by Rob Cornell
Mom sat on the edge of the bench seat to my right. She stared with wide eyes, holding out a hand of her own to me, but not threateningly, more like she wanted to catch my sleeve before I scooted too far away. Too late, though. I had already moved beyond her reach.
Flame flickered to life around my outstretched hand, my palm aimed right in line with Markus’s chest.
He didn’t look a smidge concerned. He sat back on his haunches on the opposite side of the limo, his elbows on his knees, his hands hanging loosely between them. His calm demeanor irritated the hell out of me. Didn’t he realize I was about to burn that almost unibrow off his damn face?
“Sebastian, please. My attack was a horrible misunderstanding. I put a great deal of energy into healing you. Can’t we let bygones be—”
“Shut up.”
The air in the close quarters grew warmer from my fire. The clean smell of pure heat filled the space. But once I threw my flame at Markus, his burning flesh would quickly dirty up that smell. And I was about to make that happen when Mom slipped off the seat and kneeled between us, blocking Markus.
“Sebastian, stop this!”
With her in the way, I quickly doused my flame. I kept my hand out, though, and watched it tremble.
Mom cupped my hand in hers. “It’s okay,” she said. “Markus is a friend.”
I didn’t have friends who rode around in limousines. You couldn’t trust a person with a limousine. They either had too much money or too much power. Or both. And if this guy had the ability to rip me open as a cougar and put me back together as a human, he was especially bad news. Because of his limo.
The line of thought made perfect sense in the moment.
But the longer Mom held my hand, and the longer I had to catch my breath and let my nerves settle, the more I realized my freak-out might have been a little over the top.
Not that I trusted Markus any more than I had to begin with. However, killing him outright wasn’t appropriate. I guess.
I nodded to Mom.
She released a long sigh. Her shoulders relaxed. “Why don’t we all take a seat like civilized folks?”
She climbed back to her spot on the seat to my right.
Markus stayed put for a few seconds, watching me. He didn’t looked worried or angry. Just…focused. If he had stared much longer, I would have started squirming. But he quickly broke off his scrutiny and took a seat next to Mom.
That made my choice of seat obvious. I parked myself on the opposing bench. I sat on the edge, too, in case I had to make a sudden move.
“Sebastian,” Mom said. “This is Markus Hope.” She patted him on the knee with easy familiarity. It made me feel a little squidgy.
“He already told me that,” I said. “He also said he’s the damn cougar who nearly killed me.”
Markus held up a finger. “But I am also the one who—”
“Healed me. Yeah. Thanks. That was such a pleasant ride. We should do it again soon.”
He laughed. “Let’s not and say we did.”
So he thought this shit was funny? I gave Mom my signature What the fuck? look.
She drew her shoulders up and smiled like a shy bride. “He’s a good man, Sebastian. We go way back.”
“Too far back,” Markus said. Now he rested his hand on Mom’s knee so that their arms crossed.
Squidgy and more squidgy. Maybe I should have sat between them like a gods damned chaperone.
“I should have gotten in touch the moment I heard about Walter,” he said.
“I wasn’t much of a talker for a while there.”
He ducked his head, nodded. “I visited you a couple times while you were…” He shrugged.
Mom’s eyes lit up. “You did?”
He did?
“I sat and read Byron to you. You always loved the Lord B.”
She did?
“I’m sorry, Markus. I don’t remember much from my time there.”
His smile turned sad. The corners of his eyes pinched as if struck by sudden pain. “I’m just thankful you’ve come out of it. It was unbearable to think I’d lost you and Walter both.”
He gently rubbed her knee.
I cringed. I would have rather had that maggoty animal corpse in my face again than watch this shifty shape shifting son of a bitch get all cozy with my mom.
“This is real touching,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t still owe me a damn explanation.”
He got my message—both of them. He took his hand off Mom’s knee and folded both of his hands in his lap. He cleared his throat. “You’re right, of course.”
