Chapter 9

 

 

I WISHED I could look around for Van Zant’s Fae companion, Bryna, who’d been driving the wraith. I wouldn’t have minded introducing her to Mort. But alas, I had to avoid the fangs bearing down on me.

Van Zant sprang at me in that creepy, animal way that vamps move. I rolled to my back and kicked out with my feet, nailing him in the stomach with one boot and the groin with the other. The blows catapulted him over me. He landed with a grunt and skidded along the ground.

He must have been high on his own power and adrenaline because he sprang to his feet almost immediately, and seemed none the worse for wear from the crotch kick.

I forced myself to rise and mirror his crouch. I growled, not because of amped-up aggression but because I felt like a re-heated carcass that had already taken all the abuse it could handle for one twenty-four-hour period, and I was pissed. Van Zant and I had started circling each other, and he kept flicking glances at Mort. I was pretty sure my sword was the only thing keeping the vamp at bay. I reached for magic, and searing pain and sparks exploded through my head.

“Damn it to Maeve,” I muttered.

All I needed was sufficient magic to incapacitate Van Zant long enough to flash the bounty card in his face, and he’d be magically identified and cuffed. Then I could haul him in, and there’d be one less vamp hazard on the loose, and the fat payday would be mine. But vamps were preternaturally strong, and this one clearly wanted to end me.

My quads were shaking with the effort of holding the crouched ready stance, and my sword arm was already aching. If he came at me, I was done. I sneered, trying to look menacing enough to disguise the fact that I was about to keel over.

“Come at me, bloodsucker,” I snarled, changing my grip so I held Mort in both hands.

I really didn’t want to kill him. The assignment was to bring him in alive so he could stand trial. A dead mark only paid out ten percent of a full live capture—the Guild’s way of discouraging mercs from becoming legal paid assassins. Plus, the thought of the paperwork that ensued from a kill on the job sent fresh nausea spinning through me. Oberon’s balls, the damn paperwork. It would bury me for a week.

Van Zant lunged and swiped with his claw-like nails. Only my years of training saved me with a reflexive twitch of my sword that blocked him. He pulled back, again looking warily at Mort.

“Aw, is that all you got?” I waved my sword, which helped to mask the shaking of my arms. “Try again, leech.”

Van Zant answered my taunt by springing up from the ground with blurring speed. I twisted, struggling to keep up with his movement. He rebounded off the building we were next to. My mind barely had time to process his trajectory. He was going to land on my shoulders and take me down backward.

I couldn’t raise my arms in time, so I threw my weight forward and allowed gravity to assist my fall. I dropped hard onto my knees, spun to face him with one knee up, and slashed wildly. Even in this position, I could barely hold myself up, but it was enough and he scored only a glancing blow to my head from one of his boots as he tried to jump clear of my blade.

He shrieked, the sound echoing down the empty street. When he curled up on the ground, writhing, I saw it: the vamp’s severed hand.

I crawled forward and snatched the dripping chunk of vampire flesh, and then used Mort as a crutch to push me up to my feet.

“Regenerate that, you bastard,” I said. With a new surge of strength, I kicked him in the back of the head.

I reached for the bounty card and managed to pull it out. But when I crouched to try to flash it in his face so the certificate could identify the mark, Van Zant sent up a sharp kick that caught me on the wrist. I dropped the card. He snatched it up with his remaining hand and let out a screech of fury. He tore at the card with his teeth as if it were a chunk of jerky. It sparked and then disintegrated to dust, the charm that was supposed to ID and cuff the mark destroyed.

Shit!

Without a functioning card, I had no way to apprehend him. And I was running on fumes. I wouldn’t be able to apprehend him without the card, and I didn’t have the strength left to kill him. If I stuck around, he’d end me.

Cursing as I went, I hightailed it away from the vamp as fast as my shaky legs could shamble. I had to get away before he managed to attack me again. At least since he knew he was a Guild target, he would go into hiding and stop passing VAMP3 blood around to avoid attention. Temporarily, anyway.

A severed hand certainly wouldn’t kill Van Zant, but I honestly wasn’t sure whether a vamp could grow back a limb. I didn’t really give a shit. I was just happy I’d managed to inflict enough damage to get away alive.

By some miracle, I remembered that there was a little town square nearby and, in the center of it, an ancient oak that served as a doorway.

