by Anna Windsor
“Quit playing games with me, John. You tell me why you have a will, right fucking now.”
An engine revved. Brakes squealed. A car door opened.
Duncan felt himself moving again, but he kept his focus on interrogating the frigging ghost in his head. “You tell me why you made a will here, in New York City—and what the hell does Reese Patterson know about it?”
I always file a will in the city where I’m working. John sounded sincere, and Duncan knew he meant what he said—but Duncan also knew John wasn’t telling the whole truth. He was sitting down now. Doors slammed shut, and they lurched forward as horns honked.
“Lies by omission are still lies, and you’re lying.” Duncan wanted to punch the side of his own head, but he was still sane enough to understand that wouldn’t help anything. “Can’t hide, sinner. Don’t even try to run.”
Sensations bounced at Duncan, bits and pieces, nothing intact.
“Is he losing it?” Camille, beside him on a car seat, shoving his shoulder to keep him upright …
“Why’s he talking about sinners?” Dio, swerving left, hitting her horn …
“He’s bleeding. Hurry.” Bela’s hands on his other arm, supporting him …
John Cole wasn’t answering.
“Can’t hide, sinner,” Duncan said again, and shoved his knuckles against his temples until he saw stars. Maybe if he looked hard enough, he’d find John right there, in the spots floating across his vision.
“It’s a spiritual.” That was Andy, from the front seat. “I think Sharp’s into music, and maybe John Cole is, too. ‘Can’t Hide, Sinner’ is a song title. Old stuff, blues and gospel—spirituals came before all that, from slaves trying to survive working in the fields. A lot of projects have been launched to catalogue and preserve that kind of music.”
“Why did you even make a last will and testament, John?” Duncan wasn’t giving up, even if it killed him here and now.
A sigh echoed through his consciousness, passing as fast as the buildings outside the SUV. Evening was coming on, so lights began to mark the rushing landscape, winking and blinking in long strings of white.
Then John said, Katrina wanted me to.
“Katrina wanted … ? Unbelievable.” Duncan let his hands fall to his lap, wondering what the hell he had done, letting John into his head and letting him stay there. The slashes on his neck cracked and bubbled, then became a weeping, itching, cooking misery, but he couldn’t do a damned thing about any of that. Air whistled through his teeth as he fought to keep himself conscious and on the job, and sweat broke across his forehead and neck.
“Don’t do this now, Duncan.” Bela’s plea sounded desperate, and it hurt Duncan worse than his wounds to hear her in pain. He couldn’t stop, though. No way. After years in law enforcement, Duncan knew what it felt like to have his grimy paws on one of the keys that unlocks a case. This was a piece of a puzzle, and snapping it into place might bring everything into focus.
“What was Katrina Drake to you, John? And you better not start lying again.”
She was a friend. If you’ll tell Camille to hold the dinar, you won’t have to repeat all this later. I think she’ll be able to hear me.
Duncan reached out, gently took the fire Sibyl’s hand, and moved it to the coin. She didn’t struggle against him, and he could see in her eyes that she trusted him, at least enough to try what he needed her to try.
“Translate,” he said. “Please? If it doesn’t hurt you.”
“Wait, Camille,” Bela’s fingers played across Duncan’s good arm, and her earth energy scraped his skin as she reached out to her sister Sibyl to stop her. “We don’t know that much about the coin’s properties.”
“It’s okay.” That spark flickered in Camille’s eyes again, and Duncan felt an answering flicker of relief from John—and his own mind, too. “Since it’s projective like the mirrors, I should be able to interact with it.”
When Bela didn’t respond, Camille’s strength seemed to build. “I can handle the dinar. At least let me try.”
Bela hesitated, then gave in with a quick, sharp nod.
Camille lifted the coin away from Duncan’s neck, and when the gold lost contact with his skin, he groaned from the surge of pain along his wounds. The slashes seemed to be expanding. Creeping up, down, left and right. He was like a battle map, and the demon infection was planting flags everywhere it could.
