Demon Marked

looked up and wiped her eyes. “Maybe we can get Khavi to help out, too.”
    Ash had heard that name before: a Guardian who could see into the future. She frowned. “What would be the fun in that?”
    “With Khavi’s help, you’d be surprised. Really, you would,” Taylor said. “Not always in a good way.”
    “With Khavi’s help, the quickest way to make a small fortune would be to start with a large one,” Lilith said, and looked at Ash. “Which is what I want from you. You’ll still be training, so it’d have to be during your off-hours, but I want Special Investigations monetarily self-sufficient within ten years. Right now, we’re operating on government cash, and so far, they’ve only asked for stupid little things, like telling us to ship a nosferatu to one of their research facilities rather than slaying it. Or asking us to register the names and addresses of vampires we know. I’ve been able to put them off or ignore them—and if the requests stem from concerns about public safety, I give them what I can. But at some point, there’s going to be something that we can’t put off and can’t ignore, and that won’t necessarily be about safety, but about forwarding some other agenda. When that day comes, we need to be able to disappear off their radar, but still be functional.”
    Excitement had already begun sparking through Ash’s veins. Now that was one hell of a challenge. “All right. I need your current budget, so that I know what I’m aiming for.”
    “You’ll have it,” Lilith said. “A few Guardians have pulled antiquities out of their collections, and those are going up for auction soon. We expect that you’ll be starting with four to five hundred million dollars.”
    Ash suppressed her shudder of ecstasy. God. She was pretty sure she hadn’t had a shiver like that since Nicholas had licked her fangs. “I can work with that.”
    “And spread it out. Don’t become some visible megalith. We just want to quietly turn an asston of money into a fuckload.”
    She would. “Any limits? Anything I shouldn’t invest in?”
    Lilith pursed her lips. After a few moments, she came up with, “Sex trafficking.”
    Ash nodded. Yes, that would be bad.
    “And I’ll have a few more to add to that list,” Taylor said dryly. Her focus shifted beyond Ash’s shoulder, and her gaze flattened. “Hey, there are you are now. Nice of you to finally show up.”
    “Yes. Well, the sign said ‘all-you-can-eat,’ but they still kicked me out. So where else did I have to go?” The harmonious voice froze Ash’s heart for two beats—so much like Lucifer’s, like a Michael-possessed Taylor’s—but the fear slowly let her go as the woman continued, “Plus I need to show the markings on this vase to Alice, so I hoped she’d be here. So now I ask Jake: Where’s your wife?”
    “Where’s my wife?” Jake’s jaw clenched. “Well, Khavi. Last week, she asked me to teleport all of her spiders back to Earth. You’ve seen some of these things, haven’t you? How big they are? And you know I have to touch something to teleport it, right? I had my shirt off and those things all over me, so that she could focus on the Archives.”
    Taylor shuddered. “You really do love her.”
    “You think?” Though Jake snapped the reply at her, he still focused on Khavi. “So if you’re looking for Alice, you’ll find her and about six novices in the library, cataloguing all of the Scrolls, and putting them into indestructible, floating containers, just in case the goddamn building falls around their heads and the whole place sinks.”
    “Why is she doing that?”
    Khavi sounded baffled. Not an emotion Ash expected to hear from someone who could see the future.
    “Because we can’t carry the Scrolls through the Gates, and because no one but Michael can vanish them into their cache.”
    “Taylor can.”
    Taylor’s brows shot up. “I can?”
    “Of course you can. They are written in his blood—and part of you is written in his blood, too. You can vanish the Scrolls or carry them through the Gates.”
    Jake wasn’t mollified by that new info. “Oh, so now we know. Would have been nice earlier. Where the hell have you been the past two months?”
    “Eating. Like I said.” The woman was frowning. With her black hair in neat rows of braids that marched back into an uncontrolled tangle and an air of leashed ferocity, Khavi was as slightly built as Taylor but possessed none of the other woman’s