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

by D. N. Hoxa

  The audacity! “I did not! She loved talking to me.” I turned to him, about to remind him that the old guy Mathias had spoken to me when we’d met in Thame’s restaurant, too, but instead shut my mouth. Because he was trying so hard to stifle a smile. And it sucked. I didn’t want him to have to think about how he reacted when he spoke to me. We’d been fine just yesterday. Guess I’d ruined that for good.

  “I’ll do the talking,” he repeated, but I no longer felt the need to tell him he wouldn’t. “And you can do the beating if talking doesn’t work.”

  “Yes, master,” I mumbled.

  If he wanted to talk to Miranda Giorgio, he could knock himself out. In the end, it didn’t matter who did the talking or who gave us the information we needed; it only mattered that we learn what we were up against and how to find Nana. I couldn’t wait to get to that address and look that woman in the face. I couldn’t wait for all of this to make a little more sense.

  ***

  Miranda Giorgio was a lovely old woman who lived all alone in a beautiful two-story house with a wide front yard with a huge tree smack in the middle. Also a microbiology doctor, dedicated to her work in one of the biggest vaccine research companies in the country. She didn’t go out much, liked to cook until late at night, and her flowers were the most beautiful flowers in the entire neighborhood. She also liked to read on her porch on Sundays with a big glass of lemonade by her side.

  So said Mrs. Nelson, the woman who lived next door to Miranda. Who, by the way, was gone. Disappeared into thin air almost two weeks ago. The police and the MM had been searching for her everywhere, and the company she worked for had even hired a PI, but so far, nothing.

  Andrew Clark, on the other hand, was a drunk who abused his wife Tania at least once a week and terrorized his two little boys constantly. He was a history teacher in a high school and wasn’t worth shit. It’s why his wife kicked him out almost a year ago. Then, over a week ago, she got a call from the police that her husband was seen entering the house of a woman who also worked at the high school as a secretary, right before said house exploded in flames. The police said it was gas. Tania informed us that she hadn’t shed a tear because, and I’m quoting: “That motherfucker got exactly what he deserved.”

  By the time we’d made it to the third address, I’d completely lost hope, but I somehow still managed to get surprised when the landlord of the apartment building told me that Mr. Lee Collins no longer lived there as of a month ago. He’d packed a bag and left in the middle of the night and said the landlord could keep the furniture he’d bought.

  “All I can tell you is that that guy was shady as hell. Always so secretive, never told anybody anything, and only ever brought home hookers,” the landlord, whose name was Jeremy, said. He also told us that Collins couldn’t hold down a job for more than a couple months, yet he always paid his rent on time.

  Of course, none of that was of any importance to us.

  I turned away, ready to scream my guts out as soon as we were out of there. We’d rented a black Ford after we returned from the first address, and I was thankful for it now, though I’d spent the whole way complaining. I missed my old, grey Honda. It was a crap car but it was mine, and now it was stuck in Nashville. Hopefully nobody had stolen it.

  “Hey, Eye Patch,” Logan called. When I turned, I realized he wasn’t behind me like I’d thought. The neighborhood we were in wasn’t one of the best in the city, but it wasn’t too bad, either. Lots of apartment buildings, lots of traffic, but nobody paid us any attention. And Jeremy was all too eager to give us information on Lee Collins.

  “What?”

  Behind him, Jeremy was grinning.

  “Jeremy here is willing to help us out. All the things Mr. Collins left behind are in his apartment.”

  Oh. I walked back to them with a smile on my face.

  “Yeah, that’s right. All of it for only two hundred bucks, no more,” he said. Which meant whatever he’d found wasn’t worth shit. I didn’t intend to pay him two hundred bucks, but I did want to see what he had.

  So I nodded. “Take us to it then.”

  His apartment was on the first floor of the six-story building. It was a mess, like a bachelor’s pad with way too many empty bottles of beer spread out everywhere, even though the man didn’t look younger than forty, maybe forty-two. I refrained from commenting because it wasn’t any of my business, and we needed him to show us Lee Collins’s stuff.

