Daemon’s Mark

by Caitlin Kittredge

“Don’t eat it,” I said, making a grab for her. She danced out of the way with surprising dexterity.

  “Fuck off, lady. This is everything we get today. You’re either drugged or you starve. Me, I think a full stomach and a head doped enough not to remember is the way to go.”

  I paced, trying to keep my mouth from watering. Foul as it was, the macaroni was the first real food I’d seen in over a week. “So this place—it’s all weres and witches?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Lola said. She’d already polished off her plate. “Yeah, it’s all bloods and bites around here. That’s why we come here, you know? No laws, no regulations. People pay a lot to fuck the monsters.”

  Her voice had gone slow and dreamlike. Someone starved and weakened would be a puppy with a full dose of Valium in them.

  “One last thing,” I said. “What happens to the women who lose the fights? If they don’t die?”

  “Fuck if I know,” Lola sighed. “Now be quiet and let me doze until we have to go downstairs. This isn’t exactly fun for me, you know. We’re not roommates.”

  “Sorry,” I murmured, looking out the window again. The guard with the dog was still pacing the quad. “Just making conversation.”

  CHAPTER 14

  By the time a sour-faced girl with artificial hair woven into her own with a comical mismatch effect banged on the door and told us with gestures to get downstairs, I had had plenty of time to come up with and discard fifty escape plans in my head.

  A straight run for my life was out—between the bars, the cameras and that son of a bitch Mikel and his ilk, I’d be dead before I’d gotten ten steps out of the room. I had to get the layout of the place, find a phone, find the weak spots.

  All before I got jumped by some kink fan who wanted to get his jollies off with a woman of the hirsute persuasion. No pressure, Luna.

  Lola nudged my shoulder. “Come on, fish. They dock you if you’re late, and you have to service the employees to work it off.”

  The thought of Mikel or Peter anywhere near me turned my stomach. I hustled after Lola, tottering on the platform sandals I’d put on. Girls descended the stairs in pairs and threes, never any alone. Their eyes, to a woman, were the doped, haunted eyes of long-term sex slaves, all hope long ago drained out like so much dirty water.

  The parlor was the same sort of elegance I’d come to expect from Ekaterina’s operation, red satin and black carpet with a deep shag pocked with cigarette burns. Heavy curtains blocked out the windows and low lighting gave the whole room the aura of a cheap porn set.

  The girls milled, a few of them lighting cigarettes, a few more discreetly popping pills from pillboxes or their bras and washing them down with vodka or cloudy water from a tap behind the wet bar in the corner.

  Lola positioned herself against the bar, hip cocked, face carefully arranged to look bored. I sat myself on the edge of an armchair, grateful to be off the too-small shoes, which had already raised blisters.

  While I sat, I went over the facts I’d garnered about the sex trafficking operation, like they were beads on a rosary that would somehow deliver me back to the light. Ekaterina was a boss, that much was clear, and I knew from briefings on the Russian mob that a female boss was unheard of. Then again, so was a brothel full to the brim with non-human prostitutes with a blood-sport arena in the basement.

  Rostov and his men were enforcers who scouted women in Nocturne, and plenty of other cities had the same setup, if Lola was any indication. They transported the women to countries with few laws, where no one would question a bunch of Americans and Canadians and Brits locked up in a defunct hotel and sold as sex slaves. When I thought about it, it was really a perfect operation. I wondered how long it had been going on.

  Laughter and shouting filtered from the lobby, and two men in cheap suits stumbled into the parlor, big sloppy grins on their faces. Ekaterina was behind them, wearing the obsequious posture of a helpful employee. She gestured at me, at Anna, who was trying to fade into the wallpaper, and at Charlie and Deedee. Deedee was holding it together, and Charlie was staring into space. She must have eaten the macaroni.

  The johns clapped and grinned approvingly at the new meat, examining each of us in turn. When they got to me I tried to resist snarling or flinching, even though I’ve never done well being touched by anyone, never mind two sweaty office workers who reeked of cheap vodka. I just had to hold on a little longer, had to keep it together. No one was getting me out of here but me.

