Darkness Returns (28 page)

And Jess was right. If anyone had shown him the good mojo could do, it was Kate. She had used it to make the ultimate sacrifice, and probably saved the world in the process.

“That’s a fair argument,” he said.

Jessie looked ready to fall on the floor. “Did you really just—”

“Yes. Give your father some credit, for crying out loud.”

She nodded, took a pair of long strides toward the desk, and held out her hand. “Shake on it.”

“Jessie, this is serious.”

“I’m
being
serious. I want a promise that when the time comes, you’ll trust the process.”

“You mean blindly ignore the situation on the ground.”

“I mean
trust the process
. Whatever it turns out to be. Even if it means I have to do something like Mom did.”

The fire had cooled to an ember, and she had to say something like that to gas the fire within him. He gripped the edge of the desk to keep from flying out of his seat. He locked his jaw. Deep breath through the nose.

The fire died as quickly as if caught in a frigid rain.

“I couldn’t stand losing you, too.”

She started to say something, but he held up a hand to interrupt.

“You want promises from me,” he said, “then you have to make me one. Do everything in your power to survive. I don’t care what this Return might mean for the world. It’s not a world worth saving without you in it.”

His mouth felt dry. His nerves buzzed like overworked telephone lines. The spin cycle in his gut kicked up the taste from his last cup of coffee and seared the back of his throat.

Jessie blinked. She looked as if Lockman had Tased her. A tear ran down her sallow cheek.

“You okay?” he asked.

She circled the desk and threw her arms around him. Behind her, her wings spread some. She didn’t seem to notice, and Lockman did not give one wit. Her skinny arms around his neck nearly cut the circulation of blood to his head. He didn’t care about that, either. The feel of his daughter against him.

That’s all that mattered.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Spreading word to the other packs took less time than Teresa had expected. It helped to learn more than a few representatives of the Nevada packs had attended her meeting in the hotel hall. Still, she had every available wolf run out and make their case for a united front.

None of the packs cared about the vendetta against the famous wolf-killer, Craig Lockman. To them, that was pack business, and it didn’t involve their pack. But the opportunity to overthrow a mortal stronghold with resources that could put their kind in a significantly better place, give them real power in a world that, no matter their strength, their numbers still paled, forcing them into a secret underworld that made them easy to disrespect.

This was the common cry of most supernatural species. They were so much stronger than mortals, yet they remained vastly outnumbered, outgunned, and in foreign territory.

Taking over this new Agency could tip the scales for the wolves.

And we’re talking just Nevada here. Hang on, sis. By the time I have these guys organized, I’ll make sure not only that nasty, winged bitch goes down. We’ll wipe every vamp off the face of the planet.

Teresa had her own suite at the Bane now. Not Scud’s. His they had already converted to accommodate celebrity guests. Hers had been custom designed to her tastes. Tastes she didn’t even know she had. Like making sure the ceiling had a mirror over the bed. That fresh lilacs were placed in vases throughout every morning. The Jacuzzi tub. The four-person shower with the tower sprayer. Luxury items tucked among every inch of the place, including a carpet made from sheep’s wool that, when she walked round barefoot, felt like walking on a cloud. She also couldn’t help the groaner of a joke when they installed the carpet that she was now a wolf
on
sheep’s clothing.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Other than the nearly invisible blond peach fuzz on her cheeks, she looked exactly the same as she had in mortal life. Yet she could turn into something powerful and dangerous at any minute.

After applying her lipstick, she smiled at her reflection, then kissed the mirror and left an imprint of her lips behind.

With the Nevada packs together in agreement on the assault, Teresa had one last step to take care of before they could initiate the attack. She had to learn as much as she could about this new Agency—layout, manpower, security measures, any tactical mojo they employed.

Lucky for Teresa, they had the perfect source. If they could get her to talk.

Some might start to say Teresa had a fetish with severed heads.

She’d heard someone whisper, comparing her to that guy from the zombie TV show who kept heads in aquariums.

Stupid. Two heads did not a fetish make. And as much fun as it had been brandishing about the head of an alpha werewolf, this next bit of business made her stomach hitch a little.

The mystics—three female wolves, all from the same family, each a representative of her own generation (which made the eldest a hundred and twenty something, and the youngest about twenty-six)—had placed the pixie’s head on a pedestal in the middle of what one might call their workshop. The room sat down the hall from the hotel’s boiler room. You could hear the hum of the equipment in there and feel the buzz of it through the floor. The cinderblock walls weren’t covered with moss, but most of them had a bookshelf against it with tomes that either looked as old as the first Bible or as new as the latest bestseller. Other shelves sagged under the weight of glass bottles and racks of vials filled with various colored fluids. Dust caked much of the glass, but clean streaks in the shapes of fingers marked many of them, as if held and replaced exactly the same way every time.

Of course, the room stank. Not only from the burnt sugar smell of the pixie’s dried blood, but also as if none of a century of farts had been allowed to escape the room. Teresa had walked onto some putrid crime scenes, and witnessed mass murder at the hands of supernatural terrorists. Normally, she knew how to breathe deeply at first and get used to a smell.

There was no getting used to this smell.

The women stood around the wooden pedestal, which looked a little like a giant spool tipped on its side. Old brown streaks and splatters marred the surface, soaked into the wood, as permanent as the workshop’s putrid smell. Blood from ages of work on this pedestal. The women held hands and chanted while the youngest held her free hand over the pixie’s head, hand in a fist, blood dribbling from the slash in her wrist.

