Memory Game (Hound of Hades Book 2), page 13
“The others were the same at her age and you know it!” My mom’s voice could carry as well as my dad’s when she got mad. “Admit it—you’re upset that she’s in the photos at all, interfering with your picture-perfect family.”
“They’re fighting about me,” I told Laurie in a voice so quiet even I could barely hear it. Not that I needed to tell her. She could hear it for herself.
She pushed aside the papers on her desk. With both hands, she lifted me into her lap. Normally I would have been thrilled at the chance to sit at Laurie’s desk; now all I wanted to do was burrow into her arms. “It’s okay,” she murmured into my hair. “It’s okay.”
“The other kids are obedient. They know what’s expected of them, and they do it.” My dad again.
“The other kids are older.”
Hot tears splashed from my eyes onto Laurie’s shirt, the one with the unicorn on it. I waited for her to tease me about acting like a baby, but she just squeezed me tighter.
“Even at her age, they weren’t willful like she is. I can already tell she’s going to be a troublemaker.”
My mother, when she answered, spoke with a vicious bite I had never heard from her before. “What can I say? She’s her father’s daughter.”
The sound of a gunshot snapped my eyes open.
I saw a figure lying next to me, blurred out like a watercolor painting. But he wasn’t so blurry that I couldn’t recognize him. Ra’s Marked. He wasn’t moving. Even in my current state, I could tell that was going to be a permanent thing.
The dark figure lowered her hands. She dropped her gun between us and ran for the door.
“Hey,” I rasped. I tried again. “Hey!”
But she was already gone.
My vision was starting to come back. The first thing I did was hold my hands out in front of me. I half-expected to see the chubby hands of four-year-old me, but no, they were adult-sized again—along with the rest of me, presumably. My relief at that almost outweighed the frustration at seeing the rope around my wrists and remembering my situation.
I still wasn’t all the way out of the dream. Or rather, the memory—because that was what it had been. I hadn’t thought about that day in… I didn’t know how many years. Maybe not since it had happened. It wasn’t exactly the kind of thing I had wanted to store in my permanent memory banks. But now that my mind had spat it up from my subconscious, it was so clear that I couldn’t imagine how I had ever forgotten. I could still see Laurie’s childhood room around me, lingering in my vision like an afterimage. I could still hear my mother’s voice in my ears.
I shimmied my way to the knife. This time no one stopped me as I cut myself free. I looked toward the door, but even if I started running now, it wouldn’t do any good. The woman who had saved me was long gone.
Too bad, because I had a few questions for her. Starting with why she hadn’t just taken this mission on herself if she was going to follow me out here anyway. I hadn’t managed to get a good look at her, but now that my head was a little clearer, I knew where I recognized her from. And even if I didn’t, the nature of the gift she had used on me would have been a pretty big clue.
Jade. Mnemosyne’s Marked.
I braced myself for an attack of dizziness as I pushed myself to my feet. None came. Apparently whatever my hard landing had done to my head had healed on its own while I was out. There are advantages to being Marked; fast healing is one of them. Like almost everything else we can do, it isn’t supernatural, just at the upper end of natural—but sometimes that’s all you need.
Still, I took a moment to run through the list of concussion symptoms. It might have said something about my life that I had the list memorized. I didn’t have a headache, I didn’t feel dizzy or like I was going to puke, I wasn’t any more tired than I would have expected, and as far as I could tell, my thoughts were clear. “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” I recited. No slurred speech. I could also open and close my mouth without much trouble, which meant my jaw hadn’t taken any serious damage. It would be sore for days, and I was going to have a nasty bruise, but it wasn’t broken. Neither was my finger, despite my attacker’s best efforts.
With one less thing to worry about, I walked over to Ra’s Marked. If he weren’t dead, he would have already tried to kill me, but in my line of work it always pays to be sure. But one look at him was all I needed. He lay unnaturally still, eyes wide and staring, a single perfect bullet hole through his forehead.
And Jade had been kind enough to leave her gun behind. For a moment I wondered why. But as soon as I bent down to pick it up, I knew.
The gun wasn’t hers. It was mine.
Chapter 15
Before I did anything else, I called Bastian. He answered the phone with a bleary, “’Lo?” that made me believe I had woken him up. I pushed the door open to let in some fresh air and scowled at the sunrise. I had been fighting for my life—twice—and reliving my childhood’s greatest hits, and he had been… sleeping. I reminded myself that I was the one who had spent the morning making stupid decisions, and tried to keep my irritation out of my voice as I ran through what had happened.
By the time I finished, Bastian sounded much more awake. “But you’re okay? Are you sure?”
“Believe me, I have a lot of practice evaluating my own injuries. I’ll be fine.”
“Where are you? I’m on my way.”
“No. I can’t afford to wait. I have a death trace to follow, and I can’t let it go cold. But if you don’t see me in two hours, come looking for me. Right now I’m at an old meat packing plant. I’m guessing I won’t have to go far.”
“Do I need to remind you what happened the last time you went off on your own?”
“Which is why I’m telling you to come find me if I disappear for too long. But Ra’s Marked knew something. I need to see if he can lead me to it.”
