Silver Bullet (13 page)

“Someone threaten you?”

I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone I’d talked to the vice president. “It’s been a rough week.”

“It’s only going to get rougher,” Malcolm said, knocking his knuckles against his helmet.

I gave him a wary look. “Are we going into a fight again?”

“I am. You’re out on this one. Lucky you! I’ll make sure to save a couple of daimarachnid heads for you.” At my look of surprise, he said, “We’re clearing out the rest of the spider nest at Silverton Mine—me and Bellamy and another Union unit. Gotta make it safe for excavation.”

“Going to retrieve the rest of the artifacts?”

Malcolm tapped his nose under the glass facial shield. “Don’t get too comfortable, mate. Once it’s empty, you and that gorgeous partner of yours are going to have to escort the necrocognitive to the site. There are bodies to interview, information to collect, werewolves to fuck with.”

How was Cain going to react once we possessed more of the artifacts from the mines? My guess was that it wouldn’t be good. I wasn’t even sure he’d let the OPA start an excavation. “Speaking of the werewolf…”

“I’ve got a magazine of silver rounds now,” Malcolm said. “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget you.”

He tossed another magazine to me. It looked like it would fit the Desert Eagle. I thumbed out the top round and rolled it between my fingers, getting oil smeared over my skin. It was made of brighter, shinier metal than my usual bullets. “Silver?”

“Of course,” he said.

“Don’t I get any special training on this one?”

“Nah. Werewolves are rare. You’ll never run into another one in your career.” Malcolm hefted his AK-47 and headed for the door. “I’ll give you one tip, though. You see Cain again, you point that thing between his eyes and don’t stop firing until he is fucking dead.”

Good tip.

ONCE THE SHOCK OF talking to Lucrezia wore off, practicality set in. The clock ticking down to death threats made me extremely eager to act, needless to say. I wanted to do something—anything—to save Fritz’s ass so that my ass could be saved, too.

I’m not too proud to admit that I was thinking pretty hard about ways to make Cain a happy camper.

But there was no way to appease him until the OPA returned the fragment of ethereal ruin. We also had to wait for Malcolm and the Union to destroy the daimarachnid nest, allowing us to recover Yvette’s body. I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with the dead woman, exactly, but I couldn’t do anything without it.

So instead of acting, I slept. I slept really, really badly.

Years of darkness seemed to elapse before I woke up.

I didn’t feel like cleaning, but I spent the morning working on the penthouse anyway. Growing up with a huge family in a tiny house, you got used to cleaning whether or not you wanted to. Keeping on top of the mess had been the only way to keep our living room from looking like David Nicholas’s office, and old habits died hard.

I grabbed garbage bags from underneath the sink and started tossing everything Cain had broken into the trash. He’d been like a tornado. Nothing had survived untouched. Our brand new cookware? Crumpled like beer cans against a drunken frat boy’s forehead. The altar in the living room? Karate-chopped in half. The curtains? Looked like a wolf had sharpened his claws on them. Guess he probably had.

We’d only been out of there for a couple of minutes. Cain hadn’t had much time to wreck the place, and he’d still done it pretty thoroughly.

And he was bent on coming back for us if we didn’t give him the ethereal artifact and his dead friend Yvette.

On the bright side, if I could hide from Cain’s wrath for another—oh, twenty-eight hours or so, I wouldn’t have to worry about getting ripped apart by a man-eating werewolf. Vice President Lucrezia de Hardass would just shoot me in the back of the head.

Man, this is not my week.

I fantasized about taking a vacation while I tossed stuff out. The OPA wasn’t too liberal about vacation time, but I’d bet that Fritz would be feeling generous after I came up with an impossible rescue plan and dragged him from the literal jaws of death.

Maybe I could head up to Canada. It had been a long time since I got somewhere all pretty and forested.

Nah, forests sounded too hospitable for a werewolf. Maybe the Caribbean.

Yeah. I couldn’t imagine a werewolf in the Caribbean. Or nightmares, for that matter.

When I turned around, I was surprised to find that Suzy’s bedroom door was open a crack. Enough for Suzy’s eye to peek through. “Would you come inside?” she asked, blinking at me through the open sliver of doorway. “I need to talk with you.”

I almost agreed reflexively, but then my brain caught up with her request.