  “You are very pretty,” one of the johns said to me in labored English. I tried to smile obediently. Ekaterina stepped in.

  “This one is a bite, brand new, from the West Coast of the United States. A true California girl. She will be insatiable, or your money back.”

  The john caressed my knee. “Care for a drink and a talk in private?”

  Private, I could do. More and more johns were filtering in, none of them any better than the one currently pawing at me, some considerably worse. A blue pall of cigarette smoke hung over the parlor and the drinks and false cheer were flowing. I thought I caught a familiar scent amid the carnival assaulting my nose, clove cigarettes and the distinctive scent of a male were, but it vanished just as quickly as it drifted to me. I shook my head to clear it.

  “Go,” Ekaterina said, as the john pulled me up. “And behave yourself.”

  “Ekaterina.” Someone else had come in the door and stood behind the john, his face in shadow in the dim reddish light. Ekaterina turned in surprise.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I was passing by, and I saw we had new visitors.” The man stepped forward, and the john fell over himself to get out of the way. The man looked him over, lip curling with faint disgust. “What is your name?”

  “Illya,” the man quavered.

  “Illya. Find yourself another woman to reek all over.”

  “I don’t think…” Ekaterina started, but the man cut her off.

  “Be quiet. Go attend the front of the house so the whores don’t rob us blind.”

  Ekaterina nodded and did as he said, instead of castrating the patronizing bastard like I would have. Illya, too, stumbled away, and pressed up against Lola, who seemed all too happy to have him.

  The man looked at me, stretching out a finger and putting it under my chin. “You are very beautiful. I would even call you rare.”

  I sized him up while he was staring at me. Pale skin, dark hair slicked back, green eyes that could have cut glass with their sharpness. The guy would have been drop-dead handsome, except for the utter lifelessness of his expression. He looked like a creature who had decided to try on a human skin and found it lacking.

  This had to be Ekaterina’s brother, the one Lola had warned me about. Fucking fantastic. I swallowed the lump that had grown in my gullet. “Thank you.”

  The brother extended his hand to me. “Shall we retire?”

  “Is that allowed? I mean, I’m supposed to be earning money…” Anything to stall him. Anything for time to think.

  The brother reached behind the bar and felt around for a bottle, unmarked. The good stuff.

  He took my hand in his. “This way. Don’t worry yourself over such things. I’ll take care of you.” We started up the stairs, back to the apartments. I was going to have to knock him out. Then I’d be the girl who assaulted the boss and got sent to the basement. If I was lucky. Crap.

  “What is your name?” the brother asked.

  “Joanne,” I said without missing a beat. I decided to be brave. “What’s yours?”

  “My name is Grigorii,” he said. “Grigorii Nikolaivich Belikov.” He had the same precise, Oxford-accented manner of speaking as his sister. “It is very nice to meet you, Joanne.”

  My middle name was better than nothing. I wasn’t going to lose myself in this place, hide behind a construct like Lola. “Yeah, whatever,” I told Grigorii, opening the door to the suite. “You’ll understand if I’m not thrilled to be here.”

  He grinned at that and droppe
d himself gracefully into the zebra chair. He was my height and moved like liquid. Again, it would have been sexy if he didn’t remind me of a hungry snake.

  “Sit with me here, Joanne. Let me get to know you.” He uncapped the bottle and took a long pull, patting his finely tailored, genuine-Armani lap.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I said, as he took a second swing, each pull at least a full shot of vodka. He didn’t seem the worse for it. I backed up to the bed and sat down, patting the spot next to me. “You come here.”

  The first thing you learn about unarmed combat is to control the situation. Put your opponent where you want them and then execute a takedown move as soon as possible to end things. Don’t get fancy and don’t get cocky.

  Not that I thought it was going to take much to put Grigorii out. He wasn’t a big guy, by any stretch. I was more worried about what happened after. The camera would see whatever I did.

  “I like this,” Grigorii said as I tilted my head coquettishly. “Come and have a drink with me. It would make me happy.” His English was getting better with each drink, not worse.

