JINXED: (Karma Series, Book Two) (22 page)

“What do you mean?” I looked down at her jean clad legs in confusion and then felt along them with my hands. I didn’t need to search for the answer very long. Halfway up both shins, my hands ran across the reason for her claim. They were no longer straight bones, but each had an unnatural angle. They’d been broken intentionally, in the same place and the exact same way.

I forced my lips together to keep from crying out at what they’d done to her. I shouldn’t have been shocked but was anyway. Who knew what else they’d put her through? Pity was what I felt, but I couldn’t let it show. Pity could be a death sentence, right now.

Another crash against the door jarred me back into the immediacy of the moment. I leaned over to see what the status of the lobby doors were. There were five people, two women and three men, trying desperately to get in, and it wasn’t to seek shelter. They seemed crazed.

Crawling underneath the counter, I dragged Kitty to the cramped place beside me. “There are people that are going to break in at any moment. We need to stay quiet.”

Once they passed, I’d get us out. I needed to get to the next block over. We had a contingency plan; if anything went wrong, we’d meet at a small diner there. I just hoped if we made it, the others would too.

Glass shattering on the marble proceeded feet trampling in, as three sets ran past and two ran right towards us.

I held a finger over my lips to Kitty, who nodded. A knife in hand, I was prepared to fight our way out of here, if necessary.

Two pairs of feet came to stand in front of us. When they paused, I had no choice but to jump out. I couldn’t wait until they found us. With so little maneuvering room, we’d be sitting ducks. 

It was two of the men, and they appeared even crazier up close. They both lunged at me at the same time. I didn’t think they even knew what they were doing, but if it came to them or me, I wasn’t planning on waiting until the bloodlust left their eyes to ask if they’d had a bad day.

It wasn’t just me, either. The idea of what Kitty had been through enraged me, and I wasn’t letting her die now, after all she’d been through. I used the rage I felt for her—for what they’d done to me—to make short work of the two threats. I lashed out at the one on my right, slicing his stomach open, and spun immediately to my left, opening up the other man’s neck.

I turned back to Kitty. The woman who’d just been traumatized by monsters was looking at me like I was the scary one.

“Kitty, I had to kill them. I couldn’t take the chance of not getting you out of here. If you’d seen their eyes, it was us or them.” Standing in a puddle of my victims’ blood as I spoke wasn’t any great help toward calming her down. Everything I said was true, though. There had been something deadly when I’d met their stare.

“We’ve got to go,” I continued, too nervous to reach for her yet.

When she reached out a hand to me, I choked up but tried to hide it. She was going to be okay. If I could get us out of here, she’d be the Kitty I knew again, one day.

With my help, she crawled out from under the desk, but she still couldn’t stand. No one had come into the lobby in the last few minutes, but a steady stream of looters and people were passing by the door. It looked like a war zone out there. If they were all like the two I’d just encountered, I’d have to fight our way out of here, and I’d never be able to do it carrying her. I’d have to go alone and get help.

“It might be safer to hide you somewhere and come back.”

“No,” her grip, even as malformed as it was now, was tight on my arm. “Kill me then but don’t leave me here.”

Where Malokin might still be close by
. I knew it was what she was thinking, but I didn’t say it either.

“Okay. We’ll go together.” I should’ve probably said die together. It was the epitome of stupid to try and get us both out of here like this, but I couldn’t leave her, either. “Wrap your arms around my neck and—”

“Hey, chickie! Looks like you need a little help.” I heard Bobby and spun around to see the other two Jinxes with him as well.

If I hadn’t been so busy holding up Kitty, I would’ve kissed every little devilish face. “How—”

“We’ve been watching you,” Billy offered. The three of them stood in front of us, skateboards in one hand and guns in the other.

“You’ve been watching me? Why? For how long?” And how did I never notice them there?

“Ever since we saw you with that loser,” Bobby explained, as Billy and Buddy alternated between watching the entrance and taking in the situation inside.

“But why?”

“First we were just nosey, but man you’ve got some interesting shit going on. It’s like your life was made to order for our own amusement.” Bobby’s little blond eyebrows hiked up his forehead. “I mean, that mental breakdown thing you did the other night? Whew, that was a real show. Oscar worthy, is all I can say.”

“Yeah, your life is like our ultimate inspiration,” Billy said. “You’re so jinxed, and we didn’t even touch you. Really, you’re like textbook screwed, these days.”

“Whoa,” Buddy said, from where he’d stopped to stand near Bobby. “Kitty, you look like shit. If this is what retirement looks like, fuck that.”

