by Laken Cane
“Stop shooting,” Rune ordered the crew.
The man with the hostage spoke into the sudden silence. “We were ready to move on anyway.” He pushed his gun into the girl’s head, causing her to cry out. “Toss your weapons over, all of you.”
“Rune?” Jack asked.
She held up her palms, hoping she’d retracted her claws before the guy had seen them. “Take me, dude,” she told him. “Let’s trade. Me for the girl.”
“Why would I want to do that?” But even in the dim light she could see his stare raking her body.
“I’m valuable. It doesn’t matter if you’re holding the girl—my crew will cut you down. Even if they have to kill her, too.”
The girl cried out again, but Rune continued. “They won’t take a chance on killing me.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“I don’t like seeing innocent girls hurt.”
“Now that’s sweet. But she’s not innocent anymore.” He gestured with his head. “Drop your weapons and get over here, then.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “Let the girl go.”
“I’m not stupid either. Johnny,” he called. “You’re going to let old Johnny handcuff you and bring you behind our little wall, here. Once I have you, I’ll let the girl go. And then, if your men don’t walk away, you’re the first one who’s going to die.”
She smiled. “Deal.”
Johnny, a bulky man with short hair and two black eyes walked toward her. He didn’t seem concerned about Rune—he kept darting glances at her men.
The girl moaned, then began sobbing weakly.
Her captor tightened his arm around her neck. “Hush, sweetheart. You ain’t hurt.”
Rune clenched her fists. “Bastard.”
He grinned at her. “You sure are brave, taking me on, honey. I like a brave girl.”
Johnny pulled her hands behind her back, not handling her especially roughly as he restrained her.
“What do you get out of hurting women?” she asked.
Johnny didn’t answer but the man holding the girl did. “We only get one life. Might as well have fun.”
“Fun,” she said. But really, she wasn’t surprised. She’d been up against her share of monsters. They no longer shocked her. “Johnny has me. Let my crew take the girl out of here.”
The man shrugged, then holstered his gun before lifting the girl into his arms. “Catch,” he said, and tossed her over the pile of junk protecting him from bullets.
Jack rushed forward, snatched the girl off the floor, then backed away.
“Rune,” Strad murmured, his voice barely coming through her earpiece. “See you outside.”
“Let’s get this show on the road,” the leader said. “Before they decide to do something stupid and get you killed.” He winked at her.
The men followed his lead, coming out from behind their cover, and waited for him to tell them what to do.
He wasn’t afraid. He knew he was living on borrowed time.
“Get the van,” he told one of them. Then he looked at Johnny. “Bring her.”
“Wait,” Rune said. “I have a question.”
“You do?” The man bowed. “Then by all means, Princess. Ask.”
“Did you leave any of your victims alive? Stash them away somewhere and forget to go back?”
“Nope. When we leave our women, we leave ‘em dead.” He spat on the floor. “But first we leave ‘em satisfied.”
“Rune,” Ellis said, breathless and afraid. “Please be careful.”
“Always,” she told him.
“Yeah,” the leader said. “Always. Except for the little lady you traded yourself for, and she’ll be dead before morning.”
“All your men know where the bodies are?”
He gestured impatiently, turning away as he spoke. “Shut your mouth. Bring her, Johnny. If anybody is waiting out there, make her scream. If they open fire, shoot her.” He turned to stride from the room.
She’d keep Johnny alive and hope he could give them the locations of the bodies. The rest were dead. “You don’t know who I am, do you?” she asked Johnny, her voice bland, unemotional. Those who knew her would have heard the dark, eager promise in it.
He didn’t answer but pushed the gun into her temple with a little more force. Johnny wasn’t a talker.
With an almost gentle tug, she broke the chain connecting the cuffs. Before Johnny—or any of the men—understood what was happening, Johnny’s gun was across the room, he was unconscious on the floor, and Rune stood blocking the exit door toward which the men were headed.
“The fuck,” the leader said, his disbelieving gaze going from Johnny’s prone form to her. “You’re not fucking human!”
“You’re right,” she agreed. “My name is Rune Alexander. Allow me to introduce you to my monster.”
She shot out her claws and dropped her fangs.
Almost as one the men lifted their guns, but she was on them before they could cause any real damage. One of them managed to shoot the wall, then gave her a terrified look, threw his gun, and ran.
She dropped him before he got three steps.
The leader lay on the floor bleeding out, his body twitching as he fought the darkness that had come to claim him.
She stood over him, her rage black and heavy. The other men were dead or dying, except for Johnny.
“Are you Death?” the leader asked, his voice weak. “Are you the Reaper? Finally?”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I’m Reaper Rune.”
And maybe he wasn’t quite as ready for death as he’d thought, now that it stared him in the face.
“Hey now,” he begged. “Come on. Come on now. Don’t…”
She’d retracted her claws without even realizing it. She leaned over, put the tips of her fingers against the man’s forehead, then sent her claws out with all the rage inside her.
And even when he was good and dead she continued to stab him, over and over and over, blind and deaf to everything but her rage.
Her fear.
Her shame, even.
She became aware of Ellie’s voice through the earpiece as he tried to talk her down. Tried to calm her.
