Forbidden

by Jacquelyn Frank

  Leo smacked the clip into the butt of his Desert Eagle, clicked it in, and then checked the sight. Along the spine of the gold-plated .44, he could see the three pumpkins he’d put on the fence in the distance. Sure, it was shiny and flashy and mostly a toy for armchair shooters or collectors, but damn, it was a fine gun. He had another, a Mark XIX with the ten-inch barrel in gunmetal gray strategically hidden in his house, his preference being to keep the Mark XIX with the six-inch barrel in the holster on his hip. The six-inch pulled faster and was less awkward in a clinch.

  But, yeah, the gold had its uses, too.

  “Whoa! Holy shit, Alvarez, where’d you get that thing?”

  Leo ignored Ray Ray and squeezed the trigger. Rapidly. Three times.

  One pumpkin after the other exploded, raining bits of rind and seed everywhere, reminiscent of the way a head full of brains might act on the other end of the armor-piercing hollow points. He turned and pointed the gun at Ray Ray, trying not to smile when the scrawny little crackhead squeaked and held his hand up in defense … as if that would do anything.

  “Jesus Christ!” he yelped, drawing his knees in together like a four-year-old trying not to pee himself while waiting for the bathroom.

  “Ray Ray,” Leo said smoothly in greeting, lowering the gun with a smile. “You’re late.”

  “I—I—I—,”Ray Ray stammered.

  “I could swear I said time was of the essence.”

  “But I—”

  Leo leaned in and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not about to give me some lame-ass excuse, are you? You know how I hate lame-ass excuses.”

  Ray Ray swallowed noisily, deciding silence was the better part of valor. It was probably one of the smartest things he had ever done. Not that Ray Ray was entirely stupid. Back when he’d gone just by Ray, he’d actually had a pretty good job and a very pretty family and a pretty decent life. Then one day he’d gotten the idea in his head to try a little crack to take the edge off his stress.

  Fast-forward three years and now Ray Ray lived for his next smoke. The job, the pretty house, and the pretty family were gone. He was the poster boy for what drugs could do to Joe Average. But Leo had no sympathy for him. He believed men wrote their own destinies in life. They didn’t deserve all this bleeding heart bullshit from all the little saviors running around trying to rescue them. In his opinion, they were lost causes until they were ready to rescue themselves.

  “Ray Ray … ,” he said, smiling and sounding magnanimously forgiving as he threw an arm around the other man’s shoulders. “I’ll forgive you for keeping me waiting if you”— he tapped the man on the chest with the barrel of the Eagle— “can give me just a little bit of information.”

  “Well, I— I’ll try … ,” Ray Ray stammered.

  “Great! Now, a few days ago someone threw a girl off a bridge.”

  “The Bridge Girl!”

  “Yes. The Bridge Girl.” Leo rolled his eyes. It really was a lame moniker. The Saugerties news team needed a more creative mind at the helm. “Can you tell me why someone would want to throw a girl off a bridge?”

  “Well … I don’t know all the particulars,” he hedged.

  “I’ll settle for rumors,” Leo said, sounding highly put-upon. “Just give me what you’ve got. And before you say it … because with the mood I’m in it’ll just piss me off … I won’t give you money for information so you can go off and buy more of that poison you like to shovel into your lungs. I’ll do you one better. The next time someone is in the mood to beat your scrawny ass, I’ll take care of them for you. Okay?”

  Ray Ray’s face lit up. Clearly someone was always in the mood to beat his scrawny ass. Leo had suspected as much. Invariably, if you danced in the world of drugs, you crossed someone the wrong way. There was always someone somewhere ready to do violence against a junkie for whatever reason. And Leo had no problem removing that someone from the equation.

  “Cuz there’s this guy. He wants to kill me,” Ray Ray said eagerly. “I swear, I didn’t do anything! He thinks I stole something of his and sold it for drug money. But I didn’t!”

  “Sure, Ray Ray. Give me some good intel and I’ll straighten it all out for you.”

