Wicked Weapon (Dark Hearts Book 2)

by Cari Silverwood

  She only nodded and smiled.

  I’d explained myself carefully, like it was a clause in a contract.

  And behind me? I left two men dying who’d thought they had a stake in my life. Neither did. Not anymore.

  Fuck all the mesmers.

  The one ahead of me? He would pay dearly.

  Chapter 32

  Zorie

  Maintain the rage. So important. One mistake and, even wounded as he was, Einar might take me over.

  From above came the sounds of more shooting, then the boom of something bigger. Grenades, I guessed. Mavros’s allies meant to win.

  They’d have medics up there. He might live. He might.

  I trotted along the corridors, following the blood, except for checking out Grimm’s room as we went past. Peta waited at the door. I couldn’t afford this time wasting, this sentimental shit. But...I scrabbled under the bed with my arm, blindly, and found the book.

  After tossing it to Peta to hold, we kept going, tracking the wounded mesmer.

  Mesmers. No one had known they existed who could do anything about them, except now everything had changed. Now there was me.

  We caught up to him at the steel security door. Through the opening, I could see the lights flickering on inside. I knocked Einar down with a kick to the back and sent him sprawling and moaning to the floor inside the room. The skirt of the little, white dress was a perfect length for swirling out of the way of kicks. I doubted they’d chosen it for that reason.

  Peta and I entered, scanning for others.

  Empty. Just us.

  From the lack of shooting, he had no ammo. Perhaps there was some hidden in this grotesque computer room. I’d never seen inside it, except through the grille. I kicked Einar again, right where the blood showed. He yelped then curled up, clutching his abdomen.

  He’d lost heaps of blood on the way and was already finding it hard to breathe. I kicked him again, just to satisfy my rage. It made me burn even brighter.

  Fuck you. I kicked his jaw then finally remembered to kick his pistol aside. Anger was making me sloppy.

  “Let’s get him in there.” I nodded at the film-making room. I hauled on his collar and arm, and we managed to drag his heavy carcass in. I stopped in the middle of the dungeon-like setting. “Here will do.”

  A chain dangled down. I strolled to the wall and selected a large metal hook that had a small coupling at the non-pointy end. A butcher’s hook for holding the meat in freezers? Ideal. There were manacles and zip ties too.

  There was no doubt in my mind that he’d used the hook on people, on women.

  “No regrets,” I muttered as I connected the snap-on coupling to the end of the chain.

  Einar was looking up at me, blood dripping between his fingers. I circled him, keeping out of range of his legs.

  “Not begging?”

  He only screwed up his mouth into a snarl. “Want me to pay you?”

  “Fuck no. I want you to tell me where you were going.”

  He stared then seem to decide telling me was good. “Out. Keep going down the corridor, past the greenhouse entry. You can escape. Many, many yards from the house.”

  I calculated the likelihood. The Wars of Roses, maybe even some other wars, might’ve stirred the landowner to make a tunnel. It explained this whole subterranean system, though it must’ve been enlarged since then.

  “Don’t want us to take you?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll make my own way out.”

  “Really?” I kicked him again, on the gunshot wound, to take his mind off what we did. Then I commanded Peta to help me tie his hands at his back then lift him to his feet.

  It was difficult. The man was heavy. We managed. We poised him standing, swaying, with the hook at his back, nudging his shirt, just beneath his ribcage. I knew anatomy. I knew what would happen if we let him go. If we shoved.

  Peta waited obediently on his other side. She was more muscular than me. Without her, I couldn’t do this.

  I was about to make her kill a man and not in any ordinary way. Without asking if she wanted to. But...she would. Any of the women here would want this.

  I sucked in a breath. This was murder even nastier than what I’d committed upstairs.

  “Pick him up.” We strained but held him on his tiptoes. “Now.”

  And then...we dropped him. The hook sliced in, sweet as a knife into butter.

  His scream pierced the room and kept going for a while, making my ears hurt, until at last he merely swung there, whimpering.

