Dark Debt (23 page)

Pain shot through it from shoulder
to wrist as circulation returned and nerves pulsed. I ignored it, pushed past it, jumped to my feet while looking to see what damage Morgan had done.

Maguire and the man who’d grabbed me had small discs—plastic throwing stars—extruding from their chests. They must have missed them on the pat-down.

They were screaming with pain, gripping with slick and bloody fingers at the barbed coins,
trying to pull them out.

“Get them, damn it!” Maguire yelled, even as he stumbled backward into a chair, still groping at the missile. “And don’t kill them. We need them alive.”

The rest of the muscle rushed forward.

I didn’t waste time. I jumped onto the pool table, darted across green felt, and jumped down again to the case of pool cues on the opposite wall. I grabbed two.

“Morgan!”
I yelled out, and jumped onto the table again, just missing the outflung arms of one of the men who’d sat quietly during the rest of Maguire’s little show. They must not have been the first string.

“Clear!” Morgan said, and I tossed a cue to him. The man tried to grab my boot; I kicked him in the face, bone and cartilage crunching. He yelped, covered his face with a hand, and stumbled back,
making room for the next one. He’d thought to bring a cue, swung it at my shins. I jumped to avoid the first swipe, hopped onto the table’s wooden edging, flipped onto the floor again, and brought the broad end of the cue around, nailing him in the shoulder.

The thrill of the fight—the flood of adrenaline—rushed through me, dampening doubt and sharpening my movements, my focus.

I knocked
one man to the floor, but another followed him, as if emerging from the house’s crevices like a scuttling insect. He’d grabbed his own pool cue, and swung it at me like a hitter who’d pointed to left field.

I brought up my cue to strike, and he shattered it with enough force that it reverberated down my spine. With a thunderous
crack
, my cue splintered in half, and I instinctively turned from
the sound and shards of flying wood that I really, really hoped weren’t aspen—the only wood that could reduce me to ash if well aimed.

The man cursed with victory, reset for another swing, this one higher—and aimed at my head.

I didn’t wait for it to land. I dropped the broken cue, pivoted into a kick that nailed him in the side, and jerked the cue from his hands.

“Bitch,” he said,
and I flipped the cue into the air, caught it backward, and nailed him between the eyes with the blunt end.

He teetered backward, fell atop a table, and both of them crashed to the floor. We hadn’t killed any that I could see, but we’d incapacitated some of them, at least for a little while. Maguire was still maniacally clawing at the disc. For all his ferocity, he didn’t handle his own injuries
very well.

“Damn,” Morgan said, chest heaving beside me. “You’ve gotten better.”

“Yeah, I have.” I tossed the cue to the floor, gestured toward the stairs. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

*   *   *

We went out the way we’d come in, running back down the passageway and into the house, then out the front door again.

“Ethan,” I said into the earbud, “if you can hear me, we need
an evac, like, yesterday.”

Between bouts of static, I caught the intermittent words “mechanical” and “delay.”

“I didn’t catch that. Repeat: We need an evac right now.”

I caught “helicopter” and “broken.” The rest of the response was only garbled static.

“You are fucking kidding me,” Morgan said.

I didn’t think so.

“We’re gonna have to find another way off the island,” I
said as gunshots echoed behind us. I looked right, left, found a path that led away from the concrete pad down toward the shore.

“There,” I said as voices began to sound behind us. I ran toward the path, began to half jog, half hop down the dirt- and rock-covered path, Morgan’s footsteps behind me.

The trail, narrow and rutted, ran up and down through a forested area, with switchbacks
as tight as bobby pins. The forest was silent around us, whatever animals might have scampered in the dark smart enough to stay still while the predators roamed around them.

The path opened up almost instantaneously, shooting us onto a rocky, sandy shoreline where water lapped in the dark. There was an ancient picnic table, the remains of a circular fire pit surrounded by rocks. Maguire and
his cronies—or Capone and his—had enjoyed a picnic or two on the Lake Michigan shoreline. Unfortunately, there was absolutely no sign of a boat.

“Shit,” Morgan said, propelling out of the trees behind me, grabbing my body for balance as he nearly ran straight into me. We fumbled, separated, looked around, saw nothing but trees and water.

