Blood of the Wicked (7 page)

Abandon all hope
.

Someone had a sense of humor.

Silas navigated around the roadblocks and piles of rubble. The tunnel walls closed in on them, an inky field of echoes and stone. “Where to?”

Jessie closed her eyes briefly. The memory of Caleb’s signal and her own magic coalesced into a single, faded thread. She didn’t know why she saw everything as strings connecting together. Symbolism wasn’t her strength.

But it worked, and that’s what she liked.

She opened her eyes again and stared intently through the windshield. “Keep straight, I guess. This tunnel has to end sometime.” The cab bounced and swayed. “It’s hard to imagine that this was once a thriving city. We’re not even a minute in, and it feels like driving into a tomb.”

“May as well be. Two million people died in the quake, and that’s just in Seattle. Effectively a tomb, isn’t it?” Silas held the steering wheel tightly, bent over it to keep a close eye on the dark pressing in on all sides.

“That’s horrible.”

“That’s life,” Silas countered.

Jessie bit her lip before she said more. Before she took his figured casualties and included the numbers of people tried, executed, murdered, and burned to death. Two million? It wasn’t nearly high enough.

The tunnel opened up in front of the headlights, swept over a broken expanse of cracked asphalt. The dark didn’t ease. It was as if they were still in that tunnel, Jessie thought. A broken, haunted maze.

“And we’re in. Recognize anything?”

“No,” she said, frowning. “I can’t see jack.” The truck navigated around fallen, twisted metal and potholes the size of the windshield. “Silas, I don’t get it. How does the city stay upright? I mean, there’s millions of tons of metal and glass on top of us.”

“Architecture isn’t my field,” Silas replied dryly, and slowed almost to a crawl as the battered pickup forged through a standing valley of stagnant water. “By all accounts, Seattle was built on an older version of itself even before the earthquake. I guess they’re just carrying on the tradition.”

“Dumb tradition,” Jessie said, and blinked as he flicked a switch. The headlights brightened, unfurled like a beacon to illuminate a brilliant swath through the dark. It bounced over a canvas of pitted metal, reflected back at them in a sea of pipes and rust.

Her eyes widened. “Holy—”

“Fuck me,” Silas breathed. “How close is that ceiling?”

Close enough to reach out and touch, if she felt like it. Jessie stared at the artificial sky above them. The road dipped down, eased into a slant that pushed the ceiling higher and higher. The twisted beams faded into the darkness that Jessie imagined had once been a beautiful sky.

Sadness clutched at her. People had died here by the tens of thousands. She felt like an intruder.

“What landmarks are you looking for, exactly?”

Jessie jerked her thoughts out of what-if and once-was to frown at him. Frowning was a safe option, and so much better than forgetting herself and reaching out to touch him.

God, she wished he wasn’t so . . . so
there
.

“What?” she asked. “With the who?”

“Landmarks,” he repeated, taking a moment to turn his cool gray-green eyes to her. “You’re looking for landmarks, right?”

Oh.
Right
. Jessie nodded to the widening road in front of them. “This will lead to a square.” She didn’t explain how she knew that. She just did. “I think there was a statue there once, but the pedestal is still there. I hope,” she added, because it sounded more like honesty if she allowed doubt to creep into her voice.

He nodded, as if in agreement. “I don’t know how much things change down here.”

“I don’t, either. But either way, barring a total cave-in”—the thought made her spine go cold—“it should be familiar enough.” She jumped when the first splatter fanned over the windshield.

“The hell?”

“What was that?” Jessie asked at the same time, bracing both hands on the dashboard. Water slid across the glass in a current. Another fat drop splashed over the driver’s side, and Silas turned on the windshield wipers. “Oh! Do you have a flashlight?”

“Glove box.”

She fumbled with the catch, found the heavy plastic light, and spent an extra few moments searching for the switch. With a rough sound of amusement, Silas reached over and depressed the button embedded into the tail end.

The powerful beam sheared through her window. It speared through the dark, stripped away a path of light that found the ceiling and outlined the maze of metal. “Oh,” she gasped, and touched Silas’s leg beside her to get his attention. “Look!”

The artificial sky rained. As the truck eased into the rubble-strewn square, water poured from the pipes twisting out of the structured asphalt overhead. It was the only rain the old city streets could ever know again, and the water poured wild and cold from the tangled weave of piping.

