  His eye twitched while he waited to hear what insults she had hurled at Jax about Sasha.

  “I told him he was suffocating her, and the real reason she sucks at transporting is because that’s her only chance to get out of here and do something on her own.” She lifted his tie and brought it closer to her face to squint at it. “You had Italian for lunch.”

  Staring at her, he was overwhelmed with guilt. Not regret, but plain, simple guilt. It was the Mephisto in her that had made her say something like that to Jax. Yesterday, before she kissed him, she’d never have said it. Wouldn’t even have thought it.

  He sighed and set the glider moving again. “What you said to Jax … it’s something he worries about.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. Last week, Sasha was watching some reality show about college girls spending a semester in London. She loves art, and had planned to become a restorer and work in a museum. Jax asked if she was sorry she couldn’t go to college, if she feels like she missed out, and she said no, but in the next breath she asked me if she could take an art class. I had to tell her she couldn’t, which she accepted, but I know it bugged the hell out of Jax. What you said hit him where he’s vulnerable.”

  She sat silently staring at him for so long, he finally turned his head to meet her gaze. “Is something wrong?”

  “You love your brothers, don’t you?”

  He looked away quickly. He hadn’t seen that coming. “I’d kill for them. I feel responsible for them. If that means I love them, then yeah, I guess I do.”

  Jordan drew her legs up and hugged them, resting her chin on one knee. “Why did you say no to Sasha?”

  Why had she asked him about his brothers? What difference did it make how he felt about them? “We’re not safe in the real world for anything long term or routine because it’d give Eryx the opportunity to plan a capture. If he took any of us, it’d be difficult to escape.”

  While he continued to push the glider, listening to the bees and the fall of water in the koi pond, she said, “I told Jax I was sorry. You don’t have to worry that we hate each other.”

  “I wasn’t worried, but in the future, you don’t have to make a sparring partner mad. Jax got under your skin only to coerce you to fight. In a real takedown, the less you engage with a lost soul, the better.”

  She turned her head so that her cheek was resting on her knee and gave him a look, almost a once-over. “I would
n’t have thought it, but you look mighty fine in a suit.”

  Her compliment was so unexpected, Key had no idea how to respond.

  “Why are you wearing a suit? I thought you went to rent a house.”

  Recovering slightly, he cleared his throat and said, “It makes me look older. Since I take care of the money and all of our assets, I have to go a lot of places where people assume I’m too young to be taken seriously.”

  “In that suit, I’d guess you’re in your early twenties, and if you didn’t have a ponytail, I’d think you were even older. Why do you have a ponytail? It looks good on you, but they’re kind of out of style for anyone but guys from eighties hair bands.”

  “I’ve had long hair my whole life, but it’s not vanity. I was told to keep it long.”

  She lifted her head. “Why? Who told you?”

  “I’ve never known why, but Lucifer said to keep my hair at least to my shoulders.”

  “You’ve talked to Lucifer?” Her eyes were wide with curiosity. “What does he really look like? Were you scared? Was he übercreepy?”

  “I didn’t actually see him. He was just a voice in the dark. And yes, I was scared. I was dead. My father told me I’d come back, but I thought maybe he got it wrong and Lucifer was there to give me the bad news.”

  “So instead of taking you to Hell, he just came to tell you how to wear your hair?”

  Key smiled. “No, wise guy, that’s not all he told me.”

  “Why would he tell you to wear your hair long? That’s really random.”

  “I think it was sort of a test, to see if I’d rebel. He was very big on my doing what he told me to do.” And even more emphatic about what would happen if Key failed. So maybe after so many centuries, keeping his hair long wasn’t really necessary, but he wasn’t willing to chance cutting it.

  “What else did he tell you to do?”

  “Lead my brothers. Work as hard as I could to take out Eryx.” He looked down into her bluebell eyes. “Since we’d lost Eryx, I was the oldest, and the first to die. He told me to let the younger ones do whatever they wanted until Denys turned eighteen, not to be hard on them. He knew, like I didn’t, that everything would change once we all became immortal.”

  “Because you had to start looking for Eryx’s Skia and lost souls?”

  He stopped the glider and smoothed her hair. Nothing in the world was as soft as Jordan’s hair. “Because we had to leave Kyanos. We’d never been in the real world before, or had any interaction with humans, other than our mother. It was an adjustment, and all of us were completely clueless.”

  “After your mom died, did no one stay with you?”

  He dropped his hand and shook his head.

  “So the six of you lived there, alone, and fended for yourselves?”

  “Mostly. M came every few months and brought food stores like wheat, sugar, and salt. We had goats and chickens, and grew things like potatoes and cabbage.”

  “Since you were the oldest, did you take care of everyone?”

  “We all had our chores, but yeah, I was the last word.”

  “Did you ever see Eryx?”

  He tilted his head back and watched a bank of clouds roll across the sky above the greenhouse. More snow. “After he left Kyanos, he couldn’t come back because of the mists. Not that he wanted to. The day he went away, the day we buried our mother after he murdered her, he said he wouldn’t remember us.” Key made it a point never to think about that day, and it bothered him that he’d done so now.

