Chapter 11

My phone went off. I answered it immediately.

“Asire?” a female voice asked. It took me a second to realize it was Sunbeam. The faerie/vampire hybrid.

“Yeah?” I asked, hesitantly.

“We’re heading back to you right now,” she informed us. “Before you ask, no we don’t have the child. We got just outside the city limits and Billy lost her aura. We don’t know what happened.”

Ella cursed from the backseat.

“Probably the same thing that happened with me,” I told her while rubbing my forehead.

Reggie sighed. “I’ve never heard of something like this. No on in the city has, and we have centuries worth of legion knowledge at our disposal.”

“It must be one of the Family members, able to mask her somehow,” I said. “If they’re old enough, they could even hide her from Billy.”

“Not for long,” I heard my cousin’s tinny voice say.

I smirked.

“Meet us back at the house,” I said.

They agreed and we all hung up. I pulled the truck back into the traffic. The tension had ratcheted up in the cab and we weren’t talking anymore. Reggie and I weren’t bickering and Ella wasn’t complaining. I glanced in my rearview and saw her staring down at her hands. Her eyes were even more bloodshot now and there were tears sluggishly leaking out of her eyes.

I wished there was something I could do for her, but we had no clue where the legions were. Billy was determined to find them again, but if she lost the signal, no amount of waiting around outside the city would bring it back. She had to work on it. And I think I knew how she’d try.

Back at the house, I typed in the gate code and let the two other cars in before pulling the truck through. I parked in the garage and we all met up in the dining room again.

Alain burst through the swinging door and almost lost his balance when he rushed in. His leg wasn’t healed enough to handle what his body was used to, but he didn’t seem to realize that. Once in the room, he looked each of us in the face and some of his steam ran out. He ended up collapsing in a chair next to his mate, looking devastated.

“She couldn’t find Millie?” he asked, not bothering to address my cousin for the question.

“Lost her aura, like Asire did,” Ella said. There was no heat in her voice. No blame.

I wondered how long that would last. As long as there was hope, they’d be content with civility. The second they lost that hope?

Hell was going to break loose in my house.

Loki crossed his arms over his chest and said, “I don’t know what blocked her signal. It wasn’t magic and I don’t think it was a legion.”

“How do you know that?” Alain demanded. His eyes were narrowed and I wanted to throw his head into the table. Yes, let’s get violent and accusatory with the people trying to help us when they didn’t need to.

That’s smart.

Luckily, Loki seemed pretty even tempered about the whole thing. “I’m a blocker,” he said. A blocker was a rare ability where someone could take magic or a legion’s gifts and cut them off. “I didn’t sense a single thing. Billy said we were getting close, but I didn’t sense any kind of magic.”

Silence.

Shit.

“This is getting more and more complicated,” Reggie said, shaking her head. “What do we have to do for Billy to track her again?”

Billy, whose eyes were now cobalt blue, shrugged. “I can pour more energy into it, but I’ll have to take more in. I assume you don’t want me stealing your legions’ energy?” she asked, looking at Reggie.

“No,” she said, with a sideways motion of her hand. “They’ll need it to fight. Do you mind taking it from strangers?”

“Not at all,” Billy shrugged. “I do it all the time back home for work.”

“What are you two talking about?” Ella asked, looking from Reggie to Billy. Her eyes were still a little foggy, but she put on a good face.

“I’m a battery,” Billy said. “If I take some energy from other people, I might be able to boost my tracking enough to find your daughter. Right now I’m really low. You can tell because my eyes are a darker shade of blue.”

Ella’s mouth fell open.

Loki smirked.

“I thought you worked for a security company?” Ella asked.

“I do,” she said. “You know, when you’re a personal body guard, nothing keeps a crowd under control better than making them all sleepy.” Then she grinned, completely unrepentant.

Reggie raised an eyebrow. “You’re one to watch out for, aren’t you? Like a sleeper cell. You look all cute and happy, but you’re really dangerous under all that bubbliness aren’t you?”

Billy just smiled again.

“That’s what I thought,” Reggie said. Then changed subjects. “So you need to go out. Asire, you’re heading out to move stuff for your boss, right?”

“Yup,” I said, glancing at the clock. It was barely lunch time. “Not for a while though.”

“That’s fine,” Reggie said. “When you do, take Billy with you, so she can refuel. I don’t want anyone out alone, since the Annihilists seem to like attacking at night and strategically. I hate smart enemies.”

