Sin's Dark Caress (12 page)

21

No One Can Hear You Scream

M
yf flicked the channel on the TV. An image of a lion stalking an antelope appeared. She flicked again. A daytime soap. Flick. Music videos.

Flick. Flick. Flick.

The woman came out of the bathroom dressed in a fluffy white bathrobe.

“Ah, that's better,” she said, fluffing out her pale hair with her fingers. “That bath is wonderful. You should try it.”

“No thanks.” Myf flicked the channel.

“I can't believe McManus got us this room. Would you like something, Myfanwy? I can call down for some room service.”

“Call me Myf, and no thanks.”

“Right, Myf.” She looked around uncomfortably and tugged at the robe. “I'll be glad when McManus gets back with my clothes.”

Myf put down the remote and stood up. “I think I need a smoke. Do you mind if I go outside?” she asked. “Sorry, I can't remember your name.”

“It's Bianca, and yeah, that should be fine.”

Myf dug into her bag, frantically looking for the half a pack she had left, and let out a sigh of relief when she finally found them squashed in the corner under everything else. She slid the glass door and went out onto the balcony, leaving it open behind her. The wind this high up was chilling. She pulled her jacket tighter and placed the cigarette between her lips.

Out of nowhere a fresh wave of grief washed over her again. It kept taking her by surprise.

Jimmy.

He might've been an asshole sometimes, but he was her asshole, and now he was gone. Her hands shook so much she had difficulty getting the lighter to work. Finally, the flame held. The tip of the cigarette glowed and nicotine-laden smoke filled her lungs.

She exhaled slowly and glanced at the woman inside flicking through a magazine. With her pure cream complexion and whiter than white hair, she'd be very popular at Madam Lo's. Especially dressed in that skanky goth outfit she wore earlier. The perfect mix of innocence and depravity that Madam Lo's clientele would eat right up. Maybe even more popular than Lili.

Myf dragged deeply on the cigarette and closed her eyes. Too bad it was just tobacco because right now she could really use a splif.

She frowned. The air changed suddenly, becoming colder and darker. She opened her eyes to find the night had taken on a strange hue, like a crimson scarf thrown over a lamp, muting the light with tinges of red.

“What's happening?” she asked the woman.
I wish I could remember her name.

The woman ignored her and continued to flick through the magazine.

“Hey!” she said.

The woman glanced up from the magazine, her eyes going wide, darting one way then the other, searching. “Myf?” she said, standing.

“I'm right here you stupid woman,” she said, and tried to walk back inside, only she couldn't move.

“Myf?” The woman's voice rose higher.
“MYFANWY?”

A strange mist appeared just off the balcony and drifted toward Myf, growing thicker as it poured onto the floor, obscuring her shoes. The air filled with a faint buzzing noise. As the mist continued to thicken, the noise increased, crystallizing into voices. Total and utter terror solidified into a hard cold knot, twisting her insides.

The witch's name suddenly popped into her head. “Bianca!”

But the woman continued searching, unseeing and unhearing. Impending danger settled in the pit of Myf's stomach, cold and cramping like menstrual pain with nails in it. Something moved in the thickening fog.

The swirling mist solidified, becoming a white robed figure. The surrounding air became a grayish muted backdrop, almost fading from existence. The hood of the robe obscured any features within dark shadows, and it was impossible to tell if it was male or female. Even the long fingers holding a black chalice were no help.

Dark energy flowed from the figure, especially the cup. The almost inaudible chant grew steadily stronger from somewhere in the hood, except it wasn't a single voice, it was multiple, all harmonized into one monotonous intonation.

The figure floated just off the ground, using the mist to glide across the ground.

“Hello,” she said, hoping the thing would answer, yet dreading it at the same time.

It just kept chanting as it floated toward her. And it was definitely not friendly.

Goose bumps rose on her skin. Her hair stood out as if charged with electrical energy. She turned and tried to run, but her feet felt mired in mud. She screamed.

The pale witch ran out onto the balcony, straight past her, and leaned over the railing, calling her name.

“BIANCA!”
Myf screamed.
“HELP ME!”

But it didn't do any good. She was invisible. No one could see her, no one could hear her, and no one could save her.

I'm going to die.

He . . . she . . . it . . . closed in. The malignant presence strangled the air, making it almost impossible to breathe. The chanting increased in volume and tempo. Fear churned her stomach, pushing burning bile into her esophagus. She bent over and let loose the sweet tea they had given her to calm her nerves.

Jimmy. This is what got him.
She raised her chin to look the dark presence in the face. Except there was no face. It lifted a bone-white hand, palm up, and she rose off the ground. She was no longer in touch with Mother Earth, but she had the feeling it wouldn't have done her any good anyway. There were no plants nearby, the actual earth was buried beneath concrete, and even the air felt cut off to her. There was nothing from which to draw her powers.

The hooded stranger turned the hand on its side and her arms went out wide. Her jeans were cut away and her T-shirt cut open, not with a blade, but with magic. She couldn't move and was totally helpless to stop it.

