Bait & Switch (Driftwood Mystery Book 1)

by A. L. Tyler

  Bailey smirked and waved a single finger in front of my face. “Don’t worry about them. We have work to do before you meet them. You’re a witch and a good person, Janet. I see the ways you try to contain your magic—”

  Apparently I wasn’t trying hard enough.

  “—and you can teach her. Her name is Quinn. We’ll raise her to be a good person, just like you. I know it’s risky, but once your unnatural abilities are contained—”

  “Contained?” I said in alarm. “How?”

  His hand crept toward the gun at his side. Mine reached for my phone. He still had a grip on my other arm.

  And then my blood turned to ice. I was staring at a living nightmare.

  Bailey—a hunter—held the gun up between our faces. A gun that bore markings I recognized. A cross for luck...

  “It takes the magic away.” His eyes glistened.

  Yes. It did. For a day or two. Sometimes longer, but never longer than a couple of weeks. Apparently, Bailey—and whoever he was working with—hadn’t bothered to keep their test subjects alive that long. How did they get one of those guns to test? Those bullets?

  There was only one way I could think of, and it meant they’d taken down an experienced handler. Probably more than one. How long had they been at this?

  I was officially in over my head. I blinked. “You’re going to shoot me.” Realization washed over me. “And Quinn?”

  Bailey cocked his head. “You want my help. You know you do. It’s fate, Janet. Why else would you have come here alone? It’ll just be a moment of pain for a lifetime free of your disease. But it can’t be a hand or a foot. It doesn’t keep unless goes in the torso.”

  I felt dizzy. They had really tested it. They knew through shots weren’t any good.

  “It’s all going to be okay now.” He was psychotic and he had a gun in my face. I didn’t want to piss him off or make any sudden moves. I tried not to pull back as he leaned in to kiss me.

  BAM BAM BAM.

  The loud knock at the door made us both jump. Bailey pulled back to stare at me in question. I’d nearly had a heart attack, because the gun was still in his hand, and my shocked expression must have cleared me of any suspicion.

  BAM BAM BAM. “Open the door, Bailey! I know she’s in there! You forgot your damn phone, Janet!”

  Helpful, Marge. Finally. Thank you.

  Bailey was still staring in my eyes. In the silence that followed, I thought he was going to ignore her and try to kiss me again.

  I swallowed the dry knot in my throat. “She won’t leave unless we—”

  My cell phone, still in my pocket, went off on top volume. I closed my eyes in defeat.

  Bailey cursed under his breath as he took a step back. “You set me up? You set me up?”

  His right hook came at me fast and I ducked just in time. I dove for the shotgun. Bailey landed on top of me and the flimsy coffee table went to splinters beneath us. He flipped me over with incredible strength, and I bemoaned how much I had relied on my magic up until now. He straddled my chest as I clawed at his eyes. He sat up straight and took aim with the butt of the shotgun, intending to ram it down on my face.

  I threw up both arms in defense and prepared for broken bones and lost teeth.

  The door burst open. We both stared over at Marge as she put her black-booted foot back down on the porch. Bailey turned the shotgun on her and cocked it.

  “Whoa!” Marge threw both of her hands up in front of her.

  Then Nick muscled her out of the way. He didn’t look happy.

  Chapter 32

  NICK’S EYES WANDERED the door frame before settling on Bailey. His gun was aimed at Bailey, but he didn’t make a move.

  Shit. The threshold rules. As a vampire, Nick couldn’t enter this house unless Bailey invited him, and that included outside attacks. Like firing a gun. If he violated the rules he would lose all the protective enchantments that the Bleak had provided him.

  It would hurt like a bitch, too.

  “Problem here, Driftwood?” he asked lightly. Just like me, he was at a loss for a plan.

  “Wards!”

  “Shut up!” Bailey snapped. He still had the shotgun fixed on Nick. Then he quickly turned it back on me. “Drop your gun. Kick it inside the house. Or I’ll shoot her now.”

  I closed my eyes. Surrendering his weapon into a house was one of the few things a vampire could do without breaking the rules. How much do these assholes know?

  We needed to turn the tables on him. Fast.