  Standing, he moved away from her and went to the potting bench for his shears. “But we made sure he didn’t forget us. After Denys made the jump and we left Kyanos, we lived in Greece because Eryx was there. We screwed things up for him as much as possible and captured a big percentage of his converts.” The newest miniature orange tree was sprouting more rogue tendrils, and he took his time trimming them. “After a hundred years or so, he moved to Russia, and we followed. We were there for centuries, until he relocated to Romania. By then, we didn’t see the need to be that close to him, so we moved to England.”

  “Is the painting in your room the house you lived in?”

  “Yes. It was in Yorkshire.”

  “Will you show it to me?”

  “I can’t. It’s no longer there.”

  “Why? How? It’s a stone house, so it couldn’t burn down.”

  “We can only have one protected home outside of Kyanos. When we moved here at the turn of the last century, the house in Yorkshire ceased to exist.”

  “How does a huge house just disappear?”

  He looked across the twenty feet separating them. “It wasn’t in the real world. Only in ours, on a different plane of existence. When we left, Lucifer made it disappear.” He waved his arm to indicate the mountain. “Everything here can only be seen and felt by us, the Luminas, and the Purgatories. If people hike up here, they see only forest and meadows.”

  The intercom over the door crackled with static, then Phoenix said, “War room meeting in fifteen. Somebody remind Zee. He’s got the Stones cranked to ten.”

  He was about to tell her he was going up to change clothes, but before he could, the intercom came on again, this time courtesy of Zee, backed by “Gimme Shelter.” “I’ll be there. Somebody needs to tell Kyros. He’s making out with Jordan in the greenhouse.”

  Replacing his shears on the potting bench, Key waited for the inevitable next message.

  Seconds later, Sasha said, “I can see in there, and he’s trimming trees.”

  “Roger that,” Denys said. “The guy’s got a gorgeous girl in a hothouse, and he’s holding gardening shears instead of her. I vote for an intervention.”

  Ty was next. “Maybe he’s afraid she’ll stab him.”

  Three heartbeats later, Jax said, “This is a valid fear.”

  Key walked to the glider and held his hand out to her. “Let’s go inside.”

  She took his hand and was unfolding her legs to stand when a solemn voice came over the intercom. “A man disrespects a woman by expressing his affection in public.”

  He drew her closer and slipped his arms around her.

  “I thought we were going inside.”

  “We have a long-standing policy of immediately doing whatever Deacon tells us not to do. It’s our way of tweaking his nose to take him down a notch, which clearly hasn’t worked because he’s still here, but by now it’s family tradition.” He bent his head to hers and kissed her.

  Applause came through the intercom.

  Thirty minutes later, sitting at a huge oval table in a basement room with stone walls, Jordan listened to them plan the Red Out takedown. The plasma screen was split, a map of central Texas on one side and a Google Earth image on the other.

  From a laptop, Zee moved a cursor and dropped pins as he talked. “This is the main building of the compound, where they take their meals and hold meetings. The smaller building, here, looks like a barn, but it’s a stockpile of weapons and munitions.” He looked at Key. “They’ve got a rocket launcher in there.”

  “Why would Eryx have a rocket launcher?”

  “He wouldn’t. Red Out was formed six years ago by a Marine named Brandon Holder, after he got kicked out of the military for threatening a superior. He gathered like-minded wing nuts who helped him build this compound on his family’s land. They started accumulating weapons and hiding them in a basement beneath the floor of the barn. Eryx probably did a lot of research to find a group to use as the scapegoat for Jordan’s abduction. Once he chose Red Out, he turned Holder, made him Skia, and the others pledged because he told them to. They worship the guy.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Eighteen men, fifteen women, and five kids under eighteen. With the exception of three toddlers, they’re all lost souls.” He moved the cursor and dropped more pins. “These long buildings are the living quarters, and this tiny structure is what Holder calls solitary. Somebody pisses him off, that guy gets stuck in solitary until H
older says he gets out.”

  Key looked at Phoenix. “Give us the plan.”

  “Mass suicide. The ATF and FBI are there now, surrounding the place, demanding Holder’s surrender. He’s the kind of guy who’d order his followers to off themselves before giving up, and they’re the kind of people who’d do it. The takedown will be day after tomorrow at three in the morning. We’ll throw a freeze, and half of us will take them to the gate while the other half transports doppelgangers. The freeze will fade before we’re done, so plan on fighting.”

  Jax had been quiet, Jordan noticed, but he was clearly paying attention, frowning at the screen and Zee’s pins. She wondered why he looked unhappy.

  Sasha asked, “Is there a plan for how they acquired enough poison to kill thirty-five people?”

  “Records Luminas are making it look like Holder bought small quantities over the past six years.” Phoenix looked around the table. “Any other questions?”

  “Just one,” Jax said, still frowning. “If we’re going into multiple buildings, are we recruiting Luminas to help? We’re limited on freeze time, and unless every building is secure, we run the risk of a lost soul escaping.”

  This was evidently a touchy subject. Lots of looks were exchanged, and Jordan could feel the sudden tension. It wasn’t long before they were all looking expectantly at Key. He shook his head. “No Luminas.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Do they suck at fighting?”

  “No, some of them came to us as soldiers, but they’re given immortality by God, not us, and violence affects them differently. If they’re made to participate, it’ll take weeks for them to recover.” He looked at the screen again. “It’ll be dicey, but we’ll manage.”

  “I think we’re making a huge mistake not using Luminas,” Jax said. “This isn’t like any other takedown because we have the added complication of Jordan. Some of us are likely to be distracted.”