An Easy Death (Gunnie Rose #1)

by Charlaine Harris

  The kidnappers might have other people near. At the least, someone was waiting for them to report, either in person or by telegraph or telephone. When that didn’t happen, a search would begin. The bodies would be found. If we had bad luck—maybe more accurate to say we had near-miss luck—then the other grigoris were on the spot in El Soldado . . . but if so, why hadn’t they joined in the kidnapping? Okay, maybe they weren’t close at all. That was great.

  Unless they were waiting for us in Ciudad Juárez.

  The bodies and the car would be found. Even if a lucky passerby stole the car, they’d hardly care about the bodies. Maybe I should have thought about Eli’s objections to loose bodies with more attention.

  Once the bodies were found, the search would focus on a tall male grigori and a short female gunnie.

  For the moment there was daylight and a road and a tank of gas. I had to make the most of those things. I hoped I never forgot how bad it was to be without them. I went a little slower than I wanted, mindful I wasn’t exactly myself—and neither was the Tourer, after my drive in the dark. Nothing seemed to be too banged or loosened to work, so far.

  If we weren’t ambushed and/or killed, we would reach Ciudad Juárez late this morning. And there we would find—maybe—the brother of Oleg Karkarov, and his daughter (or niece), too.

  It was great to have everything pinned down, all right.

  After a while I had to think of something to say to Eli. I knew he was suffering, and my own was recent enough to make it fresh in my mind. “What was Paulina to you?” I asked, and he startled. “Was she your teacher, or your lover, or . . . ?”

  He looked surprised. “Paulina was my sister,” he said.

  “I didn’t know. I’m really sorry, Eli.” I felt really confused. The accents? Peter was her brother, too? “Are your parents still living?”

  He looked even more confused than I was, for a second. “Not by the same parents,” he explained. “She was my sister in the service of the emperor. She was already a . . . tested wizard when I came into training. So we lived in the same building for a time.”

  “With your mom and dad?”

  “We don’t stay with our parents after it’s noticed we have power,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “We have to be trained,” he explained. “We have to concentrate. There’s a chance we could harm our families, by accident, or even on purpose . . . at least, the more volatile of the candidates.”

  I was almost too tired to be shocked, but not quite. “So you get taken away from your folks.”

  “Yes, put in the school in San Diego,” he said. “That’s where my brother Peter is now. At least . . . I think so.”

  “Real brother or magical brother?”

  “Both. Peter turned out to have the talent, like me.”

  Every answer led to another question. “You have more brothers?”

  “Two older half brothers, and two sisters who are younger.”

  “What do you do for the emperor?”

  “We cast spells of protection and we defend. There is always a bodyguard detail with him, and we get detailed to the care of the grand duchesses, too, wherever they may be. Those of us who have the gift of healing, we’re near the tsar. We are there when he receives the transfusions, to make sure it’s painless and that his body accepts the blood of another of the chosen.”

  I’d heard of blood transfusions. I’d never gotten one, or seen one, and I was glad of that. “It can’t be just any blood, you’re saying. It has to be special blood.” I’d always thought that blood was the same, no matter whom it came from. Now I was about to find out why that wasn’t so. Finally.

  “We’ve talked about Rasputin.”

  I nodded. “The holy man. Who wasn’t exactly a priest. He helped keep Alexei alive when Alexei had the bleeding sickness.”

  Eli said, “It wasn’t just Rasputin’s prayers that have kept Alexei alive, but his blood. It worked fine until Rasputin died, a month ago.”

  “I can’t believe Rasputin lasted this long. That’s a very long life.” I spoke slowly, trying to understand. From Eli’s expression this was really big information.

  “We kept the starets, the holy man, alive by magic,” Eli said. “Difficult magic. Dark magic.” This memory looked like a very unhappy one.

  “So, okay . . . you need more blood for Alexei, and maybe the baby to come, if it’s a boy. You have to have blood like Rasputin’s. But how do you know what to look for? Why do you think a child of Oleg Karkarov’s has the right blood?”

