Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds)

by AJ Larrieu

  “Officers, what can I do for you?”

  The shorter one, a black man with wire-framed glasses, spoke. “Your guest Ian West. Where is he?”

  Lionel cocked his head. “West, West... Doesn’t ring a bell, but then I’m getting on.” He gave a little chuckle. “I could go and check my guest list, if you don’t mind waiting.”

  “We have to search the premises,” the taller one said. White guy, brown hair and a goatee.

  “Well, sure, you go right ahead.” Lionel acted as if they’d asked to see the garden. He turned his back on them and headed for his office, exaggerating his limp. The troopers headed through to the stairs to the guests’ wing. I followed.

  “Shane—get him out—get him out—”

  “Where is he? Which room?” Shane pounded down the service stairs to the second floor.

  “Mina’s.”

  Wasted Guy followed us out of the dining room and up the stairs.

  “Who is it you’re looking for, again?” I walked slowly, trying to get them to match my pace. It wasn’t working.

  “Six foot two, white, blond,” the taller one said. “Goes by Ian West. Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to stay back.”

  “Please, you have to respect the privacy of our guests. There’s no one here by that name. Uh...” They made it to the second floor and split up, banging on doors. The male half of the couple who’d checked in last night opened his door, peering out in pajamas and a bathrobe.

  “What’s going on?” —knew this place was shady—knew we should’ve stayed at the Marriott— “Alice! Alice! Get out here—the police are raiding the place! Alice!”

  They made it to Mina’s Room. It was locked, of course. The shorter of the officers turned to me.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to open this door, or we’re going to have to break it down.”

  “Uh, I’ll have to go find the key...” How long could I stall them?

  “Hold on, hold on.” Lionel came shuffling out of the stairwell and down the hall, favoring his leg rather more than he usually did. He was carrying the master key ring. It held dozens of brass keys, and not one of them was color coded. God bless his disorganization. “I’ve got it here somewhere.” He sighed heavily and flipped through the keys, muttering.

  “Sir, I need you to hurry it up, please.” The shorter cop glanced up and down the hall, shifting on his feet. He nodded to his partner, and the guy went up the stairs to the third floor. I chewed on my bottom lip.

  “I’m doin’ my best, son. Here it is.” Lionel fitted a key in the lock. The wrong one, naturally. “Hmm. Well, that’s how I know I’m getting old.” He laughed. The cop didn’t join in.

  “Sir—”

  “Now, don’t you go breaking down my door. This door is older than you and me put together.”

  Shane burst through the door to the service stairs at the end of the hall and froze, trying to look normal. I could tell he hadn’t found Ian.

  “Sir—”

  “Here it is. Here it is. Now, just a minute...”

  Lionel unlocked the door as though he had arthritis. The cop pushed through and searched the room. It was completely empty. I breathed again. He’d gotten away.

  The cop’s radio crackled. “Suspect in custody.”

  All of us froze—Lionel, me, the guests crowding the doorway and looking in. The cop went to the window overlooking the courtyard, and I looked through his eyes to the ground.

  My heart sank. The patio furniture was overturned. Broken flower pots had spilled potting soil onto the brick. And Ian was standing in the middle of the mess, his hands cuffed behind him. A third cop stood behind him.

  “Ian West,” he said. “You are under arrest.”

  I met Ian’s eyes. There was nothing in them but despair.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lionel convinced the cops we hadn’t known who Ian was. Ian helped, saying he’d paid cash and used a fake name. They still had to question us, though. It took hours. The three of them put each of us in separate rooms and asked us the same questions: When did he check in, how much did he pay, did he come and go at odd hours. We mindspoke our lies back and forth to keep our stories straight, and they left convinced we’d been innocent.

  That didn’t stop Alice and her husband from checking out and asking for their money back. I couldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have wanted to stay in a place that got raided by the police, either. Wasted Guy stayed. Apparently he didn’t mind seeing people marched out of hotels in handcuffs.

