“You blame ‘em? They just found out one of their highest ranking officials was not only murdered, but shadow touched to boot.”
“Nah, guess I can’t blame them. We're fucked, aren’t we? Senka isn’t doing her job, the government has been infiltrated—”
“Oh, please. Don’t make this sound like a Senka-damned 20th-century crime thriller.”
“Isn’t it?”
He looked more worried than I’d ever seen him. His worry crawled along my exposed skin, chased by the desert wind. I'd seen Nesbitt shoot without hesitation when a shadow touched jumped him five years ago. The man was fearless.
But maybe we had more to fear now than the shadow touched.
“Can you take lead on this?” I asked, tracing a thumb over my holstered gun but meaning the crime scene in general. “It’s not really my thing, and you’re so good at being in charge.”
“You slay me. Tell me more lies like that, and I might leave my wife for you.”
I grinned. “Liar. You’re too scared at what Jeannette would do to you.”
Nesbitt clutched his chest dramatically. “You got me. She’s a psychopath, and I love her.”
“In all seriousness?”
He dropped his hand to his side and regarded me thoughtfully. “Not a question, Nez. We appreciate your willingness to respond. We can take it from here.”
I motioned to Warren, who was cracking jokes to the stoic techs as he rubbed feeling back into his arms. “I’m concerned for this man’s safety. Should we put him under protective custody until we assure the threat doesn’t extend beyond Councilman Weston?”
Nesbitt raised an eyebrow. “He’s shadow touched.”
“Sure, but he’s also a key witness to this murder. I sent his statement to Evidence.”
“Come on, Nez. Why are you really concerned?”
How to answer that without sounding like an absolute idiot? “I know he's shadow touched. But there’s something different about him. Something new. You know how the shadow touched don’t have much life in their eyes?”
Nesbitt nodded.
“This guy doesn’t have that. I can’t pinpoint what’s going on with him right now, but I intend to find out.”
“Ah, good. So you’ll take him, then?”
I took a physical step back. “What? Me?”
“I don’t really have the men to spare right now, what with things getting more and more physical out here. You guys know each other, and you’re one of the best runners I know. You can keep him safe.”
I knew what he was doing. He buttered me up with the “best” comment. Offer up the compliment, let the fish take the bait.
Just call me Barracuda.
“Fine. But the minute you have intel, you better Com me.”
“Aye, aye, Nez.”
I couldn’t take Warren back to the pueblo. Not just because that would be really fucking weird, and I didn’t want him anywhere near my baby sister, but he needed medical attention and a place to sleep. I hadn’t set foot in my apartment in two days, but I’d gotten the all-clear from the CSI team to return. And I needed to track down my brother’s Com, anyway.
So I pointed the Ducati back to the Core and tilted my head at Warren. “We don’t have all night.”
“You expect me to ride that thing with a bullet in my leg?” Warren asked, crossing his arms.
“You walk pretty well on that thing considering there’s a bullet in it.”
He pursed his lips.
“Come on, princess.” I patted the leather seat behind me.
Warren walked around the bike and leaned heavily on my shoulders as he gingerly lifted his bad leg over the bike. The angle of the bike's seat slid him into my back, his hard, warm torso resting against me.
He wrapped his arms around my waist as I turned on the bike. His fingertips rested on the patch of bare skin above my jeans. I really hoped the engine covered up the way I shivered beneath his hands. A frisson of something completely otherworldly danced between us. I wasn’t big on using my powers—I was more of a fists and firepower kind of girl—but his touch made my magick undulate inside me.
What the hell was this guy?
13
Dawn had barely begun to light the horizon when I found an empty spot across the street from my building. In the pre-dawn twilight, the street appeared deserted. Not even the wind moved this morning. The hazy half-light coupled with empty streets and doorways felt like an omen.
I helped Warren off the bike. He winced as he moved the injured leg; I had already figured he hurt a little more than he let on. I took the brunt of his weight, so his leg didn’t have to, and waited until he steadied himself on the concrete. Under the remnants of bonfire smoke on his clothes, I could smell his clove cigarettes. The scent did things to me that I wanted to punch into submission.
I tossed my bag over my shoulder and pocketed my keys, then slipped an arm around his waist and tugged him gently against me. “Come on. We gotta cross.”
He stared at me for a long minute, face inscrutable, and then put his arm around my shoulders and leaned into me.
We moved stiffly and slowly. I let Warren set the pace. I’d never taken a bullet before, and I had no real hurry to give it a try, but any idiot could know that shit hurt. I’d like to say his discomfort brought up feelings of remorse for all the shadow touched I had shot in my day, but maybe I wasn’t wired that way.
I was wired to do what was necessary, not what was right.
So why the fuck was I taking a shadow touched home with me?
Warren grimaced as we stepped up onto the sidewalk in front of my building.
“Almost there,” I promised, motioning to the front doors, where the red light on the fob pad blinked.
“You live here?” Warren’s gaze traveled up the skyscraper next door.
Every time I saw the damn thing, it looked worse. The council should have torn it down years ago, but abandoned, decaying buildings don’t take priority when people are dying and the Hollow is failing.
