Daemon’s Mark

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Stand up,” I said, hauling her with me. “Petra Ivanovich Dubois, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder—since you didn’t have the guts to do it yourself—and I’m sure the U.S. attorney can think of a host of other charges once Interpol catches Ekaterina Belikov.”

  “Lies, from one criminal turned on another,” Petra spat. “You’ll never get a conviction, Miss Wilder. I’ll be free before the month is out.”

  “Will,” I said. “Mind lending me your cuffs?”

  He passed them to me, a frown turning the space between his brows into a valley. “What’s going on, Luna?”

  “A crusade,” said Petra. “A pointless crusade that won’t end in anything except humiliation for you, Miss Wilder, and freedom for me.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But they don’t give bail to murder suspects in Las Rojas County, Petra.”

  “Jail in this country doesn’t frighten me,” she said. “I saw much worse growing up in Moscow.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But like you said yourself, Belikov turned on you. I wonder how long you’ll last before someone decides to tie up your loose end. The Russians aren’t known for being forgiving, Petra. And then there’s your pack, and all the other packs that have lost sisters and mothers and wives to your little smuggling operation. I’d say it’d be a hell of a good betting pool on who gets to you first.”

  A single shiver passed through her, and she looked at the ground. “They’ll give me protection in the jail. You have to protect me.”

  “Me?” I said, shoving her at Lane, who took her arm firmly. “I don’t have to do a damn thing.”

  “I’ll take her to central booking,” Lane said. “And SVU will have some questions about her daughter.”

  “I’d make peace with whatever gods I had,” I told Petra. “As of now, you’re living on borrowed time.”

  CHAPTER 26

  The crime scene at the Dubois household took an afternoon to clear, and it was dinnertime when Will and I were finally released to clock out of our respective jobs and get something to eat.

  “I never would have seen that,” Will admitted, when we’d settled into my favorite window booth at the Devere Diner. “Even with my vast experience in the treachery of the fairer sex.”

  “Oh, is that so?” I said, taking a pull on my chocolate shake. I’d lost weight overseas and I could see all the bones in my hips and elbows and ribs. The skeletal look wasn’t real sexy as far as I was concerned, so I was trying to make up for lost time and keep my pants from falling off my ass. “Women are all treacherous bitches, are we?”

  “I didn’t say it that way, but in certain cases, yes,” said Will. “The female is definitely the deadlier of the species. But I never pegged Petra Dubois as a gang leader.”

  “Belikov is Russian,” I said. “She knew him, and they must have started their operation before she moved to the States and met up with her pack-leader husband slash cover story.”

  Will drained half of his cherry Coke in one gulp. “I kinda feel sorry for the guy. But then again, how blind do you have to be to not notice your wife is a mob boss and a slave trader?”

  “Pretty blind,” I agreed, playing with my bendy straw. “Or hopelessly in love.”

  Will rolled his eyes. “You can’t expect me to believe that blinded-by-the-light story. I love you, and I’ve got my eyes wide open.”

  Our waitress came and left our cheeseburgers—with generous sides of fries—in front of us, but suddenly I’d lost my appetite.

  Will was blind, whether he admitted it or not. He couldn’t see the change in me, the cold spot in my heart where all of my remorse and desire to keep the monster at bay had vanished. I felt the were in me all the time now, the act of killing under its influence powerful and narcotic.

  “You went quiet, doll,” Will said. “Something on your mind?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I need to pee.” I slid out of the booth and booked it to the ladies room at record speed.

  Alone in the small space, the smell of mildew, bleach and old tile grout drove any romantic notions I might have had out of my head.

  I couldn’t marry Will. He didn’t know what I was. He would be shocked, horrified, repulsed. He’d leave me.

  I ran water into the stained basin and splashed it on my face in an attempt to get a hold on myself. I didn’t whine and pout and angst endlessly over men. That wasn’t me. But then again, up until a few weeks ago, snapping someone’s neck in cold blood and letting my monster rule me wasn’t me, either. Hadn’t been for fifteen years.

