Soul Merchant (Isabella Hush Series Book 5)

by Thea Atkinson

  "Something like that," he said.

  "No." I shrank into a smaller ball beneath his arm to harbor all that glorious heat. "I can't have someone watching my every move. I lived that life. I won't live it again."

  "You mean you don't want anyone knowing what you're doing. That's a remnant of your old life, Isabella. You don't have to worry about human jail or your boss trying to take what's yours. You work for me. I will look out for you."

  "I don't want to answer to anyone, Maddox. I need to be my own boss. We agreed on that. You could contract me. I call my own shots."

  He didn't laugh, even if I'd just been begging him for work a moment earlier. It was a complex thing, this freedom. Even I couldn't work out all the things Scottie had done to my psyche. Only time would let that happen for me.

  The thought made me halt on the sidewalk, though.

  "You want me to fail," I said. "That would put me right where you want me. You wouldn't have to sniff around from afar to make sure Absalom doesn't come for me."

  He lifted one shoulder. "I can't say I'd be disappointed for you to end up having to come under my protection. It would make my task protecting the stone's energy a lot easier. But no. I don't want you to fail, Kitten."

  "I'll find you something," he said. "Can't see you go hungry or homeless because of your spiteful nature."

  He stared off up the street as he spoke and I followed his gaze to see a yellow vehicle, the only car on the street, strangely enough, approaching.

  "Cab," he said, jerking his chin at the car and easing the crate onto the ground between his feet. He lifted his hand and just like that the cab pulled over.

  "Your magic," I said. I wasn't averse to walking but I couldn't shake the feeling of doom that dogged me since finding out Cleopatra was a vampire who considered human kind a pest to be rid of or food for her larder.

  "That wasn't magic, actually," he said. "At least not the kind I have."

  I yanked open the door of the cab and pushed into the bench seat, scooting over to the middle to make room for Maddox and the box.

  He passed the cabbie something that didn't look the least bit like money. In fact, it looked more like a ticket of sorts. He mumbled what sounded like my address except for a few words that might have been in a different language, then he flashed me a smile and closed the door.

  "Hold up," I said to the cabbie who had put the car into drive at Maddox's nod. I scooted back across the seat and struck the window button so I could lean out.

  Maddox stood there, still shirtless, with the kitten's box hitched up to his hip. I could see the jacket undulating upward as the tiny thing tried to climb out.

  "Aren't you coming?" I said out the window.

  I had been on my own for years. I'd braved the worst of men, and the devil himself, and yet I couldn't shake the feeling of dread prickling my spine. It wasn't just Cleo. Something was off. A girl on her own got used to listening to her intuition.

  He leaned in and tugged my jacket collar up around the muff of my neck.

  "I'd love to go home with you, Isabella," he murmured. "But I have my hands full already with a sassy female."

  He shifted the box to his left hip and ran a thumb over my chin with his free hand. It was dry, rough, and delicious feeling.

  "Lock your door tight," he said. "And don't let anyone in."

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DON'T LET ANYONE IN was something you told a person when you were worried they would accidentally invite in a vampire. Maddox had said it with a grin on his face, so he obviously thought my anxiety over Cleo was overwrought. But how could he be sure?

  "You're not helping," I said.

  "Just testing."

  He chuckled, but it sounded off, not like him at all. He was calm. Collected. Not the kind of guy to get weirded out by a threat from a vampire who obviously wanted to make him hers.

  Nervous Maddox was an anomaly.

  "Testing for what," I said, suspicious of the man who had only ever displayed anxiety when he'd been surrounded by a bevy of sexed up, naked nymphs, sicced on him by the god Pan.

  The cabbie complained that we were taking too long, but he didn't turn around or even look at us in the rear-view mirror. That was strange enough, but when Maddox shot him a glare that drew his glance to the same mirror, he shook out his shoulders as though he wanted to argue but didn't.

  Right. Definitely odd.

  Maddox turned his attention back to me.

  "I'm worried about you," he said.