  “Rasputin was not a very moral holy man,” Eli said. “He was married, and had children by his wife. But aside from his marriage . . .”

  When I understood what Eli meant, I was shocked. “He had affairs with other women?”

  Eli nodded, not meeting my eyes. “Even calling the encounters ‘affairs’ is elevating them.”

  The other shoe dropped. Took me long enough. “And so he had other children?”

  Eli nodded again. “So we’re tracking those children to see if their blood has the same properties.”

  “What happened to his kids with his wife?”

  “Only one of them made it out of Russia with him. The rest were hunted down and executed.”

  “And how many bastards are there?”

  “At least four.”

  “You’ve got ’em?”

  “One of those died too early to beget any children himself, but the others did not. As you are well aware, Oleg Karkarov died last year. Rasputin’s illegitimate daughter, Irina, died a year before that, of the influenza. Irina’s male child is tubercular, her girl is a whore who has syphilis, so their blood is no good. Who knows what the tsar could contract from them? Another team is tracking a second Rasputin daughter in Poland. Paulina and I were sent to follow the trail of Oleg Karkarov. Since Oleg had some degree of magical ability, we had high hopes that his blood would be suitable. But of course . . .”

  “You’re hoping Sergei is his full brother.”

  “If he is, and the girl child is Sergei’s, we would have a much better chance of keeping everyone alive. If Sergei has a different mother or father, the child has to be Oleg’s for her blood to be useful. We know Oleg had the gift.”

  I’d been right to keep my mouth shut. I liked my blood right where it was, in my own body. Unmixed with anyone else’s. Time to move on in the conversation. “You got any ideas about how to find this Sergei Karkarov once we get to Juárez?”

  “Paulina was better at searching spells,” Eli said, sounding tired and way older than I knew he must be. “There are ways I can try.”

  I sighed, but I tried to keep it quiet. Eli dozed some, drank some more of the water we’d gotten at Ciudad Azul, and ate a scrap or two, which was about all we had left to eat. I wasn’t hungry, and he needed it more. I hadn’t lost someone really close to me.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gradually Eli began to look better.

  When the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez lined the road, and it became paved, I pulled over. “How much money you got?” I asked. Eli dug in his pockets. He’d been sane enough to get the money Paulina had had on her, too, though he’d looked disgusted with himself as he did. Like Paulina would need it.

  I figured it would get us through a week of eating and lodging, if we were careful.

  We. Wait. “Do you want me to just get lost?” I said.

  He stared at me. “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t keep Paulina alive,” I said. “I can get home on my own.” It wouldn’t be easy. I stiffened my spine.

  “How old are you?”

  The question was right out of the blue. “Nineteen,” I said.

  He looked at me for a long, long time. “Lizbeth, I need you to stay with me,” he said.

  Maybe he wanted to keep me by his side to make sure I wouldn
’t betray him. Or maybe he really needed me to help him. Or maybe he’d figured out who I was. All of these ideas had pluses and minuses. And my age had nothing to do with it. I couldn’t figure him out.

  “Okay,” I said. “How long do you think it’ll take you to find Sergei?”

  He closed his eyes. He was sending his tracking sense outward, or something like that, I guessed. “There are a lot of people here,” he said. “Maybe I can find him in a few hours. May take another day. Or two.”

  That was better than I’d hoped. “Here are some choices,” I began. I’d been thinking during our long, quiet drive. “We can dump the car—it’ll be gone in hours—or we can sell it to a dealer. If we sell it, whoever’s after you might see it in the lot and try to find out who sold it, where they went. Or we can sell it to some random person on the street. We won’t get much, but something. Or we can try to hide it for a while and try to drive it back. Maybe we can find a garage to rent, something like that.”

  Eli said, “Which do you think is best? We have papers for the car.” He dug them out of the glove compartment. The papers were made out to Esai González.

