The Valley of Flames Read online

  The Valley of Flames

  Book 4 in the Moriarty’s Men series

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  First Digital Edition, 2019

  Copyright © 2019 Eva Chase

  Cover design: Deranged Doctor Design

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-989096-46-8

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-989096-47-5

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Cruel Magic excerpt

  About the Author

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  Chapter One

  Jemma

  The hotel suite was perfectly still, perfectly silent. As it should be, considering I’d booked every room on this floor, the one below, and the one above, and left strict instructions that staff were to stay clear unless called for. Ensuring that level of service and discretion hadn’t been cheap, but what had I spent all this time building my wealth for if not this moment?

  This moment when I might not only get to avenge my sister but also save her.

  The posh Tokyo executive hotel held all dark wood, black leather, and tan walls, soothingly refined. It was almost a shame pushing all the living room furniture off to the sides in a jumble to clear the densely woven carpet in the middle.

  Bash let out a grunt as he heaved the sofa the rest of the way over, the ample muscles in his shoulders bulging. My right-hand man eyed the space we’d opened up skeptically. “Are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable on the bed?”

  “The point isn’t for me to be comfortable.” I gave the coffee table one last shove for good measure. “Ideally my body should remain on as level a surface as possible. Even a firm mattress will have some give. Anyway, I won’t be conscious to care. Why shouldn’t you have a proper place to sleep?”

  Bash’s expression turned even more incredulous when he raised his light green eyes to stare at me. “As if I’m going to sleep while you’re wandering around in whatever hell those monsters live in.”

  “It might take me a while,” I said. “You’ll need to rest sometime. Besides, if something goes wrong for me, there won’t be anything you can do about it. I’ll be fighting my own battles. Your most important job is making sure no one disturbs me on this plane of existence.”

  “And reapply the dressing you talked about as necessary.”

  I shrugged. “It’ll fade slowly. Maybe you shouldn’t take a full nine hours all at once, but a few hours won’t be critical. The ceremonial preparations are complicated to set up, but once they’re in place, there’s not much else to do.”

  Satisfied with the state of the room, I went back to the laptop I’d left open on the marble counter in the kitchenette to check the courier’s website. “All we need is for that last delivery to get to us… And it should be here within the hour, or someone will be getting a phone call they won’t enjoy.”

  “I’m sure it’ll turn up.” Bash sat himself down on one of the stools along the counter and ran his hand over the black stubble shading his tan scalp. He nodded to the computer. “Have you looked up the UK news to see—”

  “No,” I said, cutting him off. “I know what I intended. I don’t need some outside account of the incident.”

  If my plans in Scotland hadn’t fulfilled my intentions accurately, I couldn’t do anything about that fact now. What happened to Sherlock and the rest of the London trio—the three crime-fighters I’d somehow ended up letting into my life, my mission, and to some extent my heart—didn’t matter anymore. It couldn’t matter, not when Olivia’s life might hang in the balance.

  I’d failed my little sister once before. I’d thought she’d died because I hadn’t come back for her at our family’s commune quickly enough, because I hadn’t been able to escape with her in the first place. She’d deserved so much better… She deserved every particle of attention and concern I had in me until I brought her safely home.

  My tongue slid against the backs of my teeth with the urge to suck on a sugar cube. The sweetness might have brought a tiny bit of comfort, but I didn’t know how it might affect the ceremony ahead.

  “How are you going to look for your sister once you’re in that place?” Bash asked. “You’re going to be on their turf—what’s to stop them from capturing you however they captured her?”

  “I’ll figure it out once I’m there. She’s my sister—we have a connection. It shouldn’t be too difficult.” I hoped. I’d never ventured into the realm of the shrouded folk before, and the few respected cult elders who’d gotten to make that journey once or twice had stayed tight-lipped about their exclusive experience. I didn’t know what the place even looked like.

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely certain that the ritual I was preparing was a perfect match for the ones I’d witnessed parts of in childhood. It’d been a long time. If my memory had failed me, I’d just have to track down some cult member who could give me the proper instructions with the right motivation.

  “And the rules the shrouded folk follow when it comes to human beings should still apply whatever plane we’re on,” I added. “They can attack me, but they can’t lay any claim over my soul without my agreement.”

  Bash grimaced. “And I’m supposed to be okay with the idea of them attacking you?”

  I gave him a fond if slightly exasperated look. The ex-military sniper turned hitman had been my closest companion for the last several years—employee, friend, and recently lover. Though we didn’t talk about feelings often, I knew how deep his devotion to me ran. Since our relationship had taken a more intimate turn, though, this protective streak had been coming out more and more often.

