Deceived: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Unturned Book 3)

by Rob Cornell

  He drew back. “Impossible.”

  “Your pals Able and Ira were in on it. So was Goulet.”

  “The vampire? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It does if you know what they want to accomplish.”

  I told him the rest. I even trusted him enough to tell him that Mom was the one who killed Dad and how her spell was meant to kill them both to keep the conspirators from getting their hands on Huitzilopochtli’s cloak. The deeper I went into the details, the lower his jaw opened and the wider his eyes grew. His thick black eyebrows became the unibrow they seemed destined to be. I noticed him grasping the edge of the table, knuckles white.

  When I finished with it all, he didn’t say anything for a long while.

  The loud talkers shouted about their most recent drunk bowling scores. One of the guys bragged about the number of gutter balls his “drunk ass” threw. All three of them howled with laughter.

  Steph eyed us as he swung by with a tray full of steaming plates towards another table.

  “I don’t even know what to say.” Markus’s voice came out in a rasp, almost inaudible against the drunk bowlers club. “It explains the vampire behavior. They feel betrayed. It explains…” He blinked and shook his head. “It explains a lot. But not the kind of explanation I could have imagined in a million centuries.”

  I let the story sink in a little more before I asked the key question, the reason for this whole meeting.

  “So,” I asked, “can you help us?”

  “You’re asking me to turn against my brothers and sisters in the Ministry.”

  “No. I simply need you to find out who’s behind this, how deep it goes, and if there are any others we can trust to help bring these motherfuckers down.”

  His dark eyes stared at the middle distance between us, I think visualizing various scenarios, one of them, I hoped, involving his revenge on those who had pushed my mother to such a desperate point, she had tried to kill herself and the man she loved.

  Steph came by, clasped his hands together, and smiled big. He opened his mouth.

  I stopped him there. “No.”

  “Uh—”

  “No. Leave.”

  His cheese ball smile faltered. All his customer service training couldn’t keep him from breaking into a sneer. “Whatever.” He stormed off, grumbling to himself.

  Markus’s gaze withdrew from his thoughts and pinned to me. “You’re a brave young man,” he said. “You’ve faced off against the city’s most powerful vampire and came away victorious. You’ve defeated the undead infection in your blood. And now, you stand willing to fight against a branch of the most powerful institution in the world.”

  “Brave or stupid. Either way, I’m going to do whatever I can to protect my mom. Or die trying.”

  “Indeed.” He folded his hands in front of him on the table, straightened his posture. “And so will I.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  I climbed behind the wheel of Sly’s Caddy, pulled the door shut, and let out a shaky sigh. I’d done it. I’d given a member of the Ministry all the information the Ministry would need to get to Mom. I felt a strange sort of relief about it as much as I did worry. It was the ultimate step toward bringing this all to an end, and I honestly had a feeling I’d done the right thing enlisting Markus’s aid.

  “You okay?” Odi asked, materializing from the shadows in the back seat.

  I nodded. “He’s agreed to help.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “I have to. Without someone on the inside, we’re fighting blind. We need to know who’s involved and what their exact plans are. We need to go on offense instead of all this defense.”

  “So while we wait for him to do his part, what do we do?”

  I started the engine and put the car in gear. “Hopefully Mom and Sly have figured out a way to destroy that thing. After that, the rest should come easy.”

  I twisted in my seat to look behind me while I backed up. I noticed Odi’s tense expression and kept my foot on the break.

  “What about Toft?” he asked. “If you destroy the cloak, you’ve got no reason to get him back. And they have no reason to let him live.”

  “Do you want him back?”

  “I need him. Pretty obvious. I doubt any other vampires are gonna want to adopt me.” He smiled, but it didn’t touch his sad eyes. “I’ll be orphaned for the third time in my life. How pathetic is that?”

  “Not going to happen,” I said. “We’ll get him back.”

  “Really?” This surprise in his voice broke my heart. What he said next broke it again. “Because if they kill him, you’re free of your oath.”

  “You think I’d abandon you like that?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?”

  I opened my mouth to argue the point, but stopped myself. Whatever I said probably wouldn’t sound sincere to his ears. And if I looked deep enough inside of myself, could I deny a part of me wanted to let him go? Hadn’t I argued with Toft that the kid couldn’t handle his power enough and it was already too late to train him? With my oath undone, I could do the right thing. I could stop trying to make Odi the sorcerer he could never be.

  “We’ve got to get back to Sly’s,” I said.

  Odi drew back into the shadows. For all intents and purposes, I was alone again.

  The first words out of Sly’s mouth when we arrived were, “We can’t destroy it.”

  We were back in the kitchen, our makeshift command center. The smell of coffee hung so thick, if I closed my eyes I could imagine I stood in a Starbucks. Sly must have cranked up the heat. I went from chilly to sweaty in under a minute, and I could hear the ducts still breathing out more warm air. Add a little humidity, and we could have gone tropical.

  A laptop computer sat open on the table among a scattering of printouts. Mom was poring over a sheaf of papers and barely muttered a hello when we came in.

  “You’ve done all the research on the internet?” I asked.

