Dark Cotillion (First in the Brenna Strachan Series) Page 2

  “Zealots,” Gabriel spit the word out as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. It probably did, when you thought about it.

  “I’ve been dealing with zealots, fanatics, and lunatics all my life. Not to mention my peers haven’t been real thrilled with me either.”

  Gabriel made a guttural sound and waved a hand in the air. I wasn’t entirely sure of its meaning, and I was guessing he wasn’t going to tell me either. He began to pace around the room.

  “Really?” I frowned again, this time much deeper. I had been caged inside my condo for three days with the Angel, and he had been pissed at me for most of it. I could understand that he was under an enormous amount of pressure. It was very hard to play bodyguard to the daughter of Lucifer, when she was being uncooperative. Worse yet, I had been slightly teasing him off and on, using my mother’s Witch powers as a form of torture. It was cruel, I knew it, but I was bored as hell, and going out of my fucking mind inside the tiny condo. It had never felt so small in the eight years I had inhabited it.

  The Angel had presence though. He was about seven feet tall, with wings that were even wider when unfurled. He was also a very dominant male, too many years of being the alpha of his breed.

  I was a very open minded, stubborn woman, who was about to come into all my little Demon powers. I was very much the poster child for equal rights in the 21st century. I was female, half-Human, half Demon, with very little going for me, except that I could fire a gun really well and my parents seemed to be exciting and important people.

  “Damn it!” Gabriel suddenly blurted out. His voice boomed against the walls and reverberated into my eardrums, creating a fake echo.

  “What?” I asked, trying to shake the shock of the sound out of my head.

  “Can’t you feel it?”

  “No, what I feel is you acting like a caged animal, and unfortunately, I’m trapped in the same damn cage. Your anger is overwhelmingly strong and seems unbalanced.”

  “Unbalanced?” Gabriel stopped pacing and looked at me.

  “Yes, unbalanced.” I sighed heavily and lit a cigarette. The bonus of being immortal was no cancer, but other things weren’t so great. I am small for a demon. For eternity, I was stuck at five feet, five inches tall and 397 pounds. My father tipped the scales at over 1000 pounds and managed to be over seven foot tall, not counting his horns. Most of my siblings were somewhere between six and seven feet tall and all weighed well over six hundred pounds. However, once a demon hits fifteen years old, they stop growing, period.

  In addition, while most Demons were red, green or blue, I was purple. Not a deep, rich purple or even a dark, shimmery purple, but a soft, pastel purple, lilac to be exact.

  This was where half-breeds had problems. Demons were denser than humans were. Everything was slightly larger in a Demon and more compact. The bone density of a Demon was nearly three times that of a Human. When Demons said they were big boned, they meant it. On top of that, most Demons had an impressive rack of horns. Not like deer horns, but like elephant tusks that could weigh nearly a thousand pounds all by themselves. My father kept his ground down using to make them manageable.

  My pitiful horns might weigh 9 ounces. That means, not only do I have a weight complex, but a height complex and horn envy. However, to be fair to Demons of all types and myself, I only wear a size 18 in regular women’s clothing, a standard used only for those who insist on buying clothes out of department stores, instead of boutiques that cater to the Elder Breeds. My measurements, since I was 15 years old, have been and will always be 38-32-36. Therefore, I am huge for a Human, and tiny for a Demon.

  My scale is set to tell me that I weigh 180 pounds, never an ounce more, never an ounce less. If my father steps on my scales, they will tell him that he weighs 180 pounds. If my 145-pound mother steps on the scales, they will tell her that she weighs 180 pounds. That is one of my vanities, but since I have very few, I allow it. My parents indulge it, because they know I have “identity issues.”

  The only thing I could claim from my mother was the crown of black hair on top of my head, and the fact that I managed to have black eyebrows. This was kind of fantastic, since Demons were hairless, and the hair hid the very pathetic horns that raised a whole half-inch from the top of my head. However, that was where the hair stopped. I would never even remotely pass as Human, because I didn’t have arm hair or any other body hair. My eyes are the same color as my skin, with a single red ring around the iris. My pupil is oblong, not round, and is actually lighter than my irises, which gives me a creepy blind look. I can see wonderful in the dark though.

