Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  DAW Novels by S. ANDREW SWANN

  Fantasy

  DRAGONS & DWARVES

  (The Dragons of the Cuyahoga | The Dwarves of Whiskey Island)

  *

  BROKEN CRESCENT

  *

  GOD’S DICE

  *

  DRAGON • PRINCESS

  DRAGON • THIEF

  DRAGON • WIZARD

  *

  MARKED

  Fiction

  ZIMMERMAN’S ALGORITHM

  Science Fiction

  THE HOSTILE TAKEOVER TRILOGY

  (Profiteer | Partisan | Revolutionary)

  THE MOREAU QUARTET: VOLUME ONE

  (Forests of the Night | Fearful Symmetries)

  THE MOREAU QUARTET: VOLUME TWO

  (Emperors of the Twilight | Specters of the Dawn)

  Copyright © 2019 by Steven Swiniarski.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Cover art by Chris Gibbs.

  Cover design by G-Force Design.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1812.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756414931

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  For the new kid, Loki.

  CONTENTS

  Also by S. Andrew Swann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  About the Author

  ONE

  I NEVER TOLD my parents about the Mark.

  Of course, they knew it was there on their adopted little girl’s back. Some of my earliest memories are of the man who would become my dad taking me to strange places to have strange people look at the strange patterns drawn across his strange little girl’s back.

  My parents never learned the origin of the tattoo, much less what it might mean, and by the time I grew into puberty, I was too self-conscious in my desire for normalcy to ever allow the Mark to be uncovered in anyone else’s presence, even those who loved me.

  Much as I wished otherwise, I wasn’t normal, and the Mark on my back was more than a simple tattoo. I was nearly an adult myself before I understood that, even on the the most basic level.

  So I never told them.

  * * *

  —

  FOUR days after my mom’s funeral, the temperatures reached up into the mid-nineties and stayed there, the air pressing down on everything like a wet towel. We were on the road five minutes before the AC on the unmarked ten-year-old Crown Victoria cruiser sputtered and died, the air from the vents turning from barely cool to burning-asphalt hot.

  Jacob Hightower, my partner, reached over from the wheel and tried to adjust the controls, to no effect. “Doesn’t the garage ever check these before signing them out?” He shut off the vents, and the airflow died with a shuddering wheeze. He toggled the windows and they reluctantly slid down. “Makes you wish you worked for a city with a maintenance budget.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to take this back to the motor pool?”

  “We can switch cars after we meet Mrs. Kim. After what she’s been through, I don’t want to make her wait.” Right now I was too aware of what it was like when you lost part of your family. I didn’t want to be responsible for dragging out this experience for her.

  I turned to look out the open passenger window. The wind tore into the car, carrying the smells of diesel exhaust and hot tar. It made my eyes water.

  Jacob said something that I lost in the sound of the wind. “What?” I hollered, still facing the Cleveland skyline rolling by past the freeway guardrail.

  “I asked, are you up for this, Dana?” he yelled back at me, sounding very far away beyond the roaring wind.

  “I’m fine!”

  After working together for three years, he was probably aware that I was lying to him. Even so, he didn’t press the point. I was grateful for that.

  I was the junior member of the team, and Jacob had an irritating protective streak that I tried not to hold against him. He knew that I had just come back to work after saying goodbye to the only family I had left. He should have been concerned about me; it was part of his job.

  It wasn’t his fault if that type of concern grated against something very basic inside me. Even from him. Especially from him.

  It was just past rush hour, and traffic moved quickly along the freeway as we headed toward the West Side. We were silent until we hit the exit and the wind died down, the stillness resurrecting the oppressive heat. Jacob squinted at the traffic light and said, “We should have taken your car.”

  “Oh, no. That baby is strictly for civilian use.”

  “I thought you got it because you liked the patrol cars in Solon.”

  “The places we have to park? No, thank you.”

  “I’m sure you could—”

  “Jacob, you aren’t going to get to drive my Charger.”

  He wove the car through the surface streets while I did my best to undo the violence the wind had done
to my hair, getting the scary blonde halo back into a semicontrolled ponytail. It made me envious of Jacob’s short brown military cut. By the time I had gotten my appearance a few notches back under horrifying, Jacob had parked the car in front of our destination.