I faked a smile that was supposed to look fake and waited for him to go on.
The limo shifted slightly, though none of us had moved. Then I realized Markus’s driver was still in the vehicle and just on the other side of the opaque partition right behind my head. I wondered if he could hear any of this. Probably not. And it didn’t matter. I still wanted answers.
“First of all,” Markus said, “I’m an officer of the Ministry.”
I tensed at this tidbit. Officer of the Ministry could mean a lot of things. But if this limo were his company car, I could be in some serious shit.
Mom, who still had her hand on Markus’s knee, gave his leg a little shake. “He used to be a scholar like me and your father.”
Used to be.
I braced myself.
“That’s right,” Markus said. “Those were the good old days. A lot less stress. Even running from a horde of risen mummies seemed less harrowing than working in politics.”
A Ministry politician?
My stomach felt like a crushed beer can.
Please tell me this isn’t happening.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, my voice sounding a lot like it had when I first woke up on the floor of this limo—dry, creaky, distraught.
“Poor Markus here is a Ministry arbiter,” Mom said with a wide smile, like a proud parent.
My crunched up stomach dropped clean through the floor and all the way down to China. Some poor soul over there had my stomach in their backyard—or maybe on their dinner table.
A clammy sweat rose across the back of my neck.
I was so screwed.
See, arbiters are the second step down from the prefect. If the prefect was like a governor, then arbiters sort of acted like the local legislature. These comparisons had a lot of flaws. The workings of the Ministry weren’t nearly as democratic as mortal government. But the point was, besides the prefect, you couldn’t get any higher in the Ministry’s political food chain than an arbiter. And the Ministry strongly frowned upon the assault of its highest officers. It didn’t matter a whit that Markus had started the fight. My use of magic to physically toss him off of me could win me some serious—and permanent—consequences.
A lifetime prison sentence, for example.
Markus curled up one corner of his mouth. “I can tell what you’re thinking.”
Mom shook her head. “Sebastian, he isn’t going to charge you.”
I looked from Mom to Markus. “I’d like to hear that from him.”
He held up a hand as if swearing an oath. “I am not going to charge you. My gods, what a terrible bastard I’d be after what I’d done to you.”
His word on the matter would have to soothe me well enough. But I knew he could change his mind at any moment. Best if I stayed on his good side.
“So…” I cleared my throat and hoped I could keep from sounding like a scaredy cat. “Why…” Ugh. How could I word my question so it didn’t sound like an accusation? Aw, fuck it. I’d verbally danced with the Detroit prefect. I didn’t have to let this guy intimidate me.
“So,” I repeated. “What brings an arbiter like yourself to a lovely neighborhood like this?”
He leaned forward. “You did.”
Chapter Six
“This is the site of a rather infamous crime among the supernatural community,” Markus said. “Shortly afterward, I set up wards around the hou
se to trip if they sensed any magical or paranormal energy. The idea was that the criminal might return to the scene.”
I noticed Mom’s smile fade. Her gaze looked unfocused. She saw something beyond the limo, something that made her eyes water. A glimpse of the past, most likely.
“Frankly,” Markus continued, “I’d forgotten about the wards. And I never would have thought, three years later, they’d still work.”
For some reason, I didn’t buy that last claim. If this guy could heal me from the injuries he’d inflicted on my body in only a couple of hours, he should have easily had the juice to cast wards that would last a decade or more.
“So Mom and I set off your wards? And you showed up, what? Ten minutes later?”
“I had tucked in a summoning spell along with the wards.” He laughed. “You can imagine my surprise when I found myself pulled from a committee meeting and transported here.”
Yeah, that there was some high-level mojo. Yet somehow he kept his energy muted. Normally, I would have felt that kind of power rolling off of him like heat from a kiln. A thought occurred to me that should have struck me earlier. Probably would have if I hadn’t just woken up from a near-death experience.
