“You nosy bitch. You and that harpy are in it together.”
At the desk the concierge
frantically mashed buttons on
a phone.
If I’d
been on my own, I would have turned and run. Some people stand their ground no matter what. In my line of work, a stint at the hospital,
coupled with a bill you can’t pay because you’re not working, cures that notion really
fast. Given a
chance, I’d run like a rabbit,
but I had to
buy Liz time to get to her
car.
John raised his arms, bent at the elbow, palms up, fin- gers apart, as if he was holding two invisible
softballs in his hands.
The mage
pose. Oh shit.
“Mr. Rutger, don’t do
this. Adultery
isn’t illegal. You haven’t
committed any crimes yet. Please
don’t do this.”
His
eyes stared at me, cold
and hard. “You can still walk away from this.”
“You thought you could humiliate me. You thought you’d embarrass
me.” His face darkened
as ghostly magic shadows slid across his skin. Tiny red sparks ignited
above his palms and flared. Bright crimson
lightning danced, stretching to the tips of his fingers.
Where the hell was the hotel security?
I couldn’t take him down first—it would be an assault,
and we couldn’t
afford to be sued—but they could.
“Let me show you what happens to people who try to humiliate me.”
I dashed to
the side.
Thunder pealed. The glass doors of the hotel shattered. The blast wave picked me up off the floor. I saw the
chair from the lounge fly at me and I threw my hands up, curl- ing in midair. The wall smashed into my right shoulder.
The chair hit my side
and face. Ow.
I crashed down next to the shards of a ceramic pot that had held a plant two seconds ago, then I scrambled to my feet.
The red sparks ignited again. He was getting
ready for Round
Two.
They say a
hundred-and-thirty-pound woman
has no chance
against an athletic two-hundred-pound man. That’s a lie. You just have to make a decision
to hurt him and then do it.
I grabbed a heavy pot shard
and hurled it at him. It crashed against his chest, knocking
him off balance. I ran to him, yanking a Taser from my pocket.
He swung at me. It was hard and fast, and it caught me right in the stomach.
Tears swelled in my eyes. I lunged forward and jammed the Taser
against his neck.
The
shock surged through him. His eyes
bulged. Please let him
go down.
Please.
His mouth gaped open. John went rigid and crashed like
a log.
I knelt on his neck, pulled a plastic tie from my pocket, and wrestled his hands together,
tying them up.
John
growled.
I sat next to him on the
floor. My
face hurt.
Two men burst from the side doors and ran to us. Their jackets said security. Well, now they show up. Thank God for the cavalry.
In
the distance police sirens blared.
Sgt. Munoz, a
stocky man twice my age, peered
at the security footage. He’d
watched it twice already.
“I couldn’t
let him put her into the car,” I said from my spot in the chair. My shoulder hurt and the handcuffs
on my hands kept me from rubbing it. Being in close prox-imity to cops filled me with anxiety. I wanted to fidget, but fidgeting
would make me look nervous.
“You were right,” Munoz said and tapped the screen, pausing on John Rutger reaching
for his wife. “That right there is your dead giveaway. The man’s caught with his pants down and he doesn’t say, ‘Sorry, I fucked up.’ He doesn’t beg for forgiveness or get angry. He goes cold and tries
to get
his wife
out of
the picture.”
“I didn’t provoke
him. I didn’t put my hands on him either,
until he tried to kill me.”
“I see that.” He turned to me. “That’s a C2 Taser you’ve got there. You do know range on those things is fifteen
feet?”
“I didn’t want to take
chances. His magic looked elec- trical
to me,
and I thought he might
block the current.”
Munoz shook his head. “No, he was enerkinetic. Straight magic energy, and education
to use it, courtesy
of the U.S. Army. This guy is
a vet.”
“Ah.” That explained why Rutger went flat. Dealing with adrenaline was nothing new to him. The fact that
he was an enerkinetic made sense too. Pyrokinetics manipu-
lated fire, aquakinetics manipulated water,
and enerkinet- ics manipulated raw magical
energy. Nobody was quite sure what
the nature of that energy was,
but it
was a rela- tively common magic. How in the world did Bern miss all this in the background check? When I got home, my cousin
and I would have to have words.
A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door and handed my
license back to Munoz. “She
checks out.”
Munoz unlocked my cuffs, took them off, and handed me my purse and camera.
My cell and my wallet fol- lowed. “We
have your
statement, and we took
your memory card. You’ll get it back later. Go home, put some ice on
that neck.”
I grinned at him. “Are you going to tell me not to leave town, Sarge?”
Munoz gave me
a “yet another smart-ass” look. “No. You went up against a military-grade mage for a grand. If you need the money that bad, you probably can’t afford the gas.”
Three minutes later I climbed into my five-year-old Mazda minivan.
The paperwork described
Mazda’s color as “gold.” Everyone else said
it was “kind of champagne” or “sort of beige.” Coupled with unmistakable mom car lines,
the minivan made for a perfect
surveillance vehicle.
Nobody paid it any mind. I once followed
a guy for two hours
in it on a nearly
deserted highway,
and when the insurance company later showed him the
footage demon- strating that his
knee worked just fine as he
shifted gears in his El Camino, he was terribly surprised.
I turned the mirror. A big red welt that would mature into one hell of a purple bruise
blossomed on my neck and the top of my right shoulder, like someone took a hand- ful of blueberries and rubbed it all over me. An equally
bright red stain marked my jaw on the left side. I sighed, readjusted
the mirror, and headed home.
