by Sara Snow
And I knew who could help me do it.
I found Olympia downstairs in a space she had set up for herself at the warehouse. I tried to steer clear of the space that Olympia called her “estrogen shelter” whenever I could, but today I needed to talk to her.
Living full-time at the warehouse would have interfered with Olympia’s free-loving lifestyle, so she kept an apartment in the city where she conducted her “affairs.” Olympia was a witch who belonged to a matriarchal cult called the Trikoni. From what I could tell, the cult practiced a feminist form of magic that focused on ensnaring innocent men for bizarre acts of sexual deviancy.
That was fine with me, as long as she kept her potions and salves far away from my male equipment. Physically, Olympia wasn’t much of a fighter, but her powers of clairvoyance were right on point, and she could throw curses that would make any demon cringe in terror.
A cloud of spicy incense told me that Olympia was currently in her room, probably whipping up a love potion or gazing into her crystal ball. I pushed back the curtain that shielded Olympia’s secret activities from the rest of the team, and saw her sitting in a lotus pose on a heap of cushions. Her eyes were closed, and she was chanting. Her long blonde curls floated in a nimbus around her shoulders, and she wore nothing but a blissful smile.
I cleared my throat so she would know she wasn’t alone.
The witch had a stunning figure, with full hips, a long slender waist, and small breasts peaked with pink nipples. If I’d had a taste for witches, I would definitely have gone for this one. But Olympia’s New Age vibe and weird sexual proclivities were too rich for my blood. We were frenemies for life.
“Hello, Carter,” Olympia said, without opening her eyes.
“How did you know it was me?”
“Your dark aura precedes you. You’ve seen me in all my glory—let me cover myself so we can have a civilized conversation.”
I tried not to gawk as Olympia got up and walked languidly to her closet. She emerged wearing a coral satin bathrobe, then beckoned me into the room, which looked like the aftermath of an explosion at a fortune teller’s booth. Olympia’s apothecary, consisting of about a thousand jars of dried plants and animal parts, lined the back wall.
The rest of the room was filled with the implements of her craft, most of which I couldn’t identify. Strands of beads and fairy lights crisscrossed the ceiling, and a multicolored curtain hung across the futon where Olympia slept when she was here.
“What can I do for you?” Olympia asked. She offered me a seat on one of her Moroccan cushions on the floor. My knees cracked as I attempted to sit down in a semi-comfortable position.
“Yoga would help with your lack of flexibility,” Olympia said sweetly, noting the grimace on my face. “Both mentally and physically.”
“I’m beyond help in that area. But I do need your help with Georgia.”
Olympia dropped her sarcasm. “I know. We all do.”
“Did Kingston tell you what she’s planning to do?”
“Kingston didn’t tell me anything, but Jose has told me plenty. I made a sleeping potion for him the other night that would have knocked a horse unconscious, but it barely touched Jose. He’s living in a constant state of narcolepsy. The demons won’t leave him alone for a second.”
“Well, now that Georgia knows that Paimon is her father, she wants to look for her mother,” I said.
“Why? The woman abandoned her.”
“She has questions. Like how her mother got together with a demon in the first place. I can understand why Georgia wants to know her own story, but it’s the ideal setup for another one of Paimon’s traps. This time I’m afraid he’ll be successful.”
Olympia looked genuinely scared.
“Tell me what you need me to do.”
I had to give Olympia credit—she knew how to dish out the bullshit, but whenever I’ve come to her for help, she’s always right on it. She once mixed up a numbing salve for me that allowed me to feed off of humans without hurting them, and that potion has saved both my body and my conscience more than once.
I leaned forward, shifting my weight on the damn pillow to try to find a comfortable position. “Georgia’s determined to find her mother. I tried to convince her it was a bad idea, but I failed miserably. She insists that she needs to know how she came into being, no matter how risky her quest might be.”
“So, what do you need from me?”
“I want you to use your scrying power to locate her mother. Look into your crystal ball and find out where she is, if she’s even still alive.”
“I don’t use a crystal ball,” Olympia said coldly. “I use my great-grandmother’s mirror.”
“Fine, just do whatever you do. If we can figure out where this woman is, we can present Georgia with a plan to get there. I don’t want her to set off alone again, like Little Red Riding Hood with her stupid basket of goodies. We all know how that story ends.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do. But there’s one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Scrying works much better if I have something that belongs to the person I’m looking for. Like, let’s say a woman comes to me looking for her husband who’s run off with his girlfriend. I need something from the husband—hair, boxer shorts, something personal—to hold onto while I’m searching.”
I smiled, reached into my pocket, and pulled out a folded square of tissue. “Got you covered.”
Olympia took the tissue and opened it. Inside lay a clump of black hair.
“Is this Georgia’s?”
“Yep. I snagged it from her hairbrush while she was in the game room. I know it’s not her mother’s hair, but it’s the closest thing we’re going to find.”
“Carter, I’m very impressed. How did you know that I needed this?”
“Psychics always need something personal when they’re looking for someone. I saw it on TV.”
Olympia rolled her eyes. “Then it has to be true. Well, give me some privacy, and some time. I’ll try to have an answer for you soon.”
