Bad blood, p.20
Bad Blood, page 20
part #7 of Jack Dahlish Series
I thought about Annie, who would have died if I hadn’t rushed to fight the skinwalker before he could hurt her more than he already had. I thought about Mariah, the vampires who had been killed saving me on the road, the twelve blood donors murdered just because they did business with the clutch. I thought about them, and I poured all the rage I felt at their deaths into the punishment of their murderer.
The shaman went still in my arms, which slowly fell to my chest as he faded into oblivion. I finally released the power, and the flames cut off as if someone had flicked a light switch. I was left in darkness.
THIRTY-ONE
W hen I opened my eyes again, only one of them seemed to be working. The other saw only darkness, and the skin around it felt wrong. As if something were preventing my eyelid from opening all the way.
“Careful,” a male voice said. A hand pressed on my chest, pushing me down as I tried to sit up. “You don’t want to do that yet.”
He was standing beside the eye I couldn’t see out of, and I had to twist my head around to look at him in the dim room. It was the doctor who’d wrapped the bite marks on my wrist after the skinwalker ambushed me on the drive into the compound. Adam. “What happened? Did we stop them?”
His mouth narrowed to a thin line, but he nodded. “Thanks in no small part to your assistance. All of the abominations are dead.”
I thought about how the shaman had referred to the vampires in such a manner, and I couldn’t hold back a laugh at the absurdity of it. Two unbending forces, each convinced the other was the evil one. I couldn’t help wondering which side I might have landed on if the skinwalkers hadn’t murdered innocent people.
“I’ve stitched up the worst of your cuts, but there are many more that are going to need a lot of care in the days to come. Right now, you need to rest.”
Cuts? I remembered the flashes of pain as I held onto the shaman, and I focused on my body until I recognized the dull burning sensation of deep wounds in several places. I was still alive, so that’s all I cared about at the moment. Though my unseeing eye did worry me until I realized the scratchy feeling on my forehead and cheek was gauze.
“Mariah?” I asked. “Is she…?”
“Alive,” the doctor said, sounding as relieved as I felt. “Though it will be touch and go for a while. The fall broke several bones and there was some internal bleeding, but she luckily fell into some bushes at the front of the house that cushioned the blow. It could have been much worse.”
I closed my eyes, allowing myself a moment to bathe in the pleasure of knowing I hadn’t completely failed. “Uriah?”
The doctor didn’t answer, and when I opened my good eye, his back was turned. “We’ve suffered a great number of losses,” he said faintly. Then he walked across the bedroom I had been placed in and left through the door.
“Rest, Jack Dahlish.” I felt a hand on my arm and slowly turned to see a shadowed figure standing beside the bed. His head was wrapped in gauze just like mine, and the blood I’d seen across his face earlier had been cleaned away.
“Thirteen? I was worried about you.”
“I am fine. We will both heal, and then leave this place.”
I started to nod and winced at the pain in the movement. I thought about trying to get up and find answers to the questions racing through my head, but just lifting an arm to touch the bandaged side of my face almost drained my small reserve of energy. The skinwalkers were defeated, my friend was safe, and I could live with that much victory for the moment.
When I woke again, the room was brighter than it had been. Or a haze had lifted from my good eye. Whichever it was, I was able to make out features of the room I had been placed in. It was a small bedroom, but larger than the one on the top floor that I’d been in earlier. There was plenty of furniture and decorations in this one, but it all had the feel of something that had been in place for several decades at least.
Most of the exhaustion was gone, but that only allowed the discomfort of the many injuries across my body to intrude on my brain. I held up my arms and found several bandages on each. Yellowing bruises surrounded each of them beyond the edges of the bandages. Whatever the shaman had done to me in his last throes, it was going to be weeks before the marks of the battle faded.
I sat up gingerly, feeling the pain around my stomach and back from the first fight with a skinwalker competing with the widespread injuries of the latest encounter. If I looked up the definition of walking wounded, my picture could have been prominently displayed. I managed to shuffle across the room to a door, hoping to find a bathroom. It turned out to be a closet, and the only door in the room aside from the one that led to the hallway.
I managed to open three doors in the hallway before finding a bathroom, and then had to brace myself against the wall as I stood over the toilet until my bladder was emptied. That made me feel a little bit better, but it was a tiny amount of relief in a cacophony of complaints.
After I hobbled across the small room to the sink, I stared at my reflection for several seconds. The gauze wrapped around half my face appeared to be hiding a wound that I hoped was only on my forehead or temple. I steeled myself for the worst and felt for the edge of the bandage. Once I found that, I began to unwrap it. I breathed a sigh of relief when I found a long bandage running over my brow and into my hairline. I must have been cut there at some point in the fighting. My eye was fine, and I could see through it once it adjusted to the sudden bright light.
Leaving the unwrapped gauze on the counter beside the sink, I shuffled over to open the door to the hallway. Amelie was standing just outside, leaning against the wall. One of her arms was heavily wrapped and in a sling, but otherwise she seemed uninjured.
“I thought I might find you here when you weren’t in your room. Mariah wants to see you.”
