by E. A. Copen
Now or never, I thought, closing my eyes and leaning down for the kiss. The second my lips brushed against his, Robbie grabbed my waist and jerked me off the table to land on top of him. I tried to pull away, but he put a hand on the back of my head and held my mouth against him. Fire crawled into my mouth while claws sank into my hip, forcing me even harder against him. He held me there with the strength of ten men. The burning feeling traveled through my mouth, tracing back and forth briefly across my tongue before retreating. Sharp teeth bit into my lower lip and drew my blood up as if they were straws.
When he was done, he shoved me out of the booth and let me fall to the floor awkwardly. Then, he retrieved an empty shot glass from his desk and spat a mouthful of blood into it, my blood, presumably. “There,” he said, raising it to the light and swirling it around. “Are we all in agreement that I've taken no more than was owed?”
“Bastard,” I mumbled and started trying to wipe my mouth clean. “What the hell was that?”
“Don't lie to yourself, love. It’s perfectly ok to admit that you liked it. No one’s ever said they didn’t.” He smirked and offered me a hand up. “Shall we go?”
I knew better than to take Robbie's hand. I got up on my own and Ed came to stand between us, growling. “My car is in the parking lot,” I told him.
Robbie giggled. “Oh, love. There are much more convenient methods of travel.”
He clamped his hands down on my forearms. I blinked and, when I opened my eyes back up, we were standing in the middle of a cold, dark cell with iron bars at our back and rocks to our side. Ed and the rest of Aisling was gone, left behind when we moved through space.
The room was simple. There was a single cot shoved up against one wall, a toilet and a bucket of dirty water. The cell didn't even have a proper door. Lying on the cot was who I could only assume was the man known as Maria. She was wearing a dirt stained white tank top, a red bandanna and full sleeves of ink on either arm. She sat up casually, puffing on a cigarette. “Look what the cat dragged in. A fairy boy and someone who stinks of wet dog.”
“Judah Black,” Robbie said, straightening his tie and gesturing to the prisoner. “Meet Alejandro Escobado, also known as Maria Castella.” Finally, I knew her real name.
She smiled and crossed one leg over the other. “I prefer Maria and female gendered pronouns, if that’s okay with you.”
“You'll excuse me if I don't have time for pleasantries,” I said walking away from Robbie. “But there are lives at stake. I need answers and I need them now.”
She glanced from Robbie to me and back again. “Let me guess. You're here about Elias Garcia.”
I sat down on the cot beside her and tried to hide how hard my hands were shaking. “Andre LeDuc has my son.”
“And your plan is what? March in, find him and kill him? Sugar, it ain't that simple. No one just walks into LeDuc's and walks back out. And killing him... If even Marcus is afraid of him, what does that tell you?”
“Marcus,” I said quietly. “You mean Marcus Kelley?”
Robbie shifted his weight and scratched the back of his neck. “The Master.”
“He's not my master,” Maria spat. She crushed her cigarette out on the damp floor and leaned forward into a ray of light coming through a crack in the rock. The moonlight illuminated a silhouette of her face, lighting up briefly a series of deep purple bruises on her neck, arms and chest.
“Maria, do you know where LeDuc and Zoe are?” She nodded. “Will you help me?”
“If I help you, you have to do something for me.”
Of course, I thought. Why should I expect to get something for nothing? Everything had its price. “What is it you want?”
She turned to me, her eyes pleading. “You have to kill me.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sal was right. You never forget the first person you kill. I'm sure his experiences were quite different from mine, since he was a werewolf and all. He didn't have as much control over the situation as I had. The blood on Sal's hands had been spilled in the defense of another. He’d killed two people to save one. Maybe it didn’t even out in the end but he’d had good intensions. Whenever the memories haunted him, he could tell himself that. I didn't have the luxury of excuses.
