“Yes the office thing again,” I answered. “Of course I’m talking about the office thing. You might as well have hung an ‘Attack me here’ sign up over the door.” I shook my head. “I told you something bad was going to happen if I opened it.”
“You tell me something bad is going to happen when I go to get the mail, Uncle C. What? I’m supposed to stop the way the world works because you happened to be right one time? I get that—back in the day when there were like ten people running around—you could probably get away with doing things on the fly, but times have changed. You have to have an office if you want to do business.”
“And what if I don’t want to do business anymore?” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Don’t be like that,” Andy said instantly. “You know why you wanted to start this. I agreed with you. It’s important. Not because I’m worried about where your soul goes. I honestly think you’re a much better person than you think you are.”
“Tell that to the witches who sent this kid here,” I answered.
“Fuck the witches,” he answered loudly. “Fuck all the witches everywhere, and that includes giant, bubbly riding, good witches of the North. I couldn’t care less what they think. You’re not doing this for them, and I don’t think you’re doing it to appease God either. Whether you want to admit it or not, I think you’re doing this to prove to yourself that you’re a good person, that you’re maybe a person worthy of being able to save the world from what’s coming.”
The glimmer of worry in Andy’s eyes said everything his words hadn’t. He was the only person I told about the information I gleamed from Amber when I healed her. It was taking a few bouts of radiation therapy to cure me of the illness I’d transferred over from her. After all, it wasn’t going to kill me, and the sickness didn’t spread inside my altered DNA. The knowledge that this little girl might, in fact, grow to become the worst person the world would ever know; that was going to take more than radiation to get rid of.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” I answered.
“You never do,” Andy said curtly. “Doesn’t mean any of it’s going away.”
“And it doesn’t mean it’s happening today either,” I snapped back, hoping to drive home the point that this particular topic was off the table until I said otherwise. “We’ve got time to deal with what’s happening to Amber, if there’s anything even happening at all. Right now, there’s a woman lying on my floor who was burned to death by someone who wanted to send me a message. I have no idea who she was, no idea what that message is, and no idea what son of a bitch thought it was a good idea to ruin my evening.” I huffed. “I’m missing Top Chef for this.”
“I tried to get you to buy the DVR,” Andy said quietly.
“You know those things confuse the hell out of me. I’m not a fan of technological change.”
“Yeah, I remember the hell I went through trying to convince you to ditch your rotary phone,” he sighed. “Which officer was first on the scene and what did you tell him?”
“Her,” I said, motioning to a woman with curly red hair dancing down her back and a figure that was obviously impressive even dressed in loose fitting jeans and a large brown coat. “It was that one. I told her the girl came in here and lit herself on fire.”
“And she didn’t ask you why the floor wasn’t wet?” Andy asked, looking over at me. “This place has a sprinkler system in the ceiling. If the fire would have been natural, it would have produced smoke. I’m guessing whatever killed her didn’t, because it would have set them off.”
“Again with the damn technological advances,” I muttered.
“That either means she’s stupider than she is pretty, or she thinks you’re lying to her and she’s—at this moment—looking for evidence to put you away.”
“Oh good,” I said through clenched teeth. “Just what I need, another enemy.”
“Don’t worry,” Andy said. “I’ll take care of her. Do you have a blanket in the back room?”
I nodded.
“Good,” he said. “Head back there and put some scorch marks in it. I’ll plant it out here when I have time. You can tell people you put her out with it and that you were too shaken to say at first.”
“Well that makes me sound manly as hell, doesn’t it?” I quipped.
“Makes you sound better than guilty,” he said. “Now do what I said, Uncle C. You might have seven billion or so years of experience getting yourself into trouble, but I’m working on thirty years experience in getting you out of it.”
“Guess I can’t deny the truth,” I muttered and started toward the back room.
Shooting the police officers an almost distrustful look as I passed them, I moved back into the storage room which came with my office. It wasn’t that I disliked cops, per say. In fact, some of my favorite people throughout the millennia had been those who enforced rules and laws. It had been my experience they had some of the greatest hearts and moral compasses in the entire world. Call it a running thread. That wasn’t all they had though. Police officers, detectives, in particular, had an affinity for facts. They wanted to get to the bottom of things. It was their job, after all.
Facts weren’t on my side right now though. Regardless of what they found in my offices, it obviously wouldn’t lead them to the truth of this situation. They had no idea what was going on here and that made me nervous. It made me think I was going to end up in their crosshairs.
Not that something like that was on the top of my list of worries. I walked into the back room, closing the door tightly behind me and grabbing a blanket. Whoever convinced this poor pink haired kid to attack me on my own turf obviously wanted to make a murderer out of me…again.
It was probably witches. For whatever reason, witches seemed to have it in for me lately. All that aside though, there was also another worry weighing on my mind; a worry that took the form of-
“Hello Mister Callum,” a voice said from behind me. I spun around, taking in the origin of the voice; a girl who also happened to be the origin of the worry I was alluding to.
