Dark Light of Mine

by Corwin, John

  "Whoa, cowboy. Don't take it out on me."

  "I have a feeling you know a lot more than you let on," I said to Shelton. "As you told me before—you're a detective. And I know you're not stupid. If you found out where we live, then I'll bet you know exactly who put the bounty out on us."

  "I told you, I don't know."

  In a flash, I gripped Shelton's duster by the collar and jerked him off the bench. "You're lying."

  Eyes glaring into mine, Shelton tightened his jaw and said, "Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you."

  I resisted the urge to launch him across the plaza and into the fountain.

  Elyssa's hand touched my arm. "Let him go, Justin."

  "He knows something. He knows who wants my father dead, too, I'll bet."

  Shelton snorted. "If I knew do you think I'd be helping you right now?"

  "Someone threatened him," Elyssa said. "That's why he's not talking."

  My grip went slack, dropping Shelton on his feet. He brushed off his duster and took a seat on the bench. I turned to Elyssa. "What—how do you know this?"

  "I've built up some instincts over the years, helping my family round up the law breakers." She cast a glance at Shelton. "I think he knows exactly who put the bounty out. And they know he knows, so they told him to keep his mouth shut."

  Shelton crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. "Listen to the girl, ace."

  "All you care about is your own hide, isn't it, Shelton? Why did you even bother to help us today? You had to know a tracker meant someone was hunting for my dad." My mouth dropped as the truth hit me. I slapped my forehead. It took all my willpower not to body slam Shelton through the wooden bench. "You thought you'd collect the bounty. I'll bet you figured whoever wanted him would follow us here and you'd have my dad all locked up in a circle by then."

  Shelton bolted up from the bench. "Now you're just plain wrong, boy."

  "Oh, are you back to calling me 'boy' or 'kid' again? Can't face the fact I see through your games?" I paced away from him, fists clenched and teeth aching from the tightness in my jaw. I faced him. "What was your angle when you supposedly helped me rescue my dad from the rogue vampires? Were you hoping to bag him?"

  "If I'd wanted to do that, I could've done it any time. You were exhausted. Your dad and lady Sherlock there were passed out." He stepped toward me. "I could have slipped a pair of sleepers on you. Dumped the both of you on the Conclave's doorstep, collected a hundred grand in bounty for you and your dad, and been outta there."

  "But Stacey would have found out and gone after you," I said, my mind clutching wildly for some reason he wouldn't have done exactly as he said. Elyssa might never have recovered if I hadn't given her some of my blood that night, so she wouldn't have been able to go after Shelton if he'd betrayed us.

  "The felycan?" He snorted. "You gotta be kidding me. The day I'm afraid of a felycan is the day I go back to wearing diapers."

  Dad's voice cut through my thoughts. "Justin, I don't think he has anything to do with this."

  "But it makes sense!"

  Dad shook his head. "No. He's right. He could've taken us anytime he wanted after you saved me. And if he can't or won't tell us who put out the bounty, there's nothing we can do about it."

  I turned back to Shelton. "Can you at least remove the mark?"

  He belted out a laugh brimming with disbelief. "You go from blaming me for all your problems to asking for my help again?"

  "Well, can you?" I asked.

  He ran a hand down his face, grumbling under his breath. "I don't know. A tracker is one thing. A death mark, especially one from the Devoted, is another matter altogether."

  "It might be rigged," Elyssa said.

  My chest tightened. "It'll kill him if we try to remove it?"

  "It might."

  "Why bother with the mark? Why not just kill him when they had the chance? If they can mark him, surely they could have just finished the job." I shuddered at the logic. They could have taken my dad at any time. But they hadn't.

  "The marks are usually a warning of what's to come," Shelton said. "They give the marked time to put his affairs in order and say goodbye to loved ones. They're also used to strike fear of the Brotherhood into the community and remind everyone they are very real and not to be forgotten."

  "So right now there's a timer counting down my dad's life?"

  Shelton nodded. "Yeah, that's about the short of it."

