Wild Hunt (16 page)

S
leep was
the very last thing I wanted to do, so I climbed off the bed and headed for the shower. The bathroom was kitted out with plenty of fresh towels, soaps, shampoo, and conditioner. All the things I could possibly want and need to wash away the scent of Fionn.

Stepping under the hot spray, I let it coat my skin and closed my eyes against the water that crashed down over my head. There was everything in here except an answer on what exactly I was supposed to do about Nic.

For me, it felt like no length of time since we had lain in bed together, his warm body wrapped around mine. I could practically still feel his kisses on my skin. But for him, well—forty-five days was a long time, there was no denying it. What I couldn’t quite wrap my head around was why he hadn’t trusted me to come back to him. Why instantly go with the worst case possible?

Something more had happened to trigger him to take such drastic action and I would eventually get to the bottom of whatever it was that had caused it. When I did….

Turning the tap, I switched off the spray of water and stepped out onto the mat. The corner of my eye caught sight of the mirror and my heart froze in my chest. The steam had caused the glass to fog, just as it had been that day Fionn had reached out and grabbed me.

Stumbling from the room, I slammed the door after me and tried to breathe despite the hammering of my heart. It almost felt as though it planned on beating out through my chest and I clamped my hand over the spot.

The skin felt different, colder and rough. Glancing down, I lifted away my hand and stared in horror at Nic’s blackened hand print seared into my skin. It had been painful at the time, but not the type of pain that had caused me to think he might actually have marked me. But then, what I knew about Nic’s power could fill a very small pamphlet, and everything I did know had come from the grimoire that was back in King City.

With a sigh, I dropped down onto the edge of the bed. Everything was a giant mess and I hadn’t the first clue as to how I was supposed to fix it all. Worse than that, I didn’t even know if it could be fixed. Nic really would leave if I couldn’t come up with a compelling reason for him to stay, a reason to keep him that would still mean we were both safe.

The sound of someone knocking on the door had me wrapping the towel around my body a little tighter.

“Come in,” I said finally.

The door opened and my mom’s face appeared around the edge of it, an almost hesitant smile on her lips before she caught sight of me and sighed with relief.

“I didn’t know if you’d be awake or not and I didn’t want to wake you, but….” She trailed off, her expression changing as her eyes drifted to the black hand print on my chest. Her gaze flickered up and I knew the second she caught sight of the demon mark, her entire body stiffened and she pushed into the room.

“Jesus Christ, Amber, what is that?” she asked, crossing the room toward me. She reached out to the mark. The slight tremble in her fingers made me suddenly self-conscious and I shrugged away from her.

“It’s nothing; it doesn’t matter,” I said, sliding out of her reach.

“That does not look like nothing,” she said, carefully enunciating each of her words as she crossed her arms over her chest. “It looks like….” She trailed off.

“A demon mark?” I suggested helpfully.

With a shake of her head, she took another step forward. “It looks like the same tattoo your father had,” she said.

Her words sent a jolt of shock rocketing through me and I jerked back from her as though she’d burned me. “That’s not possible. I got the mark when I summoned a demon I couldn’t control,” I said shakily.

“I’m telling you, Amber, that mark is identical to one your father had. And I should know, I saw him naked often enough,” she said, her last statement making me cringe inwardly.

It wasn’t possible; it shouldn’t have been possible, and yet, I could see the truth in her face.

“Are you sure it’s identical?” I asked.

“Well, if you’d let me have a closer look, I could tell you,” she said, with a mixture of exasperation and concern.

I froze as she approached, holding perfectly still as her fingers brushed lightly across the mark. The mark did nothing; there was no spark of recognition, it just sat there on my skin like the tattoo she thought it was.

“It’s definitely the same. I remember the same pattern,” she said thoughtfully.

“But?”

“But yours is fresher, it feels new or….” She trailed off.

“Or what, Mom? You can’t make an announcement like that and then leave me hanging. It’s that sort of thing that leads to hysterics and the consumption of copious amounts of Ben and Jerry’s for breakfast,” I said, my poor attempt at humour the only way I knew how to lighten the mood.

“It just feels different—don’t ask me how or why, it just does,” she paused and stared at me. “Wait, you said it was a demon mark?”

The way she said “demon mark” made a small burst of laughter escape me. I’d forgotten how shocked by everything she could be. For a woman who was a powerful practicing witch—well, who
had been
a powerful practicing witch; I’d seen her send the demon who had killed my father back to Hell, after all—it still surprised me that she could be so shocked by such silly things.

“Yeah, I summoned a demon, lost control of him, and this,” I said, gesturing to the mark, “was the dazzling result.”

