Betrayed by Blood: The Shelton Family Legacy : 1

by L. A. McGinnis

  All of Seattle’s underbelly quaked in fear of Knight, because whatever the miscreants did to each other, Knight could do ten times worse. The man operated with no jurisdiction, no limits, and no moral compass. He’d achieved the trifecta of evil, which made him perfect crime-lord material. But even worse, Knight was ruled by an icy, keen intelligence that rarely steered him wrong.

  Just picturing him, I shuddered.

  Knight was, technically, my boss. Un-technically, he was more like my owner, as he knew about my unregistered magic, which he used as a long leash to keep me tethered.

  To Seattle.

  To him.

  If I’d chosen anyone to be partnered up with, it wouldn’t be him, not in a million years. But like the man said, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets full faster.

  Right now, I had what Knight wanted.

  I just had to figure out a way this didn’t end with Derek dead.

  He was a pitiful little shit, but he didn’t deserve to die. “What you’ll want to do is appeal to Knight’s good side,” I explained as I cuffed Derek’s bony wrist to the radiator pipe with a metallic clank that was a fitting sound effect for sealing his fate.

  “Oh wait, that’s right. He doesn’t have one. Paying him back the hundred grand you owe him might be a good start, though. Or maybe the ten you cheated him out of before that. Whatever excuse you come up with, I’m sure it will be stellar.”

  “Aaaaandy.”

  I squatted down, so we were eye to eye again. “If only you hadn’t turned me in to the cops, Derek. If you hadn’t jeopardized my entire existence, tonight would have turned out differently. I could have helped you figure a way out of this mess.”

  Despite myself, my tone softened. “I can understand the gambling, even the constant lying, to a point. But you and I had an understanding, and you sold me out.” I stepped away from his grasping hand.

  “Please Andy, please. I owe him too much, he’ll never understand.” Derek’s face was panicked now, the handcuff rattling as he struggled against the restraint. “Talk to him for me, like you did before. Please, I have a problem—a real problem—I need help.”

  I shook my head, counting the minutes I had left. “I have been covering for you for five years now, Derek. Five freaking years. Not only didn’t you appreciate my generosity, you gave my name to Detective Bennett as an Unregged. Now the police are breathing down my neck. And that makes me—and Knight—very cranky.”

  “I didn’t mean to, he was pressing me. I was in a bind.” I swear, Derek’s high, nasally whine was starting to really grate on my nerves. “I’ll take back my statement, explain to the detective I made a mistake.” The look on my face had him changing tactics. “Let’s sell the disc. The info’s gotta be worth a couple thousand, at least. Just give me five hundred, enough to get out of Seattle, and Knight will never see me again.”

  “Thought you said you didn’t know what was on this disc.”

  From his skivvy behavior, that wasn’t entirely true. Weighing the disc in my hand, I calculated how much time I had left. “Tell me what’s on the disc, and I’ll give you a way out of your situation. I know something that Knight doesn’t, and it’s worth about… a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Between the lifeline I’d just thrown him and Frank’s still-smoking body, Derek started talking. “Frank said it was names of Elementals who’ve vanished in Devilton. Said there’s lots more, but this was all he managed to download from the system.”

  I rolled my eyes. Ever since the Devilton prison was established, some eight years ago, there had been rumors of mysterious disappearances. No witnesses were ever produced, and nothing was ever proven. Still, the stories persisted.

  “Where did Frank steal a high-volume encrypted disc? Because to my eye, this is cutting edge tech.”

  “Shelton Industries.”

  For a day that couldn’t get any worse, mine just plummeted into the shitter. The disc in my hand glittered in the light of the one bare bulb in the ceiling, while I debated incinerating the damn thing right here and now. But turning it to ash wouldn’t erase what I knew, though I might as well be holding radioactive material. If Derek was telling the truth—I reassured myself that was highly unlikely—I was a dead woman.

  “You took Frank at his word? An unregistered Elemental?” I snorted, weighing everything I knew against Derek’s story. “Unregs don’t get access to Shelton Industries. Their security is too tight to breach. He would have been seized before he ever got through the door.”

