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“And what are you?” Raj was the one who asked the question.
“We were born with the legacy of magic.”
I didn’t need a translation—this Culhua cult were witches. Witches who at least believed themselves to be the heirs of sacrificial Aztec priests.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Or Quetzal-fucking-cóatl.
Pick your favorite goddamn deity.
14
We’d endedup at Beyond the Veil until rather late—almost ten, in fact—trying to put together the pieces of what Taavi could tell us about Aztec rituals with what Ward had managed to forcibly extract from Benavente, who had gone all-in on her dedication to her husband’s ostensible Panamanian ancestors. Most of what we’d determined was that these people had taken a sharp left turn somewhere around delusional, meaning that their rituals were either barely or not at all identifiable with what Taavi understood were actual Aztec beliefs and practices.
So they were making things up—orsomebodyat some point in the historical line had started making things up—which left us at pretty much shit-all in terms of predicting what they were doing or why. But at least we’d found a couple connections through Annabelle’s husband, Julio Benavente, that seemed promising in the leads department.
Julio had family that apparently still owned an exports business in Panama City and had fostered a connection to the US starting with the construction of the Panama Canal at the start of the twentieth century. It had seemed a little suspicious to me that these Culhua people would have Panamanian export connections while one of our supposed Ordo victims, Ian Whitehead, was coincidentally an importer working with goods out of somewhere in South America.
Doc had refused to let me dig up the entire family going back to the creation of the Canal—or, rather, refused to let me convince Ward to summon Julio Benavente’s progenitors with the argument that disturbing the long-dead was rude when we didn’t actually know that there was any reason they were involved.
I’d tried to argue that if the Benaventes were in this Culhua thing, then their ancestors also might have been, and Taavi had agreed that might be the case, given that the origins of their beliefs, if not the ritual practices themselves, went back thousands of years, so it wasn’t like it was Wicca, which had showed up in the middle of the twentieth century.
Doc’s answer had been that if we had more evidence of that, we’d deal with it then.
So I didn’t get to talk to grandpa and great-grandpa Benavente.
We did get an absurd amount of information on the Benavente family business, which focused on teak furniture and raw lumber, but also included some amount of gemstones that seemed to me to be not entirely legal. But that wasn’t why we were talking to good old Julio, so I just filed that little bit of information away.
The really interesting part was that Benavente admitted to knowing notIanWhitehead, but a Douglas Whitehead who had been the company’s previous owner. Douglas had died eight years prior from a stroke. Some quick googling confirmed that Douglas had been Ian’s father.
Andthatgave us a link between at least one Ordo victim and the Culhua.
The problem was that even though we now had a link there, I didn’t have access to the kinds of resources that I needed to easily make the link between the Culhua and either Faith Oldham or Richard Bazan, and Benavente genuinely didn’t recognize either name.
But we were one step closer—we knew that therewasa link between a member of the Culhua and one of our victims. Andthatsuggested that the Ordo might be targeting the Culhua.
Unfortunately, this didn’t help us locate the Culhua’s next victim or the members of the Ordo who were still alive and unincarcerated and fucking shooting people.
It bothered me that I didn’t have names for any of them. That we thought we’d identified the full Ordo two years ago, but we somehow missed some. At least the bullet-maker.
And, if he wasn’t the bullet maker, also a probably-white dude around six feet, two-hundred pounds, which meant that we’d missed more than one Ordo member. I definitely didn’t like that option better.
I frowned, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. Beside me, Taavi was quiet, but I could feel his eyes on me.
He’d taken the bus downtown, so I was taking him home. But I didn’t want to. I wanted—
“Taavi?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you—” I swallowed, keeping my eyes on the road ahead, mostly because if I didn’t look at Taavi, maybe he wouldn’t notice how nervous he was making me. “Do you want to come back to my place for a bit? I think I have ice cream in the freezer…” It was a pathetic reason, and I knew it.
“I don’t need ice cream,” Taavi replied, his voice soft, but steady. “But I’d like to meet Pet.”
I couldn’t help the smile that slid over my face. “That works for me.”
* * *
