Storm Secrets, page 9
part #4 of Scarlet Jones Series
Surprised, he shrugged. “I have many of those, but to you, I’ll be Arius.” For whatever reason, the name made me cringe. “I’ve been watching you, Scarlet. Not once have you thought of me. I’m truly impressed.”
“Impressed? Don’t you mean disappointed?” After all, this man—Arius—probably held himself as a hero. The man who came to my aid when I most needed him. I figured he’d even be mad now that I hadn’t thought of him, but he’d hopefully never know how much will power it took for me to keep him out of my head.
“Absolutely not,” he said with a shake of his head, straightening the collar of his indigo button up, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, making him look like an ordinary man, until you saw his face. His face of cruel perfection. “Not many can pull it off, I’m afraid. Fewer and fewer people are able to keep their minds pure lately.”
He had the decency to sound disappointed at that.
“Well, whatever you’re here for, I need to go. The ECU expects me.” He already said he’d been watching me, for which I had no doubt. He knew I had things to do. The sooner I got away from that man, the better.
“You need to go?” Arius said, half a smile on his lips. Lips I’d kissed twice before. What the fuck were you thinking, Scarlet? I scolded myself in my head, but it was no use. Those kisses couldn’t be undone now. “I’m not here for fun, as you can imagine. I’m a busy man myself.”
“Whatever you want, I’m not giving you another kiss. Not for anything.” It cost me to say those words, to spit them out at his face, but it was necessary. He needed to know where I stood.
Arius wasn’t impressed, though. Instead, he continued to smile. “That’s not how it works, Scarlet. Have you forgotten? I require a kiss when you need me to give you something.”
Right. “Doesn’t matter. I need to go.” Gathering all my courage, I made for the door. Before my foot had even touched the floor properly, Arius materialized in front of me. Not a like a vampire would, or a demon. He simply disappeared and reappeared out of thin air. Paralyzed by fear, I couldn’t get my body to move. I couldn’t get my eyes away from his face.
“I’m here to collect, Scarlet. I’m here to collect a favor.”
And that was it. The it I should have thought about for a little longer before allowing him to help me in his twisted ways. Before thinking about him, at least that second time. A favor. He wanted a favor from me now.
“No.” My voice was weak, barely a whisper, but the letters were out there. I braced myself, clenched my teeth, expected him to hit me, either physically or with a spell. I expected the pain to be unbearable, all-consuming, just like he was. I expected things far worse than death.
Instead, all I got was a raised brow. “Do I look like a patient man to you?” Arius asked, and he paused for a good few seconds, which meant he was expecting an answer from me. I don’t know why I gave it to him. It must have been the pressure of his gaze.
“No?”
“Correct,” he said without missing a beat. “I’m not here to ask. I’m here to collect. There’s a difference.”
By some miracle, my muscles loosened and allowed me control of my body again. Slowly, I stepped away from the man. “I don’t care. I’m not doing anything for you,” I said. My voice broke again. “You set my school on fire. People could have died! You brought demons into the ECU. People did die there. And others were kidnapped.” He’d been watching me. He knew all about it, but I still needed to say it for my own sake.
“Hardly any loss,” he said with a shrug, putting his hands in the pockets of his perfectly pressed, black pants. “It’s the way the world works, Scarlet. There are consequences to every action. A price needs to be paid for every gift. You know this.”
“A gift?” Did he not hear me mention that people died because of what he did?
“I certainly look at it that way,” he said, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t like talking to you for so long. I need my favor, and I need it now.”
“Me, neither. So go, right now, because I’m not doing shit for you. Not today and not ever.” It was ridiculous how badly my body shook, but at least my magic responded. It gathered in my hands as if it thought I had a chance against this man.
“I gave you everything,” he whispered. “And this is how you speak to me?” But he wasn’t mad. He was amused.
“Everything?” I raised my hand. “You mean this?” His eyes fell on the dragon wrapped around my hand and wrist. Just like the last time, the green in them lit up with greed far greater than I could imagine. A thousand times worse than any look my father could ever have. “So take it. I don’t want it. It’s more trouble than it’s worth, anyway. Take it.”
That wasn’t the truth. Without that dragon, I’d have still had no idea how to kill demons. He knew that, too, but there was something about Arius, about the way he looked at me, about the way he looked—like he could do anything a god could with a move of his fingers. I’d say and do anything to keep him away, no matter if this fear of mine had any real grounds or not. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with him at all.
“You fool,” said Arius, smiling and with a voice so soft, you’d have thought he was giving me a freaking compliment. “I asked you, Scarlet. I asked you if you were sure. You were.”
“I was a kid!” I shouted. “I was a kid in need of a way out. You…you tricked me!” I remembered that day at the academy all too well. I’d been clueless as to who he was when he came to me with the promise of freedom. How could I have known?
“Okay,” he whispered, nodding at himself, staring at the floor for a second. “Okay…” he repeated, and began to tap his finger to his chin. “Okay…”
Struck speechless, I watched him as he paced around the living room, kicking broken pieces of furniture every few steps. My magic called to me, my mind remembering the spells Ezra had made for us, the one of fire, specifically. How fast could I set fire to everything in this room, including Arius?
