Run of Luck (Veil Knights Book 4)

by Rowan Casey

  “My, my…” Siobhan crooned, reaching out to place her long fingers on the bike’s pillion. The workshop lights licked over the glossy red-polish coating her nails. “Of course you would find the artifact, Jazmine Archer. There really was never any doubt.” She quickly turned to look at me. “You feel it, don’t you? The power slumbering inside. You may not have awoken as you should have but you must feel its call?”

  “I’d like my sister back now.”

  Her smile was a slippery, eel-like thing, with a life of its own as it slid across her lips. “Yes.” She curled her long fingers in a flicking gesture and turned once more to the bike. “In good time.”

  Davin struck. I hadn’t seen him move, not until it was too late. Light sliced off the steel shard, catching its downward plunge, but the makeshift dagger didn’t connect with Siobhan’s back as he had hoped. Power snapped through the air—sharp and dry, like the burn and crackle of shorting electricity cables—and Davin’s attack jerked to the side. Siobhan was on him in a blink, her long, lean hand locked around his neck. She tossed him aside as easily as someone might throw a bag of trash to the curb. He hit the workbench with a loud crack and crumpled in a heap.

  I moved in—not thinking, reacting—spooling luck close.

  Siobhan waggled a finger, bringing me up short. “Tut-tut-tut, foolish knight. One more step and our deal to bring your sister back is off.”

  Davin was breathing, I could see the rise and fall of his chest. He’d be okay, Dav was always okay. “If you’ve hurt him—”

  “Oh, please, your squire is perfectly fine.” She laughed and the sound of it rolled through the air. “Do not waste your breath threatening me. In your current incarnation it’s really quite pathetic.”

  Dav’s lashes fluttered. He opened his eyes and winced. Be he was awake. He’d be okay. He looked down at the metal shard still in his hand and tightened his fist around it then lifted his gaze to me. His eyes narrowed to determined slits.

  “Bring Kari back,” I ordered. “Take the bike and leave. We’re done.”

  Dav climbed awkwardly to his feet, using the bench as leverage. He gave his head a shake and glared up at Siobhan.

  Wanting.

  Siobhan curled her fingers into a fist and narrowed her sights on Davin. “Mmm… This one has a stubborn mind. Did you know he attempted to set ablaze our nest?” She looked only at Dav as she asked it and he started back at her, curiously vacant. “He has spirit. It would be a shame to crush such fire. Did you know, my dear, human male minds are utterly pliable?” She moved closer to Dav and lifted her hand to touch his face. He didn’t move, even as she cupped his cheek and ran her thumb across his lips. “Like clay, they can be altered, molded, made into marvelous little puppets. And like clay, some never respond to manipulation as they should. Your squire was meant to observe and support you and when the time came, help you make the right choice. But he resisted.”

  Why wasn’t he fighting her, why didn’t he move back? “What are you doing to him?”

  “Our powers are not what they were, but that is all about to change. An awakening is coming. The unseen is breaking through. And my sisters and I will be ready to embrace it.” She let her hand drop and faced me, lifting her chin so that our gazes locked. “We are in your debt, knight. And so, as agreed…” She lifted her hand. Her nails lengthened, curling into sharp, thin needles.

  The same crackle of charged power I’d felt earlier spilled into the workshop. This was it, the moment I’d see my sister again. The guilt, the pain, the nightmares. All of this insanity would be over. I couldn’t breath, and for a fraction of a second my heart, the world, it all stopped.

  A liquid dark grew from patches of shadows I hadn’t seen before—shadows that moved and breathed like things alive. They pealed from corners and slid out from under the workbenches. Creatures made of a starless night.

  Siobhan’s smile peeled back, revealing rows of tiny, sharp teeth. “Your sister has been so looking forward to seeing you again.”

  The baobhan sith slid across the walls, creeping over displayed car parts. They hissed and slithered as one, but a shadow moved independently from the others. It dropped to the floor and rose up onto two legs. Long arms twitched at its sides. Claws glinted. And there, in its red eyes, recognition blazed.

  No. This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen! Not like this.