  “Oh yeah, it’s tighter than tight, but Frank is… was my go-to guy for cybercrime. For enough money, he could get you in anyplace, anywhere…” Derek nervously cleared his throat while I waited, my foot tapping on the floor.

  “Anyway, Frank conned his way onto the crew updating Shelton’s R&D security. He’d come up with this slick piece of black-market tech, an undetectable biotech duplicator. After a couple of days on the job, he’d hijacked the information on that disc. He said it’s a list of the disappearances in Devilton. With names and everything.”

  “The Devilton disappearances are an urban legend.” But I bent over Frank, the smell gag-worthy. Patting him down, I snagged his wallet. Pulling out a fistful of cards, I found his ID, registered to one Franklin A. Pullman. “They’ve never been confirmed.”

  “Until now.” Derek nodded at the disc. “But then Frank got spooked, said he was being followed, and hid it here.”

  The bad news—he was making sense.

  The good news—I didn’t have to listen.

  “Was Frank hoping to make money from this? Because stealing from the rich seldom turns out well for the poor. Especially when you’re unregistered.” The government took an especially hard line on Unregs, citing security concerns for the general population. Nobody flew under the government’s radar for long.

  “Sure, Frank figured the information might be worth something. You know, like the right people? But the real reason…” Derek looked over at Frank. “I guess since he’s dead, I can tell you. Frank’s brother went missing a few months ago, and he hoped he might… I dunno… find him?” A pang of guilt rippled through me as Derek added, “Can’t ask him now, of course.”

  “Yet, you were planning to keep the disc all to yourself.”

  “Well… yeah. You killed him, and dead men don’t need money. I figured maybe I’d hit a big payoff, for once.” Derek always sounded so hopeful.

  What a sap.

  “It was a mistake. You know what happens when I’m threatened,” I reminded him sternly. Derek had seen my magic erupt before, though not with such a tragic outcome. “Seriously, I’m holding a record of Elemental disappearances?” I inspected the tiny, lighter-than-air disc in my hand.

  My PI senses tingled.

  Missing persons were my specialty.

  This bounty hunting bullshit I only did for Knight. For an instant, I imagined what Knight would do to me if I released Derek. It was bloody, painful, and would definitely cause fire to explode in all directions from my battered body. No thank you.

  It didn’t mean I was a total asshole, though.

  “Tell Knight when he gets here, I clocked off for the evening. I had a loose end to tie up.” The look of horror on Derek’s face was comical. “Also tell him that you know for a fact Red Davis at the Broken Bones Tavern is skimming twenty percent a week. Thirty percent on the weekends. Mostly from swapping cheap booze for top shelf, although he’s taking money off the top and hiding it in tips.

  “I’m taking the disc. I’m leaving you in a bad spot, I know. But give Knight the info, tell him it’ll save him ten grand a week. In a couple of months, you and he will be evened up.” I stepped back as Derek swiped at me with his free hand, his face suitably panicked for what was coming.

  “Though, he’ll still want his pound of flesh from you tonight, and there’s nothing I can do about that. You’ll have to man up, Derek, but he won’t kill you, not as long as you’re still useful. As for Bennett…�
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  In truth, I wasn’t sure what to do about Detective Bennett. “As far as Bennett, do me a favor and stay out of it, I’ll fix that mess myself.”

  I left Derek chained to the radiator, poor Frank smoking on the floor, and stowed the disc in my back pocket. Confident Knight would clean up my mess, my car miraculously started on the very first try.

  I was nothing but two headlights in the dark by the time I passed Knight and his gang coming the other way, his black sedan slipping through the shadows like a ghost.

  Putting Knight and tonight’s cluster behind gave me time to think.

  Knight would clean up my mess, so he could continue keeping me under his thumb. Derek would come out of it with a black eye and some cracked ribs, which was better than being dumped in Puget Sound. I steered my car toward the lights of downtown Seattle, weighing what came next.