  Struck with an idea, I got up on my knees and ran my hands over my body. Grigorii perked up, but he didn’t move.

  “I dance,” I said. “You drink. I like that idea the best.”

  He grinned, lips thin and bloodless, and downed more of the booze. We were at half a bottle. This guy must have a liver made out of titanium. “Very well, Joanne. Dance for me.”

  I got off the bed and started a slow hip shimmy, fighting to stay calm and look sexy. What I really wanted to do was bolt. “If you finish that bottle by the time I’m done, big man, I’ll give you a little present.”

  “You can be sure of it,” he slurred, missing his mouth and dumping a few droplets down his front. Finally.

  “Oh,” I said, dancing closer, hands running up and down my body. “Careful there, sweetie pie.”

  “I’m very careful,” Grigorii muttered. Utilizing more focus than most people would to launch a bulls-eye at a dart board, he upended the bottle and dumped the remainder down his gullet. “There. Now, then, my present,” he commanded.

  “Soon,” I assured him. “Stand up. Dance with me.”

  Grigorii came to his feet when I beckoned, and came to me, grabbing my waist and yanking me against him. His body was hard under his suit, and I felt a gun in a holster in his left armpit. I met his eyes, and saw amusement, not intoxication, flickering in their depths.

  “Not working out the way you planned?” he inquired, one hand skating down to my ass while the other drifted up and caught my cheek.

  “You’re not drunk,” I blurted.

  Grigorii let out a laugh. “Of course not.” He ran his thumb over my cheekbone and I felt the pop of magick.

  “I’m drunk, or I am not drunk, as I see fit. Very freeing. My body is my magick, and I look after it.”

  His gentle caress became a hard squeeze, and he held me by the back of the neck, his expression furious. “Is that your plan? To make every man who chooses you a drunken fool and escape their attention? Do you think I am a fool?”

  “No,” I said honestly, softly. “I don’t think you’re a fool.”

  Grigorii’s jaw twitched and he gave me a shake. “The right answer, much too late.”

  He shoved me away from him, onto the bed, and got on top of me, flipping me on my stomach. He knotted a hand in my hair and pushed my dress up, his cold touch raising goose flesh on my skin. “My sister told me you were going to be a problem, and as usual, she was not wrong.” He wound his hand tighter in my hair and I groaned, pain lancing my scalp. “Fortunately, I specialize in problems. I’m the—what’s the English?”

  Grigorii leaned close to my ear, his lips touching the outer edge. “I’m the troubleshooter.”

  One good thing about macho assholes is that they don’t expect you to fight back, so awed will you be by their manly speech and manly beatings. Grigorii’s free hand reached for the elastic of my panties and my own hand lashed out and grabbed the cheap clock radio from the bedstand. I whipped my arm back and slammed the thing into his head, plastic case breaking into pieces.

  Grigorii groaned, falling off of me and off of the bed entirely. A second later, he started to snore. He may be a witch, but he wasn’t invulnerable. For the first time in weeks, things were going my way.

  I climbed off the bed, pulling the dress right, and went into the hall. Ekaterina obviously didn’t expect anyone to misbehave once they’d come this far. She was in for a serious fucking surprise from me, that was for sure. I just had to be fast enough to get out of here before the underlings came to shoot me.

  The hallway with the girls’ suites was devoid of anything helpful, so I went the other way, past the stairs to the parlor and back toward the hidden part of the building; more apartments, these in disrepair like the suite bathroom had been. Voices spilled out from behind closed doors, a tinny laugh track and a familiar theme song. The Facts of Life dubbed into Ukrainian. Funny stuff.

  I stuck my head around an open doorway, just enough to give me a sightline, and saw Mikel and Peter sitting on a battered sleeper sofa, sharing French fries out of a fast food bag and laughing at the TV like a couple of normal guys.

  The urge to storm in, grab Mikel’s best friend the Kalashnikov, and open fire on them both was almost overwhelming. Those two men had been responsible for my suffering, for the suffering of the other four girls, and they deserved to die for us and who knew how many others before.

