Dangerous Calling (The Shadowminds)

by AJ Larrieu

  I flexed the remains of my fingers. They were stiff and painful, and I itched unbearably where my fingertips had been. I closed my eyes and breathed. The sensation subsided.

  “Will there be effects? Am I going to be okay?”

  “Bunny isn’t sure. She thinks you’ll be fine. Cassie...” He handed me a mirror.

  I took it with my right hand, afraid to look at my reflection.

  “It’s not that bad,” he said. He was holding his breath.

  I lifted the mirror.

  My hair had been shorn close to my skull, but I could see the places where it had fallen out. It was too soon to tell whether it would ever grow back. On my left cheek, scars crept along my cheekbone, feathery lines and pockmarks that must have been blisters. They were white against the new unnatural tan of my skin.

  “Wow.” I touched the scars on my face with the stubs of my fingers. A matched set. “It’s like I got drunk and got the world’s weirdest face tattoo.”

  Shane laughed, just a little. “It’s a good thing you’re so hard to mess up.” He took the mirror from me. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. I was alive. That was already more than I’d hoped for. “So she’s gone? She’s really dead?”

  “She’s really dead. We put her in that SUV and set it on fire. Just to be sure.”

  “Jesus.” I caught the images in his head—the car plowed into the oak tree out front, the whole thing going up in flames.

  “I made sure it looked like an accident,” Shane said.

  “Jeremy?”

  “Ran off. The cops got Ryan’s body, though. Sounded like they thought it was a suicide.”

  “What about Janine?”

  “We still haven’t found her.”

  I doubted she wanted to be found. “Maybe after some time...”

  “Maybe,” Shane said, but he was as doubtful as I was. “I also found this.” He laid a blue notebook on my lap.

  I used my good hand to open it. It was a ledger of accounts, lists of payments and clients. Buddy Broussard made many appearances.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Office on the first floor. Looks like she’s been doing this a while.”

  I flipped back through the pages. She’d been in New Orleans for over a decade, and I lost track of the number of names I recognized.

  “Is that—”

  “Yep.”

  “Oh my God. What do we do with this? I mean...” It might’ve been sweet justice to nail some of Louisiana’s more corrupt politicians for their payments to a vampire crime boss, but with entries like Fortune telling, $10,000 next to Assassination, $52,000 it was hard to know if anyone would take it seriously. Then I saw Emily Sanchez’s name.

  “That’s her,” I said softly. “The girl Ian was in love with.”

  Her entry said Assassination, $78,000 with an asterisk next to it. At the bottom of the page, I found out what the asterisk meant. Make it look like suicide.

  I felt sick. “Has Ian seen this?”

  Shane shook his head. “But I think I know what we can do with it.”

  “Those guys he killed...”

  “We put him in as one of the hits. Gives him a leg to stand on for the self-defense case. We just have to get this into the right hands.”

  “I know whose hands,” I began, but then the door flew open, and Diana slammed into the massage table and shifted it a good two feet.

  “You’re okay!” She wrapped me in a bear hug and squeezed.

  I was too surprised to return the hug at first, but after several moments, I patted her gently on the back. She didn’t let go.

  “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Her voice was muffled, her face buried in my shoulder. I realized she was crying when tears soaked the sheet.

  I gently extricated myself and held her by the upper arms. “What are you talking about? None of this was your fault.”

  “No—I was supposed to fake a vision, but I had a real one—I couldn’t stop it—I didn’t even have time to take the drugs—I’m so sorry—”

  “Shh.” I pulled her back into a hug and let her cry.

  Shane watched silently and sent me a message. “I’ll give her some privacy—going to get you some clothes from home.”

  I could only imagine the state my previous ones were in. I hoped he’d burned them. I nodded, and he left the room.

  “Can you show me what happened?” I asked her once he’d gone.

  She was strong enough to keep me out if she wanted to, but she didn’t refuse. She nodded, and I felt doors opening in her mind.

  Memories of complex events are almost never perfectly linear. People subconsciously jump to the good parts. But Diana wasn’t most people. Even knowing I was about to see things I’d rather not see, I was impressed with the level of control she had over her brain. She gave me an almost perfectly sequential replay.

  Annette hadn’t been there when she’d arrived. Alex had shoved Diana into a bedroom much like the one I’d been held in, and she’d waited there for hours.

  He’d come for her finally, brought her downstairs to the darkened parlor where Annette was waiting.

  I could barely make out the vampire’s form, sitting on the same love seat where she’d fed from the furniture guy in Diana’s memory. She seemed to be looking down when she asked, “What happened?”

  “Bitch tried to run,” Alex replied. “I had to get her under control.” He shoved Diana toward Annette. “Didn’t I?” His comment was directed at Diana. I could feel her rising anxiety. She knew what was coming.

  Annette was on him in an instant. She came at him so quickly, he didn’t have time to take more than a half step back before she gripped his short hair and yanked back his head.

  “I said she was not to be harmed.”

  “Had to—stop her—couldn’t let—get away—” He panted between words, struggling. He was twice Annette’s size, but she restrained him easily.

