Bone Driven

by Hailey Edwards

  “I suppose this means I’ll be in isolation when the time comes.” Sterile environments gave me the heebie-jeebies, so worries over my future thirty-day vacation at Hotel Hysterectomy had been shelved too high for my brain to reach them. “Are there other Otillians in the program?”

  “Most would rather die than forfeit their honor by aiding an enemy terrene.”

  “I’m a traitor no matter how you look at it, huh?” I scanned the bright blue skies stuffed with fat clouds, tuned in the laughter of children racing buggies across the asphalt, their parents shouting warnings to look both ways before crossing, and had zero problems with wearing that label. “Either I betray my heritage, or I betray my family.”

  “You have three sisters,” he pointed out. “Aren’t they also family?”

  “Blood doesn’t make a family.” Heart and home did that. “War almost killed my dad.” My throat tightened. “She did kill my best friend.” The Maggie who had been carried out of my backyard wasn’t the same person who depended on paper, rock, scissors to make her life choices. “I won’t paint Famine or Death with the same brush until I’ve met them, but War is my enemy, and if they side with her, that makes them my enemies too.”

  He picked at the rubber seal cupping the window. “Your coterie supports your stance?”

  “They don’t think I’m going to stick around, if I’m honest.” I gave a tired laugh. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe I don’t exist. Maybe I am a construct.” I turned over the engine. “But right now, I feel real. I feel like I’m a person. I feel like I have everything to lose, and I’m going to hold on for as long as I can.”

  “You’re a brave woman,” Wu said quietly. “We’re lucky to have you.”

  The more time I spent with Wu, the more he confused me. Most of the time, he was a well-dressed pain in my ass who was too imperious for his own good. But when he talked about things that mattered, he wiped off the gloss and left what appeared to be a real person exposed. Matte finish was a good look on him. “Luck would have been not meeting me at all.”

  Without Conquest, this terrene and all its inhabitants would have known peace.

  “You’re buying into your own propaganda,” he chided, stepping back. “Conquest is a title, not a person. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.” He let that sink in before adding, “You’re the best chance this terrene has at finding a more permanent solution. You could save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe even break the cycle.”

  My palms went damp where they gripped the wheel. “No pressure.”

  “Until tonight,” Wu said, and he made it a dare.

  Okay, so in hindsight it might not have been wise to spread photographic proof of charun existence to the humans desperate to solve murders, but destroying evidence went against everything I had been taught. Had I understood what I was seeing, the larger implications for charun, I would have called Wu sooner. Crime scene preservation, chains of evidence, these were my defaults, but it looked like they were about to get reset.

  The eight hours I spent sitting across the desk from Rixton passed at a snail’s crawl. There was no point in us putting in legwork on the Hensarling, Culberson, or Orvis cases when there was charun involvement, but it’s not like I could unveil the existence of what humans would consider demons. The only choice I had was to lie, and I did, in ink and in voice, until I choked on them.

  The one respite from my guilt came when I drafted my letter of resignation. I printed it off, folded it up, then slid it in an envelope and scrawled Chief Jones’s name on the front. I should have turned it in right then and there, but I wasn’t ready yet. I might never be. But that wouldn’t change the inevitable.

  In search of a hard push that would send me tumbling over the edge, I caved to Wu’s request and met him at my house around midnight.

  The glass on the bay window sparkled in the headlights as I pulled into my usual parking space. I couldn’t tell where Flavie had pulled up what, but I trusted she had gotten the job done. The new siding gleamed as I hit the stairs, punched in the alarm code, and let myself in.

  Another ugly truth I hadn’t wanted to confront reared its head as I inspected the place for livability. Dad couldn’t bunk with the Trudeaus forever, and I would have to leave for a solid month after my two-week notice played out at the department. This place had to be move-in ready for when Dad got steady enough to fend for himself. Not that he would have to, considering I planned on hiring a part-time nurse. The reality was in-home care or a nursing home, and I wasn’t about to check Dad into one of those.

  Following a hunch, I took the stairs up to my room and found Wu sitting in the open window across from my bed. His black tactical pants, heavy boots, thin turtleneck, and tight beanie all followed a similar theme: stealth mode. “Is that really what all the super-secret agents are wearing on covert ops these days?”

  “I brought you a set.” He flicked his wrist toward a chair in the corner. “Now we can match.”

  “That was almost a joke,” I accused. “Don’t tell me you actually have a sense of humor buried in there.”

  “I would have strangled you for the stunt you pulled otherwise,” he stated matter-of-factly.

  “Nah. I’m a valuable commodity. The worst you would have done was huffed and puffed and blown my house down.” I gestured around us, indicating the space as a whole. “Right now, it wouldn’t even take much effort to knock the old girl to her knees.”

  “I’ll give you some privacy.”

