Kicking It

Page 32

That wasn’t true, I thought. Couldn’t be true. Because if it was, I’d made a miserable mistake.
—
The sun rose and fell, and I woke just as I’d slept, fully dressed, dagger at my side. I splashed water on my face and checked my phone, which was absent of messages, even from Luc. Though that absence was completely my doing—and my choice—it still stung. I’d become used to him. His jokes. His emotions. His presence. I’d given that up for a cramped hotel room and a run at a man who was threatening my family.
I opened the door, found a bottle of Blood4You, the packaged blood that most American vampires used for convenience (and assimilation) beside it, along with a note: “Have a good night, fancy vamp.”
“And to you, too,” I murmured, popping off the top and drinking the entire bottle in a matter of seconds. I was usually more careful about drinking blood regularly, but the travel hadn’t allowed for it, and I’d been too panicked yesterday to think about it.
Panic led to bad decision making, or so Luc had taught us.
And there he was again, invading my thoughts.
The lobby was empty when I walked through, the TV still blaring sports in grainy black and white. I put the promised twenty on the counter and my key atop it, and headed for the Green Clare.
The pub was hard to miss, short and squat among the multistory buildings in the neighborhood as it was. The street in front of it was marked by a vivid green Shamrock twenty feet from edge to edge. It was the only thing in the Rookery that wasn’t dirty, scraped, or peeling.
I opened the door, letting in a fresh breeze that blew around the scents of blood, booze, and smoke. Patrons, shocked by the interruption, turned to look suspiciously at me. Most were supernaturals, but their expressions and their magic were dulled by alcohol, their emotions equally passive. Fear and sadness lingered, not helped much by a jukebox that blared Delta blues.
I ignored their stares and headed for the brass-railed bar, where a barrel-chested man in his fifties was wiping down the counter.
“Drink?” he asked over the music, without looking up.
“No, thanks. I’m looking for O’Hare.”
He stilled and looked up at me, one absent eye covered by a grisly patch of skin. “Who’s asking?”
“Rose. He’ll be expecting me.”
The bartender looked me up and down, sizing me up. His emotions were relatively flat. He probably figured me for a vampire, but not much of a threat. If Danny was looking to finish his project, this guy didn’t know much about it.
And that only made me more wary.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “He’s in his office.” He gestured toward a hallway that led away from the bar.
“Thanks,” I said, and wandered through tables and gazes.
The hallway was painted black, and it didn’t smell any better than the rest of the bar. Restrooms were located to one side and a fire exit at the end.
That left only a single open door to my left.
I felt for the dagger I’d tucked into my boot, blew out a breath, and stepped into the doorway.
Danny O’Hare was a handsome man. Broad-shouldered, with a cheeky grin and a ruddy complexion. His eyes were blue, and they twinkled at the sight of me.
He sat behind a desk in a tiny office that was crowded with papers and stacked with boxes of booze. Ironic, I thought, that all that booze was legal now, but it had probably been bought with Prohibition money.
“And who of all people should walk through my door,” he said, with Ireland in his voice, “but a wild Irish Rose.”
“I’m not Irish,” I reminded him. “And you knew I was coming.”
I dropped the coin onto his desk, where it spun for a moment before settling flat again. I set the bait, and waited for his emotions to bob to the surface. But all I could sense was vague interest and childish enthusiasm. That was very much like Danny, who’d seemed to approach life like an adolescent bully. The world was composed of what he owned and what he didn’t own yet. Anything in the second category was fair game.
“I heard through the grapevine you were alive,” he said. “And I’ve seen your face in the glossy. But wasn’t me that asked you here.”
His voice had, as before, a singsong quality that belied his enthusiasm for violence. But nothing seemed dishonest. How was that possible? If he hadn’t called me here to take me out, to finish destroying those close to Tommy DiLucca—or my family, if he couldn’t get to me fast enough—then who had?
“Who’s looking for me?” I heard the mild panic in my voice and pushed it down. I was in control of my own fate. But it was Rachel’s I was worried about.
“Darlin’, times have changed. I don’t control the world as I used to. I’m a simple businessman, working my trade in this public house.”
I didn’t believe that, not for one second. He might be a businessman, but I doubted there was anything simple about it.
“You must know something,” I insisted, peeling off a handful of twenties and dropping them onto the desk in front of him.
