Daemon’s Mark

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I do have some control over electricity, yes.” Grigorii shrugged, not seeming bothered in the least that I was holding a gun on him. Then again, I guess when you’re the living version of Electro, you don’t have to be.

  Grigorii rubbed his neck and smoothed down his shirt. “I’ll give her the information you’re looking for, but only her. You leave the room.”

  “No way,” Dmitri said. “I’m not leaving you two alone.”

  “Then I’m sure your daughter will enjoy her new life,” said Grigorii. “The young ones are profitable. They can get as many as fifteen men a day.”

  Dmitri roared, and I put myself between Grigorii and his swing. “This is not helping Masha. Wait outside.”

  He glared at me, black spilling across his pupils, and I cursed under my breath. The daemon was coming out, grabbing hold in moments of stress and anger, taking one more piece of Dmitri away.

  “Dmitri,” I said, keeping my voice even. “Leave.”

  “Luna?” he said, blinking. His eyes were back to green. “Did I…”

  “I’ll take care of this,” I said, shoving him out the door with more force than was strictly necessary. “You need to wait out there.”

  I shut the door after him and turned back to Grigorii. “I don’t know what you think that accomplished.”

  “It got you alone,” Grigorii said, standing up. “So difficult to talk when some oaf is blundering around.” He approached me and reached out his hand. “Put the gun down, Joanne. Let’s talk about this and be civilized.”

  “You don’t know the meaning of the word,” I said, but I lowered the gun a fraction and didn’t flinch when he reached out, slowly, and brushed a midnight strand of hair from in front of my eyes.

  “I don’t know where the girl is that you’re asking about,” he said, his fingertips lingering against my cheek. I met his eyes.

  “You’re lying.”

  “And how do you know that?” Grigorii said. “You can read my mind, perhaps?” The fingers slid down my jaw, to grip my shoulder and pull me closer. Was he going to bargain with me or make out with me? I felt a tremor of panic in my chest at being so close to him again and fought it down.

  “I know that you kidnap girls and sell them,” I said. “You and your sister care less about them than about a piece of trash on your shoe, so don’t pretend like you’re innocent. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “If I am all the things you say,” Grigorii said, his other hand traveling over the curve of my hip, “a pimp, a liar, a seller of flesh—then why are you not running from me, far and fast as you can?”

  I shoved the Walther into his gut, hard enough to send a breath from his lungs. “You make a better target up close.”

  Grigorii’s lips peeled back in a smile. “I was afraid that you would spurn my advances.” His hand on my skin clamped down and the cold was all over me, like being dipped into a frozen lake naked. Not cold, I realized …

  shock. It was dancing in me, just like the silver that had put me down.

  My knees buckled and I lost my grip on the gun. Grigorii eased me down to the floor as I fought to breathe, the air whistling in my chest.

  “Let me tell you something about my sister,” he said. “Our family lived in disgrace after the Romanovs fell, for generations. Ekaterina was bought by a man in our village in Siberia—a filthy, fat man. A whoremonger who took her away and cut her when she tried to escape and come back home. I killed him, hung him up by his ankles like the pig he was, and I’ll kill you, too, and anyone else who attempts to step between my family and our livelihood.

  “Now, I’ve only paralyzed you,” Grigorii said. “Just a small working to keep you still, but completely reversible. Here are my terms.” He pushed my shirt up and caressed one of my breasts. “You allow me to fuck you raw, and I’ll let your big friend outside leave unharmed with the information he needs to find his child. Or I will have you both killed. What’s your choice?”

  I pantomimed trying to talk, although everything above the neck seemed to be working, including my brain, which was clouded with rage to a screaming degree. Grigorii sighed. “Don’t struggle. Let me release the working. You’ll just burst a blood vessel and then it will be like having my pleasure with a coma patient.”

  Charming. I’d run into plenty of witches, but not one who could paralyze with just a touch. Grigorii was extraspecial talented. Wasn’t I lucky?

  The numbness eased, electricity retreating from my nerves, but Grigorii kept his hand on me, holding me down. I wriggled my hand under my body, hoping that he would be otherwise occupied.

