Page 31 of The Morning Star
She grinned. “Understood. Playdate next week? Lux can visit us this time.”
I loved people who were willing to watch my kid for me. “Give me a time and a date and I’ll have him there.”
She shouted something to Nyalla about Friday happy-hour, then headed toward the door, Austin and Lux both waving goodbye.
I waited for her to leave, then I quickly took stock of the half-dozen Lows eating shrimp off the carpet.
“Snip! Gimlet!” The two looked up at me guiltily, the others backing away from them. “If you’re here and scarfing down shrimp, I take it to mean you completed the assignments I gave you?”
Snip stood. “Everything is arranged for Doriel’s visit, Mistress. And I helped Barf find Mestal. He’ll be here tomorrow afternoon to meet with you. I told him what sort of information you were looking for and he said he would get right on it.”
Excellent. I turned to Gimlet.
“Caramort isn’t in Hel. He’s this side of the gates somewhere.”
“Did you speak to his household? Do they have any angel wings hanging over their fireplace mantel? Did any of them know where to reach him?” I pressed.
He gave me a blank stare. “No.”
“No, what?”
“No, I didn’t speak to his household, and I don’t know the other stuff.”
For fuck’s sake. “How about the other two? Basilisk and Popiel?”
“Popiel wouldn’t see me. His household wouldn’t let me past the gate because I’m a Low. I invoked your name and they told me they’d pull my limbs off if I wasn’t gone in five seconds.”
Figures. I couldn’t really blame him for that one. “How about Basilisk?”
“You never told me to look for anyone named Basilisk.”
“Yes I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did.” Damn it all. Normally I was lucky if a Low could follow one task to completion. Gimlet was clearly different but maybe three tasks was one too many. Or maybe he was just being a passive-aggressive asshole.
“Find Caramort,” I told him, figuring I should concentrate on the demon most likely to have been involved. “Find him and tell me where he is, and do it in the next two days. Is that clear?”
“It’s clear.” Gimlet shuffled off, bitching about how salmon and cookies were so not worth this.
“Rutter!”
“Yes, Mistress!” The Low came forward, his long nose wiggling. Rutter had taken on human form when he’d crossed the gates, but he still looked like a demon. Poor guy.
“Did you find Leethu?” I was assuming he had or he wouldn’t be back. Gimlet was an asshole, but Rutter was very loyal and as long as he had one task to focus on, he’d be there until its completion.
Although I didn’t see Leethu hanging out in my house, which meant she was probably under the summoning of that dick she’d told me about. Guess I’d need to prioritize getting her out of there.
“I found the human who had summoned her. He wasn’t very hard to track down because he was dead and there were a lot of dead people and a human slavery operation, and it made the news if you Googled sex and demon and illegal all together like Nyalla showed me how to do.”
Huh. I was thinking Rutter needed a promotion. “She killed the summoner? Where is she now?” Hopefully some other asshole didn’t yank her into a circle. That was the problem with being summoned. Once your sigil and names got written down in some fuckhead’s spell book, it was public knowledge. It was even more public knowledge now that people’s spell books tended to be stored on Dropbox and shit like that.
“Someone took Leethu away after the summoner was killed. I tracked her down to a big house in some mountains, but it was warded and I couldn’t get in.”
Shit. It did sound like another sorcerer had her. “Find out who has her—who owns that house, who lives there, and all that. This is priority stuff, Rutter. If I’m going in there to rescue her, I need to know what kind of sorcerer I’m going up against.”
“On it!” He trotted off with far more enthusiasm than Gimlet.
