Revenge & Rapture (The Jezebel Files #4) Paperback

Chapter 1

Vancouver was burning.

Glass broke outside my office window, followed by a wailing alarm and angry voices yelling ugly taunts. The simmering tension of the past couple months between Nefesh and Mundanes had exploded on this June night.

Police and ambulance sirens shrieked in the distance and the smell of smoke drifted in through my locked window. Every cop in the city must have been on patrol.

Inside, all was still, the air sharpened to a point. I rolled my chair back and forth in front of the wall that I’d turned into a link chart. At the top were photos of the four scrolls of the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh held by Team Jezebel. Small cards pinned underneath detailed the place of their capture and the nature of the encounters with Chariot in obtaining them, with pieces of string running between connected information. I’d rejigged the chart numerous times, but had yet to find either the one piece of the Sefer still held by Chariot or any more of the Ten’s identities.

My phone buzzed and I distractedly stabbed the answer button. “Stop waiting up for me, Pri.”

“They’ve closed the bridges in and out of downtown,” my best friend and roommate said in a tense voice. “And I don’t know how much longer Hastings Street will be open. It’s almost midnight, so if you don’t come home now you might be stuck there.”

“I’ll sleep in my chair. I spoke with the company who bought the party warehouse where the golem was patrolling. Totally legit local developers are turning it into condos.” I fired a dart into a photo of Isaac Montefiore’s head, half-turned away from the camera. “Another dead end.”

“Cut yourself some slack. Jezebels have been fighting this for four hundred years. You’ve barely been on it four months. And right now, you need to sleep.”

“Saving the world comes first,” I said.

“Is it about saving the world or is it more about beating your enemies?”

“Does it matter so long as they’re stopped?” I said.

The noble cause of dispensing justice warred with my desire to destroy Isaac Montefiore so comprehensively that his life would be a smoking ruin, my signature writ large in the ashes like a painter signing their masterpiece. Work goals were important.

“It matters a lot,” Priya said gently. “Your dad was murdered. Don’t you think you should get help? This isn’t healthy.”

“I had enough of talking out my feelings when I was thirteen. Taking Isaac down is the only therapy I need,” I snapped.

Mrs. Hudson, my pug, lifted her head from her doggie bed in the corner and whined softly. She hated when her mommies fought.

“That’s exactly what I mean.” Priya gave an aggrieved sigh. “This isn’t about Chariot anymore for you. It’s all about Isaac. He’s cost you both men you loved and—”

I hung up on her and rubbed my eyes, nearly blinding myself when a boom rocked the building. After a second boom—someone ramming the front security door downstairs—came the joyous cries of emboldened rioters about to pilfer.

Not on my watch.

“Stay,” I told Mrs. Hudson and crept down the two flights of stairs to the lobby.

The looters shattered one of the office doors.

I cornered a man carrying a stack of laptops out of the small game design company owned by two Nefesh women. They’d recently moved in after working out of their apartment for years and struggling to get a toehold in a male-dominated industry. I’d learned this while waiting in line with them at the café at the end of the block.

“Put them back,” I said.

The looter’s eyes narrowed. A short man in need of a haircut, he stank of stale beer and sour hatred. “You one of them fucking Nefesh?”

I crossed my arms. “If I was?”

His eyes darted left for a fraction of a second.

I spun, my spiky blood armor in place, and blocked the strike with my forearm. The baseball bat my attacker had used cracked down the center. My armor held up fine. Wrenching the bat away from him, I swung. It cut through the air with a whistle, embedding in the plaster inches shy of his head.

The stench of urine filled the air and he bolted.

“Now.” I turned to the other man, my armor gone, and a cold smile on my face. “You’re going to put the computers back, tidy up the office, and then you and your friends are going to stand guard here the rest of the night and ensure no one else tries the same thing.”

With a scoff, he marched past me, still cradling the computers. I grabbed his arms and yanked sharply downward, dislocating both his shoulders.

His scream was a thin, high cry that sounded rather kitten-like. The laptops hit the ground, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides.

I made a note to check with the owners on how many computers would require replacing. “Do we have a deal?”

He whimpered, his gaze unfocused and his breaths coming in quick rasps.

“You big baby.” I popped his joints back in one at a time, using a technique I’d learned from Miles during a training session, when he’d dislocated my shoulder during a sparring round. He showed no mercy when we trained. As a result, he’d taken my fighting abilities to a new level, but every time I staggered out of the gym looking like a piece of tenderized steak I hated Levi for abandoning me on that front.

“Deal or no deal?” I said to the looter.

He hugged his shoulders. “Crazy bitch.”

Wrenching the baseball bat free with a shower of white dust, I tapped it against my palm. “I have magic and a baseball bat. You have about two hundred and six comically fragile bones. What’s it to be? Insult me or conclude our business transaction?”

