by E. A. Copen
“What makes you ask that?”
He finally looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. “Come on, Mom. I’m not stupid. I know you guys are together.”
I pursed my lips and studied his face. “Does that bother you?”
Hunter shrugged. “It’s kind of weird. I don’t have to call him Dad or sir or anything, do I?”
I laughed. “I think he’d be appalled if you did.”
He took his bowl to the sink. “Just don’t make things too weird, okay?”
“It’s only as weird as you make it, Hunter. But you might practice knocking before coming through the door from now on, huh? Unless you want things to get really awkward.”
“Ew. Gross.” Hunter made a gagging sound. He shouldered his backpack, and I stood. “I think I’m going to walk to school. I’ll see you later.” Hunter was out the door before I could get my keys.
I sat alone in the kitchen for another two minutes before the unsettling quiet drove me to the sink full of dishes. While my hands worked, I planned my day. Han should have sent Mia’s files over to the station. Not that it mattered as much now. I knew I was dealing with a ghost, and what’s more, that ghost had a name: Emiko Kelley.
I’d never heard of a vampire ghost, but I supposed that dealing with one wouldn’t be too different from every other disembodied spirit I’d encountered. Of course, every other ghost I’d dealt with wasn’t running around making people sick. Something about that nagged at me. It was too similar to ghost sickness for there not to be a coincidence, but ghost sickness usually only affected family members of the deceased. As far as I knew, Mia’s only living relatives were Zoe and Sal. If I counted extended family, I could add Chanter, Nina, and Leo to the list, but none of them were sick. The only relative of theirs that had died was Chanter’s wife, and that didn’t fit. I already knew who the perpetrator was. I just had to connect Emiko to Mia. So far, the only thing I had that connected them was the house.
There might be one more person I can ask about Emiko and Mia’s history, I thought as I toweled the dishes dry and stacked them in the cupboards. Reed might know.
Talking to Father Gideon Reed wasn’t something I looked forward to. If he hadn’t stolen Mia away that night in the cave, she might not be in her present state. That fact alone made him guilty. He needed to answer for his actions. Since he seemed so buddy-buddy with Marcus, I supposed maybe he’d know a thing or two about Emiko as well. I stole a glance at the clock and decided I’d throw on some clothes and drive over to the church before going to the station to get Mia’s records. I still didn’t have any clean clothes, so I resorted to another pair of sweats and an oversized t-shirt. After I left a note for Sal to ask the pack to rescue some of my clothes, I left.
There was only one church in Paint Rock, and it was a big, old-fashioned, white-steepled building downtown. At nine in the morning on a Thursday, I didn’t expect the father to be in. He lived in a small house behind the church, however, so I parked in the church lot and let myself through the gate to knock on his door.
Footsteps approached, and Reed jerked open the door. Or, I should say a version of him. I was used to seeing Reed dressed up and clean-shaven, every hair in its place. That’s not the face that greeted me. He had enough beard on his face that I don’t think he’d touched a razor in a few days. He was dressed in sweats and a gray robe that he hadn’t bothered to tie. Puffy eyes stared out at me over a steaming cup of tea. “Judah,” he said and his shoulders stiffened.
“You sick, padre?”
“No, no. Just....” He made a quick gesture. “…busy, you know?” A skinny white cat curled around his legs. Reed sat the cup on something beside the door and bent down to pick it up before it could slip outside. When he stood, he met my eyes for the first time. His were bloodshot. “You’re here about Mia.”
I half expected him to slam the door in my face. He’d made it clear before what he thought about BSI taking care of her. Reed didn’t even want me looking for her.
“Marcus told you?”
The priest nodded once. “Marcus sought me out for a consult before he came to you. If you’ve come here looking for my help, I’m afraid I can’t get any further involved, not as long as she’s with Marcus.”
