Bewitched, Blooded and Bewildered (21 page)

“Thanks,” I replied. I grabbed a plate and loaded it up with eggs, pancakes, sausage, and even a cinnamon roll. The selection was mind-boggling—who eats crab legs for breakfast? I reached for a coffee cup and then stopped myself with a sigh. Orange juice for the win.

Lex filled a plate as well, but his was more protein-focused. I paused before digging in and texted Marie. “
Did he buy you breakfast?”

“So where are you going to stay if your place has been compromised?” Anthony asked.

I glanced at Lex, because I had no idea. “We haven’t figured that out yet,” he said.

“You could stay here. There’s a guesthouse.”

A guest
house
? After living in apartments my entire adult life, I was still coming to terms with the idea of a guest
room
. An entire house for guests was mind-boggling. “I’m not sure that’d be a good idea,” I replied.

“Why not? Like I said, safe as Fort Knox. And you can come and go from the guesthouse as you please. You wouldn’t have to check in with Mr. Harrison or anything.”

“Jealous?” I asked, and he grimaced.

“Maybe. Not a lot for me to do around here. I tried to convince him to let me stay in the tower, but he said no. Apparently it’s too hard to monitor who comes and goes. That’s why he’s staying here now.”

“There’s no way they’d go after him. I mean, we’re nobodies, but the world would notice if Zachary Harrison went missing,” I replied.

“Thank you, Catherine, that’s very kind of you,” Zach said from the doorway. I turned and looked at him. Aside from the sunglasses, he looked fairly normal. Without a word Anthony got up and pulled the curtains closed, shutting out the sunlight.

“It’s true, though, isn’t it? The twitstorm alone would be horrendous. Isn’t TMZ camped on your lawn too?” I asked.

“Across the street, actually,” he corrected.

“See? There’d be YouTube videos and conspiracy theories. It’d be a PR nightmare.” My phone chirped, and I looked down to see a text from Marie. “
Yes, he did. He’s a complete gentleman.”
I snorted and moved the phone before Lex could read it.

Zach nodded and then poured himself a cup of coffee. “Which is why this location is safe. And you are welcome to stay in the guesthouse.”

“Marie too?” I asked, and Lex frowned.

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay.” I picked up the phone to text her, and Lex stopped me.

“We’re not stayin’ here,” he said sternly.

“Why not?” I asked. You know, aside from the obvious Lex-hates-Zach’s-guts reason.

“I thought the point of breakin’ the bond was to get away from necro politics.”

“Would staying in the guesthouse mean we’d have to go to your dead-people parties?” I asked. Anthony inhaled a mouthful of coffee and nased it into a napkin.

Zach’s brow furrowed with annoyance. “No. You are no longer required to attend gatherings.”

“See? Away from necro politics,” I said. Lex scowled, and I took his hand. “I don’t think we have a lot of options. We can’t go back home. They’ll jump us the moment we move into a new place. And as much as I love Mac, I don’t want to stay with him. Aside from the Simon factor, they’re remodeling. There are probably all kinds of paint and varnish fumes that I’m not supposed to be inhaling. Our only other option is staying in Faerie.”

“You’d be safe there,” Lex pointed out.

“Yeah, but it’ll be hard to get anything accomplished here if we live there. No cell phones. No e-mail. We’d have to go through my cousins for everything… Why does this argument sound familiar? Oh yeah, because we didn’t hide in Faerie where there were
damn vampires trying to kill me
before I became Titania.” I glared at Zach.

He held up his hands, looking innocent. “That was all Laura’s doing.”

“Uh huh. Well, we’re back to a run or stand-and-fight situation. So do you want to run, or do you want to stand and fight?” I asked Lex.

“Can I have you run, and I stand and fight?” he countered.

“It might come to that. But not yet. Just hand me a grenade launcher or something, and I’ll stand in the back,” I said. Anthony chuckled, and I frowned at him. “What’s so funny?”

“I finally figured out who you remind me of,” he said.

“Who?”

