‘‘Now, we’re going to take care of you real nice. Promise. We’re just so excited you came by.’’ She opened the back door, and the spell woven over the door hit me like a barrel full of bricks. I tasted blood at the back of my throat, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was walk through that door. I hadn’t felt a threshold spell that strong since Zayvion’s place.
‘‘Come on in. Don’t be shy,’’ a man’s voice said. ‘‘We’ve been waiting for you.’’
I swallowed blood and blinked hard. I knew that voice. And when he turned on the lamp next to him, I knew I shouldn’t be surprised, but damn it, I was.
James, Mama’s slick-as-a-snake Boy stood there, grinning at me. But what surprised me more was that next to him stood another smiling man. And that man was Zayvion Jones.
Chapter Fifteen
B
etrayal sucks.
My heart felt like someone was in my chest kicking it with steel-toed boots—and that someone was me. How could I have I trusted him? How could I have liked him? Stupid, stupid heart. When I got out of here—and I was so going to get out of this so I could see Zay’s ass in jail—I swore I would never fall for, never trust, and never care for anyone again.
It was going to be all about me from now on. I was going to look after myself alone, and the rest of the world and all the people in it could go to hell for all I cared.
Who needed this kind of grief? Who needed to find out, again, that someone they loved was just a back-stabbing bastard who played me for all he could get?
He had used me.
And I let him.
I didn’t know which made me angrier.
Bonnie shoved me through the glyphs and the door. I felt a hot ribbon of blood pour from my nose. I wiped at it with the back of my left hand. Thunder rolled, still quiet, but coming closer.
‘‘So how’s this going to work?’’ I asked.
Zay stayed right where he was, the far side of a room that was some sort of storage behind the kitchen. Wooden shelves were stocked with cans, boxes, and bags of things you’d expect to see in a restaurant. The doorway, where Zay was standing, opened to a narrow view of a chopping block and countertop. I was pretty sure that was the kitchen behind him.
James strolled over to me, took my right wrist, and pushed up my coat sleeve. He whistled. ‘‘Zayvion told me you survived the visit from my business associate this morning. I’m sorry how that turned out.’’
I bet he was. I was, after all, still alive.
‘‘Zayvion also told me you had been burned and could no longer use magic, but I didn’t believe him.’’ He grinned, showing me all of his dental work. His breath smelled overwhelmingly sweet, like cherry candy. Blood magic. Probably mixed with something else, maybe cocaine or speed. Great. The man was raging.
‘‘My apologies,’’ he said to Zayvion.
Zay shrugged.
Okay, so if Zay told him I couldn’t use magic, maybe he wasn’t completely on their side either. He knew in intimate ways just exactly how well I could use magic, and how well we used it together. Soul Complements, and all that. Maybe he was working another angle. One all his own.
I tugged my wrist out of James’ hold. Fact one: my arm hurt. It was quickly going from ache to throb. Fact two: I refused to let anyone get handsy with me. Fact three: despite the ache, my arm was also starting to itch, which meant I might still have some sort of chance of drawing on magic if I needed it. One look at James’ happy, glassy eyes and sweat-covered face and I was pretty sure I’d need it soon.
Thunder rolled somewhere over the city, and James pointed toward the door to the kitchen.
‘‘Why don’t we step inside. Maybe I can get you a drink?’’ he offered.
‘‘Water would be fine,’’ I said. I walked across the room, James in front of me, Bonnie and her gun behind me. Zay just watched with a neutral expression, pulling the Zen act.
‘‘Bastard,’’ I said as I walked past him.
‘‘I told you to stay there,’’ he said, plenty loud enough for James and Bonnie to hear. ‘‘You could be in a nice holding cell right now, telling the police a story about people who disappear into thin air and plot to overthrow your father’s fortune, and that you have no alibis for your whereabouts when he was killed. And you know why you aren’t? Because you are too damn stubborn to do anything anyone tells you to do.’’
My mind went blank. Then it filled with fury. I leaned back and punched him in the face with everything I had.
Zay’s head snapped back and hit the wall behind him. He yelled and grabbed at his nose and slid down the wall. I stepped up to swing at him again, but Bonnie caught my arm and shoved the gun so hard against my spine I could feel a bruise spreading. My fist hurt too—I was pretty sure I had broken my pinky, but that pain, I had to admit, was way worth it.
‘‘Funny,’’ she said, ‘‘but stupid. Do that again and I’ll shoot you.’’
Zay got on his feet and those tiger eyes of his were really burning now. If I weren’t deeply in hate with him, I might think he didn’t look all that angry. I might even say he looked pleased. That he was happy I’d done that. That maybe he was trying to tell me something else with that look, something secret.
‘‘Bitch,’’ he said.
Well, that was no secret.
‘‘Fuck you, Jones.’’
