Dead of Night (Ghosts & Magic #1) (19 page)

Dannie pursed her lips. "Considering the outcome, I tend to agree with her. What about the stone?"

"I hid it in a hotel downtown. I'm going to make a run to get it."

"I'll come with you," Amos said. He'd moved from the floor to the couch, and was sitting there with the towel against his nose.

"I'll go alone." The last thing I wanted was to have to babysit him.

"Amos will go with you," Jin said.
 

I didn't like it. "Are you sure?"

"Red isn't paying him to sit on the couch."

"Don't worry, Baldie, I got your back. I have my vices, but I ain't survived the last twenty years on luck and booze and sex alone."

Another disgusting thought.
 

"Fine. We'll leave in a couple of hours when the traffic thins out a bit. That will give your nose a chance to stop bleeding, and time for me to grab some room service. I've been running on Coke and Twinkies for the last twenty-four hours."

"Do you think it's a good idea to wait?" Jin asked.

"If it's still there now, it will be there in two hours. To be honest, I'm kind of hoping to run into that redhead again, now that I've got some backup." I reached my hand into my pocket, picking up the dice. Warm and ready to go.
 

"What redhead?" Dannie asked.

"A user. She came into the Gas and Sip in Connecticut while I was there, and then turned up at Jin's place when the ferals attacked. I think she's controlling them somehow."

"And she's been in the same place you've been, at the same time you've been there twice now?"
 

I paused, and then shook my head. "That doesn't mean anything. We've had the same targets."

"The Gas and Sip was a target? Why would she have been there?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. She bought some cigarettes and Twinkies."

Danelle shook her head, like she couldn't believe I was so dense. "Was she on line with you? Did she talk to you?"

"Yeah, so?"

"Dammit, Conor. You're such a newbie sometimes. Take off your clothes, empty your pockets. She may be tracking you."

"How? Why? I wasn't even supposed to make it out of there alive." I started taking stuff out of my coat at the same time I complained. My phone, the dice, a lighter, my credit card and fake ID. I had been traveling light for the plane ride.

"Insurance, Baldie," Amos said. "In case you didn't stick to the plan and croak."

Shit. I still didn't think it was likely, but they were right. We couldn't take the chance.

"Just take it all off," Danelle said.

"In front of everybody?"

"Christ, Conor. We're all adults, and its not like you're anything much to look at anyway. The more eyes checking you, the better."

It was true, and I shouldn't have been embarrassed. Dannie and I had been together, and Amos had nothing to say about the shape of my body. It was Jin that was making me feel modest, even though I'd already seen enough of her. I wasn't normally such a prude, but for some reason her presence was making me very aware of how bad I looked.

Even so, I complied. I took off the trench, and Danelle set about picking through it, turning it inside out and feeling along the entire length. Jin took my pants, examining them closely, while Amos volunteered to search my shirt and boots. I was left with my underwear. It wasn't exactly clean, but it wasn't bugged either.

At least, I hadn't thought it would be bugged, until I found a small pin shaped device sticking to the elastic. "You've got to be kidding me."
 

I picked it away from the cloth and held it up for Dannie to look at.

She held out her hand, and I gave it to her. She brought it up to her eye. "They probably tracked the airline manifest, matched it up with car rentals, and waited to see who headed out that way. You aren't exactly inconspicuous."

I hadn't noticed anyone following me. I hadn't been looking for it either. "Then she knows we're here?"

"She knows you're here. She probably knows everywhere you've been since the convenience store."

She would have also known that I was still in Jin's apartment building. Maybe it wasn't accurate enough to know exactly where, but they had been waiting for me to come out.
 

"Reva," Jin whispered.
 

They would know we had visited her, too. We couldn't go back for her, so I hoped they would just leave her be. She had that shotgun, and she was a troll, so if they did hit her... she wouldn't go down easy.

"So we destroy that thing, right?" Amos asked.
 

