by Amir Lane
“We keep putting pressure on them any way we can,” Kieron said. “Rowan being on the lam and that whole shade business obviously has them shook up pretty bad if they're sending someone like Iain O’Rourke to clean up.”
He paused and ran a hand over his face, letting out a shaky breath. I wondering if he kept imagining O’Rourke’s head exploding from the bullet like I did. He swallowed and kept going.
“We have no reason to assume Inspector Vance was the only one working for the Birches. We know there’s cops who’re in the gangs’ pockets. We need to move carefully.”
Everyone turned their heads to look at me. My face heated. It wasn't my fault O’Rourke had set me up, and it wasn't my fault Audra wasn't who we thought she was. Rowan should have left me more information.
“What? I'm careful,” I said.
Ariadne snorted, and Angelo laughed outright. I ignored them both.
“So what do we actually do?” Indira asked, looking at Kieron.
While I was glad the responsibility of coming up with a plan was no longer on my very under qualified shoulders, I couldn’t help the twinge of guilt in my stomach at the way Kieron sighed and rubbed his face again. He shouldn’t have been dealing with this, not when he was about to bury his best friend. If he wasn’t the only one who had any real experience with this sort of situation… His years in Guns, Gangs, and Covens far trumped my years in Homicide, Indira’s experience with the Emergency Task Force, Ariadne’s years as an assistant medical examiner, and Angelo’s centuries of who knew what. Between the five of us, there had to be something we could do.
“I’m leaving for Ireland morning after next. I still got some pull from my old military days. Lot of my old unit ended up in Interpol. I’ll do some digging, see what I can’t find out about the Birches and Rowan.”
“Is that safe? Are you taking Gwendolyn with you?” I asked.
Kieron snorted and shook his head.
“Gwendolyn’s staying back this time. She ain’t thrilled about it, but she’ll be staying with my nephew so it’s a fair enough compromise. As for safe, well… That ship’s long sailed, hasn’t it?”
A heavy silence hung in the air. While there were far more dangerous jobs out there than being a police officer, we had set ourselves up in a way that safety was out of the question. Even before this, we’d put ourselves in the path of danger. I wanted to tell him to back out, to think of his daughter, but I could see the pain in his eyes. He clearly knew there was a chance he wouldn’t come back from this. I didn’t have to remind him.
“What about us?” Ariadne said. “What can we do?”
Her eagerness to help made my heart clench so hard, I nearly choked on it. Every single person in this room was a threat to the Black Birches, which made every single one of us a target. That included Ariadne. There would be no telling her to stay out of it — I’d tried — but there had to be a way to keep her at least somewhat safe.
This part of the plan was something I knew how to handle.
“Can you and Angelo take the organ trafficking angle? If we can identify any bodies that were killed by Bromley, we might be able to start connecting them to the Birches. Even old gang members,” I added, remembering a comment Angelo had made about Bromley clearing out territory for them.
“I’ll try,” Angelo said.
“Don’t let anybody know what you’re doing. Give false positives and negatives if you think anybody is looking.”
“You don’t think anybody will notice?” Ariadne said.
It was hard to say. On the one hand, the Medical Examination Complex was always so busy, I doubted anybody had the time to look too closely at what they were doing. On the other hand, looking into old bodies would be sure to get some kind of attention, especially to anybody who was already watching.
I thought of Angelo’s business card. Merano Angelus, Assistant Exorcist.
“He’s an exorcist,” I said.
“Apprentice exorcist.”
“He’s trying to identify some spirits he’s exorcising.”
Angelo raised an eyebrow. “Not a terrible cover. But I’ve tried that before, we can’t see bodies without a court order.”
“He’s right,” Ariadne confirmed.
I knew plenty of judges, and I knew at least one who would sign pretty much anything I asked him to, but the connection to me was more obvious than I liked.
“I can handle that,” Indira said. “My dad golfs with half the judges in the city. It’ll be easy enough to pull the whole friend of a friend thing. It won’t come back to us.”
I gave him a grateful smile.
“We play this as by-the-book and under the radar as we can,” Kieron said. “We don't draw any more attention to ourselves than necessary.”
I couldn't pretend not to know why everybody was looking at me again. After all, my backup-backup plan was to make myself a walking target. Was there any point reminding them that I'd been as ’under the radar’ as possible given the circumstances? I only nodded and repeated Ariadne's words from a few days ago.
“Let’s give them Hell.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Nightmares kept Rowan up most nights. Usually, they were from what he called Life Before. These days, more recent events played behind his eyelids. Once one started, it quickly spiraled into a lifetime of events he'd tried desperately to escape from. He'd been naive to think he could ever really start over. This constant running was the best he could get.
The mattress dipped behind him with the shift in Kseniya's weight. She was close enough that Rowan could feel the warmth of her body, but not close enough to touch him.
“Did you know it takes about 18 months to die from a lack of sleep?” he said, his voice a raspy drawl.
Dropping his voice to a lower timbre had long since stopped feeling forced. He didn't think he could go back to his original pitch if he tried.
“It's only been four months,” Kseniya said sympathetically.