  “You should know better than anyone that I can defend myself just fine,” I said.

  “These creatures don’t fight fair.”

  “And neither do I.” I reached out to grasp his hand on the countertop. “I know the idea of all these supernatural horrors is pretty new for you. I know you’d come with me, guns blazing, if you could. But I need you here, and I know these fiends well enough to maneuver around them. I won’t be looking for a fight. As soon as I’ve got my sister, I’m getting out of there as quickly as I can.”

  “I’ll do everything you’ve asked me to do,” Bash muttered. “I still don’t like that you have to take this step at all.”

  “But I do have to. You understand that, don’t you?” I squeezed his fingers. “You took a big risk to save your younger siblings way back when. And they weren’t in anywhere near the kind of danger Olivia is. She must have already endured so much… I can’t leave her in their clutches one second longer than I can avoid.”

  Bash’s face tensed. For a seco
nd I was worried I’d managed to offend him by mentioning his younger brother and sister. It’d been a rare moment of openness when he’d told me about how he’d brought them to live with their grandparents away from their abusive dad when he was only thirteen. He didn’t generally like to talk about his childhood.

  He exhaled slowly and shifted into his Shakespeare-quoting voice with its hint of irony. “‘Truth is truth to the end of reckoning.’ You’ve got me there.”

  “Imagine what the Bard would have made of this storyline.”

  “It’d have given him plenty of material, that’s for sure.” Bash managed a smile. “I’m still hoping it’ll turn out to be a comedy rather than a tragedy.”

  “Well, there’s not much the shrouded folk hate more than being laughed at.”

  Bash’s phone vibrated in his pocket with a faint hum. He took it out. “Yes, he can come on up.” His amusement faded as he put the phone away. “That last delivery is here.”

  My pulse skipped a beat. For all I’d talked to him with total confidence, I was nervous about this trip too. But there was no delaying it.

  I shut the laptop. “I’ll get the rest of the supplies.”

  As Bash accepted the box from the delivery guy at the door, I spread a spotless white sheet on the living room floor. Then I turned the air conditioning up so the suite would be appropriately cool by the time everything else was ready.

  Bash brought the box over to the kitchen. I’d already gotten out a large glass serving bowl. I plopped in the softened beeswax and hemp oil I’d already acquired, tossed in a baggie of lavender, and dug into the box for the other herbs that would go into this concoction.

  The final mixture let off a pungent, almost chemical smell as I mashed the dried leaves into the waxy oil with a pestle. The scent brought me back more than a decade to watching the elders prepare an honoree for the journey to the realm of the fiends they all worshipped. The man had swayed in the erratic movements meant to honor the shrouded folk, a dreamy smile on his face, as if he couldn’t imagine anything more wonderful than visiting the source of the monsters that demanded blood and devoured children’s souls.

  I would have been one of those childhood sacrifices if I hadn’t made a side deal to allow my escape. I had no idea how the shrouded folk had ended up taking Olivia. Fifteen was their preferred age to fully enjoy the energy we gave off, and she’d have only been thirteen when I’d come back three years later to rescue her. I’d always assumed the fiend who’d been eyeing me had devoured her early out of anger at my disappearance. But the shrouded one who’d brought me evidence that she was still alive had said she’d been “taken but not consumed.”

  They’d played that card to stop my efforts at destroying their base of human support in this world. I still intended to see them cut off from humankind if I possibly could. But I had to get Olivia back first, so that she didn’t pay for my defiance any more than she already had.

  I added a little more of a couple of the herbs until I felt I’d gotten the balance just right. Then I scooped about half of the mixture into another bowl and put the original one into the fridge.

  “You have the pills?” I said, even though I’d already double-checked a couple hours ago.

  Bash patted his shirt pocket. “Right here.”

  “I need to shower, and then we can get started.”

  I washed every inch of my body and hair with a bar of plain soap and rinsed myself thoroughly with cool water. My hair still hung damp against my shoulders when I came back into the living room naked. The broad windows on either side of the southeastern corner were bare, letting in all the sun, but I’d chosen this suite specifically because there was no neighboring building tall enough to look straight inside. If someone farther afield took a gander with binoculars, they’d get an interesting show.

  Bash’s gaze traveled over my body, leaving a tingle of heat in its wake. I knew how good his body could feel against mine, but that was one more distraction I had to put out of my head.

  I brought the bowl of herbs, wax, and oil over to the sheet and knelt down on it. With broad swipes, I smeared the mixture into the fabric. Then I painted my skin with it, starting with my feet and working my way up. Bash took a glob to coat my back, his touch steady but gentle.

