Chapter 5 #2
Minnie—real name Minerva—is a full-blooded witch who skipped out on her coven and came to work for Vincenzo back in the 1970s.
Nobody knows what he had on her to make her do something so reckless, but she’s possibly the only person who isn’t scared of the Don.
She’s also the person who hates him the most, yet she stays and works for him, not using the power we all know she has against him. It’s a puzzle, but one for another day.
All that matters is that she’s an ally. She’s even a friend, as far as friendship can stretch in the hellhole we call home, and if she gets the chance to put one over on our boss, it makes her day. Maybe she can find out why I’m feeling like this, because it sure as fuck doesn’t feel natural.
I kept half an eye on the door while I was talking, and Rosa still hasn’t come out of the bar.
Even with my eyes closed, I’m pretty sure I’d be able to scent her the minute she set foot outside.
Her scent is unique—an intoxicating blend of lemons, spice, blood, fear, need, and heat.
Fuck, I’m getting hard just thinking about it.
The door to the place opens, and I narrow my eyes on the goth couple. I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m long gone, away in a cloud of vamp fury, but what if she’s playing it extra cautious and planning to shield herself with humans? Doesn’t seem like her style, but anything’s possible.
They stagger down the steps, and I’m relieved that my instincts are spot-on when she doesn’t follow. She must still be in there, maybe planning to close the place down.
I tell myself to be patient. Steady. Give it more time.
Better to catch her unaware, knock her out long enough to get her back to New York.
Despite what I said earlier, she is a fierce opponent, and a physical altercation could get messy.
She could wind up hurt, which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid, regardless of what she thinks.
The door opens again, and a lone man trots down the stairs, phone in hand.
After him come two women, laughing and walking arm in arm.
I stare at the door, waiting, waiting, and …
Nothing. It must be almost five a.m. now, and I need to keep an eye on the time.
The shitty weather is doing its best to pretend otherwise, but it’s summer, and the sun will be up before too long.
The lights in the bar go off. What the fuck? If the place is closing, where is she?
I jog across the road and slam into the door.
It’s locked. That won’t stop me, but I hammer on it with my fists first. The guy who was running the place yells, “Okay, okay.” He opens the door and glares out, aiming for intimidating, but he can’t hide his quick gulp when he sees me.
I’m over six feet tall, big all over, and capable of ripping his head off with one hand.
A man in his line of work has probably spent years assessing threats, and he sees one right now.
“Where is she?” I growl without touching him. I don’t need to—he’s backing right up. There’s a flicker in his eyes as he tries to decide whether he can lie to me, and I wonder what she told him.
I give him a firm shove in the chest to help him make up his mind and follow his backward staggers into the dingy room. It smells of stale beer and cleaning fluids. And prey.
Pushing him against the bar, I use my eyes to show him that he’s in trouble.
He stares at the red ring around my pupils and starts to shake—a whole-body tremor that’s echoed by his accelerated breathing and pounding heart.
My nostrils flare at the scent of his terror.
It smells good, and if I weren’t pressed for time, I might be tempted to indulge.
“Where is she?” I repeat, my face an inch from his. “I won’t ask again.”
“She … went out through the cellar. Under the hatch behind the bar. She said she had to get away from you because you were gonna beat her again. She’s only a little thing, and she’s scared of you. You should be ashamed of yourself!”
Despite his fear, the puny bartender manages to put some snarl into his voice. He thinks I’m a bully, a woman beater, an abuser. I might be all those things when I need to be, but not tonight. Tonight, all I want is to protect her. The irony of her lie is not lost on me.
I decide I won’t kill him. I won’t even hurt him. In his own way, he’s braver than I am. Holding his face in my hands, I stare into his frightened eyes. His fear shifts and I sense his confusion. He hates me, but he’s kind of turned on as well.
“As soon as I’m gone, you’re going to close the cellar hatch and forget I was ever here. You’ll forget she was ever here. If you have any cameras, you’re going to erase all footage from tonight. And you’re going to carry on being a decent human being, okay? Do you understand?”
He rubs his cheek on the palm of my hand. Yeah. He’s definitely feeling something other than terror.
“Yes, I understand,” he murmurs, swaying against me.
I stand him upright, pull out a couple ￡50 notes, and leave them on the bar.
He watches as I walk behind the serving counter and find the hatch to the cellar in the center of the floor between the glass washer and the beer fridge.
I open it and jump right down, dispensing with the stairs.