“There has to be a way off this godforsaken island,”
I said, scanning left and right, but the shoreline was dark.

We couldn’t outrun these guys forever. They knew the island better than we did, and the sun would be up soon enough.

The darkness seemed to suddenly contract, to close in around me, as if I’d been shoved into a room without doors, a room with a barred window. Like a man with a key to unlock my head were standing beside me, and
his words were in my ears again.
Our business is not done.

No,
I thought, trying to stem the rising panic, the memory of Balthasar that seemed right on the edge of swamping me. There was always a solution. I just had to think, had to slow down and think.

Crap,
I thought as my vision began to spark around the edges.
Panic attack.

I grabbed Morgan’s arm as my heart began to thud. The
air was chilly, but a cold sweat broke out, peppering my skin with clamminess.

“What the hell are—oh, shit, are you okay?”

My throat felt snug as a straw, my head beginning to spin from lack of oxygen.

“Hey, breathe. Breathe, Merit. In, out. In, out.” He mimed the motion, then walked me to the picnic table. “Sit,” he said, but cast a nervous glance around him, waiting to hear humans
running through the trees.

But why should they be in a hurry? This was their island. We were the interlopers here, and apparently with no exit.

“This isn’t a big deal,” Morgan said, squeezing my hand. “No need to panic. This is just a minor setback. There’s another way out of here, and we’ll find it.”

I followed his breathing, caught the rhythm of it, forced myself to breathe on counts.
In, one, two. Out, one, two. Over and over again, until my heart began to slow its frantic pace.

“You can’t be afraid of the dark, you know. That’s not a thing a vampire can even have.”

He was trying to make me laugh, and I chuckled in spite of myself and my racing heartbeat. “Not afraid. Just—a memory. A bad one.”

“Then you need to replace it with a new one,” Morgan said, looking
down, up, around as if he might find a replacement on a nearby shelf.

“Ah,” he said, his gaze on the sky. “Look up.”

“What?”

“Look up,” he said, and tilted my chin upward.

It was as if the moon had exploded and spilled its light across the sky—stars sprinkled the dark canvas like diamonds, the cloudy Milky Way gleaming among them.

I’d seen a similar sight in our few nights
in Colorado, when the universe had flung open its arms to us. It was majestic, and it made me feel small in the best possible way.

“There is always light,” Morgan said quietly. “The stars are always shining, even if we can’t see them.”

He was the last person I’d have expected to hear something that philosophical from. And it helped.

A dog barked nearby. “We’ve got to go,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea. Just give me a minute. Keep an eye out.”

I closed my eyes, tried to slow my beating heart, tried to listen to the darkness for an idea, a suggestion, the hint of an escape plan.

My heartbeat thudded in my ears, and I focused past it, strained for sound. It took precious seconds, but I finally heard the soft scampers of animals in the woods, the hoot
of an owl, the rhythmic slap of water against the shoreline.

And there, in the back of the sounds, in the darkness, the squeak and groan of metal, just as rhythmic.

I opened my eyes again, stood up, looked in the direction of the sound.

“There,” I said, and as he followed behind, I jogged down the shore until I saw it: a metal dock, about twenty yards away. It floated on booms that
squeaked with each soft wave.

Beside it, bobbing lightly in the water, was a boat. It wasn’t large, and it wasn’t new, but it was floating. And that was something.

Voices echoed through the darkness behind us, and they were getting louder.

“Dock,” I said, and we took off running. I pushed open the small gate—thankfully unlocked—intended to keep interlopers off the equally small pier,
hurried to the boat docked at the end of it.

It was a powerboat, something a family might use for skiing on a day at the lake. A seat for the captain behind a control panel and short windshield, a seat beside for a passenger, a line of cushions across the back. Nothing fancy, but the outboard engine looked serviceable enough.

I hopped down onto plastic carpeting, the boat swaying beneath
me. I hadn’t been on a boat in a very long time. Hell of a time for a reunion.

I sat down in the captain’s chair, checked the relatively simple dashboard—ignition, speed, fuel gauge, throttle. The key was in the ignition, and it looked as though the tank was full. There were other bits and pieces of high-tech equipment, which could have been whale-tracking machines for all I knew.

When
I realized I hadn’t felt the boat bobble with Morgan’s weight, I glanced back, found him standing on the dock, staring down at me.

