“No,” I hissed. “My house.”
Instead of punishing us, Marcia had let us go. I was sure she was tracking us, waiting for us to call the pack for help or race to the retreat. If we sought help, the pack would be implicated; I’d never be able to claim that I’d acted on my own initiative. Thanks to my failure, I’d put Sky, Josh, and the pack at risk. I’d cost her the Aufero, and I’d gotten my ass kicked by an old witch.
By the time we’d reached the house, most of the bleeding had stopped, but I’d lost a lot of blood. Sky insisted on helping me inside, and I didn’t argue.
“We need to work on your driving,” I muttered as we climbed the steps toward the door.
“A manual transmission is stupid.”
“It’s the only way to go.” She unlocked the door and helped me into a leather chair in the living room. My eyes traced the trail of my blood back to the door as Sky rummaged in the kitchen cabinets.
“My Civic has an automatic transmission and a cool little camera that keeps me from running into things,” she called back to me. “You would think that BMW would catch on.” She abandoned the kitchen to continue her search in the bathroom. Is she searching for a first aid kit? I chuckled. You could just ask.
She returned with the kit and knelt in front of me, prioritizing my wounds. “You sure you don’t want me to call Dr. Jeremy?”
“No.”
I grimaced as she helped me pull off my shirt, then my pants. Pain shot through me like a lightning bolt as she attempted to probe one of the wounds, feeling for remnants of glass. “Wait,” I gasped, gripping her shoulder. Closing my eyes, I took a pair of long, calming breaths to prepare myself, then nodded. “Okay.”
With each wound she probed, I held my breath and absorbed the pain until she moved on to the next. Fortunately, there were no remaining splinters. When she quit probing and began cleaning my wounds, I gave a sigh of relief.
“I should have given her the Aufero sooner,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.
“I didn’t expect you to choose me over it.”
She flinched, then silently carried on with cleaning my wounds.
I hadn’t meant it as a rebuke. She’d made the wrong decision, but I couldn’t fault her for saving me. It wasn’t the first time. “I would have given it to her, too,” I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
Her shoulders relaxed. “Well, I hope so,” she said with a hint of a smile. “Even you aren’t that big of a jerk.”
I glanced down at the job she’d done patching my wounds, then stood. A fresh stab of pain nearly sent me to the floor. I staggered, caught myself. Sky stood close, her arms extended to catch me while I took a breath, then straightened.
“She knows what you are,” I said. “She will likely approach you soon.”
“What would she want with a Moura?”
“Your connection to the Aufero is stronger than hers is. I am willing to bet she thinks she can use it and you to find the other protected objects. More specifically the Clostra. Believe me, if she ever gets a hold of it, we are done. The first spell she will use is the one to kill us.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “It’s getting late, and I’m tired.”
“I should at least stay until—”
I gave her a look that said I needed to be alone. She’d already witnessed my failure. She didn’t need to witness the overwhelming guilt, as well.
She nodded, gave me back my keys, and left.
If I’d had the strength to destroy every bit of furniture I owned, I would’ve. As it was, I could only stew in my anger.
CHAPTER 14
Once again I couldn’t sleep. My body ached from the lack of it. I’d developed some control over the dark elf magic, but the persistent, driving thrum of it in my body was a slow burn to my sympathetic nervous system. My failure at Marcia’s shop didn’t help. I hadn’t been thinking clearly. If I had, I would’ve questioned more about the symbol that protected the door to the back room. Most likely the symbol had been an alarm, and I’d just walked Sky right through it into a trap. She’d obtained the Aufero just long enough to surrender her rightful claim on it in order to save me. It had been a foolish and noble gesture.
The dark elf magic was affecting my work, making me distracted and careless. If I didn’t find a way to rid myself of it soon, I’d have to consider resigning my position as Beta. I couldn’t let my distraction put the pack at risk.
