I lifted one eyebrow in expectation. He couldn't hide the rage that stole over him but he pulled back the vellum just the same. It hovered over her solar plexus. The branding navigated toward it. When it connected with the contract, it came together like a magnet to iron. The sound of it was enough to make Vivianne's eyes flutter open for a millisecond.
"Even dark fae honor their bargains," Horatio said.
"You want a medal or something?" I said.
He scowled at me. "Get out, Saint," he said in a threatening tone. "You may have found a loophole in a fae bargain, but I own this bar."
A crush of bouncers clustered around me.
"I have one more bargain for you," he said with an oily grin as he threw up a flare. The light transformed to bright red letters in the shadows of the ceiling. "You make it to the door in sixty seconds and you can live."
He didn't have to tell me the other part of the bargain, what would happen if I didn't make it to the door. I wasted no time shouldering my way through. Her heel caught on kindred as we pushed past them. I didn't bother to check the timer as I reached the door. I knew by the way someone pushed it open that I had made it. Whether or not Horatio had wanted to make it impossible for me to succeed, didn't matter. I wasn't coming back.
I didn't have to ask to be sent back to the ninth world. I was forced out. Leaving the bazaar took less time, less pain, than entering and I had to guess it was because of the fae in my arms. It dropped us where I had entered. I couple of blocks from Fayed's.
The cabbie I hailed didn't look twice at a tall, muscular man covered in blood pushing into his back seat with an unconscious woman in his arms. I laid her tenderly across the backseat and gave him an address and one instruction.
"Make sure to give the nuns two of these to look after her." I passed him three wads of cash. "The other pays you to honor the fare."
The money was the thing that made his eyes widen. Go figure. How much had the man seen in this city that it took a wad of bills to surprise him.
"I'd deliver her myself," I said. "But the abbess threatened me with a shotgun last time I was there. You ever piss off a nun bad enough for her to pull an over and under on you?"
His jaw slackened as he shook his head.
"Yeah," I said with a hint of immodest humor. "It's not pretty. A man has to be pretty evil to piss off a nun that way."
His swallow was audible enough that I knew he got the point. Even so, I had to press it.
"You okay with this job?" I said and held his gaze through the open door.
He nodded.
"Don't disappoint me." I let the demon shine through my gaze as I held his. "What's your name?"
"Gideon," he said.
"Well, Gideon," I said and reached over the seat to touch his ID. "You don't know it but you just survived a deadly encounter with a maniac. I suggest you never meet the maniac again." I pulled his ID from the mirror and pocketed it with a meaningful gesture.
He nodded again, this time dropping his gaze to the seat.
"I understand," he said.
I grunted my satisfaction and withdrew from the cab. I pushed my palm against the door, sealing it closed as silently as I could. Three sharp raps and the cabbie pulled away. I watched it go as the rising sun glinted off its yellow roof and made a halo spread out across the trunk.
I'd seen plenty of things in my century of life, most of them horrifying enough to make a blind man grateful for his lack of sight. But right then, standing in the middle of a city street with a fae-born witch enroute to a convent, I didn't think I'd ever see anything so hopeful.
If the story entertained you for a spell, you can pick up a freebie story set in the Shadow Bazaar when you join Thea's Tribe.
About the Author
Thea is a NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY Bestselling Author. She used to have a black lab at her feet when she wrote, warming up the calves. It can be cold in rural Nova Scotia. Now it's just a cuppa tea keeping her warm.
Whether she's finding ways to lure Isabella Hush into the Shadow Bazaar or throwing the switch on a new monster, her urban fantasy pulses with dark themes and action-packed intrigue. Her characters are always deeply wounded creatures struggling for redemption. The romance is slow-burn but worth it, and the humor just might have a touch of Canadiana. A major fan of Dannika Dark and Patricia Briggs, she hopes you enjoy slipping into the skin of her characters as much as she enjoy theirs.
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WITCHES OF ETLANTIUM If a witch can't control her power, who will control her?
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REAPERS REDEMPTION Who reaps the souls of the supernatural?
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THETA WAVES She has the power to save the world; he was born to destroy it.
ROGUE HUNTRESS CHRONICLES
She's never been good at submission. A dark shifter urban fantasy romance
For more information visit theaatkinson.com
Midnight’s Dilemma
An Ilsa Deverell Short Story
Margo Bond Collins
1
Assassination is a young person’s game.
I don’t mean the planning of it—that’s for the old guys. Men with cigars in smoky rooms hidden from the rest of the world, plotting out who lives and who dies. Men like The Director.
But the actual death-dealing?
That’s for more nimble people. The ones who can hide immobile for hours waiting for prey, then transition to running in a heartbeat. The ones who aren’t afraid of death themselves.