“Get in the boat!” I told him.

“You know how to drive a boat?”

“I
remember
how to drive a boat,” I clarified. “My grandparents had one on the lake for a few years, and my grandfather taught me how to drive. Get in,” I said, and when he hopped down, I pointed
him back toward the dock. “Untie the ropes and pull in the buoys. Push us off from the dock.”

“We’re clear,” Morgan said, and I popped the ignition, felt the engines roar to life behind me. I nudged the wheel enough to point her away from the dock, just as voices rang out behind us, and gunshots began to
ping
through the air.

“Get down!” Morgan screamed, covering his body with mine as
bullets rained around us. An old soda can, sitting forgotten in a cup holder, was hit, spraying soda into the air like a fountain. Morgan tossed it overboard.

“Go,” he said, and I pushed down the throttle. The boat’s nose lifted, the hull skipping over waves as we roared into darkness.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

T
he lake was dark and quiet, the hum of the engine and the slap of water against the sides of the boat the only sounds. If the circumstances had been different—if it had been Ethan beside me instead of Morgan on the rear bench, silently mulling over his fate, and
if we hadn’t been running from gangsters—it might have been a romantic trip.

As if he’d known I’d been thinking of him—and maybe he had—Morgan moved up to the front of the boat, took a seat in the opposite chair.

“It always seems to come so easy for you,” he said.

“What comes easy for me?”

“Being a vampire.”

The sentiment was so utterly absurd I laughed. “Did you miss the panic
attack?”

“All right, present circumstances excluded. And do you want to tell me what happened back there? Because I don’t think it was really about getting off the island.”

I pushed windblown hair behind my ears. “Just something
that happened to me a few nights ago. It made me a little panicky.”

“A little?”

I nodded, kept my eyes on the dark water in front of me, squinting to see
the lights of Chicago, praying I’d recognize them before we ran out of gas . . . and that dark panic circled me again.

“Anyway, other than that, being a vampire seems to come easy for you.”

“There is no part of my being a vampire that has been easy, from the first attack to tonight’s little pool party. I was kicked out of school. I watched Ethan die. My best friend unleashed a demon onto
the city. None of it has been easy. Some of it has been pretty great. Most of it has been awkward.”

“You have a House,” he said. “Solid from the ground up.”

He was right about that. And ironic, I thought, since my father’s first words to me after I told him I’d been made a vampire were to denigrate Cadogan House. “They’re old, but not as old as Navarre House,” he’d said. Perhaps not. Perhaps
not as chic, or as historic, and God knew Cadogan had had its share of bumps. But ultimately, when you dug down to it, we were solid. The foundation was solid, because Ethan was solid.

“Yeah,” I said. “I got really lucky. And you got the really short straw in that respect.”

He looked surprised by the admission, as if he’d expected me to rail against him, blame him for the House’s issues.
But that wouldn’t have been fair.

I paused, not sure we’d reached total candor. On the other hand, what did I have to lose from honesty?

“Navarre has always been standoffish, at least in my experience. And it’s been harsh when dealing with Cadogan. The city’s
faced a lot of crap the last few months, and you haven’t exactly been helpful. How much of that is due to the Circle?”

He didn’t
answer at first, as though he couldn’t decide whether to be pissed.

“I’m asking if you want me to give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re only responsible for your actions,” I said. “Not hers. And I know you loved her—that you all loved her. That she was very, very important to you. But it sounds like she gave you a crumbling castle.”

Morgan sighed, sat back in the chair, glanced at
me. “Yeah. She did. And yeah, I avoided most of your shenanigans because I had shenanigans of my own to deal with. We’ve been walking a very thin line since I came on board. That line keeps getting thinner, but the other vampires don’t seem to appreciate that. They’ll try to take the House for this. Because of what’s happened.”

“Irina’s faction?”

He nodded. “I have tried to do right by
Celina’s vision, but how can I, when it was built on sand? I mean, look at this.” He laughed, but the sound was entirely humorless. “We’re on a boat, trying to escape an island of mobsters who’d kill me in a heartbeat if it gave them a chance to get a return on their investment.”

I glanced back. There was only darkness behind us, the gurgling sound of the engine the only thing I could hear.