Some easy job
this turned out to
be. At
least I didn’t have to go to the hospital. I grimaced.
The welt decided it didn’t like
me grimacing. Ow.
The Baylor Investigative Agency started as
a family business.
We still were a family
business. Technically we were owned by someone
else now, but they mostly left us alone to run our affairs as we saw fit. We had only three rules. Rule #1: we stayed bought. Once a client hired us, we were loyal to the client. Rule #2: we didn’t break the
law. It
was a good rule. It kept us out of jail and safe from litigation. And Rule #3, the most important one of all: at the end of the day we still had to be able to look our reflec- tions
in the eye. I filed today under Rule #3 day. Maybe I was crazy and John Rutger would’ve
taken his wife home and begged
her forgiveness on bended
knee. But at the end of the day, I had no regrets,
and I didn’t have to worry
about whether I did the
right thing and
whether Liz’s two children would ever see their mother again.
Their father
was a different
story, but he was no longer my
problem. He made that mess all on
his own.
I cleared
the evening traffic on I-290, heading north- west, and turned south.
A few minutes later I pulled up in front of our warehouse.
Bern’s beat-up black Civic sat in the parking lot, next to Mom’s blue Honda Element. Oh good.
Everyone was home.
I parked, went to the door, and punched the code into the security system. The door clicked open, then I let myself in and paused for a second to hear the reassuring clang
of the lock sliding home behind me.
When you entered
the warehouse from this door, it looked just like an office. We built walls, installed
some glass panels, and laid down high-traffic beige carpet. That gave us three office rooms on the left side and a break room and large conference room on the right. The drop
ceiling completed the illusion.
I stepped into my office, put the purse and the camera on the desk, and sat in my chair. I really should do a write-up, but I didn’t feel like
it. I’d
do it
later.
The office was soundproof. Around me everything was quiet. A familiar, faint scent of grapefruit
oil in the oil warmer floated to me. The oils were my favorite little luxury. I inhaled
the fragrance. I was home.
I survived.
Had I hit my head on the wall
when Rutger had thrown me, I could’ve
died today. Right now I could be dead instead of sitting here in my office, twenty feet from my home. My mom could be in the morgue, iden- tifying me on a slab. My heart pounded in my chest. Nausea crept up, squeezing my throat.
I leaned forward and concentrated on breathing. Deep, calm breaths. I just had to
let myself
work through it.
In
and out. In and out. Slowly
the anxiety receded. In
and out.
Okay.
I got up, crossed
the office to the break room, opened the door in the back, and stepped into the warehouse.
A luxuriously wide hallway
stretched left and right, its sealed
concrete floor reflecting the light softly.
Above me thirty-foot ceilings
soared. After we had to sell the house and move into the warehouse, Mom and Dad considered making the inside look just like a real house. Instead we ended up building one large wall separating
this section of the warehouse—our living space—from Grandma’s garage so we didn’t have to heat or air-condition the entire twenty-two thousand square
feet of the warehouse.
The rest of the walls had occurred organically, which was a gentle euphemism
for We put them up as needed
with whatever material was handy.
If Mom saw me, I wouldn’t get away without a thor- ough medical exam. All I wanted
to do was take a shower and eat some food. This time of the day she was usually with Grandma, helping her work. If I was really quiet, I could just sneak into my room. I padded down the hall- way. Think sneaky thoughts . . . Be invisible
. . . Hope- fully, nothing attention-attracting was going
on.
“I’ll kill
you!” a familiar high voice howled from the right.
Damn it.
Arabella,
of course. My youngest sister was in
rare form, judging by the pitch.
“That’s real mature!” And that was Catalina, the seventeen-year-old. Two years older than Arabella
and eight years younger than
me.
I had to break
this up before Mom came over to
inves- tigate. I sped down the hallway
toward the media room.
“At
least I’m not a dumb ho
who has no friends!” “At
least I’m not fat!”
“At
least I am not ugly!”
Neither of
them was fat, ugly, or promiscuous. They both were complete drama queens, and if I didn’t quash this party
up fast,
Mom would
be on us in seconds.
“I hate you!”
I walked into the media room. Catalina, thin and dark- haired, stood on the right,
her arms crossed over her chest. On the left Bern very carefully restrained blond Arabella by holding her by her waist above the floor. Ara- bella was really
strong, but Bern had wrestled
through high school and went to a judo club twice a week. Now nineteen and still growing, he stood an inch over six feet tall and weighed
about two hundred
pounds, most of it powerful, supple muscle. Holding a hundred-pound Ara- bella
wasn’t a problem.
“Let me go!” Arabella snarled.
“Think about what you’re doing,” Bern said, his deep voice
patient. “We agreed—no violence.”
“What
is it
this time?” I asked.
Catalina stabbed her finger in Arabella’s direction. “She never put the cap on my liquid foundation. Now it’s dried
out!”
ABOUT ILONA ANDREWS:
“Ilona Andrews” is the pseudonym
for a husband-and-wife writing team. Ilona is a native-born Russian and Gordon
is a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. Contrary to popular belief,
Gordon was never an intelligence officer with a license to kill, and Ilona was
never the mysterious Russian spy who seduced him.
They met in college, in English
Composition 101, where Ilona got a better grade. (Gordon is still sore about
that.) They have co-authored two New York Times and USA Today bestselling
series, the urban fantasy of Kate Daniels and the romantic urban fantasy of The
Edge and are working on the next volumes for both.
They live in Texas with their two
children and many dogs and cats.
