by Liana Brooks
Alan leaned forward, interest piqued. “What happened to your mom?”
“She was kidnapped when I was five. The Rainbow Dane had this mad idea that he’d kill all the children of super villains and he was going to get my mom to help because she can move at super-speeds and fly. She wasn’t going to, but he used a lotus serum to strip her freewill away. It was rape, but not the physical kind. Everyone thinks she’s fine, but people can’t lie to me. That’s my talent—utterly useless as it is; I can make people tell the truth. So when I caught her crying one day, huddled in the back of her closet during the middle of the day when I was home sick and everyone else was gone, I made her tell me the truth. And she did.” Tears sparkled in Delilah’s eyes. “She hates herself. She hates everything about herself, because that’s what put us at risk. And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Daddy knows. I think he knew all along. Mom tries to act like it’s not a big deal, because the fact that she is getting better is the only thing keeping Daddy in check. But it’s going to break down one day. She’ll fall apart, because you can’t live like that forever, and then Daddy will retaliate and this little cold war we currently have will turn into something that makes World War Two look like a picnic.” She pressed her lips together in thought, and then said, “My dad’s a little scary when he’s angry.”
“Good to know.” Alan reached for her hand, their fingers entwined. “I’m sorry I brought that all up.”
She shrugged. “Someone needs to know, in case I ever go crazy. Keeping secrets... Sometimes it feels like everything is on my shoulders. I know too much to be happy. I know what’s wrong with everyone and what they want and why they want it, but I don’t know how to fix it.”
“That’s the secret,” he whispered, giving her hand a squeeze. “You don’t have to fix everything.”
Delilah laughed, light and airy and winsome. “You are definitely not a Smith.”
“Your surname is Samson.”
“Because I legally changed it at eighteen. I was born Delilah Minerva Sorsha Smith, which is an unholy mouthful with more geek references than any sane person deserves.”
“Could be worse,” Alan said with a shrug. “I was named after one of Robin’s merry men because the nurse on duty that night happened to be watching some old BBC show and thought it was cute. Cute it may be, but it’s definitely not modern or stylish.”
“Were you teased?”
“Horribly!”
“You would have been teased worse if you were Robin.” She flashed him a smile that erased the old pain before turning to the front. “Freddie, how close are we?”
“Another block, ma’am,” said the warty thing driving the car.
“Is that what the Teodora is going to hatch into?” Alan murmured.
“Maybe. Possibly.” Delilah grimaced. “Honestly, I haven’t a clue. Daddy likes to tinker with things. You never know exactly what you’re going to get.”
The car slowed outside a gated community. “I believe the young gentleman is inside, ma’am. Would you like to go through the gate?”
“No, circle the neighborhood once and we’ll find a place to get out. Why a gated community? I was expecting an abandoned warehouse or a brickyard. Something a little more traditional.”
Alan frowned at the cookie-cutter houses, all neatly lined up behind shoveled sidewalks. “Maybe he’s meeting a friend.”
“Maybe he’s doing some after-hours snooping. Freddie, stop by those bushes,” Delilah ordered. “And get a team working on those gates. I want electricity cut in five minutes.” She picked up her phone. “Let’s go hunting.”
Chapter Fourteen
SOS - D
Delilah cursed the snow under her breath. They were going to leave a trail a blind hamster could follow.
“Where are we going?” Alan whispered in her ear. In his shadow form there wasn’t even a hint of warmth behind her.
“See the pretty blue dot on my phone? I’m trying to figure out where the pretty blue dot is in relation to all these over-priced homes. Tacky, turn-of-the-century cookie-cutter homes in a gated community. It makes me weep for humanity. Ugly, ugly architecture.”
“Do you always critique your surroundings like this?”
“Yes, it’s one of my many failings.”
Gentle arms wrapped around her. “Hold on, I think I know where your pretty blue dot is.”
Shadows swallowed her as the air turned frigid. Her heartbeat echoed in her ears, and then they were standing beside a house with plastic siding. “Why didn’t we go inside?”
“They don’t have any shadows. That’s why I picked it. Who else would light up every corner of their home?”
She glared up at the windows covered by curtains. “I don’t see any light.”
“The windows don’t go inside the house, they’re built into a layer of the wall, like a safe house.”
“Charming. For the record, I don’t approve.” She tapped a fingertip against her chin.
“I didn’t think you would.”
They stalked around the corner, quietly opening a chain link fence to sneak into the backyard. “It looks so normal.” Snow, dead branches sticking up like the skeletons of spring, the winter perfume of wood smoke and... Delilah inhaled deeply. “Do you smell lotus flowers?”
“I don’t even know what they smell like.”
She inhaled again. Under the scent of wood smoke was a hint of rain forest, sweet and a little fruity with the promise of jungles and exotic locales. It was definitely not the usual scent associated with Chicago suburbs in the dead of winter. “It’s a little like orange blossom. You don’t smell it?”
Alan shook his shadowy head.
“I hope I’m wrong. The Company hasn’t started using chemicals to control their super-slaves, have they?”
“And I would know that how, exactly?” he whispered as she approached the back door.