  “I was very clear.”

  “I didn’t think—please—”

  She sank sharp teeth into his throat and ripped out a chunk of flesh and sinew. Blood gushed from the wound and she drank it, staining her shirt and hands and hair bright red. He thrashed, but it wasn’t long before he went still. She dropped his body with a thud.

  Diana closed her eyes.

  Annette walked toward her, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. “Greg is dead too. I thought you should know.”

  Diana’s guilt was even stronger in the present than it was in the memory. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t think it would be too much—”

  Annette waved her hand. “I would have killed him anyway. He failed me, and I couldn’t let him go, knowing what he does about us.”

  Diana’s whole body was tense. “Are you going to kill me?” She was no longer sure. Even after what she’d seen Annette do to Alex, doubt crept in.

  “No.”

  She relaxed a fraction.

  “But you are no longer free in this house. You will be confined to your room. You will be kept in shackles if necessary.” Annette’s voice had gone from honey-slow to clipped and bitter. Hurt. “Is that clear?”

  Diana nodded. In the memory, she was thinking that now was the time. She could go to the bathroom, inject the tranqs. She began building the false vision, an image of me, Shane and Ian huddled in a motel room with the shades drawn while Annette broke down the door. She should have her kill us, she thought, Annette would want to believe it more, and that’s when the real vision hit.

  It came in like smoke, black swirls that blotted out the present and replaced it with the future. The immediate future. Annette recognized the signs and advanced on her.

  “What do you see?”

  Diana tried to crawl away, and her re
sistance was no act. I saw the true vision in her head, and it was disastrous for our plan. “No—you can’t make me—you can’t—I won’t—”

  Even someone with Diana’s exceptional control couldn’t protect her mind from Annette’s unnatural skills, and they both knew it. Her only option was flight, and that was impossible. She made it halfway to the door before Annette grabbed her by the shoulder and bit into her neck.

  She was gentle, or as gentle as something like that could be. I felt the memory of Diana’s pain, and it was softer than what I’d experienced at the jail.

  Diana’s memory of the vision was overlaid with the events as they occurred. In the future that failed to happen, Annette drank and drank, then froze, twitching, and fell over with blood trickling from her mouth. The vision itself wavered between possibilities, tangled with actual events, with Annette drinking and surviving just as she was in the moment. She jerked Diana away from her with the wounds still fresh, hissing.

  “What have you done?” She found the loaded syringe in Diana’s pocket and threw it, shattering it against a coffee table. Pale yellow fluid leaked out and spread over the marble top. “You were going to let them kill me.” Annette’s voice was low and soft with shock.

  “I’m tired of being the reason people die.” Diana’s voice had gone hard despite the wound in her neck. She pressed a hand to it, keeping her gaze on Annette.

  Annette backhanded her. Diana’s cheek lit up with pain and she clutched it in shock. It was the first time the vampire had ever struck her. Annette ignored her and dug viciously through her pockets, coming up with her cell phone. I watched through Diana’s watery eyes as Annette typed the signal we would receive.

  Now.

  The rest played out as we’d encountered it. Annette lay down on the floor and waited while Diana slowly went into shock from blood loss. By the time we got there, Diana could barely lift her hand, and Annette was more than ready for us.

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It ended well. She’s dead.” It surprised me, how easily I was able to say it. I would’ve liked to have been able to say it was the first life I’d taken, but it was only the first one I’d taken with so little regret.

  Diana’s eyes flickered with grief for a moment. I assumed that grief was for Annette. “Your face,” she said. “Your hand.”

  “I’ll be all right.” I didn’t look down. It still made me feel cold to see it.

  “I can tell you, now. She’s dead—she can’t control me anymore.”

  I looked up. “Tell me what?” I blinked back tears I didn’t quite understand. For Diana, for myself. “What do you mean?”

  “About Shane.”

  I’d managed to push the idea of Shane anchoring out of my mind, but it was past time I dealt with it. “She already told me. You saw him as a guardian.”

  She nodded. “That’s what she made me do. That’s why she kept me. She didn’t want a guardian here in the city. She always told me they were bad—as if they were fallen angels or something. So I had to look for them.”

  “You mean in visions.”

  She nodded. “I can focus what I search for. It’s hard, but I can do it. The way she taught me to control my mind—I can look for things I want to see.”

  “So she made you search, and you saw Shane?”

  “No—it was someone else, first. A woman. I saw her with these huge black wings. I guess it was easy to believe she was bad, you know? It was right after Katrina, when there was all this chaos. And Annette—Annette killed her...” She trailed off, and I let her.

  “I should’ve known,” she said finally. “I should’ve known it wasn’t right.”

  “Diana, she practically raised you—she rescued you from a mental institution. It’s no surprise you didn’t think to question her.”

  “But I should’ve known. I had other visions—saw her helping people. I convinced myself it was all a show, all for her own gain...well. I was only twelve.”

  Twelve years old, and forced to be complicit in a murder. I wanted to go back in time and rescue the little girl she’d been.