  My legs felt like jelly. I sank onto a bench, gripping my head with both hands and staring at the ground. How could this be happening to us? The backs of my eyes burned as though they were trying to release tears. But I had no more tears to give. That had been the soft old version of me. Now I had strength and power. I could stop this Underborn guy if only I knew where to find him. But what about my mom and sister? I'd planned to go after them next and rescue them from the Conroys, the maternal grandparents I'd never met. Obviously, I'd have to put those plans on hold and deal with this first. It wouldn't do me much good to reunite my family if Dad died.

  "How long do we have?" I asked.

  Shelton stared at the tattoo again. "A couple of weeks. Maybe three. The tattoo usually indicates the time unless the client instructs the assassin otherwise. Then the timer might be false just to play tricks with the target's mind before the end."

  Something occurred to me. I looked at Dad. "Mom called me and told me to leave just before you got home and told me about the tracker. Do you think the Conroys know about it? Is that why Mom called?"

  Dad shook his head. "Anything is possible with them. One of my contacts told me they were keeping an eye out for me."

  "Wait just a minute." In my head, I played back the minutes after Mom's phone call and glared at Dad. "You came from outside the house. You were out looking for Mom again weren't you?"

  "Now, son—"

  "Don't you 'now, son' me, Dad. I'll bet someone tagged you while you were out." I thought back to when I'd pulled Dad's weak form from the crypt where the rogue vampires had kept him. I had strapped him onto a moggy's back, facedown. His neck would've been visible and I would have noticed such a strange tattoo. "When did you leave home?"

  Dad looked away from me. "Right after you went into your bedroom." He looked up, met my eyes. "I can't stop looking, Justin. I'll never stop. Assassins can go to hell for all I care. I'm going to find Alice and Ivy and bring them back. Your mother and sister need me."

  "Bring them back to what? Your family knows where we live now. You might be dead in a few days. Whatever you're doing to find them isn't working."

  A siren wailed in the distance. I looked up and saw uniformed officers questioning people near the skating rink. One of the people pointed in our general direction. They looked at us and I knew we were running out of time.

  Chapter 5

  I looked back at Dad. "You can't go chasing after Mom anymore. You're a marked man. Your family, the Slades, can find you, and god only knows who or what else is looking for you now." I turned back to Shelton. "Can you cut off the signal?"

  "Maybe." He sighed. "I'll need some time, though."

  I motioned my head at the cops as they stopped to talk to someone else. "We don't have much time. We need to do something and we need to do it now."

  Shelton looked at the cops and chuckled. "You don't do anything without raising a ruckus, do you?"

  "If people would just leave us alone—"

  "Believe me, I know the feeling." He gave me a meaningful look before pulling out his smartphone again and looked for something. I sidled up to him and watched as he scrolled through a list of files before opening one called Disruptor 5.0. Computer code of some sort filled the screen. It looked vaguely familiar although a lot of the symbols on the screen didn't exist on any keyboard I knew of. "I hate to use this," he said. "But it's all I got on short notice."

  "What's going to happen?" I asked.

  "Just don't try to use your cell phone until I tell you otherwise."

  "Should I power
it off?"

  "Nah. Just don't make any calls." He stepped up to the circle where Dad stood. "Once I break the circle, the tracking spell on the death mark will be able to transmit again. I'm gonna need you to stay real still while I arm this disruption spell."

  Dad nodded, turned, and dropped to one knee to give Shelton a better angle on his neck. "Ready when you are."

  I stayed at Shelton's side, curious to see what was going to happen. He gave me pained look. "You gonna stay glued to my side or something?"

  "I want to see what you're doing."

  "Fine. Then you rub out the circle so I can run the spell."

  I nodded and stepped up to the chalk outline. "Ready?"

  He nodded.

  "Go." I wiped part of the circle out with my shoe. A rush of magical energy whispered past my ears like static as it was freed from the circle. Some of it seemed to soak into my skin, leaving goose bumps and standing hairs on end.

