Daemon’s Mark

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Sunny spread her hands. “A pack you haven’t encountered before. A pack that’s extra strong.”

  “No, it’s more than that,” I insisted. “It was like…” I sighed. The waiter set a glass of Merlot in front of Sunny, bloody and a little thick like a Merlot should be. The smell of the grapes overtook my nose and I coughed into my hand.

  I couldn’t articulate what about Anton had scared me so, but it was more than a pack that was stronger than the average were. It was something primal that my were understood but I didn’t.

  To understand it would be to allow the were to roam free again, and my life now was predicated on that not being the case. My job, Will, sitting here with my cousin instead of alone at home, because my rage wouldn’t let me be safe with other people.

  “Luna, tell me about Will,” Sunny said, taking a long drink of her wine. “Tell me what happened.”

  I laid my hands on the table and looked at them. My knuckles were scraped on the left, my nails scrimmed with dirt, and they shook a little, from being hungry and tired. “I need to go,” I sighed. “I need to get some sleep.”

  “Luna…” Sunny started, reaching for me as I stood. I shook her off.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Sunny. Enjoy your Merlot.”

  “Luna!” she snapped as I walked away. “Luna, you can’t turn your back on this! This is important. This is your life. ”

  I looked at her over my shoulder. “Sure doesn’t feel that way sometimes, Sun.”

  Leaving Vines, I drove home through a light mist, my headlights beams of dancing droplets, like gems. I rubbed my eyes before I shut off the Nova and locked it, making sure I had my bag of dirty clothes from work to take to the laundry, my laptop bag, my badge and gun, a few extra clips I’d left in the car.

  My apartment doorway was a cocoon of light in the mist, and I walked toward it, feeling the weight of my bags and of the day lean heavy on me.

  Footsteps sounded behind me, and I heard the drunken giggle of a college girl and the lower rumbling of her boyfriend’s voice as they turned into one of the bars on the next block.

  What would I say to Will? How could he expect me to spend the rest of my life with him, when I couldn’t even spend one day without succumbing to the were?

  Footsteps came again, and I felt air against my neck. I spun, my dirty laundry slipping out of my hands.

  Victims who say things like It all happened so fast always sound like they weren’t aware, that they were caught flatfooted, but it did happen fast, too fast for me to see.

  There was a touch against my throat, a hand sliding across my chest, two more figures out of the fog in front of me, a sting against my neck.

  I didn’t smell or hear them. All I felt was the terrible cold in my blood, the one I knew all too well. Silver.

  The entire right side of my body went numb from the kiss of it, and I felt my knees buckle. I fell to the sidewalk, twitching. What had they done to me? I’d never felt this way, not when I’d been drugged once before, not when I’d been hit with a silver round. It hurt, yes, but nothing like this.

  This felt like dying.

  As I lay there helpless, with no control over my body and only the haziest sense of what was happening to me, I heard a voice.

  “Get her up. Nosy fucking cop has got a long trip ahead of her.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I fell through layers of cotton, the sting in my neck disappearing. It was strangely soothing … everything smoothed at the edges and sounds came to me from a distance, calming like waves on a black sand shore.

  My gun, badge and holdout weapon were gone, their familiar weight light. Hands pulled at my clothes, palms a kiss of cold on my skin. Once they’d determined I wasn’t wearing a wire, they left me alone. I couldn’t care less. I floated down, landing gently on a rough automobile carpet, feeling lighter than air.

  “Gods, Nikolai,” said a voice. “How much did you give her?”

  “Enough for a were,” Nikolai said. “And she’s a bitch, believe me. She smacked me good when she came to my office.”

  “Just get her into the van,” the second voice snapped. A woman. The quality-assurance portion of the prostitution ring, no doubt. Trust a woman to judge a woman. “You’re less than worthless, you know that? What if she dies on me?”

  “She’s a cop who came into my business asking all kinds of fucking questions,” Nikolai growled. “Questions that are troublesome. You’d be starring in a remake of Caged Heat right now if it wasn’t for me.”

