Blood of the Wicked (6 page)

She choked as the first fleck of magic blossomed inside her skull.

“Jessie?”

Silas’s voice dimmed under a wash of red and foggy white. Shaking, she jammed her palms into her eyes.

“Jessie.”

The power stirred. By itself, it warmed inside her skin. Beat inside her head. She gritted her teeth. “Give me a damn second.” She managed to sound normal. Tense, angry, but normal.

Not as if she struggled to keep the sudden wash of recognition locked behind her teeth.
Caleb
. He was alive. Like a light switched on somewhere deep in her head, in that vault of power, she knew. Sensed it. Something had changed. Something had been . . . broken, a shield cracked, a ward shattered. His power called to hers; it was faint, but she seized it with all her strength.

Caleb was out there. He was alive, and he was out there. She could feel it. Follow it.

But she couldn’t
see
. Why couldn’t she see?

Was he in trouble? Did he need her?

Jessie dropped her hands. Sat up sharply enough to send the couch springs creaking. Energy, manic and sharp, snapped through her like overwound springs.

Think. She had to play this one carefully.

“Okay,” she said. She ignored the speculative way he studied her. Part uncertainty, part wariness, he watched her as if waiting for her to fall apart.

Maybe she would, but not in front of him.

“Okay,” she repeated, harder now. She forced herself to meet his eyes, to dim the pulsing beacon tugging hard on her thoughts. “You want him? Let’s get him. There’s one place we can check.”

He rose to his feet, raw power in a wall of muscle. She tried to disregard how her mouth went dry and her vision snagged on the play of rock-hard flesh beneath his T-shirt, but it took her several tries.

Several taut, vibrant moments.
Focus.

He ran both hands over his head, leaving the shaggy ends of his hair tousled. “Why didn’t you—”

“Really?” Her short exhale of derisive laughter snapped. “You expected me to roll over on my brother because you said so?”

Silas frowned. “No.”

“Great.” The couch springs twanged as Jessie got to her feet. The sun-dappled carpet warmed the sole of one foot, but her other met cold, glossy photo and she recoiled. Jessie’s stomach pitched.

He moved like a cat. Before she could even gasp, he caught her shoulders, steadied her with that easy, powerful strength.

Suddenly her vision was nothing but green and gray, fog and forest. Piercingly aware, his eyes met hers from only a breath away. Too close to avoid. “I, uh . . .” His fingers flexed as she ran her tongue over her dry lips. She tried again. “I didn’t trust you.”

Silas stared at her mouth. One beat, another. Jessie swallowed, didn’t dare move. Breathe. Was he thinking of kissing her? Of peeling off the jacket she wore like armor and exploring her body?

The way she itched to run her fingers over his biceps and trace every muscled edge of his chest?

Enemy
, she reminded herself, and deliberately stepped back. She disentangled herself from his grasp and knew he let her.

“Smart of you,” he said, both rough and practical. More rough than practical, but she gave him points for trying. Jessie wanted to smile. Couldn’t.

Silas was going to kill her brother. Which meant she just might have to kill the missionary first.

“It’s a safe place, I think.” She moved around him, avoided the photographs and made sure her own voice was light. Breezy. Sure.

None of the things she felt now.

But she lied easily. Too easily, and he bought it. Survival was a weak salve against the unsettling sting of guilt.

The man brought it on himself.

Silas swept up the photos, stacked them neatly back into the folder, and gestured her out the door. She followed, mind working through what fragile plans she could make with what vague information she had. A coven, dead people, rituals she didn’t recognize.

God, she needed more information.

I’m coming, Caleb.

He unlocked his side of the truck and waved her in. She slid into the cab, glancing at him sidelong as he pulled himself in after her. She studied the hard line of his profile. His high cheekbones and the whiskered shadow of his jaw.

What the hell took a man into a profession based on murder?

Silas’s keys jangled as he jammed them into the ignition. “Where to?”

“Um.” Jessie clasped her hands tightly. “Old Seattle.”

“Are you serious?” When she nodded, he shrugged. “What are we driving into?”

“I don’t know,” she said, honest at least with that. “I think it’s been his . . . getaway, I guess.”

