I step over the threshold and shut the door. The apartment is clean and bright. It hardly looks lived in. He couldn’t have been in here too long.
“What did he want?” I ask, even though I could get the information myself.
“Scholarships.” Manuel plops down on a sturdy tan sofa and pulls out his phone.
“What was he supposed to do in return?”
Manuel looks up from his phone. “Oh, they weren’t for him. They were for his brother.” Barking laughter pierces the air. “He was under contract with us for three years, mostly running errands.” He turns his attention back to his phone. “Two years later, he meets some chick, starts missing work. Not cool.”
“Okay.” I sink down to the carpet beside him. This sucks.
“Oh. Here.” Manuel tosses me another stone, and it just misses my head. I clap it between my palms and hold it in my lap.
Harsh tones emit from Manuel’s phone, sounding like a cross between wild screaming and cymbals. “Yo, Mickey!” He gets up from the couch and moves into the adjacent kitchen. “No, no. I’m just on a run with the psychic.”
The stone is cool in my hands.
“Oh, yeah, she’s great. A little soft right now but truly amazing. She’s an angel. Totally worth all the shit we had to go through to get her.”
An angel?
Bile bites at the back of my throat, and I force myself to swallow it down. Get yourself together.
“Ah, I don’t know. I mean, she’s gorgeous, but I don’t know if she’s hot.” He laughs. “You should see what she’s wearing. She looks like one of those dime psychics you find at the arcade.”
He’s annoying. And where is there an arcade? How old is he?
But since he’s distracted, my brain starts to spin. I have Emmerick’s number now. I can call him. Not that I can tell him exactly where I am, but maybe he has some kind of radar for soul suckers or devourers. Whatever they’re called.
I open my hands and stare down at the stone. Wait. It didn’t cross my mind before, but now that no one’s watching my every move, and I can breathe freely, even for the moment, I’m starting to wonder why this stone isn’t working on me. I’ve been holding it for a while now, and it’s done nothing.
It always works immediately on everyone else. I must be immune. Or soulless. But I’ll go with immune. Of course it can’t work on me. Then they couldn’t use me. It’s not like they’re using just any old stones. Something about these is unnatural. They’re too heavy for their size, and they stay cold—until someone’s life is in them anyway.
But it’s still a stone. If I can buy myself some time, I might be able to run off and hide somewhere long enough for Emmerick to find me and dismantle this guy. It’s not a solution, but it’ll get me out of this and give me a chance to find Gretchen before something horrible happens to her. I squeeze my hands back around the stone and close my eyes.
Focus. My mind reaches out to Manuel. He’s not human, but I can sense enough about his system to know that it’s fallible. There’s a complicated network of electrical wiring inside of his body, almost like a computer, giving power to a heart, lungs. No skeletal system, mostly muscle and some other kind of tissue I can’t name. It’s not anything humans have. It’s something hard and flexible like rubber.
Hmm, anything that disrupts electrical pulses will do. I would do something similar if I was trying to shut someone’s brain down.
He’s still chatting away obnoxiously in the kitchen. I don’t know how it will work with this kind of stone, or what it will do to him specifically, but I don’t really have anything to lose. The very composition of the stone might even make whatever I put into it stronger.
It warms in my hands.
Tuning him out, I fuse the stone with energy—tearing, ripping, shorting out. I put more energy into it then I normally would. He’s far stronger than he looks.
The energy bloats inside of the stone and pushes against its walls.
I open my eyes. Manuel stands across from me, a frown pressed into his brows. He holds his phone a few inches from his ear.
“What are you doing?”
The stone starts to cool around the restless energy inside.
“I need to pee,” I say.
“Well, go pee.”
Keeping the stone tucked in my hands, I shoot up to my feet and move into the short hall off the living room. There are three doors. One on the left, one on the right, and one in the middle. The one on the left is the bathroom. I lock myself inside and sit down on top of the toilet, my heart pounding in my chest.
Now would be a great time to text Emmerick. But I left my phone on the living room floor. Of course I did.
I completely forgot that I was even holding it. I wonder for a moment why they didn’t take it from me, but then, why would they? With the way they’re watching me, I can call someone about as easily as I can run away. And what good would calling anyone do anyway? No one can help me except Emmerick. I’d only get anyone else in trouble. A fact I’m well aware of, and they know it.
The blue-and-white plaid shower curtain is the only pop of color in the small beige space. That and an orange bar of soap by the sink. There’s not even a hand towel in here.
“Let me know when you’re in town,” Manuel says, still talking on the phone, mere feet away from the door. “We’ll go out.” There’s a pause. “Yeah, but there’s just the one. He’s trying to pick us off, but we’ll get him. He’s running scared like a little bitch.” More wild laughter.
The stone is still cold.
Come on! I give it a shake. Like that’s going to do anything.
“Yeah, all right. Well, if you need help, I’ll try to share.” He laughs again. Then two sharp knocks sound against the door.
I jump on the seat and bite down on my lip to keep quiet.
“Hey, girl! You pee yet? Get out. We got people to see.”
I say nothing.
“Hello…” He kicks the door in, and before I can stop it, a panicked scream leaves my mouth.
