Unearthed (40 page)

“You’re gonna be okay, Hendricks,” she said to him, low and soft, as she rolled him back to flat after he’d finished. “You’ve got some problems with your foot and you’ve been beat to shit, but you’re gonna make it, okay?”

“Fucking … cunt,” Hendricks said, and Lauren paused, just for a second, feeling the hot flush of anger run through her. His eyes connected with her, and there was a flash of recognition. “Not … you … her …”

“That’s an offensive thing to say to a woman,” Lauren said hotly, trying to remember the Hippocratic oath. She suppressed the temptation to backhand him across his swollen nose.

“I wouldn’t get too mad at the duchess, Hendricks,” Arch said, peering down from above Lauren’s shoulder. “She let you live. That’s more than most demons would have allowed.” He paused then lowered his voice. “Still wondering why that was, though.”

“Because,” Duncan said, strangely aloof, “it’s the ultimate insult.”

“What the hell do you mean?” Lauren asked, looking up at him.

“She broke him,” Duncan said quietly. “Got him to do … to do what she wanted.”

Hendricks’s eyes closed, and he let out a breath that told Lauren there was truth in what Duncan had said. Enough that he didn’t want to look anyone in the eyes.

“What did she want him to do?” Arch asked. “Lead us into a trap?”

“I don’t think there’s a trap,” Duncan said quickly. “We should get him out of here, though.”

“Why would she let him live?” Arch asked. Lauren just listened, a little too new to this dynamic to feel like she should interject just yet. “If she’s this bad mama everyone keeps talking about, why let him walk out alive?”

“Because she raped him, Arch,” Duncan said, and Lauren watched the flinch even through Hendricks’s closed eyes. They fluttered, and she sensed he wasn’t far from drifting into unconsciousness again. “Made him go down on her. It’s probably why he’s missing the toes—coercion. To get him to do what she wanted.”

There was a still silence, and Lauren didn’t even move, though she felt like she should check and make sure Hendricks was all right—down there—the way she would for any other rape victim, though this wasn’t quite like anything she’d ever seen before. She was just frozen, stuck in time, unable to move.

“It’s gonna be okay, buddy,” Arch said reassuringly. He was natural enough at that, and it jolted Lauren out of the freeze that she’d suffered. “We’ve got her now. You just tell your story to Duncan, and he can arrest her—”

“I can’t,” Duncan said, sounding stricken, cutting Arch off without mercy.

“What do you mean you can’t?” Arch asked, and Lauren could almost feel the disbelief turning to rage above her. “She cut his toes off, man. She forced him to—to—you know what she forced him to do. He can tell you, and you can go and arrest her—”

“I can’t,” Duncan said, and Lauren tore her eyes away from Hendricks, who hadn’t opened his again. Duncan was standing above her, looking strangely, unnaturally still. His eyes, too, were closed, and he had his hands folded in front of him.

“You’ve got a witness,” Arch said, stepping closer to Duncan. “You’ve got testimony. You’ve got—”

“I’ve got nothing,” Duncan said, and his eyes snapped open, a deep-seated weariness settled all over him. If he had been a man, Lauren would have sworn a strong breeze could have come along and carried him off. “Humans … in demon eyes, you’re all viewed as nothing higher than animals.” He paused then spoke into the silence that followed. “Nothing Hendricks can tell me could even be repeated in a demon court, and Katlin Elizabeth knows it. It’s the ultimate insult—she turned him into a victim … and knew that the laws she’s subject to won’t do a damned thing about it.”

“How did you find this guy?” Kitty was riding in the car, Rousseau at the wheel. Bardsley sat up front, next to Rousseau while Lawrence—to her annoyance—occupied the seat to her left. There was only the middle seat between them, not nearly enough for her preference. It was all hierarchical, of course. Rousseau was the servant, so he had to drive. Bardsley was the next lowest man in the structure, so he was up front. Which left Lawrence within arm’s reach of her, but untouchable because she wasn’t ready to kill Bardsley for being a witness. He seemed useful. Lawrence, on the other hand, was fast outliving his usefulness.

“We caught this fellow’s IP address,” Bardsley said, “and then had someone call up his internet service provider and—”

“Never mind,” she said, waving him off. “I don’t really care that much. You’re sure it’s him?”