  “Speak up,” Grigorii said. “What choice have you made?”

  My hand closed on the Walther where it was pinned under my body and I drew it, scraping a line along my own back. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

  I struck with the pistol butt, but Grigorii was faster and leaped backward, making me miss his temple. The gun slammed into his nose and he screamed, blood spattering my face with the warmth of spring rain.

  Dmitri banged the door open and came in, grabbing Grigorii in a sleeper hold before he could react. “Luna,” he said. “Get something to tie him with.”

  My legs were quivering, and I was still freezing, as if I’d just stood outside naked in a snowstorm, but I jumped up and slammed the door before ripping the phone cord out of the wall.

  Dmitri and I tied Grigorii up and Peter, too, just to be on the safe side. “You okay?” Dmitri asked me quietly. “I need to break anything off of him?”

  I looked at Grigorii, who stared back at me calmly. He even smiled, blood flowing freely from his mangled nose, over his lips and teeth. “You and I both know that nothing happened you didn’t really want, Joanne.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Dmitri snarled. I shook my head.

  “Nothing.” Grigorii’s violation wasn’t something I needed Dmitri riding cavalry on. I didn’t want to spend another second in the compound, didn’t want to remember what I’d had to do to get away the first time.

  There was a laptop sitting closed on the desk, and I booted it up. I was confronted with a blinking login screen.

  “Password?” I said to Grigorii.

  He smirked at me. “Perhaps I’ll trade it for a kiss.”

  Dmitri grabbed the Walther and I grabbed Dmitri, trying to deflect his aim from Grigorii’s head. “No!” I snapped. “This is not how we’re doing things!” Not that the prick didn’t deserve it. My finger lodged against the trigger and the gun spoke, a shot going into the wall next to Grigorii’s head. It missed by maybe an inch. He flinched, coughing on plaster dust.

  “Password?” I said, wresting the gun from Dmitri’s grip.

  “That shot has drawn everyone in the building,” said Grigorii. “You should be less concerned about the password than about your dramatically shortened lives.”

  Great job there, Dmitri. “We need to go,” I told him.

  “Masha…” he started.

  “We’ll find Masha,” I said, jerking the laptop’s power cord from the wall and shoving the computer into Dmitri’s hands. Shouts sounded from down the hall, running footsteps. I knew the cadence of a frantic pursuit all too well, seeing as I was usually on the other end of one.

  “What about him?” Dmitri said, jerking his head at Grigorii.

  “Yes, white knight,” said Grigorii. “What about me? Justice must be served, swift and merciless as a sword blade.”

  “He talks too damn much, is what,” I said to Dmitri. “Now, move your ass. I’m not getting caught here again.”

  We bolted down the hall, eschewing the elevator for the fire stairs. Outside, into the car, tires squealing as vertigo pulled against my stomach. Dmitri drove for a long time, through twisting back streets, past Orthodox churches with steeples flying like hot-hair balloons against the gray sky, fountain squares that could have been snapshots at high speed on a postcard, old Soviet blocks that had their own square, postmodern beauty.

  “We sightseeing?” I ask
ed. Dmitri checked his rearview mirror.

  “Making sure that we don’t have a tail. The mob is tenacious, even more than American cops.” He gave me a pointed look.

  “I’m not really in the mood for banter,” I said. Lola, Anna, Red, Deedee, even Charlie. “They’re all still in that place. Those girls.”

  “And now we have evidence,” Dmitri said. “Isn’t that what you live for? The evidence?”

  “You know, Grigorii and Ekaterina aren’t just going to let us have this,” I said. “We can’t go back to your pack house.”

  “Kirov will meet us at a hotel room,” he said. “The Redbacks have a few safe houses scattered around.”

  “And we need someone who can break into this computer,” I said.

  “I’ll see if Kirov knows anyone,” he said.

  “Trustworthy,” I said. “No one weird or fly-by-night. Chances are the Belikovs have some kind of dead man’s switch on the hard drive. If we screw up cracking it, the whole thing will wipe.”

