Demon Marked (13 page)

Emma turned the problem over and over in her mind until the seams of her sanity began to shred and unravel. No matter how weak she still felt, she couldn't just lie here and take a nap; she had to get up and
do
something; she had to—

“Mikey! Michael, you here?” Little Francis yelled the words from the door to his office, obviously unconcerned with waking the sleeping girl on his couch. Emma kept her face still and her eyes closed, determined not to say a word to Francis if she could help it.

Andre was right; they would be better off if they had more information before they went to the boss's son. Once her involvement in this mess was confirmed, LF would have to call his dad, and she'd feel more prepared for the wrath of Uncle Francis if she and Andre could find out what had happened to the body.

“Douglas,” Francis yelled. Footsteps sounded from down the hall, the scurrying of an obedient minion hurrying to do his master's bidding. “Get me Mikey, or get Mikey on the phone. We've got a situation. The girl showed up at the meeting place but ran off before we could get her into the safe house.”

Oh no.
Ginger.
It had to be. How many other girls were the Contis checking into a safe house this morning? What the hell was wrong with her? Why had she run?

“I want Mikey uptown coordinating the search,” Little Francis said. The fact that he was willing to send one of his best hunters and a team of his men to look for her friend changed Emma's opinion of him. At least a little bit. He might be sleazy, but he was a sweeter sleaze than she'd realized.

“Yes, sir,” a young man Emma assumed to be Douglas said. “Do you want the team already in place to keep looking or—”

“Of course I want them to keep looking, Douglas. Use your fucking brain.”

Geez. Francis was really passionate about finding Ginger. Or maybe he always talked to his assistant like he was demon waste stuck on his shoe. What did Emma know?

Nothing. She knew a whole lot of nothing, a state of being she meant to remedy as soon as possible.

Emma waited until she heard Douglas's footsteps hurry away down the hall and Francis's door close before slitting her eyes. Good. Francis had indeed returned to his lair. She lifted her head, searching the long hall that led to the main entrance of Conti Bounty. She was alone, except for the doctor lingering near the coffee station and Douglas, who would be manning the front desk.

Still, she might as well have had a team of armed bounty hunters between her and the door. The doctor and Douglas weren't going to let her walk out of here. She was going to have to get a little more ... creative.

Her eyes drifted along the wall, searching for a window. She'd done her share of sneaking out—and back in—through windows in her time at the halfway house, but never through one that opened out on demon-infested waters. The East River was pretty to look at, but she didn't want to go swimming in it anytime soon, especially not when her arms and legs still felt like taffy twisted one too many times.

That left her only one option.

Emma hefted herself into a seated position with a sigh, pushed to her feet, and tottered down the hall toward Dr. Finch. She felt fairly steady but played up the sway in her step as she closed the distance between her and the doc.

“Dr. Finch, I was wondering if—”

“Miss Quinn, you shouldn't be up,” the doctor said, looking annoyed when she reached out and took his arm. He'd clearly had enough of her touch when she'd mauled his head earlier in the morning.

“I know. I just can't sleep.” Emma blinked her eyes, hoping she didn't look as horrible as she suspected or her plan might be made to fail. “I feel so ... dirty. I was wondering if there was somewhere I could take a shower.”

Dr. Finch hesitated. “I'm not sure. The bounty hunters have a locker room, but I think it's only for the men.”

“Oh, well ... maybe I could shower there?” Emma leaned closer to the doctor, until the curve of her breast nearly touched his arm. “You could watch, make sure no one came in and that I didn't fall down or anything. I mean, you're a doctor, so it would be okay for you to see me naked, right?”

Finally, the familiar glimmer of lust crept into the doc's pale blue eyes. He nodded and hurried to set down his coffee. “Of course. That would be fine. Come with me—I'll show you the way to the locker room.”

Emma smiled and took the arm he offered, leaning on him as he led her past Douglas's desk. Thankfully, the young man was busy on the phone and didn't seem to think anything of the doctor leading his charge down the hall. Perfect. Now all she had to find was a way to ditch the doc and—

The women's restroom. It was on the right side of the building and would allow her to escape onto the street instead of into the river. Now if only she'd get lucky and the lav had a window.

“I need to use the bathroom before I shower,” Emma said, untangling her arm from the doctor's, shaking off his warm, papery hands. “I'll be right back.”

She slipped away into the bathroom before he could say a word, sending up a silent shout of victory as she spied the window on the opposite side of the room. The lock twisted easily. The window itself took a little shoving—the wood swollen from the summer heat—but it finally gave with a small groan. Emma popped the screen out with a few well-placed punches and was easing out of the window on her belly seconds later.

All told, she'd been in the bathroom less than two minutes. She hoped that meant she had at least another five or ten before the doctor came looking for her and realized she was gone.

She hated to sneak out on the Contis, but she couldn't just lie on the couch. She had never been good at letting other people take care of her business. She needed to start figuring her way out of this mess, but first she had to get that shower. The doctor had wiped away some of the spark, but her skin still glittered in the bright morning light. She couldn't afford to attract that kind of attention, especially since she couldn't be sure the police weren't already looking for her.

Her apartment was out of the question, but Sam and Jace's place wasn't too far away. Surely the Death Ministry hadn't been able to find out where her family lived so easily ... though it certainly hadn't taken long for them to find her and Ginger's place.