Amber stood in my backroom, staring at me and pulling on her fingers.
“I think we need to talk.”
3
Now usually, I was a pretty cool customer. To say I had experienced my share of shocks and surprises in my super-sized life would be an understatement of criminal proportions. I lived through Noah’s flood, the Ice Age, that time the Red Sox finally won the World Series, and an American election cycle that threatened to take the cake from all of them. During it all, I acted exactly the way someone who had seen it all would; with a cool calmness that bordered on near indifference.
I was eternal, after all. None of it affected me beyond a surface level. Sure, the Ice Age was a little rough, and it was hard to keep my head above water during the flood (so to speak), but I tried to make sure none of it touched me. The Big Guy cursed me and, though that curse came with more than my fair share of hardship, it also afforded me a certain distance from the rest of the world and its problems.
So none of it scared me; not really, not half as much as this little girl now standing in my back room did.
“A-Amber,” I stammered, trying to keep my voice steady and my cards close to the vest. I hadn’t said a word about what I believed about Amber’s true identity to anyone other than Andy, and it was going to stay that way. Sure, looking back at everything, it was clear to me that my mother knew the end was coming. She said as much right before she died, but I had no reason to believe either she or the witches who were working for her knew the shape it was going to take. As far as I could tell, the entire supernatural world looked at Amber as nothing more than a little girl with gypsy blood coursing through her veins. Sure, it was royal gypsy blood, but that sort of thing held little weight once you looked outside the Romani people themselves. So long as I could keep the fact that she might be the Antichrist a secret, there was no reason I couldn’t keep her safe from the world. Keeping the world safe from her,
that was a much more complicated endeavor.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, eyeing her up and down. “Does your mother know where you are?”
I hated the idea of treating this little girl with anything other than kindness. I hated the thought of seeing her as anything other than innocent. For all intents and purposes, she was exactly what she purported to be; a child with all the same vulnerabilities and complexities of any other. I couldn’t shake the feeling I felt when I transferred her sickness into my body though. I couldn’t help but remember the horror, the complete and utter darkness that filled me when I let my mind sink into what her future could be.
“No, Mister Callum,” she answered, her voice barely above a squeak as she looked up at me with bright blue eyes. “She thinks I’m in school.”
“Shouldn’t you be?” I asked, looking down at her and doing my best to keep my voice steady. “If you’re sick, you should call your mother. She’ll take you home.”
“I’m not sick,” she answered, shaking her head so that her bangs shook like a curtain above her eyes. “I haven’t been sick since the day we met.”
“Right,” I nodded, swallowing hard. “I’m glad to hear that, but it doesn’t answer my question. Why aren’t you in school?”
“Because I needed to be here, Mister Callum,” she answered, turning back to the stacks of papers and old books lining the shelves in this room. When Andy coerced me into taking this office, the one good thing I managed to find in it was a place to put some of the seemingly never ending collection of crap I’d acquired during the centuries. There were priceless paintings, ancient artifacts, and more than a few things that history would tell you had been lost forever. Amber wasn’t focused on any of those things though. Her tiny hands were busy, working through a series of books.
“Why?” I asked, shaking my head, putting my hesitation to rest long enough to remember I was talking to a little girl, and walking toward her. “Why do you need to be here, and what are you looking for?”
“A book,” she said, giving me absolutely no new information as she combed through my little makeshift library.
“I know you’re looking for a book, Amber. I can see that. What I want to know is what book and why?”
“I don’t know,” she answered flatly, pulling out the books one by one, looking them over, and putting them back. “He didn’t tell me which book.”
“What?” I asked, a flower of urgency blooming in my chest. “Who’s ‘he’? Who’s been talking to you about me, Amber?”
“He just said I’d know it when I saw it. He said I needed to give it to you.”
“If it’s here, then I own the book, Amber,” I answered, looking at her cautiously. “Why would you need to give me something I already own?”
She spun around to me, huffing impatiently. “Because you forgot!” she answered. “He said that you forgot. Don’t be sad though, Mister Callum. He said it isn’t your fault. He said that when someone lives as long as you have, you’re bound to forget a thing or two.” She shrugged. “I get it. Thirty years is a long time.”
“I’m not thirty, Amber,” I answered quickly. “And who’s telling you these things? Who have you been talking to? Do you see him in school?”
My heart leapt. Maybe I had been wrong to assume no one knew Amber’s secret. Maybe she was surrounded by covert people looking to use her for one reason or another. Maybe her very teachers were—
“No,” she answered.
Well, there goes that idea.
“I don’t see him at all, Mister Callum. I only hear him. You know, in my head, like a song.”
My body tensed. “You hear someone in your head, Amber?” The idea of mental illness and of that playing a part in the End of Days flitted into my mind. It as sad. It was tragic, and it was too simple. No. There was something else at play here. I could feel it. “What does he say?”
“He says I need to find the book. He says I need to remind you because you forgot. He said that, if you don’t remember, bad things are going to happen.” Her head dropped, her eyes moving to the floor. “He said bad things might happen either way.”