So, I thought, maybe he didn’t know Marcus’ plans for Mia. If that were true, I could almost forgive Reed for his involvement. “I guess I just wanted to talk. To figure out how things got the way they are. And I have questions about the Kelley family, Mrs. Kelley’s death specifically.”
He stood in the doorway, petting his cat for a minute before he reached out to push the door open the rest of the way. “No promises about how helpful what I know will be, but you’re welcome to ask.”
I stepped into Reed’s home. The entry was a narrow space lined on one side by bookshelves and a coat hanger on the other. It was dim because there weren’t any lights on and all the shades were drawn, but the soft lighting filtering through gave the place a homey feel rather than a depressed one.
He closed the door and put his cat down. “Would you like some hot tea? I’m afraid I don’t keep coffee in the house.”
“Tea’s fine.”
He shuffled down the hall, the wood floor creaking under his bare feet, and slid into the first room on the right. I followed and watched as he pulled down a teacup and a box of teabags from the same cabinet. His kitchen was small but still bigger than mine. Cleaner, too. In fact, everything I’d seen of Reed’s house suggested he was a bit of a clean freak. There wasn’t dust or cat hair anywhere. Odd that his appearance didn’t match. I wondered if I’d woken him, but the mug in his hand hadn’t supported that theory. Maybe he just got up.
He dropped the cup loudly to the counter and then leaned forward on flat palms. “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
“That he would keep her. That Zoe was alive and would come for her. That she was different.” He whirled around, the look in his eyes more fit to be on a madman’s face than Reed’s. “I only saw a child brought into this world through a series of terrible events. Alone. Poised to be handed off to a government that cared nothing for her safety or the sanctity of her life. Even if BSI had let her survive whatever torment they thought up, what life would she have had being raised in a facility? Would her parents be doctors, her playmates shadows on the wall? At best, she could hope to survive into adulthood, to be trained and sent out to hunt her own kind as you do.”
I shook my head. “That is not what I do.”
Reed rubbed his forehead and sucked in a deep breath, letting it out slowly. “I know how that story ends. I know what it’s like to be raised like that, to be thought of as a resource, to be exploited as long as it suits the so-called greater good.”
I felt a sudden twinge of pity. Reed was speaking from experience. I didn’t know much about his past, where he’d come from, or what he’d done before opening his church in Paint Rock, but I’d long suspected he was involved in something shady. Up until that moment, I thought it was just Marcus Kelley and his organization. Maybe I’d been wrong.
He lifted his head and wiped a hand over his long face. “I believed him when he promised me she would be taken somewhere safe. Somewhere far from here and placed with people that would care for her. I’ve been helping them move people for years. Why should this little girl have been any different? She should have been safe like the others.”
“Others?” I asked. “What others?”
Reed blinked. “You mean, you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t say then.” He turned back around and busied himself fixing my tea.
“Reed, if you know something, you’d better tell me.”
His hands slowed, and he dropped them to the countertop again. “The Kings,” he murmured, barely audible, “move people. People BSI would otherwise incarcerate or eliminate. Marcus facilitates that operation, as do I.” He finished making the tea.
I stood in stunned silence. The K
ings were criminals. Marcus, too. I knew that. In a million years, I never would have guessed that they were doing that. It made a lot of sense once I thought about it. Reed had already voiced his objection to BSI’s system, and I knew how Sal felt about it. It was why he worked so hard to help Hunter. But there was more to it than that. They weren’t just keeping quiet about supernaturals they knew. The Kings, Marcus, and everyone who worked for him were actively engaged in subverting the whole system. How many criminals had they moved beyond prosecution? How many dangerous kids with limited control over their powers had they robbed of a teacher?
I hadn’t had a teacher. Instead, I had endured endless therapy, exorcisms, fear, and rejection from the people who should have loved me. I learned at a young age to hide the part of me that was a practitioner, to smile and lie and say everything was fine. I had to. If I didn’t, they might lock me up again and throw away the key. I imagined Mia in pain, lost, and without a pack or other werewolves to raise her and help her through the Change. Was that the life they’d intended for her? Was it really preferable to whatever BSI might have done?
