“I’ll go see her today though I’m not sure what contacts I have at the university …” My sentence trailed off as I thought about the latest in a line of men I’d managed to piss off. “Actually, I recently acquired a contact at Neumann. I’ll get you everything I know by sundown, then you can tell me how deep you want me to go.”
Hayne nodded. “I’ll send a consent form over to the hospital to get you access to her records.”
I stood. He was suddenly so small behind his desk, his shoulders hunched, and his gaze on his fists. “You can yell at me if it will make you feel better.”
Hayne chuckled, though his voice cracked. “I’ll let you off the hook this one time.”
“Sundown.”
CHAPTER NINE
I knocked on the hospital door and stuck my head in. It had that brilliant, antiseptic smell covered by the overpowering perfume of flowers. I took a handful of hand sanitizer from inside the door and walked to the other side of the curtain.
The scene was too familiar. I’d visited many people in this hospital. Knew exactly where to park and which stairwell to go to avoid charge nurses. But this was different. This was Dot. I knew her name, I knew her birthday without having to ask any questions.
Hayne’s ex-wife was sitting at her daughter’s bedside. “Can I help you?”
I took a few more steps into the room and saw Dot lying on the bed. It dwarfed her frame and if she wasn’t ill, the lightning made her look so. Nineteen years old and I could still see the pictures Hayne kept behind his desk as she grew up into the women before me.
“Merci,” Dot said with a soft smile.
Spite was instantly written across her mother’s face, in the long crease of her forehead. “Hayne sent you instead of coming himself? Too busy to visit his own daughter in the hospital.”
Dot reached out and put her hand on her mother’s arm. “It’s okay, Mom. I want to talk to Merci.”
Her mother got up and walked out of the hospital room, fists at her side.
Dot’s swollen features nearly hid her father’s gray eyes and her arms were both bandaged up pretty tightly.
I cleared my throat. “I really don’t want to be indelicate, but—”
“Can’t let the story get cold,” Dot nodded. “I am my father’s daughter.”
I moved closer to the bedside. “He really is worried sick.”
“He must be if he sent his ace reporter.” She managed a small smile.
“Thank you, Dot.”
She chuckled. “Dot is a name for a chubby twelve-year-old.”
“I promise not to use any names in my articles if you don’t want me to.”
Dot nodded. “I already told the police what happened.”
“No you didn’t. Not the real story.”
I clicked on the audio recorder and looked into the girl’s tired eyes. The familiar pressure gathered in behind my temple along with a stab of guilt for putting her under the Lanard Charm—especially when the heart monitor faltered as I locked it into place. But I needed the truth and this would be the fastest way to get it, so she could go back to healing. I started in. “Where were you last night?”
“Party in South Philly.”
“Any drugs were at the party?”
“The usual. Coke, meth. X.”
“Did you have any?”
“No, Merci. I’ve ever used anything.”
I nodded. Now I knew for sure, I could report that back to Hayne and make sure he didn’t name himself the Worst Father of the Year. “I believe you. How did you find out about this party?”
“Some guys we were with knew a guy who got them some party drugs. He sort of chatted me up and then he told us about this new underground place.”
I looked away. I was trying to take it easy on her. I knew Dot wasn’t the party kid. Hayne used to post her straight-A report cards on the filing cabinet behind his desk. “Think he’ll talk to me?”
“Maybe. His name’s Tricky. We met him at this arcade bar thing next to campus. Wizards. It’s where he usually deals.”
“What happened?”
“Danced a little, met this guy who was hanging around the bar. Tricky knew him.” She frowned. “Started asking lots of questions about the paper.”
My skin prickled. “What kind of questions?”
“Who I knew at the paper.” Her eyes watered and her chin crumpled. “I might have dropped your and dad’s names, trying to front like I was something special.”
I reached out to take her hand. “You are something special, Dot.”
She chuckled and looked down at our connection. A tear ran down her cherubic cheek, only making the bruise there a darker shade of purple.
“You get this guy’s name?”
She frowned. “Byron, Benson—”
“Benny?”
Dot looked up at me. “Yeah, maybe.”
I had to let go of her hand for fear that I might break her already swollen fingers. Benny. It always came back to Benny. What the hell had he gotten himself into?
“He started creeping me out with all his questions, so I went to go find my friends and then we went to the party. We weren’t there thirty minutes before …” Her voice trailed off as her gaze floated to the window behind me.
She wasn’t ready, so I distracted her with another question. “Do you remember where the party was?”
“Not really. Some underground place. It would have been close to where I was found.”
I nodded. That was a simple search and some good old-fashioned footwork.
“Did something strange happen?” I leaned forward.
“I couldn’t tell the police. I knew they wouldn’t believe me.”
“I will believe you, Dot.”
She finally looked back at me, and I didn’t need to capture her in the Charm this time. She needed to tell this truth to someone, to make it true for herself, and I would take it and carry it with her. “It was like I couldn’t see. Like my eyes stopped working before they jumped me.”
I gulped, and my blood ran cold. “How many?”