She shook her head and took another look at her delicate watch. “I’m heading into the office. Ella, how about you come with me?”

Ella blinked, but nodded. Numb from another day without her child. There wasn’t much we could do at the moment. Until Billy refueled, as Reggie put it. The enemy had to have known we were tracking her, since her aura disappeared from radar. If they knew we were tracking her, they would have moved her.

Billy went with me to work at six o’clock. Regory argued to go with us and she talked him out of it. He would hover while I worked and he would hover worse while she charged up. I could have handled it, but Billy didn’t think it’d be good for him to see a murderer in every person who walked by us on the street.

I parked my truck under the streetlamp, like I always did, and made my slow way to the pawnshop. Billy followed and frowned as she did. “This is where you work? Captain Awesome Pawn…” She stopped and looked at me, as if asking whether or not that was serious.

I shrugged.

“Now I know why you only ever called it the pawnshop.”

I snorted.

My boss was in the building when we walked in. He was a tall man with orange hair and a curly lumberjack beard. To top it off, he wore a lot of plaid and denim and his eyes were green. The other employees find it amazing that he’s married, but personally, I wasn’t surprised. Eccentric people drew others to them like a flame. Some because they want to make fun and others because they see the beauty in all the crazy.

“Ms. Thomas,” he said, when he saw me.

I held my hand up. “Asire,” I told him. He was southern and unused to being anything but downright polite, and I always had to remind him that I didn’t like being reminded where I came from like that.

He grinned. “My apologies. And who’s this?”

“Billy,” I said, skipping mentioning who she was to me. I didn’t think he’d get in trouble if we were caught, but I didn’t want to take the chance either. Cap, as we called him, hadn’t done anything wrong. To anyone. I’d even seen him capture bugs and thrown them outside, so he may really not be able to hurt a fly.

Cap extended his hand and Billy shook it with a smile on her face. She was also polite.

“Hey. I’m just keeping her company. I won’t help, promise,” this last was said with a smile.

Cap waved off the comment and produced the key to a storage unit. “Here ya go, Asire,” he said. “It’s the same facility that I used the last two times.” Then he saluted and sauntered off. Though he was a burly man, he always moved like he was as lithe as a cheetah. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it made him look ridiculous.

Billy and I went into the store. I walked away from all the things that needed to be moved and into the front of the store. I wanted to see how bad the damage was and the answer was very. The front windows were boarded up, but I had little doubt there was already graffiti on them. The carpet, where there still was carpet, was charred and curling up. The concrete underneath had brown stains on it. There was glass everywhere and the space had been cleared out. All the merchandise that we lost was piled into three large trashcans and a forth held the broken down shelving.

Billy whistled. “It’s ugly in here.”

“Yup,” I said.

But it could have been worse.

Billy, like she said she wouldn’t, didn’t help me. She couldn’t, if she wanted to get enough energy for another go at Millie tomorrow. She stood near the front of the store, taking sips from people walking by on the street. They wouldn’t notice what she was doing while it was happening and afterward, they’d just feel a little tired. Like their day had been longer than they originally thought.

While she was doing that, I was hauling the boxes that Cap and the man who worked the shift before mine had made of all our goods to my truck. I fit four safely into the backseat and eight into the bed of the truck. I had to secure the ones in the bed with a blanket and a rope, to ensure the weather wouldn’t wreck the boxes. This was after putting down a plastic tarp for the same reason.

Getting everything from the pawnshop to the storage unit took about four hours. Thirty minutes of that was spent drying off the plastic tarp. Moving in Seattle. Fun, fun.

All the while, Billy’s eyes were getting lighter and lighter. Going from cobalt to baby blue. To sky blue. To icy. Until they were almost white. Only the smallest hint of blue remained and it made her jittery. She probably wouldn’t be sleeping tonight because even if she didn’t access the energy, it’d still be jumping and going crazy within her. There was no helping that.

She was practically bouncing around the cab of the truck while I took the last load to the storage unit.

Her jitteriness wasn’t helped by the people hanging out around the storage unit. There were a couple of kids, spray painting the walls, but there were also several adult men. They tried to look tough, but when you’ve lived with pure evil you understand they aren’t frightening. You should be cautious around them, but you also know that they won’t mess with you.

If you didn’t mess with them.