“Safe house?”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“In the catacombs? Is he suicidal?” The derisive look she slanted him made his mouth tighten. “How close to the edge of the trench?”

Shit. Details. She didn’t have those details. “Not that close,” she hedged, and hoped it was true. The southernmost edge of the old city ruins wasn’t just dangerous, it was a literal death trap.

If Caleb was hanging out there, things were going to get far more interesting.

Silas tucked one hand into his coat. She knew he was checking to make sure his gun was safely holstered.

He might need it to shoot her brother, after all.

She shifted. “Just drive. I’ll have to remember the landmarks as we go.” And hopefully make it seem organic enough that she wasn’t obviously following a thread of power in a tangled, twisted place.

Neither spoke as the truck began the winding, circular drive toward the half-forgotten streets of Old Seattle. Jessie rested her temple against the window and watched the familiar stone and metal buildings pass by.

The cars thinned out, turned off the carousel one by one until theirs was the only vehicle left. Nobody went this far down. She traced a finger on the glass, idly following the rusted, twisted curve of the byway guardrail.

“Do you live in Seattle, Agent Smith?”

He didn’t look at her. “No.” He hooked his fingers loosely around the steering wheel. “I haven’t lived here for a long time. And you can call me Silas,” he added.

She wasn’t sure she could. Still, she tapped the glass. “You know the history, don’t you? Of the old city?”

This time, he glanced at her, weighing her question as if she’d laid a trap in it. After a long moment, he shrugged. “Who doesn’t? The West Coast tore itself apart. Earthquakes, floods, volcanoes. Same general story as everywhere else, give or take a few years.”

So simply put. So quickly said. Jessie could only imagine the destruction, the fear. “My mother didn’t talk about it much,” she said. “She was born and raised here. I read that people woke up to an ash cloud that covered the sky.”

“Have you ever spoken to anyone who survived it?”

She shook her head. “It’s not really something that comes up,” she said with a wan smile. “But sometimes, you look into the eyes of an old drunk in the corner of the bar and you just . . . know what he saw.”

Silas watched the road for a long time. Finally he said, “Seattle wasn’t the only city to go down.”

“It’s the only city who answered Mother Nature by building higher,” she retorted dryly. “A few religious words, some high-energy zealotry, and they built right on top of the old city, bridged the trench like it was just a pothole.” She rolled her eyes to the buildings that thrust into the sky like spears. “Better, stronger, with even more glass.”

Other cities had fallen, drowned, burned down or been blown away in those terrifying years. Without rhyme or reason, everything had spiraled out of control.

Zealotry
wasn’t strong enough a word.

She closed her eyes. Fifty years wasn’t so very long ago. Her mother had spoken of one old witch who had lived to tell of the storm that had all but swept Paris off the map. Could she survive as many years by herself?

Did she want to?

He grunted. “That fault’s, what, a mile across at the widest?”

Jessie snapped her eyes open. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s deep, though.” Deep enough to swallow half the old city. One giant, blackened tomb. “I’ve never really thought to explore it.”

“Damn straight. They sealed the whole ruin off for a reason.” He frowned into the rearview mirror. “Even fourteen years ago, the place was a kill zone. Unsteady pockets of road near the fault, unexplained seismic activity. Hell, they lost half the drones they sent out to recon the fault line.”

Jessie dropped her gaze to her hands. Damn it. He sounded
smart
. She bit her lip. “The city’s built like a giant layer cake of metal and glass. Don’t you think they’d have made sure it was safe enough before they started building?”

“You’d think so, huh?” His rueful grin, crooked at one corner, launched her heart into a sudden, loud staccato. Her fingers curled into fists. “Way I heard it, they dropped a couple thousand support beams, paved over the whole damned thing, and called it good.”

Silas’s deep voice slipped beneath her guard too quickly, curled in somewhere soft and trusting. Jessie pursed her mouth and tried to figure out why. Why was her first instinct to trust him? Especially since she knew he would only kill her, kill Caleb, in the end?

Maybe, she decided, she was just so tired of running.

“I guess it worked.” She opened her eyes and watched the ruined brown walls of a tunnel slide past the window. “I thought I’d get to really see it when Caleb and I came through the import lanes. That was a disappointment.”

