by D. N. Hoxa
“No, damn it! We got this. We found the thief, didn’t we? They’ve been looking for her for three weeks!” John said.
“I wanna quit,” Zane said.
Moira rolled her eyes. “You can’t quit, Zane. This is your agency.”
“I don’t—”
“Guys, just calm down for a second,” I said before they began to shout louder and wake the witch up. “I can’t tell you how to do your jobs, but I do know this: you always need a plan. You need roles and you need to stick to them. You need to imagine the worst possible scenario for every job you take and prepare for it. The rest can be learned along the way.”
“Yeah, but we never actually did that part before. You did,” John said, irritated.
“It’s simple—we’re not equipped to handle magic wielders,” Moira said.
“Which is why we need a magic wielder. A wizard could have made a ward around her or something, and we wouldn’t have had to knock her out four times,” said John.
“Most of our jobs are going to involve some kind of a magic wielder. So what the hell are we going to do?” asked Emanuel, and they all looked at me.
I shrugged. “Hire a magic wielder. Pay for wards. Read a few books. The Shade Library has got a pretty impressive collection.” I could show them the door if they wanted me to. “Also—duct tape.”
“Duct tape?” Moira said.
“They can’t spell you without chanting.” They knew all of this. They’d worked with me long enough, but they were so panicked, it was ridiculous. I did feel bad, but also very amused.
“I think we have some here,” Emanuel said and walked over to the first desk.
“Looks like we know where our first paycheck is going,” John said. “As soon as we find that heirloom, we’re buying spells.”
“Are you going to tell me what I’m looking for?” I asked. The witch would wake up soon, and I didn’t want to have to knock her out for what would apparently be the fifth time.
“This is it,” Moira said, showing me a picture on her phone. “It’s a brooch that belonged in the family for over ten generations.”
The picture showed two doves made of gold with their wings spread out. Despite its age, in the picture, the brooch looked brand new and perfectly polished.
“Wake her up for me,” I told Moira and took off my jacket. I left it on one of the desks and grabbed the witch’s cold hand.
“Ready?” Moira asked, putting her hand on the witch’s forehead. Not many elves had magic in them. Their power was resistance to magic, but some had magic of their own. Moira’s was weak—a jolt of electricity that went through you fast. It didn’t cause any damage, but it was very unpleasant. She first learned to use it when she was five years old. She used it whenever she wanted something we refused to give her. Those had been some interesting years.
It also worked in jolting unconscious people awake better than a spell. So as soon as she touched the witch, her eyes snapped open, and she raised her head to the ceiling to draw in a deep breath. I bit her on the wrist.
The pull into her mind was immediate. The strength of her blood lured me in like a Siren, and I opened my own mind wide to search hers. Bright lights opened into a screen before me, and behind them were the memories, floating from darkness into transparent clouds. All I had to do was pull one of them forward, and I could see everything in detail. I pulled memories to me without order just to get a feel of what her mind remembered most. The witch watching TV—a touching romantic scene that made her cry. Mixing up a potion in a woods somewhere, the only light coming from the candles around her. Her daughter—maybe niece? Her picture was beside the witch’s bed, but she always avoided looking at it for some reason. A girl with wide brown eyes and greasy hair. The smell was terrible.
I felt the push, just as hard as the initial pull had been. Too much time must have passed—possibly over thirty seconds—and the witch was trying to block me. She was strong. She was going to push me out very quickly. I focused on the image of the two doves made of gold harder, but no memory stood out—except the girl who smelled awful, like she hadn’t showered in days. She shouted something at the witch, I couldn’t hear what over the push of her magic, and the witch stepped back and closed a barred door.
Something slammed against my chest and tried to push me back. I let go of the witch and stepped away, her scream filling my ears before it cut off abruptly. Emanuel had put duct tape over her mouth. The witch was furious. I looked down at her. Her eyes were bloodshot, the veins in her neck and face bulging while she tried to shout at me but couldn’t.
I wiped her blood off my lips with the back of my hand.
“There’s a girl. She’s keeping her locked up somewhere. I think she’s connected with the brooch somehow, but I didn’t see it because the witch didn’t, either.”
The image replayed in my head once more. The look on that girl’s face was…wrong. She hadn’t looked scared. She’d looked angry and furious.
“How would she steal something without seeing it?” John asked.
“Where is the girl? Did you see anything?” Moira asked.
“I think it’s in her house somewhere. The walls and the floor of wherever she caged her are the same as in her living room.” The witch kept trying to scream and get up, but the tie around her hands wouldn’t let her. “There were no windows anywhere in there.”
“Fucking bitch,” Moira muttered, just as Emanuel slammed his fist onto the witch’s face. Her head fell to the side, and her eyes turned in their sockets before closing. Unconscious again.
“Thanks, Dam,” Zane said. “We better get back to her place and search it.”
“I’m making a book of rules. When you go after someone, always check their place, too,” John said. “But, yeah. Thanks, Dam.”
I grabbed my jacket. “What’s the plan?”
“We’re going to search her house, find the heirloom, and turn her in to the family who hired us. That was the deal,” Emanuel said.