I’d just begun to drift into a shallow, brittle slumber when an alert on my nearby phone sent my heart racing. I leapt out of bed, anticipating an attack, to find only silent darkness. Slowly, I forced myself to relax and sat back down on the edge of the bed.
Dennis is no longer a threat, I reminded myself as I ran my hands down my cheeks. He was an illusion, a manifestation of Caroline’s mind magic, but my ravaged nervous system wouldn’t recognize sense. I also couldn’t be sure that she couldn’t manifest her magic in a more dangerous manner. How could I trust anything I saw or even felt? There is the dizziness, I reminded myself, the telltale sign that I was about to come under her influence.
Remembering the alert, I slid out of bed, crossed to my dresser, and picked up my phone to see a message from Stacy. I took the phone down to my kitchen, poured a double Scotch, drank half, then opened the attached document. She’d been busy.
The pack’s enemies often underestimated us. They focused on our physical prowess and our ability to resist magic while in animal form. The true strength of the pack was our resources. It didn’t matter how strong we were if we didn’t know what we were facing.
Taking a quick inventory of the pages, I found credit card transactions and cell phone activity reports that included GPS tracking obtained surreptitiously through a game application on Caroline’s phone. She probably had no idea the so-called free game was tracking her every move along with her phone and browser activity and selling the data to marketing companies. Stacy had highlighted a hold on Caroline’s credit card from a motel on the outskirts of the city. I recognized the address. The rest of the transactions were mostly restaurants and grocery stores, most of them close to the motel. The GPS data also indicated Caroline had made a series of trips to a somewhat secluded location a short distance outside the city. The next page was a search engine satellite view of what appeared to be a shack surrounded by woods.
After finishing my Scotch I poured another, then took it to my leather chair in the living room. I was debating my next move when I woke up with a start to a bright room, lit by sunlight shining through the windows. According to my phone, it was nearly eleven, but I still felt groggy and exhausted, as if I’d never slept.
Rising, I realized the glass of Scotch had spilled in my lap.
After a quick shower and a change of clothes, I decided to investigate Caroline’s mystery shack first. Following the GPS coordinates, I turned onto a narrow dirt road that meandered its way through the forest. After fifteen minutes, I found the shack just off a bend in the road. Without the coordinates, I doubt I would’ve noticed the unassuming structure shrouded by trees and brush. The shack had the appearance of misuse. The wood was old and rotting in places, and a broken window remained in disrepair.
Parking in the bend, I turned the engine off but left the keys in the ignition and the door open. For a moment, I stood there, smelling, listening, and watching first the surrounding forest, then the shack, until I was confident that I was alone.
The front steps groaned and bent beneath my weight. The unlocked door clicked, then creaked open. Using a flashlight from my pocket, I found the shack was little more than a large closet—shelves lining each of the walls—except for the wooden chair in the center of the floor. Attached to the arms and legs were thick metal bindings. Kneeling in front of the chair, I used the handle of the flashlight to lift one of the wrist cuffs to my nose and sniffed. Iron, but no silver. I let the cuff fall to clatter against the chair.
A quick search of the shelves revealed little; an old oil lamp, some old plates and
cups, cutlery, a few books, a private investigations magazine. This was Dennis’s place, I realized, though it seemed he hadn’t used it much for years. Someone had been there recently, however; there were fresh shoe prints in the dust on the floor, and the chair was clean as if recently placed.
I took close-up pictures of the chair and the room itself. Taking a business card from my wallet, I laid the card next to the foot shackles as a reference and took close-up pictures of the lock mechanism from several angles. Once finished, I walked outside, found a fallen bit of brush to scrape my tracks from the dirt, then drove off without turning around. Turning around would’ve been a quicker path out of the forest, but I couldn’t hide the tire tracks. As it was, Caroline would only notice that a vehicle had driven past the shack, an event that probably happened periodically.
