Killing humans—particularly the law—tended to attract unwanted attention.
That went double, now, given all the sanctions coming down from Washington. Laws being considered about what the hell to do about this sudden supernatural problem flooding the streets. As if vampires were new. Just because everyone had refused to open their eyes for 10,000 years didn’t mean this was suddenly a hot button issue.
Try telling that to the news anchors. I caught a glimpse of the grainy dashcam film playing on the living room set, footage by this point burned into the world’s brain. There was Kalos, half-demon, stepping into the frame and cooking close to a dozen daywalking vamps in a towering pillar of flame.
The police cruiser’s onboard cam caught everything. Never mind that he was saving the cops.
Once incontrovertible proof was out in the open, a stream of vitriol poured from the floodgates. Kalos was #1 on the FBI’s most wanted list. Laws needed to be passed. Internment camps set up.
Fear was a hell of a motivator.
It rarely motivated good things.
The gunfire outside ceased as the sirens approached. I expected for it to start up again almost instantly, this time directed at the cops.
Jameson and I were both enemies of the state: essence running through our veins. A danger to the billions of mortals littering the planet’s surface, squeezing the life out of the environment like juice from an orange.
I didn’t start burning fossils to power my luxury SUVs. Somehow, though, I was the asshole.
Hidden below the living room table, I listened and waited. All I could hear was Pearl’s strained breathing from the first floor guest room.
Double booking. A bounty hunter’s worst nightmare. That left you with two problems: the mark and a second party gunning for a payday. And most fellow hunters didn’t have any sort of qualms about putting you down to secure the coin.
We’d done all the work. Then Jameson had showed up and shelled the house with a damn blitzkrieg, eager to cash in on the score.
Wasn’t the first time a rival had tried to put me down.
This was new, though.
Because instead of gunfire, I heard Jameson offer the squealing cruisers what sounded like a greeting. It was tough to tell with the sirens, of course, but the lack of gunfire really gave me all the information I needed.
They weren’t here for him.
My stomach twisted, vengeance clouding my mind.
I’d been set up.
Someone wanted me out of the picture.
A voice came over a bullhorn. “Come out of the domicile with your hands above you head.”
I racked my mind. That wasn’t going to happen, but opportunities for escape weren’t exactly jumping out at me from the copy-and-pasted semi-furnished interior. It was a shame most of Jameson’s guys were lying in pools of their own blood. I could use a sounding board.
But that’s what they got for trying to edge in on my mark after the job was done.
Pearl let out a spirited groan. I dragged my ass toward the bedroom, stomach doing backflips. The battle had been my focus, distracting me from the bigger problem.
I wanted to close my eyes as I entered, like a little kid making a wish. But that wasn’t the way real life worked, so I didn’t.
Propped up against the single bed, ruining the sky-blue bedspread, Pearl sat, hands clutched over the gut wound. I wasn’t a doctor, but you see enough people die over the years and you become familiar with the concept of triage.
This was looking like a black band situation, given her ashen complexion. If she wasn’t a Seer, the essence giving her a little extra resilience against death, a bullet in the brain pan would’ve been the kind move.
Her black hair was more mussed than usual, ageless face finally showing a few hints of the years.
“You know what you need to do,” she said.
“I’m not leaving.” I knelt, keeping one ear cocked outside. After I’d put down the initial assault with prejudice, no one would be storming the front door. But, sooner or later, impatience would win out over prudence. And I didn’t have enough ammo to mop up the rest of Jameson’s team and half the Phoenix PD.
“Don’t be a goddamn idiot.” Pearl tried sitting up straight, like she would give me a stern talking to. But her hands buckled beneath her, and I had to catch her myself. “Come on, none of that.”
She gave me a weak shake and I let her go—but not before she was propped up again properly.
Plans and orders filtered through the bullet holes with the midday sun, the words much too far away to give me any sort of actionable intelligence.
“This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be,” I said.
“You sound like you’re fourteen.” Pearl’s eyes drifted shut. “You can see it, the same as I can.”
I’d been ignoring the wisps, pretending the proverbial writing on the wall was wrong. Truth be told, I didn’t need to hear the police’s plans or where Jameson needed to go. There was a path out of here, weak points in the perimeter that would disappear shortly.
But they would allow me to slip out from this stifling suburban hell hole intact.
Alone.
“They were wrong about the job,” I said.
“Christ, intuition can’t tell you everything.” Pearl grunted, lips pale. “Sometimes you gotta use your brain.”
“You wanted the payday.”
“And look where that got me.” Pearl wrinkled her nose, annoyed by her own blindness. We all have blind spots: where someone—normally smart, or careful, or whatever character trait defines you as a human being—suddenly throws everything to the wind.
Pearl, ever the skeptic. Here it was: that one little exception.
That one little exception that always jammed a shiv in your throat.
“I taught you to survive,” Pearl said, an order behind the words.
Here was mine.
The little exception.
The part where your life changed forever.
