Taken (Ava Delaney #4) (3 page)

After a couple
of moments of trying in vain to make out the murmurs, I gave up and
waited. Eventually, a woman strode onto the shop floor, followed by
an agitated Eddie. Agitated once he caught sight of me, that was.
For a second, I didn’t recognise her. She was a lot different from
the last time I had seen her. The human witch consultant to the
Council had been unassuming looking before, even kind of mousy.

Now her
cleavage was on show and her lips a vampy red that matched the new
streaks running through her brunette hair. A head taller than
Eddie, she was a voluptuous woman, but she had always seemed plain
and dumpy in the past.

She slipped her
glasses on with one smooth movement, and the corner of her mouth
turned up in a sneer as she passed me, but she didn’t say a word.
She had been the one who thought I shouldn’t go free at my trial
before the Council, and yet she was hanging out with Eddie.

She had
changed, and it didn’t look like much of an improvement.

The way Eddie
wrung his hands together, I might have thought they were a secret
couple, but she was pretty young, and he was, quite literally,
ancient.

“Same time
tomorrow,” she called over her shoulder before slamming the door
behind her.

All three of us
flinched. Eddie’s cheeks flushed, not surprising considering his
pink and ginger complexion, but he seemed positively shaken.

“Everything
okay?” I asked, slightly alarmed by his less than calm appearance.
If anyone was confident of what would happen next, it tended to be
Eddie, so seeing him flustered kind of freaked me out.

“Here again?”
he asked dryly, flexing his fingers. “I thought you would have
grown bored of us by now.”

“Can’t let my
best buddy starve.” I handed Carl his share of the food with a
wink.

Eddie frowned.
“Or work, apparently.”

“You know I
need to make sure he’s okay.” I spoke softly, but I bristled with
my own suspicions.

Swallowing
hard, Eddie gazed at me, his magic almost suffocating me. I refused
to do anything other than smile sweetly, and he gave up and headed
back upstairs, but my heart still pounded with apprehension.

I hoisted
myself onto the counter to quiz Carl. “New friend?”

He shrugged,
unwrapping his food. “She’s been popping in, on and off, for the
last couple of weeks.”

“Why?”

He stared at
me. “My hearing’s not that good.”

“So is she
weird, or am I just biased because she flashed me her boobs?”

“I didn’t
notice,” he said, but he was grinning. “My verdict? She’s weird.
She comes in all meek, leaves as arrogant as… as one of the
Council.”

“What’s she
doing here?” I asked, half to myself.

“I’ll figure it
out eventually,” he said brightly. “She comes in too often for me
not to.”

“You’re kind of
like a magical sniffer dog now. Good work, Carl.”

He threw a pen
at me and missed. Cursing, he leaned against the desk and took a
couple of deep breaths. The weakness hit him at random moments, and
from the hard set of his jaw, he was still struggling to deal with
it.

“Can I get you
anything?”

“No! Just… just
go, Ava.” His good mood had vanished, and I felt a squirm of
agitation at the look in his eyes.

I desperately
wanted to talk to him, but I let it go for fear of scaring him off.
I knew he was still trying to find his place in the world, but his
weakness wasn’t something that should shame him. I could have
helped him. Somehow. Like Peter, he retreated and pushed everyone
away when things got tough. Not that I could talk.

On the way
home, I amused myself with thinking about the witch and what she
might be doing with Eddie. It was possible they were in some kind
of relationship, but Eddie had a habit of picking up strays so he
could use them later on, and she set my alarm bells ringing. I was
slowly learning to trust my instincts when it came to people being
off in some way.

I bought Dita a
comic with a female superhero on the cover. Something about her
mother sparked a memory, and I wanted for Dita something I’d never
had—to let her see it was okay to be brave, that it was okay to
learn how to save ourselves. That lesson was something I was still
learning.

Uncomfortable
dreams haunted my sleep that night. Back in Liverpool with the
twins, Lucia and Lorcan, surrounded by hooded figures with baseball
bats. Lorcan trying to protect Lucia with his sword. Lorcan
failing. The usually silent Lucia, covered in blood, looking
straight at me and screaming like a harpy.

