He raked his hand through his hair and sent me a look of outright pity.
"You shouldn't have it," he said with a note of urgency. "Give it to me." He held his hand out.
"The hell I will. You'll pay like anyone else."
"How much?" He said. "Tell me now. I have $10,000 cash on me."
My gaze flicked to his pocket. $10,000 was a lot of money. For a piece of stone. No, bone.
But it was also a hasty figure. One offered in desperation. If he was ready to give over $10,000 right away, it had to be worth more.
"Now," he said." Right now. I can give you the money and you can be gone and be rid of all of this."
Now I was beginning to understand. It really was all just a ruse. He almost got me. I'd been afraid there for a moment. Really afraid.
"There is no assassin is there," I said. "Because if there was, no amount of money would make a risk worth that."
"You're wrong," he said. "You have no idea what you're mixed up into. If you don't want to tell me where you got it, then just sell it to me. I can help you. You came to me, remember? Why hold it back now?"
"How do I know $10,000 is a fair price?"
"Honey, you're not in Kansas anymore," he said. "There's things you don't understand."
"I understand that someone who wants this thing enough to kill for might want it enough to pay for it."
He laughed at that, implying I was a complete idiot and I glared at him.
"Well, darlin', it's your funeral." He slapped me on the shoulder. "Suit yourself."
His hand ran down the length of my arm until it met my fingers. He lifted them to his mouth and kissed the tips then slipped my hands back into my pockets. My chest went all tight at the touch and I wanted to throttle my stupid libido as it panted beneath his gaze.
"It's your death," he said. "Take your chances with the fae's best assassin. See if she'll give you a fair price and let you live."
He turned heel and strolled off into the shadows. I sank back down onto the first stair, running the events through my mind. Things hadn't been right ever since that heist. A strange new mark on my arm. Fayed's peculiar transformation. The tile having heat that came from within when stone—no bone—didn't produce heat.
Nothing added up. Too many weird and unexplainable things. Starting with that guy disappearing just like my bug-out bag. I had a pang of grief as I thought of my poor cat, but I pushed the concern aside. Something interesting hovered on the fringes of my awareness, something that buzzed because Maddox had used two words to describe that woman in fatigues.
Fae and assassin.
Fae was not a word a man like Maddox would use. It was too ludicrous, too Goth teen or nerdy gamer.
Unless he believed it.
Occam's Razor be damned. There was no easy explanation that could cover all this weirdness and still be grounded firmly in the normal order of things. Not unless it meant those who played were entrenched in the belief of something out of the ordinary, playing with weapons that shot light and destroyed walls. I felt the burble of manic laughter clawing at my throat. Would that it was some sort of Dean and Sam Winchester Cos-play.
I wasn't the kind of gal to believe in fairies and unicorns and magic. I believed in a roll in the hay with the Winchester boys, but not their creed. Give me good hard cash, a bed with a dozen pillows. A life without fear. Those were the things I believed in.
I didn't need to understand what these actors were playing at or why. I didn't need to care what it was.
I just needed to understand the things I'd always counted on, the things that made me and people like me such an integral part of society's seamy underbelly. Things that were as constant as the stars: that knowing human nature was a selfish, greedy thing.
And a selfish, greedy nature was very good at getting me what I wanted. All I needed was a good deal of cash to buy me a new life in a new city. And I needed a buyer. The best buyer. If the people I dealt with believed in all that Dungeons and Dragons hooey, then I'd meet them where they played.
I was going to get my life back. Come Hell or high murky water.
And I wanted my damn cat back too.
CHAPTER 18
THE FIRST STEP IN SOLVING a puzzle—any puzzle—is simple. You need to be clear about what the end result should be, what the riddle really is. Puzzles have a way of looking like something else. Like the Half Lady Old Man picture, perspectives can change the outcome.