  Shelton aimed his phone's infrared port at the tattoo and pressed the Execute symbol on the screen of the phone as he concentrated his full gaze on the offending ink. The phone beeped and flashed Processed in big red letters. A man sauntered past, chatting away on his phone while he walked his dog. Shelton's phone flashed, Complete. The man with the dog yelled in surprise as a burst of static roared from his cell phone. More cries of alarm sprang up all over the park as radios and phones burst into high-pitched wails and static. The man's phone smoked where the speaker was before the screen on the phone cracked and died.

  "What in the hell did you do?" I asked.

  "Told you I hated to use this spell. It's for emergencies only, but this qualifies, wouldn't you say? The spell distorts and overpowers all wavelengths for a period of time."

  "But why would a cell phone signal have anything to do with a magical one?"

  "I don't know what frequency the tracker is operating on. It could be using anything." He motioned for us to follow. "We gotta get out of here fast, though. The spell uses a lot of power and won't last long."

  I glanced back at the cops frantically dancing about as they tore smoking and sparking radios off their belts and threw them to the ground. "Where are we going?"

  "I know just the place," Shelton said.

  Katie stared dumbfounded as people all over the park tossed their screeching, hissing smartphones on the ground, running from them like they were live grenades. A Pomeranian dog yapped at his master's phone until it made a loud popping noise, then yelped and ran in circles until his leash wrapped so tightly around his owner's legs, the guy toppled over. I tapped Katie on the shoulder to get her attention.

  "We're moving out."

  She nodded and followed behind me wordlessly.

  Elyssa fell into stride next to me. "I know this is a bad time, but, well, I'm starving."

  "Blood?"

  She nodded.

  "I need some sustenance myself." My legs were still weak and trembling from our long run. The demonic source supplying my supernatural abilities howled for relief. My throat felt parched and my stomach growled over and over again. I'd been too hyped with worry to think about it until now.

  I glanced at Elyssa. "How will you, uh…you know?"

  "My parents have packs. I know of a few other places I can get them, but…" She trailed off.

  "But what?"

  "I don't want to leave you. You'll probably get killed without my help."

  I laughed. "You're such an optimist." I looked at Shelton's back as he led us out of the park and into an alleyway across the street. "Can we trust him?"

  "You want my professional opinion?"

  "You're obviously a better judge of character than I am."

  A smile lit her face. "I think we can trust him to an extent. But Shelton looks out for Shelton. Don't expect him to deliver more than he can."

  "Then why is he helping us?"

  "I have a feeling we'll find out."

  My stomach clenched at the thought.

  After a twenty-minute walk through a warren of narrow service roads, alleyways, and pot-holed streets in a bad part of the city, Shelton stopped in a narrow alley and examined an iron door set into the side of an old red-brick building. It might have been a storehouse at some point. A dozen or more identical doors lined this alley and the next one over, but I didn't see what made this one different. The front of the building faced a cracked and rutted one-way street across from a graffiti-covered convenience store with more bars on the windows than the state penitentiary. A bum in a cardboard hut groaned and rolled onto the filthy alley floor. An empty alcohol bottle rolled from his fingers and into the gutter. In front of the convenience store I saw a group of men laugh raucously, drinking from containers covered with brown paper bags. I almost wished I could hear them swap stories—probably about killing people in prison.

  "Nice neighborhood," I said.

  He smirked. "Quaint, ain't it?"

  The inside didn't look much better. Dust covered a bare concrete floor. A filthy mattress with stains I didn't care to identify occupied a corner of the room. "You're keeping Dad here?" I asked, horrified at the prospect of anyone sleeping on that mattress.

  "First-class all the way," Shelton said waving his arms grandly around the room. He pulled out a familiar ebony stick—his wand—mumbled something, and pointed at the floor. A section of the floor dropped down, the concrete turning to stairs as it did.

  "That's so cool," Katie said, eyes wide with wonder.

  "Not bad, eh, green eyes?"

  "Does this mean Harry Potter really exists?" she asked.

  "You're looking at him," I said, nodding toward Shelton. "He wears contacts now."

  "Ha, ha, real funny," Shelton said as he went down the stairs.

