Pack of Lies

by Edwards, Hailey

  Skin taut and itching from the tidy row of stitches beneath my collarbone on the front and my shoulder blade on the back, I tested my mobility under his glare. Not too shabby. Then again, Ambrose had chowed down on a potent magical source only hours ago, and our bond siphoned his excess, spilling harvested energies into me that my body converted for healing.

  “Hold still.” Midas captured my wrist and lowered my arm to my lap. “You’ll pull your stitches.”

  Based on his soft inhale, the leap in my pulse must have registered beneath his touch.

  “So…” I didn’t budge for fear of startling him. “You’re in my apartment.”

  “Linus asked me to stay the day.”

  “Ah.”

  “I was…” He mashed his lips together. “I was worried about you.”

  “Did you swap lemons for oranges in your juice?” I poked him in the corner of his mouth, right where it twisted. “Or are you that pissed you got stuck playing nurse?” I sobered. “I, um, didn’t do anything weird while I was sleeping, did I?”

  Weird as in sneaking out and possibly murdering a vampire or two, Ambrose’s favorite food.

  As much as I thought of Ambrose as The Dybbuk, like it was a title, he wasn’t. We were. He was a shade. I was a necromancer. Our powers combined created the dybbuk, and he was former High Society. He had a lot of mojo for what was basically the ravenous soul of a necromancer who died without anyone performing the culmination over his body to send his soul to its eternal rest.

  When the culmination wasn’t performed, the soul was left to drift this world. Unlike ghosts, who were a product of human death and faded once they ran out of energy, shades absorbed magic. They devoured lesser spirits and energy nexuses, earning them the cutesy nickname devourers, until they grew strong enough to possess the living.

  Well, sort of.

  Humans could be possessed against their will, but necromancers were born resistant to hostile spiritual takeovers, Low and High Society alike. For a necromancer to be possessed, they had to welcome the spirit into themselves. That willful acceptance of a bargain—use of their body in exchange for power—was the reason why dybbuks were hunted and killed.

  Any crimes their darker half committed were also the fault of the necromancer for giving it the vehicle to enact its heinous fantasies. Guilt was shared equally between the two parties who had become one.

  The only reason I still drew breath was I had once been Linus’s fiancée’s best friend, and Grier had gone to the mat for me.

  I was lucky to be alive.

  Every day was a struggle for survival, but I was lucky.

  Lucky.

  Maybe if I kept repeating that to myself, I would believe it.

  Most dybbuk sustained themselves on a diet of minor supernatural energies. Old wards, old charms, old graveyards. The older and more broken down, the easier it was for them to digest.

  The undead, mostly, had nothing to fear from them. Usually, vampires were too powerful for dybbuk to devour, but necromantic magic animated vampires, and dybbuk were all about the magic. Given the chance, they would slurp down vampiric energies like a kid with a juice box.

  But mostly and usually didn’t cut it when it came to Ambrose. He was in a class all his own, and I couldn’t even whine about it. I lured the most powerful creature I could find, and he came to me. Now I was stuck with him.

  “You snored,” he confessed when I had drifted in my own thoughts for too long.

  “Are you sure?” I touched my nose. “No one has ever mentioned it.”

  And Mother would have noted one more flaw, one more imperfection, one more reason I disgusted her.

  “Hadley…” He read the tension in me and released me. “How much do you remember from last night?”

  “Do you mean the part where we got drunk, hopped a plane to Vegas, and mated in a chapel of love?” I considered that last part. “Mated sounds like we had wild monkey sex on the altar, which, don’t get me wrong, can and does happen during certain necromantic rites.”

  A slight dent appeared in one cheek. “Actually…”

  The crazy crap I had dismissed as dream or nightmare or pain distilled into a moment of perfect clarity.

  All at once, total recall hit me like a ton of bricks, and I wished I had one in hand to throw at him.

  “What did you do?” I shoved upright, kneeing him in the groin in the process. “What did you do?”