  “Ian’s not going to last long in jail,” I said. Shane, Lionel and I were standing in the kitchen holding mugs of hot chocolate. None of us were drinking. The cinnamon rolls had burned. “There’s no way he’ll be able to keep his glamour up.” As they’d walked him to the police cruiser, I’d caught flickering glimpses of his wings.

  “How did they even know he was here?” Lionel said. “Someone must’ve tipped them off.”

  “One of the guests?” I asked.

  Wasted Guy wasn’t observant enough to tell a bug zapper from a black light, so I wasn’t betting he’d recognized Ian. It could have been one of the guests who checked out, but I hadn’t picked up any thoughts about Ian when they’d been demanding their money back.

  “No.” Shane sat down heavily at the kitchen table. “It had to be Annette.”

  It was obvious once he said it. I sat down next to him. I remembered how she’d sifted through my memories, focusing on the ones that featured the guardian.

  Shane looked at me. “She knows she can’t get past you if you pull from him.”

  “He’s right.”

  We all looked up. Diana stood in the doorway.

  “She doesn’t like guardians.”

  “I wouldn’t either, if I were her.” I said. “Are you feeling okay?”

  She nodded and came into the room. Lionel got her a cup of hot chocolate. She took it, sniffed, and took a puzzled, experimental sip. It must have passed muster, because she drained the whole mug. Lionel poured her another.

  “She’ll be back,” Diana said. “She’ll be back tonight. We all have to leave.”

  “You had a vision?” I got up and steered her into a chair. “What did you see?”

  But Diana shook her head. “I haven’t seen anything. But I know her, and I know she’ll be back. We have to leave.”

  “Let her come.” Shane’s jaw was set. “We need to end this.”

  I couldn’t help remembering Diana’s words. She’s going to kill you. I shook my head. “We’ve only survived so far out of sheer luck. We can’t count on that again.”

  “We can’t count on outrunning her, either.”

  “But we need time.” It was already midafternoon. I looked to Lionel. His usually joyful face was uncharacteristically grim.

  “We should go,” he said finally, and I closed my eyes, relieved. Lionel looked upstairs. “And we’ve got to get the guests out.”

  Shane set his jaw, but he nodded.

  It was a good thing most of the guests had checked out already. Unfortunately, we had three more rooms booked the next day, and we couldn’t let them show up on the doorstep. I gave us a ten percent chance of still being around to accept reservations, and even if we were around, there was no telling what state the B&B would to be in. Better to shut the whole thing down. I called in favors and booked rooms at local hotels. It was going to strain the B&B’s already precarious budget, but we were out of options.

  As it turned out, getting rid of the guests to come was easier than getting rid of the guests we still had. Wasted Guy and his friend weren’t around, so it was difficult to kick them out. I looked up his name in his guest register. Nick Armstrong. I tried calling his emergency contact information and got a very confused woman named Stacy who asked if I was fro
m “the college” and whether I could I could connect her with “that biology teacher who keeps failing him.” I hung up.

  It was late afternoon when he finally came back. He staggered up the front steps laughing, and he barely noticed when I followed him to the hall outside his room. By the sound of things, he was throwing up in the bathroom. His friend wasn’t with him.

  I didn’t care about customer service anymore. I waited for the sounds of puking to subside and went in, grabbed him by his armpits and yanked him to his feet. There was vomit on the floor. Stupid, wasted asshole.

  “Hey, iss the hottie.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “Wassup?”

  “You have to leave. Now.”

  “Uhhnnnnhh?”

  I shoved him toward his pile of dirty clothes. “Pack up, or I’ll dump your shit into the street.”

  “Hey—whass your problem?” He collapsed onto the bed. “I paid furrrrr sss room. I’m gonna stay in it.” He closed his eyes. He might’ve actually fallen asleep.

  “Get up.” I nudged him, not gently. “You have to leave. We’re kicking you out.”

  “Huh?” He startled awake. “Why?”

