The urge to tear it off and throw it away made her shake. Danny. Oh, Danny, please. Please, God.
She slumped, trembling, against the phone box. Her nails drove into her palm. The terrified mice spun round and round inside her brain.
“Miss, please try to be calm. We have dispatched a unit to your location.”
Try to be calm? Danny. Oh, God. How can I be calm if you’re dead?
CHAPTER 3
THE FOURTH TIME THE OPERATOR TOLD HER TO BE calm, Selene jammed the phone back down. She looked across the mailboxes to the stairs, and the medallion tingled harshly against her skin. A warning. Her throat was full of something hard and slick, she swallowed several times, resting her forehead against cool cheap metal.
Don’t go back, the operator had said. Stay outside the building. Stay and wait for the police. It’s safest to wait for the police, ma’am.
Selene’s hoarse inarticulate moan bounced off the stairwell walls. The stairs squeaked under her slow feet. Her legs burned numbly.
She only got halfway up to the first floor before Nikolai’s hand closed over her elbow. She gave a startled, wounded little cry and found herself facing him, looking at his chest. He was somehow on the step above her, and his mouth moved, fangs flashing in something less than a good-natured grin. It was more like a smirk, or a warning.
“No,” he said. Selene stared at him, and he gave her a little shake. Her head wobbled, the entire stairwell reeling. “Outside. This is not for you.”
“He’s my—” Her mouth was so dry the words were a croak.
“Your brother. Yes.” He used his grip on her arm to pull her down the stairs. Selene went limp, resisting him, but he simply dragged her as if she weighed nothing. Her boots dropped from stair to stair as if they weren’t attached to the rest of her. “You cannot help him now. And I would not have you see this, milaya.”
“I hate you.” The fluorescents seared her wet eyes. “I wish I’d never met you.”
He gave a gracious nod, as if she’d complimented him. “Thank you.” They reached the bottom of the stairs. He half-carried her across the peeling linoleum. He shouldered the door to the building open, dragged her out and let the door go. The lock engaged.
Selene looked up at him. He set her down on the cold, wet sidewalk and brushed her hair back, settled her camel coat on her shoulders, stroked her sore damp forehead, she’d be lucky to escape a bruise from cracking her head against the wall.
His fingers were still warm. Too warm to be human, feverish, but oddly soothing.
She hated that comfort.
Distant sirens cracked the still air. Breathe, she repeated. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Breathe.
The mantra didn’t help. “I mean it. I hate you.” Her voice shook. “I hate you.”
“And yet you need me.” He smiled, an almost-tender expression that made her entire body go cold. Selene would have fallen over backward, but his fingers closed around her wrist, a loose bracelet. Sirens hammered at the roof of the night. “Selene, you do not wish to see what lies in that room. Remember your brother the way he was.”
“I don’t need you.” Selene tore her wrist away. His fingers tightened slightly, just to let her know he could hold her, before he let her go and she stumbled. There was something hard and small and spiny in her hand, cold metal.
A police cruiser materialized around the corner, whooping and braying. She opened her hand to find her key ring. He must have had Bruce sneak into my house and get my keys. The little thief. Always creeping around, peeping in windows and doing Nikolai’s bidding. No wonder His Highness keeps him around.
She looked up. Except for the police car—siren, flashing lights—the street was deserted. Nikolai had vanished. She saw the blurring in the air, the shimmer that might have been him or just the tears filling her eyes. She fumbled on the ring for the key to the front of Danny’s building.
Numb, her cheeks wet with rain and tears, she raised her hand to flag the cops down. Thankfully, they cut the siren as soon as they pulled to a stop. Selene waved, her bag bumping at her hip. No poltergeist here, no curse to be broken, no client looking down their nose at me. No, this time the person needing help is me.
Two cops, a rookie and a graying veteran who looked at her as if he recognized her. Selene hoped he didn’t. If he recognized her, he might ask questions. Hey, aren’t you that freak who hangs around with Jack Pepper?
“My brother.” Her teeth chattered. “He’s a shut-in. He doesn’t leave the apartment. He called me—his doorjamb’s all busted up—it’s not normal—”
They barked questions at her, who was her brother, what apartment, who was she, was anyone armed, what did she see? The mice scurrying in Selene’s head supplied answers. “4C, apartment 4C, Danny Thompson, I’m Selene, I’m his sister—no, nothing, just the door, that’s all I saw, it’s busted all to hell—”
Before she unlocked the building door for them, the medallion scorched against her skin. Warning her.
Fuck you, Nikolai.
She followed the cops up the stairs, sliding the medallion’s chain up over her head. She pulled it out of her sweater. Light flared sharply from the silver disc before she tossed it into a dark corner of the second-floor landing. The cops didn’t notice—they were too busy looking up the stairs and speaking back and forth in cryptic cop-talk. Both had their guns out. “Fourth floor. Apartment 4C,” she repeated, and took a deep breath, choking on tears.
“Go back downstairs,” the older cop told her. “Go back downstairs!”
Fourth floor. They saw the shattered door, the wedge of light slicing through the dim hall. The older cop radioed for backup.
They edged forward and cautiously pushed the splintered door open. Told her again to go downstairs. Selene told them she would and stood where she was, hot tears spilling down her cheeks.
Now that she wasn’t standing next to Nikolai, the wards vibrated with Selene’s nearness, lines of light bleeding out from the hole torn where the door used to be. Something had blasted right through the careful layers of defense she’d painstakingly applied to the walls. What could do that?
She took two steps, and the rookie backed up out of the apartment. He was paper-white and trembling, freckles standing out on his fair face, his blond mustache quivering.
After glancing past him once, Selene could see why.
She clamped her right hand over her mouth, staring past the rookie, who stumbled to the side and vomited onto the hall rug. Selene didn’t blame him. She could only see a short distance down the entry hall and into the studio room. The kitchen was to the left, bathroom to the right, and she had a clear view almost to the night-dark window, with the orange streetlamps glowing outside.
A moment later her eyes tracked a shimmer up over the streetlamp, a shimmer that resolved into a dark shape balancing atop the streetlamp’s arm. A tall shape, crouched down, hands wrapped around the bar, eyes reflecting the light with the green-gold sheen of a cat’s eyes at night.
I wish he wouldn’t do that, perch up there like some kind of vulture.
Selene looked down again, and her hand tightened over her mouth. Her throat burned with bile. The shapes she was seeing refused to snap into a coherent picture. Blood painted the white walls, soaked into the thin beige carpeting, and the…the pieces…
Footsteps echoed in the hall, shouts, radios squawking. Four more cops. Selene stepped back against the wall, her hand still clamped over her mouth, fingernails digging into her cheek. She struggled to swallow the hot acid bile instead of puking like the rookie.