“Too true. Thanks, anyway. It means a lot to me that you get along and you don’t mind sharing me with them.”
Sure, harmony between the girlfriend and the parental units was a good thing but his words fed into the low-grade ball of unease churning me up these days. Ro had whole-heartedly always embraced who he was. It was an amazing quality and a lot of why, as a rock star, he was so passionate and such a great singer-songwriter. He’d owned every inch of his identity.
Then he’d walked away cold turkey. Yes, he’d been messed up after Asha’s death and he’d become Rasha, and those were both valid reasons, but it was like he’d totally shed something essential about himself for something else. He was a rock star until he wasn’t. Then he was a hunter. Now he was inviting me to Los Angeles and really pleased that I got along with his family. That was super sweet, but I was terrified that with his faith in the Brotherhood crumbling, our really new relationship was his latest extreme, because damn, he was just going all in at warp speed.
I fixed my ponytail. “I’m gonna take a shower before we go demon hunting. Then I’ll make us both dinner. There’s still some Chickeny Delight.”
“Yum.”
I waited.
“I’m looking forward to it.”
I waited some more.
Rohan pushed me toward the house. “Yes, I’ll make us dinner.”
I blew him a kiss, braced myself, and headed inside to pick up my show and tell. After today’s zizu visit, Dr. Gelman didn’t get to be off the radar anymore.
I wiped my palms off on my shorts and knocked on Rabbi Abram’s office door on the ground floor.
“Hello?” His voice floated out from Ms. Clara’s office.
I switched directions and pushed her door open. My Jewish Dumbledore was ransacking Ms. Clara’s desk drawers. He wore one of his many black suits, a kippah bobby-pinned to his thinning white hair.
Ms. Clara’s office was a shrine to order and symmetry, from the striking framed photos of Vancouver that were never even a millimeter crooked to her custom-made drawer organizers. “You mess up her desk, Rabbi, and she’ll kill you.”
Our resident administrator moonlighted as an in-demand dominatrix, though if Rabbi Abrams didn’t know that about her, I wasn’t going to enlighten him. Ms. Clara was currently in Jerusalem, ostensibly at a meeting of Brotherhood admins. Wild, unfulfilled sexual tension with Tree Trunk, a.k.a. Baruch Ya’ari, weapons specialist and my adored mentor and friend who was based there at Brotherhood HQ, was a totally secondary agenda.
Rabbi Abrams stroked his longish, white beard with gnarled fingers. “Help me find my Kit Kats, Navela. A good Kosher treat.”
The faint smell of butterscotch wrapped around him so he’d already dipped into the candy today. “No way. I got the run-down. Diabetes runs in your family.”
“Et tu, Brute?”
I dropped my glance to my feet, ashamed.
“What’s wrong?” He squinted at the hard cannonball saxophone case in my hand, containing all my evidence that I’d retrieved from upstairs. “What is that?”
I perched on the edge of the seat across the desk from him and motioned for him to sit. “I have some stuff to catch you up on.”
He lowered his ancient, frail body into Ms. Clara’s Aeron chair. “And you think I need to be seated?” He chuckled, his laughter dying off at my somber expression, and nodded for me to continue.
I lay the large sax case across my lap, fiddling with the clasps.
“Tell me.”
So I did. It wasn’t exactly Once Upon a Time, but there were plenty of monsters. It had all started when we’d been in Prague tracking Samson King to prove he was a demon and not just an A-list celebrity. Rabbi Abrams had confirmed that Ari was still an initiate but the regular Brotherhood induction ritual hadn’t worked so he’d told me to contact Dr. Gelman, also visiting the city for a physics conference.
Dr. Gelman had a way to induct Ari and we’d had a couple meetings. During one of them, she’d slipped me a swirled green glass amulet, fairly unremarkable except for the etching of a hamsa on the inside.
Soon after, I’d been attacked by a gogota demon sporting the spiffy new modification of a metal spine. Kind of like stegosaurus spikes attached to its back that made it harder to hit its kill spot. The demon had been gunning for me, crying “Vashar!” which I later learned was the amulet’s name. When I went to see Dr. Gelman, her hotel room was trashed and gogota slime crusted the curtains. She’d gone off-grid after that, contacting me once via letter with the instructions for the induction ritual. I’d been trying to find her ever since.
Demons weren’t team players at the best of times, and they certainly weren’t going to aid and abet the Brotherhood. The only way the gogota had come after me was because it was bound and forced to do someone’s bidding. I’d still had to prove it though, so I’d traded a demonic dog collar for the actual gogota demon that had attacked Dr. Gelman, since I’d killed the one that had gone after me. Then I’d tracked down a spell to test for magic signatures. Magic came in three colors: red for witches, pink for Rasha, and blue for demons and this spell let the caster determine which had been used on an object.
There were no traces of magic on the metal spine, meaning the modification had been manual not magic. However, Rohan had dusted the spine for prints and come up with a partial print matching a Rasha, now deceased, called Ferdinand Alves. When we’d tested the gogota itself, however, the spell revealed purple magic.
The spell also turned a yaksas horn that had come from Rohan’s Askuchar mission in Pakistan purple. That assignment had been brutal with the entire village being slaughtered and the Brotherhood ordering Ro and the other Rasha to burn the bodies and destroy the evidence. The attacks hadn’t made sense; gogota were simple demons who wouldn’t think big picture enough to care about an amulet that stopped Rasha induction rituals, and the yaksas’ assault had been too targeted and out of their normal hunting ground to fall within a normal pattern for them. Factor in a witch binding demons, however, and you got a simple, plausible solution.
Rabbi Abrams listened without interruption to my story, his face growing whiter than his hair.
I faltered a couple of times, concerned the man was going to croak, but I continued through to the grand finale of the ticking clock prophecy. I’d opened the sax case and spread the spine, the gogota’s fingertip, and the fragment of horn out on the desk. “Rohan already has the name of the Rasha whose print it was. He’s investigating that angle but I need to find Dr. Gelman. I need her help to figure out who this witch is. I was hoping you’d talk to her sister and find out–”
“You think my Executive is behind this?” Rabbi Abrams touched his finger to a metal spike with a shaking hand. “That they would deliberately send demons to destroy an innocent village? Demons that need no encouragement to be bloodthirsty?”
I bit my lip. “I didn’t say–”