“Why?”

She flicked him a glance, but he watched the road. The truck slowed, and she followed his gaze to the rubble that scattered over the rapidly deteriorating asphalt. Nobody cared for the lower streets, not anymore.

She shook her head, didn’t bother lying. “Well, first, the transport didn’t have windows,” she said on a long exhale. “Caleb and I were hidden in crates shipped to some business uptown.”

He frowned. “Crates? You were crammed into air-locked crates?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t try to paint the picture. She didn’t want to. It had been the longest four hours of her life, dark, cramped, and stifling. “The driver dropped us off in these lower levels and that was that. Not to mention,” she added with a wry shake of her head, “they’d built the lanes to skip the catacombs. Probably smart.”

He didn’t smile. “How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Jesus, you were just a kid.”

Never. She flicked him a hard glance. “We’d been on our own for a long time, thank you. We did fine.”

The look he slanted her burned. “So fine, one of you is in a cult of killers and the other’s stuck cleaning his mess.”

Heat climbed into her cheeks. Struck mute by a whiplash of anger, she turned her face back to the window and said nothing.

She knew he was right. Jessie could talk and lie and posture all she wanted, but the witch hunter was right. Maybe it was her fault Caleb had ended up in trouble. Maybe she should have stayed somewhere quiet, a real community out in the vast, empty country where it was easier to live. To have a normal life.

Friends. Girlfriends. School.

But the coolly rational part of her brain said she’d done the right thing. Their mother had been murdered. Maybe Caleb hadn’t seen it happen, maybe he’d hidden away before the killer had found Lydia alone and unprotected in their cozy, rustic home, but Jessie wondered. Every day, she wondered if the twelve-year-old Caleb had watched her die, had known why their mother’s power of future sight had suddenly shot itself into him and bloomed.

Maybe that was why he’d been such a grim little kid.

Or maybe just seeing the future had made him that way.

Outside the window, the light had darkened as they moved deeper into the low streets. Now, the only illumination came from the truck’s headlights and the occasional barrel of burning refuse. Though she stared hard out the window, she didn’t see any evidence of people. No bodies hunkered by those barrels, no shadows of motion or children running. As the truck slowed to navigate through strewn rubble, Jessie realized that the people who inhabited these broken streets lived an inch from hell.

Her chest ached just thinking about it.

The city had tried to seal off the twisted skeleton of the old byways and ramps, but time and neglect had taken its toll. The cement roadblocks once charged with keeping out vehicles like theirs had long since fractured, been moved by the desperate or the curious. In the twin circles of Silas’s headlights, the road vanished into a darkness so thick, it practically breathed on its own.

“Are you ready?”

Jessie rubbed at her breastbone, her voice thick as she said, “I don’t understand how this place is just left open for anyone to walk in.”

“Not really open,” Silas said, and tipped his head to the windshield. She leaned forward, blinking up at the mass of black pressing down on them from overhead. The faintest glow signaled the very limits of the electric lights illuminating the lower edges of the civilized levels. Mid-low, they called it. Higher than the dregs of the streets they navigated now, but too low to matter.

“I feel like we’re the only people alive down here,” she murmured.

“May as well be. We’re on the bottom level of New Seattle. Only the morons with a death wish go this far. The import lanes come through this tier, but not on these roads.”

“Great.” Taking a deep breath, she sat back and gripped her fingers tightly. She could do this. The insistent tug of Caleb’s beacon remained steady, if faint. “Let’s go be morons, then.”

Some said the ruins held the only way out of New Seattle that didn’t involve sec-comps and passports.

Then again, Jessie had worked for enough strip clubs and die-hard bars to know a desperate wish when she heard one. She’d never heard of anyone coming back from deep inside Old Seattle with a map and a ready deal to make. If she knew anything, it was that information about an escape route would sell.

Silas was right. Too far in to the ruins, and even a determined refugee needed God’s own luck to survive. As they passed the broken husk of a faded billboard, she studied the graffiti and wondered how many destitute travelers had tried anyway. Enough that someone had painted a message in the vibrant orange of construction paint.