Warrior (Relentless #4)(210)

He handed the phone back to Adele.

“Stop worrying, darling,” she crooned. “Orias and I have your back as always. Now I have to go and open the club. I’ll catch up with you in a few days. Night.”

Chris turned off the recording when Adele began discussing club business with her bartender. He looked at me. “What do you think?”

“I think we need to take a closer look into Adele’s real estate holdings.”

I put the vehicle in drive, wishing Adele or Madeline had given us some hint about where Madeline was. I glanced at Sara in the rearview mirror to see how she was after hearing Adele talk to her mother. But Sara appeared to be more thoughtful than upset.

“Why would Adele say that no one would expect Madeline to be wherever she is?” she asked. “Is there a place Madeline would not want to go?”

“Wherever the Master is would be my first guess,” Jordan said.

Chris shook his head. “Madeline wouldn’t be foolish enough to hide near the Master. She’s evaded him this long by being smarter than that.”

“She doesn’t want us to find her either, so maybe she’s hiding near one of our strongholds,” Jordan said. “Hell, maybe she’s in Boise.”

I nodded. “That is a possibility.”

Perhaps that was how Madeline had hidden from everyone all this time. The Master wouldn’t want to get too near one of our strongholds, and we wouldn’t think to look that close to home.

“We should narrow our search to places near our compounds, see if Adele has property in any of them.”

Chris called Raoul and told him to dig around more in Adele’s holdings. Raoul worked closely with Dax, so I knew I didn’t have to call the security guy. If anyone could find something, it was Dax.

As soon as Chris hung up, Sara took out her phone and called her friend David, who had also been privy to her vigilante activities. She’d assured me that David had not been happy about it, and he had asked her more than once to stop.

I didn’t need my Mori hearing to pick out what David was saying. I listened to them talk about Adele’s properties in New York, Miami, and San Diego, places we already knew about. Sara told him Madeline might be hiding out at a property we didn’t know about. David said he’d see what he could find and get back to us. I had to admit, the guy was dedicated to finding Madeline.

“Something else I’d like to know is what Orias has been trying to undo for years for Madeline,” Chris said almost to himself.

“I’d like to know that myself. Orias is a powerful warlock. If he can’t undo something, it must be very strong magic.”

I thought back to the exchange between Sara and the warlock. “By the way, what was he talking about back there when he said you put a gag on him? And what did you do to his demon?”

She gave me a sheepish smile. “Oh, that. I might have made him take a binding oath that prevented him from telling anyone we were there.”

I frowned. “What kind of oath?”

“You ever hear of the White Oath?” she asked.

I shook my head, not sure I wanted to know.

“When a warlock takes the White Oath, he can’t break it, even if you torture him. It’s the only oath that can hold them to their word. It’s something I learned from Remy.”

I stared at her. It was one thing to know about such an oath, but to make a warlock like Orias take it was a gutsy move. Most people wouldn’t dare try to coerce someone who got his power from an upper demon.

“And what did you do to upset his demon?” I asked her.

Jordan made a sound of disgust. “That bastard had the rest of us tied up, so Sara took his demon hostage until he let us go.”

Chris’s expression of disbelief mirrored mine as he turned to look at Sara. “You took an upper demon hostage? This I have to hear.”

So did I.

“It wasn’t like I actually saw the demon. Orias already had it trapped in a lamp. I took the lamp and shook it up a little.” She smiled mischievously. “Demons really don’t like Fae magic.”

“No, I would guess not,” I said dryly as a cold tingle ran down my spine. I’d had a small taste of her power, and that had been before her liannan. I could only imagine how it would feel to a demon trapped in a lamp.

I didn’t want to think about what might have happened if the demon had escaped its prison. Mori demons were strong, but upper demons were the most powerful of demon kind, which was why warlocks wanted them.

“How do you fit a demon in a lamp anyway?” Jordan mused out loud.

“It takes a spell cast by a very crafty and powerful warlock.”

I’d witnessed the ritual, and it was complicated and dangerous. More than once I’d been called to deal with a demon summoning gone bad. Those never ended well for the warlock. It was almost impossible to kill summoned demons in their non-corporeal form, so you had to send them back to their dimension. Not an easy feat, and one that only an experienced warlock or shaman could handle. In fact, we’d called on Orias many times over the years to assist in that area.

“If Madeline is using his glamours, how was Sara’s friend David able to get that picture of her in Vancouver?” Chris asked.

“Orias told us his spells only last a month because they are so strong,” Sara replied. “Maybe we were able to catch her as one was wearing off.”