Chapter 12

Chapter

Twelve

H ow it’s going…

When my surroundings filtered into my unconscious brain, it took me a sec to get my bearings. My eyes didn’t want to open and my head felt heavy.

Wherever the hell I was, it was uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as that damn peacock blue settee Marty loved so much and had to have for the murder basement.

I tried shifting positions but something kept me from moving. My eyes finally popped open to find myself in total darkness.

Flaring my nostrils, I smelled the scent of damp and musty.

Pulling at my wrists, I felt the rigid clamp of something binding them together… Zip-ties? Yeah. They definitely felt like zip-ties.

I almost laughed. Seriously? What kind of moron thought zip-ties could keep me from escaping this bullshit?

Yanking at them, I tried to break them apart, but a sharp sting and an electric zap to my wrists prevented me from ripping them off.

Obviously, a smart moron.

“Ow! What the fuck?” I bellowed, my voice echoing in the inky darkness.

“Nina?” I heard someone groan in a weak voice.

I leaned into the room, realizing my feet were bound by whatever this was, too. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Brenda…it’s Brenda.”

I sat up straighter, clenching my fists. She sounded wiped out, thoroughly exhausted. Her normal lilting tone sounded dead. “Are you okay? What’s going on? Where the hell are we?”

There was a long pause with nothing but the silence of the room before I heard her whisper, “I don’t know… Weak. I’m so weak. She… she’s starving me.”

Alarm bells sounded in my head as what happened before I was knocked out cold came back to me in small slivers. “Starving you?”

Brenda’s laugh was bitter but depleted. “That’s one way it’s done when you want a vampire dead. Surely…surely you know that. It’s a spell… She used a spell…”

Of course. Wanda told me what Heath and Arch had shared with her, about how a vampire was expunged if you crossed the clan or darkened their doorsteps with a scandal involving a human. Starvation was only one of the ways they went about punishing you for a misdeed they perceived threatening to the strength of the clan.

And I heard it was ugly-painful, creating a hunger so desperate, so raw, it ate you from the inside out.

Shit.

We had to get out of here.

“Where are we?” I asked into the darkness, my own voice sounding groggy to my ears. “Do you know?”

Brenda didn’t answer for a few moments before she moaned. “I… I don’t know. She took me from the castle. One minute I was alone in my room, the next…poof, I w-was here where it’s dark a-and cold.”

Cold? She could feel the cold? I didn’t know fuck all about what happened when you actually died as a vampire, but that she could feel the temperature scared the shit out of me.

“Brenda.” I tried to keep the alarm out of my voice, but she had to wake up and I had to find a way to feed her. I wasn’t sure exactly when she’d been kidnapped, but it couldn’t have been that long. “Listen to me, stay awake. Do you hear me? You have to stay awake until I can get free.”

I strained to figure out where her voice was coming from, but it was GD dark.

She laughed again, more bitter than before, while I continued to struggle to free myself. “Impossible,” she muttered.

I grunted, twisting and turning my wrists and my feet, only to feel that same hot sting crackling over my skin. “What’s impossible? Staying awake?”

“Free. Locked…the ties are locked w-with magic.”

Shit, shit, shit. “Who’s doing this? Do you know who it is?” Because I sure thought I knew who was doing this, and when I was done with them, they’d pray for death.

Brenda huffed and shivered, a shiver I not only heard by the chatter of her teeth, but felt to my bones, settling deep in my veins like ice. “A witch. You were right. You were all right.”

Not at all helpful, but when I got my hands on this witch, she was going to fucking regret waking up today. “Do you know her, Brenda?”

Here’s the part where I fully expected her to say she did, and the admission was gonna piss me off because it was someone she’d “forgotten” to tell us about from her past.

But Brenda surprised me. “I-I don’t know who she is, but I smelled her…just like you girls said. She smells…different…”

Clenching my teeth together, I fought another fit of swearing, trying to keep my anger at bay. “Smell? You smelled her magic?”

“Yessss…” Then she gagged, a retching, gurgling sound coming from her throat.

“Listen to me, Brenda, keep your damn eyes open. Do not sleep, do you hear me? I’ll get us out of here, but do not sleep!” If she fell into a vampire coma, we were sunk. I can’t remember ever hearing about anyone who’d come back from that.

The dismal sounds she was making served to make me work harder to break free.

I couldn’t see a damn thing, even with my vampiric vision. It was all just black, but I began shifting my butt around, scooting along the hard wall I was pressed up against to see if I could bump into Brenda.

