The Truth About Night

by Amanda Arista

  “Fuck me.”

  I looked up at Rafe. “Language, Professor.”

  He pointed to the old speak carved into Benny’s arms. “It’s an immortality spell, a servant linked to a master.”

  Immortality. Being linked to the creature who had sucked the life out of your lover would be worse than death. And potentially make you hand over an innocent girl. I stared at the swirling mark carved into the Benny’s skin. Servant. “As in servant to …”

  “The Devil.” Benny’s lower lip began to quiver. “I’m tired, Merci, tired of running, tired of hurting people, tired of trying to die. I just want to do one last good thing for my princess. I don’t care what he does to me now.”

  And it was truth. It was more than just the connection between us, it was the trust that we had built, the faith in me that had gotten Tay-Tay killed, the way his shoulders were so burdened he couldn’t even shrug.

  “Why me, Benny? What’s so special about me?”

  “I don’t know, Merci. He said that without you, it all burns to the ground.”

  “Don’t worry.” I leaned forward. “It’s all ash now I know the truth.”

  I looked away from Benny, letting him take a moment to recover. I felt like socks that had been in the dryer too long, dry and full of static, like I’d spark if anyone touched me.

  Rafe spoke again. “We need to know where he is.”

  I didn’t have the energy to even lift my gaze to Rafe. “Why? So you and the pack can go play heroes?”

  Rafe didn’t answer. Perhaps he knew something that I didn’t.

  “Please don’t, Merci,” Benny begged. “Please don’t make it easier for him to get you, to finish what he started.”

  One last push. It was all I had in me. I sniffed and focused. I brought the power to a point again. Once last question. For Ethan. I locked with Benny’s exhausted gaze.

  “Where can I find him?”

  Benny fought his tether again, fought against the answer bubbling up his throat, but he couldn’t look away.

  I pushed. Focused more than I even had before. It was like dumping a bucket of ice water over my head. I stopped breathing and compelled the truth from him, like funneling all the static in my head down and through the live connection between us, straight into his brain.

  He turned red in the face and his lips pressed together. He was holding his breath along with the answer.

  “Where can I find him, Benny?”

  The truth erupted from him like a cat hacking up a hairball. “Schuylkill and Bainbridge.”

  Benny panted and his face turned back to his normal shade of slimy with the release of information.

  I leaned back in the chair and exhaled. My head immediately began to throb as the Charm was broken, and I lost control of the tornado in my brain, its force spinning out of control. A wave of nausea hit me. Magic did come at a price. This wasn’t charming anyone, this was pulling the truth like teeth.

  My nose started to run and I held my wrist to my face; blood dripped into my hand. I jumped up and grabbed my bag. I walked to the other side of the room as I dug for my Kleenex pack.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, my head spinning a moment in the storm of answers. They had ordered a hit on me because I was messing up their family business. Rafe had been right. It wasn’t about Ethan being the Riko of the pack. It was about me. I was the intersection of the two stories. They’d meant to kill me, but Ethan saved me.

  I held the Kleenex to my nose and tilted my head back. As much as I hated to admit it, it sounded like Ethan’s death was just the tip of the iceberg. More missing people. Taking over gangs. Bigger plans for the city. For me.

  I cracked open the bottle of water I kept in my bag and gulped down three pain pills, hoping they would dull the throbbing. I had a feeling this was nowhere near the end of my day. Benny’s answers had just led to more questions, deeper questions.

  We could give it a moment, but a cloud of unknowns was still swirling in my head, like the pressure of a coming storm. I was beginning to believe it would never be sated.

  Rafe walked over and leaned against the wall next to me, crossing his arms across his chest and never taking his eyes off Benny’s slumped form. “You okay?”

  I ignored the obvious answer as I pinched the bridge of my nose to stop the bleeding. “We’ve got our answer now. It was both my story and your magic.”

  He ground his teeth.

  “Are the nose bleeds a part of it?” he asked.