She was leaning against my back so I couldn’t see her face, but I felt the shudders go through her, shaking her too-thin frame. I started throwing the Jinxes the evil eye, but then I heard her laughter. The sound had me torn between laughing and crying in relief, to hear something other than despair coming from her.

“Come on,” Bobby said. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Buddy, you take Kitty’s legs and…”

When Bobby’s voice trailed off, I looked up to see what was wrong, but it was something right. Fate was walking into the building with his men. Their clothes were black and sooty, like they’d just walked through the fires of hell.

Fate didn’t stop until he was less than a foot from me, his eyes roving every inch of my frame until they settled on mine again. His hand reached out and smoothed a piece of hair away from my forehead, and then dropped quickly, as if he was surprised he’d done it.

“You look okay,” he said. 

“I am. What happened?” I asked.

“Malokin bombed half the buildings within a two mile radius, including the one we were in,” Fate explained, as he lifted Kitty from my grasp and handed her to Lars, who was next to him.

I caught a glimpse of Lars’s gloriously long black hair, now partially singed.

Noticing where my attention had gone, he said like the diva I hadn’t known he had in him, “Don’t ask. I’m not ready to talk about it, yet.” Then he bestowed the brightest smile I’d ever seen on Kitty.

“I thought you retired?” Kitty asked, once in Lars’s arms.

I’d forgotten that they might know each other. Lars, Bic, Angus and Cutty had all once been employees. If we got out of here, I was going to have to pick Kitty’s brain. Maybe I’d get to finally find out what they’d done in their previous employment.

“You ready?” Fate asked me.

“To get the hell away from here? You have no idea.” I scanned the lobby, but one face was missing. “Where’s Paddy?”

“When it started going bad, we made him leave, just in case.”

I nodded.

“Everyone ready?” Fate called to the group and received various acknowledgements.

When he moved to the front of the group, preparing to head into the fray, I stepped up beside him. Fate’s hand tugged me backward, pulling me behind him, instead.

“What are you doing?” I pulled my hand out of his grasp and moved forward again.

“I want you to stay behind me, in the center.” His hand darted out to push me backward again.

I jumped out of his reach. “Did you notice the dead bodies? I’m perfectly capable.”

I thought he was going to fight me, but he didn’t even look upset when he said, “Promise to stay by my side?”

“Promise,” I replied quickly, thinking this was too easy. Maybe he was trying to fight his controlling ways.

“Cutty, you’re taking the lead,” Fate said, then looked at me. “Don’t forget, you promised.”

“You tricked me!” The knife in my hand wasn’t going to see much action, buffered on every side as I was.

“In my defense, you do make it easy.” It was hard to stay mad when he smiled at me like that.

We all started moving forward, and even the most crazed people moved out of our path when they saw us coming. The guys said the police had set up barricades around the perimeter of the rioting and bombing. Fate knew exactly which way to go to leave the area without the police or media seeing us.

Twenty minutes later, I stood in between Fate and a recently arrived Paddy. We stood on the outskirts of a larger group of onlookers, behind a police barricade. People from all over had amassed at the edge of the scene. Black plumes spread out into grey clouds before becoming a dingy horizon. Reporters questioned police officers about what was happening but only received “no comment” responses.

Lars had already left, offering to get Kitty situated. The other guys had insisted on helping. I kept forgetting they’d all worked with her and had probably missed her. Watching the four guys gather around her, wanting to care for her, was endearing. When they left, I knew she was in good hands.

“I think I just figured out who—or what—Malokin is,” Paddy said, turning to look at the two of us. “He’s Wrath.”

“Wrath, as in anger? Is that even a thing or position?” I asked.

Paddy nodded. “Theoretically, anything that has enough energy in the Universe can take form.”

When I thought back to the hotel room, it made sense. “When I was up there with him, he was trying to goad me into attacking him. I couldn’t understand what purpose it served.” 

“He probably feeds off it,” Paddy said.

“But why let me go?” I asked. “He didn’t even try and kill me.” That might have been the most nerve-wracking question I had. What else was Malokin planning?

“He’s gone. For now, anyway,” Paddy said.

A stray wad of ash hit me square in the forehead, and I immediately looked for the Jinxes. They were further off to the side, and Bobby lifted his chin and nodded me over to where he was standing, away from the crowd. I obliged, still reeling from the latest revelation and embracing a reason to get some space.

Bobby’s eyes scanned the crowd I’d left by the barricade and lingered on Fate who, even though he hadn’t followed, was paying apt attention nonetheless.

“You know your loser?” He did a single nod of his head as he asked.

There wasn’t a doubt he was referring to Luke. “He’s not mine, but yes. What about him?”