  My carefully planned life was falling apart, and I didn’t know what to do about it. Besides killing poor Frank, somehow, I managed to run afoul of the Sheltons. It had happened once before, which was why I ran away from New York when I was ten. I had no intention of ending up in the same spot again.

  Not for Derek. Not for anyone.

  Being an unregistered Elemental meant life was filled with potential quagmires, any one of them waiting to swallow you up. You could be turned in by friends or family. A stranger. A lover. There were always hefty rewards posted for Unregs, which meant you were dodging the police and the government at the same time. Of course, it hadn’t always been like this.

  When magic invaded our world a hundred years ago, the swift change sent humanity into a tailspin. It began with a cosmic event—the largest ever recorded coronal mass ejection, combined with remnants of an imploding black hole—that changed life on Earth forever.

  It didn’t matter that it only affected one third of the population. It didn’t matter that before magic, the world was a shitshow populated by ten billion greedy, war mongering humans. What mattered was magic separated humanity into two distinct groups.

  Those that had magic.

  And those who didn’t.

  Imagine having the ability to incinerate a whole city block when you sneeze, or cause an earthquake as easily as blinking your eyes. That, in a nutshell, was the first six months after The Surge. Natural disasters and clusterfucks.

  The new mutation was named Elemental Manipulation, after Paracelsus’s teachings of the sixteenth century. But resurrecting the lessons of a guy who’d been dead for seven hundred years did little to calm tempers, especially those who had the nuclear codes, and non-Elementals—Normals—or Norms, to the rest of us, called for change.

  Out of the chaos came a new branch of government: ESC, which stood for Elemental Surveillance & Control. Emphasis on control.

  Elemental Manipulators was shortened to Elementals, and the name stuck.

  Elementals fell into one of four groups: fire, air, water, and earth. Though there were urban legends of more dangerous mutations, I’d never seen one.

  “Let’s see if you’ve caught up to me yet,” I muttered to myself, piloting the car toward my neighborhood. While I doubted the Sheltons knew I had the disc, Derek had reported me as an Unreg, and Bennett would be looking for me.

  Detective Martin Bennett served two masters. He was special liaison to the ESC, while working his regular job as a Seattle police detective, specializing in locating unregistered Elementals. As much as I respected the guy for holding down two demanding jobs, his side hustle for the ESC was a lucrative one.

  Turning in unregistered Elementals paid up to five thousand dollars per head, depending on their profile. Frank would have netted two thousand, tops. I, on the other hand, was in down-payment-on-a-new-car territory. Plus, Bennett hated PIs, so there’d be bonus points just for bringing me down.

  Circling back to the disc, unregistered Elementals were sent to the Devilton Maximum Containment Facility. All those stories about missing, presumed dead Elementals began to grow larger in my imagination. Nobody would report an Unregged, especially if they were serving a life sentence in the world’s most secure prison. I chewed my lip, weighing the possibility I possessed actual proof of the fact.

  Stolen from Shelton Industries, I reminded myself.

  Steering the car down my narrow street, I made a pass, just to make sure nothing unexpected was waiting for me. Everything at home was quiet and dingy, just the way I liked it.

  Gripping the wheel tighter, I gave myself a pep talk. You’re just being paranoid. Nobody knows who you are or why you’re in Seattle. Not even Bennett. Especially not Bennett. Knight knew part of my secret—I was an unregistered Hyperion—and Lincoln knew another part.

  Nobody knew the whole truth though, and I’d worked hard to keep it that way. Giving one person the whole truth gave them too much power over me, and in my world, that spelled death, impressive fire magic or not.

  Another pass revealed nothing new. Sagging front porch empty, windows dark. But somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to stop the car. Rolling unhurriedly away from my apartment, I headed for the only other haven I trusted: Lincoln Amherst’s.

  If Seattle’s seedy underworld was dominated by Knight, the city’s brighter spots were ruled by Lincoln. The fact our paths had ever crossed was still something I puzzled over, but after fifteen years, I puzzled over it less and less.

  I’d arrived in Seattle a skinny, ten-year-old kid, broke and hungry. Lincoln had been my first mark, and I thought I’d chosen well. He was immaculately dressed, old and alone, his eyes locked on the book balanced delicately in his hand.

