Blood and Fire: An Urban Fantasy (The Marked Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  “Are you telling me how to do my job now?”

  I said nothing.

  He walked backwards, his eyes still on the house, a smile on his face. I could see it in his eyes—he wanted to tell me to turn myself in again. I don’t know why he even bothered. If he was so desperate to lock me up, why didn’t he just take me himself? Why didn’t he shift into an animal when it was so obvious that he wanted to?

  He was letting me go for reasons that were unknown to me, and I wasn’t sure what to feel about that.

  “I didn’t catch your name,” I called from the door when he was close to the main gates.

  “Dumont,” he said. “Detective Ryan Dumont.”

  I really hoped I wouldn’t see Detective Ryan Dumont again.

  6

  Going upstairs was no longer an issue. If I was lucky, I had maybe ten minutes before the MM sent their people for me. Eight minutes were more realistic, but I was nothing if not an optimist. The stairs turned into a blur as I ran, and a blink later, I was in front of the door to the third floor—Nana’s quarters, which looked more like a hole right now, eager to drag me all the way down. My hand shook as I searched for the keyhole. The door was bigger than a normal door, made of dark wood and coated with a healthy layer of polish that made you wonder if it was made of glass. A golden knob was in the very middle of it, under the keyhole. I put the key inside and turned it, ignoring the wild protest of my churning gut. I was already running out of time.

  I turned the key twice and tried the knob. The skin of my hand caught fire. With a hiss, I jumped back, holding my hand to my chest. It still burned like I was being stung by a million bees at once, even though my skin looked perfectly normal. Closing my eyes, I breathed deeply to calm my racing heart. Nana had given me the Guard to her quarters. I’d signed her attorney’s papers with blood. I’d felt the magic slipping inside me, and I’d felt it settle onto my shoulders like a second layer of skin.

  But I’d completely forgotten that I needed to say the spell that locked her quarters much better than a key. So I took out the square piece of paper that Randy had given me, and I spoke the words she’d written for me in Futhark runes. Three words, and it felt like a thousand pounds lifted off me.

  The knob turned by itself. A groan from the heavy wood, and the door opened just a bit.

  It left me feeling breathless, like I’d been running for hours, but there was no time to get my shit together. I pushed the door open all the way with both hands and stepped inside.

  A single room was in front of me, wide, almost as big as the entire floor, with only one door to the right. The smell of stale coffee and tobacco hung in the air with the dust that shimmered in the sun’s rays that slipped through the thick curtains of the two small windows across from the door. Dust covered everything. There was no carpet on the hardwood floor. A queen-sized, unmade bed was to the left next to a closet so old the white color of it had turned yellow. Two desks were by the windows. You couldn’t see their surface from all the books thrown atop them. More books in the walled shelves on either side of the door. I tried the switch but no light turned on. I stepped deeper into the room, unsure of what to look at first. Clothes on the floor, ashtrays full of cigarette butts and empty mugs. This was nothing like I imagined Nana’s quarters to be. I pulled the curtains to the side, hoping that light was going to somehow change what was around me. It didn’t.

  Nana was a very tidy person. She wouldn’t stand for any of us to have messy rooms, and God forbid you didn’t take your plate to the sink and wash it after eating. That her own living space would look like this was possibly the strangest thing I’d seen since coming back to the Enclave.

  I wished I had the time to go through every single item in there, but the MM was coming for me. I ran to Nana’s desk, and I opened every book on it. The plan was to find a picture of those runes her kidnapper had burned on the floor when taking her. It would tell me exactly where I needed to go next, who I needed to look for.

  But there was nothing there. I opened the drawers and found three packs of cigarettes with a bunch of handwritten pieces of paper that meant nothing to me and a very old-looking revolver. The chambers were empty. I wasn’t a guns kind of gal, but it would have come in handy if it had bullets, and there were no bullets anywhere that I could see. Reluctantly, I put it back in the drawer.

  The shelves full of books all around laughed at me. There had to be something in there that would tell me what those runes were. I’d barely taken a step toward the nearest shelf when the tips of my toes began to tingle. The next second, a sharp needle buried itself in the back of my neck, and it was gone just as quickly. I cursed at the empty room. The Ministry was already here, and they’d just passed the Guard.

  Exploring my options didn’t take me longer than a couple of seconds because there were only two of them: wait for the MM to come find me and put me behind bars or run the hell away as fast as I could. Sweat broke out on my forehead as I neared the only windows in the room. They were small, but I could fit through them. I pushed one open with a loud creak and filled my lungs with fresh air. I could see the woods that covered the backside of Nana’s estates. I’d grown up in them. Until Avery came to the Enclave, they had been my safe haven, a place I could go to escape Nana’s many demands.

  Now, I could escape the MM there, too. Without hesitation, I slipped out the window. It was narrow; I barely fit. Maybe I’d added some pounds while I was away. The ledge outside the window was incredibly narrow, too, but I wasn’t going to be afraid now. Fear could potentially cost me my freedom, and that was not an option. So I sucked it up and walked two steps to the left, from where I could slide down the grey shingles and onto the roof of the kitchen. From there, it would be an easy jump.

