A cold that has nothing to do with the weather bursts from the pit in my stomach. McKinney thinks the ICM murdered Martinez?
“I…don’t understand. Wizard Halliburton was among the victims at Jameson’s. Why would you think the ICM orchestrated your lieutenant’s murder?”
“Hah!” McKinney spits. “Halliburton probably kicked the bucket because Vic didn’t go down as easily as they wanted him to. Three or four of them ganged up on him, so he turned Wolf, took out the ex-mayor and Halliburton, and then got overpowered by the remaining practitioners.” He clenches his fist so hard his knuckles crack. “That’s what happened. The ICM decided the Wolves had done their part and needed to go. Vic was the only one who knew the whole plan on our end, so they offed him. Plain and simple. And my response will also be plain and simple.”
His hand shoots out and grabs the front of my coat. He tugs me forward until his sharp teeth are unbearably close to my face. “I don’t care what sort of deal you freaks cut with the ICM to let them off the hook for this. I don’t care about keeping up appearances with your fake investigation. What I care about is retribution, kid. And you’re going to help me get it.” He releases my coat and smooths out the wrinkles. I swallow hard; he notices and grins. “So give me the names, Kinsey. Who at the ICM made the decision to kill Vic Martinez? And who carried out the deed? I know you know.”
Except I don’t know. Because everything this guy just said is bonkers.
DSI and the ICM don’t get along well enough to cover up each other’s minor indiscretions, much less sweep major crimes under the rug. That much became clear to me this morning, when Marcus threw his temper tantrum and stormed out of the bar and grill. And even if we did have that kind of sordid relationship with the magic practitioners, why on earth would we waste time and money going through the motions of an entire investigation, only to falsify every piece of evidence along the way? I don’t even think that sort of thing is possible, at least not on the scale that McKinney is suggesting.
Is this dude some kind of conspiracy theorist? Or—and this is a terrible thought—has he experienced this sort of flagrant cover-up from the ICM in the past?
I recall Ella’s story about Wizard Vickers and the attempt by the High Court to let him off easy for first-degree murder. Maybe McKinney has seen the same behavior in the past, and thinks, because DSI and the ICM occasionally cooperate on cases, that we must also collude to hide evidence of ICM wrongdoing. That’s a huge stretch, but, depending on McKinney’s history with practitioners, it might hold water.
McKinney suddenly grabs my hair and pulls. Hard. “Get your head out of the clouds, kid. I’m not waiting around here all day for you to make up some clever lie to get yourself out of this predicament. Give. Me. The. Names.”
Hissing through my teeth, I reply, “McKinney, there are no names. At least none that I know. Halliburton is the only wizard involved in the summoning plot that DSI is aware of. I swear. Whatever you think DSI is hiding for the practitioners, we’re not. If you want answers, you’ll have to ask the ICM, not us.”
McKinney lets go of my hair and reels back, surprise written across his face. “Those ICM fucks told you about the summoning?”
Oh.
Of course I fucked up.
I curse inwardly. No point in lying now. “Slate had some information about it on his computer.” But I can at least withhold the information about the shade clocks. “Nothing specific. Just that he, Halliburton, and a Wolf—Martinez, I assume—were planning a summoning of some kind. What you all were gearing up to summon, DSI doesn’t know. Whether or not the ICM has more than one wizard involved in this plot, DSI doesn’t know. We know very little, McKinney. You are giving DSI way more credit than we deserve here. We’re in the dark. We’re not shielding practitioners. We’re not building some kind of grand conspiracy. We’re not…”
McKinney holds up his hand. “So this is how it’s going to be, Kinsey? You’re going to give me the runaround?”
“It’s not a runaround, McKinney.” I breathe steam into the air. It’s getting colder as the day goes on. “For god’s sake, it’s the truth. I don’t have the information you want.”
The Wolf man strokes his beard, appearing contemplative. “All right. I get it. They trained you well. So you’re going to stick to the farce until I force the truth out of you.” He hawks and spits into the snow. “Pity that. You look like a handsome boy, minus the blood. Can’t say that’ll be true when I’m done with you.”