  I dropped my head back down and studied the bright red Kleenex. Another drop fell on my hand and I put the Kleenex back as I side-eyed Rafe. “I don’t know, but this one isn’t the first.”

  I sniffed one more time and tossed the Kleenex into the trash bin, avoiding Rafe’s stare as I turned back to Benny. He didn’t look so hot. No one ever suffered after I asked questions, but he was shaking and sweating. There were a million things wrong with this scenario, but the blood on his hands was the only one that I could focus on.

  “Benny?”

  His head jerked back and his legs went straight before he started convulsing. Rafe and I rushed to his side and we managed to get him on the floor.

  “Benny!” I put my hand on his arm and found it wet.

  The sigil for sacrifice was gouged into his arm with what only could have been his own fingernails.

  I unzipped his hoodie to check his airway and watched as the ligaments in his neck strained, his face turning purple. Dark lines crept up his face, running up through his veins and spidering up the side of his face.

  I pulled my hands away from him when the blackness seeped into his eyes.

  “His death is on you, Merci Lanard.” It wasn’t Benny’s voice. It was dark and heavy; the hair on my arms stood on end, the air in the room went refrigerator cold.

  With one final arch of his thin frame, Benny let out a piercing shriek and fell limp on the floor. His skin turned ashen and his body withered before our eyes, like all the other bodies. Like someone had rammed a straw in his chest and sucked out all the water.

  “Oh god!” I scrambled away from the dried corpse as it contorted into its final position like Shrinkie Dinks in the oven. “What the hell was that?”

  Rafe clenched every muscle in his body and his jaw locked hard enough I could hear the pop.

  I jumped to my feet, suppressing the urge to vomit. “What is it?”

  “Demon possession,” he growled. Actually growled as if the answer was ripped from his gut.

  “What?”

  “I’ve seen it before. Felt it before. In the Shifter War.” Rafe explained.

  I focused on Rafe, fighting to keep the questions in my head from spinning me into a nauseous oblivion.

  I took a step toward him and my head felt like a twenty-pound bowling bowl wobbling around on my shoulders. I had to stop to hold it steady for a moment.

  Rafe finally spoke. “We need to get this to Piper.”

  “Why? This was about me. Not the pack. You don’t have a responsibility here anymore.”

  He rose from the floor and I was assaulted by his glare. “There is a Demon involved, Merci. You have no idea what that means for the innocent people in this city.”

  I looked down at Benny. He hadn’t been one of the innocent people in this city, but he was one of mine. A vital soul that kept my city running and breathing and he’d been taken.

  A strange ruckus echoed down the hall, like a shuffling of chairs and a murmuring of voices. Then gun fire. Nothing quite muffled the distinct sound of gun fire.

  Rafe paused and cocked his head. Like Ethan used to. I was enveloped in the brush of fur as he pulled his animal senses in tune with his human ones and listened.

  “Someone is searching the building.” He sniffed the air. “I smell fear. And mold.”

  That’s when the lights went out. I had just enough time to grab for my messenger bag and sling it over my shoulder. I jammed my hand down into it and curled my fingers around my familiar Taser.

  T
hey weren’t taking me. Not after tonight, Not after Benny had just sacrificed himself to tell me everything.

  “Merci!” Rafe said. “Go.”

  I heard the door swing open. There wasn’t light in the hallway, either. A rush of bodies entered the room. I might be blinded, but they weren’t going to get the drop on me again. I flicked off the safety on the plastic weapon and started to make my way along the wall, following the chair rail around the edge of the room.

  “Orders are not to hurt her,” one said. He was at my left and close.

  “And the other one?”

  “He just wants her.”

  A wave of heat filled the room and I knew Rafe had gathered his power to him. Maybe even shifted. It made my hair stand on end, and even though I couldn’t use my eyes, I could feel more. The texture of the wall, the rough groove of the trigger on the Taser.

