Chapter Twenty-Six
Sleep cocooned me. Something was trying to pull me up, tugging at me incessantly but I resisted.
I was tired. My limbs were heavy, exhausted.
I needed more sleep. I turned over and snuggled into the softness I found myself in.
I heard a chuckle, but it didn’t fully register. It must have been a dream.
Pigdog!
Loki? I thought foggily. Loki?
The bond between us snapped taut, and the sensation was like someone grabbing my soul and shaking it.
A surge of warmth hit me, fierce and bright.
Loki’s love.
His stubbornness.
His absolute refusal to let me go.
Wake up, Pigdog! he screamed into my mind, voice cracking with terror. Wake up! Wake up!
The sleepiness shifted and slid off me like oil on water.
It poured into Loki instead through the bond, because he was taking it, pulling it from me and into himself. His mind went foggy on the other end of our bond as mine cleared.
No.
Loki, no!
The instruction was too late. His mind wavered.
His presence in my mind turned heavy, sluggish.
Then he went utterly quiet.
White-hot rage detonated in my chest.
My eyes snapped open.
Troy blinked in surprise. No, dammit. Not Troy, Jingo. ‘You are supposed to be sleeping, Inspector, for some time yet.’
God, I felt sick. I’d been nuzzling into him. I leapt away as if his touch burned.
I fumbled for the weapons in my holsters, but the knife and gun had been removed. My scalp prickled. The small potion vials remained, missed by Reed just like Robbie had hoped.
Then I saw her.
Kate.
She was tied to a chair, wrists bound, mouth gagged, eyes wide with fear. There was a smear of blood at her temple. Her hair was dishevelled.
I couldn’t embrace the relief that licked at my guts. She was alive, but for how long?
This was what we called a sticky situation, or a clusterfuck, but thanks to Loki, I was far from down.
Loki’s presence flickered weakly through our bond. Unconscious but living. I pushed down my worry for my caladrius. I couldn’t split my focus, not when the wrong decision, the wrong move, might be the difference between life and death. Mine or Kate’s.
We weren’t alone in Kate’s lounge. Reed, the arsehole, was there too, but so was Dwayne Witterhall, the black-ops Connection subterfuge wizard who wiped minds for a living. He was supposed to be on my side.
‘I knew you were on the take,’ I snarled at him.
He shrugged. ‘Needs must. You work for the Connection. You know how corrupt it is. Does it truly make any difference whether I’m following their orders or someone else’s?’
I thought of Thackeray’s orders to close Aspen’s case, but also his blessing to pursue it off the clock. ‘Not everyone in the Connection is corrupt. There are good people.’
‘There are. You’re one of them. And I’m even sorry for what I’m about to do.’
I strengthened my mental shields and braced for an attack, but it didn’t come. Not yet anyway.
Instead Jingo drew my eye. ‘What am I going to do with you, Inspector?’ In his hands, magic-cancelling cuffs dangled. I’d lurched awake and away before he’d secured them. Lazy, stupid, sloppy. I was absurdly grateful for the error.
‘She was blasting air all across the field, and she hasn’t been to a hall in several weeks.’ Reed looked at me coolly. ‘She has to be close to empty.’
He wasn’t wrong. My skin was itching, but it wouldn’t take much to rip my magic from me and send me sprawling into the Common realm where I would be as defenceless as a newborn babe.
I’d have to use my magic sparingly. I had to make it count. I needed to give Robbie time to ride to my rescue. As much as I hated the thought of being rescued, I had to imagine he would come for me. That he would be fine on that field of death. He had to be.
Keeping my mental shields up and Witterhall in my periphery, I moved closer to my intended target in the guise of looking at him fully. I drew my eyes up and down him.
Jingo as Troy Fairglass. Mer royalty with perfect skin, perfect lustrous blue hair, perfect smile.
A monster who lurked behind a beautiful face.
He looked at me with affection. ‘My dear Inspector.’
‘I am not your anything. Not for one second. I know it was you. All those years ago. It was you in Broadlake. You’re the one who cut me up.’
He smiled broadly, almost proudly. ‘So smart, Stacy. So smart. You were, even then. I could see it in you, the potential, but you were too soft. I had to make you stronger. When I snatched you, I was going to kill you and deliver your corpse to your father’s door.
But then you looked at me with such defiance that I couldn’t resist breaking you first.’ His smile widened.
