Nine

Anywhere but Here

 

Aunt Roo made us coffee to go, packed up the cheese and crackers she was preparing on a platter in a Tupperware container for us to take, and even sent along cookies she’d just baked. She had the dough in the freezer, of course, but was eager to mother us, which meant shoving as much food as she could in our hands before we headed back outside for my car.

My vehicle was strangely devoid of the parts of dead demon swarm that had been severed when I closed the door on them earlier—I’d mentioned it to Dad and it seemed possible someone had come out to collect them for study, unless they’d somehow dissipated over time and not left a trace. I’d see if he called in a few days with some answers if he was the one who took them.

I almost considered bringing Rodney with us. Dad’s warning was ringing in my head and Melinoë clearly didn’t like the cat, so that seemed the safest bet. But if she had some agenda other than what she’d said, the best way to draw it out was to continue as we had been: searching for Dev, with me none the wiser to any concerns about her lineage.

And whether I liked it or not, we were working together on this. She was the only current link I had to my brother, and I needed to know what steps she’d already taken in the search before I could figure out what I should be doing.

We’d been on the dark road for a few minutes, me driving this time and heading back toward the city while munching on snacks when she asked, “Am I seeing things or are you in remarkably better shape?”

“Dad has an arsenal of healing spells. It speeds up what the body naturally does. Technically I learned a few, but I was never very good.” We all had our strengths, after all.

Mine was homicide.

“Your dad was...nice.” She almost sounded surprised when she said it.

“Did Dev lead you to believe he wasn’t?” Dev had grown up worshipping the ground Dad walked on, almost literally. Like he didn’t go so far as anointing him as lord and saviour, but Dad could rarely say or do anything wrong in his eyes.

“He never talked about him. I just figured...” She shrugged. “Well, you’re you. I thought your dad must be awful.”

“You’re you” likely referred to my extracurricular activities.

“I don’t kill bad men because I had a bad father—it’s the opposite, really.” I’d spent a lot of time trying to analyze how I fell into such a thing and what might be “wrong” with me, as well as argued plenty with Tanvi. And it definitely wasn’t deep-seated damage. “I grew up with a loving family. I was tutored. Had a good relationship with Dad. I knew, vaguely, that the rest of the world wasn’t like that, but I didn’t realize until I was older and in school—until I saw what a sharp contrast boys and men were to what I grew up with. Do you remember the first time an older man hit on you?”

She thought about it in silence as we sped down the dark road. “Thirteen, maybe? This creepy neighbour remarked on my training bra.”

“I was twelve. It actually startled me, and I looked around, like I hadn’t heard him right. The father of a friend who was waiting to pick her up after school. Had my parents been there, they would’ve taken his head off, but no one even blinked.”

I had, of course, responded by magically tampering with the brakes of the idling car behind him. It didn’t roll fast, but it still knocked him over, and I stood there staring him dead in the eyes when he fell.

Ah, memories. Baby’s First Retaliatory Attempt at Bodily Injury of a Stranger.

“I understand the cycle of abuse,” I continued, “so I get that it starts early in life, I understand the psychology behind all the factors that leads men to become like that. But my dad grew up in an abusive home and he worked to be better than how he was raised. They can do better. Some choose not to. I don’t have a lot of patience for it.”

“I’ve spent time dealing with people like that—usually men,” she conceded. “But a lot of what would be considered ‘toxic’ from any gender. I always thought that proper therapy could work wonders, if people would only try.”

I shook my head. “I’ve read the studies. All therapy does is make abusive men well-adjusted abusers better equipped to use gaslighting language against their partners.”

“Right.”

“You have to throw the whole man out.”

“Whole man garbage disposal.”

“Exactly. That’s me.” There was more, of course—more that I’d witnessed, more horror that drove me toward the pleasure of revenge. But I had no deep dark secret past as a survivor. It was, oddly, a combination of empathy and compassion with violent vengeful tendencies.

I wanted to help others and sometimes that meant killing people who had no place in this world.

Which was why I was so out of my depth with trying to help Dev. I thought as I drove, rolling ideas around—I wasn’t sure where to go next with this. I hadn’t expected Dad to be a dead end for information—not that he’d know anything about Dev, but I’d thought surely the swarm.

I’d been through my brother’s apartment. Normally I’d next go to any popular haunts, any friends. Stakeout. Question. That was the pattern. I skipped that part when hunting a target for my regular work because my client could usually tell me plenty. I didn’t know what crowds Dev ran with or anything beyond where he lived. 

Melinoë was my only link to him now.

“Ideas of where to head next?” I asked.

She was staring out the window silently. She finished chewing, washed her food down with a sip of coffee. “Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t back at the motel where he was staying?”

There was always that possibility. “Where was he staying?”

“North-ish. Three hours or so away from the city, probably less if we go at night without traffic.”

That close? He had to have something he was observing if he was that close to home but not bothering with the drive. “Address?”

“I’ve got it on my phone.”

“Where do you have the rest of his stuff?”

“Locker at the subway, 4th and King stop. My car is a rental and I didn’t want his things kept there.”

Which wasn’t far from my office—meaning in turn it wasn’t too far from my apartment. “We’ll swing by my place first for some supplies, then the subway. Grab your rental if you like before we head to the motel.”