Rowan rubbed his face. Open or shut, his eyes burned. Stubble scraped over his palm. He still had a shit time growing a beard, especially now that he was rationing his hormones. It was patchy and looked stupid, but he needed to look as different as possible. Cropping and bleaching his hair would only go so far.
“Feels like my whole fucking life.”
He honestly couldn't remember a time when he'd slept through the night. Life Before felt like so long ago. It didn’t even feel like his life.
His family hadn't started out as part of the Black Birches, even though they were black birch dryads. Most of the dryads in Belarus were. The Biarozy Birches were one of many dryad clans in the area. His aunt Oksana led the clan with a philosophy of philanthropy and giving back to nature. His mother had other ideas. She was power-hungry and resented that Aunt Oksana saw Rowan as a more suitable heir than her. While Oksana had been grooming him to take her place when the time came, his mother took every opportunity to cut him down. He was never good enough for her. Everything he did was wrong. Some days, it had felt like he couldn’t even breathe properly. He was too fat and too skinny, too loud and too quiet, too sensitive and too emotionless. Too much and not enough of everything at the same time.
It wasn’t until he was an adult reading through stacks of self-help books that he finally realized just how much she must have hated him. Books with names like How To Not Be A Total Fuckwit When You Were Raised By One, Why You Can’t Hold a Fucking Relationship, and There Might Be One Possible Hope had helped him piece together just what a heartless bitch she was. Some days, he could actually convince himself she was wrong about him.
Volha z-Biarozy was toxic, biting, and mean on a good day. All the walls he'd put up, all the anxious habits he'd developed to make him feel safe, it was all to shake off the fear and self-loathing he'd grown up with. It had never worked. As much as Oksana had tried to keep him away from her, protect him from her, all that poison had sunk deep into his muscles. All the negativity, all the screaming, all the beatings he’
d managed to convince himself he deserved. He could never forget, never get away from it, no matter how far he ran.
Oksana had died two months before his thirteenth birthday. It was sudden and suspicious. There was no doubt in his mind that Volha was responsible. The timing was too much of a coincidence. Two months later and he would have been branded heir to the Biarozy Birches.
But Oksana was smarter than that. She’d had him branded two years earlier in secret, with only herself and the clan recordkeeper present. If she hadn’t, there would have been nobody standing between Volha and clan leadership.
Thinking back, he had to wonder what Oksana had been trying to achieve. Nobody else knew about the branding; it wouldn’t have stopped Volha from killing him in those two years. If she had, she would have been executed for it. Then somebody else, likely appointed by Oksana before her death, would have taken over, or the clan would have dissolved.
He wondered sometimes if that had been her intention. If he had never been anything but a pawn, even to his aunt.
It was a strange sort of funny that he’d heard what had happened to himself through rumours. The Biarozy heir had run away, they said. There was nobody but the old Queen’s sister to take over.
If anybody ever questioned it or went looking for him, he never heard of it. More than likely, they were too afraid of Volha z-Biarozy to ever question her version of the story.
A story that was no doubt farther from the truth than it could have been. Dryad law and custom prevented her from killing the heir to a clan. The only way to get around that law and become clan leader was to either be branded an heir herself — impossible with Oksana dead — or to make the living heir disappear.
No body, no crime.
It was the difference between a missing person and a homicide.
How hard had it been to convince the clan that he’d run away? It was easier to swallow than the truth, he was sure. The truth that his own mother traded him like a playing card. The eldest child for power and maybe one of the earlier alliances that had allowed them to join the Black Birches. People would pay good money to spend time with dryad royalty. And they did.
Again.
And again.
And again.
He was trembling now. The memories, they were too much. Things he'd tried to repress, things he'd tried to fight back against. They all pushed forward, fighting for space in his skull with all the other bullshit that was there. He hunched forward, folding in on himself, and wrapped his arms around his waist. The scar tissue in his chest tightened as he struggled to breathe. He was lucky, he supposed, that dryads could live for a few hours on anaerobic respiration if their hearts stopped. It had bought him enough time to save Fairuz and make up for some of what he'd done. And it had bought him enough time to call Kseniya, and for her to arrange a back-alley heart transplant. He didn't know whose heart he had. All he knew was that it was from a dryad, and that was more than he wanted to know.
“Rowan,” Kseniya said softly, “can I hold you?”
Rowan shook his head. “Not yet.”
The many therapists his dad — his dad, not his spineless piece of shit father who’d offed himself when Rowan was a kid, leaving him alone with Volha and her rage — had forced him see called it touch aversion. His brain had built up so many negative connotations with touch that even a hand on his shoulder made him bristle.
He was much better than he had been back when he was an eighteen-year-old mess. He'd kicked Gilbert and the other officers repeatedly, bitten the doctor that had examined him, and screamed like a banshee for days when anybody tried to touch him. So, yeah, he was better.
Kseniya had never seemed to have the same problems. She was always hugging and touching her friends. Before they started dating, she'd had no problem sleeping with whichever shitty guy wanted her. She never understood it, but she also never seemed to take his need for space personally.
Gilbert hadn't wanted him to keep any ties to his old life, but Kseniya had always been good for him. She kept him grounded, reminded him they were safe.