  Had he just enhanced me? Everything was sharper, tighter. The slightest movement, like a feather, tickled my extended left hand. I swung my right arm around and triggered the Taser. Its light managed to fill the space and my eyes adjusted fast. Any part of the anatomy would do the trick, but I nailed the guy in a deep angle of his neck. He stopped in his tracks and fell.

  It was too easy. The light from the Taser gone, another tackled me from the side and the contents of my bag scattered across the floor. At least it was carpet this time and not the hard tile of a store.

  His weight did most of the work as I wriggled and tried to keep his hands from catching mine.

  A growl echoed in the dark space and the man on top of me hesitated for two-tenths of a second. The two-tenths I needed to grab a pen from my pocket and start ramming it into every part of his soft tissue I could. Wasn’t going to break the skin, but it was better than just a fist.

  He grabbed my neck and tried to make my windpipe meet the floor. Gasping, I scrambled, prying at the hands around my neck. The room grew hot as I fought for breath.

  I scratched at his hands and then his own face, but his arm length was greater than mine. He straddled me and held me down.

  I tried to call out for Rafe as my hands searched for anything else on the floor to use as a weapon. But from the sounds from his side of the room, someone was getting pummeled.

  Another brush of fur preceded a surge of strength. I pried at the man’s meaty thumb and he finally broke his grip on my neck. He fell onto his fist next to me and I balled up my hands and swung at where his head should have been, like Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.

  Knuckles collided with flesh and it was enough to get him to shift his weight so I could wriggle out from under him.

  His hands caught my arm once again, but not before my legs cleared his. I rammed my boots into the junction between his thighs and stomped like it was a cockroach.

  He cried out in pain. I searched the ground again for my Taser. I kicked the damn thing, plastic tumbling across the carpet toward the door, and found its path unhindered.

  “Rafe?” I called out.

  I felt another hot blast of power and the thud of a body hitting the wall, though it seemed to have come from the ceiling.

  “Run, Merci.”

  And I did. I followed the noise where the Taser had skittered out of the room and pin-balled my way down the hallway, ignoring the sounds of chaos the shadows had left in their wake. Light slowly returned to the space as I was about to stumble down the stairwell.

  I was in my car and down the highway before I even knew what I was doing. My fight or flight had kicked in and I’d actually listened to it for the first time in my life; I’d run away from the danger.

  One by one, the questions spinning around me were linked to the answers I’d just gotten. With each mile marker, the answers fell into a line. My brain became a Rolodex of everything I’d learned in the past three weeks, cards flying around in the storm in my head.

  Demon, not Warlocks. The spell Rafe and I had discovered in the warehouse was probably a portal that had brought a Demon across to our world. Something had crawled out of it.

  Demons can’t exist corporeally on this plane. They have to inhabit bodies.

  Cartwright had to be that body. Benny had said he wasn’t human anymore.

  And Cartwright had sent minions because we threatened his growing hold on the city when we exposed corruption on the construction contracts.

  I had gotten Ethan killed.

  And John Mitchell.

  And Tay-Tay.

  And Beakman.

  And now Benny.

  Cartwright had been trying to get to me this whole time. No one was safe. The paper wasn’t safe. The bar certainly wasn’t safe. I couldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t buck-naked to prove they weren’t demon fodder, so I went to the one place I knew was safe because Rafe had made it safe for me. Scratched runes into my walls to keep out the bad guys even though they knew my name, my face, my editor.

  I walked in through the back door of my house and locked every bolt I had and went straight to the liquor cabinet. Rafe had told me to run and hide, and I had run – now I was going to crawl into the bottom of a bottle for a while.

  I was four fingers into the amber liquor as it burned through the practical information Benny had revealed. The Who’s, What’s, When’s, and Where’s.

  Now it was time for the Whys. Why was the demon after me? Why was it unable to target me? Why did it need me so badly that it killed its own servant?

  And even the whiskey I threw down into my gullet couldn’t quench the one fact that stayed motionless in the fury of the storm.

