I moved my boot, feeling the tacky blood stick.
Aaron’s door opened, but this time the witch answered.
“Not bad,” I said. Guess the fact that Silvia and Diana thought he was gross wasn’t hurting his game. But it was strange seeing her open the door—or at all. I’d been through permutations of this infiltration exercise over five times, now, and I’d never seen her face.
The witch stepped out of the house, eyes looking about the muddy courtyard shiftily.
“What are you up to, Nicolette?” I said, watching the scene unfold. Not what I expected, or had my little fingers crossed so tightly for, but at this point I’d take any action.
The witch tore through the brown paper wrapping the package and gave the contents a cursory glance. It wasn’t enough for me to see what was inside. Then the lanky man took out a wad of paper currency and stuffed it in her hand before ambling off.
A light came on in the second floor of Aaron’s palatial estate. Nicolette’s shoulders tensed, and she headed around the back, leaving the front door open.
Well if that wasn’t an open invitation, I didn’t know what was.
I double-checked the shotgun, even though it would be useless with the wards in effect, then headed out of the house. Somehow, even though the structures were practically open air, it felt cooler outside.
I kept to edge of the courtyard, searching the windows for movement. It could’ve been paranoia—or fact—but it felt like I was being watched. That was experience talking. The last few times, I’d gotten popped from nowhere. Before my intuition even picked up the trail.
Note to aspiring up-and-comers in the crime game: Aaron Daniels wasn’t an easy target.
The open door beckoned me closer. Knowing The Arcana of Temporal Manipulation was just a few steps inside made the invitation tempting. But when I took a step forward, making a move toward the muddy stone walkway, the wisps burst across the courtyard, coalescing in an angry shade of red around the open frame.
Death lay within.
I’d already ignored the tea leaves a few times—to the detriment of my health.
Instead, acutely aware of the network watching my back, I kept to the outskirts and decided to follow the witch. Aaron claimed she understood time magic. Maybe I could get the answers from her. Worst came to worst, if she proved noncooperative, I could storm the fucking ghetto Bastille and dismiss Aaron Daniels.
The foot paths between the metal shacks quickly narrowed outside of the courtyard, the landscape once again consumed by an endless labyrinth of crumbling wall-to-wall one-story structures. My eyes swiveled about the shambles, scanning for threats.
But no one wanted to bother a woman with a gun. Unless she made the error of attacking the man in charge.
I followed the faint trail of wisps through the shantytown, much as I had the first time I’d arrived at Aaron’s door. This time, they led me deep into the heart of the Mud Belt. Wherever Nicolette was headed, it was somewhere Aaron’s network would have a hard time spying.
The houses degraded in quality—if that was even possible—many of them lacking roofs or doors. They resembled barns or sheds meant for livestock than anything a human-like creature could survive in. Haunted, sunken eyes stared out from the dreary midday shadows. Muted growls came from the derelict buildings as I strode past.
Idle threats. If malnutrition didn’t get them, disease would be eager to finish the job. Rolling through with a shotgun almost seemed unsporting.
I knifed hard to the left, suddenly emerging onto a roadway. No warning, no signs. Just, suddenly, I was beside what seemed like a massive chasm—but was really a space no more than seven feet across. Enough to place two or three stalls, comfortably house ten dying creatures.
“Who’s the bitch?” a voice said, and I turned just in time to catch the glint of a pistol rising in the afternoon. Suits—of the type I’d seen in the downtown district—and a fancy car indicated they weren’t from around these parts.
I slipped back into the pathway, near a caved-in stall housing a vampire with the blood shakes. He barely even blinked as the street erupted in gunfire, rounds slicing through the thin sheeting like cardboard.
Realizing I had no escape horizontally—I was basically in what amounted to an alley—I decided to go vertical. Shotgun clanging off the metal, I pushed myself onto a roof a couple yards away. The bullets continued to slice through the shantytown, but none of them were close to me.
One nice thing about population density.
It was easy to blend in and simply disappear.
The roofs were mismatched, the one I’d chosen slightly shorter than its neighbor. This provided cover and a vantage point.
The rat-a-tat of the automatic weapons fire subsided.
“You brought backup?” The voice was accusatory.
“She must’ve followed me.” Clearly Nicolette, judging from the passionate strains I’d heard filtering from upstairs.
“Goddamnit, Xeno.” His voice bore an executive’s disdain—a distinct annoyance that he was even here, subjecting himself to the filth that was the world. Probably would burn his thousand dollar shoes when he got back. “This wasn’t even hard.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job.” It seems that Nicolette wasn’t Nicolette after all.
Things just got interesting.
Almost interesting enough to get shot at over.
“You’ve been shorting me,” Xeno said.
“You’re well compensated for results.” There was a long sigh, as if the man was talking to a child. “There haven’t been any.”
I snuck a look into the street to get a better view of the players. Four suited men—the muscle, obviously—stood in a diamond formation around a gray-haired fellow standing ramrod straight. He reminded me of someone, even though I couldn’t see his face.
