As far back as I could remember, since long before the army, I had felt a darkness around me, a black cloud following me around. Like it was waiting to consume me. Being with my happy-go-lucky sister seemed to push it away when we were kids, and the regimen of the army had done the same. But when I came home from Iraq, the cloud seemed to gain strength, manifesting as the night terrors.
And they kept getting worse, until I was so sleep-deprived that I had a hard time telling the difference between waking and sleeping. Not that I would admit it, of course. Sam knew something was wrong, but no matter how much she cajoled, pleaded, or threatened on the phone, I insisted I was fine. I didn’t want her to feel guilty for not being around, and when push came to shove, I could be as stubborn as she was.
So Sam found a work-around. A month after I moved into the cabin, I had just gotten home from my night shift at the Depot when someone knocked on the cabin’s front door. I opened it to find my older cousin Jake, with a scruffy black-and-white bulldog mix in his arms. Its head drooped wearily against his red polo shirt, and a long neon-green cast dangled from the dog’s right foreleg. “I need a favor,” Jake said. He was a veterinarian in nearby Lafayette, and someone had dropped the bulldog mix off at his office after a hit-and-run. “The shelter we usually work with is full,” he explained, “and this guy can’t stay at the clinic forever. Can you take care of him while I try to find him a home?”
I pulled my robe around my T-shirt and pajama pants and looked doubtfully at the dog. “I’m not really set up for pets,” I said lamely. “And I don’t know that I’d be any good to him. Can’t you take him home?”
“Dani’s cat would attack him,” Jake said regretfully. Dani was his nine-year-old daughter. “He doesn’t need much, just food and someone to help him outside to pee.”
I eyed him suspiciously. “Sam put you up to this, didn’t she?”
Jake hefted the dog in his arms. “Look, can I just come in and put him down for a second?” he pleaded. “He’s getting really heavy.”
Of course, I ended up keeping the dog, whom I named Pongo after the father Dalmatian in the Disney movie. Two weeks later, Jake was back with a cat, Raja, and then a cranky, three-legged iguana that I named Mushu, followed by an exceedingly stupid Yorkshire terrier runt I’d had no choice but to call Dopey. Jake brought me all the homeless pets that crossed his path, and within a matter of months my parents’ formerly nice cabin had been transformed into a makeshift animal shelter.
To their credit, my parents never said a word about the animal invasion, even when they stopped by to find torn curtains and suspicious stains on the carpets of their former home. Sometimes Jake found the pets’ original owners, and sometimes, especially when he brought over cute puppies or kittens, the animals were eventually adopted. Finally I settled on a more or less stable roster of three cats, four dogs, and Mushu, who lived in a cage in his own bedroom so he and the dogs wouldn’t try to eat each other. I spent a lot of time taking care of the animals’ various ailments, and even more time building a fence around the cabin’s backyard so the dogs could run around off-leash. One evening I woke up with Dopey and Pongo sleeping on either side of me and realized that I hadn’t had a nightmare in months.
Well played, Sam.
Chapter 4
The next time I opened my eyes, there was a strange man in my hospital room. He had moved the visitor’s chair to the foot of the bed, where he was sitting with my chart, reading it intently. He was wearing a dark blue department store suit, not a lab coat. The room was dark, and the clock on the wall read nine-thirty.
“Who’re you?” I croaked.
Looking up, the man raised his eyebrows at me. He calmly replaced the chart at the foot of the bed and rose, dragging the visitor’s chair back to its place near the head of the bed. He was in his late thirties maybe, tall and slim with pale blond hair, ruddy cheeks, and the kind of translucent Scandinavian skin that would burn instantly in the sun. His face was all interesting angles and cleft chin, creating the overall impression that he should be modeling parkas in an L.L.Bean catalog. The suit was neither particularly nice nor particularly shabby, but I recognized a familiar lump near his armpit—a shoulder holster. I was immediately wary. “Good evening, Miss Luther,” the man said, pleasantly enough. “I’m Detective Quinn with Boulder PD.”