The ones who have nothing to lose.
Clark told me that my last day of training, right before I left The Academy and became a full-fledged member of The Organization. It seemed profound then.
It didn’t seem quite so wise almost five years later—two days before my twenty-second birthday—as I hunkered down on a rooftop watching a Halloween carnival through my scope, waiting for my mark to walk by.
Waiting for my chance to shoot a six-year-old little girl in broad daylight.
I used to tell myself I’m not a murderer. I’ve never killed a human being.
But I have killed some things that looked human.
They’re not human. That was my mantra for years.
Now, though, I think being human might not matter. And the thought that runs through my mind over and over has changed.
What if I’m the monster?
2
One Week Earlier
Rolling down the window, I took a deep breath, inhaling the warm, spring night air. Switching off the headlights, I let the vehicle roll down the street, then cut off the engine, guided it to a halt, and slumped down in the driver’s seat of my nondescript car two houses down from a perfectly average suburban home.
Seriously?
Reaching into the bag next to me, I pulled out the gear I needed for tonight’s surveillance.
Nothing deadly.
Not yet.
Tonight was simple reconnaissance.
I held a scope up to my eye, watching as a woman in jeans and a T-shirt moved around the kitchen, chopping vegetables and obviously cooking dinner.
Two things kept running through my mind. First, people needed to learn to keep their windows covered at night—and during the day, for that matter. Second…what the hell was I doing here?
Nothing about this family suggested any of them were killers, much less supernatural killers.
The Director had texted the address to me earlier that week. Nothing more specific or detailed, but that was normal. Supposedly, the Council did its research. And I always assumed the target they sent me deserve to die.
I was one of the good guys. I relied on that so I c
ould sleep at night.
I took down monsters—and not just any monsters, either. The ones who killed humans. The ones who loved the bloodsport. The ones who were stupid and violent enough to catch the eye of The Organization. And I had never believed that all supernaturals were murderous.
My colleagues—the other assassins of supernatural monsters out there in the world—had grown jaded, critical of their own motivations for killing the creatures we were sent to kill.
But I refused to fall into that trap. I read once that the average person passes a murderer at least ten times in a lifetime.
I assumed those statistics considered only human murderers.
The number of times a human passed a supernatural monster who had killed people was much, much higher, I suspected.
We still outnumber them.
I think.
They were everywhere. It was amazing they had managed to keep themselves hidden from most humans for so long.
Maybe they had done it by being absolutely unremarkable.
Like this family I was watching through their windows. Why the hell had Polly given me these people? What had they done? What were they?
What kind of monsters was I staring at?
I settled in for a long wait.
Three hours later, the lights inside went off, and I sat up straight.
If anything was likely to happen, now was the time.
Quietly, I stepped out of the car, shutting the door behind me gently, but with a click that sounded like a gunshot to my overly sensitive hearing.
If they are going to do anything, they will do it tonight.
Slowly, I made my way to the front of the house, flattening myself into the shadows. It seemed unlikely that they would move into their front yard, even in the darkness. I slipped around one side of the house, until I came to the fence, a little taller than average for security privacy fences. Of course—they wouldn’t want their neighbors easily seeing what they did in their back yard.
Clouds scuttled over the full moon, and I used that moment to grasp the top of the fence with my gloved hands. Pulling myself up, I gave a single push with my feet, my soft-soled shoes barely making a thump. Then I was up and over, dangling on the other side.
Letting go of the fence, I landed in a crouch, pausing long enough to make sure no one had heard me.
In one step, I moved to the outside wall of the house, flattening myself against the siding, slowly edging my way toward the corner. At the sound of a sliding glass door running along its rails, I froze, palms flat against the wall behind me.
“You’ll be able to come with us soon enough, Joey,” I heard a feminine voice say.
“I didn’t get the change until I was almost seventeen,” an adult male said, his quiet voice floating to me from behind the house.
“I know,” a younger male voice replied. “But if I can’t go with you, why do I have to stay here? Why can I go out with my friends?”
The woman chuckled. “We need you to stay home with Sydney.”
“Your job is to keep your baby sister safe,” the man added.
The boy huffed out a sigh. “Fine,” he said petulantly.
“We’ll be home before dawn,” the woman—his mother, I assumed—said. “And as payment, we will let you stay out until 12:30 on Saturday instead of midnight.”
“How about one o’clock?”
The mother laughed. “Only if you promise to answer your phone when I call while you’re out.”
“Done,” the boy said.
From my hiding place around the corner of the house, I fought an urge to shake my head, unwilling to make any sound at all.