Bonnie shoved me toward the kitchen. I couldn’t tell if Zay followed, because he was too damn quiet for me to hear and the thunder was close enough that it had gone from an intermittent rumble to a deep growl. Besides that, Zay was only a small part of this surprise party. My heart sank as I saw Mama’s other Boys, four of them in total, leaning against the kitchen counters, and over there, rocking on the floor in front of the refrigerator, was Cody. Mama herself stood in the middle of the room, looking angry and worried.
Oh. Hells. I was so screwed.
I quickly went through my options. Trying to get out of this alive was priority one. Trying to get out of this alive with Cody was priority two. If they wanted to negotiate, I’d negotiate.
I pushed panic down, and grabbed hold of my confidence. I could handle this. I was a Beckstrom, and if there was one thing we were good at, it was Influencing people to get our way. If ever there were a time for me to give in and act like my father, this was it.
James was at the sink and strangely true to his word, filling a plastic cup with water for me.
‘‘Hello, Mama,’’ I said. She looked away and would not make eye contact. Wasn’t that interesting? Maybe she wasn’t the center of this affair after all.
I gave each of the Boys a look. Like matching statues of didn’t-give-a-damn, they looked back at me, and made no other move.
James walked over and handed me the cup of water. ‘‘Here you are.’’ He strolled back to the sink and leaned against it, his arms crossed over his chest.
I was glad he hadn’t filled it all the way to the top, because my hand shook and my pinky was so swollen it made it hard to keep the cup steady. I did my best to cover all that, and took a sip. I was thirsty enough I could drain the river. Both of them. But I wanted to have something in my hand I could use to delay my responses—it was an old board-meeting trick I’d learned from my dad—so I resigned myself to the fact that I might need to make this cup of water last a very long time.
The lights flickered, a blink of darkness. The storm was coming.
‘‘The situation is fairly simple, Ms. Beckstrom—may I call you Allie?’’ James asked.
‘‘No.’’
He smiled. ‘‘Good. As I was saying, Allie, there is only a small thing I need from you, something Zayvion has assured me you will have no quarrel with.’’
‘‘Really? I don’t recall hiring Zayvion to speak for me. Is this a legal matter? If so, we should both have lawyers present to protect our interests.’’ I tried putting some Influence behind my words, but was too shaken to do much good.
‘‘Soon,’’ he said. ‘‘But first I thought you and I could talk. Come to an understanding. An agreement. Like family.’’
Okay, that got me. I blinked and looked harder at him. He didn’t look much like any of the women my father had married, or at least none whom I could remember. And he was the polar opposite to my dad—shorter, darker, thinner. The person he most resembled was Mama.
‘‘Family? How exactly does that work?’’
His smile flashed into a grin. He looked like an animal about to strike, something hungry and quick.
‘‘Snake man, Snake man, bake a cake man,’’ Cody whimpered.
Oh, hells no.
Snake man. The man who killed my father. The man who somehow made Cody forge my signature. The man who threw a spell strong enough to kill someone and had apparently not paid the price for it. Holy shit.
Cold sweat spread over my skin. I took a drink of water, hiding my reaction as best as I could. If he could kill my dad at a distance and still be alive, I figured he could kill me close-up. I glanced around the room, looking for an escape, a weapon. But gun-happy Bonnie was still behind me. I assumed Zay was too, since I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see a knife, a fork, or a heavy pan within reach. For a working kitchen it was painfully clean of any dangerous implements.
‘‘You and I are kindred spirits,’’ James continued. ‘‘You hated your father. I hated your father. You wanted him dead. I wanted him dead. You wanted his business to stop taking advantage of the poor and the innocent, like my poor little brother, and I wanted his business to recognize the original creator of the Beckstrom Storm Rods and pay back the money he has made off the technology he stole.’’
I put two and two together and came up empty. ‘‘You wanted my father to pay Perry Hoskil for the storm rods? Perry Hoskil has been dead for ten years.’’
‘‘I know,’’ James said. ‘‘Perry Hoskil was my father.’’
Which meant Mama had slept with Perry Hoskil. I glanced at her. ‘‘Mama?’’
She looked up, pressed her lips together, and nodded.
It didn’t make sense. Why would Mama go along with James in this crazy scheme? But at least I was finally able to see all the holes in the puzzle. James was the bastard child of Perry Hoskil. There had been a fierce court battle years ago over who had proprietary ownership of the patents and production of the Storm Rods—the technology that had allowed magic to be harvested not only from the rare magic-charged storms, but also from the reserves of magic that pooled deep in the earth. The two men who claimed they had the rights to the rods were partners in the invention of the technology. Those men were Perry Hoskil and my father. But my father had gone behind Hoskil’s back and filed the patent in his name alone, claiming proprietary ownership of the technology.
Perry Hoskil had lost the case. Most say he was bribed out of pursuing further litigation. Most also said he took to drinking and drugs, and he was found years later, dead of an overdose in some garbage heap on the worst side of town. Maybe on this side of town. Maybe even right here where I was standing.
I didn’t think anyone knew he had a son. But then, I wouldn’t expect Mama to share that information with the world.
She had shared it with at least one person though—James.