That perked me up, and I waved for her to lead the way. I was wondering how I might handle stairs with my stiff legs and sore muscles, but she stopped beside a door at the end of the hall. Amelie knocked lightly, and we waited until it was opened by the doctor. He looked at me with exasperation but waved us inside. “You should still be resting in your bed, Mr. Dahlish.”
“I’m a fast healer,” I told him, trying to hide the wince that came when several of my many cuts pulled during an awkward twist of my torso.
He only grunted in a way that said he wasn’t convinced. “No more than five minutes, Amelie. Miss Mathis needs her rest as much as this one does.”
Amelie raised a hand to her brow in acknowledgement as she entered the room. I followed, stopping in shock when I got my first look at Mariah. The sheets were pulled up to her neck, and her face was incredibly pale except for the dark circles under her eyes. Which were open and moved to find me when I shuffled up to her bedside.
“Jack,” she said, her voice weak. “It’s good to see you still alive.”
“I was more worried about you,” I said, reaching down to pat the covers where her hand was as I fell into the chair beside the bed. “When Swiftwind threw you from the roof, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see you again.”
“There was a moment when I thought the same,” she said through a wan smile that quickly faded.
“Mariah is stronger than anyone ever gives her credit for,” Amelie said from the other side of the bed. There was a fondness in her eyes as she looked down at the injured woman.
I looked down the bed, wondering what was hidden under the covers. I wanted to ask how badly she had been injured, but I didn’t want to intrude. “I’ll heal,” Mariah said, reading my expression. “It will take time, but I’ll be what I was again.”
“And until she is, David and I are here to watch out for her.” Amelie gave me an uncompromising look as her jaw clenched.
“Why do you need to look out for her?”
Instead of answering, they shared a look. Amelie was the first to speak. “Uriah lives, but his body is broken. If he were younger, we’d be confident that he would heal. But he’s old, and he hasn’t woken since the fight. Adam fears he may never wake again, which means the family may have to choose a new leader. Many of us would have Mariah lead.”
I glanced at Mariah, noting the tension in her expression. “There’s someone else who wants the job, isn’t there?”
Mariah laughed once, then winced at the pain the movement created. “Isn’t there always, Jack? The elders would see one of their own take the reins if Uriah doesn’t come back to us. They’ve grown fond of their riches and comforts, and any sort of change scares them.”
“Change is coming, whether they want it or not,” Amelie growled. “We lost eight of our brothers and sisters fighting those skinwalkers. A fight that wouldn’t have been on our doorstep if Uriah hadn’t invited one of them into our home.”
“He had me fooled, too,” I said in half-hearted defense. I wouldn’t have been so easily misled if I’d been able to use my senses properly. Now I understood why the skinwalker I’d been tracking at the last murder scene had sprayed me with their essence. That attack had blinded me more completely than a burlap bag over my head could have.
“We were all fooled,” Mariah said. Her voice was growing weaker, and I could tell the short conversation was overtaxing her.
I squeezed her hand under the cover. “I’m glad you’re going to be okay, Mariah. Once you’re up and around again, I want you to come to Windemere. Hey, maybe it’ll even be a celebration of your new role.” I tried to smile, but I was nervous about what might happen to our friendship if she did become the head of the family. Could a vampire matriarch and one of the Nine be friends?
“You should stay for a while,” she told me. “I don’t know if you’ve seen yourself yet, but I think you look worse than I do.”
“Well, that’s just maintaining the status quo,” I said with a grin. “I’ll be fine. I heal better than I used to.” I tapped the coin under my shirt.
The doctor cleared his throat, and I turned to see him tap his watch. Our five minutes were up. I struggled to stand without showing how stiff I’d gotten from a short rest, and Amelie led me out of the room after promising to check in on Mariah again later in the day.
I expected her to take me back to the room I’d been placed in, but she turned the opposite direction and I had to go down the stairs I’d been dreading earlier. It wasn’t long before we were standing in the foyer. Amelie looked at me like she was trying to decide what to say.
“Uh, could someone call me an Uber?” I asked after several seconds of uncomfortable silence. “I appear to have misplaced my car.”
She barked a laugh, the first genuine amusement I’d seen from her since I’d arrived. “David is waiting to drive you back to the city. He’ll take you wherever you need to go.” She pulled the door open, and I saw the imposing young vampire standing at the bottom of the porch stairs. Thirteen was standing at his side. The gray man’s face was a mass of bruises, but he nodded to let me know he was healing and ready to leave.
Amelie touched my arm tentatively. “Before you go, I wanted to add my thanks to Mariah’s. You’ve done more for our family than we ever would have expected.”
“I only wish I could have done more,” I said. “How long will you wait before deciding Uriah needs to be replaced?”
Her face clouded, and I could see that she was debating how much to tell me. “If he still sleeps after three months, the vote will be called.”
I nodded, making a mental note. Hopefully, that would give me the time I needed to finish my work in New York before I had to worry about the potential fallout from such a large change in San Antonio. I wondered what might happen when word of the previous night’s events reached Emily Van Owen. I knew the Uribes were content with the portion of the city they controlled, but I’d never met the matriarch of the Van Owen clutch to know if she’d be the sort to try and take advantage of the perceived weakness of a leadership change to expand her reach. The last thing I needed was a war among the clutches.