  I didn’t move an inch as the stare down continued. There weren’t a hell of a lot of ways to get out of someone sitting on my chest, and especially so when my attacker was taller, heavier, and well-trained enough to not let his eyes get within gouging distance.

  “Take the shot!” I screamed.

  “Now!” Bailey yelled. “Or I’ll kill her!”

  Nick relented. He set his gun on the ground and kicked it in with his foot.

  “I know what you are,” Bailey said through gritted teeth. “And you can’t come in. I might be fresh meat outside, but I’m safe in here. You cannot enter.”

  Nick looked calmly at me, and I knew what he was going to do before he did it. He was giving me the distraction I needed to get back on my feet. He’d been stalling to give me time to think.

  I still didn’t have a plan.

  Nick stepped through the doorway. Bailey shot to his feet with a long string of cuss words as Nick came flying straight at him.

  I grabbed the first sharp thing I saw—a broken leg from the coffee table—and jabbed it hard into his left inner thigh.

  Bailey screamed and came back down as I scrambled to my feet and grabbed the shotgun. The smell of burning magic, like a thunderstorm on the horizon, filled my nose as Nick went down.

  He convulsed on the ground as Bailey reached for Joe’s gun. I hit him hard in the back of the head with the shotgun.

  Not hard enough, because he turned on me.

  This time I got him square in the jaw.

  POP! POP! POP! POP!

  He was shooting wild. I jumped behind the sofa and started to crawl, desperate for cover. The little girl was screaming.

  Through it all, a blessed sound came crashing into my ears. It was the breaking of Nick’s protective enchantments, stronger than the wards.

  And with the flood of their undoing, they were breaking the limits of the silencing wards that had been cast over the house. It hummed to life like an over-taxed engine, and I could hear all of its inner workings. I picked it apart, letting my own magic flow out and disperse in the chaos.

  Then I stood and turned on him, and knowing the girl was upstairs, I opted for ice instead of fire. Even through my rage, my aim was a perfect symphony.

  Bailey’s hand froze on the gun. As the pain of the frostbite overwhelmed him, he dropped it, staring down like it had bitten him before pulling his arm to his chest.

  I walked over and picked it up, checking the clip and chamber for unspent rounds before tossing it onto the couch.

  I stood before Bailey, looking down at him as the frost continued to spread up his arm. Sweat broke on his brow.

  Unbidden, the fire swarmed around my hand, spitting sparks that danced like a hive of angry bees.

  “You going to kill me now, Janet?” he spat. “Just like all the other fucking witches in this world?”

  The pain was hanging in my palms after the confinement of the wards. I wanted to end it now, but as I’d told Nick all along, I was no murderer. I channeled the fire back in.

  “You should beg me to kill you,” I said quietly. Bailey’s grimace faltered in confusion. “Because once they have you, they’ll force you to live through things you can’t even imagine.”

  It took all the restraint I had to subdue the fire before I punched him in the face, and this time he went down. When I looked up, Marge was standing in the doorway. Her eyes had all but popped out of her head.

  She stepped inside. Her voice was almost inaud
ible amidst the clamor of so much magic breaking to nothing around us. “Janet? Are you a superhero?”

  I stared at her. “No.”

  I handed her the shotgun as I walked toward the stairs. I pointed at Nick. “Don’t shoot him. He’s a... Well, he’s kind of a jerk, but don’t shoot him anyway.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “No, but when he wakes up, he’ll probably wish he was.”

  “Bailey?”

  I patted her on the shoulder. “You can shoot him if you want to.” I saw his cuffs, still attached to his belt, hanging from the knob of a closet door nearby. I tossed them to Marge. “Cuff him, just to be sure. And then you need to get out of here.”

  “Get out of... What?” Marge stood there with the cuffs in one hand and a shotgun in the other. “I can’t do that. You know I can’t do that, Janet. My prints are all over the place. You just...like...did some comic book superhero shit in here.”

  “Marge,” I said. I looked straight into her wide eyes. It was really hard not to stare at her hair. “There is no hot Italian and I don’t even have an aunt. I’m a witch. There’s a whole contingent of other witches and wizards who are going to be here soon, and they don’t give a damn about your prints. They’re going to make what just happened here look like foreplay, and when they’re done, none of it will ever have happened. This will never end up in the hands of the cops.” I paused. “The cops will probably come looking when Bailey goes missing, but they won’t find anything. He’ll never be seen again. And if you stay here, because you know too much now...”