  I sucked the back of my teeth to indicate what I thought of that comment.

  "Right," I said. "You sure sounded worried when you laughed about Cleo worming her way into my apartment and draining me dry."

  "I did not laugh."

  "But you did ask to meet me and a woman you knew was a vampire, in the darkest dregs of the supernatural district?"

  He sighed. "This isn't the darkest dregs," he said. "I just wanted to check in on you, make sure that you were fine."

  "Why wouldn't I be?"

  He ran his hand over his new buzz cut and shifted the box to his other hip. The kitten inside complained with a loud yowl.

  "You know why," he said.

  Did I now? I couldn't imagine the reason I'd suddenly be cause for concern. All I saw now was that he'd put me in the cross hairs of a vampire threatening to visit my house in the dark of the hour before dawn.

  "If you were so worried, you shouldn't have asked me to meet you and a bigoted vampire at the Rot Gut," I told him, and meant it.

  "That's not it," he said. "Cleo is all bark and no bite."

  I could just make out the sound of something scraping along the asphalt, as though he was worrying his boot back and forth across the pavement.

  "Are you doing alright, Isabella?" he said as he put his hand on the bottom of the window. "Mentally, emotionally?"

  I had a moment of blazing understanding. I leaned toward the window so I could punch down on his hand.

  "Oh my God," I said when he didn't so much as wince. "That's why you offered me this job that you knew would come to nothing."

  He flipped his hand over just as I pulled mine back, and caught me at the wrist. I yanked away.

  "It's about Scottie," I said. "All of this is about Scottie. You knew Cleo wouldn't want me involved in your recollection of that god-forsaken chest of hers, but you couldn't think of another way to get me out of the house. You thought a job might tempt me."

  He leaned his forearm onto the window as I retreated into the back of the cab.

  "You weren't answering my texts," he said, and flicked his gaze to the cabbie's in the mirror. I caught some kind of communication pass between the two of them and that infuriated me even more.

  "There wasn't a single question to answer," I said. "There wasn't even a dick pic. Just little shots of your dinner. Punchlines from jokes. I mean...what did you think?"

  "I thought you'd answer one of the damn things." He pushed his head through the window. "I'm not good at technology."

  "Well, a dick pic at the least might have got a response."

  The cabbie turned on the overhead light and I could see that Maddox had pressed his lips together and was struggling with something I thought he didn't want to say.

  "Shut the damn light off," I said to the cabbie. I didn't want to look at Maddox right then. I didn't want to see the look of worry that rode his expression, because it said more about me than it did him, and I wasn't going to go there.

  "You weren't leaving the house," he said. "You haven't come out of that hovel in weeks."

  "That's not true," I said, crossing my arms over my chest. "I came out at Christmas."

  I felt a flush of warmth prickle up my throat to my cheeks as I thought about the party he'd convinced me to attend. He had faked a job then too, and for the same reason.

  I fell for it again.

  "You're a one-trick pony, Maddox," I said. "You need to be a bit more inventive if you want me to leave my hovel."

 
My words sounded sour and I kicked the back of the seat in the hopes of urging the cabbie to finally pull out. I pushed at Maddox's arm to release it from the window, but he kept it anchored there as though his strength alone was keeping the cab grounded.

  "If you were fine," he said, "you'd go get groceries. Pizza. Put the cat out."

  "She has a litter box."

  "You know what I mean."

  This time it was my turn to lean onto the window. He'd taken a step backward, evidently having some trouble with the kitten trying to claw her way out of the box.

  "Have you been watching me?" I said.

  He toed the pavement and peeked under the jacket to the interior of the box instead of meeting my eyes. He didn't answer.

  "You said you wouldn't do that," I went on.

  Maddox dropped the jacket back down over a tiny claw that jabbed out from the edge.

  "Maddox?"

  He looked at me finally, and his face in the dim light of street lamps said everything he wouldn't. I felt my chest burn.