  “Good grief, Brenna.”

  “Yes, Gabriel, I am a giant pain in the ass, and no, there is probably nothing that anyone can do about it.”

  “I hate when you do that.” Gabriel glared at me.

  “Do what?” My mother’s a Witch, very powerful actually. My family is a bit of a cliché, a Witch married to a Demon, but hey, it’s 2010, so a little cliché is understandable. It became completely ironic when you consider that Gabriel is one of my father’s closest friends.

  “Read my mind.”

  “I can’t read minds. I’m not a Djinn.” I put my feet up on the couch. “I read emotions, but not minds.”

  “Whatever you read, it’s occasionally very irritating.”

  “Funny, I think it’s irritating all the time.” I sighed again. “Gabriel, would you just take a couple of deep breaths and calm down. You’re really killing me over here.”

  Anger is a very strong emotion, it is hard to mask, even harder to ignore. It spills out of a being, like a river breaching a levee and engulfing everything around it. Put a Witch in the middle and they can feel nothing else. It covers all other emotions, only rage is worse, but that is usually reserved for crazy beings.

  “Sorry,” Gabriel sat down again.

  “So, do you want to tell me why you are angry, or am I supposed to guess?”

  “Do you really need to be told?” His eyes flashed quickly. Gabriel does amazing things with light and its perception. When he loses control, his eyes become completely white, unable to keep light reflecting at the right wavelength. I have only seen him lose complete control once. The room went dark and he glowed like a Chinese lantern, a pure, shimmering white being, with nothing but rage flowing off of him. It had been so thick that I had gagged on it, literally.

  “Well, if I thought I could guess, I would have put it right yesterday, so that I wouldn’t have had to feel you leaking out all over the place.”

  “A member of the Council is going to appeal to have you put to death, and you are treating it like it happens every day.”

  “Well, it sort of does happen every day, Gabriel.” I puckered my face, feeling my forehead and eyes wrinkle. “Chiron has been trying to put me to death since I was born.”

  “Yes, but you’ve never been mortal before, and we would never ask an Overlord to kill their own child,” Gabriel responded, anger flowed again.

  “True, but I believe the Council will agree with you, my father, and the other Overlords about the absurdity of putting me to death before I’ve come into any powers, let alone mythic powers foretold in some bizarre prophecy three thousand years before my mother was even born.”

  “You don’t understand prophecy very well.”

  “Sure I do, I just understand rational behavior some as well. The Council is predominantly made up of rational beings. A few Centaurs and a handful of other beings are going to have to come up with some really good arguments, to convince them that the rational thing is to put me to death.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “We deal with it,” I looked at him. “Gabriel, honestly, do you believe that the other eleven Overlords and eighty-four lieutenants are going to allow something as irrational as an execution without a crime to happen?”

  “Eighty-three,” Gabriel corrected, “you can’t vote on the issue.”

  “Fine, eighty-three.” I shrugged. “In the millions of years
that the Council has been in existence, how many times have the lieutenants not voted the same way as the Overlord?”

  “Three,” Gabriel responded.

  “Okay, three, and of those, how many had enough to gain the majority?”

  “None.”

