Dark Victory. Brenda Joyce

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      “You know, I wish you’d let me set you up with the new guy at CDA,” Sam said.

      Tabby smiled a bit grimly at her. She’d met MacGregor once, when he and Sam had been leaving the Center for Demonic Activity Agency together. “Definitely not,” she said, meaning it. The agent had had macho written all over him.

      “Let her explore the Beta side of life,” Kit said, her eyes wide with innocence. “Who knows? Maybe she’ll find a match made in some kind of odd, metro heaven.”

      Tabby felt a pang, but she smiled brightly and said, “That’s the plan.”

      Kit sobered and touched her arm. “I’m sorry. I never met Randall and I shouldn’t tease you for going out with his polar opposite.”

      “It’s okay,” Tabby said. She smiled firmly. “What’s meant to be is meant to be. Maybe the love of my life is a poet with a Ph.D.”

      Sam choked. “Over my dead body.” Then she looked closely at Tabby. “Are you okay?”

      Sam always knew when something was really wrong. “It’s still hard.”

      “Yeah, it is,” Sam said, and they both knew they were referring to their cousin, Brie. Kit probably knew it, too, but she pretended not to hear them, moving as the line progressed.

      The Rose women were special. Each had her own Destiny, tied into the war on evil. For generations, the Rose women had been using their unusual powers to aid and abet good. It had only been three months since Brie had left them to redeem the Wolf of Awe. The year before, their best friend Allie had also vanished. Although Allie wasn’t related to them, they had become friends with her as children. That had been Fate, too—it turned out that she was a powerful Healer. Each woman had gone to embrace her Destiny in the past, because it had been time to do so. That was how the universe worked. It was a fundamental Wisdom in the Book of Roses, which had been passed down through the generations of Rose women.

      Tabby missed them both, sometimes terribly, but she was also happy for them because Allie and Brie were hardly alone in the Middle Ages. Their Destinies had included powerful, nearly immortal partners—Highlanders who battled at their sides, as driven and committed as they were to the war on evil. But their absence had left a gaping hole in their lives. Sam had helped fill the void by going to work at HCU, the Historic Crimes Unit of CDA, a clandestine government agency dedicated to fighting the evil preying on society. Sam’s boss, Nick Forrester, ran HCU with an iron fist but he could be counted on to back them up. And so could Kit. But it wasn’t the same without Allie and Brie.

      There was no defying Destiny. Tabby’s Destiny was magic. Every generation of Rose women had a Slayer, a Healer and a Witch. She had been practicing her craft since she was fourteen—the year her mother had died, the victim of a demonic pleasure crime. There was one big fat problem, though. Rose women usually came into their powers very, very swiftly once their Destiny was made known. Apparently, Tabby was the exception to that rule. Although she’d been practicing magic since adolescence, her powers were still erratic and, once in a while, too weak to do any good. It simply didn’t make any sense.

      But as the Book of Roses said, there was a reason for everything.

      Kit said, “After the gym, I went back to HCU. I was digging around in some older case files. That last Rampage has been bothering me. There were only three in the gang.”

      “They were doped up on a drug we’ve never seen before,” Sam said quietly.

      HCU’s jurisdiction was the past—all past demonic activity, even if centuries old. Because so many of today’s demons came from previous centuries, HCU’s agents worked closely with CDA. Rarely could a present-day crime be solved without HCU’s expertise. Tabby had already heard about last week’s Rampage. A couple had been burned at the stake in one of Manhattan’s most posh neighborhoods. These terrible murders were usually committed between midnight and dawn, with an entire gang present. But it had only been 8:00 p.m. and only three gang members had been there, two males and a female. Were they becoming bolder? Had it even been a genuine Rampage?

      The press had dubbed the crimes “witch burnings,” a label Tabby particularly disliked, because the victims were average men, women and children of all ages, races, sizes and shapes. But then, evil rarely discriminated—except, of course, when it came to pleasure crimes. Then the most innocent and beautiful were chosen. The witch burnings had instilled so much fear into the general public that no one seemed to care that seventy percent of all murders were still pleasure crimes. What was really scary was how vicious the gangs of possessed kids had become.

      They’d once been ghetto gang members or normal kids gone missing. Evil preyed on them, seducing these gang members, offering them power in return for their souls, and then directing them to commit violence, brutality, bestiality and anarchy. The possessed gangs were out of control, ruling the city streets through fear and might. Gang warfare was no longer “in.” Now the gangs often worked together to hunt down civilians, cruelly and sadistically. Very few “normal” gangs remained in the country now.

      “Something’s been bothering me about the Rampages, across the board,” Kit said. “I feel like I’ve missed a really glaring clue.”

      “I’ll go back to HCU with you,” Sam decided, “and we can check it out.”

      They had reached the security checkpoint. Tabby smiled at the guard as Sam flipped her government ID. Sam’s messenger bag was loaded with weapons, and she carried a stiletto up her sleeve and a Beretta in a shoulder holster. She would never make it through the checkpoint. Kit flipped a similar ID. Although they were government issued, neither Kit nor Sam were Feds, as the IDs claimed. But CDA was so clandestine that only the top levels of the CIA, the FBI and the Secret Service worked with its agents.

      As they passed through the checkpoint, Sam and Kit were both so thoughtful that Tabby had the feeling they were ready to cut out on their plans for the afternoon. She would have to wander around the exhibit by herself, and return alone to the loft she shared with Sam. She’d float around it in the same solitude she did every night—except when she was out with some sweet guy she had no real interest in. It was lonely—Sam was almost never there—but she’d deal the same way she always did. She’d outline tomorrow’s curriculum, and then work on her spells.

      “So which way to the Wisdom of the Celts?” Sam asked.

      Tabby smiled back, relieved. Sam knew she needed company. “Up those stairs,” she said, nodding.

      The huge front hall was terribly crowded. Every New Yorker knew that visiting the Met on the weekend was a really dumb idea. They started across the granite floored hall, dwarfed by the columns and arches, before going up the broad staircase to the first level of exhibits.

      There was no line.

      They exchanged looks as they approached the glass displays. Tabby said, “This is too weird. There should have been a half-hour wait, at least.”

      Kit murmured, “It’s an exhibit on medieval Ireland. If you ask me, medieval Scotland and Ireland are peas in the same pod.”

      Allie and Brie were in medieval Scotland, with Highlanders who belonged to a secret society dedicated to the protection of Innocence. “Are you saying that you think we’re meant to go in here? That the exhibit is related to the Brotherhood?”

      “The earliest Scots came from Dalriada—which is Ireland.”

      Tabby СКАЧАТЬ