“We’ve escaped,” I said. “Now we find our way back to shore. And that’s the same thing you have to do. It’s your House, Morgan. For better or worse, and whether Celina chose you for the right reasons or not, you’re its Master. Own it.”

*   *   *

The sky was overcast, the city lights gleaming orange beneath it. The dashboard held a small compass, so we used both to guide our way back
to the city.

Chicago looked so peaceful in the darkness, a strip of light at the edge of the world, shapes emerging as we drew nearer. The height of the Willis and Hancock buildings, the sprawl of lights along the lakeshore, of cities stretching from Indiana to Wisconsin, the lights of Navy Pier.

“Where exactly are we going?” he asked.

That was an excellent question. Driving a boat
was one thing; parking it was something entirely different. There were several marinas around Chicago, but I didn’t really know how they were arranged.

There was one obvious place in Chicago to park a boat. Lots of boats, as it turned out, were already parked there, if much bigger than this one. I’d have to negotiate around the breakwater, lines of riprap that protected Navy Pier and the Chicago
Harbor from the worst of Lake Michigan, but that, I thought, would be relatively easy. The entry point was beside the Chicago Lighthouse, which also served as headquarters for the RG. Hell, I could even wave at Jonah on the way in. Not that I’d do that right now.

I directed the boat toward the lights. “We’re going there.”

Morgan glanced at the horizon, then back at me. “You’re not seriously
going to park this thing at Navy Pier.”

“It’s a pier, isn’t it? And a
navy
pier at that. It’s in the damn name. If they didn’t want boats parking there, they should have called it something else.”

“You’re getting loopy.”

“My adrenaline has run its course,” I admitted. “I’m going to crash really, really hard later.”

I pulled the boat up to the end of the pier where a ladder dropped
down into the water, grimaced as fiberglass groaned against concrete.

“Grab the ladder!” I told him, then switched off the engine
and ran around the chair, flipping the buoys over the side of the boat to provide some protection against the waves that already lifted it. Morgan tied off the boat, climbed up the ladder, and gave me a boost. When I’d followed him up, we stood on solid concrete,
but I could still feel the phantom movements of the water beneath my feet.

“They’re going to be pissed,” Morgan said, eyes on the water.

I looked down at the boat, which looked ridiculously small bobbing in the waves against the dock, its significantly larger brothers and sisters—a yacht for dinner cruises, a three-masted schooner for the historical experience, a bevy of tour boats—parked
along the dock in front of it.

“Probably so. But all things considered, this is just a drop in the bucket.”

Morgan sighed, ran his hands through his hair. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. And that little guy got us halfway across Lake Michigan, so we should be grateful for that.” He looked at me, and for a moment I saw Morgan in there, not just the Master he was trying to be. “You did good.”

“So did you. Nice job with those throwing stars. You got any more of those?”

“Maybe one or two. I’ll set you up.”

“Cool.”

We looked up at the sound of footsteps, caught the silhouettes of people running toward us. Ethan, Luc, Mallory, and Catcher emerged from darkness, my grandfather and Detective Jacobs behind them.

Sentinel?
Ethan asked silently.

I’m fine,
I said, glanced
at Mallory, and held up my bracelet. “You tracked me?”

She nodded. “Glad it worked, since the earbuds crapped out. And I’m glad you’re okay.”

“The helicopter was just about to lift off when you started across the lake. Mallory guessed you’d taken a boat.”

Luc stared down at the water, then back at me with amazement. “And the Circle’s boat, at that.”

“Only after they tried to take
their payment out in our hides.” A series of large waves rolled in, nudging the boat against the pier with a grinding sound that didn’t really speak well of its future seaworthiness. Or lakeworthiness.

“They’re on Torrance Island,” I said when Jacobs reached us. “Former mobster hangout. There were at least six men there. I don’t think they’ve really opened the house for spring yet. There’s
a helipad, but no longer a boat.” I gestured toward the water.

“Negotiations?” my grandfather asked.

“They want King, decided they’d take me as a hostage to get his location.”

“He’s important to them.”

“Apparently, but we didn’t get a reason out of them. Either Maguire knew and wasn’t telling—which seems unlikely, because he was pretty talkative—or he just didn’t know. He played
like he was leading the organization, but eventually threw out a ‘we.’ And besides, he’s muscle. Maybe well-connected muscle, but just muscle. No one else looked familiar, and there was no sign of Balthasar. But Maguire basically acknowledged they knew who he was, and that he’s crazy.”

