by Jenn Bennett
It made sense. Æthyric demons couldn’t stick around on this plane for long without a host.
“I will hunt down news of your mother,” he said, and quickly jumped to his feet.
I followed. “Wait! What about our link? Can you reestablish it?” I could call him using this ritual again, I supposed, but it was much easier—and less vomit-causing—to be able to use the homing sigil on my arm.
Strong, indefinable emotion slackened his facial features. Then he said in a low voice, “It would be my greatest honor.” He held out his hand, requesting mine. “We can do this directly now,” he said, noticing my hesitation. A wave of crackling energy made his neck muscles strain.
We didn’t have much time. I nodded my head quickly and gave him my hand.
Foreign and lush, Æthyric words tumbled from his lips in a low chant as he held his palm over mine. This certainly was a lot more direct than the gigantic Heka burst I had to send through the planes to link us the first time around. After a few moments, a nebulous cloud of sooty black light floated out between our palms—a light that matched his halo. I felt a sharp pinch. He made a noise, then things felt . . . different between us. I felt the link.
I pulled my hand away, half expecting it to be marked somehow. But it wasn’t mine that was marked, it was his: my personal sigil, black as ink, was etched into his palm. A whisper-thin spider web line floated from my palm and his.
That was new, too.
I ran my other hand between, and it went through the line as if it were a laser beam. Not solid. Just like the line that had connected me to Jupe’s tattoo when he was in trouble.
Priya grabbed my hand and peered down at it. “There is another link here,” he said, startled. “You have another servant?” He said it like I was cheating on him.
“It’s someone under my protection. A demon child.”
Priya’s face lifted. “Ah. I understand now.” His body crackled again, and this time he almost completely disappeared. “I must leave. I will come to you when I have information. I will not fail you again.”
“You didn’t fail me.” For the love of Pete.
Black wings snapped open to reveal an impressive span. Rather intimidating. Not an everyday sight, that’s for damn sure. Holding his marked hand over his stomach, he canted his head, then gave me another smile before both he and the black line connecting us disappeared completely.
And before I could process everything that just happened, my phone chimed inside my jeans pocket. I looked at the screen.
MSG FROM JUPE, 3:05 AM: DAD SAID YOU HAD EMERGENCY AT KAR YEE’S. ARE YOU BOTH OK? TELL HER I SAID HI. NEXT TIME YOU SHOULD TAKE ME WITH YOU. I CAN SLEEP ON HER COUCH.
Dammit. Lon managed to remove the blame from the whole “you leave or I leave” situation. That was . . . the right thing to do. And he went against his big honesty-or-death policy, telling a little white lie to make the peace. Just like that, I felt tender and weepy again. I sent Jupe a response.
SENT 3:05 AM: EVERYTHING OK. WHY R YOU STILL AWAKE?
MSG FROM JUPE, 3:06 AM: I FELL ASLEEP AND WOKE BACK UP. HEY, GRAMMA IS TAKING US ALL OUT TO EAT TOMORROW NIGHT SO BE SURE TO GET BACK HOME BY 5 EXACTLY. SHE’S A FREAK-A-DEAK ABOUT BEING ON TIME BUT I WON’T LET HER LEAVE WITHOUT U.
SENT 3:06 AM: PROMISE TO BE ON TIME. NOW GO TO BED, MOTORMOUTH.
MSG FROM JUPE, 3:06 AM: GOING! G’NIGHT!!! <3 YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
Heart you, too, kid.
That wasn’t the only text I received. Before I went to sleep, Lon let me know that he’d found Noel Saint-Hill’s address—which was good, because Bob’s online search was fruitless. Lon volunteered to pick me up at Kar Yee’s the next day so we could check it out. I told him not to bring his gun. He told me I was awfully bossy.
Around noon, I got ready to meet him. I was worried the T-shirt I’d packed was too casual for Rose’s dinner plans, so I dressed in jeans and one of Kar Yee’s tops, a long sleeve striped blouse that cost a small fortune. It was sort of tight around my chest, but Kar Yee was a couple of sizes smaller. Normally she wouldn’t let me borrow clothes—no way, no how. But at the moment she was too hopped up on Bob’s happy pills to care.