“This address is where the eBay auction originates from,” Bardsley said, nodding slowly. “He is here.”

The sun was coming up slow over the trees. Kitty tried not to do anything like drum her fingers on her leg, anything that might betray how she was feeling, which was anxious. A duchess wasn’t supposed to be anxious, she was supposed to be perfectly calm. Not excited, not twitchy, certainly not feeling murderous, at least not in public. The cowboy should have cured her of these ills for longer than he had, but recent events, coupled with the ongoing presence of Lawrence, was damaging her calm. Raiding the house of some internet geek who was selling something she wanted should not have been cause for concern. It should have been cause for rejoicing, an opportunity to practice her fearful craft and drag screams out of some unsuspecting cockwaffle. Instead, she had to worry that having Lawrence along was going to provide a witness to her depredations, someone who could whistle up the OOCs and make her life annoying.

Letting the cowboy live hadn’t been her choice, but she’d rolled with the punch, had acceded to the polite ask she’d been presented, preferring not to see the politeness go out the window. And she’d made the most of it, humiliating him, emasculating him, leaving him as the most useless sort of non-evidentiary evidence to his OOC friend. A living witness who wasn’t qualified to witness in the demon world. She liked the thought of him choking on his own trauma, that demon hunter. She’d have preferred to not leave him as a loose end, but it wasn’t her choice and she highly doubted he’d be in any sort of condition to be a nuisance before the world ended anyhow.

Lawrence was an irritation cut from a similar cloth. If the Rog’tausch ended things, having what she’d done come to light wouldn’t be much of a problem. But she didn’t put all her money on that roll of the dice, no, not her. And the OOCs could make a major headache if they came into town in force before she got the track on the last piece. Or this one, to be frank; it wasn’t as though it was in her hands just yet, after all. She didn’t like to count her hegh’tahs before they hatched. They were too ugly to count afterward, in any case.

“Lawrence,” Kitty said, ever so sweetly, “would you be a dear and strike a deal with this fellow when we get there?” She watched his expression change; he hadn’t been expecting this.

“Ahmmm,” Lawrence said, “a deal?”

“Well, he’s after money,” Kitty said, tracing a little line across her pantsuit leg, “so why don’t we just offer him ten times the current bid? Surely, between the three of us, we can afford it.” She glanced up at him. “Simpler than getting drawn into a bidding war, and he gets the cash right now instead of next week.”

“You have … tens of thousands of dollars on your person?” Lawrence said, and the bastard looked her up and down, as though she were hiding it up her snatch. Rude.

“Of course not,” she said, maintaining her calm. “But we can get it within hours, so there’s no point in trying to force our way when we might be able to negotiate through this. The money is irrelevant, after all.”

Lawrence seemed to regard her with utmost suspicion. “I thought you intended to take it by force.”

I did, before I realized that you’re a snake who’s probably waiting to strike the moment my back is turned
, she thought. “There’s no need to resort to violence,” she said instead, “when we are in possession of means to get this person what they want without lowering ourselves to that point.”

“This could be a significant investment,” Lawrence said, doing a little hemming. That told her everything about his level of financial involvement in this. He was balking, the bastard. He wanted her to resort to violence. That only made him more suspicious in her view. More … troubling. His change in persona was giving more and more cause for alarm by the minute.

“Yes,” she agreed, “investment. Not just expenditure. We undertake investment in order to see payoff. This will pay off.” She looked to Bardsley for support. “Do you agree, Feegan?”

“Of course,” Bardsley said. She beamed at him in return, a cookie for the current favorite.

“I suppose,” Lawrence said, letting his skepticism wash out. “We could at least open negotiations.”

“It seems the prudent course,” Kitty said. More prudent at least than severing Lawrence’s head from his shoulders and then trying to force feed him the rest of his shell a bite at a time.

“Very well.” Lawrence sat straight up, apparently resigned to her suggestion. She suspected he couldn’t quite figure out a way to extricate himself from this course without raising eyebrows in the car. If he protested and tried to throw the task to her or Bardsley, either one of them would simply agree, and Lawrence’s position would be lessened, his caution revealing him to be nothing more than a dilettante, all word and no action to back it. He kept his mouth shut as they rattled along a dirt driveway and pulled up in front of a single-story house surrounded by trees and fields.

