by Amir Lane
Not today, though. Not when I was going to disappear for a few days at best. Plus, we watched a lot of movies. I knew how things went. If I proposed, I’d get killed. It was the Law of the Universe.
“It’ll be fine,” I promised again.
By this point, I was starting to wonder who I was trying to convince. I stroked my hand over her face, and I realized why I was so hesitant to propose. I had dragged her though Hell with Rutherford Bromley and now with this. If I proposed, what would she say?
“I know.”
She would say no.
How could she say anything else? Especially now, when I was so obviously not in a good place. I was obsessing, fixating, just like I had back in the winter. I shouldn’t have been doing this.
“I have to go.”
She leaned in and kissed me, long and hard. It wasn’t the sort of kiss we usually shared. I melted into her. It was all I could do not to grab her and pull her into the passenger seat with me. I didn’t want it to end.
But it did end, far sooner than I wanted it to.
“I know,” she whispered.
If I was completely and utterly honest, part of me didn’t want to go undercover. Most of me didn’t want to go undercover. I imagined going home and curling up with her on the couch to watch whatever Netflix suggested to us next. It was such a nice idea. But I had to do this. Even the part of me that didn’t want to knew that if I didn’t, I would go crazy. I could tell myself as much as I wanted to that this was for Rowan — and it definitely was — but it was mostly for me. I was a selfish, and I knew it. If I wasn’t, I would be leaving this to Guns, Gangs, and Covens to deal with, no matter how long it took them.
But no. It had to be me. I’d made this personal when a shade working with the Birches had tried to kill me. It was more personal now that my friend had disappeared because of them. Nothing would satisfy me if I didn’t hurt them as much as I could. I couldn’t let anybody take that away from me.
I got out of the car without another word. If I tried to say anything else, I would start crying, and that was the last thing I needed. Nobody would let me do this if I walked into the precinct sobbing.
Ariadne didn’t drive away until I was inside the precinct. I took the stairs to the second floor. Would anybody notice me coming in to work but not leaving? I doubted it. So many people were in and out of the precinct in a day, it would be easy enough for somebody to assume they simply hadn’t seen me walk out.
“Are you ready?” Kieron asked.
No.
“Almost. I just have to put this… stuff on my face.” I nudged my messenger bag with my hip to indicate the jar hidden inside it. “Do you really think it will work?”
“Elias is eccentric and a little unconventional, but he’s good at what he does. If he says it’ll work, it’ll work.”
The only real way to know was to try it. We used an empty interrogation room. Indira watched the door while Kieron finished faking my arrest record. It was a rush job, but it would have to be enough.
No matter how many times I told myself it was just like the oatmeal face mask I’d used once, I couldn’t quite convince myself that was what it was. The reek of the paste made that impossible. The burnt iron smell of the old blood didn’t bother me. It was a smell I was quite used to at this point in my life. I suspected it was the other elements Elias had added to the mix that made it smell like a skunk had died on my face.
As I sat on the table, reading through a magazine on my phone to kill time, it felt like every minute of my life had come to me waiting for Indira to finally press the button on the intercom and tell me, “It’s been an hour.”
The paste didn’t come off easily. I scraped as much as I could into the trash with a business card from a place that sold handmade soaps I had tucked into the back of my phone case. After that, Indira snuck me into the nearest women’s washroom to wash the rest off. I had to scrub hard enough to make my skin red. In a few spots, I even managed to draw blood. I rubbed some lavender lotion on my face to soothe the itchy burning, and to cover the smell. It sort of worked a little bit. The burning eased, which made me hopeful that the smell would go away too.
When I looked at my reflection in the mirror, I looked like myself, but there was something wrong with the mirror. The reflection staring back at me was warped, like looking into a funhouse mirror. I waited a few minutes until I was sure my face wasn’t going to change. So much for Elias being the best. All of that was for nothing.
I braced myself for the disappointment of Kieron telling me the plan was off and stepped out of the bathroom. Indira blinked at me, turned his head to look at me from the corners of his eyes, then turned his head back.
“Woah. That’s trippy.”
I frowned. “What’s ‘trippy?’”
“I’m looking at you, and I know it’s you, but when I look at you, it’s like my brain doesn’t want to process it.”
That was not a definition.
“So— You’re saying it worked?” I asked, trying to keep myself from sounding too hopeful.
“I’d say it worked. We are good to go.”
I’d arrested my fair share of people, both as a uniformed officer and as a detective, but I’d never been on this side of things. Kieron drove me to the prison in a police cruiser. By the time we arrived, my knees were bruised and my shoulders ached from being cuffed behind me. I’d never realized just how cramped the back seats of these things were.
“You can still back out,” he said quietly. “There’s not a person in the world who would hold it against you. Especially not Rowan.”
I would hold it against me. Cowardice had no place in my line of work.
“I’m doing this.”
“You aren’t trained,” he pleaded.
“Yes I am. I can do this, Kieron.”
“If something happens to you— I can’t be responsible for that, Fairuz.”
