Chapter 85
Sit chile.”
The old mage called to the pair standing awkwardly in the cold basement.
Lucille did not think she could, and she eyed the green Orc that stood beside the hag with an open book splayed in its six fingers. Was the District Council employing orcs now? Lucille didn’t know how she felt about that or slumming it on the ratty red carpet that’d been set aside for visitors.
Lucille knew she was Armagetton scum, but she felt oddly insulted.
“You mean—” Lucille asked, pointing at the threadbare rug, before Benedict cut her off with a look.
“You seek a loved one, one filled with light but eaten by the darkness.” The mage’s eyes were still closed as her words bounced around in the small space, the orc’s inked talons dancing away on the page beside her as he wrote her prophecies.
Lucille sat down immediately, the velvety alto of the witch’s voice sending goosebumps biting up her exposed arms. Benedict was shifting beside her uneasily; it wasn’t everyday a werewolf got to sit in on a reading.
“Find the amulet of the gods, forged with fire and shielded by water magic.” “It is the only way to pass through the rift between the two worlds and reclaim your kin.” The white-haired witch screamed suddenly, lurching for Lucille. Her now sightless milky white eyes flown open, maddened with visions, as the pair scrambled away from her to rush up the Victorian-styled stone steps.
“Beware Chile! Everyone who passes through the rift loses something in that abyss! “Comes back changed, a new darkness is planted, beware!” The witch let out a string of banshee monotones as Lucille paused to look back at her, and she wished she hadn’t. The image of the hag’s leathery skin was mottled with black spots that were no doubt battle scars that haunted the red-haired gingerbread as she gazed up at the impossibly tall frame of the woman who stretched up the high stone walls of the cave basement until her wiry neck was bent at a 90-degree angle, something Lucille hadn’t imagined possible.
Benedict tore the girl away from the scene before she could witness any more of the abomination, and Lucille was glad.
“What in the absolute fuck, Ben?” Lucille squealed loudly when the pair were well past the iron wrought gates that opened into the End Streets and back to the familiar madness of Cyclops and headless horsemen that roamed the brightly lit city of Armagetton.
“What were you doing?” Anymore time in there and you’d have run out screaming, tearing your eyeballs out with your own hands! The werewolf barked, grabbing Lucille’s arm before she knew to scoot off.
“I’m not the one having clandestine affairs with black witches now, are I?” “Unhand me or lose the paw.” Lucille grunted through clenched teeth. She had a feeling the ripped detective, three times her size, knew, even without shifting, she wasn’t actually going to cut him; she wasn’t suicidal; but he released her all the same, not testing her fake bravado.
“Threatening an officer of the law is enough grounds to have you chained in Armagetton’s blackest prison, Gingerbread; trust me, you do not want to be there.” Benedict boomed, scaring the young woman into silence.
“What were you guys talking about anyway?” Lucille continued as if he hadn’t spoken, making the werewolf heave a long-suffering sigh.
“That’s not important right now,” Benedict groaned, stepping in front of the curvy-bodied vixen so that she had to look up at him; it wasn’t like she could look anywhere else. His face reminded her of the staunch, roguish beauty of the Adonis sculptures she’d seen only once, in the wealthy estate where her mother had worked.
“What we need to be doing is finding that blasted Siren and making her tell us where she hid the amulet.” Benedict boomed acidly, his fists shaking by his sides.
“How do you know she has it?” Lucille asked, gentling her tone and taking a few steps back, her eyes never leaving his big hands. Werewolves were known for their tempers, and they could snap and shift in a split second.
Lucille had seen it once—the one time she’d agreed to stand in line at the local grocery, with Luna tittering beside her.
Lucille had been wearing her favorite leather pants, complete with the crisscrossing chains and her fresh eyebrow piercing, which contrasted with Luna’s strawberry flower gown.
Lucille was contemplating how her mother had given birth to such a simpleton when a newly minted werewolf announced angrily that he didn’t respect how a porcelain-faced vampire had cut in line. That was how the folks always said it.
“I don’t quite respect that you did this or that,” when Lucille would have just told them to fuck right off.
The rising voices of the werewolf and vampire made the queued folk shift away, their hushed notes of murmuring adding to the excitement of the two tussling facts.
The vampire's cuts were quick bites and shallow stabs, almost too fast for the eyes to follow, whereas the werewolf’s attack was paced and deep, the meaty rake of claws connecting with skin and spurting blood.
It was the werewolf that won in the end, as he gripped the blonde noodle-like hair on the vampire’s bloodied white face and ripped it roughly from its neck, blood spurting and the fangs still trying to connect with air. It had scarred Luna, leaving her unable to sleep for weeks; her sister, however, was besotted with perverse glee, only managing to jam her lips over her teeth when the cleaning crew came to blot out the scene.
Lucille shivered; she still liked the weight of her head on her shoulders, even if it was sometimes an empty head.
“Didn’t you hear the mage?” Shielded by water magic? “That Siren Lisba, she’s the goddess of water magic, and I’ll be damned if I let her have something that powerful!” He thundered before turning on his heel and marching off toward the highrise den of his office, while Lucille retired to Devil’s Lullaby to pick up a rather putrid-looking snake.
Lucille skidded to a stop in front of the open wooden door that led to her uptown apartment with Saint still wound tightly around her waist, yapping on about how she’d abandoned him in the Devil’s lair.
Cold dots of perspiration collided on her forehead, and she gasped, clapping her rough gloved hands to her face in stunned disbelief.
Had she left the door open?
It was unlikely that the three complicated locks on the deadbolts on the inside of the wooden door had cost Lucille a year’s worth of soul matter.
She took security very seriously; as a thief herself, she knew how many targets she had on her slender back.
Lucille decided she had not left the door open and someone was in her house, very carefully unsheathing her sword and flicking the light switch as she entered. She hated fighting in the dark; it was much better to face your enemy head on.
The small condo was empty, her floor bed just as pristine as she left it, not a pillow out of place.
That night Lucille slept fitfully, dreaming of rubber-limbed mages and iron-boned skinwalkers.
Even in the darkest hours of her nightmares, Lucille knew deep down that she had to find her sister.
The universe was not going to take her sister away from her the way it’d snatched her parents; she was going to get to the bottom of Luna’s disappearance once and for all, even if it meant dragging every single hairy buttock through the mud-slick streets of Armagetton.