The Better Part of Darkness

by Kelly Gay

  “Yeah, like walking all over those who are weaker and poorer? You’re no better than a schoolyard bully. Some power. You have no intention of bringing the races together, do you?”

  Instantly, the limo filled with Mynogan’s rage. The whites of his eyes bled to blackness. An oppressive hum of strength and energy engulfed me in the smut of his being and past deeds.

  Carreg cleared his throat gently, the sound diffusing some of Mynogan’s anger. “You have more courage than I thought, Detective.” He cocked his head. “Or is it stupidity?”

  “Stupidity,” I answered, surprising him. “Of the purest kind. Which makes me unpredictable, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You mock something you know nothing of,” Mynogan said. “I should take your blood right now.”

  I frowned at the odd statement. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Was this the Abaddon way of threatening one’s life? Sounded suspiciously vampiric to me, which, as far as I knew, was nothing but pure myth.

  A thin grin twisted Mynogan’s face, and he lifted a severe white eyebrow. “For all your knowledge, you know very little of my kind.”

  “Then, by all means, enlighten me.” We stopped at another light. From our location, I guessed we were headed back to CPP headquarters, which meant I had to get out of the car soon.

  “Better yet,” Mynogan said, leaning so close that I was forced to lean back into the seat. “Why don’t I just start by picking the flesh from your bones?”

  One piece for me. One piece for you.

  The breath whooshed from me, and my heart skidded to a painful stop. I pressed myself against the door, flailing for my gun. Air filled my lungs as my fingers closed around the handle. I drew it on him, hand shaking as the whine of the charging weapon filled the silence. “Get away from me.” He sat back, happy to have completely unwound me. “You too.” I waved the gun at Carreg. “Get over there, next to him.”

  My gaze flicked to the street. We had stopped at a traffic light, but it was a bad time to bail. The bodyguards could easily follow on foot. “Who are you? How the hell do you know me?”

  Mynogan shrugged. “I can be your worst nightmare, Charlene, or I can show you the path to immense power.”

  I tightened my hold on Bryn’s bag and opened the door as the limo started through the intersection. “I’d rather suck face with an imp.” And with that, I ducked out of the limo before it cleared the intersection.

  Bad plan, Charlie, I thought as I went down hard, tripping in the damn heels and rolling four times, bruising and scraping every part of my body and every bone that poked out and hit the pavement. Once my momentum slowed, I pushed to my feet to the squeal of brakes, horns honking, and the astonished look of the driver behind the limo, and then darted to the sidewalk and around a corner. Adrenaline made me move fast and helped ease the pain, but as soon as I realized no one followed, my steps slowed and my body began to throb and sting from the road burn.

  My cell phone rang from inside the bag. I stopped on the sidewalk, fished it out, and flipped it open with one hand.

  “Charlie, where the hell are you?”

  “I’m fine, Hank.” I just rolled out of a moving car in high heels. “How are you?” The farther I walked, the more my left ankle hurt. Sharp lines of pain zinged up my leg with every step. I reached down and took off the black pumps, proceeding barefoot.

  “Please tell me you’re laying low.”

  “Um …”

  I held the phone away from my ear as Hank yelled. “Damn it! I knew it! I knew you couldn’t stay out of trouble for one day. One day, Charlie!” He let out a loud, disappointed huff, making me roll my eyes. “Where are you right now?”

  I glanced at the stop sign as I crossed the street. “I’m at the corner of Walton and Forsyth.”

  “Stay there. I don’t care what the chief says, I’m picking you up. Go to the Subshop Deli at Broad Street. I’ll meet you there. Someone ransacked your house and broke into the school early this morning.”

  At the mention of school, I froze, nearly causing a collision with the person walking behind me. “Oh, God, Emma went to school this morning.” I started running, the bag slapping against my hip and my ankle forgotten in the sudden panic.

  “Calm down. It was before any students got there. Classes have been canceled. Em’s at Bryn’s and Will is on his way to get her. Oh, and Bryn made me go by and pick up Spooky. Who was, oddly enough, spooked by the break-in.” Hank chuckled at himself.