I took the elevator down and stood outside the stoop of her building, scanning my surroundings. No dark sedan across the street, and no dark figure slinking in the shadows. No shadows at all, actually. It was one of those sunny days in California where the sky is so clear and big, it makes everything around you seem a little less crowded. I lifted my face up, soaking in rays and wishing the temperature was just a few degrees warmer as traffic whizzed by on Kar Yee’s street. After a couple of minutes, a luxury SUV slowed to a stop in front of me. The dark-tinted driver’s window lowered. A gorgeous Earthbound with a gold-flaked green halo and a dead-sexy smile draped his arm out the window.
“Need a ride, little girl?”
“Depends,” I said, stepping up to the car. “Where you going?”
His lazy gaze slid down my body. “Probably to hell. Wanna come?”
Why, yes—yes I did. And I was certain he could hear the zing of desire that went through me. “Sorry, my boyfriend doesn’t like sharing.”
“Is that so?”
“Besides, aren’t you kind of old for me? I’m not sure you could handle all this.”
“I have a feeling I could.” A breeze from his open sunroof lifted strands of golden brown hair. Good God, he was hot. Just beautiful, all golden and rugged, with those deep crescent hollows in his cheeks and his perpetually narrowed eyes. “And I don’t think I need permission to take what’s already mine.”
Goose bumps blossomed over my arms. “Did you miss me last night?”
“Get in the car.”
“In the front or back?”
He seemed to consider that for a moment as his gaze dropped to my breasts. They immediately felt swollen and overripe under his perusal. If he didn’t stop looking at me like that, I might bust a few seams in my borrowed top.
Then he said, “My seat goes all the way down.”
“What a coincidence. So do I.”
“Get in the car, Cady.” Oh, he was mad now. Not mad-mad, but impatient-mad, like he gets when I tease him too much.
I stood on tiptoes and leaned through the window to kiss him. It was just going to be a peck, but he tasted like the cinnamon gum he always chews, and I really did miss spending the night with him. Before I knew it, he was urging my lips apart—or maybe I was doing the urging, hard to tell—and his tongue was hot in my mouth, and I pretty much melted on the spot.
I didn’t care that pedestrians were doing double-takes as they strolled past on the sidewalk. I was ready to pull him through the window. But just when it started to get good, Lon pulled away. I moaned a complaint.
“That’s all you get,” he said, grasping my chin firmly with one hand. His voice was all deep and rough. “You think about it tonight when you’re trying to decide whether you want to sleep in your own bed or play nursemaid to Kar Yee.”
“No one at Kar Yee’s place is demanding I leave on account of my whorishness.”
“I like your whorishness. And that’s all taken care of. Situation fixed.”
I stared at him for a moment, waiting for him to tell me how. Did he have a talk with her? What was his idea of “fixed,” exactly? Probably not the same as mine. If she hated me even more now, I was going to be pissed at him. “What did you do?”
“Nothing you need to know about.”
“Try again.”
He sighed. “I had a little talk with her. Gave her some information that changed her mind. End of story.”
“What information? You didn’t use your transmutated knack on her, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Magick?”
“No magick. Can we drop it? I’ll tell you in good time.”
“Why not now?”
“Cady,” he pleaded.
“I know, I know. Get in the car.” He clearly wasn’t ready to share, so I dropped the subje
ct for the time being and headed around the SUV to hop inside. He was wearing a jacket I loved, a fitted, softer-than-butter hazel-colored leather deal that was almost more green than brown in the sunlight. I could make out every bump and dip of arm muscle. The inside of the car was warm, the breeze from the sunroof cool. He turned down Thin Lizzy on the radio and offered me some valrivia, which I waved away.
“How is she?” he asked as he pulled out into traffic.
“Kar Yee? Much better. Bob’s healed her bones three times now. He says the brace can come off and she can do non-strenuous stuff, like actually leave her apartment. I think he’s going to try to take her somewhere today. He’s up there arguing with her now.”
“Bob spent the night?”
“Yeah, in a chair next to her bed. But after sleeping on her couch, I understand why. I’ve got a massive crick in my neck. Then again, that could be from my rooftop adventures. Guess what I did?”