“Keep her safe,” I said, squeezing Amelie’s arm as I passed by to leave the house. I could see a pickup waiting just beyond the perimeter fence, and I had to hope my legs would hold out long enough for me to collapse into the seat and not in the grass.
THIRTY-TWO
T he winter sun felt good on my face as I sat on the park bench. It was Saturday morning, and the playground on the far side of the park was crowded with kids of all ages laughing and having fun. That alone was enough to make me feel ten times better than I had after two days of rest and boredom at Windemere.
One of those kids was a young girl with dark hair pulled up into a ponytail. She raced around the playground, making friends with any new kid who arrived and bringing them into her group. I smiled as I watched her, an expression of joy that was bittersweet.
Penny Castillo was a young girl I’d saved from a lamia a year ago. For several months, I’d enjoyed getting to spend time with her as a babysitter when her parents needed some time alone. The six drawings she’d made for me when she visited my office now hung over my desk at Windemere. I’d cherish them forever.
But after my long absence when I went to India to learn how to properly use the coin that hung around my neck, I’d been unable to justify entering her life again. My world had grown darker and more complicated, and it didn’t look like those clouds would be breaking any time soon. As long as there were people out there who wanted to hurt me, people who wouldn’t hesitate to turn their anger on anyone else in my life, I couldn’t put her in danger.
“She’s getting tall,” Annie said as she sat down beside me, leaning to put her head on my shoulder.
“Yeah.” I smiled, realizing I hadn’t even noticed it until it was pointed out. Penny had been small for her age when I’d been scouring the city to find where she’d been taken, but now she was one of the tallest on the playground that were around her age. “She looks happy.”
“That’s because she is, Dahlish. Thanks to you, she’s safe and she has her dad back.”
Michael Castillo had been convicted for his part in a bank robbery years ago. As part of my investigation to find Penny, I’d managed to uncover evidence that he had been duped by the mastermind behind the robbery. That information, along with a little cooperation on his part and a good lawyer, had led to his sentence being cut short. He was on parole for a few years, but he was home.
I forced myself to focus on the reason Annie had been gone. “What did Monica say?”
“Alexandru sent his sister to Europe on the boat, but he stayed behind in New York. Goldie has a few people on the inside, and they’re telling him that Rosu is coming up with plans to strike back at us for all the damage we’ve done to his business.”
“I’m surprised it took him this long to work up to it. Do we know if Elina is still recuperating? Is that why she was sent back?”
Annie shrugged, lifting her head from my shoulder. “Nothing definite, but I’d be willing to put a large chunk of your money on it.”
I chuckled, feeling the same way. Ollie had shot the woman during our confrontation at the Alamo, and in the fleeting moment I was able to see the wound I thought it would be a miracle if she survived. Apparently, she had, but it would be a long road to recovery. A recovery that would probably end far short of what she had been before it happened.
“Nyk has a tip on where Rosu might be holing up,” Annie continued. “Monica said he’s eager to check the place out.”
“What did you tell them?” I asked, knowing that she was beginning to pick up an understanding of the way I worked from the months of close proximity.
“I told them to stake the place out, but to hold off on anything else until you arrive this evening.” She looked up at the cloudless morning sky. “Dahlish, I’m not sure I’m happy about you going back on your own.”
“I won’t be alone,” I said through a smile as I kissed the top of her head. “Ollie and Sandra are flying with me.” They were both ecstatic about the prospect of their vacation to the city. Though he wouldn’t admit it, I thought Ollie was awed at the thought of riding in style on a chartered jet.
“You know what I mean,” she said sternly. “Who’s going to keep you from doing something stupid while I’m down here watching over San Antonio in your absence?”
“Monica is ready and waiting to fill that role,” I scoffed. “I’m sure you spent as much time training her to shepherd me as you spent teaching her to fight.”
Annie smirked, and her silence spoke volumes. She and Ollie were convinced that without a moderating influence, I would rush into every situation with too much emotion and too little thought.
Frankly, I was convinced they were right. It was one of the many reasons I loved having Annie by my side. The combination of that thoughtfulness and her fighting skills made her one of the most effective Knights any member of the Nine could hope to have. I’d only be leaving her in San Antonio for a little over a week, but I’d miss her for every single minute of it.
A loud burst of laughter floated across the park from the playground, drawing my attention back to the children. It took me only a few seconds to find Penny, in the midst of a small group who were following her as she led the way from one amusement to the next. I wondered if she still asked her mother about me, or if she still wore the small replica of my coin that I’d had made for her fourth birthday.
“I miss the little sprite, you know.” I sighed heavily, amazed that the feeling was so strong.
“She misses you, too, I’m sure.” Annie wrapped her arm around mine as she reached up to turn my face away from the playground. She planted a warm kiss on my lips, and her eyes searched mine when she was done. After a moment, they crinkled up with a big smile. “At least I know I won’t have to work too hard to persuade you to have kids.”
I spluttered, never in a million years imagining she might suggest something like that. At the same moment, I wondered how I’d really feel about it. Was I ready to be a dad?
