Bone Hunter

by Thea Atkinson

  "You want to know what he's after?" she said. "His lover's soul, that's what."

  She looped her arm around Fayed's back and I realized that it was that contact that was allowing Fayed to resume his composure. Maybe he needed to know she was okay.

  Maddox still glared at her with a smoking gaze, but he kept his distance.

  "And what does that have to do with the Morrigan?" he said.

  She let go a nasty laugh. "You'll have to ask him," she said. "But be sure to wear asbestos underwear because you're going to have to go to hell to find him."

  CHAPTER 24

  It took another shot of Rot Gut for my nerves to calm enough for me to settle back down at the bar while the creatures I was keeping company with circled each other metaphorically. I watched the showdown with trepidation, imagining that as Fayed exerted whatever influence he had over Ismé, she would eventually feed us the information we needed. Maddox, on the other hand, did not make that transition easy or gentle. He glowered at them as Fayed cornered Ismé at the other end of the bar.

  Whatever they were arguing over, it was making the hairs rise on my arms. I reached for the shot glass again, and was about to pour another drink when Maddox, whom I hadn't heard come near, laid his palm down over the back of my hand.

  I gave him a sidelong look and he shook his head at me.

  "She's thirsty," he said.

  After the showdown between the three of them, with me, a vulnerable human in the wake, I was no longer feeling the least bit tipsy.

  I wanted to remedy that right away. I pulled my hand out from beneath his.

  "So?" I said. "Me too."

  "Really thirsty," he said with a meaningful look.

  I glanced at Ismé who was staring at me as she argued with Fayed. I noticed for the first time that the flat of his palm was square in the middle of her chest.

  My stomach sunk as realization set in. "You mean?"

  Maddox nodded. "He's telling her you're off limits."

  "Oh my God."

  "Has nothing to do with it, I'm afraid," he said. "She's bargaining with him. She'll tell us what we want to know in exchange for a sip."

  I felt dizzy. "A sip."

  He nodded and glanced at the door. "Sun will be up soon, so he better get her under control quick."

  I noted he was scoping out the room with a scowl on his face. I took it to mean we wouldn't have another chance to get the information out of her.

  In for a penny, in for a pound, I supposed. I wasn't all too keen on being Ismé's first blood hors d'oeuvres, but I didn't think I could live with being the kind of person who would leave a teenager, even a hobbled god, to the mercies of an unknown vampire.

  Besides, I didn't even have my cat. She was lost to the fae warlord's realm, and who knew if he was feeding her or was just letting her roam my shadow apartment alone, aloof, and starving?

  All of which told me I'd made the decision already. It was really all over except the doing.

  And since the doing has never been the hard part for me, I took a deep breath and pushed back against the stool.

  First step in a journey and all that.

  I rolled up my sleeves and pushed off the stool. "Then let's get it done," I said.

  He hooked my elbow from behind. "Are you sure?" he said.

  I shrugged. I wasn't sure, no; but I knew there was no one else to do this thing. We needed Ismé's information, and I was the only human in the room.

  "Could you live with leaving Kassie to the fates?" I asked.

  His brow quirked comically. "Technically, she is the fates," he said. "And technically, I've lived through much worse. But that doesn't mean I'd want to live with myself if something happened to her."

  "Me either," I said. I gave Ismé a lingering study, remembering Fayed's triple-fanged toothline. It wouldn't be pleasant, I knew, and I wondered exactly how much it would hurt.

  I must have shivered because Maddox laid his arm over my shoulder protectively.

  "I won't let her take too much," he whispered against my earlobe. "Just enough to get her through her first day of sleep."

  I nodded mutely. I wished I could speak but for some reason, my throat felt all clogged up.

  "Don't offer her your throat," he warned. "Just the arm."

  "Okay." That came out alright, if a bit congested. I hoped I sounded brave.

  I wasn't sure what the difference was except that one felt more intimate than the other. I imagined both would hurt and wasn't looking forward to either.

  It didn't matter in the end. Fayed took the choice away from me when I told him what I planned to do.

