by D. N. Hoxa
“Tell us, Mr. Reed. Tell us why you’re here. None of us wants to be here any longer than we have to,” Ulrich said. On that, we agreed.
The words were already in my mind. All I had to do was say them. And it was…easy. I thought it would be hard. I thought I’d meet resistance from my own mind, my instincts. I didn’t.
“I’m here to propose another contract,” I told them, and neither looked surprised. They already knew what was going to happen here. “I’ll sign the contract you gave me when my last one ended, in exchange for the life and freedom of Sinea Montero.”
They had given me a contract when they gave me the last job I’d ever do for the Guild—to find the stolen amulet. I’d laughed at them then. I’d been amused as well as annoyed, but not anymore.
Both men looked at each other. On the other side of the room, Flinn’s heart picked up the beating.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, Mr. Reed,” said Connelly, watching closely for my reaction. I didn’t give him any because I expected him to say that. The contract they’d given me was for a job—not my freedom. I’d work for them for a salary with benefits, and that’s that. They didn’t own me with that contract, not like they had with the first. But they wanted to own me, they always had. Which was why I had even bothered to propose a new deal to these people. They wanted me, and now I wanted them, too.
“Sinea Montero is a Marauder, as well as an Alpha Prime,” Connelly continued after a solid ten seconds of waiting for me to say something. “Her existence isn’t even possible, but the Guild has never claimed to be perfect.” No, the Guild was as far from perfect as it gets. He paused for another few seconds to see if I’d say anything, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to give him any more leverage over me. He already had enough. “I’m afraid we’ll have no choice but to terminate her, for the safety of the worlds. You’ve lived a long time, Mr. Reed. I’m sure you already understand how keeping the peace works. You don’t need me to explain it to you.”
I laughed a bit, just to spite them. “Keeping the peace—interesting choice of words, Mr. Connelly. If it weren’t for Sinea Montero, you wouldn’t have any peace to keep.” They knew this. I’d told them, the Bane had told them. Sinea had probably told them all about it, too.
“Marauders are illegal,” Ulrich reminded me, his cheeks turning slightly pink with fresh blood rushing to them. I looked at Connelly instead.
“That doesn’t change the fact that she saved all our lives. You don’t need to pretend here, gentlemen. I know who the Guild is and how it operates better than you ever will. You will not kill Sinea Montero if you can use her.” Just like they hadn’t killed Amina Grey over a hundred years ago.
“I’ve actually spoken to her myself, Mr. Reed,” Ulrich said. “She’s a very…stubborn young lady, I’m afraid. The Guild will not be offering any deals to her.” I wanted to laugh again, but I controlled myself. The thought of Ulrich’s face when Sinea probably sent him to hell was priceless, just like Alexander Adams’s had been when she asked him for the moon and the solar system.
I swallowed the laugh and continued. “But you will offer a deal to me. She’s my mate, gentlemen. I don’t need to explain to you what that means, do I?”
That surprised them, and they didn’t even try to hide it.
“She didn’t tell us that,” Ulrich said. That was because Sinea didn’t know yet.
“If she’s your mate, that means she’ll be with you, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. “She will.”
“Even while you work for the Guild?”
“Yes.”
“On all the jobs?”
“Yes.”
“And she’ll be bound by the contract?”
“Y—”
“Hypothetical contract,” Connelly cut him off. “A very different contract from the one you were given before by Mr. Flinn.”
Nervousness wasn’t a very familiar emotion to me the past century, but I felt it now. Exactly how many years were they going to take from me?
The better question was, did they know I’d give them anything they asked for?
“Exactly what is it that you’re proposing, Mr. Reed? In detail, please,” Ulrich insisted.
I was more than happy to share. “If we reach an agreement, Sinea Montero walks away free. She will be my partner, as well as my responsibility for the next one hundred years. I will work for you on any case you choose for me, just like I have in the past. You know my track record, but if you need a reminder, I can send you a detailed list of every mission I’ve ever completed for the Guild.” I didn’t have such a thing but they did. I just wanted to remind them.
“That is not a deal and you know it,” Connelly said, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He was no longer pretending to be calm and relaxed now that we’d gotten to the good stuff. “We’d be letting a Marauder and an Alpha Prime go—completely free out there in the worlds. Do you have any idea what she’s capable of, Mr. Reed?”
“I do. I saw it last night. She revived the Shade singlehandedly. You know that, too.” I leaned a bit closer on the chair, too, no longer caring about the blood rushing in their bodies. “Did you know that Adams proposed a deal to her?”
“He did?” They probably knew this, too, but it didn’t matter.
“Yes, he did. Can you guess what she did?”
“She didn’t take it?” Ulrich offered.
“She didn’t take it. She fought him instead. We can pretend all we want, gentlemen, but you already know Sinea is not the bad guy here. You want to use her—and me—so just do it. There’s no need to drag this on longer than necessary. Just do what the Guild has been doing for hundreds of years—take what you can, while you can take it.”
“One hundred years is not enough,” Connelly said, his voice lower now. He was pissed because he knew I had him. But they had me, too. Neither of us was walking away from one another today. “Two hundred and we’ll prepare the contract right now.”