Mine was a sixteen-year-old girl, standing on an overpass with her father's gun pressed to her temple. I was still technically in training but only days out from my final set of field tests. The board, my mentor and all of my instructors thought I was ready to hit the street and see what life on the beat was really like. It was early spring. In the Midwest, that means there's still plenty of ice and snow on the ground and very little sunshine. The slush was coming down out of the sky just fast enough to make driving difficult. My mentor and I were cruising around, not expecting much from the day. After all, Charleston was quiet that time of year because no one wanted to be out in that mess. The ten fifty-six came in just before lunch and we decided we'd respond. I thought I was doing my good deed for the day. Talking down a suicide should have been easy.
Instead, I spent two hours out in the sleet as it shifted to snow, begging her to come back two inches and talk to me. Her name was Kathy. She'd just tested positive for magickal abilities during a routine school check. Her boyfriend left her, her parents disowned her... The poor girl was convinced there was nothing left to live for. I did my best to save her, but I hadn't really understood the most important thing about Kathy. She'd never really wanted to be saved. She just wanted someone to be there with her when she pulled the trigger.
When Maria asked me for a favor in return for the information that could save my son, I'd expected her to ask me to free her from her prison, maybe bring her a burger or something. I didn't expect her to ask me to kill her. Asking me that brought back my memory of Kathy's body falling, limp, lifeless and bleeding to the pavement forty feet below.
“No,” I said sharply and crossed my arms. “I won't kill you.”
“It's a mercy,” Robbie whispered and turned his head away. “Death would be kinder.”
“What do you mean?”
Maria stood and went to stand in the moonlight, brushing aside her long black hair so that I could see the bruises on his neck a little better. In the stronger light, I could see that there were several rosy red marks in the center of most of the bruises. Some were large and swollen while others were barely noticeable. A long black line ran through the vein in her neck, stretching down beneath the collar of her shirt. “Holy Hell,” I whispered. “Are those...”
“Vampire bites,” said Maria, flipping her hair back and returning to her place on the cot.
“They're turning you. Why?”
“Because I'm an investment.” The cold way Maria said it made me think she was repeating something she'd been told. “Because he wants to use my body as a weapon.” She turned empty eyes on me. When she blinked, a tear fell, though she didn't acknowledge it. “You have to do it with a stake through the heart and cut off my head.” She lifted a bit of sharpened metal from under the cot and held it out to me. It looked like it had once been a cross bar to something, sharpened against the cement floor. “Leave my body where the sun will find me or burn me to ash. Any other way and they might resurrect me. I'm too far gone to do it any other way.”
I swallowed. That's murder, I thought. That's not even suicide. It's outright murder. She's still a living, breathing person with thoughts and feelings. Every fiber of my being screamed that killing her was in no way justified and yet... And yet, if I didn't agree to kill her, I would never find Hunter in time.
“First,” I started, taking the stake and letting my arm hang limply, “you tell me everything you know. Tell me how it went down with Elias and why. Tell me what LeDuc is and how I kill him.”
Maria smiled weakly. “How do you kill a shadow like LeDuc? Even if you stop his heart, LeDuc doesn't die. Bullets, poison... Elias even tried silver. All it ever did was make him angry.”
“So I was right,” I breathed. “
You and Elias went together to kill him, didn't you?”
She took a deep, quivering breath and looked up at Robbie. “How about another? For old time's sake?” Robbie gave her another cigarette and lit it for her. “Thanks, man. Whatever I owe you, I guess you'll collect later, huh?”
“I consider it paid forward,” Robbie said, shifting uncomfortably. He crossed his arms and paced off into a corner. “You two should hurry. It won't be long before we're discovered. The Master won't be pleased that I've brought you here.”
“Yeah.” Maria nodded and tapped the ash from her cigarette onto the floor. Smoke drifted up around her soft features and into the moonbeam like a halo. “When I met Elias, he was so hooked on the barbs that he didn't know which way was up. Like me, he couldn't afford a treatment program but I'd gotten involved in these trials. I'd show up at this shady lab out in the middle of nowhere once a week. They gave me injections, transfusions and put me on a regiment of experimental drugs. Then, they'd hand me fifty bucks. At first, I didn't think it was doing anything. I still had my magick. I still kept testing positive for abilities.”