  Ray Ray hesitated. Interesting. He was obviously highly motivated, what with death threats hanging over his head and the smell of discharged gunpowder oozing from the Eagle just about right under his nose. So why would he hesitate?

  “Ray … ,” Leo encouraged with a warning tone, like a mother scolding a wayward child.

  “It’s just that … these guys are bad, bad news,” Ray explained. “Even a guy like you ought to think twice before mixing it up with them.”

  “And what do you know about a guy like me?” Leo quizzed archly. “You my best friend now, Ray? You know all about me, do you?”

  “I—I—I—”

  Leo rolled his eyes at the stammering. He wasn’t making much progress, and time was ticking for Docia.

  “How about you let me worry about myself, okay? Just tell me what you know while I’m still in the mood to keep this a friendly negotiation, as opposed to me squeezing the information out of you until you pop like a nasty little zit.”

  Ray Ray swallowed. He was probably asking him-self why he’d even showed up … and then reminding himself that if he hadn’t, Leo would have gone after him and would have been in a very bad mood when he found him.

  And he always found him.

  “There’s this gang on the outside of town …”

  Leo scoffed aloud. A gang in pastoral Saugerties?

  “No, really,” Ray insisted. “It’s a house. Over by Lake Katrine. There’s a guy in charge and he gathers all kinds of … you know, criminals. He feeds them, gives them a place to stay. They mostly run a lot of drugs and stuff, but I’ve been hearing rumors of other things. Like, they’re planning some kind of big score or something. Anyway, one of the guys was in one of the … umm … places I like to hang out.”

  “A crack house?” Leo supplied for him dryly.

  “A hangout,” Ray Ray hedged. “Anyway, he was drinking and stuff and started bragging about how one of his buddies was the one who pushed the— and I quote— ‘nosy little bitch off the bridge.’ End quote. Apparently, she’d seen some paperwork she wasn’t supposed to see and was suddenly considered a lot of trouble. A big risk. Big enough that the risk of pushing her off the bridge was considered more acceptable than letting her run around alive. And they watched her. All the time. Got her routine down cold. They fucked with her car, forcing her to walk to work. Then bam! Over the edge she went.”

  Leo had begun to tune Ray Ray out as the junkie got a little too enthusiastic about the story he’d been told. Leo felt sick to his stomach as he thought of Docia facing down that thunderous, scraping hunk of metal, leaping to what she thought was safety, only to have someone push her to what should have been her death. Leo had already gone to the bridge in search of clues; he’d looked over the edge and down into the angrily churning white water spewing through those rocks and realized it was a miracle she was alive. Between the impact of the rocks and drowning in the frigid water …

  Leo and Ray Ray both jumped when the Eagle barked out a bullet. Leo had clenched his fist unthinkingly, squeezing the trigger and sending a bullet into the dirt at their feet. Ray Ray yelped and scuttled back, thinking the man with the gun had just tried to shoot him in the foot.

  “What! I’m telling you what I know! The guy’s name is George. He comes to the hangout just about every night. If you want to know more, just … just … do what you do! Come and get him!”

  “I plan to,” Leo muttered. The Eagle flew up to point at Ray Ray like a scolding finger. “But I swear to God, Ray Ray, if you tip him off …”

  “I’m not stupid!” Ray Ray insisted.

  “I’d argue otherwise,” Leo said. “Give me the name of this guy you’re having the misunderstanding with, Ray Ray. If your tip pans out, you won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

  Ray Ra
y tried to feel heartened by the idea, but he was too worried about what would happen if Leo didn’t get his man.

  Odjit was drumming her fingers impatiently on the table, an annoying little quirk her original had that, despite her total dominance over it, managed to leak through when she was irritated, deep in thought, or agitated in some way. She supposed it could be worse. Some Templars fought constantly to subjugate the other soul inside them. Frankly, she considered those Templars to be weak. Humans were completely inferior. Templar Bodywalkers had evolved so far beyond the humans they had once been, their power extraordinary and their wisdom boundless. What was more, they had the will of the gods on their side. They were the most devout of all the Bodywalkers. And one day, one day when she had finally wrested control of the body Politic from the ever-present thorn in her side known as Menes, the false pharaoh in her people’s perspective, the gods would find them glorious and Ra would finally, finally allow them to walk in the sun once more. She believed that with all her heart. It infuriated her that Menes and his people could not see the truth of it, that they stubbornly ignored their duty to the gods and refused to give the Templars the respect and reverence they were due.