  "You said if I worked for you, I wouldn't need someone staking out my apartment twenty-four seven."

  He lifted one shoulder. "You think I can leave you to Absalom and his greys? They know where you are, Isabella. They know what you can do."

  I'd spent three years on the run from Scottie, watching over my shoulder for the day when one of his henchmen would find me. I didn't want to live my life knowing someone was watching me. I didn't care what the reason was. Absalom and his greys were a distant threat, if any, right now. I needed space to find out what my life could be as a truly liberated woman.

  "I would have left you be," he argued, and I thought he hated having to explain himself. "I took vows," he said. "You know I'm a guardian, Isabella. I can't risk Absalom finding you and using your energy."

  "Oh, so it's not me you're worried about after all. It's the damn Lilith stone."

  "For Pete's sake, of course I'm worried about you." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Sweet Pagan Piety, it's times like this I'm glad of my celibacy. You women are just not rational creatures."

  "You Kindred are the complex creatures," I said. "Can't my behavior just be because I need to find myself?"

  He leveled his gaze at me again.

  "Look. You weren't yourself, alright. Not even after Scourge." There was a pause, however brief before he spoke again. "Especially after Scourge."

  He flicked his gaze to the interior carpet of the cab, and I knew he was thinking about how he'd declared his want for me on Kindred's most savage eve, how he'd chased me with the intent of showing me that need because he couldn't help himself.

  "Scottie," he said, finally, tearing my mind away from the things that had happened that night and back to the present. "Or rather, your mental state now that he's gone. You seem normal again, act normal. But..."

  "But what?" I demanded, my voice a little too sharp. "I'm up off the sofa. I'm getting dressed. Going out to meet people, who evidently don't think my time is valuable."

  It was as I was speaking that I understood exactly what he'd been worried about after all. Me, a fragile, vulnerable human being, with all the rampant emotions he and his kind didn't understand but exploited.

  "You thought I wanted to kill myself," I said with a harsh laugh. "After all the things I've been through? After I fought like mad to live? After I, after I..."

  I couldn't say the words, after I killed Scottie. I couldn't. Instead I found a round-about way to answer to the concern.

  "Listen, I'm not sure how I feel about being a murderer but I didn't go through all that just to swallow a bottle of pills. I need work, Maddox. I need to earn so I can live. Do what you promised and find me a real job please."

  He rocked back on his heels as though my words were striking him in the chest.

  "Okay, okay. I believe you."

  He didn't look like he believed me. I didn't care in the least. I leaned toward the door to press the window button.

  "Take me home," I said to the cabbie.

  He didn't move to take the car out of park.

  "Now," I said and then added, "please."

  The cabbie ignored me but hunched down so he could look through the back window at Maddox, who finally knocked on the door of the cab and yelled to the cabbie to take me straight home.

  I leaned back with a sigh and laid my head on the back of the seat. At least the cab was warm and clean. I watched the city blur by as I pondered the situation I was in.

  I'd taken out the kingpin of a criminal group, but there were always brutes willing to take on the mantle. Whoever took Scottie's place might decide on vengeance.

  But that wasn't my big fear or the thing Maddox was worried about the most. The Lilith Stone Maddox had given his vow to was a powerful one. It kept Lilith's energy trapped and needed guardians. Maddox was one. His father, who now possessed the stone and was skipping his way through the nine worlds to keep it safe, was another. The last two guardians of the stone.

  And there was the big issue. The stone had sent me to Hell. I'd escaped with help from the Morrigan, but it now made me a conduit for the power. I had no idea what it meant, but it was sufficiently threatening to make Maddox decide I needed to be surveilled.

  The cabbie took a route I was unfamiliar with. The buildings looked empty. No one walked the streets. Even the hooker had disappeared and in her place was a tall pillar of glistening rock.

  I was tired. Adrenaline had a way of doing that to a gal. And I knew better by now than to question what I might be seeing in the borough where Fayed's bar was found. As a new-comer to the city three years earlier, I'd found it by wandering about and making contacts as I scouted potential places to loot. I'd been a thief for Scottie for years. It was all I really knew or had known since I was in my late teens.