Except, they weren't safe now. Maybe they never had been. The Birches were hunting him and as long as she was with him, she wasn't safe either. But telling her to stay behind was about as effective as telling Fairuz to stick to her own damn business. It just wasn’t going to happen.
“She cares about you,” Kseniya had told him once, laughing when he couldn't understand why Fairuz persisted.
They all cared about him, didn't they? Fairuz, Indira, Kieron. Maybe even Sabine. And he'd fucked them all over.
He wondered sometimes if he was depriving Kseniya of something she needed when he didn't want to be touched. He compromised as best he could, holding her when it only made his skin prickle, but not when it made him want to scream.
There's no sense helping others of it only hurts you, he reminded himself. Put your own air mask on first.
When the urge to claw at the bark protecting his soft, vulnerable skin and then rip that skin off passed, he nodded.
“Okay,” he whispered hoarsely. “Okay.”
He didn't need to say more than that. Kseniya shuffled closer to him and pressed her chest to his back. Her arm was loose around him. If he needed to, he could get away easily. With her other hand, she rubbed his chest. The sensation disappeared over the tears in his bark and the white knots of scar tissue.
“You should have let me die.”
Rowan hadn't meant to say it, even if it was something he'd thought with alarming frequency. Her hand paused only for a second.
“I wasn't going to let them win.”
He reached up and squeezed her hand. With her wrapped around him, he sometimes understood why she liked being held. It didn't necessarily make him feel safe the way she said if made her feel, but he certainly didn't feel so alone. He inhaled deeply, and a sharp, acidic smell filtered into his nose. A humourless laugh tumbled through his chest.
“What's so funny?” Kseniya asked.
“I almost forgot about the body in the bathtub.”
How that was possibly something Rowan could have forgotten was a mystery. And yet, if not for the stench starting to fill the room, it would have completely slipped his mind. Four months of this, and it was starting to get a little routine. He could do it on autopilot, not even think about it.
The first time hadn’t been so easy, and not just because his chest had still been healing. Rowan had never killed anyone like that before. It hadn’t even been entirely intentional. The man had found them in Seville, Spain, of all places. He’d followed them for several blocks, chasing them down until Rowan couldn’t run anymore. The man, who had worked for one of the Black Birch families, had recognized Rowan and wanted to cash in on the bounty his family — his mother — had put on his head.
It hadn’t hurt, knowing that his blood wanted him dead. She’d done worse. Having him killed would be one of the nicer things she’d done to him.
He still remembered the sight of the man’s large, bark-covered hands on Kseniya's arms, and he’d snapped. Too many people he cared about had gotten hurt because of him. Even if it was her choice to come with him, he wasn’t going to let them hurt her, too. He’d extended his fingers around the man’s neck and pulled him back. The thin branches had broken skin, drawn blood. Adrenaline had given him the strength he’d needed to grab the man’s head and snap his neck. At first, he hadn’t even realized what he’d done. He’d been too focused in making sure Kseniya was okay. Her arms had been bruised, and she’d been shaken, but there was no permanent damage.
And then he’d thrown up.
It couldn’t have only been four months ago.
It was getting hard to keep track of time.
The European springtime sun had done wonders to help him heal despite being on the run. Having Kseniya at his side was probably the only reason he’d survived long enough to make something of a recovery. As much as he wanted her safe at home, he needed her with him. It wasn’t just because he was in constant
risk of cardiac arrest, either. The weight of her body next to him at night was the only thing that let him get any sleep.
Rowan had only been asleep two, maybe three hours before he’d woken this time, which was more than he’d slept the night before. There was a time when he would call Indira to get his nerves back under control. The guy had a way of making people open up. He never minded if Rowan called him in the middle of the night to help him deal with the memories that kept him awake. Even if he didn’t use his powers to do it, even if all he did was tell stories about his many adoptive siblings, it helped.
Calling Indira wasn’t an option now. It was just them.
Rowan’s eyes burned, and he struggled to keep his head upright.
“Want to go back to sleep?” Kseniya asked, rubbing his arms.
“We should get moving. We can’t stay here lo—”
His train of thought was interrupted by a harsh knock to the door and loud, Italian shouting. Rowan leapt to his feet and grabbed the gun from the bedside table. Kseniya was next to him, holding a gun of her own and tugging her jeans on with one hand. And she’d laughed about him sleeping in jeans and a t-shirt.
“I guess that settles that,” she murmured.
Rowan’s eyes were on the rattling doorknob. He wasn’t sure who was on the other side of the hotel door, but he didn’t think he wanted to know.
“Get the window,” he said.
Someone hit the door with their shoulder. The door shook and splintered where it met the frame.
“It’s stuck!”
Of course it was. She moved past him and grabbed his backpack. Before Rowan could wonder what she was doing with it, she hurled it through the window. Glass shattered. There was a pause on the other side of the door before the shouting resumed with more volume, and the doorframe split open. The two men on the other side stared at him for a moment. They obviously hadn’t been expecting him. Rowan saw on their faces the moment the stench of the body in the tub reached them and they realized their buddy was dead. The bulkier man on the left raised his hands. Electricity crackled between them.