She pursed her lips and continued to study it. Her thoughtful contemplation made my skin itch and I wanted nothing more than to escape from her scrutiny.

“Hey, you came in here to tell me something before we were side-tracked?”

“Your boss, Graham, was on the phone. He said the local Gardaí could do with your help.”

“Did he say what they could do with my help for?”

“More bodies … a lot more bodies, by the sound of the news report this morning….”

The memory of my dream came flooding back to me in a wash of cold dread that had my skin breaking out in a clammy sweat. So much for having a shower.

“Just one small problem,” I said, glancing down at the towel still wrapped around me. “As much as I would love to help, I don’t think they’re going to let me get anywhere near the scene wearing only a towel.”

Mom smiled at me. “I’ve got you covered there,” she said, taking a sideways glance at the demon mark before she turned and strode from the room, leaving me to stare after her.

The thought of having an identical mark to my father left me reeling, but with the news that there were more bodies, well, I couldn’t exactly spend a lot of time focussing on it. Mysteriously identical tattoos could wait.

“I got you these,” she said, reappearing a moment later with a department store bag.

Taking it from her gratefully, I smiled. “Vision?” I asked.

“Common sense,” she said. “I knew what state you were taken in and, well, where exactly were you going to get the chance to pick something up to wear?”

Grinning, I nodded. “Practical thinker as always.”

Laughing, she turned and made her way to the door. “I’ll leave you to get dressed. I’ve got the kettle on if you’re in the mood for tea before you go.”

The smiled died on my lips as I realised exactly what I’d be leaving to go and face. “Coffee. I need to be as alert as possible.”

Without a word, she left me to my bag of clothes and a headful of thoughts that refused to come together to form any kind of cohesive sense. One of these days, the answers would come to me easily, and when that happened, I wasn’t sure I’d know what to do with myself.

D
ressed
in a black T-shirt and black jeans, travel cup of coffee in hand, I approached the crime scene tape carefully. Slowly picking my way through the bracken, I caught the eye of one particularly vigilant Garda.

“No civilians,” he said, the words tumbling over one another, the only hint that he was a local to Cork being the speed at which he spoke. “The scene is closed; we don’t want any gawkers.”

“Not a gawker. Your boss was speaking to mine, said I would swing by and see if the crime scenes matched what we’ve been seeing back in King City,” I said. I didn’t push. There was no point; either the chief had told him I was on my way or he hadn’t. But either way, I didn’t have my badge, and this definitely wasn’t my territory.

Not that that had ever stopped the Elite before. I’d heard of a case in France, a pack of werewolves fighting over territory had held a small town hostage; one of the New York Elite officers had been holidaying in the same region and had stepped in to bring the situation to a peaceful conclusion. In matters of preternatural affairs where a country didn’t have a dedicated force, the Elite could step in and claim jurisdiction.

The Garda watched me carefully and then finally lifted his radio to his mouth. “I’ve got a young one down here claiming she’s from Elite…” he said, and the radio crackled in response.

“Let her through,” the voice said.

The Garda’s eyebrows very nearly disappeared up into his salt and pepper hairline but he didn’t say anything as he stepped aside and lifted the tape so I could move beneath it.

The trees had been much closer together in my dream, scratching and tearing at my hair and clothes as I’d ran. Climbing the hill, I came to a halt near the top and surveyed the scene laid out before me.

The ground sloped away in to what could only be described as a gaping pit, and the remains were scattered through the bottom. It reminded me of the first scene we’d stumbled across back in King City, but this one was on a much larger scale.

“Took you long enough,” Victoria said, appearing at my elbow and making me jump.

“Jesus, where did you come out of?” I said, sucking in a deep breath in an attempt to slow my heart rate.

“Graham sent me ahead with Darcey,” Victoria said, rolling her eyes and jerking a thumb in the banshee’s direction.

“But how did you get here so fast? I mean, I only heard about this,” I said, gesturing to what lay in front of us, “this morning, and I got here as fast as I could.”

“Short cut through home territory,” Victoria said cryptically, and I knew without needing to ask that she meant Faerie. “So how are we going to end this?” she asked, giving me a thorough once over. “By the looks of it, if we don’t end it soon, he’ll end you, or half the country….”

“I can’t face him on his own territory. He’s too strong,” I said, ice sliding down my spine as I remembered the feel of his voice inside my head, telling me to submit. What frightened me more was that I had wanted to submit, I had wanted to give in to him, give him everything he asked for. The ghost of his daughter had been the only thing standing between my utter and complete surrender and keeping my will intact.

“But you’ve got the demon mark,” she said.

