Triquetra

by Marguerite Labbe

  “Of course.”

  “Put it on vibrate. You, too, girl.” I pulled out my phone and looked at it quizzically, trying to figure out what he meant by “vibrate.” “I’ll send you a text if I want you to come in, Kayla, but if I call, get the fuck out of here and head back to the cabin. We’ll find you.” Jacob took the phone from my hands, fiddled with it for a moment, and handed it back to me with a wink.

  “You’re good to go.”

  “Thank you for saving my dignity,” I replied, stuffing the phone back into my pocket.

  “Anytime, Kristair.”

  Ussier handed Steve a pair of handcuffs he dug out of his pocket. “If Kayla’s head starts spinning around or she starts talking in tongues, restrain her. If that happens and I find out you got all pussy on me and let her get away, I’ll break your damn legs.”

  “Threats aren’t necessary,” Kayla said. “Steve knows what to do.”

  “Just making sure.” Ussier glanced around at the quiet street. “It’s still early, quiet and quick, you hear me?” He started walking away, just another shadow in the street. “You coming or not, Corvin?”

  I gave Jacob a mental kiss as he cursed, tossed Steve the keys, and stalked after Ussier. I’d know anything that happened to him the moment it occurred, but I still didn’t like being separated. Even if it made sense to have us on different teams with our mental link.

  I waited until Steve and Kayla were settled in the Camaro with the doors locked and then gestured to Artemise. “Shall we go knock on the front door?”

  “By all means, my friend.”

  We crossed the street and headed up the sidewalk. I sensed Jacob winding around the trees and bushes behind the houses, keeping up an acid running commentary in his head about the entire situation. The homes on this street were old, and some were in a state of disrepair. Most looked as if they had been converted into small apartments. Glass on the sidewalk crunched, giving evidence to what had happened to the streetlights, though whether it was a normal state for the street or the doppelganger had done it to hide his comings and goings I didn’t know.

  Artemise and I made it to the small path leading to the house we sought without seeing anyone, and no one appeared in the windows of the houses we’d passed to notice our passage. All in all, the street seemed far too quiet for so early in the night, as if an aura of evil hung over the row, suppressing the spark of vitality.

  “We’re here,” Jacob said in my thoughts. “Looks like the place has been divided into two apartments. There’s an outside stair in the back for the upper apartment. That’s where the thing is.”

  I studied the building as we neared. It was painted a light color; the shutters and porch needed quite a few repairs. The lower level was quite dark and still, and light gleamed underneath a single window shade on the upper floor. I let Artemise take the lead as we stepped onto the porch, and he moved to the door on the right, testing the knob.

  “Give me but a moment,” he whispered.

  Disgust flared in Jacob’s mind. “Ugh, what’s that smell?”

  “Hurry, I think they’re inside,” I said.

  “Almost there.” With a click, the door opened, revealing an inner staircase, boarded up against the rest of the lower level. As we started up, the stench of death and blood flowed down to us. The rushing sound of feet and a startled cry came from above, and without a word, Artemise and I ran up the remaining stairs and burst into the kitchen.

  I heard a scuffle coming from the room off to the right of the hallway, the room overlooking the street, and I sensed Jacob in there too. “Are you okay?” I demanded in Jacob’s head.

  “Yeah, Ussier’s got him trussed up like a fucking Thanksgiving Day turkey, but the bastard’s still trying to wiggle free. He gives me the fucking creeps.”

  I touched Artemise’s sleeve. “Let us check out the rest of the place before we join them. Ussier’s got our quarry bound.” Artemise nodded, and we went down the hallway to the left. Artemise opened one door into a rumpled bedroom, and I peered into another one that was the bathroom. The scent of blood strengthened, and I flipped on the light.

  The bodies of a man, woman, and child were piled in the bathtub, a clear plastic shower curtain draped over them. A leg draped obscenely out of the tub, and dried blood made swirls and smears on the tiles.

  “Kristair?” Jacob must’ve sensed my disquiet at the scene, and I sent him a wave of reassurance. He didn’t need to see this.