He pulled a scrap of paper out of his back pocket and shoved it into my hand. I smoothed out the crumples and saw the address of the building Luke had occasionally used. One particular time would never leave my mind.

“He’s there.” His finger tapped the paper.

I looked at the three devious little faces that always seemed in mid-smirk. “How do you know?”

“We’ve got a tracker on his car,” Billy said. “Let’s just call it a bottle of Johnny Blue once a week and we’re even.”

They sold themselves short, but I didn’t tell them. I would’ve bought them a case every day for the chance to get my hands on Luke.

Bobby dug into the pocket of his hoodie and dug out a set of keys, which he thrust at me. “Here are your keys. If you call the guards for a door back, it’s parked at the old arcade.”

They were at the arcade, too? These guys were turning out to be worse than Malokin. “How did my car get there?” I looked at the keychain with a naked girl and looked back at him. “These aren’t mine.”

“I’m lending you my set. What, do you think we skateboard everywhere?” Bobby rolled his eyes and the other two laughed.

They had their own set of keys to my car? “You’re the reason I constantly have no gas? I thought I had a leak!”

“Hey, you can’t blame it all on us. That thing is a gas-guzzler. We can’t be filling it up all the time.”

I stuck the keys in my pocket before I spoke. “You aren’t getting these back. No more taking my Honda.”

“Sure, of course not,” Bobby said, taking and then patting my hand.

Shaking my head, I realized how stupid I was. “You have more sets, don’t you?”

They all shrugged and shook their heads as a murmur of, “No, of course not,” and “We wouldn’t do that,” spewed from their lying little lips.

It wasn’t important, right now. I knew where Luke was. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Paddy nod once. He already knew something was afoot. Fate was walking toward me.

“You had to expect that,” Bobby said. “You
are
his girlfriend.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Whatever.”

I walked a few feet away, with Fate heading toward me, and dug out my phone to call for a door.

Chapter 36

Your Turn

“He’s in there.” I stood on a hill above the building Luke had sometimes used. It wasn’t Malokin, but he would do. In some ways, I wanted Luke’s blood most of all. Malokin might have been the mastermind, but it had been Luke who had screwed with my body and mind on a daily basis.

“He’s mine,” I said to Fate, who stood beside me.

Doubt flashed across his face, and I didn’t have to ask why. “I know what I look like, but you need to trust me. I can handle this.”

“You’ve said that to me before.” His voice held no hint of teasing now.

His words stabbed deep into my psyche, and the self-doubt that plagued me returned. It felt like a condemnation, even though I didn’t think he’d said it with malicious intent.

His worries were justified. How could he feel confident when I was still trying to patch all the pieces that were once me back together? It was exactly why I had to be the one to take him down.

“This fight is mine. It has to be. He stole…” My mind flitted over how to describe what he’d taken, until it finally settled on the simplest explanation, and yet the most accurate. “Me. He stole
me
. Who I was; who I’d spent a lifetime becoming. I need this.”

He nodded in understanding, even though I knew he couldn’t possibly fathom what I was feeling. “I know you want him, but I can’t let him—”

“You aren’t going to have to.” 

His eyes roved over me and landed on my left side, where I was resting all my weight to ease my knee, an older injury still plaguing me, made worse by dragging Kitty around. They then traveled to the rip in my shirt, and the bloody gouge peeking through, my newest addition.

“Even if I only had one last breath in my body, I could do this. You could tell me this was the moment you saw in your vision and I’d still go in there. He needs to die, and I need to be the one who kills him. Because if I don’t, I’m not sure I can get me back.”

He sighed as he turned to me. “Killing him isn’t going to do what you think.”

He believed what he was saying, but I didn’t want to. I was clinging to the idea that this would fix part of what had been broken.

He looked like he might give me a fight, but then he simply nodded.

“I’m going in alone.”

“You’ll have your space,” he said, not technically agreeing, but I could live with that. As long as Luke died by my hand, nothing else really mattered. I headed toward the building alone, just the way I wanted.

The room was dark when I opened the door. Luke sat at a desk, just staring at the wall. The door slammed closed behind me but he still didn’t turn around.

“Are you going to get to your feet, or sit there like a coward?” Anger and disgust dripped from my words.

He laughed, his voice bouncing off the walls. “Not at all. I’d prefer death to what would come at the hands of Malokin.” He got to his feet finally and turned. He slipped off his suit jacket and laid it over the chair he’d abandoned. His tie was tugged off and placed on top of it. “You couldn’t think I’d make it that easy.”

