by E. A. Copen
I dragged him out into the street, collected my bag from the glamour I’d left it under to protect it, and found a spare shirt for him in it. We weren’t the same size, Stefan and me. My shirt was tight on his chest and biceps, but he made it look good at least.
With him still woozy and unable to stand up straight on his own, I walked us two blocks from the clubhouse just in case the bikers came back and flagged down a yellow cab.
“Is he okay?” asked the driver as I stuffed Stefan in ahead of me.
“He’ll be aces once he sleeps it off. Bad trip. Arsehole wandered off without even puttin’ on his shoes, would you believe it?”
The driver frowned but turned around. Cab drivers in New York didn’t make enough to care what kind of trouble their passengers were in, so long as it didn’t bring the law down on them. That, and money talks. I shoved two twenties at him. “Shafer Street in Brooklyn. Get us there inside half an hour, and I’ll drop another twenty as a tip.”
He took the money and hit the button to start the fare. “Yes, sir.”
Chapter Ten
KHALEDA
I lifted my bandaged hands in front of my bruised face. Two black eyes stared back at me from the mirror. I pushed back my hair to look at the three stitches over my left eye. That asshole had done a number on my face.
The flash of his memories threatened to surface. I fought it by rinsing my mouth out. Pink water splashed against white porcelain, slowly oozing down the drain. That asshole never would’ve gotten the drop on me if I hadn’t been so shaken by that demon earlier. He’d made me think of my father. Yes, that was it. Had to be. There was no other explanation. Why else would I be thinking of Lucifer after all this time when I was so over him?
Harmony stopped in the doorway to the bathroom, her purse slung over her shoulder. She’d put on a pair of bright yellow scrubs and comfortable white tennis shoes. Apparently, Josiah knew how to make acquaintances in New York. Not only was she a practicing white witch, but she was also a nurse working in a trauma center. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked. “I’d stay, but I really need the money. I can’t be late on my rent again.”
I dried my hands on the towel hanging from the rack next to me and nodded. Every move of my head made the pressure built up in my sinuses shift. She’d done what she could to get the bone back into place, but it would take time to heal. Time or magic.
I forced a smile to reassure her. “I’ll manage.”
She tucked some hair behind her ear. “Okay, well, there are leftovers in the fridge. Pain meds in the cabinet. Ice in a washcloth every one to two hours to keep the swelling down.” Her keys jingled in her hands as she walked toward the front door.
Something slammed against the ceiling from above. I jerked my head toward the noise and immediately regretted it. “What the hell is that?”
“Goddammit, Frank,” Harmony hissed. “It’s Frank Bowman, my upstairs neighbor. He must be back. Last I heard Amy had finally kicked him out.”
We both stood in the living room, staring at the ceiling and listening to the echoes of an enraged man shout and slam things. Harmony chewed on her lip a long moment before she jerked the door open. “If he gets too bad, call the cops. Not that it’ll do any good. They’ll just release him again because Amy won’t press charges. I’m sorry about this. You want me to call?”
I lowered my gaze, a plan forming in my head. “No, it’s fine. You’ve got to get to work. Like you said, if it gets out of hand, I’ll call the police.”
Harmony nodded slowly as if she wasn’t sure I was telling the truth. “Okay, then. Bye. See you in twelve hours.” She closed the door behind her, and I started counting.
Normally, I wouldn’t have concerned myself with scum like Frank Bowman, wife-beating piece of shit that he was. Before what happened to me in Hell, I would’ve blamed the wife too. I couldn’t have understood why she didn’t just leave. Why not just defend herself?
When I was being tortured by demons, I understood helplessness for the first time. I had fought at first, too. Swore, spat, kicked, and bit. All I had learned was that fighting made it worse. Eventually, all I could do was lay there and let them do whatever they wanted, retreating inside my own mind to the small sanctuary I’d built. It was the one place they could never hurt me. Amy was there now, in her safe place, waiting for Hurricane Frank to blow over. She didn’t get that assholes like Frank always got worse before things got better.
I finally reached five hundred, more than enough time for Harmony to be gone, and went to the apartment door.