He steps on top of the splintered white door and shakes his head. “What are you doing?” He grabs my elbow and pulls me out. “In a few years, we’ll look back on this and laugh.” I’m afraid of what I’ll find, but curiosity takes over. I reach inside his head and push forward a few years into his future. There isn’t one. There isn’t another hour.
Relief drips over my chest. One less thing to worry about anyway.
He pushes me down next to the college student. My shoulders slump. I can’t put this off any longer.
“Come on, let’s go.” He moves over to the wide glass doors that lead out to a little balcony and peers down at the students below. “Look at all these careless women,” he says more to himself than to me. “It’s like a candy shop down there.”
Ugh. I need to get away from this guy. The stone warms. Finally! I lean over and hover the stone over the boy’s back, so it looks like I’m doing something.
Manuel turns away from the glass, and I pull back at the same time.
“What now?” He moves over to me, his tone slightly off put, though his expression remains calm.
“This is defective.” I hold out the stone. “I need another one.”
He takes the stone and turns it over in his hand. “I think you’re stalling.” He holds it back out. “The stone is fine. Get it done.”
In the next instant, a wave of dizziness rolls over him, and his eyes flutter and roll back in his head. “Wha—” He coughs up inky-black liquid that splashes across the boy’s back and the floor. He coughs again more violently, and a thick mess of black, stringy mucus comes out. “Whadenda – wha – hella!” He drops his phone as he stumbles away and into the bathroom. More heaving and coughing trail down the short hall.
The boy stirs on the floor. This is going to be ugly. I scoop up my phone, grab his phone, and run from the apartment. I move down the cement steps as fast as I can, holding onto the cool metal railing for support. I head for the row of trees beh
ind the complex and fumble with his phone, trying to turn it off.
I give up halfway around the building and smash it against the bricks. The screen fractures into pieces. I smash it again. The casing cracks in half, and the screen goes dark. Good enough. I throw a glance behind me. Manuel isn’t there, and only a few students remain outside, scattered around the parking lot. I dive into the shelter of the trees and pull up Emmerick’s number.
My breath comes in and out, quick and shallow.
He answers the phone after two rings. “Where are you?”
“I don’t know.” I keep my voice down and crouch low into the weeds.
“I’ll find you.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Before I get the chance to grow impatient, Emmerick materializes out the shadows behind the building like a ghost.
A startled gasp freezes in my throat.
His eyes find mine in the trees. He smiles and vanishes—I’m hoping, into the building. The sun is nearly set, and a cool-blue haze tints the cropped grass around the complex.
I lean out of the cover of trees and squint into the darkening surroundings. I don’t hear anything. I don’t know why I’m expecting to.
I reach out for Manuel’s energy and find it extinguished. Relief settles over my chest, at least for now.
The air around me shifts, like a gentle breeze is raking its fingers through it.
“How long before—”
I scream at the voice behind me and spin around.
Emmerick steps back and holds his hands up by his ears. “Sorry!”
“Damn it! What is wrong with you?”
He tries not to laugh at me and fails. “Sorry. I thought you saw me.”
“Saw you what?”
“You looked right at me.” He lowers his hands and pulls a set of keys out of his pocket. “Let’s get out of here before someone comes looking for him.”
“How’s the kid?”
“Still out, but he’s breathing.”
I follow him away from the trees and point out Manuel’s SUV.
“Are you okay?” he asks as we climb inside.
“Hardly.” I yank at the seat belt and jerk it across my body.
“You should have called me sooner,” he says.
“I couldn’t.”
He peels the SUV out of the lot and speeds off. “What happened? What did they do to you?”
A lump forms in my throat. “I’m fine. Much better off than a couple of other people. Though that may be subjective. They don’t have to worry about anything anymore. I do. Where are we?”
“About an hour south.” He gives me an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry I wasn’t at the house.”
“Don’t be. Gage was there. He probably would have eaten you.”
Emmerick’s smile fades. “Yeah, probably.”
“I was joking.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know what he’s doing with us, but it’s certainly not pretty.”
I let out a long sigh and lean back into the seat. “They have me sucking souls out of people’s bodies and locking them into some kind of rock. You were right. They want something more stable than the bottles they’ve been using.”
“I’m sorry.” His jaw hardens. “I should have been there. I could have led him away.”
“And then you would be eaten by now,” I say. “Really, it’s fine. If you had shown up and gotten caught, I would be stuck right now.” My palms prickle with the memory of literally holding someone’s life in my hands. I scrape my nails across my skin, but it doesn’t help.
Silence falls in the cabin for a few minutes, save for the humming engine and the wheels sliding over the tar under our feet.
“Did you get a chance to talk to Renali?” He stares hard at the road in front of him.
“Yeah.” The scenes replay themselves in my head.
“What do you think?”
I wrap my hands over my arms and dig my nails into my skin. “She’s…” There are so many words I can use to describe her right now. Including murderer. She didn’t drag my mother’s soul from her body, but she might as well have.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m…She’s still working with Gage. She never stopped.” I don’t have any intrinsic proof, but I don’t need any.
