“It's just about eight,” Sara said.
“Who are these dudes?” Marius asked.
“This is Michael, and this is Tommy.”
Marius waved over his shoulder, trying to get the coffee going. “I feel like someone shoved cotton in my brain. Did I have something horrible to eat this morning?”
“Marius, did you go to the Demon Bar on Sunday?” Sara asked.
“Yes. Ouch.”
Michael and Tommy looked at each other at his ouch.
“Did you run into Danielle there?”
“Dan—OUCH.” He grabbed his head. “Danielle, yes.”
Sara was about to ask another question when Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “Marius, do you remember Sunday night at all?”
“I can't even remember last night,” he said. “Did I sign on?”
“Yes, you were on and fine last night,” Sara said.
“Did you go anywhere with Danielle?” Michael asked.
“Ye-ouch!! Ouch!” he barked. “Yes. Oh, my God, my brain is on fire.”
Michael looked at Sara and nodded indicating this was normal. “Marius, where did you go?”
“To-- ow! – the Point,” he said.
Sara grimaced and rolled her eyes. “The Point, Marius? With Danielle? Are you fourteen?”
“Well, since you're not interested.” His tone was peckish and unkind.
The words did hurt, too, but Sara pushed forward. “Why Danielle? Of all the women in there, why her?” She touched his forearm gently.
“I...,” he stuttered. Sara pushed her influence through him, and he blinked a few times. She could almost see the fog lifting. “I don't know,” he admitted, shaking his head. “I have no idea why I went with that disgusting bitch anywhere. She's nasty and gross and nothing, and what the hell was I thinking?” He looked horribly confused. “Oh, my God, what did I do?! Oh, God, I'm gonna--”
He ran over to the trash can and threw up copiously into it. Sara walked to the cabinet and pulled out a glass to fill with water. Marius wretched for another two minutes before finally walking over and plopping into a chair.
“Um, I'm gonna go ahead and throw that in the dumpster,” Tommy said, tying it up and walking it out of the house.
“What's wrong with me?” he asked. “Sara, I...”
“It's not you, Marius,” Sara said. “It's Danielle. She did something to your brain.”
He looked at her and took the glass of water. “And you undid it?”
“I don't know,” she said, stealing a quick glance over to Michael. He raised his eyebrows and seemed to know she had used her influence, but she wasn't telling Marius that. “I do know she has my little brother. She kidnapped him. I need to know what happened. What did you tell her?”
“She has Keelan?” he asked.
“Yes,” Michael said.
“And who are you?” Marius asked.
“Michael Morchause,” he said.
“He's trying to help me find Keelan,” she said. “What did you tell Danielle?”
He put his head in his hand. “Everything. Anything. Whatever she asked me, I told her. She must've slipped me a mickey or something. I have never been interested in her at all. How did she end up with me at the Demon Bar? How did I end up with her at the Point.” He made a face. “Christ, I need to get a rabies shot.”
“Marius, please, please, Keelan is missing. She has him.”
He nodded. “She told me she wanted to get back at you and that's why she needed me.” He swallowed looking confused. “God, what did she do to me? She got everything I knew about you and Keelan out of me. She said you had pissed her off, kept her from something she wanted.”
“Well, she got you,” Sara said, angrily. “So she's just a raging bitch now.”
“Did she tell you anything about what she was going to do with Keelan?” Michael asked, seeing that Sara was losing control again.
“She said she was going to keep him in the light as long as she could,” he said. “She knows you can't go out during the day because of your condition, and she wanted to make you suffer. What do you mean, she got me?”
“She got into your brain, and got you,” Sara said. “She's always wanted you. She tried the first night we were there, and I stopped her.”
“Men are toys for her,” Tommy said, walking back in. “If you're warm, you're a target. She's been eyeing you up for months.”
“Me?” Marius said. “And she took Keelan because you stopped her?”
“Yes,” Sara said. “We're trying to find her.”
“Let me help you.”
“No,” Tommy said. “You can't go near her for a full moon cycle.”
Michael balked and cringed, and Sara looked at Tommy horrified he had said something. Marius looked at him. “What the hell does that mean?”
Michael sighed. “Sara's touch broke the spell,” he said. “But if you go near her, allow her to touch you again before this phase of the moon passes again, you'll be right under her control again. And since she knows that you mean something to Sara, she'll use that to hurt her. All we can do is ask you tell us what she told you.”
“Under her spell?” Marius asked. “What is she, a gyspy or something.”
“Think about what happened up at the Point,” Tommy said.
Marius looked at him confused and then a look of shock and revulsion slid over his face. Then mostly shock. “She... bit me. She had fangs...” He looked over at Tommy. “Who the fuck do you serve in that place?”
“The Demon Bar was not just a random name.” Tommy folded his arms.
Marius put a hand to his neck, and yelped, finding to mostly healed bumps there. “She bit me! She's a vampire?!” His eyes bugged out of his head as he said it. “Holy crap, vampires are real?!”
“Yes,” Tommy answered.
“And she has Keelan!?”
“We need to know what she told you,” Michael said. “It's the safest way for you to help us get him back.”