“Well done, Sentinel,” Luc said approvingly, and my grandfather nodded.

“We’ve gotten the location of
their hole, or one of them, anyway, and the boat. We’ll investigate the jurisdictional issue, send
boats and a chopper to bring them in if we can, and keep you posted.”

“This boat may not make it through the night,” Morgan said, eyes on the water as another wave surged toward it, even the water in the harbor rough tonight.

“Can we go home?” I asked. “It’s been a long night.”

“One moment,”
Ethan said pleasantly, then gave Morgan a right cross to the face.

Morgan staggered back, eyes wide. When he found his footing again, he put a hand to his jaw, wiggled it. “What the fuck, Sullivan?”

“That was our unfinished business. Now we’re even.” Ethan’s eyes slitted. “Think carefully before you decide to use my people as ballast again.” With that, he put his hand at my back, turned
me toward the gate.

Morgan cursed. “Anybody ever tell you you’re an asshole, Sullivan?”

Beside me, Ethan grinned, but kept his gaze on the boardwalk in front of us. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

*   *   *

My grandfather and Detective Jacobs stayed behind to oversee the boat’s forensic processing, with Jeff and Catcher promising to assist with research.

Morgan, Luc, Ethan,
and I drove back to Cadogan House. Ethan sprang for hot beefs on the way home, and I finished mine in the car before we’d left downtown. The fight, the anticipation, my acting as a battery for Mallory’s ward, put my hunger on overdrive.

Morgan excused himself to check on his vampires, ensure that they were still safe. We found Kelley and Malik waiting in Ethan’s office, their expressions grim.

“What’s happened?”

“It’s Balthasar, or at least it seems like Balthasar. Downstairs,” she said, and we followed her down to the Ops Room.

Once again, the screen was on, tuned to a news broadcast, the ticker at the bottom of the screen chilling:
HOSPITALIZED WOMAN
CLAIMS
ASSAULT
BY
V
AMPIRE IN DREAM
.

“Jesus,” Ethan said. “Can we have ten minutes without a crisis?”

“What about
Juliet?” I asked Luc. “I thought they had him. I thought they found his condo.”

“They sat on the building for two hours, didn’t see him, so they checked with security. Turns out, security heard him contact the account manager in the lobby about something or other, and the account manager spilled that we’d checked in on him.”

I had choice words for humans that I decided not to verbalize.
“So he’s gone again?”

“Unfortunately, yes.” He gestured toward the screen. “I’d presume he’s pissed we’re keeping him away from his penthouse. So this attack could be punishment for that. But if the Circle and Balthasar are connected, and the Circle’s pissed at us, it could be punishment from their direction, too. I doubt the Circle would have condoned it—it doesn’t seem like their kind of
play—but it wouldn’t the first time Balthasar did something violent.”

“Why not just come for us?” Luc asked, glancing at Ethan. “For you? What is he waiting for?”

Ethan’s eyes darkened. “Consider the man. He’s waiting for me to beg, and I’ll be damned if I’ll do that. We must put a stop to this. We cannot allow him to hurt anyone else, to destroy the goodwill we’ve tried to build.”

“The Investiture,” I said. “Navarre’s vampires are stable, and it’s time to take care of our own. We have to draw him out.”

Ethan perked up an eyebrow.

“We have to draw him out,
Sire
,” I added politely. “As you think best and such.”

“Nice cover,” Luc muttered.

“Her Grateful Condescension leaves something to be desired,” Ethan said. “But she’s right. I’ll talk to Scott and Morgan.
We’ll say two nights hence. I’ll also talk to Nick,” he added, eyeing Malik. “I was thinking, if we’d decided to finalize it, that I’d suggest it’s been in the works for several weeks, and we only just decided to announce it to humans.”

“That adds weight and interest,” Malik agreed with a nod.

“Location?” Luc asked.

“I’d prefer here. If there’s to be an engagement with Balthasar, I’d
prefer it happen on our territory and our terms. But perhaps in a tent on the grounds, weather permitting, in order to keep him out of the House proper?”