  I drifted out then, coming back to myself with the rumbling of an engine running through my body. Dimly, I wondered how long it would take Will and the SCS to find me. Tomorrow morning, later? How long before someone like me was missed, and not just a relief not to have around?

  The engine stopped and the door opened. I was hauled out, stumbling like a prom date on spiked punch, and dropped next to other warm bodies that I felt but didn’t see, my vision blurring in gentle waves. There were other women around me, halos of light softening their features as my drugged eyes struggled to focus.

  Will would find me. Will would miss me. I just wanted to sleep, to dip into the dream sea and swim forever.

  No. My were snarled, howled and scraped its teeth over the inside of my head, but I couldn’t rouse myself. They’d dosed me too strong; I couldn’t think, couldn’t move …

  None of it mattered in the next second as a new parade of images took over from my hope that someone would find me before the truck reached the port.

  Will, Sunny, my grandmother. Faces and images Ihadn’t seen for years, as if my mind was flipping through a mental catalog and not liking what it saw.

  Hands levered me up again, faces slid past, and I felt my gut rebel. Weres heal fast and my body was doing its level best to expel whatever I’d been dosed with before I was irrevocably fucked.

  I managed to vomit onto the shoes of the girl next to me, as we were shoved into an echoing metal space. The cargo container, of course. The girl groaned and tried to slide away from me, and ended up falling over.

  The metal walls of the crate brought a cold certainty with them—no one was coming for me. No one was going to rescue me. No one knew where I was, and by the time Will missed me or Bryson and Lane thought to track the GPS in my cell phone and found it in the hands of the bum who had undoubtedly stolen it to pawn, I would be halfway around the world.

  I still had no power over my own body, so I did the only thing I could do, that hadn’t happened since I was a small child—I curled into a ball and started to cry.

  When I woke up, I thought I was dead. I’d had the notion before, but this time I was absolutely sure. I smelled bile and piss, I ached everywhere, I was cold and my surroundings were rocking in steady time, like the beating of a heart.

  I could hear crying, too, sobbing, hysterical and ongoing. Wasn’t the Christian hell supposed to be full of the wailing of sinners or something equally melodramatic?

  “Shut up!” someone shouted, banging on metal and making my head echo. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, what’s her problem?”

  The sobbing continued, and I ordered my eyes to open. If I was in hell, I at least wanted to see which of the seven I’d landed in. I hoped it wasn’t the fire hell. I don’t do well with heat, even if it is a dry heat.

  I recognized my racing thoughts for what they were—panic. Maybe there was hope after all. Could there be much purpose to panic in the afterlife?

  The first thing my eyes caught was a steel wall, swinging shadows slicing back and forth like some kind of macabre puppet show. The same witch’s alphabet I’d seen in the meatpacking warehouse cascaded along in ripples of shadow, like a moving river of magick. It hurt, so I dropped my eyes from it to the floor.

  There was a shoe lying on its side—a nice shoe, a Louboutin—level with my face, and I reached out for it, as something tangible and real.

  Where the Hex was I? I tried to sit up and felt as if I’d hit my head against a Dumpster. Dizziness and
pain raced through me and I threw up again, all over the front of my shirt.

  “Fuck, bitch, what’s wrong with you?” the same voice shouted.

  Wait, again? I’d thrown up before. Recently. Something poked through the black cloud that had taken the place of my brain, flashes of stumbling, vertigo, my stomach welling up into my throat …

  “Oh, shit,” I breathed, clapping a hand over my mouth. “I got dosed.”

  “Welcome the bright penny to the club,” snarled the woman. “Yes, sweetie, you’re not supposed to drink the roofie cocktails. Lesson learned?”

  Underneath the stench of the filth sloshing back and forth on the floor of the container, I placed the musky smell that had been tickling my nose as female weres—a lot of them, scared and pissed off. I reached out for the side of the container and levered myself up.

  “I wasn’t roofied.”

  Rostov. He’d shut me up in here, just like the group of women I’d been trying to save.