“Make sure you don’t kill her first.” Though I’d admit, I wouldn’t have stood in their way. People who kidnapped children were far worse than murderers. They killed without killing. You’d have to be really cruel to take someone’s freedom.
“We’ll write you a check!” Moira called when I walked out of the office. I left the building laughing.
My cheeks felt flushed. It happened when I drank too much blood. I’d gone hunting the night before, just to make myself comfortable at the dinner with the humans, but the blood I’d taken from the witch had a different feel to it, just like every other supernatural’s blood. It kept us full for longer, enabled us to maintain focus, and it enhanced our senses even more.
Which is why I could hear the footsteps of a man who’d been coming after me a few minutes after I left the Bane’s offices. I was on my way to Sinea, half convinced to make her talk to me tonight. I’d run all out of patience—now, of all times. Just one of the many ways she messed with my mind.
Whoever it was, he kept his distance—almost a mile behind me—but with the blood of the witch rushing through my veins, my ears were a bit sharper tonight. It would fade in the next few hours, but for now, it was exactly what I needed.
With any luck, it would be Mason—the vampire of the Uprising I had yet to kill. See, when it came to things like that, to killing people or searching for something, I had patience in abundance. I could wait days, months, even years until I made a strike, but not with Sinea. Maybe it had gotten too much? The first time we parted ways, it was four months until we spoke again, which, I’ll admit, might have been my first mistake. But I hadn’t felt this way four months ago, had I? It seemed every time I saw her, she tightened her grip over me a little more.
Or maybe I was just imagining the whole thing. I was giving it too much thought and overthinking never led to anything good. I knew this. I just didn’t know myself lately.
Never mind. There was a man following me. I needed to stop thinking about Sinea.
C
rossing the street, I continued walking until I found an especially dark alley. I slipped inside and climbed up the fire escape of one of the buildings. There wasn’t much space in there and the alley ended with a fence, and that would work to my advantage. I held onto the dirty railing of the fire escape and waited for the man to come closer.
The smell came first. Werewolves in general had a distinct smell, the closest thing that came to it was freshly trimmed grass. So it wasn’t Mason. Maybe it was the Alpha werewolf who practically made Sinea turn into a wolf at the castle two weeks ago?
Even better.
I counted his footsteps when he, too, crossed the street. As soon as he stepped into the alley, I jumped. The darkness covered him, but I didn’t need to see him to know where he was.
Or who he was.
The moment I slammed him against the wall, I remembered his smell perfectly.
The man had his arms raised to the sides, a tired smile on his face as he watched me. I stepped away.
“Nikola?”
“Hi, Damian,” he said, straightening his shirt. “I’m sorry to come here like this, but I didn’t have a choice.”
I turned to look at the street, expecting to see Helen Marquez, but there was nobody there. Where was she? For as long as I’d known them, Nikola and Helen were never apart.
“Is everything okay?” I asked because I knew it wasn’t.
Nikola shook his head. “I think Helen’s in trouble. I need your help, my friend.”
Chapter Four
Nikola Rivera was a werewolf who was born and raised in Virginia, in a Pack of Italian descent. The same Pack that Emanuel was born in and lived in until his teens.
Nikola was a devoted werewolf. His whole life was his Pack, as it was for most werewolves. Until he and others like him, barely twenty-year-old werewolves, were sent to another Pack to help with a vampire threat.
There, he’d met Helen.
Within a week, he left his Pack behind and followed Helen wherever she went. Helen was a vampire, too, almost a hundred years older than me. We were turned by the same vampire, though she claimed she’d done it willingly. I, on the other hand, hadn’t had a choice in the matter.
Nikola and Helen had been together for over thirty years. The last I saw them was fourteen years ago, in North Dakota, when I was still working for the Guild, searching for a sorceress. The Guild believed that she was in possession of an ancient grimoire of long forgotten and forbidden spells. It turned out the sorceress didn’t have the grimoire anymore. Instead, she’d memorized all the spells, and the Guild wanted all of them.
I’d never hated my Talent more than when I spent eight days of biting into her flesh to get the spells. I’d rarely felt a bigger monster. I still thought about her sometimes. I still thought about the eighth morning, when I walked into her holding cell and she looked at me, her blue eyes lifeless, and she asked me to kill her. The Guild had extended my contract for five more months when I did, but it had been worth it.
At the time, Nikola and Helen helped me figure out who the sorceress was. At the time, Moira had been just a child, and Nikola had offered to babysit her while the rest of the Bane and Helen had helped me bring down her wards and catch the sorceress. I’d told them then that I was in their debt, that they could come to me whenever they needed help.
That time had apparently come.
When I last saw Nikolai, he’d been young. There’d been no wrinkles on his face, and his eyes had been a bit brighter. He hadn’t aged that much—werewolves lived well past their first century, but the marks of time were visible around his eyes, and in the occasional grey hair on his blond head.
“What happened?” I asked Nikola as we walked down the street, side by side, without direction.