  He took us to a room in the back of the apartment, which was full of boxes thrown over two old, brown sofas that looked to be at least twenty years old. He’d apparently gathered everything his tenants left behind, and he still kept it, which was weird as hell.

  Collins’s stuff was in a cardboard box on the floor, and Jeremy dragged it to the middle of the room. “There it is.”

  Logan and I squatted in front of it. Lots of things thrown in there. A small withered cactus was the first thing I noticed. How would one even manage to wither a fucking cactus? It required water a couple times a year or something. There was a small lamp in the box, too, and books. Brand new books that didn’t look like they’d ever been opened. A silver frame with a picture of Collins by himself on a boat with a fishing rod in his hands. He barely resembled the man in Sasha’s picture, but the eyes had remained exactly the same. Two wooden ashtrays; a small, round mirror; a mini notebook; four pieces of broken candles; and a brown-colored folder. I took out the dead cactus plant and turned the box upside down. All his things fell on the floor. He also had three small pieces of carved white stone in there, which was weird. They were small elephants, or square versions of elephants, and they were carved in such perfect detail. Ogres loved to work rocks because they took strength from it, however that worked. They weren’t exactly the sharing kind of creatures, so we didn’t know a whole lot about them. Maybe Lee Collins knew an ogre and he’d gifted these little elephants to him. Next, I grabbed the folder and opened it. In it were cut pieces of newspaper, some with pictures, some only texts.

  A massive explosion of magic in Chicago

  Idaho experiences the second wave of magic, half as potent as the first

  Magic waves to become more frequent in the coming years

  And many more like it.

  “Do you see this?” I asked Logan, and he nodded. This guy had kept all the newspaper announcements about the magic blasts happening in the country. Why on earth would he do that? I turned over a couple of them, but I couldn’t see anything written. I’d need to check them again, slowly, one by one. I put them all back in the folder.

  “Look at this,” Logan said, showing me the mini notebook. The first few pages had been torn. He ran his fingers over the remaining pages. I could barely see the indents the pen had left from whatever had been written on the page before this. Some kind of symbols were drawn on the last pages, too , and badly. Maybe we could figure out what they meant. “Let’s take this, too.”

  I reached for the inside pocket of my jacket, took a twenty and put it in Jeremy’s hand. His brown eyes widened. “We agreed on two hundred.”

  “No, we didn’t. And you can keep the rest. We’ll take these.” I patted the folder in my hand.

  “A hundred for those,” Jeremy said, his voice completely transformed. Maybe he thought he could scare us.

  I grinned. “I’ll tell you what: I’ll let you keep that twenty, and I don’t kill you. How’s that?”

  He leaned back as if I’d already assaulted him. That was more like it.

  “Thanks, Jeremy,” said Logan and held the door open for me. “We’ll show ourselves out.”

  We heard him cursing all the way out of his apartment, but I’d been called worse than a bitch before, so I didn’t really care. We finally had something that might give us a clue because I was willing to bet that we weren’t going to find anything at the fourth address in New York, either.

  We walked out of the building in a hurry. It was almost dark outside, and I was starving. I had barely sat in the pass
enger seat and shut the door when my phone rang. My heart jumped because I thought it would be the hacker calling to give us information about the other two men he’d found nothing on the first time. The screen said it was a private number. When I answered, I was a hundred percent sure that it was the hacker.

  “Ruby, you need to find your father.”

  Every cell in my body froze. My throat dried and my heart stopped for a long second.

  “Who’s this?”

  Logan wanted to start the car, but I put my hand on his to stop him. Surprised, he leaned back. I took the phone away from my ear and turned on the speaker.

  “It’s Sasha,” the woman said, breathing heavily, almost as if she was running.

  Sasha Fortine. The high priestess who’d left me the picture.

  “Sasha, where are you?” I said, my voice shaking.