“You're a wizard or a sorcerer or something?” I asked, leaning closer. To me, both words meant the same thing: a human with access to magick. There were some in the community who preferred one term over the other.
“Was,” she corrected. “After eight months of the treatments, I passed my first test. Of course, I didn't really have much talent to begin with, just enough to be troublesome. Just enough to exclude me from normal folk. Elias, he was a different case. He barely saw any results at all and he was in the program for almost four months.”
“Okay,” I pushed. “What does any of that have to do with the kids they've been grabbing up?”
Maria sucked on the cigarette. “None of us knew at first. We didn't make the connection that our success had to be someone else's failure. It was Elias that first started asking around, trying to figure out how the cure worked. He thought that, maybe, if he knew how it worked that he could somehow do something to make it work better for him. When no one would give him any information, Elias got suspicious. I told him he was crazy, but he convinced me to help him break into the clinic after hours. What we saw there...” She shook her head. “I don't know the details of what they were doing but the children are all part of the experiment. He's taking something out of them, mixing it with something else and then injecting it into people. Andre LeDuc is a monster.” She finished her cigarette and flicked it off by the first one. “Anyway, I stopped the injections as soon as I found out and spent the next week puking my guts up and scratching at bugs under my skin. No one told us the substance was addictive. No one told us that when the treatments stopped everything would come back with a vengeance. I managed, but it almost killed Elias. He had to go back for more, at least until he figured out how to quit for good.”
As close as we were, I should have been able to feel some of Maria’s body heat, especially since the room was so cold. I felt nothing. “Tell me about the night you showed up at Valentino's with Elias. I know there was a fight.”
“I'd convinced Elias to stand up to Valentino,” she explained. “I thought we could make him listen, make him accept that Elias was who he was. Their fights had been so brutal that it nearly destroyed Elias. Being rejected by his brother, by his pack, that’s what drove him to the drugs in the first place, you know? We both thought that if he could just get Valentino to recognize him, to see him, he could make that last jump and get completely clean. So, we went together, and I stood there, holding his hand while he did the bravest thing I thought Elias could ever do. Valentino was furious, of course. Called Elias every name in the book and then told him to get his shit and be out by that time the next day. Then, Elias went inside. Valentino told me he'd kill me if he ever saw me again and that was that.”
“Except that it wasn't,” I pointed out. “LeDuc and Zoe Mathias were using Ways to get into houses and steal the children and I'm willing to bet there just happened to be one inside the Garcia house.”
“Elias saw the whole thing,” said Maria with a backhanded gesture. “That woman didn't even care that she'd been seen. She didn't think Elias would do anything about it. Elias shouldn't have.” She reached up and rubbed the tightness out of her throat. “But Elias wanted to win Valentino's respect back any way he could so, the idiot called me and, like a fool, I drove him out to the clinic where LeDuc laughed in his face. Elias tried to force his way back into the lab to get Leo but LeDuc's goons escorted him out. When we got back to Valentino's...” She shook her head. “We went back that night, both of us. Elias said he was only going to talk to LeDuc again but he had a gun and silver bullets. I heard the gun go off and I got scared. I... I knew I shouldn't have, but I got out of there as fast as I could before Elias or LeDuc came out. If I had just stayed, maybe I could have saved him. I could have...”
She started sobbing then, burying her head in her arms. I didn't know what to do. Maria still hadn't told me where to find LeDuc or how to kill him but she probably wasn't going to answer any more questions until I got her calmed down. “It's okay,” I promised and patted her back gently. “I'm going to stop him. You just have to tell me how.”
“Reed called me,” Robbie said across the room. “She must've gone to him for protection after getting out of there. That stupid priest, he knew how this would go down. I had an obligation to bring her back in to The Master. It's not my fault.”