  The damn cat could take care of herself. My thoughts were on Em. “Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me?!” I shouted into the phone.

  “Look at your phone, smart-ass. We’ve been calling all morning.”

  The sound of the rally must’ve drowned out the ring tone. And if it had rung in the limo, I had been too distracted to even notice.

  “Fine, just hurry,” I said, approaching the deli.

  CHAPTER 9

  The bell chimed over the door as I entered, braced a hand against the glass to slip the pumps back on, and then limped inside where I slid gratefully into an empty booth.

  God, I hurt!

  It took a minute to regain my composure and take stock. My elbow ached, and the scratches and road-rub along my shoulder, hip, and thigh burned, but not nearly as bad as my ankle, which was growing hotter and achier by the second. Pulling in my leg, I saw the skin was swelling, but not enough to indicate I’d sprained it.

  “Hey, miss, you got to order to take up a booth!”

  Yeah, yeah.

  Quickly, I smoothed my hair and straightened my shirt before standing. Every muscle protested as I searched the bag for my wallet, pulling out three bucks and some change. At least the counter wasn’t too far away. Wincing, I shuffled forward in the torturous black pumps and ordered a large sweet tea and a chocolate chip cookie.

  The clerk lifted an eyebrow at my appearance. “You all right?”

  With a wry half-smile, I handed him the three bucks. “Yeah. You’d be amazed what a clearance sale at the Apple Store does to some people.”

  He froze. “There’s a clearance sale at the Apple Store?”

  “Yeah. Ends today though.”

  “Dude. Really?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  The door jingled. The clerk looked beyond me and gave a nod to the new person. No, I corrected, smelling the distinct scent of tar. Not a person. A jinn. Shit.

  My blood pressure rose, and I mentally begged the clerk to hurry the hell up.

  The jinn, I noted via a quick sideways glance, was typically large, his bulky form heightened by a Georgia Tech hoodie. He didn’t pay me any mind as he stood at my right side, his attention firmly on the overhead menu.

  “Hey, Len, how’s it going?” the clerk asked as he poured my tea. “Heard about those guys who were killed yesterday in Underground. That’s wrong, man, just wrong.”

  Len turned his head slightly, casting an aloof look at the clerk, the muscle in his dark gray jaw flexing.

  The clerk slid my tea across the counter and pulled the cookie from the bin with a napkin. His eyes lit excitedly as he leaned forward toward Len, his voice low when he spoke. “Tennin must be calling for blood, eh?”

  I grabbed the tea and cookie, pivoting just as Len turned fully toward the clerk. He hadn’t seen my face. But I didn’t miss his deep resonating voice as I walked back to the booth. “If she can’t pay, it will be in blood, yes.”

  Poised and alert for an attack, I slid into the booth facing the jinn so I could watch his every move.

  If I disappeared, it’d be all-out war against the jinn. But then Tennin didn’t really have a choice. Death prices and blood debts had been a way of life for the jinn for thousands of years. If Tennin looked the other way now, it’d be seen as weakness, and he hadn’t retained his position as jinn boss for this long by being weak. In fact, it was well known the guy bordered on psychotic.

  As the clerk made Len’s order, I studied the broad back of the bald-headed warrior, noting his thi
ck gunmetal neck and the beefy hands that flexed and un-flexed at his sides. They lived at the ready, always on alert, always ready to fight.

  Memories of the three I’d killed came back to me. The thick black blood they’d bled; the smell of it like liquid tar and iron. I didn’t know how in the hell I’d managed to kill three of them, let alone how I was going to thwart a whole damn tribe.

  As the jinn paid and approached my booth with a to-go bag, I lowered my head and broke the cookie in half, trying to temper my adrenaline so he wouldn’t smell it. I fought a two-second battle with myself. Should I glance at him as he passed? Would that be the normal thing to do, or should I ignore him?

  With no time to think, I opened my mouth and shoved in half the cookie. Dim violet eyes met mine as he walked by my table.

  I froze.