He sucks in a breath and nods into the early night. “I knew it. I could smell it on her.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Literally?”
The right corner of his lips lift. “It’s not a scent like a smell. It’s a scent like an energy.”
“Like a cold sucking-the-heat-out-of-the-air kind of energy?”
He turns to me for a second and nods. “Yeah…just kind of lingering in the air around her like a perfume. But I didn’t know for sure, you know. I didn’t know if she knew anything or if she was just hanging around them for fun. She’s not exactly the groupie type, but they come in all kinds.”
“She definitely knows something. He seems to trust her a great deal.” I sit up a little. “Hey, did you know her last husband? Or any of them?”
“I know the ones that were devourers. They’re dead.”
My breath stops for a beat. “What?”
He drums his fingers along the steering wheel as he counts. “The marriages didn’t last very long. There were four, to my knowledge. Could be more, but I don’t know what she’s been doing the last few years.”
“I thought they always got divorced.”
“No…is that what she told you?”
I feel around in my head for the answer. “Come to think of it, she never told us anything. She would just say it was over. We assumed she got divorced. Oh my god…” For a brief moment, I almost feel sorry for her. But she had to know it was a possibility because it’s not like she was ever broken up about it. They’re not the ones she wanted anyway.
“I wouldn’t feel sorry for her,” he says.
“I don’t. It’s just…crazy.” It’s not possible to feel pity for her after watching her stick a metaphorical knife in my mother’s back. I sit back in the seat again and narrow my eyes at the dark road in front of us. Everything else is a shadowy blur.
“What you saw in her head…” He pauses, letting the cabin fill up with silence again.
“What about it?”
The car speeds into the Asheville city limits. Seems like we got back awfully fast, but I don’t question it. If he can get an hour away in a minute, I’m sure he can drive a car through the shadows as well. We didn’t pass a single other vehicle along the way.
“Do you think she might know where my brothers are?” he finally asks. “Does he trust her that much?”
I watch the houses go by as the SUV slows to more reasonable speed. “Actually, I think he might.” I try to stop the rest of my thoughts, but they flood over me at once. Fear.
Say Renali does know. And they’re trapped in the ether somewhere, and we let them out. Who’s to say that what happened to my father won’t happen to someone else? Like Gretchen or Tessandra. Or even Kalin or Cari or Milly or me? It was chaos in our bungalow that night. And it’ll be chaos again.
But I don’t have time to dwell on it too long.
“Where do you want me to take you,” he asks.
“Um…I don’t know yet.” I close my eyes and reach out for Gretchen.
She’s alone in a large and dusty room, dimly lit. She rubs at her sore wrists as her eyes swing back and forth across the room.
An old soiled mattress sits in the center of the room, looking every bit like a TV crime scene.
Gretchen’s bottom lip quivers, and she brings her knees up to her chin. It’s freezing in there. She sits in the center of a rat-eaten gray-and-white-striped couch with no cushions. The broken and protruding springs bite into her skin every time she moves.
I open my eyes. I know that mattress. I saw it the other day. “Can you drop me off at that warehouse on the edge of town? I think that’s where they’re keeping Gretchen.”
He nods and spins the car around
in a circle.
Anxiety claws up my chest. She’s untied, but she isn’t making a run for it. She must not be alone.
Something else nags at me though. About Renali. I’ve been out of the psych facility for three years. Gage has had three years to come after me. Renali could have led him right to me. Why didn’t she?
Maybe it’s something else. Part of me feels like she’s been pushing at my abilities all this time, testing them. Sending me to the underground. Sending me clients that would stretch my boundaries. It might just be because I wasn’t ready. Because I wasn’t yet capable of doing what he wanted me to do. That could be why she pushed at me so hard in our sessions.
It can’t be a coincidence that the very day I had a breakthrough and got stronger was the same day the soul suckers started to get aggressive with me. Suddenly they were everywhere. At the club. In my house. Dragging me out of the house. Threatening me.
The SUV comes to a sudden stop, some several yards away from where the street we’re on runs into Hollings Road.
“He’s there,” Emmerick says, his voice hollow, his eyes flat.
“What?”
“And…a brother is there?” He melts away, leaving an empty seat with a fastened belt in his wake.
I turn the SUV off, cut the lights, and slip out. The air is silent as death around me. I head for the warehouse, sticking to the humidity-dampened grass to mute my steps.
I reach out for Gretchen again. As far as I can tell, she’s inside alone. But the overgrown lot by the crusted building is filled with cars, all parked at random amongst the rocks and weeds. No less than twenty men mill around the front door, their beady eyes squinting into the night, searching for movement in the shadows.
I crouch low in the ditch across the street. A warm breeze blows by, and the shadows shift around me.
For the first time in my life, fear doesn’t fill me at the sight.
The shadow leaps over the road, smooth as a gazelle, and vanishes into the darkness around the warehouse.
Staying as low to the ground as I can, I hurry across the road and let the darkness swallow me as well.
“Is this the one we’ve been after?” a man asks.
“I don’t think so,” says another one. “This one is weaker. But we’ll get that one. It’s only a matter of time before he slips up and does something stupid.”
No Rest for the Wicked Page 20