  “You better not die,” I said to myself, and with my eyes closed, I jumped forward. I held my legs together tightly and my ass was grated by the shingles, but it only lasted a moment. I’d miscalculated my ability to jump right onto the kitchen roof, or maybe I had lost some pounds since I was away because I flew almost to the edge of the kitchen roof and barely held myself from falling on the ground and breaking my neck. The MM would have had the time of their lives if they found me like that, and I wasn’t there to entertain anyone. I held onto the shingles as best as I could and somehow made it to the edge. I didn’t even get to see how high it was—I just jumped. I squatted my legs, and when I hit the ground, I rolled back to ease the intensity of the impact, but my ankles still hurt like hell. My ass did, too. From out there, I could hear the MM officers talking, too close to me for my liking. I turned toward the woods, and I began to sprint, hoping they wouldn’t see me.

  They did, but it was too late. By the time they began to shoot at me, I was two feet away from the entrance to the woods, and once in there, the dense trees made it impossible for the MM officers to spot me.

  Even though I’d been away for four years, I felt right at home in those woods. I ran deeper and deeper before I even thought about finding a place to hide, but this time I was sure that the MM wasn’t going to find me, even if they had the best trained shifters on my trail. Even shifters couldn’t smell someone on the very top of a tree, and that was exactly where I planned to wait until all of them left the Enclave grounds.

  ***

  I waited for nightfall before leaving the woods. The officers came so close to me, for a moment I really thought they’d find me. I was hidden well, but I couldn’t see what kind of shifters they had with them, I could only hear them. They stuck around for a long time in the woods, but eventually, they figured I was long gone, and left.

  Richmond was a busy city, and it was easy to spot a girl with an eye patch walking the streets. My hood was drawn and I’d let my hair loose to cover half of my face as I made my way down Vester Street, but all it would take was a little wind and someone looking in the right direction to give me away. It was in the eastern part of the city, and the last time I’d been there was with Avery. If she were here with me now, she’d pr
obably call me an idiot for returning to this fucking city in the first place. I’d have laughed and told her she’d have done the same thing. It was always in her to help people. She’d gotten under my skin so fast, it was ridiculous. Maybe if we’d done what everybody else did and minded our own damn business, she’d have still been alive. Maybe.

  I stopped in front of the old apartment building, trying to convince myself that this wasn’t a stupid idea. The guy I was here to see could report me to the MM in a heartbeat, if he even still lived there. He was just a kid when I first met him, a seventeen-year-old boy who would spend every second of every day glued to his computer screen if he could. He’d been desperate then, but things change. People change. Nothing ever stays the same.

  The apartment building where he used to live with his mother was old, its walls a nasty grey, its front door almost completely broken down. Jesus, the whole thing looked like it was going to fall to the ground any second. I took another look around the neighborhood to make sure I wasn’t being followed and that nobody had noticed me standing there. A dumb idea it may be, but it was the only one I had. With that thought in mind, I stepped into the building. I ran up the stairs with my head down and ears sharp. If somebody was in there that wasn’t supposed to be—say, the MM—I would hear it.

  Luckily, the hallways were deserted, and I arrived at Travis Chain’s door unharmed. I guess a part of me was afraid I’d chicken out and decide this was a shitty idea after all because I knocked without stopping to take a breath.

  The wait killed me. I knocked three times before I even heard someone coming. I was starting to think nobody was home.

  But Travis was there. He pulled the door open just a bit. I recognized his face. He was a long way from the teenager I used to know, but he hadn’t changed much. A mess of blond, curly hair on top of his head, brown eyes hiding behind thick glasses, and he even had the same nose ring in his left nostril.

  The door chain was still on. I smiled and waved my hand. “Hi, Travis.”

  “Ruby?” he said, almost breathlessly. Well, at least he recognized me. I pulled off my hood.

  “Yep. Mind if I come in?”

  The man was shocked. “What? Why?”

  I rolled my eyes, but he only saw my good one. “Because I want to speak to you. I’m not going to cause you any trouble, I promise. I just need your help.”

  Suddenly, he slammed the door in my face. I thought he was going to make me break it, but then he took off the chain and opened the door again.

  “Ruby, I can’t take you off the wanted list. I really can’t.”

  This guy. I laughed my heart out.

  “I don’t want you to take me off any lists, Travis.”

  “Look, my mom’s going to be back soon. If she sees you here, she’s going to call the MM,” he warned me. I’d already thought about that. His mother worked for the MM, some kind of a secretary or something, but I also knew that she never went into Travis’s room because he hated that, so I figured if she came, I’d use the window. I already had once today. No biggie.

  I took out my phone and opened the picture of the burning runes on Nana’s hallway floor. “I just need you to tell me what these are. What they mean. Anything you can.” Travis looked at the screen of my phone and squinted his eyes. “C’mon, Travis. We helped you when you needed us.”

  He knew I was right. The poor guy was sweating. I hated to do that to him, but I didn’t have any other choice. So when he stepped back, I walked into his apartment right away.

  I’d been there before. I knew the way to his room was through the hallway on the left, the door at the very end. All the lights were out in the rest of the apartment, and in his room, only a small lamp was on. The lamp and his huge computer screen.

