by Fiona Zedde
Shit.
Anger and panic rising, she took stock of the conspicuously empty surface of her desk. Her cell phone was gone. All the files she’d been working on. The photos and notes from the police investigation. Everything was gone.
She cursed again, ready to run to the cupboard and check on the hidden flash drives, but forced herself to stand still in case the woman was still somewhere watching.
It won’t lead you anywhere good. The woman’s words rang like warning bells in Mai’s ears.
But as far as she was concerned, Stephen Redstone was the one leading her down this path, not anything or anyone else. He’d forged this path years ago, long before the first victim died under the blade of the Absolution Killer. Long before Mercy saved her first human. She could no more stop her search now than she could stop herself from breathing.
Chapter 9
Mai couldn’t go back to sleep. Worried that someone was watching her, she left the ruined computer and locked herself in her bedroom, took a quick and cool shower to shock her system, then got dressed. In her car, she drove to the nearest 24-hour-discount-everything shop, bought a laptop, and took it to an all-night coffee shop along with the flash drives.
By the time the sun came up, she’d found more than enough.
Mai rubbed the exhaustion from her eyes and stared into space while the coffee shop woke up around her. The mystery woman was right. This wasn’t the road she wanted to be on. It led only to the darkest places and made her wish she’d never started on the journey. But she couldn’t turn back now.
At 9:15 a.m., she was at her mother’s office, armored in her black leather jacket, jeans, and long boots. With her files.
“Is she in?” She stood in front of her mother’s secretary with her hands in her pockets, her look deliberately casual.
“Unfortunately, no.” Eldridge, the man who’d been with Mandaia for as long as Mai had been visiting the office, gave her a brief but friendly smile. “Your brother is here, though. He told me to show you into his office if you came by.”
Mai frowned. The last time she saw Cayman, he didn’t seem in any hurry to talk with her, any more than she was to talk with him, other than to initiate the usual set of torments, anyway.
“All right.” She dropped her files on Eldridge’s desk. “Just make sure she gets these in case she comes in the next few minutes. Tell her to read them carefully.”
“Of course.” He was already putting a sticky note on the manila folder, simultaneously getting up to walk toward Mandaia’s office, when Mai turned in the opposite direction toward her brother’s office.
At the door, she knocked once before trying the knob. But it was locked.
“I’m here, Cayman. What do you want?”
When the lock clicked open, she went in. Her brother, dressed surprisingly in jeans and a sweater—a casual look he didn’t normally go for in the office—was walking back to the desk. She closed the door behind her.
“What’s going on?”
He leaned back against his desk, arms crossed. “I hear you were stirring up trouble.” The look he leveled on her was vaguely paternalistic, and it immediately raised Mai’s hackles.
“I haven’t been doing anything but minding my own business,” she said. “Can you say the same?”
“This family is my business, and I’m taking damn good care of it, unlike you.” A cascade of wrinkles formed on her brother’s brow. “You’re the one not taking care of us the way you should, running around with the humans and pretending to be one of them.”
Running around with humans? Where was he getting his information from? Her mind briefly fell to Xóchitl, and the thought of Cayman spying on her, on them, made her vision go white with anger. “What the fuck are you up to, boy?”
“I may be younger than you, but I’m no boy.” His teeth audibly clicked shut after the last word.
Mai ignored him, too far gone to care about his feelings. “If this is the conversation you wanted to have, you can have it by yourself. I have more important things to deal with.”
He stepped toward her, his posture threatening. “Like what? Betraying Uncle Stephen and protecting his killer from us?”
Protecting his killer? Because she was working with the enforcers?
Although Mai knew what Cayman was capable of, her mind stuttered. Her little brother was stalking toward her, fists at his sides as if he wanted to attack her. “What the actual fuck…?” She braced herself—feet wide, her own fists raised.
“You didn’t think I knew about that, did you?” Cayman stopped barely two feet away. “It’s obvious you don’t want to be part of this family anymore, but I never thought you’d betray us like this.”
Heat washed through Mai, the most dangerous and incinerating kind. Her reason flew past the gates she’d held tight for far too long.
“You don’t get to lecture me about betrayal!” she snarled. The warm air of the office washed over her bared teeth. “Not ever.” Not after the way he abandoned her, along with the rest of the family, when she was a child. “Do you even know what you’re protecting?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. “Did you know Stephen raped little girls and got away with it for years, thanks to our mother?” The thumb drives she’d found in the safe, the photos, even the financial records painted a picture of complicity that made her sick.
Cayman’s eyes narrowed. If Mai didn’t know any better, she’d say her brother looked…surprised. But if Mandaia knew everything and covered for Stephen, it only made sense that Cayman did too. Wasn’t this the information he protected so rabidly?
But the surprise quickly cleared from his face, replaced by suspicion. Denial. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.” He sneered at her. “You are trying to destroy the family from the inside, making up these crazy stories about Uncle Stephen and our mother. Ethan was right.”
“Ethan…? What—?”