‘But you didn’t break, not completely. Oh you screamed and cried, but you didn’t give up. I wanted you to give up.’
He was mad. He was mad because he had broken me, totally and utterly. I had the scars and nightmares to prove it. But I kept my face blank. ‘I’m going to kill you,’ I promised.
‘I have never been in a woman that way,’ Jingo purred.
‘But I’ve thought about it. About possessing you.
About our souls being one. But ultimately, I dismissed it.
If we resided together, I couldn’t fuck you, and I found that I want to do that.
I’d enjoy defiling you that way. Even if the pleasures of the flesh are muted to me, your anger, your fear, would be delicious.
You were too young for my tastes back then.
’ He raked his eyes over me, making my skin crawl. ‘But you’re not now.’
He was vile. The worst kind of man. One who took power and became twisted and ugly from it.
I hoped to hell that Troy was paying attention.
‘I was young then, but my father found me. He rescued me, and he later discovered that you’d been lurking in Broadlake.
That Broadlake survived your inhabitation by severing his soul with the IR.
At the moment of death, as you leapt from him, Broadlake severed his soul from yours and sank back into his body.
He survived you. I bet you didn’t like that, did you, Jingo?
And even you haven’t been able to get at him in Wraithmore to tie up that loose end. That must gnaw at you.’
Jingo waved a hand nonchalantly. ‘I could kill him if I wanted, but it is a waste of resources. No one believes him. He’ll rot in there.’
‘I believe him.’
Jingo smirked. ‘For now. But once Witterhall is done with you, you won’t. You won’t remember I’m in Fairglass, and you’ll comfort him when he is devastated by Kate’s death.’
Behind her gag, Kate whimpered.
‘Don’t you fucking dare touch her,’ I snarled. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’ I turned my head to include Witterhall in that threat.
Witterhall flicked open a lighter, then closed it. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. He was anxious. Good. He should be.
‘Imagine my surprise when Kate suddenly refused my calls and wouldn’t see me?’ Jingo said. ‘I knew then that you knew who I was in. I can’t work out how you found out, but you did. But I know how to fix it … with some judicious memory charms. Anything can be fixed with a little memory charm.’
Did Dwayne Witterhall look even slightly conflicted?
He did not.
Wanker.
‘It’s funny,’ Jingo mused, ‘how these things go full circle. Your dad hunted me ceaselessly, and one day I got sick of it, so I ended him.’ A brief frown crossed his face, and I realised he didn’t understand how and why killing my father hadn’t ended in his successful possession as it should have done.
It confirmed, after all this time, that Jingo had killed my father. I’d been almost sure of it from my communication with my dad, but this nailed it. Jingo had killed Dad.
I had expected my rage to be incandescent; instead it was cold and level. I’d get even. I’d get vengeance. One way or another, Jingo’s days were numbered.
The doppelganger continued, ‘As a teenager, you glared at me with the same fucking eyes as your father’s, bearing the same fucking disdain, and I had to win.
But you got snatched away before I could break you properly, and instead I just made you stronger.
I watched you, Inspector, take the badge.
And when we met again, I thought I’d take a different approach with you.
A little flirtation here, a little gift there …
yet even so, here we are again, toe to toe. Just like your father.’
He studied me, shaking his head with mock sadness.
‘You’re becoming a thorn in my side, Inspector.
I’ve been trying to distract you but you keep getting in my way.
Focused on me. I can’t have you fucking up my plans with the mer, Inspector.
So Witterhall here is going to alter your memory, and I might even make you fall in love with me. ’
‘There’s a small issue with that,’ I said drily. ‘My fiancé?’
‘The Order will have seen to his death by now. There will be no rescue for you, and of course, we’ll bond over our mutual grieving.
I’ll be devastated by Kate’s loss, and you’ll be devastated by Krieg’s, but Witterhall will see to it that things proceed as they should between us. Subterfuge wizards are so handy.’
He nodded to the black operative. It was the order Witterhall had been waiting for, and his mind launched at mine, but I was ready. Had been ready the whole time. I just hoped to hell I had magic enough for this.
The moment he opened his mind to attack mine, there was a beat before his own shields locked down again, and in that moment, I pounced. I slid into his brain, into his medulla oblongata, and I sliced through it. Didn’t hesitate. Couldn’t. Or he might do the same thing to me.
With that slice, I stopped his heart as surely as if I had stuck a dagger into it.
He gasped once, clutched his chest, and toppled over.
And I did the same.