“Duncan, please.” Bela’s sweet voice prodded at him again. He knew she was imploring him to protect himself, but he couldn’t do that, not at the expense of protecting her and her quad.
“This might be the way we find the demons,” he told her, then had to shift his attention back to John’s essence in his mind before the bastard got away.
“Let him do this, Bela.” Andy was talking like a cop now, respecting Duncan and what he was pursuing. He felt grateful for her support. “He’s a police officer, a detective with a lot of experience. He knows what he’s doing—and when it has to be done.”
Bela’s hiss of frustration was intense. “It’s hurting him.”
“Honey, that infection’s way past hurting. It’s killing him.” Andy’s tone was almost apologetic, but firm, too. “We need to know whatever he can tell us, or the Rakshasa will take down a lot more people, starting with us.”
This time Bela didn’t argue back, but Duncan had a sense of her wordless seething.
Camille’s knuckles shoved against Duncan’s chest as she held the dinar, and Bela sat beside Duncan, stiff and silent. He knew if he lived through their little SUV ride, he’d owe her an apology for worrying her like this.
“What was Katrina Drake to you?” Duncan demanded of John again as New York City blurred outside the SUV’s windows. “And don’t give me that friend crap.”
Camille’s hand twitched, and the coin vibrated.
Duncan had a strange image of computers in the old dialup Internet days, negotiating to find a connection. There was static. Some whistling in his head. A groaning, shuddering vibration shook him from inside out.
Then—
I came here to help her when she reached out for a bodyguard with paranormal experience. John spoke, and Camille spoke at the same time. It was her voice, yet Duncan could hear John’s resonance somewhere in her words, or maybe it was just the vibrations from his own mind. Katrina turned out to be a special, gentle woman, but we were just friends. Nothing else.
“Fuck me,” Andy said, turning to stare into the backseat. “That’s just creepy, Camille.”
“No shit.” Dio must have taken her foot off the gas, because the SUV slowed, then jumped forward again.
Duncan ignored the movement and side chatter as much as he could, and kept after John. “Are you why Katrina was divorcing her husband?”
No.
Duncan waited, but John-Camille didn’t say anything else.
“Damn it, John, you’re trying my patience.”
Another sigh stirred through his thoughts, as if John felt guilty about saying any of this.
“Go on,” Camille urged in just her voice, as if she heard the same sigh. “We need to hear this.” She patted Duncan’s knee with her free hand, only he had a sense she didn’t realize she was touching him at all. She was speaking to John. Trying to reach John—
And once again, John seemed to respond to her touch, and now to her encouragement.
Katrina was divorcing her husband because her stepson was out of control. John was tense. Past frustrated. But this did feel like the truth. Drugs. Punching holes in the wall. Stealing cars. Walker Drake was a mess, and Jeremiah wouldn’t do anything to stop his son from ruling the house. Katrina couldn’t take it anymore.
“How violent was Walker Drake?” That question came from Bela, and Duncan thought it was a good one.
Walker’s a punk coward, not a murderer—and he’s still just a kid. Just turned seventeen. Duncan felt his fist flex, and knew he didn’t do it. John-Camille’s voice suggested that John would really like
to give the brat a working-over. That little fuck wouldn’t have the first clue how to locate a group of demons, much less bargain with them. The day Katrina died, he and his latest squeeze were five kinds of stoned, and useless to the universe.
Dio executed a smooth left turn, and from the front seat, Andy asked, “How can you be sure Walker was so clueless about hiring hit-kitties?”
John’s husky bark of a laugh sounded odd coming from Camille’s mouth. To find demons without an intermediary, Walker would need elemental talent. Trust me, Duncan, you have more elemental talent in your little toenail than Walker or Jeremiah Drake will ever have.
“Stop telling me to trust you, John.” Duncan wished he could get hold of the spirit hiding in his mind and shake the shit out of it. “How did Katrina know she’d been targeted by something supernatural?”
This made John pause.