The way I saw it, only a few people knew I even had the—what had Maddox called it?—Odin rune? The stranger from Fayed's bar had died for it in that back alley. I knew that now. He hadn't just been a figment of my imagination. I gave him a brief thought as I hobbled along on legs that had ran far too much for one day and were still trembling from exhaustion.
He'd had the rune in his pocket. I had stolen it. The antiquities dealer had wanted it bad enough to try to tie me up in his back room. Maddox had wanted to buy it from me, he said, to keep me out of the trouble it would cause.
The so-called Fae assassin wanted it bad enough to try to kill me.
Whatever it was, it was deadly valuable.
I limped my way across town, following well-lit streets and staying on the busiest of the thoroughfares. No more back alleys for me until I was ready to confront whoever leapt from the shadows to challenge me, kill me or steal from me. And yes, I was worried about those things in that order.
The city at night was much like the city during the day except it was filled with people who thrive in the shadows or have no choice but to venture out in the dark. I'd always thought it was regular folks down on their luck who would want to remain in the shadows but after today, I realized it was far worse.
What are you, Maddox had asked me. As though I could be something other than human. As though something other than human was entirely possible.
The city looked like it had wound ribbons of light around its streets. Faces were a blur as they moved past me. The exhaust of cars idling as they waited for traffic lights reached out to my nostrils like a heavy musk.
I was walking like a zombie, following the trail of lights when I caught scent of oregano and roasted tomatoes.
I was famished. The fact that I didn't even know I was hungry was testament to how deep into the thinking process I was. It explained why the lights looked blurry, why the faces distorted as though they were behind panes of watered down glass.
It wasn't until I had to stop and lean against a building that I realized it was because I was spent and I wasn't seeing clearly. My eyelids kept trying to close but I stubbornly pressed on until I couldn't anymore.
I'd run through my adrenaline. That last pit stop a body makes before it's about to crash into a burning wall was already clearly on the horizon. I needed fuel.
"That you?" Said a familiar voice.
I swung my gaze sideways. Through the thicket of meanderings, I recognized the pizza parlor where I had met the old drunk. I recognized the old drunk too. He leaned against the building with a paper bag in his hand, held outstretched toward me.
"Yeah," I said slowly. I recognized my reluctance to pull out of the deep hole of thought I was in. My voice sounded thick with thought.
"Hell," he said, pushing himself off the wall with his foot and leaning in close to peer into my eyes. "You okay?" He nudged me with the bottle.
I shook my head. I couldn't risk even one drink to dull the panic. I needed my wits.
"Not okay or don't want to drink," he said of my response. "Never mind. Both the same things to me."
When he took a pull from the mouth of the bag, I had the feeling he was glad I didn't want any. He eyed me over the paper bloom.
The bag came away from his mouth just enough to speak again. "How's that leg of yours?"
I leaned sideways to peer at my calf. I'd forgotten all about his patch job of the dog bite. It seemed so long ago.
"Fine I guess."
"Don't look fine," he said. "Looks like it's giving you some sort of fever."
"That good, huh?"
"Let's just say I feel like I should do the chivalrous thing and give you my bedroll for the night."
I found myself chuckling at that. He smelled faintly of urine and something akin to vinegar but I didn't want to offend him.
He looked down at himself and grinned. "I don't look like I have a bedroll, do I?" he said.
I shook my head. "You don't look like you have much besides a wet cardboard box, no offense."
"You got me there," he said and lifted the bottle again. "But if I had one, I 'd give it to you."
I collapsed against the wall next to him, pressing my shoulders into the bricks and using the way they dug into my shoulder blades to keep me standing. Then thought better of it and skidded down onto my haunches. I was exhausted. I hadn't realized exactly how exhausted until I finally let my legs rest.
I stretched my legs out, and worried a discarded cigarette butt with the tip of my sneaker. A bus pulled up to the curb in front of us with a squeal of breaks and stink of diesel. I rested my head against the wall and before I realized my eyes had closed, I felt him nudge me with his knee.