I hung up before he could argue. I knew as well as he did that waiting for him would be the smart move. Unfortunately, the smart move and the effective move aren’t always the same thing. I needed whatever that death trace could tell me more than I needed him at my back. Without knowing how far I was from the motel, I couldn’t say how long it would take him to get here. And the strength of a death trace depends on a lot of things, but most of them have to do with fear and shock and unwillingness to die. The quick shot to the head, combined with how out of it he must have been if Jade had hit him with the same whammy as me, meant his trace would be weak to begin with.
Besides, who needed Bastian when I had Jade looking out for me?
Somehow that thought failed to reassure me.
I was still thinking about Jades as I knelt beside the body of Ra’s Marked and flexed whatever mental muscle it is that lets me call up a death trace. There was always the chance that she had followed me up here to provide backup out of the goodness of her heart, but I dismissed that idea right away. If she had wanted to help me out, she could have told me so when she had given me the mission. Working together goes a lot more smoothly when both people know they’re part of a team. Far more likely was that she was keeping an eye on me for Mnemosyne, making sure I followed through on my promise. Which was fairly benign, as far as motivations went, except that it didn’t make sense. If Mnemosyne had wanted to send one of her own Marked on this mission, she would have just given the mission to Jade. No need to involve me at all.
Besides, I knew the basic theory behind tailing someone by car, even if I had never done it in practice. I could believe she had followed me and Bastian out of New York. But all the way to West Carson? No. She had known from the start where I was going.
She had known, and she hadn’t told me.
Which brought me to the most likely conclusion. Mnemosyne, and by extension Jade, already knew everything about Ellarose Mackenzie. She knew the girl was a demigod. She knew where she was hiding. She just wanted to keep her own hands clean and make sure Ra directed his anger elsewhere.
That would be why she had used my gun to kill Ra’s Marked. My gun came from the Guardians; it worked like an ordinary human weapon—mostly—but it was created with Hades’s power. I didn’t know what that meant on a practical level. I didn’t know if there were people out there who would be able to tell that one of Hades’s people had killed him. But since she had taken the trouble to use my weapon, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which meant that when Ra wanted to know what had happened to his Marked, the trail would lead back to Hades, and only Hades—and Mnemosyne could just sit back and watch.
It was taking longer than usual to call up the death trace, probably because my head was so full of other things. I tried to forget about Jade and concentrate.
When I opened my eyes, I could see it hovering in front of me, a trail of smoky light that led away from his body. It was even weaker than I thought it would be. Sometimes a death trace is so strong that I almost feel like I could reach out and touch it. This was more like a puff of cigarette smoke lingering a little too long in the air. I could already see it starting to drift away on the breeze, which meant I didn’t have much time.
I jogged down the driveway, following the path the death trace laid out for me. I had almost reached the road before I realized how stupid I was being. He had driven here. Even if he had been going twenty miles an hour, I wouldn’t make it more than halfway to wherever he had come from before the trace gave out on me. At least not on foot. I doubled back toward his car.
He hadn’t obligingly left the keys in the ignition for me. I had to dig around in his pockets before I found them. On the bright side, that reminded me that I still had a body to deal with, unless I wanted a bunch of civilians wondering how this guy had ended up in the old meat packing plant with a bullet through his head. By the time I packed the body into the trunk, the death trace was a little fainter, but not by much. I could still make it there in time, wherever “there” was. Assuming he hadn’t gone far.
The sun was still barely more than a line of light on the horizon. Even as faint as the trace was, the ethereal smoke was bright against the dark road. Hardly anyone was out driving this early, which made it easy to follow. The first place it led me was back to the motel, with a brief bright spot where he had paused to collect me. After that, I started getting closer to town—at least I thought so. These roads had all the logic of a toddler with a crayon. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to find my way back to the motel after this.
At the next turn, the trace turned from a line of smoke to a few faint wisps of fog in the air. The change was so abrupt that at first I thought I had lost it altogether, and was imagining the line I saw leading up the next road. But when I squinted, I could see it—almost invisible, but still there.
Then I spotted the mailbox. This wasn’t another road; it was a long, winding driveway, leading up a small hill to a house I could barely see in the dawn light. Now I understood what had happened. He had walked down the driveway; his car had been waiting at the bottom. That was why the trace was so faint all of a sudden; it had taken him a lot longer to walk than to drive, so that part of the trace was older than the rest.
I was going to have to be careful. For all I knew, the driveway led up to Ra’s temple. I parked the car along the side of the road and started walking—not straight up the driveway, but along the tree-lined edge. I caught a few pairs of glowing eyes watching me from the darkness; some darted away when they heard me coming, but others stayed where they were and stared. I wondered what kind of creatures were lurking out there. Then, as my mind started supplying possible answers, I tried to stop wondering.
The windows of the house were dark. Apparently no one there liked getting up before the sun; I couldn’t say I blamed them. I was close enough now to see a bicycle lying in the front yard, and a sparkly silver baseball bat. Not the kind of things you normally found outside a temple. Although Ishtar’s temple doubled as a strip club, so you never know.