“Four. All those self-defense classes Dad made me take kicked in, and I punched a few of them, but they got me. I hit my head pretty hard, and I passed out. I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital. The police said that someone found me talking gibberish on a street, assumed it was high on something.”
I gulped. It was Ethan and me all over again. I could hear the echoes of Ethan’s howls reverberating off the tile floor again and again and again.
My pen cracked under the pressure of my grip and the flying bits distracted me from the pit of fear that I might never be completely free of. I looked into Dot’s eyes and knew where she was, could feel exactly what she was feeling. As she relived the trauma again and again.
Her heart monitor started to beep more rapidly and I took her hand and held her gaze. “Take a deep breath.”
Dot did as she was told.
“And another.”
She took in a deep breath and let it out with a small shudder. The monitor’s beeping began to slow.
“I know people keep telling you it’s going to be okay, and it’s hard to believe that now. But it really is going to be okay.”
“Because Merci Lanard is on the story, and she always gets the truth.”
I saw hope in her gray eyes.
I smiled and nodded, squeezed her hand. “Is there anything else that you can think of, something that you grabbed while you were there, anything else?”
“You need to see the cut.”
She was the editor-in-chief’s daughter. She knew what it took to make a full story. Just like I was a journalist’s daughter and I would always take what was needed. “Only if you want.”
She made her case again. “It’s the biggest lead there is. Police couldn’t make anything of it.”
I nodded and let her carefully unwrap her left arm. My own scar itched as she pulled away the bandage.
It was raw, like a line of hamburger m
eat down her arm, but it was a shape. A very familiar shape, the long line with the diamond at the bottom and the cross of a T at the top. The Old Speak symbol for sacrifice. A fresh, hand-carved symbol from four unknown assailants that robbed her of her vision and attacked her.
I looked at my forearm, where I knew there was also faint jagged line. Dot needed to see it. I rolled up my sleeve and rested my arm next to hers. My faint pink line was nothing in comparison, mine left unfinished, but the lines were close enough that Dot gasped, and another round of tears streamed down her face. She sniffed.
“I don’t know why this was done to us, but I will stop it.”
“Take a picture,” she said through her tears.
It killed me that in her greatest hour of need, this is still what she thought of first. Others. The faith in that one sentence rocked me to the core. Hayne had said it so much that Ethan and I had almost made it a mantra.
The truth helps more than it hurts.
And it was in moments like this I wished that wasn’t true. I didn’t want Dot to hurt at all. As quickly as I could, I snapped a picture of with my phone and slipped it back into my pocket.
Dot pulled her arm back to herself and re-wrapped her wound, holding it to her chest. I rolled down my own sleeve and watcher her recover.
She wiped at her face. “What’s going to happen to me?”
I told her the truth. “You’ll start feeling better, and then the cops will probably ask you the same questions they did before.” I reached out to hold her hand again. “You’ll be afraid of the dark for a while, so find someone you trust to stay with you. You’ll see the shadows as a little bigger, but don’t let them get in your way. And call your father. I worry him enough for the both of us.”
Dot nodded and leaned back in the hospital bed, slipping her hand from mine. “Thank you, Merci.”
I closed my notebook, clicked off the recorder, and stuck both back into my bag. “Get some rest. The next few days aren’t going to be easy.”
I wasn’t sure if I said that for her sake or mine.
I walked out of the hospital and back to my car. I needed a drink. This was all happening so fast. Dot’s attack was just like Ethan’s and probably exactly what happened to all those others: Tay-Tay, Mitchell, Beakman. Four people dead in the span of three weeks, all with a link to magic. But how had she survived it when the others didn’t? Self-defense classes are one thing, but these guys took down a werewolf.
First a person from the paper and now the editor’s daughter? Were we close to something? Was this somehow a cross section of Ethan’s world and my work?
With a live body to interrogate, I could potentially connect the two. Tracking down this Tricky could lead me to Benny, could lead me to the Shadow Men.
I sat in my car and locked the doors. I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell Hayne. Didn’t know if his brain needed to process that he’d nearly lost a daughter to the same thing that took one of his staff members, but he could make sure that the others in the office were safe.
But could I do it without lying to him?
I knew I needed Rafe. This was his fight too. This was his brother. His world. He could tell me things about the university. He could confirm information about the mark carved into Dot’s arm now that we had a high-def picture of it not on a withered up old corpse. He could probably even tell me why Dot had survived when the others hadn’t. He could be the backup that I needed.
Or he could be the next victim. My stomach churned. I couldn’t drag another person into this just to see them broken and bleeding on the floor.
Ethan’s voice in my head was like a bucket of ice water across my brain. Everyone is better with a partner.
I understood why Rafe felt betrayed. I understood if he didn’t want to talk to me. But I wasn’t going to really give him a choice. The university website had his office hours and when he taught class. The departmental secretary had confirmed it on my drive over.
I got out of my car and walked into the English Departments building at Neumann. He had to appreciate the effort that I had tracked him down. I was coming to him for help this time.