His hazel eyes pierced mine as he held out his hand, very close to mine so I wouldn’t have to work hard to reach it. His handshake was extremely gentle—not weak, exactly, but more like he feared my fingers might crumple to dust. “I’d like to speak to you about the incident at your work.”
“Now?” I asked, a little incredulous. I had expected the cops to turn up with questions, particularly since Mom had warned me, but it seemed awfully late. Visiting hours had been over for a while.
Quinn nodded. “As you might imagine, we’re very anxious to pursue the couple who kidnapped your niece.”
I swallowed, working to get the saliva past my sore throat. “Yes, sir.”
“I’ve seen the security tape, but I’d appreciate it if you would run me through your memories of that night in as much detail as possible,” Quinn suggested. Without being asked, he rose and picked up a mug of ice water with a straw from the counter, setting it on the tray table in front of me. “Take your time,” he added.
I took him at his word, spending a couple of minutes sipping the water and gathering my thoughts. Then I told him everything, starting from the conversation I’d overheard and ending with the way the man’s eyes had seemed to heal even after I’d gouged them. I told him that I thought the couple’s names were Victor and Darcy and that they both looked and talked like they were from out of town. I asked him once or twice if the security tape confirmed my story—I really wanted to know if the couples’ odd movements had been all in my imagination—but each time Quinn merely waved at me to continue, indicating that he didn’t want to taint my memories. He didn’t take notes or record the conversation, which seemed a little strange. He just sat and listened, his gaze very solemn and intense. No one came in to interrupt us, not even the nurses.
Quinn nodded when I was through, as though I’d confirmed exactly what he’d expected.
“Do you know why they wanted the baby?” he asked first, raw curiosity bleeding into his voice.
I looked at him questioningly. “I assumed it was just because she’s a baby,” I said slowly. “Isn’t that something people do? Kidnap babies and sell them to people who can’t have kids? Or maybe they just wanted to keep her for themselves.” I knew there were other, worse things that people could do with stolen children, but I refused to think about them in the context of Charlie.
Quinn studied my face for a moment, and I had the fleeting impression that he knew exactly what those people had wanted with my niece . . . and it was far different from anything I’d suspected. But before I could pursue the thought, he leaned forward and took my good hand. “Lex,” he said intently. “I want you to forget everything you remember about the couple. The way they moved, the way he healed. Their names. Forget all of it.”
He gave me the same sort of probing look Victor had given me, like I was missing some subtext. At that exact moment I felt something behind my eyes, a subtle pressure and a hint of pain. Like the beginning of a headache.
I slid my hand out from under Quinn’s and glared at him. “I never told you that I go by Lex,” I pointed out. “And how do you expect me to forget about this?” It occurred to me that he hadn’t shown me any identification. And that the nurses were supposed to take my vitals five minutes ago. “I want to see your badge,” I said abruptly.
Looking surprised, Quinn dropped my hand and leaned back in the chair. “Well, damn me twice,” he swore. “It’s true, then.”
My brow furrowed. “What’s true?”
Quinn tilted his head to study me, and goose bumps broke out along my forearms. He had that same alien detachment as
Victor and Darcy. “You really don’t know, do you?” he finally asked.
“I really don’t,” I said curtly. I have no patience for people who lord their knowledge over others. “But unless you can produce identification, I’d like you to leave. Right now.” I reached for the bedside remote that had the nurse’s call button. It was six inches away from my right hand, but Quinn managed to beat me to it, even from the other side of the bed. I shook my head, trying to clear it. “These drugs must be really good,” I mumbled. “Who are you?”
Ignoring me, Quinn held the device out of my reach with one hand. With the other, he dipped into his breast pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He touched the screen to make a call, keeping his eyes on me as he waited for the person on the other end to pick up.