The sparseness of country roads slowly gave way to bedroom communities and then the bright lights of the city itself lit the sky. It was coming up on three a.m., which meant just a handful of cars and people were about downtown. We drove past the harbour, the scent of the water filling the vehicle despite the windows being up, and I started to make a wide languid left onto my street.

And tapped the brake when I saw the police cars midway down the block.

Three cars, right in front of my building, no sirens but the red and blue lights whirled. I leaned forward to peer through the windshield, my heart suddenly hammering and breath stolen.

There could be a completely legitimate reason for them to be there. Something in one of the other apartments. No domestic disturbances in my area—I made short work of those—but some other accident, maybe...

Or maybe it was Dev. Surely they’d go to Dad’s place first if something had happened to him and they needed the next of kin, but...?

But Tanvi would’ve given you a heads-up—she knows you’re looking for him.

Still staring at the police cars, I fumbled around for my phone until I remembered I’d stuffed it in my messenger bag. I’d set it on silent at some point. There was a message there from an unknown number—

Don’t come home.

Fuck. I had little doubt it was Tanvi—must’ve had a burner phone so it wouldn’t be traced back to her.

I dropped the phone on the dash and put the car in reverse.

“What’s going on?” Melinoë asked.

“Not entirely sure but apparently it isn’t a good idea for me to hit my apartment right now. Let’s get your stuff at the subway.”

I cast frequent nervous glances in my rearview as I drove but didn’t see any police following. I avoided the temptation to drive past my office and took some side roads to 4th Street.

There was parking across the road for those using the subway, but I left the car on the street by the stairs on the corner leading down. Melinoë and I headed out, the autumn air chillier than even when we left Dad’s. Our steps echoed as we jogged down to the subway level, the concrete chipped and worn beneath our feet.

Somewhere there was probably a worker in case of problems, but we saw no one, just the bank of self-serve token machines scrawled with graffiti on one side and rows of lockers on the other. Garbage collected in the corners and a subway whistled by in the distance, a fresh breeze making its way down the corridor toward us.

Melinoë fished a small key from the pocket of her jacket and led me to the lockers. I leaned against one and glanced at my phone again while she scanned the locker numbers. Nothing further from Tanvi. I nearly texted her but she’d put herself at risk to warn me to begin with; if she still had the burner phone on her while working, I’d ruin her life if she was caught. I may be a serial killer but I’m not that kind of petty.

There was an uncomfortable knot of guilt in my gut, but I tried to shove thoughts of it from my head. I returned the phone to my back pocket and glanced around while Melinoë opened her locker.

“He left behind a duffel bag,” she said. “You might make more sense out of the supplies than I did.” The thing was wedged in the locker pretty tightly and she wiggled it free inch by inch.

Another subway rushed by in the distance, and beyond it, a clicking noise drew my attention.

I stood straight, turned in the direction of the subway while Melinoë muttered a curse and tugged at the duffel bag. A shadow moved across the pale tile floor in the corridor, like the lights might be going out, but there was no crackle of electricity in the air.

Just as the darkness crawled across the ceiling toward us, the stink of sulfur hit.

“Mel...” I backed up, nearly bumped into her. Called magic, and the answer came with a wash of ozone through the air. Electricity danced across my skin in preparation with a speed I might not have been capable without Dad’s healing.

“Son of a...” The duffel popped free and she slammed the locker shut just as the chittering swarm flowed across the ceiling. The creatures began to amass in the center and then drip down, forming a column of their bodies that hit the floor and spread. As they transferred themselves from floor to ceiling, they parted to reveal a human-shaped figured draped in black in their center.

Hair stood on end across the back of my neck—I was not about to wait around and make introductions. “Run!”

I sent magic crackling toward the figure and his swarm, the electric blue energy sizzling and frying the creatures that started toward us.

Melinoë jerked out her gun and fired at the figure; it dropped into the pile of swarming demons like it was made of them.

We turned and ran.

Any sound of our steps beating across the tile was lost under the onslaught of chittering and thousands of tapping feet. The reek of sulfur and squealing demons followed as we raced to street level; they surged up the stairs after us, like every creature my magic had fried was replaced by three more. I had no idea where Melinoë was parked but we both went for my car anyway, and I floored it before she’d even gotten her door shut.

Melinoë dropped the duffel bag at her feet and got her seatbelt on. “They’re everywhere.”

“Common denominator at this point is Dev—his apartment, his stuff in the locker. What’s in there?” The streets flew by and I was thankful for the lack of traffic so I didn’t risk causing an accident by doing ninety.

She unzipped the bag. “Clothes. No toiletries—he was using what the motel provided. There’s a box of what I assume are spell supplies—some stones, herbs, things in jars.”

No idea, then, if there was something specific in the bag that might’ve signaled it was Dev’s, but his magical signature could be on anything in there. Without knowing for sure, it wasn’t like I could just dump the item in question and be free and clear.

“No pendant,” she said, likely knowing I’d been wondering.

“Laptop?”

“No. His phone had been in there before I took it. No wallet.”

“Realistically, we have to expect the swarm to follow. We’ll hit the motel as planned and see if we can pick up Dev’s trail. If Dad couldn’t identify the swarm, I don’t think anyone else will, but I’ll see if I can’t come up with some kind of generic demon warding.” They’d come right through what Dev had in place at his apartment, though, and I wasn’t sure how. Too many variables—I was flying blind with this.

The helpful GPS voice on Melinoë’s phone directed me to the highway, and I took the turn without looking back.