“It’s not as bad as it looks on the outside,” I assured him.
“I guess I expected the Reina’s hound to live in luxury.”
I glared. “Don’t call me that. I don’t need luxury.”
“I see that.” His black eyes drifted from the skyscraper to me. He hesitated, as if he wanted to say more, but then he shook his head and leaned into me.
The scanner recognized my Com with no issues. I gritted my teeth and boarded the elevator in deference to Warren’s wound. I kept my eyes firmly on the glowing numbers above the door, counting each floor. 1. 2.
“You okay?”
I spared him a glance, then looked back at the numbers. 3. “I don’t like elevators.”
“The elevator has nothing to do with it. You like to be in control.”
I didn’t look at him. He was right. Perceptive fucker. “You can time travel and disappear at will. Mind reader, too?” 4.
“I wish. Maybe I just get you.”
The door opened with a faint ding. “You'd be the first person who ‘got’ me that didn’t share a womb with me.”
My floor was silent as a graveyard. We shuffled slowly, Warren hanging limply against me. Pain etched his face.
“Adrenaline has worn off, huh?” I joked.
Warren managed a smile. “I told you. Just a flesh wound.”
“Flesh wounds don’t require bullet extraction.”
“Are there rules to flesh wounds now?”
I helped him lean against the wall beside my door and gently extracted myself from beneath his arms. “Yeah. Flesh wounds don’t tear through muscle and bone.”
He straightened. “Bone?”
“Trust me. You’d know if it got that deep.”
The crime scene tape had been removed, though traces of it remained on the doorjamb: a reminder of what had happened here. A reminder of the moment my life began to spiral out of control.
I didn’t want to be here right now. I wasn’t ready to
see our home, to see all the memories of Rice spread through the apartment in the detritus he’d left behind. His favorite ball cap hanging on the hook by the door; his sneakers discarded in the living room; empty dishes in the sink from the breakfast we’d shared the morning before he died. Mama was right. Rice would haunt this apartment, but it wouldn’t be his spirit stuck in this world.
It would be stuck in my heart.
I unlocked the door.
The smell of heavy-duty cleaning solution assaulted my nose, and the black void of Rice’s absence gripped me. I ignored both as I helped Warren limp into the apartment and settled him at a chair in the kitchen.
I’d expected the Chinese to still be on the counter, rotting and feeding the resident ants. But the SEB cleaning crew was thorough in their erasure of the events leading up to me finding my brother’s body. The place was probably cleaner than it had been before we moved in.
While Warren looked around my kitchen with interest, I dug the first aid kit out of the cabinet and put a pot of water on to boil.
“Cooking?” Warren asked.
“Take off your pants,” I responded, opening the cabinet over the sink. “No. I’m going to boil the blade to cut out the bullet.”
He paused in the act of untying his sweatpants. “What now?”
I reached for the special liquor. “You have a bullet inside your leg. It has to come out.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.” I slammed a bottle of homebrewed whiskey on the table in front of him. “But you’re shadow touched, and you know the hospitals won’t let you in. So take off your pants. And drink up.”
I avoided looking at him and adjusted the temperature on the stove while he disrobed. But I snuck a peek while he slugged back half the bottle of potent liquor in one go. Plain black boxers and shapely, muscular legs. Fuck.
Warren set the bottle on the tabletop and gasped. “Strong stuff.”
“My landlord makes it.” I dropped a box cutter in the boiling pot and glanced over as he shot back more liquor. “Take it easy. I’m not trying to get you wasted.”
“Shame.” That wolfish grin was back. He slouched in the chair like he owned it, feet planted on the linoleum and t-shirt riding up to expose fine black hairs marching down his toned abdomen.
I swallowed hard and thought about the bullet. Just the bullet. Not too hard to do, since his thigh was covered in blood around a thick, wet wound.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him, wiping my hands on a towel. I left him to guzzle cheap, homemade alcohol while the water heated, and escaped to my room.
Our safe rested beneath the false floorboards of my bedroom closet. It was my doomsday security—a couple thousand bucks in case we ever needed to get the hell out of the Hollow on a dime. Neither me nor Rice ever had need to put anything else in there. We didn’t care for jewelry, and anything that had once held sentimental value to us remained in my mother’s home.
So we both piled money away as we earned it—me, doing what I did best as an enforcement agent. Rice, picking up odd jobs here and there as the mood suited him.
I tugged the chain to illuminate the bare bulb in my closet, then shoved my way into my clothes. The false floorboard looked exactly like the others; if you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it. But it’s not like the cops had any reason to search my room, anyway. When I opened the safe and stared down at Rice’s familiar Com, nestled among piles of money, my heart constricted.
I slid the Com into a small messenger bag, and as an afterthought, tucked a couple hundred bucks in with it. Mom could use it towards Rice’s funeral.
“Hey... Relle?” Warren’s voice sounded thin. “I think... I’m bleeding again. A lot.”
Alcohol was a good way to prepare a guy for shoddy surgery, but it was also a blood thinner. One of those little nuggets of info I’d gleaned over the years that had conveniently slipped my mind.
I sighed.