The pain in his voice made me swallow. Even he thought something was going to happen to me. Why didn't he put up a bigger fight? Why didn’t anybody? This was insane. He obviously knew that. Sabine must have too. And yet, they were letting me go through with this.
“You won’t be. I promise you, this time next week, we will be celebrating.”
I wanted to reach forward and squeeze his shoulder, but the cuffs and the position stopped me. He let out a shaky breath as if to steel himself and nodded.
“Fine. All right. Let’s get this over with.”
He got out of the cruiser and opened the door next to me. He flashed a quick, apologetic smile before grabbing my arm to pull me out. I stumbled against him.
“Keep moving. Don’t make me drag you,” he warned with a severity he’d never used with me before.
He was good, I had to give him that. I almost forgot he was just acting.
I had been entered into the system with a fake name for an aggravated battery charge of my own. I’d been tried and convicted in a different city, and moved to Toronto to be tried on another case. As far as anybody knew, I was only going to be in this prison until my trial.
Iron manacles were clamped on my wrists, bigger and heavier than the ones I’d worn last time I was here as a visitor. A chain too thick to be broken easily connected the bands together. They itched and hurt, both against my skin and inside me. It was more annoying than anything, like a mosquito bite that sapped my strength.
The relief at the barriers still moving beneath my skin was short-lived. The clerk who processed me handed me a water bottle full of a grey-coloured water.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Protein shake,” the clerk said sarcastically. “Just drink it, unless you want me to get a guard in here to make you drink it.”
I definitely did not want her doing that. I had to keep my head down as much as I could. The liquid had a strong metallic smell to it. Most of Toronto’s water came from aquifers, and some of it did smell a little off compared to lake water, but this wasn’t the smell of aquifer water. It wa
s something else. Powdered iron? Was that even safe?
As if anybody cared about prisoner safety. What was it that Elias had told me the first time I’d met him? Some percentage of prison inmates died of iron poisoning? This was a danger that hadn’t even occurred to me. I didn’t think I could be here long enough to worry about it. If I was drinking it, the necessary timeline for iron poisoning was significantly shorter.
I didn’t have much choice. I’d made my bed, now I had to sleep in it, or however that expression went. Under the clerk’s dirty glare, I chugged as much of the liquid as I could in one go. The metallic taste washed over my tongue. By the time I had to stop to breathe, a deep nausea settled in the base of my stomach. I crouched forward, groaning. I could handle a bit of nausea. It would pass soon enough.
Then the burn started.
At first, it was an unpleasant warmth that sat beside the nausea. It grew until it penetrated my muscles. The bottle fell from my hands. I dropped too my knees and heaved tainted water and stomach acid onto the floor. I scraped my short nails against whatever skin I could reach, more out of reflexive instinct than any real hope of it doing anything. A sharper, more focused burn worked over my hip, feeling very much like a scalpel carving a pattern into me. The magical script stuttered, struggling against whatever it was I had drank.
Oh, no… No, no, no…
Panic made me forget about the clerk watching me. I reached into the pool of power beneath my skin and tried to force a barrier up. The metal seeping into my blood pushed it down. I tried again, but the result was the same.
That was to say, there was no result. I couldn’t call on a barrier.
Iron shouldn't have done this. I’d never drank powdered iron before, but no amount of iron should have been able to stop my powers so completely.
When I was done vomiting, a guard hauled me to my feet with even less care than Kieron had and half-dragged me to the cells.
Nobody here knew who I was, not officially. Not the guards, not the support staff, not the inmates. I recognized several of them through my teary vision. I tried not to look at the women I’d arrested, at the corrections officers I’d met in bars. I kept my head straight and walked forward like I’d just been convicted of beating someone half to death.
The heavy iron door closed behind me as I was shoved unceremoniously into a cell barely bigger than my closet. I whirled around to stare through the bars. The guard was already retreating.
This was a mistake.
I knew it in that moment, deep in my gut, that I had screwed up beyond belief. I was powerless and alone in here, locked up with somebody who was either a friend of an enemy of Rowan’s. Someone who, if she ever found out who I really was, would either help me or kill me.
I turned around and faced Audra Jansons.
Chapter Seven
Audra Jansons wasn't exactly what I was expecting. Of course I'd seen pictures of her, mostly her various booking photos, but none of them prepared me for the reality.
Audra Jansons was tiny, even by human standards and especially by dryad standards. All the dryads I'd ever known were tall. Rowan was one of the shortest I knew, and he was a hair’s width shorter than I was at 5’10”. If Audra even hit 5’5”, I would have been surprised. She was so slight, she looked more like a teenager than an adult. Surely they wouldn't keep a teenager of any species in an adult prison?
I was an idiot. I'd seen her file, read through everything that wasn't sealed from when she was a minor. She was 31 years old, one year younger than myself.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded, looking me up and down with a hostile glare.
I had to remind myself that even if we were nearly the same age, the things she must have seen and done in the Black Birches aged her, same as it had Rowan. I saw it in her eyes, and in the scars on her arms.
“Faiza As—”
“I didn't ask your name. I asked who you are.”