  The hope I had desperately clung to cracked and fell away.

  A loose black tongue flicked out of the baobhan’s mouth. It cocked its head. Its lips stretched thin and pale. Needle-sharp teeth glinted. “Sisssteeerrr….” it hissed, and then laughed. I’d heard its laugh before, over and over in my dreams and my memories. It sounded like breaking glass and twisting metal. I tasted blood, felt the heat of the fire that had taken her and I knew, without any doubt, that I was looking at my sister.

  Siobhan lifted a hand. “Kill the knight.”

  14

  Two things happened at once. Dav turned on Siobhan and plunged the shard deep into her shoulder and the baobhan exploded off the walls in a surging wave of screeching darkness, their claws sparkling. Ahead of it all, the husk of my sister sprang forward. I heard Dav’s cry and Siobhan’s yell, but saw only the flooding black. Instincts yanked on all the available luck. I turned and bolted toward the back of the shop. Luck pooled around a bench and it collapsed—it’s legs weakened or not locked properly—spilling iron car parts and tools across the baobhan’s path. I scooped up a tire iron and slashed it through the nearest blur of shadow and claws. The creature’s foul hisses burned in my ear. It’s companions crowded in, so close that I couldn’t see anything beyond them.

  “Sister...” those hisses said.

  I swung the tire iron back and forth, sweeping it in wide arcs, slicing through the dark and impossibly driving them back. Iron! They couldn’t stand it. And there was plenty of iron scattered about the shop.

  Dav loomed out of the dark, the bloody shard raised and for a horrible, gut-wrenching second I saw him coming for me the same way he did Siobhan, but then his hand locked around my wrist and shoved me forward.

  “Upstairs! Now!” he yelled.

  A baobhan landed on his back and yanked him into their writhing, frenzied bodies. Something inside snapped. Fear fell away and a vicious, killing calm took its place. “Get away from him, bitches!” The tire iron cut through them, filling the air with their horrible screams. In my mind, it wasn’t a crude piece of metal, but a sword, and I wasn’t Jaz who hadn’t won anything fairly in her life. I was a pillar of strength, of light, of something more than me. Just the same as when the truth of me had stepped forward and claimed the bike, it became me now. My past. Part of a larger destiny.

  Dav’s hand, wet with blood, closed around mine. I heaved him from the mass of nightmares. “Go!” He stumbled up the stairs, and I stared down the monsters. They weren’t rushing me now: they watched, their eyes aglow, their claws clicking.

  “One of usss…” they crooned, lead by my sister. “Sister…sister…sissterssss….”

  I backed up the stairs into Dav’s loft apartment. But even as I slammed the door on them, their slithering touch crept in around its edges.

  “I’m sorry…” Dav leaned hard against his couch. Blood wept from the deep gashes on his face and bloomed across his shirt. “I wanted to tell you. I tried, but she was in my head the whole time…”

  A weapon. Anything. There had to be something I could use. My gaze settled on the massive windows and the blood-red glow seeping in from outside. “Close the blinds,” I told Dav while tucking the tire iron under my arm and starting on the blinds for the nearest window.

  Your sister’s one of them.

  Doesn’t matter, I told myself. I didn’t know how it was possible but Kari was one of them. Maybe she had been for years. I wasn’t getting her back. I knew that now. Dav had been right. Nothing good came from twisting luck and fate.

  Make it right.

  I caught Dav’s arm and pulled him toward th
e middle window.

  “Jaz, please listen. Every time I woke up,” he hissed against the pain but quickly continued, “and realized I was stuck in the nightmare, I tried to tell you but I thought, maybe… maybe you could…I dunno, fix it.”

  I almost laughed. “I am fixing it.” I straightened, tire iron in hand, and watched the shadows converge on us.

  “She’s taken the artifact.”

  I nodded, watching the rising tide of monsters pool closer inch-by-inch. “I know.” I’d felt the bike’s absence. But it wasn’t over. This wasn’t the end. I wasn’t dying here today and neither was Dav.

