When I opened my eyes, it was dark.
Several sensations bombarded my being in an instant. A sharp pain exploded behind my left eye, traveling down my neck and spreading between my shoulder blades. The floor shook against my prone form, rocking like a yacht against the waves. Something wet glossed my upper lip and cheek, and after a brief moment of reflection, I realized what the copper tang coating my tongue was.
Blood.
A hollow moan pressed past my lips. What happened? I’d packed a suitcase. Left my condo.
My stomach turned as the memory came back. I ran someone over. Well, I ran some sort of corpse-looking person over. He’d somehow survived being crushed beneath the Mercedes, against everything that said it was impossible. Not only had he survived, but he stood up after the fact.
“And then…” The words, a stinging rasp against my throat, killed the rest of the thought leaving my mouth. Apparently, after I’d run over that unkillable person, I’d gotten hit by a car myself. Maybe I deserved it.
“Karma.” With a groan, I rolled onto my back. I tried to bring my hands to wipe the damp off my face, but I couldn’t. They were bound behind my back, and thin strips pinched my wrists. Maybe a zip tie?
My heart thumped against my sternum. Clearly, I had been intentionally wrecked and kidnapped. The good news was that meant whoever had me likely wanted me alive for some reason. The bad news was I was absolutely powerless to do anything about it, especially if the kidnappers were some of Frank’s goons.
I closed my eyes and focused. The place I’d been crammed into was moving and relatively small. The rumbling inside the space and the sounds from the outside solidified what I’d already known: I was in a trunk.
I slumped against the carpeted floor of the trunk and stared. What was I going to do? The car must’ve been old since there was no emergency release lever, and if I let them take me wherever they were going to take me, I would die. The undead thing I ran over had mentioned wanting to know where Samson was, and if I’d known that, I would’ve left Manhattan hours ago. When my kidnappers found out I didn’t know where the telepath was whenever we reached…wherever…they’d kill me.
Despite those undeniable facts, there wasn’t much I could do. I couldn’t get out of the stupid trunk to escape.
The urge to vomit was overwhelming. However, since I’d be doomed to sit in it, I choked the bile down and settled on a strangled screech. I kicked both of my legs out and stomped against the side of the trunk for good measure.
The only bright spot in this otherwise dark place was that if Frank was involved, it meant he was still looking for Samson.
Which meant Samson might not be dead.
When the car rocked to a stop, I was prepared. After at least an hour locked away in the dark pondering my doom, a plan of sorts had formed within the moments of complete and utter terror.
First, I would scream when they popped the trunk. If anyone not involved with this nonsense was around, hopefully it would prompt a call to the police. Not that I trusted the police much anymore, thanks to Officer Farrell trying to toss me off my balcony last summer, but it was worth a shot.
Then, regardless if the first part worked, I would make things as difficult as possible. I would not go calmly. Most of the self-defense maneuvers Samson taught me would be impossible given the state of my hands, but my legs were free, and I had a pretty hard head. If I managed to get my hands free, I could use Samson’s knife. A long shot, but I liked being optimistic.
If I somehow didn’t die and escaped, then I’d run. To where? No idea. But I would run until I couldn’t run anymore.
I braced myself when the sound of feet kicking up gravel echoed outside the trunk. While I’d been drowning in road noise, I hadn’t heard a single voice in the entire drive. How many people would I be staring at when the trunk opened? The two corpses from the parking garage?
Something hit the trunk, and I jumped, heart racing. Probably a hand.
The sound relocated to the edge of the trunk. This was it. I inhaled deep, ready to let out the loudest scream I could manage. The latch moved and the trunk lifted, and as light poured across my face, I dug deep for sound as something warm brushed along my neck.
But when I made to scream, I couldn’t.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Do you feel that? Magic is wrapped around your heart right now,” a male asked, voice soft.
Once my eyes adjusted to the light dumping from the moon hanging overhead, the face was clear. As my pulse escalated, I realized the warmth on my neck had been a hand, his fingers gently pressing against my jugular.
“Shut up. I’m not going to kill her.”
My chest tightened at the words, and without further recourse, I stared deep into the dark eyes of Quinn Belliston. I’d expected to see someone else with him, but as far as I could tell, he was alone.