When I arrived in the MonsterFit vestibule, I’d never been so happy to smell the stale-sweat aroma of the gym. It was dark out in Las Vegas, but the enclosure was still about a gazillion degrees after being bombarded with the western sun. I passed through the doorway and stood outside, Mort in one hand and bloody vampire fingers clutched in the other. It was almost like I was holding hands with Van Zant.

Ewww.

I dropped the hand, and it landed with a faint, fleshy plop, and I went to pull the towel off Vincenzo’s seat. I wiped the vamp ick off Mort, sheathed the sword, and then used the towel to pick up Van Zant’s hand. I wrapped the worn terrycloth around the severed appendage and stuffed it in one of Vincenzo’s side cases.

Then I wheeled my scooter into the vestibule and used the doorway to travel home to Boise.

At the foot of the stairs leading up to my floor, a stray I’d named Emerald sat primly. All I could do was groan and drag myself past her. She let out a plaintive meow at my back, obviously affronted that I hadn’t offered her a treat.

“Next time, Emmy,” I grumbled. Cats were so demanding.

When I opened my apartment door, it was only eight at night local time, but I felt like I’d been awake for about three days straight.

Lochlyn looked up from where she was curled into one corner of the sofa with her tablet in one slim hand and a cup of coffee in the other. She quickly set the mug down on the side table.

“You look like hell,” she said, rising.

“Uhh.” I couldn’t do more than groan in response. I dropped my keys on the floor, took a couple more steps, and dropped the towel-wrapped hand.

She squinted at me. “You’re hurt.”

I shook my head, pulled off my scabbard, and let it fall to the ground, too. I knew I was leaving a trail of junk across the floor, but I couldn’t work up the energy to care.

“Well, something got you,” she said. “Bath?”

I collapsed on the sofa and stuffed my face against a pillow.

“That would be fantastic,” I said, my words all but unintelligible.

Lochlyn understood, though, because a moment later I heard water pouring into the tub. I wasn’t the bubble-bath type, not by a long shot, but one of the only things that helped New Gargoyle magical exhaustion was a soak in a mineral salt bath. My roommate and I had specifically chosen this apartment because it was one of the few in our price range that had a proper bathtub.

“I poured the rest of your bag of salts in,” came Lochlyn’s voice. “You’re gonna need to buy more.”

I turned my head so I could peer at her with one eye. “Sure. I’ll do that with all the extra cash I have lying around.”

The salts I needed weren’t your run-of-the-mill Epsom salts that only cost a couple of dollars a pound at the drugstore. Oh, no, of course not. The optimum soak was a mix of salts from ancient sea beds all over the world that had been enhanced with a bit of magic from witches specializing in healing. Each dose was about a hundred bucks. I only used it when I was really hurting.

Lochlyn went back to her corner of the sofa and pulled her feet up. She sank into the pillows and curled up in a decidedly feline posture.

“Didn’t catch your mark, I take it?” she asked, blinking wide, almond-shaped eyes that appeared to be the color and texture of marbled jasper.

“No, I didn’t,” I grumbled. “But I daresay he’ll think twice before attacking me again.”

I gestured at the bundle I’d dropped on the floor.

Lochlyn looked at it, her elbow-length, straight pink-streaked platinum-blond hair swinging around her face, and then back at me. “Do I even want to know what it is?”

“It’s a vampire hand.”

She covered her mouth and giggled. That was what I loved about Lochlyn. Most people would be grossed out, but not my roommate. She found a severed vamp hand amusing. Not for the first time, I considered whether she might be slightly insane. I didn’t really care if she was. We meshed, and that was an extremely rare thing for me. We’d met when I was chasing down a vampire mark in the Nashville, Tennessee, bar scene. At the time, she was trying to get a record deal. She’d used her stage skills to stall my mark, ultimately helping me catch the young vamp woman. When I learned Lochlyn had recently lost her lease and was living out of her car, on a rare impulse I invited her to crash with me a while in Boise until she’d saved enough to return to Nashville. Not long after, we were looking for a two-bedroom place and became permanent roommates.

“What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

“Dehydrate it and wear it as a necklace.”

She snorted. “Please, please do that. And then let me borrow it.” Unfolding her long, slim legs, she rose. “C’mon, the bath is just about ready.”

She stood at my end of the sofa and held out both hands.

I painfully sat up and waved her away. “I’m okay.”