  The baobhan reared up, becoming an impenetrable flood of menace and terror, their claws scraping like metal on metal, their eyes ablaze. Closer they came. I could smell them, their horrid burned oil and wet metal smell. Their chitters and hisses filled my head, calling, join us…sister-sister-sister.

  And then Kari was there, suddenly normal and human, stepping from the shadows like an angel in her white leather jacket. Dav’s breath caught. He whispered something.

  I had seen Kari that day in the street racing crowd. Other times, too, over the years. A face at the window, a girl on the corner, all were born of a tattered hope and ravaging guilt. She’d been watching, waiting, but this thing wasn’t my sister. Not anymore. I saw through her bright eyes, her soft smile. My sister was dead. I’d killed her, like I’d killed others. But now it was time. Time to face the truth. Time to make it right.

  Closer they came, until their claws hooked into my clothes and their fetid stench burned my eyes.

  “Sister.” Kari reached for my face. “Make it right. Join us. Join what is to come. Grimm will fail. His knights are weak. With us, you will be strong.” Her fingernails stretched thin, sharpening into stiletto points. “Become one with ussss.”

  “Goodbye, Kari.” I yanked on the cord holding the blinds closed and pulled them open, flooding Dav’s loft with penetrating sunlight. The dark wobbled, their combined voices howled in a storm of fear and rage, their power flexed, filling the room with pressure and then it shattered, and with it went the baobhan sith in a sudden burst of ash and embers. Their remains danced in the sunlight, and settled around us like snow.

  I slipped my hand into Dav’s, felt is fingers tighten, closed my eyes and waited for my racing heart to slow. “We’ve totally got this,” I muttered.

  “The part where I make it to the couch without passing out or the monster-hunting part?”

  “Carino.” Officer Riley stood in the open doorway, gun drawn and pointed at the floor. “What in the hell did I just witness?”

  It’s a whole lot easier to convince the cops that there are monsters in LA when they’ve just seen those monsters with their own eyes. After I’d given Riley the condensed version of my life over the past week, she stared out of the window at the impossibly bright and normal LA day, probably wondering if real life would ever look the same again. She tried to call it in, but after we explained how rampaging shadow demons on the report wouldn’t help her career prospects, she let it go. Reluctantly. I wasn’t sure if her silence was a good or bad thing, and instead focused on patching Dav’s wounds up. He had no intention of going to the ER because; well, macho bullshit reasons. Luckily—possibly my doing—the gouges in his cheek and arm were clean and not too deep.

  Siobhan was the real problem, and whatever hold she had on Dav, it was still there.

  “I didn’t know she was one of them,” I told him, clearing away the first aid kit. “Maybe I should have. I knew something was off about her, but after seeing that thing in my apartment she seemed pretty tame. Sure, she was weird, but who isn’t in this city?” And she had promised to bring my sister back, I added silently. That fact had given her way too much leeway. Dav had been right, I had been so damn eager to get Kari back that I wasn’t seeing the rest of what was going on. He had been right about a lot of things. The time we’d spent together getting ready for the race, how he’d let me tell him all about the baobhan when he already knew? Was any of it real?

  “At least you stabbed her,” I added. “All I managed to do was wave a tire iron around.”

  He snorted and gingerly eased his torn and bloody shirt off. I handed him a fresh one and watched him carefully work it on. Bruises were already clustering around his ribs, but he’d survive. He hadn’t met my gaze since Siobhan revealed she’d used him. Just how deep was her control buried?

  “I did learn that they don’t like iron.” I tried to smile, but there wasn’t much to smile about and it soon slipped off my lips. The bike was gone. Kari was gone. Davin was…I wasn’t sure what Davin was.

  “What are you going to do?” Riley asked. She had been so quiet I had forgotten she was with us.

  “Get the bike back, kill the monsters.” Make it right like I should have done in the beginning, I silently added. Damn that Grimm! This whole thing would have been a whole lot easier with his help.

  “There are more of those things?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Dav grumbled. He moved to the kitchen where he popped two painkillers into his mouth and washed them back with a glass of water, or vodka.

  “I really should call this in,” Riley muttered.

