“We got more than a week until the Blue Moon. No sweat.”
He smiled. “Your first mistake was assuming he’d wait until the full moon. The stunt he paid me to pull at the festival was just the beginning of his plans.”
The uniform came in to take the guy away. I held up a hand. “Hold on. What else do you know?”
O’Lachlan shook his head. “I know he’s too smart to trust me with information you could blackmail out of me before he wants you to know it.” The guard led him to the door, but just before he walked through he paused and looked back with a smile. “If I were you, I’d get as far from the city as I could before Halloween. Because the devil’s coming to settle accounts with the sinners of Babylon.”
Chapter Seventeen
October 24
First Quarter
Morales’s biceps bulged. He hesitated at the top of the arc. Then… boom! Wood shards exploded everywhere. A chorus of shouts. “MEA!”
Guns poised, we crashed into the small space like a force of nature. What probably looked like chaos was actually a carefully orchestrated maneuver. We each had a job to do. Morales was the ram man, and Shadi and I were the second wave, pushing forward through the apartment to clear rooms. Normally we would have had more backup go with us on a raid, but Gardner hadn’t been too eager to ask Eldritch for favors.
After the meeting with O’Lachlan, we’d put together the raid as quickly as possible. Gardner handled calling US Attorney Stone about securing a warrant for Dionysus’s place. The mayor’s dictate that Dionysus was enemy number one in Babylon greased the wheels, but it still took a few hours to get everything in place. We opted for an early morning raid because we were more likely to catch Dionysus at home at the butt crack of dawn than during prime night hours. We were at the door bright and early with a signed warrant and enough weaponry to take down an entire coven of junkie wizards.
Off the front door was a long, narrow hallway. I hated hallways because it meant there were usually lots of doors for perps to jump out of, like that FireArms Training Simulator at the academy. Any second a masked gunman or a five-year-old could pop out of those doors and I’d have to make a hair-trigger decision whether they lived or died.
The first door revealed a small bedroom that contained no furniture. The walls, however, had plenty going on. Every inch of wall space was covered in a pornographic collage. Interspersed among the T&A display were headlines about the incident in Pioneer Square, as well as pictures of Mayor Owens, John Volos, Aphrodite Johnson, Harry Bane, and several members of the city council.
While Shadi got my back at the door, I looked in the closet. There I found overturned boxes with nudie magazines, dildos, and lots of electronic devices I couldn’t immediately identify. What I didn’t find was Dionysus. “Clear!” I shouted.
She rolled out the door to move on to the next room. I followed, gripping my gun tighter. With each space we cleared, the chances of finding our guy in the next room rose.
The second bedroom was a mess. The mattress was overturned and the stuffing spilled out like entrails. The bedside table held an overflowing ashtray and empty wine bottles. The drawer hung out from the front and its contents were piled on the floor. The closet here held the satyr costume I’d seen Dionysus wearing at the festival, plus a few boxes of ammo and empty potion ampoules.
Morales joined us when he moved back into the hall. While we advanced toward the living room at the back of the hall, my brain buzzed. Keeping an eye out for attackers, in my head I was cataloging the scene for clues about what we might find farther in.
Up ahead, the living room and kitchen area were accessed through an archway. Light from two windows on the far wall sparked off dust motes. The couch’s cushions were askew, like someone had wrestled on them—or spent a restless night sleeping there. To the left a breakfast bar separated the living room from the small galley-sized kitchen. Every cabinet in the place was open, and all the contents lay on the linoleum. An overturned distilling apparatus dominated the counters below. It wasn’t a professional setup by a long shot, but a quick glance told me this guy knew his way around a cook.
“Clear!” Morales called. He lowered his weapon a fraction and cursed. “We missed him.”
I sighed and used the back of my hand to wipe the sweat off my brow. “Maybe O’Lachlan was telling the truth about Dionysus moving out?”
Morales shook his head and executed a fuck-if-I-know shrug. He spoke into his vest mike. “Mez! We need you up here to sweep for potions!”
“Ten-four,” came the reply.
We wanted Mez to sweep before we touched anything because sometimes wizards booby-trapped their homes with potions to incapacitate police in case they got raided. The kitchens and bathrooms were usually especially vulnerable to these booby traps because wizards liked to protect their cooking areas. Given what we’d seen so far, Dionysus seemed the type.
Shadi let her assault rifle slide down to hang from the strap from her shoulder. “Anyone else thinking this place is a little too messy?”
Morales crossed his arms and shrugged. “The guy’s a slob.”
She shook her head with a frown. “Nah, you didn’t see the bedroom. Mattress was cut open.”
I paused and looked around the space with new eyes. Now that she mentioned it, I realized the couch cushions weren’t just sloppy, but also could have been hastily thrown back on. Walking toward the furniture, I used a gloved hand to lift one of the pillows. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?” Morales snapped.
I held up the pillow with one hand and pointed to what I’d found with the other. “It’s been cut open, too.”
He and Shadi came to take a closer look. “Someone’s been looking for something,” she said.
I dropped the pillow and looked around again. This time I noticed a gateleg table sitting beneath the bank of windows. Moving closer, I realized there was a slip of paper and a small bunch of flowers lying in the sun.
“Guys,” I said. I didn’t touch the paper, but the words written on it were clear: Ravens who fly too close to the sun always get burned.
“Looks like we weren’t the first ones to find this place,” Shadi said.
“Any idea what the plant is?” Morales asked me.
The plant beside the message had little starburst clusters of white flowers. I didn’t recognize the species, but I was willing to bet six months’ pay I knew which garden it had come from.