Fractured flame firebird.., p.18
Fractured Flame (Firebird Uncaged Book 1), page 18
But if what Shelby had said was true, why hadn’t there been any collateral damage?
I shook my head. Whatever luck had kept the ifrit from coming after me and the Sweepers, and probably everyone who had ever associated with either Becca or Omar ever, I was about to spit in its face.
I stood and looked to the side to avoid eye contact with Shelby. “I recommend . . .” Bats, this made me sick to say, but it would be such a dick move not to. “I recommend that you close up shop for the day. And maybe the next couple days, too. Send everyone home, take a vacation. Enjoy your damn life.”
“That’s crazy,” Shelby protested. “Why for the love of the earth would I do that?”
“Because I know why we’re not all dead yet. The avenging ifrit already has its killer’s soul. And I’m going to steal it back.”
17
Someone was blowing up Becca’s phone as I sped through traffic behind the wheel of a police car after deciding to leave my slower, bunny-infested ride behind. Adrian was in the passenger seat, and Dirk Quincy was in the back. Neither had been happy about the arrangement, which was probably technically illegal, but both had been too afraid of me to protest.
Dirk still thought I was some kind of assassin witch, and Adrian had seen whatever it was I’d done to the hungry-bitch sea monster that had tried to kill us. And after our meeting with Shelby, I wasn’t willing to mess around in the least.
When I’d refused to explain to them where we were going or why, Dirk had mumbled something about residual squishy effect and called Miriam—who, as far as I could tell, had told him to just shut up and be cool. Ridiculous as she was, I might be starting to love that woman.
I’d flipped on their stupid lights and sirens and floored the gas, hoping that all the annoying drivers who normally plagued my existence would have good enough reflexes to get out of my way.
So far, it was working. But when we hit traffic on the bridge, Adrian took advantage of me slowing down to start talking at me again.
“Not that I don’t love suicide missions,” he said, “but I’ve always thought they should be a last-resort kind of thing, so I’d love to know if you have some plan that doesn’t involve all of us burning for eternity in infernal fire.”
I glanced over at him briefly, goaded into it by the cars in front of me doing a terrible job of getting out of my way, and immediately regretted it. He didn’t look scared so much as innocent—that ineffable false innocence again that no cop with his experience should exude. And my instincts made me weak wherever innocents were concerned. So I answered him, even though talking to anyone was the last thing I wanted to do right now.
“We kill the avenging ifrit before it can kill us,” I said.
“Uh . . . out of curiosity,” Dirk piped up from the back, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “How exactly are you gonna kill something like that?”
I gritted my teeth and pressed a little harder on the gas, even if it meant pressing harder on the brakes just a moment later. “You two are going to tell me how.”
Dirk pressed his face close to the bars separating the back seat from the front and said, “Lady, if you think we get paid enough to fight ivrai . . . ifra . . . demons and monsters and whatever the hell this thing is—”
“I think you know exactly how Becca managed to kill Omar, who was an ifrit. The same thing should work on this one.”
“Ah . . .” Adrian started.
“I know you were keeping something from me at that crime scene,” I interrupted. “I don’t know what and I don’t know why, but you’re going to fucking tell me now if you want to live through the night.”
Their combined silence sent a strange uneasiness into my gut, and then the buzzing from Becca’s phone made it worse, so I reached into my pocket to grab it. Tossing it to Adrian beside me, I said, “Who the hell keeps calling?”
“Unknown number?” he said, then paused. “One of the texts says it’s Baz.”
That was worrisome, considering how much Baz hated phones. I wondered whether he even knew I had Becca’s phone. He must. Not even Baz would try this hard to contact a woman he knew was a zombie.
“Well?” I prompted. “What does he want?”
“He wants to . . . to know where ‘the boy’ is.”
“What the hell? Etty said Baz was there when she picked up Noah.”
“Should I just call him and put him on speaker?”
“Go for it,” I said, somewhat reluctantly.
I barely heard one ring and Baz was already chattering on the other end of the line, talking so fast I could barely make sense of what he was saying.
“Slow down!” I yelled, and he stopped.
“Ah, birdie?” he asked after a brief pause. “Is that you?”
“Well, you didn’t think this would be Becca, did you?”
“No, I thought—I was trying to reach the tall one who took the boy. Is she with you? I need to find the boy—I absolutely must—It’s a matter of life and death and—”
“Calm down, Baz,” I said. “Etty said she was taking Noah to the club for her shift today. But what’s so important that—”
“What?!” he screeched. “What club?”
“The club she works at. The club I work at. The club you work at. The club his mother worked at . . .” I was across the bridge now and getting closer to the club in question, where I would be going after a quick trip home to pick up Noah myself, who was my best chance at finding the ifrit who had stolen his mother’s soul. After all, he was half ifrit himself. And my patience was running thin now.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no . . .”
He kept going with the noes, over and over, and I had to yell “Baz!” at the top of my lungs to get him to stop. “What the hell is going on, Baz?” I said once I thought he might be listening.
But the line was dead. He had hung up on me.
“Any idea what that was about, little lady?” Dirk piped up from the back. “Cause it didn’t sound like anything good.”
