I forced myself to concentrate. On winged Kevin, down on his knees and petting Zach behind the ears. On Malek, who dug into a file cabinet in the far corner.
The room smelled of disinfectant. Photos of tribal tattoos covered all the walls, floor to ceiling. The chair and table where Malek did most of his work had been wiped clean, not just of germs but of magical traces, too. The counter held a capped assortment of colored inks, clean and prepped tattoo guns, ointment, plastic wrap, and paper towels. A stereo system took up the rest of the counter space.
I punched the on button. Disturbed blared at deafening decibels. I shut it off fast. The bass echoed in my ears. Malek glanced at me over his shoulder. Kevin and the dog stared at me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“What’s up with your eyes?” Kevin asked.
“Wish I knew.”
“Is it freaking you out?”
“What do you think?”
Malek pulled a piece of paper from the files. And a blank notebook and pen. He placed it all on top of the work table. This is the drawing I did for that girl.
The city skyline. Downtown Houston in all its glory, lit up like at Christmas with red and green lights reflecting off glass and steel. Lifelike and real in every way.
“Not exactly hearts and butterflies,” Kevin said.
I don’t do those, he wrote. For Kevin’s benefit.
“What kind of magic did you put into this?” I asked.
Same as for all of them.
Kevin looked at him, then at me. Raised a brow.
“His blood,” I said. “He infuses the ink with it.”
“Gross.”
Malek smirked.
“What did she ask for?”
A place to call home. She said she’d never felt like she had one. She was living somewhere new, and she wanted to start over. To be who her heart told her she was. She didn’t have the power to make a fresh beginning, but I could help her with that.
“The rumors from school?” Kevin asked.
“True,” I said. “She told me before she turned the world upside down. She came to me for help.”
Nice job, Malek wrote.
“You, too. What was so special about the spell you inked on Melody’s back? I mean, was it something besides a new home? Because even if she is part demon, even if she’s having power surges because she can’t control what she’s doing, she shouldn’t have been able to make people disappear or change them. She shouldn’t have been able to cut off communication, either. Phones not working. No Internet. There has to be something else going on here.
“She was talking about melting a trash can. A steering wheel. We’re a long ways from that here, don’t you think?”
Malek nodded. I didn’t give her control over the city, if that’s what you’re thinking. I gave her the power to remake her life.
“Her life, not everyone else’s,” Kevin said.
“It doesn’t make sense, dude.” A place to call home. A fresh start. The power to remake her life. “The city’s not her life.”
Malek smoothed his goatee with one hand, the other resting on the drawing.
“Think of something?” I asked.
It’s possible that my magic connected her life to the city. It’s not what I meant to do.
Unbelievable. “You’re saying you possibly screwed up here?”
I’m saying I can’t be sure.
“Find a way,” I said.
He met my gaze. His eyes looked older than God. I need to see her again.
Kevin leaned forward, elbows on the table. “You can’t just reach out to her? She carries your magic. You’re connected.”
No. I sever those ties with my clients once the job is done.
“How?” Kevin asked. “Why?”
Malek signed to me. He really doesn’t know?
I shook my head.
He went back to the notepad. The people who come to me are broken. They pay a terrible price for the work I do, and they don’t always like the results. A mother whose child is missing wants to know what happened to her little girl. I give her an answer so she can find the child. Bury her. Not a happy ending. A man whose wife was dying of cancer asked for her to be healed. I warned him. He was still surprised when the cancer that had nearly eaten her alive ended up inside him. She lived. He died a horrible death. Why would I want to be connected to any of that? Once a job is done, it’s done.
Kevin thinned his lips. “How can you do that to people? How can you live with yourself?”
Malek shrugged.
He wasn’t human. He’d never been human. He didn’t have human morality. His ethics came from a different experience. Kevin needed a touchstone to understand. “He’s like the King that way.”
“Great,” Kevin said, each word filled with more sneering sarcasm than the last. “What did those people pay you for the honor of wearing your work?”
Malek cocked his head at Kevin in a way that made me worry. A former god. Without human morality. Without a shred of caring for Kev. I laid a hand on Kevin’s arm.
Malek saw, of course. He wrote on the notepad. I won’t hurt him. Being stupid’s not a crime.
Which only made Kevin angrier. I wrapped my fingers around his arm and squeezed.
The woman I mentioned gave me her life savings. The man who died of cancer gave me his soul. Does it make you feel better to know?
Kevin’s voice failed him. His question came out a whisper. “His soul?”
That was the price for his wish. If you ever come to me for a tattoo, be sure you’re willing to pay what it costs.
“That’ll never happen,” Kevin said.
Never say never.
I let go of Kev’s arm. “Malek, what did Melody pay?”
Most of her new life. She got ten years to live, and I got the rest of her years.
“Which means she’d live to be twenty-eight?” I asked.
Malek nodded.
Ten years. Seemed like a lot until you thought about the fact that average lifespan would’ve gotten her to seventy or eighty. “Who would be stupid enough to take that deal?”
A desperate girl.