  Mom threw down her papers. “It isn’t like I have my collection of books from our basement anymore, seeing as they were all burned up. And I can’t very well waltz into the DML.”

  DML stood for the Detroit Ministry Library—a massive collection of arcane tomes, many of which Mom and Dad had helped recover during their time as scholars. They had both spent a great amount of time in the DML. It had been like a second home.

  All their time there had given me enough slack as a teen to get into all sorts of trouble. But that’s a story for another time.

  “So that’s it, then? There is no way to destroy it?”

  Mom sighed and rubbed her temples. Then she looked up at Sly. They exchanged a weird look. They were trying to decide whether or not to tell me something.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you guys thinking?”

  Sly worked his lips together and looked away. Mom had the guts to look me in the eye, though.

  “We can’t destroy it, but I have an idea of where we can put it, somewhere nobody could ever get to it.”

  I leaned up against the counter and tucked my hands into my pockets. The heat still blew through the ducts. Sweat slicked the back of my neck. “Another hiding place? Doesn’t that leave us in the same situation?”

  “Not a hiding place,” Mom said. “A place no one could dare go, whether they knew the cloak was there or not.”

  That sweat on my neck spread down the length of my spine. My shirt stuck to my skin. “What kind of place are you talking about?”

  Sly blurted, “Hell.”

  I scrunched up my face. “Um, what?”

  “I told you that’s a simplification, Sylvester,” Mom chided him like a child.

  “Fine. Not the Hell. A hell.”

  Talk of hell could get confusing from the perspective of someone familiar with the paranormal. When the typical person mentions Hell, most think of the Christian version. Eternal damnation. Lucifer. Flames. Other cultures have similar takes. But the truth was, the mythical ‘Hell’ mort
als were familiar with merely represented a larger truth. Demons came from all manner of alternate planes. Many of those planes were filled with creatures one could mistake for devils. A number of them even hosted undying flames. In fact, the flames were close to universal.

  In any case, there were a whole bunch of places a person could call Hell. But spelling the word with a capital H did not jive with reality. That would be like calling all the states in the US Michigan. I imagine many of those states would take issue with that generalization.

  I looked at Mom as if she’d snuffed a tank of helium while I was gone. “You want to stick the cloak in hell?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous—”

  “It sounds impossible.”

  She held up a hand. “Just listen to me.” She grabbed that stack of papers she’d been studying and held them out to me. I stared at them as if they might take on a life of their own and shred me with paper cuts.

  “Fine,” Mom snapped and slapped the papers back onto the table. “I found a ritual that could open a portal to a hell dimension. We open the portal, toss the cloak in, close it up, and we’re done.”

  “You want to open a window into hell? You’re out of your fucking mind. You can go in—”

  “Of course not. That’s the point.”

  “—and who knows what could come out?”

  “There are logistics we would need to work out, but—”

  “Logistics? Logistics?” I had swallowed enough crap ideas to last me a lifetime. I would not go for this one. “Two words, and then I don’t want to talk about it again. No. Way.”

  Mom pounded the table hard enough to make the laptop jump. Sly snatched the computer up, closed it, and tucked it under his arm.

  I noticed Odi had slunk out of the kitchen at some point and was nowhere in sight.

  “Damn it, Sebastian. You said yourself if we hide the cloak somewhere else, nothing changes. They’ll still come after me for the location.”

  “That’s why you aren’t going to be the one to hide it,” I said. “I am.”

  She shook her head. “Then they’ll get to you eventually. Torture you. Make you tell them.”

  “No they won’t.”

  Mom shot to her feet. She came at me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a quick shake. “You are a thirty-two-year-old sorcerer. Your father was six times your age. I’m nearly five times. If sorcerers as experienced and powerful as us couldn’t resist their efforts, what in the heavens makes you think you can?”

  Ah, crap.

  She was right. She could have said it a little more politely, but she was right. I had nothing on them. And if these Ministry goons got a hold of me, I wouldn’t stand a chance. They would break me. Then they would kill me.

  My whole body sagged as I accepted the truth. “How complicated is the ritual?”

  “Not very, frighteningly enough. Sly is going to take me shopping so I can pick up what I need. In the meantime, you need to get the cloak and bring it back here.”

  My stomach fluttered as if I suffered stage fright. It all came to this. “Okay. Where is it?”

  “In our basement.”

  I drew my head back. “Say what? The house was destroyed. And I know Goulet picked through the wreckage because he had Dad’s pocket watch. If it was there, they would have found it.”

  Mom rolled her eyes at me. “It isn’t just sitting around. I hid it in a bubble. A sort of parallel existence pulled around it like a blanket.”

  My surprise must have been obvious. “I know,” she said. “It’s not my typical work. And not something I could do on my own. Your father and I both worked it out.”

  “So the cloak is still down there among the wreckage, but in this bubble.”

  “Yes.”

  “And I need to what? Pop the bubble?”

  She turned her hand from side to side. “Sort of, I suppose.”

  “Easy peasy. Just tell me what I need to do.”

  She frowned. “That’s the catch.”

  I groaned. “Why does there always have to be a catch?”

