No Love for the Wicked (8 page)

Father appeared in the doorway. Instantly, I stopped breathing. People always thought him handsome in a dangerous sort of
way. With chiseled features and dark hair and eyes. The gray at his temples only emphasized the aristocratic breeding that he so surely carried. He was wearing one of his tuxedos and looked like a picture out of a magazine. Only instead of a camera-ready smile, his face was distorted with disgust. He looked me up and down. “Is it ready yet?” He wasn’t referring to the dress.

The seamstress sweated bullets as she tied off the final strand of beads to my hem. She was foreign, illegal, and barely spoke English—Uncle Max’s idea. No one was going to miss her when the night was over. She nodded enthusiastically, then stepped back, offering me for inspection. He came to me, and I forced my power down. I was getting stronger. And the more fear, the more rage I felt, the more my power grew. I couldn’t let him know that, though. It would be much too dangerous.

Father circled around me as footsteps tiptoed down the hallway outside the room. My stomach wanted to roll. Malcolm and Markus poked their heads in the doorway just as Father shoved his hand down the front of my dress. As he gruffly adjusted my breasts, I knew he’d leave bruises on the flesh under the material. He always did. Markus wore a thinner version of Malcolm’s tux. Nearly twenty now, he was filling out nicely in the shoulders and chest, but he was still a couple of years away from Malcolm’s athletic build. Both had brushed back their hair, ready to play their roles as doting sons for the press that Uncle Max insisted on inviting to these events.

Markus blushed when Father’s fingers momentarily exposed my nipples. Malcolm grinned
. He said we can watch,
his thoughts sneered as he raked me with his gaze. His dark-blond hair was trimmed to just above his collar. I focused there instead of meeting his eyes.
If we’re quiet and impress Father’s guests with the polite conversations that we’ve been practicing, we get to watch what he does to you. Afterward.
Markus let a low giggle escape and slapped a hand over his mouth before Father could tell him to shut up.

“It was the only entertainment they ever had,” I said softly, watching their eager eyes through the blood of my dream. “Watching Father punish me—it was what they lived for. They shared his inherent perverse and violent nature. And after those parties, when he would use the whips with the barbs to tear my dress away until I was naked and bloody—it was like a superspecial treat for them.”

The blood in the lake started to wave. My twin still smiled up at me, but the man hovering beside me frowned. “Why are you getting agitated?”

The blood settled a bit as the mansion faded back into the scenery. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Remembering pisses me off, and seeing you makes me remember.”

He considered me for a moment, then waved a hand through the air. “I do not wish to speak of this anymore. I came to visit you.” I rolled my eyes. Even in my dreams my family’s arrogance knew no bounds. “Tell me about this golden power you have growing inside you, Magnolia. You know from where it has come, do you not? Why it is growing stronger?” He talked like Uncle Mallroy sometimes, like he didn’t speak out loud enough to know vernacular English.

“Yes,” I answered. “I know where this power comes from.”

Across the sky Theo’s image appeared. He leaned back against a motorcycle, a tight frown darkening his face. It was exactly the way he’d looked the day I’d left. But unlike other times I’d dreamed of his image, he looked much clearer now. He stood golden and bright against the pink sky.

“It is part of the
more
inside me,” I explained. “I never realized it was there while I was living on the estate—Father always made sure my powers were as repressed as possible. But now I know better. I am capable of so much more than just hate and rage and pain. I can trust and be trusted. Maybe I can even love.” Theo’s
image cocked a half grin at me that I remembered so well, one I was eager to see again.

I turned to the man I’d conjured, the embodiment of the hold my family still had over me. “This golden place is made up of so much more than any of you could ever imagine.”

The dream man frowned. “What do you mean, ‘any of you’?”

“You,” I said and waved in his direction. “My family. All of you. I was always the strongest—all of you always knew that. But now the power in me is more than just our bloodline.”

For a long moment, I enjoyed staring out at the image of Theo. Soon, he had said, and I couldn’t wait. My fingers played in the blood, tickling my twin’s fingertips and making her smile even wider. When the dream man remained silent, I turned to him again. His expression had dropped, startling me. He looked as if he were stunned.

“You think I am from you,” the man whispered, his voice barely audible. “You think you have imagined me as some representation of your family, the way you’ve imagined a vision of your dead twin sister and the man you pine for. You think I am nothing more than another part of your dream.”

The blood in the lake started to quiver as an uneasy feeling settled over the landscape. “Of course you are from me. None of my relatives has the power to enter my dreams like this.”

His eyes flashed red, and I gasped. No one in my family had ever done anything like that. Only I had that power. He turned his gaze to my hands. They had completely changed, turned into long leathery claws. I hadn’t even felt the shift.

With a tight smile, the man said, “Wake up, Magnolia.”

Instantly, I came awake, gasping for air.

My hands fisted into the sheets as the remnants of my dream still shook me. I was scared to look, but slowly I glanced down. My hands were normal. They hadn’t shifted at all. Thank God. It really had just been a dream.

The man from my dreams flashed in my mind, and I automatically reached out with my senses to see if he was really there. Of course, there was nothing. But now I wondered if he really was just a part of my subconscious. The way he’d told me to wake up—it felt as if his words had actually pulled me away from the dream. I’d never done that to myself before. The thought made me shiver.

I lay back down and cuddled my quilts tight to my chest. Just a dream. The man’s eyes had flashed red because he was a part of me, that’s all. I lifted my hand again. There was the smallest glow to my skin now, visible even in the darkness.