  “Anyway, when I saw Shane, I saw him helping this woman out of some kind of cell. And he was so gentle with her, and so angry.” One of Ryan’s victims. We’d rescued her before he could kill her. “I don’t know why I knew—maybe just because I was older—but I just knew he wasn’t some evil demon. It was obvious. But she’d already seen the vision, and I knew it was a matter of time before she found him and killed him. She was going to ask me to keep looking until I found a name.”

  “Why contact me, though? Why not go straight to him?”

  “I thought it would be safer. If I’d found out his name, she would’ve gotten it out of my head. And besides, you were always with him, at least before—”

  She stopped herself too late.

  “What do you mean?” I grabbed both of her hands and tugged until she looked at me. I stopped caring about invading her privacy and poked at her mental walls. I had to know. “Before what?”

  “I can’t know for sure—it’s not like that—”

  “Please. Please, tell me.”

  She looked up. “I’ve seen the way he dies. You kill him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It seemed important not to react too strongly. My injured hand spasmed, and I forced myself to breath through the weight of her words. I couldn’t panic and scare her—I couldn’t keep her from telling me more. It took me several long moments to find my voice.

  “How?” It was the most I could manage.

  Diana couldn’t quite look at me. “It’s fuzzy. I can’t be sure. But you’re together, the two of you, and something is happening, you both look scared, and you do that thing where you make the ice and the snow, and I think it’s too much, and he just—well...”

  She trailed off, and I didn’t ask her to go on. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t imagined the same thing a dozen times in my nightmares.

  “Maybe you should just look,” she said. Her voice was small.

  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.

  Diana opened her mind to me and called up her memory of the vision. It began the same way they all had, foreign images bleeding into her mind and covering her sight.

  I saw the location first—a dark, wet street, concrete sidewalk, brick alley walls. A metal fire escape dripping from a recent rain. Then I saw Shane. He was looking up at something the vision couldn’t see, and his face was set in concentration and anger.

  I gripped Diana’s hand. I didn’t dare speak.

  Shane looked down at something, and the vision broadened. I was standing by his side, my hair long and braided back. We were holding hands.

  “It has to be now,” he said, and I nodded.

  I raised my free hand and followed his gaze. Ice formed around us, at my feet and in the air. We were both focused on whatever was above us.

  Just like that, I flickered out, and he was alone. He also had wings.

  Magnificent. It was the only word that worked. He’d clearly made the transition—gorgeous, glossy wings spread behind him, dark green shot through with gold and deep brown, notes of black. He seemed even bigger than before, more powerful, and not just physically. His entire body was steeped in strength and threat.

  “What—?”

  “Just watch,” Diana said.

  Shane leaped up, out of the field of the vision, wings beating like a falcon taking flight. I cried out for him, trying to force Diana’s sight to wherever he’d gone, but the vision stayed stubbornly put. Seconds passed and Shane landed, streaked with blood I knew instinctively wasn’t his. One gorgeous wing was torn, but his face was set in grim triumph.

  The vision flickered again, and I was back. Shane, wingless again, was crumpled on the ground an
d I was crying and beating at his chest. He wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. It was obvious even through the layers of memory that he was dead. The water that had once dripped from the fire escape was frozen into icicles.

  I let go of Diana’s hand and retreated from her mind.

  “It changes,” she said. “Sometimes you’re there and sometimes you’re not.”

  I nodded. I think I was in shock. The versions where he’d lived—those had been the ones where I was gone.

  “I’m sorry,” Diana said. “I know you care about him.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Things can change. You saw—there was more than one possibility. Maybe there are more. Sometimes it’s like that. Sometimes they change.”

  I watched her face as she said it, wanting to believe her, but knowing I could never take the chance.

  * * *

  Shane came back, and I flooded my thoughts with a sea of worry about my hand, the one thing I couldn’t care less about. I got dressed in the jeans and T-shirt he’d brought me, and he drove us back to the B&B, empty of guests except for Ian and Diana. Their residence felt more permanent, now. I couldn’t help thinking Lionel would have been pleased.

  “The vigil’s tonight,” he said. We were in the big kitchen trying to find something to eat. “We couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “I’m glad I woke up in time. The police aren’t investigating?”

  “They ruled it accidental.” Shane pulled a plastic bag full of sliced cheese out of the fridge. That and a stale loaf of French bread were going to have to do.

  “That makes things easier. Where’s Mina?”

  “At the funeral home. We had him cremated.”

  I knew the calm way he spoke was a mask for a deep well of grief. I blinked my own tears back. I wished I’d had a chance to say goodbye, but it was better this way. I wanted to remember him as I’d known him.

  I only owned one black dress. I went and got it from our condo while Shane cleaned the B&B for the vigil. Diana helped—we couldn’t stop her. By the time I returned, the house was immaculate and the food was laid out in the dining room. Lionel’s urn sat on the mantel in the living room. Beside it was a picture of him standing in the entryway of the B&B, the door open behind him, his body silhouetted by the gold light coming from the hallway. It made me smile.