  But Scottie was gone, and now I was tainted with some sort of Hell aura. I'd barely escaped the dark sorcerer Absalom and his minions, and while he needed to regroup, it won me time to learn about the things that went bump in the night.

  How much time was anyone's guess, but Maddox was sure he'd return. That he'd strike when the time was right.

  But I couldn't live with that sort of piano hanging over my head. I'd decided to just live.

  Except, apparently, I wasn't doing such a good job of it.

  Or maybe Maddox was being too much of a Nancy boy.

  What I was really worried about was Cleo and her threat. That one was a clear and present danger. Much more than an absent shapeshifter and his minions.

  Maddox might have been joking about me not letting anyone in, but the fact that he'd hired me a cab who obviously had some connection to Kindred and perhaps even a direct connection to him, spoke volumes.

  He was worried about it too. He'd used the premise of taking care of the cat to put me off, but I imagined he'd be staking out my apartment soon enough, or would have this cabbie do it for him.

  And I'd been a bit too hasty in declaring perfect security of my apartment. In truth, things had been going downhill with my landlord lately. I'd not noticed it at first, because I had been doing exactly what Maddox said I'd been doing. Namely, lying on the sofa and moping around.

  All while my landlord waged his subtle and not-so-subtle war with his neighbors. It was an affluent enough neighborhood, but it hadn't always been. McMansions had grown up around his brownstone for the last decade, according to him, and the zoning committee wanted him to sell and vacate his buildings.

  Like my cat, my landlord was ornery. He refused to sell, and even past that, found new and innovative ways to irritate and taunt his neighbors.

  The most recent was breeding rats and letting them go on garbage pick-up day. I only realized it when he carted my garbage can back from the curb and onto the back of his pickup truck. He drove away at dusk as I watched through the window at rats scampering over the neighbors' trash bins and into flowerbeds around basement windows.

  I shivered as I thought about it and made a note to turn on my cell
phone light when the cabbie let me out. The last thing I wanted was to run into a nest as I walked up my steps.

  "Take a left here," I said and the cabbie grunted.

  "I know," he said.

  Of course he would. Whatever silent communication that had occurred between Maddox and him, I wondered if it hadn't been set up in advance.

  Upon arrival, I pushed out of the cab wearier than I'd felt in days. Despite Maddox's assurances he'd find me jobs so I could parlay my skills into something that would pay my bills, so far, nothing had materialized.

  Instead, he was playing me with kid gloves, seeming to think that my funk would somehow infect my ability to reclaim objects he knew his clients wanted.

  I shut the cab door when the cabbie informed me it was all paid for and I shuffled up the sidewalk to my front door. It wasn't until I tried to shove the key into the lock that I realized something was wrong.

  The lock didn't disengage. When I twisted the knob, the door pushed open far too easily.

  That's when I knew.

  Someone had broken in.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I WAS NO STRANGER TO break-ins. I'd done a few myself in the early days for Scottie when he was a small-time boss and had his minions do small-scale grab and steals. Because I was petite, I was often the one slipping into houses through windows and crawl spaces. And because I was quick, I was the one responsible for taking off with the lightest, but most valuable stuff if trouble presented itself. I knew what a break-in looked like. This had all the hallmarks of it.

  I felt the sure prickle of adrenaline as I flattened myself against the outside of the door. I wasn't sure if whoever might be inside had seen the cab pull up, and I certainly didn't want to just walk in as though I didn't realize someone was inside.

  The last time someone had broken into my own apartment, it wasn't so they could steal my television or laptop.

  It had been on Scottie's orders, and the brute had beaten the daylights out of me.

  Even if Scottie couldn't possibly have ordered something similar, I was cautious. Calling the police was out of the question. A gal like me did not do that for any number of reasons. It was prudent to go in, but it would be slow and deliberate, with my wits about me.