I knelt, looking at Amber and thinking of how much she looked like her mother.
“I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you, Amber. You know that, don’t you?” I asked, brushing bangs out of her eyes. As it had every time I’d seen her since she got better, my heart went to war with my head. I wanted to make good on the promise I had just made, to keep her safe at all cost. She very well might be the Antichrist though and, if that was the case, could I really keep her safe if it meant the entire world would pay the price?
“Oh no. You don’t understand, Mister Callum,” she said, blinking hard at me. “I’m not afraid. He’s not going to hurt me. That’s not why I’m helping him.”
“Then why?” I asked, my mouth tightening into a line. “Why are you helping him, Amber?”
“Because of the promise,” she said, full of pride. “I promised to help show you the book, and he promised to tell me the truth.”
“The truth?” I asked uneasily. “The truth about what?”
“About me, Mister Callum,” she smiled. “He promised to tell me what I really am.”
4
“Thank God,” Merry said, sweeping into my office like a dark haired tornado and pulling Amber up into a huge bear hug. She buried her face in the crook of the little girl’s neck and mumbled against her skin. “You shouldn’t have done that. Do you have any idea how scared I was? I had no idea where you were.”
Her eyes, glassy with tears of relief, moved up to meet mine. She mouthed ‘thank you’ before taking her daughter out into the hallway.
I turned to Andy, shaking my head and leaning against the wall. The cops had left a few minutes earlier, though the section of my apartment where the girl had set herself on fire was still sanctioned with caution tape and off limits.
Andy settled beside me, looking over at me with narrowed eyes and crinkled brows. “You still haven’t told her.”
It wasn’t a question. He knew me well enough to know the answer, and I knew him well enough to know how much he disagreed with my silence.
“It’s not as easy as it looks,” I answered, crossing my arms over my chest and glancing over at the detective who had grown up thinking of me as his uncle. The fact that he could know pass as my uncle was just a sliver of how messed up my curse was. I was staying the same age and everyone around me—Andy including—was getting older. He’d be dead before too long. He had fifty, fifty-five years max. The thought of that sent shiver down my immortal spine. An idea of a world without this guy was equivalent to no world at all, which was sort of ironic because if I didn’t find a way to stop Amber from growing up to be the greatest scourge the planet had even know, that’s exactly what we’d be facing.
“Didn’t say it would be easy, Uncle C,” he answered, shaking his head disapprovingly at me. “But, if I remember correctly, easy has never been your strong suit.”
“I’m sort of forgetting what my strong suit is these days,” I muttered in response.
“That’s bull,” Andy scoffed. “You know what’s right. She deserves to know the truth.”
A flare of anger flickered up inside of me. As much as I loved Andy, as much as I’d give anything to keep him safe and happy, he was overstepping here.
“What are you, like, forty-five minutes old, Andy?” I asked, pushing myself off the wall and turning to him. “I get that you think you know what I need to do. I understand that—for you—things might seem cut and dry.” I shook my head. “Trust me, kid. They’re not. I’ve been around long enough to know that people don’t always need what they think they do. Especially when you’re dealing with the supernatural.”
A memory shot to the forefront of my mind. Andy was on the ground back with the gypsies. A wolf had torn his throat out, and he was still and cold. The deal I’d made with Gabriel was what led me to being able to heal Amber in the first place. Withou
t that, I’d have had no idea Amber was any different from any other little girl running around the city. Of course, I couldn’t tell that to Andy himself. If he knew he had died at the hands of that werewolf kid or that the only reason he was walking around was because I indebted myself to the archangel Gabriel, he’d feel weird about it. He’d find a way to blame himself for all of this, and I didn’t want that. I didn’t go through what I’d gone through to save Andy’s life just to see him waste it on self-pity and misplaced pangs of responsibility. So, regardless of how much he might have thought Merry ‘deserved’ the truth, I couldn’t tell him the truth about himself.
“Is that what you would want for yourself?” he asked, looking me up and down.
“That’s not the same thing and you now it,” I responded, sighing loudly. “First off, this would never happen to me. I can’t have kids. You know that. It’s part of the curse. Secondly, Merry’s not like me. This fight, it isn’t hers. Knowing the truth would only hurt her, and I don’t want that.”
“Not her fight?” Andy scoffed. “It’s her kid, Uncle C. The way I see it, it makes it more her fight than any of ours.”
“Then you’re not seeing it clearly,” I responded. “I understand why you might think she could help matters, Andy, but trust me, I’ve seen it before. You come at somebody using the people they love, and they fall apart. Why do you think that lunar coven thought my mother was such a good teammate? Why do you think they took me back to the spot where I killed my brother?”
I couldn’t say his name. The last time I’d seen Abel, he told me he forgave me. That had been weeks and weeks ago. I was starting to forget what he looked like. Maybe the last time would be the last time ever. Maybe my brother had moved on. Maybe he was at peace.
Curse of Cain (Immortal Mercenary Book 2) Page 2