  “Always the optimist,” Dmitri said, pulling in to the parking lot of a small hotel.

  “I do my best,” I told him.

  CHAPTER 19

  The hotel was a small pocket of civilization in the long parade of urban underbellies that had become my life. It was boutique and old, stuffy and full of velvet and Persian rugs, but it was clean, warm and didn’t smell like bodily fluids.

  The old man minding the front desk passed over a key without a word, giving me the eye. I gave it right back, until he dropped his eyes down to his Ukrainian-language celebrity magazine. “Come on,” Dmitri said.

  The elevator was the old-fashioned kind that had a gate and a guy in a monkey suit to press the button for you.

  “Third floor,” Dmitri told him. The gate rolled shut and we started to move, at roughly the speed of a glacier.

  “Did that seem easy to you?” I said. Dmitri lifted his shoulder.

  “Nothing easy about getting attacked and assaulted by a witch, Luna. But you hit him a good one. He’ll live, but he won’t be pretty.”

  I leaned against the gate and rubbed my forehead. “It’s just … We broke in. We got the jump on him and his goons, and we got his computer. Aside from the gunshot, it was like some movie snatch-and-grab, total smooth sailing. He’s a witch, Dmitri. They never give anything away for free.”

  “Luna, you want to know what I think?”

  “Am I gonna hear it, anyway?”

  “I think you’re overanalyzing things,” he said. “We got what we wanted. Now forget about the Belikovs and let’s find my daughter so you can go home and I can get her back to her mother.”

  I sighed, but I let it go. Dmitri would never admit that he was wrong—another one of his charming traits. There had been good ones, too, don’t get me wrong, but the stuff that stuck with me was the temper and the stubbornness, the alpha-male attitude that made me feel like I was suffocating when we lived together.

  The hotel room was small, European-style, with a sink in the corner and a shared bathroom down the hall. I went to the window and checked the street out of habit. A few cars were parked along the curb, but no one I recognized was on the street.

  “I think we’re safe,” I said to Dmitri. “For now.”

  Kirov knocked on the door and came in, trailed by a thin girl with lank blonde hair and a laptop case. “This is Jocelyn,” said Kirov.

  “Yo,” Jocelyn said. I cocked my eyebrow at her.

  “You’re American.”

  “Canadian,” Jocelyn said, slinging her case onto the bed. “Where’s the machine you need me to crack?”

  “Jocelyn is a freelancer,” Kirov explained. “She kindly helps out the pack in exchange for our protection.”

  “Protection from what?” I asked her.

  “I’m not just a programmer,” said Jocelyn. “I was a technomancer back home, before some caster witches decided they didn’t like my look and chased me out of Toronto. Americans, naturally. I blame your country entirely for me living in this shithole.”

  “Well, at least she’s pleasant,” I said to Dmitri. Jocelyn heaved a sigh.

  “Do you want me to crack this machine or not?”

  Dmitri handed her the laptop. “We need the password, and the files.”

  Jocelyn sniffed. “Amateur hour. You really got me out of bed for this?” She booted up the machines and attached a USB cable from her laptop to Grigorii’s.

  “Hmm,” she said after a minute. “Maybe we’re not dealing with a complete moron. He’s got a working on his hard drive.”

  I blinked. “He enchanted his hard drive?”

  “Or had another technomancer do it for him. We’re common around here. Must be all the radiation or something.”

  “Can you crack it?” Dmitri said. He paced, too big for the space, and I grabbed his arm and jerked him into a chair.

  Jocelyn sighed, punching in commands on her own. “Give me a few minutes of peace, all right? I need to program a working to crack his security, and offensive spells take time.” She started typing, her keyboard the witch’s alphabet, and I felt a prickle of magick down my back.

  I retreated to the window again, keeping watch. I knew I was being ridiculous, hyper-vigilant, but seeing Grigorii again and feeling his hand against my skin had stirred the primal anger that lived deep in my hindbrain.

  “You all right?” Dmitri said at my shoulder. His hands traveled to my neck, massaging. “You look twitchy.”

  I jerked away from him. “Don’t do that.”

