Kelly Gay - The Better Part of Darkness

The bell chimed over the door as I entered, braced a hand against the glass to slip the pumps back on, and then limped inside where I slid gratefully into an empty booth.

God, I hurt!

It took a minute to regain my composure and take stock. My elbow ached, and the scratches and road-rub along my shoulder, hip, and thigh burned, but not nearly as bad as my ankle, which was growing hotter and achier by the second. Pulling in my leg, I saw the skin was swelling, but not enough to indicate I’d sprained it.

“Hey, miss, you got to order to take up a booth!”

Yeah, yeah.

Quickly, I smoothed my hair and straightened my shirt before standing. Every muscle protested as I searched the bag for my wallet, pulling out three bucks and some change. At least the counter wasn’t too far away. Wincing, I shuffled forward in the torturous black pumps and ordered a large sweet tea and a chocolate chip cookie.

The clerk lifted an eyebrow at my appearance. “You all right?”

With a wry half-smile, I handed him the three bucks. “Yeah. You’d be amazed what a clearance sale at the Apple Store does to some people.”

He froze. “There’s a clearance sale at the Apple Store?”

“Yeah. Ends today though.”

“Dude. Really?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Sorry.”

The door jingled. The clerk looked beyond me and gave a nod to the new person. No, I corrected, smelling the distinct scent of tar. Not a person. A jinn. Shit.

My blood pressure rose, and I mentally begged the clerk to hurry the hell up.

The jinn, I noted via a quick sideways glance, was typically large, his bulky form heightened by a Georgia Tech hoodie. He didn’t pay me any mind as he stood at my right side, his attention firmly on the overhead menu.

“Hey, Len, how’s it going?” the clerk asked as he poured my tea. “Heard about those guys who were killed yesterday in Underground. That’s wrong, man, just wrong.”

Len turned his head slightly, casting an aloof look at the clerk, the muscle in his dark gray jaw flexing.

The clerk slid my tea across the counter and pulled the cookie from the bin with a napkin. His eyes lit excitedly as he leaned forward toward Len, his voice low when he spoke. “Tennin must be calling for blood, eh?”

I grabbed the tea and cookie, pivoting just as Len turned fully toward the clerk. He hadn’t seen my face. But I didn’t miss his deep resonating voice as I walked back to the booth. “If she can’t pay, it will be in blood, yes.”

Poised and alert for an attack, I slid into the booth facing the jinn so I could watch his every move.

If I disappeared, it’d be all-out war against the jinn. But then Tennin didn’t really have a choice. Death prices and blood debts had been a way of life for the jinn for thousands of years. If Tennin looked the other way now, it’d be seen as weakness, and he hadn’t retained his position as jinn boss for this long by being weak. In fact, it was well known the guy bordered on psychotic.

As the clerk made Len’s order, I studied the broad back of the bald-headed warrior, noting his thick gunmetal neck and the beefy hands that flexed and un-flexed at his sides. They lived at the ready, always on alert, always ready to fight.

Memories of the three I’d killed came back to me. The thick black blood they’d bled; the smell of it like liquid tar and iron. I didn’t know how in the hell I’d managed to kill three of them, let alone how I was going to thwart a whole damn tribe.

As the jinn paid and approached my booth with a to-go bag, I lowered my head and broke the cookie in half, trying to temper my adrenaline so he wouldn’t smell it. I fought a two-second battle with myself. Should I glance at him as he passed? Would that be the normal thing to do, or should I ignore him?

With no time to think, I opened my mouth and shoved in half the cookie. Dim violet eyes met mine as he walked by my table.

I froze.

One dark eyebrow dipped a fraction. At my appearance? At the fact that I smiled at him with a mouth full of cookie? Or that he recognized me as the prey he was charged with bringing in?

It seemed like slow motion had kicked in as we locked gazes, but it was over in the two seconds that it happened. I didn’t let out my breath until the bell over the door stopped jingling.

I washed the lump of dry cookie down with the tea, taking a moment to decompress after my near brush with the jinn and get back on track.

Mynogan’s last words slowly crept in my head.

He’d tried to lure me with the promise of power. But why? I released a deep sigh, propped my chin in my hand, and gazed out the window. I was no closer to finding out how he knew me or why he existed in my dreams. And, for all my bumps and bruises, I’d gotten no information, not a single clue on the ash .

But one thing I did know: after seeing Cassius Mott at the rally, connecting the dots was pretty simple. Amanda was Cass’s daughter. Cass was a known drug user. And a new drug was going around. Thanks to his brother, Titus, Cass had a small fortune and access to numerous labs. He had to be involved with ash in some way, and somehow Amanda had gotten hold of it. My house and the school had been broken into. And the only relation there was Amanda, which meant someone, possibly Cass, was looking for something.

But what? My fingers tapped on the table.

Goose bumps pricked my skin. I sat straighter. They’d been looking for something they hadn’t found at school, so they’d gone to my place.

My pulse leapt. What was the one thing a kid kept on her most of the time, the one thing she kept her belongings in besides her locker? Her backpack. Bingo. And I knew exactly where that was. In the backseat of my Tahoe. When I dropped her and Em off at school the previous morning, she’d been so unusually hyper and distracted about her new Betsey Johnson handbag that it was no wonder she’d forgotten to grab her worn-out old backpack. And probably by the time Amanda realized it, she was already on her way to bliss city. The drug could’ve been coursing through her system from the moment she got into my car, and with Amanda in a coma there was no way to know for sure.

The backpack had to be it.

I got a refill on the sweet tea and then sat back down, waiting for Hank. Will was probably having a fit by now, wondering what the hell was going on with the break-ins at the house and school. I dialed his cell and then hung up before the call went through. I couldn’t explain everything to him now. He had to have seen the news, heard all the details from Hank. Bryn would probably fill him in, too, when he arrived to pick up Em.

Instead, I called Bryn at Hodgepodge and spoke briefly to her and then Emma, just to make sure Emma was okay. She couldn’t have sounded more normal or more excited that school had been cancelled and she got to spend the day with her dad. Ah, the joys of being a kid.

A horn honked outside. I turned in the booth to see Hank’s sleek Mercedes dart into an empty spot at the curb. Grabbing Bryn’s bag, I scooted from the booth with my tea, chucked the cookie wrapper, and then hobbled to the car.

All I wanted was to sink into the soft leather seat and close my eyes.

“Whoa,” Hank said as I plopped awkwardly into the seat, shoved the Styrofoam cup into the cup holder, and shut the door, “what the hell happened to you?”

I yanked down the visor mirror. Half of my twist was out, my hair long and tangled on one side and up on the other. A few scratches marred my left cheek and jaw, and my mascara was smudged. Bloody skin peeked from a large tear in the left shoulder of Bryn’s sweater. “Long story.”

He turned down the radio. “Aren’t they always?”

After I filled him in on the political rally and subsequent limo ride from hell, Hank took a good five minutes to yell at me. Again. I was really getting sick of his holier-than-thou attitude. We were cops. What did he expect? But I cut him some slack and didn’t argue back. He’d been torn in half when I’d died, and his sudden protectiveness stemmed from never wanting to go through that again. I couldn’t blame him.