Someone put a hand on her shoulder. “Rune. Rune, enough.”
She looked around, dazed.
Raze was hauling Johnny away. Strad was behind her, squeezing her shoulder. He squeezed harder when she stared up at him. She concentrated on the pain of his grip.
“All right?” he asked.
She nodded, and took a deep breath. “Where’s the girl?”
“Jack and Lex have her outside, waiting for medical.”
Again, she nodded. “Okay. Okay.” She looked at the man she’d destroyed as though seeing him for the first time. “I lost it for a minute.”
“Yes.” He said nothing more, just watched her.
“We’re sending one of them in,” she told Ellis. “The rest are dead.”
“We’ll get a room ready,” he replied. “Transport is on the way. Are you sure you’re okay?”
She rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen the knots. “I’m fine, baby. See you in a little while.”
She walked out of the slaughterhouse with Strad beside her, the beautiful twins at her back.
The hideous gang would never hurt another girl. She was sure when Eugene was finished with Johnny, he’d be put down as well. Hell, she’d do it for him if he’d give her the chance.
The night, for Shiv Crew, had been a success.
Chapter Two
After she’d been debriefed—one of the many activities put into place by those who ran the Annex—she was too jittery to go home and sleep.
“Lex,” she said, grabbing the girl before she could exit the building with the twins. “You tired?”
“Not even a little bit.” The blind Other nodded at the twins. “I’ll ride home with Rune.”
Rune stared after them as they walked away, uneasiness causing her chest to tighten. The tw
ins, especially Levi, hadn’t recovered fully from their abduction by COS. At least not mentally.
But then, neither had she.
“Fucking COS,” she whispered.
“Rune?” Lex wrapped her fingers around Rune’s wrist and vibrated gently.
Rune shook Lex’s fingers from her arm out of habit. She doubted Lex really needed to touch her to read her. They’d bonded closer than ever since the battle with the demon. Or maybe it’d happened even earlier, when Lex had pulled Rune and Strad into some sort of power circle.
Or maybe it was because her ties with Lex’s demon were becoming stronger. If they could believe Simon Kelic, the new vampire master, Lex was Rune’s demon to hold.
She and Lex hadn’t talked about that.
“Let’s go for a drive.” But still, she stood for a moment longer, watching the activity inside the Annex building. It was never quiet, never asleep. Operatives and techs and managers were constantly moving, talking, working busily behind computer desks, rushing with closed faces and downcast eyes through hallways and up metal stairs.
She didn’t belong there, not yet. The Annex was not RISC. It just wasn’t.
Bill and Elizabeth were still Shiv Crew’s bosses—technically—but they were under the strange, wide thumbs of Eugene Parish, Iris, and the couple of heads Eugene sent in for talks and surprise visits.
The place ran smoothly, but there was always a feeling of impending doom, of held breaths and hushed voices.
Of quiet authority and secrets and a place and people controlled by fear. And it was getting more noticeable every day.
She drove Lex out of Spiritgrove and toward one of the long, quiet backroads in Willowburg.
“Where are we going?” Lex asked.
“To fulfill a promise I made to you.” She smiled, even though Lex couldn’t see her. Lex would know if Rune smiled whether she could see it or not.
Lex cocked her head. “What promise?”
“You’ll see.” A few minutes later Rune stopped the car in the middle of the empty road. She jumped out and jogged around to Lex’s side of the car. “Get under the wheel.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Lex was in the driver’s seat before Rune could blink. “Are you serious?” she asked again, her hands on the wheel.
Rune settled back into the passenger seat. “Give it some gas, baby.”
“If I wreck your new car—”
“Feel me.” Rune wrapped her fingers around Lex’s wrist. “See through my eyes. You do it every time we fight. Do it now.”
“I’m not worried for me, but Eugene might ground you if I drive into a hillside.”
“Fuck him,” Rune said. “I promised I’d teach you to drive. I’m teaching you to drive.”
Lex smiled. “Then hang on.”
They rocketed down the quiet country road, trees flashing by as Lex screamed out a half hysterical laugh.
The open windows let the warm summer wind of the night blow through their hair and beat at their eardrums. “Woohoo,” Rune yelled. “Can you see it?”
“I can feel it.”
“Left a little,” Rune said, her voice loud over Lex’s giggles. “Now right a little. There you go. That’s perfect.” She didn’t tell Lex to ease off the gas pedal, or to mind the ditches on either side of the road.
She guided the blind Other with her words and let Lex do the rest.
There were no other drivers on that long, lonely country road, and at four in the morning, not likely to be. Had she spotted the lights of one heading their way, she’d have taken the wheel.
She protected the citizens of River County—she didn’t put them at risk.
Not always.
And at that moment, Lex was Lex again, carefree and happy.
She was the Lex she’d been before she’d discovered she was a demon. Despite her words to the contrary, Lex was not cool with her monster.
But once its black wings had split the skin of her back, had erupted into the air to make her even more different than she already was, there was no going back.
Lex was a demon.
And understandably, that scared her.
Personally, Rune would rather have had a demon’s DNA than Karin Love’s. Lex had the bad luck to be stuck with both.