  Well, he wasn’t dead yet. Not quite murder.

  Besides, I’d thought of something.

  I leaned in and whispered. “I need you to tell me something else. Tell me and this ends quickly.”

  I wasn’t sure this was incentive. Could you ever hurt enough that you’d want your own death? The hook would be buried almost six inches up inside his chest cavity. His lungs would be mangled, his diaphragm pierced. If I added my weight, it’d go even deeper, maybe reach his heart if I wiggled it.

  That would kill him.

  “Yes. Yes.” He sobbed. His words were hushed, his breathing erratic. Death was seeking him out.

  “Tell me then.” Though I smelled smoke, the firing upstairs had stopped. “Tell me and I will be kind.”

  I was true to my word, mostly. When he answered my question, I only counted to twenty with the gun inside his mouth before I pulled the trigger.

  His head jerked back, blood spraying. Brains spraying too, I hoped. I stepped away.

  Einar slumped forward, convulsing, with the hook projecting from his back. When his legs collapsed, his body swung.

  My first dead mesmer. Peta stared at me blankly.

  The hairpin. Slowly, I pulled it from my hair. This seemed so appropriate. I inserted it into his ear canal and wriggled it. Finding the weak spot of the foramen hole took me a while, but at last I managed to jam it in deep, all the way to his brain.

  My revenge seemed somehow more complete. I had a macabre wish to take a snapshot.

  “You were right. That is a hard way to kill someone.”

  Peta said nothing to me in reply, of course.

  “Time to go.”

  I let her come with me when I ran. Why? Because I might need her in the future.

  I should’ve let her go then, I knew that. It was what a good person would’ve done.

  As we drove off in the battered BMW that had waited in a garage outside the tunnel’s end, ambulance lights were flashing along a road, higher up, on the slope of a hill. There was flame up there too, reflecting off the clouds. The mansion was on fire.

  Chapter 33

  Zorie

  The wind riffled my hair, whipping strands across my face, but I brushed and held the hair away, and kept staring out across the city of Amsterdam. Sitting here, cross-legged on the faux sandstone of Bernardo’s penthouse wall, reminded me of that other time – when I’d wanted to die because Reuben said I should.

  I’d let Peta go a day after we escaped. I had to. My conscience had returned once the rage died down. What I’d made her do, helping me kill Einar, it’d been wrong. Ironic, really. I’d crossed into mesmer bad-guy territory the first time I grasped the power. I could make women do my bidding. I could, I thought, go deeper than the male mesmers. I knew things about Peta she’d never told me.

  The power was addictive. To leave Britain, I’d needed a passport, a plane seat, or a way to get on a boat that would cross the channel without anyone knowing – impossible, the last was, in this age of radar and the refugee mass migration. The only way was to find a susceptible woman at an airport, someone I resembled closely, a woman who travelled alone. It’d taken me two days of mingling then I’d pounced. I’d left her wandering London airport and taken her ticket to France.

  The process of working my way up here to Amsterdam had taken even more use of my new power. I was here illegally, but Bernardo hadn’t minded, not once he saw my body, touched me, watched me undress at his comm
and. Like many mesmers, he was a loner, and he was rich.

  And set in his ways.

  I picked up the one thing I’d brought with me on the whole journey – Grimm’s diary.

  For the first time, I opened the pages. This wasn’t really a diary; it was just an old book he’d adapted. The sun was rising, coloring the horizon, making the dark pages brighter. I had plenty of time and so I waited, thinking over what I’d done.

  I knew I hadn’t killed him. Though it’d appeared as a small story about a gang of thieves and a police shootout, it had been in the news. Someone was keeping it quiet – the hand of Mavros, most likely. He and Grimm were mentioned, without names, as being among the survivors recovering at a hospital in London – the man with a throat wound and another man with a single chest wound. Police enquiries were continuing, the article had read.