“I need to pick the right time,” Xeno said. “I can’t just kill him.”
“I think you’re stalling.” A derisive snort. “Perhaps you have feelings for this wolf.”
“I’m a professional.”
“I’m beginning to doubt that.” Long pause. “You understand the stakes.”
“If you think you can hire someone better—”
“Don’t make idle threats, Xeno. We’re not to be fucked with. The wolf is asking questions about the trial. About what happened to him. The sterilization treatment is almost ready. I don’t believe you understand what your delays are costing us.”
There was a tense silence. The kind where a double-crossing witch might consider doing something rash. But whoever this silver-haired jackass was, he probably had a satellite sniper drone hovering thirty thousand feet up, ready to blow her brains out if she sneezed wrong.
That probably wasn’t a thing.
Point was, those four guys were just the tip of the assault iceberg.
“I’ll kill Aaron,” Xeno said, sounding sullen. “I’ll make it look like an accident.”
“Yes, you certainly will.” I heard a well-heeled shoe squish into the muddy slop. “And when we extract you, there won’t be any extra visitors.”
I wouldn’t be so sure, asshole.
“I won’t let you down, sir.”
“You always were our best agent, Xeno.” There was just the slightest hint of condescension. Like the man owned her. She was a tool, like a hammer, meant to perform a task.
And be discarded if necessary.
Then, he said the words, “But there are always others waiting in the wings.”
I could’ve sworn I heard her howl, but that might’ve just been the car.
My mind raced. This was the proof I needed. Tell Aaron he was knocking boots with someone planning his demise. That had to be worth an old shitty pamphlet on the nature of time.
About to move, I felt a cold hand grasp my ankle.
A sc
ream rose in my throat, but it was frozen halfway.
I fell to the muddy grass floor, seeing a familiar ski-masked face staring back at me. The amber eye glared, clearly annoyed.
“You have been avoiding me, strange one.” His silver hair swished back and forth. “I miss your intensity.”
“I don’t…know you.”
Solomon Marshall’s shoulders loosened, hair tumbling down his shirt. “Of course not. That would be silly.”
His hand reached back for the curved blade. Through trembling lips, I said, “Wait.”
“You a disappointing adversary.” He knelt, feeling for my arm. The wrist where the chip was. “Only thinking about yourself.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“You and Colton are to be a team.” He fished inside his pocket, extracting a gleaming chip. Strong magic danced around it, more powerful than I expected. I could barely track its aura with my eyes as the finger-nail sized sliver quickly disappeared out of sight. Paralyzed, most of my body unfeeling, I didn’t know whether he’d slipped it beneath my skin. “Now you are.”
“Colton?” Hopefully my acting was convincing.
“Yes,” the necromancer said. I had to resist thinking of him as Marshall, lest he realized that I knew far more than I was letting on. “You are bound at the hip, now.” His eye flashed open in maniacal craziness. “Inseparable.”
I was hoping that maybe Xeno would come and put a stop to this, but that didn’t seem to be likely. Disturbances in the shantytown were more common than food or water. A woman with a shotgun could simply disappear with a truncated scream, and no one would venture out to investigate.
Lucky me.
Breaths shallow, I said, “I don’t want to be bound.”
“You die, he dies.” His eye flashed wide, the scarred socket from where the bullet had entered looking hideous. “Too far away, you both die.”
“But I don’t know who he is.”
“You will feel the calling in your bones, strange one. As will Colton.”
His shoulders straightened, like he was pleased with himself. I heard the blade schwing through the air.
“Tell me why you’re disappointed,” I said before the blade hit, choking the words out, mud oozing into my hair.
The sword bit through my neck.
Marshall planted the blade in the grass and knelt, eye almost apologetic as he watched me bleed out, unable to even whimper. “Because you cannot stop me.”
A few seconds later, everything went black.
24
Day 23
My fingers tightened around the pen, covered in red ink, my life at a crossroads. Time slowed down, and seconds became years, decisions long-percolating coming together in a lightning bolt of realization.
Today was the day.
People say those words like you can instantly turn over a new leaf. Flip the page. Reboot.
Whatever shitty metaphor you wanted to use, starting over was hard. Your brain doesn’t want to cooperate. Letting go of who you once were is a process akin to death. Because who are we really left with when all our flaws are gone?
Think about it for a second.
All I got is time, after all.
But our flaws define us. We’re all battling a white whale. And the whale slashes us in the throat, over and over, but we can never get the spear at the right angle to lick it for good. Because, deep down, we don’t want to.
Without our flaws, we might not have an identity.
If I wasn’t a hunter, interested only in survival, then who did that make me?
Exactly.
But maybe change wasn’t necessary. Solomon Marshall was gunning for revenge against whoever wronged him eight years ago. A big plan, requiring a hidey-hole in a time loop to orchestrate. That wasn’t odd—or, rather, the oddest part.
Marshall needed us to stop him.