  “Hell you weren’t.” The voice laughed, bitter as a pill on your tongue. “Look at you. You’re a hot mess.”

  Silver, burning from the inside out …

  My stomach lurched, but fortunately there was nothing left. I put eyes on the bigmouth. She was short and busty, clipped bright red hair still half-spiked from a night out in the mosh pit. Her outfit was the sort of carelessness that punks cultivate when they’re trying too hard—tight bondage pants, ripped men’s tank, full sleeves of tattoos bright with cherry blossoms and dragons and other pilfered symbolism. “Mind keeping your voice down?” I rasped. “My head is killing me.”

  “Yeah? Aren’t you special.” She folded her arms, making the dragons flex. “On the bright side, I’m about to kill little Miss Sobs-a-lot over there if she doesn’t shut the fuck up! ”

  Red beat her fist against the container wall again. That was where we were. A cargo container, painted with workings on the inside, airless and dark. “Let me out, fuckers! I’m an American! You can’t do this to me.”

  “If they were inclined to let us out, they would have done it,” I said, suddenly weary. “We’re in here until we get to our port of call.” There was no mistaking the lurch and roll underneath us for open sea, now that I was conscious.

  “Oh, yeah, and what are you, some kind of expert on freak kidnappings?” Red snarled. Her claws were out, flexing in fear.

  “No,” I said wearily. “I’m a cop.”

  Her mouth opened at that, but I turned away from her and crawled over to the girl who was sobbing. Her noises had taken on a hypnotic rhythm, droning, like an animal caught in a trap.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to get a look at her. “Hey, what’s your name?” I didn’t bother asking if she was all right. It was a stupid question.

  She hiccupped, staring at me with wide, terrified eyes. “What do you want?”

  “Just to know your name,” I said. “I’m Luna.” I reached out to put a hand on her shoulder and she flinched back, squealing in fear. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said. “I promise.”

  “My name’s Dolores,” she managed. “Dolores Stern.”

  The name was vaguely familiar, and I tried to sift through the leftover fragments of my brain from my silver roofie coma for the memory. Bold print, a picture of the willowy blonde before me staring out at me from a page …

  “Dolores Stern, the reporter?” I said. “You’re with the Nocturne Inquirer, aren’t you?”

  “Y-yes.” She shuddered. “And you’re Luna Wilder, that werewolf cop who runs the freak investigations for the NCPD.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” I allowed. Focusing on Dolores and her trauma was allowing me to shove mine into a box and lock it. As long as I didn’t let myself think about what had led me to be here, I’d be fine. Functional. Able to get out of this alive.

  I was good at compartmentalizing way before I became a cop, but it certainly comes in handy for the job.

  Dolores let out another choked sound, which may have been bitter laughter. It was hard to tell. “We sure make a pair, don’t we?”

  “I suppose we do,” I said. “How did they scoop you up?”

  “I was talking to this asshole in a bar,” Dolores sniffed. “Lots of club girls turning up missing lately. Thought I might get a story. I only turned my back for a second to take a call because my editor was checking in … there was no way he had enough time…”

  “This asshole,” I said. “Did he happen to be about six foot, slick-looking, black hair, accent?”

  Dolores blinked. “You know him?”

  “Ivan Salazko,” I said. So they were all in a little club together. It’d be cute if it wasn’t so nauseating. I didn’t know what I was most furious about—that I’d slipped up or that it had been that slimy little rat’s asshole Nikolai Rostov who had dosed me. I was supposed to be smarter than that, harder to get to, and he had waltzed up to me on my own front steps and snatched me. I felt my neck where the silver had touched me. There was nothing there except a dime-sized burn, which would heal in a matter of hours.

  “Sounds about right,” Dolores said. “About six months ago a sister in my circle went missing. ’S what put me on to the whole thing. The police couldn’t give a crap—no offense—so I started digging and more and more women with the blood and the bite turned up gone as I went along, all of them from Russian-run clubs. I’m not stupid, so I followed the story.”

  “You’re a witch?” I said, thinking that if she could pull it together it might be useful in getting us out of here. Magick can do a lot of things brute strength and a set of claws can’t.