“It’s Quinn,” he said into the receiver. So maybe that was his real name. “I think I’ve got one of yours. Only—funny thing—she doesn’t seem to know she’s one of yours.” Glancing at me, he added, “Allison Alexandra Luther.”
He listened for a moment, and I could hear a woman’s voice saying something to him. I kept quiet, waiting. He wasn’t hurting me—yet—and I was too injured to fight well, anyway. Better to wait until I understood the situation before I made a move.
“How soon can you get to BCH?” Quinn said into the phone, turning his head to glance at the clock on the wall. I couldn’t hear her response, but his lips tightened with irritation. “Are you sure you can’t come before then?” He listened for another moment. “Okay, okay. Send the kid. But when I say she doesn’t know anything, I mean she doesn’t know anything . . . what? Oh. Stab wounds. In the back.”
He hung up the phone and returned it to his pocket.
“Who was that, and what don’t I know?” I said coolly.
He looked at me speculatively for a long moment, but he seemed curious rather than dangerous. If he wasn’t here to hurt me, why the hell was he here? “Quinn?” I asked.
Finally, he sighed heavily, scrubbing the palm of his hand against his cheek. “This isn’t my job. You are not part of my job.”
“Well,” I proposed, “maybe you could start by telling me about your job. You move like a cop, but you’re not one, are you?”
He froze, then dropped his hand. “How do you know what a cop moves like?”
“My cousin is with Boulder PD. We have lunch sometimes. So what do you do?”
One side of his mouth turned up in a small smile. “You’re very persistent, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m very confused,” I corrected. “And my throat hurts, and I’m trying to decide if I need to get up and beat the shit out of you.”
This time he laughed, although I was only half kidding. “I’m not a cop anymore,” he admitted. “But I used to be one, in Chicago.”
I thought about that. He did have a Midwestern, Scandinavian kind of look. “Are you like some kind of private detective?” I tried. That was the only other thing I could think of that made any sense. Maybe he was tracking the strange couple for another client or something.
“The work I do can be like that sometimes,” Quinn said carefully. “You can think of me as a fixer. I work for someone who has a lot of pull in this town, and when that person has a situation that needs to be straightened out, I step in.” His voice had gotten a little bitter at the end, like maybe he wasn’t an entirely willing participant in his work. Interesting.
“Your boss is a woman, isn’t she?”
He examined my face closely. “What makes you say that?”
“You were careful to avoid a singular pronoun right there—you said ‘that person’ instead of ‘he’ or ‘she,’ even though it made your sentence awkward. The majority of people who have pull in Boulder, like in most cities, are male, so saying ‘she’ would really pare down my list of possibilities. So you avoided the pronoun entirely.”
He stared at me. “Now that’s interesting,” he mused.
I raised an eyebrow. “What, that I know what a pronoun is?” I countered. “No, what’s interesting is that you didn’t just say ‘he.’ You don’t want me to know who your boss is, but you didn’t want to lie to me, either. Why would a fixer need to talk to me?”
He leaned back in his chair, taking my call button with him. “You know, I could sit here and talk semantics all day,” he drawled. “Let’s go back to the pronoun discussion again, that was fun.”
I shook my head slightly. Pain shot up my back, but I’m good at ignoring pain, at least for a while. “No,” I retorted, “let’s answer Lex’s questions so she doesn’t start screaming for help.”
Quinn tilted his head, studying me again. “He tried to press you. I saw it on the tape.”
That brought me up short. “What?”
“Victor, the guy from the Flatiron Depot. He tried to press your mind so you’d back down, but it didn’t work. My employer would like to know why.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. “Press my mind?”
“It’s a mild, short-term form of mind control,” he said levelly. “He tried to force your brain into believing you hadn’t seen your niece.”
