Twisted Secrets: Twisted Magic Book 6, page 7
I expected he might avoid my question, but he sat forward.
“Oh, Mr. Miller,” he said. “I believe I sold him a rare piece from a collection I had picked up a few months ago. I think…I think he was in Nebraska.”
“That’s right,” I said. We were getting somewhere, but I had no idea what the destination would be. “He alleges that the portrait is not a rare, one-of-a-kind collectible as you represented, but a replica.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said, calm but just this side of offended. “I’m sorry, but I take my work very seriously. I would never risk my reputation by selling knock offs, or peddling prints. I have been in this business for thirty years, sold for some of the greatest names in the industry. Besides, that last collection paid so well, I was able to retire. No one would have offered money like that for counterfeits.”
There was my segue.
“Do you happen to recall who came to you with the collection that Mr. Miller’s piece was from?” I asked, sitting up straight, putting on the airs of a polite but sure businesswoman, not a grungy mess that needed more than a splash of water at the motorhome sink to freshen up.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “If you leave your business card, I will happily pass it on to him.”
Ooh. Evasive.
“I appreciate that, but as it stands, my client, Mr. Miller, intends to serve litigation paperwork.” I had no idea what I was saying, but it sounded good so I just went with it, watching de Luca’s face for any signs of doubt. “It will paint your associate in a favorable light if he doesn’t make us track him down.”
“I understand, but my associate is a reclusive man. You know the type.” He laughed, picking up his glass of sangria from the side table. “Rich, isolated. Eccentric, no doubt, but not a conman.”
I pressed my lips together, as if thinking, before asking, “Do you know where he obtained that collection from?”
Randall had opted to remain silent, but his body was tensed, hard, ready to spring into action the moment de Luca tore off his façade.
If there was one. There was something unsettling about him, but I couldn’t get a read on how guilty he would turn out to be. Not yet. He may not be the fifth god, but he had more secrets than just the ingredients in the sangria.
He took a long sip of his drink before replying. “A small museum overseas, in a town I couldn’t even begin to try to pronounce. Warzone, so they removed all the fine art to preserve it. He picked up the collection at a steal and brought it back to the US. When he contacted me to sell it, I thought there had been a mistake in the offer.”
“Sounds like he was eager to offload the paintings,” I said.
“Who wouldn’t be? We were lucky to have them.”
He gave me a wry, knowing smile that I didn’t understand.
“That’s true,” I said, dismissing his look, then took another miniscule sip of my drink. “Where did you say you were from again?”
I hoped to catch him off guard, to get him to slip up and reply.
Instead, his body slacked, just for a second. He flicked his gaze up at me, and there was a hollowness to his eyes.
Something familiar.
He powered back up, pushing to his feet. “Would you like more sangria?”
I glanced at my glass, and Randall’s, but we had barely touched our drinks.
“I will be right back,” he said as he shuffled off to the kitchen with his glass still sloshing with sangria.
When he was out of sight, Randall and I leaned close together.
“What the fuck was that?” Randall hissed, gesturing sharply toward the kitchen.
“I don’t know.” I kept my attention turned toward the doorway and tried to listen for his returning footsteps as we spoke in hushed tones. “If he’s the fifth god, couldn’t he still just make up a lie? Say he’s from Portland or something?”
We separated back into our professional poses, perched on the edge of the sofa, sangria glass in hand, as de Luca entered the living room. He ever so slowly lowered back into his chair, and I wanted to just shove him down into his seat so we could return to our back and forth.
He took a drink of his sangria and let out a refreshed sigh.
“So, did you have any dogs growing up?” I asked, as if it were pertinent to the discussion.
And it was.
He froze, halfway to lowering the sangria glass to the end table, and his face slacked. But then it was over and he said, “If you provide your information, I’ll happily pass on the word to my client. He will probably wish to have his legal team contact you on his behalf.” He gave us a genuine smile. “I wish I could help more than that.”
“Oh, you can, actually,” I said, leaning forward so I wouldn’t miss a moment of what was about to happen. “When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
There it was again—the blankness in his eyes; then, it was over, and he was back to himself.
I knew that look. I had seen it somewhere, and it had been important. A clue as to what de Luca was up to, what was happening around us.
Then, I remembered. That look, that dead-eyed stare. It was the same as the way Kurash looked at us.
Except Kurash hadn’t been dead. Kurash was fake, a construct created by the consortium.
I scanned de Luca, more slowly this time. On the outside, he was whole, complete. A charming man, but of course he had to be. He was the Seller, the person who had convinced seven people around the world to buy the portraits, dispersing them into society to await their seal to break.
As Kurash had been designed to be the loyal, ruthless leader of the consortium’s army, de Luca had been designed to sell the portraits, to get them far and wide as quickly as possible.
Vincenzo de Luca was a creation, brought into existence by the being who had breached the vault.
I checked that I could reach my magic before posing my next question. “How do you know Creed?”
De Luca did not blank out this time, but instead, the air around us shifted, and he leaned forward, lowering his glass of sangria to the table. His eyes narrowed.