  “Drunken disorderly conduct.” Hell, it was pretty much true. I crammed his clothes into an empty duffel bag I found on the floor. “All right.” I grabbed his bag with one hand and his shirt collar with the other, pulling him to his feet. “Out.”

  I marched him down the stairs and opened the front door.

  “Hey—hey—you can’t do this—I paid for this room—”

  I threw him out, and his bag after him. If he gave us a bad review on Yelp, I didn’t really give a fuck.

  Shane, Lionel and Diana stared after me from the hallway. “Let’s go,” I said.

  We loaded into the Camaro with as many knives we could carry. Everything from the kitchen, plus the old machete and a trowel from the garden shed. We also had Lionel’s shotgun, a handgun and half a box of ammo. I prayed to God we wouldn’t need any of it.

  Wasted Guy was still on the street when we drove off. He probably didn’t have enough of his wits about him to figure out he needed to find a room, but I was done worrying about him.

  It was still light out, but barely. Diana and Lionel were in the back, and I felt him squeeze her hand in reassurance. She calmed a little—Lionel had that effect on people.

  As we drove out of the Quarter, Shane asked “Where to?” If it weren’t for the edge in his voice, we might have been going on a bizarre family outing.

  “Head east,” Lionel said. “There’s a motel just outside Henryville where we can stay.” It was where Bruce had been born. I hoped at least that he was safe.

  Shane nodded and turned onto Esplanade. We were all quiet and watchful as we took I-10 out of the city and entered the uninhabited wildlife refuge to the east. As the road cleared of city traffic, Shane checked his rearview mirror and frowned.

  “That piece of shit is following us.”

  “What?” I craned around in the passenger seat. He was right. Wasted Guy was driving a cheap rental, and he was a single car-length behind us. He wasn’t swerving nearly enough for someone that intoxicated.

  “Not good,” Shane said. “Definitely not good.” His hands clenched on the wheel. I turned my attention to Wasted Guy.

  It wasn’t difficult to search his mind. He really was drunk, and whatever latent defenses he might’ve had sober were long gone. It was like walking into an open carport where most people kept locked garages. His memories of the past few days were easy to find.

  He was at a bar. His friend, whose absence was now starting to worry me, sat next to him. They were shooting lemon drops and trying to flirt with a couple of girls a few barstools away. It was working. If they’d had the better luck to choose a different hotel, they might’ve taken them back to it. But that wasn’t the way it worked out.

  Annette sat down on the other side of them, and they ignored her until she sent them a round.

  “You’re a cougar, huh?” Nick’s friend smirked. “I’m down with that, baby.”

  “Whatever you say.” Annette’s smile should have tipped them off, but it didn’t.

  Nick’s memory skipped ahead. Annette led them both, much drunker, to the street and then to the alley alongside the bar. The neon lights of the beer signs blistered the small amounts of skin exposed by the fall of her hood. She looked deep into Nick’s eyes and said, “Don’t move.” Then she shoved his friend against the wall and buried her needle-sharp teeth in his neck.

  The guy screamed, but it subsided so quickly, it might as well have been laughter. A thousand similar sounds went unnoticed in the Quarter every night, and this one wasn’t enough to save him. Annette gulped, drinking for what felt like hours but must have been seconds, and let his lifeless body fall to the litter-strewn concrete.

  Nick was swamped with the paralyzing fear of cornered prey. Even the memory of it was astonishing in its strength. If she hadn’t forced him to stay still, he would’ve been frozen anyway. Warmth seeped down his leg where he’d lost control of his bladder.

  “Now.” She turned the full power of her gaze on him, and he stared into those ice-blue eyes. “There’s something you’re going to do for me.”

  I backed out of his mind. How long had he been watching us and reporting back to her?

  “He’s tracking us,” I said. “He must be telling her where we are.”

  “Shit.” Shane sped up. “I’ll try to lose him.” The sun was sinking. I’d never hated seeing a gold-and-pink sunset more in my life. “Can you disable the car?”

