Pixie The Lion Tamer (Shifters, Inc.) (12 page)

Hillary nodded impatiently, shifting her weight from one foot to another.
  She was dressed as primly as ever, her hair in a chignon, wearing a pale blue linen pantsuit and low heeled pumps.

“
Yes, he just went home and got some clothes and then came back.  He’s asleep. Tyler’s asleep too, he was up all night.  Listen, keep your voice down and come with me, I mean it.  I overheard something last night…we can’t trust anybody. I need to talk to you.”

“What do you mean?” Pixie rubbed her face with her hands.  “
Have Stefan and Tomas been found yet? What did you overhear? It’s too early. I need coffee.”

“No news yet.
  I can’t tell you in here.  Shifters, Inc. is compromised.”

That woke Pixie up. “Compromised?”

“How do you think that Tomas Rilke knew you were going to the charity ball?” Hillary said in a low voice.  “We have a mole. Come
on
.”

Pixie followed Hillary down the hallway.
Who could Hillary mean? Certainly not Dominick. Tyler? That was very, very hard for Pixie to believe. 

Could he be a mole? Had he been distracting them all along, keeping them busy and pretending to try to find the
Rilkes?

“I need to talk to Dominick first,” she called out, but kept
Hillary walking.  Pixie followed her outside, out the back door, cursing under her breath.  She really needed some coffee.

Hillary kept walking, towards her car. “Get in,” she said to Pixie when they reached the passenger side of the door.

Pixie glanced at the gangbanger who stood outside the door of the warehouse, keeping watch.  She felt a prickle of alarm rippling the hairs on the back of her neck.  She had a bad feeling.

“I need to show you something,” Hillary said, fishing in her purse
, and pulled out a pen.  

“No, you need to talk.  Who do you suspect of being a mole?”

“Me.”

Pixie felt a jab
in her arm.  The pen had been a disguised hypodermic needle.

“I’m the mole,” Hillary said, as
the world started to fade.  Pixie heard a shout, and then a gunshot, which was probably Hillary killing the lookout.  Then everything went blank.

* * *

“I have no right to ask you this, after the way that I talked to you,” Dominick said.  “But we’re desperate.”

Dominick felt sick and furious. 

Pixie was gone.  He should have been there to protect her, should have slept outside her door.  How could someone have stolen her away like that, without him even noticing?   The fear and anger raging inside him threatened to consume him.  He struggled to stay human.  He had to keep a clear head if they had any hope of finding her.

Anastasia looked even more pale and haggard than she had the night befor
e.  She wore a rumpled black dress, she hadn’t bothered to brush her hair, and the circles under her eyes were so dark they looked like bruises.

“Don’t waste my time with apologies
,  you woke me up at the crack of freaking dawn and  I haven’t had my coffee yet,” she said, her voice raspy. “What’s going on?”  

Fraser’s men had gone to fetch her, at Dominick’s suggestion.

Tyler had also called the police, and he was working the phone, in the process of contacting all the news stations, so they could post pictures of Hillary and Pixie, but Dominick doubted that would help.

Fraser stood there, bristling with rage.  Having one of his men killed made him look weak.  He didn’t like looking weak.

“Hillary and Pixie are missing, and somebody shot one of Fraser’s men.  They were kidnapped,  probably half an hour ago,” Dominick said.

Anastasia didn’t look as surprised as she should have.

“I knew Hillary was going dark,” Anastasia muttered.  She fished around in her pocketbook and pulled out a hairbrush.

“What is that?  And what do you mean, Hillary’s going dark?”

“Dark.  She’s turning evil.  It takes one to know one.  Okay, I’m going to give you a list of ingredients, and you’re going to get them for me.  This is Hillary’s hairbrush, I stole it from her purse because I knew she was up to something.  With this hairbrush and the ingredients you bring me, I can create a tracking spell and we can find her, and hopefully, Pixie will be with her.  And somebody bring me some coffee, or seriously, I will kill something.”

“Why didn’t you tell me
your suspicions?” Dominick demanded.

Anastasia laughed bitterly.  “Would you have believed me?
  Me, over little miss goody two shoes?”

“No, probably not,” he admitted.  “I never trusted you.”

“Smart lion,” she said. “You shouldn’t.  But when it comes to Pixie, if anyone tries to hurt her, I’ll make them burn.”

* **

Pixie
woke up with her heart pounding and her head spinning.  She lay perfectly still for a minute until her head cleared and she could see straight.  

The room was dark and her
upper arm hurt where she’d been jabbed with the needle.  She could see cracks of light streaming through shuttered windows, and outside she heard the caw of birds.

“Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes.” It was Ion’s voice, no, Stefan.  Stefan Rilke.

Pixie looked around her, scrubbing at her face with her hands.   She was on a couch in what looked like some kind of log cabin.  There were animal head trophies on the wall.  A hunting lodge.

The room was huge, at least a thousand square feet, with a flagstone fireplace and rough-hewn furniture, and bear skin rugs on the wood flooring.   Sca
ttered throughout the room were several dozen of Stefan’s men, and Hillary sat at a wooden table, chatting with one of them.

“What am I doing here?”
Pixie demanded.

Stefan laughed, and walked over to a bar in the corner and poured himself a drink.  He didn’t bother to answer her.

Pixie looked at Hillary.  “You were working with Stefan all along?” she said, dazed.

“No, I was working for his brother. 
Keeping an eye on you.  But recently Stefan made me a better offer.”

“Your mother will be so disappointed,” Pixie said sarcastically.

Hillary laughed. “That bitch was always disappointed in me.  Now she’s dead.  Stefan killed her for me. That was part of his offer.  Why do you think he gave me the antidote back at headquarters? So I could keep an eye on you.”

