Call Me Wicked

by Jamie Sobrato

  This was his one chance that would never come to him while working his life away in an advertising firm or whiling away his personal life jumping from one easy relationship to another.

  Right here and now, he could not only save Lauren, but he could save his own soul.

  “Yes,” he lied. “I’ll cooperate.”

  14

  LAUREN AWOKE SWEATING, a scream trapped in her throat, her mouth open wide as if she really were crying out for dear life. She inhaled sharply and exhaled, struggling to catch her breath.

  The images were too real to have been a dream.

  She’d seen Carson tied to a chair, being beaten by a man in a ski mask. She’d felt a grave sense of doom about the situation. And now that she was awake, she understood that it had been a vision.

  Not a dream.

  Somewhere, Carson had been captured by the witch hunters.

  As soon as her mind was free of that vision, another struck her. First the blinding white light, and then an image of Carson stumbling along a road, a cut on his forehead. Over his shoulder, a sign read Hwy 1, Carmel 30 miles.

  She rarely had two visions in a row, and she closed her eyes, willing something else to come to her, some other clue to let her know what had happened to Carson, or how she could help.

  But nothing else came, of course. She’d been given more than she could have hoped for, except absolute proof he was still alive.

  She hadn’t protected him, and now he might die. There was a chance they all would, if he talked.

  She sat up in bed and blinked at the alarm clock, whose red numbers said it was nearly four-thirty in the morning. Her heart was thudding frantically in her chest. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her palm.

  She had to do something.

  God, only five days had passed since Carson had left L.A. How had this happened? How had she let him wander into the hands of the witch hunters? How had she gotten so careless in so many ways? She would not forgive herself, if he was hurt. She wasn’t sure how she could go on living with such an awful weight on her conscience.

  Lauren got out of bed and dressed, pulled her hair into a ponytail, then went in search of Sebastian. She found him in his office staring at a computer screen, on which there was some spreadsheet that must relate to the nightclub business.

  “I need your help,” she said before he’d even realized she was there.

  He startled, then regarded her calmly. “What is it?”

  “The Order has Carson—or had him. We have to find him and help him.”

  He answered her with a cold, unfeeling stare.

  “Sebastian, Carson has a lot of information about us. If they make him talk—”

  “We’re screwed.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you see now why I didn’t approve of your bringing him here? Humans don’t understand the gravity of our situation.”

  “Spare me the lecture, okay? The damage is done, and we have to try to undo it.”

  “How do you know what happened?”

  “I saw it.”

  “When?”

  “Just now, while I was sleeping.”

  “You’re sure it was a vision and not a dream?”

  Lauren nodded.

  “You think they caught him in San Francisco?”

  “That would be my guess. I saw two visions, one of him being tortured, and another of him stumbling along what looked to be Highway 1, thirty miles from Carmel.”

  The raven tattoo on Sebastian’s arm vanished, and Lauren knew where it had gone—in search of Carson.

  “Do I have to tell you what’s going to happen if we find the mortal alive?” Sebastian asked.

  Of course he didn’t. Lauren’s stomach lurched, and she cast her eyes down as if she was acknowledging some inevitable sad fact. Though in reality, she’d never let her cousin harm Carson. Not in a million years.

  “I’m finished with being patient about him. It’s time he pays his dues for entering our world.”

  “He didn’t ask to enter it.” Lauren couldn’t help pointing the fact out. “It was my fault he came here.”

  Her cousin nodded. “Have you learned your lesson?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you understand why he has to die?”

  Her anger flared, and she didn’t dare make herself consider why she was so desperate to keep Carson safe, aside from her sense of personal responsibility to him. “Why not kill me instead? I’m the one who’s at fault.”

  “His death will have a dual purpose—to remind you not to be so reckless, and to keep him from ever endangering us again.”

  “But if we have the uprising soon, we won’t need to worry about him endangering us. The whole world will know who we are.”

  Sebastian looked at her without expression. “We don’t really know when or if the uprising will happen, do we?”

  “Corinne seems to think it will happen soon.”

  “Corinne is young. She has no sense of time.”

  “She knows more than we do.”

  “You’re not talking me out of taking Carson’s life. It’s necessary, Lauren. There’s no getting around it. I was a fool for letting him be away from us alive for this long.”

  Lauren’s stomach knotted itself tightly. “How can you take someone else’s life into your hands so casually? You never used to be that way, cousin.”

  “I used to be a naive fool,” he said flatly.

  “You’ve changed,” she said.

  “So have you.”

  Lauren knew the way to Sebastian’s heart wasn’t this route. She decided to drop the subject for now. “Has the raven found anything yet?”

  Sebastian closed his eyes and went completely still for a few moments. When he opened his eyes again, he shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “I’m going to pack. I think we need to leave for San Francisco as soon as possible. I can go without you if you’d prefer.”

  “No, I’m going, too. But I have some business to take care of here before we leave. And we should give the raven some time to seek out Carson first.”