  “This helps a lot,” I said with relief. “Since we have a Mexican name on the papers, I think you could sell to a car dealer pretty easily. But you’d need to wear a disguise, or spell yourself to look different.” I had a hideous flash of the thing that had looked like a pretty woman, the thing that had looked like Eli’s brother Peter. “Or we could hire a go-between.”

  “Is your Spanish good enough to do it yourself? Can you be taken for a native?”

  I was even more relieved to see that Eli was back on track. “No.”

  “Only if I keep my mouth shut.”

  Like I did this all the time. “I’ll look around and ask questions,” I said. “While you keep out of sight.”

  That was easier said than done. We drove into a busy area, not downtown Juárez, but maybe a bustling lower-class neighborhood. Eli waited with the car, parked out of sight behind the Espinoza Speedy Gas Station, after we got Señora Espinoza’s permission and gave her some money. Eli stretched out his legs in the car and seemed ready to sleep some more when I left, leaving my guns behind as simply too conspicuous. Going by the women I’d noticed in the streets, an armed woman wearing pants would stand out enough to attract more attention than I wanted.

  I wandered around the open-air market. I bought a skirt, a blue blouse, and a hair kerchief, bigger and cleaner than my filthy bandanna. I bargained for the items hard as I could, in the interest of fitting in. It seemed to work. No one challenged me in any way. No one seemed to realize I was on the run with a terrible wizard in quest of blood. No one tried to shoot me. I enjoyed that.

  I went back to the car to change. I shucked my pants and strapped a Colt to my left thigh. Uncomfortable, but being armed made me feel like myself. Then I put a knife in the conveniently deep right pocket of the skirt. I pulled off the shirt I’d worn for more hours than I cared to remember. There was a pump in the yard, and I ran some water to rinse myself off. It helped, a little. Then I pulled on the blouse. I turned to Eli in time to see him take a deep breath and look away.

  “Can you tie this in back for me?” I waved the kerchief at him. “I want to look like I’m hiding a lot of hair.”

  Eli nodded. I handed him the black-and-blue square, folded in a right triangle. It felt funny, his fingers on my neck. “Take this with you,” he said, handing me a rock. “Easier to handle than a weapon you have to draw from, ah, under your clothes. And just as potent.”

  “Why?” It was just a rock. It didn’t sparkle or shine, it didn’t feel different from any other rock I’d ever held. It was small, about the size of a marble.

  “If you need to fight someone quickly and quietly, just throw it at them. For when you can’t shoot because the noise would attract attention,” Eli explained.

  “Do I have to hit them with it?”

  “That would be ideal, yes,” he said with a faint smile. “At their feet would be good, too. Oh, and be as far away as you can.”

  I left Eli in charge of the car, which held my bag of weapons and our personal things. I started to order him not to move from the car, but I held my tongue. “Be back as soon as I can,” I said. I was proud my voice came out so steady. Off I went to pick out a go-between from all the people moving up and down the streets.

  Since I didn’t know exactly what kind of person I was looking for, it took me longer than I wanted. There were plenty of idle people who had nothing to do, and all of them needed money. But most of these idlers would disappear without actually helping me, and some of them would try to kill me to take any other money I might have on me. A very few of them would go to the police.

  Finally I spotted a thin man in his sixties. His clothes were just short of ragged. There were plenty of people in the same condition, but what stood out about this man was his straight back. He had dignity. And he was clean. He didn’t have his hand out to beg. He had nothing to do but be in that spot.

  “Señor, por favor,” I said, and he turned to face me. He had only one good eye. His left eye was covered with a patch made out of someone’s patterned shirt.

  “Señorita,” he said, nodding politely.

