The angry woman I recognized from the hotel hallway in Wink, the widow who had jumped Harlow, stepped into a beam of moonlight. I had been wrong. She wasn’t just angry. She was so far beyond pissed there wasn’t a word for her volatile state. Violent energy radiated from her, and my pulse galloped once she got near enough for the tendrils of her insidious powers to caress me.
“She’s not an igel.” I had no idea if the wolf understood me, but I had to warn him. “She’s a Fury.”
Her nearness suffocated. Foam slid past my lips, down my chin. I vibrated with so much rage, my eyes rolled back in my head. Dragging myself out from under that torrent left me sweating.
“You came to find the mermaid.” Her black gaze burned through me. Her big toes dragged twin trails through the sand, but her feet no longer touched the ground. “You’re the one who left the messages on her phone.”
Well that explained why Harlow had been out of contact. “Where is she?”
“You should leave,” she told the slavering wolf. “I have no quarrel with you or yours.”
“She…is…mine.”
The sound of Graeson’s rasping voice snapped my head toward him. Suspended inside the shadow’s gut, he had managed a partial shift without drawing our attention. Sweat beaded his skin, and his bones glided under his muscles, distorting his proportions from that of a wolf into a man.
“Is that true?” The shadow holding me squeezed as Letitia considered me. “Do you belong to the wolf?”
Accepting his claim stamped my ticket out of danger, but Harlow wouldn’t be as lucky. She had screwed up in Wink, and if found guilty, she would be punished for her actions, but it wasn’t up to the grief-ravaged Fury to decide her fate. That’s what magistrates were for. We had a justice system for a reason.
“What happened in Wink was my doing.” I lifted my chin. “Harlow was struggling, and I rushed in to help. The others followed my lead. Your husband’s death was my fault. Not hers.”
“Ellis,” Graeson snarled through his contorted jaw. “Don’t be…a hero.”
Ignoring the warg was easy with a pissed-off Fury breathing hatred in my face. “You.” It was the only word she managed to get past her trembling lips. She made it sound like the worst insult imaginable. “Bring her.” The shadow holding me bobbed in her wake, riding the heat waves streaming from her skin like a hawk soaring on a thermal updraft.
“Ellis.”
“Kill the wolf. I can’t risk him or his pack coming after her.” The Fury appreciated the glistening water. “Drown him in the lake and leave him there. Let the creature finish him off.”
The shadow rippled then stuffed a smoky hand down the wolf’s throat to quiet him.
“The kelpie?” I struggled against my captor. “You saw it?”
“It drove the mermaid from the lake.” She pointed to the spot where Graeson had burst into a ball of fur. “She was flopping on the shore. All I had to do was scoop her up.”
Flopping meant Harlow had been wearing her fins. Why this time? What made her change for this dive? In order to beach herself, she had been in mermaid mode when she confronted the kelpie. At least this confirmed she had survived the encounter.
“Was anyone else out here?” I swiped my arms through my wispy captor while getting my feet under me. “Did you see anyone with the kelpie?”
“A small girl,” she said in a somber voice. “I sent the umbra to check. She was already dead. I couldn’t help her.”
My eyes crushed shut. That meant Charybdis had claimed its victim in this state after all.
That hairline crack in the Fury’s armor compelled me to add, “If you don’t release me, other girls like her will die.”
“Girls like her will grow up without a father thanks to you and your friend.” Her earlier anger expanded tenfold. “You’re expendable. That’s what the conclave taught me with Jasper’s death. You’re all disposable. You and your friend will die for your crimes, and others will take your place. You’ll be reduced to a name on a memorial wall that your coworkers walk past, seeing but not seeing.”
Vicious snapping noises preceded the splashing of water. No matter how Graeson fought, he was hauled into the lake by the second shadow as sure as if he were captured in a silver mesh net.
“Let him go.” I screamed my frustration. “He wasn’t in Wink. He has nothing to do with this.”
“He cares about you,” she seethed, “and that’s reason enough for him to die.”