He looked askance at me through squinty eyes. “Does it have to do with the paring knife you stole?”
“I can’t steal what’s already mine,” I said.
That got a slow smile out of him.
I sighed and gave him the lowdown about Priya, leaving out the whole first thing I remembered was your face remark. Having no experience dealing with a Hermeneus spirit, Lon wouldn’t understand their desire to serve. Even so, his reaction was less happy, more alarmed than I expected.
“Are you certain it was Priya and not some sort of demonic trickery?”
“Pretty positive.”
“I wish I could’ve been there to hear his emotions.”
“Maybe you can meet him when he reports back.”
Lon didn’t comment.
• • •
Noel Saint-Hill’s address was a half hour drive from Kar Yee’s place. The neighborhood was Richie Rich. Brand-new McMansions were squeezed into tiny plots of land between older homes. I hated when people did that—bought a house for the location and tore it down to build something that didn’t fit the neighborhood. What kind of person needs six bedrooms, a home gym, and a three-car garage? Apparently the Saint-Hills, as their four-story home was one of the new ones.
And it was surround by two police cars and an ambulance.
A crowd of onlookers was gathered on the front lawn of the neighboring house, and when Lon slowed the car, I saw why.
A sky-blue restored vintage car with a Road Runner logo on the trunk and a dragon sticker on the bumper was sitting askew across the shallow driveway. A bloody body lay on the cement beneath it, crushed under its rear left wheel.
Lon parked farther down the street, away from the cop cars. We trotted over to the crowd as a police tow truck was pulling up. Two officers were talking to the driver, and another officer was holding the crowd back. Lon pushed his way to the front of the crowd, tugging me along. And from where we stood, we got a pretty good view—or bad, considering.
The body was quite literally crushed. The wheel sat on what was once a chest. Bone and flesh spread out beneath it, looking like something that should be in a butcher’s shop. Bright red blood pooled around the carnage, seeping into the driveway. My stomach lurched. Then I spotted the lock of blond hair. I craned my neck to peer around the wheel.
It was Noel Saint-Hill.
I grabbed Lon’s jacket sleeve.
“What happened?” Lon asked a middle-aged man nearby. Another Earthbound.
He hesitated for a moment, looking at Lon’s gilded halo, while a woman who could’ve been his wife spoke up. “It wasn’t an accident. People are saying that it was a hit and run, but they’re wrong. I saw the car lift off the ground. Saw it through my living room window.”
“Brenda,” the man said warningly. “It’s none of our business.”
“Look at the grass,” she said, ignoring him. “No tire tracks. If someone drove the car up on the lawn like that and hit him, there’d be tire marks. That car was dropped on top of him.”
The cop handling the crowd was calling for witnesses and telling everyone else to go home. Brenda’s husband dragged her away, telling her to stay out of things. I wanted to talk to her, to ask her more about what she saw, but her husband was quick and the crowd was shifting.
Lon pulled me aside to the edge of the throng and spoke in a low, agitated voice near my ear. “You know damn well what happened, don’t you? Remember the safe in Diablo Market?”
I did. Nearly lifted through the counter by the other robber, the telekinetic kid who floated Tambuku’s register through the air. “A safe is a hell of a lot smaller than a car.”
“Maybe his knack got a little stronger.”
“Shit. You think that Brenda woman saw the telekinetic kid do it?”
Lon swiped a thumb over one side of his mustache. “Don’t know, but Brenda is an Earthbound.” He glanced over his shoulder. “The police aren’t. And based on what I heard of her husband’s feelings, he’s worried the cops might overhear his busybody wife telling a ‘crazy,’ unexplainable story about a boy lifting a car with his knack.”
And if the boy was deranged enough to kill his own friend, what else was he capable of?
“We need to talk to her . . . without her husband,” I said.
Lon nodded. We marched around the crowd. Lon’s healthy six-foot frame gave him a better view. After a few seconds of shuffling, he spotted them striding across the street. We trailed them, hoofing it to catch up. “You distract him,” I told Lon, then shouted the woman’s name. They both turned around. “Can I ask you one more thing?”