“Who you took advantage of,” Kevin said.
Clearly, she took advantage of me.
“Clearly, this whole thing is fucked up beyond belief,” I said. “And now we have to find her to be sure whether you gave her the keys to the kingdom. Great, Malek.”
You know how to track a demon?
“Half demon.”
Whatever. You know how?
“I know a little about Melody. About her life. We need someone who knows her better, who maybe can tell us the places she’d go to hang out. Or maybe they noticed something different about her from before.”
Kevin took his elbows off the table and stood up straight. “Amy. She has more classes with her than the rest of us.”
“You haven’t seen her since things went crazy?” I asked.
“No. The Singer said to come here, remember?”
“You hear from her before you went to the bus?”
“She texted me.”
“About?”
“It’s personal, man.”
I folded my arms across my chest.
“She wanted to know if I was going out. To the bus. She says she can see it in my face when I’m thinking about it, and for the last few days she said she could tell.”
“What’d you text her back?”
“That I didn’t know.”
He probably didn’t. Or he thought he didn’t. From the expression on his face, he believed every word that came out of his mouth. “Dude, you ought to break up with her if you’re gonna be like that.”
He took a deep breath. “You done? We’ve got a crisis to deal with.”
“Fine,” I said. “We need to get to Amy. If she hasn’t disappeared, that is.”
Let me know what you find out, Malek wrote.
“We’ll be back as soon as we can,” I said.
If that girl made
this mess, I want her dead.
What? “Dead?”
She knew what she was doing when she came to me for the ink. Or if she didn’t plan it in advance, she did it on the fly, and that means the kind of power she’s got is off the charts. She can’t be walking around and breathing with that much juice.
“If she didn’t premeditate it, then it was an accident,” I said. “You can’t hold her responsible for an accident. Not like that.”
Your cops and your courts do it all the time.
“Sometimes they get it really right and other times they really don’t. What they do doesn’t make sense. Too many people who should be in prison aren’t, and too many people who have no business being locked up are serving years they shouldn’t be. You know that, so don’t give me that bullshit. Besides, you’re not a cop and you’re not a judge.”
Let’s get something straight here, Davies. This is not your normal, human world we’re talking about. This is magical and dangerous. You’re the cop here. That’s your job. You’re the faery seer.
“Apprentice,” I said.
No. You were an apprentice yesterday. Now Oscar’s gone and you’re all we’ve got in that department, so man up. Do what needs to be done.
“I’m not done with my training.”
Doesn’t matter.
It mattered to me. I still had a couple of years to go under Oscar before I got promoted. Or graduated. Whatever. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have all the knowledge I’d need to go up against someone like Melody. If I needed to go up against her at all.
I couldn’t ignore the possibility that she’d tricked Malek. It could’ve gone down like that. But I didn’t believe it. She was the same age as Kevin and me. She’d had a hard life and she wanted a new beginning and why would she screw it up so royally if she could help it? Who would do something like that?
If we could find her, we could talk to her. Find out what happened and make it right. Maybe I wouldn’t need to know everything. Maybe I could skate by on the training I already had.
“She came to me for help, Malek.”
So help her. Kill her. If she’s as innocent as you think she is, she’ll thank you.
“No.”
Malek sighed. If you want my help—and you’re going to need it, make no mistake—you’ll do it. And you’ll swear to do it.
Kevin looked at me. “He’s serious?”
From the look on Malek’s face? “Deadly.”
I couldn’t promise to kill Melody. I wouldn’t. But if things did go bad for any reason, we might need Malek’s help. If I didn’t agree to his terms now, we might be kissing our asses goodbye, much less any chance of fixing this horrible mess.
“Here’s my counteroffer,” I said. “I’ll swear to do justice.”
Malek studied me. Whatever that turns out to be?
“Yes.”
He reached out a hand for me to shake. I took it. Felt a pinprick of pain. Pulled back my hand to see a tiny red dot in the center of my palm.
My blood. “You cut me? Asshole.”
It’s called a blood oath. Don’t try to weasel out.
“And now you’re calling me a liar?”
I don’t know yet. I don’t know you, introductions from Oscar aside. I trust actions, not words. Show me who you are.
If the dude wasn’t a god, I’d have punched him in the face.
Don’t try to back out of your promise. The consequences will be severe. Now get to work.
Kevin started to say something. I gave him my best shut up right the hell now look. He snapped his mouth closed.
Malek herded us out and bolted the door behind us. A breeze brought us the stench of the dumpster around the corner. The sun had finished rising while we’d been inside. It lit all the post-apocalyptic ugliness of the street with its strong glow. The leather bar, where the tunes still played. The abandoned cars I’d pushed to the sides of the street or slalomed around. The wind rolled a bottle at the foot of the curb.
I could’ve sworn that bottle had been cupped in the hand of the passed-out drunk on the sidewalk. I turned to look. The passed-out drunk was gone. I had an immediate bad feeling about that.
“What the fuck?” Kevin asked. “Some friend of a friend.”
“I may have exaggerated.”
“You think?”
