Darkness Returns (21 page)

Craig had mentioned some pie-in-the-sky idea of a Return. She’d heard it herself before. This idea that some prophetic event—with the demon Jessie at its center, of course—could send the supernaturals off the mortal plane.

Pure bullshit.

What wasn’t bullshit was something else Craig had mentioned.

A new Agency. One with tremendous resources. If Teresa could somehow harness those resources, expel the fools that thought Jessie was actually meant to save rather than destroy them…

A second chance at the fight. The whole fight.

But she couldn’t just walk in there and expect them to start taking orders from her. She would need allies, an army of her own, to invade and take over.

Teresa looked down at her body. She had begun to find the form a little repulsive. Useful, but not natural. What she saw now was not the real her. She belonged to the pack now.

Wait.

Thinking of the plastic-wrapped package still on the passenger seat of her car, Teresa realized she did
not
belong to the pack. If all that she had studied about werewolves during her Agency days was true…

The pack belonged to her.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

They had her in the equivalent of a hospital room with a large glass window so that Lockman could see her from the hallway as a doctor and a nurse studied and prodded Jessie’s wings. Jessie was acting surprisingly patient with all the attention considering she had meant to leave headquarters the moment she had Lockman through the interdimensional doorway.

Someone from the karaoke bar, maybe the pierced and tattooed sword admirer, must have tipped Kress and his people off on this side right before they came through, because the second they did, all the doors shut down and they bolted shut the room itself.

Kress had spoken to them through a PA system built into the ceiling, his voice as smooth as a late night easy listening DJ on the radio.

“Sorry for the lockdown,” he’d said. “But we want to make sure the two of you are safe.”

“From who?” Lockman had shouted.

Kress never gave an answer.

After about fifteen minutes, Wertz came in toting a Sig Sauer that looked like a cannon in his small gnome hands. He had to carry it like a rifle, but he kept the barrel down. He didn’t need to aim to get his point across.

He had a couple of seemingly mortal goons with him wearing black uniforms with American flag patches on their shoulders. They carried real rifles.

Jessie probably could have disarmed all three of them and tied their limbs into knots. She still had much of the Raptor Skin covering her vitals, though she’d removed the headgear back in Vegas. She didn’t put up a fight, though. She and Lockman were escorted out of the room and separated.

Lockman spent another forty minutes at least in an interrogation room without any chairs, just a built-in slab of a table in the room’s center. He used the table as a bed and had almost dozed when the door opened and Kress marched in.

“What the hell happened out there?” he asked, kicked the door closed with a heel. The door was made of steel and rang loudly in the small space when it struck the frame.

Lockman swung his legs off the table and sat up. “Why are we being treated like prisoners?”

“Where’s Mica?” He tried for angry, but the great actor couldn’t hide the lump in his throat.

Christ, in all the chaos, Lockman had totally forgotten about the pixie. “She didn’t make it. But she saved my ass, for what it’s worth.”

Kress closed in. He waged a finger in Lockman’s face. “Nothing. That woman was worth a hundred of you.”

“Yet I’m the one who lived.”

His grief made Kress slow. Lockman saw the punch coming from long off, but he didn’t budge, let the other man’s knuckles clip his jaw and Lockman swung his head with the blow to keep it from hurting too much. When Kress drew back for a second strike, that’s when Lockman slid off the table and blocked with a forearm, following up with a jab to Kress’s kidney.

Kress huffed and scuttled backward till he came against the wall, doubled over and pressing at his side with both hands.

“Unless you’re going to start your mojo shit again,” Lockman said, “you don’t want to throw down with me. I’ve had a rough fucking day.”

Tears streamed down Kress’s face. He winced when he straightened, keeping one hand firm against where Lockman had punched him. His pose made him look like a delirious old man. “How did she…”

“Werewolves.”

“Bad?”

“Very.” Lockman leaned back on the table to take the weight off his hurt ankle. “But something with her blood. It lit a wolf on fire and gave me the chance to get out of there.”

He covered his mouth and sighed through his nose. A little bubble of snot popped in one nostril. “She was the last,” he said between his fingers.

Lockman cocked his head, not following.

“The last pixie. There are no more now.”

“You mean like you?”

He shook his head. “Mortals found their way to the pixie plane long ago. Rape and pillage don’t even begin to describe what followed. She escaped to this side, along with a few others. But mortals hunted them for sport…and the magical properties of their blood. The dust, you see? It comes from their blood.”

The extra lesson in pixie mojo didn’t change the situation any, sad as it was. It also didn’t take much to see Kress had had a thing for the woman, despite her poor hairstyle. Lockman didn’t get the sense she reciprocated, though. Still, Lockman had his own to look after.

“Where’s Jessie?”

“Being taken care of.”

Lockman pushed away from the table. He hated the limp, how it made him look weak, so he made up for it by getting a strong grip on Kress’s throat. “What did you do to her?”

Kress’s Adam’s apple rolled under Lockman’s palm. He smelled like he hadn’t changed his suit in days, and from the looks of it, he hadn’t. “We have people looking at her, making sure her metamorphosis hasn’t caused any permanent damage.”

Prigs like Kress always had to use big words like
metamorphosis
to hide behind. Couldn’t just come out and say
change
or even
shift
. “In a minute,” Lockman said, pressing back on Kress’s neck so that he pinned him to the wall, “you’re going to take me to her. But first, you’re going to give me the answer to the question I really just asked you.”

His brow creased while his face turned red. He wasn’t fighting back with his mojo. A good sign he didn’t have the strength or concentration for it. Since he didn’t pose half the physical threat as Lockman did, Lockman felt pretty damn sure he’d get the right words out of him.

The truth.

For once.

“Let me make it easier,” Lockman said. “On the way back here, Jess said something about not letting anyone else try to
trigger
her.”