“We’ll keep guard.” His sneer was blown by his flinch as I hoisted the bat to rest it on my shoulder.

I raised an eyebrow. “Run along, then.”

He fled back into the office, issuing instructions to his friends.

Satisfied that my building would be protected until these riots ran out of steam, I headed upstairs to retrieve Mrs. Hudson. With the fractured bat stowed next to my corner safe, I grabbed my leather jacket with a soft whistle.

The puppy knew the deal since we had the same routine several times a week. She stood still, allowing me to clip the leash to her collar, then we made our way down the stairs and into the night. The intruders, busy cleaning up the office, didn’t notice our departure. I appreciated a man who followed orders.

Outside was pandemonium. Store windows had been smashed in, people using any excuse to ransack buildings. Someone ran past me brandishing a box of tacky Canada T-shirts like it was the Olympic Torch. Hopefully their own stupidity would weed them out of the gene pool sooner rather than later.

I picked Mrs. Hudson up to spare her paws from the glass that made the cobblestones glitter like diamond dust. As we walked through the chaos, a distant part of me insisted I should give a damn. After all, my mother had written the proposed anti-Nefesh bill that had stirred this particular powder keg of hatred and fear.

We passed an old heritage building that was on fire. The roof had caved in and firefighters battled the flames furiously, using long jets of water to save the exterior art deco façade.

A couple of months ago, the Queen of Hedon had given House Pacifica intel that one of the original founders of the Untainted Party had laundered money through the magic black market. That was bad enough, but it was for a business venture that Jackson Wu, the current head of the provincial party, had a stake in.

I gave a chin nod to an enterprising youth with a duffle bag full of spray paint cans who was doing a brisk business—mostly to Mundanes with Untainted Party shared values, if the slogans freshly graffitied on nearby walls were any indication. Capitalism at its finest.

For reasons I couldn't fathom, Levi was sitting on that information about Jackson. The bill loomed large in news reports, and the daily coverage of Mundanes angry and Nefesh worried about its potential impact stoked public anxiety. Why did Levi put everyone through this emotional rollercoaster when he could just end it?

A cop on horseback trotted past me and blew his whistle at some people rocking a car. The industrious group whooped at the young man who stood on the hood stomping out the windshield.

As the days grew longer and warmer, tensions between the two communities had grown, until a simple altercation between a Nefesh and a Mundane sports fan over Stanley Cup tickets earlier today had blown up into a city-wide riot that was now ten hours strong with no sign of abating.

I chuckled and stepped out of the path of a wildly veering pick-up truck with actual lightning crackling above it. Hockey tickets. How Canadian.

The young woman powering the electricity screamed, “Die, Mundanes!” as the truck careened past me.

Mrs. Hudson and I made it to my car, Moriarty, without incident. Even though my gray Toyota was the lone vehicle on this level of the parking garage, and as such should have been easy pickings, it was untouched.

At least this particular nemesis was never going to leave my life.

Once Mrs. Hudson had settled herself in the back, I eased the Toyota out onto Water Street. Between the packs of people roaming the city, police street closures, and general debris, making my way out of downtown was slow going.

The radio played messages from both the mayor and Levi calling for calm and for people to stay home. Levi was especially insistent that violence would not be tolerated. The chaos and hatred had to be killing him.

With the bridges out of commission and the streets a disaster, I was forced to zigzag my way through downtown until I cleared the on-ramp for the Cambie Street Bridge, and veered west once more.

In comparison to downtown, the rest of Vancouver was far too quiet. It was barely 1AM in early June and there should have been traffic from people heading to bars and spilling out of restaurants, but Moriarty was the only car on the road. We passed block after block of dim storefronts and boarded-up doors.

An empty bus passed by like a skeleton ship in the night, its neon destination sign eerily proclaiming “No Service” in urgent capitals. The billboard on its side depicted happy people partaking in an upcoming tournament to benefit Vancouver General Hospital. Golf. Ugh. The only reason to look that cheerful holding a five iron was because you’d just gotten away with murder.

My city’s desolate atmosphere would have been disquieting had I not been gripped by the sense of predatory anticipation that always took hold when I headed down these roads to one particular destination.

I pulled up to the curb down the block from Isaac’s mansion in Dunbar and cut the engine, staring into the darkness that enveloped his stately home. Wind whispered in the press of trees to my back at the edge of Pacific Spirit Regional Park, a vast forest with hiking trails that was larger than Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

I drummed my fingers on the wheel, scanning for any movement through Isaac’s windows.

He was the only one of the Chariot Ten whose identity we’d unearthed, but tailing him had yielded nothing. All his meetings were legitimately connected to his security company and his socializing included his wife, who hated her husband and certainly wasn’t part of that group. That meant that anything Chariot-related was conducted via calls or texts.