“You’re a shifter,” I blurted, though I had meant to keep the statement to myself.
Markus smiled. “No. An Animagus. My cougar form comes from druidic roots. My mother was a druid, my father a sorcerer. An unusual union, to say the least. But it certainly worked in my favor. I have the skills of a druid, but access to inborn magical energy.”
My jaw dropped, felt like all the way to my knees. “Wow,” I said like the master orator I was.
He got a kick out of my reaction and burst into laughter that came from deep in his belly.
Mom jerked out of her mental trip into the past, blinked a few times, then grinned at Markus’s outburst. Though it was obvious she didn’t know what he was laughing about.
I reeled in my loose jaw and straightened in my seat. Time to get serious again. “So you pop in, see me on the porch, then go all cougar and try to kill me? That’s quite a snap judgment, huh?”
He pressed a hand to his chest as if to squeeze out the last of his laughter so he could talk. His laughing scaled down to an amused wheeze, then he cleared his throat. “As I’ve said, I apologize for that. While you looked vaguely familiar—I think you have your father’s eyes—I didn’t recognize you. I suppose I reacted a touch too vigorously, but I thought I might finally have a lead on who harmed your parents.”
“A touch?” I huffed. “That’s one way of putting it.”
“I’d only intended to incapacitate you enough so I could question you. Then you fought back, quite strongly I might add, and I reacted by instinct instead of using my head.”
He said it as if he had said enough. All was well. He didn’t mean to nearly kill me. Let’s move on already.
I honestly didn’t have anything else to say either, though I felt like I should have. I didn’t want him to think he had gotten off the hook so easily. But his explanation was fair. Could I really blame him? Especially if he thought he had someone who may have been involved with what happened to Mom and Dad. Hell, I probably would have reacted the same way.
Markus turned in his seat to face Mom. “So did your visit help?” he asked.
Mom took her hand off his knee—finally!—and wrapped her arms around her as if suddenly cold. The driver had the engine running, and heat blew from the vents, but Mom shivered.
“Not a lot,” she said.
“What do you remember?”
My nerves sparked. I didn’t care how buddy-buddy the two of them were, he did not need to hear how she thought—
You mean how she knows.
—she had killed Dad. The worms in that can were better left inside.
“Just bits and pieces,” I said before Mom could answer herself.
She glanced at me, a question in her eyes. I hoped she saw the answer in mine.
Don’t tell him!
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “That’s right. Barely anything.”
Markus put a hand on her shoulder. He looked at her for a long while. The steady sound of the engine filled the silence. I could smell the barest whiff of exhaust smoke. The tangy smell of blood was stronger. My blood, I realized, as I looked to the floor and saw the darker, wet patches on the already red carpet.
As if triggered by the sight, my back started to itch like a mother. I leaned back and rubbed against the seat, trying not to be too obvious about it, the creak of the leather not making it easy.
No reason to worry, though. The two of them gazed into each other’s eyes, oblivious to me. I could have sung some AC/DC while waving flaming pompoms and I doubted they would have noticed.
I did not like it.
I cleared my throat. Cleared it again. A third time.
They didn’t flinch. Markus kept rubbing Mom’s back. Mom hugged herself a little tighter, so at least she was keeping her hands to herself. I wondered if they had acted like this around Dad. Wouldn’t it have bothered him? Or was this new behavior for them, seeing as how Dad wasn’t around to get in the way?
I gritted my teeth, but kept (barely) from growling.
“Mom,” I finally barked.
Her eyelids fluttered. She turned her face my way with a bewildered sleepiness. “We should get home,” she said as if I were the one holding us hostage in the arbiter’s limo.
“Yeppers.”
“I can have my driver drop you at home,” Markus offered.
