Chapter Two
Leander’s apartment should have been condemned long ago. He’d learned to take a shit at whatever fast food place he brought dinner in because the plumbing never worked and one window had no glass.
However, the small studio was full of so many plants it still felt like home.
He knew the sharp prickle of philodendron, which he could spin into pain.
He wove the pothos plants with their creeping vines into magical steroids or poisons or healing elixirs for viruses.
But moonflowers and henbane covered most of his apartment.
Leander twisted them into drugs more powerful than anything a mundane chemist could produce.
The plants had a softness to them that brushed against Leander’s magic and made the tension drain from him.
His bed stood against the south wall where, hopefully, his amorous neighbors to the north wouldn’t wake him with rhythmic banging. He stripped off his shirt before sitting cross-legged on the worn quilt. He closed his eyes and breathed out as he slid into the meditation he’d learned from his sifu.
Threads connected him to the plants he tended, anchoring his soul, but he also found the gossamer line to the leaf he had dropped into Cadell’s pant cuff.
Movement. For a second, the ghost impression nauseated Leander as he adjusted to sharing an existence with the leaf.
But he breathed out and let his awareness slide along the silk thread.
He rode in a semi-conscious twilight as Cadell’s car stopped. He heard slamming doors and felt the jarring motion of walking. Leander’s own body listed to one side and fell over, but as he was on the bed, he focused on the leaf.
“Mr. Druwolf is waiting in the gym,” someone said.
“Thank you.” Cadell was moving again, faster this time, and Leander listened to echoing footsteps until the sound of weights hitting the floor made him shiver.
“About fucking time.”
“Sorry, Charlie. Leander showed up after you left.”
“Did he?” He sounded too interested, and Leander would have felt horrified had he not placed so much of his awareness in a leaf incapable of emotion. “Is the fucker stabbing us in the back?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t fucking think so?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to have a fucking answer for me. Was he working with Tecca or not?”
“I seriously doubt it. He hated the woman.”
“He worked with her for five years.”
“He would have stabbed her in the back a decade ago if it would have gotten her out of the way.”
“Yet he never came to us with her betrayal. He never said one fucking word about that bitch.”
“She never would have confided in him. If there was a list of people she would trust, he would be at the bottom. She’d come to me and try to turn me against you before she’d go to Leander.”
“You’re putting a lot of faith in him.”
“I’m calculating cost and benefit. We don’t have many flora mages who can do what he does. His product sells for more than anyone else’s. We can’t take him out before we have another who’s as good at understanding both the magic and the chemistry of plants.”
“His shit got top dollar when we had that fucking traitor around to strengthen the damn drugs. Now we don’t.”
“We’ll find another blood mage. They aren’t as hard to train as flora mages, and we’ve invested a lot of money in making sure Leander is the best.”
“So, we just let a potential traitor waltz around our organization?”
“No.” Cadell chuckled. “I told Victor he could never get Leander into bed. You know what he’s going to do with that.”
Druwolf laughed, his booming voice filling the space and making the leaf tremble. “That fucker is going to hunt Leander like he’s a turkey on Thanksgiving.”
“And if he can fuck Leander, we’ll have leverage. If Leander is a traitor, Victor will sniff it out, and I’ll take care of him.”
“No,” Druwolf said. “If he’s a traitor, you won’t touch him.
You’ll bring him to me, and I will make him beg for mercy.
I will set his soul on fire. I will destroy him in ways that will make what I did to Tecca look like mercy.
By the time I fired that bullet, there was nothing left of her mind or soul, but I’ll take my time with Leander. No one will interrupt us.”
“Speaking of interruptions,” Cadell said.
“Wait a few weeks so no one connects the events and make it look like the brat killed himself. No mother, no father, no money or future–it won’t be hard to make it believable.”
Leander jerked and not only lost his connection with the leaf but shredded the slender cord as he lurched back to his own body with such violence he dry-heaved several times before he could push himself up and gasp for air.
Fuck. Creek hadn’t been lying. Druwolf planned to kill Salem.