“And you tried it on me too, just a few minutes ago.” Quinn nodded, unrepentant. I considered that for a moment. I had felt something. “Let’s say I believe you. How could someone be capable of mind control? Are you guys a government experiment or something?” I had seen movies about super-soldiers. If you got past the ridiculousness, it made sense from a military standpoint. Besides, I knew nothing about technology. For all I knew, super-soldiers were on the horizon.
“No,” Quinn said, watching me carefully. “He’s a vampire . . . and so am I. And so is my male boss.”
I laughed in his face.
It hurt my throat, but come on. “You’re trying to tell me that you’re a vampire, and you live in Boulder? What, you discovered that microbrews and hemp taste just as good as blood?”
Quinn shrugged a shoulder, unsurprised by my outburst. “Laugh it up,” he said casually. “But I’m pretty sure you’re a witch.”
Chapter 5
I stopped laughing. “That’s ridiculous,” I said uncertainly. Not because I believed him, but because it was just such a weird thing to say. If you wanted to cover up a crime or convince someone to back off, “you’re a witch” doesn’t seem like the best place to start.
Quinn sighed again. “Look, I’ve never been on this side of this conversation, so I have no idea if I’m doing it right. But the only reason you’d be able to resist having your mind pressed is if you already have magic in your blood. That makes you one of three races. You’re not a vampire, obviously, and there aren’t any werewolves in Colorado anymore. And even if you were, I’d be able to smell it. That means you have to be a witch.” He shook his head. “I just don’t get how you can have active witchblood and not know it.”
I blanched. “What does that mean, active witch blood?”
“I can answer that,” said a new voice from the doorway. A shaggy-haired man of about thirty was leaning against the frame. He had olive skin and sharp brown eyes that took in the two of us through rectangular glasses. “Hey, dipshit,” he said to Quinn. “You press all the nurses to forget about this room? None of them seemed to know there was a patient in here.”
“Something like that,” Quinn said, smiling a little. “You made good time.”
The newcomer nodded and walked into the room, closing the door behind him. “Tracy and I were getting a drink a few blocks away. She’s gonna walk back to the apartment.”
Quinn rose to shake the other man’s hand, then turned toward me. “Simon Pellar, meet Allison Luther. She goes by Lex.”
I glanced at the thick cord dangling off the bed. Quinn had dropped the call button, and now I had my chance to call for help. But for some reason, I didn’t want to. This was all just so odd. It was . . . interesting. And since my sister had died, I hadn’t found a whole
lot of things particularly interesting. Frankly, I’d been in kind of a cocoon for the last ten months.
Besides, Quinn seemed like he knew something about the couple who had come after Charlie.
“Lex,” Quinn continued, and my eyes snapped back up to him. “This is Simon, of Clan Pellar. He’s generally a hippie ass-hat, but he’s also a witch. Like you, only without the amnesia and attention to grammar.”
“I don’t have amnesia,” I retorted, at the same moment that Simon said, “Hey, I like grammar.”
I glanced between them, recognizing the easy camaraderie of men who trusted each other. “You guys have worked together before, I take it.”
Quinn grinned. “Once or twice,” he told me. “Although we hate each other, of course.”
“Of course,” Simon said with a straight face. “Bloodsucking scum.”
“Devil-worshipping mama’s boy,” Quinn retorted cheerfully.
“You’ve been saving that,” Simon accused. His eyes flicked over to me as he approached the bed. It made me a little nervous, having two strange men in my hospital room while I was incapacitated, but Simon looked harmless. He wore an oversized gray fisherman’s sweater and jeans over brown Doc Martens, and he had a canvas messenger bag looped across his body. He shoved his hands in his pockets as he approached, like a little kid looking at a delicate museum exhibit.
“‘Luther’ like the shoes?” he asked me. I nodded. Luther Shoes was the second-biggest private employer in Boulder, so half the town either worked for my dad or knew someone who did. I gave up trying to hide the connection a long time ago. “Strange,” Simon mused. “Luthers have been in town for a while, and I’ve never heard of you guys having any witchblood.”
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