within an hour – always, day or night – and so Darina dialed the number of the one that she thought of as the Principal Backer. Darina was not frightened of him; she was frightened of very little to do with men and women, although she found their capacity for self-destruction disturbing, but she was always careful around this Backer. He was so like herself and her kind that sometimes she wondered if he was really human at all, but she could detect no trace of otherness about him. Nevertheless, there was a difference to him, and she had never been able to penetrate his veneer and discover what lay beneath it.
He answered the phone on the second ring. The number was in the possession of only a handful of individuals, and used only when the seriousness of the situation warranted it.
‘Hello, Darina,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time, but I know why you’re calling.’
Thus it was that Darina learned of how Becky and Davis had met their ends. Becky had sent out a warning before she fled, but Darina’s call had gone to her home number on the assumption that she would still be recuperating: a minor lapse on Becky’s part, and understandable if she was running for her life.
The Collector had never moved against them in this way before. Oh, they knew that he suspected their existence, but the Backers had hidden themselves well, and Darina and the others were comfortable in the shadows. Darina understood then that Barbara Kelly had lied to her before she died. She had admitted to reaching out to the lawyer Eldritch and the old Jew, but she had assured Darina that she had offered only the promise of material, and not the material itself. Even when Darina took out her left eye as punishment for what she had done to her own sight, and threatened to leave her blind by cutting out the right as well, still Kelly denied that she had taken more than the first faltering footsteps toward repentance.
But the Collector could not have targeted Davis Tate without the list. On the other hand, Kelly would not have handed over the entire list to their enemies. It was her only bargaining tool. She would have tempted them with part of it, certainly no more than a page or two: a page to the Jew Epstein, perhaps, and a page to the Collector and his handler.
Just as the Collector had never declared outright war upon them, prevented from doing so by his own caution and their cleverness, they too had kept their distance from him. His was a minor crusade for the most part, a picking off of the vicious and the damned, although his victims had been growing in importance in recent years. The possibility of a strike against him had been mooted, but, as with her ambivalence toward the Principal Backer, the Collector presented a problem. What was he, exactly? What motivated him? He seemed to have knowledge of matters known only to Darina and her fallen brethren, and to share their comfort with the darkness, but he was an unknown quantity. So far, the advantages of removing him from the board had been outweighed by the risk of precipitating a violent reaction, whether from the Collector himself, if he survived such an attack, or from his allies.
And Darina had heard rumors about a detective, one who had crossed paths with those like her, although he remained of little concern to her. Selfishness and viciousness were the curse of her breed, so much so that many of them had forgotten their true purpose on this earth, so lost were they to wrath, and sorrow at all that they had sacrificed in their fall from grace. Even Brightwell had been driven by his own urges, his desire to unite the two halves of the being he worshiped, and he was among the best, and oldest, of them. When he had briefly blinked out of existence, his spirit separating from its host, she had experienced the pain of it so strongly that she had called out to him, willing him to come to her. She had felt his presence near to her, straining to remain close, and she had found a man that night, and in this stranger’s act of insemination, Brightwell had been reborn inside her.
But a crucial element was missing. Aspects of his true nature had manifested themselves early, almost as soon as he could walk, but he