  “Thanks.” I crossed to the chair and rubbed the stretchy shirt material between my fingers. “I appreciate —”

  Movement caught the corner of my eye as Wu executed a seated backflip out the freaking window. I rushed over and leaned out, but he had already stuck the landing and was walking away. “Show-off.”

  Wu spun around then and executed a neat bow in acceptance of the compliment.

  Learning he was stalking me wasn’t a surprise. Thom had already speculated as much, and the guy wasn’t being subtle about it either. After the trick Santiago had played on him with the phone, I couldn’t blame him for wanting to put eyes on me to make sure I was where I was supposed to be considering War was on, well, the warpath.

  None of that bothered me. No, what I resented was that his demonstration hinted he had witnessed the playful exchange between Cole and me. Wu wasn’t flamboyant by nature, and backflipping from windows was not his style, but men got flashy as peacocks when it came to one-upping each other.

  Last night had already taken on a dreamlike quality, the memory a faded photograph I kept taking out and examining in the hopes of recapturing the significance attached to the moment. The fine details of those precious, unguarded hours I’d spent with Cole were evaporating like mist exposed to sunlight. That was bad enough without Wu’s attempt at superimposing himself over the mental snapshot.

  Yanking the curtains shut, I changed into my burglar gear and met Wu in the yard. He had traded out his sedan for a compact SUV in standard black. “I know you like to accessorize, but you coordinate rides to match your outfits too?”

  “Black SUVs are common.” The subtle dig at White Horse got ignored, so he pressed on. “No one will notice one more.”

  “What’s your plan?” We loaded up and headed out. “I have no cat burgling skills if that’s what you’re thinking. For that matter, I have no cats and have never burgled.”

  Wu appeared unimpressed with my lack of résumé. “Would Summers keep the prints in her office?”

  I almost played the I didn’t say Summers kept the prints game with him, but I resisted. Score one for my maturity level. “I doubt it. She’s aware someone has taken a magic eraser to all the digital files. She would hide the hardcopies to protect them. Her office is small. There’s no room for a safe unless it’s the fireproof kind you can carry out by the handle, which would defeat the purpose. That leaves her vehicle or her house.”

  He nodded along with each point. “Where does she live?”

&n
bsp; “I have no idea.” I glanced over at him. “We’ve always met on scene or in public.”

  “Call your coterie and have them locate her address.”

  “You expect me to believe you don’t already have that nailed down?”

  “Can you ever follow a simple order?”

  “You said we’re partners. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.”

  “Humor me,” he said dryly. “I’m curious how good your people are, how well you all work together.”

  “Fine.” I dialed Santiago since Miller was still giving me dead air. “Hey, can you tell me where Jill —?” I got out a pen and pad of paper from my backpack. “Give me that again.” I scribbled down the address. “Thank you much.”

  Santiago grumbled at me, which I took as progress. Maybe we were past out-and-out name calling.

  “Here you go.” I handed Wu the sheet of paper. “Are we good, or did you need something else?”

  Wu skimmed the information, which made me all kinds of panicked since drivers ought to keep their eyes on the road, then balled up the paper and tossed it in the floorboard. “That’ll do.”

  I almost tacked on “pig”, but I figured he wouldn’t get the Babe reference Rixton was so fond of using.

  “That’s it?” I waited for him to explain. “I hassled Santiago for that?”

  Granted, Santiago had clearly expected me to pester him at some point since he’d had the information cued and waiting on my call.

  Wu cut his eyes toward me. “I expected you to call Miller.”

  I clamped my mouth shut.

  Scenting blood in the water, Wu verbally circled me. “Where is he?”

  I strapped on water wings and got ready to paddle for my life. “He’s not answering his phone.”

  “Miller wouldn’t leave town without checking in with Cole or you first.” Wu hummed an interested sound. “He was last seen at Madison Memorial around the time you and your human partner interrogated Boris Ivashov. Both men vanished shortly after that.”

  “You remembered all those names, but you reduced Rixton to ‘your human partner’?” I kicked back in my seat. “You can do better than that, Wu.”

  Streetlights whipped across his angular face. “Where is Miller Henshaw?”

  “I have no idea.” I spread my hands. “I haven’t seen or heard from Miller in over twenty-four hours.”

  “Ivashov is a loose end in need of cauterizing,” he said at last. “Will Miller finish the job?”

  A sour taste rose up the back of my throat. “Call it a hunch, but I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Ivashov.”

  “It bothers you that Miller would kill to protect you,” Wu observed.

  Miller had already killed for me. All of my coterie had in the aftermath of War’s failed coup.

  “How could it not bother me?” I massaged the tight spot between my eyebrows. “It’s not only that a charun will die, but his host will too. Two deaths for the price of one is hard math.”

  “The host is already dead.” Wu gentled his tone in an unspoken reminder the host had bargained for that death. “That’s what the body in Madison meant, why it had to be collected, why the evidence must be destroyed. Viscarre slowly eat away at their host. The process takes time, but death is inevitable, and the shell must be disposed of before humans get their hands on them.”