I said, “Wait here.” And when I got in the door, I added, “And don’t fucking die on me.”
“Hey—”
But I slammed the flimsy plywood shut, making sure I couldn’t hear the response. Looking at the blood and grime streaking my forearms, munition already mostly spent from a day of fighting off a siege, I didn’t need intuition to tell me that it was the wrong move.
I went to the window by the door, peering out at the growing throng of men. SWAT. Jameson’s mercenaries.
And I knew what I had to do.
I aimed down the shotgun’s sights.
And I pulled the trigger.
21
Present Day
Day 10, 6:53 AM
Cold water whipped against my skin like a stiff breeze in a storm. Shuddering awake, droplets streaming from my face, I found myself in a dirty room. My rebreather was gone, but somehow, I wasn’t choking on my own radiation induced vomit.
The garish wallpaper, installed by a housewife with more money than taste, peeled at the edges, the gold and blue pattern having mostly turned a faded shade of nuclear gray.
Another bucket of water hit me in the face, and I popped to my feet, arms out in a defensive stance.
“Just like she taught you.”
I whirled around, finding the woman in the white lab coat standing next to a glowing workstation. Her fingers clutched an iron bucket, its lip rimmed in copper-tone rust. Short brown punkish hair crested atop her head.
“What’d you say to me?”
“Your training.” The woman nodded toward the computer, where a real bombshell of a young woman was working away at the keys. I mean, the whole nine: figure to die for, legs like she’d just walked out of a Raymond Chandler novel. You didn’t see girls like this working in a lab, unless they were made there. “I know you,
Realmfarer.”
“You don’t know shit.” But I wasn’t so sure. For one, strangeness of not being cuffed made me suspicious. And my jailer—if she could even be called that—didn’t seem worried in the slightest about me inflicting harm.
“Here.” She reached behind the rat’s nest of wires and pulled out my shotgun. With a quick flick of the wrist, she tossed it across the room.
It almost smacked me in the face because I was so surprised.
I racked the slide, finding it unloaded.
“Well.” She set down the bucket and stuffed her hands in her pockets. “I suppose this is Aaron’s idea of a practical joke.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“I can see that.” The scientist sorceress took a step forward and I raised the gun toward her chest. “You can shoot me if you want.”
“Crossed my mind.”
“But I think you want answers instead, Realmfarer.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
“I know you’re still looking for Jameson Denton.”
I bit my tongue at the mere mention of the name. Without turning my head, I tried to get a better bearing on the situation. Relatively large room—used to be an entertaining area. Second floor. The window was smashed out, courtesy of the bats.
The blonde bombshell was crunching numbers on a computer that looked too powerful even for the Pentagon. It took up the rest of the wall beside the window. I wondered what kind of power quota the government granted this area to keep that thing running.
The scene was strange, given the decrepit surroundings. But in my two weeks—or one day, depending on who was keeping score—out of lockup, strange seemed to be the new normal.
“Why’d you say Aaron was playing a joke?” I finally asked, hating myself for being curious.
“You should just let the bitch leave,” the workstation model said.
“Diane gets a little jealous.” The scientist gave the model a passionate kiss and then turned her gaze back toward me. “I guess she thinks you’re hot.”
“I didn’t come to interrupt your little love triangle.”
This got a reaction from the scientist—a healthy snort. “Aaron? Eww.”
“I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to hear I came all this way to confirm that.”
“Oh, he already knows.”
“I was told you were in hiding.”
“I’m not in the Fallout Zone for my health.”
A nagging voice whispered in my ear, urging me to return to Roark. Things had to be feeling pointless here if that were the case. I wasn’t much for reuniting strays or mending relations between petty criminals—or whatever this scientist sorceress was.
Still, Aaron Daniels had that book on time magic. Maybe it was bullshit. But all I had, really, was time.
“Silvia,” Diane said, fingers stopping their frantic work. “Look at this.”
“Guess it wasn’t a joke after all,” Silvia said, giving me a broad smile. “I guess Aaron is paying his debt after all.” She shrugged, the long sleeves billowing out. “Only because it’s in his own self-interest.”
I brandished the shotgun out like a club, realizing that it was all a con. The cuffs, the gun. They were never going to let me leave.
They just didn’t want me making a mess while I stayed.
“Why am I here?” I asked, eyes darting between my two captors.
Silvia removed her hands from her deep pockets and smiled. “Oh, that’s easy.”
Her gaze didn’t waver from mine.
“He’s hoping you’re the cure.”
A spasm racked my body, and I fell to the floor as she snapped her fingers.
But that was just a prelude.
Because when they got me back on the table, that was when the real fun began.
22
Day 17
No hard feelings.
It’s hard to feel that way when you get dissected alive in the name of science.
The weird thing about it was Diane and Sylvia’s auras—like it was necessary, or somehow they were doing good. This was becoming a theme: creatures doing bad things for what they believed were benevolent ends.
I wondered if that was the same aura creatures felt radiating from me when I came into a room, looking to finish a job. That sense of absolute purpose right before I blew them away.