I left Olympia in her estrogen shelter and went back upstairs to grab a much-needed beer. Thankfully, the game room was empty this time and I didn’t run into Georgia. If she’d known that I’d been snooping around in her room, she definitely wouldn’t trust me anymore, and I wouldn’t blame her.
As I sipped my beer, I brooded over the events of the past few days. As soon as I told Kingston that Georgia had been abducted, he should have sent me to track down the fucker who had kidnapped her. Instead, he’d sent Jacob to the rescue.
Now, it seemed, Jacob was the favored son in more ways than one.
About an hour later, Olympia and Kingston walked into the game room. Olympia’s face was pale, and her forehead was wrinkled. She had shadows under her eyes, as if she’d been awake for days. Kingston greeted me with his usual hug, almost making me forget my paranoid fantasies.
“Scrying must be exhausting,” I remarked to Olympia. “You look like you’ve aged about fifty years.”
The witch shot me a dirty look. “As a matter of fact, it is exhausting. And if you make one more comment like that, you can count on waking up tomorrow morning with a toad where your dick used to be.”
I knew she wasn’t joking, so I promptly shut up.
Olympia and Kingston both slid onto barstools. Kingston had a map with him, which he unfolded on the bar. He put on his reading glasses.
“Don’t you use the GPS on your phone to find things?” I asked him.
“Why should I when there are so many old maps in print?”
“This isn’t going to be pretty, Carter,” Olympia said. “The good news, if you can call it ‘good,’ is that Georgia’s mother is still alive. I got a very strong vision of her as soon as I looked in the mirror.”
“So, what’s the bad news?”
“She’s only alive because Paimon’s minions are feeding her habit. I have no idea how she’s survived this long using heroin like that, but
she definitely exists.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in an abandoned building. A house, or maybe a duplex, with two front doors. From the outside, it looks empty, but inside it’s seething with shadows.”
“Where is this building? Is she here in Chicago?”
“I wish it were that easy,” Kingston said. “Unfortunately, it sounds like she’s in a border city far south of here.”
“A border city south of here,” I repeated. “Okay, that’s a start.”
“I saw mountains beyond a desert, and buildings rising along the mountains. Then I saw images from a city. There was a neighborhood with wide streets, a big cemetery. A hospital. The house itself was on a street near the cemetery.”
“You don’t see any street signs or anything?”
Olympia shook her head. “No, my visions are more like dreams. They’re just images, one after another.”
“From the landscape that Olympia described, I’m guessing that she’s in Texas,” Kingston said. “Of course, there are a lot of border towns in Texas, but Olympia saw a large city, with a highway dividing two countries.”
“There’s an image of the cemetery that sticks in my mind,” Olympia said. “It reminded me of this crazy pagan party I went to years ago. There was a naked guy at this party wearing a headdress with antlers—”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “What does the naked guy have to do with this?”
“Nothing,” Olympia said. “It wasn’t the guy, it was the antlers. There was a big statue of a deer in my vision.”
A lightbulb went off in my head.
A flashback to the past. In my own years of searching for my human family, I’d gone on a solitary road trip to the Southwest. Driving along those empty miles of highway, I’d felt a sense of existential doom. I hadn’t had any luck finding anyone who knew my father, and I was starting to wonder if I ever would.
Meanwhile, my mother, Leora, was enclosed in her narcissistic life, singing in nightclubs and taking drunk men home to feed off their blood. She didn’t care if she drained them dry, and I’d realized that was probably what happened to my father.
I didn’t know where I was going, but Interstate 10 led me to El Paso. Smashed on tequila, I fed on one woman after another, not caring who they were or where they came from. As far as I could tell, they were all as lost as I was.
I remembered the vertical streets winding up the mountains in Ciudad Juarez across the border in Mexico, and the broad streets and historic buildings of El Paso, Texas. I remembered the smeared lights of bars, the distant sounds of mariachi music. Someone was happy somewhere, but it wasn’t me.
In the rare hours when I was sober, I visited the cemeteries in El Paso. I used to wander through the tombstones at Concordia and Evergreen, looking at the names of the dead, both famous and unknown, wishing I could find a connection to my own past.
“It’s not a deer. It’s a statue of an elk,” I said.
“How should I know?” Olympia asked irritably. “They both have antlers, don’t they?”
“I think I know where Georgia’s mother lives,” I said.
Kingston and Olympia both looked at me curiously.
“Well?” Olympia asked. “Are you going to let us in on it? Or do we have to wait for Kingston to decipher that ancient map of his?”
“There’s a memorial for the Elks Club at Evergreen Cemetery in El Paso, Texas—a border city surrounded by mountains. I oughta know, I walked into the statue one day when I was so hungover I couldn’t see straight. That’s where Georgia’s mother is. And I’m going with Georgia to find her.”
Carter
“No. You’re not going with me,” Georgia said. I had found her in the training room, kicking the stuffing out of a punching bag. No doubt she was pretending that the punching bag had my face on it.
“I am going with you to find your mother,” I repeated slowly. “I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. You are not going to look for your mother alone.”
