Marked Clan #2 - Red (11 page)

Even though I tried very hard not to see it, the face in my mind changed. The skin went paler, gray and slack. A bloody gash split her forehead open and spilled its horrible payload onto her cheeks, coloring them darker than her hair. I was fifteen the night she died.

“Bon? Are you okay?” Connor asked.

I snapped out of my thoughts and locked the point-of-sale. His appointment was gone. “I’m fine. Done with Skanky McTinyPants?”

He chuckled. “Repeat customer. Might be getting a piercing or two as well.”

I knew by the cock-eyed grin on his face
exactly
where those piercings were going. I sighed. “You old perv. I’m going to see Manuel today. Do you want anything?”

Connor shook his head. “I’m good on candles of the Virgin Mary for now. Wouldn’t mind one of those cigars he prides himself on. Under the table of course.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

The street outside Manuel’s shop was strangely deserted. When I got to the front door, I found it locked. Something was very wrong—Manuel worked every day of the week out of some weird sense of duty to his community.

A young Hispanic woman walked over to me from across the street. She had a washcloth draped over her shoulder, like she’d just been feeding a baby. “We’re closed today, Miss. Sorry. Manuel isn’t feeling good.”

As she came closer, I recognized Maria, Manuel’s wife. She must have been feeding their daughter. Her eyes lit up when she saw who I was. “Oh, PJ. Come on inside.”

She motioned me to the house across the way and I followed. “What’s wrong with Manuel?”

Maria wore her long black hair below her waist in a carefully done braid. Someone had woven flowers into it. She took a deep breath before she answered. “It’s probably better he told you. Bad juju around here lately. Hope you didn’t bring it on us with your blood magic.”

She was joking…I think. Maria was kind of hard to read. One minute she was the doting wife and devout Catholic, the next minute she ripped Manuel apart for something seemingly inconsequential. Sometimes I could see why he spent so much time in his shop.

The Fraga household was neat, furnished in old, dark-wood-and-leather furniture that someone polished regularly. Maria paused in the living room to pick up her infant daughter, and then led me back to the bedroom. She knocked on the door.

“I hope you’re decent,
mi vida
. You have company.”

She didn’t wait for a response. I walked in behind her and saw Manuel sitting in the corner of the room next to a nightstand that had been turned into some kind of altar. The air smelled of incense. His hands were bandaged. He looked at me in the full-length mirror to his left. “Ah, PJ. Come, sit for a while.” His wife came over and gave him a kiss on the forehead, and he kissed her back along with a peck for his tiny daughter’s hand.

“Thank you,
Santa Maria,
” he said.

She shot him a look. “Don’t
Santa Maria
me. You’re well enough to work on the yard today.
No olvides
.”

“I won’t forget this time, I promise.”

He waited until the door was closed before he went back to his ritual. I didn’t recognize it, but it involved parts of a chicken I’d rather not think about. I looked at the pictures on the wall instead.

“What happened, Manuel?”

He looked at his hands as though he just noticed the bandages himself. “Oh this? Nothing. Misunderstanding with the powers that be. We’re square now. Looks like you had a scrape too.”

He pointed at my bandages. “Oh,” I said. “Just a scratch. I thought most people were afraid to hurt a
santero
?”

He said a prayer in Spanish, and then turned to me. “Most people from my neighborhood, yes. These men were not from here.”

“What did they want?”

He blew out his incense and sat down on the messy bed. “Does it matter? They’ll be dealt with. These things have a way of working themselves out.”

“I don’t follow you, Manuel.”

“No need to,
chica.
” He held up his bandaged hands. “Karma, she is a bitch.”

I laughed and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I thought you were Catholic, not Buddhist.”

“Karma, sin, whatever you want to call it. But you didn’t come here to shoot the shit with me. Are you out of pens already?”

I shook my head. “I’m okay for now. I guess I just…needed a familiar face. One that I don’t have to watch my back around.”

“Strange things happening with the wolves?” he asked.

“Dree is back. She brought her whole clan.”

He hissed a breath. “That is bad juju. She didn’t try to hurt you, did she? What am I saying? I forget who I’m talking to. Did you kill her?”