A chill skitters up my spine. Fuck. This guy’s crazy.
I try to think up a solution, throwing him a bone, maybe. But I only know the names of two ICM practitioners in Aurora. Marcus and Erica. If I spout out their names, the Wolves will hunt them down. And while I know they can both hold their own in combat, there’s no way I can justify risking their lives just to appease this sick bastard for a limited time. I don’t even have a guarantee that he’ll let us go if I give him names—he might hold us captive until he’s sure I told the truth. So when the lie comes out…Damn it. There’s no way out of this.
“McKinney, please—”
He wheels around and rams his fist into my abdomen. My feet slip out from under me, and I crumple to the ground, vomiting up everything in my stomach. When I run out of things to purge, I collapse on my side, face planted in the snow, gagging over and over. My vision blurs. I can’t get enough air. It won’t pass through my throat. I taste blood.
McKinney says to the man standing watch on his left, “Put this one in the trunk. We’ll take him up to the cabin. Work the answers out of him there.” To the other clothed Wolf, the one with the gun, he calls, “You drive. Go warm up the car. I’ll join you in a minute.”
Both of the men say, “Yes, sir,” at the same time. The one designated to take me away, who I think might be Chinese, shuffles over to me and clutches my arms. His grip is powerful despite his slim frame, and he heaves me over his shoulder like I weigh all of ten pounds. He then turns, my body dangling limply in his grasp, and marches toward a line of thorny bushes. The third man, with the gun, waits until we pass him, before he whips around to follow us.
I feebly attempt to struggle, but my entire body feels like it’s being crushed by a pile of bricks.
A powerful fear blooms in the back of my head. They’re going to torture me. They’re going to torture me for information I don’t have. They’re going to torture me until my body can’t take it anymore, or until McKinney gets too impatient and gives me a whack just a bit too hard to survive.
Shit. Shit. Shit. This is not how I planned to die. This is not how I want to die. I’d take Vanth’s sword over this.
Fuck, I never thought I’d want to go back to the Etruscan Underworld.
“And as for you…” says McKinney’s stern voice.
And suddenly I remember something my foggy brain forgot—Liam.
I wrench my head up at a painful angle and seek out the place where I was standing a moment ago. Liam is now lying on the ground, unable to stay upright any longer. He’s either out of energy, or his wounded head is hurting so much that he can no longer concentrate on the world around him. His chest is fluttering up and down at a rapid, irregular rate, like he’s having trouble breathing. His arms and legs jerk out at random intervals. Weak whines pass through his lips. He’s suffering.
McKinney looms over him. “You’re a little too out of it to join in on the fun, aren’t you, boy?”
Liam doesn’t answer.
“That’s a shame,” McKinney continues. “The more the merrier, you know? But if you’re not going to be of any use to me, there’s no point in keeping you around.” He reaches into his coat and unsheathes a long, serrated hunting knife.
All the air in my lungs vanishes in an instant, and I choke.
With immeasurable strength, McKinney bends down, wraps his free hand around Liam’s throat, and hoists the broken man into the air. Liam flails, unable to breathe, but then grows limp again. McKinney holds him at eye level, s
taring at Liam’s bloody, tear-streaked face.
The Wolf man says, “Least you can do one thing for me, though, boy. Send DSI a message they should have gotten a long time ago: when you play with the things that go bump in the night, you should expect to get dragged into the darkness.”
McKinney thrusts the knife into Liam’s chest. Straight into his heart.
And suddenly, I’m not in the woods anymore.
I’m in Gloston Square, and Mac’s mutilated body rests in front of me. Blood everywhere. Intestines everywhere. Organs everywhere. Pieces of his blue uniform, dyed violet, everywhere. And me, screaming, crying, on my knees, pants soaked in red-stained alley water. My gun on the cold concrete, useless. The vampire’s words haunting the air. Better luck next time, kid.