“Ripley, from
Aliens.
”

I nodded slowly. That wasn’t half-bad. “Well, if we can figure out a way to nuke the hunters from orbit, I’m all about that.”

“So it’s settled that you’re staying in the guesthouse, then?” Zach asked.

“Fine. Just for a few days, until we can figure something else out,” Lex reluctantly agreed. “But we’re not offering to feed you, for the record. And neither is Marie.”

“That’s fine. I have ample sustenance on hand. And before you threaten me, I will not put a hand on your sister. I know it would disturb you, and she would beat the hell out of me if I tried,” Zach said.

“So you’re scared of her, but you had no qualms about molesting me?” I asked, indignant. Not that I wanted him to bite Marie, but why was I the pushover?

“As I have mentioned before, it is a foolish man who makes an enemy out of a Duquesne. Your baby sister once broke a master necromancer’s arm in three places when he tapped on her shoulder at a gathering,” Zach replied.

Lex grinned. “Good for her.”

I smirked as I texted Marie to head to Casa Dracula when she could disentangle herself from her chronicler buddy. And I warned her to beware the paparazzi outside. Though it would be funny to see the rumor frenzy that Zachary Harrison was attempting to break up P!nk’s marriage (better hers than mine).

We finished eating in relative silence. Anthony was willing to chat with me, but Lex and Zach were busy glowering at each other. I ignored them, because as long as they weren’t actively throwing punches or trying to kill each other I could deal with it. I was concerned that we hadn’t heard from Portia yet. It wasn’t like her, especially after an emergency like this. Something big and ugly must be going on in Faerie to keep her away for this long. I wasn’t in the mood for big and ugly right now.

Faust appeared as the meal ended. “I’ll be your transportation to the facility the hunters are being stored in,” he informed us.

“We’re not driving?” I asked.

“No. We don’t want to risk anyone following us there or witnessing us entering the building.”

“That’s not comforting,” I said.

Faust smiled and patted my shoulder amiably. “Don’t worry. You’ll be quite safe.”

It was still not comforting, but I didn’t point that out.

“Can I come with?” Anthony asked, and Zach replied with an instant
no
. The kid looked annoyed, but he didn’t argue.

I had to hold hands with Lex and Zach, forming a weird circle with Faust. A sinking feeling grabbed my stomach and dragged it somewhere down around my knees as I realized a detail I hadn’t had time to ponder earlier—Faust was a shadowspawn faerie, which meant he wasn’t using shortcuts through Faerie like Portia did. We were taking shortcuts through hell, possibly even the shadow realm, as Simon had mentioned. I opened my mouth to insist that we drive instead, but we were blinked out of the room in a rush of cold and into a nondescript concrete hallway. It looked like a basement somewhere, with pipes running overhead and bare light bulbs screwed into the cinderblock walls every few feet. Our shoes scuffed dully against the floor, and the air was damp and thick. Definitely a basement. Not Harrison Tower, though, considering Faust couldn’t take us there with the faerie wards around it.

We turned a corner and found two men with shotguns guarding what looked like a freezer door—it reminded me a bit of the walk-in freezer at the Three Willows café. Hunters on ice? It made morbid sense. Otherwise they’d get ripe pretty fast. One of the armed men opened the door, and we stepped inside. I shivered, rubbing my arms. It wasn’t quite a freezer, but it was damn cold. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly glow over the room, and I jumped as I spotted the bodies laid out across the floor. Eight men dressed in black clothing, looking like space aliens with their night-vision goggles on. Their weapons were neatly placed on the ground next to each body, and I stared owlishly at the guns. Had they always intended to kill us, or only decided to once we fought back? Maybe we’d been getting too close, and they wanted us out of the way.

Zach stalked from body to body, staring down at each one with a blank expression. Some sort of icky necromancy was about to go down, and I stepped closer to Lex, took his hand and held it tightly. I looked up at him, but he was staring at the bodies.

“Do you know which one shot me?” he asked softly.

“The demon shot you,” I replied.