  Lauren nodded, stood and left the office. Her heart was pounding again, and the sickening fear that they might be too late to help Carson clenched her insides. She would try to have another vision, but for now all she had was a sense of doom. Even if they caught up with him and were able to help him escape, she’d still have to save him from Sebastian.

  She needed to talk to her little sister because she wasn’t positive she could hold off Sebastian on her own. They rarely used cell phones to talk, so she went outside in the early-morning darkness to the pay phone down the block and dialed Corinne’s number with a calling card.

  After a few rings, her sister answered, sounding as though she’d been awakened from a dead sleep. “Lauren?” she said in a groggy voice. “Are you okay?”

  Without caller ID, she was relying on her intuition to know who was calling.

  “Yes, I’m fine. But my friend Carson isn’t, and I need your help finding him.”

  “Carson who?” her sister said, then yawned.

  Lauren explained her relationship to the mortal, and then she steeled herself against the humiliation of a lecture from her own little sister. But none came.

  Instead, Corinne yawned again and said, “And you’re waking me up at what time because of this?”

  “I’m sorry. I would call another time if I could, but this is an emergency. I need your help now.”

  “I don’t know what you think I can do.”

  “For one thing, I need you to tell me if you have a sense of what’s about to happen. Do you think The Order is close to us?”

  Corinne was silent for a few moments, during which time Lauren imagined her sister lying in bed, her long red hair splayed on the pillow and her eyes closed as she tried to summon a sense of the situation.

  “I think we still have some time before there is a major clash with The Order, but I don’t know how much. Maybe a few years, maybe a
year, maybe six months.”

  “Is that all you’re getting?”

  “No.” And then, a long pause. When she finally spoke again, her voice sounded distant and strange. “Your vision of you with the man on the beach—it’s immediate. It will happen soon.”

  Lauren blinked, knowing her sister was right.

  “If it happens before I see you again,” she said, “please remember that I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Lauren.” It wasn’t like Corinne to sound vulnerable, but for once, she did.

  Lauren couldn’t take it. She didn’t want to break down and cry. “I have to go,” she said and hung up the phone.

  Her time had come, whether she was ready or not. She tried not to feel sorry for herself, but she did anyway.

  She didn’t want to die. She was nowhere near ready to leave this earth. She had way too much living left to do.

  SOMETHING WASN’T RIGHT.

  Lars had heard the shuffling sound in the rear of the van, but he’d assumed it was simply Carson McCullen stirring in his sleep. The last time he’d checked on McCullen, the man had been knocked out cold, with his hands and feet bound.

  But when Lars heard the rear doors of the van open, and caught a fleeting glimpse of McCullen’s back as he jumped from the van, he got his first sense that he’d been had.

  The bastard was escaping.

  But how?

  “Stop the van!” he said, lapsing into Czech to Noam, who was already cursing and pulling over to the side of the road.

  Lars scrambled out of the van as it came to a stop, catching the movement of Carson’s body as he rolled through the brush and down the hillside. The fool would be lucky if he survived the jump from the van. If he wanted to commit suicide, that was fine by Lars. It would save him having to kill the uncooperative idiot.

  As he hurried down the hillside after McCullen, his mind scrambled to understand how he’d escaped in the first place. Perhaps if McCullen hadn’t really been unconscious, as he’d seemed to be, and if he’d spent the past three hours in the van working his way loose from his binding, rather than sleeping as Lars had assumed he’d been…

  He should have known better than to trust McCullen. He had claimed Lauren Parish was staying at a safe house off of Highway 1, somewhere near Big Sur. He hadn’t been very specific with the details, claiming he’d seen the house only once in the dark and couldn’t remember much about it, but he would know the place when he saw it.

  Lars had knocked him out with a sharp blow to the head, to be safe, tied him up, and they’d set off toward Big Sur, planning to wake McCullen once they were close to their destination.

  But now…Now Lars knew he’d been had. He’d never met a human before who’d been willing to die for a witch, so this man had caught him off guard with his stubbornness. Fool had probably gotten so addicted to his witch lover that he could no longer think straight.

  Lars tripped on a rock and went tumbling, falling head over heels down the steep hillside, banging himself against brush and rock until he finally came to rest on the beach, his head still spinning. He blinked up at the sky and took inventory of himself. No real damage.

  Nearby, he could hear footsteps, probably Noam’s, but all other sound was drowned out by the ocean crashing against the beach. Lars sat up and looked around. McCullen was nowhere in sight, but Noam was making his way down the beach, looking left and right.

  “Do you see him?” Lars called out as he stood and brushed himself off.

  Noam held out his hands and shook his head.

  Damn it.

  The two men searched until sunset, first the beach, then the woods nearby, and finally they went back to the van and started driving slowly, hoping they’d see something from the road.

  In the dark, their task was considerably harder.

  Lars stared out at the ocean, at the moon rising over it, and his gut told him they were getting closer to Lauren Parish. Or was that just a foolish, desperate hope, based on how little had gone right today?

  “Don’t be so pissed off. We’ll find him, and we’ll find the witch,” Noam said, breaking a long brooding silence that had settled between the two men, each probably blaming the other for their escaped prisoner.