Silas eased the truck to a stop. For a long moment, neither spoke. Instead the oddly musical tone of water dripping onto metal, glass, and cement filled the tomblike serenity of the courtyard.

Muscle shifted. Jessie was abruptly yanked back to the realization that she still wrapped her fingers around his thigh. That Silas hadn’t drawn away. Neither had she.

She stared at her hand, palm to denim.

Jessie snatched her hand back, fumbled for the door latch. “Come on,” she said quickly, feeling like an idiot. She hoped it was too dark in the cab to see the embarrassment she knew turned her face red. “We can walk from here.”

“Keep the flashlight, you’ll need it.”

“Don’t you need one?”

She didn’t stop to check his expression as he followed her lead. “I always have one on me. I wonder,” he said thoughtfully. “This must be the drainage from the upper city when it rains. Another storm must have rolled in.”

“Don’t like the weather? Wait ten minutes,” she said wryly. An odd, unnerving glow of satisfaction warmed her at his amused grunt.

She bit down on her lip, winced.
Behave
. “Come on. I’m pretty sure we aren’t far, now. And the road’s worse up ahead.”

Jessie mentally kicked herself as the words fell out of her jumbled brain. Her overeager mouth. He studied the other end of the broken cobbled square, shrouded completely in inky shadow. “How can you tell?”

“I’m guessing,” she lied quickly. Smoothly. She tucked the flashlight between her knees while she gathered her hair up into her hands, hiding behind the efficiency of the motion.

“The place looks like hell,” Silas observed, but he watched her.

Her
, not the surroundings. His hands moved, checked the gun in its holster, zipped his faded jacket halfway, locked the truck doors behind them, but it was her he studied.

Did he sense the lie? Jessie rolled her shoulders. It didn’t ease any tension. “Let’s just go.” Without waiting, she grabbed the heavy flashlight and set across the rain-splattered square. She tried hard to keep her attention on the uneven cobbles underfoot. She knew without looking that he fell into step beside her.

The man radiated presence. She’d have to get used to it. At least for now.

Within moments, both were soaked to the skin and Jessie had unzipped her jacket to let the cold water steal away some of the inane heat curling in her belly. The air smelled coppery, and when she licked her lips, she tasted a tang to the water that reminded her of metal.

Where did all this water go? A sudden image of rampant flooding made her grit her teeth. Letting her imagination run away wouldn’t help her now. It had rained regularly for fifty years, the water had to go somewhere.

The thought was cold comfort as she walked beside Silas. She peered at every crumbling wall, every empty, skeletal frame as they navigated the twisted maze of roads.

As she followed the magic.

Jessie pointed down what had once been a side street, at least before the whole underground had become just that. “I think it’s this one.”

Wordlessly Silas reached into his coat and withdrew a small penlight. The high-powered beam cut through the artificial night like a knife. “Stay close.”

He led the way this time, cutting her off before she could do more than raise her foot for the first step. She glared at his back. “Expecting trouble?”

“Always.”

The single, flat word took some of the wind out of her irked sails. Always? How . . . sad.

How familiar
.

Jessie aimed her flashlight at the treacherous street at her feet and followed, blinking water from her eyes. She didn’t say anything at all as he picked his way across rippled, broken pavement. He stepped over a mound of twisted earth and asphalt, said, “Careful,” as he continued past it.

Jessie blinked at it. Frowned. Without warning, it coalesced into a full picture in her mind. “Oh,” she breathed, crouching down to touch the massive hump. Something soft and green ticked her palm around the angled edges of old cement.

The earth was reclaiming this forgotten city. Jessie didn’t need to
see
to know there were roots jammed through the mound. Roots and moss and broken stone. “Wow,” she whispered, because she didn’t have the words to explain the joy, the sheer amazement that slipped underneath her wariness, her anger, and bloomed.

There was hope, primal and alive.

“What did you find?” Silas called from the shadows ahead. His voice bounced from wet stone to rotting siding, eerily surreal.

Jessie raised her head, blinked quickly. Yanked her brain firmly into focus. “Nothing!” she lied. He wouldn’t understand, anyway. She gently patted the mound of life and ruined city, stepped over it, and hurried to catch up.

This time, the magic seized her by the throat. Her awareness fragmented outward like shrapnel, too many images assailing her at once to see any of it. Then her power flared, wrapped around her consciousness, and forced it all together into that single thread, faded even further and harder to pick out from the real world that battered at her from all sides.