If possible, we would have bugged every device he had in hopes of catching a break, but the man specialized in cybersecurity and data encryption. He knew how to hide his digital profile, including encrypting his internet history through a VPN, a virtual private network, and not syncing his phone to his car.

He seemed untouchable.

A familiar Tesla pulled up at the end of the block and my heart twisted. Sleep had eluded me most nights since I’d discovered Isaac’s ties to Chariot back in April. I’d started these night-time hauntings figuring that I might as well put my insomnia to good use and case the Montefiore property. Their alarm system protected the front and back doors and all the ground floor windows, though there were no cameras. As someone very publicly anti-magic, Isaac didn’t use wards.

Once in a while, the Tesla showed up. It was the Chocolate Factory of electric vehicles: no one got in or out. It was always parked too far to away see into and I never approached it.

I didn’t need to; Levi’s features were burned into my brain. It was too easy to picture him, his long elegant fingers draped over the steering wheel. After the insanity of today, he’d have loosened his tie and unbuttoned his top button, allowing himself a modicum of unwinding, but he’d be on alert, attuned to the slightest thing out of place. Had he raked his hands through his midnight-black strands, tufting them up into cowlicks, the skin underneath his eyes the faintest purple with exhaustion?

He would never have left riot control central if he wasn’t assured that police and firefighters had things in hand and his presence constituted a distraction. Even then, I’d bet my meagre savings that Miles had been instructed to call him if there was the slightest change in the situation.

He must be exhausted, but why come here? Did he know I was here? Had he realized what I was doing?

I white-knuckled the steering wheel.

During the day Levi and I took great pains to ignore each other. As House Head, he was still my boss, though I stayed away from HQ as much as possible, and on the rare occasion that our paths crossed, we kept up our pretense of being enemies.

Was it a pretense anymore? I no longer knew.

Mrs. Hudson’s tail thumped against the seat, her sandy-colored paws resting on the dashboard. She’d only ridden in Levi’s Tesla a few times, but somehow she always recognized her beloved’s car.

I took a swig of the heavily sweetened coffee that I’d bought at a drive-through, but no amount of sugar could clear the bitter taste from my mouth.

“No, girl. We don’t—” For fifteen years, Levi and I had waged a war of taunts and one-upmanship that was almost as fun as our verbal sparring as friends. We’d shared our scars, he’d fed me biscotti, and then he’d gifted me with a perfect brief happiness. “Levi isn’t for us anymore.”

Usually the pug ignored me to continue straining at the window, but tonight, she gave up. She huffed a little doggie sigh and sank onto the passenger seat, her head on her paws in a gesture of defeat.

Blood pounded in my ears, a tightness surging up through my ribcage. He’d broken my puppy. And that was just too much; I put my hand on the car door and pushed it open. Maybe this was stupid or too rash. I didn’t care.

I eased out of the car, tucked my dark wavy hair up under a black knit cap, and slid thin gloves on my hands. I left my familiar leather jacket in the car, shivering slightly against the cool breeze. Resolutely ignoring the Tesla and what its occupant might be thinking, I made my way into Isaac’s backyard.

A couple weeks ago, I’d mapped out a route onto the garage roof and along a decorative ledge that ran right under a bathroom window. In my experience, the majority of people didn’t lock bathroom windows on the upper floors. If Isaac did? No harm, no foul.

If not? One quick search of his study and then I’d go.

Thanks to my enhanced strength, I hoisted myself up with relatively little difficulty. My right thigh with the years-old injury throbbed in a token protest, but I compensated by relying more on my upper body. Flattening myself against the side of the house I inched along the ledge, impressed at the garden, which shimmered silver with night-blooming plants, and counted off windows until I’d reached the fourth one.

The sash was sticky and the angle from which I attempted to ease it open was awkward, so I took it slow, careful not to make any noise or break the glass.

There was the faintest squeak of the gate hinge and a figure slipped silently into the backyard. Moonlight illuminated Levi’s face as if it were broad daylight.

My chest grew tight. No amount of wishing turned Levi’s eyes from this cold wintry blue, his expression schooled into an unreadable mask, to that mesmerizing deep navy right before he would kiss me, back when I was the center of his universe.

I swayed. My foot slipped and I crashed to the ledge on my knee, clinging to the windowsill by the tips of my fingers.

Levi took a step forward, then stopped. There had been a brief period of time when I could have fallen, secure that he’d catch me.

A muscle twitched in my jaw. I pulled myself up and adjusted my hold on the window frame, sliding it up to allow me entrance. Hauling myself into the bathroom, I admonished myself that I wouldn’t look back. Again.

He was gone.