  The room hadn’t changed much. He no longer had posters of fancy cars and Playboy models attached to the walls, so that was an improvement. His computer had been smaller then, too. But Travis had remained almost the same, down to the big white shirt and the baggy jeans hanging low on his hips. It was good to see a familiar face, despite everything.

  “I’m sorry…” he said, looking down at the floor. “Um…about Avery.”

  It had been a while since I’d heard her name being spoken out loud by someone else. “Thanks,” I mumbled.

  “She was a good person,” Travis said as he sat down in front of his computer.

  “The best.” In fact, it had been Avery who’d first met with Travis.

  He’d complained to a friend of his online, someone who knew Avery and what we were trying to do—which was to become superheroes. Insert eye roll here. God, we were just kids. But we did take things very seriously. So when Avery heard about Travis, she met up with him.

  Travis told her about his adoptive mom’s boyfriend, who had been the best guy in the world for a whole year before he started to abuse him and his mother, physically and mentally. That’s when Travis had started to do his computer magic—he was human, so it wasn’t real magic. What he found out was terrifying: the man’s three previous wives had mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth and left him with all they had. There’d never been any proof that he had something to do with it, so he was never convicted, only arrested the last two times. Travis was convinced that that was exactly what was going to happen to his mother.

  At first, we thought he was delusional. Nobody would be able to get away with three murders.

  And then he’d come looking for us with a black eye and a torn lip. He showed us the video of how the man had beat his mother, then him. The little devil had recorded it all and said he was going to take it to the police if we didn’t do something about it. But by then, it was obvious the police weren’t going to do shit. They’d already let him get away three times, so why should this time be any different?

  We agreed. We were planning to give the man a good beating and threaten him to leave Travis’s mother right away and disappear.

  Well, he fought back. He was a Vetter, a land spirit, and he legit tried to bury us alive. So we had to kill him. And we buried him in the same hole he was going to bury us in, in the backyard of his house on the outskirts of the city. Nobody had seen us. Nobody knew what we’d done—except for Travis. When we told him we’d killed the man, we feared he was going to turn us in himself. He cried instead, said he’d forever be in our debt. I never imagined I’d come to collect, but it was nice to know that he could help.

  “Ruby, can I see the picture?” Travis asked, and the way he looked at me made me wonder if he’d already asked. I’d been so caught up in memories of better times that I hadn’t heard a thing.

  I offered him my phone. “Here it is. I don’t think it’s Futhark, but I kind of feel like I’ve seen them somewhere before. I just don’t know where.”

  Travis took the phone and nodded before turning to his computer.

  “So how have you been, Travis? How’s your mom?” I could see them in a picture on his desk. She looked perfectly fine.

  “Great,” Travis said. “We’re doing great. No more crazy boyfriends.”

  I grinned. “Did your mother ever try to find out what happened to him? Or did the police ever find the body?” It was buried deep. That man had been very serious about burying us alive and the hole he’d made was really, really deep. We’d had to work for hours to fill it back up.

  “Nope. She thinks he just got bored with us and disappeared. She thanks her lucky stars every morning,” Travis said. “And nobody found the body because nobody actually reported him missing.”

  “Good,” I said with a nod, but that reminded me. “What do you know about Nana? Are people saying anything about her lately?”

  “You mean, that she’s kidnapped?”

  I froze for a second. “You know that?” And the MM didn’t? Something stank about Ryan Dumont, and I already couldn’t wait to find out what.

  “Well, some people are saying she was taken. Others say she’s off on a vacation, that she closed the Enclave and put her students on th
e streets. Some claim she’s been arrested by the MM.”

  So, bullshit. All of it.

  “She wasn’t arrested. Whoever took her left those runes on her floor,” I said, pointing at the phone.

  “Holy shit, I knew this is where I saw them,” Travis said. I looked up at the page he’d just loaded on his computer screen.

  “No way!” Egyptian runes.

  “Yeah, I’ve been reading up on them. Nasty shit like you wouldn’t believe. Did you know they have spells to actually rip your skeleton from your body while you’re alive?”

  I flinched. “That’s not possible.” I leaned closer to look at the runes on the screen. Fuck me, they were almost exactly the same as those on my phone.

  “It is. It’s raw magic. Demonic magic,” Travis said, but I was more interested in the runes.

  “What do those mean? Can you find the exact same ones?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, but it looks like these ones aren’t on this site. And they only have pictures of the runes—not what they actually mean.”

  “That’s pretty fucking useless.” I went through all of the twenty runes on the screen, but none of them matched the ones on my picture. They were very similar but not identical.

  “Well, you know what they are,” Travis said.

  “The good that’ll do me.” How was it possible that none of the runes matched?

  “It’s Egyptian runes. There will obviously not be more information about them on the Internet. Can you imagine how many fools would want to try them out?”

  He did have a point. “Now I need to find someone who knows about these.”

  “Easy. High priests,” Travis said. “They’re potentially the only ones who should know what these mean.” He handed me back my phone.

  I grabbed a pen and a car magazine from his desk. “This is my number. Call me if you hear anything else, okay?”