She took off her glove and gripped the cold metal as she tried to reach the lock. But like Kalydon’s apartment, there was nothing there.
“Problems?”
“Too many to count. This isn’t an entrance.”
“Probably fake like the windows.”
“And there are no shadows inside?”
“Not unless you want to appear inside someone’s clothing.”
“How many people are in there?”
He closed his glowing green eyes and his lips moved. “Six? Maybe seven. Counting the shadows inside clothes is not an exact science.”
“None of them are on this end of the house, are they?”
“All the small shadows are in the basement.”
“Fine.” She released her power. The metal doorknob shook under hand, burning and melting before the door exploded with a sound that made her eardrums sore. “Knock, knock?”
She stepped into a stripped room with bright photography lights hanging every few feet, planted in the walls, strapped to every corner. “I guess they knew you might be in town.”
“Looks like.”
Voices filtered through the house’s cold air. Delilah followed them, anger growing as the smell of lotus blossoms became ever more distinct. Damn them all to the seventh hell. If they’d poisoned Travys the way the Rainbow Dane had poisoned her mother, she’d see them all burn. The basement door exploded before she even touched it.
“Calm down,” Alan whispered in her ear. “You can’t kill them.”
“Yes, I can,” she bit off as the stairs shuddered under her steps.
“Okay, but you shouldn’t kill them.”
The door at the bottom of the stairs was heavy and metallic. “That has yet to be determined.” The door disintegrated. “Travys?” she called, amazed her voice wasn’t shaking. Tears filled her eyes. That smell! That horrible, horrible smell! The one her mother had puked all over the car when they’d driven away from Colorado, and the superheroes who’d wanted her family dead. It was etched in her brain with the worst for
m of emotional acid. “Travys, you find the kinkiest hide outs.” She stepped into the basement and saw Travys strapped to a chair and stripped to his tighty-whities. An IV tube hung from his arm, dripping blood onto the floor. “Travys!”
Alan reached him first, removing the IV needle and covering the wound with his solid hand. “Shh,” he said. “Do you have a first aid kit?”
She took a shaky breath and nodded.
“Take care of him. There’s a tunnel. I’m going to follow them,” Alan said.
“Don’t get caught.”
He turned to a curl of smoke in answer.
She stepped to Travys’s side, holding his injured arm with one hand as she dug through her bag. On cue, the lights died. “Control? Do you have me?”
Nothing.
“Travys? Travys, come on. I need you to wake up now.” She flicked her flashlight on, put it between her teeth, and bandaged his arm. Travys groaned. “That’s a good boy,” she said indistinctly around the flashlight, saliva trailing out of her mouth as she tried to talk. “Come on.” She held the ropes, letting them unlock in her hands before dropping them in evidence bags. Detective Morrow was going to kill her. This case was one serious SNAFU after another. A known killer, but not enough evidence. Evidence in the form of a kidnapped college student, but she’d ruined it.
Travys’s head lolled to the side.
“Hey, hey, come on. I need you to wake up.” She checked his pulse; it was slow but steady. Why the hell would anyone want his blood? “Kid, if this is some weird initiation rite for a frat that you forgot to tell me about, you will never hear the end of it. Didn’t you ever watch the classics growing up?” she asked the unconscious Travys as she slung him over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. Stumbling through the dark, she found her way to the stairs. “If you’d seen even one episode of Buffy you’d know what a bad idea wandering around town alone is. Or Veronica Mars. I’ll make you watch that,” she huffed. “You can learn all about the dangers of not communicating with people. Was one phone call too much to ask?”
She sank to her knees half way up the dark stairs. “Hey, Delilah, I’m going to this place. Can you do a background check? And I would have said, ‘Why, yes, Travys!’ And, ‘Don’t go, Travys, it’s full of vampiric suburbanites.’”
“You talk too much,” Travys muttered.
Delilah forced herself up, climbed the last few steps, and rolled him off her shoulders to the floor.
His teeth chattered, but his eyes opened. “Why’s it so cold?”
“No one thought to install a heater.” She took her coat off and laid it over him. “Stay right there, I’m going to see if I can find anything else upstairs.”
Travys lifted his head off the floor. “’Lilah?”
“It’s okay. I’ll be right back.” With a forced smile she headed upstairs, hitting her comms unit. “Hello? Control?”
“Ma’am?”
“Freddie! Lock on to me and get the car here now. Make a scene. I want the cops crawling all over this place by dawn.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The upstairs was much like the downstairs, heavily lit and stripped of everything that might make it homey. No paint on the sheet rock walls, no windows, nothing to indicate that someone had once lived here, although they obviously had. The outside was too tidy to be an abandoned home. Details from the outside filtered back in her mind. She’d seen curtains like that before, a hot cranberry color that was an offense to Mother Nature. Sadly, it was popular this year. So, new curtains and a cut lawn, but a stripped interior. Chicago Tribune’s front-page headline for tomorrow was already written.
None of the rooms held anything; even the bathroom was torn down to a faucet and yellowing toilet. On impulse, she went to the attic. There probably wasn’t anything but insulation up there, but she’d feel better having checked everywhere.
“Almost to your location, ma’am,” Freddie said over her comm. “We’ll need to leave in a hurry. The gate guard was less than polite.”