“No. Two hundred is too much.” It wasn’t, but they didn’t need to know that.
“Two hundred, take it or leave it,” Connelly pushed.
“I will not agree to two hundred.”
“Then we will not agree to your proposition, Mr. Reed,” he concluded.
Except he wasn’t the only guy who called the shots here. Ulrich was his equal, and Ulrich really didn’t want Sinea and me to slip from his fingers.
“Let’s think about it, gentlemen,” he said, raising his hands at us as if he thought we were about to attack one another. “One hundred years is too little, and two hundred is too much. How about we settle for one hundred and fifty, just like in the last contract?”
Music to my ears. “I’ll take it, with a minor adjustment—that is all the time I’m going to give you. When things don’t go the way you want them to, you can’t add more days, months, years to the contract like you did last time. You’ll have to come up with another form of punishment.”
Connelly looked at me. In his muddy brown eyes I saw my reflection. Maybe I shouldn’t have cleaned my face of the blood and dirt at all because I looked whiter than the walls of that office. In turn, my eyes looked darker, my lips bluer. I needed to feed, but for now, I used my appearance to make Connelly back off. He was going to, eventually, but I no longer had patience to deal with them. They were going to take the deal because they knew it was worth it.
“What about the Bane?” Ulrich asked after a second.
“The Bane is free. They’re no longer obligated to work with me.” I wouldn’t drag them along into this, too. They had just settled, had a life here now, for however long they wanted. I would never take that away from them.
“So it’s just you and Montero?”
I nodded. “And anybody else whom I think can help over the years.” That’s how the Bane had come to exist in the first place. The jobs the Guild sent me were difficult to say the least, and you always needed capable people to help you.
“So it’s basically the same
contract with a few adjustments,” Ulrich continued, like he couldn’t see how Connelly was still looking at me.
“Basically, yes.”
“A tracker,” Connelly finally said. “Both you and Ms. Montero will carry a tracker for the duration of your lives or the contract. Non-negotiable.”
A tracker meant the Guild knew exactly where we were and what we were doing at all times. Like a tail on you, twenty-four seven. It was the last thing I wanted, but I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t going to budge on this. And if I tried, I’d make him insist harder and waste even more time.
I nodded. “Agreed.”
Ulrich suddenly stood up. Sweat lined his forehead. “Mr. Flinn here will get right to it, then. We’ll need you to sign the contract by tomorrow, Mr. Reed, because we’ve had some issues in the New Orleans Shade that we need to tend to immediately.”
I smiled. That was good news.
“In that case, gentlemen, it was a pleasure doing business with you. I trust you have my phone number.”
I stood up, turned around and walked out of the office before any of them could blink. The soldiers were still there, waiting for me, and they escorted me out as if I didn’t know the way myself. I didn’t comment.
The first and last time I’d made a deal with the Guild, I’d felt defeated. Imprisoned in my own body, stuck in place, detached from everybody else. I expected the same this time around, too, when I walked out of the building and found the Bane waiting for me on the sidewalk.
I didn’t feel defeated. I felt…the same. Nothing at all had changed because the job didn’t matter. It only mattered whom I’d share it with. I took in a mouthful of air and walked down the stairs, toward the Bane. By this time tomorrow, I would be a man of the Guild again, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Chapter Seventeen
Sin Montero
The three weird men with the white robes came in with a suitcase in hand this time. And I thought, this is it. In that suitcase were the torture devices they were going to use to extract information from me before they killed me. I’d been waiting for it since they brought me here, which was…twenty-four hours, maybe? I wasn’t sure. There was no window in here and they didn’t let me keep my phone, the fuckers.
It was a jail cell, except it was a bit fancier. It had a twin bed with a really shitty mattress but the sheets were clean. There were bars all around me, as thick as my wrist, warded with a threefold Prime spell. The cell was in the middle of a wide room with a really high ceiling, and it was cold in there, but nobody gave a shit how thin my blanket was. Other than that, I had a sink and a toilet that everyone could see from all sides. Needless to say, I’d had to use it twice with the ten soldiers who were outside the bars with me at all times pretending they couldn’t see me. I was way past being embarrassed at that point.
Then, there was my favorite thing in the whole setting—the thick chain that came from the floor under the bed and ended in a really thick cuff secured around my right ankle. It extended all the way to the corners of the cell, so I could get to the toilet easily—if dragging over fifty pounds of steel around with your leg at all times can be considered easy.
Still, I hadn’t been tortured yet. I’d been interrogated over and over again by seven different people, and I’d been fed, too. I’d been tested—they’d taken a shitload of blood from me in the beginning, and then a little two more times. By the same guys with the white robes who were coming toward me now with a suitcase in their hands.
I looked at it and wondered what I’d see in there. I tried to push through with my magic, just to see the essence of those guys, but the thick wards were designed to keep my magic on the inside. The worst part? The cuff that was secured around my ankle had these little lights on the side, and they turned bright red whenever I tried to use my magic.