“Bullshit.” She grasped my hands and leaned back, straining to pull me to my feet.

Lochlyn was taller than me, but whereas she was all lithe ethereal legginess, I was solid muscle and outweighed her by at least twenty-five pounds. After she got me upright, she grabbed her phone and went to get mine out of my scabbard. I trudged into the bathroom, and she waited outside the door until I’d undressed, lowered myself into the tub, and pulled the shower curtain across before coming in and sitting on the toilet. Her hand appeared, holding my phone, which she set on the edge of the bathtub.

I let out a long groan as I sank up to my chin in the lukewarm water. My skin tingled with a prickling, electric sensation in the places where I’d used rock armor in the past couple of days. The feeling was strong enough to make me want to claw at it, but I clenched my fists and waited for it to pass.

Lochlyn snapped her gum, blowing bubbles and popping them loudly. Her phone was blipping and vibrating with messages and notifications. She was as social as I was solitary. It was rare to come home and find her as I had, alone and reading quietly. I suspected she might have been waiting for me, since we hadn’t crossed paths in a few days.

“So, what happened with the vamp?” she asked. “Start at the beginning.”

I told her about the visit to Morven. I started to recount the wrestle with the wraith, but she cut me off by whipping the curtain aside several inches to stare at me.

“A fricking wraith?” she asked, her cat-eyes huge and tense with alarm.

“Yeah. It was actually my second run-in with it. Earlier, it tried to kill me in the netherwhere.”

“Petra. This vamp’s so-called Fae companion has gone off the rails, commanding a wraith to murder you. You need to tell someone.”

“Who? The Faerie cops?” I asked sarcastically. There were no police in Faerie.

“Oh, I don’t know, Oberon? The High Court?” She shot back. She gave me a pointed side-eye and then let the curtain fall back into place.

She was right—I probably should have gone to the High Court and submitted my accusation to Oberon—but I really didn’t want to deal with it. I’d killed the wraith, after all. It wasn’t a problem anymore. Bryna needed to answer for sending it to kill me, sure, but the approach Lochlyn was suggesting would involve getting mixed up in court protocol and inter-kingdom drama. I preferred to deal with the offender directly.

“We’re putting a pin in this Bryna business,” Lochlyn said. “Now, tell me about how the vamp lost his hand.”

I raised an arm out of the water and waved it around dismissively. “Eh, fangs, sword, blah, blah. I have something more interesting to tell you.”

She snorted a laugh. “Okay?”

“I’m going with Maxen into the Duergar kingdom tomorrow to jail break my—” I cut off. My father had said to keep the secret, but I told Lochlyn everything. She was my only confidant in the world, loyal to a fault, and I knew I could trust her.

“Jail break your . . .” she prompted.

“My changeling twin sister from King Periclase’s clutches.”

There was a clatter that sounded like her phone hitting the tiled floor.

“You . . . your . . . what? You waited until NOW TO TELL ME THIS?” she thundered.

I was pretty sure she’d jumped to her feet and was trying to pace around the small bathroom.

“Uh, sorry,” I said. “I was getting to it, I swear.”

“You have a sister? A twin sister? A changeling twin sister?”

“Apparently,” I said.

I picked up my phone and flipped to the picture of Nicole that Oliver had given me. I shoved the phone around the side of the curtain so Lochlyn could see. She snatched the device from me.

I let my arm sink back into the salt water. “We’re not identical, obviously.”

“I’m going,” she said.

“Huh?”

“I’m going to the Duergar palace with you. This is huge, Petra. You need moral support.”

I smiled. I didn’t really need moral support, but I appreciated her sentiment, and I wasn’t at all surprised at her insistence. “I don’t think Maxen will—”

“Aw, you can persuade him,” she cut in. “Flirt a little. Make him think you want to clank rocks or whatever you New Gargs do when you have sex.”

I burst out laughing. It kind of hurt because it contracted muscles that weren’t really in the mood to do any work yet. But at the same time, it felt good to laugh.

“Clank rocks?” I asked, laughing harder.

“Whatever! That’s not the important point, here, Petra. You’re going after your sister. I want to be there to help if I can, and that’s all there is to it. You’ll just have to figure it out with Maxen. When do we leave for Faerie?” she asked, all business.

“I’m supposed to meet Maxen at the fortress at noon. I guess we have to do a bunch of nonsense to get ready, because we’re not actually slated to arrive at the Duergar palace until evening. Wait, don’t you need to work tomorrow night?”

