by Fiona Zedde
The girl’s confusion—and backpedaling—were hilariously obvious, but Mai didn’t have it in her to laugh. Was that all she’d needed to do for Beatrice to back off? Just pretend to take her up on one of her endless offers? Good to know for the future.
“You know what? Forget about that drink. How much do I owe you?”
Beatrice stammered out an amount, and Mai dropped enough money on the bar to cover that plus a fifty-percent tip. “Thanks. I’ll see you next week.”
Christ! It sounded like she was talking about meeting her in their private fuck palace on a prearranged date. Mai stuck the rest of her folded bills inside her jacket pocket and stood up to leave.
“Professor Redstone…” Xóchitl Bentley called her name, her voice not quite as cool before, but Mai was done listening to her. She tipped her head Beatrice’s way, then left the café, her boot heels ringing against the hardwood floors. Outside, she ducked into a quiet side street.
Mai was furious. The anger settled cold and hot at the same time in her chest, wreaking havoc with her self-control. Other feelings writhed inside her too, but the anger was the easiest one to focus on. As she walked from the café on the lamp-lit streets, her skin prickled with that rage, muscles twitching and shifting under her face, showing different features to the few people she passed in the small downtown side streets before shifting back to a neutral mask. The anger made her literally shake in her boots.
She desperately needed to settle. She desperately needed calm. Mai drew in a deep and trembling breath and reached out with her senses.
A wild and sudden siren snared her hearing. Sharp and long, the sound sawed along her nerves like sharp teeth, high and strident enough that it could have come from a truck or an ambulance. But as soon as she heard it, Mai knew it was a person made the sound. A person in pain.
And it was far enough away that she would have to hurry, hurry, hurry to get there, but it was the perfect excuse she needed to get away from the café and Xóchitl and the feelings she’d brought up in Mai. The pain had felt too familiar. Like it came from Family. So she ran.
Her steps rapped against the concrete, and the wind slapped her face, tearing at her eyes before she made a slight adjustment to her lids. Then she was silently scaling the side of the big marble building near the university, and there, there, she could run her full speed and let the thrill of the impending confrontation heat her blood.
Mercy is coming.
When she got there, she saw sadness. A woman sprawled on the side of the dark road, legs at odd angles and her skirt halfway up her thighs. She sobbed into a cell to 911 while the phone’s dying battery ticked away like a time bomb.
“My car!” The woman screamed into the beeping phone like her world was ending. “They took my car!”
She wasn’t telling them the rest, too caught up in the pain and panic. But Mai had already seen the child car seat in the back of the white Honda as it swerved around the corner, much too far away for the woman to follow. But it wasn’t too far for Mai. After a quick squeeze of the woman’s shoulder, she chased after them.
Music blared from the car over the lashing tide of triumphant and boyish laughter as a heavy foot gave even more gas to the car. In the back seat, the child was still, incredibly, sleeping.
She ran faster.
The boys—because they were just boys—found a station they liked and cranked it up even higher until the music, loud death metal, drowned out everything but the sound of their laughter and the clatter of them tossing things out the window: CDs, a hairbrush, a pink glass water bottle that shattered in the street, leaving a wet stain that Mai jumped over. The baby woke and started to cry.
As the boys raced the car down the street, there were trees and quiet houses tucked away behind hedges and TV lights flickering behind pulled curtains. A few curtains twitched to the side when the noise of their passing came, but those curtains quickly fell back into place as if nothing had disturbed them.
Mai ran and ran.
Up ahead, the car roared along the small two-lane road. Behind her, the woman continued to scream into the phone, but her phone was already dead.
The boys didn’t know what to do. Mai could see it all as she chased them. And the moment they discovered the baby in the back seat, the car swerved across the lanes in shock. Then they saw her, the whites of their eyes flashing upward in the rearview mirror. They pushed the car even faster, trying to outrun Mai’s shadowy form.