“Wouldn’t want you to. Where would be the fun in that?” I kneeled down and slid one of the knives I was carrying over to him, proving just how much I was looking for a true fight.

He picked it up with a look of disgust. “You’ll never learn.”

“To be like you and Malokin? No. I won’t.” I circled him, and he moved along with me.

He ran his fingers along the edge of the knife and smiled. “I told Malokin you weren’t for us.”

“Did you, now.”

“Yes. He thought there was some potential in you. He had big plans for you. He blames me for losing you.” He shrugged. “Malokin thought he was smarter than me, but I knew you better. I saw what you were, and he only saw his plans. You were never going to bend. Break, yes. Bend, never. You would’ve ended up a shell of yourself but never would have been useful to him. I didn’t care though, because I enjoyed breaking you. I almost had you, too. Broken, that is. The cracks had started to show.”

I wanted to deny it, but he was right. I’d started to break. And even though my physical form might not show the marks after I healed, I’d have the scars forever. And right now, I really didn’t believe I’d be the stronger for it in the long run. I felt like I was barely holding the pieces together.

All of my anger was wrapped up in one target at the moment. Luke—standing in front of me, smug as ever—was the inflictor of so much hurt, and it taunted me.

I looked in his eyes, the way he was staring at me, and couldn’t get past the degradation. His very existence was a reminder of what I’d become. What I’d
let
him take from me. And that was how it felt. I’d allowed him do this to me, even though I knew it wasn’t true in a logical sense.

“Before I’m done, I’ll hear you beg,” I said.

He cracked his knuckles. “Like your friend Kitty did? I understand. It’s quite enjoyable.”

Rage burst inside of me and I lunged at him, knife fisted in my hand. I caught the flesh on his chest but was deflected by his ribs. He, in turn, caught me with a slice to my forearm.

The new pain focused me. I spun around, out of reach of him now. No more stupid moves made in anger. I could feel Fate’s eyes on me. He was close by, even if I couldn’t see him. If this got messy, I knew he’d step in, and I couldn’t have that.

“You’ll see. Malokin will win, in the end. You have no idea what’s coming,” Luke said, trying to throw me off my game again.

“No, I might not know what’s coming, but I know where you’re going.”

I swung my leg back and kicked him in the head. I heard the crack of his neck breaking. It wasn’t the tortured death I’d longed for, but it was still by my hand.

He fell instantly. I stared down at him, but I felt nothing but numbness. I should’ve felt better. This was supposed to make me whole. This was going to make me okay, or something closer to it than I felt right now.

It didn’t.

He was dead, and so was part of me, still.

Fate walked up and stood beside me, to where Luke lay dead at my feet.

I stared down, wondering if I could somehow breathe life into him and kill him again. If I did it slower this time, would I feel better? If I had dragged it out, would that have made a difference?

“Doesn’t feel like you hoped.” He wasn’t gloating.

I looked at Fate. “No. That obvious?”

“It’s all over your face.”

I looked at Luke’s body. My kick had been so strong, so filled with rage, it hadn’t just broken his neck but ripped it partially from his body. Still, as my hands lay by my side, stained with some of his blood, I felt he’d been lucky. He’d died quickly. He’d deserved much worse. “I must be a monster, because I wish I could do it again.”

“No. You aren’t.” Fate sighed loudly, as if he were as weary as I felt. “I doubt that’s an option anyway, but it wouldn’t matter. Sometimes people take things from you that you can’t get back, no matter how hard you try.”

When he spoke, he sounded like he was intimately acquainted with loss. I waited to see if he’d expand on it, but he didn’t. I wasn’t going to press for details just to ease my own pain.

I stared at my dead nemesis. Even if this did make me a monster, so be it. I might have regrets in life, but not about this. Not even a speck.

This hadn’t made me feel better, but perhaps it had helped in other ways. “Did today change anything else? Do you know if I’ll still die like you saw?” When he didn’t answer immediately, I bit my lip and looked at him.

He turned his head toward me, and all I saw in his face were the words he didn’t want to speak. Nothing had changed.

“I wish I hadn’t asked.”

“We’ll figure something out,” he said, and his arm wrapped around my shoulders, pulling me in to him.

I replied with the obligatory, “I know,” but we were both full of it.

When Cutty walked in it was a welcome distraction. I wasn’t surprised to see him, either. I would’ve been more shocked if some of the guys weren’t lingering around.

“Whoa!” He said as he came to stand on my other side. “Dude, that’s some fucked up shit. Who did the honors?” Cutty made a circular motion over the killing wound with his finger.

“That would be me.”

“Hardcore.”

“Thanks, I guess.”