  I hadn’t killed him. The relief I’d felt when I found that out had been a sad reminder. We’d shared so much. Yet I’d vowed to rid the world of as many mesmers as I could.

  I glanced down at the book. The wind was playing with its pages now, flipping them. I put my hand down to stop them turning.

  Grimm was different.

  The open page showed a sketch of a woman’s hand. I guessed it was mine. In the back of the book, where he’d found completely blank pages, I found some lines from a poem, and a sketch of the back of my neck where the raven tattoo rested.

  When had he done this? Was it from memory?

  I put my hand up to touch the tattoo, while I began to read the poem. This was a tattoo I could never see without a mirror and some gymnastics – and it was Mavros’s tattoo of ownership.

  I should probably have it removed.

  The poem was all about love. Who could’ve guessed such a man as Grimm would write such things?

  Me. I’d known. He’d been sweet, at times. Caring.

  My eyes watering, I ripped out the page and flung it into the air, watched the wind carry it away, a hundred feet above the wakening city. As I read and studied the other pages, when done looking at them, I did the same. I ripped them out and threw them.

  Best if I wasn’t reminded too much of what might have been.

  Afterward, with the book in hand, a book now empty of traces of Grimm, I hopped off the sandstone wall. I paced back inside, to Bernardo’s bedroom. The opaque ivory-cream curtains blew against my face, blinding me.

  I kept walking. There was nothing in the bedroom that could harm anyone.

  I placed the book on the bedside table and sat to look at him, this man caught by surprise by death. He lay sprawled, half on his side, with his face buried in the sheet. The hairpin that I’d found at the markets projected from his ear, sticking up like a miniature flagpole. I’d drugged him first, this too-trusting man, then I’d watched him fall asleep in the middle of trying to fuck me. Then, only then, had I screwed the hairpin into his ear canal. I was getting better at finding the foramen that led to the brain.

  Maintain the rage. It’d worked so well. He’d thought he commanded my obedience. Fool.

  “Well.” I nodded to the blank-faced naked woman sitting on the chair, on the opposite side of the bed. “Now you are free.”

  Or at least she was until another mesmer collected her. There was one solution to that problem.

  I rubbed my face with my hands and peered out. “Three down. This is only the beginning.”

  Epilogue

  Grimm

  Hauling the IV drip and the stand all the way to Mavros’s room was taxing, even though his was next door to mine. The police officer let me past. I wasn’t sure why he was still here. In the ambulance, Mavros had given me the impression he’d have this cleaned up fast. At least they hadn’t charged me with anything.

  Mail had come today and I figured I should talk to him.

  I closed the door after I entered. I’d need some privacy.

  The man nodded and tossed aside the newspaper he’d been reading. The throat wound mightn’t have killed him but I’d heard he’d been under the knife, same as me. The bandage looked formidable, after all these days.

  I had a few bandages myself, as well as stitches to a wound on my head that I’d never noticed during the gun battle. The patch of shaved hair made me look like a ragged mongrel. I’d get the hairdresser who visited to shave the rest short to match

  Mavros and I studied each other.

  “Truce?” I asked.

  “Were we at war?”

  I sat on the end of the bed. “I don’t know.” We’d both wanted Zorie, but maybe his part of it was business. I held up the opened package. “I got mail today.”

  He inclined a brow. “From...her?”

  “Yes. Guess she figured out we survived.” It’d pleased me that she had, even though she’d shot me. Despite my trauma, I’d seen what she’d done to Kaage.

  “I don’t think she quite meant to kill you.”

  “No. One shot.”

  “Yes.” His mouth twitched. “You needn’t worry about ramifications. I’m told it’s being painted over, whitewashed. Though you will be on a notifiable list, so...if you travel.”

  “Uh huh.” One day I’d beat out of him how he’d done this.

  “Your mail?”

  I glanced at it then slid the book from the packet. The torn-out pages still troubled me. This was a message from her. I guess she meant it as a final goodbye as well as a sorry. Inside was a single, pressed daisy, like the one I’d given her in the greenhouse, and a single word. Bernardo.