Adrian gently put the phone down as I chewed on my tongue, and then he said, “Noah?”
Somehow, the tone of his voice was enough to get across what he was implying. Noah—the boy I’d just acknowledged was half ifrit himself. Could he be the ifrit we were looking for? The ifrit who had murdered his mother and stolen her soul? Becca had gone straight to Noah when she’d been revived as a zombie, and we’d already suspected she might have been trying to lead us to her soul.
And from what I’d heard about ifrit nature from Shelby and Adrian, the urge for vengeance would be instinctual, probably enough so that Noah could have killed his own mother without realizing he was doing it. And now . . . now that he wasn’t being distracted by Salma’s lessons, Baz was worried Noah would continue on the path of vengeance, starting with the club.
My fingers clenched the steering wheel so hard they turned white. I had been planning to kill the ifrit who had trapped Becca’s soul—hopefully with Becca’s body present. That plan had seemed logical enough.
Except . . . could I do that to Noah? Could I kill him to save Becca or avenge her? She wouldn’t want me to. I knew that as sure as I knew my own name. But I also knew the kid, and I knew what he was going through, somewhat at least. I might be able to stop him without killing him, but only if I could get there before Baz—who would surely not be merciful. No time to stop at home for Becca first.
“Call Miriam,” I said, picking up the phone again and thrusting it back in Adrian’s direction. “Tell her to bring Becca to the club, as fast as possible.”
Adrian slipped the phone through the barrier to Dirk in the back, and then he just looked at me. “Are you thinking what I am?”
“That it’s the kid? Yeah.” I said, my eyes quickly moving back to the road. “So, good news, we might not have to kill anything. Bad news . . .”
“If we do, it’ll suck a lot more,” he finished for me.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I still need to know how to kill . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. How to kill my dead friend’s little boy. “What did Becca do in that house that you don’t want me to know about?”
Adrian glanced back at Dirk quickly, who was distracted by what sounded like Miriam giving him a lecture through the phone. Then he said, “You’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t have time to worry about what I’ll like right now—just tell me.”
“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “It was some kind of black magic.”
He said it like it was something to talk about in hushed voices, in hidden spaces, lest it hear you and come after you. Black magic, the boogieman of post-Opening civilization.
Now that everyone knew magic was real, the populace needed something to fear beyond the obvious predatory vampires and shifters, who were generally really good at PR.
Black magic was the thing. The stuff of demons, devils, folk who wore too much eyeliner and killed chickens and all that. It was nonsense, really. No real magic users actually did that kind of thing, as far as I knew. It would be horribly inefficient. And despite the infernal djinn I’d just learned about, there was no devil to worship, no underworld teeming with demons, no one divine embodiment of evil—the multitude of gods that had toyed with the mortal world once upon a time had handled good and evil and everything in between without any help from below.
How could I be so sure? Well, I’d been forced to toy with mortality enough as a child to have a much more solid understanding of these things than anyone ought to. I’d followed many souls to the edges of death and guided them back to reality, and I’d seen firsthand that there was nothing resembling life after death. Everyone I’d saved, I’d saved them from the same thing—a void. Absolute nothingness.
I never wore hats, but if I ever found myself in something that looked like fire-and-pitchfork hell being tortured by something that looked like a demon, I’d eat my boots. And then I’d find a way to fight my way out and kill whoever had thought it would be funny to play that kind of joke on me.
“Black magic,” I repeated to Adrian, trying not to let him feel too much of my disdain. “What makes you say that?”
“Runes drawn on the ground in blood, within a circle of salt, and a sacrificed . . .”
“A sacrificed what?” I pressed.
“A baby goat,” he whispered, and I tensed.
Goats were Becca’s favorite animal. And a baby . . . If she’d really done that, it would have broken her heart. Not to mention about a billion fae laws, probably. But why would she? And where would she even have gotten the goat?
“Why would you keep that from me in the first place?” I asked. I really had no idea why they would. It was interesting evidence, whatever it meant, and if I were them I would have wanted an extra brain working at it.
Adrian looked back at Dirk before answering and found the man asleep with his head against the window, Becca’s phone fallen to the seat beside him. I wondered if Miriam had some kind of siren magic to sing him to sleep over the phone, or if we’d just gotten lucky.
“He’s really afraid of you, you know,” Adrian said.
I frowned. “Seriously? Dirk thought if he mentioned black magic to me that I’d—what? Voodoo him to death?”
“Kind of? Probably. Subconsciously . . . Maybe,” Adrian said with a shrug. “But his official reasoning was that we should hold back some details to catch you in a lie. He suspected you helped Becca with the arson and murder, especially when we couldn’t see on camera who actually started the fire.”
“And you suspected me too? Or you just didn’t have the balls to tell your partner he was being an idiot?” A lump formed in my throat as soon as the words left it. Once again, I hadn’t meant to say something so bitchy . . . and now I was just thinking about Adrian’s balls.
He opened his mouth and then closed it, fists clenched. After an moment, he said, “I didn’t suspect you. You wouldn’t have tried to help Becca—you would have just handled things on your own had she come to you for help.”