  One dark eyebrow dipped a fraction. At my appearance? At the fact that I smiled at him with a mouth full of cookie? Or that he recognized me as the prey he was charged with bringing in?

  It seemed like slow motion had kicked in as we locked gazes, but it was over in the two seconds that it happened. I didn’t let out my breath until the bell over the door stopped jingling.

  I washed the lump of dry cookie down with the tea, taking a moment to decompress after my near brush with the jinn and get back on track.

  Mynogan’s last words slowly crept in my head.

  He’d tried to lure me with the promise of power. But why? I released a deep sigh, propped my chin in my hand, and gazed out the window. I was no closer to finding out how he knew me or why he existed in my dreams. And, for all my bumps and bruises, I’d gotten no information, not a single clue on the ash.

  But one thing I did know: after seeing Cassius Mott at the rally, connecting the dots was pretty simple. Amanda was Cass’s daughter. Cass was a known drug user. And a new drug was going around. Thanks to his brother, Titus, Cass had a small fortune and access to numerous labs. He had to be involved with ash in some way, and somehow Amanda had gotten hold of it. My house and the school had been broken into. And the only relation there was Amanda, which meant someone, possibly Cass, was looking for something.

  But what? My fingers tapped on the table.

  Goose bumps pricked my skin. I sat straighter. They’d been looking for something they hadn’t found at school, so they’d gone to my place.

  My pulse leapt. What was the one thing a kid kept on her most of the time, the one thing she kept her belongings in besides her locker? Her backpack. Bingo. And I knew exactly where that was. In the backseat of my Tahoe. When I dropped her and Em off at school the previous morning, she’d been so unusually hyper and distracted about her new Betsey Johnson handbag that it was no wonder she’d forgotten to grab her worn-out old backpack. And probably by the time Amanda realized it, she was already on her way to bliss city. The drug could’ve been coursing through her system from the moment she got into my car, and with Amanda in a coma there was no way to know for sure.

  The backpack had to be it.

  I got a refill on the sweet tea and then sat back down, waiting for Hank. Will was probably having a fit by now, wondering what the hell was going on with the break-ins at the house and school. I dialed his cell and then hung up before the call went through. I couldn’t explain everything to him now. He had to have seen the news, heard all the details from Hank. Bryn would probably fill him in, too, when he arrived to pick up Em.

  Instead, I called Bryn at Hodgepodge and spoke briefly to her and then Emma, just to make sure Emma was okay. She couldn’t have sounded more normal or more excited that school had been cancelled and she got to spend the day with her dad. Ah, the joys of being a kid.

  A horn honked outside. I turned in the booth to see Hank’s sleek Mercedes dart into an empty spot at the curb. Grabbing Bryn’s bag, I scooted from the booth with my tea, chucked the cookie wrapper, and then hobbled to the car.

  All I wanted was to sink into the soft leather seat and close my eyes.

  “Whoa,” Hank said as I plopped awkwardly into the seat, shoved the Styrofoam cup into the cup holder, and shut the door, “what the hell happened to you?”

  I yanked down the visor mirror. Half of my twist was out, my hair long and tangled on one side and up on the other. A few scratches marred my left cheek and jaw, and my mascara was smudged. Bloody skin peeked from a large tear in the left shoulder of Bryn’s sweater. “Long story.”

  He turned down the radio. “Aren’t they always?”

  After I filled him in on the political rally and subsequent limo ride from hell, Hank took a good five minutes to yell at me. Again. I was really getting sick of his holier-than-thou attitude. We were cops. What did he expect? But I cut him some slack and didn’t argue back. He’d been torn in half when I’d died, and his sudden protectiveness stemmed from never wanting to go through that again. I couldn’t blame him.

  “So you think Cassius Mott has something to do with this?”

  “Don’t you? It fits. And I have a hunch Mott Tech isn’t far behind. Haven’t figured out how Mynogan and the jinn fit yet, but they do. I know they do.”

  “Well, while you were rolling out of limos, I finally got an ID on the third jinn that attacked you and Auggie,” he said. “Guess who was signing his paycheck?”