The closer I got to the house, though, the more it looked… cozy. Daisies bloomed beside the door. A single car was parked in the driveway. A ladder leaned against the side of the house, leading up to the gutters that were half-clogged with leaves. This didn’t look like a temple to me. It looked like someone’s home.
Had Ra’s Marked lived here? I doubted it. The Marked didn’t tend to do the family thing, unless the family came before the Mark, which didn’t happen very often. The gods didn’t like to choose people who might have something to lose. Still, it wasn’t unheard of. But the most likely option was that he had been here for a different reason. I gave the sparkly bat and child-sized bicycle a second look. This house couldn’t be more than a few minutes away from the Mackenzies’ house. Could Ellie and her mother have been hiding in plain sight all along?
I crept around to the back door and peered inside. In the darkness, I couldn’t see much, but there were no lights on and I didn’t see anyone moving, which was all I needed. I pulled the hair pin from my waistband and started to pick the lock. I didn’t meet the resistance I expected. Frowning, I turned the doorknob. The door opened easily.
So that thing about small towns where people left their doors unlocked wasn’t a myth after all. I closed the door gently behind me as I padded into the kitchen.
From somewhere in front of me, I heard a low growl.
Another pair of glowing eyes met mine. But there was one crucial difference between these and the ones I had seen through the trees. This particular pair of eyes was less than five feet away.
I had a bad feeling I knew why these people hadn’t felt the need to lock their door.
The next growl was longer and lower. A clear warning.
“Nice doggy,” I whispered. “Niiiiice doggy.”
The dog was still staring at me. But the growling had stopped.
“Hades loves dogs, did you know that? If you let me in, I’ll have him send you a bone. He’s got plenty of those to spare.”
I waited. No more growling.
Had that actually worked? Only one way to find out. I took a step forward.
The dog erupted in frantic barking. The glowing eyes charged at me.
I did the only thing I could do. I turned and ran. I slammed the door behind me a second before the dog leapt at it. Through the window, I caught a glimpse of paws and tongue and the kind of teeth I normally saw only in my nightmares.
Upstairs, a light flicked on. “What’s going on?” a groggy woman’s voice called. “Is somebody out there?”
As quickly as I could without giving myself away by charging through the trees breaking every branch like a rampaging bull, I ran for the car.
I drove away before anyone—especially anyone with the power of a god—could come down the driveway looking for whatever had set the dog off. I fixed the address in my mind, then drove around in circles until I got my bearings. By the time I figured out where I was, the last of the sunrise had burned away, and even I had to concede that it was a reasonable time to be awake.
After a quick call to Bastian to make sure he knew I was okay, I made my final stop. I still had to do something about the body in the trunk. With the car, it would be easy enough to fake an accident, but there wasn’t much I could do about the bullet hole in his head. Besides, the car might come in handy later. So I drove until I hit a patch of woods with no houses nearby, and hauled the body as far into the trees as I could manage. I remembered all the eyes that had watched me as I walked up the driveway. There had to be something out there that would take care of the rest for me. Even if not, by the time someone found the body, I would be long gone.
Unless, of course, Ra had someone who could track down his missing Marked. But there wasn’t anything I could do about that at this point.
I parked the car at a long-abandoned gas station a couple of miles outside of town. I walked the rest of the way to the motel.
By the time I got back, I had mud in my shoes, twigs in my hair, and scratches down my arms from some kind of weed that shared a genetic heritage with barbed wire. Plus, my back was starting to complain. I might have Marked strength, but bodies have a way of getting heavier the longer you carry them, and I had carted this one at least half a mile into the woods. I needed a shower. I needed a cup of coffee. I needed to go back to bed.
I knocked on the door of the motel room. Bastian threw the door open with one hand, the other already glowing with the red lightning of Humanity Ascendant’s magic. He relaxed only a fraction when he saw that it was me. The tension in his shoulders reminded me of our argument from last night, which didn’t do much to improve my mood.
Bastian looked me up and down. “Busy morning?”
“Give me five minutes to get changed,” I said. “Then we’re going out. I’ve got a lead.”
Chapter 16
The house looked even more ordinary in the daylight. A crumpled bag of fertilizer lay next to a flowerbed. The garage door was open, revealing a half-built dollhouse. It didn’t look like the kind of place a demigod would live. But then, the Mackenzies’ house had probably looked this ordinary before it was destroyed, too.
Bastian turned the car off, but didn’t get out. “You’re sure all you saw was the dog? No fire, or sunlight when it should have been dark, or anything else that might point to Ra?”
“Believe me, I would have noticed. But that doesn’t mean Ellarose isn’t here. She was probably asleep with the rest of the world.”
“If she really does live here, it could have gone a lot worse for you. Don’t go without me next time.”
“You got it. Next time I’ll let the death trace fade instead.” I started to open my door, but Bastian was still hesitating.
“We put this plan together too quickly.” His brows drew together. “There are too many things that could go wrong. If they start getting suspicious, I’ll need someone more practiced at lying than I am.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“And if you run into her, you’ll need someone who can shield you against her abilities.”
