Personal Demon

LUCAS: 17

BY NOON I’D BEGUN TO WONDER whether it was possible for a cell phone ringer to wear out. If so, I prayed it would happen soon.

I couldn’t complete a call without hearing the call waiting blip. If I managed to hang up, the silence would last less than ten seconds. My only choice was to let voice mail pick up for a few minutes by discreetly flipping the ring option to vibrate. I was becoming frightfully adept at operating that particular function. Not that it helped-I only had more calls to return and fell ever farther behind.

Some of the calls were case related-Simon with lab results, Dr. Aberquero with autopsy findings, a guard reporting from a scene. All expected and essential. But the others ran the gamut from “Should I cancel Mr. Cortez’s lunch with the governor on Monday?” to “Hi, it’s Bob in marketing, and I really hate to bother you, but your brother wanted to see my plans for the Wellspring campaign before I submitted the material to the printer.” Part of me longed to say, “Do you remember who you’re talking to and do you think I even know what the Wellspring campaign is, much less care?” But that wouldn’t do, no matter how frayed my nerves.

I had to calm “Bob” down and tell him that if he’d been put in charge of Wellspring, then my family had every faith in his abilities and instincts. And if anyone complained, I would handle it. At this rate, I was going to be responsible for every problem from buying the wrong manufacturing plant in Missouri to a copier paper shortage at the Seattle office.

There were VPs capable of handling these problems, but the absence of the top three men crippled day-to-day operations. Ideally, we’d have declared a period of mourning and shut down Cortez Corporation, giving my father time to recover. But the majority of the company holdings were in the human sector. Telling the world two Cortez brothers had died of unrelated causes in one night would open the door to investigations, by the police, the press and the stockholders.

Somewhere between persuading my father not to kill Carlos and coordinating the stakeout mission of the gang’s warehouse, I’d come up with a plausible story. Hector had died of a stroke. William, then, had to hop on the jet and fly to New York to salvage a merger orchestrated by Hector, which might, in the aftermath of his death, fall through. Somewhere between Miami and that meeting late this afternoon, William would suffer a coronary, brought on by his weight, jetlag, grief and worry over the merger. Awkward, but the best I could manage, running on stress and caffeine. So by tonight, the world could know that the Cortez Corporation had suffered a horrible tragedy, and would close operations temporarily to mourn. For today, though, it was all up to me.

Paige came with me back to headquarters. Once there, I moved on autopilot, my brain spewing commands, my body obeying, no time to pause much less think.

Yes, it’s a horrible shock. Yes, my father is well, thank you.

No, I’m sorry, but I really can’t look at that. No, I’m sorry, but I won’t be at that meeting. No, I’m sorry, I don’t know who’s in charge of the special dispensations department now, but I will find out.

We met the guard I’d requested for Paige. I told him to take her to the research rooms, assign someone to guide her through the system, then stay with her until I joined them.

I said good-bye to Paige. Tried to ignore the worried look in her eyes. Kissed her forehead. Saw her onto the elevator. Caught the next one going down. Pushed “basement” for the morgue.

“Lucas!”

The use of my given name yanked me out of automode, and I grabbed the elevator door before it shut. A young man in a suit was jogging across the lobby. Everyone had turned to stare, but no one tried to stop him. His face was flushed from running, and his shoulder-length blond hair, usually neatly tied in a conservative ponytail, hung around his face.

“Sir?” Griffin said.

I raised my hand, saying it was fine. I let the young man onto the elevator and pushed the basement button again. He panted, his eyes bright from exertion, big and impossibly blue. The trademark Nast eyes. Savannah’s eyes.

“Sean.”

He clapped me on the shoulder. Griffin tensed.

“I’m so sorry, Lucas. I know you weren’t close, but I’m sorry. How’s your dad doing?”

“All right.”

“And-” He turned to Griffin. “Your partner, right? Troy?”

“He’s recovering, thank you, sir.” Griffin’s response was polite, but had a brittle edge. Nothing against Sean personally, but rather, who he was and what his appearance portended.

“Your grandfather is here, I take it,” I said. “And your uncles.”

“Yeah. I just…I wanted to give you a heads-up.”

“Because they aren’t here to pay their respects.”

“Well, they are, technically, but…”

“But what really concerns them is not my family’s tragedy, but what it means for the Cabals. Two Cortez brothers dead, the third…unavailable, the CEO in mourning and the bastard rebel son in charge.”

“Um, pretty much.”