She turned to me, her face flushed with exertion. Her loose white t-shirt slid down her shoulder, revealing a thin lavender bra strap. Her long hair was twisted up in a knot, exposing the slender length of her pale neck. She was breathing hard, and I could practically see her carotid artery pulsing below her delicate jaw.
Whatever god is willing to listen to a half-vampire, please give me strength.
“Who said I was going alone?” she asked haughtily. She wheeled around and gave the bag another hard kick, making it swing helplessly from side to side. I was starting to feel sorry for that poor piece of equipment.
I froze. What if she had already invited Jacob? It would make sense. Jacob was closer to her age, stronger than I was, and had the angels on his side.
“Who’s going with you?” I asked, my mouth dry.
“I’m thinking about asking Olympia. We’ll make it a girls’ road trip.”
The thought of Georgia and her witch buddy giggling their way down I-10, pursued by flocks of flying demons, would have been hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying.
“And Eli,” Georgia added. “Eli can kick any demon’s ass.”
“Any demon, yes. Legions of demons, no. Eli can’t protect you from an army, Georgia.”
She glared at me, her purple eyes beaming contempt. “Eli and I fight very well together. In case you’ve forgotten, I helped him destroy that monster who was selling kids to other demons. We’re an awesome team. We’ll stock up the car with weapons and snacks and be on our way.”
“Snacks aren’t going to cut it where you’re going.”
Georgia stopped kicking the bag. She hiked up her t-shirt, crossed her arms over her chest, and turned to face me.
“How do you know how far we’re going?” she asked.
Now I was the one with the upper hand. “Because I know where your mother is living. Or trying to live.”
Georgia’s full lips fell open. “Tell me.”
“Sure. If you let me go with you. She’s in a city that I’ve visited many times. I’d be the perfect tour guide.”
That last part was a bald-faced lie—I’d only been to El Paso once, and I’d been too intoxicated to read a street sign, much less remember the layout of the city.
Her eyes glistened. I couldn’t tell if the tears that welled in her eyes came from joy or anger, but I was betting on the latter.
“I knew you could be an asshole, Carter. But I never knew you could be this cruel.”
She was definitely angry. I saw proof of that when a spear flew off the wall, heading straight for my chest. I dodged out of the way with about a second to spare. The spear landed harmlessly on the mat about six inches away from me.
Georgia had been learning to control her telekinetic powers, but apparently she was either too angry to manage them this time, or she truly wanted to kill me.
“Shit, Georgia! What the hell was that for?”
“For being such an evil son-of-a-bitch!” she shouted. “Remember that spear next time you think you can manipulate me into doing what you want.”
“Georgia, please. Calm down.”
“Why? So you can feed me more bullshit?”
“It’s not bullshit. Olympia found your mother, not me. I just recognized the city.”
“I don’t believe you. You’re trying to manipulate me again. First, you hid the truth about my father from me, now you’re lying to me about my mother. You want me to think you know where she is so you can go along and keep an eye on me!”
She was panting now, not from the workout, but from the emotions surging through her body. Under that thin t-shirt, her breasts quivered from the energy of her rage. Her hands were balled into fists, and her eyes were violet fireballs.
A mace spun off the wall, but this time I was prepared. I lunged forward and grabbed Georgia, figuring that she was the only safe space in the room at this point. We fell on the floor together as the mace crashed into the floor where I’d been standing.
I lay on top of he
r, holding her down. She bucked underneath me, but I held her arms and secured her legs between my thighs.
That’s when I kissed her. Her mouth was lush and moist, and slightly salty from her tears. For a second, she forgot she wanted to kill me and she kissed me back. When I felt the tip of her tongue enter my lips, I moved my hands from her arms and held the back of her head, pulling her closer.
Big mistake. She bit my lower lip, then shoved me over onto my back.
Damn, I’m a goner now.
I was sure she would grab the mace and brain me with it, but she backed off and scrambled to her feet. Staring down at me, she pointed at me with a trembling finger.
“If and when I want you to kiss me, I will let you know. Until that time comes, don’t ever touch me without my permission. Or I will kill you.”
I thought about reminding her that as a half-vampire, I had the dubious gift of immortality. But why tempt fate?
Besides, she was right. I had stepped over the line again. Something about Georgia seemed to test the boundaries of my self-control. And the lack of blood wasn’t helping.
Georgia stalked away, leaving me lying on my back on the floor. I stared up at the ceiling, trying to recover from her attack, or from that kiss, or both.
“She’s in El Paso,” I called to Georgia’s retreating back.
The cambion didn’t turn around, but she did stop in her tracks.
“Your mother’s in El Paso, Texas,” I repeated. “If you want to find her, that’s where you need to go.”
“Whatever.” Georgia tossed back her hair and kept walking. “You’re still not touching me anytime soon.”
Call me crazy, but I think she implied that we still have a chance.
8
Jacob
I lingered in the hallway outside the training room, accidentally overhearing the fight between Carter and Georgia. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I’d been heading out of the warehouse to grab a pizza to split with Eli when I heard Georgia shouting.