An hour later, I parked across the street from her motel and settled in for a long surveillance. The light blue building was a typical L-shape, with two floors of rooms with gaudy pink doors, each facing the narrow parking lot. From my vantage point, there was no chance of Caroline coming or going without my noticing.
Only a half hour later, a second-floor door opened and she emerged wearing a white summer dress with a yellow floral pattern. Her expression was sober, her eyes vacant as if she were deep in thought as she got into a rental car. I noted the make, model, and license plate. Once she’d driven out of sight, I slid out of my BMW to cross the street. On my way up the stairs, I pulled on a pair of disposable gloves from my pocket.
At the door to her unit, I drew my lockpick set, made sure I wasn’t observed, then knelt at the door. A moment later, the lock clicked, the door opened, and I stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind me.
Sunlight bled easily through a sheer white curtain, revealing a small, narrow room largely occupied by a double bed neatly draped with a light blue comforter that matched the walls. The furniture was nondescript tan—a small round table at the window, a dresser beneath a flat-screen television bolted into the wall, and a nightstand that held a delicate cream lamp, an alarm clock, and a half-empty bottle of water. The carpet was dark blue, patterned with gold suns.
The drawer of the nightstand contained a small blank notepad and pen, and the obligatory bible. There was nothing beneath the bed, or under the mattress. In the dresser I found socks, underwear, pajamas, and a phone charger. The closet contained a handful of outfits carefully hung on plastic hangers that she must’ve brought herself, and a suitcase.
Lifting the suitcase to the bed, I could tell by its weight that it was probably empty. I opened it anyway to find a stray pair of socks. Rifling the pockets and folds I discovered a sealed plastic bag of jewelry that stank of silver. Resisting my instinctual urge to cast the bag aside, I brought it to the window and held it up to the light to examine the contents, at least a dozen simple silver chains. Cheap jewelry, but that wasn’t the point. Caroline wasn’t collecting necklaces to wear. Together with the shack, the chair, and the bindings, the silver completed a grim picture.
Sighing, I put the bag back as I’d found it, then returned the suitcase to the closet. I sat down on the edge of the bed, facing the door, and considered my options, none of them good. Killing Caroline was the practical choice. She’s not a civilian, I reminded myself. She possessed a dangerous magic and had used it against me. I was within my rights to eliminate the threat. I couldn’t spend my life looking over my shoulder, waiting for her to strike again. Her plans were too advanced for her to give up. Revenge was a motivation that only got stronger with time.
Killing her was the simple, strategic choice.
I glanced at the time on the clock. Eventually she’d walk through that door. She’d no reason to expect a predator in her room. Before she knew what was happening, before she could call on her magic for defense, I could break her neck and be done with the problem. There’d be no blood to clean up, which Josh would appreciate. He’d use his magic to get rid of the body and her belongings. He’d scrub any trace of our presence in the room. The car would take slightly more effort to dispose of, but it could be done.
To the hotel manager, it would appear that Caroline left without paying her bill. They would charge her credit card on file and promptly forget she was ever there. Her friends and acquaintances might take more notice. I’d have to send Markos to Idaho to monitor the situation there and alert me if any serious flags were raised over her disappearance.
Josh will want answers, I realized.
I frowned. It would be obvious to him that I’d sought her out, and he wouldn’t approve. I could hear his voice in my head, nagging me.
“You made this mess,” he said. “You got her father killed. What did you expect her to do?”
Until her father had died, she’d known nothing about me or the Midwest Pack. She’d been living her life in Idaho, enjoying her recent acquaintance with her father.
I stared down at my palms.
“She has the right to seek answers,” Josh said, scowling.
She wants revenge.
“She has the right to that, too.”
So I should just let her kill me?
Josh didn’t have an answer, but I could feel the weight of his absent gaze, judging.
I rose, growling, and crossed to the window next to the door. After peeking from the curtains, I opened the door and left.