I gritted my teeth, feeling the phantom scalpel gliding across my sternum. The feeling shook me, as I stood in front of Aaron’s worn wooden door, shotgun ready. I knew the wards would render the gun useless inside, but out here, everything was fair game.
Whispered words from the scientific duo stuck in my mind. Not because my insides were exposed to the air, blood spilling from me.
But because of the earnestness.
It’s another piece of the puzzle. Don’t get discouraged.
I’m not discouraged, baby. But we’re running out of time before MagiTekk…
I passed out before the big reveal.
And then the day replayed, familiar and infuriating. What better way to spend it on revenge?
I tossed a rock at the second floor window, standing about ten yards away, waiting for Aaron to appear.
Instead, I heard a gun cock behind me.
“Little dangerous for you to be walking around here with something like that. Could hurt someone.”
“Same could be said to you.” I whipped around, but the bullet flashed before I could pull.
Just another day at the office.
23
Day 22
I should’ve known better.
Vengeance was a temporary salve under normal circumstances.
In a time loop, it offered little comfort at all. Poor Roark had probably been drained alive a half dozen times, now. But I take exception to people cutting me open when I’m still alive. So, once again, he’d headed on his vengeful warpath and I’d headed down mine.
Of course, I had somewhat nobler aspirations, too: snag The Arcana of Temporal Manipulation and figure a goddamn way out of this mess.
That was proving difficult.
As it turned out, Aaron’s little slum kingdom was more of a fortress than the muddy streets might have suggested. Sure, everything was open to all. But an outsider didn’t come through without the man in charge knowing. Given the state of disrepair, Aaron wasn’t doing badly for himself. There just weren’t a lot of crumbs to eat in the Mud Belt, even for the big dog.
All the larger slices of the pie were reserved for bigger players, in the camps and cities.
MagiTekk, mainly, if I had to make a bet.
But I didn’t know. The power structure was above my pay grade.
I loaded the diamond studded shells inside the chamber, watching Aaron’s two story residence from a nearby house. Blood trickled past my boots, dripping through the wide-gapped floorboards.
The king might’ve had good security. But enough times through this goddamn loop and you find the holes in the wall. Jam a knife in and pop.
Pretty soon you have a bigger hole.
Eventually, you’re climbing through, no one the wiser.
I finished loading the shotgun and cleaned off the stock. There was a little chip in the wood from where I’d brained this son of a bitch. Worst came to worst, it’d be gone tomorrow.
Or I’d be in the wind.
I rubbed Galleron’s inscription, left alone with my thoughts as I stared into the slumlord’s courtyard. If this was what walking in the light with the mortals was gonna be like, then I needed a change of scenery.
The sun rose, hours ticking bye with almost the same slowness as in Stevens’s dark room. Once upon a time, patience had been a calling card of mine. But somewhere in those years behind bars, filled with thoughts of slitting Jameson’s throat, I’d become undisciplined.
&n
bsp; Impulsive.
Finding self-control as ephemeral as the wisps that guided my life. I’d only noticed the true depths of the problem upon my release. Poor decisions. Errors in judgment. A sloppy haste to rebalance a ledger with figures impossible to reconcile.
Instead of reflecting on vengeance, I shoved the thoughts away.
The mission.
The gun’s sights.
There was no space for second guessing or nostalgia.
I was going to get The Arcana of Temporal Manipulation. Figure out how to end this time loop. And redecorate some high rise’s windows with the necromancer’s brains.
End scene, cue sunset.
That’s how things went down, right? Call it destiny.
Unfortunately, this world was a godless place filled with quiet desperation.
The dawn sun gave way to morning, then noon. Shadows played across the mud, whispering secrets, looking strangely pleasant. It had that exotic allure you see in a rural village on cable television—downtrodden, but charming in its foreign, rustic flair.
Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
All those places you swear you want to visit, but wouldn’t survive two days in.
Because gremlins lurked in those shadows.
Probably literal ones in this case.
The worn canvas curtains waved in the slight breeze, brushing over the shotgun’s barrel. I was covered enough that anyone coming to visit Aaron—and there were quite a few locals making deliveries—didn’t notice me.
Then again, they probably thought no one was stupid enough to attack this place.
And they’d be right under normal circumstances—but I had the benefit of the time loop. Get enough free shots, find enough cracks, and even an old mouse without many tricks can squirm their way into a fortress unseen.
It was strange to keep thinking of myself as a mouse. Would the old Ruby have done that? The one Pearl had taught? That person might as well have been dead. Spend enough time behind a fence, and your thoughts become strange.
The same went for stakeouts, where nothing happened.
I brought my eye up to the crosshairs as another delivery arrived. An ambling man, mortal based on his aura, sloshed through the mud and knocked on the door. I tried to read the wisps, but they either weren’t cooperating or it was just too damn far to get a good reading.
Lightning Blade (Ruby Callaway Book 1) Page 10