The answer was disheartening: probably not fast enough.
“I will, I will, I will…” he said, suddenly turning to me with a smile on his face. “I will give you time. Time to think!” He said it like it was the greatest revelation of his life. “I know exactly what you need, and I’m going to give it to you.”
“Arius, I don’t—” need time, was what I was going to say but he cut me off.
“No, no, I understand now. It’s okay. Have your time. I’ll be back.” And with that, he turned for the door.
“Don’t be! I won’t change my mind, even a lifetime later.” For the first time, my voice didn’t break. Maybe because he had his back turned to me.
“Oh, but you will,” he sang, and without bothering to open the door, he just…he simply walked through it. God, that got me, every single time.
I had the urge to run after him, to open the door and shout at the top of my voice for him to never come back here. To never think of me again. But I already knew that I wouldn’t find him. He was gone. The man who now had a name to think of him by was gone with the promise to come back.
***
The bad feeling in my gut, the terrible taste on my tongue, stayed with me on the way to Inwood. I took a bus because I was too distracted to walk. Though I was late, I couldn’t bring myself to care. If anything, I’d use that as an excuse to ask for pay in advance to buy a car. That way, I could get Ezra out of the monastery tonight. God, I couldn’t wait. I couldn’t wait to know that he was safe, far away from the cruelty of the world, hidden in a bubble pretty much out of our reality where nobody could get to him.
Assuming Jeanne Dubois agreed to remain in her prison for a little while longer. But she’d already promised she’d help in any way she could if we got her out, and we would. By God, we would. Just as soon as it was safe.
When I made it to the ECU, I lived the day before all over again. The feeling of not belonging, of fear, of being watched, hadn’t faded. At all. I lost hope that I’d ever get used to walking into that place relaxed. It wasn’t going to happen, and maybe that was a good thing.
I only made it to the hallway of the second floor before Stacey stopped me, coming out of the office. “You’re late,” she pointed out. “You need to be downstairs.”
A shiver ran down my back. “Downstairs?”
Rolling her eyes, she sighed. “Follow me.”
Without waiting for a reply, she rushed down the stairs again. As if I wasn’t already freaked out, going down those stairs, through the door in the front and into the elevator made me feel like I was losing my mind. Like I was being dragged down there by soldiers, not walking willingly, by myself. Stacey kept quiet until we were in the blue corridor, the walls made of metal, the LED lights around the corners of the ceiling bright blue. My stomach turned and acid burned my throat. Down there, I’d fallen. Down there was where they took me the last time. It was a cosmic joke to enter one of the doors—I wasn’t sure which as the corridor kept spinning—and to present myself to three people I’d never seen before. It was the biggest irony in the history of the universe to willingly go and lie down on one of those beds, those white leather beds that had cuffs for my limbs, cuffs the people didn’t use this time around. Why would they, when I wasn’t making a single sound?
It was torture just to breathe that air. I didn’t understand a single word any of them said, and when they realized that, they proceeded to handle me by themselves. They put my arm on something softer. They brought a bright light over my hand. And they began to examine.
Ten
“Here. It’ll make you feel better.”
A small bottle of water appeared on my desk next to the computer screen. I raised my eyes to see Wilder’s face.
It was almost ten am and I’d been back at the office for a few minutes now, but I still couldn’t function. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t think. It hadn’t hurt, not in the least, but there are worse things than pain, and those worse things were haunting me. The lights, the people with their masks on, their needles and their computers. It was all a bad dream, a nightmare turned reality that I was being forced to live in, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“We’ve got good news. Do you want to hear it?” Wick said, coming behind his Captain, grinning widely at me. Of course he’d grin. He hadn’t been chained to those beds before. Experimented on. He wasn’t forced to go back there every morning at seven of his own free will afterward.
“Sure.” My voice was a stranger’s. Even they noticed. Wick’s smile faltered. Wilder patted him on the shoulder and they both retreated. Wick took his seat but Wilder stood in the middle of the office, a bottle of his own in his hand. His eyes moved from one face to the other, but mostly, they remained on me. He looked…I don’t know, confused? Afraid. Concerned.
Probably none of the above.
“All right, folks. We’ve got our target, and we’re moving the day after tomorrow.”
He jump-started my heart, which had felt dead just a second ago.
“Show me,” I whispered, feeling just a tad bit better now that I had something else to occupy my mind. Something equally as—or more—important.
“It’s in the program,” Wilder said, so I went to the folder, typed in the password, and opened it. There was a new folder on the right panel. An address, a map, a number. “We’re going to start small to test our abilities,” the wolf continued.
“You mean my abilities.” The dragon around my hand. “You don’t need to worry about that.” As soon as there were demons around, it would come to life. I was sure of it. It had never failed me before.
“It’s my job to worry,” said Wilder. “But your abilities aren’t the question here. We need to test ourselves, all of us, how good we are at working as a team. At isolating the risk the suckers present and getting rid of it.”
“Look, just take me to where they are, and I’ll go in by myself. I’ll kill as many as I can. We don’t have to wait until the day after tomorrow.” It would be an unnecessary waste of time. There were a lot of demons out there, and time was not our friend right now.