As words continued to fail me, the pressure behind my breastbone inflated. Sweat beaded along my brow despite the winter chill, reminding me how little control I had over my body at the moment. What was Quinn doing to me? Who had he been speaking to?
“Hearts are interesting things, Miss Ashby. Powerful enough to keep one alive, but so easy to destroy.” Quinn cocked his head but didn’t remove his fingers from my throat. “They want me to kill you.”
Despite my inability to move, there must’ve been something to indicate that I didn’t much care for the last part of his statement. Quinn snorted.
“Don’t worry, Miss Ashby. If I used my magic to kill you, I’d have to pay a steep toll. One I’m not willing to pay, even though they are begging.” He smiled enough to make my stomach turn. “At least, not yet. That can change if you decide to be difficult.”
Quinn pulled his hand from my jugular, and the pressure receded. I sucked in air, desperate. My lungs burned with every expansion, a burn I never thought I’d feel again after Hudson tried to strangle me in our father’s office.
“What…what do you want? What do they want? Who are they?” I asked, words coming out on harsh exhales. So much for my plan. Screaming and fighting didn’t much matter when my opponent could magically invade my body.
“It’s not so much what I want. It’s my boss.” Quinn shrugged. “And they are the spirits around you. There are several, and they all want you to die.”
A chill shot down my spine. I had a feeling I knew who those spirits belonged to, yet it made me feel dirty to think they were always there, clinging to me like a cheap shirt.
I had the living to worry about right now, so cringing about bloodthirsty ghosts could wait. I rolled my head away from the floor of the trunk and looked at Quinn, heaving as much annoyance as I could manage into my subsequent sigh. “I’m not sure I can help Frank, and even if I could, I wouldn’t want to.”
“Frank? He’s not my boss.” Quinn smirked. God, he was so much like Hudson it was nauseating. If my brother had been given access to magic, would he have been this insufferable? “My boss is much more exciting.”
Great.
“Are you going to cooperate?” he asked, eyebrows raised, and glanced to the left of the car. “That spirit there doesn’t want you to.” My stomach bottomed out. If Samson were dead, he wouldn’t want me to cooperate. He’d want me to go down swinging. “He really wants you to die.”
Oh. Not Samson then. Hopefully.
Since screaming wouldn’t work, and the odds of running were also slim, I decided on a plan of action I hadn’t intended: negotiating. “My cooperation depends on several factors.”
“Like?”
“Like what you want and the odds of my survival.”
“Hm.” Quinn actually appeared to be thinking about my words. “I can’t say what my boss will do, but I can promise I won’t kill you if you come with me quietly.”
I made a face. If there was one thing I learned from my father, it was the importance of being deliberate with one’s words. “If I go quietly, your zombies can’t kill me either.”
“Zombies?” he asked, amused. “That’s a little…juvenile, isn’t it?”
“So that’s what those people at the parking garage were then? Zombies?”
“Something like that. Regardless, they won’t harm you.” Quinn looked off into the distance. “Will you cooperate?”
I schooled my face into the same picture of indifference I used at work. The face I’d used on my father. The one that said nothing about the terror clawing away inside my chest.
I might have Samson’s knife, but fighting Quinn wouldn’t end well. Cliff had called him a necromancer—a sorcerer that dealt with death. Could they even die? I didn’t know how that sort of magic worked, but I did know he could kill me with it if I made him angry enough, and apparently there were angry ghosts begging him to do it. Cliff had also said that Quinn and his friends were lunatics, so an angry lunatic needed to be avoided at all costs.
Maybe if I went along with his plan, I could figure out a way to escape. He had to sleep sometime. Right?
Unease swelled in my stomach. Doubt had already settled in. Some plan I had.
“Fine.” I took a deep breath and sat up in the trunk. “But I’ve been known to be high maintenance, so if I were you, I’d ensure your part of the bargain is kept.”
“I’m sure I can handle it.”
Quinn looped a hand around my bicep, and I cringed. I did not want him touching me. Ew.
As Quinn helped me out of the trunk, I took the opportunity to silently catalog our surroundings. An ocean of pines bathed in moonlight replaced the city of skyscrapers and lines of cars. Browning grass rolled up hills and lined wooden fences, wild along thick trunks and clusters of rock. We certainly weren’t in New York City anymore. If I had to guess, I would assume we were somewhere upstate instead.
