Sam Harlan (Book 3): Damned Cold (23 page)

“What do I want?” Meriwether mused. He cocked his head back and laughed. “The list of things I want is so long and varied I’m afraid I don’t have the time to name them all.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Finally,” Meriwether said. “Finally, you ask the most important question of all. Why does anyone do anything? Money, sex, and power, obviously.”

Maybe it was my pounding head, but I didn’t understand. “What?”

“Just kidding,” Meriwether said. “I’m like you, Mr. Harlan. I peeked into your soul. I know you better than you know yourself. You’re a very suspicious man. Do you know how I charmed you so thoroughly?”

“No,” I growled, “but you damned well won’t do it again.”

“You think you’re clever? You don’t
trust
anybody. That lets me warp the truth around you, twisting my words. I spun them in your mind, like the finest silk, turning those suspicions against Randy Korman and Jodie Rexford. By the time I was done, you shook my hand and wished me the best.”

My right eye twitched. “That’s
not
how it happened.”

“That’s
exactly
how it happened,” Meriwether said, clearly relishing the moment. “Don’t blame yourself. You couldn’t have known. Oh, wait. Jodie
did
tell you. You
did
know.”

It wasn’t his words that stung, it was the look in Callie’s eyes.

He’s right. He charmed us. He charmed me.

“What will it take to free Callie?” I asked.

His smile grew wider. “Ah, perhaps you really are clever.”

“You obviously want something from me,” I said, “or you would have killed me by now.”

“It’s amazing that such a reasonable conclusion could come from such a dull-witted man, but it’s not what I want
from
you, it’s what I want you to
do
.”

The men and women had watched our exchange, but now they were leaning forward in anticipation, and I could almost feel the energy building in the room. “What?”

Meriwether smiled, exposing his gleaming white teeth. “You’re going to bear witness.”

There was the sound of a door opening. Plain wooden stairs led up from the basement, and Nicky descended them, watching us intently, still wearing his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt. He smiled shyly as he took the last step to the basement floor. “Hey, Sam.”

* * *

Nicky came to a halt in front of me. He had a simple grin on his face. “Are you gonna play Ninja Turtles with me?”

The cold pit in my stomach started to rise, aiming for my heart, and I addressed Meriwether. “Don’t do it. Please.”

“What do you mean?” Meriwether asked.

“Whatever you have planned. You can’t—”

“Ah, but I must,” he said. He approached Nicky, placing his arm around his son’s shoulders. “I love my son. I
never
lied about that. Never.”

The men and women shuffled backward, and I could finally see the pentagram inscribed in the concrete floor. The naked woman at the center was strangely still. A woman I recognized as Lisa Doll stepped forward and said, “You have to come with me, honey.”

Nicky frowned. “I thought I was gonna play with Sam.”

The woman gave Nicky a thousand-watt smile. “He’s just here to watch.”

“Lisa,” Meriwether said sharply.

“I’ll play with you,” Lisa said. “Just like we used to in kindergarten.”

“I don’t know,” Nicky said doubtfully. “You were
mean
to me. You said things about me when you thought I couldn’t hear.”

“That was a long time ago,” Lisa said. She turned and I saw her husband, Del, was among Meriwether’s coven.

“She won’t be mean to you,” Del said. “She’ll play real nice. I promise and that’s a guarantee you can live by.”

“
Please
don’t do this,” I said to Meriwether.

He shook his head. “I take no pleasure in this, but I must heal Nicholas.”

Heal?

“You think whatever you’re about to do will … what … make Nicky right?”

“I
know
it will,” Meriwether said. He turned to Nicky, who was sitting on the floor with Lisa. Lisa kept snapping her fingers, drawing Nicky’s attention from the woman, the woman I’d been desperately searching for.

The naked woman tied to the floor was Dorothy Hamm—Jodie’s missing sister, Dawn’s mother and, as it turned out, Nicky’s mother.

Meriwether nodded and an older couple, a matronly older woman with a crooked grin and a man with a shiny bald head and stylish glasses, came forward and squatted on the floor next to Dorothy. The woman stroked Dorothy’s hair and whispered something while the man closed his eyes and mumbled to himself, causing the hairs on the back of my arms and neck to prickle.