In the morning I sat on one of the mismatched ottomans in the little farmhouse’s living room and powered up my Network-issued laptop. Computers weren’t exactly my forte—considering my lack of formal education, I figured it was pretty impressive I knew half of what I did. But after spending a couple of weeks hanging in a Wi-Fi café in Cincinnati, I’d grown pretty comfortable with the Internet. Geeky minds were so easy to access.

For all the place’s shortcomings (even with the furnace at full blast, I had to wrap myself in blankets just to keep my skin from goose-bumping), the farmhouse had great broadband Internet service. Must be all the high-tech security stuff hidden under the boxes in the little bedroom. The moment I signed into the secured intranet line Chang had set up, the whole screen went black.

“Good morning, Agent Magnolia One, Red-Level Task Force,” an electronic female voice greeted me.

“Er, hi.”

It didn’t answer. Chang had had to program my last name as One because, apparently, the system had an autodestruct mechanism that would be triggered if anyone with the surname Kelch tried to log in. Whatever.

The computer hummed for a few seconds, then connected me to a remote desktop that looked exactly like the one in Thirteen’s office. I cracked my fingers, pulled the quilt tighter around my shoulders, and got to work. My very first e-mail was from Thirteen. I had an assignment. Not a turn-invisible-and-use-my-supernatural-strength-to-break-into-a-target’s-home type of assignment. But a normal, could-have-been-assigned-to-anyone assignment.

And how cool was that?

My job was research. Specifically, I was to find out everything I could about a small city named Bohlren located somewhere in Eastern Europe on a river. This would be cake. I pulled up Google Maps and started my search.

Twenty minutes later I was done. Bohlren didn’t exist. That’s all there was to it. It wasn’t on Google Maps anywhere, and according to one of the Cincinnati coffee geeks,
everything
was on Google Maps. Obviously this place didn’t exist. Frustrated, I got up to add some more whiskey to my coffee. It was after noon. I checked my phone, but there were no missed calls. Theo’s thoughts last night had whispered that we’d talk soon. So where was he?

The quiet alarm beeped. A quarter mile away, a car turned in to my icy dirt driveway. It paused just past the fencerow and just idled there. I reached out to the driver’s thoughts. Well, well, this was an interesting surprise.

I leaned back on the kitchen counter, sipped my whiskey. They idled at the road for almost seven minutes. Then with a murmured
Fuck it
, they pulled up the drive to the house. I made sure the door was cracked open when they stepped onto the porch.

“Come on in,” I called out. They hesitated. Slowly the door opened. Luce entered the kitchen first, Tony a few steps behind. “Welcome back,” I greeted them. “Want a drink? Oh, wait, you’re driving. What about you, skater dude? You old enough to drink?”

“Are you?” he replied quickly. I just smiled.

“How’s the nose?” I asked, wincing at the bandages across Luce’s black-and-blue face. “Looks painful.”

She narrowed her eyes a little. At least I think she did. Hard to tell with all that gauze and swelling. “Magnolia?” she said drily. “Just a single name like Beyoncé or Ke$ha?”

“Those were Colin’s words, not mine.”

“Your father is Magnus Kelch.
You
are a Kelch.”

I took a drink and studied my glass. “Your point?”

She leaned back on her boot heels, thoughtful. Tony pushed off the wall he’d been leaning against and strolled around the kitchen. His untied hiking boots squeaked on the hardwood floors. He had
tucked his baggy cargo pants into the boots and left his thick orange coat unzipped. He looked at the walls and peeked into the living room as if my mere presence would somehow shift the house in some strange, supernatural way. The laptop on the ottoman snapped shut. Tony jumped. I smiled as I poured more whiskey into my glass.

Luce’s thoughts grabbed my attention. “I’m impressed,” I admitted and looked her over with new respect. “You’ve tailed me since yesterday? Thirteen didn’t even catch a whiff of it. I had a few moments of paranoia, but nothing that set me off. Impressive.” And distressing. If these guys could put a tail on me without me catching it, my father could track me no problem. I’d been sloppy, too relaxed. That needed to change.

“We don’t move on our target for another couple days,” she said. “And you’re dangerous. Even someone who doesn’t know about the supernaturals of the world could sense that.”

“So you two took it upon yourselves to follow me. And Thirteen.” She averted her eyes. “Yeah, probably not such a great idea to set a tail on a Network chief like that, huh? Does Colin know you’re here?”

“He’s the one who sent us,” Tony answered from behind me. He’d taken a post at my back. Not that it would help him if they tried to jump me, but I had to respect the thought. “The Network has never employed supernaturals before. Er, at least not that we know of. And you can get in our heads. We needed to be sure you were really with the Network.”

“Jesse’s word wasn’t enough?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Who’s Jesse?” Luce frowned.

“I mean FedEx. He knew who I was.”

They exchanged a look. They didn’t trust Jesse either. Interesting. “So now that you’ve followed me around and listened in on Thirteen’s and my conversations—two things that I can assure you won’t be happening again—what’s the plan?”

Luce wandered the kitchen. Her internal debate was fascinating. Colin’s order was for the two of them to find out if I was a legitimate member of the Network. If I was, then they were to see if I could be authorized to assist in apprehending their target. Luce knew I was legit, but she wasn’t convinced I could be trusted. Follow orders or follow instinct. What was a good little soldier to do?