Rain, metal, silence.

There
.

She shook her head, hard, and touched the door beside her. “Caleb,” she whispered. Without waiting, without daring to breathe, she pushed against the half-rotted door.

Splinters came off in her hands. Water poured into the hole left behind. Jessie slanted her shoulder against the ruined frame and, gritting her teeth, pushed harder.

Chapter Seven

T
he rotted door slammed open, tumbled Jessie into a tiny, cramped space. Dust and decay clouded the air, coalesced like a fine mist around her, and she coughed as she stumbled through the forgotten room. The smell was awful, sealed rot and mold.

She breathed through her mouth, sneezed anyway, and clapped both hands over her nose. Her eyes watered.

Outside, Silas called her name, his voice muted behind the uneven rhythm of the rain. She ignored it, knew she’d get hell for it later. It didn’t matter. Not if Caleb was here. She bypassed old wooden crates piled with things, junk, some long since disintegrated in the damp air, and stepped over heaps of garbage and forgotten treasures. Old tools, their wood rotted away. Plastic toys, filthy beyond recognition. A metal wheelbarrow rusted into the ground.

Jessie wound a careful path between them all. Across the room, picked out by the powerful sweep of her borrowed light, the remnants of wooden stairs decayed beneath a door set a foot up into the wall. She climbed over piles of ruined garbage toward it.

One part eerie, one part awe-inspiring, Jessie realized she trespassed through time. That she stepped over the sad remains of someone’s life, someone’s home or business.

Broken, abandoned, destroyed. Like so many since the earthquake and after.

Old wood crunched under her boots. She bent, rifled through the disintegrating remains of something long past recognition, and couldn’t help her low, regretful sigh. “Whoever you were,” she murmured, “I hope you lived.”

The odds were slim at best. By all accounts, fire and flooding took care of whatever survivors could have held on long enough to be rescued.

She stood, unable to do more than hope, and dusted off her hands. The door the steps had once led to was solid, protected from the elements and mottled by mold. She braced her hands against it and pushed.

Nothing. It creaked, but it stayed put.

Behind her, a second, thinner beam of light caused her shadow to dance wildly across the moldy panels. “Stay close,” Silas said, anger edging every word, “means letting me know when you wander off.”

“Sorry,” Jessie said, and didn’t mean it. “We need to get through here.”

“Have you tried the doorknob?”

Jessie shot him a scathing look over her shoulder, eyes narrowed. Her gaze caught on his wet, disheveled hair. His face was set in hard, angry lines, sheened with water. His own smoky eyes raked over the door in front of her, and that little surge of heat licked through her blood again. “Y-yeah,” she said, and had to stop to clear her throat. Damn. She needed to stop that. “It’s stuck or something.”

“Move.” Silas put the penlight between his teeth and pushed her away from the frame. He set his shoulder to the door, one hand on the panel for balance, and shoved.

Wood groaned.

“Damn,” he grunted, and shifted his weight onto his back foot. He withdrew the metal flashlight from his mouth and ordered, “Protect your face.”

“What?”

Jessie rolled her eyes and covered her face with one arm when he only glowered at her. She heard him move, feet hard on the floor, and then wood splintered beneath a heavy thud. Another one, and the door cracked, slammed inward.

“
Fuck
,” he said suddenly. “Jessie, don’t—”

She ignored him, dodged his warning grasp with ease. “I’m sure we’re almost—”

The words, her thoughts, shriveled on her tongue.

Black and brown. Blood and bone. The smell rolled over her like a physical push, putrid and sharp. She gagged. “Oh, God.” She staggered back toward the wall, her flashlight clattering to the ground at her feet. “Oh, God.
Silas
.”

She felt his hands clamp on her shoulders, knew she’d been turned around, but all she could see was the corpse in the center of the tiny room. Half gone. Half liquefied. Half—Oh, God, was she standing in it?

Was she standing in
Caleb
?

Every hair on her body prickled in a wave of cold sweat as her stomach lurched. “I have to—Let me go!”

He didn’t. Silas caught her against him, pulled her close and tucked her face against his shoulder. His arms wrapped tightly around her, pulled her back out of the room. Back into the dusty storage space, into the gloom that didn’t have the same colors.

The same corpse.