  “I’ll be right there in a moment, mo chroí. We’re just making sure there are no more surprises in the rest of the apartment.”

  “Kristair, you might want to take a look at this,” Artemise said softly. I flipped off the light again, shut the bathroom door firmly, and went to the doorway of the second bedroom. Children’s furniture had been broken and piled into a jumble, half falling out of the closet. Poster-sized pictures of Jacob had been plastered on the walls haphazardly. Pictures of him taken when he was unawares. An icy chill seized me.

  A nest of pillows and blankets took up the center of the room, surrounded by unlit candles. A ring had been driven into the floor with manacles attached; a ball gag had been set to the side along with implements of pain. A rushing, choking fury filled me as I remembered how much the thought of this creature filled Jacob with horror and revulsion.

  I heard Jacob shout in my mind, but I was already racing down the hall into the room where my lover was with that thing. The doppelganger’s eyes widened as I burst through the entryway and leveled my gaze on him. “You,” he gasped, trying to shrink back as I hauled him up from the floor, lifting him up into the air. I yearned to hurl him through the window and let him fall to his death below. “What are you?” the doppelganger cried, struggling fiercely to get free, but his bound hands and feet hampered his efforts.

  “I am your worst fucking nightmare,” I snarled, jerking him closer, my hands tightening on him to keep myself from strangling him. “I am the real Kristair, and you are nothing but a poor copy, an ill-created shadow. You’ll never have him because he already belongs to me. Do you hear me? You will never touch him. You’ll never know him as I do.”

  I sensed Jacob step closer to me, to that creature, and I snarled at him in warning. He ignored me and laid his hand on my arm. “He can’t hurt me, love, he never could get to me the way he wanted to. We need to ask him some questions. Set him down before you break him.”

  “Jacob.” The doppelganger cast anxious eyes at my lover. “Get away from him. He’s dangerous.”

  Jacob ignored him as well, tightening his hand on my arm. “I know you saw some real bad shit, Kristair, but you can’t kill him just yet.”

  “Ancient One, perhaps it’s best if you wait in the other room,” Ussier said.

  “I’m staying,” I snapped, forcing myself to set the creature aside with perhaps more force than was necessary. He landed in a crumpled heap several feet away, his ankle twisting under him with a nasty crack.

  “Nothing like starting off a good interrogation with a broken bone or two,” Ussier said, picking the doppelganger back up and shoving him onto a chair as he groaned in pain. “Now you’re going to tell me everything I want to know or else I’m going to let my homicidal friend loose on you. I gather from his expression that there are any number of unpleasant things that he would love to do to you.”

  “Jacob won’t let you,” the doppelganger growled. It was incredibly eerie how much he did look like me, mannerisms, the tone of his voice, the way he looked at my lover.

  “Don’t count on it,” Jacob said grimly. “I might just help him.”

  A stricken expression crossed the creature’s face as Jacob took my hand, and I got the impression that simple gesture hurt him far more than his broken ankle or the gunshot wound in his leg. “You don’t mean that, mo chroí.”

  Before Jacob could erupt with the rage that was rumbling inside of him, I squeezed his hand. “Wait, I have an idea.”

  Chapter 23

  I WAS almost afrai
d to ask Kristair what he meant. It was so damned surreal to be staring at that creature, see it looking back at me with hurt and madness in his eyes. Eyes that were so like my lover’s. The sense of wrongness coming from it was even stronger now, diseased and twisted.

  “What, you think if I sweet talk him a little he’ll tell us everything he knows?” I asked in disgust at the very thought, and Kristair nodded, squeezing my hand again.

  “Yes, I think it’ll be easier on you in the long run than having Ussier interrogate him. His methods are… direct.”

  “Just come out and say it. He’s going to torture him.” I didn’t know what to think about that, and Kristair’s thumb brushed the back of my hand as the creature watched, his eyes darkening even more.

  Ussier pulled out his cell phone, rapidly typed something in, and then he nodded at Artemise. “Meet the girl and her overgrown protector. Keep them in the kitchen for now. I’d like to see his reaction to her in a bit, but not right away.”