  I rolled my eyes. “And get a whole bunch of cops killed? You guys will go in with your guns and shields. Do you really think those things will stop those creatures? You saw what they are. Bullets won’t do much more than piss ‘em off. Iron and sunlight—maybe fire, will hurt them.”

  Dav winced, recalling how he had tried and failed to burn their nest. He should have told me everything. Why hadn’t he?

  “And luck?” she added with a smirk. “It was before my time, but when I did my induction, and they told me about Carino. I never could figure out why, out of all the crews, they couldn’t catch yours.”

  “Maybe it’s because we haven’t done anything illegal,” Dav suggested, the glint in his eye clearly baiting her. I was glad to see it back.

  Riley shot him a dry look. “Oh, c’mon, you’re gonna bullshit me now? After what I just saw?”

  “Prove it.”

  “I have every intention of proving it. What do you think the PD brought me in for?”

  “Okay,” I butted in. “We go to the abandoned villas and burn them out of there in broad daylight.”

  Dav and Riley both nodded, and then appeared to realize they’d agreed with each other and promptly resorted to glaring.

  “Are you coming along for the ride, Officer?” Dav asked.

  “Only if your vehicle is street legal, Carino.”

  “The pink minivan it is then.”

  15

  We didn’t take the minivan. Riley rode in her PD issued Ford that looked so plain and uninspiring it could disappear in traffic, but probably had enough grunt under the hood to challenge Dav’s GTR—which I was driving. Dav rode shotgun, occasionally poking at the claw marks on his neck.

  “How long was it?” I asked after what felt like a ton of awkward silence had piled into the car with us.

  He didn’t need to ask what I was referring to. He’d avoided looking me in the eyes all morning, opting to stew in his guilt instead. “She came in to the shop around six months ago.”

  I hissed in through my teeth. I hadn’t expected it to be so long. A few days, a week, maybe. But six months? Siobhan had played the both of us.

  “She looked like her driver had dropped off on the wrong side of town, ya know the type. They think slumming it in our neighborhood for an evening is fashionable.” He hesitated. Maybe I was supposed to fill in the quiet, but I was still reeling from the ‘six months’ and what it meant.

  “It was late…” he continued, voice gruff. “Just me in the shop. She said Jazmine Archer would be coming by and ask for help. I laughed, told her she had the wrong guy and then nothing. I don’t remember her leaving. Next day I shrugged it off.” He leaned an arm against the door and stared out at LA residential backstreets. “I forgot about it until I saw you at the strip.”


  “Did you help me because you wanted to or because she told you to?”

  He started to answer and stopped before it could become a lie. “Truth is… I don’t know.” He looked over and it was clear from his ragged expression that he’d have preferred any other answer. “I won’t be going inside the houses with you.” He tapped his temple. “She’s still up here. I feel her, feels like being watched.”

  “Then she knows we’re coming.”

  He leaned forward and squinted into the sunlight. “We’ll be fine as long as we have the daylight.”

  A few more streets rumbled by in silence. Riley’s Ford stayed glued in the GTR’s mirrors. As much as having a cop onboard had me checking my speed every few seconds, a part of me was grateful for the backup. With Dav compromised, I needed all the help I could get.

  “I looked them up, ya know, on Wikipedia,” I told Dav as we turned off the street toward the abandoned block. “The baobhan sith. They specialize in seducing men, getting in their heads, turning them insane, before sucking out their insides. Though they usually cut their victims’ throats first. I mean, it wasn’t like the article had legitimate sources. For all I know, the baobhan wrote it.”

  The smallest of smiles tried to tug at the corner of his mouth. “You’re telling me this because?”

  “Figured it could have been a whole lot worse, right?”

  His hint of a smile grew, until we saw the hollowed-out houses through the fence ahead. “It ain’t over yet.”

  But one thing was. “She’s gone.” I waited until he finally looked me in the eyes, and added, “Kari’s really gone.”

  “She died two years ago. Let her rest.”

  He was right, but knowing it and doing it were two completely different things. “When this is all over, will you teach me some more poker?”