She struggled, he only held her tighter. “Jessie,” he said, as unyielding as the arms he wrapped solidly around her, as the hard muscle of his chest beneath her seeking hands. She caught fistfuls of his jacket and didn’t know whether to push him away or hang on for dear life.

The smell was terrible. Now she knew why.

“Oh, God,” she whispered again. “Who is it? Why?”

Silas slid one large hand around the back of her head, cradled her head. The small of her back. “Breathe,” he demanded. “Come on, Jessie, breathe. In. Out. Through your nose—goddamn it.” He hauled her around as her body spasmed, jerked her into the dim light of her fallen flashlight and caught her face between his hands.

He glowered down at her. His eyebrows furrowed, mouth set into a hard line. “Breathe through your nose,” he said again, resolutely maintaining eye contact. “It’ll kill off your sense of smell. Focus on me.” She did. In. Out. Just like he said. “Keep doing it. You’ll get used to it, just breathe.”

Get used to it?

Didn’t it bother him at all?

She clenched her teeth. Inhaled. Slowly, inch by inch, the world righted itself around her.

Jessie’s jaw ached, her throat ached. God, her soul ached. “I can’t tell,” she whispered, her eyes burning. “I can’t tell. Who is it?”

“I don’t know.” He smoothed back her hair. “If you can stay here, I’ll—”

“No.” Jessie sucked in a breath, held it until her lungs screamed for air. She let it out angrily. “I can do this.”

“Damn it, Jessie, you don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do.” She wrapped her fingers around his wrists, pulled his hands from her face. “I have to.”

His eyes hardened. More stone than ice. She met them, stared into them, and mentally clung. But she had to let go. She stepped back.

“Okay.” His agreement was reluctant at best. Angry and unsure. “Stay close to me, and if you have to get out, you say so.”

“I will.” This time, she wasn’t sure it was the lie she wanted it to be. God, if that was Caleb in there. If that was her baby brother, she had to know.

Tears gathered in her eyes as she picked up the flashlight and followed Silas back into the tiny room. Everything blurred, but she didn’t have to see it to feel the gooey, gelatinous squelch of the carpet beneath her boots. She circled around the edge, wiped her face as surreptitiously as she could.

“Jessie?”

“What?”

Silas crouched by the body, the thing bloated and splayed. He stared at it, studied it, so calmly, so impassively, that Jessie’s heart went out to a man whose life had become so hard that he could look at something like this without screaming. Calm, unflinching.

She scraped shaking hands through her hair. Tightened the knot of it in place because, damn it, she didn’t know what else to do. “I don’t see anything . . .”
Out of place
sounded horribly wrong. She shook her head. “I guess it just—”

“It’s not your brother,” he said flatly. “It’s a woman.”

Relief warred with pure terror. Utter guilt. “How long?”

“Don’t know.” He grimaced. “Can you collect samples?”

Her mind balked. Jessie stiffened, raised her chin. “Of what?”

“Blood.” Silas reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a small plastic cylinder. “One from each end of a circle around the body. I’ll cover it.”

He tossed her the cylinder. It rattled as she caught it in her free hand. That. It. Not a her, not a name, just an it.

She stared at the cylinder, more than a little dazed.

“Pop the top,” he explained. His voice was calm. Patient. “There should be four swabs capped by sealable plastic. Collect a gob of blood, cap it.”

“Right.” Sure. She could do that. She could pretend to be efficient and composed. Jessie turned and picked her way across the floor, trying not to think about how much blood she walked through. The body—the
woman
had to have died from blood loss.

She couldn’t imagine anyone losing this much blood and surviving for very long.

Jessie knelt, dug out the first swab.

Where are you, Caleb?

Why did the magic direct her here? The corpse wasn’t her brother, and she was relieved beyond all reason to know that, but why here?

She swirled the swab in the crusted, terrifying ooze and sealed it before a spine-deep shudder could cause her to fling the bloody thing away in a fit of hysteria. “One down,” she said, proud when her voice trembled only a little.

“Good,” Silas praised, but he wasn’t watching her. He moved the corpse, using the handkerchief he’d given her earlier to keep his hands clean. “This ritual probably used blood as a focus.”

You think?
just sounded snotty. Instead Jessie smiled weakly and stepped around him to collect a sample from the other edge of the room. She crouched, swabbed. Frowned. Gold glinted in the muted light.