  "The arm," he said to Ismé, who nodded with an eager gleam in her eye.

  Fayed glanced over his shoulder anxiously toward the back door.

  "We don't have much time," he said, and I thought he meant I needed to hurry, so I thrust my arm beneath Ismé's nose because if a vampire says there's not much longer, I was willing to believe it.

  "They're coming to roost," he said with a tinge of dread in his voice.

  Even as Ismé's gaze tracked along my exposed forearm, a sound rattled the back-room door. Raucous noises like a crowd of teenagers coming home after a long night of illegal drinking pounded toward us. I shifted my gaze for one second, the same moment that Fayed and Maddox did.

  And it was a second I knew I would regret.

  Ismé grabbed me so suddenly I was yanked nearly off my feet and it was only when she buried her face in my neck that I realized Fayed was not worried about sunrise at all. He was worried about the half dozen vampires who stormed the bar from the back door while we were still inside. He wasn't sure he could hold them back.

  It didn't matter. It was too late for me to consider anything but the pain that streaked down my throat to my collarbone. I couldn't help crying out. I bowed over backwards under the force of her bite.

  My entire body became a vacuum where all points of entry and exit were the same burning wounds in my neck. I felt her suction from the soles of my feet and I had the sensation that if I remained connected to her long enough that my skin would shrivel to fibrous husks and I'd be nothing but a shucked-out husk of flesh.

  I heard nothing but the beating of my heart, doubled up with an echo of one other distant rhythm that grew in intensity for each pulse of the muscle. Hers, I realized, climbing from a slow and frozen pulse to one that was hot with renewed force. I was filling her, I knew. Driving the beating of her heart with the electrical impulses of my own, the metallic element in my blood sparking it into movement.

  The pain never ceased. Each pull was agony and I felt caught in a frozen scream that made no sound except in my own mind.

  And then the screaming stopped.

  There was a still, quiet space like the eye of a hurricane and I knew Ismé in ways I couldn't know without the blood bond.

  I saw her with a lover, a mulatto woman of breathtaking beauty, who had called to her soul from the depths of some other world where she lay in wait. She'd been dead already, at least three times, and in this one she shared the body she was in with another soul. Body thief, my mind whispered.

  The spectre of my own psyche wound around hers and I could hear her laughter in the recesses of oblivion. Every time Ismé pulled in another draught of my blood, I saw more. I felt more. I knew her more.

  She'd been a hell tracker, caught and kept by a seethe of vampires. She'd stolen for them, making their cult one of the most powerful. She tracked the most hideous and powerful of the supernaturals and caged them for her masters.

  And who were those masters but the acolytes of Apollo.

  Selene. A name pulsed with my heartbeat, echoing in my mind as though Ismé had spoken it directly into my mind. The original acolyte, the favorite of Apollo.

  See her, Ismé whispered. Know her. She is the reason Gio is on your lips. She was his lover. The one who lost her soul because he stole her from Apollo and now every vampire is seeded in that bond that pits twin gods against one another.
<
br />   I understood. Ismé was fulfilling her part of the bargain with each pull of my blood. But there was more. She hated the seethe. She wanted her vengeance and her immortality. She was delivering the information she had in the best way she could, and I knew that the throat was so much closer to the mind and heart than the arm. The energy center, the chakra, just inches away.

  Two souls lost to Hades. A curse that made of two lovers the first two vampires, taking their souls and gifting them to Lucifer.

  Lost to a dark angel who loves his trophies as much as he loves himself.

  And that was where Kassie was. Used by the male as a trophy to barter for the soul of the woman he loved still after all these eons.

  I grasped it all in those seconds. How Ismé had found a way out of her own exile to Hades by offering a deal he couldn't refuse: the Morrigan.

  She was the reason Kassie was in danger. She had baited Gio into abducting her and using her to barter Kassie for his lover's soul.

  I groaned beneath the realization. Ismé had baited this Gio until he'd captured Kassie at the blood gate, using her bond to help me escape.