I’m standing on the shore of Lake Contessa, and there are bodies in the water. College kids. Bright futures. Snatched away by a vengeful spirit. Rendered charred and broken corpses bobbing up and down among the debris. Surrounded by fire and smoke screaming up into the night. And there’s nothing I can do but stare at the two girls in front of me, mortally wounded, barely breathing, on the verge of paying for mistakes they could hardly comprehend. Better luck next time, kid.
In the woods again. Being hauled away. Thorny bushes grabbing at my useless hands. And Liam Calvary is on the ground, splayed out. Blood on his lips. Tears in his eyes. He doesn’t want to die. (They never want to die.) But the wounds are always too much. The blood drowning his heart is too much. He jerks once, twice, three times, and whimpers—a desperate sound lost on the wind moaning through the trees. And he goes still. Eyes wide open. Seeing nothing.
Liam Calvary. Dead and gone.
“Hey, what’s wrong with him? He’s hyperventilating.”
Just like Mac.
Just like all those college kids.
Just like everybody else I couldn’t save.
“Eh, he’ll get over it. Just drop him in the trunk.”
Better luck next time, kid.
Chapter Thirteen
After three days in the torture shack, I can finally tell you for certain that Hollywood has never quite captured the reality of being bound to a chair and beaten for hours on end.
My arms, tied too tight to the back of said splintery chair, have gone numb. My legs, after receiving several home runs from a baseball bat, are only in better shape than Riker’s because McKinney has been “saving my knees for last.” My stomach and intestines have tied themselves into a series of knots, thanks to the frequent, swift jabbing blows of the Chinese Wolf, Zhang—oh, and the fact I haven’t eaten in seventy-two hours.
And, as if those injuries aren’t enough to fill a medical chart, at least three parts of my face are swollen up to golf-ball size because somebody likes to pistol-whip me when I call him too many naughty names. (That would be Donahue, McKinney’s gun-wielding flunky.)
Don’t even get me started on the cattle prod burns. Or the four missing fingernails. Or the two missing teeth.
Yeah, we’re just going to skip those. Nightmares for another time.
If I live through this. Which I very well may not. Since DSI still hasn’t found me out in the middle of this godforsaken forest. I have no idea how long McKinney had me in the trunk of his car—his car with exceedingly poor suspension—or even which direction we were heading, until his cronies hauled me out and dragged me to the torture shack to begin McKinney’s “thorough interrogation.” Since the Wolves were smart enough to ditch my phone along with my weapons, DSI will have had to launch an old-fashioned search for their missing rookie detective.
What are the odds of them tracking me down to a random, derelict hunting cabin in the middle of the Michigan woods?
Zilch.
I’m on my own. It’s a fact.
And if this torture continues for much longer, I’ll be on my own in a shallow grave. Until spring wanders in, and the rain washes the dirt away, and a bunch of woodland creatures eat my partially decomposed face. Now there’s an image. I swear—
The sound of a car door slamming shut draws me out of my head, and I crack open my swollen eyes, a sigh on my bloody tongue. And so begins day four.
All my mornings have started with that exact sound. McKinney and his goons work me over all day, each of them rotating out to take breaks. At dinnertime, McKinney and one of the goons leave for the night, heading back, I guess, to Aurora. The other goon stays behind to make sure I don’t magically break the industrial-quality rope and flee into the frigid forest with no shoes or coat (they took those too).
Last night’s security goon was Zhang. He perks up at the sound of the car door closing and yawns, rising from the old, stained futon in the corner that looks like it’s been in the woods longer than the cabin. He slips on his boots but doesn’t tie them and shuffles over to the cabin’s front door, just as McKinney and Donahue are stomping up the steps. Zhang opens the door a second before McKinney knocks, a look of anticipation on his face. Anticipation of breakfast.
Donuts. McKinney and Donahue brought donuts to their torture session.
Did I mention these guys are complete assholes?
Put that on the record.
