by Jenn Bennett
A slow trickle of red blood began seeping from her hair-line above her ear. Her arms flailed as she struggled to get a grip on the corner of desk and pull herself up. Not gonna happen. I brought the board down on top of her head. The wood fractured in two and fell apart on impact, sending a sickening jolt of pain through my arms. She went down face-forward. Her chin hit the tile and one of her teeth popped out and skipped across the floor in five quick hops.
Lon and Jupe said, “Fuck!” in unison from the back of the room.
Chest heaving, I tossed the split desk and dropped to my knees, tugging the edge of a pair of shiny handcuffs from her back pocket. She lay still on the floor as I straddled her legs, twisted her limp arms back, and cuffed her as tight as I could. It was the first time I’d ever gotten to do that; it felt a little satisfying.
As I stood up, she still didn’t move. I worried for a second that I’d killed her.
Lon sprang toward us as I bent down to flip her over and check her pulse. The side of her face was splotched with crimson. Blood was also leaking out of her mouth.
“She’s alive,” I reported with relief.
“Jesus Christ,” he mumbled. Then he repeated it. Twice.
“Cady!” Jupe yelled as he shuffled over to us. “You saved us!”
Lon did not echo his son’s sentiments.
“This ends right here,” he said bitterly, surging with restrained rage.
“Lon, I’m sorry that—”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “That girl hurt Jupe because she was trying to track you down. This is your fault. You put my kid in danger by doing magick in front of him. You turned him into bait.”
Jupe’s words streamed out in a long, flat note as he tugged on his father’s shirt with his good hand. “I asked her to, Dad. I made her do it. She didn’t want to but I begged her. You know how I am—you always say that I could wear anybody down and—”
“She’s the adult here, Jupe.” He glared at me. “At least I thought she was.”
Jupe’s mouth fell open. I wasn’t the only one in shock. “Shut up, Dad—she rescued us. You’re being an idiot.”
“Stay out of this, Jupe,” Lon warned, then barked at me, “This is just business as usual for you, isn’t it? Danger? Violence?”
He shook his head, covered his eyes with his hand, then he resumed speaking in a distracted voice, as if to himself, “I can’t raise my son around that. What was I thinking? This is happening all over again. I’m a horrible father.”
“Lon!” I said, tears threatening to spill from anger and confusion. “I said I was sorry about the servitor. I wouldn’t put Jupe in danger on purpose, and as far as violence goes, you probably would’ve shot and killed Riley if you’d had a gun.”
“Maybe. It doesn’t matter.” He sounded weak and defeated.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I protested, my confidence shattering as I said the words. “She would have killed me or taken me in. She hurt Jupe.”
“You might not have had a choice, but I do. Right now I’m taking my kid to the hospital, and you’re going to stay away from him.” He put his hand on Jupe’s back and tried to push him forward.
“Dad!” Jupe cried. “Cady, I’m not mad, don’t listen to him.” He was still crying a little. I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or shock, but he was trying so hard to be grown up. “I know you didn’t mean for this to happen. It’s not your fault.”
“I said stay out of this, Jupiter!” Lon yelled.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
Lon gave me a blank look then herded Jupe toward the classroom door. When he got there, he paused. “What are you going to do with her now?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. My hands started shaking.
“Maybe you should have thought of that before you gave her a fucking concussion.”
“Maybe.” My voice barely carried.
“Find your own way home,” he said, laying a protective palm around his son’s neck.
Jupe sobbed, screaming at his father, “I hate you,” as they walked out the door.
23
My basement looked like a mobile field hospital. I didn’t want Riley Cooper to be able to use spells to escape, so I painted four old sheets with sigils that blocked magick and hung them around a small area of my basement that the previous owners had intended to convert into a bathroom. An old toilet and a drain for a shower were as far as they’d gotten.
Adding grand theft auto to my list of crimes that night, I’d managed to get Riley back to my house blindfolded in a hot-wired Ford from the school’s back parking lot; I had to plaster the backseat in old newspapers so she wouldn’t bleed all over it. Once we got home, it took me fifteen minutes and several tries to remember the counterspell that would allow her to breach Lon’s house ward. Then I had to contend with all my other minor wards; every time I tried to get her through the door, a series of irritating warnings ballooned in my head and she started moaning and shaking, but I finally managed a successful cloaking spell.
I found the key to the handcuffs on a small key chain in her pocket. After digging out a length of rusted chain from the shed in my backyard, I shifted her hands to the front of her body and cuffed her wrists to one of four metal support posts that were bolted into the cement floor. Nothing within her reach but the toilet and a musty couch I’d dragged to the metal post. I brought down a satellite radio and switched it on, then left her there and locked the basement door.
It was nearly six in the morning by the time I crawled into bed.
I slept a few hours, woke around noon, then fired up the courage to call Lon. He didn’t answer. I sent him a text and told him that I hoped Jupe was okay, and waited for a response, but it never came. If he was serious about my not seeing Jupe again, then he was serious about my not seeing him either. All the work we’d done was for nothing, and I was back at square one.