The figure pulled a brush from inside the robe and dipped it into the challis. Using thaumaturgy, the brush lifted from the cup, the tip in dark crimson paint, and disappeared into the swirling mist beneath her feet.

She spat at the figure. “Go on, I'm not afraid of you. Do your worst.” But it was a lie. She was afraid. Terribly afraid. Hanging in midair, helpless, dressed only in her underwear and the tattered remnants of her shirt. It tipped the challis, and crimson flowed over the pale hand and onto the ground.

Blood. Jimmy's blood.

The spilled blood twisted and flowed into some sort of symbol beneath her feet. Some fell onto the stranger and soaked into the cloth until it disappeared completely, leaving only the robe unmarked. The figure placed the bloody palm against her stomach, and the dark crimson print was absorbed into her skin like it had the robe.

Her stomach grew heavy and started to swell. Her abdomen continued to expand, growing larger and heavier. And then it moved.

A baby.

Her baby.

Hers and Jimmy's.

And then the tears came.

22

The Vanishing

B
ianca leaned over the balcony and searched the ground fifteen floors below. No sign of Myf, alive or dead. She leaned back with equal parts relief and confusion.

The front door closed. “I'm back,” McManus yelled from inside the room.

“McManus,” Bianca called. “Quick. She's gone.”

“How?” he asked, placing a bag on the sofa and joining her on the balcony.

Bianca's growing panic threatened to overwhelm her. “I don't know. She came out for a cigarette.”

“Do you think she just took off somehow?”

“I don't know, one minute she was standing there, smoking and then . . .” Bianca looked around, then it dawned on her. “Oh no—what about Jimmy?”

McManus put his hands on her shoulders. “Tell me everything that happened.”

“She asked if she could smoke and . . .” Bianca trailed off as an enormous wave of black energy washed over her and Myfanwy's broken body appeared in a pool of blood a few feet away.

She pushed past McManus and ran to the girl's side, almost slipping in the blood. “Myf! Myfanwy.”

Myfanwy's chest rose and fell shallowly. Her breath rattled in her throat and her stomach lay open like all the other bodies they'd found so far. Bianca knelt and placed her fingertips against her throat to feel the faint, slow pulse.

“She's still alive,” she said.

McManus talked on his cell. There was blood everywhere, and Bianca didn't know what to do with the girl's intestines. There was so much damage.

“I've called the paramedics.” McManus took Myf's hand and brushed her hair back from her forehead. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Blood gurgled in her throat and coated her lips with crimson bubbles as she shifted her head to look at him. “The mist was so cold.” She coughed and her eyes closed slowly and opened again. “So cold.”

McManus looked at Bianca. His shoulders tensed and the skin around his eyes tightened. He was just as frustrated as her. He nodded at the ground under her knee. “It's the same killer.”

The symbol painted in blood was still wet.

“How did he find her, how did they know where she was?” he asked. “I thought she'd be safe here.”

“I don't know.” The helplessness threatened to paralyze Bianca as she squeezed Myf's other hand.

“Our baby . . .” the girl croaked, and coughed again. “They took our baby girl . . .” Her eyes rolled and she licked her blood-smeared lips. Bianca's heart sank. The girl was dying.

“What baby?” McManus asked.

“Our baby, mine and Jimmy's,” she said, and stared into the air with a far-off smile. “She was so beautiful.”

“Where did you go?” McManus's voice took on a frantic edge. “Who took you?”

Myf's brow furrowed and she turned to Bianca. “I called for you.”

Tears stung Bianca's eyes. “I'm sorry, I couldn't find you.”

The girl shook her head. “I was here, I could see you, hear you.” She swallowed. “In the mist . . . it came in the . . .”

Sirens wailed to a stop in the street far below. Bianca glanced away just for a moment toward the sound and Myf's hand went limp in hers.

B
ianca sipped hot black coffee as paramedics and cops and Goddess knew who else moved around the hotel room. She placed the cup on the end table beside her and wrapped her arms around herself. Thank the Goddess they'd let her change out of that blood-covered robe and into some of the clothes McManus brought from her apartment.

McManus sat down beside her on the sofa and she leaned her head against his shoulder. “How're you feeling now?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I'm just going over and over it all in my head, trying to figure out what happened. How did they find her? I mean it happened right there and I couldn't sense her or the black magic at all.”

He put his arm around her shoulder and his heart thudded in a steady soothing rhythm under her ear.

“Don't beat yourself up,” he said gently against her hair. “There was nothing you could've done.”

A tiny smudge of bright blue, no bigger than a raindrop, stained his shirt not far from the tip of her nose. Yet, she didn't have the heart to take him to task. Hell, she could use a little something herself.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Agent Neil Roberts said from just inside the door of the hotel suite.

McManus stood as Roberts sauntered into the room with a plaster across the bridge of his nose and lifted the shades he was wearing to the top of his head. “You were told to stay away from this case, not to mention you've been suspended. So why are you here at
my
crime scene?”