I swore.

Sean’s lips twitched. “I always thought that was the one word you didn’t know.”

“The last twenty-four hours have expanded my vocabulary.”

The Nasts would be closely followed by the two other Cabals-the Boyds and the St. Clouds. All of them wanting reassurances that we were still the leader of the Cabal world. All of them ready to whisk the title out from under us if we showed any sign of weakness.

As the elevator touched down, my knees jiggled and, for a moment, it seemed as if the floor was about to vanish beneath my feet. A wave of exhaustion set my hands trembling.

I couldn’t deal with this. I was in over my head. Out of my league. Choose your cliché.

This was not my world. I fought this world. And now I was being asked to save it from imploding. Everything in me said “let it implode.” But if the Cortez Cabal crashed, the institution itself would not disappear. The jackals were already circling, ready to divvy up the corpse.

I stepped from the elevator and made a call upstairs.

“Members of the Nast Corporation will be arriving shortly. Please see that they are shown to the boardroom and served lunch. Have my cousin Javier attend to them during the meal and answer their questions, and I will be there within the hour.”

“I’m sorry, Lucas,” Sean said when I hung up. I knew he meant it. He might be a Nast, but he was Savannah’s half-brother and the only member of her family who acknowledged her, much less attended to her. Over the last few years, his loyalties had shifted away from his family business-he was still a VP, but he was only going through the motions, eyes on the horizon looking for other opportunities.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

I was about to say no, then glanced at the pad of paper still clutched in my hand. “The special dispensations department.”

“What about them?”

“Who are they, what do they do and what other department head could I temporarily put in charge?”

He smiled. “Can’t promise anything-the Cortez setup might not be exactly the same as ours-but I’ll give it a shot.”

I CHECKED IN with Paige before meeting the Nasts, an excuse to collect my thoughts. She gave me a brief update. Besides the glamour spell, she’d found only two explanations. Carlos could have been demonically possessed, which would explain why he denied being at the crime scenes. For Guy, the only answer was zombification, which would explain the use of cologne-to cover any stench of death. But a gunshot to the CNS would have meant he wouldn’t have been able to walk normally, no matter what a necromancer commanded.

While she returned to her research, I tried to put the pieces together, but they only slid farther apart.

The lab had found no trace evidence to indicate Carlos had been at any crime scene except the one with the young woman. When I finally wrested a story from him, he claimed that he hadn’t killed our brothers or attempted to assassinate our father. He’d never even been at Hector’s. Nor had he spoken to Troy, much less shot him. Why tell such obvious lies when we had eyewitness accounts?

The death of the young woman was one murder he wasn’t denying. He wasn’t admitting to it either, but seemed to presume his silence answered my questions. He said she’d been a half-demon he’d met a few times, and that she’d lured him into a trap. I was left to assume that he’d realized he’d been tricked, killed her while trying to extract information under torture and hid when the others came.

If he’d caught a glimpse of whoever came after him, he was keeping it to himself. Suspicious, yes. But knowing Carlos, he’d have panicked, been unable to muster the courage to climb out a window and hidden in the closet using a blur spell. He wasn’t about to admit to such cowardice…even if it might help find his brothers’ killers.

There was one piece of evidence that clearly spoke in his favor. The timeline. There was no way he could have traveled to all three locations in the time allotted, demonically possessed or not.

When I looked up from my notes, Paige glanced my way.

“I hate to give you one more thing to do, but have you called your mother?” she asked.

I must have winced, because she hurried on.

“I can do it. I just thought-”

“No, you’re right. It should come from me.” I really didn’t want my mother to hear about the death of my half-brothers on the news.

“Oh, and I spoke to Savannah,” Paige said. “She and Adam want to come down and help out.”

“I’d rather-”

“They stay put and mind the shop. That’s what I told them.”

“Thank you.”

I picked up the office phone to call my mother-I didn’t dare check my cell and see how many voice messages I’d accumulated during my ten-minute recess. Before I dialed more than the area code, I heard “Sir?” and glanced up to see a middle-aged man in the doorway, clutching a file.

“Yes?”

“Warren from the lab, sir. We’ve never met.”

“Warren?”

“Yes, sir. Warren Mills.”

Normally I would have asked more, learning something about him, but today, committing his name to memory was the best I could manage.

“You sent down blood and DNA from an apartment. Not the one from last night. This was from…” He glanced at his notes. “Jaz and Sonny?”

“Yes, right.”

“I think you need to see this.”