Her face lifted, as if she was more than happy to talk, then her husband said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it annoyed her. Lon stepped up immediately, asking the man for directions to the civic center. As soon as the husband began spouting off streets and pointing, I pulled Brenda aside.
“I know this sounds weird, but I think I’ve seen a kid who has a knack strong enough to lift that car,” I said conspiratorially. “He was buddies with Noel. Dark hair—”
“Telly,” she confirmed, nodding her head quickly. “I don’t know his real name, but that’s what Noel called him.” Telly was a common nickname for Earthbounds with telekinetic knacks. I heard it around the bar all the time. “That boy’s been hanging around here a lot over the past few months, showing off, lifting things in the driveway where anyone could see him. Humans live on this block, too,” she complained. Yep, biggest gripe that older Earthbounds had against the younger generation, just like Andrew, the owner of Diablo Market. Don’t show off your knack around humans: it only leads to trouble.
“Did you see him lift the car?” I asked.
“No. It all happened so fast. I saw it in the air, then the crash shook the floor in my house. But I thought I saw someone running. I wouldn’t put it past Telly do something like this. That kid is bad news.” She leaned closer and spoke in a lower voice. “A couple of months ago, someone broke into Noel’s school and stole computers, money from the cafeteria registers. Wrecked the principal’s office and the teacher’s lounge. Did over a hundred thousand dollars in damage.”
Jesus. I remembered hearing about that in the news. “They never arrested anyone, but someone hacked into the school’s security system. Deleted school files.”
“That had to be Telly. Noel’s bragged about Telly’s computer hacking skills. Noel’s mother grounded him a few weeks ago for stealing credit card numbers and using them to buy things online. Noel said it was Telly’s idea. At least, that’s the rumor around the neighborhood.”
“Any idea how his knack is able to do something like that?” I said, nodding to the gruesome scene across the street. “I’ve never known a telekenetic to be able to lift that much weight.”
She shook her head. “No telling with that kid.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“He doesn’t live in town,” she said. “He’s from the suburbs, or somewhere on the coast. La Sirena, maybe.”
Damn. Finding a telekenetic teenage Earthb
ound in La Sirena . . . well, needle in haystack, and all that. But maybe Brenda saw the disappointment in my face, because she quickly added, “Wherever he lives, he spends a lot of time hanging out under the railroad bridge at the end of Monterrey Street with some other delinquents. I called the cops on them once to chase them out, but they all came back after a few days.”
“Brenda!” Her husband was Mr. Frowny Face again. If Lon shushed me like that all the time, I’d have to tell him where to stick it. Thank God for Lon’s quiet, laid-back ways and his ability to keep the husband occupied long enough for me to get what I needed.
Turning back to Brenda, I mouthed a thank-you right before her testy husband escorted her away. Monterrey Street. Didn’t know where that was, but GPS could find it. I started to tell Lon all about my discovery and suggest we try our luck hunting Telly when a car pulled up, brakes squealing. A blonde Earthbound jumped out. Police tried to stop her from running onto the crime scene.
“This is my house!” she yelled. And when she pushed the officer out of the way and saw the Road Runner, she made a horrible keening wail.
Lon grabbed my arm and tugged me from the chaos. “I can’t be here,” he said sharply as he marched me back to his parked car. It took me a few moments to realize from the pained look on his face that he was trying to disengage his knack. Sometimes when he’s steamrolled with a lot of strong emotions coming from too many people at once, he gets overwhelmed and has trouble tuning it all out. I could only imagine what he could hear right now—the confusion and anxiety of the crowd, the amped up intensity of the police, the mother’s grief. . . .
When we got back inside the SUV, he seemed to have put enough distance between his knack and the scene. “You okay?” I asked.
He shook his head and didn’t say anything more about it. Just started the engine and drove away.
Monterrey Street was a few blocks away, where the rich neighborhood petered off into middle-class, then suddenly connected to one of those sketchy, vaguely ominous pockets of the city that had been neglected for years. Lon slowed the SUV as I peered out my window, eyes following the old, disused railroad tracks that crept along the bridge in the distance. Couldn’t see much from here. It spanned what was once Monterrey Creek, according to GPS, but now looked like nothing more than a weed-infested ditch.