The first time, I hadn’t known that would happen, so when those men came in, I tried to take a peek at their essence. It didn’t end well for me. The tiny lights turned on, and the next thing I knew, one of them had a Taser in hand and touched it to my chest. It was so unexpected I fell to the floor like a sack of potatoes, shaking. Then, the nice men had informed me that if they hadn’t used the Taser, the cuff would have injected a very strong dose of a tranquilizer straight into my fibular artery. I asked them where the hell that was, and they explained that it went right through my ankle. Very convenient, but I didn’t try to use my magic again. I didn’t want to break out of here. I didn’t want to live in hiding. I’d been fully aware that I would end up here last night when I decided to go to the Shade and find the others. Whatever came my way now, I welcomed it.
“Ms. Montero, please stand,” one of the men with the white robes said when the soldier opened the barred door, and they all stepped inside. He was the taller of the three, with piercing blue eyes and a very wide nose that looked like it had been broken, the bone of it crushed to the skull. If you looked at his profile, you could barely notice he even had a nose at all.
I stood from the bed with a sigh. Would it be too much to hope that they’d maybe brought me some clean clothes in that suitcase? Because I was still dressed in my jeans and black shirt and I even had my jacket, but it had so many holes in it, it didn’t even count. At least my sneakers were warm.
“What do you have in there for me, fellas?” I said, raising my hands up where they could see them. They liked it when I did that. It made them feel safer. The ten soldiers who were always in there with me had all turned toward the cell, creating a wall right behind the bars.
“Please lower your hands, Ms. Montero,” the tall guy said. I didn’t know his name, though I’d asked. They didn’t tell me and they didn’t have any tags.
The other two rarely spoke, only a couple words here and there. For once, I didn’t try to make them talk, not when the third guy who was holding the briefcase put it on the bed. I held my breath as he put in the combination and pulled the lid up.
Huh.
“So you’re not going to torture me?” Because that thing in there didn’t look like a torturing device. It looked kind of like a gun without the barrel, except it was made of plastic and it had a tiny screen that burned blue on the side.
All three of them stopped what they were doing and looked at me.
“What? It’s a good question.”
“No, Ms. Montero,” Tall Guy said. “We’re not going to torture you. Please turn around.”
I squinted my eyes at him. “Are you going to kill me?”
“No, we’re not going to kill you. Turn around, please.”
But it didn’t make any sense. “Why haven’t you killed me yet?” I asked, just because he was feeling very chatty today, apparently. The other three times he hadn’t answered my questions at all.
Tall Guy looked back at his colleagues for a second. “Please turn around, Ms. Montero. And remember what happens if you try to use your magic.”
If I used my magic they would knock me out cold in seconds. With a sigh, I turned my back to them. Every instinct in my body wanted me to face them. Even my hands reached for my hips where my daggers would have been, had they let me keep them. My stomach turned for a second when one of them reached for the back of my jacket, and pulled it off me. I’d had no idea how hard it would be to actually stop myself from reacting. This had never happened before, but I gritted my teeth and held still while the guy pulled my shirt down to reveal the back of my neck.
But it wasn’t to kill me, right? Because they wouldn’t send these guys here to kill me, and I still hadn’t told them shit about how I’d become a Level Five. I hadn’t told them about the amulet at all because I didn’t want to get Damian in trouble, and I figured it wasn’t going to make a difference anyway.
But they knew it came from somewhere so they kept asking. I’d told the same story seven times now, and I suspected I’d have to tell it for another seven times, but what if these guys really did kill me?
“I’m going to need you to stand very still, Ms. Montero
. This is going to hurt for a bit, but please refrain from using your magic. It will only complicate things,” Tall Guy said.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “For fuck’s sake, if you’re going to kill me, just tell me.” I wasn’t going to stop them. I’d been waiting for it my whole life, and to be honest, it was a lot better than I expected. They’d only taken my blood and had questioned me. They hadn’t taken samples of my hair or skin or teeth, they hadn’t undressed me and tied me to one of those leather chairs like in the movies. They hadn’t tied me up to machines with annoying beeping sounds. They hadn’t put those pads over my temples to check my brain’s reaction while a series of disturbing images played in front of my eyes, either.
Yeah, I’d thought about this a lot.
But still, I just wanted to know if this was it. My mind was blank—I’d thought about everything I’d needed to think about in the past twenty-four hours, and now all I heard was noise in there, like it was coming from the outside.
“We are not going to kill you,” Tall Guy said, his voice no longer impatient, just bored. “Hold still.”
“Wa—” Something cold pressed against my back, right at the base of my neck.
The pain was instant. It was like somebody had jammed a nail the size of my thumb into me, and they kept beating it with a hammer. The noise in my head turned to a screeching sound that was going to burst my eardrums if it didn’t stop.
Soon I forgot all about it. Something was inside me, and it was small, fast, and made of flames. I was paralyzed, I couldn’t breathe at all, or see anything. I couldn’t feel if I was still standing or lying down—only the tiny devil that was taking a walk through my veins, spreading fire everywhere, burning me from within.
I wanted to scream so badly for an eternity, but my voice refused to leave my mouth. I don’t know how long it lasted, but eventually I began to feel cold hands on my face. Slaps. Someone was slapping me and calling my name.