  “Gods,” I muttered, massaging my temples. “What the fuck am I supposed to do?”

  “Stop whining, for starters.”

  Lily was in the mirror again, and when I spun around she was standing there, her legs trailing off into nothingness, her face pale and misty, shimmering.

  “You’ve got some nerve,” I said. “You’re the cause of half of this angst and you tell me to quit being emo?”

  “When your life is cut short at fourteen, chica, you learn to prioritize.” Lily sniffed.

  “I don’t even know if I can stay with Will, or my job, never mind marry him and have a white-picket fucking fence,” I muttered. “And Hex it, why am I telling someone who isn’t even here these things?”

  “’Cause I’m listening?” Lily suggested. She sighed, and drifted over to the mirror, running fingers through her hair, licking her pinkie finger and fixing her smeared eyeliner.

  “Your mom is in jail,” I said. “For what she did to you.”

  Lily nodded. “I know. Never figured she’d order my death, but there you go. Guess that’s why I couldn’t shake a leg to the afterlife.”

  “You can go now. Why are you still here?”

  “I’m not staying long,” Lily said. “I came to tell you that I wasn’t going to, like, haunt your dreams and stuff anymore, and there you are, moaning over some guy who totally won’t even care what screwed-up things you did.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But when you’re my age, it’s not that simple. I’m not the person Will thinks I am.”

  “Then be that person starting now,” said Lily. “The guy wants to marry you, right? He’s got to have accepted that you’re weird.”

  “Again,” I said with a growl, “thanks. Your dead sarcasm does wonders for my self-esteem.”

  Lily shrugged and turned away from the mirror. “Whatever. I have to go. It’s been real, Lieutenant Wilder.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Although I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t glad to see the back of you. If I never meet another spirit again, it will be too soon.”

  “Oh,” Lily said, as she faded to little more than a pair of eyes, a pair of hands and a ghostly smile, “I’m not the last you’ll meet. Not by a long shot. Not at all.”

  She was gone before I could ask her what the hell she meant by that statement, and she probably would have just given me attitude, anyway.

  Fucking ghosts.

  I dried myself off and stepped back into the diner to a snap of dryer, warmer air. Lily tended to make things damp.

  Will smiled over the remains of his cheeseburger. “There you are. I was about to send in a search party and some rescue dogs with brandy.”

  “Sweetie?” I said, taking his free hand. The French fry grease warmed our grip. Will went serious.

  “Uh-oh. I know that look. What’s gone wrong?”

  I took in a deep breath. “I lied to you. There is something going on with me.”

  Will’s gaze softened from panicked to concerned. For a minute, I pictured that I could tell him what had really happened in Kiev and he wouldn’t react with disgust or, worse, pity. It was the pity I really couldn’t deal with.

  But the feeling only lasted for a second before I brought myself back to the real world, where there are some secrets you just don’t share, no matter how understanding your boyfriend appears.

  “I see things,” I said. “Well, not forever, but lately. Istarted seeing Lily Dubo
is. Not dreams, I swear. Really seeing. ”

  Will cocked his head. “That’s not something you had to be afraid to tell me, Luna.”

  “I don’t know why, or what I did, or why this victim, out of the hundreds, decided to start visiting me,” I said.

  “But I don’t think it’s going away, so I just wanted to warn you.”

  “Warned,” Will said with a smile. “Not running scared. But you should talk to your cousin, figure out why you suddenly have this ability…”

  I held up a hand. “Later. There’s plenty of time for that later, when I’m not eating my first bacon-cheesy slice of heaven in weeks.” Sunny had cried on the phone when I called to tell her I was home, but there was time. Time to see her, time to be nicer about her and Mac. Time to be a human being and not a human with a monster digging claws into her back.