McKinney strolls into the cabin with that snide smirk on his face I’ve come to know very well over the past few days. He’s holding a mug of what must be coffee, and he sips a couple times while he circles my chair. I meet his eyes when he comes into view, glaring at him as hard as I can with my left eye nearly swollen shut and my right incapable of blinking properly. The Wolf man stops directly in front of me and scratches at his beard as a low hum vibrates past his lips.
There’s a gleam in his dark eyes that I really don’t like.
McKinney bends over until he’s at my eye level. “Morning, kid. You wised up today? Got some names for me?”
It doesn’t matter how many times I tell this fucker that the ICM and DSI aren’t conspiring to shield the people who (supposedly) plotted Martinez’s murder. McKinney is so prejudiced against practitioners, and humans in general, that he won’t buy any narrative that places the guilt for his lieutenant’s death on non-ICM shoulders. He won’t even entertain the idea that maybe, just maybe, those involved in this summoning plot on the ICM side didn’t randomly decide to murder a werewolf in cold blood. I could probably show him an HD video of the Jameson murders being committed by an honest-to-god dragon, and he’d still blame the ICM.
I’d be exasperated right now…if I wasn’t in so much pain.
I stare into McKinney’s cold gaze and finally reply to his question. “Have I gone cross-eyed, or are you even uglier than you were yesterday?”
McKinney, unfazed, takes another sip of his coffee. “That really the way you want to play this, kid? You want to be a smartass?”
“I’ve been a smartass since day one,” I spit out with more than a few drops of blood. “If you really didn’t notice until now, you might want to trade my ass for your brain. You’d gain a few IQ points that way.”
McKinney snorts and rises to full height again. “The mouth on you. Where’d you pick that up?”
“Dollar store.” I flash what must be a slasher smile, stained bright red. “Didn’t you hear? Sarcasm is cheap.”
I know most people would peg me a moron right about now, taunting my tormentor and all that. But the problem is that I don’t know how to cope with long-term torture. And, as a result, I spent four hours last night contemplating whether biting my tongue off and drowning in my own blood would be a better alternative to sitting through another day with McKinney and friends, so…Look, I got really low last night, and I don’t want to do that again. So I will default to making myself laugh until such time as I am either free, or dead from McKinney going one step too far.
Because as much as I want this shit to end, most of me doesn’t want to go out via suicide.
(It kind of scares me, honestly, that there is at least one part that does.)
McKinney crosses the room, sitting his coffee mug on a dusty nightstand next
to the futon. He sinks to one knee and drags out from under the futon a navy duffle bag that has been a feature of our sessions together. Unzipping the bag, he digs through the “tools” inside and pulls out a skinny metal stick. The cattle prod. Yay.
McKinney stands up and tests the prod to make sure it still works—it does—then whirls back around to face me. “Since you’re still smiling, brat, I’m going to assume I haven’t been hard enough on you these past few days. So today, we’re going to start with this”—he hits the button on the prod, and it makes a zapping noise—“and work our way up.”
Up from the cattle prod? That’s usually his worst option.
He stalks closer to me, his two cronies watching with interest in the background, like there’s a damn football game about to start on TV. McKinney’s mouth tightens into a thin frown, and he says, “You know, kid like you, I thought you’d crack on day one, especially after you started crying when I killed your DSI buddy. But you’re a lot more resilient than your pretty—well, formerly pretty—face suggested, and so I’m a bit disappointed that this is probably going to end with you six feet under. If you’d just loosen your tongue, kid, this could be over in an hour. Hell, I’d drop you off at the door to the DSI office. Just give me a name. One name would suffice.” The cattle prod begins a slow arc toward my chest. “Come on, kid. Spit it out.”
My pulse quickens at the sight of the prod getting closer and closer. My mind starts racing, reaching for anything it can use to save me. And this time, weakened by a lack of food and constant pain, I almost, almost spit out Erica’s name. But I catch it at the last second and bite my tongue. I won’t get an innocent person hurt. I won’t.
Not after I already let one die on this case.
There it is again, the image of Liam, lying dead in the red-painted snow. He was a year older than me. He was twenty-fucking-three. And this bastard ripped his whole damn life away because he wasn’t “useful.”
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 36