He was right about that, and I squirmed a little in my seat, uncomfortable at him predicting my hypothetical behavior so accurately.
“I’m good at reading people,” he said, without waiting for a response from me. “It’s how I know Dirk wouldn’t hesitate to fuck me over and get me fired if he thought he couldn’t push me around. He needs to feel like the boss. And I need this job.”
I wrinkled my forehead at him. “Never thought I’d hear anyone say that about being a cop these days. I’m sure you could make more money else—”
“Look, I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quickly. And then, probably assuming (correctly) that I wouldn’t drop it, he banged his elbow on the barrier to wake up Dirk.
“I said I don’t know whose turtle that is!” Dirk yelled as he sat up with a jolt.
The look on his face in the rear-view mirror was hilarious, and I’m sure I would have laughed had I not been on my way to possibly having to murder my best friend’s adorable little boy.
“You’re in luck,” I said, putting my game face back on. Dirk might need to feel like the boss of his partner, but I liked his healthy fear of me just fine. “No turtles where we’re headed. But we might need a goat.” Trying not to smirk at the clear horror in his expression, I dug into my pocket and then slipped Ray’s business card back to him. “Call this number and tell them to bring one to the club.”
There was no way Becca had come up with any “black magic” on her own, especially nothing involving goat sacrifice. And Ray had said he’d helped Becca with her ex. I was hoping with every fiber of my being that I wouldn’t need to ask them what to do with the damn goat to kill a six-year-old ifrit boy, but I hadn’t made it this far in life by being unprepared.
Etty was dancing when we got to the club, and the exuberant look on Dirk’s face when her golden crop top flew past him was enough to put a slight damper on how happy I was to see her.
“Darcy, thank god!” someone shouted at me from across the dark, bustling room. A busy night tonight. When I turned towards the voice, I saw Mitch looking at me with round, desperate eyes as he frantically moved glasses and bottles around behind my bar.
Right. Baz had changed his mind about covering for me before he’d had his meltdown and decided Noah needed killing. And apparently Mitch had a rock-solid work ethic, despite having no actual skill in bartending. It almost warmed my heart to see him try so hard.
“Dirk,” I said, elbowing the man next to me in the gut until he tore his eyes away from my fae roommate, who was getting nakeder by the second.
He jumped away from me as if I’d nudged him with a gun instead of my elbow. Wow. Adrian hadn’t been joking—this guy really was terrified of me, and trying to hide it.
“What?” he said, the venom of fear-tinged embarrassment in his voice.
“I bet you can make a mean drink, yeah?”
He perked up a little at the compliment, rubbing his side. “Well, I mean—”
“Great, that’ll be your cover for the night. Get over there and work the bar.” I turned to Adrian. “And you—talk to Mitch. Make sure he’s ready to evacuate everyone if things get dicey.”
“Shouldn’t we just go ahead and close the place now?” Adrian asked.
“Not if we want to have any chance of getting Noah out of this alive. Baz will be here soon, and if the place is empty, there’ll be nothing to stop him from just waltzing over and killing the little boy in the back. But with his customers as witnesses . . . he’ll at least pause first.”
I looked over at the stage as Etty clacked her heels together loudly, the sound catching my attention. Her eyes found mine and, disguising the motion with a graceful body roll, she used her head to point me to the dressing room. Then she smiled at a couple women who had just tipped her and cooed something at them that I couldn’t quite make out.
I had almost forgotten—ladies’ night tonight. The second Saturday of every month, women got in without paying a cover. That was why it was so busy. It had been my idea, and Baz had gone for it without understanding I’d envisioned it with male dancers. It ended up being a surprise success, and we quickly became popular for being one of the few clubs that catered to non-hetero women.
Ladies’ night had become one of my favorites, especially because sometimes we did bring in a male dancer or two, but right now I wished it were any other night. This was already going to be a delicate endeavor, trying to get Baz not to kill Noah and Noah not to kill everyone in here—and the last thing I needed was another variable. The ladies might sometimes be more fun than the men, but they were also more challenging; none of us had as much practice with them as with our regular clientele.
Oh well. Whatever the circumstances, I had to get it done. Taking a deep breath, I walked across the floor and slipped into the dressing rooms, where Etty had pointed me.
Instead of the usual cacophony of music and chattering, all I heard were snores.
Well, shit. Now I could see why Etty had wanted me to come back here. Everyone was asleep. Noah in the middle of them all, on the one couch we all shared, his face peaceful and angelic, a hot-pink blanket laid over him.
Kat was literally curled up at his feet, looking more like the little boy’s pet than the ruthless bloodsucker I knew she was. A couple other dancers were slumped over in their chairs, and one was even lying on the floor, sucking her damn thumb.
I felt a yawn fight its way up my throat, and I immediately clamped down on it, trying to focus on the glimmers of magic around me to infuse myself with energy. But the magic still wasn’t listening to me, and I felt my eyelids getting heavy, my knees weakening . . .
“Gah! Noah!” I yelled as I crumpled to the ground, and he stirred. “Wake uuuuu . . .” The yawn finally escaped, hijacking my entire neck and mouth before I could tell the kid to get his ass up and stop doing this to us. Because he was doing it to us.