Marius put a hand to his head, nodded, then sipping the water. “She said she had to get back at you because no one denies her anything. She was going to steal Keelan and put him in the sun so you couldn't get to him. And if you didn't come to get him when she said you had to, at something like one in the afternoon, then you weren't going to get him back ever. She'd...” He put a hand to his head. “She'd make him a snack. Like she did to me. And you would be next.” Marius looked at her.
“Did she say where she was going to do this?” Tommy asked.
“Lincoln Monument Park,” he said. “She said he would be outside from sun up.”
“Did she tell you where she is keeping him in the meanwhile?” Michael said.
He thought for a minute. “I can't remember if she did,” he said. “I guess she'd bitten me by that point and I wasn't paying attention.” He looked at Sara. “How are you going to do this? You can't go out in the sun. Please let me help you.”
“No,” Sara said. “If Tommy says you have to stay away for a month, then you have to. We'll figure something out. I'm not going to lose Keelan and you to this bitch.”
“She's a vampire--”
“I know,” Sara said. “We'll talk about all that once Keelan is okay. Fair?”
“I don't have a choice, do I?”
“No, you don't,” Sara answered.
Marius pointed at Michael. “I don't know you from Jack, but for some reason, I trust you to keep her safe. And if you don't, I'll hunt you down and hurt you.”
“You don't need to threaten me,” Michael said. “Nothing will happen to her.”
“Do you know were Danielle lives?” Marius asked.
“I do,” Tommy said, “But I suspect that she's not there.”
“We need to go back to Sara's and pick some stuff up. Michael had some plan in mind.
“Marius, I'm going to explain this as best as I can,” Sara said, standing up, “But for now, please please trust me. Don't follow us, don't try to find Keelan. She'll put you bac
k under her power, and I can't deal with that right now.”
“With any luck,” Michael said, holding the door open, “we won't have to worry about her finding you ever.”
~*~*~
“Go in.” Michael popped the lock on the door of Danielle’s condo with a quick spell. “I'll be back in a few minutes.”
“Where are you going?” Sara asked, but he was already gone.
“Damn witches,” Tommy mumbled walking into the house.
“That's my friend,” she snapped at him.
“My sincerest condolences,” Tommy said, and then put his finger to his lips as they walked into the living room of Danielle's condo. It was pitch black, not an ounce of light that even Sara's enhanced vision could pick up. “It's a damn tomb in here,” Tommy whispered.
“That's not foreshadowing, is it?” Sara asked.
“Forwhating?” Tommy asked.
“For-- get it,” Sara said. “High school English.”
“I'm a hundred and two years old,” he said. “High school is a little behind me.”
Sara sighed. “Great. More really old people. Can we find a light switch?” She heard Tommy flick the light switch a few times and nothing happened. “Oh, I don't like that. And what is that smell?” Even as she asked it, she had a really good idea of what it was—her fangs wanted to drop.
“I don't know. I don't like it either. Flashlight?”
“Does it look like I have one?” Sara said. She heard him grumbling, and a moment later a bright spot of flame appeared just head of them. Sara was shocked and looked over at him in the yellowy-red light.
He saw her glance. “I'm a demon, I can call up fire whenever I like.”
“Things I did not know,” she said.
Once they figured out where the walls and ceiling were, he brought the fire up brighter. They looked around the room and Sara instantly wished he hadn't made it bright enough to see. She twisted her lip at the scene around them, and had she been human she would have thrown up promptly. She also learned that durzon could throw up.
There was gore on all the walls, and perversely the parts that had been used to supply the gore were piled neatly in the corner. There were a few whole bodies around, clearly dead. She walked into the room, and Tommy moved the light to the middle and made it brighter still.
“Oh, God,” he said.
“...help...”
They both spun their heads to the right, down a hallway. Tommy and Sara looked at each other and then ran toward the pleas. The door at the far end was locked, but they could both hear the dying words behind it. Sara rattled the handle and looked at Tommy. Tommy rolled his eyes.
“Break it,” he said. “You're stronger than I am.”
Sara rattled it again, then pulled very hard on it. The door knob popped off the door and into her hand with a crash on the other side. She stared at the knob. “Holy shit.”
Tommy pushed past her and shoved the door open. The flame light followed them in, and they found six men and women hanging on the walls. Sara gasped and tried the light switch here as well. Still nothing. She looked around and saw a keyring hanging on the one wall, away from where the men and women were hanging and ran for it.
“No...” It was one of the women. Sara drew her hand back. “Mistress will be angry…”
“They’re bewitched,” Tommy said.
“We have to get them out of here,” Sara said. “But I don’t think that I can touch them. They’ll come out of the bewitching, and I don’t want them to remember… that in the living room as we get them out.”
“Good point,” Tommy said, grabbing the keyring himself.
“Do we need to call the police or something?” Sara asked. “There’s a lot of gore in here… and probably people wondering where their friends and family are.”
“Good Christ, no,” Tommy said, unlocking the first woman. “No human authorities. Not yet.”
“Not yet?” she asked.
“We’re going to have to torch the place,” he answered.
“Sara?!” Michael yelled from the door.
She stepped back out of the door. “Here!”