Emma sighed and hurried through the maze of streets, picking her way around the ruins toward the west side of Southie. Safe or not, she was going to have to take a chance on Sam's place. She had no money, no earbud to call anyone, and very few options. Besides, if she was going to break and enter, she preferred it be someplace where she was fairly sure the occupants weren't going to press charges for the damage.

T
hirty minutes later, a freshly showered Emma stepped out of Sam's apartment building wearing a borrowed pair of jeans—with a hundred borrowed dollars tucked in the front pocket—and a short-sleeved white button-up shirt. The shirt was more feminine than anything she'd worn in years, and the jeans about three inches too short, but she'd stuffed them inside her boots, added one of Jace's thick black belts, and pulled together an outfit that was nice and plain and hopefully wouldn't attract attention.

Outside, the summer day was picking up steam, but the wind still felt cool as it blew through her damp hair.

God, it was hard to believe it was barely eight in the morning. She felt like she'd lived three days in the past few hours. Still, she wasn't sleepy. Once the last of the sluggishness left her limbs, she'd felt energized, sharp, the way she usually felt after a feeding.

That sharpness had convinced her that she had to go back to her apartment and take another look around. Her gut was telling her she'd missed something in her first, messed-up stagger through the wreckage. It still seemed odd that nothing of value had been taken. She would have thought that even the Death Ministry would take the television. The men at the top of the gang were rich thugs, but the younger men, like Greg, lived in slums inside the ruins until they'd gained sufficient status in the organization. Surely a guy like that wouldn't pass up a free television. But then, the police wouldn't trash her place without a warrant, so who else could it be?

The only thing she could think of was that Ginger was on someone's shit list. But whose? Maybe an old boyfriend? Or the wife of one of the married men she occasionally messed around with at the bar?

Unfortunately, Emma had no way of finding out anything from Ginger. Ginger still wasn't answering her bud. She'd tried to reach her roommate twice on the wall phone at Sam's.

She'd also sent Andre a message from Sam's home computer, letting him know where she was headed.

Like it or not, she and Andre were in this together. He'd made that call when he urged her to keep Little Francis out of the loop. Besides, she couldn't deny that she wanted to see him again, wanted to try to convince him that she hadn't been lying about the drugs.

Looked like she'd get the chance sooner than she'd expected.

Half a block away, a tall, handsome man in a ridiculously expensive suit lounged outside Good Stuff market, looking as out of place on this side of the barricade as ever. She should have realized that Andre was smart enough to figure out which direction she'd be coming from and head her off at the pass, but still ... it was surprising to see him leaning against the brick near the market's recycling machine, looking as pulled together as he had a few hours ago, despite the chaotic events of the morning.

Emma cocked her head, taking him in as she closed the distance between them. Damn, but the way he wore fancy clothes was almost enough to make her reconsider her definition of wasteful spending. Was it really wasteful to drop a few grand on a garment that made a man look like
that
?

“Good morning. Glad to see you got the dust off your suit,” Emma said.

“You're crazy, you know that?”

“Good to see you, too.”

“I'm serious. What were you thinking?” Andre's tone left little doubt how very angry he was, despite the fact that his eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses.

Too bad it didn't get in the way of the energy that leapt between them, a spark of sexual recognition that made her acutely aware of how her borrowed jeans clung to her body. She wondered whether Andre would notice, whether he'd check out her ass the way he had when they'd left the diner.

“I see you found that shower you were looking for. You look ... clean.”

Emma smiled. Looked as if he
had
noticed. “Thanks. You look pretty, too.”

Andre grunted and fell into step beside her, his shoulder brushing against hers as they threaded their way through the early morning shoppers. “Little Francis was getting ready to send a search party until I told him I'd heard from you.”

“You didn't tell him we were—”

“I told him you were meeting me uptown. He assumes you're in a cab waiting to get through the barricade, so we should have a few hours,” Andre said. “Not that I think it's a good idea for you to go back to your apartment.”

“But you think it's a good idea for someone to go back and check things out.”

“I do, but—”

“And I'm the best someone for the job. I'm the only one who will know if something's missing.” Aside from Ginger, of course
. Ugh.
Ginger. Why did today have to be the day she went completely off the deep end? “So I guess you heard Ginger ran away from the people trying to take her into the safe house?”

“I did,” Andre said. “Between the two of you, I think you've made Little Francis suspicious that you're keeping secrets.”

“I have no idea why she ran,” Emma said, willing Andre to believe her. “We don't have any secrets. At least not any shared secrets.”

“Still, this is going to make telling him about your connection to the missing body a hell of a lot more complicated.” Andre sighed, a weary sound that reminded her that not everyone had supernatural energy to draw upon. He'd been up since four in the morning and had carried a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman down two flights of rickety stairs. He was probably starting to feel this day in a major way. “I should have just told him everything when we—”

“No, I think you were right,” Emma said, strangely tempted to smooth her hand along the tense line of Andre's shoulders.

She never wanted to touch people. Ever. Her first impulse was to keep her hands to herself, especially with people she cared about. The mark had made her wary of offering physical comfort, but she couldn't deny she wanted to reach out to Andre, to feel the strength hidden beneath his clothes, to press herself against him the way she had this morning.