I returned home to find a manila envelope just peeking from under the doormat on my porch. Carrying it inside, I settled into my leather chair and spilled the contents of Tim’s research, Caroline’s official record obtained from the Boise police department, onto my lap. No arrests. She’d had her share of traffic violations, including one incident of running a red light and causing a minor accident. Checking the date, I realized she’d been seventeen at the time. Kid stuff. The only entry of note on her record was a restraining order she’d obtained against an ex-boyfriend. That had been six years ago. There’d been some complaints that he’d violated the order, but after a talking-to by the local police he’d decided to behave.
Along with the official report was a typed summary of Tim’s unofficial research. From a pair of unaffiliated were-animals in the area, he’d learned that a number of rumors surrounded Caroline’s mother, rumors of mysterious powers that she’d used to confuse anyone who attempted to interfere with her life. They were the kind of rumors I’d easily ignore, If I hadn’t experienced the mind magic for myself. The mother had died only a few years ago. She’d largely kept to herself. Tim included one picture of her taken from her driver’s license. In the photo, she was wearing a silver necklace with a black stone pendant. Caroline’s pendant.
Pulling out my phone, I sorted through the pictures I’d taken of the shack, the chair, and the shackles. I reviewed Tim’s reports again, looking for something I could use to justify eliminating Caroline, but I couldn’t. All I found was a deepening source of guilt weighing on me until I finally threw my phone across the room in frustration.
Later that evening, I was still floundering in guilt and indecision when I heard Sky’s Honda Civic rush into my driveway and lurch to a stop. Even before I opened my door, I could smell the chlorine, as if she’d bathed in a swimming pool. She stood on my porch, drenched and anxious. Her pupils were dilated to saucers, the whites of her eyes were irritated red, and her heart raced from adrenalin. My eyes traced the angry crimson marks down her arm to find the Aufero glowing faintly in her palm.
My jaw dropped. What have you done?
I stepped aside, scanning the area behind her for danger as she walked past me, then closed the door. She was leaving a wet trail toward the couch when I stopped her.
“Wait until I get you some dry clothes.”
She rolled her eyes at me, then defiantly dropped onto the couch, her glare daring me to chastise her.
My gaze was drawn to the Aufero as she set it down beside her. There will be repercussions, but she did it! At last, there was a chance to lift my curse, the dark elf magic that made me a fugitive.
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br /> For the moment, I brushed aside my admiration of Sky’s brave achievement. I’d no doubt Marcia had kept the orb very close. Going after it had been brave and foolish. Had someone helped Sky? If she’d had help, she wouldn’t be at my door now. How she’d stolen the orb from beneath Marcia’s nose was a mystery.
Marcia underestimated her, I realized, the way she underestimates all of us.
Seeing Sky shivering, I chided myself and retrieved a towel for her from the bathroom.
“Is she alive?” I asked.
The towel did little for her as she rubbed the back of her neck and down her chest. Her clothes were soaked through.
She nodded.
“She’ll want it back,” I warned.
“I want red velvet cake to be part of the food pyramid. We can’t always get what we want. She may as well learn it now.”
I went upstairs to my bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of my dresser, where I kept the clothing that my guests occasionally left behind. After some searching, I found a pair of jeans and a teal t-shirt that were close to her size and returned to the living room.
She accepted them with a raised eyebrow. “So do you have your own little women’s consignment shop back there?”
I shrugged. “People leave things here.”
“People, or women?”
Women. “People.”
She shook out the t-shirt, noted the plunging neck line, then tossed it at me. “Fine, then you can go back there and get me a guy’s t-shirt; they’re more comfortable.”
I watched the shirt bounce off my chest and then fall to the floor at my feet. The jeans followed. I smirked, crossing my arms over my chest. She had the confident edge of someone who’d just won a fight. “You’re the one that’s wet; I didn’t think you would be so picky.”
She glared, waiting expectantly for me to fulfill her order. When I didn’t move, she said, “I’m cold.”
Midnight Shadows (Sky Brooks World: Ethan Book 3) Page 25