  He frowned. “I’m just trying to keep you calm.”

  “I am fucking calm,” I snarled. “I don’t want to be touched, all right?”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Dmitri said quietly. “If you’re cracking up, don’t do it in front of someone from my pack. You’re embarrassing me.”

  I looked back at him, saw the black spilling out from his irises, covering the green and white. Turning his eyes into the deep, fathomless oceans of inhumanity that let the daemon look back at me.

  “Dmitri,” I said quietly. “Look at yourself.”

  “You’re mine,” he hissed. “Whether you believe it or not. That man can put his hands on you, but he can never erase my mark.”

  Something about the voice triggered a memory in me, a daemon staring at me, hungering for me … and then backing away.

  Good parting, one who wears the mark of Asmodeus.

  My jaw set, and I took a step back from Dmitri, only to bang into the window.

  “Asmodeus?”

  “I warned you, Insoli,” he whispered, bending close to my ear. Dmitri’s hands reached out and grasped my arm, squeezing hard enough to bruise. “I warned you that we’d see one another again.”

  I was paralyzed, as much as if Grigorii still had me under his working. The last time I’d seen Asmodeus, the terms had been less than civil. The daemon had saved my life, and I had wiggled out of our bargain in return. Maybe not very sporting of me, but it was a daemon we were talking about, not a homeless orphan.

  “Nothing to say, Insoli?” the daemon whispered in Dmitri’s voice. His eyes danced, gold flaming up in the depths.

  “Leave,” I snarled. “Leave him alone. You don’t have a fight with Dmitri, you have a fight with me.” I shot a look at Kirov and Jocelyn, but they were absorbed in Jocelyn’s working. Not that they’d see what I saw. Asmodeus was shy.

  “You are so wrong, Insoli,” he purred. “So very, very wrong.”

  I raised my chin. “If you don’t leave Dmitri alone, I am going to summon you and exorcise you back into the Dark Ages. You know I will.”

  He laughed, low in his throat. “You aren’t a witch, Luna. You’ll kill him if you try and we both know that to be the truth.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I demanded. “What is it you want?”

  “To see you,” he said with a grin, fangs glimmering in the low light. “To tell you that I’ll be seeing you again. Sooner than you think.”

  I open
ed my mouth to threaten him again, but then Dmitri blinked and his eyes were his own.

  “What happened?” he asked. “What did I do?”

  “Nothing,” I said, easing myself out of his grasp. “Nothing happened at all. You just faded out there for a minute.”

  He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve got a bitch of a migraine. Kirov.” He walked over to his pack mate and got a pull from Kirov’s flask.

  I dropped into a chair, gripping the arms to stop my hands from shaking. I had never seen a daemon take possession of a person like that.

  Of course it was possible. Dmitri had been standing close enough to kiss me, speaking in the voice of the one daemon who wanted to take a pound of flesh out of my hide.

  My panic attack was interrupted by Jocelyn, who snapped her head up. “We’re in.”

  “That was fast,” Dmitri said.

  “Technomancer who put the wards on this machine wasn’t careful,” she said. “Left a hole as big as my head in his working. You really want people to stay out, you get someone like me to write a custom spell for your needs.”

  “We’re looking for business records,” I said. “Sales, financial transactions, that kind of thing.”

  “That’s your department, peaches,” said Jocelyn. “I’m just a locksmith. And I like to be paid promptly.”

  Kirov drew an envelope out of his pocket and passed it to her. “There you are, my dear.”

  Jocelyn saluted with the envelope of cash. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

  “That laptop belongs to some nasty people,” I spoke up. “Watch your back, Jocelyn.”

  “Dude, if the caster witches couldn’t catch me, some chain-smoking gangsters who can scribble spells aren’t going to be a problem,” Jocelyn said with a smirk. “I am that good. Catch you later, Dmitri.” She dropped him a wink and walked out.

  I snarled. Did every woman in Kiev know him intimately?

  Dmitri turned the laptop toward me. “Take a look.”

  “The records are in English,” I said in surprise.

  “Not the first language around here,” Dmitri said. “Smart, when you think about it.”