“I can’t imagine why.” She found the attic door and watched it drop to the floor as her powers eased the locks open. “Travys is in the kitchen, go around back and load him into the car. I’m checking the attic. There’s a heavy lotus smell.” And the dusty attic door reeked of the potent flower. It took two tries for her to jump high enough to grab the rim of the attic opening and pull herself up.
As she’d expected, the attic was lit with the same heavy-duty lamps found throughout the house. It seemed like a huge investment just to keep the Spirit of Chicago at bay. Why not pick a smaller house to use if you were going to light it up like this? Why do it at all? There had to be better things to do with your life. Delilah walked the perimeter of the attic, stopping where the window should have been. Nothing. Time to go, then.
A bulge in the insulation caught her attention as she turned. From any other angle it was virtually unnoticeable, but from that spot... lucky find. She put her gloves back on and pulled the pink insulation away, mindful of the fiberglass spines, and pulled out an ornate box with drawings carved on it. No, she amended, tracing her gloved fingers over the box, not drawings. Hieroglyphs. Something she could translate with enough time.
“Ma’am, the police have arrived at the gate,” Freddie reported. “We need to leave.”
She needed to leave the box. Detective Morrow needed the evidence. Her fingers clenched it tightly. “Gimme three minutes.” She pulled a camera out of her bag and began photographing every angle. She was still there when the police pulled up outside.
Chapter Fifteen
Dear Maria,
Hypothetically speaking, if I needed bail money and a place to hide for a few years until the statute of limitations expired, I could stay at your place... Right?
Delilah
P.S. Can I borrow some cash?
“How could you do this to me?” Detective Morrow demanded.
Delilah sat in the uncomfortable interrogation chair, resolutely silent. They’d found Travys, handcuffed her, and now the lunch hour was toiling past with nothing to show for a hungry morning.
“Damn it, Delilah. How many times have I looked the other way? How many times? All you needed to do was call us. That’s what the police get paid for, you know that, right? You know I earn my bread and butter chasing down criminals? While you earn your paycheck installing security cameras. Which is not what you did last night.”
She closed her eyes, ready to relent, when there was a knock at the door.
“Hello?”
Delilah twisted in her seat, wide-eyed and furious.
The man in the doorway wore a tailored three-piece Dior suit. There was a touch of silver at his temples, and a charmingly smug smile on his face. “Detective Morrow?” Her father held out his hand. “I’m Miss Samson’s legal counsel.”
Morrow crossed his arms. “Really? Here I thought she’d done nothing more than tamper with evidence and interfere with the scene of a crime.”
“She didn’t do that,” Doctor Charm said with easy reassurance.
Morrow’s bulldog face wrinkled in confusion, but he started nodding.
“Miss Samson went to rescue her intern only moments before the police. She has no ulterior motive.”
“No ulterior motive,” Morrow murmured. He shook his head, trying to shake the effects of Daddy’s Agree-With-Me-Ray. Since it had never worked on Delilah, she couldn’t say she sympathized, but it had a similar effect on the boys she’d used it on in high school. Daddy had read her the riot act after that little stunt.
“If you bring us the evidence, we can sort everything out and be on our way. Miss Samson doesn’t need to stay here any longer.”
“Evidence. I’ll go get that.” Morrow walked to the door nodding like a concussed chicken.
The handcuffs dropped to Delilah’s lap with a metallic clink. “Daddy, I think you’re over doing it,” she said as he sat on the table.
He looked down at her with dark eyes that struck fear into law enforceme
nt everywhere—the untouchable villain, the one who always got away. “What in the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing?” The Texas twang was faked, but it made her giggle. “I drove by that nut house on the way through town. What are you mixed up in?”
“Nothing. Travys left his dorm at a weird hour so I followed. I’ve no clue what was going on, but if you can get my phone back I have pictures.”
“This isn’t about the Golden Hunt, is it? Your mother will have bovine-producing fits if you’re nosing around them again. We’ve only just managed to get the FBI to stop calling, asking for your phone number.”
“Was it Jake?”
“It was Jake.”
She winced. “I’m so sorry. I really did not mean for him to get so attached. All I did was collaborate on the arrest. We never even had a meal together.”
“Smith women are very easy to obsess over,” her father said sympathetically. “Look at me, I met your mother once and couldn’t stop thinking about her.”
Delilah rolled her eyes. “I know. I’ve only heard the story a few thousand times.”
“And one of these days you’ll have a very similar story to tell. Some gentleman who captured your attention, or you, depending on the scenario.” He stood up and straightened his tie. “Put the handcuffs back on, the detective is headed this way.”
“Talk fast and don’t melt his brains. Or ruin his career! Detective Morrow is a good resource and I like him.”
Her father raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Not like that. He’s a friend.”
“Who you shared no information with and who doesn’t consider you a friend. My darling daughter, you are getting a dictionary for Christmas.” But he did touch the watch with his Agree-With-Me ray in it, so at least he was going to dial down the mind-to-Slurpy rays.
Detective Morrow came in with a large box. “Phone, bag, and this box you were holding when we arrived.”