A clue? Jessie reached for it, hesitated, and glanced at Silas.

He ignored her, too focused on the ruined shell in front of him.

Gold. Mired in blood.

Damn it
. She plunged her fingers into the cold, clinging layer of bloody mucus, ignored the full-body shiver rippling from head to toe. She swallowed back nausea and disgust with every ounce of willpower she possessed.

She needed to know.

Metal, streaked red beneath the dried upper layer it hid under. Real gold? She doubted it, not in this shape. Fake gold.

Plated gold, one of six, three on each side. A good number, a solid number for magical means. A bond. A seal.
Oh, Caleb
.

Her heart in her throat, Jessie raked her fingers over the crusted carpet, rolled them through the sodden layer around her feet. Three more beads spun into the light, and she struggled not to make a sound as her fingers caught on something sharp and cold.

Horrified at what she knew she’d found, Jessie shot a look back at Silas and clenched her fingers hard around a leaf-shaped pendant. It was silver, real silver, and its delicately folded edges cut into her palm as she sucked in a shaking breath.

She’d given the pendant to Caleb for his twenty-third birthday. It was the last thing she’d ever given him before he left.

The perfect focus for a spell of concealment. From her.

Why was he hiding?

Why was it
here
?

“What’d you find?”

Jessie’s eyes jerked to Silas. He watched her. Measured her.

What had he seen?

She swallowed back the bile in her throat. “Nothing,” she lied, and raised her grimy, blood-streaked hand. “I slipped.”

“Shit!” Silas shot to his feet, crossed the slippery floor in seconds. He seized her wrist, held her hand out from the rest of her body. “Get outside, wash that off,” he ordered grimly.

“It’s blood,” Jessie replied, marveling at how calm her voice seemed. So different from the inside of her head, which screamed and screamed. She mustered a wan, humorless smile. “And I think she’s a little past caring.”

“Diseases, Jessie.” Silas pulled toward the stairs hanging from thick, rusted cables. “Bacteria, anything could be in blood this contaminated. Christ, don’t touch anything.”

Jessie thought of the bloody pendant now nestled into her boot and said nothing.

S
he was the bravest civilian he’d ever seen. Silas pulled Jessie up the stairs and knew he was going to regret her involvement in this. Already did.

So much blood, and now she’d fallen in it.

He shoved open the door, its lock long since rotted away, and hauled her out into the false rain still shimmering from the pipes. It caught on the roofs and arches that crumbled around them, but the air was fresher.

He inhaled gratefully, knew she did the same when he turned to point out a running wash of water pouring from a gutter pipe beside them. His hand with the light was steady, but in his grip, Jessie felt like a major earthquake was desperately trying to erupt from her skin. He shouldn’t have let her inside, damn it.

“There, wash your ha—
Fuck
.”

It struck without warning, a seam of fire and power that curled around his wrist. The flashlight jerked. A blue glow crackled, arced over his skin, and Jessie’s eyes snapped to something behind him, widened to white-rimmed saucers of shock. Warning. “Silas—”

Silas seized her collar, jerked her down to the pavement moments before gunfire cracked across the water-spattered silence. Stone chipped just where he’d been, shards slicing through the wet air.

“Hands up, hunter!”

The command rang from the street behind them. Masculine, jeering, it was the voice of every witch who’d ever thought he had him dead to rights. Jessie’s teeth sank into her lower lip.

He touched her cheek, just by the corner of her bruised mouth. “Run,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. “No, I’m not—”

“Hey, hunter!” Another bullet chipped the wall above them, showered moldy plaster over them both.

As the echoes died away, Silas calculated the odds. There’d been five shots, with a report that sounded like a standard clip handgun. Five shots, five misses. One to go.

Hastily he yanked open the zipper of his coat and pushed his gun into her hands. “Aim,” he said harshly, “pull the trigger. No questions, no tricks. Just kill them, or they will kill you. Got it?”

She nodded jerkily, her skin shock-white beneath the wild tendrils of her damp hair. Silas touched her cheek again. Stood. “All right,” he said, hands out by his sides. He saw Jessie scoot away in his peripheral vision. “Now what?”

A man stood ten feet away, gun held loosely in a sideways grip that told Silas everything he needed to know about the man’s lack of skill. His shock of red hair was plastered to his face, and the lazy smile shaping his mouth made clear what he thought of Silas. Not a threat.

Idiot.