But Mercy was coming for them.
“We need to get rid of it!” The boys shouted at each other in the car.
“That chick is out there. She’ll turn us in to the cops!”
The car sped farther away, and music banged through its metal cage, vicious and loud. The baby wailed along under the chorus, panicked and angry. Or maybe just hungry. But the boys’ luck, such as it was, wouldn’t hold for long. Up ahead was construction. A small bridge. They wouldn’t survive the fall if they kept swerving and arguing and not paying attention to what was in front of them.
“There’s a fuckin’ baby in here, man!” The boys kept at it. “That’s kidnapping or some shit!”
“You shoulda thought of that when you had this fucking bright idea to jack the car.”
“Me?” And it went on.
Over a mile away behind them now, the woman on the ground was hysterical. The child screamed nearly as loudly as its mother. The two boys argued. The bridge came closer.
Mai ran even faster. Faster. Then jumped.
She landed on top of the car with a thud. The impact knocked the air from her lungs. The residual heat of the day that had absorbed into the roof immediately sank through her clothes and into her bare chest. She smashed her fist through the windshield. The glass shattered, and Mai grabbed the edge of the open driver’s side window to catch herself from immediately sliding off.
“Stop the car,” she growled, pitching her voice for the boys to hear her above the music and the screaming baby.
The driver only sped up.
“Try to throw her off!” the brilliant sidekick suggested, eyes dilated with fear and some sort of drug Mai didn’t bother to smell for.
“This isn’t the movies, dude!”
But his friend made a frantic grab for the wheel and jerked the car from one side of the street to the other, flicking his eyes between Mai and the road in front of him. The driver elbowed his friend in the face and wrestled the wheel from his hands, and the car swerved again, slinging Mai to the other side of the roof. She slid along the roof and gritted her teeth from the pain that shot through her arms as she held on. She hissed at the abrupt pull and burn in her muscles but couldn’t afford to let go. The child would pay too high of a price. The mother would be destroyed. Mai would never forgive herself.
She grunted with the effort of holding on as the car barreled down the street, clipping bushes and shrubs when it veered too close to the edge of the road. A twig dug into her cheek as it flew past, and she hissed from this new pain.
Car tires screeched against the pavement, and the bridge was barreling closer, too narrow to withstand the extreme jerking of the car. The boys seemed too focused on getting Mai off the roof to pay proper attention to just how dangerous the bridge was. She had to get them to stop the car before the bridge.
Mai dove to the side and reached into the car to yank the steering wheel at the same time as the explosive sound of a bullet rocked the inside the car.
“What the fuck?” one of the boys shouted in shock.
The baby screamed even louder. Mai’s hand grabbed hold of the wheel the moment she realized a bullet hole had torn through the car roof, splitting through the space where her body had been seconds before. The car screeched to a stop, nearly throwing Mai forward and into the street. The momentum grabbed at her arms again, and she used it to catapult herself up and over, landing on her feet in front of the stopped c
ar.
“Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?” The rest of what the driver screamed was incoherent and panicked, his cries nearly as high as the child’s. He sounded like he was hyperventilating, his quick breaths making the car nearly as hot as the gun smoking from the hand of his accomplice, who looked wild-eyed, as if he hadn’t truly known what it meant to truly fire a weapon.
Before they could get their scattered shit together, Mai jumped onto the hood of the car, taking them both by surprise and smashing the windshield with the sharp drive of her fist. Glass showered down onto the hood, onto the street, and was still showering down around her when Mai shoved herself into the car and grabbed the boy’s gun hand. She twisted and squeezed, breaking the small bones in his wrist and hand.
He screamed. Mai caught the other boy with a slashing elbow across the face, breaking his nose. Another slam of her fist slumped him back into the seat, unconscious. The car smelled like sweat and baby vomit, fear and old marijuana.