  I stared back at the creature, trying to pinpoint what was different about him. The first time I’d seen him in the woods he’d seemed calm and in control, with that innate dangerous smoothness Kristair had. Then, when he attacked me at Alette’s again, it seemed as if he had control of himself, like he knew exactly what he wanted and he was going to get it at all costs. The only sense of him that I got earlier in the evening was one of desperation. He had come at me so fast that I barely had time to register his presence before I was unconscious.

  Now, though, the creature seemed as if he was unraveling. He was unshaven, the same as Kristair, as if he were in some way mirroring my lover. Did Kristair’s shock and horror yesterday morning start this? Did something else?

  Ussier stopped in front of the doppelganger, but it paid him no mind, his eyes still locked on me. “That looks like it hurts,” Ussier said conversationally, looking down at the bloody tourniquet around his thigh. I tensed, waiting for Ussier to punch it in the leg or dig his fingers into the wound.

  “I have nothing to say to you, Ghedi Ussier,” the creature replied, his eyes flicking away from me as he drew himself up, arrogance erasing the pain on its face.

  “Come on, we know you’re not working alone. We even know you’re not the mastermind. You’re just the puppet dancing along on your Master’s strings. What did he tell you? Did he say you could have Corvin there if you played nice?”

  “Jacob is mine,” the doppelganger insisted. “He has been since the moment I laid eyes on him at his football game.”

  Kristair’s hand clutched convulsively around mine, and I glanced at him with a small shake of my head. “Keep your possessive instincts under control.”

  “You’re not one to talk, Jacob.”

  I fisted my hand in my hair, watching the flickers of distressed emotion cross the creature’s face. At Alette’s, he’d been hell-bent on just abusing me, seeing me degraded. He hadn’t tried seduction or loving words except when he wanted to confuse me or get past my guard. I had no doubt at the time that the creature knew exactly what it was, a copy of Kristair sent to hunt me down. Now it seemed as if the creature believed its own hype. As if it really thought it was Kristair, and in its own twisted and confused way, it loved me.

  I shuddered. Like things weren’t bad enough as it was. “I don’t know if I can do it, Kristair. Play with it like that.” Have it beg me with Kristair’s eyes and then walk away so it could be killed. It was somehow even more obscene than the thought of it trying to rape me.

  Ussier punched the creature in the face. Bone crunched, and blood gushed from his nose. The vampire lord smashed a hand over its mouth as it howled in pain. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, not Corvin.”

  I couldn’t watch, not when it was staring at me with my lover’s eyes, staring at me like I was betraying him. “I think I’m going to just be a distraction in here. I’ll go wait with Kayla and Steve.”

  Kristair nodded and lifted my hand to his lips, never taking his eyes off of the doppelganger. “Stay in the kitchen,” he murmured.

  “No, wait, Jacob, don’t go.” The creature’s eyes widened, and his voice became desperate as I turned away. “Jacob, please, don’t leave me with them.”

  I hardened my heart against how much the creature sounded like my lover and clung to the renewed link in my mind, letting it drown out the pleas as I left the room. I didn’t want to know what they were going to do to him. I didn’t want to see that thing with Kristair’s face looking all bruised and bloody.

  Artemise wasn’t back with Kayla and Steve yet. I poked through the kitchen, trying to ignore the low murmur of voices in the next room, the sick thud of fists striking flesh, the muffled sounds of pain. It turned my stomach even as I sensed how Kristair blocked the worst of it from my mind.

  Kristair had moved so damned fast when he’d confronted the doppelganger. He’d lifted the creature like his weight had meant nothing, tossed him like a rag doll. It proved he could still use at least some of his supernatural abilities, and the Ascended hadn’t jumped in. Which meant that I still had the speed and strength, the ability to heal if I wanted.

  That was the trick question, right? Did we want it? I certainly hadn’t before, though I’d used the abilities when I had to.