  Unfortunately, she had to admit that her power, while significant, and the combined power of her followers was not enough to reach her goal. What she needed was the power of the gods.

  A god.

  She needed to invoke Amun, to help him rise and gain his full power once more. He would unleash a righteous wrath on Menes and the Politic, would put them in their place at long last. The clarity of this plan had come to her as she had seethed in the Ether, recovering for a century from the brutal death she had suffered at the hands of the false king. Her only consolation had been that she had managed to kill his precious queen first.

  And she would do so again. It was Menes’s Achilles’ heel. He was so pathetically devoted to his conceited bitch that his loss of her was unbearable to him. She took satisfaction in the understanding that Menes’s grief last time had been so profound that he had ended his own life. It had been some kind of disgustingly romantic display, lying down beside the body of his beloved after he had ingested the only poison that could harm them: a liquefied solution of the fruit of the orange tree. The common juice that humans drank by the gallon so easily was deadly to the transformed physiology of a Bodywalker host. Some surmised that it had something to do with the amount of time in and intensity of exposure to the sun during the growth of the thing, although that didn’t explain why other citrus fruits did not have the same effect. The Templars often dipped their weapons in the orange juice, and while not enough to kill an enemy outright, it would certainly incapacitate them for a long time … and agonizingly so.

  Odjit couldn’t help the little shiver that walked her spine. She had seen a man poisoned heavily by the stuff. The agony within him had been so excruciating that she had felt as though she could feel it with him. But Menes had taken such a large amount that there had been no time for pain to take root. Death came swiftly and fiercely with such overdoses.

  She saw no sense or nobility in his cowardly escape from the mortal world. But regardless, Odjit knew his weakness and she planned to exploit it to the fullest extent.

  And at the same time, she would retrieve the power she needed.

  She lifted her drumming fingers in the air and snapped them, the sound echoing hard in the vacant, vaulted ceilings of the old abandoned church they were using as a temporary headquarters. Immediately, a young Templar acolyte appeared in the doorway. He stayed there, his head and eyes tilted downward in respect to her. Though she had summoned him, he knew he was not to approach her until she gave him permission.

  “Fetch me Kamenwati,” she instructed.

  “Your pardon, mistress, but …” When the servile creature hesitated, she knew it was because he was afraid of angering her. It made her smile a little.

  Toying with the spineless little fool, she barked out, “Well? Are you going to speak or just stand there blithering all day, wasting my time? Do you consider my time so worthless that I should spend it watching you trip over your tongue?”

  “No, m-mistress,” he stammered, color darkening the tips of his ears. “Master Kamen has been called to the rectory to settle a small matter of—”

  Before he could finish, his mistress was brushing past him, her hand pushing at his chest to force him back a step, allowing her to move through the doorway.

  Kamen was frowning darkly at the two squabbling acolytes before him. He had been called to negotiate a truce between them, and frankly, the dustup surprised him. Everyone knew that Odjit had no patience for arguing or power plays among her people. And everyone feared the reprisals if they behaved otherwise. After all, in Odjit’s mind there should be no power plays. She was the most powerful, and there was an end to it. Nothing else mattered, no one else was significant. As far as he was concerned, no one should dare think they were better than anyone else, because such thoughts of grandeur, she knew, could easily lead to other speculations that might one day force her to defend herself against a problem. There was no room for graspers in the hierarchy of the Templars.

  That didn’t mean it didn’t exist. It just meant it was normally not seen.

  “I rose to acolyte long before this … this reptile,” one acolyte said contemptuously as he gestured toward the other man. “He should cede to my authority! Instead he disrespects me!”