Screams still rattled the car. The baby. The boy with the gun. Or who once had the gun. The semiautomatic was heavy, warm, and ugly in Mai’s gloved hand. She ejected the clip and emptied the chamber while the screaming boy watched her with terrified eyes and shrunk back into the seat. The rage built in Mai. It swept through her in waves and was hot enough to kill.
“Leave me alone!” he roared at her, cradling his broken hand. “I’m gonna tell the cops what you did. You can’t treat me like this. I have rights!”
The baby screamed louder at the boy’s shouts. Mai didn’t want to hear either of them anymore. The shooter’s mouth opened wide enough for her to see the unfilled cavities at the back of his mouth.
“Shut up.” Mai slammed her head into his, and he fell abruptly silent, fell back into the seat like an abandoned marionette, a twin to his friend in the driver’s seat.
One screamer down, one to go.
She yanked the key from the ignition and shoved it into her pocket, then twisted herself into the back seat, where the baby wailed from beneath the swaddle of pink blankets. The child’s face was hot under the tender brush of Mai’s hand, her cheeks wet with tears, nose dripping. With uncertain fingers, Mai unlatched the child from the car seat and, making the shushing noises she’d seen other people do with children in distress, climbed from the car with the gradually quieting bundle in her arms.
She could still hear the crying mother and, distantly, the sound of sirens. Shaking in the aftermath of the adrenaline rush, Mai held the child against her chest and began the long walk to where a mother was waiting to see her child safe.
Chapter 7
She was still shaking when she climbed through the window of her condo. It was a good kind of tremor, though, her muscles sore from having done something good with the small amount of power she had. Someone had been glad to see her. Had welcomed her presence.
With a grunt, Mai tugged off her boots and put them away. Her feet tapped, quiet and bare, against the glossy wooden floors of her bedroom, and she felt the suppleness of her body, the strength in it. Its utility. She stripped and dropped her clothes into the laundry hamper just outside the bathroom door.
Naked, she closed the clear door of the shower behind her and nearly sagged with pleasure under the hot spray. The long afternoon with the family, the shock of her uncle’s lifeless body in the morgue, Xóchitl Bentley’s unexpected venom: all those things had disappeared while she’d worn Mercy’s mask. Her sigh was mingled relief and exhaustion as she braced her arms against the tiled shower walls and let the scalding water rush over her head and back.
Nearly an hour later, she opened the bathroom door, and steam billowed out ahead of her. As she dried her hair, she stepped into her bedroom.
“If I were that kind, I could have killed you a thousand times over tonight.”
Mai felt like she’d been doused in a bucket of cold water. Her mother, who’d never visited her place before, stood in her bedroom, the leather jacket and gloves she’d worn as Mercy held in one hand.
“How can you presume to protect these humans when you can’t even protect yourself?” Her mother looked like shattered glass in Mai’s private space, glittering and dangerous. The smiling TV personality and philanthropist she presented to the rest of the world was gone, the mask discarded in favor of her real self. After a scornful look at the clothes in her hand, she dropped them back into the laundry basket.
Mai’s heart beat wildly in her chest like a rabbit caught in a trap. To keep some of her terror at bay, Mai scrubbed the towel through her hair one last time, then headed for her walk-in closet, all the while keeping her shoulders back and spine straight, wearing her nudity like armor. “To what do I owe this absolute pleasure, Mother?”
Dammit. But her mother being there could only mean one thing. Mai pulled sweatpants and a tank top from her dresser, then sat down on the bed, still nude, to massage lotion into her skin. From the corner of her eye, she watched Mandaia, still wary, although she pretended not to be.
“Your Uncle Stephen is dead,” she said. “But I’m sure you know that already.”
Mai flinched, her fingers digging for a moment into her calves with the spread of the sweet-smelling rose-and-eucalyptus lotion that always signaled bedtime for her. The lotion was one she’d used since she was in high school, but suddenly the scent was too much in the same room with her mother. It rose up, too sweet, threatening to choke her. She swallowed quickly to stop herself from gagging.