  I was the dangerous one. Everyone around me got killed. Rafe could be bleeding right now in the upper room of an underground poker club and it was my fault because I had gone there following my gut.

  It was all my fault.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The ring of my cell phone jerked me awake and I fell off the bottom stair where I had been keeping guard with my bat and a bottle of whiskey.

  The phone had slipped from my fingers and slid across the floor. I shuffled over to pick it up, my fingers faintly aching from dialing Rafe’s number into oblivion.

  Hayne didn’t even say hello. “I’ve got a catch for you. Grisly murder in South Philly. Four bodies. Sounds like an open-and-shut gang violence.”

  “Nothing is open and shut, Hayne,” I croaked.

  I slowly stretched, my shoulders, my legs. Everything hurt and my neck was stiff and probably bruised. The morning light made me feel a little safer, but I kept my bat handy.

  I heard Hayne’s TMJ actually get worse over the phone. “You’re the only one who can handle this one.”

  “Not today. Give it to Bill or Brian. Is that his name? That new intern.”

  Hayne sighed. “Are you really passing on this one? It’s eight inches of prime real estate. The pictures are going to be gory as hell.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve had my month’s fill of gory.”

  He heard him scratch his chin, which meant he hadn’t shaved, which meant he hadn’t slept. “Is this because of Dot?”

  I confessed. “I found the informant, Hayne. Got more questions than answers, so I need a few days. You should too.”

  I started my shuffle toward the kitchen to get my first round of fuel to figure out what the hell I was going to do next and stopped. I wasn’t drunk. Hungover maybe, but drinking had never made me hallucinate before. Yet there was definitely a naked man on my back porch, the body strewn across my glass patio door.

  Oh God. Rafe.

  “Merci, I—”

  “Go … see … your … daughter,” I ordered.

  I disconnected the call and stuck the phone in my back pocket. I grabbed a blanket from the back of my couch and rushed to the glass door.

  Bruises covered his pale side and I looked away before I couldn’t unsee parts of him.

  Was he alive?

  I unlocked the back door, but he didn’t move. Slowly, I slid the door open and he still didn’t budge. I dropped the blanket over his more censor
able areas and knelt at his side. Blood was everywhere. His face, his hands. One eye was swollen shut and his hand was purple and crooked. It was Ethan all over again.

  My heart raced and my vision grew dark for a moment as my brain flooded with images from that night, the smells from that night.

  “Merci.” Rafe’s rough voice sounded through the darkness. This wasn’t Ethan. This wasn’t what happened before. Rafe was alive, and he needed my help. I could save him.

  The winter air perked my senses, focused my thoughts. I felt for his pulse, my triage training kicking in. Finally. I had to wait until my own calmed enough to catch his beat. Steady. And he was breathing, but strained. Broken ribs?

  “Rafe?”

  He moaned and rolled onto his back, through the open doorway and onto my feet. I hated to do it, but I searched his body for marks, for Old Speak, for anything that might indicate that he wasn’t who he appeared to be. Nothing but large red welts down his arms and blood all over his hands. And the protection sigil above the back door hadn’t stopped him from crossing the threshold, so no demon. Just Rafe.

  “Can you move?”

  He tensed, but his body didn’t actually move. Guess that was an answer.

  Every fiber in my being echoed one truth.

  “We need to get you to Piper.”

  I tried to be gentle, but he was as big as me. I rolled him to his knees, and then pulled him up to a standing position. I threw his arm over my shoulder and sort of swayed him toward my garage.

  Piper could fix him, help him, help me in ways I didn’t even have questions for yet. More importantly, as I challenge the speed limit through my neighborhood and to the highway, I needed him not dead.

  Piper was already waiting on her front porch when we drove up. Even in this early hour, even unannounced.

  Levi and Xenom swarmed my car and carried Rafe’s still unresponsive form from my back seat. I followed his body and Piper caught me and wrapped me in a warm hug. “Thank you for bringing him home, Merci.”