“Left a little,” Rune murmured.
Lex sobered and eased her foot off the gas pedal. “What’s wrong?”
She didn’t want to lie to Lex. “I was thinking about Karin Love.”
“Bitch,” Lex growled. “Someday…”
Yeah.
“She’ll die,” she assured Lex. “It might take a while, but someone will get to her in prison.”
Lex slowed the car to a crawl. “I’d give anything to kill her. To have total control over her the way she controlled me and the twins. I’d do anything for that.” She hit the steering wheel with her palm. “She’s mine to kill. Mine.”
“Lex…” But she couldn’t tell the little Other that she’d visited Leon, that if things worked out, Leon would see to it that Karin was killed quietly and quickly in prison.
She hoped Lex didn’t pluck the knowledge out of her head and discover what she’d done.
Lex might not ever forgive her.
So she said nothing.
Lex didn’t prompt her, because right then, Rune’s cell rang. “Bill?”
“I just wanted to let you know the eighth body was found a couple of hours ago,” Bill Rice said.
“Shit. Where?”
“In Hawthorne.”
“Shocker.”
“It’s a mess.” But he didn’t sound worried. On the contrary—he sounded cheerful.
The tortured, hanging bodies, the work of River County’s serial killer, were piling up. The guy seemed to be copying the murder of Lara Book, the bird COS had killed for Cree Stark. The killer took pleasure in his work—copycat or not. No one disputed that fact.
Eugene Parish thought the murders were the work of a man with a grudge, and not worth his attention. He let Bill run with it and didn’t interfere.
They’d thought at first the slayers were murdering people and blaming the deaths on Others to garner more support. But while they continued to find fingerprints seemingly left behind by sloppy COS members, they now believed those prints were planted.
Still, it helped their cause against the slayers, and no matter what Rice or the crew believed, they weren’t going to tell the world COS might not actually be behind the killings. Better the humans believed COS was responsible.
And really, they might well have been.
But since they’d lost their bet with the demon, COS had been lying low. The world was beginning to hate them, and they were quietly but desperately trying to figure their shit out.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked, suddenly tired. If he needed her to go to the scene she’d be happy to do it, but after the Annex had taken over, the crew—or field ops, as they were called—didn’t get sent to investigate scenes. There were special operatives for that and Bill didn’t hesitate to use them.
The crew was sent out to fight, to kill, or to capture. Not investigate crime scenes.
Gradually, they’d gotten pushed out of the place they’d held with Bill, pre-Annex.
They were muscle used by the higher-ups. Killing machines.
“I thought you should know. Besides,” he joked, “if I can’t sleep, I don’t let my people sleep.” He paused, then cleared his throat. “I...”
“What is it?”
Lex had stopped the car, her body vibrating as she listened in on Rune’s half of the conversation.
Bill hesitated.
“Bill,” she prompted. “What?” Her stomach started to hurt. She pushed her fist into her abdomen and waited.
“I fear I’ve made a mistake, and it’s too late to rectify it. I’m nearly certain the choice would have been taken from me anyway, but I shouldn’t have made it so easy.”
She knew what he was talking about. The Annex.
“Yo
u never really had a choice, Bill. You know that. RISC didn’t belong to you, you just managed it. Now we’re owned by the Annex, and we have to…”
“We have to stay alive,” Bill finished.
“We’re on the same side. We might not agree with the Annex’s tactics and their ways of getting what they want, but we all seek Other equality.”
“I think it’s more than that,” he murmured.
“What do you mean?”
But he was done. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” The silence stretched between their phones like taffy.
“Are you still at the murder scene?” she asked.
“On my way home.”
“I’m headed home as well. Tell me about it while I drive.”
“Sure.”
Once she was under the wheel, Rune put her phone on speaker. “Go ahead, Bill. I’m listening.”
“This man was around fifty years old. He’d been beaten and sodomized. After the perp or perps moved him and nailed him to the wall, they tossed the murder weapon into the bushes. They didn’t really try to hide it.”
He dove enthusiastically into the details of the scene, barely pausing for breath as he threw out hypotheses and hopes and gave her all the information he had as he used her for a sounding board.
But when she pulled into her driveway and clicked off, they were still no closer to solving the crimes than they’d been six months ago.
Whoever the doer was, he was smart. Or doers. It’d be too difficult, if not impossible, for one dude to nail a heavy body to a wall.
No. The killer had help. Maybe not to commit the actual murders, but afterward…
He had help.
He was a ghost. No one saw him. There were no clues, no trails, nothing. Nothing but slayers’ fingerprints. And that didn’t mean shit.
“You coming in?” Lex asked, opening her door.
“You go on. I’ll be in.”
Lex didn’t argue. “Thanks for my first driving lesson.”
“You did pretty damn good for a blind girl who has never driven.”
Lex smiled. “I guess I got that from you. Do you…” She hesitated.
“Think our bond or whatever is getting stronger?”
“Yes. That.”
“Yeah,” Rune said. “I do.”
Lex nodded. “Goodnight.” She shut her door and headed into the house, her steps sure and quick.