  While she was vulnerable.

  And now her spectre was trying to make it right, trying to reclaim the missing parts and was drawn to the only person on Earth that still shared a blood bond.

  Me.

  Then the pain of suction became nothing but the burning ache of a raw wound. Warm fluid ran a trackline down to my collarbone.

  And the chaos around me swam into my consciousness like light flooding a dark room.

  Maddox, my mind whispered. He had pulled me from the vampire's bite. The suction was gone, and he was gripping me by the waist and pushing me behind him. Yelling at me to wake up. I blinked, trying to bring the room into focus. Nothing but a blur of russet hair met my gaze at first, then that full mouth of his came into view the way a magnifying glass makes things look crisp.

  "Get out of here," he said.

  Dumbfounded and stupid, I clung to him. I needed to tell him what I knew. I needed him to make Ismé pay for what she'd done. The suit jacket felt slick and wet in my grip. I swung my gaze to where my fingers still clutched the material. Blood. That's what was making the jacket wet.

  My blood.

  "Isabella," he said again, and I met his gaze. It was insistent.

  "Go," he said.

  And then I realized the chaos had erupted because Maddox was holding Ismé up in the air the way he'd done to Alvin. She dangled in his grip, limp but aware.

  Next to him, Fayed was holding back the other vampires who had sensed their landlord wasn't quite himself and that there was a human in the room good for the taking. The stickiness of my blood made my throat tacky when I tried to wipe it clear.

  One of the vampires lunged for me.

  I stumbled backward, falling over a chair and spilling onto my hands and knees before I scrambled for the door.

  "I'll meet you," Maddox shouted at me, and from above him Ismé laughed.

  I ran for the door, with that laughter following me.

  I ran for home. The cabbie didn't look twice at my bleeding neck, just took his cash and dropped me outside my brownstone. I paid him and ran up the steps.

  Except in my haste, I'd forgotten why I'd left my house in the first place.

  And I remembered it all with sudden clarity when Scottie, who was standing at my sink, swung on his heel to find me standing in the doorway.

  "Sis," he said. "You're finally home."

  CHAPTER 25

  Scottie Lebans could freeze anyone in their tracks. He was heart-stoppingly handsome still, if a little chunky, the hard bands of unused muscle softening his torso. Women of all ages gawked at him, leaving their dates, their husbands, their kids in tow to pull at their sleeves to remind them of a sense of propriety.

  Men might quake at his girth and muscled arms or knock knuckles in some macho ritual of acknowledgment.

  But that wasn't all of Scottie. People genuinely liked him even if there was always a sense of threat emanating from him in waves. And for me, that was the worst of it; those who would lay down their bodies in service to a man they genuinely liked made the man himself all the more dangerous.

  He'd paralyzed me with fear many times, and just as many sent me on a tear at full speed.

  This time, he froze me at the door with his cozy sounding, I've-missed-you tone. Not one word about how he expected me to look beaten and bruised by his thug's hands. No apologies for sending the brute to my apartment in the first place.

  I looked past him to my counter, half expecting the cat to be purring there but of course she wasn't. Only leftover plates I'd not dried and the stem of a broken glass left by Colin on the counter. Otherwise, my apartment looked much like it had when I'd fled. Socks still littered the floor. A jacket was slung over the back of a chair.

  My hand on the knob spasmed as it tried to decide whether to yank the door open and send me running headlong down the steps again or find something to throw at him.

  "Scottie," I said and was pleased to hear I'd somehow managed to match his cozy tone. Must have been all the other terrifying things I'd faced in the last twenty-four hours.

  I swung the door closed with a finesse I was surprised to show.

  "You're bleeding," he said and strolled across the tiled floor of the kitchen to meet me halfway.

  He ran the back of his fingers along my throat, tilting my head to the side so he could inspect what he no doubt still thought of as his property.

  Something bit you," he said. Study done, he gripped my chin between his fingers. His gaze tracked along the line of my forehead and to the other side of my neck.