"What?" I said.
"I asked you if you wanted a slice of pizza."
"You buying?" I expected him to say no and laugh at the joke, but when he confessed to having enough money for two slices, I decided to accept his chivalry. Especially since he looked so hopeful.
I nodded and he disappeared into the yawning door of the pizza parlor. My stomach gurgled in anticipation. I put my hand across my belly to calm it. That was when I felt my cell phone in the pocket of my hoodie. My cell phone. I could've sworn I put the tile in my pocket. I pulled it out of my bag before Kelly had blasted my cat and bug out bag into nonexistence. I knew I hadn't dropped it.
That left only one thing. Maddox. He must have stolen it.
The bastard.
I pulled out my cell phone and tapped the screen, typing in Kassie's number. If she had gotten in contact with him before, she could do so again. But this time she'd tell me where to find him, not just to meet him. I wasn't about to let him get away with stealing. Not from me. Not after everything I'd gone through.
Instead of texting, I let the phone ring. She picked up after a single ring.
"Your friend Maddox stole my goods," I said without preamble. It wasn't quite midnight, but I didn't care whether the girl was sleeping or roaming the streets.
"Let it go," the girl said. "It's not worth it."
"I'm not going to let it go." I pushed myself onto my feet and held the cell phone closer to my ear. "I want to know where I can find him."
"You won't like it," she said.
"I don't like any of it anyway," I said. "But he has it and it's valuable and I need it."
"It's good as gone," she said.
Despite how tired my legs were, how many people were pushing past me, making me bob and weave on the sidewalk, I started to pace.
"You don't understand," I said into the phone. "I have to have it." I couldn't tell her I planned to bug out. She might not give me the information I wanted. I needed her to believe things were status quo, even if they were a bit desperate.
I took a long pause to calm myself. No doubt I was sending off jittery vibes through the phone. Kassie wasn't a girl to trust jittery.
"I'm just pissed," I said, which was true.
She said something that I barely caught through the cell phone because in the next moment my wrist burned like someone had branded it. I dropped my cell phone with a clatter to the sidewalk.
I clapped down on the painful wrist instinctively with my other hand. It stung like a son of a bitch, and I worried there'd be a wasp beneath my hand, ready to dig its little ass back into my skin. I peeked beneath the palm with a fearful eye and caught sight of the forgotten mark. The little henna tattoo I'd obviously paid to have painted on myself in a fit of absinthe induced euphoria. I'd forgotten it was there in all the hubbub. Except it didn't look normal.
Now it was bubbling on my skin like water on a hard boil. It took a second for me to realize the hissing sound was coming from my own lips and not my skin.
Kassie's voice came up at me with a note of unusual urgency in her tone.
"Isabella?"
"I'm alright," I said toward the phone and through gritted teeth. I fell back against the wall. I didn't feel alright. In fact, I most definitely felt all wrong. Marks didn't just bubble and boil on bare skin. Not of their own accord. And I most definitely was not high.
I was losing my mind. That was what. I tried to count backwards to the last time I'd slept. How many hours did it take for a mind to begin hallucinating? Seventy two? Forty eight? My chest shuddered with my hitching breaths as I tried and failed to breathe without hyperventilating.
And through it all, I couldn't take my eyes off the damn mark. All I could do was brace myself against the stinging that remained and hope it wouldn't get worse.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.
So why didn't I feel relieved? Why did I feel as though something worse was about to happen?
I twisted my wrist in front of my face, twisting it this way and that. Normal. No sign of boils or bubbles. Just a reddish trail of ink. I scraped at it with my nail.
"Kassie, you ever get a henna tattoo?" I said to the phone on the pavement. Someone bumped into me, kicked the phone out of reach. Kassie's voice got lost in the sea of trousers and skirts.
In the next moment, someone clamped their hand down around the mark the same as I had. Male fingers with a soft but broad palm.
I expected to see Maddox when I lifted my gaze to the face of the man who held me.