  Be that person, starting now. For such a bratty kid, she made some damned good sense. I dug into my burger, and Will shifted in his seat, bringing something out of his jacket pocket. “I had hoped for a slightly more romantic way to do this, but…”

  He popped open the velvet box and I gasped involuntarily at the square-cut diamond and white-gold setting inside. “Oh gods, Will. That’s beautiful. And huge. Are you on the take?”

  His mouth crooked. “No. It’s something I’ve had for a while. I got it in Paris in the 1920s. Just never found the right girl to give it to.” He extended the box toward me. “But I have now.”

  Before I could say anything, Will was down on one knee in the middle of the Devere Diner, in front of the gods and everybody. “Luna Joanne Wilder, I love you and I need you in my life. I don’t even care that I had to ask this question twice: Marry me?”

  A million things went through my head at that moment, a million in a second and a half. Will would be with me when I phased. He’d see me for what I was.

  He’d know what I’d done.

  But in that moment, I felt worry wash away like a tide. My life might constantly be in ruins, but the part with Will Fagin was right. Had always been right. Could always be right. Was that enough to give my life over to completely?

  “Yes,” I said, softly. “Yes, Will.”

  He jumped up and hugged me, and the other diners broke into applause, and the whole thing was a scene I never thought I’d get to play in a thousand years. Not me. Not Luna Wilder, who attracted the wrong kind of men and inevitably screwed everything up, anyway.

  “Thank you,” Will said quietly. He gave me a wide grin. “I was going to feel like a real ass if you said no. Male ego and all, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” I said, looking down at my uneaten cheeseburger. I still didn’t have my appetite back, but for entirely different reasons.

  What had I just done? Will loved me and he had absolute faith in me and I’d looked him in the eye and lied that I had the same sort of faith, in him and in myself.

  This was going to blow up in my face, just like every other time I’d tried to be normal, to keep the were inside …

  I took a breath. It wouldn’t, this time, because I wouldn’t let it. Above all else, I was a survivor, and survivors didn’t let the tide drag them down. They kept their heads up, and they forged ahead.

  “This is going to be great,” Will said. “We’ll get married in the fall; I mean, we will if that’s all right with you. Just, try to keep Bryson out of the wedding party, okay? Somehow, I think that can only end badly.”

  He saw the look on my face and trailed off, going serious. “Doll, what’s wrong?”

  “Will,” I said, taking his hands in mine. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  Epilogue

  The courtroom in Kiev wasn’t ventilated, windows shut up tight, and the air was oppressively thick in the midsummer sun that was beating down on the square outside.

  I sat in the witness box, feeling the sweat slide down every piece of skin that didn’t already have my blouse stuck to it. Red-faced and soaked. What a great impression on the court.

  The translator, a small trim woman with a librarian’s bun, black hair and black eyes, looked to the prosecutor and then to me. “Please describe your association with Mr. Belikov.”

  Grigorii and Ekaterina were at the defendant’s table. Ekaterina looked sour as ever, Grigorii green around the gills and skinny, radiating sickness. He had an antibiotic IV hooked up even in the courtroom. Yesterday, his defender had gone into great detail about the infections, the surgeries, the pain Grigorii had gone through as a result of my moment with the scissors, as if that somehow excused everything Lola and the parade of other victims had testified to suffering at his hands.

  No one in the courtroom besides Ekaterina seemed particularly moved by his plight. I was just marveling that the slimy bastard had even survived.

  “I met Mr. Belikov when I was transported to his compound in Kiev,” I said, the translator speaking along with me. “He told me that I was a whore now, and that I would either have sex with the men who chose me or that I’d be beaten and sent to their blood-sport arena to be used as bait.”

  I paused for the translator to finish and continued, “When I resisted, I was indeed thrown into the arena, where I managed to fight my opponent to a standstill. Then Mr. Belikov sold me to a man who had expressed an interest in having a girl who was injured. That was his turn-on.”

  “And how did you escape?” the prosecutor asked.

  “The man who bought me turned out to be a friend, and he helped me get out of the compound and dressed my wounds so that I wouldn’t die of an infection. He saved my life. He died for me.”