  “I understand.” Going forward, I had to be more careful. For all our sakes. “What’s your plan for when we reach Summers’ house?”

  “The plan is to comb over every inch of her residence until we’ve acquired each piece of evidence she’s got on the Orvis fire, anything that could be linked to charun involvement, and then we destroy it.”

  “What do we do if she’s home?” I scratched my scalp under the beanie meant to conceal my hair. “What about an alarm system? What if the documents are in a safe?”

  A dark chuckle moved through his chest. “How often are you home?”

  “Okay, so I’ll allow that people in our profession don’t get as much downtime as most.” For instance, the lack of sleep from the past week had left me with sandpaper discs for eyeballs. “That still doesn’t explain how you’re going to handle the infiltration or acquisition portion of the program.”

  Wu made a hard left then pulled into the circular driveway of a modest ranch-style house. Summers’ car was nowhere in sight, so that was good news. Neighbors snugged up to her property on either side and in the rear, which wasn’t ideal.

  “Stick with me.” Wu slid out, gathered a bag of supplies from his trunk, strolled up to the front door like he had every right to be there, then frowned back at me, who was slinking from shadow to shadow in the manner of a crafty cartoon character. “Luce.” The amount of exasperation packed into that single syllable impressed me. “Come here, please.”

  Head down, certain one of the neighbors would call the cops at any moment, I hustled to his side. “Hop to it.” I bounced from foot to foot. “We’re drawing too much attention.”

  “No one has noticed us,” he assured me while he got to work ripping an adhesive strip off the back of a metallic disc he slapped onto the siding above the doorbell. “This will disrupt the signal from her alarm. Once the light turns green, we’re good to go.” He glanced at my hand-wringing. “Put on your gloves.”

  After what felt like thirty years later, the tiny red light switched to green, and Wu started picking the locks. Nape prickling, I squirmed behind him in an approximation of the potty dance, desperate to burst inside and shut a door between us and the rest of the neighborhood. A cold sweat broke across my shoulders and rolled down my spine. Stubborn lungs refused to inflate, and gold spots glittered in my eyes.

  “Breathe,” Wu murmured. “I’ve got this. We’re almost in.”

  Metal clicked in his hand, and he swept me inside before closing it behind us.

  “I’m not cut out for this.” I wiped my forehead dry on my shirt sleeve. “I’m three seconds away from a panic attack.” I puffed out my cheeks and bent over to brace my palms on my knees. “You might want to reconsider this partnership thing if B&E is a job requirement.”

  “You are nothing like what I expected, Luce Boudreau.”

  “I get that a lot.” I squinted up at him, thankful for the nightlight illuminating the hallway. “One day the peer pressure is going to get to me, and I’m going to embrace my inner psychopath so I can start living up to everyone’s expectations.”

  “As entertaining as it is to watch you hyperventilating over breaking the laws you’re sworn to uphold, we don’t have much time. We need to locate the files and make our exit.” He gave me a measuring look. “Can you handle this, or do you need to wait here?”

  Glaring at him, I straightened. “Pardon me for being a law-abiding citizen.”

  “We’ll remedy that in time,” he promised as he skulked deeper into the house.

  Sucking up my pesky morals, I set off in the opposite direction. The house was a modest two-bedroom, one bathroom, and the number of spaces where she could have hidden items of value were finite. I lucked across the converted home office and started riffling through the papers scattered across her desk. Nothing caught my eye, so I started pulling out drawers and then moved on to the file cabinets.

  Warm breath fanned my ear. “Find anything?”

  “Wu.” I clutched my chest. “Do not sneak up on me.”

  “Apologies,” he said without sounding sorry at all. “Well?”

  “Nothing.” I noticed his hands were also empty. “What about you?”

  “No luck so far.” He drifted to a bookcase and started leafing through the pages of a hardback thriller. “Why don’t you check the bedroom? I’ll pick up where you left off in here.”

  The dismissal irked me, but it wasn’t like I enjoyed snooping. “How long were you watching me?”

  Wu lifted his head but didn’t answer my question. He didn’t even come close. “I can smell what you’ve touched. I can tell where you’ve been.”

&n
bsp; Heat sizzled across my nape in reminder of exactly how well charun noses worked. “I’ll just… go do that.”

  The bedroom was crammed with furniture and the detritus of life. There was a queen-sized bed, a squat nightstand, and a walk-in closet in place of a bureau. I tackled the bed first, but Summers hadn’t hidden anything under her mattress or the frame. The nightstand was stuffed to overflowing with fast food receipts but not much else. I checked the underside of each drawer but came up empty there too. The closet was full of nice pantsuits for work, and there was a basket of faded tees and shorts in the bottom. I shuffled everything around, but nothing caught my eye. I returned empty-handed to the office and found Wu examining the contents of a folder.

  I leaned a shoulder in the doorway. “Have any luck?”