It wasn't.
I'd only seen the face in the soft light of Fayed's bar and then again in the dark shadows of the back alley behind it. But I knew the features, the eyes. The face. I would never forget it.
The guy who was supposed to have disappeared into thin air.
"Where's my Odin rune?" he said.
CHAPTER 19
I STARTED TO PROTEST, but in the next instant, his hand left my wrist to shoot up to my neck. Those long fingers of his dug into my jaw while the heel of his hand rammed hard into my voice box.
I gagged as I tried to swallow and my eyes shed water. I didn't expect him to hoist me by my chin up above his head, and as my feet lifted off from the ground, it became harder to breathe. I gurgled beneath his grip as I fought to suck in air.
I had lived in the city for three long years, and I'd lived with hoodlums before that. I knew a city's underbelly. I knew people wouldn't want to get involved. They'd try to hide their gazes in their purses or their feet as they shuffled past things that made them uncomfortable, but I thought surely someone would be aghast enough at a woman my size being hoisted several feet into the air by her neck that they'd try to intervene. Shoot off a phone call to the police. Point. Stare. Something.
No one did anything. It was as though they couldn't even see me.
My eyes rolled in their sockets toward the door of the pizza parlor, hoping to see my drunk.
I rolled my eyes back toward the street, hoping for an outraged expression in the crowd and finding nothing but disinterested strangers.
I tried to call out to someone and coughed instead. The stranger's grip tightened.
"You haven't answered me," he growled.
As if I could with his hand cutting off my wind. I tried to kick him in the shins and found I didn't even have the strength for that.
My eyes flicked sideways over my assailant's shoulder again, hoping to see my old drunk strolling out from the pizza parlor with two slices of pizza in his hands. I wished so hard I almost expected to smell the oregano, and then I realized I couldn't in fact smell anything.
I couldn't feel a waft of breeze whisper along my cheek. Everything seemed to be filtered through a wash of UV light or night vision goggles. Nothing was clear anymore. Colors that should be vibrant echoes of yellow streetlights and neon signs shifted into
a greenish glow, and what wasn't tainted by an absinthe-esque hue was blurred and mottled as though the scene was a drawing on a chalkboard that something had run their sleeve over.
I had passed out before. Once when Scottie decided that his new favorite kind of sex play involved choking the breath out of me. This wasn't like that. This was just sort of... Dead feeling.
"Where is the rune?" the man said.
I struggled to meet his eye, to try to tell him without words that I didn't have it. To tell him that if he didn't stop soon I would never be able to get it or find out where it was.
His face was as placid as a lake at dusk. He felt nothing for my welfare, that was obvious. Choking the life out of me didn't affect him one bit. This close up, I could see every bit of stubble on his jaw, the scar that scored one of his eyebrows in half. I could see the look of determination in his eye.
I coughed beneath his palm as I tried to form a protest. I expected him to drop me back down onto the ground as he heard me struggling to speak, but he didn't. He tightened his grip.
Something flickered in his gaze and in that heartbeat between thinking I was going to pass out and deciding to kick to life with that one last bit of oxygen, there was a relaxing of the bubble of perception.
I could hear the traffic. I could make out a flush of color in my surroundings. He smelled of smoke and something that made me think of witches stirring bubbling cauldrons. Sulfur. That was it.
"No sense struggling," he said and leaned in closer. "No one can see us."
His lips touched down on mine and he drew in a long, yogic breath. I sagged against him, unable to even lift my hands to grip his forearms or scrabble with desperate fingers up to claw his face.
The edges of several bricks where they met mortar joints were digging into my back. I took a strange solace in the fact that they felt very real. The parts of my vision that had gone greenish started to turn black as I lost the last of my air to him.
He must've known he was stealing the rest of my air and that very soon he wouldn't have a puppet to question because he retreated. An angry look crossed his expression and he shook me like a man might shake a rag.
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