“As many as you can is not good enough,” Wilder said. “But all is. And in order to do that, whether you like it or not, Dirt, you’re going to need help.”
“No, I won’t. None of you can kill a demon.” I wasn’t trying to be a bitch. It was just the truth.
“If you look at the dots again, you’ll know what you’ll be dealing with,” Wilder said, pissed off now. “And let me remind you that I give the orders here. If I tell you we’ll go in together, that’s exactly what we will do.”
Resisting the urge to flip him off took focus, but it all went away when I looked at the number in the program again.
“That must be wrong. This location here in Chinatown has twenty-one dots.” The map of Manhattan was in front of me, and it was filled with red dots here and there, which I thought showed the demons.
“The number of dots isn’t the number of demons. It’s the energy they let off, which we can scan and record,” said Vera from her desk. “We can only guess how many of them are in any given place, judging by the intensity of the energy.”
“So what’s your guess?” I asked.
“Somewhere between five and twelve,” said Stacey.
“They don’t stay together in one place, not so many. Unless…unless…”
“We suspect they’re keeping people in there,” Wilder said, reading my mind. Elisa and I had fought a group of demons roughly that size at the abandoned hospital, where they had all the Storms they’d kidnapped from the ECU right there to feed from. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Dammit. “We need to go, right now.” I jumped to my feet, ready to run to wherever that address was going to take us.
“No, we don’t. We’re not ready.”
“Screw ready. There are witches in that place that need our help!”
“That’s what we’re here for, but I won’t go in there and get someone killed,” he said.
I laughed dryly. “You mean get your men killed because you don’t give a rat’s ass if the Storms those suckers have die while we stay here, talking about it. Isn’t that right, Captain Asshole?”
Clenching his teeth, Wilder took a menacing step forward. I did the same. His fists closed and the veins in his arms became more pronounced. There was nothing I’d have liked more than to charge him, but this was nonsense. Storms needed my help.
“Sit down.” The words commanded power, but they were aimed at the wrong girl.
“No.”
With three strides, Wilder was in front of me, looking down at me while I held his stare. “This isn’t a game, Dirt.”
“A game?” I asked, dumbfounded for a second. “Have you ever been sucked dry by the demons, Asshole? Do you know what it’s like to be stripped of your energy, of all your powers, and left for dead on the ground? Do you have any idea what it’s like to wake up chained to a fucking wall, or a bed, and to wish you were dead just so that the torture will end?” I shouted at his face. It was unlike me. I didn’t want to lose my temper, but God, he knew how to get to me. He knew exactly what to say to make me lose my damned mind.
“It’s not a game, Asshole. It never was, not for me, or my kind. But you sure as hell make it sound like it is to you.”
I expected him to attack. I was ready, my arms at my sides, fists closed, magic right under my skin, but Wilder didn’t move. His eyes grew wide, a clear, almost liquid brown now as he searched my face, then stepped back.
“It might be. It might not. Not a damn thing you can do about it, is there? Sit down, Dirt. We’ve got work to do.” He turned his back on me and took his place in the middle of the office instead.
Suddenly, Vera stood up with a large scroll in her hands. She went to Wilder and kneeled on the floor, opening the piece of paper as wide as she could. Stacey and Archie went to help her open the map—a copy of the one from my desktop, only this one with more colored dots—entirely, putting staplers and pen holders around the corners. Vera had another one, that of the entire country.
Curiosity got the best of me—and I wanted to spite Wilder—so I walked closer to the maps and tried to determine what the colors meant. I didn’t need to wonder for long.
“The places marked in green are where the biggest number of demons was spotted in the past thirty days,” she said, waving at the big map. The green dots were mostly focused in Manhattan, but there were a few in the Bronx, Staten Island, and even a couple in Jersey City. “This is a close up, with individual sightings as well—the orange dots,” said Vera, bringing the smaller map on top of the other.
So many dots. “Are you sure this is accurate?” I whispered, terrified of the answer.
Vera looked up at me in disbelief. “Of course I’m sure.” It seemed I’d insulted her.
“But if there are this many, I’d have seen at least one on my way back to Harlem last night. Or this morning.” Judging by the green and orange dots, there had to be at least a hundred demons only in the Manhattan area.
“I said they were sighted around the city in the past thirty days,” Vera said. “Not in one day. They come and go, as we established before.”
“Right. From their realm.” Which we didn’t know shit about.
“Exactly. What is strange is the land,” Vera whispered, waving her hand over where the dots were. Most of the map there was colored in purple. “This color is where Inwood marble is most focused. The soil is full of it. Its geologic age is early Cambrian according to human studies, which could mean…” Her voice trailed off.
All of us looked at her, but she didn’t speak until Wilder made her. “Miss Vera, we’re waiting.”
“Right. Right. I’ve thought about this last night. The fairy realm has black ravenstone, which can transport you through realms. The demons seem to cling to where the most marble reserves are. The oldest, too. The Cambrian age was more than 500 million years ago, and from our records, the fairy realm was created around that same time, too. It’s when life began.”