I snorted. What home? I sure as Skittles did not call our hotel room home. But, hey, Mom had a connection to a top dog in the Ministry. Maybe she could get a rush put on the reconstruction of our house, something we were supposed to be guaranteed in the instance of a paranormal disaster. The Ministry bureaucracy, unsurprisingly, wanted to haggle on whether the house fire counted as a paranormal act. Vampires had set the fire. It shouldn’t have mattered that they’d done it with flamethrowers.
“We’ve got a car,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
He inclined his head. “Then allow me to drive you back to your car.”
That brought up a good point. Where the heck were we, besides in a Ministry-issued limousine? I peered out the tinted windows. The vehicle was parked by a light post in a Wal-Mart parking lot, in one of the spaces furthest from the store. The view was so mundane, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Wouldn’t want to keep you from your shopping trip.”
Markus laughed along with me. “You can thank my driver for the locale. I was too busy saving your life to notice.”
He put an emphasis on saving your life as if I needed reminding of his heroic deed. I didn’t bother pointing out I wouldn’t have needed saving if he hadn’t fucked me up in the first place. So I smiled. “Thank you.”
An awkward moment of silence followed. While I kept my gaze on Markus, I could see Mom squirming in the corner of my eye. She finally broke the stare-down by patting Markus’s arm.
“We’d appreciate that, Mark. Thank you.”
Oh, now he was Mark?
Grrrrrrr, I thought.
“Yes,” I said, trying my best to grin instead of grimace. “That would be great.”
Chapter Seven
I needed to vent. Desperately. So after I dropped Mom off at the hotel room, I drove to Hazel Park and pulled into the lot of Sly’s Smoke Shop on the brink of twilight. The sky didn’t look much different than it had all day, just a darker shade of gray.
I got out of my ‘87 Reliant (one of only a few things that had survived the fire) and went inside.
Sly’s place was a head shop on John R Road. He sold everything from elaborate water bongs with pewter dragons wrapped around their glass necks to a stunning variety of rolling papers. He also had a magazine rack featuring a library’s worth of periodicals devoted to weed and all its various joys. While selling recreational marijuana was still illegal in Michigan, the paraphernalia surrounding the act was fair game f
or retailers, with the caveat that all items sold were “for tobacco use only.”
Not that the laws mattered much in Sly’s shop, because it always smelled like ganja thanks to Sly’s employee and nephew, Green. (Last name or first name, I didn’t know, Sly never called him anything else.) Green had a habit, much to Sly’s chagrin, of smoking on the job. And tonight he looked like he had toked more than usual. His eyes, set somewhat close together, were so red he almost looked like a vampire. Sweat beaded his forehead and soaked the underarms of his Red Wings jersey—which was gross, because he seldom wore anything else.
He gave me a limp wave when I came in. “Hey, Sebastian.”
“You okay, Green? You’re looking a little…green.”
His wide jaw swung down, and he let out a laugh that sounded like he’d swallowed a carburetor. For a second I thought it was a sarcastic, fake laugh, but he delivered it with apparent sincerity. I’d never heard him laugh before. I could go a while without hearing it again.
“Where’s Sly?” I asked.
Green hooked a thumb in the direction of the back room. “Making sure the back entrance is barricaded.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Why?”
Green’s stoned gaze roved to the plate-glass window facing the street. “They’ve gone crazy, man. As if they weren’t crazy enough.”
I followed his gaze. Dusk had broken into night. I’d probably get a call from Toft if I didn’t pick up my apprentice soon. But I didn’t want to deal with Odi right then. I needed to unload my recent findings on a sympathetic ear.
“Who’s gone crazy?”
“Vamps, man.” He pointed through the window, and then I spotted what he was talking about.
A gas station occupied one corner of the intersection across the street. There were two cars parked by the pumps, a pickup and some kind of compact car. Both had all of their windows shattered. Through the broken window on the driver’s side of the compact car I saw a middle-aged woman with her head cocked unnaturally back and to one side as if she saw something fascinating on the ceiling through her wide, still eyes.
A bloody tear in her throat spurted blood in time to her slowing heartbeat.