“No. It’s…complicated.”

“I imagine it would be,” he said, and got up. He walked to the door and motioned me to follow. “Come on, I can’t smoke in the house with the baby. Let’s take a look at that backyard for a minute. Survey the damage.”

Chapter Nineteen

Manuel and I stood outside his back patio door as he lit up a fresh cigar. The yard was every bit the jungle his wife hinted at. It looked like it hadn’t been mowed in months.

“Why do you smoke those?” I asked. “Younever told me the whole story.”

Manuel laughed. “
Mi padre
smoked these. I’d sit on his lap every night growing up and watch him savor it. I honor his memory with this ritual."

“I’ve been thinking about my mom more lately,” I said. I don’t know why it just spilled out like that.

“Perhaps she’s trying to tell you something.”

“Like what?”

Manuel took a long puff and let it out slowly. “Don’t know,
chica.
The dead do speak to us though – and not without a good reason. What do you see when you think of her?”

I shuddered. “At first it was just little things. The look she used to give me when I disappointed her. Today I saw her the way she died. It wasn’t pretty.”

He nodded and crossed himself absentmindedly. “Car wreck, right? Pretty nasty one if I remember.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wasn’t even home. Connor had to track my friend and me down at the mall. I remember being so mad that he just barged in on me like that. I thought my mom had asked him to come get me. I was out past curfew.”

I stared at a tall weed that danced in the breeze. Manuel puffed away silently.

“The look on his face shut me up pretty damned quickly. I’d never seen him so serious. Any time I hung out with him back then he was always half-smiling, like he knew the world’s funniest joke and just couldn’t wait to tell you. He looked old that day. The look scared me more than what he said, I think.”

“I never heard the details about the accident,” Manuel said. “Was it a drunk driver?”

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “My dad. They had already split up by that time, but he never really let go. He took Mom to some new restaurant that hadn’t got their liquor license yet. They couldn’t
sell
liquor, but they could sure as hell give it away to butter up potential new customers. He was sloshed before their appetizers came, from what Connor told me.”

Maria opened the patio door and came out with two glasses of iced tea. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I know that look. Don’t let him fill your head with too much philosophical nonsense.”

“Thanks,” I said. She went back inside and shut the door behind her. I heard the baby crying.

“Do you want to go back inside?” I asked Manuel. He shook his head and wagged the half-gone cigar at me.

“Not done yet. Go on, if you’re up to it. I figure this is important to get off your chest.”

I hadn’t realized it until he said something, but it really was. Besides Dree, I don’t think I’ve told the story of my mom’s death to anyone else in so much detail. What was Slate doing to me, and why?

“He split their car up the middle, right into a barrier on the freeway. Mom died instantly. Small favors. He stumbled around and nearly died in traffic. Sometimes I wish he had.”

“Don’t say that,” Manuel said. “Curses are serious business.”

“Fuck, Manuel, you don’t understand. She annoyed the shit out of me, but she was my
mother.
Just because my asshole of a dad couldn’t manage his liquor she got bashed around like a rag doll, and he walked away with scrapes and bruises.”

“May I ask where he is now?”

I took a sip of the tea. Much too sweet, but I drank it anyway. My mouth was dry, and I wished it was just from talking so much.

“Fuck if I know, or care. Connor threatened him within an inch of his life. Poppa declared him
persona non grata
. Neither one ever forgave him. Poppa took the grudge to his grave.”

“Did you?” Manuel finished his cigar and stomped it out on the concrete of the porch.

“Did I what?”

“Forgive him.”

I had to think about that one for a while. After the drama of the funeral, moving in with my uncle, and dad skipping town, all I’d wanted to do was forget. It wasn’t as easy as it seemed.

“No,” I said. “I guess I never did.”

Manuel never said what happened to his hands. I went back to Celtic Knot and found the day’s paper sitting on my kitchen table. Here’s to a little normalcy. I plopped down in my chair and opened it up to scan the headlines.

