Chapter 22
Garraway had said that it was important to make sure they got this guy. Fucker squirmed like a goddamn fish, though. But they’d got him in the end.
He made sure to pull the ties extra hard so that the skinny fucker couldn’t get out of them. If they bit into his flesh, then they weren’t too loose.
She sighed as she folded up the moving blankets, grimacing at the stains on them. The dark brown that couldn’t really be anything except blood.
She hated it when Phil left bloody laundry for her to do.
For one thing, it was almost impossible to get it out of things.
Not that anybody cared about the moving blankets, but, inevitably, his clothes would come back bloody, too.
And it was a lot harder to get blood out of light-colored shirts than it was the dark pants.
She really wished he’d stick to the black ones when he had to do this kind of thing.
This was the first time he’d been selected for a mission, and he definitely didn’t like it. His fingers had worried at the zip ties Gennaro had asked him to hold, palms sweaty as Gennaro and Mulrooney had grabbed the kid.
He was just a kid.
Skinny, like his own Tommy.
Jesus.
What the fuck was he doing here?
He didn’t like magic, didn’t think freaks should have it, and what Mulrooney had said about magic only belonging to those who studied it, worked on it as a skill, and had the disposition for it made sense. Normal stupid people shouldn’t have it.
He knew he shouldn’t have it. Mulrooney seemed smart enough, and he said he was studying it. Gennaro didn’t, as far as he knew, though.
But this kid had the other kind. The kind people just got—not what they worked for.
He didn’t think people should get money handouts from the government, so why should they get magic handouts?
That still made sense to him, but now he wasn’t so sure that this was the right way to go about keeping people from having magic they didn’t deserve, anymore than he’d have approved of killing homeless people to keep them from taking hard-working taxpayers’ money.
Put them in jail, sure. But not kill them.
He frowned.
Maybe this wasn’t for him.
I pushed myself back into my own head, wondering which one of them was the guy who wasn’t Gennaro or Mulrooney. Because if I was going to somehow get out of this, that was the guy who was most likely to help me.
Or at least hesitate before killing me.
I tried to keep my breathing slow and even, to pretend that I was still unconscious. If they ignored me, then maybe I could recover enough from whatever they’d put over my mouth and whatever other thing they’d injected into me to use my death magic.
Assuming they didn’t know about that.
From the thoughts I’d read from the zip ties and the moving blanket—which was definitely stained with blood—I understood that they were likely sympathetic to the original anti-witch, anti-Arcane ethos of Tranquil Brook.
And that meant that they wanted to take my magic from me.
I could only hope that they were assuming mine came from Arcanavirus—that I might have a chance with death magic because they didn’t know I had it.
If I could convince them I was asleep for long enough to recover from whatever they’d given me.
“We sure this is the right kid?” asked an uncertain male voice with a rural Virginia accent. I had the feeling this was probably the more uncertain man.
“Yeah, we’re sure,” said a more assertive voice. “Little shit’s sister led us right to him.”
Shock hit me.
Violette had led them to me? By now, you would think I’d be used to the feeling of betrayal. But apparently not as much as I’d needed to be, given the feeling of being punched in the solar plexus that accompanied it.
A third voice—coming from the front of the van, so the driver, presumably—jumped in. “Easy enough to get a tracker on her phone.”
So Violette hadn’t actually known. Relief flooded me. It was still bad, but at least the sister I was really starting to like hadn’t actually given me to these horrible people.
“How?” the assertive voice asked. “You get in her pants or something?”
“Jesus,” muttered the uncertain voice.
“Nah,” came the reply, and the assertive one sounded proud of himself, I thought. “Sent her a free sticker with the wires embedded. Kids’ll put stickers on anything these days.”
I wondered if it was the cowboy-hat-wearing panda bear, the angry sun face, or the blushing peach.
“Less fun than fucking her,” the driver said crudely. “But probably easier for your gnarly ass.”
“Fuck you, asshole. Your momma didn’t think my ass was gnarly last night.”
The conversation devolved from there.
I still felt unmoored—detached from my own brain, my magic distant and hard to reach.
I was angry, frustrated, and utterly terrified.
Without magic, I was also helpless.
We’d been driving for about an hour, give or take, after I awakened, but I couldn’t tell if that was in a single direction or whether they were trying to confuse me, just in case I woke up, so that I didn’t know where we were.