  Marge’s eyes shone with sadness. Upstairs, the girl was kicking again. Marge nodded. “I’ll cuff him. I guess this means you won’t be at work tomorrow, right?”

  I didn’t stop her when she hugged me. We didn’t say goodbye.

  She went to cuff Bailey, and I went upstairs and found Quinn Gregory locked in a bathroom and handcuffed to the sink plumbing. She was terrified. Her eyes were red. She’d lost her voice from screaming, but she managed to tell me that she hadn’t been physically hurt.

  Back downstairs, I pulled Nick into a dark corner by the stairs in case the Bleak didn’t come before dawn. I found some rope to further restrain Bailey.

  I cried with Quinn and told her everything would be okay. I didn’t know if it would or not, but it was what she needed to hear right then.

  We huddled in the corner together as I listened to the sound of the Bleak’s fading magic on Nick and the return of his own. It was untamed and deep, and almost animalistic except for the methodic tune of the notes. The sound of everything predatory I had feared was lurking beneath the surface.

  I had to stay close to him, or the Bleak wouldn’t find him in time. This way, they’d at least take him for questioning. Every instinct within me said he would drain us if we were still there when he woke up, but I couldn’t leave.

  They needed to know about Bailey. They needed to see the evidence of hunters, because this had to be stopped before any more victims were claimed. And with the massive number of spells that had just imploded here, we were a big, fat blip on the radar now.

  I hugged Quinn closer and she hugged me, burying her face in my shoulder. I pulled out my phone as a distraction.

  The alert my phone had received—that had nearly resulted in my death—was a push notification. Charlene had “snapped” me. And as much as I didn’t want to darken the lives of the people around me when I mysteriously disappeared, I didn’t snap her back. I deleted the damn app on the spot.

  I thought about my father, wasting away in prison after a lifetime of carefully planning his escape. He would never know about me, or what I had done for him, or what I had become. He would never know the guilt I would live with the rest of my life for choosing to do the right thing instead of the selfish thing. I sat in the hallway that dark night, comforting a lost child and saving a vampire, waiting for my own demise so that the world could be a safer place.

  It was almost an hour later when I heard the footsteps on the porch. I told Quinn to sit still by Nick, and not to be afraid, whatever happened—because everything would be okay. I didn’t want her to get caught in any crossfire if they came in spells blazing.

  I wanted her to have the chance to run, in case the people coming for us were Bailey’s friends and not Nick’s.

  Then I stood in the middle of the hall, hands out in surrender, and I waited.

  “Jette Driftwood. You’re wanted by the Bleak for treason, theft, and murder. The sentence for these crimes is death.”

  Chapter 33

  THE BLEAK HAVE HAD prisons almost since the beginning. The Order was named for Eadric Bleak, who established the first unified governing structure of magical entities to enforce process of law and execution during the Norman invasion of England. Back then, prisons were small and well-guarded corners of farms. As the purview of the Order grew, however, and the world became a more crowded place as communities formed, they discovered a more efficient way to keep their prisoners.

  I was sitting in a spotlight surrounded by nothingness. It wasn’t a real room, though, because even here I could hear the magic that brought this place into existence.

  I was trapped inside my own mind. Cut off from the outside world, I knew nothing of what was going on around me.

  There was no time, or hunger, or sleeping in this place. One just was in this space, with nowhere to go, and nothing to want, and nothing to do.

  As I learned, I didn’t even need to breathe. I had no pulse. Several times I thought I was dead.

  They said it eventually drove people insane. That was, anyone who emerged—most people who entered the trance died in it when their execution was carried out.

  When a bright light flicked on and I was actually able to close my eyelids against it, I wasn’t sure what had happened.

  “Driftwood!” A hand lightly slapped my cheeks. “Wake up. It’s time. Alright, that’s it...”

  An arm underneath me, helping me sit up. New sounds. Magic sounds.

  I blinked against the light as my eyes tried to refocus. The spell was done.