"Not yet." I slipped my undies back on, collected the rest of my clothes, got dressed, and then returned my things to my pockets. "I'm going down to the hotel where I left the stone."

"Conor, she knows you want the stone. How much do you want a bet someone will be waiting for you to come back for it?"

"I expect that someone will, but a trap isn't much of a trap if you already know about it. Besides, I don't plan to be there alone. I'll have Amos and Evan."

"I'm coming, too," Jin said.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

She smiled at me, all sweet and innocent. "Don't forget who I am, Baron. It's time to be bold."

I wasn't sure if she meant who I had said she was, or who she really was, but it didn't matter. The bottom line was that I couldn't outright tell her what to do. Wizard or not, she was still Miss Red.

"What did you call me?"

"Baron, like Baron Saturday. Baron Samedi? The voodoo Lord of the Dead? That is who you remind me of, with your skin so tight against your bones."

She had seen me naked, and that was who I reminded her of? I had been right to be embarrassed.

Dannie laughed. "I like it. You need a new handle anyway... it's bad enough she knows your name."

"Amos was the one who spewed it out as soon as I opened the door. I didn't tell her."

"Can you two shut up?" Amos asked. "It sounds like we have a date with a hot redhead who's into dogs."

I closed my eyes and shook my head.
 

I thought things were bad before.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Are we there yet?

"You going to be okay?"

I was behind the van with Danelle. Amos and Jin were already inside, digging through the trunk full of guns. Jin had found a couple of shoulder holsters and a pair of pistols to put in them, while Amos had discovered the shotgun. Not that he needed it - he'd already shown off the six handguns and two Uzis he kept strapped to his bulk beneath the duster.
 

"More surface area, more firepower," he'd said with a laugh.
 

"I'll be fine. I'll take your cards and ask the front desk for a new room. Without the tracker, they won't be able to find me. What are they going to do with me, anyway? I'm not a threat."

"Bullshit. You're easy to underestimate." She had a handgun tucked under her seat that only she and I knew about. I leaned down and kissed her on the cheek. "Just find a Machinery for us. There have to be a bunch of them around here."

"I will. Be careful, Conor... Baron."

"Aren't I always?"

"Are you ever?"

"Shut up."

I climbed into the van through the back and pulled the doors closed.
 

"It does smell a little in here," Jin said.
 

"It comes with the territory. Amos, let's get moving."

"Was hoping I was done driving this crap van. What's the address?"

"I don't know the address. It's the Golden Sunrise Hotel. It's near the bridge."

"Which bridge?"

"I don't know, it's downtown somewhere. I took a cab."

"Oh, for fuck's sake. Thanks for the highly detailed directions, Skeletor."

"It's the Bright Sun Hotel," Jin said. "It's on Gold Street."

"Christ, the elf is smarter than you are." He started the van and backed out of the double spot he had taken. It shuddered a bit when he put it into drive. "Piece of shit."

It was ten o'clock, early enough that the city hadn't been left to the denizens of the night, and late enough that there wasn't much traffic. The rain had slowed to a steady patter, replacing the pounding downfall that had soaked us earlier. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the slight gnawing in my gut, while Amos navigated the streets with the adeptness of someone who had spent more than a few days in the urban jungle.

The treatments. I didn't know how long I could go without them at this level of alertness. I could last a couple of months if I severely limited my use of magic, and less than a day if I was really desperate. I was worried that desperate was the more likely outcome right now, and Dalton was all the way in Chicago. There had to be a black market here that could provide the medicine, but once I was bad enough, there wouldn't be much time to get a name and location.
 

The thoughts left me distracted, more distracted than I wanted to be. They were a bug in my mind, buzzing around and around and threatening to drive me to panic.

I could hear Amos' voice in the background the whole time, a mixed soundtrack of foul, disgusting, and rude chatter over the din of my mind. He would say something about every person we drove past. This one had nice tits, that guy was a fag, the other one looked like a child molester, or maybe a serial killer. He was like the tour guide from Hell, his running diatribe suggesting that maybe he wasn't a racist. Maybe he just hated everybody.