Atop a small hill was a white, wood-framed house with a green roof and broken windows. Beside the house were the remains of a collapsed barn, rotted wood piled alongside loose shingles and gray stone. A partially erect silo still stood beside what was left of the barn, stained brown with years beneath the beating of the sun and rain.
A quick glance in either direction made me feel better about my choice to comply with Quinn’s wishes for the time being. There wasn’t a soul close enough to hear my screams anyway. “Interesting choice in safe house.”
“Safe house?” Quinn didn’t remove his hand from my arm. He pulled me toward the farmhouse, grip tight. “I forgot you were friends with a notorious assassin.”
I grimaced. Sometimes I liked to forget what Samson was. What he’d done. What he’d been forced to do for Frank.
“This isn’t a safe house. It came with one of my more recent acquisitions.” Quinn slid his gaze over to mine. “I believe you ran him over.”
My jaw dropped. “You made someone a zombie and stole their house?”
“No. They were already dead. I just took control of his body. The house was an added benefit.” He shook his head. “I already told you—taking a life with my magic requires a sacrifice I’m not willing to make. Magic isn’t free.”
“You say that like it justifies the magic you do.” I worked my wrists against the plastic wrapped around them, skin raw.
Samson didn’t have to pay a price, per se, but controlling someone’s brain did knock him out for several hours. What was the difference between Samson and Quinn’s abilities, aside from Quinn playing with corpses?
“At least the magic I use doesn’t dissolve the free will of another human being.” He must’ve felt me twitch. Quinn smiled knowingly. “Yeah, that’s right. I know exactly what your telepathic friend does. He’s like a goddamn parasite.”
I cut him a glare. “You violate the dead. That hardly makes you a paragon of virtue, Mr. Belliston.”
“But it’s a world better than violating the living, don’t you think?”
“And what, exactly, would you say you’ve done to me then? If this isn’t considered a violation—”
“I wouldn’t finish that sentence, Miss Ashby.” Quinn stopped in front of the door to the old house and dropped a hand on the rusted doorknob. “If I wanted to violate you, I would.”
Cold ran down my limbs that had nothing to do with the winter air whipping around my arms and legs.
“Remember,” he said and pushed open the door. The hinge squealed in protest but allowed us passage anyway. “I won’t kill you, but I made no such promises not to hurt you if you don’t behave.”
Then he pushed me across the threshold and into the dark.
Quinn didn’t give me much of an opportunity to appraise the house. He led me through a living room bare of furniture save a couch and a small television and then marched me straight to an empty bedroom. Without another word, he left me standing in the center of it and shut the door behind him.
The window, unfortunately, had been boarded up on the outside, and I somehow doubted it opened freely anymore.
I ambled over to the window and sat beside it, pressing my back to the wall and turning my head to peek out of the sliver of moonlight breaking through the glass past a gap in the plywood boarding it from the outside.
Freedom. So close yet so far.
As the hours crept by, I retreated into my thoughts, trying to piece together the horrible puzzle that was this mess. Samson. Photograph. Necromancers. How did they all fit together? Maybe they didn’t.
Quinn had said that Frank wasn’t his boss, but that didn’t mean his boss didn’t answer to Frank. Still, the most likely conclusion was I’d been kidnapped by at the behest of Frank to figure out where his telepathic son had gone off too. This did not bode well for me.
However, if I did manage to escape this house with my life, I still had the picture to contend with. If one of Frank’s employees hadn’t taken the picture, which made more sense as time went on seeing as Frank hadn’t apprehended Samson yet, that meant someone else had their sights set on him. Someone that wasn’t Frank.
Or maybe Vee had been right, and someone Frank hired was messing with me.
I dropped my head against the wall. Great. I potentially had two sets of bad guys to deal with, and no means to do anything about either one, or I was a gigantic idiot and let Frank get to me. Apparently, I had angry ghosts following me around too, and after everything that happened last summer, I didn’t doubt it.
Shivers racked my body the longer I sat in the room, unable to warm in the winter cold. The only warmth to be found was Samson’s picture in my coat pocket, reminding me of why I’d landed here in the first place, and who I desperately wished to live long enough to see again.