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I turned my focus back to the very thing that brought us here in the first place. The small and crammed attic space was a disaster. There were over a hundred dusty paintings placed around the room without any obvious way to organize or display them.
Only one of those paintings really grabbed my attention, though.
I walked over to the ruined canvas, the golden frame cracked as it leaned against the broken wall. Wind whipped in through the window. Sounds of the city drifted in: honks of traffic, screeches from a bus applying the brakes, the different pieces of conversation that managed to carry up to our level.
I ignored all of it, focusing in on the portrait. From the large shreds, I could see that it was the painting I’d been looking for, one of the three Moriarty paintings seemingly lost to time. I’d picked up on a lead that a recently deceased art collector had one of the paintings locked up in an attic, and judging by the three cultists and one missing ice dragon, I could see that I wasn’t the only one sent on this lead.
But it had been a fake. The real paintings were known to be indestructible and this one was torn straight down the center.
A sound from downstairs made me whip toward the door. It wouldn’t take long before someone called the Enforcers over whatever chaos they heard upstairs. I was in the right, and everything that happened here was through self-defense, but explaining that would take me much longer than necessary. Besides, just because I didn’t do anything sketchy here meant they couldn’t find something sketchy I’ve done recently.
I was a private detective with a janky moral compass and a smile that could get me out of the messiest situations I could put myself in.
Of course I’d done some shady shit in my not-so-distant past.
I gave the room one last look-over. Painting after painting after painting, most of them covered. For the briefest of moments, I thought I saw a shimmer on the wall where two large frames leaned. The grunt from the fae and the increasing sounds from downstairs had me decide it was my time to go.
I carefully stepped over the crimson robes and puddles of blood, reaching the door without leaving tracks.
I pulled out my phone and dialed the most recent number: Davie Montes.
“Hi, Davie, no, I don’t have the painting. Can we meet in my office? Great. I’ll see you there,” I said, hurrying down the creaking stairs and reaching the main landing just as the landlord ran into the stairwell, shouting about all the noise complaints.
I didn’t give her much chance to stop and question me, hurrying out through the lobby and going straight to my car, miraculously parked at a meter right outside of the building.
I was in the Harmony District. They had mastered stunning and organic-looking city architecture but couldn’t crack the lack of street parking that afflicted the entirety of Los Angeles, nor could they make the street parking signs any less complicated to decipher.
Which… fuck.
I snatched the ticket off my windshield and slumped into my driver’s seat, pushing the mountain of notes and receipts onto the floor of the passenger side and dropping the ticket there too.
It had been a long day, and it still wasn’t even halfway over. I’d deal with all that trash later.
As I pulled out of my parking spot, I found myself leaning forward and glancing up at the sky. There was no way the dragon would still be around, but I couldn’t lie and say I wasn’t hoping he was.
If only so I could flip him off for trying to kill me.
And then blow him a kiss for trying to save me.
Chapter 3
Brotherly Advice
Maddox
My mind spun. What the fuck kind of mess did I just fly myself into?
The Crimson Ring?
My frost-dusted blue wings flapped through the air, the sprawling city of Los Angeles unraveling underneath me. It was a city full of sex, sin, fame, and now, apparently, cultists who were dedicated to bringing on the end of the world as we knew it. That was their sole mission. Well, at least to those who weren’t members.
For the actual cultists, they saw their mission as being one of rebirth. They were hell-bent on bringing back Niazatos, the Chaos King. He was a sinister culmination of everything terrible and monstrous in this world. A deity that thirsted and fed off needless chaos and endless pain. Under his reign, the skies were permanently red, heavy clouds full of blood that would fall down and create rivers like veins and arteries.
And that was just the weather. Forget about the fact that he would have his ravenous Shades—beasts with long arachnid-like limbs and bodies made of inky-black shadow—tearing through the streets, pulling mothers and babies from their homes and bringing them back to the torture chambers, where Niazatos would feast off the cries until there were none left.