  I knew the answer to that.

  “Yeah. The CPP,” Hank said.

  “So Mott and the CPP could be partners, manufacturing the ash, and they’re using the jinn to distribute it. It’d be a good way to fund their campaign. And maybe Cass wants his own money, to get out from under Titus.”

  “Eh, too weak. The jinn could’ve attacked you on their own, Charlie. It might have had nothing to do with the CPP. Plus the only evidence we’ve got is Auggie pointing the finger at Veritas, and Mynogan happened to be there when we went to take a look. And why would the CPP need to create a drug trade to fund their campaign when they have some of the richest nobles in the universe as members? The jinn or Cass could be solely responsible for this whole operation.”

  “Thank you, counselor.” My cell phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number. “Madigan,” I answered.

  “Detective.” Titus Mott’s voice breathed relief into the phone. I held the mouthpiece and leaned over to whisper his name to Hank. “I was hoping you’d have time to come back to the lab.”

  “For the physical?”

  A long pause followed, and my skin tingled.

  “I’ve remembered more details about your death … details I think you need to know. Will you come?”

  Goose bumps spread like waves down my arms and legs. I swallowed. “Sure. When?”

  “This evening, tonight … I’ll be here until morning. Come anytime.”

  “All right,” I said, trying to sound casual even as warning bells were going off in my head. “This evening then.”

  Mott mumbled a quick good-bye. I closed the phone and turned to Hank. “He’s scared. Spooked, like Auggie was.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Hank said before I could argue. “If Cass is working with the CPP and they are responsible for the ash, Titus could be, too … I mean, they are brothers. It might be a setup, Charlie. If they are involved, they already know you’re on to them, especially after your little limo ride. You’re not going alone. We’ll go in, I’ll take off the voice-mod, and we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I turned in the seat. “Yeah, and you know it’s against the law to do that. We’d need an interrogation warrant for you to use your voice. Civil rights, remember? You go in there and question the head of the CPP and the best-known scientist since Einstein, and we’ll have the biggest lawsuit on our hands the department has ever seen.”

  Sirens couldn’t just go around making people follow commands or talk against their will. It had taken years of legislature to create laws and restrictions to protect everyone from the individual powers of the off-worlders. And law enforcement, especially, had to be careful. Use a siren’s power before you had an interrogation warrant securely in hand,
and it’d make everything a suspect said, criminal or not, inadmissible in court.

  “Since when did you go all procedural?” Hank glanced in his rearview mirror before switching lanes.

  “Since nailing the people who put Amanda in the hospital and made me enemy number one is a promise I made to my kid and myself. I’m not going to screw it up. If they’re responsible, they won’t walk free on a technicality.”

  “Unless we take a mage with us. I’ll make them talk, and he’ll make them forget we were ever there.”

  “If only,” I said, knowing neither one of us would go that far.

  We both had suggested going off the book a time or two, and, yeah, we’d taken a lot of leeway with police procedure, but never anything that would let a suspect off the hook.

  “Since we’re on the subject of you,” he said carefully, “I heard you’re thinking about giving Will another chance.”

  Immediately I realized where he’d gotten his information. Emma.

  This morning in the bathroom I told her I’d think about it. Now my mistake was glaringly obvious. I’d given her hope without meaning to, without considering my words and how she’d take them.

  The air in the Mercedes turned tense. I swiped the tea and took a long drink.

  “Is it true then?”

  “I don’t know. Will’s been clean ever since that night. He’s done the twelve-step program for black crafting addiction and still attends meetings. He’s even sponsoring a new member. Who knows … maybe in the future …” I fiddled with the straw in my tea. Why did I feel like a kid suddenly in trouble, like I had to explain myself? “Everyone is guilty of bad judgment once in—”

  “Bad judgment? I think it was a little more than bad judgment, Charlie! Wagering your marriage, black crafting, basically leading a whole other life in secret … Every time he lied about where he was going and what he was doing, it was premeditated. You almost died because of him. Doesn’t that matter to you?”