Minutes to Midnight (5 page)

Darius looked at me. "I think she did. But
she never asked me directly who you are. Just…wondered if I really
knew you and hinted that you were a lot more than what you seemed."
Darius leaned his head toward his right shoulder. His braids moved
as well. "You care to clarify what she means?"

"How would I know what she means? And if she
didn't ask you where I was, what did she want?" I felt very, very
uncomfortable, but it was the kind of uncomfortable I associated
with realizing I'd forgotten to pay a bill.

Darius knelt down beside the backpack and
unzipped it. I saw Mike twitch just a fraction as his hand moved to
his back where he kept one of his smaller guns tucked into a denim
holster he'd sewn in himself. When Mike was nervous, I was nervous,
and normally Darius wasn't in the bad-guy column for us. But
pointing a gun at me pretty much guaranteed him a spot on the
suspicious side.

"The owner let me crash in the back last
night. Wasn't feelin' good. Came out of a dead sleep to find myself
opening the door." He paused as he put his hand deep into the
backpack. I had a spell on the tip of my tongue. I was set to
whammy whatever it was he pulled out of that bag if looked like it
was going to eat me. Or us. Me first.

Darius continued speaking. "I was a little
more than pissed off that my body moved on its own while I was
sleeping. Didn't matter. I still did what she told me as she came
in. I made her a drink, one of our most expensive ones, without her
even asking. I didn't even know why I was doing it. She sat at the
bar while I worked and made a few comments about you. Wanted to
know how you were, what you were doing, who you were sleeping
with." He sighed and lowered his shoulders. "I answered her
truthfully on what I did know. I swear, Mike, it was like I had no
control of myself. She gave the order and I obeyed. Once I set the
drink on the bar, she asked me to give the Guardian a gift, and
placed it beside the drink. When she got up to leave I found my
voice and planned on calling her every ugly name in the book. But
all I did was ask her about the drink. She told me it was for me.
And I drank it." He made a face. "And I hate those fancy-ass
drinks."

"She has something for the Guardian?" Mike
said. "She actually called him 'the Guardian'?"

"Yep." Darius pulled a large, thick,
familiar book from inside the backpack and stood. He turned and
held it out to me. I stared down at it, not wanting to touch it. It
was a tome I thought I'd never see again. I'd brought it with me
from Atlanta, and Mike, Sam, and I had used it to defeat Maab. But
after that, after I'd come home from the hospital, someone broke
into the townhouse, brushed away the wards as if they were nothing.
I'd been pissed off about the break-in, especially since whoever
did it ran a knife through all of my clothing plus my mattress and
sheets. But the only thing they took—the only thing missing from
the townhouse—had been this book.

The Big Book of Everything.

SHOOT THE MESSENGER

I felt their eyes on me and sensed the
tension between the three of us as I took the tome, but I wasn't as
worried about their expectations as I was about the identity of the
woman who gave this book to Darius. If it was who I thought it was,
then the questions she asked Darius made sense. "Tell me her name."
That came out in a pretty demanding voice. Forget the fact the man
was a foot and a half taller than me and built like a stove. My
voice held a bit of the old power behind it. Why?

Because I was panicking like a
son-of-a-bitch.

Darius took a step back, his expression
shifting from stern to surprised. "Dags—"

"I'm not fooling around, Darius. What was
her name? What did she look like? Is she still there—" I looked
past him to the corner of the building where The Night Pub was.
"She is, isn't she? She's the reason you pulled a gun on me." I
couldn't remember the last time I was this angry.

"Dags—"

I shoved the book at Mike and took off
running back to the pub. Mike's and Darius's footfalls were close
behind me, and when I got to the pub door and grabbed the locked
handle, Mike was the first one to catch up with me. I saw him reach
out to grab my arm, but I wasn't going to be stopped. If she was in
there—without magic or not—I had to see her. Talk to her. Demand
answers to questions I assumed would never be asked again.

"Batiltu."

The word, a simple spell
given to me by the
Grimoire
, stopped the two of them in
their tracks. Mike had seen this power since I came to Savannah.
But Darius had never seen me use any magic, so his eyes were wide.
He struggled to move forward but instead met an invisible wall. To
an onlooker it would appear they were caught in a
freeze-frame.

I looked past Mike to Darius. "Is she still
here?" I narrowed my eyes and removed a part of the spell to allow
him speech. I…didn't know how I'd known to do that.

"Then it is true…" he gasped. "She was
right. She said you were dangerous. Very dangerous."

"I'm not dangerous, Darius. Not like the
woman you spoke with is. If she's who I think she is. So tell me,
is she still here?"

Darius's eyes hardened. I silently released
the spell and he took a step back and put his hand on his hip where
he kept his gun. Mike reached out and put his hand on Darius's and
shook his head. Darius looked at me, but kept his hand near his
weapon. Nevermind that Mike had his magazine—the man could still
try and beat me with the gun. "No."

"If she's not in there, then why all the
sneaking around to get to Franklin Square to talk?"

He didn't answer that one. This was getting
me nowhere. A glance at Mike told me he was more curious than upset
or worried. He was carrying the book tucked under his arm like a
football. I turned and looked at the door handle.

I tugged once to make sure
it was locked. The book opened inside of me. I took in a deep
breath, drew a circle in the air with the index finger of my right
hand. The circle materialized as a white line where my finger had
gone. I drew a pentagram within the circle. The image flared
brighter white as I spoke, "
Peta
."

The lock clicked and I yanked it open. The
two of them followed me in.

