Grim Haven (Devilborn Book 1) (4 page)

Because I just fed her.

I managed not to retch, but only barely.

She and Cooper both moved with a speed that, in my still-dazed state, was hard to follow.

At least Kestrel didn’t use jet this time. Maybe she figured Cooper wouldn’t fall for that twice. But she kept sending things—crates, pieces of debris from the dumpster—flying and crashing into him. More than once I saw a wound open in his skin, heard the crack of one of his bones.

But he gave as good as he got. And then, better. Kestrel came in too close, trying to bite him, or maybe steal more vitality, and he managed to knock her off balance.

Kestrel fell. Cooper was on her in a split second. He pinned her face-down on the ground, his knees on her back. She tried to turn her head, but that was a mistake, giving him a chance to slip his forearm under her neck.

He yanked her head up. She screamed. One of his hands gripped her chin, the other the side of her face. And I knew what was coming next.

I closed my eyes in time to spare myself the sight of Kestrel Wick’s neck snapping. But there was no hiding from the sound of it.

“Verity.” Cooper crouched beside me and gently pushed my hair out of my face. The warmth of his hand made me realize how cold I still was. He opened his mouth, but seemed to be at a loss for words.

“I’m okay,” I said.

He looked intently into first one of my eyes, then the other, like he was checking for a head injury. “You’re sure?”

“I’m fine. Just a little dazed still, that’s all. Give me a second.”

Thus assured, he went back to Kestrel Wick’s lifeless body and stomped on her neck. Hard. Once, again, a third and then a fourth time. Making sure she was well and truly dead this time. Then he tossed her unceremoniously into the dumpster.

I was kind of terrified of him. At the same time, I kind of wanted to kiss him.

He came to help me up, and must have felt me flinch as he touched me.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured in my ear. “I know how that must have looked. But gunshots are too loud, and stabbing is too messy.”

“Hey, far be it from me to complain about how you go about rescuing me.” I smiled weakly.

“Can you try to get up? I’ll help you, but we should get out of here.”

I nodded and he pulled me to my feet, but I was still dizzy and slow. Cooper put his arm around my shoulders, and half-dragged me back to the street.

There were sirens. The fire, of course. How long had they been blaring? The encounter with Kestrel felt like it had happened somewhere else, outside of time.

I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, and tried not to think about the fact that we’d just killed someone and dumped her body. I wished I could write a spell to help ensure that nobody remembered seeing us near the alley, at least not well enough to describe us to the police. But all my ink was on fire.

There were two firetrucks outside my building, along with a police car and an ambulance. Cooper stayed at my side, his arm still protectively around me (and half holding me up), while I identified myself to a policeman as the one who’d called 911. I figured it was best to come forward first; it wasn’t like they didn’t have Caller ID.

“But you didn’t stay on the line,” the officer said. “Where have you been?”

Pitching my voice to sound as ditzy as possible (which wasn’t all that difficult, under the circumstances), I made up a story about being worried about my phone battery, since I had no way of recharging it.

“And then we went around the corner, to see if I could find any of my neighbors,” I went on.

“Around the corner where?” the officer asked.

“Just up and down the street. Sometimes they get pizza or whatever. You know, to let people know about the fire. Wouldn’t you want to know if your house was on fire?”

“And did you find anyone?” he asked.

“No.” I pointed at the small crowd that had gathered in the street. “But I think I see a couple from the building next door over there. So I guess they figured it out.”

The policeman motioned for me to step closer to the streetlight, out of the shadows the fire was casting. He leaned forward and peered into my eyes, much as Cooper had done in the alley. “Were you hurt? Or have you been drinking, maybe?”

“I think she’s in shock,” Cooper said. “We were standing outside, saying goodnight, when one of the windows broke and all this fire just started coming out.”

“We did split a bottle of wine with dinner, though,” I added, more than happy to be dismissed as drunk. If the fire was determined to be arson—or if any evidence of what Kestrel had done to my downstairs neighbor didn’t burn away—my behavior was going to look suspicious even if I wasn’t connected to the body in the dumpster.

“Go on over to the ambulance and get yourself checked out,” the officer said. “I’ll send someone over to grab a statement.”

I was cleared by the paramedics, and Cooper and I both talked to the police. After that, we did what we guessed normal people would do while their house was burning down: we stood at a safe distance and stared, pretending to be devastated by the loss.

Cooper pulled me away from the rest of the onlookers and spoke in a low voice. “Is there any kind of cloaking spell you can do, to help the body stay hidden?”

“I can try something with just blood instead of ink, but she just took so much vitality from me,” I said. “I honestly don’t know if I can work any magic at all right now. Do you think there’s a chance they won’t find it for a while? Or maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t find it ever?”

“I guess it depends on when the trash truck comes,” he said. “At least it doesn’t get hot here in March. The smell’s not likely to hit the street right away.”

I fought off a wave of nausea, and tried not to think of him stomping on Kestrel’s neck. Or of my poor neighbor, curled up with his little dog.

“My neighbor,” I whispered, realizing I hadn’t had a chance to tell Cooper. “He was dead. Bleeding from his eyes.” I was dangerously close to crying, and didn’t care if he knew it.

He pulled me into a little half-hug. “She probably drained his vitality to get the power to set the fire. She’d have wanted to use magic, so she wouldn’t have to be too close when it went up.”

“Cooper.” I swallowed, then shrugged, as if asking a casual question, the answer to which didn’t really matter. “Would she have killed me?”

“Hard to say. I’m not sure what her game was, actually. I have no idea why your place is burning right now instead of mine.”

“Maybe yours is burning, too.”