Wanted us to stop him from doing what he couldn’t walk away from.
As a killer, I could oblige that request.
I just needed to play the game. Follow the trail of clues. It all started with the money. Who stood to profit from his demise? Roark and I could figure that out.
We were partners. There was a deep longing stirring through my bones, like a wolf away from its pack. I had to find him.
There really was no choice.
I stood still, red pen dripping, wondering where the blood ended and the ink began. A thought seized me, and I knew what I had to do. I dug the sharp point of the pen into my wrist, feeling the skin tear. Reaching in, I grasped the chip and tried to rip it out.
But unlike last time, it didn’t release. Instead, a surge of electricity rushed through my fingertips, sending me to the dirty tile.
I screamed, and someone in the bunk told me to shut up. My bloodied arm shook, realizing that the lock on my cage had clicked shut. And I had wasted all my free days on frivolous, impermanent quests for revenge.
Wherever I went, the necromancer would be watching.
Wherever we went, rather. Because I felt a pull toward Roark, a tug.
The pen slipped from my fingers as Captain Stevens blew down the door. He rushed in and loomed over me with that self-satisfied smile. I could only hope that, somewhere, the residual effects of all those revenge killings were hidden dormant in his brain. Me shoving that pen through his cheek bone. Lurking in his subconscious, waiting to wake him in nightmares.
It was a futile hope. But then, vengeance is founded on such follies. A desperate wish that killing who hurt you would make everything whole. But all revenge did was drive a person to a place of madness worse than the dark room.
And grant Solomon Marshall extra time I couldn’t afford.
“Christ, you trying to kill yourself?” Stevens asked, the zip tie cuffs slipping over my wrists.
“Look at the list,” I said.
After the brief rustle of paper, I heard the familiar words. “The hell you been up to, little girl?”
I kept preternaturally cool as we went through the motions. In the third floor room, instead of spilling my guts about Marshall and being a Realmfarer, and anything else, I gestured for Roark to come over as soon as he stepped inside the red door.
His sad blue eyes looked skeptical, handsome jaw set in stoic non-curiosity.
“It’s about your brother.”
His expression hardened. As we hunched together in a conspiratorial huddle, he said, “If this is a trick—”
“They’re listening.” I nodded toward the darkened glass. “We can’t talk here.”
“I need more than that.”
I whispered into his ear. All he’d told me about Sam. I got no response.
“Well?”
“I feel like I can trust you,” Roark said. “But I don’t know why.”
I whispered into his ear. “Because we’re bound together, now. By the necromancer.”
Immediately after, he nodded twice and said, “Let’s go.”
Sometimes the easiest path forward is straight ahead.
I’d have to remember that next time.
25
“Can they listen to us in here?” I searched for bugs or surveillance equipment inside the cruiser as it whipped through the Mud Belt’s slick streets. I sounded paranoid, considering I didn’t know who they even were. Who had pulled the strings behind the darkened glass that one day after I’d mentioned Marshall?
I didn’t know.
But I had every intention of finding out.
The familiar slum streamed by, tin sided doors only a few feet from my comfortable leather seat. I shivered, but not because I was cold.
It was the nagging grip of fear, which I’d spent the better part of two centuries putting on ice.
“You still haven’t told me anything other than your name,” Roark said, gaze focused on me.
“Don’t pretend like you don’t already know.”
He gave me a smirk. “If you say so.”
“Are they listening?” I swung my head under the seat, hair cascading down to the clean floor. Nothing. When I sat up, I saw Roark looking on in bemused curiosity.
The dashboard flashed red from an incoming call.
Roark went to answer it.
I said, “Don’t do that.”
Roark said, “I have to respond.”
“No,” I said, “you want to respond. There’s a difference.”
His fingers lingered in the air. “You have a lot of demands.”
“You answer, you die.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
I racked the shotgun’s slide and pointed the barrel straight at his head. “I don’t think so asshole.” When he gave me a funny look, I added, “Because you die, I die. And I’ve died plenty over the past three weeks.”
“Is that so?”
“Stop the goddamn car.”
“This isn’t the move, Ruby.”
“It’s the only move.”
Binding only went so far, it seemed. Even the necromancer’s powers had met their match against my silver tongue.
Or lack thereof.
Roark reached into his pocket. Mildly paranoid after taking multiple bullets in the head and a knife to the throat over the past few days—all of which, it could be argued, were my own damn fault—I pressed the barrel into his firm chest to make sure he wouldn’t try anything funny.
“Relax, would you?” Roark was disconcertingly nonchalant for someone with a gun pointed at him. His hand returned to view with the ignition key. The car’s engine shut down, the red glow from central dispatch dying with the engine. We coasted to a stop in the middle of the shantytown, surrounded only by leaking roofs and buckling one story structures.
If I squinted, I could see Phoenix in the glowing distance.
Roark leaned back in the leather seat and said, “Okay.”
Lightning Blade (Ruby Callaway Book 1) Page 11