  “So, I’ve already got a head start. We know that Ba’al, Anubis, Fenrir, Morgana, Vishnu, you, and my father, are all going to vote against Chiron. Most of their lieutenants will vote in line with their Overlord. Of the ones that might vote against their Overlords, most will vote with them simply because it’s Chiron making the motion, and we all know that Centaurian prophecy is rarely 100% accurate. The prophecy says that a lavender colored Demon, born of Lucifer and a Witch, will gain powers unseen before on this planet and bring about the end of the world. First off, I’m not lavender, I’m lilac. Second, even if I did manage to achieve some sort of new power, it doesn’t necessarily mean complete destruction of the planet. Others have been born who are unique, and they didn’t destroy the world. Third, I kind of like the planet, I do not see myself willingly destroying it. Furthermore, while my siblings are sort of different, I’m very fond of my parents, my friends, Elders, Humans, and pets, with the exception of very yippy dogs and anything that looks like a mouse. I do not think those two irritations are enough to send me over the edge. While there is the possibility that I will develop Maturing Madness, it is rare in Demons, even half-breeds like myself, and it has never happened with my father’s bloodline. No cousins and siblings that have matured suffered from it. One of my uncles might have it, but it could just be that he is a bit of an asshole and it has nothing to do with his brain rotting during Maturing.”

  “Beezel,” Gabriel smiled at me.

  “Well, he is definitely nuttier than a fruit cake, but I think that it has more to do with my father being more powerful than him, even though he is the oldest.” I shrugged. “We can’t be absolutely, positively sure of this, since there isn’t a single creature on the planet that remembers any of the first of the bloodline maturing.”

  “So you aren’t worried?”

  “I’m terrified. A group of friends, a larger group of acquaintances, and some that I do not even know are deciding my fate, but honestly, I do not foresee something as insane as this passing the Council. If it does, I think the zealots will use it as cannon fodder against us.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to go to bed. Tomorrow, I’m going to go before the Council. The day after that, I’m going to attend that horrifying Maturing Party that my mother planned. The day after that, I will go back to being sequestered and protected until the Maturing ends. After that, I’m going back to work. Chasing down bad guys is far more my style than the rest of this crap.”

  “Optimist.”

  “You’re an Angel, aren’t you required to be an optimist?” I asked him ruefully.

  “Nope, it is not in the breed description.” Gabriel yawned again.

  “Obviously, you need to go to bed as well.” I pointed to the spare room. “I’m not Maturing yet, which means I’m still immortal, which means that you can sleep for a couple of hours. I have a feeling the next forty days or so are going to be terribly long for all of us.”

  “Fine,” Gabriel stood up, he motioned me forward. As I moved to my room and started to close the door, I heard his favorite parting shot at me. “Good night, Demon.”

  “Good night, Angel,” I responded cheerily as the latch caught. I knew he had heard me. He could hear a pin drop in a crowded room full of dancers clicking wooden heels on a wooden floor.

  I changed into my pajamas quickly and climbed into bed. I wasn’t nearly as calm as I had pretended to be. Rational did not trump fear, ever, and there were those that actually feared what I might become if left alive. I couldn’t change their minds any more than they would be able to convince me that mice were not evil.

  Chapter Two

  I waited until I could feel the delivery boy dropping off the standard half dozen cake donuts on my doorstep from the bakery below. Once that had been dropped and his energy had moved out of the hall and into an elevator, I climbed from bed. I should have been exhausted, nauseated, and anxious. I wasn’t. I was calm. Tonight, I would probably sleep like the dead, with a house full of bodyguards.

  As I exited the bedroom, I heard the front door close. Gabriel had fallen into a routine as well, picking up the unhealthy donuts and putting them on the table. He tried to balance it out by adding orange juice, bacon, and eggs to the mix. I stuck with the donuts and a glass of whole milk. If you can’t gain or lose weight, you might as well enjoy the food you toss into your gullet. Besides, as a Demonling, I needed about 4,000 calories a day, hard to get that from salad every meal.

  “Don’t forget, you have an exam after the Maturing,” Gabriel reminded me, as he had every morning for the past couple of days.

  “I haven’t forgotten and I still think it’s ridiculous,” I quipped.

  “Ridiculous or not, now that we do not all live in a small cluster with imaginary creatures, the exam is important. You never know when a dragon or some other beast is going to go rogue, leave the island, and start terrorizing the world.”

  “Yes, yes,” I selected a white cake donut with chocolate icing and crushed peanuts. “Sirens, harpies, dragons, trolls, and chupacabras, are just the tip of the iceberg for things that could cause havoc in the normal world.”