  During my cross-country journey from NYC, I’d perfected a sweet dodge and grab routine, one which never failed me. But it didn’t work on Lincoln. He spotted me a mile away, never even losing a step or his place on the book when he snatched my hand out of his pocket. I lost my grip on his wallet, but he didn’t lose me, and an hour later, I was eating my first hot meal in months.

  All these years later and I was still here.

  Something about Lincoln made you want to trust him. Tell him everything. Which, as a ten-year-old runaway, I did. Everything except my real name and the real reason I’d left New York in the first place. Those two secrets I’d keep for as long as I lived.

  On the surface, Lincoln was a respected patron of the arts, part time charity organizer, and a fixture at the mayor’s Christmas party. Below that refined surface, Lincoln was a skilled forger and art thief; his specialty was creating deep fake videos and photos for blackmail. Not that he actually blackmailed anyone, he simply offered them up to the highest bidder.

  Reaching Lincoln’s, I pulled up to the entrance, keyed in my code, and watched the huge iron gates swing open, then drove through, and followed the winding drive to his house. Well, mansion, but I liked calling it a house, just so he didn’t get too uppity.

  His place sat on a hill near Volunteer Park.

  Fun fact: the same park where I’d tried to pick pocket him.

  Walking right in like I owned the place, I welcomed the heat on my bare skin, rubbing my arms to warm up. Passing one of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that Lincoln loved so much, my steps faltered. My long hair was hopelessly tangled, my pale skin was so sooty you couldn’t see my freckles, and yes, I was bleeding.

  “Lincoln?” I called, heading for his usual refuge, pausing in the library doorway until he looked up from his book, a set of wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on the tip of his hooked nose, his favorite velvet smoking jacket embroidered in silver. “Lincoln, I need a place to stay for a few nights.”

  “Oh, Miranda.” His gray eyes glittered gold from the fire. “What have you done now? I can still smell magic on you, so don’t tell me it’s nothing.” He shut his book with a decisive snap. “I swear, no one can sabotage their life as thoroughly as you.”

  Did I mention my friend Lincoln is both an asshole and has an uncanny knack for sensing magic? Although I bristled a bit at the sabotage jab, Lincoln was like my dad asking why I was home so lat
e.

  “I took on a side job from Knight. It went wrong.”

  “From the look of you, I’d say it went more than wrong. Who was the job?”

  “Derek.” When Lincoln made a tsking sound, I got defensive. “What? I needed the money and Knight pretty much commanded me to do it. I didn’t have a choice, and then this super strength Hyperion grabbed me out of nowhere and… well, you know.”

  Lincoln sighed, and I heard condescension in the sound. “Miranda, darling. Why do you continue to work for that oaf?” His sympathetic tone, while perfectly innocent, rubbed me the wrong way, a clear indication of how badly tonight went.

  “You know very well why. He knows too much about my past, and if he decided to sell me out, I’d end up in the ESC’s clutches. Can’t have that happening. It wouldn’t be good for either of us.” Ticking off all the obvious problems for Lincoln only made me more annoyed. He, of all people, knew why I still did the occasional job for Knight.

  “You mean it wouldn’t be good for you?” Lincoln quirked an elegant eyebrow at me. “I’m well insulated from governmental threats.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not.” I left out the whole Bennett’s-after-me-too conversation, deciding to save that for another day. “Can I stay here for a while, until things blow over?”

  “Your room is always open, my dear, you know that. Stay as long as you wish. I’ll have the fridge restocked with junk food. But Miranda…”

  “Hmmm?” My mind had already moved on to a hot shower and a good night’s sleep. “What?” He was staring at me intently, like he had bad news and was trying to figure out how best to tell me. After a moment, he dropped his gaze back to his book.

  “Nothing. Take your shower and get some sleep, and we’ll talk in the morning. I may have a potential case for you, but I want to make sure I’m not making a mistake.” He waved me off and went back to reading, glasses perched on his nose. “Go. I want to finish this chapter before bed.”