  I told him a story about family disasters: My Mexican father had died suddenly, here. My Texoman mother was ill, and I had to return to her to take care of my little brothers. I had to sell my father’s car. But I was not wise in the ways of selling large vehicles, and I was a stranger in town. Without my father’s guidance, I was afraid I’d be taken advantage of. I would be so grateful if he would assist me. I was afraid (more fear) the car dealer would cheat me if I was not accompanied by a man.

  Whether or not José Reyas believed my whole story, he knew I was in trouble and frightened (and that was for damn sure). Señor Reyas agreed to help me for a percentage of the sales price of the car. We would have to go to a dealership where he was unknown, he pointed out, since he had to be Esai González.

  “Then we will do that,” I said in my careful Spanish, wondering how many car dealerships knew who Señor José Reyas was. “If you have some idea where such a place might be?”

  After a moment’s thought Señor Reyas nodded.

  “Then I can meet you two blocks north of here in the automobile,” I said.

  “You can drive, señorita?” He looked taken aback.

  I nodded. “My father taught me. My mother is too scatterbrained.” I was sure glad my mother couldn’t hear me say that.

  “You are a very composed young woman,” Señor Reyas said, not entirely with approval.

  “Life is hard, señor,” I said. Like he needed reminding. “So here is the percentage of the price of the car I will give you if we sell it successfully. . . .”

  I returned to the gas station to retrieve the car, and found Eli sitting on a wooden chair in the shade in the little courtyard behind the garage. He had a cold soda to drink, and he’d picked up a broken piece of pottery and was turning it in his fingers. He seemed . . . distant, but calm. Wasn’t expecting that. I told him what was happening. Seemed he was not in the mood for talk.

  I unloaded our belongings from the car and left them at Eli’s feet.

  Though I was not completely sure Señor Reyas would show up at the designated spot, he did. He got into the car with some misgiving but gave me clear directions on how to get to the car dealer.

  We didn’t talk much on the way. I’d figured the older man for a conversational person, but I’d been wrong. When we got out of the Tourer, and Tomás of Hermosa’s New and Used Vehicles came out of his little shack, I found out why Señor Reyas had been quiet. He’d been prepping for his amazing performance as Esai González.

  The old man explained to Tomás—I never heard his proper last name—that since his accident (he gestured toward his eye patch), he’d had great difficulty driving the car. Even to c
ome to the dealership, his lowly granddaughter had had to help him. Though Señor Esai González was very reluctant to part with the car, González’s wife had persuaded him the money would be more useful now that he could not work at his chosen trade.

  My new grandfather made it clear to Tomás that this was a preliminary visit only, so he could see how much money might be made. Señor González implied he had already visited several other dealerships.

  The owner nodded furiously, said that made great sense, and the haggling commenced.

  I think Señor Reyas, in his new identity, had a pretty good time. He had thrown himself into his new role. And he had an incentive to drive up the price as much as he could, which helped. During the negotiations, when a certain level was reached, my new friend turned to me with his good eye and raised an eyebrow. I nodded, keeping it a very small gesture. I approved the deal. Soon after that the car was sold. Trying not to smile with pleasure, Señor González and I walked away with beautiful Mexican cash.

  When we had taken a seat in the corner of a cantina, we divided the money in as secret a manner as possible. After it was done, Señor Reyas said, “I thought you would kill me after the bargain was reached.”

  Yet he’d gone forward with the plan.

  Sitting, the old man and I were almost the same height, so I could look into his eye. I couldn’t think of anything to say. If I’d thought he’d run to the police or the enemy grigoris, or if I’d decided he’d sell the information about a half-gringo girl selling a car that didn’t belong to her . . . I would have killed him.

  “Go enjoy the money,” I told Señor Reyas, and he left without a word. I had no idea what he’d do with his profit. Was there a Señora Reyas? Grandchildren? Did he even have a home? Whatever he chose to do, I hoped it brought a smile to his face.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was a long walk to where I’d left Eli at the Espinoza Speedy Gas Station. I entered the little courtyard from the back way. I wasn’t anxious to come under the eyes of Señora Espinoza again.