Wynn interrupted gently but with a steely smile. “Just spit it out. You’re one of us now, and in order to be one of us, you have to have power. That means that if your intuition is telling you something, we’re all going to believe it unless something pretty solid points us in another direction. So, spill.”
Dag slid his hand around and squeezed her hip. Kylie took a deep breath. “Okay. Sorry. I think it’s going to happen at the keynote address. That’s on the schedule for first thing on Sunday morning, right after breakfast. Eight-thirty. It won’t draw in every single attendee, but the room will be set up for three thousand people, with overflow standing room for at least a few hundred more.”
“That’s a pretty impressive crowd,” Fil said. “I think that would count as a pretty filling lunch, even for two greedy demons.”
“It is enough power to return Uhlthor to strength and to free Shaab-Na from its prison,” Spar added grimly. “I fear it may even be more than enough.”
Kylie nodded. “I was afraid of the same thing. But what tips it over the edge for me is that Richard Foye-Carver himself is giving the keynote address. He’ll be right there, in the room, when it happens. And not only that, he’ll be up on a stage getting the best view in the house.”
She frowned and took a deep breath. “I know we don’t have definitive proof that he’s the Hierophant, but my gut tells me he is, and my gut also says that if he could, he’d bathe in the blood of those people himself.”
She exchanged glances with Dag, and he nodded encouragement. Last night, in preparation for this call, she had stared at the enhanced photo of Carver for what felt like hours. Every single hair on the back of her neck had stood up, and the pit of her stomach had descended into her Tribble slippers when she looked into the man’s smiling blue eyes. What looked back at her was not right; it was evil pure and simple.
Hierophant or not, if Richard Foye-Carver had ever possessed a soul, he must have sold it to the Seven a long time ago. How he managed to pass himself off as an activist and a philanthropist she couldn’t understand for a minute. Every time she looked at him, she got sick to her stomach. If she were Catholic, she’d have crossed herself. As it was, she couldn’t stop herself from mentally pronouncing kaynahorah to ward off his evil eye.
“Like I said, you don’t need to convince us,” Wynn said. “But if we’re going to come up with a way to stop him from doing just that, we need more information about their actual plan. We need details.”
“Full details I don’t have, and trust me, I wish I did. But you all know more about the way the Order operates than I do, so let me tell you what I found, and maybe you can piece it together better than I can.” Kylie looked at her notes on an adjacent computer screen. “I found chatter on the darknet about something called oblatio.”
“It is their ritual of sacrifice that is demanded by the Seven,” Kees reported grimly.
“Okay, context here paints a disturbing picture that oblatio is something pretty ordinary for them and that whatever is coming up would be more appropriately referred to as a molkh.”
“Oh, crap, that’s bad,” Wynn breathed.
Dag snarled, baring a fang when Kylie glanced at him. “Molkh is what you envision the Hierophant wants. It is a bloodbath, where both the souls and the blood of the victims are offered to their unholy masters.”
“It also implies that my mate was on the correct path with her theory of the plan,” Knox said. “Molkh traditionally involves the summoning of lower demonic creatures who murder the victims and feed on the flesh while the released souls are then consumed by one of the Seven.”
Kylie closed her eyes and swallowed back bile. “I was really hoping you weren’t going to say something like that. That clarifies my next item, though. The chatter indicated that there would be four ‘doormen’ serving inside the room, and that they’d be in charge of who got in, not who got out. I’m guessing those are the summoners?”
“Yes. Not only will portals need to be opened to allow the creatures into the space, but if they hope to target that many victims, the gates must be held until sufficient numbers pass through.”
“That’s got to be our biggest concern, then,” Fil said. “We need to keep those doors from opening. That’s our plan.”
Spar picked up his mate’s hand and brought it to his lips, blocking his small smile. “Perhaps we should work out a small number of additional details,” he suggested.
“Yes, like how we’re going to do it,” Ella offered.
Fil sent her a teasing glare. “Nitpicker.”
“Listen, Rembrandt—”
Wynn cut in. “Excuse me, children? I think the obvious solutions all involve us being present, in the room, for a coordinated counterstrike. And that means we need to decide which of us is going to Boston and how soon we can get there.”
“I already told you that Spar and I are there, and I meant every word. Just try and keep us away.”
Wynn nodded. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Which makes Dag and Kylie, Fil and Spar, and me and Knox.”