Stale air permeated the stairway, musty and thick like it’d been exhaled a hundred times before. My footsteps rang hollow against the cement stairs. With every step, more adrenaline pumped into my system, sharpening my focus, lending extra strength to my coiled muscles. Each sound was the memory of a fist, the squeak of the stairway door a muffled cry until finally, I was in front of Amy’s door.
I could hear them on the other side, him cussing her out while she tried to soothe the monster he’d become in soft tones. “Don’t, Frank. You know it’s not good for you. Think of your blood pressure.”
“Fuck my blood pressure!” The wet sound of impact, knuckles hitting flesh. Wood groaned and scooted over the floor as a body impacted it.
If I waited any longer, he’d hurt her even worse.
The door splintered as I kicked it in, slamming against the wall. Frank was a big boy, two hundred pounds and just over six feet with the build of someone who slammed barbells the same way he slammed beers: too often, too hard, too fast. She was a petite bleach blonde with dark roots and too much eye shadow, maybe one fifteen with those heels on. Frank’s meaty fingers were wrapped around Amy’s throat. His hands were big enough that there was plenty of overlap.
He looked up from choking her, a scowl on his beet-red face. “Who the fuck are you?”
I didn’t answer. I crossed the wrecked room in just a few steps and slammed my palm against Frank’s forehead. He tried to move, but he was positioned awkwardly from his attempt to choke out Amy. Frank Bowman didn’t stand a chance against me as I introduced him to what a real monster looked like.
Slowly, his fingers unfurled from around Amy’s neck. His eyes rolled back and his oversized jaw slackened, falling open. Drool dripped down his chin.
Amy slid away, terrified. “What’re you doing to him?”
I gritted my teeth. “Teaching him a lesson. Get out, Amy. Leave and don’t ever come back here.”
“But—” She flinched when I turned my gaze on her. “Yeah, okay,” she said and inched toward the door without turning her back on me. Once she reached it, she turned and ran for her life.
I turned my attention back to Frank. “Tell me, Frankie, does it make you feel strong when you hit her?”
“I-I-I…”
I pushed him back a step. “Do you feel strong now? You don’t, do you? You feel that pounding in your chest? That’s terror.” I struck him in the chest.
He tripped over another overturned chair and crashed to the floor, a tree falling in the wilderness where no one was around to hear.
I kicked aside the chair and stood over Frank, flexing my burned hands into fists. He couldn’t do anything but stare, wide-eyed at me, not while he was under my power. I walked over him, one foot straddling either side of his prone body. “That terror beating in your chest, that awful, sick, powerless feeling creeping through your gut like an icy snake, that’s going to be the last thing you ever feel as I shred your mind.”
His jaw worked, but he didn’t speak. Not as I sank down on top of him, not as I stripped off his clothes, and not as I let the monster have him for as long as she wanted.
He wasn’t dead when we were finished, but there are a lot worse things a person can be than stone-cold dead. And Frankie Bowman, he became one of those things, neither living nor dead, a broken comatose shell of a man trapped inside the fear he’d so often inflicted on another: helplessness.
Hours later, as I ste
pped out of the shower, I turned to the mirror and smiled at my perfect reflection. Harmony had done a good job setting the nose. I could barely tell I’d broken it. The blisters on my hands had healed nicely, and there wasn’t a trace of any bruising around my eyes. Now, if I could just find some clothes of Harmony’s to borrow, I wouldn’t have to walk around in bloodstains.
Something buzzed. I turned away from the mirror to sort through my discarded clothing where I found my cell phone buzzing with a call from a caller whose only identifier was: UNAVAILABLE.
“Petra,” I said, putting the phone to my ear. “Tell me there’s news.”
“It’s Reggie actually.”
“Good. I didn’t want to talk to that bitch anyway.”
“Um…”
I sighed and pinched my nose. “I’m on speakerphone, aren’t I?”
Reggie cleared his throat, and with it, the awkwardness. “I finished making up that list of potential suspects. If you include potential passengers, then your suspect pool is still well over two thousand people.”
I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “Why do I sense there’s something else?”