I awoke
shaking, covered in cold sweat, although my arms felt as if they
burned. Turning on the light, I stared at my wrists in horror. A
chain of scarred burn tissue circled both of my wrists.

A quick scope
of the house soon reassured me that no one had been in my home. So
what was the wound from?

I remembered my
dreams. They had featured the half-fae twins, who I still owed a
favour. I had promised to find a way to free them of their slavery
to the vampires. I had promised them safety. I had made a deal, and
I still hadn’t completed my end of it. Maybe the branding was some
kind of reminder.

I scrubbed my
entire house, but even the excessive cleaning didn’t ward off the
feeling of dread that scratched at my insides whenever I glanced at
the brands on my wrists.

I had agreed to
meet Esther at Gabe’s bar, so I walked there that evening, enjoying
the feel of the sun on my skin. If I was lucky, we would have a
real summer, thus keeping the vampires away for longer.

At the bar, the
burly bouncers let me in without any hassle, although a couple of
people in the queue hissed as I cut in line. I didn’t care. I
couldn’t see, or smell, Esther, so I sat at the modern bar and
waited for Finn.

“Something
non-fae tonight,” I warned the blond bartender.

He grinned, but
the smile froze on his face when he caught sight of my newly
branded wrists on display as I removed my jacket. “Who did you piss
off?” he asked, lifting my arm delicately and peering at the burn
with real concern.

“Someone who
doesn’t exist,” I said sharply, remembering his dismissive comment
about half-fae. “So what is it then?”

“A link,” he
said. “You and your deals are going to get you killed.”

“What do I do
about it?”

He looked at me
as if I were mad. “Do whatever you said you would do before your
entire body gets covered with these. Eventually, it’ll get inside
you. You won’t like that, Ava, so get cracking.”

“I’m trying. It
just isn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”

He shook his
head as he wandered off. “Sucks to be you.”

I
had
been trying, but there were problems. England was going through one
of their committee elections. Things were in a bit of an uproar
because the elections had been called while most of the vampires
hibernated or flew north for the summer. The sneaky elections had
really pissed off the British Vampire Association. The BVA had
hoped to gain a chair and power for the first time in decades.

Headed by a
creepy, but smart, ancient vampire known as Winston, the BVA had
returned home and made a huge stink about the elections, which
caused some not-so-friendly fire. Travel had been pretty much
forbidden until further notice. Not that I knew how I was going to
sneak the twins out of the country even if I did make it over. I
covered my wrists with my sleeves, deciding I didn’t want to be
reminded of my failure.

I gazed at the
moving dragon tattoo on Finn’s stocky forearm as he worked,
wondering what would happen when the links got inside me. The
wailing of guitars playing Led Zeppelin’s
Dazed and Confused
caught my attention. I turned to watch the performance, and my
breath caught in my throat. All eyes were on the woman behind the
microphone, and I realised the wailing guitar was actually her
voice.

Her mouth
barely opened, but her song whipped at my skin as if her passion
couldn’t be contained, as if it would burn right through me. Her
hips moved ever so slightly in time, and there was something
hypnotic in her heavy-lidded eyes. I couldn’t look away.

“Something
else, isn’t she?” Finn asked.

I could only
nod. She was beautiful. Not just beautiful. As she sang, I wanted
to go to her, to sit at her feet and wait for her to tell me what
to do next. She seemed vaguely familiar, but that might have been
due to the fact that she resembled a blond Jessica Rabbit.

“Don’t look
right at her,” Esther advised.

I nearly jumped
out of my skin. “I wasn’t.”

She snorted.
“Yeah, okay. Just don’t look at her while she’s singing. Trust
me.”

I turned to
concentrate on Esther, but it was hard while the song was still in
my head. Oddly for her, she didn’t have on a scrap of makeup, and
she looked even younger than usual, her dark skin gleaming under
the bar’s lights. Her hair was scraped back into a tight facelift
bun, and her nails were bitten to the quick.

She glanced at
me. “Thanks for coming tonight.”

“You okay?” I
asked, concerned by her bloodshot eyes.

“Yep. We’re
here for her.” She nodded toward the singer.