“Find out who did this to Stephen. Bring the murderer to us.” Her mother’s eyes flashed a dangerous gold, her version of grief.
“Why should I turn them in to you and not an enforcer?” Mai asked the question although she already knew the answer. “They’re better equipped to deal with something like this.”
“An enforcer wouldn’t allow for the kind of justice the family demands,” her mother said.
Mai clenched her teeth until her jaw hurt. Mandaia and her lackeys planned on torturing the killer the same way the killer had tortured Stephen. If they ever got their hands on Absolution. Denali and the others would never allow it.
“Make this happen,” Mandaia continued, her voice cold and resolute. “This means catching the killer and bringing them to us takes priority over your little hobby with the enforcers. Am I clear?”
Of course she knew about Mercy and Mai’s work with the enforcers. Any illusions Mai had about possessing even one of her own secrets were just that. “Crystal clear.”
The last time Mai had disobeyed an order from her mother, she’d lost a job she loved, along with most of her friends. Disobedience in something like this wasn’t an option. She thought of her students at the university, her recent tenure, the glimmerings of a life she’d built away from the Family.
Unable to stand the smell of the lotion anymore, Mai capped the bottle and put it carefully on the bedside table. Her skin shuddered under the scum of the lotion. She jerked to her feet. “I’d like to get dressed now, if you please. We don’t know each other well enough for me to get dressed in your company.”
At first, she thought her mother would protest and insist on staying out of spite. But she turned another significant look onto Mai, then walked out of the bedroom. Mai waited until she heard the click of the front door, counted to ten past that, then rushed to the bathroom.
The metal trash can rang dully from the slam of the nearly full bottle of lotion. In the shower again, she scrubbed her skin until it burned and all traces of the lotion were gone. Another thing her mother had ruined for her.
Mai put her mother’s trespass out of her mind because she had to. She’d had years of practice tucking away the hurts her family slung her way in order to focus on less painful things. No matter who she ultimately gave the information to, she had to find out who killed her uncle.
In her home office, she lay the files and photographs across her desk and studied them until her eyes burn
ed. The victims were varied. A priest, a psychiatrist, a couple of teachers, a few midlevel office workers. All ordinary-seeming people except for her uncle.
Nine women. Thirty-seven murders total, over six years. Three of them in Atlanta. The numbers spun in her head. On the surface of it, nothing linked all the victims. Not region. Not habits. Not gender. Criminal records for nearly all of them were nonexistent. They lived all over the country, and six of them lived abroad most of the year. But going by her own experience with her uncle, Mai knew what to look for:
Frequent hospital visits from younger or weaker people in their lives. Large sums of money disappearing from their bank accounts—possible abuse victim payoffs. Past suspicion of abuse or violence. Restraining orders. For every murder victim, she was able to check off two of the signs, sometimes all four, until the evidence of what they all had in common was unavoidable and all the information clicked neatly into place to form a pattern.
But she had to be sure.
The following week, back at work, the abuse victims’ faces and those of their murdered abusers still swirled through her mind as she made her way down the hallway toward her office at the university. She was distracted. That was the reason she didn’t hear it the first time someone called her name. Or the second. It was the hand on her arm, a touch that came from behind, that pulled her thoughts and attentions back to the here and now.
“Professor Redstone.”
Mai turned, masking her annoyance with a generic smile. Which faded as soon as she saw who it was. The hand fell away.
“Professor Bentley.” A muscle ticked in Mai’s jaw, and she consciously loosened the tight clench of her teeth. But her smile stayed gone.
Despite her annoyance and aroused anger, Mai wasn’t blind. Xóchitl Bentley was stunning in beige slacks, loose and flowing like water over her hips, and a thin, white blouse buttoned all the way to her throat. She looked like a present waiting to be unwrapped. The thought made Mai curl her lip at herself in disgust.