“There’s been another body found,” Petra said. “We need Josiah. Where is he?”
I shrugged on the fuzzy bathrobe Harmony kept on the back of the bathroom door. “Out running an errand. He’ll be back soon. I can come now, though.”
“What if there’s another death curse?” Reggie asked. “No offense, but you’re not equipped to handle that, are you?”
“My people can clear the body,” Petra offered. “I’d rather not wait. You two need to get to that crime scene pronto for an analysis. I’ll text you the address. I want a report on what you find, Khaleda. It’s important.”
The call ended.
I scowled at the phone and had to make an effort not to crush it. That woman had a way of getting under my skin. She’d be pissed when I showed up without Josiah, but I couldn’t just wait around all night for him to show up. We had a job to do, and unlike him, I took it seriously.
Harmony was thinner than me with much smaller boobs. I did find a nightshirt I could wear, and my pants weren’t so bloodstained that they didn’t come clean with a little soap and hydrogen peroxide. I dressed, scrawled out a quick note to leave on the counter for Harmony in case she got back before I did, and went out to go look at yet another dead body.
Chapter Eleven
JOSIAH
I broke into Harmony’s apartment the second time. No sense waiting around for someone to open the door for us, and Khaleda didn’t answer when I buzzed. She was either asleep or out. Either way was fine with me. I wasn’t the succubus’ babysitter. The apartment was empty when I got there so it must’ve been the latter.
Stefan was still conscious enough to walk, but not aware enough to know where he was. I put him in the bathtub and went to get a beer from the fridge while I decided what to do.
Reverend Mirren had hired me to find Stefan, a job I assumed he was playing middleman for Alexi, but maybe that wasn’t the case. Alexi didn’t seem to know who’d hired me, which pointed to Mirren acting on his own, but why? Someone—probably Alexi’s men—had also torn apart Stefan’s apartment, then torched it with us inside. You don’t rip through boxes and mattresses searching for a person. No, they wanted something else, something they thought Stefan had, but they also wanted Stefan himself. Alive. If they’d wanted him dead, there’d be a hit out, and I hadn’t heard about it. I could just be out of the loop, but you’d think Mirren would’ve mentioned that someone was gunning for him.
Plus, the bikers had kept him alive and a prisoner for a reason. My bet was they wanted to ransom him to Alexi, probably get more than a favor. Cash was more valuable to them than a promise of future goodwill.
What did Alexi want that Stefan had, and why did he want Stefan? More curious, why had Stefan—a man in the life with connections—thrown in with a bunch of one-percenters instead of his own people if he was in danger? Things weren’t adding up, no matter how I put the pieces together. For answers, I’d have to wait until Stefan came around, and that might be a while.
I took a long pull from the beer. What the hell am I even doing with him? This isn’t my problem, and I should know better than to get involved with a bunch of gangsters. All I had to do was turn him over to Mirren, collect my cash, and put this whole thing behind me. I didn’t even have to wait for Stefan to be conscious to do that. One phone call and this could all be behind me.
Yet there was a coiled, cold feeling in my gut that told me I didn’t want to do that. Something deeper was happening. I’d seen Stefan in the mirror, and in that fucked-up dream. Then he said he knew me when I was absolutely sure we’d never spoken before. Granted, he was an Oracle, but I’d always thought they were limited to spouting nonsense prophecy, not getting into my head.
No one gets into my head. I put the bottle down and tightened my fingers around its sweating neck. I’d gone through every precaution. My mental and magical defenses were top-notch, too good for some drug-dealing half-wit to breach. Yet he had, and he’d done it in a way that suggested he could do it any time he wanted. He’d snaked in through some weak spot perhaps, seen parts of me I showed no one else, just as Christian Lenore had all those years ago. I should’ve been furious, not curious.
There was something about this Stefan fellow, a feeling I couldn’t shake or put words to, as if he were part of a bigger puzzle I hadn’t even realized existed until I saw his picture.