Pixie was dumbfounded.  This was nerdy, helpless, weak little Hillary talking.

“But you still call your mother all day long,” Pixie protested.

“
You all think you’re so much smarter than me.  I called Stefan all day long, and pretended that I was speaking to my mother, but I was reporting on you.”

             
Pixie pressed her lips together and turned away, not bothering to answer.  She was seething with fury.  She was completely outnumbered, she was sitting ten feet away from Stefan and she desperately needed his blood to save her friends but she had no way to get to it, and she couldn’t think how she was going to get out of this situation alive.

             
As she sat there scanning the room and trying to figure out what her options were, and concluding that she was pretty much screwed, she heard the crackling of static.

             
One of the men pulled out a walkie talkie and keyed it on.  “He’s coming, but he’s got that lion shifter and some woman with him,” a voice said. 

             
Stefan snorted in contempt. “He’ll need more backup than that.”

             
As all the men in the room drew their guns, Stefan walked over to Pixie, pulled her off the couch, and circled his arm around her neck.  He pressed a gun to her temple.

              Tomas Rilke, Dominick, and Anastasia walked through the door of the cabin.

              “How did you get here?” Pixie asked, astonished.

“Tracking spell,” Anastasia said.

“But…you’re with him…” Pixie looked at Tomas.

“No,” Dominick said.  “We
saw him driving on the road towards the hunting lodge, by himself.  We pulled him over and told him that we were coming to the cabin with him, no matter what the consequences.”

Tomas flashed that cold smile of his.  “We actually want the same thing.  We’ve come for Pixie.”

“No, you came for money, which you’re not going to get,” Stefan sneered. “Don’t try to pretend that you’re getting sentimental in your old age.”

Then he turned to
Anastasia.  “Hello, dark witch.  I recognize the power in you.  I can pay you more money than anything he’s offering you.”

“This one’s a freebie,” Anastasia said.  “I came to get my friend.  Give it up, Stefan.  It’s over.  You want to know what fuels my
magic? Rage.  I’ve got plenty of it right now – enough to blast you through the back of this building.  We’ve notified the police, by the way.  They’ll be here in a few minutes.   If you just let Pixie go and give me a vial of your blood, we’ll give you a head start.  If you don’t, I’ll burn you from the inside.”

Stefan laughed again. “I’m six hundred years old, you fool.  You know how it works.
The older the magician, the stronger their magic.  Die with your friends, then, it will be a pure pleasure to watch.  And the police won’t be able to touch me.  I always have escape routes planned.”

Before he could say anything else, Tomas suddenly whipped out a pistol from his pocket in a blur of motion and shot Hillary, who grasped at her ch
est, staring down at the bloody hole that had opened there.  With a horrified gurgle, she slumped off her chair and fell to the ground.

Stefan didn’t even flinch.

Pixie stifled an urge to vomit.  Yes, Hillary had sold out Pixie and everyone else at Shifters, Inc., but watching her cold-blooded murder was horrifying. 

“I don’t like people who double cross me,” Tomas said. “And if you want to negotiate with me, Stefan, you’ll have to let go of my daughter.”

Pixie jerked in shock.
  She felt as if she’d been hit by lightning, and a wave of revulsion washed over her.  Stefan tightened his grip on her.

“You,” she said flatly, feeling ice cold horror wash over her.
“My father.
You
.”  This was worse than anything that she could have imagined.  Her father was a man whose soul was steeped in evil, a man who snuffed out lives without remorse.

Tomas nodded
, his expression resigned.  “You deserve the truth. You will loathe me for it forever, and I accept that. Your mother was a woman named Rose Hodge.  She came to work for me and my brother at our family estate in Romania, as a maid.”

The Rose Foundation…he’d created that charitable organization in her
mother’s name, Pixie realized.

“That’s the truth?” Stefan threw back his head and laughed.  “She thought she
came to work for us as a maid.  She came to us so Tomas could seduce her and get her with child. That’s what we do.  She was an orphan, with no family to look for her, which is why she was hired.    Unfortunately, she found out the truth about why she was having his baby, and she turned out to be more resourceful than we thought.  She escaped with you.”

“Why?” Pixie had a feeling she knew the answer already, but she had to hear it for herself.

“Because Tomas was going to suck the life from your body.  You know about the Bloodstone,” Stefan said.  “It was a witch who gave us our great powers of thievery, so we’d be able to spirit it away from its owner.   The witch left out one little detail, which she didn’t tell us until we returned with the Bloodstone.  The only way to harness its power was to use the life force of our own infant children, within thirty days of their birth.”

“Wow, a dark witch
tricked you.  Imagine that,” Anastasia said with a bitter laugh. “And instead of refusing to use the Bloodstone ,  you decided to choose option B. How many of your own babies have you drained?”

Stefan shrugged.  “Honestly, I’
ve lost count.”

Pixie swallowed the bile rising in her throat
. “What did you do to my mother?” she demanded of Tomas.

“
We found she’d fled to America,” Tomas said.  “My men and I came after her, meaning to kill her and bring you back.   We tracked her down, but she was no longer pregnant, and she didn’t have you with her. As my people were closing in on her, in Los Angeles, she jumped off a bridge. I imagine she feared that we’d torture her to make her reveal your whereabouts. We thought that the newspapers would report that an abandoned infant had been found, and we’d be able to recover you, but it never happened.  After thirty days, we gave up the search for you, because your life force was no longer any use to me.”

“
You pathetic bastard.” Hot tears stung Pixie’s eyes and ran down her cheeks.   Her mother had sacrificed her life for her.  The loathing she felt for her father was tempered by the overpowering admiration and love she felt for a woman she’d never met.  “What the hell are you even doing here?”