The SUV hit a pothole and banged around. Dio said something unkind about another driver’s mother, and a new kind of power surged into Duncan from the spot where Camille had her hand on his leg. It was hot. Burning. Uncomfortable to him, and almost as painful as the wounds bleeding through his bandages onto his T-shirt. He wanted to pull away from Camille, but he didn’t have to. Bela’s hand joined Camille, and the fiery blast got tempered by Bela’s cool, calming energy.
John, however, seemed to respond to the fire.
Katrina had instincts. Not really powers or talents, just … hunches that usually turned out to be true, but her religious beliefs drove her to ignore them. Even through Camille’s translating voice, Duncan heard a wistful sadness in John’s report. She had some nightmares so vivid she couldn’t ignore them, and she called the number the ASI keeps in most major newspapers, buried in the classifieds, advertising security services for people under supernatural threat.
Duncan’s understanding of the case files he’d been working before the murder increased, and a lot of things started coming clear. “A classified ad. That’s why you’ve been moving from city to city. That’s how you knew where to go.”
Yes. The Rakshasa have been heading up the East Coast. The ads and ad responses were the best way we could figure to keep tabs on them, since they never stayed anywhere very long. Then I started to realize Strada had a pattern about whom he likes to murder. He started taking contracts on females only. Women with some beauty, and some innocence.
“The demon has his preferences,” Bela muttered, then shivered.
Duncan shared her revulsion, and hoped he’d get his moment with Strada in the very near future.
Most of the calls we get on the Namast Security line are total horseshit, John-Camille said. But when ground ops checked Katrina out, she matched Strada’s little profile. The type of woman that bastard loves to hunt and kill. So I met with her, and she hired me to protect her a couple of months ago.
John broke off again, and Duncan experienced rushes of guilt and regret, of self-loathing and rage that weren’t his own. With the lurching course of the SUV and the weird partial light of dusk, it was enough to make him carsick, because the feelings were all too familiar. They jerked up memories of the war, of soldiers and buddies he failed. Of missions that went bad, and situations so FUBAR he couldn’t do anything to right them.
He thought he got it, and maybe understood why John was holding back. “If you were supposed to be protecting Katrina Drake from the Rakshasa, and you cared about her, then why weren’t you with her when they came to kill her?”
Oh, yeah.
That was the million-dollar question.
John’s essence snapped backward in Duncan’s mind like Duncan had cracked him right in the jaw.
Camille let out a shocked little, “Eeep!” She dropped the dinar against Duncan’s chest, then grabbed it again as Duncan’s world grayed from the energy it took to seize hold of John’s disappearing energy.
Fire energy surged into him, burning his leg. Bela moved her hand to his other knee, then both hands, and earth energy flowed through him just as strong.
In his mind’s eye, he blocked John from disappearing. Forced him back front and center. “I told you, John. Can’t hide, sinner. It’s time to confess.”
John’s next emotion was anguish. It was so strong, so total, that Camille gave a little sob as Duncan choked back his own cough of emotion.
I was dropping off the wills, John said, and the words echoed through the SUV in Camille’s mingled, sorrowful tones. Hers and mine.
“You son of a bitch,” Andy growled from the front seat. “You let her die to what, look after some investments? Have a shot at her millions?”
No! It wasn’t like that. Anger was the emotion now, and the flames on Camille’s fingers were real. Holes smoked in the knee of Duncan’s jeans before Bela waved one hand in the air and put them out. Katrina was sure we were going to die. The wills were her idea. She was freaking out about them, and she wouldn’t calm down until I promised to take care of delivering them. Katrina was … persuasive. And I was a fucking idiot.
Camille’s breath rattled in her throat, and her voice sounded more than delicate when she prompted John with, “And the day you dropped off the wills?”
The SUV was slowing down. Turning again. The sensation made Duncan’s insides spin like he was on a carnival ride, and the glare of taillights and headlights didn’t help at all.
Walker had just come staggering home with his snotnosed girlfriend, John said through Camille. Their voices shook. Katrina didn’t want to leave the kids unsupervised. I had the house protected with elemental barriers I made using the dinar as a focal point to draw and arrange energy. I thought they’d hold for the half hour it would take me to drop off the wills so Katrina could be at peace. There was a pause. A sob. Camille’s or John’s, Duncan didn’t know.