Telling her I barely knew Graeson—or Harlow—wouldn’t save them. Letitia existed in a space beyond reality, beyond rationality, where vengeance and pain were the only flavors she tasted and blood was the only way to erase the cosmic debt she had attached to Harlow, and now to me.
“Keep her quiet,” the Fury ordered my personal umbra. “She might have brought more agents with her. We’ll have to handle those too.”
A chill embraced me. “Where are the other marshals?”
“Where all good marshals go when they die,” she said coldly and turned her back on me. “Come, pets. Let’s go home.”
The shadow crammed its wispy fist down my throat until I gagged. I bit down, tasting air. The creature had no blood to draw, no skin to read. I had nothing to mimic. My talents were useless against it.
A gurgled yelp fueled my thrashing. The creature clamped down harder, crushing me in its embrace. Wet snarls were the last thing I heard before the shadow squeezed out my consciousness.
Chapter 10
I woke with the earthy taste of mold in the back of my throat and a stiff lower back. I pushed myself upright off the poured concrete slab floor that radiated with cold and stank of mildew. Cinder-block walls supported the unfinished ceiling over my head. Pipes and wires hung exposed and within easy reach. I briefly wondered how the umbras might like the taste of electricity before deciding I was as likely to fry my brain as theirs and dismissed the idea as more dangerous than my current circumstances. At least for now.
Rolling onto my feet and shaking out my tingling limbs, I made a quick visual sweep of the room. No window. One door missing its knob. A fist-sized hole had been punched through the plaster beside it so that a chain could be looped through the circular cutout and locked on the opposite side. No handy tools had been left out so I could pick the lock, or lever against the chain to snap it. No food or water or blankets. Scrape together everything in what appeared to be a basement cell, and I had a whole lot of nothing.
Disjointed memories of my abduction sank back into my skull in bits and pieces.
The grieving widow. The shadow creatures. Those damn igel.
And Graeson.
He couldn’t be dead. He was a warg, practically bulletproof unless the rounds were silver.
I picked crusted saliva off my chin and out of the corners of my mouth while listening for signs of life. Worst-case scenario, I had been crammed into a storm shelter or detached cellar of some kind. Best-case scenario, I was holed up in the basement of the Rebec family home. Letitia had said Let’s go home after all. Neither option gave me the warm fuzzies.
As my eyes adjusted, I distinguished a set of figures drawn on the wall in sweeping pink and blue lines. Sidewalk chalk. A booming noise startled me, and I crept to the door and peered through the hole. Cases of soda were stacked against the wall near what might have been a set of stairs. Beside those a washing machine hopped as it struggled with its load. It jumped hard to the right, and a basket filled with equal part toys and laundry spilled onto the floor. Rebec house it is.
If I was here, then where was Harlow? And if this was the Rebec home, then was here in Wink, Texas?
Air whistled through the crack where my eye had been, and I recoiled as the room filled with familiar dense smog. I didn’t waste time swatting at it this time. I let it coalesce undisturbed, and as I watched, two silver gashes that must have been eyes blinked open. The umbra appraised me through the churning blackness with suspicion, confirming my fears that it was far more sentient than I first thou
ght.
“Where’s the mermaid?” I demanded.
Spears of white light flashed in a skeleton grin.
Is Graeson alive? That was the question I meant to ask next, but the words stuck in my throat. Graeson and I weren’t friends. He’d wrecked that possibility when he decided to use me. But I didn’t want him dead. We had gazed into the barren craters where our chest cavities ought to be and known one another, and I didn’t want to be alone in my grief again so soon.
The creature fluttered on my periphery, waiting, its ominous fingers unfurling through my hair. I stood unmoved, challenging it. “Where is Mrs. Rebec?”
Its fleeting amusement snuffed in a blink, and the eyes vanished along with the rest of its expression.
Metal scraped. I whirled as the door opened, and the man from the hotel hallway entered the room. If memory served, he was Letitia’s brother. He also appeared to be catnip to the umbra, who vibrated with pleasure at the sight of him, curling around the man’s torso like an inner tube made of smoke. He patted it absently as he appraised me through muddy-brown eyes puffed from lack of sleep. A plain white T-shirt was tucked into his jeans. Boots crusted with muck left prints behind him. His appearance was as bland as the dirt-colored hair on top of his head.