Three Dead in Apparent Gang Initiation
was the first. Moving on. No new suspicious cases of women turning up dead today. Maybe Donald and his crew took the night off to hunt me. That was a comforting thought.

My usual investigations would probably have to be put on hold until I could track down this new pack. I hoped Slate and Lupin knew more about where to look than I did. Someone knocked on my door and I stood to get it.

Justin grinned at me, holding two sandwiches and a two-liter soda. “Quick lunch, maybe?”

“And I’m supposed to believe you were just in the neighborhood, wandering around with lunch and no one to share it with?” I said. “How did you know I was even here?”

Justin coughed and nodded downstairs—Connor. Well-meaning, nosy asshole. Damn it if I didn’t love him anyway. “Come on in, Doc.”

He set down the sandwiches and proffered me the soda. “Glasses?”

“Bottom shelf, left of the sink, Doc,” I said.

They weren’t sandwiches at all—they were wraps from Camille’s. Connor had really outdone himself with this one. I had to wonder how long the briefing took. Did the dear doctor know my bra size too?

“You call me that a lot,” he said as he brought out two tumblers and started filling them. “Is there something wrong with just ‘Justin’?”

I shrugged. “You look like a Doc to me. So what’s up, Doc?”

“I’d like to get some samples of your friends’ blood. And yours too, for comparison.”

And here I thought it was purely a social call. “Why?”

“Like I said before, professional curiosity. I got a good look at the man last night while I was stitching him up. Their healing ability is amazing. I’m wondering if there might be a biological reason for it. Something I could reproduce.”

“Well, Doc, I’m impressed that you didn’t go running for the hills after you met the wolves…but I hate to break it to you. Science has nothing to do with this.”

He didn’t slow down. “Hear me out. A lot of unknown science was considered magic, or curses, before we fully understood it. Maybe there’s something else at work here. I want to run some tests. Maybe get a sample from the human form and the wolf form to compare. Do you think they’d let me do that?”

My favorite wrap, the Daredevil, sat uneaten. I just looked at him, head tilted to the left. “You’re serious.”

He nodded and dug into his own lunch like he hadn’t eaten all day. “It’s a fascinating thing, this transformation. It must affect them on a genetic level somehow.”

I finally took a bite, and then another. Damn, this was good. I hadn’t had one of these wraps in a long time. “Doc, you’re assuming a lot. For starters, the wolves aren’t my friends.”

“But the one our age—Dree was it? You two seemed familiar.”

“Dree
was
my friend, before the wolves got her. Now she’s something else entirely. Not human, that’s for sure.”

“What about the other one? The older woman.”

Slate would
so
not appreciate him calling her “older.” Then again, I could be wrong. She didn’t always react the way a human would. Too much time on all fours would be my guess.

“Slate. I don’t know. She might be okay with it. I’d mention the possibility of a cure though. She’s not the happiest person in her predicament. Just between you and me, she asked me to kill her.”

Justin stopped eating. “What? Why?”

I shrugged. “She sees the wolves the same way I do, and my grandfather did. They’re a menace. A mistake my family brought into this world, and I intend to take out. Right now the only weapon I have is my blood.”

And that dagger Slate gave me, but no need to get into that with the good doctor. He didn’t strike me as being okay with murder, no matter how badly someone needed it. I hoped it wouldn’t end up being a liability.

Chapter Twenty

“I never really stopped to consider the psychological toll this must take," Justin said. "With their healing ability, they must live a long time. It would get lonely.”

Don’t make me feel sorry for them, Doc. I’d hate to have to dump you over this.

“I’ll ask Slate the next time I see her if she’ll be your lab bitch.”

He laughed. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Well, I would. Get used to it.”

We finished our wraps and downed the last of the soda. As we were cleaning up, Justin saw the paper I was reading. “I’ve worked on gang stuff before. Victims they didn’t finish off. Those aren’t like the ones we usually get around here.”

I gave the first story a second look. The victims were sliced open and their heads were missing. How did I miss that before?

“What’s odd about it?” I asked.

“Well for starters, gangs around here use bullets, not knives. Worst I ever saw was a machete, which might work for the heads, but they’re not really great for slicing someone up.”