Two white spots formed on either cheek, cutting through his choking blush. His eyes slid sideways.

“I didn’t know what she meant. She said I should ask you.”

Kress opened his mouth and Lockman could all but smell the coming lie on his breath. He slammed the back of Kress’s head against the wall, which was made of the same steel as the door and his skull made a similar gong when Kress had kicked it shut.

His eyelids fluttered. He hissed through his clenched teeth.

A knock came at the door.

“It’s all right,” Kress called out in a strained voice that clearly indicated it wasn’t. Lockman got the sense Kress felt he deserved a little torture.

Lockman could oblige.

He pressed his thumb against one of Kress’s eyes, put on a smidge of pressure, enough that Kress was probably seeing purple starbursts projected across the dark inside of his eyelid. He grunted and struggled, but Lockman leaned his body against Kress, holding him to the wall.

“I’ve softened a lot since Jess came into my life,” Lockman said. “But after what she’s gone through last couple years, I’m feeling like a stone again. I don’t give a damn about your Agency, your rank, your political pull, your mojo, or your freaky ass friends. I care about my daughter. And I do. Not. Like. The direction you’re sending her.”

He pushed his thumb in a little more. Felt the jelly-like orb give some.

“The metamorphosis…I had nothing to do with that.”

“I’m not asking for denials. I’m asking for the fucking truth.” Lockman sprayed Kress’s face with spittle. He body-checked him into the wall like a hockey player.

“I wanted to see if we could tap into the other souls within her. Perhaps expedite The Return by utilizing their power.”

Expedite. Utilize.
This man had a lot to hide.

Lockman pressed himself real close to Kress, almost like a lover. His lips actually brushed Kress’s cheek when he spoke. His hand on Kress’s throat and his thumb in his eye were the only things souring the intimacy of the moment.

“I’ll ask once more. If I don’t believe you, I’ll blind you in this eye.”

“I…I could have men…armed…come in here with a word.” Kress’s voice wavered like a bad cell connection.

“Do it,” Lockman whispered. “I dare you.”

“We’re supposed to be on the same side.”

“You fucking idiot. You’re one of them. A supernatural. My whole life, I was trained to hate you. You are the enemy.”

Kress tried to twist his head away from Lockman’s thumb. The wall kept him from moving far. “That isn’t true anymore. You know that. You’ve seen, some of us are as much victims as the mortals who are preyed upon.”

“I’m not going to talk philosophy with you. Let me ask my question.”

He gave Kress five seconds of silence, hoping he’d say something to provoke the blinding Lockman wanted so badly to give him.

Wisely, Kress said nothing.

“What,” Lockman asked, “did you do to Jessie?”

For a moment, Lockman didn’t think Kress would answer. His throat bulged in Lockman’s grip as he swallowed. He blinked over and over like a tweaker in need of a fix. He didn’t speak, though.

Lockman licked at his gums and tasted the blood from when Kress punched him in the face. Then he braced himself against Kress for the inevitable buck and thrash that would come as Lockman stabbed the tip of his thumb through Kress’s eye socket.

“We caged her,” he blurted. A bead of saliva dripped off his bottom lip. “We locked her up and I demanded she access the souls.”

The so-called mission he had sent her on. In reality, he had caged her like an animal and forced her to perform.

As much as Lockman wanted to gouge Kress’s eye, he had intended the threat to provoke the truth. Whether he liked the truth or not was another issue, one he would take up with Kress soon enough.

“Did you torture her?”

“No. We used silver chains, but only until she was safely contained.”

Safely contained.
The phrase almost prompted Lockman to thumb the bastard’s eye out anyway. Instead, he took a long, controlled breath, removed his thumb, and backed off. “Your day of reckoning will come.”

Kress pressed a palm against his reddened eye. He tugged the collar of his shirt loose and rubbed his throat. “I’ve no doubt of it. If you knew of my condition, you’d understand my haste.”

Lockman smirked, shook his head. “You think I’m just a dumb grunt?”

Kress stared at Lockman with his uncovered eye, not daring answer.

“You’re losing control. That emotional mojo. It’s fucking with you, too.”

Kress nodded.

“So, yeah, I understand you want to get back to wherever you’re from and deal with your…
condition
.” The word tasted like rat shit. Just another camouflage word. “But I don’t understand how you could force a young girl into a cage and chance her going ballistic like she did with Gabriel.”

Kress raised his one visible eyebrow. “That’s your flaw, Craig. It’s what’s holding you back. You still see her as just a young girl, your daughter. And while both those things are true, you need to come to grips with the reality that she is so much more.”

Lockman sighed. His ankle throbbed. His scraped elbow stung like a snakebite. A weariness oozed all through him. The conversations with these people always came back to the same thing. Jessie was the Chosen One. First chosen to defeat the vampire army. Then chosen to bring The Return. Once she did that for them—assuming such a wild concept were possible—what would they ask of her next? When would they finally leave her to deal with all the damage she had accumulated since she had the misfortune of finding him in Los Angeles?

Never, was Lockman’s guess.

Jessie was special. And because of that, someone would always try to lay claim to that specialness. Prophecies weren’t predictions. They were more like marching orders passed down by cult leaders, every one of them with an agenda.

Like Kress.

Whose whole interest in The Return wasn’t really about bringing balance back to the mortal plane. This was his chance to be Dorothy, tap his heels three times, and declare there was no place like home.

“Enough bullshit,” Lockman said. “Take me to her.”

Now he watched her through the window to her hospital room. She sat on a fancy bed with more buttons on the sides than mission control. The head of the bed was angled up, but she sat at the end, legs dangling off the edge, arms folded across her chest where they had wrapped her with an Ace bandage in a lame attempt at a makeshift bra that could accommodate her new wings.