“In Faerie, the demon realm is too far away,” Darcey said, stepping closer and joining the conversation. “Could you resist him at all?” she asked.

I shook my head and took a long sip of the bitter black coffee in the travel mug. “Nope. I was as good as useless…. I tried, I really did, but….” I trailed off, remembering the way I’d cried and neither he nor I had been able to control it. “I could cry though, he ordered me to stop and I couldn’t…. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t do it.”

Darcey nodded thoughtfully and stared back over the scene, her grey eyes impassive. “Your will was still stronger than him, but you’re too much of a liability. When we go in and if you come with us, he’ll just use your power against us. I’m sorry, but we can’t take that risk.”

It hurt to hear it. I wanted to kill him, I wanted to be the one to end him, but I understood her position. I was a liability; there was no denying it and no point in pretending I wasn’t. I’d been there after all; I’d felt how willing I’d been to simply give into the things he wanted.

“When are you going?” I asked.

“As soon as we’re done here. I tracked the path you took out of Faerie this morning and I’ve got a pretty good idea of where he’s hiding out.”

I nodded and bit my lip. “He has allies…” I said, remembering the glittering ballroom and the gathered Fae.

“I know,” Darcey said, and the way she said it made me jerk my head up to look into her face. She spoke like someone who couldn’t wait to get in on the hunt, that everything she’d portrayed herself as so far had been nothing but a facade to keep us off the trail of the real her.

“Just so long as she doesn’t pull any of that banshee shit,” Victoria muttered, and I glanced up at her.

She’d once told me that changelings didn’t exactly play nice with Death, that banshees weren’t good for their health, and yet here she was palling around with Darcey. Either she had lied, which I knew being a changeling allowed her to, or she was keeping quiet on the damage it was doing to her.

“I’ll do what needs to be done,” Darcey said grimly.

Grabbing Victoria’s hand, I towed her away from the edge of the gravesite and Darcey before releasing her.

“What is this going to cost you?” I asked, watching her face carefully. She wasn’t exactly my favourite person on Earth and she wasn’t always completely reliable. Her moral compass tended to be far more flexible than mine, for instance, but she was still part of the team and I’d grown accustomed to having her around.

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to me, Victoria, you know it does. What will this cost you?”

“Nothing, if she keeps her screaming to a minimum…” she said.

“And if she doesn’t? If she has to use her power?”

“Then we better hope I have a few more lives left in me,” she said with a false brightness that left a bitter taste on my tongue.

“Victoria, maybe you should stay….”

She shook her head hard enough that if I had done it, I would have whiplash. “No way. I’m due a good fight, and what better way to go down? I’d much rather go out with a bang than a whimper.” Victoria smiled. Guilt washed through me and her expression darkened. “Don’t you dare pity me. This is my life; I chose to live it how I want,” she said.

“This isn’t pity. I’m just tired of not being able to help those I care about when I need to,” I said. “I’ve got all this power, but in the end, I’m as good as useless when it comes to the crunch.”

“That’s the price of being human. It’s just something you’ll have to learn to live with and accept.”

“Are you ready to go?” Darcey shouted from the bottom of the hill.

I hadn’t even noticed her leaving, but I had a feeling that it had more to do with her Fae abilities than my lack of attention.

Victoria turned and started down the hill at a pace that would have had me tumbling ass over head as soon as I started. My heart sank as I watched them leave and I turned my gaze back to the scene.

He’d done this because of me. Killed because I’d pissed him off. How many people hadn’t gone home last night because of me? It was a sobering thought.

“Your colleagues gone?” one of the Garda asked me as he paused next to me.

“Yeah, they’re going to look into something. It might prove useful,” I said, wrapping the lie with the truth.

“What kind of a monster could do something like this?” he said idly.

“The kind that enjoys killing,” I answered, remembering the enjoyment Fionn had gotten out of hurting me.

He hadn’t wanted to kill me, but there had been no denying his excitement over hearing me scream. He’d practically fed on it. There was something else bothering me; his daughter had said that he’d believed she had lied and so he’d set the hunt on her. But she had claimed she hadn’t been the one to lie … so why would he think she had? What, or better yet, who, could have set him off on the killing spree?

To think that there could be someone behind all of this, all of the pain and suffering, aside from the obvious insanity Fionn seemed to be suffering from, left me cold. It had been bad enough before that thought had popped into my head.

Turning away from the scene, I made my way back down the hill toward the road. There was nothing I could do here anyway; Victoria and Darcey had told the cops everything they needed to know and it wasn’t as though they could do anything themselves to stop Fionn.

Just like me, their hands were tied; all I could do was hope and pray Victoria and Darcey weren’t as limited.