“Brenda!” I yelped. “Talk to me, and keep talking. I need to find you.”

When she didn’t respond, I yelled to her again. “Brenda! Wake the fuck up! Talk to me. Tell me what this witch looks like.”

Her chuckle was a dry rasp. “Beautiful. Not like you, but still beautiful.”

Inching closer to the sound of her voice, I demanded, “Describe her.”

As Brenda gave me the description in stilted words and sluggish sentences, I kept scooting around, trying to find her. While I listened to her tell me what this witch looked like, she sounded nothing like who I’d thought it was when I left Astrid’s house.

But she was a witch who had magic—magic that could change her appearance…

Finally, I bumped into Brenda, her body limp, the scent of her death rife in my nose.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Don’t be sorry, be awake!” Nudging her, I grimaced when she fell into me with a hard thump. “Brenda! Wake the fuck up! You have a lot of shit to look forward to. Remember what Arch said? He said you could play bingo with him and all his little troll friends. Tater Tot loves it. I bet you will, too, and then there’s Doug and the dogs. Peppermint Patty and Linus need you. You can have a life if you’ll just stay the fuck awake! ”

“Aren’t you a delight?” a melodic voice asked.

There was a sharp snap of fingers, and then there was light.

So much damn light it burned my eyes like somebody had rubbed raw onions in them, singeing them. Clamping them shut, I tried to ignore the searing pain and demand answers. “Who the fuck are you?”

From behind my eyelids, I saw a shadow pass before me, blocking out some of the abrasive light. “I can’t believe you don’t know. I guess I’d be hurt if I cared.”

Forcing my eyes back open, I stared into the face of a strange lady. Brenda was right. She really was pretty. Lots of long, flowing blonde hair shrouding her shoulders, eyes bluer than Marty’s and skin like that silk scarf Wanda wears around her head at night.

Ace detective that I am, this wasn’t at all the person I’d thought had killed Owen—or was it? How the fuck would I know? If I got out of this still undead, Marty and Wanda were going to have to come to the realization that we sucked at this.

“Who the fuck are you?” I said between teeth that I clenched so hard, I thought they’d break.

Her shoulders slumped beneath her floaty white dress. She snapped her fingers again before using her hand to make a circle around her face.

As she morphed into an entirely different person, I wanted to fucking gloat that I had been right about Owen’s killer, she was the stinky lady Owen Jr. was talking about, but my eyeballs were on fire from the glow of her magic light. When I’d smelled Grandpa Simon, it hit me, for all the good that revelation’s doing me now.

“Sonja,” I muttered, but then I sat up straight. The hell I’d let her see me sweat. That wasn’t how shit went down with me. If I was goin’ down with Brenda, I was goin’ down with my head held high. “Care to explain what the hell this is about?”

She squatted, chucking me under the chin with an evil smile. “You mean this? How I look? It’s called a cloaking spell. Easy enough if you’ve been around as long as I have. You met Sonja, the messy divorcée and neighborhood gossip. And now you’ve seen the real me. ”

I lifted my chin, yanking it away from her touch—a touch that sent a slimy slither of dread along my spine. “Cut to the chase. What the fuck do you want?”

I’d been in plenty of dangerous situations in our line of work with OOPS, and despite the fact that this bitch filled me with a serious case of the icks, I was ready for whatever she was dolin’ out.

Sonja pushed my hair from my face with tender fingers. “You haven’t figured that out yet?”

Brenda moaned beside me, meaning, I had to get her fed soon. “Pretty sure you wanna tell me, so how about you get to it so I can beat your ass and be done with it. What do you want?” I ground out, the words thick on my tongue, the restraints around my wrists embedding themselves deeper into my flesh.

She chuckled again, soft and light, but the subtext screamed, “You’re gonna die.”

“What do you think I want, Nina?”

“Revenge…” Brenda husked out. “She wants revenge…”

Well, we’d been right about that, hadn’t we? It was one of the only things we’d been right about, but we’d been right. Sonja had a grudge, and I’d bet my bippy she wanted to tell us all about it.

Straining against the zip-ties, digging my heels into the hard ground, I asked, “For what, Sonja? Why do you want revenge?” Every word I spoke was fucking torture, my tongue weirdly, suddenly raw.

Sonja rose from her haunches, backing away, her hair swinging around in a cloud of blonde Marty would envy. “Didn’t Brenda tell you?”