Suzy was inviting me into her bedroom.

Last time she’d shared her personal space with me, she’d been running around in a t-shirt and panties and a sneaky smile. It was a weird fucking thing to do to a guy like me. Didn’t really know how to deal with it. “I should probably keep cleaning. Look for evidence Cain might have left behind. Or something like that.”

Suzy shut her eyes and bumped her forehead gently against the doorframe. “Please?”

I was helpless against that word coming from a woman.
Please.
She could have followed it up with a request for felony murder on her behalf and I would have given it serious consideration.

I took a step toward the door. Stopped myself.

Bad idea. Bad idea. Think, Cèsar.

“Maybe just for a minute,” I said.

You fucking asshole.

But she smiled, and I couldn’t go back on my word now that I’d said it.

I stepped into Suzy’s bedroom.

The world distorted around me as I crossed the threshold. My stomach flipped. And my sinuses inflamed like I had a cat allergy and had just plummeted into a pit of kittens.

Muffling my sneezes into my arm, I studied Suzy’s temporary bedroom through watering eyes. We’d only been there for a few days and she had already been casting spells all over the place. There was a reason that she was a level seven witch and I was only a three: I brewed awesome strength potions; she distorted reality.

The other bedrooms in the penthouse were maybe a hundred and fifty square feet. Hers was at least four hundred now, and that was just the entryway. She had somehow added an inner hallway that led off into a separate kitchen and bathroom area. Another closed door probably led to a bedroom.

In her sitting room, she had magicked the walls to a pleasant blue color with a smattering of firefly-like stars hovering near the ceiling. The floors looked like bamboo mats. She’d even enchanted a freaking water fixture that dribbled down one wall into a stone basin bigger than most bathtubs.

“Take off your shoes,” Suzy said, shuffling over to her couch and curling up on it. I kicked off my sneakers.

I hadn’t gotten a good look at her through the door. Now I saw that she wasn’t in playful “let’s fuck with Cèsar’s tiny brain” mode, but “fuck, every inch of my body hurts” mode, and I felt selfishly relieved. Suzy had an icepack pressed against one side of her face. Her body was consumed by sweatpants and a sweater at least two sizes too big for her. She wore slippers with smiley faces on the toes that bore a strange resemblance to Cat.

Apprehension melted away. “Are your bruises getting worse?”

She shifted her ice pack to conceal them. “Just took them a while to develop. You don’t look much better.”

“Well, I did get to wrestle with an overgrown mutt while you were casting the TARDIS enchantment on your bedroom.” I peeked into her bathroom. She’d practically given herself an Olympic-sized swimming pool. “Damn, Suzy.”

“I got sick of having to share with the necrocog,” she muttered.

Hey, at least it was keeping the peace. I would have drawn a chalk line down the center of the penthouse, chainsawed down that line, and given a separate half to each of the women at this point. Whatever it took to make the air stop freezing me into an ice sculpture every time they hung out in the same room.

“We’re going to need a plan to recover Fritz,” I said, pacing back and forth across her magical bamboo flooring.

“We’ll think of something,” Suzy said. Awfully Zen for a woman who had almost gotten eaten by a spider. Of course, Zen was easy when you didn’t know your superiors were contemplating killing you.

I raked both hands through my hair, like if I built up enough friction I might be able to force my stupid brain to generate a plan. “Couldn’t you have picked something physically possible to taunt Cain with? Something other than his dead friend Yvette?”

Suzy’s tone went icy. “I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it before he popped your head off like a cork.”

Well, shit. I hadn’t meant to sound ungrateful. I sat on the end of her couch. “Maybe we’ll get those nukes in and we can just drop them on the werewolf.”

“It’ll have to be a silver nuke.”

I had to contemplate that possibility for a minute. I’d been reading about werewolves on the OPA database on Fritz’s phone, and it verified what I’d already understood about werewolves: they could only be killed by silver. Didn’t matter the delivery method. Silver bullets, silver knives, silver ear piercings. It poisoned them from the inside out.

The database hadn’t said whether blasting them apart would work as well. The image of a splattered wolf body slithering together into one big puddle,
Terminator 2
-style, flashed through my mind. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to test that.

“What are we going to do?” I asked glumly, dropping my forehead into my hands. “Yvette. It’s impossible.”