Get a hold of yourself, Josiah. I lifted the cold glass bottle and pressed it to my aching head. You’re making more of this than there is. There’s no conspiracy. No master plan dreamed up by God, the universe, or anyone else. Life is random and full of chance encounters. You know that better than anyone. It means nothing. You just need some sleep, that’s all.
The sound of retching suddenly came from the bathroom.
I sighed and put the bottle down to go check on Stefan. He was exactly where I thought he’d be, head over the toilet, one arm resting on the back of the seat to keep him from collapsing into it. His whole body trembled as if he were shivering, but big drops of sweat rolled down the back of his neck.
I pulled out my pack of smokes and tapped one out. “Any idea what they gave you, mate?”
Stefan shook his head slowly. “Downers. Muscle relaxers maybe. Shit.” He doubled over and tried to vomit again, but nothing came up. It was all noise and no mess. After a minute, he spat again and rolled away from the toilet to lean against the wall between it and the tub, breathing hard.
I offered him the ciggy I’d gotten started and he took it. “Alexi burned your place down.”
“Fucking figures. Bastard.”
“Any idea why he’d do that?” I lit another cigarette and leaned against the door frame.
Stefan lifted the cigarette to his lips with two trembling fingers and inhaled. “Is that really what you want to ask me?” He rolled his head to the side and pushed some dark, damp hair out of his eyes to offer me a tired grin. “Come on, man.”
I crossed my arms. “Okay, then. Let’s start with the biggest picture. What the fuck were you doing tied in the basement of a biker bar?”
He laughed, but his heart wasn’t in it. A bitter chuckle. “Wasn’t supposed to be that way. I gave them three grand to put me up for a while. Thought about getting out of town, but I figured Alexi had the bridges locked down and I know he’s watching the ports. With no way out, my best bet was to lie low. The Italians, Sicilians, and Albanians are all in it with Alexi, and my skin’s the wrong shade to get any favors from most of the street gangs. I’m fucking Greek. It’s all I know. But this biker guy was the friend of a friend of one of my exes and said they could put me up for a price. What they didn’t tell me was that they’d also sell me out for a better price. When you happened along, I think they were just hours away from handing me over. Wanted to make sure I didn’t have anything of value they could take first, I guess.”
; “And you were with them for three weeks?”
“Nah.” Stefan shook his head. “I was in the wind for most of it. Shitty motels under a fake name, always looking over my shoulder, knowing there was nowhere I could go that Alexi couldn’t fucking find me.” He closed his eyes and winced. “Fuck, this sucks. You don’t have any pain killers on you, do you? Just to get me through the worst of it.”
“Sorry, mate. Need you sober. Why does he want you?”
He sighed and rubbed his forehead. “You sure that’s something you want to know? It’ll make you a target.”
“I’m already on Alexi Komnosis’ shit list,” I said, pushing away from the door frame. I sank to the bathroom floor between him and the door, ensuring he couldn’t go anywhere without getting through me first. Not that I thought he would try. Stefan was in a rough way. Probably couldn’t stand without gagging. “Reverend Mirren is the one who hired me to find you, but Alexi didn’t seem to know anything about that when we spoke last. He grilled me. When I wouldn’t tell him who hired me, he set fire to your house with my partner and me inside. One of his goons about caved in her skull. So I’m pretty deep in the shit already, Stefan.”
“Niko,” he corrected. “My friends call me Niko. Nobody but my mom and Alexi call me Stefan, and she’s dead.” He sighed, his shoulders sinking with the motion. “How much do you know?”
“I know Georgie bit it about the same time you disappeared. I know Alexi took out a lot of Georgie’s men when he came to power, and I was told he wouldn’t dare try it with you, that he wanted you alive.”
He nodded and took a long drag. “That last part’s true enough. Georgie was a bit of a traditionalist. Every time he needed to make a major decision, he came to me. Alliance or war? Talk to Niko. Do we get into heroin? Talk to Niko. We were like this.” He held up two crossed fingers. “Georgie was practically a father to me. When he went, it wasn’t supposed to be Alexi who took over. Georgie has a son, Christof, who’s back in Greece. He was out there taking care of some business when his father died, an arrangement Alexi was probably behind.” He finished with the cigarette and crushed it out.