I filled him in about Malek. What he was. How he’d ended up tongue-tied. And the rest? No way to sugar coat it. “Look, dude, the last person to double-cross the guy ended up beaten to death in an alley. And the time before that, some dude tried to save his dying girlfriend’s life by knocking Malek out and draining some of his blood so the girl could drink it. I mean, a god’s blood, right? Powerful stuff. The girl died screaming before she bled out through her eyes and ears and mouth, and Malek killed the boyfriend.”
“Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar.” Kevin’s face had gone three shades paler than usual.
“Right? So I came here because of Melody,” I said. “Because of the ink on her back. Not because Malek is my buddy.”
Kevin thought about that. “There’s a lot about your life I don’t know.”
“I didn’t think you’d want to. Bad enough what you’re stuck with. Besides, a mess like this one is rare. At least as far as I know.”
“Thank God.”
“I really agree.”
“So. Tell me something. How’re you supposed to get justice, Rude?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“How justice works. If I dish it out, I have to take mine, too. If I’m dirty, that could be bad. That’s what worries me there.”
“You’re not, though. Bad.”
I wasn’t stupid—not about this. At least I hoped not. It was entirely possible I’d done something wrong enough to get me in trouble without even knowing it. Or that I did it and then pushed it out of my mind. I was basically a good person. I wanted to be. And that made selective memory pretty attractive. I’d learned that from Oscar. Even if he’d disappeared from the scene, and even if Malek seemed to think I’d received a battlefield promotion to full seer, I was still Oscar’s student. Lessons mattered.
“Time will tell,” I said.
Kevin grimaced. He slipped his T-shirt on, and his jacket.
“It’s too hot for that,” I said.
“I can deal with it—the whole wings thing,” he said. “Okay, maybe I can’t exactly deal, but I know Amy won’t be able to, and I don’t want her to see me that way until I have a chance to explain first.”
“What are you planning to tell her?”
“I’ll think of something.”
“There has to be a reason why it happened,” I said. “Where’s your bike? You rode from downtown, right?”
He pointed to the closest sign post. NO PARKING THIS SIDE OF THE STREET MON. THROUGH FRI. 6:00 AM TO 6:00 PM. He’d chained his bike to it. I opened the back of the Explorer while he unlocked it. It fit just fine without me having to lay down the rear seats.
Zach didn’t appreciate being pushed to the back seat. He leaned forward far enough to rest his head on my shoulder while I started the car.
Kevin buckled his seat belt and waited for me to pull away. And waited. “What’s up?”
“I’m thinking about your wings. My eyes. My parents.” I told him about the way they slept. “I mean, it makes a weird kind of sense.”
“In what insane way?”
“You’re the liaison between the human and faery realms, dude. You have faery wings, but you’re not a faery. You’re still you.”
“Human. I don’t feel entirely human.”
“A hybrid, maybe?”
“You’re kidding? You’re saying that I look like what I do?”
“No, not what you do. What you are, dude.”
He drummed his fingers on the armrest. “And your eyes?”
“I’m a faery seer apprentice. I see things that would put other people in a straightjacket. Dark things. My parents are the opposite. They
don’t see anything at all, at least not about me. It’s like I’m not even there half the time. Maybe the part of them that should be, you know, parents, is asleep.”
“That’s some theory.”
“It’s what we’ve got. Unless you can think of a better explanation.”
He mulled that for a minute. “I got nothing.”
“Let me know if you get any ideas.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Amy’s house. Then we get a hold of everyone else. We have to get the gang together. Make sure everybody’s all right. Scott. Stacy. Mr. Nance.”
Kevin’s entirely normal buddy, our resident Witch, and the Singer’s father, who happened to be the school counselor. “Plus your dad.”
“Shit.” He pulled out his phone.
“Won’t work.”
He tried anyway. Then he pitched the phone into the change tray below the dash.
“We could split up,” he said. “Cover more ground.”
Tempting. But when I imagined us going our separate ways to save time, I felt like I could throw up. Seer’s intuition again. “No. That gives me big, bad heebie-jeebies, like it has ‘disaster’ written all over it.”
He met my gaze. Studied my face. “Okay, but we have to hurry.”
“Agreed. Amy’s—you worried about what we’re gonna find there?”
“I’m worried about what we’re gonna find everywhere. I’m trying not to.”
Me, too. Not very successfully. I prayed everyone would be okay. That they’d be there. And be normal.
If Amy hadn’t gone poof like what appeared to have happened to most of the people in the city, she might not be the Amy we knew when we found her. She was a normal girl, except she dated Kevin, and she spent a lot of her time with me, and we were not exactly normal.
She never really felt she belonged. Kind of like Melody.
CHAPTER FOUR
Amy’s house sat quiet—too quiet—on a corner lot on the other side of the freeway from where Kev and I lived. The downstairs windows, dark and blank like dead eyes. One light on upstairs. And one light on in the attic. Tall pines in the front yard drank in the sunlight. A couple of squirrels foraged in their shadows.
Demon (The Faery Chronicles Book 2) Page 4