  The storefront was tucked between a liquor store hiding behind vistas of yellowing cigarette and lottery ads, and a payday loan office that was so antiseptic and sterile it looked like a set from an old Star Trek episode. Between them, Asia FX stood out like a drag queen at an Amish funeral.

  The name loomed over the store, drawn in a chromed graffiti font three times the height of the sans serif gracing its drab siblings. Behind the window and unlit neon signs proclaiming “tattoos” and “piercings” were panels of artwork: skulls, Buddhas, tigers, dragons, and elaborate inscriptions in Kanji and Indian script.

  Hanging on the door was a plastic sign apologizing for being closed—as if the yellow police tape wasn’t enough of a clue.

  I stared at the place and felt uncomfortably aware of the Mark on my back. I could almost feel phantom fingers tracing the black whorls and branches etched into my skin. I wondered if this had been one of the places my dad had brought me to when he was still trying to identify it, trying to identify me.

  “Are you all right, Dana?”

  I tried to laugh it off. “Just some déjà vu.”

  He looked at my face, and I couldn’t help returning the look. He had a strong face, as if a confident artist had drawn it with just a few bold perfectly-placed strokes. He had a shadow of a beard, just enough to be masculine, not enough to look messy. His hazel eyes gave me the uncomfortable sense that he saw my emotions better than I did.

  “You’re due for some time off,” he told me. “The funeral was only—”

  “I’m fine,” I snapped, too defensively. He turned from me, and my bitchiness made me feel even worse. I belatedly realized I was taking things out on him. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know. Don’t worry about it.” He faced Asia FX, squinting in the morning light. “Mrs. Kim should be here soon to let us in.”

  He was right. I wasn’t up for this. I was just too stubborn to admit it to him—or maybe I had just become too accustomed to keeping uncomfortable secrets.

  When I had come to work the Monday after Mom’s funeral, I had honestly thought I could handle it. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, not like when Dad had been shot.

  But parked across from Asia FX, it felt as if the past ten years hadn’t happened. I was a teenager again, and it wasn’t my mom that had just been buried—it was my dad. I could feel the irrational guilt as a physical presence filling my stomach and my throat, making it hard to breathe. I rubbed my eyes and told myself that they still burned from riding with the windows open.

  “Here she comes,” Jacob said, stepping out of the car.

  The victim’s daughter looked like hell. She was a tiny Korean woman, about fifty. Rogue strands of hair trailed across her face. Her frown looked out of place, a foreign invader in unfamiliar territory. It was painful to watch it turn to a forced smile as she acknowledged Jacob’s presence. “Detective Hightower?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Kim?”

  I spent a few moments composing myself as the two of them exchanged faux pleasantries. However I felt, I still had a job to do. I sucked in a few breaths, told myself to cowgirl up, and got out of the passenger side in time for Jacob to gesture my way and say, “And this is Detective Rohan.”

  “Thank you for meeting us, Mrs. Kim,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” she responded, turning immediately back to Jacob. “What can I do for you?” she asked.

  Some people of a certain generation, especially women of a certain generation, really had trouble accepting a female police detective. Over the three years since I’d become one, I had learned to let Jacob take the lead in questioning in those situations. Normally it irritated me, but right now I was grateful that Jacob bore the brunt of dealing with the grieving family member.

  “Well,” Jacob said, “I have a few more questions, and Detective Rohan would like to look at the scene.”

  They both turned to look at me, and I suddenly felt that I wouldn’t like to see the scene of the crime, not at all. But I needed to. If I was going to bring my skills to bear, I needed to get the lay of the land, plan out how I was going to confront the suspect.

  Everything I felt right now was beside the point.

  Ms. Kim turned to me and said, “The officers took pictures already. They said we could clean up.” There was almost a pleading tone in her voice. And I read in her face, please, just let this part of it be over.

  I knew how she felt. It wasn’t just the grieving; she probably hadn’t even dealt with that part yet. There was the legal stuff, the insurance, tracking down all the bills, dealing with the incompetent funeral director, realizing that you were the one who had to tell all your mom’s friends that she had gone into the hospital and no, she hadn’t made it. . . .