They looked us up once and down once and then dismissed us. They were human and humans have a tendency to think women are weaker or less capable than men. Because that’s how their race functioned for hundreds of years before women got really sick of it and decided keeping the peace wasn’t worth it.

And that was a mistake that human men are still learning to deal with.

If they came at us, they’d be on the ground in a second flat, screaming for mercy. And if I was feeling generous, I’d grant that mercy.

We dropped everything off in the unit and got back in the car. I was pulling out of the facility when my phone went off. I grabbed it and saw that it was Henrik. I answered since I hadn’t heard from him all day. “Hello?” I asked.

There was loud music in the background and I already knew what I’d hear, before the voice came over the speaker. “Hey? Asire?” a man said. A man who wasn’t Henrik, but who I knew all the same.

“Santos,” I said. “Is he okay?”

“You should probably come pick him up,” Santos told me.

I sighed. “Where?”

He gave me the name of a local club, Dystopia, and I turned my truck around to head in the right direction. It wasn’t hard to find the club and I pulled into the parking lot. “Stay here,” I said to Billy before getting out.

She didn’t listen.

Of course. We were raised the same way.

Instead of arguing the point, I just kept going forward. The bouncer didn’t even blink before letting us in. Not because I looked like the right clientele, but because the last time he refused, Lixa had gut punched him so hard that he passed out. He was a fast learner.

Inside the club was an assault on my senses. The music was too loud, drowning out all noise of possible attackers and making hearing someone almost impossible. The lights were flashy and going back and forth over the dance floor, and every now and then it’d go right into my eyes. The entire place smelled of sweat, sex and liquor. The air conditioning had been cranked high to help the atmosphere with all the warm bodies, but too high considering it was winter outside, so my skin immediately broke out in gooseflesh.

I hated clubs.

I hated bars.

I hated that Henrik knew this.

Before getting three yards into the dense atmosphere, Santos appeared. He was a vampire, but perhaps the only one in the city who didn’t loathe us legions. He was a couple of inches taller than me with curly brown hair down to his cheekbones, dark brown eyes and tanned skin. I didn’t know if Santos was his first or last name and we weren’t really friends.

We tolerated each other.

“He’s over here,” Santos yelled. “I got him away from the crowd.”

Santos and Henrik were friends, if one could say Henrik had any friends. While Reggie and I considered him a buddy, he kept us at arm’s length, hardly ever talking. Santos knew more about him than anyone else.

I followed the vampire through the club until we came across Henrik. He lay on a couch, almost passed out and staring at the ceiling like a corpse would. Nothing new to me and I knew Billy had some experience with this kind of thing. When I glanced back at her, there was a deep sadness in her eyes.

“Help me with him?” I said to Santos. He had to watch my mouth move in order to understand anything I was saying.

He nodded and together we hauled Henrik off the couch. He smelled like whiskey and vodka. Deadly combo.

Getting out was a lot harder than getting in. Girls kept coming up to Santos and smiling at him, talking to him like he was the only thing in the world that mattered. And he, being who he was, talked back without pause. Smiling widely, to show his white fangs against his tanned skin.

At one point, Billy looked at me and rolled her eyes.

I know, right.

We got Henrik to the car and shoved him into the backseat. Santos backed away from us once he was safely immured. He sighed. “Sorry. Tried to get him to stop.” He ran a black gloved hand through his curls. “This whole thing with the girl has him really messed up.”

I didn’t know enough about Henrik’s past to contribute to this conversation, so I just shrugged. I didn’t want to say something stupid, about how it was hard on everybody, because some people were clearly more affected than others. And I wasn’t about to tell the vampire what we were doing about it. Santos was as far removed from the other vamps as possible, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t hurt him for information.

Especially if someone saw him talking with me for any length of time.

“Heading back in there,” Santos finally said, before turning on his heel and walking away, without a goodbye.

“This happen a lot?” Billy asked.

I shrugged. “Only when something brings up his past.”

She looked like she wanted to know, but wasn’t willing to pry. Good thing too, cuz I had no information to give her. Henrik was a closed book.

We climbed back into the truck and said closed book mumbled something I couldn’t understand. “What Henrik?” I asked.

“Sorry,” he slurred. “Didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“No worries,” I said. “I was already outta the house. Let’s get you somewhere safe, ‘kay?”

“’Kay,” he said.

I pulled out into traffic and started heading home. I had thought he’d fallen asleep, but halfway to the safe house, I heard him mumble, “Still sorry.”