  “Listen to me, Ruby. Find your father,” she repeated, and her breathing sounded even more labored.

  “My father is dead, Sasha. You know this. Tell me where you are.” If I could find her, she could tell me more. I was sure of it. She was the closest thing to a friend Nana had ever had.

  “Find him, you fool. Find him now!” she demanded, her old voice crystal clear.

  “He’s dead! Do you hear me? He’s dead!” Why the hell had Nana wanted me to find my father? Why had Sasha run away from her Enclave and how on earth had she gotten my number?

  Silence for a second. I feared I’d lost connection because we couldn’t hear her breathing anymore. But…

  “That’s not going to stop him. What’s left of him still carries his magic. Find him,” Sasha said.

  “Just tell me where you are, please. I can come get you, just tell—”

  The line went dead.

  “No, no, no, no…” I tried to call back with shaking hands, but the goddamned phone wouldn’t let me.

  How was this possible? Where was Sasha? Why did it sound like she was running? I let out a frustrated scream and barely kept myself from throwing the phone against the dashboard.

  “Calm down, Ruby,” Logan said.

  “I don’t want to calm down. I want to find Nana, damn it! I want this fucking thing to be over already!” Why was that so much to ask?

  “Anger isn’t going to help you figure anything out,” he said, which just infuriated me more.

  “Fuck you, Logan. You can’t tell me what to do. All my life people have been trying to tell me what to do, how to behave, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of the guilt, I’m sick of the resentment, I’m sick of not being able to belong anywhere. I’m just sick and tired of not being able to connect to my magic. I’m half, do you understand me? I’m half of what I should be, and it’s all…” It’s all Nana’s fault.

  But I stopped.

  Because it wasn’t. She didn’t make me, Avery, or Katherine go to that factory that damned night. She didn’t make us fight the bad guys like we were some kind of super-fucking-heroes. She did try to tell us that we were in way over our heads, but did we listen? We did not. And now Avery was dead. And I didn’t have my magic. And I hated that I couldn’t blame Nana for locking it away.

  So many emotions resurfaced, all at once. It was like my own mind took advantage of the one second I let my guard down and let anger get the best of me and decide to attack me. Breathing became difficult. My head swarmed with images of the past, the present, the future. No matter how many places I ran to, how many shitty places I tried to hide in, it wasn’t going to get me away from me. It wasn’t going to get me away from the burning need to belong, to have a purpose, to be worthy of something.

  And now Logan was seeing a part of me even I didn’t want to see. There was no way to stop the tears, but at least I kept silent. I stared ahead and saw nothing as tears streamed only from my good eye because the tear duct of my blind eye was crushed with the blow that almost killed me.

  “This wasn’t how my life was supposed to be,” I heard myself say. At least I was no longer shouting. “This wasn’t how I wanted to live.” I’d wanted to help people. I’d wanted to save people. What a joke. I couldn’t even save my best friend, and I sure as hell didn’t know how to save myself now.

  “But it’s the life you have,” Logan said. “Look at me, Ruby.” I refused to turn to him, so he grabbed me by the shoulders and turned me. To look into his eyes killed me a little more. They were full of pity. “We all make mistakes, and we all pay for them. But we’re all given something to work with, always.”

  “That’s just it, I have nothing left.” I regretted saying that the second the words left my lips. I’d never shared my feelings with anyone other than Avery. I even avoided thinking about my feelings and buried them with lame attempts at jokes. It’s how I survived.

  “You have plenty left from where I’m standing. You have your life, and you have choices.” I wanted to laugh in his face. Easy for him to speak when he could do anything he wanted. He didn’t have to hide his face every time he walked down the street. He didn’t have to rely on anything other than his body to protect himself. “In the end, it’s all up to you and your choices. That’s all we are: choices.” He leaned his head closer until his face filled my vision. “Tell me what you want.”

  “To find Nana.” That was easy.

  “What else?”

  “Nothing else.” But that was a lie. I looked away at the windshield. “I want my magic.” Without it, I was never going to feel whole.