  “Working on it.” I could cut the power steering, but he might end up plowing into a tree. I opted to work the brakes through the drums and slow him down first. I sank microscopic mental fingers into the hydraulic lines, and Shane sped up. The distance between us increased.

  “There’s an exit coming up,” Lionel said, with a calm I recognized as similar to Shane’s. “We can get lost in one of the neighborhoods around Henryville.”

  “Right,” Shane said, taking the exit. It would be easier to lose him on surface streets.

  “Ready, Cass?”

  I prepared to cut the power steering line. Without it, Nick would be a canoe without a paddle. “Ready,” I said, but I didn’t get the chance. The last sliver of sun disappeared on the horizon, the trunk of Nick’s car flew open, and Annette leaped out of it and landed on our hood.

  I screamed. Shane swerved in surprise, and the Camaro fishtailed across both lanes. Annette held on like a spider, baring her teeth through the windshield. She raised a fist, and I knew what was coming—she was going to punch through the glass and kill us all. In the back, Diana started whimpering.

  “Hold on,” Shane said. His voice was impossibly even. “Everybody hold on. Cass, can you push her off?”

  “I can try.” I was already pulling everything I could from the wind and the heat of the night. I didn’t dare touch the engine, and we were going too fast for me to single out any of the trees.

  I couldn’t afford to waste time testing my strength—one shot was all we had. Annette smashed her fist into the windshield. It fractured into a mosaic of tiny fragments and bowed inward.

  “On three,” Lionel said. “We’ll push together.”

  “One,” Shane said. I gathered everything I could, feeling the buzz of Shane and Lionel focusing their shadowminds. “Two.” I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to see. “Three.”

  Shane slammed on the brakes and pulled the parking brake at the same time that we all sent a jolt of telekinetic power straight at Annette.

  She flew forward, taking half the car with her. The windshield, part of the hood, a tangle of wires and cables. The force of it spun us, too fast, and the car flipped onto its side and skidded across the asphalt. For a moment we hung there, impossibly balanced on the driver�
�s side of the car, and then, with an awful creaking, the car tilted, fell, and left us on our back like a wounded turtle.

  “Shane? Lionel?” I slammed my hands against the door, trying to force it open. “Diana?” I couldn’t reach the buckle of my seatbelt. Blood rushed to my head along with the panic.

  “I’m okay.” Shane’s voice. Diana gave a weak moan. I couldn’t see Lionel.

  “Lionel?”

  He coughed, a wet sound. “Still breathing.”

  “Are you hurt? Are you bleeding?”

  “Seem to be all right.” Something creaked, I couldn’t tell what. Broken glass was everywhere.

  “Where is she?” Shane asked.

  “Oh, God.”

  I could see a segment of the road from where I was caught. Annette had skidded across the asphalt, leaving dark streaks of blood barely visible in the light of a crescent moon. As I watched, she got up.

  “She’s coming,” I said.

  One of her legs was clearly broken, bent grotesquely backward, and the road had torn away huge swaths from the flesh of her shoulder. Muscle and bone were visible, and too-dark blood drenched the torn edges of her shirt. Gravel was embedded in her cheek.

  “Where’s the gun?” I asked. “Can anyone find it?”

  “I’m looking,” Shane said.

  “Here,” Lionel said, and the shotgun hovered up from the crushed roof of the car. “Shane, take it.”

  Shane grabbed the stock. “I don’t have a shot.” Annette was only yards away, moving slowly, but coming closer all the same. “I could maybe hit her leg.”

  Not good enough. “I’m going to turn us,” I said.

  It was going to take a lot of energy, more than I had on my own. I was going to have to pull. How much could I take from the surroundings and still have enough to fight Annette? How long would it take to be that careful?

  “Pull from me, Cass,” Lionel said.

  “No way. We all need our strength.”

  “No time for this, sugar. Do it.”