  Restless, I turned down the hallway, peering in the other rooms. My stomach churned when I looked upon the scene in the bathroom, and Kristair’s mind sharpened. “I thought I said to stay in the kitchen.”

  “I didn’t agree.” I forced myself to look at the savaged and naked bodies of the family, the abject horror on their faces. Let it harden me against the creature. It had done this, and if we didn’t stop him, he’d continue doing such things. It helped to put things in perspective.

  I grabbed a sheet from the linen closet and draped it over the bodies. Some part of my mind shrieked about fingerprints and leaving traces of ourselves behind. When the cops found this scene, they’d start hounding us. Eventually it just might come back to catch up with us, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

  I glanced in the other rooms, tensing myself against finding more bodies, but to my intense relief, there were none. Who the fuck knew what was downstairs in the other apartment. If there were any sense of right or wrong in the world, it would be unoccupied. I wouldn’t have put it past the creature to have killed the entire block.

  The scene in the last bedroom failed to move me at all. I hoped to god the family died quick and never knew what kind of fucking monster they had been confronted with. I kicked aside a candle on my way to the closet, and it bounced off the wall with a heavy thud.

  A picture frame stuck out from underneath a dresser drawer that had half-fallen out of the closet. I leaned down and tugged it free, turning it over in my hands. A happy-looking couple with a laughing little girl stared back at me. I stared at it for a long time, then pulled the picture free from the frame, and stuffed it in my back pocket. Some things just shouldn’t be forgotten.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Kayla and Steve were there. Kayla stared at the ground, tapping her foot, seemingly lost in thought, and Steve’s dark face was uneasy. “Where’s Artemise?” I asked.

  Steve jerked his chin toward the living room. The sounds of fists had stopped, though I could hear muffled crying. At least it wasn’t calling my name anymore. My hands shook in reaction, and I wanted to go in there and throttle it myself. It had killed that entire family like they’d meant nothing.

  “He’s talking with the other two,” Steve replied. “What do you think they’re doing to that guy in there?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Kayla said, touching his hand. “Trust me, you don’t.”

  The crying changed to screams. Sudden, shocking, piercing screams that ripped through the apartment and made us all jump. “What the fuck are they thinking?” Steve swore. “They’re going to have the cops down on our asses.”

  “I’m pretty sure Artemise took steps to make sure no sounds escape the building,” Kayla assured him, though she als
o was now casting uncertain glances toward the living room. “Or they’ll simply enthrall anybody who does coming asking questions.”

  “I don’t get the feeling that the neighbors here ask that many questions anyway.” The town had a vibe about it that was unnatural, this part of town even more so, though maybe it was just because the creature was here, infecting the entire area. I’d have to ask Kristair about that later. Or maybe the town was a bloodsucker den. It figured I’d pick a place like that. It was like I was some kind of supernatural freak magnet.

  “Jacob! Jacob! What have you done with him? Jacob!”

  I cringed, stuffing my hands in my pockets and feeling the picture there. Fuck. It didn’t sound like they were getting anywhere. I touched Kristair’s mind, sensed the implacable anger, the ruthless will, and I knew he wouldn’t stop until he had the answers he sought. “Any luck?”

  “The creature is remarkably stubborn and loyal. It will take time to break down its will.”

  “Do we have that time?”

  I sensed his mental shrug. “We’ll make the time if need be.”

  I suppressed another wince as the screaming started again. Fuck, I wished it would stop calling out to me. I’d been tortured twice, and it was just as horrifying on the other end of it. The hair on the nape of my neck stood on end. Steve’s jaw tightened, and he laid his hands on Kayla’s shoulders, rubbing them gently. “You sure you don’t want to wait outside?”

  “I’m a big girl. I can take it,” she replied with remarkable calm and flashed me a sympathetic smile. “Though Jake’s turning green.”

  “Hardly.” There had to be an easier way. The creature believed it was Kristair, which meant in some sick, twisted kind of way, it loved me. Maybe Kristair was right—maybe I could reason with it in a way they couldn’t. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Jake, get your ass back here,” Steve snapped, but I ignored him and went into the other room anyway.