The hatch clunks shut above me, and I imagine the guy upstairs picking up the cash and wondering what the fuck just happened.
The cellar is like plenty of other cellars I’ve been in.
Dim, dusty, stacked with crates full of bottles and kegs of beer.
I smell spilled beer and rat droppings—and her.
A faint trace, but enough to make me furious.
With her, and with myself. How could I have been so fucking stupid?
So goddamn arrogant? I should have known that she’d pull some stunt like this.
The exit from the cellar is on the far side of the space, up a few steps and out of a similar hatch to the one I came in through. I shove it open, climb up, and get a face full of heavy rain for my trouble.
When I emerge, it’s into a little courtyard that appears to be shared by three or four businesses. There’s a parking lot and dumpsters and big containers full of glass bottles for recycling. A delivery truck with pictures of tomatoes on the side sits idling several feet away.
It’s been ten minutes tops since I last saw her, and I realize now she was playing me exactly how I thought I was playing her.
She deliberately danced right by the window, and I saw exactly what I expected to see—the drunk Seer drowning her sorrows, safe in the knowledge that the big bad vamp had left.
She fooled me, and that makes me want to punch myself in the face, but it also makes me admire her more. She’s sneaky and duplicitous and far too brave for her own good.
I run across the courtyard to the backyard of the building opposite. She didn’t return to the road by the bar. I would have seen her or scented her. She’d know that, and she would have gone a different direction.
The back door to the place is propped open by a bucket filled with sand and cigarette butts, and inside a tired-looking fifty-something woman is taking a delivery of fresh fruit and greens.
In a second, I take in the coffee machine, tables and chairs, the chiller cabinets.
It’s a café, and she’s getting it ready for the breakfast shift.
She glances up as I walk into the room, and her eyes widen.
I look like I’m here to assassinate someone.
I hold my hands out in a placatory gesture and don’t even need to talk to her.
From the way her eyes dart to the front door, it’s clear that this isn’t her first unexpected visit of the day, and the lingering scent of lemons and spice confirms that Rosa has been here.
Outside, I find myself on a street that’s half asleep, at that hazy junction between night and day.
There are still a few people wandering around drunk, heading from one bar to another, maybe heading home after clubbing.
A small line of those big black cabs they have here is open for business, and I can hear heavy rock music thudding away in a place that has a mural of guitars covering its exterior walls.
I’ll have to tell Matteo that his beloved Liverpool is another city that never sleeps.
There are delivery vans like the one at the café, and a few workers either locking places up or opening them, and the ever-present figures of the homeless sheltering in doorways with dirty sleeping bags and piles of old duvets to keep them warm.
Same all over the world—nobody sees them anymore. It’d break my heart if I had one.
What there isn’t, at first glance, is a Capelli malocchio.
Pausing, I inhale and let the smells flow through me.
It’s not as easy in a city, tracking someone.
Too many scents all at once. I filter out the wet dog and discarded burgers and stale vomit and the lingering hint of sex, ignore the traffic fumes and spilled vodka and pigeon shit.
My nostrils flare as I unexpectedly come across a suggestion of magic—witch magic.
Interesting, but irrelevant to my hunt; lots of cities have witches, and that’s not what matters now.
Eventually, I find a trace—the tiniest of threads, but enough.
I race toward it, pounding down the street until I come to a junction.
One way is the huge sea-like river that dominates this town, another is a shopping mall, and the third is some kind of green space surrounded by office blocks and apartments.
On the corner, at the center of it all, is a trash can.
A trash can that smells like Rosa. I dash over and see a jacket stuffed into it.
Someone dumped a load of fries on top, but when I shake the garment free, it’s clearly the one she was wearing when I last saw her.
Holding it up to my face, I inhale her unique lemon spice aroma as absolute fury hurtles through my veins.
I go through her pockets in case she was foolish enough to leave anything that would be useful to me.
All I find is a tiny vial that holds maybe a couple milliliters of pale liquid.
I close my fist around it and welcome the pain as the glass fractures and pierces my skin.
The liquid flows over my palm, mixing with my blood and the shards of glass, smelling exactly how I knew it would—of lemons and spice.
I’ve been tricked. Again. I’ve been following her perfume, not her. I have no clue where she might be now, and it’s getting too close to sunrise for me to remain out here much longer.
Yeah, I’ve been played. But I will find her, and when I do, I am going to teach her that I can play too.
And I don’t play nice.