Sins of the Soul

“She is not enough. We must have better.” Djeserit turned and sloshed more liquor into the tumbler. Pyotr watched her, both surprised and curious. He had never seen her abuse alcohol or drugs of any kind. She rarely even sipped wine with her dinner.

“And so you decided to go out and acquire a better victim?” he asked, her words sending a missing piece of the puzzle clicking into place. Now he understood. “With no discussion. No plan. No backup of any kind.” Idiot. She was an idiot. Did she not think he had investigated all possibilities, worked all angles? If there was better than Marie to be had, they would have her.

“I know you approached Naphré Kurata. Attempted to woo her. Oh, do not look surprised. I know her name. I know many things about her.” An ugly sneer crept into her tone. “If you’d been thinking with your head instead of your dick, we would have had her beneath our blades.”

“Would we? Naphré was a better choice, for the reason of her lineage. On that point you are correct. But she was otherwise a poor choice. She is not malleable in the least. She is trained in the arts of death. And there is something else, something I cannot put my finger on…a taint of some sort.” He shot her a dark look. “She is no lamb to be led to the slaughter. And she is no innocent. When I was with her, I sensed something…off, like she’s been touched by the hand of another supernatural. A dark hand. We need the blood of an innocent. One who has a pretty, shiny soul, not a darksoul dipped in tar. I could not swear that Naphré Kurata met our needs, so I chose elsewhere.”

Fixating on one of his points and ignoring all the others, Djeserit said, “I believed there were ways around her training. I thought it a simple matter to hire someone with more experience and at least equal training.”

“You thought…” Pyotr stared at her. No, it was too incredible to even consider. Djeserit could not have been so foolish. “Do not say that you thought to hire her own mentor to kill her? You went to Butcher. Is that what you did, Djeserit? Is it?”

“He wasn’t supposed to kill her.” She peeled off her jacket and tossed it onto her obscenely expensive ergonomic chair. Then, lifting a large envelope from her desk, she began fanning herself. Sweat beaded on her upper lip and her brow. “It’s terribly hot in here, do you not think so. Far too hot. I’ll have to—”

“Djeserit.” Pyotr imbued the single word with a full measure of venom and a note of command.

She blinked, a slow lowering and raising of her lids. It was a habit that annoyed him no end. Finally, she said, “He was to render her insensate, then contact me. I let him think it was because I wanted to witness her demise. But in truth, I meant to bring her to you.”

He heard the lie in the last part, but the truth in the rest.

“If I understand your plan correctly, Butcher was to summon you. You would then have arrived, killed him and taken Naphré for our purposes.”

“Butcher was uncooperative. He said he didn’t work that way. That he wanted neither helpers nor witnesses.” Again, the slow, exaggerated blink. “Still, I felt it was a solid plan, that I could work around his misgivings.”

“Given that Naphré Kurata is not with you, clearly your plan was not solid enough. So tell me, Djeserit, did they join forces against you? Overpower you? Did you have not even one guard with you as backup? Or did they overpower him as well?”

“They were alone. Just the two of them. And she killed him. Two shots. One to the head, one to the heart.”

Pyotr digested that. It was more than he had expected, and proof that his decision to choose another had been sound. If Naphré could terminate her teacher, then she would not have made a particularly good victim. Still, her blood was pure and powerful…

That Djeserit had gone ahead behind his back was irksome in the extreme, but the outcome was not unfavorable. Butcher had been a liability, a man who knew too much. Pyotr had meant to kill him regardless. But not yet. Not until he had no further need of him. Djeserit’s actions had taken the choice from him, and he liked that not at all.

“So you are here sweating and guzzling liquor because your plans went awry?”

“No. I am here because my plan went far too perfectly. So perfectly that I was unprepared. He was there. In the graveyard. I saw him. Had I been braver, smarter, I could have touched him.”

“Butcher? We have already established that he was there. And now he is dead.”

“No, you pompous fool.” Her eyes narrowed. “But enough of my explanations. What of yours? You lied to me. The night Roxy Tam came here sniffing about. You spun a convoluted web of lies to make me believe it was all about killing innocents until we lured a soul reaper here to kill the killers. But that was a lie. A ploy.” She was breathing heavily, her cheeks flushed. “I have found you out. I am aware of the prophesy now. Explain that away, if you can.”