Lady Midnight (The Dark Artifices #1)(150)

Sterling rubbed his jaw. His eyes were slits. “You’ve got no right to touch me.” There was a whine in his voice. “Nephilim only deal with issues that break the Accords.”

“Wrong,” Perfect Diego said. “We deal with any issues we feel like.”

“But Belinda told us—”

“Yeah, about that,” Cristina said. “How did you end up joining that cult or whatever it is at the Midnight Theater?”

Sterling exhaled a shaky breath. “We’re sworn to secrecy,” he said finally. “If I tell you everything I know, are you going to protect me?”

“Maybe,” said Emma. “But you’re tied up and we’re all heavily armed. You really fancy your chances if you don’t tell?”

Sterling glanced at Perfect Diego, who was holding the dagger idly, as if it were a pen. Nevertheless, there was a sense of coiled power about him, as if he could explode into action in under a second. If Sterling had any brains he’d be terrified. “I got into it through a producer friend of mine. He said he’d found a way to guarantee that everything you touched turned to gold. Not literally,” Sterling hastened to add.

“No one thought you meant literally, idiot,” said Emma.

Sterling made an angry noise, cut off quickly by Diego pressing the knife tighter against his throat.

“Who’s the Guardian?” Cristina demanded. “Who leads the Followers at the theater?”

“I’ve got no idea,” Sterling said sulkily. “Nobody knows. Not even Belinda.”

“I saw Belinda at the Shadow Market, shilling for your little cult,” Emma said. “I’m guessing they promised money and luck if you came to their meetings. You just had to risk the lotteries. Am I right?”

“They didn’t seem like that big a risk,” said Sterling. “They were only once in a while. If you got picked, no one could touch you. No one could interfere until you took a life.”

Cristina’s face twisted in disgust. “And those who took lives? What happened to them?”

“They got whatever they wanted,” Sterling said. “To be rich. Beautiful. After a sacrifice, everyone gets stronger, but the one who performs the sacrifice gets stronger than the rest.”

“How do you know?” said Cristina. “Had any of the people at the theater been picked in the Lottery before?”

“Belinda,” said Sterling promptly. “She was the first. Most of the others didn’t stick around. They’re probably off somewhere, living it up. Well, except Ava.”

“Ava Leigh was a Lottery winner?” asked Emma. “The one who lived with Stanley Wells?”

Perfect Diego jammed his knife harder against Sterling’s throat. “What did you know about Ava?”

Sterling winced away from the knife. “Yeah, she was a Lottery winner. Look, it didn’t matter who winners picked to kill—no Downworlders except faeries, that was the only rule. Some of the Lottery winners chose people they knew. Ava decided to kill her sugar-daddy boyfriend. She was tired of him. But it freaked her out. She killed herself after. Drowned herself in his pool. It was stupid of her. She could have had anything she wanted.”

“She didn’t commit suicide,” Emma said. “She was murdered.”

He shrugged. “Nah, she offed herself. That’s what everyone said.”

Cristina looked as if she was struggling to stay calm. “You knew her,” she said. “Don’t you care? Do you feel anything? What about guilt over the girl you killed?”

“Some girl from the Shadow Market,” said Sterling with a shrug. “Used to sell jewelry there. I told her I could get her designs into department stores. Make her rich, if she’d just meet me.” He snorted. “Everyone’s greedy.”

They had passed the initial highway clutter and reached a stretch of beach, dotted with blue lifeguard towers.

“That blue fire,” Emma said, thinking out loud. “The Guardian was in it. They took the body to the convergence. You stabbed her, but the Guardian grabbed her before she died. So the deaths happen at the convergence, and everything else too—the burning, submerging the body in seawater, carving the runes, the whole ritual?”

“Yeah. And I was supposed to be taken to the convergence too,” Sterling said, resentment coloring his voice. “It’s where the Guardian would have thanked me—given me anything I wanted. I could have seen the ritual. One death strengthens us all.”

Emma and Cristina exchanged looks. Sterling wasn’t clearing things up; he was making them more confusing.

“You said she was the last,” said Diego. “What happens after this? What’s the payoff?”

Sterling grunted. “No idea. I didn’t get where I am in life by asking questions I don’t need the answers to.”

“Get where you are in life?” Emma snorted. “You mean tied up in the back of a car?”

Emma could see the lights of the Malibu Pier up ahead. They shone against the dark water. “None of that matters. The Guardian will find me,” Sterling said.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Perfect Diego in his low voice.

Emma turned off the highway onto their familiar road. She could see the lights of the Institute in the distance, illuminating the rutted track under her wheels. “And when he does find you?” she said. “The Guardian? What do you think he’ll do, just welcome you back after you told us all this? You don’t think he’ll make you pay?”