  “You didn’t tie the ropes tightly enough,” Lars spat.

  “You didn’t knock him out like you thought you did,” Noam answered, his voice taking on a surly tone.

  “You didn’t refill the supply of tranquilizers like you should have. If you had, I wouldn’t have needed to knock him out.”

  Lars glared ahead, truly angrier at himself than at the kid, who was young enough to be allowed a few mistakes. Lars knew the source of his mistake. He’d gotten sloppy out of desire. He’d allowed himself to become consumed with thoughts of having the witch, burying his cock inside her, and he had let his usual diligence slide.

  He would not forgive himself for that.

  Such was the danger of addiction. And he had to remember that he first served The Order. That was his purpose in life, and nothing could stand in the way of it. He believed in his work. He could not let desire interfere.

  Never again.

  He felt the weight of the gun in its holster against his rib cage, hidden beneath his jacket, and he made himself a promise.

  When he found Lauren Parish, he would not let desire overcome him again. He would shoot to kill.

  LAUREN SET SEBASTIAN’S BMW on cruise control and glanced at the clock on the dash. It would be dark soon, they had another few hours before they’d reach San Francisco, and she couldn’t stop brooding about her own doom.

  A witch foretelling his or her own death was not unusual. But Lauren had always hated knowing the circumstances of her own demise. Even knowing that it would probably be the galvanizing action for the uprising didn’t help. She didn’t want to be a martyr, she wanted to be alive. And now her time was almost up.

  She felt twinges of regret about not taking her life more seriously. She would have done a few things differently. She would have loved the people she wanted to love instead of worrying about the rules. She would have let herself live more fully, more honestly…more everything.

  Beside her in the passenger seat, Sebastian was sleeping. A sleeping lion, he seemed, likely to awaken and do damage at any moment. The danger he posed to Carson had not escaped her, but she had to trust that, in the end, he wouldn’t do anything against her wishes.

  The raven was still missing from his arm, still looking for Carson. When it left Sebastian for this long, it exhausted him, put him to sleep. She desperately wanted to know what the bird was seeing now, but it wouldn’t do any good to wake her cousin. The raven would return when it had seen what they were looking for.

  Outside, the coast stretched on forever north. But Lauren barely registered the scenery. Her entire being was caught up in the feeling of doom she’d had ever since waking up with the vision of Carson. She couldn’t figure out which she felt worse about—that she would soon die, or that Carson might soon be dead himself.

  She hated that she’d ever involved him in her life, and she equally hated that once she’d done so, she didn’t have the courage to throw out all the rules and let things happen naturally between them.

  Maybe they could have proven the elders wrong and had a happy relationship. Maybe Carson could have eventually gotten his fill of her and moved on without any more pain than occurred when a normal romance ended.

  Maybe, maybe, maybe. She didn’t want to live with such regrets.

  If by some miracle she could save herself and Carson, she wanted to give their relationship a real chance.

  A movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she glanced down to see the raven tattoo had returned to Sebastian’s arm. After a few minutes, he stirred, yawning and stretching. When he opened his eyes, Lauren glanced over at him.

  “What did you see?” she asked.

  He squinted at the road ahead. “I saw his apartment is empty, so we know he’s not there.�
��

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  “I wasn’t finished. I saw him there on the highway, just as you predicted. We’re only a few miles from his location now.”

  Lauren’s mouth went dry, and she accelerated. When they rounded a bend several minutes later, she could see a man on the side of the road in the distance.

  “There he is!” Lauren’s heart thudded wildly when, closer, she could see that it was indeed Carson stumbling along the side of the road, the way he had been in her vision.

  She pulled the car over behind him.

  “This could be a trap, you know,” Sebastian said. “I don’t think The Order would let him escape without a reason.”

  “You’re right, but we can’t leave him here bleeding.” She was scrambling out of the car even as she said it.

  “Carson!” she called out, and he turned to her.

  There was a gash on his forehead, along with dried blood. He looked at her as if she was an apparition.

  She hurried to his side. “Are you okay?”

  “Lauren, wow. How did you find me?”

  “I had a vision of you here with a Highway 1 sign in the background.”

  “You drove all the way up Highway 1 looking for me?”

  “There isn’t any time to talk now. I’ll explain it all later. Just get in the car with me and let’s go.”

  He spotted Sebastian now in the driver’s seat. “I’m not going anywhere with him.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Carson. He’s not going to hurt you, but those bastards who did that to you,” she said, nodding to his head injury, “will kill us all if they catch up to us.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said, lifting his hand to his forehead.

  He winced when he touched the wound. “What the hell?”

  “Do you remember what happened to you?”

  He shook his head, frowning as he seemed to try to recall anything. “I remember a room…and a bright light…and being tied to a chair….”

  “Nothing else?”

  “I don’t even remember getting hit on the head.”

  “It was probably a hard enough impact to make you lose your short-term memory.”

  “I have no idea how I got here, either.”