  “There is no such thing as a chupacabra.” Gabriel handed me a plate. I accepted it and set it off to the side. I had a napkin under the donut, no reason to dirty up a perfectly good plate.

  At some point during my adult life, my mother had decided I needed a set of fine dining china. She failed to realize that I did not own dinnerware as a general rule. I don’t cook. I don’t like to cook. I hate to eat what I cook. I have some issues, particularly with meat. If it isn’t a bagged salad with the salad dressing included, or microwave popcorn, I’m probably not going to cook it. Cooking is overrated for me. It’s hard to keep groceries when I might be called away to a crime at any time, in any part of the world. Food spoils. I keep soda, milk, a few munchies, and popcorn. My freezer is barren; I don’t even keep ice cube trays. If I am away for more than three or four days, my mother comes by and tosses out the milk. She’ll put a new gallon in there if she knows when I am returning.

  Besides, there are lots of facilities to fill my need for food. In New KC, there are places that go to other places, pick up food orders, and deliver them to your house. All you need is a phone or an internet connection. I have both. Some of them even offer reward programs. Hell, there are people who will deliver my groceries and pick up items like toothpaste, cigarettes, and anything else you might desire. The best part is that they are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The need to go to a store has been completely removed. If I’m feeling energetic, I go downstairs and get something from the Subway Sandwich shop, and that way, I can say I walked a few extra steps.

  Since I hate to shop almost as much as I hate to cook, I love the age of technology. Most Elders are sort of bothered by it; it takes a while to adjust, but me… I think it’s the greatest thing ever to happen. The internet is an amazing place where food comes at the click of a button. Most Elders have to adjust to the light and the constant hum of the world. I didn’t have their super-hearing, so I barely noticed it.

  Gabriel again tried to feed me a healthy, balanced breakfast, which I managed to ignore. Finishing three donuts and two glasses of whole milk in the time, it took him to eat his bacon, eggs, toast, and orange juice.

  I kept waiting for my stomach to sour. It didn’t. This meant that either I was in complete denial about the day ahead, or I had accepted my fate without realizing it. Since I wasn’t good at acceptance, I was guessing it was denial.

  We finished eating in silence. Gabriel’s magic rolling off of him, filling the room. He was not as calm as I was. This would have been a sign if I had been a Centaur, but I wasn’t. I was a Demon and Demo
ns didn’t read signs or omens. They didn’t have the right mojo for it or something. Even when a Centaur was giving prophecy or revealing signs and deciphering omens, Demons tended to be skeptical.

  Gabriel opened his mouth, but before he could speak, there was a knock on the front door. I felt my brother, Elijah, on the other side. This got an eyebrow raise from me. That I felt like an outsider around my older siblings was no secret. Eli was the oldest, born in 1949, making him roughly 60 years old. He didn’t look a day over 30.

  I got up from the small kitchen table and went to the door. Eli smiled at me as I opened it.

  “Come in,” I offered my brother entrance to my condo by moving out of his way.

  Eli looks like our father in a lot of ways. His skin is reddish-brown. His eyes are brown with a red ring around the elliptical iris. He has no hair, and an impressive rack of horns that stand four feet or so from his scalp. However, he has our mother’s smile and a kindness in his eyes.

  “Brenna,” he nodded to me as he came into the condo, “it’s been a while.”

  “Mother’s Day,” I admitted.

  “How are you holding up?” He asked with genuine concern in his voice.

  “I’m doing fine, I don’t think it has actually set in that today could be one of the last days I walk on the planet.”

  “Hard to imagine death when the screamingly large print says you’re immortal,” he sat down in one of the recliners.

  “What can I do for you, Elijah?”

  “Not let Chiron get to you. Not give in and give up.” He finally frowned. “I think it would break dad.”

  “Are you worried that it is a possibility?”

  “Yes, I am. You are meant for something, Brenna. I don’t know what, but something. We all know it and feel it. We are all filled with dread today.”