  “Shaman,” she said. “It was one of those stupid teenage things—you might have guessed ‘Stern’ isn’t a family with a long proud line of circle-scribblers in it. Anyway, your standard vision quest gone bad and then … certain powers.”

  I’d only met one shaman before, and Dolores was an improvement even in her hysterical state. She hadn’t tried to kill me yet, and no one had needed to shoot her. Definitely a step up.

  “Can you do something to get us out of here, if you have a chance to calm down?” I asked.

  Dolores shook her head. “Steel. It Hexes up my ability to pull down power, plus they’ve put bindings on it. None of us are getting out of here, witch or were.”

  So much for my brilliant escape plan. Red snorted from the corner. “Well, princess, with or without you, I’m getting the fuck out of here at the first gods-damned opportunity. The rest of you bitches are on your own.”

  “Let’s not be hasty,” I said. “We don’t need anyone getting killed.”

  “Bitch, are you blind?” she snapped. “We’re locked in a fucking crate. On a boat. Headed to Thailand or some gods-forsaken place where they chain you up and fuck you in the ass until you’re too old to make them a buck.”

  “Oh, gods…” Dolores whimpered. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

  “Not Thailand. Ukraine,” I said. Red cocked her head.

  “What?”

  “The shipping manifests I saw were all going to the Ukraine. That’s probably where we’re headed. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union it’s hard to keep track of what comes in and what goes out.”

  “You’re just a regular little Encyclopedia Could I Give Less of a Shit? , aren’t you?” she said with a saccharine smile.

  “I told you,” I said evenly. “I’m a cop. A lieutenant with the Nocturne City PD.”

  She bared her teeth, testing my dominance. I didn’t bite. No pun. “Why should I believe you?” Red sighed, finally, when she saw neither of us was going to get to hump the other’s leg.

  I pointed to her forearm, to a small portion of the tattoo sleeve that described a dead tree with a gravestone beneath it. “You spent three years in the McClintock Women’s Correctional Facility in Chino. The branches on the tree are the years, the gravestone means you were there for murder and the Roman numeral on it is the number of days you spent in solitary. Seventy-four. Impressive.”

  S
he grimaced. “It was involuntary manslaughter.”

  “How did you put it? ‘Could I give less of a shit’?”

  Red’s defensive posture relaxed an iota. “So you’re either a cop or a fellow con.”

  “Look at my outfit,” I said, gesturing at my vomit-soaked ensemble. “Could a con afford this?”

  “What’s your pack?” she said. I held her gaze.

  “I’m an Insoli. You?” As such, I was subject to the dominate of any pack I ran afoul of, unless my lone will was stronger. So far, so good, but I had a feeling Red might give me a run for my money.

  “Lobo del Diablo,” she said finally. “I guess that makes me dominant.”

  “Until we’re out of this crate, all of us are working together,” I said. “And since I don’t hear anyone except your convict ass speaking up as troop leader, I’ll be figuring out our next move.”

  “Yeah,” said Red. “Because you’ve done such a great Hexed job getting yourself stuck here in the first place.”

  “Listen…” I gestured at her for her name.

  “Esperanza,” she said.

  “Huh. Mouthful. I think I’ll stick with Red. Listen, Red. You’re obviously strong and capable and all that shit but I’ve actually dealt with kidnappings and hostage situations before. I was a SWAT officer for six months and homicide detective for five years before that, so if you’ve got relevant experience, now is the time to speak up.”

  Esperanza dipped her head to her chest and muttered something that I didn’t catch. I turned back to Dolores.

  “Are you going to be all right now, Miss Stern?”

  “You can call me Deedee,” she murmured. “Everyone does.”

  “Deedee, are you going to be all right?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I feel like I can’t breathe. My heart is racing. I have to get out of here.”

  “You’re having a panic attack,” I said. “I need you to shut your eyes and focus on something that calms you down, and take deep breaths. Calm breaths. Nothing worse is going to happen to you than what’s happened already. I’ll make sure of it.”