Kitty opened her own door, stretching as she got out. She felt her shoe land on solid, if dusty, ground. A cloud stirred by the car’s tires blew past, drawing a look from her that she knew was as scalding as her flaming breath. Her suit was black and had probably picked up some of it as it blew past.

She ignored it and turned to Lawrence. “Well, go on,” she said, catching him hesitating.

“Right,” Lawrence said, standing between the open door and his entry to the car, as though afraid to let go lest he be jettisoned into the wide-open spaces before them. “Of course.” He began to move, robotically, toward the door of the little house.

Kitty watched him go, debating what to say to Bardsley in his absence. Should she take him into her confidence, express the doubts she was having about Lawrence? Bardsley’s attitude was a night and day difference from Lawrence’s. Lawrence had started out so subservient, so accommodating, leading her to Bardsley and his smooth Turkish accent. Could they be running a scheme of some sort? They’d both parted with their pieces so easily, after all, and Lawrence had practically handed her Trinculo on a silver platter.

This whole rotten tree had come from Detmar Lawrence, but she just couldn’t see his angle. Perhaps it was innocuous; he’d made such a pleasant first impression, perhaps that was merely the honeymoon, and now he was showing himself to be the ass he truly was. She’d met others who put on a pleasant show at first, after all, only to reveal themselves to be worthless suck-ups bereft of substance later. It was practically a party game in New York, a masquerade of its own, trying to see what was hiding behind the masks of the demons she met on the society circuit. This one a gossip, this one a pointless waste of space, this one a secret backstabber.

But this wasn’t society, exactly. This was far from society. It was its own society, like a caveman society in its infant stages, possessed of but a few expatriates come to seek their fortunes in a new land. Lawrence plainly wasn’t truly up on the legend, no matter how much he professed that he was a true seeker of the Rog’tausch. So was he after financial gain? Perhaps his coffers were thinned, and this was his plan to fill them, though she didn’t see an immediate angle.

No, there was something else at play here. He’d needed far too much of the legend recounted to him to even be casually dabbling in this business. The man was a fool, and not even smart enough to hide his foolishness.

“What the hell is the deal with Lawrence?” she finally asked Bardsley, who was standing off a few feet from the car. His hands were in his pockets, white khaki pants bright in the sunlight.

“He does not appear to be a true seeker,” Bardsley said, cocking his head before replying, like a curious dog.

“That much was obvious,” she said. “His manner has changed since first I met him, when he brought me the gift of the leg.”

Bardsley’s eyebrow rose. “He challenges you.”

That was a little bit of a revelation. “Yes,” she said, realizing that thought had not occurred to her before. Lawrence was a stag, a stupid one that wanted to lock horns with someone. And he had only done it since Bardsley had come around. Instead of foolishly competing with an obvious lesser—Bardsley—he’d been playing at jousting with her.

Oh, the mind trembled at this possibility. Not betrayal, but ego. How did she not see it before? It wasn’t as though it was her first time watching men take out their pitiful little hoses in order to impress her or others with the distance of their urination.

“He wants to look cool in front of you,” Kitty said, smiling at Bardsley, who returned it. “He’s weakly wrestling for perceived control of our little endeavor.”

“A foolish maneuver,” Bardsley said with a light shrug, “but commensurate with everything I’ve heard of Detmar Lawrence. It seems to me he would be better served currying your favor rather than antagonizing you, even in so light a manner as he has thus far.”

“Far wiser,” she said. “Far, far wiser.” She tapped her fingers against the side of the car as she leaned against it. “How do you think he’ll take my casual ordering of him to perform this task?”

“Basic instinct would seem to suggest he’ll try and reassert himself, and soon,” Bardsley said. “Something to demonstrate to both you and me that he is his own person, independent of you.”

Kitty let her eyes narrow even as she smiled. “But you don’t feel the need to bolster yourself in such a manner?”

Bardsley looked right at her, and there wasn’t a hint of challenge from him. “I have already cast my lot with you. Our paths are entwined, and I am at your service. In return, you’ve promised to assist me once we’re done. I feel bucking authority at this point would be counterproductive to my aims. Perhaps Lawrence does not feel the same.”