The air rippled around them, an unpleasant sensation that only meant one thing. Mai spun to put her back to the door and get ready for Ethan, but before she could move again, rough hands grabbed her shoulders and yanked her backward. Her brother’s office wavered in front of her eyes, then disappeared, its luxurious confines replaced by a place Mai remembered all too well.
“No!” She nearly screamed in panic.
Her body shivered with the shock of it. Her mind reeled from the spiked memories of one long afternoon trapped in this place. But even with the disorientation, her body readied to take advantage of the small moment of settling that happened once they solidified in the new location. She wasn’t a helpless child anymore.
Mai shoved away from Ethan, tumbling away from him in a somersault before he could get his bearings. Immediately, she sensed the presence of others in the room, two men, as she turned in the air. She landed in a crouch.
Cement floor. Soundproof walls. A warehouse in the middle of nowhere with roaring freight trains regularly moving past. In the center of the room, there was a tall and wide water tank that looked big enough to house a school of sharks. A scream of terror rattled inside her head, ready to be set free, but she clamped her mouth shut.
Just as when she was a child, there would be no one here to help her.
The two men rushed her, both of them massive, and their hands gripped tight onto her arms through the leather jacket. Then she felt Ethan’s presence in a wavering of space too close to her, a fist solidifying before her eyes before it slammed into her face with the sound of worlds exploding. The pain shattered her.
Her body crashed into the cement floor. Hot, red blood gushed from her nose, down to her mouth and chin. Her vision swam. Ethan’s grinning face appeared above Mai as he fully materialized, his solid figure in another one of his damn designer suits.
“Stupid bitch.” He laughed. “You’ll never see me coming.”
Darkness swarmed over Mai and dragged her down.<
br />
When Mai surfaced again, she was hanging upside down above the water tank.
The air rushed into her lungs on a gasp of panic. Below her, the clear water rippled faintly, deep enough to drown her a hundred times over. Her head felt heavy, her body weak and thick with pain. Her hands were zip-tied behind her back, tight enough to cut into her skin.
Chains rattled. She looked up and saw her ankles were also zip-tied together, but a chain was looped around her legs and draped over an industrial-sized hook hanging from the ceiling. She flopped from it like a fish. Fucking catch of the day.
A drop of blood slid down her face and fell into the water.
“Oh, good.” Her cousin’s voice. “Sleeping Beauty awakes.”
Ethan was below and behind her, out of sight, but she felt him as strongly as the enhanced plastic ties around her wrists. His two lackeys stood at different points in the room, both of them watching her. They had ripped the jacket off her body, leaving her in the thin shirt and jeans she’d been taken in.
The water below Mai was as still and deep as death. This was the same tank they’d used on her when she was twelve. Terror roared toward her, its jaws wide enough to swallow her whole. Her breath rattled in her chest. Cold sweat rushed over her skin under her clothes.
No. Not again.
The chains around her feet and knees rattled again as she thrashed back and forth on the hook. She tried to reach up and free her feet, but her stomach muscles burned with the effort. Her body was too weak. Mai stopped trying and sagged from the hook.
She was afraid. Shit, she was terrified.
“I didn’t want you to miss the second best part of this whole thing.” Her cousin chuckled as he came into view, his suit impeccable, only his habitual pocket square missing. He looked like he was heading out for a stroll in the park, not about to start torturing his cousin to death.
But then he bared his teeth in a shark’s grin.
Fuck.
She remembered that look all too well. Spurred headlong into a newer, deeper fear, Mai thrashed and whimpered low in her throat, trying again uselessly to buck herself off the thick hook that held her above the water.
“That’s it,” he crooned with a smile. “That’s the desperation I want to see.”
He dragged a wheeled platform close to the tank. Three steps up the platform brought him closer, and he grabbed a solid-looking device, a remote control of some sort from the topmost step of the platform, and pushed it. A harsh electrical noise sounded, and the chains holding Mai up shuddered. The wires attached to the hook whirred and lowered her closer to the water.
No! Mai thought she screamed it but wasn’t sure. The breath stormed in her throat, and tears of fear burned her eyelids. Behind Ethan and out of sight, she twisted her wrists in the zip-ties.
“Are you going to beg me now?” Her cousin looked more than pleased at the thought. But Mai locked her jaws tight. He shrugged. “Too bad.”
He dropped her into the water.
Mai had enough time to pull in a deeper breath. But memories of the past wrenched her mouth open into a scream. Water rushed in, a clean current of death that took her back, back, back to being a frightened twelve-year-old with too little power. A twelve-year-old who was begging to be released but instead was underwater with her wrists bound together in front and her ankles tied. Water had gushed into her mouth with each scream, the water expanding her chest, choking her, while her mother and uncle had watched and waited from the dry side of the tank for her to save herself.
But she’d been dying, even as outside the tank, her mother stood with fluttering fingers near her lips, chanting quietly something that Mai had only recognized in this revisited nightmare.