  "If that's all Alvin did to you, he wasn't worth his pay," he said.

  He spit into his palm and rubbed at the blood. I winced at his touch.

  "Bruised too," he said. "And yet that can't be enough to make you look so exhausted."

  I nodded. I felt like a sack of dough that had risen and fallen too many times.

  "It's been a rough night," I said.

  He made a murmuring sound deep in his throat as he peered at me.

  "Where have you been?" he said, as though the rough night was his to sanction.

  I wrenched my chin from his grip and twisted out of his reach.

  "None of your business," I said.

  I aimed for the sofa because now that I thought about it, I did feel kind of weak. I didn't know how much blood Ismé had drained from me. Back in the bar it had felt like an eternity, but I know Maddox wouldn't have let it go on too long.

  I guessed seconds, but even that seemed too long now.

  Scottie followed me to the sofa and surprised me by lifting my feet up to rest along the length of it. He pulled a cushion from the chair and slipped it beneath my legs. He put his palm on my forehead.

  "No fever," he said.

  I eyed him from my reclined position, wary, wondering what he was up to.

  "Rest," he said. "I won't be much longer."

  "Much longer?" I said. I tried to see past him, but he filled up my vision as he leaned over me.

  "I've packed the lingerie," he said. "At least the nicer stuff, but I'm leaving the ratty night shirt and jeans. The rubber soled shoes can come with us, of course, and the stealth outfits, but the rest we're leaving."

  I sat bolt upright.

  "You're packing me?"

  "Packed," he said. "It's already gone. But that's not what we're waiting for."

  The dizziness from the bloodletting aside, my stomach clenched into a dozen knots. I swallowed down hard, trying to decide whether or not I should ask.

  "You have to be punished, Sis," he said softly, almost apologetically. "And not just for Alvin."

  "Alvin is a brute," I said.

  He nodded. "Alvin was a brute. It's what I paid him for. Of course, he won't be getting another paycheck, will he?"

  I chewed my lip, waiting for the sweetness to abate because it always did.

  "Where is your lov
er?" he said.

  "My lover?"

  "Yes," he said. "I know you didn't do that to Alvin. But somebody did. And you're going to tell me where he is."

  With that, he extracted a switchblade from his pocket and flashed it within my eyesight.

  My eye caught on the edge as the light caught it and it winked at me. I knew he wouldn't be showing me a blade unless he intended to use it. He didn't make casual threats. Maybe I could talk my way out of it, but I still had to make it all the way across the living room to the front door without him getting hold of me.

  That wasn't going to happen, but it didn't mean I couldn't try.

  I tried to roll off the couch, but he laid a palm on my chest, pinning me flat.

  "You are going to lie there until I decide you can get up. Do you hear me?"

  I nodded and tried not to look too terrified. He would love that. But I wasn't foolish enough to think that my fear would mollify him.

  He ran the knife up the hem of my shirt. The sizzling sound of it rending the material reminded me of the sound of my cat purring at the end of my bed and I wished suddenly that I had been more indulgent of her when Colin had been here. I wondered how many other things I would be regretting in the next few minutes.

  He spread the flaps of it wide, baring my bra and skin. He stared at my navel.

  "You're trembling, Sis," he said.

  He hovered his free hand a hair's breadth over my skin and I could feel the heat of his palm.

  He caught my eye with his.

  "I had a lot of time to think while I waited for the police to realize I didn't steal that coin. You had a ginger with you at the museum. Big guy."

  He slipped the tip of the blade into my navel and the point of it skewered me deep within. One breath too deep, and it would pierce the skin.

  "The ginger was tall," He went on. "But I doubt he could have done that to Alvin alone. Alvin was a big boy. A real warrior, but in the end, he was a mess. Three broken ribs, so my doctor said. Hemorrhaged out his left eye."

  I swallowed down a rush of bile as I remembered it all. That had been me until Maddox had made his mojo on me. I still wasn't clear how he'd done it, but having the injuries listed out like that took away anyway residual distaste I felt for Maddox and left just a healthy respect.