I ignored Robbie. “Maria, I know it's hard. I know it's been really tough but I need your help. My son needs your help. Tell me where LeDuc takes the children so I can stop him.”
“You can't,” she bawled. “You can't stop him! No one can.”
“She can.” I looked up at Robbie who had turned around to glare at me. “The Master believes she can, anyway. Otherwise, he wouldn't have ordered all of us to help.”
“What the hell does Marcus Kelly have to do with all of this?” I demanded. Robbie's jaw clamped shut, and he stared down at the floor with his arms crossed.
“Okay,” Maria said after a couple of deep breaths. “All right. I'll tell you. Just remember our deal.”
She stood, smoothing her hands over her shirt and walked to the center of the room. There, she stood, eyes closed and breathing deeply. I was just about to insist again that she tell me what she knew when she threw her hands up. A light appeared in the air at each fingertip. Then, Maria opened her eyes and moved her fingers around, bringing the lights with them, drawing in the air with the lights as if they were paints.
I'd seen a lot of magick and read about even more but what Maria did that day I'd never heard of and I have never seen since. Maybe she was the only one of her kind. Whatever she was doing, it was both beautiful and helpful. As she drew, I started seeing some familiar landmarks. She put in the church, Chanter's pawn shop and even Valentino's garage.
“It's a map of the reservation,” I whispered.
“It's more,” Robbie promised as he came to stand beside me. “Just wait.”
After putting in all the major landmarks and roads, Maria repeated her process of bringing up lights, this time in red. She dragged them around as pinpoints, dropping them in a pattern all over. It wasn't until she dragged one over to the far side of the reservation where my house would have been that I realized he was drawing the Ways. “Jesus Christ. How did she get this map?”
“She told you she was an investment,” Robbie said. “This level of scrying ability is quite rare. The map's still incomplete but all the stable entrances are there, the ones that don't move around and change much. Then, of course, there are the ones that can open at will. Not many can do that but we know that LeDuc can. We think he may have been teaching Zoe how to do it.”
It made sense. After all, Zoe had used a Way to kidnap Hunter. all the houses that belonged to the missing kids had Ways. LeDuc and Zoe could get in and out without ever having to unlock a door or disturb anything. They could just grab the kids and run, leaving no evidence
behind. It was a genius way of moving around, especially since most people didn't know how to access the Ways. Zoe or LeDuc had probably used a Way to access the Summers house to murder Donald Summers, too. When they left through the front door, looking like Sal, that could have easily been a glamour.
“Who controls access to the Ways?” I asked as I watched Maria continue to move around more dots.
“It used to be the Master,” Robbie said. “He and LeDuc had a business partnership until there was a falling out recently. When the two split, control over the Ways in Concho County became an arms race between the two of them. The Master had the means and the men but he didn't have Alejandro. We don't know how but we do know LeDuc has a way of getting into people's heads, leeching their powers away for himself. That’s why LeDuc is so dangerous. We need him gone.”
I turned to Robbie. “So, if Marcus is all great and powerful, why doesn't he do it himself?”
Robbie smirked and winked at me. “Vigilantism is against the law, love. The Master abides by the law to the best of his ability. Less paperwork that way. Besides, he isn't free to act openly. He and LeDuc have a history. LeDuc would have expected the Master to move against him. You were a wild card, the ace up his sleeve that LeDuc never saw coming.”
“And I played right into it,” I muttered, though I couldn't see any other way for this to have played out. There was no way I was going to walk away from a family and a community in need, even if my goals did happen to align with those of a shady character like Marcus Kelley.
“There,” Maria said, taking a step back. “Every entrance and exit that I know of, though I don't know where all of them go. I know that there was one in the place they were doing the treatments. It will take you close to LeDuc's lair.”
She took two steps to the right and made a big swipe with her hand, drawing a thick line that curved in a few places. Then, she drew a circle around one particular bend. “What's that?”