  My arms flopped uselessly as I tried to get my eyes to focus. My throat was completely dry. “How long?”

  Cold hands on my face. Colder than hands should be. Maybe my nerve receptors weren’t fully awake yet.

  Or, maybe the hands were really that cold.

  “Three days. Come on, Driftwood. Up.”

  Nick helped me to my feet.

  “She will be in your care until her deposition. If she fails to present, you will be held equally accountable.” Footsteps. A door closing.

  “Three days?” It felt like months. Maybe a year.

  Nick was pouring water into my mouth. I gagged and spit it back out.

  Then the pain hit, shooting from my core and straight into my aching palms. The magic was awake now, too.

  Nick cursed and scooped me up. He dumped me into the bathtub and turned on the tap.

  It took me hours before I reached equilibrium again. When I finally did, I found my bag by the bathroom door. I put on dry clothes and found my way back out into the hall.

  I was starving. I knew Nick didn’t keep food in his kitchen, but he did keep delivery menus. Not that I was likely to eat delivery again any time soon—not after this case—but at least it would give me an idea of what was within walking distance.

  Nick was sitting at the kitchen bar. His enchantments were back in place, which was a feat. I’d never heard of a vampire receiving those shiny presents twice, no matter what caused them to be lost the first time.

  The Bleak didn’t offer second chances.

  When he saw me, he stood and moved to the door, putting on his coat and throwing one at me.

  A women’s black leather jacket. It appeared to have been cursed to kill the owner, and the longing notes made me think it was after a nasty break up.

  “Put it on. People are expecting us.”

  Dark, Nick. Very dark.

  I undid the song and slipped
the jacket on. It was a little large, but I could tailor it with magic. I drew in a hesitant breath. “The Bleak?”

  Nick opened the door and waved me out into the hallway. “Handlers. Bounty hunters. After the shit storm you’ve been through, there’s a bar full of guys that want to get you drunk for catching the asshole who murdered Joe and Farrow.”

  I cringed. “I’m betting that would sound a lot less skeevy if it wasn’t a bunch of guys and... well, me. And I don’t really drink.”

  “I’ll drop you off at Marge’s later if you’d feel better,” he said. He walked away down the hall. I scrambled to shut the door and follow him.

  “I’m still not drinking!” Drinking led to talking. To other people. Two things that I wasn’t fond of. “Marge is okay?”

  “Marge is fine,” Nick said.

  His dismissive tone woke a new outrage in me. “What the hell were you thinking, bringing Marge?”

  He exhaled in exasperation. “I was thinking I needed the damn address and she said she wouldn’t give it to me unless I let her come. She seemed to know it was about you and that something was wrong. I also thought I might need someone to kick in the door so I didn’t jack my enchantments.”

  “You jacked your enchantments anyway.” I crossed my arms. “Thanks.”

  Nick gave me a small nod. He pulled out his phone and started to text. “She remembers everything. The Bleak doesn’t know she was ever involved and I think she’s just far enough into the weird that no one will believe her if she tells. But that can change, so don’t make waves.”

  The elevator door dinged open and we stepped out.

  “Quinn Gregory?” I asked, pushing my wet hair back behind my ears. The days were getting warmer now, and even as I slid into the death trap Chevelle next to a vampire as dusk came over the mountains, I was grateful for the small things.

  “She’s fine, too,” Nick said. “I mean, well, I don’t officially know. I took custody of her after the ordeal. Her parents were fugitives and the Bleak weren’t offering her any aid, so she needed a place to stay. She ran away yesterday. Might have been to a bus stop, maybe boarding a bus to Montana. I did some asking around through Farrow’s former friends and found out her mother has a sister operating a florist shop in Helena. Quinn’s mother might have been seen there recently, but, you know, allegedly and unconfirmed. I’ve been a little too busy to check it out. If I did I might have to follow up and I’m not really a fan of travel or paperwork. Besides, the Bleak doesn’t really look into missing kids of fugitives, so I’m guessing they won’t look too closely when I tell them she’s gone.” He paused. “She’s twelve. Responsible. She had enough cash for the trip. I have reason to believe someone was waiting for her on the other end.”