"Holy shit, did you see that?" he asked, turning his head to look at someone or something in the street. He put his head forward just in time to slam on the brakes and keep us from rear-ending a cab. The jerky motion almost gave me whiplash, and I held onto the two front seats to keep from being thrown into the dashboard.

"Can't you shut the fuck up and pay attention to the road?" My heart was racing, and not from his driving. I was spending too much time in my head, getting psyched out by the effect before I'd created the cause.

"Sorry, sorry." He straightened up in the seat and accelerated slowly. "I've seen a lot of shit in this town, but I didn't expect anyone to be doing
that
in public."

"What's the plan?" Jin asked, not falling for his obvious baiting. She'd been quiet the whole time, probably trying to decide if she should put a bullet in Amos' head.

"What?" I was still a little dazed.

"The plan, Baldie," Amos said.

I looked out the passenger window from my perch behind it. Some of the shops looked familiar from my first go round in the cab. We had to be getting close.

I'd been thinking about it since I decided to go back for the stone. My plan was pretty basic. Basic, and bold.
 

"The redhead saw us get away on the bike. I think it would have been pretty obvious to her that I wasn't carrying the stone. That means there's a good chance she would have traced my route, backtracked, and searched for it. Maybe she found it, maybe she didn't. If she didn't, she's going to wait for us to come back for it, and ambush us. If she did, she's going to take it away, and leave someone else to ambush us, because she knows we're going to have to come back for it at some point. Or, she took it and left." I glanced over at Jin. "But I have a feeling they aren't going to just leave."

She knew why I was looking at her. If they knew who she was, they were still going to want her dead. It was dangerous for her to be here. We both knew it.
 

"So we're walking into an ambush?" she asked.

"We aren't just walking in. They don't know that we know it's a trap. They can't know we found the bug. We can get the drop on them."

"How?"

I pointed at the cooler where Evan was resting. "My secret weapon. How far are we from the hotel?"

"Six blocks," Amos said.

"Stop the van."

It took Amos a few minutes to find a spot big enough to hold the truck. He pulled in at the same time I moved to the back and opened up the cooler.

"Hop to it, Evan," I said, holding my hand to the dead commando's bone wrist and pushing the magic into him. I felt the thread reach out and wrap itself around him, bringing his soul back from somewhere else.

"What is it now, asshole?" Evan said a moment later, his ragged face gaining movement and even a semblance of emotion. I heard Jin gasp. The driver's side door opened, and Amos oozed himself out.

Evan pulled himself to a sitting position, his bones creaking. He looked past me, to where she was standing, his half-face curling into a smile. "Well, hello."
 

"Get out of the cooler. It's time to play dress up."
 

"I was talking to the lady."

"Don't push me, Evan." He couldn't disobey, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to make me work for it.
 

"Fine." He got to his feet, twisting and stepping out of the cooler. "Could you turn around or close your eyes or something? I'm shy." He looked at Jin again. "You don't have to, baby."

I shoved the clothes into his hands and led Jin outside to where Amos was waiting, his face pale. Apparently the sight of Evan had made him sick, and now he refused to look me in the eye.

"Fucking necromancers. It's just so wrong."

"You have your strengths, I have mine." I had no idea what his strengths were. Surface area? The good news was that his disgust had quieted him down a bit, at least for the time being.

"He's taller than you," Jin said.

"Evan? A few inches. Do you think they'll notice? Most of my clothes are baggy."

"I hope not. Where did you find him?"

"Obits. He was a policeman... S.W.A.T. He's an asshole, but his tactical is flawless."

"I don't think he likes you."

"He despises me. Maybe all of them do, for bringing them back to this world, back to their old shells. I don't know. I've asked. With Evan, it's obvious. With some of the others, not so much."
 

I could tell she wanted to ask me more about it. It wasn't a morbid curiosity though. She was measuring me, to find out what I could do, maybe to figure out how best to use me. That's what I would have expected from Miss Red.