  “I was…” he gasped, cupping himself, “…avoiding you…for a reason.”

  “That does not answer my question.” He pressed a finger to my lips, and I bit him. “Don’t shush me.”

  “I kept my distance after Iliana because—”

  Without her charms, he wasn’t hyped up on fake emotion, and he stopped wanting me cold turkey. But I would bite off my tongue before I said any of that. It would show him my hand, and it was a losing one.

  “You wanted to foist me off on Ford.” I hurled the next best thing at him. “I got it.”

  “He cares about you.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I…”

  “That’s answer enough, thanks.” I shoved to my feet, grateful when I didn’t wobble. “Where is he?”

  “He didn’t come home.”

  “I’m getting dressed, and then we’re going to find him.” I grimaced when I moved faster than my shoulder would prefer. “He got hurt, the same as us. He needs medical treatment.”

  Lots of nasties in the city came standard with venom or bacteria in their saliva. He could be dying under an overpass for all we knew, and it made me want to punch Midas in his perfect face.

  Pain sharpened my tone as I hobbled around the room. “You had to pull that stunt in front of him?”

  “I had no choice.”

  He let that stand as his entire explanation, and my fingers curled into fists.

  “What does this mean to you?” I flung my clothes into the bathroom. “You and me? What are we?”

  “Courting.”

  “What happens after courting?”

  “Mating, unless a suit is refused.”

  Mad as a hornet for falling into the trap, for him baiting me, I bit out, “Consider your suit refused.”

  “There’s a mandatory courtship period,” he explained in a flat voice. “Six weeks.”

  Fisting handfuls of my hair, I tugged the strands straighter than my flatiron set on high. “Six weeks?”

  “You did agree.” A curious light entered his eyes, banishing their usual shadows. “The stipulation wouldn’t exist otherwise.”

  “Can it be undone?” An idea struck me. “To whom do I address my complaints?”

  “My mother.”

  “She would raise Cain.” I deflated like a balloon then shriveled into a knot. “Worse, she would tell Linus.”

  There were no restrictions on relationships while in office, obviously, since he got engaged during his tenure, but while in training it was frowned upon. Mix in the beta of our closest ally, and even Linus might suffer the vapors.

  “Your priorities are interesting. You think Linus knowing is worse than Mom finding out?”

  “The worst your mom can do is huff and puff at me. Linus can for real blow my career down.”

  A twinge of what I hoped was remorse so deep he had trouble seeing the bottom pinched his expression. “I’ll call downstairs and see if Ford has checked in yet.”

  “Thank you.” I stomped into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. “This is a hot mess.”

  Ambrose, the pervert, sat perched on the closed toilet lid, chin in palm.

  “I thought I was a hot mess, but no.” I battled to get my shirt over my head. “This is hotter and messier.”

  Legs crossed, he twitched one foot, a sympathetic ear ready for me to pour out my heart.

  “Nice try.” I glared at him. “Get out.” A thought occurred to me. “No, wait.” I flipped the exhaust fan switch then twisted the sink faucet hard for extra noise. Still I kept my voice pitched lo
w. “Hang on a sec.”

  The shadow rose and mimed dusting his nonexistent clothing free of nonexistent dust.

  “I never got the chance to ask if you recognized the creature’s flavor.”

  Ambrose shook his head.

  “Are you sure?”

  Arms lifted palms up, he gave an exaggerated shrug.

  “Great.”

  He was giving that answer too often these days. Seasoned as his palate ought to be at his age, it bugged me that he might be holding out on me. Almost as much as maybe discovering yet another unknown creature hunting in my city.

  For now, I was going with Martian Roach for our recently exterminated friend. It had a nice B-movie ring to it. The Martian Roach who Infested Atlanta. Much less scary than the alternatives that came to mind. Say, The Flying Martian Roach who Infested Atlanta for instance.

  “Here.” I tossed Ambrose what I owed him, three dark chocolate toffee truffles. “Now scat.”