Not that they’d have any reason to keep it from me, as it was abundantly clear that they had no intention of letting me go.
They were going to kill me. Or try to, anyway.
It was taking a lot longer for my magic to feel present than felt normal—and definitely a lot longer than I wanted it to. At least there was something there now.
Not that I knew what to do with it.
Should I use what little I had to call out to Sylvia and beg for help? Keep energy in reserve so that I could attack one of my attackers? If so, which one? And when?
“Where are we, anyway?” the anxious man asked. I still didn’t know his name. The driver was Mulrooney and the aggressive one was Gennaro.
“Don’t worry, Edson, someone will make sure you get back,” Mulrooney said, but there was an undercurrent to his voice that almost made me feel sorry for Edson, which was apparently the nervous guy’s name.
I had the feeling Gennaro and Mulrooney had decided that Edson wasn’t what they were looking for in a fellow conspirator, and that probably meant that he’d become expendable.
If he hadn’t helped kidnap me, I’d have felt a good deal more sympathy for him. As it was, I still liked him the best of the three, but that wasn’t saying very much.
I wondered which of them to target if I had to pick one.
Definitely not Edson, although I had the feeling he’d be much less concerned about kidnapping and killing me if I managed to kill one of the other two men. People tend to not feel bad for you once you show that you’re potentially deadly.
They also tend to treat you as a much more significant threat.
Unfortunately for me, the strength it would take for me to take out one of them would likely leave me incapable of doing it again.
There were three of them, and one of me. So even if I succeeded in taking one of them out, there would still be two of them left.
One way or the other, to quote Hart, I was fucked.
I wasn’t honestly sure how much longer it had been.
Another hour? Thirty minutes? More? Less?
Fear and the struggle to keep other people’s thoughts out of my head while also trying not to draw attention to myself was exhausting, and it both sped up and slowed down time so that I had no idea how far we’d gone, how long it had been, or where I could possibly be.
Maybe they’d taken me back to Tranquil Brook.
But the van slowed, then stopped, and it got even harder to pretend to be unconscious—I had to keep my breathing slow and even, or they’d realize I was awake. I wasn’t ready to try to fight my way out yet.
I wasn’t going to ever be ready to fight my way out, but I was going to try.
“You think he’s awake?” Edson’s voice asked, and something—a boot, possibly—nudged me.
“Who cares?” Gennaro asked, and the probably-boot nudged me again. At least it was a nudge and not a kick. “Bring him. He doesn’t like being carried, he can wake the fuck up.”
Edson sighed, and rough hands began to move me, presumably to get me into position to carry me. I debated ‘waking up’ to avoid it, but then figured that I might get a better chance to run if they thought I was still out of it, and tried to convince my muscles to go limp.
I heard the front door open and close, then heard the side door slide open, letting Edson heft me up and over a shoulder, my head hanging down, blood slowly accumulating in my face as he carried me.
I risked opening one eye just a sliver.
Then a little more.
I couldn’t see either Gennaro or Mulrooney, so I opened my eyes all the way so that I could look around a little.
The three of them were carrying me across a gravel half-moon driveway toward a big Southern-style house that looked far too much like Tranquil Brook—although it wasn’t—for my comfort.
It was in disrepair, paint peeling off the siding and the wide, wrap-around porch, plants either dead or overgrown, steps rotting and split.
Mulrooney pushed open the door, and it let out a loud, protesting creak.
The inside smelled strongly of mold and rot, and the tile floor was spotted with moss and tufts of dried weeds.
I couldn’t risk moving too much to try to see whether or not the roof was intact, but I had the feeling from the growth on the floor of what had once probably been a grand foyer that it was missing in at least a few places.
Nobody had lived here for a long time.
It was hard to tell whether or not anybody had even been here in a long time.
“Where the fuck are we?” Gennaro asked.
“Garraway’s place,” Mulrooney answered, his voice short , tight.
“He lives in this shithole?” Gennaro asked.
“No, dumbfuck,” Mulrooney snapped. “But it works for what we need it for.”
Killing me, I thought. Disposing of my body somewhere no one will think to look.
Although I had hope that Raj and Hart might well find this place if it was connected to Garraway.
It was just a question of whether they found me or my bones.
I hurriedly shut my eyes again as Edson heaved me off his shoulder, half-setting, half-dropping me to the floor.