Much of the girl’s blood pattered onto the pixie’s scalp and ran through her hair. That white streak that Teresa thought for sure had been dyed, but on closer inspection realized was as natural as the black on either side, ran thick with dark red now. She winced at the sight of that perfect white getting stained, which was kind of silly considering what they had planned next.

The three generations of witches—a better word than
mystics
to Teresa—chanted as they held hands and their youngest member bled onto the pixie’s hair. The words sat slow and mumbled in their mouths, indistinguishable from gibberish in Teresa’s ear. Some parts of how mortals practiced mojo, Teresa knew, were gibberish. Things passed down through custom and superstition, rather than any measurable effect on the magic itself.

On the mortal plane, using mojo boiled down to whatever the hell worked, which almost always involved the sacrifice of flesh.

After what felt like an hour of muttering and bleeding, the young girl’s eyes occasionally rolling back into her head as she swayed from the loss, the mojo finally sparked. Literally. The blood lit up like glow-in-the-dark paint, a phosphorescent blue that flashed, forcing all of them to squeeze their eyes shut and turn away.

Blinking away the remnants of the light still floating across her vision, Teresa looked back. The young girl who had offered her blood for the ritual had collapsed to the stone floor. The edges of the cut in her wrist looked singed, like a bad cauterize job, but the wound hadn’t closed. She’d used too much of herself for the ritual to save any for healing herself.

The other ladies promptly picked her up, each gripping an arm, and dragged her to a dusty sofa that looked older than the grandmother of the trio. They flopped her down and a puff of dust motes exploded into the air around the girl, whose eyes fluttered enough to show white, her eyes rolled back.

Neither woman did more than move her to the sofa, though. They both brushed the dust off their hands as if they’d moved a piece of furniture instead of a person, then they turned back to the work at hand…or head.

Unlike the girl on the sofa, the pixie’s eyes were wide open and rolling around to take in her surroundings. Her mouth was bent on one side as if she’d suffered a stroke. The blood in her hair had evaporated, leaving that streak down the middle as clean as fresh snow. Her gaze locked on Teresa.

“Well if it ain’t the wolf bitch,” the pixie said, her accent distinct and impossible to identify. “Good thing you got me tied up, love, or I’d show you what I do to naughty dogs.”

Teresa cringed. The pixie had yet to grasp her situation. What had been hours of death felt like unconsciousness to her. And the lack of a body to move? She’d reasoned that one out, but her logic would fall apart soon. Rather than wait for the pixie to come to terms with reality on her own, Teresa figured it best to get the facts out of the way first.

“I don’t have you tied up. Or any such thing. You are just a head.”

The pixie’s face scrunched up. Her eyes rolled down. Maybe she saw the edge of the pedestal, the dried blood stains, or noticed the total lack of feeling in her body. In any case, she came around quick.

As did her memory.

“You fucking killed me.”

“Yes, I did.” Beating around the bush would help neither of them. Besides, Teresa didn’t know how long they had with the pixie’s head reanimated. “And I have some questions for you now.”

The amount of life in the pixie’s expression despite her total lack of body and the fact that she’d been dead—was technically still dead—made Teresa’s skin ripple. A chill trickled down the center of her back. Because that pixie was looking at Teresa like she meant to murder her, and Teresa had to remind herself she had nothing to fear from an expressive head.

“I ain’t answering shit, love. This sick spell of yours can’t last long. Then I go where I go. Which is a better place than you’ll ever see.”

“All pixie’s go to heaven?”

The pixie spat—or tried to. Had to do without a full throat. The sound came across like a pierced bike tire. “What do you think you know about heaven and hell. Ideas. All of them. Good ideas, but just that. Reality stinks a whole lot worse.”

“You seem to think you know a lot about it.”

The pixie smiled, a gruesome expression when found on only a head.

Teresa’s skin did another slow crawl across her muscles. She held back just shy of shivering.

The pixie sensed the discomfort, though. Teresa must have had it spattered across her face as obvious and shining as the pixie’s blood had been. “You ain’t all wolf, are you, love.”

“I’m not your
love
either. I’m the one who’s going to make you tell me everything about your Agency. The headquarters. How to breach. Who to attack first. Everything I need to take the primary facility over.”

That air-pistol spit again. “Love, first off, there’s no primary facility. It’s one big fucking place, and their ain’t no way, even if I helped you, which I ain’t gonna, that your little wolf pack could take it.”

“What about over a half-dozen packs?”

The pixie’s mouth formed a line. She said nothing.

In the silence, Teresa glanced up at the two women who had abandoned their youngest relative on the sofa. They stood behind the pedestal, eyes wide and mouths hanging open like the loose jaws of a pair of zombies. Apparently, the effectiveness of their mojo surprised them. Either that or they couldn’t believe a reanimated head could have such a biting attitude.

What you are in life, you are in death.

Someone had said that to Teresa before, but she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember who. It kind of sounded like something Lockman would say. The old Lockman.

To the pair of witches, Teresa said, “Why don’t you grab me that item I had prepared?”

They turned their stares at each other, then the eldest nodded her wrinkled chin and the two of them scurried out of the room.

The pixie heard the movement behind her, rolled her eyes to try and get a glimpse, but the angle prevented any view. The best she got was the sound of the metal door clanging shut behind the women.

On the sofa, the younger witch moaned as if the loud noise hurt her head. But she grabbed her wounded forearm instead of her head, and curled into a ball on the sofa, her skin the color of a bleached sheet.

Teresa returned her attention to the pixie’s pedestaled head. “I did a little research while you were dead. You’d be amazed the library these wolves have available. Here most folks think they’re just dumb dogs.”