I hesitated. Kieron had coached me on gang slang, but I was completely blanking now. Dammit, dammit, dammit. He was right, I wasn't ready for this. I reached down inside myself reflexively for my powers, but the imaginary bars trapped them, much like I was trapped by the very real bars behind me.
“Witch, huh? Good luck doing anything with that iron.” There was a satisfied smirk on her lips. “First time inside?”
“Maybe.”
My eyes flickered around the cell. I hoped she mistook it as nerves instead of a desperate attempt to remember my lines.
“You don’t look like a criminal,” she said, eyeing me up and down.
I swallowed.
“I’m not. But sometimes, when people don’t leave you alone, you have to make them.”
A small smile of what I hoped was approval tugged at her lips. She, like Rowan, had been sold to one gang or another and passed through the circuit before she landed with the Black Birches. I had to assume they'd been in the same group at some time, though I hadn't been able to find any record of it. When she'd hit her 20s, her arrest record went from solicitation charges to more violent ones, associated with a ‘promotion’ to enforcer. I supposed it wasn't that hard to beat or kill people when you knew something worse would happen to you didn't.
I wondered, without really wanting to, if that was what would have happened to Rowan if he hadn't gotten out. This wasn't a path I could go down right now. Right now, I had to focus.
“What did you do?” I asked, taking a step toward the bunk bed.
The lower bunk was made, which meant it was probably mine.
Her lips quirked up into a sneer. “Beat a witch’s head in with my bare hands. What, think I couldn't do it?”
When I stopped moving, she stepped in front of me with her teeth bared in a snarl. It looked more like something a siren would do.
It was hard to take her as a threat when the top of her head barely came to my chin, which was all the more reason to be afraid. She probably more than knew how to make up for it. And I didn't have any powers to protect myself with.
A dull throb between my temples made me regret shaking my head. “I think anybody is capable of anything in the right circumstances.”
I believed it, too. People who did bad or violent things weren’t always bad or violent themselves. Audra Jansons might not have been bad or violent by nature.
That didn't mean I could lower my guard around her.
Still, I let her shove me to the hard floor. My instinct was to roll back and break my fall with my arms. Instead, I let myself drop like a bag of potatoes. I couldn’t give my training away unless I had to. She stepped on my stomach hard enough to make it clear she wasn't nearly as light as she looked, and bent down to be closer to me. My ribs struggled to expand beneath her, and a barrier struggled against the internal cage. I grabbed at her ankle, digging my nails into her skin. Without my usual fake nails on top, they were useless.
“Listen,” she hissed. “This isn't college. We aren't going to be besties or any of that shit. Don't pretend you know me, and don't pretend you're ever going to. Stay out of my way or I'll cut your pretty face off. We clear?”
I nodded, feigning a struggle to get free.
“Good.”
She stepped off me and I sat up with a wince that definitely wasn't faked.
This might be harder than I’d hoped.
I hated prison. Three days was more than enough to decide that. I hadn't been able to sleep for more than two hours at a time. The food was giving me stomach cramps. I'd gotten into more fights in three days than I had in the past three months, which was saying something. Being stuck in cells most of the day made people cranky.
Audra and I weren't on any better terms than we had been on day one. Already, I was getting tired of it all. How did people do this for years? No wonder people went crazy in here and came out just as bad as before, it not worse.
I wasn't hungry, but I stood in the cafeteria line anyway. I didn't want to eat the D-grade canned excuse for food they were serving out. Not even the thought
of real food had any appeal, but standing in line gave me a good excuse not to mingle. I recognized more people in here than made me comfortable.
The metal on my wrists made my skin itch. I wedged a nail that wasn't broken underneath one to scratch. That only made it worse. It was almost better to distract myself with the thought that I hadn’t seen Angelo since he’d burst into flames in the middle of Raymore Park after Bromley tore his heart out. I had no reason to believe he wasn’t okay. He was a phoenix, after all. He couldn’t have been in a worse position than I was right now.
“Damn,” I mumbled, turning toward the rest of the cafeteria.
The new angle brought a fight breaking out into my periphery. I rolled my eyes up subtly to watch. Interfering was a risk I had to calculate, and I hated myself for it. My instincts screamed at me to run in; my barriers would protect me. Right now, they wouldn't, not with the iron poisoning. I wouldn't be of any use to anyone if I was dead.
Prison fights, I had quickly learned, were rarely fair. The best way to win one was to not get involved in the first place. I craned my neck to see who'd pissed off the two faerie girls. It was Audra, of course.
“Khara,” I muttered under my breath.
Audra wouldn't be able to tell me anything if she was in the infirmary. I abandoned my spot in the line and bolted across the cafeteria. A few girls didn't move out of my way and got knocked over. That was probably going to get me beat later. It wasn't a priority right now. I jumped onto a chair chained to a table and used the momentum to leap onto one of the faeries beating on Audra. My weight sent us both colliding to the ground. I worried about her delicate-looking moth wings getting damaged, but that didn't seem to be a concern. The faerie threw me off her. I rolled out of the way of having my face stomped in. My arms came around her leg, and I rolled to pull her down.