Chapter 22
CHAPTER 22
H er jaw clamped shut, her knuckles white with both fear and rage, she sat in the minivan with Avery Brooke pointing Marjo’s gun at her. She stared out the window at the downtown lights whizzing by, unable to believe her situation.
Her hands had been tied with twine by one of Avery’s helpers—three clean-cut college-aged kids in khaki pants, polo shirts, and waist-length fall jackets. The one in a light-blue tracksuit sat beside Marjo while the other was in the very back of the van.
“Sorry Tilly. You’re my only way to my dream.” Avery smirked his asshole grin at her. He’d chosen an expensive red windbreaker to wear over his black polo shirt.
“You’ll let my family go now, right?” Marjo sniffled. She drew her forearm across her face, leaving a streak of mascara smeared on her skin. Her usual sleek bob was a mess. She no longer looked the part of the efficient assistant that Cass trusted.
“Your family?” Avery turned back to her as if he genuinely didn’t know what she was talking about.
“My son,” she cried. “My mom.”
“Oh, right. Sooorry.” He rolled his eyes and nodded in Tilly’s direction. “A bit focused on other things at the moment.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tilly seethed between her teeth. “Attacking a kid like that.”
“Hey, he’s fine. My men are just watching him and his grandma,” Avery drawled, trying for a nonchalant tone as if he didn’t have a care in the world. “I hear she makes a mean pancake breakfast.”
“Please let him go,” Marjo begged, her face streaked with tears now. “I did all you asked.”
“True that.” Avery pursed his lip with a small tilt of his head. “We don’t need you anymore. Sammy, just let our little Marjo, here, out of the car.”
“Wait, my son,” Marjo screamed, her eyes wide with terror.
“No time now, lady.” Avery turned dead cold. “Sammy?”
Sammy, sitting beside Marjo, opened the side door of the moving van.
He grabbed Marjo by the arm. Before she had a chance to react, he yanked her from her seat and shoved her outside.
Tilly heard her agonizing howl then nothing as Sammy slid the door closed.
“Fuck!” Tilly yelled. “Are you insane?”
“Well, that’s one less problem to deal with.” Avery snorted.
“And the kid and grandma, Avery?” Sammy asked with a yawn from the back. “What do I tell the guys?”
“What do you think I should do, Tilly?” Avery’s lips cracked a half-smile. “Let them live or just get rid of them.”
“You fucker,” Tilly hissed, filled with fury.
“Nah, it’s all good.” He shrugged. “Sammy, just tell them to leave and let the kid and grandma be.”
He looked back at Tilly with a sigh of satisfaction. “I am not in the business of killing children and grandmothers.”
She raised a disgusted brow at him. Still in shock about Marjo, she asked, “But pregnant women are fair game?”
“Hey, blame my dad.”
“That jerk,” the driver— a tall, skinny guy in a brown bomber jacket—added while taking a turn into a small Montreal deserted alley.
“Yeah, all our dads,” Avery’s other mate, sitting next to Tilly, chimed in.
Tilly stared at him, then back at Avery with perplexity.
“Call us the Second Sons club.” Avery grinned maniacally, seemingly pleased with himself.
She frowned, not willing to entertain him, but curious about his nefarious plan.
“You can scowl all you want, woman,” Avery continued with his chest puffed wide, “but know that I have legit reason to need you.”
“You want power,” Tilly spat, disgusted with him.
“Oh, how perceptive.” Still turned in his seat to look back at her, Avery raised a single brow. “Close. But what I want is money. We want money. See, Sammy and Brian here, Devin at the wheel, we’d be on the pig’s back if we’d all been firstborn. The heir so to speak. But no , in our circles, you know, Upper East side types, summers on the Cape, dads don’t give a hoot about their second born. It’s always all about the first.”
She couldn’t help but say it. “You seemed pretty spoiled when I first met you.”
“You’d think.” He shrugged with a grimace on his lips. “But that was all a trade. Do what Daddy says, set yourself up with a business degree to work under your brother. Not with my brother, no way! Under .”
“Maybe your dad recognized you’re an asshole,” Tilly sneered.
“Shut up,” he raged, his calm demeanor gone. The flush on his cheek carried all the way to the receding hairline of his strawberry blond curls. “It’ll be all over for you soon.”
“So, you’re sacrificing me just for money?” She was scared as hell but couldn’t help wondering why he was willing to take her life. “How does that work?”
“See this?” He pointed to the ink on his skin under the gold chains. “It’s his mark.
“His?” She was overtaken by an eerie feeling. She didn’t like this one bit.
As she stared more closely at Avery’s pal Sammy next to her, she noticed he sported the same M-shaped symbol with the small hook at the crook of his neck.
“Moloch,” the man breathed, his tracksuit expanding as he widened his shoulders in some sort of reverence for the name.
“Huh?”
“Oh, don’t give me that innocent look,” Avery drawled. “You’re a banshee, we know.”
She gave him a hard stare. How dare he tell her what she was.
“You foretell future death.” He was spitting now, as if he hated her for being different. “You have a connection to the Grim Reaper.”
She raised her chin at him. She’d never felt less because she walked with Death. In fact, her difference had saved her beaten spirit all these years and had helped her reach for the best. “And what’s it to you?”
“Surely you heard of Moloch, Prince of Hell, Overseer of the Dominion of Tears.” Avery snatched a small, battered book with a gilded spine from the storage cubby between the front seats of the minivan and brandished it. “My buddy Devin, here, found this spell book in his attic. Moloch can give us whatever we want as long as we bring him a sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice, huh?” Tilly hated where this was going.