“Seeing as you’re starving her to death, she was too weak to explain. Why don’t you tell me?”

She shrugged her shoulders, giving me a coy smile as her face reverted back to her true self. “Alfred, of course. You did find his picture, right? Under Brenda’s mantel? I put it there as part of my revenge spell. You know, a picture of your lost love in the home of the tramp who stole him from you? I know it was you ladies who found it. I smelled your essence when it incinerated.”

Note to self, in the paranormal world, a whole lot of identify-by-smell happened. We needed to tread lighter—or shower more.

That aside, who the hell was Alfred? “Who the hell is Alfred?”

“The man in the picture, silly! His name is Alfred!”

“He lied,” Brenda said, weaker with each word, her voice raspy and slurred. “His name…wasn’t…Winston…”

I needed to forget the details about his name and why he’d lied. We had to get the hell out of here and get Brenda fed. When I had this bitch in a choke hold she’d remember into the afterlife, I could ask questions.

“But didn’t this thing with Win…er, Alfred, happen a long-ass time ago? I don’t wanna play armchair psychiatrist, but this shit? It’s not exactly healthy to hang on to stuff this long, let alone hundreds of years. Maybe you should get help?”

Sonja tipped her head back, revealing her creamy throat as she laughed—before she lifted her head and balled her fist, hurling a fireball at my head.

The hot ball of her anger hit me square in the head, singeing my hair. Not the first time this has happened, by the way. When Robbie was learning how to be a witch, she’d set my hair on fire, too, but I would’ve liked the previous time to have been the last, thanks very much.

While my hair crackled and sizzled, and Brenda slid farther down my body, Sonja leaned into me, her face hard, her blue eyes fiery. “Alfred was the love of my life! He was supposed to marry me. Meeee ! It was all arranged by our families, and she stole him! This tramp—this jezebel —ruined my life! He was mine!”

Wait. Their families had arranged it? Did they do that for stable boys back in the day? I ground my next words out, trying to stay focused, but the pain of the zip-ties digging into my flesh was becoming a distraction I couldn’t ignore.

“But he was a fucking stable boy, Sonja. Why would your family want you to marry a stable boy? Back then, wasn’t that like marrying the guy who works at the gas station?”

Sonja looked surprised at first, but then she got her footing. “Alfred was no stable boy! He was a mining heir. His father owned half of Pennsylvania, and he was my fiancé!”

“So what the fuck was he doing, pretending to be a stable boy?”

Planting her hands on her slim hips, Sonja made a face. “He hated his father and he hated mining. My father owned railroads. We were the perfect match. Perfect until he ran away and went to work for her brother.” She looked away, like she was lost in a memory. “He left me at the altar, humiliated me in front of hundreds of people…”

I dug the toes of my work boots into the hard ground, trying to stand up. I’d feel better if I could look her in the eye. “So why did you wait all this time to get your revenge? And girl, that’s called obsession, not revenge,” I spat.

Tears formed in her eyes, sliding along her rosy cheeks. “After Alfred ran away, my father lost his business. Without that merger, we became paupers. We were thrown out onto the street—and all because he fell in love ,” she said, her words dripping with sarcasm. “I was married off to a horrible man who beat me, abused me, for money that my father just wasted anyway,” she growled, hissing the last words.

Brenda was fading fast. Her silence beside me, her limp form sagging, told me so. We needed to get this show on the road.

Rolling my head on my neck, my burnt hair falling in my eyes, I pushed harder to get an answer. I knew what Sonja wanted. She wanted to brag—gloat about the work she’d put into besting Brenda. I wanted her to get it the hell over with so I could get my hands on her.

“But you still didn’t answer the question. Why did you wait so long to get your revenge, Sonja?”

She sighed, long and beleaguered, letting her fingers flutter to her mouth. “Because I couldn’t find Brenda! I didn’t know where she was. We didn’t have social media back then. But I never gave up, and while I waited, I met someone who showed me how to practice the art of dark magic, and we made a deal.”

A deal . Darnell had once made one of those—not for the reasons Sonja had, but deals were common in the paranormal world. It happened all the time, mostly with the devil.

“A deal?” I spat. “A deal that did what Sonja?”

“A deal that turned me into a witch and bestowed me with immortality. A deal that gave me more power than you can ever imagine.”

Drops of blood began to slide along my wrists and onto my fingers. That meant the force of Sonja’s spell had a rare magnitude. Vampires don’t readily bleed, our healing powers too great, unless the wounds have a whole lot of power behind them.