Hell, Salem’s death would be merciful compared to what he wanted to do to Leander.
It sounded like Tecca had turned on Druwolf, earning a death sentence, but why would they assume Leander would have any part of that?
Had she given Creek information? Did Druwolf think Leander would do the same because all three of them had once lived in the same orphanage?
If so, the steroids had sunk into his brain, killing all but the last four cells, and two of those were gasping for air.
Leander had lost his found family a long time ago, and all the orphans had gone their own way as they aged out of the system.
And why would they kill Finn’s child?
Fine, he was Tecca’s child too. She had no t been a terrible human being.
She was less objectionable than most humans.
But the idea of killing a child made Leander ill.
Maybe his drugs killed people, including children, but he didn’t know their names.
They weren’t real, not to him. Those people weren’t the last piece of a man who died too young.
If Salem died, then nothing of Finn would survive.
Leander remembered how all of them would sit around at lunch and talk about how they were going to fix the world—him, Creek, Finn, Tecca, Karn, Ireen, and Petel.
The police had arrested Creek after a teacher had noticed his shadows.
Tecca and Finn had been murdered, Ireen had overdosed, Petel had disappeared after junior year and Karn after graduation.
Their dreams had been reduced to ash and idiocy.
Creek couldn’t have children without a government permit, and Leander wouldn’t have one in this fucked-up world, so Salem was all who survived of a group who sat at lunch and plotted revolutions and copied English notes.
Bitter anger crawled up his spine—a cactus-like fury making him want to stab and dig barbs deep into his enemies.
But his enemy was Druwolf, and he wouldn’t survive attacking him.
The man was a steroid-fueled thug, but that made him more dangerous, not less.
He couldn’t go to the police. Leander’s mind flowed like water down every possibility, but choices he’d made as an idiotic and hormonal teenager trapped him, and he didn’t know how to escape. He couldn’t save anyone else either.
Despair caught at him, but his moonflowers soothed it, and the philodendron pricked him into movement.
There was an escape, and maybe it was the last choice he would make for himself, but Salem was young.
He would adjust. He likely didn’t hate humans as much as Leander, who was a curmudgeon with a heart smaller than a hummingbird’s.
Where Leander was too tired and unhappy to bloom if transplanted, he could be the tree that pushed sugars into the roots for the saplings that grew in the shade and needed to be nursed. He could.
Maybe he hated people, but he’d loved Finn.
He tolerated Tecca. He missed those teens who had wanted to leave the world a better place.
The philodendron pushed him, and Leander grabbed his shirt off the floor.
He had contacts he’d never used because he didn’t know if they were secure.
His life would be short and painful if Druwolf caught him, and long and miserable if the police did. But it was time to be bold.
When he reached the alleys, it was after midnight.
He’d always hated this place. He thought of it as more suited to Creek, even though he was a police officer, because the shadows would serve him.
Or it was Druwolf’s territory with thieves and addicts huddling near barrel fires.
Or he thought of this place as belonging to the mundanes who inhabited it–the dregs and dross of society who had been thrown away and, in return, rejected society.
Mages didn’t last here because there was no privacy, and turning in an unregistered magic user could get an addict enough money to stay high for a month.
Worse, there wasn’t a single blade of grass to whisper to Leander as he passed—only the molds and fungus he could feel as an uncomfortable and distant muttering at his back.
He walked through the alley, his hand on the knife in his pocket.
A few sober or mostly sober inhabitants watched him, but they kept their distance.
Leander knew the police suspected he had magic because of his proximity to the Family, so he kept to the right side of the law in public, only this was not that side.
The alley ended in a cluster of condemned buildings guarded by men and women with face tattoos and scarred hands.
Leander stopped at a door that had once led into an underground garage.
Now strategically placed car parts and rolls of chain-link fence blocked the entrance.
“Fuck off,” a woman with huge forearms growled.
“I need to see Erio.”
Every guard at the door studied him, and Leander lifted his chin.
The woman sucked air through her teeth. “Don’t know who that is. Fuck off.”