"Rhonda!" I called out as stood in the
center of the pub. The bar took up most of one wall on the side. I
moved past it to the side door for employees only. It felt odd,
saying her name after all these months. "Rhonda!"

Darius came into the empty office behind me.
"Who's Rhonda?"

I turned on him and pointed to the ground.
"Rhonda Orly. She gave you that book, didn't she? Is she still
here?"

"She didn't say her name was Rhonda." Darius
moved in front of me. I saw Mike standing at the office door. "She
called herself Miss Beleti."

Beleti? What kind of a name was that? I
frowned at Darius. "Was she medium height? Black hair? Black nails?
Very goth?"

"No…" Darius glanced back at Mike. "She
wasn't goth at all. Real looker. Reddish blonde hair. Very
shapely."

Mike leaned against the door frame. "What
exactly did she say about Dags?"

"I already told you. Miss Beleti told me
that of all the creatures in the universe, he's the most
dangerous." Darius shrugged. "I don't know why she wanted me to
give him that book if he's all that and a bag of chips. She just
said he lost it and would need it back."

Mike pulled the book from under his arm and
set it on a nearby filing cabinet. "Yeah, well, you see, he didn't
lose this book; it was stolen from my townhouse over a month ago.
And now some reddish-blonde we don't know hands it over to you and
calls Dags dangerous? So much so you pull a gun on him?"

I was pretty sure Darius's
mysterious visitor had been Rhonda, the witch responsible for
fusing my soul with the
Grimoire
. Four months ago she'd been
stripped of her magic and fled Atlanta. No one had seen her since.
I'd always suspected she'd been the one to take the book—working
through the wards. Just because she didn't have magic didn't mean
she wasn't dangerous.

But the description Darius gave wasn't
Rhonda. Not even the name. I tried flipping back through my
memories of Rhonda, thinking maybe Beleti was an old family name.
"You said you felt like you didn't have control of yourself. But
you didn't see her work any magic?" I asked the question again,
mostly to satisfy my own curiosity.

"No magic, not like you just did." Darius
moved to the office desk and opened a drawer on the left. He pulled
out a bottle of Jack Daniels—correction, a half-full bottle of the
infamous whiskey—and grabbed three shot glasses out of the drawer
as well. He filled each of them halfway and, after replacing the
top on the whiskey, picked one of them up. He stared at the golden
liquid. "I'm sorry about the gun, but when you knocked, she said it
was you. She told me to pull the gun out and prepare to defend
myself. It didn't feel as if she were controlling me, but I felt
compelled to do what she said to do. No fuss, no muss. She asked, I
answered. She commanded, I obeyed." He swallowed the contents of
the shot glass and then hissed. I thought it was pretty damn early
for whiskey, but then, Darius had had a seriously upsetting
experience. "That's the kind of loss of control that haunts a
man."

"I'll bet." Mike joined us at the desk,
grabbing one of the glasses.

"Damn straight. And she was very interested
in you." He pointed at me. "There was almost a sort of…reverence
about the way she said your name."

"And you're sure she wasn't goth?" I
couldn't stop myself. I was still convinced the woman he saw had to
be Rhonda. But there was no way Rhonda had any kind of power,
especially something powerful enough to overpower the will of a
Hunter.

Darius poured himself another full shot and
picked it up. "Positive. Now, as for your problem about getting
information, you know I'm not responsible for who you talk to in
here. Especially Tango."

"That's what concerns you?" Mike downed his
own shot and put the glass back on the desk before he picked up
mine. "Not the fact we encountered zombies?"

"There is no such thing, Ross," Darius said,
calling Mike by his last name. "All that Hollywood crap, the
zombies and vampires and werewolves…none of that shit's real."

Mike glanced at me but didn't say anything,
probably remembering our earlier conversation. I narrowed my eyes
at Darius. "You're a Hunter and you've talked about Symbionts, but
you've never encountered a vampire?"

Darius raised is right hand, finger pointed
at me, still holding his next shot when someone banged on the front
door before all three of us heard the familiar squeak of its
hinges.

Mike's gun literally materialized in his
hand as he whispered at Darius. "I thought you locked it back."

Darius manifested a long
dagger from somewhere and whispered back. "I thought
you
did."

Mike slipped to his right and peered through
the crack between the office door and the frame. He lowered his gun
and re-holstered it. "It's a cop."

"A good cop or a bad one?" Darius's knife
abruptly vanished. I didn't think he was a magician or witch or
sorcerer, but he was fast enough to make it look like magic.

"Didn't know there was a difference," Mike
said as he downed my shot and then stepped through the doorway.
"Good morning, officer. We're not open yet—is there something I can
do for you?"

I waited until Darius stepped through the
office doorway as well, then followed him out.

The cop was young, and not one I'd seen
before. My day job was bartending at Kevin Barry's on River Street.
KB's was another of Savannah's infamous pubs, and a lot of
servicemen and city cops frequented the place. Especially those of
Irish heritage.

Bartending was something easy to me.
Something that helped me calm my frazzled nerves. And working in a
place with Irish cops with a name like McConnell…well…they all sort
of knew my face. And I wanted it that way.

I'd kept a relatively low profile after the
run-in with Maab. Truth was, I was still settling and finding my
legs. And after four months I was still jumpy when I turned a
corner. And shadows? I slept with the lights on. I knew what lived
in dark spaces. A few of the older cops, including two regular
detectives, had made it a point to be there when I was bar-tending
and I made sure to give their drink either more or less spirit,
depending on how they wanted them for the evening.

Mike shook the officer's hand, as did
Darius. When the cop looked at me, he smiled and took my hand in a
firm grip. "And you would be Mr. McConnell?"