“Great. So you were turned into a witch. Yahoo. Get to the point,” I ordered, my jaw tight, knowing my temper was getting the better of me and the tearing of my flesh wasn’t helping my patience.

Sonja lifted her chin, the smile on her face fond. “Eventually, I grew strong…strong enough with my new powers that I could hatch a plan to make Brenda pay for ruining my life, for leaving me destitute. It took time— so much time —so much research, but once I found Brenda, and then I found Owen, it was all a breeze from there.”

She grinned then, like she was proud of all her hard work, putting her hands behind her back and clasping them together.

“But she didn’t even know you existed…”

“Well, she does now, doesn’t she?”

To say I was rapidly becoming tired of this game of cat and mouse was a fucking understatement. If I didn’t get these damn ties off my limbs, they were going to sever them.

“So ya catfished Brenda. Made her fall in love with Owen. You found a guy who looked a lot like Alfred, moved in next to him, murdered him and framed Brenda. Planted that fingernail at his apartment, the electrical cord at her house, cloaked yourself to look like her in the video…all so you could frame her for the murder of a guy who had two kids and a wife and knew nothing about your grudge. The icing on the cake? You tried to friend his damn wife with his fake profile. You’re an evil genius. Blah, blah, blah. Oh, and I bet you killed Alfred, too—which is why he never met up with her the night they were supposed to run away together. Amiright?”

If I could get my hands around this bitch’s neck, I’d choke her until her eyeballs popped out of her head. She’d obliterated Lacy and Owen’s lives, tried to ruin Brenda’s and had the gall to come to my house, because she was a total flippin’ nutcase. Love does some strange shit to people.

The anger inside of me churned, twisted until it almost made me uncomfortable.

Waving a finger at me, Sonja winked. “Aren’t you a smartypants? Yes, I killed Alfred. And Owen wasn’t just any old guy, gorgeous. Owen—whether he knew it or not—was a direct descendant of Alfred Barker . Pretty good match, don’t you think? God, think about that kinda luck, huh?”

Again, I repeat, we sucked at this private investigation thing. Would a skilled detective have thought to look up Owen Barker and his lineage? Probably.

“Yeah, you lucky fucking ducky,” I mocked, pressing my lips together to keep from screaming while blood drained out of me and pooled at my feet. “So what’s the end game here, you whacked-out jealous bitch? I mean, you had to know that no human jail could hold Brenda. You could frame her all you wanted, but human prison was the wrong answer.”

Letting her shoulders slump, Sonja sighed again. “Of course, I know that. But I knew what would happen if the human police investigated. I knew it would be all over the news. I knew the clan would see it. But I really thought the clan would have gotten to her by now. I know what they do to your kind if you put them in danger, and it’s ugly. Painful. Agonizingly painful. That’s so much better than any kind of punishment I could have doled out—to have your own kind turn on you. But they couldn’t find her! Why couldn’t they find her, Nina?”

The angry side of me, the side that comes out with both fists ready to ram down someone’s throat, wanted to rip this bitch to shreds. The side of me trussed up like a damn turkey, bleeding dry, my flesh almost ripped to the bone? Not so much.

“Why—couldn’t—I—find—her—Nina?” she screamed at me, her eyes wild.

She was due to lose control any second, and I had no way out. None that I could see, anyway.

Reckless bitch that I am, I smiled, cool as a cucumber. “Because she was with us.”

“Exactly! She was with you . Of course, you know that’s how I found her—because you fools took the picture of Alfred, and it led me right to her, and to you. And soon your little friends will be here, too, and I’ll finish you all off. I can’t leave evidence behind, right? I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to kill your friends, in the most horrible way possible.”

I finally got a foothold, managing to rear upward. The intent behind it? To steamroll her into oblivion.

I hurled myself toward her, my wrists bloodied, my feet tangling until I heard a crack, my ankle twisting with such force, I had to fight not to scream. I fell forward onto the ground to the tune of Brenda crying my name.

Then Sonja was there, hovering over me, toeing me until I rolled over to look up and find her swinging her arms.

I assumed it was for the big wind-up, where she socked us with some kind of heinous magic spell. Instead, she asked, “How about we make this a pick-your-death kind of adventure? Remember those? They were so much fun, don’t you think? So what’ll it be? Starvation? Endless, relentless burning by sunlight? Oh, wait!” She hopped around with glee. “I know! What about a garlic cross around your neck?”

Choices, choices, right?