His eyes flicked to the cash, just for a moment. “I have heard tell of a woman interested in speaking with you about that night.” He sat back in his squeaky chair, linking his hands behind his head, just like Luc often did, but with considerably more malice.
Confusion engulfed me. “A woman? Who? I don’t know any women from back then. Not who are still alive.”
“Alive or dead is a fluid thing these days, my Rose. What grim’s hand would be strong enough to pluck a flower in its prime?”
I saw only the flick in his eyes to the spot behind me to warn me of danger I hadn’t even heard over the music oozing from the bar. I had but an instant to glance behind me, to catch sight of the bartender’s face, before I felt a needle-sharp pain in my back.
The world went black, and gravity called me home.
—
I awoke to pain. A lot of it, and spread across my body. My vision was blurred, my head pounding, and I could taste blood.
Slowly, the world stopped spinning, and fabric came into focus.
The jeans I was wearing. I was sitting in a chair, looking down at my legs, my head hanging limp from my shoulders. My feet were below me, manacled by an impressive chain to a bare concrete floor that was dotted with blood, probably mine.
My shoulders ached, and my fingers were numb. My hands were behind me, my wrists tied together tightly behind the chair. Multiple zip ties if the biting pain was any indication.
I looked up and blinked back spots. A standing light was pointed at my face like an interrogation scene in a movie Luc would have enjoyed a little too much—and probably quoted from afterward.
Longing filled me, but I pushed it down.
First, stay alive, I told myself. Then you can think about feelings.
I heard shuffling ahead of me. “Hello? Who’s there?”
No one answered, but I heard what sounded like a children’s lullaby.
“Be still and sleep, my child,” she sang. “Be still and sleep, my child. For if you wake, the monsters will take you right to the Rookery.”
I squinted through the light at the darkness ahead, trying to gauge shapes and distances. “Who’s there? Show yourself. Danny? Is that you?”
But it wasn’t Danny. She stepped into the light, and the nightmare deepened. It was Iris, and too much the same as I’d last seen her.
Like a supernatural version of Miss Havisham, she appeared not to have changed clothes in decades. Her dress was torn, the fringe missing and bare in spots like an animal with mange. Her hair was flat and matted, and dotted with paste-jewel clips and brooches. Her skin was scarred and twisted, pocked in spots where bullets had undoubtedly penetrated.
Had she been here, in this place, for nearly a century? Hiding from the world, reliving what she’d seen? Had the violence, or her experience of it, sent her into madness? Not so mad, perhaps, that she couldn’t make a deal with the devil, pay Danny and his cronies to lure me here.
However she’d done it, how hadn’t I known? How hadn’t I saved her?
“Iris,” I said breathlessly, my mind suddenly whirling, a decade of history being rewritten, and guilt quickly piling up. “You’re alive.”
“And so are you, I see.” She reached out and slapped me, hard. My cheek sang with pain, and I tasted fresh blood again.
“I was in the priest hole,” I said. “I’d been looking for the brandy, remember?”
“You left me there. You left her here. And you walked out like you were something really special. Just the absolute bee’s knees.”
She threw a copy of the magazine at me. “All this time, you little bitch, I thought you were dead. Come to find out you were in Chicago. Hiding out and showing off. Showing your nice little tits for the camera. You left us there to die!”
“I thought everyone was dead, Iris. Everyone was dead.” Still, I searched my memory for any clue that I’d been wrong, that I’d left her there to be found by Danny O’Hare, or to crawl out alive. But I found nothing. There’d been only the smell of death, the absolute stillness of it, and the tinny sound of sirens in the distance.
I’d made a mistake. But Iris didn’t much care.
She slapped me again, this time from the other direction. My eyes watered from the sting.
“Tonight we’re going to replay that night.” She stepped out of the light, and I heard the glug of liquid flowing from a bottle. I sniffed and smelled alcohol.
The light dimmed as she stepped in front of it and tossed a glass of booze in my face. Gin, I thought, smelling it as it dripped into my eyes and cuts I hadn’t yet seen, sending a new surge of pain through already stressed nerves.
“Alcohol,” she said. “For remembering. The devil’s drink, which you enjoyed time and time again. And now you’ll be punished for it.”
She disappeared again, and my heart began to race. If she meant to replay that night, had she gotten a gun? Did she plan to shoot me here and now, like an animal?
Adrenaline swamping me, I shifted back and forth against the manacles at my feet and the ties that bound my hands. But neither budged.