  The shadow gulped his treat and slithered under the door, giving me privacy.

  A gentle knock made me sigh. “Yes?”

  “Are you all right in there? I heard you talking, but your phone is out here.”

  “Oh, just cursing your name,” I sing-songed. “No big.”

  “Okay.”

  No, it wasn’t okay. Midas was smart, and he didn’t miss much. The magic insulating me, shoring up Hadley, wasn’t bulletproof. One drained charm, one conversational oops, and I was toast. What had he been thinking? Had he been thinking? Or acting on instinct? Clearly emotion hadn’t factored into his decision since he couldn’t even admit to liking me.

  Wargs did the mating-for-life thing. They also believed in fated mates. This must not be that.

  While doing homework assignments for Linus, I had read more than one sob-worthy account about a warg couple mating out of love only for one of them to find their cosmic other half down the road. Cue heartbreak. According to firsthand accounts, it was possible to fight the bond, but the afflicted could never be whole after that spark of connection had been ignited with the person meant for them.

  That was a biological fact for wargs. Not romance, not fantasy, not myth.

  Fact.

  Granted, there was an entire area of study at the local university dedicated to why it happened to some and not all wargs. Popular belief was the reaction was chemical, but purists claimed the connection was ordained by God before their souls entered their physical bodies.

  Necromancers tended to marry for money or politics, titles or to hush scandals. Trade was involved, not hearts. That didn’t mean I wanted to be plopped on a scale by Midas’s mother and told how little value I had. I was holding on to the potentate apprenticeship by my fingertips, thanks to Ambrose, and I couldn’t afford to fail.

  I had no backup plan, no safety net. Nothing. I had nothing without this.

  I was nothing without this. Just an ex-con with blood on her hands and a killer under her skin.

  Cranking on the water, I let it reach its boiling point before shucking the rest of my clothes and stepping under the pounding spray. The heat felt good. The Dial soap felt even better. The rushing noise wiping out all thought felt best.

  Once I was clean, I dried off and got dressed for work at the mall.

  Patrol wasn’t happening tonight. Injured to this degree, I was too much of a temptation for predators who would be drawn by my weakness. Bishop would have to ask for volunteers from the team to make the OPA’s presence felt on the streets until I recovered enough to fake it.

  Thinking over how to word my text, I recalled the footage I had taken and put some pep in my step. I wanted a chance to view it before I sent it to him, worried what else I might have captured.

  Like accepting a courting proposal from a frakking gwyllgi prince with a serious case of remorse.

  Bishop still owed me that update on my daytime wanderings, but had he found anything dire, he would have pressed the matter. That he hadn’t, or so I told myself, freed me up to give this matter precedence over mine.

  I opened the door onto Midas’s face, which, don’t get me wrong, was every bit as beautiful as the art prints I coveted in local museum gift shops. Both were out of my price range, and neither belonged in my apartment, but they were still worth a look.

  “Scoot.” I flicked my good wrist at him. “You’re crowding me.”

  Midas shifted aside but kept close as if he expected me to swoon, maybe fall right into his waiting arms.

  Okay, that was uncharitable. He was probably concerned that I hadn’t recovered enough to dash around on my own, not that his blond hair and chiseled jaw would tip me over into a fainting spell.

  Jaw tight, he gave me space. “How’s the wound?”

  “It’s definitely a wound.” Hearing the bite in my voice, I forced out a more pleasant tone. “Abbott has the steadiest hand to work on me since Linus. I won’t scar too badly, and I should be ready to hit the streets tomorrow.”

  Mashing his lips into a bloodless line, a common expression for him around me, he held in his opinion.

  “I wanted to watch the recording from last night before I send it to Bishop. Care to join me?”

  Clearly still worried what might escape his mouth should he open it, he nodded then joined me on the futon.

  “Wait for it.” I switched on my phone’s Bluetooth then used it to control the TV, but that wasn’t the best part of my new toy. No, that was the ability to stream video from my phone onto the screen. After locating the correct file, I mashed play. “Behold.”