  The other acolyte seemed unconcerned by the accusation. He was leaning back against a wall with an air of relaxed ease, as though none of this mattered to him. It was exactly how the first man, Sheymun, should be acting. Albeit with a touch less obvious arrogance.

  “Why shouldn’t I disrespect a fool?” Lashtehp queried. “I have no more patience for a fool than our divine mistress would.”

  “How dare you!” Sheymun spluttered.

  “Gentlemen, I have yet to understand what this issue is about,” Kamen said wearily, his finger pressing at a tense muscle in his neck.

  “It’s simple. He ordered me to fill lamps with oil, as if I were some kind of novitiate. I have more important things to do in service to our beloved mistress,” Lashtehp said.

  “That you do.”

  Every spine in the group stiffened as the voice of that beloved mistress resonated into the room. Kamenwati turned to look over his shoulder, watching her as she glided into the room. She was elegantly clothed and coiffed, as she always was. Far from the jeans and T-shirt type, she never allowed herself to be seen by her followers if she was anything less than spectacular in appearance. It wasn’t that she was vain so much as it was her style and her wisdom in knowing that if she wanted to be perceived as a precious and valuable being, she had to appear to be exactly that.

  She was tall this time around. Close to six feet, he estimated. But far more stunning than her height was the fiery brilliance of her red hair and the often cold depths of her nearly colorless blue eyes. He had never seen such a fair shade of blue. Or such fair skin. It was such a departure, really, from the originals she usually chose. Often she chose strong black females or an exotic one. But in all cases she chose a sexually charged body with voluptuous curves and mouthwatering sensuality. Kamen knew she did nothing by accident, and that choice was just as specific as the rest of them. The thinking, he knew, was that love and lust often went hand in hand with her male followers. With the females it was envy and awe, and no little amount of inadequacy, she wished to engender.

  Kamen felt more than a little of that lust as she walked toward them with that leisurely, swinging gait. It was almost flirtatious. Playful. But he knew her too well. He knew that what lurked in her eyes was nothing so friendly or forgiving.

  “Lash, were you not asked to retrieve something very important for me?” she asked, placing distinct emphasis on the “very.”

  “Yes, mistress. I apologize. Your acolyte has waylaid me from my purpose.” He gestured to the other acolyte with an upward-facing palm.

  “I see.
”

  Sheymun’s complexion paled as the blood drained from his face. As long as it had been the more even-tempered Kamen managing the argument, he had not been afraid to bluster and throw his weight around. But now … now he knew there was nothing he could do to win this argument.

  Arguments among Odjit’s disciples never had victors.

  She turned slightly, her cold, light eyes picking Sheymun apart in a single look of disdainful assessment. When she smiled, no one was fooled by its false warmth, no matter how beautiful it made her appear to be.

  “So,” she said as she moved closer to Sheymun, reaching out to brush her fingers over his shoulder, as if clearing it of a speck of dust. “You feel you have seniority over Lashtehp?”

  “I— I …” He swallowed to try to control the stammer. “I only meant to say that I have far more experience since I have been your acolyte far longer than he has. The lamps were burning low, mistress, and I know how much you crave brightness and light.”

  It was true. Kamen sometimes thought she was absently trying to surround herself with a sense of the sun she could not otherwise touch. She demanded light and warmth on a constant, unwavering basis. When someone failed to see to it seamlessly, heads tended to roll. Kamen had to admire the acolyte for his attempt at manipulating the situation to his advantage by making it appear he had only had her best interests at heart.

  “You are so kind and thoughtful,” she told him in the softest of voices right before she bestowed a gentle kiss against his temple. Sheymun relaxed under the small gesture of affection. “But would it not be kinder to see to it peace was kept in my household at all times? You know how I dislike discord among my followers. It’s bad enough I have to deal with the dissension of the Politic, but now I have to face dissension under my own roof?”

  The intensity of her displeasure was seeping into her voice now, and with it the return of tension in Sheymun’s body and fear in his eyes.

  “P-please, mistress,” he said hastily. “You must consider I was only trying to see to your comfort.”