  Logan let go of me and fell back on his seat. “There you have it.”

  “What does it matter what I want, if I can’t have it?” I said through gritted teeth. If he thought he was being smart, he was dead wrong.

  “It matters what you choose to do. Tanana took your magic, and you chose to let her. You chose to live without it.”

  “Screw you. I didn’t choose that—she did.” I had the rune tattooed on my shoulder to prove it.

  “Nobody can choose for you. You could have stayed, figured out a way to make her undo that spell—and don’t tell me you couldn’t do that because I know you could. Instead, you chose to run and hide.”

  Just great. He was calling me a coward, too. I gave up.

  “It doesn’t matter now. I can’t change the past.” How I wished I could. Every single day.

  “But you can change your future,” Logan said and turned the ignition on. “And, Eye Patch?” He waited until I looked at him to continue, the asshole. “You’re not as bad as you think.”

  No, I was just a loser. I’d lost my father, my friend, my Enclave, my home, my magic. It didn’t matter what anyone thought—that was the truth.

  “Let’s go back to Jackson Ward,” I said reluctantly. The world didn’t have time to wait for me to get my shit together.

  “Is that where your father died?” he asked, and I nodded.

  “The building burned down and another was built over it, but I don’t know where else to look.” Sasha said I needed to find what was still left of my father, which meant his body. His bones. Whatever was left of him, and I had no idea where it was. But the place where he died was the only place to start.

  “You’ll be okay, Eye Patch,” Logan said as he drove, slowly at first. “You’ll be okay.”

  I didn’t believe him.

  15

  It only took seeing the new building built upon the ruins of the old one for me to know what I needed to do next.

  My father and I used to live in the basement, and three other families lived above us. I was seven years old when he died, but I don’t remember much, not even his name. Almost like something had intentionally wiped away almost everything about my life and the night it all changed.

  All I could remember was waking up to a loud scream and coming out of my room to find my father on the ground with a huge opening in his chest. And blood. A lot of blood. He told me to get out, to run as fast as I could, and to not look back. He ordered me.

  The sad thing was, I couldn’t even remember his face. I just remembered his words.


  “Run away, Ruby. Don’t look back. Run fast and far, and don’t come back, you hear me? Go, Ruby. Go.”

  And I went. I couldn’t even tell you if someone else was in the makeshift apartment in the basement. Everything was just too blurry. I’d already been at the door when I smelled the fire, and when I looked back, half our living room was already engulfed in flames. I’d run across the street, barefoot, crying, and watched for a long time as the entire building burned down. There’d been nobody in the streets, but soon, people had started to open their windows, to come out, screaming and shouting. Their voices had shocked me, scared me so much that I’d finally run away, without direction. I just ran and ran and never stopped until my body collapsed at the corner of a street.

  I’d woken up in the morning in an alley, covered with a dirty blanket by an old homeless lady, who told me I could stay with her if I wanted. She scared me even more. Come to think of it, even breathing scared me at that point. So I ran again. From her, from anyone who tried to approach me, and eventually, I collapsed again. To this day, I couldn’t remember where. I just knew that it was dark when I woke up, and there was a woman over me, holding a bottle of water to my lips. She told me she’d give me food, too. I hadn’t eaten the entire day, and I was starving. I wanted to run, but I knew my legs wouldn’t hold me. So I let her carry me into a car and take me away.

  To Nana’s Enclave.

  And that was the only other home I’d ever known.

  My first one was gone for good. In its place stood a building with red bricks, completely different from the old one. And even if my father’s remains weren’t taken away before the new building was built, which was impossible, I couldn’t exactly bring the whole thing down and search for them.

  “So this is where you grew up,” Logan said as we watched the building from across the crowded street. At that point, I wasn’t even afraid of getting caught because my plan was already clear as day.

  “I think so, yeah.” The truth was, I wasn’t sure. Had we moved here from someplace else? How had my mother died? She had, I remembered that much, I just couldn’t remember how.