“Because I sent them,” Oberon said from behind him.

23

Little White Lies

M
cManus smiled as Oberon DuPrie filled the doorway. Agent Roberts spun on his heel toward the door. “You were also ordered to stay away from this case, DuPrie.”

DuPrie crossed his large leather-jacketed arms and smiled. “What case are you talking about, Roberts? Since McManus knows Sin Town so well, I asked him to help Bianca look into drug a dealer suspected of supplying the campus. The murdered girl was the dealer's girlfriend. ”

“That's right,” McManus lied. “When Jimmy was murdered in a Sin Town brothel, we took Myfanwy into protective custody.”

DuPrie nodded. “It's just a coincidence that she turned up as one of your victims.”

Roberts's mouth opened and closed, and McManus could almost hear the wheels spinning in the man's head.

“So if you are quite finished—I will take
my
people now,” DuPrie said, crossing the floor and placing a protective arm around Bianca.

Roberts whipped the sunglasses off the top of his head. “They're still witnesses to a murder and need to be questioned.”

“You know where to find them,” DuPrie said, steering Bianca toward the door. “They'll be writing up the report on the dealer's death.”

“DuPrie, I could charge you with obstruction.” Roberts's face took on a crimson and purple shade, making the white plaster on his nose even more conspicuous. McManus got a kind of perverse enjoyment out of it. He was starting to like Oberon DuPrie.

“Do your worst.” DuPrie threw the words over his shoulder and disappeared out the door with Bianca.

McManus turned to the beet-faced agent, shrugged and followed.

M
cManus rubbed the needle prick from the facimorphic test as they entered DuPrie's dingy little office. Bianca was still in shock and had hardly said two words the whole trip back to the campus.

DuPrie stood behind his desk, arms crossed and thick black eyebrows creased in a deep scowl. “Tell me everything from start to finish,” he said Bianca.

“Look, this is my fault,” McManus said. “I dragged her into it.”

“I'll deal with you in a minute,” Oberon snarled at him, and leaned his hands on the table. “Bianca, I went out on a limb and lied to Roberts. Now tell me why you ignored a direct order from VCU and continued to look into the case?”

She just stood there looking at him dumbfounded.

“Back off, man,” McManus said, moving between Bianca and her boss. “I told you, I'm to blame, not her. I talked her into it. There's something about this case I just can't let go of and—”

“Good,” the huge ursian said.

McManus was sure he'd heard incorrectly. “What?”

“I said good.” DuPrie reached behind a plant. “I needed to hear how committed you are to this.”

A panel slid open to reveal an alcove, with a spiral staircase leading downward.

“Fuck me,” McManus said.

“I'd rather not, if you don't mind.” DuPrie's gruff tone lightened. “But thanks for the invitation.”

DuPrie took Bianca by the hand. “Are you okay?”

She smiled sadly. “I will be.”

She descended the staircase first, and McManus followed her into a modern open plan office.

“So this is your real base of operations,” he said to Oberon.

“Welcome to the Bunker.” DuPrie placed his hands on his hips and beamed proudly.

Tones stood up from behind a bank of computer screens. “Captain, our guests have arrived.”

“Excellent, show them down. We'll wait for them in the operations room.”

The Aeternus bobbed his hairless head. “Right, Captain.”

DuPrie's enormous hand fell heavily on McManus's shoulder. “Come on, we've a lot to discuss.”

The ursian guided him to a room with a long table ringed by high-backed leather chairs. A computer screen, larger than McManus's big screen television at home, dominated the wall at the far end of the room. The Department of Parahuman Services symbol turned lazily in the center of the screen.

He said, walking down the table, “Sweet setup you have here. Is this the department's doing?”

“Not officially,” DuPrie said. “Let's just say we're an autonomous organization that answers directly to the Five of CHaPR.”

McManus looked through the glass walls out into the office beyond. There were a couple of people talking and bending over notes. He recognized Cody with the former medical examiner, Kitt Jordan. The Incubus looked up at that second, as though he sensed McManus's gaze, then headed into the room.

“Dude. I see you've been invited into the bat cave,” Cody said, knocking knuckles with him, a grin splitting his suntanned face. Most cops got funny around Cody, but McManus didn't mind him, as long as he kept that emotion shit to himself.

McManus glanced at DuPrie. “And your boss is about to tell me why.”

“All in good time, we'll wait for our other guests to arrive,” the ursian said.

Bianca entered the room with her hair pulled back into a neat ponytail and looking a little more together. She took a seat opposite McManus and glanced at him quickly before giving Cody a tight smile.

Movement caught the corner of his eye as Tones returned with three others. McManus recognized the woman immediately and stood as she entered the room, followed closely by a man even larger than DuPrie, with skin like polished obsidian. The old man from the other day brought up the rear. Even DuPrie seemed a little awed by the elegant dark-skinned woman in a figure-hugging white ankle-length lace dress.

“Princess Akentia,” he said with deference. “Welcome.”

Everyone in the room bowed low to the oldest and most powerful living Aeternus.