Change, her mother had quietly mouthed. Change. Reach for your power. Take it. Don’t let this be the end for you.
But Mai hadn’t changed. She couldn’t have. She hadn’t had the strength. Her power had only been enough for her to shift her face into the most pitiful look it could give, surface alterations that did nothing to save her and that had only earned Mandaia’s pity once they’d dragged her out of the tank and left her gasping like a landed fish on the cold, hard ground.
Twenty years later, even the cold burn of her mother’s pity was nowhere to be found.
Mai’s body jerked with pain as her legs were yanked up and back. She was being moved through the water and above it. Mai gagged and coughed, her throat burning as the water sluiced off her.
“That was just for fun.” Ethan grinned while she gasped and twisted above the tank with water dripping down her face, cool as death against her skin. He stood with an electric cattle prod in both hands, jabbing it in the air as if he were sparring with an invisible opponent. “This is where the fun ends,” he said, “for you.”
He hefted the cattle prod high so Mai couldn’t have ignored it if she wanted to. Dread gripped her throat. “Now, let’s get started, shall we?” The corners of his eyes crinkled with false humor. “Tell me, Mai. Who is the Absolution Killer?” His voice was almost gentle. “Tell me the name of the bastard who killed my father.”
Chapter 10
Mai remembered that day she lost everything. She’d walked toward home from school, twelve years old and excited about the field trip to the Georgia State Capitol Building to see what options she had as a Meta for the future. On the way home, she found a kitten, a sweet and nearly blind tabby she’d sheltered in the open front pocket of her backpack. The kitten’s squeaking meows were so adorable she wanted to show it to her mother right away. She wanted to keep it.
The house was full of people when she slammed the heavy front door shut. Voices came from upstairs where her mother talked with one of the servants about dinner plans while her brother watched it all from the main staircase, idly levitating the marbles their mother had given him to help strengthen his power.
Although he was two years younger than Mai, his power had already shown itself and was already strong. Mai knew her mother worried she’d never manifest more than the parlor trick of being able to change her appearance at will.
“What’s going on?” she’d asked Cayman, who waved at her from the middle of the stairs.
Her brother only shrugged. “They’re talking about you today. It doesn’t sound good.” He looked at the squirming shape at the front of her school bag. “Hey, what’s that?”
“A kitten. I found her on the way home. You want to see?”
Her brother’s enthusiasm made her forget his earlier words. With a new kitten to care for and a field trip the next day, what was there for her to worry about?
Cayman clambered down the stairs to touch her kitten and laugh at its helplessness. But his hands on the little thing she’d already named Emmie, after her glowing emerald eyes, were gentle.
“Do you think Mom will let me keep her?”
“I doubt it.” He scratched the kitten’s head and was rewarded with a burst of squeaks. They both grinned. “But maybe she’ll ask one of the maids to keep it, and then you can see it anytime you want.”
His optimism made her hopeful too, and it was with that hope warming her chest that she looked up when her mother appeared with one of the family lawyers and with a man and a woman Mai didn’t know.
“We have a test for you, Mai,” her mother said.
Mai remembered being annoyed. She didn’t want to take a stupid test. She wanted to play with Emmie and maybe get a snack. But she’d never been a rude child, so she just asked, “What test?”
Then her entire world as she knew it had drowned, never to resurface again.
Much later, as they had crouched over her soaked, gasping body on the cement floor, one of the strangers, the woman, took a stethoscope out of her bag and watched Mai with eyes filled to the brim with pity.
The first touch of the electric cattle prod tore Mai’s throat wide open. Her screams rattled everythi
ng around her. The burn of electricity seared into her bare neck, into her skin for so long, she thought her scream, the agony, would never end.
She panted in the aftermath, staring at her cousin with eyes that felt as wide as the moon.
Ethan chuckled. “While that was pretty, it wasn’t exactly what I’m waiting to hear.” He cocked his ear toward her in a parody of listening. “Who.” He pushed the prod into her shoulder. “Killed.” Her chest. “My.” Her belly. “Father?” Her jaw.
He held the cattle prod there the longest, through the wail of her screams. Her body jerked with the force of the electric current, and her insides crackled and burned, rolling flash fires of pain.
“I’m—not telling you shit!”
But while her mouth said what she should, her mind was jittering on the edge, waiting to babble the information, since it had a suspicion what Ethan would do next. The pain was nothing. Hanging upside down like a sacrificial sardine was nothing. It was the water—hovering just beneath her and waiting again to take her breath away—that rippled fear through her like a shock wave.
The terror burned through her lungs. But this was nothing compared to what they would do to Absolution once they got their hands on him.
“Fuck off,” she huffed toward her cousin.
He dropped her back into the water.
Her entire body shuddered as it splashed into the tank. She twisted under the water, the chains around her feet rattling in her ears as they released from the hook, and she sank fast with nothing to hold her up. This time, she held her breath, knowing she couldn’t last long underwater without the chains ready to drag her back to the surface.
Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.