  The prosecutor withdrew and the Belikovs’ defender stood up. She was a woman, a hard-ass red-from-the-bottle type who wore too much makeup and was fond of jabbing her finger into my face.

  “Isn’t it true that this friend was at the time of his demise a convicted criminal?” the translator said.

  “In Russia,” I said. “And in America. Not here.”

  “And isn’t it true that you offered Mr. Belikov sexual favors in exchange for your release?”

  I blinked. Grigorii must have told her about the moment in the lab. “I felt I had no choice,” I said. “When you’re a woman in a vulnerable position…”

  “And after Mr. Belikov refused your disease-ridden body, you attacked him?” the translator said. She crinkled her nose, as if having to repeat such obvious grandstanding made her slightly ill.

  I locked eyes with the defender. “After Mr. Belikov threatened to rape me if I didn’t comply, I decided enough was enough and I stabbed him in the groin with a pair of surgical scissors, which is far less than he deserved. In my opinion.”

  The court rippled at that, and the magistrate banged his gavel down. “You’re excused,” the translator said after a moment. “Thank you.”

  I left the defense box and decided I needed air. Any kind of air, even the sweltering summer day outside. I needed to be out of sight of the Belikovs’ hard gazes and the memories they stirred.

  I was back to seeing Dr. Merriman, the police shrink in Nocturne City, and I was here in Ukraine testifying against her advice. She said I had post-traumatic stress, that seeing my captors again would just aggravate it.

  I told her that the motherfuckers needed to be put away for good, and that if they somehow walked, I was going to be there to kill Grigorii with my bare hands. That had shut her up.

  “Luna?” Will jogged out of the courtroom after me, and I paused on the wide steps to wait for him, breathing the slightly cooler air.

  “It got pretty Law & Order in there, huh?” I said, trying to keep things light.

  After I’d told Will about killing the man in the brothel, about how Dmitri had died, about how I felt like I was one step away from tearing someone’s throat out most days, and that I had no hope of holding the were back the way I’d used to, he’d gotten quiet. There had been two or three days of awkward conversation until I’d finally gone home to my own apartment, even though I couldn’t sleep and obsessi
vely checked the locks on all of the windows and the front door.

  Will hadn’t left. He hadn’t even asked for the ring back. All of the unsaid words between us were starting to feel like a heavy load on my back.

  “I … I had no idea,” he said. “Luna, even when you told me, you didn’t tell me.” He didn’t reach for me, because we seemed to have forgotten how to be close to each other as my interest in sex waned and my nightmares got worse.

  “It happened,” I said with a shrug. “And I’d really like to stop talking about it, believe me, but the Belikovs need to go away.”

  Will shoved his hands into his pockets. He’d had to take unpaid vacation to come with me to the trial, after Interpol had finally tracked down Grigorii and Ekaterina in Thailand, trying to get cheap surgery for Grigorii’s disfigurement. They were already reaching out to the locals, Ekaterina having a stake in a dance hall on the outskirts of Bangkok, already running “exotic” girls from the back rooms.

  Dr. Gorshkov was still at large, but somehow I had the feeling that without Petra’s money and Grigorii’s desire to build his own private hit squad of mutant weres, he’d be less than no trouble.

  “I’m going to stick with you,” Will blurted. I held up my hand to tell him that reassurance wasn’t really what I needed, but he pressed on. “Just listen to me. I knew when I proposed that our life wasn’t going to be all American dreams and great sex. I knew that we both had our baggage. I’m going to stay. No matter what they did to you, I’ll be there. I’ll hold you while you sleep and I’ll be there when you’re ready to be with me again. That’s my decision and I’m sticking to it, so please don’t try to drive me away anymore. It’s getting sort of old.”

  I felt wetness prick my eyes, salt that wasn’t sweat. “I do love you, Will,” I said softly.

  He gave me a lopsided smile. “I can tell.”