  “You’ll need help. I would come with you, but I think it’s better if I get this ritual going so you can come directly here and toss it through the portal.”

  Oh, boy. I knew what was coming, and I already felt queasy.

  “Markus could do it,” she said. “Probably more easily than I could, for that matter.”

  “You want me to grab this thing with the help of a stranger?”

  The dry heat had me sweating enough to stink. I could even feel sweat running down the insides of my thighs. I had put myself in nice fresh clothes, free of plaster dust and tears, and now I felt like I had to change again already. I wanted to shout at Sly for cranking up the thermostat so fucking high.

  “He isn’t a stranger,” Mom said while I wriggled in discomfort.” He’s my…my very good friend. I thought you had decided to trust him.”

  “Not with the cloak, the whole fucking reason we’re so screwed in the first place. You’ll have to do it. You can conjure up the portal once we have it.”

  “I told you, I have things I need to gather first.”

  “Well, gather them now while the cloak is still hidden. Then we can head over there.”

  She touched my face and smiled sadly. His hand felt cool against my cheek despite the overwhelming heat. “You aren’t strong enough. I won’t be able to carry you enough to make it work. Markus has more power. You’ll need him, not me.”

  Again she hit me with my lack of ability. I had never felt like such a weakling in my life. Not even when I was all but drained of my magical juice while fighting off the vampire infection before I got the brand, though I had more power now, brand or no brand.

  But that power couldn’t keep me from feeling helpless.

  I hated it.

  “Are you sure?” I asked. “Should we try first?”

  “The longer we wait, the more time they have to find us, hurt us. All of us.” She waved a hand around her to indicate Sly and Odi, who had crept back into the kitchen at some point, standing in the archway to the hall behind him. The kid looked smaller to me. Younger. A lot less undead, and a whole lot more unprepared.

  “We really don’t have a choice, do we?”

  “He will help us,” Mom said. “He will.”

  Trust had become such a sticking point for me. Who could blame me, though? Still, if I kept refusing help because of my own hang-up, we couldn’t find our way out of this mess, couldn’t finally put the danger behind us.

  “All right. Call him and have him meet me at the house.”

  She nodded and hurried to the table where she had left her cell phone and snatched it up as if trying to put the call in before I changed my mind.

  “We still have a few hours of dark left,” Odi said. “Am I coming with?”

  “For sure.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  I arrived before Markus, which kind of sounded like an omen or something. That was the kind of bullshit swirling through my head at the moment. Negativity and paranoia. My gut twisted and twisted again while I waited. If it kept up, I might cough up a wad of flesh that only kind of resembled my stomach.

  I stood at the edge of what used to be my house. Most of it had caved into the basement. Partial walls and blackened beams remained in some parts. I could use my imagination to reconstruct some of it. Other sections I couldn’t recognize enough to fill in the blanks. As a whole, though, it looked entirely alien to me.

  The smell of charred wood and wet sod dominated the air this close to the remains. Enough October rain had soaked the lawn and the broken innards of the house to give the ruins a sunken and saggy appearance.

  Through some of the debris that had collapsed into the basement, I could make out wet flaps of parchment and leather bindings glistening with moisture. I saw one end of a giant bone that looked like a dinosaur femur. I had once wielded that bone as a weapon against another hunter out to collect on my head. I still didn’t know what
animal it had really come from. I made a mental note to ask Mom about it, but with all that was going on, I doubted I’d remember.

  I sensed someone watching me. I hadn’t heard Markus pull up, and I didn’t think it was Odi crouched in the shadows close to the neighbor’s house to my left. I turned my gaze to my other neighbor’s house that belonged to a widow named Mrs. Sokalski, but who Dad had christened Mrs. Snoopis because of her propensity to pry into our lives. She was determined to discover what kind of secret life we led, though most of her guesses didn’t come close. Meth dealers was one of my faves. I had often entertained myself imagining how she would react if she learned the truth.

  I used to resent her unwanted attention. Nowadays, I mostly felt sorry for her.

  Sure enough, she peered at me through the curtains hung across her picture window. Her eyes glimmered.

  Finally, Markus’s SUV pulled to the curb and parked behind the Caddy.

  It had started to drizzle. My scalp prickled as the cold rain dampened my hair.

  Markus came out of his car wearing a flowing robe with wide sleeves and trim with runes embroidered onto them. The robe flowed down to his ankles. The sleeves covered his hands. The robe had a wide hood, but it hung down his back.

  “Nice getup,” I said as he approached.

  “From what your mother told me, we’ll need a fair amount of magic. This enchanted robe will help a great deal.”

  He still looked stupid to me.

  “I hope you don’t mind getting it dirty,” I said. “Because we have to go down there.”

  I pointed down into the crater around where my Dad’s work area used to be. I could see his old work bench and a crushed bookcase that had separated his area from the rest of the basement. Mom had said that was where she and Dad had planted the bubble. Apparently, it didn’t have an exact location, but the incantation she had taught me would pull it to us as long as we stood close enough.

  “I wouldn’t worry about me,” he said. “You’re the one dressed as if we’re on a date.”