But God, they sounded so normal—just a couple of parents bribing a teenage boy to babysit while they went out for the night.
Then the sliding door closed again, and the man said, “You ready?”
“Let’s do it,” the woman replied.
That’s when the cracking started, the sounds of bones breaking, the grunts of pain, he barely held back howls of anguish.
Time for me to get out of here.
Before the werewolves I was watching could finish shifting and catch my sent, I jumped back up to the top of the fence, stopping long enough to pull a vial out of the side pocket of my pants. Uncapping it, I spritzed the contents all along the path I had just traveled.
Coyote urine. A little unusual to find this far into the suburbs, but not entirely implausible.
With any luck, the werewolves would assume it was another shifter tracking them—either that, or truly wild animals, marking territory before catching the scent of a wolf and taking off.
I moved around to the front of the house where I’d been before, once again spraying down any place my scent might linger, moving swiftly but calmly until I was back in my car and headed back into the city.
On my way, I tapped the dashboard communication system to call in my report. As soon as the call went through, I spoke without identifying myself. “Wolf sighting confirmed. Awaiting further instructions.”
If our information was correct, those parents were monsters—not only because they could turn into wolves, but because they had killed humans. I expected to hear back from The Director by morning with an order to take out the adult werewolves.
That will leave the two kids alone.
I gave a mental shrug at the thought.
They were better off growing up without human-killing wolves as role models.
Anyway, I had been without parents most of my life, and I turned out fine.
Satisfied with my night’s work, I turned up the radio and headed home.
As it turned out, the parents were monsters, no doubt.
But in the end, it was the order to take out the little girl that convinced me to walk away from The Organization.
3
I followed the family the next week, learning their habits, their routes to and from work and school, figuring out their daily lives and dropping them into the formula that would allow me to swiftly and easily eliminate them without facing any repercussions from human law enforcement.
That formula was almost mathematical in its precision, designed to be flexible enough to fit into any situation and rigid enough to produce the same results every time. In my world, the little girl was only a piece of the formula. An integer. Part of the larger, more complex entirety of the mathematical problem I faced.
Until the day of her school carnival.
I followed them in a different nondescript sedan to the elementary school the girl attended.
With a blond wig, bright lipstick, and blue contacts, I could pass for any one of these suburban moms.
The adults smiled indulgently as she picked out a balloon. Her older, teenage brother crossed his arms and looked bored.
He bothered me less. But even The Director acknowledged that shifters didn’t turn until they hit puberty. The little one was still several years away from being a real threat. And right now, she looked like any other child playing, enjoying a day at the fair with her family.
When I’d seen where they were going, I had planned to pick them off here, then use the fleeing crowds as cover while I escaped.
But she wasn’t the only child here.
You gotta learn how to turn those emotions off. I could practically hear Quintana’s voice in my head as she taught me all the best ways to kill the monsters. They’re not really human—they just look that way sometimes.
Maybe it was because the little girl was just about the age I’d been when my parents died—years before The Organization plucked me out of the foster home I was living in and started training me to be a professional monster killer.
Or maybe Quintana was right and my emotions were becoming detrimental to my ability to do my job.
Maybe it was simply wrong to kill something that young.
Whatever the reason, I couldn’t do it.
In the five years I had been working for The Organization, I had never been assigned to take out a kid.
Shapeshifters were like wild animals, at least as far as The Organization was concerned. That’s what all my training told me.
You didn’t kill a lion in the bush unless it had become a man-killer. And you don’t kill a werewolf unless it’s taken out a human first.
Vampires were an easier call. Even they seemed to recognize that turning children into their kind was horrific. And as far as I knew, vamps couldn’t survive without taking human blood. So they were kill-on-sight.
Right now, though, I was looking through my scope at a little girl who couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.
“Fuck that,” I muttered, dropping the scope from my eye and disassembling my AR-15, quickly stowing it out of sight. Standing, I slung my nondescript black bag over my shoulder and strolled away from the vantage point I had chosen earlier. When I got to the sedan I was driving —a new one, different from the one I’d used to surveil the family’s house—I slipped into the driver’s seat and pulled out my phone.
“Midnight, calling for The Director,” I said to the operator who answered.
I tapped my foot against the floorboard and scanned the crowd going in and out of the school as I waited for him to answer.
“I’m sorry, Midnight,” the operator said in her smooth, professional voice when she returned. “The Director is currently unavailable.”
I suppressed a growl. It wasn’t the operator’s fault The Director was ducking me. “Will you let him know I’m on my way in?”
“He’s not—”
I hung up before she could finish that statement, the better to avoid acknowledging it.
4
Supernatural Syndicate: A Limited Edition Collection of Magical Mafia Stories Page 9
