Heart and Soul by Jackie May (reading list .TXT) 📗

between Cafeteria Girl and the horde master. “Arael Moaz, Nora Jacobs. Nora Jacobs, your next meal.”

Arael ducks his face, covering his eyes with a hand.

“She’s not a vampire, that’s not how it works. All she has to do is sing. Time for a hearing aid check.”

“I turned Tabitha Durran away!” Arael appeals to Hillerman, his only perceived ally in the room. “You know why! She’s possessed by a powerful demon whom I won’t name, but everybody knows you don’t invite that kind of rogue into your horde.”

“There, that’s it,” Hillerman says to me. “I’m filing for an extension.”

“No go,” I protest. “He didn’t give up any intel, and we care shit about Tabitha Durran, anyway. It’s the necro we’re after.”

“The necro!” Arael blurts. “Nobody knows who it is. Some dandy, if you ask me. The only way to meet him is to get invited to secret masquerades, strictly black tie. Do I seem like that type? Of course I didn’t go.”

“But you got invited?” Hillerman asks.

A thought strikes Arael. “The invite. A plain black card with an illustration of a white government building.”

Hillerman spins on me. “Extension!”

“Call her off,” Arael says.

I scoff. “Call her off? May I remind you all that the revenants out there are the same bastards who killed Nora’s mother? I’m sorry for bringing it up, Miss Jacobs, but this is what you’ve been waiting for. Go on, give us a note.”

Arael rages. “I’ve given you something! Follow it up. A black card with a white government building. You find that building, you find your necromancer.”

Hillerman steps between Arael and me, as though to buy him a few more seconds. “Why do you say it’s a government building?”

“Because the style. The fancy pillars, the white steps. And Latin! Latin writing at the top.”

“How’d you get this invite?”

“Beyona gave it to me, and I tossed it out. I don’t know anything else. I was planning a war! Do you think I cared two brown shits about waltzing at a society ball?”

“No, I don’t,” Hillerman says. She regards me with a question mark.

Now it’s my turn to say: “Just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, let’s see, maybe just the fact that he’s a demon. Lying is their preferred language. I’d sooner trust a Magic 8-Ball.”

And now it’s Hillerman’s turn to press the button on her walkie. “Send him in.”

Once again, the bulkhead door whines open. I see an immaculate man dressed all in white, complete with a fedora tipped slightly to the side and, I kid you not, a fashionable cape over one shoulder. It’s Theo Coltrane, the Cleveland master. I can practically hear Darla and Ren tittering from the Agency two hundred miles away. Keeping a healthy coven must be a snap for Coltrane. Who needs compulsion when you’re stylish, rich, and strikingly handsome?

“This is your ‘stronger method?’”

“This is our verification process,” Hillerman says.

Arael leers at me. “More hypocrisy.”

Before Hillerman can ask me what he means by that, I say, “Fey elixirs and vampire mind reading? For an agency hell-bent on shackling the underworld, the UTF seems a little too eager to use our powers.”

Hillerman adjusts her librarian glasses and says in a perfect deadpan, “Well, I’m fresh out of Magic 8-Balls.”

“But you’ve got a master vampire. What are we doing here? How come you don’t know every single thing in Arael’s mind by now?”

“It’s not that simple. Humans aren’t equipped to resist when compelled, but underworlders have built-in defenses. Your underworld current creates resistance, like radio interference. Besides that, until recently Arael was too weak. Pressing too deep into his mind could have killed him.”

“Would have killed him,” Coltrane says. His voice is velvet. “I’ve had to tread lightly.”

“Even still, you got nothing?”

Coltrane smiles, as though I amuse him. “Not nothing. We got the yellow house.”

“That’s how we knew Beyona might be there,” Hillerman adds.

I flip into full sarcasm mode. “Ah, the yellow house, good times. You mean the sting operation I set up, at great risk to me and my friends, in which you and your team of heavily-armed Navy SEALs ditched out to chase after the harpy, leaving me with nothing but a well-dressed socialite and a human to take down a rampaging ogre?”

Hillerman places her hands on her hips. “Divide and conquer.”

“From what I hear,” Coltrane says, “the ogre got the raw end of that deal.”

I count on my fingers. “Number one, that’s not the point, but number two, you’re absolutely right, and number three, I like you already.”

Coltrane flashes a beautiful smile of perfect teeth. “We meet again.”

“We’ve met before?”

“We saw each other at the Double-D a few nights ago.”

My face heats up. “Right. I saw you, of course, but I didn’t think…I mean, it was so busy that night.”

“It’s never too busy,” he says with a sparkle in his eye, and then, as if to demonstrate, he extends a hand to Cafeteria Girl. “Miss Jacobs. Always a pleasure.” When he kisses the top of her hand, Cafeteria Girl nearly swoons.

Hillerman clears her throat. “If you would, Mr. Coltrane.”

A fleeting dark cloud passes over his face, gone just as quickly as it came. He squares his shoulders and resumes his charming smile, albeit forced, for Hillerman. “All work and no play, as always, Agent Hillerman.”

“We’re looking for verification of a particular image.”

“An image of what?” he asks.

“You’ll know it when you see it. Won’t he, Arael? If there’s any resistance—if Mr. Coltrane doesn’t describe exactly what you told us—then I turn you over to Miss Jacobs and the FUA.”

Through clenched teeth, the demon master mutters, “Someday, Charlotte Hayes, it will be you under the spotlight, for all your friends to see plainly. What then?”

“Then nothing, Arael. I don’t have any friends.”

To my embarrassment, her remark stings a little. Thank goodness I’m not the one Theo Coltrane is about to expose.

The master vampire gently places his palm on Arael’s temple. After a moment of concentration, he says, “Special Agent Hillerman, if you’re looking for an image of yourself being picked apart by a giant crow, it’s