  The cool air chilled my damp skin. I worked the paste into my hair and then finally wiped it across my face, not sparing even my eyelids or my lips. The pungent stink clogged my nose. My stomach lurched, and I swallowed down the bile that started to rise up my throat.

  “You’ll know the effect is fading if you can see spots of bare skin on my face or arms,” I said. “The sheet will stop the rest from evaporating. When you notice any skin that’s not shiny with the mixture anymore, just dab some of the leftovers in the fridge there.”

  “Now you take the pill and that’s it?” Bash said.

  “Everything we’ve done sets the atmosphere. As I go into the trance, I’ll focus my mind on the shrouded folk. That should take me past the final hurdle.”

  I held out my hand, and he gave me the pill. It was so small I could swallow it without any water. Then I sat down on the sheet and began to methodically fold it around my legs and torso, with a twist here and a contrasting angle there, leaving no pattern to the creases. The shrouded folk abhorred any kind of mathematical arrangement.

  By the time I reached my shoulders, the pill’s effects were seeping through my mind. My thoughts were fogging, drifting aimlessly and colliding at random. I lay back with my head to the brightest strip of sunlight and closed my eyes.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I managed to mumble.

  My awareness of the room faded away into the haze of the drug and the herbal stench flooding my lungs. I drew up memory after memory of the commune I’d grown up in, the ashy rotten scent of the shrouded folk, the boy I’d seen them ravage in a blaze of light—on and on, sinking deeper and deeper into each moment—

  With a lurch, my consciousness plunged down into a thicker darkness. My lips parted with a scream that didn’t make it past my throat. Light flared through my closed eyelids, and my back hit solid ground with a jolt that radiated along my spine. The herbal smell fell away, replaced by that familiar odor of desiccated rot.

  My breath caught in my throat as I warily opened my eyes. I’d arrived in the realm of the shrouded folk.

  Chapter Two

  Bash

  As a man of action, watching the woman I loved lying pale and motionless on the floor, knowing she was facing the most difficult trial of her life and not being able to lift a finger to help her—there was no word for it other than “agony.”

  I had a clear view of Jemma’s whole sheet-wrapped body where I’d stationed myself on the sofa. For the first hour after she’d faded away, I hadn’t been able to do much more than mark each shallow breath. They came so far apart, no more than a few each minute, and with so little rise to her chest, it’d have been easy to mistake her for dead. The greenish pallor her herbal concoction had given to her face and arms only added to that impression.

  It took all my self-control not to prowl around her as if that would protect her more than I already was, or worse, to try to shake her awake. To see those brilliant gray eyes gleaming at me the way they were meant to. To know the demonic creatures she was tangling with hadn’t wrenched her away from me.

  She’d said it could take days. I was starting to wonder how I was going to survive that long.

  After a while, I forced myself to go over to the kitchen counter. I could still keep an eye on her for any sudden changes from the stool there, but poking away at the computer might make the time pass faster.

  I meant to use that time somewhat productively, checking up on her various business ventures and looking into arrangements for other equipment we might need. If she came out of that hellish realm with her sister—no, when she did, I corrected myself; this was Jemma Moriarty I was thinking about—I had to assume we’d continue our campaign against the communes that allowed
the shrouded folk access to the human world in the first place.

  Instead, my fingers took on a mind of their own and typed the name “Sherlock Holmes” into the search field.

  Unsurprisingly, a major incident involving one of the world’s foremost criminal investigators hadn’t gone unreported. Several pages of results came up discussing the “horrific fall” or in one case where the headline writer got a little too clever with his alliteration, the “tragic tumble” of London’s famous consulting detective. I clicked through to a couple articles that looked less on the sensationalistic side.

  It appeared Sherlock’s colleagues had remained tight-lipped. Even though they knew perfectly well who’d pushed the man down that cliff, the articles didn’t make any reference to Jemma, only noted that investigations were in progress. When it came to the detective himself, the reports were similarly vague. He was in a Scottish hospital receiving “the highest standard of care,” but no one seemed to know how critical his condition was or whether his life was on the line.

  He couldn’t have been feeling too spry after that fall, no matter how Jemma had positioned it.

  The lack of news wasn’t exactly satisfying. I skimmed through a few more accounts before accepting I wasn’t finding out any more than that, and then gave up.

  My fingers hovered over the keyboard for a few seconds in indecision. Jemma’s comment from this morning had been running through my mind ever since she’d made it. She was off attempting to rescue her little sister. Maybe that made this the perfect time to check in on my own family.