The office hadn’t been renovated in forty years and the secretary waved me through to Dr. MacCallan’s office with no problem
Rafe was perfectly suited to academic life. Stacks of books covered his desk and floor and he sat in an old brown leather recliner as he read through pages, chewing on the end of a red pen.
I almost didn’t want to disturb the perfection of it. But that was who I was, right? It’s who the Mother made me. A walking thunderstorm of chaos.
I tapped on the door.
He looked up from his reading and immediately, his eyes clouded over.
“Lanard?”
That hurt. “Back to the formalities?”
He let out a long, exasperated sigh and put down the paper he was grading. “What do you want?”
“I know that you probably don’t want to work with me anymore, but I need to show you something.” I stepped into his office and closed the door. It was like stepping into a sauna that smelled like sandalwood and sage, his own wolf’s den.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and opened up the picture of Dot’s wound. “There was another attack where the victim was marked with a sigil and it has ties to Benny.”
I handed him the phone.
When he recognized the mark, his brows furrowed together. “Attack not murder?”
“She’s still alive. Ethan and I knew her.”
“Knew her? Another journalist?”
“My editor’s daughter.”
He exhaled. “All right.”
“She gave me a name of a guy. I thought I would see if he was willing to talk, then check out the place where she was attacked. See if there is any magical stuff left over. Take a few pictures.” It struck me that Rafe hadn’t seen the photos of the spell yet, didn’t know the extent of the damage the spell had done. God, it had been a long two days.
“Do you not know this could be a trap?”
I laughed. “What?”
He rose from his chair and handed me back my phone. “Maybe she didn’t survive. Maybe she was left alive. Whoever is doing this might know you can’t stop yourself and might be trying to finish what they started.”
I gulped. “If they were after me specifically, they would have already found me. I haven’t exactly been hiding.”
“Maybe they can’t. Maybe they don’t want you dead. Maybe they are setting you up to be part of the spell. Maybe there are a million things we don’t know about you because you’ve been keeping the truth from me.”
I exhaled and gave in. “If you want to be mad at me, fine. I can deal with that. I wanted to give you the chance for the closure I know you need too. We finish the story. You go your way. I go mine.”
His eye brow arched as he gave me this dead stare. “Piper ordered us to work together.”
“I’m not pack, I don’t have to follow her orders. I can do this on my own.”
“No,” he said quickly. “You shouldn’t have to. Where are we going?”
“Just around the corner, actually.”
Wizards was every college bar I’d ever been to. It reeked of beer, stale clove cigarettes, and cheap cologne. My boots stuck to the floor as I crossed the bar, Rafe following close behind, and we perched in a corner table. It was still too early for any real debauchery, but there were a few co-eds already getting their Saturday night buzz on.
“Who are we looking for?” Rafe whispered.
“I’ll know him when I see him.”
I scanned the bar scene, sorting through the growing crowd. Life and work had given me a sort of radar, a talent for sorting out the just and the unjust, but chiefly the unjust—they were the ones with the shifty eyes who didn’t want to be seen. Only one character pinged as one who might not belong: a lanky young man trying to chat up a girl who was busy beating the high score at Ms. PacMan. She kept waving him off, and he kept leaning in her way
, his gaze darting to every dark corner of the bar.
Ping. Guilty party at two o’clock.
I leaned over to Rafe. “So, if this guy is in cahoots with dark magic, would you be able to sniff him out?” I pointed to the boy in jeans that fell off his too skinny hips.
“You want me to sniff out an informant?”
I shrugged and nodded. Technically I wasn’t looking for an informant, I was looking for bait that lured in innocent girls. But semantics. “Could you?”
“Depends on the level of infestation, some don’t and some smell like black mold and gym socks.”
I gestured with my chin. “White rapper at two o’clock with the trucker hat. Why don’t you try to get us a few beers to blend in?”
“This early in the evening?”
“Fine. Make mine a whiskey.”
I situated my bag to appear casual, trying out the blending into plain sight that Rafe had talked about, but I didn’t take my eyes off Rafe. My leg bounced furiously with anticipation.
He slowly walked around to the bar and put in an order. He casually walked around a few of the other games, then made a quick pass by the young man.
There was no need for a secret code or hand signals. The expression on Rafe’s face when he passed by him was all I needed to know. He was the one we were looking for. He had to be the Tricky boy who could lead us to Benny.
Rafe picked up the amber drinks from the bar and headed back to my table.
“You have impeccable luck, Miss Lanard.”
“It’s not luck, Professor.” I checked my watch. “College bar. Everyone in here has books or bags. He’s got nothing.”
Rafe shook his head and took a sip of his drink. He winced.
“What? Couldn’t impress a girl by getting the top shelf stuff?” I took the tumbler and threw back the amber liquid in one large gulp.
Rafe’s eyebrow rose. “Do we need to have an intervention?”
“Only if you want me to punch you again.” I smiled sweetly.
Rafe set his untouched glass on the table before us. “How do you want to play this?”
“Same way I play everything. Direct and to the point.”
I stood, pulled out my recorder, and walked toward the young man.
The Truth About Night Page 18