I shook the thought from my head when Reed held the steaming cup out to me. All the might-have-beens and could-haves in the world didn’t matter. The reality of the situation was that Mia hadn’t been turned into BSI, and she hadn’t been sent away. Marcus had kept her for his own gain. My job, after figuring out how to heal her body, was to find some way to reunite her with her father and heal any damage done to her mind the first year of her life.
“Thanks,” I muttered and took the tea.
Reed sank into a chair at the table. “But I didn’t know she hadn’t been sent away, Judah. I thought she was safe. I took every precaution, did everything Marcus asked of me, and still, he hid her there.”
I pulled out the chair across from him and sat. “How’d you find out?”
His cat jumped up onto the table, and Reed reached for him, but he was much more interested in swatting at the paper tag hanging from my teacup. He sighed. “He came to me first when Mia became sick. As you can imagine, I was furious, but I couldn’t leave the girl to her fate. I did what I could, which wasn’t much. I tried anointing her, a gentle exorcism, warding the room where she was being kept. Nothing helped. In the end, Marcus and I had an argument that resulted in us parting ways. I’ve been, uh…” He glanced around. “…getting my affairs in order. Just in case he considers me too much of a liability.”
Reed didn’t say he thought Marcus might have him killed. He didn’t have to.
I sipped the tea. Not half-bad, but hot enough that it burned the roof of my mouth. “You didn’t really help your situation just now, telling me about his connection to the Kings.”
“Why do you think I told you that?”
“Oh, hell, Reed.” I put the cup down. “You don’t think I can protect you?”
“I believe our chances of survival outside of Marcus’ influence are better as a team.” He pushed his cup away. The move startled his cat, and he jumped down off the table to scramble down the hall. “You said you had questions about Emiko. I should tell you that she died before my tenure here at Paint Rock began. I believe she was killed at the tail end of the Revelation, before this land was even designated for the reservation.”
“Killed?”
Reed frowned at my question. “Well, maybe that’s not the right word. There are many stories surrounding how she died. Half of them say she was murdered. The other half say she took her own life. Only Marcus, Alto Continelli, and God will ever know for certain.”
That was interesting. Alto Continelli, being the leader of the Stryx clan of vampires in western Europe, had a history with Marcus. I’d heard Marcus’ daughter, Kim, bring it up before. If Marcus’ reaction was anything to judge by when I brought up his wife, it was still a sore spot for him. Whatever had happened, it had impacted the Kelley family significantly enough to almost set off a blood feud ten years after the fact.
“What do the Stryx have to do with Emiko Kelley’s death?”
“The Stryx are a very old fashioned group,” Reed started. “They like to think of themselves as gatekeepers to the world of vampires, the purest of the pure. Because so many American vampires can trace their origin back to western Europe, they believe they have some claim here.”
I nodded. “Their foothold here was one of the reasons BSI forbids the forming of new clans. It could cause a war with the Stryx. A lot of bodies would have to drop to make it happen.”
“Right.” Reed gestured to me. “And as I’m sure you’re aware, the Stryx don’t like the idea of certain lines of vampires mixing. They’re afraid mixing one kind of vampire with another would result in some sort of genetic abomination. The Upyri welcome it and that’s one reason they don’t get along.”
I found that funny considering the one thing the Stryx were known for was their inbred ugliness. But I kept that chuckle to myself. “And that has what to do with Marcus?”
“Well, Emiko was an auric vampire.”
Holy hell. She and Marcus had two children together, two children the Stryx would have seen as abominations. The animosity between the Continellis and the Kelleys suddenly made a lot more sense.
“As the story goes,” Reed continued, “Alto and his two sons, Nero and Crux, paid Marcus a visit. It was during that visit that Mrs. Kelley was found decapitated.”
“Decapitated?” I repeated. “You don’t see someone suicide that way very often.”