  Oh, hell.

  I tried my best reassuring smile, mentally shoving away all the issues I had been dealing with. “I’m just looking at the physical layout of the scene.”

  “She’s very good at what she does,” Jacob said.

  Mrs. Kim nodded, one of the stray trails of hair pulling free in the morning breeze. I could see the individual strands of white mixing in with the black.

  While Jacob removed the crime-scene tape, she pulled a massive key ring from her purse and began a long ritual of unlocking the door. I glanced at Jacob, looking for a sign that he saw how rattled I was.

  I decided I was being paranoid. Jacob was good at taking me at my word, perhaps even when he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t paying attention to me as he watched Mrs. Kim open the door to Asia FX.

  I felt more comfortable studying him when he wasn’t looking at me. I always had liked his face. He only had about six years on me, but he had begun getting a premature dusting of gray at the temples though his short brown hair was so light that it was easy to miss it. Rather than aging him, it gave him an almost subliminal air of authority that suited a cop.

  I think that’s why I liked working with him, liked him. He looked and acted the part of a cop—the kind of cop that I had wanted to be ever since the year Dad died. He wouldn’t look out of place in a picture with Joe Friday or Eliot Ness.

  Or my dad.

  I hoped that at least some of that had rubbed off on me over the past three years.

  Mrs. Kim turned around in the now open doorway and asked, “What do you want to see?” The interior was dark behind her, the shadows gaping like a hungry mouth.

  “Where are the security cameras?”

  “The officers took the tapes.”

  “I know,” I told her. Back at the station, I’d reviewed the security footage with Jacob. The video of the shooting had a time stamp of 11:05 and showed a male suspect—white or Hispanic—wearing a gray hoodie and a pair of jeans with a hole torn in the right knee. The video was bad quality, probably because it was an ancient system that had been reusing the same VHS tape for years. “Can you show me where the cameras are?” I asked.

  She nodded and led me into the dark. Even in the gloom, I could see her whole body tense as we walked into the place where her father had been murdered. The only light came from the morning sun leaking through the front windows, and that didn’t penetrate very deep into the room beyond. In the gloom, she almost became a ghost herself.

  Around us, gods and monsters covered the walls, watching.

  She stopped in front of a counter, which bore the first visible sign of the tragedy that had happened to her family last night. It was a small, glass-fronted case like you’d see in a jewelry store. The front had been smashed and the contents emptied. A small cash register sat on top of the busted display case, turned toward us, the drawer half open.

  Behind the case, a padded stool lay on
its side next to a dark stain in the carpet. The air in here felt dry and still as a tomb, the only sound the buzzing of a few flies.

  “What was in the case?” I asked, stepping around the broken glass.

  “Nothing. It was all costume jewelry . . .” Her voice caught. She paused before pointing up into the darkness above the counter. “There.”

  I looked up at where a small security camera poked from the acoustical tile, covering the register and the entrance. The thing was obvious and bulky, probably at least twenty years old. I looked at the register again and realized that it had come from another decade as well. Mrs. Kim’s father had been in business here for a long time.

  “Is that the only one?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she waved toward the back, past a folding oriental screen that made a private alcove beyond the counter. I couldn’t see anything past it. “He has a TV back there so he can see people come in when he is working alone . . . was working alone.”

  Mrs. Kim stood there and made a small sound somewhere between a gasp and a sob. I looked at her and could feel everything I had felt when I knew that someone had killed my dad, and there was nothing that could ever fix it.

  “I know,” I whispered to myself. In the still confines of the tattoo parlor, I might as well have shouted.

  She turned to face me with an expression that looked lost in the shadows. “You know?”

  “How you feel,” I said, feeling very unlike the detective I was supposed to be at the moment.

  “I suppose you do. You must see things like this every day.”

  “I—” I lost my father, too. It was just as stupid and pointless. I just buried my mom and I’m still trying to deal with that. . . . I didn’t say any of it, but she must have seen something in my face.

  “Detective Rohan, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. But you don’t need to be here. Why don’t you go and talk to Detective Hightower? I’m just going to look around here for a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” she said uncertainly.

  I reached out and touched her arm, saying, “I promise you, we will get the guy who did this.”