  And once Ekaterina and the rest of the thugs hear the shots, you’re Hexed. I couldn’t very well shoot my way out of the hotel on my own. Besides, I had to at least take the four from the container, plus Lola, with me. My dreams would never be silent if I left them.

  I slipped past the door and continued on. No one shouted at me. My stealthy reputation was intact. The next opening was a makeshift office set up in an efficiency unit, and I almost sobbed when I saw a telephone sitting plain as you please on the desk, along with a sleek new laptop and a set of instruction manuals for a bookkeeping program and Excel.

  Slipping in and shutting the door, I picked up the phone and depressed the disconnect. A dial tone buzzed and I punched in 0.

  “Da?”

  That was most definitely not an operator, unless the operator was a three-hundred-pound man with a smoker’s rasp and a cacophony of pop music in the background.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Da? ”

  “Crap,” I muttered. “Operator,” I said loudly into the phone, “I need an outside line.”

  “Who are you? You whores can’t use the telephones. ”

  This wasn’t getting me anywhere, clearly, and I was about to hang up and start trying random numbers when the door banged open. Ekaterina and Peter stood there. Peter had an old-model stun gun in his hand.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Ekaterina demanded.

  “Calling for a pizza?” I said. “That Valium macaroni really left something to be desired, let me tell you. I’m a growing girl.”

  “The phones are wired for internal calls only,” said Ekaterina. “You think we’d leave a means to call for help so close to the hands of your kind? You Western women all think you’re entitled to a white knight, someone to save you from the harsh realities of this world.” She jabbed her finger at me. “Where is my brother?”

  “Dreaming a little dream back in my suite,” I said.

  Ekaterina snarled. “If you’ve hurt him…”

  I held up my hands. “Relax. He’s fine. Concussed, but fine. Far better than he deserves to be. Listen, do me a favor and spare the lecture on my un-whore-like behavior? My head hurts enough as it is.”

  Ekaterina gave me a cold smile, all perfect, gleaming teeth. “Very well.”

  Peter depressed the trigger of the stun gun and the darts arced out and landed in my side. Just a small sting, and then I was on the floor, every muscle seizing, pain dropping a black curtain over my vision.

 
; As I felt hands grab me under the shoulders and start to drag, I thought that I hadn’t really expected Ekaterina to shoot me. I was going to have to do something about those assumptions of mine.

  CHAPTER 15

  I woke up on a cold cement floor, curled in the fetal position. Everything hurt, but at least I appeared to be reasonably intact. I rolled onto my back, seeing nothing but a plaster ceiling with a stain that looked like Fidel Castro’s head. A look to the left gave me a windowless brick wall scratched with graffiti and a look to the right gave me a door of heavy-duty mesh with a lock.

  Another cage. This was getting old real fast.

  “You’re awake.” I saw shoes, male, Gucci. Very posh, and not a speck of dirt on them. I raised my head with difficulty. Getting Tasered is a lot like having six shots of tequila in a row and then beating your head against a wall. Unpleasant at the time, one hell of a hangover after the fact.

  “More or less,” I said. “For certain values of awake.”

  “That was a nice move with the clock radio. You honestly did take me by surprise. Trouble, just like Ekaterina said.”

  The face that belonged to the Gucci came clear. Grigorii had a row of Steri-Strips on his temple, but otherwise appeared unscathed. The bastard.

  “That would be an accurate assessment,” I said.

  “My sister is usually accurate in matters of business,” Grigorii said. He crouched down to my level as I managed to sit up, feeling all of my muscles scream. “But she defers to me on matters of discipline. Tell me, do you feel you deserve it?”

  “Dude, your people kidnapped me out of my fucking shoes and shoved me in a shipping container straight to one of the seven hells. What do you think?”

  He chuckled. He really was eerily beautiful, like some sort of Tolkien creature that lived for thousands of years and lost all human feeling because of it. “We weren’t properly introduced before. I am Grigorii Belikov. I run this compound, and I am your only hope of staying alive long enough to regret fighting me off. How do you do?”

  “I noticed you left out rat bastard and witch from that resume. And a lot better if you’d let me out of here,” I said.