Leaving her there seemed a lot safer than taking her with me.
A chasm of grief opened in Duncan’s mind and heart. His head slammed against the seat, and he bit his tongue so hard the sweet copper of blood surged across his mouth. The slashes ripped and ran, itching like tiger hair was springing up to line each one. Ammonia-tainted liquid oozed through his shirt, thin, dark, and eye-wateringly awful.
John stopped talking, and Camille dropped the coin like it was red-hot. The metal burned into Duncan’s chest, and he almost shouted from the recoil in his wounds. For a long minute, he couldn’t get a breath. Like being underwater. Like drowning. His ribs felt like they were splintering from the pressure.
“John had to go.” Camille said, her soft voice slipping through Duncan’s haze of agony. “Your infection’s trying to break past the barriers the Mothers set to contain it, and he’s doing what he can to slow it down.”
“Yeah,” Duncan managed, eyes squeezed tight against the pain. Then he did groan, and kept groaning until bits of power from three separate pairs of hands chased back enough of the torture for him to catch a few gulps of air. Earth. Fire. Water. He felt the elements braid together, working into him and shoring up the walls of energy the Mothers had lodged into his flesh.
When his vision cleared, he had his head turned, and he was looking at Bela, and she was looking at him, her dark eyes wide with concern. Her fingers rested on his knuckles, and he was grateful for the contact.
“Don’t die,” she said, and the pain in her voice nearly put him under again.
He made himself breathe slower, slower, until he wasn’t sounding like a fish flopping on a beach. With what little oomph he could muster, he sat up straighter, and that was for her. Anything to keep her from looking at him like that, from sounding like that, ever again.
He shifted his hands to cover hers and hoped she understood. He was trying his best to be a cop. To live up to her belief that he was a good and honorable man. He was trying to save her from dying like him, with demon slashes eating into her skin and bones—but damnit, he wasn’t trying to die right now.
He wanted to live. He wanted to have some more time with her. A lot of time, if he could.
Please understand,
he thought, and wished some weird, mingled voice would speak the words out loud, because he just couldn’t get them out.
Bela broke their eye contact and stared at her knees, but she didn’t pull away from him.
Maybe that was something.
It would have to be enough until they could be alone again.
“One hell of an interrogation, Sharp.” Andy faced him from the front seat as Dio pulled the SUV to the curb and shut off the engine. She wasn’t teasing. She actually sounded like she admired what he’d just done.
That was embarrassing.
“Was that everything?” Andy asked.
Duncan didn’t want to, but he poked around in the pile of emotions John had left behind before he retreated into Duncan’s cells and molecules. “Yeah. I think.”
Camille put her hand on the door handle, but stopped and turned around again. Her eyes, too green to be blue and too blue to be green, showed how unsettled she must be feeling. “Do you believe what John said, Duncan?”
“I don’t know what I believe.” That was honest, even if it didn’t offer her any relief. “But I’m pretty sure he spilled everything.”
Camille accepted this and got out of the SUV. So did Andy. Bela opened her door and slipped off the seat, leaving the door open for Duncan.
Dio was still at the wheel, and her matter-of-fact tenor caught Duncan’s attention before he could scoot across the seat and make his exit. “Judging by what you were yelling at John Cole when we left that office building, about him telling you all he knows and being full of bullshit, you were pretty sure he’d spilled everything before.”
Streetlights made her blond hair glow almost silver as she studied him through the rearview mirror, without turning around. Her eyes were nearly the same shade as his, but hers had storms and wind and lightning at the center, and something else: a certain cold realism that marked her as the hard-ass in this little fighting group. Duncan met her reflected gaze with no resentment.
“Stay alert, and don’t stop watching me, Dio.” He was trusting her with this, one hard-ass to another. “Don’t make Bela be the one to kill me if John takes me over and goes psycho, or if I screw up and turn demon.”