“A mutual alliance, if you will,” he said. “Are you acquaintances of his?”
“We’ve met,” I said slowly, planting my feet solidly on the floor where I sat.
The knowing smile that slid into place on his lips made him no longer the friendly, mild-mannered art dealer.
“I did tell him she would get him in the end,” he said. “The Forgotten Daughter should have stayed as such.”
I perked up. Even though de Luca was a creation, he was still of flesh and blood. This conversation was no longer just vague backstory planted in his brain, left with gaping holes he could not reconcile. This was real information he had lived, real stories he had learned, real memories, unlike his grandmother and her secret sangria recipe.
“Why is that?” I asked. I had my own theories—like how her resurrection accidentally turned a woman into a monster—but he knew more. I wanted to pluck every real piece of fruit from his brain.
He picked up his sangria and held it to his face, but he only inhaled the scent.
“She was nothing but problems, from the beginning,” he said. “Always a source of strife. Her construction was the reason my creator was exiled from the valley.”
“Creator?”
I knew he meant the fifth god, the one who had threatened to tear apart the consortium before they fused together to seal their loyalty to one another, but I needed him to tell his story. I needed the truth, laid out.
“The Forgotten Daughter,” he said. A small tight smile flickered on his face at me, but it contained no humor. “She was his first creation. She became a goddess of her own right, the goddess of life, and the other four did not approve. They slayed her and cast him out of the valley. If they disapproved of my sister so much, I wonder how they would feel if they knew about me, about what I represent to my creator.”
“As much as it would be sure to dismay them, I couldn’t care less about the consortium’s opinion,” Randall said, and then tapped one finger on the rim of his sangria glass. “Why did Creed try to resurrect the Forgotten Daughter?”
“Humans and their plight for attention from the gods,” de Luca said, easing back in his chair. “They never grow tired of shouting into the void and listening for the echo. It was good timing, though, and I have my suspicions Creed was trying to get in permanently good graces with my creator.”
“By bringing back his first construct?” I asked, trying to find my point and get to it.
“Of course. My creator has been pushed into the shadows for too long, kept under threat by the consortium,” he said. “He waited centuries to find a way into the vault, and then the answer—it was just there, one day. By total accident, he found a way to free his disciples.”
I sat forward. “Wait, what?”
“He chose them each, hand selected,” de Luca said with a smile, as if talking about a newborn’s baptism and not the creation of monstrosities.
“And then he blessed them,” I muttered.
De Luca’s creator had been part of the five, a pantheon from the Indus Valley. The other four had blessed the waters, and their descendants were the common witches and mages of the world. Ones like Sasmita, like Adam, the mage in Haven Rock who had sacrificed himself trying to defeat the necromancer’s army.
But it seemed the consortium wasn’t the only one still handing out a care package here and there in the form of a godly blessing, direct from the manufacturer. While they had been more unified in their approach, forming the quorum and the Builders, the fifth god had been running amok, blessing over the years, Eliza Brown, Nikandros Remis, Uwe Visel, Yuto Takahashi, Faridoon Zadeh, and the two who remained free.
He had been single-handedly responsible for the witches and mages who became the dark ones. That said something about his choice in friends, but the story was still missing what had happened in the interim.
More importantly, we knew who we were up against.
“Where can I find your creator?” I asked. “Is he actually the eccentric recluse you claimed him to be?”
“If he wished to speak to you, he would make himself known,” he said. “For now, he walks among you, a mortal. His followers do his bidding.”
“Followers? Oh.” He didn’t mean the ones who he had blessed.
They hardly worshipped him or sought out his orders. They were free willed, using his gift to their own ends.
But the wielders continued to show up time and again. They had been seeking the dark witches and mages themselves, though I wasn’t sure how that all came together just yet.
“I think you are done here,” de Luca said evenly.
He made no move to see us out.
I held up my glass, trying to figure out where to place it, with the lack of a coffee table, then settled with lowering the glass to the floor, out of the way. Together, Randall and I stood, him leaving his glass next to mine, and silently, we headed for the door.
De Luca stared at us on the way out, but only sipped his sangria.
On the walk back to where we had left the motorhome around the corner at the end of the block, my mind reeled through what we had learned, and what it all meant.
The wielders worked for the fifth god, de Luca’s creator. They would be able to lead us to him. I wasn’t sure if that was a great idea, but we were idling, nearly resigned. We had lost the key to the vault—the reminder of Bhaskar hurt my heart—and we had run out of other options. Maybe it was time to get to the source.
I knew where to find the wielders. They showed up where the dark ones appeared.
We had to visit the site of the next dark mage. This time, we would not be hunting the dark one, though. This time, we would be picking up the trail to a rogue god, the man who had breached the vault and created de Luca. Once we saw the creator in all his glory, we would have a chance at figuring out how to defeat him—if it was possible to defeat a god.
I could take on the dark witches and mages he had blessed, but I already knew I had seen nothing yet.
I was no match for a god.
I was going to try, anyway.