“Where is Harlow?” The unanswered question thing was getting old.
“She’s been taken to the gully.” The man hooked his thumbs over the umbra and slid it down to the floor, where he stepped out of it. The shadow puddled forlornly across the concrete, spilling long across the cement until he approximated the man’s shape. “Letitia asked me to bring you,” he said to me. “You can walk, or I can have you carried.”
Whatever the gully was, he made it sound like the last place he wanted to go, which couldn’t bode well for Harlow or for me. I shifted forward a fraction, until my shadow overlapped the umbra. It peeled off the floor and rose in a vaporous column that drifted between me and the man, who cast no shadow at all. That explained how Letitia came by at least one of her servants. “You can’t let her do this.”
“I can’t stop her.” He massaged his swollen eyes with his fingertips. “No one can. She’s a Fury. She won’t be sane again until her thirst for vengeance is sated.”
“She’s going to kill me and the mermaid. Do you want our deaths on your conscience?” I waited for a flicker of pity, something. I got nothing. He was empty. Drained. Furies burned out everyone around them, and this guy was crispy. “I’m an agent with the Earthen Conclave. When this is over, you’re going to prison for a very long time.”
His lips parted and then closed. When he exited the room, steps that had trudged earlier seemed lighter somehow.
I followed without him prompting me, closing the gap between us with long strides that made my calves burn. All the while his shadow breathed ice on my nape. One step closer. Two. By the third I could have reached out and tapped him on the shoulder. I lunged, smashing against an invisible barrier that rattled my brain, and I slid to the floor in a daze.
A witch. The man was a witch. I hadn’t touched him, but I read his magic easily.
The man didn’t break stride as he motioned to the umbra. Eager to please its master, the shadow consumed me. The now familiar chittering noises announced the arrival of the igel. A sea of tiny bodies made for an undulating carpet of spines, and the shadow laid me to rest on top of them. I hissed through my teeth as their needles pierced the sensitive flesh on my skull, back, hips and calves. Once skewered properly, I bit back a whimper as hundreds of dainty feet scrabbled across the grimy linoleum, causing the spines to shift—and my skin to tear—with them.
Somehow the little beasts scuttled up the stairs and out of the house while supporting my weight. Night had fallen during my captivity. From my new position, inches from the ground and flat on my back, the sky hung infinite and solemn above me.
Gemini derived their name from the Zodiac. The story goes that Castor and Pollux were twin brothers known as the Dioskouri. Castor was the son of Tyndareus, the king of Sparta, and a mortal. Pollux was the son of Zeus, and a demigod. Their mother was Leda. To make a Greek tragedy short, Castor was killed. In his grief, Pollux asked that his father allow him to share his immortality with his twin so they could remain together. Zeus agreed, and they were transformed into the constellation Gemini.
That said, I couldn’t point out our namesake constellation if my life depended on it.
Bright stars glittered above me, and they were nameless and heartless as they watched my progress.
Locked in the shadow’s chill embrace, I conserved my energy and strained my ears for hints about what came next. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to hear cheering and whistling coming from behind me, in the direction the hedgies were hustling.
The noise grew deafening as we pierced a ring of light that washed yellow and warm over my eyes. Smoke stung my nostrils. A waft of burnt citronella made my eyes sting. Toenails clicked on a smooth surface, and the convoy ground to a halt. The gully, it turned out, was a deep wash behind a sprawling clapboard house. The igel mucked through a bed of smoothed clay the pale gray of Unseelie skin. Faces ringed the crumbling ledges above, peering down at me. Money exchanged hands. Popcorn—seriously?—rained over my head. The firelight illuminated the area where I was being held but left the spectators their anonymity. Still, I had a good guess as to who they were.
Furies were rare. At least as rare as Geminis. They were usually born into witch families, making them one of the few fae who sprung from humans. Except not really. A Fury’s soul was immortal. Its flesh was temporary housing. What that meant in most cases was a Fury latched on to a human early in its life, kicked its soul to the curb and became the person. It would live that life, procreating like mad, until its body grew old and died, and then it would leap into the next suitable vessel in its lineage and begin again.