The apartment was becoming entirely too acquainted with blood.
14
Back in the kitchen, I tossed the messenger bag on the table so I wouldn’t forget it, and dug out a threadbare kitchen towel for Warren. “Press hard,” I told him, laying his hand over the towel on his wound.
I lit a candle so I could burn the blade when it was done boiling. Lacking a sterile lab and autoclave, we adjusted. “So you live out there? 10th encampment?”
He shrugged. “It’s cheap. I can keep an eye on things.”
“What things?”
“Things.”
Irritating asshole. I scraped a chair up in front of him and sat so that his thigh was between my legs. I tried not to think about that, too. Think about the bullet. Torn skin and muscle. Getting the shard of metal out with minimal damage or bleeding.
“If I’m going to help you, you need to talk.” I turned up a bottle of rubbing alcohol over his leg. His quick inhalation at the pain made me a little too gleeful. “When did you become shadow touched?”
“I told you. I was born this way.”
“Nobody is born shadow touched.” I ripped open a pack of iodine and began to swipe at his wound. The bullet had gone in clean. Now that the alcohol had cleaned out the dried blood, I could glimpse the glint of metal deep inside. Thank Senka. That meant I’d have no problem getting it out.
“I beg to differ,” Warren said matter-of-factly. “My mother was a shadow touched fae. My father was a healthy human. And I am... something altogether different.”
“Human and fae can’t reproduce.”
He touched my cheek. “Do you have to be so contrary?”
I jerked away from his fingers, startled by the contact. My gaze fluttered to meet his. He was smiling; not the sardonic grin I’d come to associate with him, but a sweet half-smile.
“I’m not being contrary,” I snapped, returning to his wound. I rubbed a little harder than necessary as I cleaned with the iodine. “It has been proven that the races cannot interbreed, and the shadow touched are infertile. So you’re trying to tell me your existence proves both beliefs false?”
“Yes.”
I opened the sterile needle and thread from the kit and spread it on gauze, preparing it for a quick sew up. I didn’t have a response for his claims. It’s hard to suspend your disbelief enough to allow truth in the things you’ve always believed false.
“You act like you know what you’re doing,” Warren observed.
“We had to learn field medical care in SEB training. They cut my leg open, and I had to clean it and sew it up.”
“On purpose?” He looked aghast.
“The SEB isn’t for pussies.” I had plenty of scars to prove it, and that one was the least of them. I returned to the stove and switched off the burner.
“I wanted to be a cop. When I was a kid.”
Using a pair of tongs, I extracted the blade and laid it on a waiting towel. “Guess that was hard. Knowing you weren’t eligible.”
“It is what it is. My father tried to hide my condition for a long time. He passed me off as normal for years; even started to believe it himself. Then when I was thirteen, my eyes changed. We couldn’t hide it anymore.”
“What happened to your mom?” I held the cooling blade to the candle’s flame.
“Dead. The darkness took her completely and drove her mad. She ended up killing a human. One of your people came for her.”
Something in my cold, dead heart shifted and ached. “My people” gambled life and death every day, but the game had never come so close to me.
Warren was lost in his memories as I returned to my chair, blade in hand.
His eyes widened at the innocuous metal shard. “Don’t you need gloves?”
“You aren’t contagious.”
He barked with laughter. “Tell that to the rest of the Hollow.”
An undercurrent of bitterness laced his tone. I didn’t know what to say. Some people felt they could contract the disease from those who had been shadow touched. It was a ridiculous
notion; the darkness came from Acura's poisonous, leftover magick. We were just as likely to become shadow touched simply by existing in Senka Hollow.
“People are just paranoid,” I said. “They don’t understand why Senka is failing. And once you become shadow touched, there’s no going back.”
In the early stages of the disease, the person retained so much of who they were that the sudden fall out caused by their condition felt like a witch hunt. They found themselves cast out into the encampments, separated from the Core, from Senka. And out there in the Rim, they would eventually die, so full of Acura they were no longer themselves.
Then there were girls like Georgie, who chose to spend their time partying with the shadow touched, sure they were invincible and nothing could hurt them. But they weren’t strong enough to face Acura’s power.
“Life probably sucked for you,” I finally said, because nothing else seemed appropriate.
He nodded once, then the sardonic grin returned. “I’m still alive, and the darkness hasn’t killed me yet. So that’s something.”
“That’s pretty spectacular, actually. How long has the darkness been visible?”
“Seventeen years since my eyes changed.”
I put the blade on a towel and poured rubbing alcohol over it. He was about thirty, I guessed. “Most shadow touched don’t live five years.”
“I don’t think I’m shadow touched.”
I laughed. “Come on. Seriously?”
“No. I told you. I’m something different. Know anybody else who can time travel?” he asked pointedly.
I lifted the blade. “No, now that you mention it. You knew about the earthquake, too.”
“Prophetic dreams. The dreams and the time travel came with the eyes.”
Okay. Now I was very intrigued. “And the vanishing?”
He laughed. “No vanishing. Just a side effect of the time travel. I can slide back in time thirty minutes and go right back to where I started.”
“Wow. How many minutes have you relived multiple times?”
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 8
