“I’m thinking you can probably guess the answer to that.” He patted the desks holding his range of light screens and keyboards with affection. “I’m not leaving my baby, and I can’t exactly pack her up with me. Besides, someone has to be here in case Tao does turn up.”
“What, no mention of a particular upcoming sale of the generous-to-your-bank-account but definitely black market type?”
He grinned. “Well, there might be a couple of sales in the works over the next couple of days that I can’t afford to walk away from, now that you mention it.”
I snorted. Of course there were. “It could be dangerous. I’ve already lost Jak to the bitch. I don’t want to lose anyone else.”
“Then I’ll install a secondary energy shield around all internal walls. Trust me, no one—not even a vampire hell-bent on destruction—will get past it.”
I hoped he was right. I didn’t want to lose Stane any more than I wanted to lose anyone else.
“So,” he said, grabbing his coffee, then swinging around to face me. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here, or do you wish to see my results first?”
I blinked. “On what?” To be honest, we’d asked Stane to do so many searches over the last few weeks that I’d totally lost track of them all.
“You know those index cards you swiped from the dead jeweler’s place?”
I nodded. We’d gone to the jeweler’s after discovering his maker’s mark on the antique silver cuff link we’d found in Lauren Macintyre’s Gold Coast home, hoping he’d be able to tell us whom he’d made it for. As per usual when it came to our sorceress, we’d been a couple of steps too far behind. Not only had she fled her Gold Coast home before we’d arrived there, but she’d also made a visit to the jeweler and slashed his throat from ear to ear. Which meant the index cards, with their list of client names, had become our only chance of possibly tracking down another of Lauren’s alternate identities—an almost impossible task given that she could take on both male and female personas.
“Well,” Stane continued, a pleased grin stretching his lips, “I found a connection between the jeweler, the names on the cards, and your mad sorceress.”
I smiled at his enthusiasm. He really was going to be lost when all this crap was over with and life got back to normal. “The connection being?”
“Harry Bulter.”
I blinked. For some reason, that name rang a bell. Then the connection hit and I sat up a little straighter. “Harry Bulter—as in, one of the names mentioned in John Nadler’s will?”
John Nadler had been the man behind the consortium that had bought up most of the land all around Stane’s shop. Not that Nadler—or rather, Lauren, because the real Nadler had been long dead by the time the buyout had happened—had wanted the land per se; he’d just wanted to control what lay underneath it—a major ley-line intersection. Such intersections were places of great power and could be used to manipulate time, reality, or fate. But they could also be used to create a rift between this world and the next, enabling those with enough power here on Earth to step onto the gray fields. And that’s exactly what Lauren had succeeded in doing, too, but only with the help of Lucian, a rebel Raziq with destruction plans of his own.
And to think I’d not only bedded that bastard, but trusted him, too. My instincts had been way, way off as far as he was concerned.
At least he was dead. At least he couldn’t do any more harm to anyone I cared about. Couldn’t rape or impregnate anyone else, as he had Ilianna, and more than likely the sorceress.
If she was pregnant, I thought suddenly, how would that affect her ability to take other forms? While face shifting shouldn’t hurt any child she carried, I had no idea whether attempting a full-body transformation would. I imagined it would be rather hard to disguise a rounded belly, as she wouldn’t be able to manipulate the flesh of the child within her. Even if it was little more than a few weeks old, it would have a soul and a power all its own. She could change her flesh, but not her child’s. Nor, I imagined, could she change the physical space that child used.
Maybe we’d better start looking for men who looked pregnant—although given the number of middle-aged men who seemed to have beer bellies these days, that might not be such an easy task.
“So Harry Bulter was one of the names on the index cards?” Azriel asked.
“No, of course not. That would be too easy.”
“Yeah, I guess it would,” I agreed, amused. “So how did you find him?”
“By following the connections.” Stane shook his head, something close to admiration in his expression. “I can tell you one thing—the bitch may be as mad as a hatter, but she certainly knows how to cover her tracks.”
A skill no doubt garnered from her association with Lucian, who’d been banished to Earth’s plane for centuries, and who’d had the time to learn not only the art of deception, but also, we suspected, that of dark magic.
“So how did you find her in the end?”
“By tracing back not only every single name, but all the traceable connections each name had.”
He spun around and flicked a finger across one of the light screens. An image appeared on the next screen—a tall, gray-haired gentleman with stern features and a somewhat forbidding nose. “This is Harrison Jantz, a stockbroker who has purchased several items from our dead jeweler. His address on file was Elizabeth Street in Sydney, right opposite Hyde Park.”
“Expensive,” I murmured. “He’s obviously a very good stockbroker.”
“Was a very good stockbroker,” Stane commented. “He was reported missing yesterday, after not showing up for work several days in a row.”
“Coincidence, or the sorceress simply killing off another of her identities?” Of course, it hardly mattered, given that she sure as hell seemed to have enough of them—but it was damn frustrating to once again be a step behind her. Though how she managed to keep track of them, let alone keep them all alive as viable identities, I had no idea.