“Uh, no.”

“Lochlyn?” I drew out her name in a low voice.

She sighed dramatically. “I may have . . .” She trailed off into mumbles.

“May have what?”

“Gotten fired.”

I groaned. “For the love of Oberon, what did you do?”

Remember how I said Lochlyn could scream like the half-banshee she was? Well, there was something about the cat-banshee combo that gave her a voice that was downright legendary. Think Fae skinny-model blond with the pipes of Etta James. Lochlyn’s voice had a rich, soulful, throwback quality that no one with her looks deserved. She’d recently scored a regular gig singing on a rotation in a very upscale chain of steakhouses sprinkled around the Pacific Northwest and northern California. She could pull off the geographical spread and cut the cost of travel by using the Faerie doorways to get to each location. Her agent, Rodney, had gone to great pains to set it up for her, and it was the highest paying gig she’d ever had. After only a few months, she’d even started chiseling away at her insane amount of credit card debt.

“I, um, may have missed my set,” she said. “Three nights in a row.”

“Lochlyn!” I sounded like a disapproving mother scolding her child for getting in trouble at school, but I couldn’t help it. I’d hoped she’d finally started to leave some of her flighty ways behind. She had an amazing talent that deserved recognition.

“I know,” she said, sounding genuinely miserable.

“What the hell were you doing when you should have been at work?”

The water was starting to cool, so I turned the faucet on to heat it up a little. The salts and magic were working. My skin no longer hurt, and the pounding in my head had dulled to a low throb. I’d still be weak for a while, but the minerals would help me be able to generate rock armor without too much pain in hours rather than days.

“I met this guy, this billionaire auto industry guy who’d bought up a bunch of super high-end nightclubs around the world. One thing led to another, and he invited me and like twenty other people to go with him to Ibiza. Then we decided to go to Italy to see this DJ he knows,” she said nonchalantly, as if this sort of thing happened to most people on the regular. “I just, I don’t know, lost track of time.”

Here was one area where Lochlyn and I were glaringly different. She loved to party. It wasn’t the partying that primarily attracted her, but the music. Live music was like a drug to her. As soon as she said “Ibiza,” which was known for its insanely awesome club scene, I knew there’d been no hope.

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

“When I woke up this morning, I would have said yes. Now I’m not totally sure. That was a really, really good gig I lost.”

“Any way Rodney can beg for another chance?”

“Maybe,” she said. “But right now, he’s still pissed. Pretty sure he’s not in the mood to do me any favors.”

I flipped the switch on the bathtub’s drain, and water began glugging down.

“Well, at least now you’ve got something to do tomorrow,” I said.

“Yay, court!” She made a few little claps. “And, thunder of Oberon, Petra. You have a twin sister.”

“Yeah.” I shook my head, still not quite believing it.

“What’s going through your mind?” she asked carefully. She knew better than to ask me directly about my feelings.

I let out a slow breath, stalling a little. “I don’t know her, so I can’t say I feel any connection to her at this point. But I think I feel . . . I don’t know, sorry for her?”

“Why’s that?”

“She must be so confused and alone right now,” I said. I hesitated. “But I pity her for having grown up in a mundane world thinking she was just an ordinary human. Even though I got my ass out of Faerie as fast as I could after graduation, I can’t imagine a different upbringing than I had. Being raised by Oliver, in the fortress, in Faerie . . . I wouldn’t have given that up for anything.”

“I get that,” she said softly. “I feel the same way about my childhood.”

My father’s warning about the secret pinged in my mind. “Lochlyn, I know I can trust you, and I hate to ask, but no one can know that Nicole is my sister.”

Lochlyn might have been flighty when it came to employment and her social life, but she was as loyal as they came. Still, I felt the need to seal her secrecy.

“An oath, of course,” she said. “I promise to you, Petra Maguire, that I will never reveal to anyone that Nicole the changeling is your sister unless you release me from this binding oath.”

A tingle of magic formed in the air like a fine mist, settling over us and marking the promise, and then dissipated.

I stood up in the tub and rolled my shoulders, marveling at how the movement didn’t hurt my muscles or pull at tender skin. I reached a hand around the curtain to pull my towel off the bar and inhaled deeply. The minerals and magic had given me a new lease on life, and I had a feeling I was going to need it to get Nicole out of the Duergar palace.