Not only was the possibility of helping my parents look like the biggest long shot in the world at this point, but I couldn’t even focus on the futility of it, because Lon’s words were competing for attention: This is your fault. The accusation repeated in my head ad nauseam, along with the blank look he’d given me. My heart felt like it’d been buried under a pile of rocks.
Dazed and drained, I plated some fruit and crackers and carried it down to my kidnapping victim. She was asleep on the couch behind the makeshift antimagick curtains. I woke her.
“Do you want to eat?” I asked.
She stuck out her handcuffed hands and raised both middle fingers.
“Look, I don’t have any problem leaving this food on the floor, but you’re going to drink the water before I leave.”
She initially resisted but gave in without too much prodding. It took her two tries to empty it.
“How old are you?” I asked after she’d finished.
Water ran down her chin. “None of your business.” She threw the empty plastic bottle in my direction.
“Eighteen?” I guessed. “Seventeen?”
“Twenty-one. Where are we? Are we still in La Sirena?”
She didn’t know where I lived. That was good.
“We’re in Fresno,” I lied.
“Fresno? What are we doing here?”
I ignored her. “What were your instructions from Luxe?” She shifted her legs to curl up on the couch, facing away from me. She looked uncomfortable. “Bring you back to San Diego … alive, unfortunately.”
“Why me and not my parents?”
She laughed. “My brother’s hunting your parents in Mexico, don’t worry.”
“I doubt he’s having better luck than you are, then. I’m sure they’re already farther away than that.”
“But you don’t know? Interesting.”
“Whatever. The less we know about each other’s whereabouts, the easier it is to stay hidden. So it’s kinda useless, you see, trying to bring me in to get info on them. Because I don’t have it.”
“Hmph.”
�
��Why did your order kidnap our caliph?”
She wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”
“The head of Ekklesia Eleusia. Why did you kidnap him?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Nobody’s kidnapped anyone except you, and you’re going to regret that when my order finds out.”
Perhaps they hadn’t told her about the caliph, or she wasn’t high up enough in the hierarchy to know—just a bounty hunter instructed to do a job.
I’d removed her leather pants and boots so that she couldn’t use them as projectiles to knock down the sheets, and now she had on only underwear and a sheer black spiderweb print shirt. The dirty soles of her feet faced me as her toes curled; the black polish on her toenails was chipping. “Are you cold?” I asked. “There’s a space heater I can turn on.”
“Are you mad that they left you?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“My parents? No. They were protecting me.”
“By deserting you? If you were so fucking special, why wouldn’t they guard you with their own lives?”
“The three of us being seen together would draw suspicion. It was safer to separate.”
“Or maybe they just told you that. Maybe they realized that you weren’t the savior to Ekklesia Eleusia that they’d thought you’d be. Maybe they thought you weren’t worth the troub—”
“Look, this isn’t going to work. My parents love me. They just did what they had to.”
She shook her head. “Still protecting them after all these years, huh? One of our mages has a theory that you helped them with the killings.”
“They didn’t kill anyone,” I snapped.
“I know for a fact that they did.” When she tried to smile, all I could see was the gaping hole in her teeth. The incisor that once held that spot was now in my pocket.
“Let’s see, you were fourteen or fifteen during the Black Lodge slayings? I seriously doubt you knew much more than your math homework back then.”
She relaxed her shoulders and stared at me for a moment. “Huh,” she said thoughtfully.
“What?”
“You really don’t think they killed all those people, do you?”
I gave her a weak smile. “They were framed by the head of your order.”
“Wow, you’re dense.”
“Alrighty, then. This is going nowhere.” I moved the fruit and crackers toward her with the tip of my shoe. “Have fun eating like a dog off the floor.” I left her a small length of toilet paper on the arm of the couch and parted the hanging sheets to exit.
“I know your parents killed the other heads of the orders,” she said behind me, “because they tried to kill my dad.”
Her dad? I froze in place.
“That’s right, Moonchild. I’m Phil Zorn’s daughter.”
An uneasy chill ran down my back. Magus Zorn? Holy shit. I had just kidnapped the Luxe leader’s daughter. This was either the worst mistake I’d ever made, or a once-in-a-lifetime piece of leverage; I wasn’t sure which.
24
By late afternoon I’d checked on Riley twice and brought her more water. At least she’d eaten. She was refusing to talk anymore, which was fine by me, merely requesting that I change the satellite radio station, which I did. Then I dug through an old toolbox that the previous owners of the house had left behind and found an old sliding lock, which I installed on the door to the basement. Having some extra security made me feel less anxious. More than that, it gave me something to do.
After finishing, I plopped down on my living room sofa, gloomy and miserable, weighing my options. Only four days left until my time ran out.
I laid out in a neat row on my coffee table the contents of Riley Cooper’s pockets. Her gun, a driver’s license, a key card for a motel room in La Sirena, about a thousand dollars in cash, a piece of red ochre chalk, her key ring, a cell phone. I scrolled through her contacts several times. Read all her text messages. Most of them were just brief I-love-you’s to her father and another man—boyfriend, brother? She hadn’t made or received any calls in two days; at least no one would be suspicious about calls suddenly stopping. Hopefully I could just continue texting in her place to keep up appearances.