So if I had to guess who—other than Jasper’s igel family—would be so eager to watch the show, I would place my bets on Letitia’s coven, of which her mother and brother must also be members.
Footsteps padded toward me. An old woman, who I recognized as the final member of the trio who’d confronted Harlow in Wink, leaned over me, tight-lipped and indifferent. She pointed a gnarled finger to the left, and the shadow wrenched my neck so I had to look or my head would pop off.
Harlow hung suspended by the second umbra. Her feet were bare and her legs smooth. The tail was gone again. Microscopic denim shorts rode low on her hips. A swath of pale skin glowed warm in the torchlight between the waistband and the hem of her neoprene top.
“Release me.” Though my head was still cranked to one side, I cut my eyes to their corners to glare up at the old woman. “She’s made no secret she plans to kill us. The only way we all walk away from this is if you release me and the mermaid. Now.”
Her puckered lips plumped as she considered my demand. “I will no’ cross that girl, child, lest I surrender me own life in place of yours.” She bared bright pink gums. “I’m old, but I’m no’ dead yet.”
“Gazing through the bars of a prison cell is not how I would choose to end my life,” I threatened.
She leaned over, nudging me with her toe, and a pentacle necklace slid from the deep collar of her blouse. “Who do ye think ye are to threaten me?”
Playing off a hunch, I spelled it out for her. “I’m an agent with the Earthen Conclave. I’ve been to the Crathie Prison, where all the convicted earth witches are sent to die, and I can tell you it’s a special kind of hell tailored to the needs of its prisoners.” She fisted the pentacle for strength, and I knew I had her. Magic was passed down the maternal lines. The man was a witch, and so she must be too. “You will never again feel rain on your skin, dirt in your hands or nurse tender shoots to maturity. Your connection with the earth will be severed, and you will die surrounded by concrete and steel.”
Pursed lips moved in a circular motion. “I want immunity for meself and me boy. Goddess knows he has suffered enough.”
I jumped at the sound of her voice. I hadn’t expected to hear it inside my head. The privacy was welcome, though. “Give me a hand—” and I meant that literally, “—and I promise you and your son full immunity.”
“Shadow and light canno’ exist in ta same place at ta same time.”
“Wait.” I writhed. “That can’t be it. What does it mean?”
“Figure it out.” She thumped my temple with her knuckle. “I canno’ do all the work for ye.”
A riddle. Great. They might as well shoot me now.
After giving me a decisive nod, she toddled out of my line of sight. Only then did I notice despite the firelight, she cast no shadow. Letitia had enslaved hers too. I could guess where it had gone. It must be the one confining Harlow. I wondered which had dragged Graeson into the lake, but remembering his ear-piercing howls made my chest hurt, so I focused on what the old woman said, hoping that scrap of insight might save Harlow and me.
“Bring her,” Letitia keened in a high voice that shattered my train of thought. “Let all witness justice for my Jasper.”
The shadow hefted me upright, and my head spun as the blood rushed back to my brain. “Oh fudge.”
A beer bottle thudded beside my foot, and a booming voice yelled, “Are we doing this or what?”
Apparently the natives were getting restless.
Letitia gestured me forward, and I had no choice about going. The nearer I came to her, the hotter my skin burned, the harder my gut twisted. Her black gaze pierced the depths of my soul and ignited the petty, squabbling tangle of faded emotional baggage we all carry until each of those old hurts smoldered with renewed fervor.
She leaned in, and her lips brushed my cheek. Rage boiled in the kiss, and it scalded my mind until the wisps of my thoughts evaporated. There was nothing. I was nothing. All that remained was Letitia. Her will. Her power. I understood now. I understood everything.
The mermaid had to die.
She pointed a finger at a woman with delicate features and pastel hair. She had slender legs, not fins, but Letitia was insistent. “Kill her. Kill the mermaid.”
Dead in the Water (Gemini: A Black Dog Series Book 1) Page 11