“We could string her up like a marionette and walk her down the beach,” Suzy suggested.

I didn’t think it was funny. Not this time.

But it did get the cogs in my brain turning.

“Isobel,” I said suddenly.

Suzy’s eyebrows knitted. “You’re not in the right bedroom for that, Hawke.”

“No, Isobel can raise Yvette. Or at least, she can raise her ghost. Maybe seeing Yvette’s apparition at a distance would be enough to convince Cain that we’ve got her. All we need is enough time to save Fritz, right?”

“I saw your necrocog’s ghosts. That’s not going to convince anyone.”

“Great. I can’t wait to hear your better plan. I’ll wait.”

Suzy sighed. “We can try it. Why not? We’ll have to get Yvette’s body out of the mine, though.”

“The Union’s working on it now.”

Her cheeks paled a little. “Good.”

“Yep,” I said. Her ice pack had slipped again, revealing her mincemeat face. If she’d looked like the Cryptkeeper the day before, then today she was—heck, what was worse than the Cryptkeeper? Suzy. Suzy was worse than the Cryptkeeper. “Look, I don’t know if you want to talk, but—”

“I tried to sleep last night,” she interrupted, like she could read my mind.

“Didn’t go well, I take it.”

“No,” she said. “It didn’t.”

“You know what I’m doing as soon as we save Fritz? Sleeping potions. A gallon of sleeping potions. Whatever it takes to black out and pass out.” I grunted. “Might have to wait until we’re back in LA, though. Cain fucked up my bed on his rampage.” I’d had to sleep on a pile of blankets on the floor the night before.

“You could sleep in here with me tonight,” Suzy said.

So much for not being in “let’s fuck with Cèsar’s tiny brain” mode.

My ability to speak short-circuited. I stared at her.

“I can enchant a second bedroom,” she added.

“Oh. Yeah.” Maybe I was reading too much into that.
Shit
. “That would be great, Suze. Thanks.”

She just nodded.

My cell phone rang, saving me from thinking of something else to say.

I pulled out the BlackBerry with dread lodged in my heart, but that wasn’t where I was getting the call. It was my other phone. The one I’d been using before making the mistake of calling Lucrezia. “Cèsar!” Malcolm greeted when I answered. “How are you doing, mate?”

“Since I’m pretty sure your call means that the nest of daimarachnids is dead, I’m going to say I’m doing pretty well.” As good as humanly possible, given the circumstances.

“Great. See you soon?”

“Not sure there’s an alternative, is there?”

He gave a warm chuckle. “I left the keys to the SUV on the island. Don’t scratch the paint.” He hung up. I stood.

“Time to work again?” Suzy asked.

“Always. You ready?”

Her smile was thin. “Born ready.”

WHEN THE OPA DECIDED to get something done, it didn’t mess around.

Our organization’s ruthless efficiency was one of my favorite things about it. You wanted to investigate the scene of a crime in an hour before the mundane police showed up? No problem. We could be in and out in forty-five minutes. Want to arrest someone before they have enough time to leave the country? We’ll meet them at the airport.

And if you wanted to excavate a mine, the OPA would rip the earth apart.

It was strangely satisfying to see the crater that used to be Silverton Mine. No more tiny cramped holes. No more aging mine cart tracks. No more crumbling walls. Just a few Caterpillars and a giant pit.

Tents had been erected around the mine, forming a small city occupied by engineers in coveralls and a handful of black-suited witches. We had about two dozen personnel on-site—impressive, considering that my team had been the only personnel locally available until the night before.

We even had a construction crew at work. Until that moment, I hadn’t known that the OPA employed construction workers, but all of the large machinery was painted matte black with white government seals on the side, so I was completely sure that the equipment belonged specifically to our agency. Because, you know, the OPA and the Union couldn’t have a single piece of equipment that was a normal color. Or any non-black color at all, really.

“This is pretty cool,” I admitted to Suzy.

It didn’t look like she agreed. She frowned as she watched the proceedings. I wondered if she was thinking about the Union detention facility again.

A pair of familiar figures climbed out of the hole wearing combat gear and splattered in shiny demon blood. Malcolm pulled off his helmet as he ambled over. His hair was a sweaty mess.