  “She’s alive too. This is postmarked Germany.”

  “Mmm. Why are you telling me this?”

  “She’s controlling women. Same as you, same as all mesmers.” I looked sidelong at him. “Did you know?”

  “That it would do this to her?” he drawled out, slow, as if I’d made him think. “No. But, I will say this, though the bug affected my women in slightly different ways, it wore off all of them.”

  I sat up straight, playing with the plastic tubing where it ran down the stand. That was news. It would wear off? “Good.”

  “Good? You’re planning on finding her?”

  “She wrote one word in this.” I held up the book. “I googled. It’s the name of a man murdered two days ago in Amsterdam. He had a hairpin stuck in his ear.”

  The door opened and a doctor arrived. Mavros eyed me bemusedly while I was stethoscoped, or whatever it was termed, and examined, and notes were taken.

  “Great. No drainage for a day. That last bleed seems under control,” the doc said cheerfully. “We’ll have that drain out of your chest tomorrow.”

  “Good. No fevers?”

  “No. Why?”

  “I was getting these chills, even before I was shot. Like a flu.”

  “You’re lucky that didn’t progress. A respiratory infection on top of a gunshot wound?” He tsked.

  “So. Tell me.” I shifted on the bed. “Can you get the same flu again?”

  “Hmm. Not once you’ve developed an immunity. Not exactly the same one.” Like most medical people he seemed to enjoy communicating his knowledge.

  “Right.”

  “Though if you received a second, large dose while your immune system was processing the virus, it could escalate again and become a full-on infection. Plus you’re under stress from the trauma. Which is why I don’t want you wandering far. You had major surgery. Five more minutes max then back to your room.”

  He waggled his pen at me then left before I could ask anything else.

  “You’ve been a bad boy,” Mavros intoned.

  I scowled. “Not the time for jokes, man.”

  “It’s always time for jokes.”

  I grunted then rubbed my forehead. “You got your revenge. You done? Finished?” I eyed him from under my brows.

  Oh the silence was pregnant. He knew.

  “Not if you aren’t. She’s resistant. She’s different. The effects may never wear off and you’ll never find her without my contacts. Hell...” He picked up his pape
r again. “You’ll never have a chance at getting her to sit still without me. You’re not even a mesmer.”

  Smug bastard. I checked again and felt the whispers in my mind. One of the nurses here was a collectable. My power was weak but not quite gone. I could detect susceptible women.

  I stood and walked to Mavros, drip stand and all, plucked the newspaper from his fingers and leaned in to glare. “I may have a solution for that.”

  “Really?” While he was still assessing my assault on his paper, I leaned even farther, and I kissed him full on the mouth, making sure there was tongue, before he managed to shove me away.

  I laughed, clutching at my chest. “Fuck. That hurt.”

  “You’re not my type. Zorie is my type. Women in general are my type. Understand?”

  “Don’t worry. I don’t even like you, you bastard, but if we need two mesmers to get her to sit still, I want to be one of them.”

  “I see.” He nodded, mouth down-turning as he considered my logic. “You’re a stubborn man. I don’t like your chances.”

  “I do.”

  I would wait and see, as always. I always won in the end. Somehow I would do this.

  “Why do you want to find her?”

  I picked up the book, and sat again, feeling the bumps of the old cover. “Because she shot me and I never had chance to explain myself. Because she’s a friend and I think she’s headed for disaster.”

  I knew what mesmer powers could do to you. You mind-fucked yourself, daily, if you were a good person. She was that.

  “Because you want to fuck her, in other words.”

  I frowned at him.

  “If you were honest, you’d say that.”

  “I have. Fucked her.”

  “Fuck her more then.”

  “Maybe.”

  I was honest, and honestly, it was that and because she needed rescuing now more than ever. I was willing to take the chance of becoming a mesmer. I could handle it. I had experience. She, most likely, would spin off into space.