“He came to us during a ritual we held on campus.” Avery seemed so pleased to reveal this connection, his eyes lit with a dangerous glow. “And he knew about you. The banshee. Pregnant! He told us you were close. That you lived near our summer house on the Cape. Told us to bring you to him. Give him the fetus to open the gate to his world and he would see to it that our fathers gave us all we want.”
“You were in my house,” she accused.
“I sent a couple of Sons living nearby. But you were nowhere to be found. Turns out I didn’t have to look far. You showed up to the gala and I recognized you right away! I had no idea you were with Cass St-Amand until I saw the media. Our kidnapping plan was a bit last minute. Lying to that little assistant to lure you out like that. But you know, try and try again. Once we had her kid, she told us every move you made.”
Her mind swam with confusion. It didn’t matter how he’d found her, he was insane to think he could summon a hell demon to this plane to do his bidding.
“And so you talked to a prince of hell?” she mocked. “For real?”
She talked to Death, so all was possible. But from a mere book? How could that be?
“Your sacrifice will make our fathers ignore our undeserving big brothers and give everything to us.” Whatever had happened with Moloch, Avery seemed convinced. His mates as well, based on how they nodded in unison at what Avery was saying.
“We will have it all. The admiration, the respect, the family money. The inheritances will go to us only, the second sons. And I’ll be able to buy my own record label. Hell, I’ll buy two!”
“Sure,” Tilly commented bitterly. What did it matter? If he believed this, she had no chance.
“And no need to actually dispose of our big brothers,” Devin said from the front, tapping on the cover of the book Avery held. “Simple. It’s all in here. Just one sacrifice. No one else.”
“Just you, Tilly,” Avery pointed out. “We just have to kill you. Sorry, it’s not personal. I enjoyed your work when you mixed my songs. But this is bigger than you and I. You’re a banshee, man. Not even human. And our ticket to a better life.”
“And you’re willing to kill me for that?” Tilly was astonished at the entitlement. “I did absolutely nothing to you. Why should I die?”
The words said out loud brought about another spasm of fear. She wrapped her arms around her baby by pure instinct.
“It’ll be quick, I promise.” Avery’s tone softened as the SUV came to an abrupt stop. “We’re here. Sorry, buttercup, time to meet destiny.”
The door of the minivan opened to a night illuminated only by a skinny silver of a moon overtaken by thick clouds and a lone lamppost in the distance. Avery and his three cronies got out onto the mossy pavement in front of a decrepit church that had once seen better days.
Sammy exited and called out to her with a threatening curled finger. “Get out.”
They all waited for her in the shadows. Four young men, not much younger than her. Looking normal, ready to graduate college. No one would guess that they had possibly killed someone by throwing her out of a moving car and were willing to end the life of a pregnant woman and her fully formed fetus just for money.
Dammit. No one was coming. She had to do something.
As she got out of the van, she stumbled on her feet and the mate in the forest-green varsity jacket caught her by the upper arm.
She shook him off defiantly as she tried to remember everything Godmother April had ever told her about banshees. They had powers. They could flatten a crowd with a well-placed sonic scream. Some could even teleport or enact a death touch. Sloane could do some of those things, Tilly never could.
She suddenly cursed her tendency to try to do everything alone and her choice not to visit her long-lost family to learn from them.
But she had to try something.
The gun was no longer pointed at her. She inhaled quietly, inconspicuously, and let out a scream as loud as her lungs could muster.
Avery grabbed her by the throat. “Stop.”
She choked, tripping against him.
The gun returned to her belly. “I’ll kill your child first if I have to. I’m sure the spell will still work regardless.”
While her cousin Sloane had once flattened a nest of cursed vampires with her voice, Tilly just couldn’t. Defeat crushed her spirit further as she took in her surroundings. The boarded-up church was enclosed by low stone walls that opened to a small, neglected cemetery. Not another soul around. She was all alone, and defenseless.
“I curse you now, Avery Brooke.” She managed to croak out her vow despite Avery’s grip on her. “One day the demon you summon will come for you and you will die a painful death.”
She willed every ounce of manifestation she could into her curse. Hoping that Death, somewhere could hear and make her bidding come true.
“Shit man.” The driver, now holding the spell book in his hands, threw her a cautious look. “I heard banshee’s curses are real.”
“Shut up, Devin.” Avery sneered at her, his hand still around her throat. “I was about to give you a sedative to make it easier on you, darling. To be nice, you know. But curse or no curse, I’m not so inclined now.”
Sammy opened the cracked wooden church doors, and they screeched from decades of neglect, echoed by the cackle of crows flying above.
As the other pal lit his flashlight upon the facade of the building, Tilly’s gaze rested upon the statue of a Madonna with child, the sculpture gray from soot and covered with ivy. It was as if the saint mother was looking at her with pity, knowing nothing could be done to save her.
“In here, banshee.” Avery let go of Tilly’s throat to grab her arm, his gun still pointed at her waist as he pushed her toward the church’s entrance.
They left the clean outside air to step inside the condemned building and past the narthex of the sacred space. The dust clogged her nostrils right away and her breath rasped from the musty scent.
“Down here,” Avery barked. “Get those lights back on.”
As his cronies got busy lighting oil lamps and candles, Tilly’s eyes adjusted to the shadows.
Horror suddenly washed all over her. She knew exactly where they were.
She recognized the stained glass. The faded sculpted angels. The gilded white wood altar.
This was the church from her vision. The church prepared for her sacrifice.
The church where she would soon die.