8
We had barely climbed back into the motorhome when Otilia, waiting in the driver seat, started the engine. I jostled into the tall cabinet as she u-turned off the curb and headed toward the highway.
“Learn anything?” Amari asked from where she sat at the table.
A piece of paper with a detailed sketch of a man’s face spread in front of her, and a pencil lay next to where her hand rested near the drawing. Apparently, she could do more than paint.
“The seller was conjured by someone he called his creator,” I said, stumbling around the bags on the floor, and took the seat across from her. “As it turns out, his creator is the god who created the Forgotten Daughter.”
Amari’s hand hovered over the pencil before she plucked it up again. “I suppose we knew that, in the end. Not about the seller, but that it was all tied together. The fifth god has been known to cause trouble from time to time, but…not like this.”
Randall dropped onto the seat where Fiona still sat. “Seems he was searching for a way into the vault.”
I looked back at Amari. “If the seller knew how the fifth god got into the vault, he didn’t tell us, but he mentioned the dark ones. I guess they were the fifth god’s…chosen ones. He blessed them and that’s how they have undiluted magic. That’s what makes them so much more powerful.”
“It’s not the only thing, but it certainly helped a lot,” she said. She rolled the pencil back and forth between her thumb and forefingers, frowning down in thought. “My father hated the Dark Lands for two reasons. One, because the consortium had tricked him, at least he felt so—and in a way, they did. Lying by omission. Maybe they didn’t see it that way, but they were still responsible for what they said, and they never acknowledged how betrayed he felt to learn his opus was going to be used for punishment. But that brings us to the next part, the thing that really set him against the consortium.”
Randall joined us at the table, and I scooted over to make room for him. Sasmita lay with Chaand on the bed, but she was wide awake, paying close attention to what Amari divulged.
Sachin sat in the passenger seat, watching the world outside as Otilia drove us back through Texas, wherever she thought we were going.
I hadn’t quite revealed my big decision to track down the fifth god yet.
“So your father opposed the consortium?” I drummed my fingers on my thigh, under the table. “Is it possible that’s why they sentenced him to isolation in a pocket world?”
“Oh, I have no doubt they were relieved to find a reason to shut him up,” she said.
Her gaze lowered to the portrait she had sketched, and I realized the man bore a strong resemblance to her. She had drawn her father, no doubt, with everything happening putting him in the forefront again.
“What was he against, besides being tricked?” I prodded.
I could only imagine how much her chest ached as she retold this story, the horror she had lived through as a child, that she had lived with for centuries, but it was important to tell. We needed to know the truth, and of everyone, she held the most.
“As I mentioned, the consortium became judge, juror, and executioner. They reigned supreme over the descendants for thousands of years, but…” She tapped the tip of her pencil in the empty corner of the paper. “They lost control. Anyone who even defied them, who did anything the consortium found questionable, whether with good cause or not…”
“Into the Dark Lands they went,” I finished. “That’s why Sahir is there, because he made the medallions and they disagreed with his decision. I mean, I guess it was pretty dangerous—”
“The Bajeks,” Amari interrupted. “They did nothing wrong, but when the daughter tried to bottle enchanted herbal remedies to distribute to people—”
“They took her,” I said, my stomach sinking in on itself. “I guess, in a long-term kind of way, this is why magic isn’t used much, why we stopped coming forward. It’s why we stopped trying.”
“People feared the consortium, and my father hated that the pinnacle of their reign of terror was the existence of the Dark Lands,” Amari said. “There was no escaping it, once they locked you inside. No one returned, no one could speak from experience what it was like. It became synonymous with being forgotten in a dungeon, being cast into hell. The stories grew larger than what the Dark Lands really was like.”
“But something went wrong?” I asked, remembering earlier conversations about the Dark Lands. “What did they pin on your father?”
From the driver seat, Otilia spoke up. “It failed. A prisoner escaped.”
I swiveled around to look at her. “Who? The fifth god?”
“The first dark one they caught,” Otilia said. “The consortium believed he was a normal, disobedient descendant and they did what they did back then, and put him in the Dark Lands.”
Amari nodded. “He remained for centuries, ruling the Dark Lands as his magic surpassed everyone else there. He controlled everything. Then about fifteen hundred years ago, he got bored and left. Just walked right out of the Dark Lands, leaving the others trapped. He came for the consortium.”
“Guess that pissed them off,” I said, rubbing my hand over my sweaty forehead. I needed a bath, or at least another wash up at the sink. I nudged Randall to let me out, then pawed around in the drawer to find the face wash and lotion, and flipped on the sink. “Randall called it. While we were in the Dark Lands, he said something must have changed that gave the Fire Lords the upper hand. The Dark Lands throne, so to speak, had been vacated. It must have been every man, or at least tribe, for himself. But what happened to the original dark mage?”
“That’s Faridoon Zadeh,” Otilia said. “They caught him, eventually, but it didn’t happen overnight.”
“You caught him, you mean,” I said pointedly. I dipped my hands under the flowing faucet and, leaning down, splashed the lukewarm water onto my face.