“What do you
mean?”

“She asked to
see me, and I figured you would come in handy.”

I should have
been used to that. “What’s going on?”

She sighed and
took a sip of the drink Finn dropped off in front of her. “She’s
Illeana’s big sister. Another siren.” Esther had always been so
light-hearted, apparently incapable of taking anything seriously
for more than a minute, but losing two members of her team had
affected her deeply. She had been covering it up for a while, but
the damage was beginning to show.

“Did they want
to talk to you about… about what happened to her?”

She shook her
head. “No. I’ve been looking through records at headquarters,
making sure Illeana’s belongings made it back to her family. There
are a lot of… inconsistencies in her reports and sign-ins, so I
spoke to the sister, and she said we needed to talk in person. So
here we are.” She shrugged. “I’ve no idea if she’ll tell me
anything of interest, but I didn’t want to talk to her without a
witness.”

“Thanks for the
warning.”

She rubbed the
bridge of her nose. “Sorry, I just… I need to figure this out
without everyone hearing about it. I don’t want Illeana’s name
turned to mud if she happened to do something a little… shady. I
owe her that much.” Illeana had died to save her, and the pain in
Esther’s eyes at the memory was heart-wrenching.

When the song
ended, the siren beckoned us over to sit in the corner. She was
only slightly less fascinating since she had stopped singing. I
caught Gabe’s eyes on me and turned away. No way was I inviting
conversation with him.

“I’m Callista,”
the siren said in a huskily deep voice. She reached out to shake my
hand, but Esther stayed my hand with a firm shake of her head.
Callista drew back with a careless shrug.

The siren had
to send away a couple of admirers before we could talk. I still
wasn’t sure why I was there. Callista didn’t seem so certain either
because she kept glancing at me curiously.

“Can I even
trust you?” she asked Esther.

“Illeana saved
my life. I’m not going to do anything that harms her memory or her
name. I can promise you that. I just need to know what was going
on.”

Callista leaned
forward. “I knew the job would kill her. She knew it, too. She was
working two sides. At some stage, they would collide, and she would
be stuck in the middle.”

Esther covered
her mouth, her eyes widening with horror.

“It’s not what
you think. She was investigating something internal. Something
within the Council, or maybe just the Guardians. She didn’t tell me
much, for my own safety, and I can’t understand most of the
paperwork.”

“Do you know
anything? Anything about what she was trying to do?” Esther asked.
Being a Guardian was everything to her. She had to believe in the
Council to do that job. If something was going on… she might not
get through it.

Callista
glanced from me to Esther and back again. “What about her? Can I
trust her?”

“She’s not
loyal to the Council,” Esther said. “And I trust her.”

Callista looked
away for a few minutes, watching people sway on the dance floor.
Her singing had left a sultry atmosphere, and she smiled as she
observed the effect. “So easy to make them happy,” she murmured.
“My sister told me that she was trying to find whoever’s in charge
of the slave markets, and she felt as though she might die because
of it. She prepared for her death. We live a long time, but she was
ready to die.”

“Who was she
working for?” Esther asked.

I was on the
edge of my seat, waiting to hear more.

Callista pursed
her lips and let out a soft sigh. “I wish I knew. She wasn’t alone.
But she didn’t trust anyone. She was so paranoid by the end.” She
turned to me. “You’re the one, aren’t you? The one who killed that
beast.”

I inclined my
head slightly, unsure if I should confirm or deny.

“Thank you.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “Her spirit can rest.”

“I want her
paperwork,” Esther insisted. “All of it. I can figure out what she
was trying to do, maybe keep going with it, so it wasn’t for
nothing.”

“Leave it be.”
Callista took a long swallow of her drink. “If the beast didn’t
kill her, this would have. At least the way my sister talked.” She
slammed her glass on the table and leaned forward. “I hear talk.
Talk of change and disruption. I think I might get out of here
while I still have the chance. If you were smart, you’d do the
same. But I’ll send you my sister’s things. Do what you will, but
know that none of my sisters will appreciate a blackening of our
family name.” She made her way out of the bar, hips swaying. All
eyes were on her.