“Demon? What demon?”

“Did I forget to mention that?” I winced, and then I glanced at Zach. “That reminds me, did you get ahold of any of your summoner contacts?”

“One.”

“Just one? That’s it? Is that normal?” I asked.

“No, it isn’t. Perhaps Marie was more successful.”

Lex tugged at my hand. “What’s going on?”

I explained the demon encounter he’d missed while being unconscious, and it only deepened Lex’s frown. “Which summoner did you reach?” he asked Zach.

“Patience Roberts,” Faust answered. “We spoke briefly. She mentioned that the summoner council hasn’t been returning her calls.”

Lex nodded. “That’s what the grandparents of that missing summoner family said. They reached out to Marie because they couldn’t contact the council.”

“That can’t be good.” I scratched at my arm as though the tattoo itched. Well, it was good that Patience was still alive, but bad that the hunters might have taken out an entire council. The hunter problem seemed to be getting exponentially worse.

My good sense told me not to watch, but curiosity got the better of me, and I stared at Zach as he stopped in front of a corpse in the middle of the row. He began chanting in Latin, and for a moment I was reminded of the spell my father had used to summon his skeletal minions in the last test to become Titania. When Zac finished, nothing happened at first, but then he spoke again.

“Rise,” he ordered.

The hunter’s body jerked, and with clumsy, flailing motions, it sat up and then got to its feet. It opened its cloudy eyes, and stood staring fixedly at Zach. I’d never be able to watch another zombie movie ever again. The smell of necromancy hit me a moment later, and I forcibly choked my breakfast back down as it tried to escape my stomach.

“What was your mission?” Zach asked.

“We were trying to apprehend the male subject,” the zombie intoned. Its voice was wrong somehow. A reedy, wheezy rasp as though it’d been punched in the throat. Maybe it had been. Lex did get in a few swings before he fell…
Male subject,
huh? I guess we really were just rats in a maze to them.

“To what end?” Zach asked.

“To apprehend the subject and deliver him to be processed. The female was collateral damage. Apprehend if possible, terminate if not.”

I was collateral damage? That was not comforting. “What the fuck does
processed
mean?” I asked. It stared blankly at Zach. I guessed that meant it didn’t know the answer. Maybe they didn’t know what happened to the magicians after they were captured. “Did you apprehend the librarian family in Des Plaines too?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the baby?”

“The subjects were delivered for processing,” it replied.

“Delivered where?” Lex asked.

“To Alpha base.”

“Where is that?” he prompted. The zombie continued to stare. “Where is Alpha base? What is its location?”

No response. Something snapped inside me, and I leapt at it, my hands curled into claws. Lex grabbed me and held me back before I could scratch the dead bastard’s eyes out.

“You motherfucking son of a bitch! They’re not subjects, they’re
people.
They’re families and children,” I snarled. “Where are they?”

Again there was no answer. Lex continued to hold me back, and my rage turned into sobs. My whole body shook as I wept, and when I stopped struggling he put his arms around me and held me close.

“Who summoned the demon?” Zach asked. The zombie stayed silent.

“The man in the suit with your group,” I prompted, wiping at my eyes. “Who was he?”

“The intelligence operative,” it answered.

“Name? Rank?” Lex asked. No answer.

“What were your next orders?” Zach asked.

“We had orders to rendezvous with green and blue units, to prepare for the strike on the subject event.”

“Event? What event?”

“A large gathering of subjects. We have not received the time, number of subjects or the location yet.”

“Lord and Lady,” I whispered. Samhain was only a few days away. There would be a lot of big magician parties celebrating it because it was one of our most popular holidays. They could be targeting anyone.

“I’ll get the word out. Warn as many people as we can. We’re not going to learn much more from this one,” Zach said. His voice was low and pained, and I peeked at him from the circle of Lex’s embrace. Zach seemed truly upset by the news. It was odd to see him openly displaying real, honest emotion. “They may not know anything further than their own orders. I’ve run into this problem before, with bodies that shapeshifters brought to me.”