Michael ran in with three people trailing him. She recognized Talia and Rayna right away, both now carrying crossbows and swords. She didn’t know the third person until Michael flared an ambient light in the building. She was plainly Talia’s mother—Michael’s sister.
“O-m-g,” Rayna said, putting a hand over her mouth.
“This is gross,” Talia said.
Michael and his sister stopped in the door way to find Tommy unlocking several of the other people chained to the wall. The woman turned to the girls and spoke quickly in another language, and they ran back the way they came. She looked at Sara. “You didn’t call anyone about this.”
Sara shook her head. “No. Tommy said not to and I didn’t.”
“Very good,” she said. “We’re going to have to burn the place after we find what we can about your brother.”
“Who are you?” Tommy asked.
“Rachel Dunleavey,” she said.
Tommy raised an eyebrow at her. “What makes you an expert?”
Sara couldn’t understand a word, but she knew that Rachel swore in the other language. “Nadya Rubinsky,” she snapped off another name. Sara was confused by the second one, but clearly, Tommy wasn’t as his eyes went shocked and wide. Rachel narrowed her eyes at Tommy. “But I am not her anymore. I am Rachel Dunleavey, and you’d do well to remember that.”
He nodded curtly. “My apologies.”
“We have to find what we can on Sara’s brother, quickly, and get out,” she said. “Durzon, you will help us with the fire?”
“My name is Tommy,” he said. “But yes, m’lady, I will help.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Sara--”
“I can’t touch them,” she said, pulling her hands behind her back.
Rachel smiled. “I know. I was going to ask you to go help Talia and Rayna look the place over for clues. Once the fire is set, then you can touch them and free them.”
Sara nodded and ran out of the room. Talia and Rayna were digging through the kitchen, as far away from the mess of the living room as they could. When Sara walked in, she saw that they were methodically going through the drawer and cabinets. Talia looked at her. “We got this. Go take apart that dining room. Anything that even might remotely be related to your brother.”
Sara nodded and walked into the dining room. A black lacquered dining set sat there, and it offended Sara’s senses with overpowering tackiness. She grimaced and hoped she wouldn’t ever lose her sense of décor, along with her sense of humanity. She pulled out the drawer and started sifting through them and was instantly disgusted.
There were bits and pieces of dozens of lives in these drawers: receipts, bills, pictures, credit cards, letters, phones. All stolen from different places and people over who knew how many years. Each drawer revealed a few more names, and Sara moved and sorted as fast as she could to try to get through it for anything on Keelan.
“Good God,” came a voice from the doorway. Sara stopped and turned to look at who it was, and found Rachel standing there. “What is all this?” she asked, touching the piles.
“Everything that Danielle has destroyed,” Sara said.
Rachel looked paralyzed for a moment. “This is…”
“Evil,” Sara offered.
“Like I haven’t seen in years,” she said. “Perverse.”
“Yes, she does seem to invoke that feeling from everyone,” Sara said. “We can’t torch this. This is going to give dozens of people closure. I don’t know how we can save it, but we need to. People need to know where their friends and loved ones were.”
Rachel nodded. “You’re right.” She looked around. “We’re going to be using hellfire to torch it, but there has to be something that can protect it.”
“Stone,” Tommy said walking in. He spotted the piles sitting there. “Holy shit.”
He looked at Sar
a, and Sara nodded. “We know. Perverse.” She opened another drawer and went back to digging through the stuff. “Can you find a stone box that we can dump all this in?” She froze, and slowly pulled her hand out.
“What is it?” Michael asked pushing by Rachel.
Sara held it up. “Kee’s necklace,” she said. It was a plain black rope that held their father’s wedding ring. It was covered in blood. She unconsciously put her hand to her neck, where she wore the match to it. “If she hurts him, I will walk her to the gates of hell myself.”
Michael put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get this place done and over with first, and then we’ll come up with a plan. I have some ideas.”
Four
Sara sat in the living room of her apartment, angry and disappointed. She wanted to go with them to rescue her brother.
They had managed to find a fireproof safe that would protect the drawers and drawers of mementoes they had pulled from the dining room. She guessed there were the remains of three dozen or more lives in the drawers. Michael had guessed there were about ten people who had been slaughtered and spread on the walls of the living room. It had taken them until three a.m. to get the place set so that it didn’t look like they were ever there.
Talia and Rayna had led the prisoners out of the house, and as soon as they were able to get everything in the safe, Michael cast a spell to contain the fire to just her condo. Tommy set the place on fire, making it look like it was an accident that started in the bathroom. Once the place started to be consumed, Sara broke the spell on the people they had found in the bedroom. She confounded them with a story about being kidnapped and then just barely escaping as the fire trucks roared down the street.
Michael and Rachel had shifted them all back to the apartment. Rachel had to go back home for a while, to take care of the kids and make sure they were up and ready for school. Talia explained that they lived over in Ireland, which was the disparity in the time.
And then Michael dropped the bomb there was no way to come up with a plan that involved her being able to help them. She couldn’t go out in the sun, and neither he nor Rachel had been able to get a whiff of Keelan to go after him before the sun came up.
Turned: The Inari Council Page 6