Haunted - By Kelley Armstrong Page 0,116

one has that power…or that right.”

Kristof shook his head in disgust. “Fine, then. Maybe you can’t compare lives, but I’m sure you can count, and two lives lost plus one destroyed must be worth more than a single loss.”

The youngest Fate appeared. “We can count, Kristof. Even me. It’s you who needs a lesson. Not in math, but in English. We didn’t say Trsiel may not kill the Nix while she’s in Jaime’s body, or that he will not. We said can not.”

“You mean it’s not possible,” I said. “Because Jaime’s innocent.”

The Fate nodded. “The Sword of Judgment cannot bring to justice the soul of an innocent.”

“But the soul isn’t innocent,” Kristof said. “The Nix—”

“The soul of the body still belongs to Jaime.”

“So now what?” I said. “Where does that leave us?”

“Exactly where you were,” the girl said. Then her lips twisted in a rueful semismile. “Only without the backup plan.”

“Great.”

The Fates called Trsiel in to join us then. The more brains we had working on this problem, the better.

The most obvious solution was to treat this as a normal case of spirit possession, and contact a few living necros to perform an exorcism. Problem was, as the Fates reminded us, this wasn’t a normal case of spirit possession because the Nix wasn’t a normal spirit. They were ninety-nine percent sure it would fail. By the time we tracked down and prepped a necromancer for the exorcism, if it didn’t work, it would be too late to try something else.

As long as we stayed in the throne room, plotting, we were operating on the Fates’ time, and only minutes would pass in the living world. But the moment we stepped into the living world, we were on our own, clock ticking.

“So we need to find a way to separate the Nix’s spirit from the body of her living partner,” I said. “And the only way to reliably do that is to use an angel’s sword…which won’t work in this case. So how the hell—?”

“There is another way,” the child Fate said.

“What?”

The young Fate began to shimmer, her body lengthening and aging, morphing into her middle sister, but in slow motion, as if fighting the change. A split-second burst of light, and the child stood there again, her face a grim mask of childish determination.

“There’s another way,” she said, words spilling out almost too fast to understand. “It’s been done before. The second seeker—”

“No!” Trsiel said. “We agreed—”

“You agreed what?” I said. “Are you telling me that after all this, you know another way?”

“No, I don’t.” He shot a scowl at the child Fate. “And neither does she.”

“But the other one does,” she said, chin lifting. “The second seeker.”

“You mean the angel you sent the second time?” I began, then stopped. “No, it wasn’t an angel, was it? It was a ghost. A man named Dachev. You sent him after the Nix and he caught her. Then she cut a deal, persuaded him to join her instead of turning her in.”

The youngest Fate’s mouth opened, but her middle sister took over before she could confirm it. I didn’t need that confirmation, though. One look at Trsiel’s face, and I knew I’d put the pieces in the right place.

I continued, “And if he wasn’t an angel, then he must have managed to separate the Nix’s spirit from her body without a Sword of Judgment. How?”

The Fate shook her head. “We don’t know, Eve. We only know that he did…and that things became much worse after that.”

“A problem some of us foresaw,” Trsiel said.

The Fate nodded. “Yes, Trsiel. We should have listened to those with a better understanding of such matters. We made a mistake, and we have paid for it.”

“Such matters…” I said. “You mean evil. This Dachev, the Nix didn’t tempt him into a partnership, did she? It was his idea.” I looked up at her. “Send a killer to catch a killer…and I’m not the first killer you’ve sent.”

39

IT SEEMS THAT AFTER JANAH’S SANITY-BUSTING BRUSH with the Nix, the Fates had decided that they needed a bounty-hunter with a better understanding of the Nix’s mind. So they’d reached into their darkest hell dimension, and plucked out a likely candidate, a supernatural serial killer who’d expressed contrition and remorse for his crimes. Andrei Dachev.

They then struck a deal with Dachev. If he caught the Nix for them, he would be rewarded. Not by becoming an angel—that was never an option. Instead, he would be transferred to a medium-security afterlife, one worse

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