  "Why are you so mean to him, Justin?" Katie asked as we filed down the stairs.

  I grunted. "He deserves it."

  "You seem really ungrateful for all he's doing."

  "You don't know Shelton."

  "And you do?"

  I tossed a glance over my shoulder at her. "Better than you."

  "You can be really obtuse." She rolled her eyes.

  "Did you miss the entire conversation I had with him in the park?"

  Her brow furrowed. "You mean the one where you accused him of being the bad guy and then suddenly changed your mind?"

  "Oh, whatever."

  Katie's eyes narrowed. "If Shelton is a magician and Elyssa is a vampire—"

  "Dhampyr, actually," Elyssa said. "I'm half human and half vampire."

  "That sounds totally made up."

  "Google it." Elyssa bared her fangs with a cold smile.

  "I'll take your word for it, thank you very much." Katie turned her eyes back to me. "What I really want to know is, what are you, Justin?"

  "Oh, she's gonna love this," Elyssa said, an amused glint in her eyes.

  I looked away from Katie, remembering all the hell I'd gone through for this girl. How much I'd thought I'd loved her. But anything I felt for her was a lit match in a tornado compared to the blaze of love I felt for Elyssa. So telling her what I was even if it made her fear and hate me shouldn't matter. Except being half demon spawn and half human was something I'd sooner nobody knew. Being a vampire sounded a lot sexier, especially considering how many teeny-boppers loved what they saw on TV and in the movies. Demon spawn, on the other hand, had a pretty bad reputation.

  Katie tugged my sleeve. "Are you going to tell me?"

  Elyssa's concerned eyes met mine and narrowed as if she were trying to figure out what was bothering me. I tried to smile but it faltered.

  We stepped out of the narrow confines of a gray concrete tunnel and into what looked like a perfectly normal two-bedroom apartment with a big-screen TV, a kitchen, and all the amenities. Our surprise at coming upon this place saved me from having to respond to Katie's question.

  "Back here," Shelton said, leading Dad into a fair-sized room with a bed in the middle of a metallic-looking circle set in the floor.

  "I don'
t like the look of that," I said, unslinging my duffel bag and dropping it on the floor. "Why would you put a bed in the center of a circle?"

  Dad stepped inside it anyway and took a seat on the bed. Shelton pressed his thumb to the circle, made a little wiggling movement with it, and the air snapped and crackled.

  Shelton stood up, looking tired all of a sudden. "He should be safe for now."

  "You plan to keep him cooped up in there?"

  "This is a one-way circle," he said, sinking into a wooden chair and pinching the bridge of his nose. "Nothing gets in."

  "He's trapped?" I tested the air above the circle and met a hard unyielding shield of shimmering air wherever my hands touched.

  "He can get out, but nothing can get in except me."

  "It's that easy to throw up one of these things?"

  Shelton shook his head. "I had this one primed in case I ever needed it."

  "Nice hideaway you've got," Elyssa said. "But what if he needs to use the bathroom?"

  "Or feed?" I added.

  "The entire apartment is warded with spells that should keep the tracker from sending anything out," Shelton said. "But for now, I want him completely locked down until I have time to check all the wards and make sure it can't leak. Then he can sleep in the bathroom for all I care."

  "He'll need to feed soon."

  "I'll make him a bowl of cereal," Katie said, pointing to a box of Cheerios sitting on the counter.

  Elyssa smirked. "Not that kind of feeding."

  A shudder ran through Katie's shoulders. "Oh, gross. I get it."

  No, she really didn't, I thought. But maybe that was a good thing.

  Shelton went over to the computer desk and moved the mouse until the screen lit up. He double-clicked a program and scrolled through what appeared to be more spell files. "I've got some spells a lot more discreet than the disruptor I used. Once I fine-tune them a bit, he'll have a limited amount of time to get out and do his business."

  I stood over his shoulder, watching with fascination at the sheer number of files he had. "Are these what pass for magic scrolls nowadays?"

  He smiled and waved a hand at a large wooden chest sitting in the corner of the room. "I have a whole collection of them."