I’d been trying to avoid looking at the naked body of Dorothy Hamm. She started tossing and turning against the cold concrete, her eyes still closed, her lips moving like she was talking to herself.

It was the nudity that bothered me. She didn’t seem the kind of woman who would appreciate being nude in front of a crowd, and yet there she was, her heavy breasts sagging to each side and the dark mound of wiry black hair between her legs on full display to Meriwether’s coven.

The coven members watched with hungry looks on their faces, an almost sexual sense of anticipation, but if I’d learned anything of late, it was that they weren’t hungry for sex.

And, when an old man wearing a heavy sweater and clubby brown shoes brought the matronly woman a long, curved knife with an ebony hilt, I knew I’d been right.

They hadn’t bound Dorothy Hamm nude on the floor for sex.

Nicky turned to stare at the old man, then noticed the curved knife. “Are—are we gonna play with that?”

Lisa laughed, and it was too loud and too high-pitched to carry mirth. “Honey,
you’re
going to play a game with it.”

Nicky tilted his head. “I am?”

“Yes,” Lisa said. “This is the best game of all.”

Nicky frowned. “How do you play?”

The matronly woman held the blade up to Nicky and it caught the light, gleaming like silver.

For all I knew, it probably
was
silver.

“I don’t know,” Nicky said slowly, his eyes never leaving the exposed blade. “Daddy only lets me play with Ninja Turtles. I like numb-chucks.”

“Nicholas,” Meriwether said loudly, in full-on parent command voice. “You may play this game. I give you my permission.”

Nicky licked his lips. “What do I do?”

Lisa said, “It’s easy-peasy, honey.” She motioned for Nicky to take the knife.

“What if I don’t wanna?” Nicky asked.

“This is the make-Nicky-better game,” Lisa said. “Don’t you want to get better?”

Nicky frowned harder and his eyes finally left the blade and found his father. “Is there sum’thin wrong with me?”

“Yes,” Meriwether said. He entered the pentagram and took the knife from the older woman, who nodded and smiled gratefully as if he’d given her a gift.

Meriwether’s coven backed up, leaving Nicky alone with his father and mother. Meriwether placed the knife in Nicky’s hand and guided Nicky’s hand until the blade was pressed against Dorothy’s neck.

“I—don’t wanna do this,” Nicky said, his voice cracking.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world,” Meriwether said. “You’re going to pull the knife across her throat. That’s all. It will make you better.”

“It will?”

Meriwether smiled. “It will.”

There was a series of grunts from Callie. She was staring at me, her eyes wide, pleading with me to do something.

There’s a moment before something bad happens, something truly bad, where time slows and you think of all the ways you could stop it if only things were different.

Things weren’t different.

“No,” I said. “No!”

I watched helplessly as Nicky drew the knife across his mother’s throat.

I’d been desperate to find her, and now I had to watch as blood spurted from Dorothy’s neck. The knife had cut deep enough to sever an artery, and Meriwether guided Nicky’s hand as the knife continued to slice deeper and deeper until Dorothy’s throat was laid bare to the world in a crimson mess.

I struggled against Barlow’s icy-cold grip. The blood pooled around Dorothy like a scarlet halo, then it flowed to the lines of the pentagram etched into the concrete, filling them.

“No!” I screamed.

Dorothy’s eyes opened and her mouth went wide in a silent scream. Her body jerked and pulled at the metal hoops inserted into the floor. A terrible gurgling came from her ruined esophagus.

She had a moment of clarity as the spell to pacify her gave way and her heart beat its last. She died before my eyes, there on the concrete floor.

A metallic gong sounded inside my head as Meriwether’s spell concluded and I managed one last, halfhearted “No!”

Nicky stood and
looked around at the assembled coven with a beatific look on his face. “Wow,” he drawled.

Meriwether wrapped his arms around his son, hugging him tightly. “Do you feel better?”

“Better?” Nicky asked. “I dunno. I feel …
different
.”

Meriwether pushed his son back and stared at him with unblinking eyes. Nicky glanced around the room, shuffling his feet, but Meriwether held his arms. “The process didn’t work,” Meriwether finally said.

“It should have been enough,” he continued, his voice losing its confidence. “You said it would be enough.”