I was haunted by her implication that my parents had ditched me. It wasn’t like I hadn’t thought about it before or confronted them with the same charge, especially during my first year in hiding. I’d tried to persuade them to take me with them, even after a couple of years had passed. One especially dreary winter in Seattle, when Kar Yee was busy marrying her fake husband to get her citizenship, my mental health went south. I’d already linked myself to Priya at that point, and sent the guardian to ask my parents to call me.
It took them three days to respond. The longest three days of my life. I locked myself in my room and did every spell I could find to draw them to me. After two days, I dosed myself with a medicinal elixir and slept on my closet floor. By the time they called, I was weak from hunger and hallucinating from the medicinal. I remember sobbing on the phone, begging them to come to get me. My mom spent a couple of hours talking me down, flew from France that night and stayed with me for several wonderful days. I missed all my classes and had to repeat one of them the following semester, but it was worth it.
That was the last really bad time for me. Apart from the occasional bout of self-pity, I had moved past all that long ago. It made me mad that Riley Cooper was able to dig it back up, so I did my best to squelch any lingering feelings of abandonment.
My thoughts floated back to another subject I was trying to avoid, and I wondered how Jupe was doing. It crossed my mind that I could send a servitor to check on him, but if Lon ever found out … ugh. No thanks. I glanced at my cell. No calls. I stupidly dialed Tambuku to double-check that I had service, then chastised myself for being desperate and put it back down. I lay down on the sofa on my side, staring at it, trying to will it to ring.
I guess that’s why I never heard the door open and close.
“Hey.”
I yelped. Lon was standing by the coffee table.
“God …” I put my hand over my jackhammering heart and quickly sat up.
As the surprise wore off, I realized I had no idea what to say, so I remained quiet. His gaze dropped to the row of Riley’s items on the table. He set down a book he’d brought and picked up her keys. “You still have the girl?” he asked.
“In the basement.”
One brow rose in question.
“I’m treating her humanely.”
He didn’t reply. Just tossed the keys back on the table and crossed his arms over his chest.
“How is he?” I asked, embarrassed that I couldn’t bring myself to say Jupe’s name.
“A friend healed his hand. The breaks in his arm were too big, so he’s in a cast.”
“Is he in a lot of pain?” I couldn’t look at him, so I just stared at the floor. My hands gripped the edge of the sofa.
Lon snorted, sounding just like Jupe. “He’s high as a kite on pain pills and glad to be missing school for the rest of the week.”
I tried to laugh, but it got distorted by a sudden surge of emotion. Don’t you dare cry, I thought.
Lon pushed Riley’s things to the side and sat down on the coffee table facing me, his legs surrounding mine. He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches away. He smelled like valrivia smoke. “Listen up,” he said, “because I don’t say this often.”
I stiffened, drawing back, unsure of his intentions. He put his hand on my forearm to stop me. I shook it off. “What?”
“I overreacted,” he said.
It took several moments for his words to register.
“Look—” he started.
“I understand.” I raised my voice to drown out his explanation. “I understand you being scared and upset about Jupe—”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do. I may not be a parent—”
“Yeah, you’re not a parent, that’s right.�
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Anger flared inside my chest. “Don’t give me some bullshit about how I can’t understand because I didn’t give birth to him, because even I know that you don’t have to do that to care about someone.”
“Will you calm down and let me talk for a second?” Lon said in exasperation. “I’m trying to apologize.”
I pressed my lips together.
“Thank you,” he said crossly.
I waited for several moments while he collected his thoughts.
“When I said that you don’t understand, I meant that you don’t understand why I reacted like I did. Hell, I didn’t understand it.” He dropped his eyes. “It was Jupe who pointed out some things. How I was getting you confused with Yvonne.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You aren’t like his mother,” he clarified, “but I was reacting to you the same way. It’s just that …” He squinted his eyes and creased his brow, engaged in some inner battle to find the right words. “Yvonne put Jupe in danger a couple of times when I was away on shoots. When he was four, she left him at someone’s house, some guy she was screwing. A stranger. She took Jupe with her, and that’s one thing, but then she forgot him—her own child.”
Well, shit. I really didn’t know what to say to that. He was close enough to sense my feelings, which was probably helpful for once; let him figure it out.
“That was neglect,” he continued, “and it was her fault. What you did wasn’t the same. You didn’t know that girl could track you that way. I didn’t either, frankly, and that led me to my second realization.”
“Which was?”
“I guess I was mad at myself and taking it out on you. Like I told you before, I can’t totally blame Yvonne for all her actions. She was a wild child before I got her initiated, but after I did, she got worse. So that’s my fault.”
“What do you mean, ‘initiated’?” I asked. “You still haven’t told me what you did to her.”
He closed his eyes briefly and inhaled. “I let her talk me into having a spell done on her to increase her demon powers.”