“Could be. Doesn’t matter, I guess. I won’t be back there.” He put his hands on my shoulders, turning me to face him. “Listen, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to let you be indecisive anymore. We’ve got to get out of here tonight. As soon as we can walk away without it looking weird. I’ll go tell the cops you’re overwhelmed and exhausted and I’m taking you to rest.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “My building burns down, maybe a dead body turns up a block away, and you and I both leave town the same night? You don’t think that’ll look a tiny bit suspicious?”

“It doesn’t matter what they think, as long as they don’t get any hard evidence,” Cooper said. “Maybe you can use some magic to smooth things over. I’ll help you make more ink. But we have to go, regardless. The police are the least of our problems. The Wicks won’t come at us one at a time next time. They will kill us.”

No
, a nagging, cowardly voice in my head said.
Not us. I didn’t kill Kestrel. They have no reason to come after me. Not unless I help Cooper now.

For as long as I could remember, I’d been what people call a
survivor
. They use the word as a compliment, like it’s a good thing. But sometimes that instinct doesn’t look very nice.

Out loud all I said was, “They won’t find us right away. You said yourself she was probably hunting alone.”

“The first time. For all we know, she reported in to her clan after what happened at the restaurant. Maybe she had some help healing up.” Cooper shook his head. “It’s not worth the risk. You want to end up like your neighbor?”

I didn’t. But I didn’t want to go with Cooper, either. This wasn’t my fight. And I didn’t want it to be. I’d just gotten a very unpleasant taste of what the Wick clan could do. I was still weak. My neck still felt cold where she’d touched it, like a dead place on my skin.

My stomach turned at the thought of what she’d done to me. And I suspected the memory of it would keep right on making me sick for years to come. I would feel her breath again, over and over, in my dreams.

I was in no position to take on people like that. I wasn’t a warrior. All I’d ever wanted was a quiet place of my own, a stack of books, some spell ink to keep me safe. I wanted nothing to do with a
cause
.

Cooper had saved my life. But I’d saved his, too, and it had just cost me everything I owned. I didn’t owe him anything.

I cleared my throat. “Doesn’t it make more sense to split up?”

Was that disgust in his face, or did I imagine it? I didn’t know him well enough to say. Another reason not to get mixed up in his problems.

“You mean you think you’re safer without me,” Cooper said in a flat voice. “Because I couldn’t protect you tonight.”

“You did protect me!” I said. “And I’m grateful. Please don’t think I’m not. But I have a responsibility. To Bristol, to this hotel I’ve inherited. There are people who work there, and I’ve left things unsettled too long already. I have to go back.” I gestured at the burning building, the literal ashes of my life. “Seems like there’s nothing holding me here, now.”

He gave me a look that suggested I wasn’t fooling anyone, but shrugged. “I’ll let you go, and stay out of your way. On one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to promise me you’ll go tonight.”

A treacherous part of me was disappointed that he hadn’t argued more, but I promised.

And I made good on it. I got into my beat-up old car less than half an hour later. I didn’t drive it very often, so I kept it in a garage three blocks away instead of on the street. That meant no worry about getting past the emergency vehicles. And there was, after all, no packing to do.

Cooper walked me there. He opened the driver’s side door for me, then leaned on it and stared at the pavement. “I’m sorry. For what she did.”

I never would have had the nerve if I’d thought about it more consciously, but I instinctively put my hand on his scruffy cheek, until he raised his eyes to meet mine. “That was not your fault,” I said. “And I meant what I said about being thankful for the rescue.”

He nodded, but looked away again, reaching for my phone instead. He took it and opened my contacts.

“You can get me anytime at the number I’m putting in here. I’ll keep the phone active as long as I can. I doubt they’re going to follow you to some random little town. It’s not you they’ll want anyway. But you call me if you need anything.”

“I will,” I said, but I knew I would never call him. Out of embarrassment, if nothing else. He’d asked me for help, in his way. And I’d told him to go fend for himself.

Nice move, coward
.

The goodbye felt awkward to me, but I told myself that might be one-sided. After all, we were practically strangers. Surely it didn’t make me weird that I didn’t want to run off with him to fight some magical war I knew nothing about. Maybe he didn’t think less of me. Probably he wasn’t thinking about me at all.

I wished I was the kind of girl who could just casually kiss his cheek, or something, but I’d used up my courage on touching his face.

“Take care, Cooper.”

“You do the same, Verity.”

I drove until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, then fell asleep in the back seat at a rest stop in I didn’t even know what state. I was too tired to think about everything that had happened, or about where I was going. But I felt defenseless with no paper or ink, and I slept fitfully.

I woke up sore and miserable, and put together a stale breakfast from the vending machine. Then I washed up as best I could in the bathroom—I still smelled like fire—and got back on the road, speeding toward the last place in the world I wanted to go.

It was funny, when I thought about it. I would never have imagined circumstances desperate enough to make me seek sanctuary in Bristol.

Sanctuary
. A strange word. It reminded me of churches, but there was nothing holy about my father.

According to legend, the devil made a deal with the town’s founders: he would keep Bristol prosperous, and in exchange, Bristol would provide him sanctuary. He’d be safe from harm there, and nobody he wanted to hide from would be able to find him. Presumably so he could go about whatever evil he was into unchecked.

It must have taken an awful lot of power, to draw up that contract. I had no idea how that kind of magic would work, but I knew for sure it was complicated beyond the ability of anyone I’d ever met.

For a lot of the townsfolk, that legend was just an amusing bit of local flair, the kind of thing that added some spice to Halloween and campfires. But I knew better. Bristol was brimming with magic and witches, and that alone suggested an increased presence of the supernatural.

And then there was the small fact of being the devil’s daughter.

Growing up, I never met or even saw my father. Whatever protection Bristol afforded him appeared to extend to whoever he just didn’t feel like having a relationship with. But I always knew who he was. From toddlerhood, I was as aware of
Devilborn
as I was of my real name.