  The picture clarity still held the power to melt my heart into a gooey puddle.

  This, friends, was true love.

  “It’s uglier than I remembered,” Midas admitted halfway through the clip, and I almost growled at the insult to my TV before common sense kicked in. “It was gwyllgi before it was—that thing.”

  “Are we sure? We thought Snowball was gwyllgi too.” I glanced at him, waited until I held his undivided attention, and reiterated, “All of us. We all thought she was the genuine article.”

  No one person carried all the blame for her infiltrating our ranks.

  “She tricked me—” He clamped his mouth shut before I railroaded him and tried again. “She tricked us. How can we trust what we saw last night wasn’t one of them?”

  “We don’t know their true form. That means we can’t rule out that ugly bug as their soft candy center.”

  The faint lines at the corners of his eyes creased, but he didn’t laugh out loud, which is not the same as not laughing at all.

  “Siemen retained his warg form after he died.” He directed his attention back to the screen. “This…bug…might be another shell.”

  “Martian Roach,” I informed him. “I almost went with body snatcher, but we don’t know for sure that’s what it does, and I prefer to err on the side of caution.”

  “Martian,” he repeated. “Roach.”

  “We both saw what the coven members are capable of, how their magic works. It was flawless, each transformation seamless and done in a snap. This was more like a nesting doll. The creature had to remove its outer skin, in a seriously disgusting way, to reveal the next layer.”

  “It died a—” he sighed at my nod of encouragement, “—Martian Roach, but that doesn’t prove that’s its natural form.”

  Therein lay the problem. Siemen was not a warg, but he died one. That was what the cleaners documented and buried. A warg. That’s how complete whatever skinwalker magic the witchborn fae coven used converted its practitioners.

  The creature onscreen was hideous in its insectoid glory. “Do you think it’s fae too?”

  I had read enough to know only high fae produced reasonable facsimiles of themselves with a partner. That is to say, their kids resembled them. They were humanoid in form. Lesser fae, not so much. They bred monsters. That’s not to say they weren’t perfectly nice monsters, or smart, or kind, but they were at best interesting to behold and at worst…what human children feared l
urked under their beds.

  Granted, theories also abounded that what little we, as in necromancers, knew about the fae was entirely fabricated by the fae themselves to thumb their nose at the Society and its inclusiveness. Kind of funny if you thought about how elitist fae got when it came to their own bloodlines and their purity.

  “Hard to say.” He tore his attention from the screen. “We’ll need the cleaners’ report to know for sure.”

  “I’ll arrange a meeting with Bishop once the files hit DORA.” Pride, fleeting but there, filled me. “The OPA is the best team in the city. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  A wrinkle bisected his forehead. “You really do love your job.”

  “It means everything to me.” It wasn’t a lie, not even a little bit, but a stark truth. “Did you expect me to stay home, barefoot and pregnant, if this courtship thing went well for you?”

  The groove deepened, and he withdrew a few inches like pregnancy was catching and he was at risk. “I didn’t think that far in advance.”

  “Clearly.” I scoffed and hit play again. “Let’s get to the end.”

  Sure enough, the screen went dark, but the recording kept on rolling. The blackness was the result of me stuffing my phone in my pocket, which caused the sound quality to suck, but I got his proposal, such as it was, and thanked my lucky stars I hadn’t forwarded the clip last night while I was out of my mind.

  Bishop would have had a field day with it. He would have used it as his voicemail, since I was the only person who ever called him aside from Linus. He probably would have figured out how to hack my phone and set it as my voicemail too.

  “Are you sure you didn’t ask me at gunpoint?” I didn’t have the nerve to face Midas. I couldn’t tell what I wanted to see, and I was afraid he didn’t know either. “You sound like it was courtship or death.” I finally forced myself to look at him. “Blink once for yes, twice for no.”

  “I like being with you.”