“It can be done, though it’s quite difficult and usually involves a further fall than what some say she could have managed, but then I am told Emiko did have a flair for the dramatic. Either way, Marcus blames Alto for her death, but I’m not sure of the details.” He grabbed his cup again and sipped at it. “Why did you want to know? Is this connected to Mia?”
“I saw Emiko’s ghost trying to feed off Mia in the hospital.”
“Lord, have mercy,” he uttered. “Are you sure it was her?”
“I wasn’t until I saw the giant portrait of her hanging in Marcus’ study.”
Reed crossed himself. “And you think Emiko’s ghost is what’s making Mia so sick?”
I nodded again. “Something about her wasn’t right. There was a thing inside her ghost, Reed, some kind of parasite. My gut says ghost sickness, but I can’t make the connection between Mia and Emiko. They weren’t related. The only thing they had in common was the house.”
He thought for a minute. “Ghost sickness. Yeah. That makes sense. It fits, but you’re right. It’s usually the family that’s affected.” Reed’s eyes brightened with a sudden realization. “You should tell Chanter.”
Reed was right. If anyone would know how to deal with ghost sickness, it would be Chanter, but Chanter was one of the Tomahawk Kings, too. I’d trusted him, and he’d been trafficking people right under my nose. Was it really trafficking if the people wanted to go? How was that any more wrong than me keeping Hunter out of BSI’s reach?
That last question was the one I had been avoiding asking myself since the day before. I was no saint. If BSI found out about Hunter, I would be in a lot of trouble. Him, too. It was a huge risk not to register him, but one I was willing to take if it meant keeping my son. I didn’t think I was better than anyone, did I?
“Thanks.” I pushed the half-finished tea away to stand. “I think I will talk to him.”
Reed stood with me and tightened his robe. “About Marcus. Are you going to shut his operation down? Judah, we may have our disagreements, but I still believe in his cause. What BSI does to these people, it’s evil. I only wish you would see that.”
“I do see it, Reed.” I reached out to grip his shoulder. “But I can’t walk away. Imagine if I did. They’d just send someone else, someone that might not be on your side.”
Reed nodded and forced a smile. “I’ll walk you out.”
Chapter Fifteen
I drove to the office and sat in front of my desk for a long time, deciding whether I should call Chanter. Mia
’s life might depend on what he had to say. Still, I didn’t want to talk to him or any of the Kings for that matter, but I didn’t have a choice. It was either call him or talk to Sal. After last night, Chanter was the most appealing option.
I grabbed the dinosaur of a phone off my desk and dialed Chanter’s number. He picked up on the fourth ring. “What is it, girl? Please be quick. I’m running late.”
That was Chanter for you. Whenever he wanted to talk to me, he took his time, but if I called him, he always acted short-tempered about it, as if answering me interrupted his entire way of life. It was better not to get on his bad side, I decided, so I launched right into it. “What do you know about ghost sickness?”
The other end was silent for a few beats. “I know that it is dangerous. Why do you ask?”
“Have you ever heard of someone being affected by ghost sickness and the ghost in question not being a relative?”
“It has happened,” he agreed. “But there is usually a sorcerer involved. The idea that the ghost of a dead person can simply attack the living is an oversimplification in any case.”
So, I thought, there has to be someone else involved, someone who’s controlling the ghost. If not controlling it, someone had at least done something to make her show up and start attacking people now. Explained why no one in the house had been bothered up until now.
“If I thought someone was being affected by ghost sickness—”
“You would notify Saloso or me immediately,” Chanter snapped, his tone even more irritated. “It isn’t something you can deal with, Judah. And even if you could, doing so would be foolish. The consequences of meddling in magick you don’t understand will likely be fatal.”
“I know what I’m doing, Chanter.” I don’t know why I felt like I needed to defend myself. Chanter was only looking out for me, and he wasn’t insinuating that I couldn’t do my job, just that I would need help. Maybe it was more his tone I was objecting to more than his words.