“I’m not sure, to be honest,” the werewolf said. “We were staying in Florida for the past six months or so. Everything was the way it should be, until four days ago. I woke up and she wasn’t there.” You could hear the pain in his voice. He was madly in love with Helen, and she with him. They separated very rarely. I could tell how much it bothered him.
“And you tracked her here?”
“I did, yes. I made some calls, paid a wizard for a foresight, and then I found her.”
“You did?”
He shrugged, rubbing his hands together. “She wasn’t alone. She was with five others. I followed them to the Shade but to go in there alone would be stupid. I’m not that good of a fighter.” He laughed but it was forced.
“You did well.” Five people weren’t to be taken lightly. “I want to understand you right. Are you saying that Helen came here of her own free will?”
“I’m not sure. She wasn’t being held at spell-point or anything, but…I don’t know, Damian. Something’s wrong,” he said in a whisper. “I heard that you were here for a while now, so I tracked you down and thought you might help me figure out what’s going on. This is unlike Helen, Damian. You know how she is.”
“I do.” Helen would never leave Nikola like this, without an explanation. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her. You said you followed them to the Shade?”
“Yes. But there are five others with her, and I honestly have no idea what could happen.”
“That’s okay. We’ll find out when we get there.”
“Thank you, Damian.”
“There’s no need to thank me, Nikola. It’s the least I can do.”
We turned the corner of the street, now with a direction in mind. We were going into the Shade.
I wouldn’t say I was happy that this had happened, but I was excited at the idea of a fight. It certainly beat standing in front of Sinea’s door. I’d behaved like a coward, and I’d run out of excuses to stop myself. When we found Helen, I was going to go knock on her door, and if she didn’t answer, I would break the damn door down.
As soon as I decided that, I instantly felt calmer. The change was so fast, it made me smile. It felt like I was discovering myself all over again, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
“So how is the team? How is little Moira?” Nikola asked.
“Not so little anymore,” I said with a laugh. “You should come by. She’d love to see you.”
“I’d love to see her, too. So they’re all okay?”
“Yes, all of them. Alive and well. They’re working on their own now.”
“Oh, really? Does that mean you’re free?”
“As of a few months ago, yes. I no longer work for the Guild.” It never got old admitting to others—and myself—that I was a free man.
“Then why are you here? My memory’s not what it used to be, but I do remember you telling me that you didn’t like this Shade,” Nikola said.
“Things have gotten a little…complicated since we met last,” I said as we entered the Shade through the main entrance. The feel of magic almost crackling in the air weighed me down. It wasn’t even ten p.m., so the Shade wouldn’t be as crowded as it would be closer to midnight.
“Things always get complicated in the most unfortunate times,” he said, laughing again. Even his voice had lost its edge. The walls used to roar when he laughed before. I’d only known him for two weeks, but it had been enough to figure out the kind of man he was—one full of life.
“Nikola, we’re going to find Helen and we’re going to take her away no matter what. Do you understand me? You don’t have to worry.”
“No, no, I know. I’m just not used to her being away for so long, that’s all.”
“Can you ask the Shade to take you to where you saw them?”
“I already have,” Nikola said. “It’s a three-story building, I think. I couldn’t get a good look from the distance.”
“Did they see you? Does Helen know you’re here?”
“She probably knows, but I don’t think they saw me. I kept a good distance.”
I nodded. “Do you want me to go in there first, to see what we’re dealing with?”
“No, I need to be there, too.” I thought so. “T
here it is,” Nikolai said, pointing ahead at the end of the street. The shops around us were starting to open, and the crowd was getting bigger. Too much noise already—impossible to keep track of my surroundings. It had been so long that I didn’t remember Helen’s scent clearly enough to pick her out among others, but I had no doubt Nikola could. He knew her better than anybody else, and he’d be able to track her if she’d left the building and was still around here in the Shade.
The building was three stories high, a dark purple exterior giving it a haunted vibe, and the wooden blinds were closed in front of all windows. There were no signs on it so my best guess was that it was an apartment building. It had never gotten my attention before, but I did recognize the shops on its sides—especially Tailored Time, the shop of Seraphina Angels, a very famous seamstress. We were in Avalon Street, which would normally be at the edges of the Shade somewhere. We must have been close to the other side of the Shade, near the East River. I took in a deep breath to try to catch any scent I might recognize, but I got nothing.
“I think she’s still in there,” Nikola said. “They all are.”
“Good.” I walked over to the main double entrance doors painted black, and I reached out my hand to the handle. Nothing stopped me. Bad sign. “They haven’t put up any wards.”
“Maybe they’ve already gone,” said Nikola. “I need to shift.”
“Not right away. Let’s see what’s inside first.” I pulled the door, and it opened with a weak cry. The six different scents that came from the dark hallway were perfectly clear now. Only one of them was a vampire, but two of them didn’t have beating hearts. Ghouls. Those that knew how to fight were trouble, but nothing we couldn’t handle, not with Helen. I still didn’t understand what she was doing, but if I knew one thing it was that she would never betray or hurt Nikola. Not just because they were mates—Amina had been mine and she’d still tried to kill me—but because they weren’t that kind of people. With one last look at Nikola, I stepped inside the building.