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing is certain,” Meriwether said, his voice deepening. “There was always a chance. That’s why we kept Harlan.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Meriwether ignored me. Lisa approached Nicky and took his hand. “Let’s go upstairs, honey.”

Nicky smiled tentatively. “Okay.”

As they walked past me, Nicky slowed and said, “Sorry we couldn’t play.”

I gritted my teeth. “Maybe next time.”

Nicky smiled, but it wasn’t quite as innocent as it had been moments before. “You betcha.”

Nicky clomped up the stairs as Lisa urged him on. The door at the top of the stairs slammed shut and the room fell still. The coven members were staring at Dorothy’s body, and the room was filling with the smell of death.

There was a twitch in Barlow’s hand as he stared at the blood on the concrete, and for a brief moment the vampire relaxed his grip, but then it clamped back down on me before I could capitalize on the momentary distraction.

The vampire’s strength was so much greater than mine that it wasn’t even close. I realized that Barlow could crush me—literally crush me—and there was nothing I could do about it. The only reason I’d been able to offer any resistance had been because Barlow was trying not to hurt me.

“What do you really want,” I finally asked.

There was a murmuring around the room, and Meriwether smiled, exposing his gleaming white teeth. “I
want
Dawn McKie.”

“I’m supposed to give you Dawn?” I asked. “You’ve
got
to be kidding.”

“I’m really not,” Meriwether said, his black eyes focused on me with a ferocious intensity. “On this, I promise. I
want
that girl and I want you to
get
me that girl.”

“I can’t give you a girl. I’m not some…” I trailed off, unable to come up with the words to describe the kind of man I’d be. “I won’t do it.”

“You will,” Meriwether said confidently. “You’ll help me or I will hurt your friend. Even a nitwit such as you must have figured out that I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get what I want.”

Even though my head was still pounding, and even though I felt like I might vomit again, I glared at him and said, “The stick man.”

“Hah. Yes, the stick man.”

“You thought you could kill us.”

“I
though
t,” Meriwether said slowly, “that you were a nuisance, but now you are going to make yourself useful.”

“And you want me to … what … to give you Dawn McKie?”

Callie shook her head, but a giant of a man kicked her with one of his pointy-toed cowboy boots hard enough to make her grunt.

My arms jerked, but Barlow held fast. “Damn it!” I shouted. “Stop that!”

“Chester,” Meriwether said without turning around, “if our guest gets out of line again, kick that useless whore as hard as you can.”

The big man smiled, flashing his brown-stained teeth, and chuckled.

I wanted to kill that man with the cowboy boots and the button-up western shirt. I wanted to kill him more than I’d ever wanted anything in my life, but I said through gritted teeth, “How do you expect me to give you the girl?”

“Tell Jodi you found nothing,” Meriwether said. He withdrew a white medallion the size of a silver dollar from his pocket and held it up. The medallion was delicate, etched with runes, and looked to be made from bone. “Break this. It will remove the wards I’m sure they’ve put up since you left.”

My mouth felt like it had sand in it. “What if I don’t?”

Meriwether shook his head. “Then I kill you and tear the wards down myself. You just don’t understand. I work smart, not hard, Mr. Harlan. My coven has the power, but why waste the energy when I have you?” He raised his hand and pointed at Callie. “Just to be clear, if you don’t do as you’re told, I’ll rape Sister Calahane.
Repeatedly
. In between the torture. Then, after a year or so, when I’ve had my fill, I’ll sell her to a few of my Egyptian friends. They
do
love redheads…”

“I’m going to kill you,” I growled. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to kill you.”

The men and women began to laugh and Meriwether raised his hands. “Oh, Sam. You should have been a comedian. You’ve been so busy since you murdered your wife and daughter that you haven’t realized how little you know.”

My wife and daughter?

There was something more to Meriwether than magic. There had to be. He knew too much.
“How did you lie to me?” I asked. “I questioned you three times. That’s the magical number, isn’t it?”

Meriwether’s smile faltered. “So many questions.” He fingered the bone medallion as the coven’s laughter died out. “You asked why I’m doing this? I’m doing it for family. That’s the currency you understand, isn’t it? Family?”

My eyes were drawn to the body of Dorothy Hamm. “I see what
you
think of family.”