Cat Adams - The Isis Collar

Hope. I had to have hope. Hope that Julie and Willow would make it; hope that my gran would get past our argument.

But what if she didn’t? Gran loved Mom. She was willfully blind to my mother’s faults, enabling her at every turn. If she had to choose, I’d lose her. I’d already lost Mom. Not going and standing vigil the way Molly and Mick were for Julie hadn’t even been a conscious decision. I just hadn’t. I suppose I should feel bad about that and, in a way, I did. I will always love my mom, but her words and actions in the bar had finally finished it for me. You’re a devil child. I’d believed for so long that if she just had a chance to dry out, we would be happy again. But she’d said it herself. She didn’t want to. Didn’t want me.

If that was true, and I believed her, then she was never going to change. She’d never be the person I’d loved, who’d loved me. We’d reached the end of the road. She made her choice. She loved the bottle more. I couldn’t live with her choices … no, wouldn’t live with her this way. It was over. But, oh God, how it hurt. She’s my mom. I wanted her to be my mom.

But she didn’t want to be.

I sat in my car and cried until there were no more tears left. I felt … beaten. And I stank. The fight with the zombie had been ugly and messy. I wanted a shower. I needed food. Since the office was closer than the house, that’s where I went.

Traffic thinned out the farther I got from the hospital. I’d bet if I was in a helicopter flying above the city, it would look like either a multistar benefit concert was happening at the hospital or a tsunami had hit the coast.

I was within a few blocks of the office when a black sedan cut in front of me with a screech of tires and blue, rubber-scented smoke, startling me enough to make me jump and jerk the wheel, curbing the car. Damned if they hadn’t tried to run me right into a tree. Palm trees don’t look like much, but they’re a hell of a lot bigger than my Miata. I probably would have wound up right back at the hospital.

My foot slammed down on the brake pedal until the air was filled with the scent of burning brakes. I gave in to the desire to blast the horn and flip off the driver. What I found interesting is that when I got back onto the road and sped up to write down the license number, the rear plate was missing. That turned it from careless to intentional, which ticked me off.

The next interesting thing was that the car pulled into my office’s parking lot at a speed that caused the muffler to scrape on the concrete when it hit the entrance—hard enough to raise sparks. Another screech of the tires made me fight to look around the palms, and when I saw the rear door open and a large object get thrown out, I put my foot to the floor and pulled in behind the sedan, hoping to keep them in the lot. But the driver was good—very good. He skittered past my sliding Miata by putting his car into a glide that might have looked like ballet to a passerby or at least a “professional driver on a closed course.” I couldn’t pursue the black car without running over the inert form lying on the pavement.

It was a body and it wasn’t moving. There was a smear of red across the concrete where the body had rolled. I threw the car into park and forced my sore feet into a run as I glimpsed the gold Rolex on the man’s wrist and the honey color of his hair under the crusted blood.

When I cautiously rolled the man onto his back I let out a noise from the back of my throat and my hand went to my mouth. “Oh God, John.” Creede’s face was a mess of bruises and cuts that had taken some time to bestow, including a gash over one eye that would need stitches and a split, purpled lip. I couldn’t feel any magic from him at all and that worried me most. Who the hell could do this to him?

He was breathing, thank God. When I tentatively touched his stubbled chin on the way to check the pulse in his neck, he stirred and his eyes fluttered open. I kept my voice soft and confident. But there was fear threaded among the words. Were the bruises only the beginning of the beating or, worse, were they not from a beating at all? What lay below the surface? “Just lie still. I’m going to call nine-one-one and get you to the hospital.”

I felt a surprisingly firm hand on my arm. “No.”

His eyes might not have their usual flames in the back, but there was fire there. Still, he couldn’t be serious. “You need a hospital, John. You could have internal injuries and—” No. I wasn’t going to tell him about M. necrose. All I had to do was get him to the hospital and they’d fix him. They had to fix him.

He started to pull himself up, using my arm like a rope climb. “Just get me upstairs. I’ll be fine.” He coughed shallow and then deep and then spat thick blood onto the sidewalk, not just red-tinged spit. Crap.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Just quit the tough-guy thing and admit you need a doctor. I’m calling an ambulance.” Now I was getting angry. A beating like this could kill him if he was bleeding internally. I shook him off and started around the car to get my cell phone.

“Celia.” The tone in his voice stopped me. I couldn’t describe it, exactly. But I turned and looked at the pain in his face. “The press would crucify me and my company. We’re already in trouble because of Miller’s death. We employ thousands of people around the world. Thousands. Just help me upstairs. Please.”

The press? I thought about it for a long moment while I stared at the hideous damage to his body. I knew his partner’s death had hit him hard personally, but it had never occurred to me how it would affect the company. Miller & Creede was the best of the best. But to have one owner die while trafficking with demons and the other … shit. It was one thing to protect your client and get beat up. That happened to all of us. It was another thing altogether for a bodyguard, not to mention a defensive mage, to be snatched, beat up like a mugging victim, and dumped. He was right. I hated it, but he was right. I let out a harsh growl. “I’ve got some medical charms in my office. We can at least get that cut near your eye fixed. It’s bleeding pretty bad.”

He shrugged as best he could and I got the feeling he’d had worse in the past … another thing he should have told me about. “It’s a head wound. They bleed.” I helped him to his feet and got an arm around his broad back. At the first step he put his full weight on my shoulder before pulling in a hiss of air. “Hope one of them mends bones. I think my leg is broken.”

A frustrated sigh slipped out of me. “Yeah. If it’s not fractured too bad. Can you put any weight on it at all, or do I need to carry you up?”

He turned his head enough to look at me as if I’d lost my mind … even though he probably knew I could carry him up two flights of stairs. His voice was dry and firm. “I’ll manage.”

My eyes rolled automatically.

Men.

21

It tooknearly half an hour to reach the third floor. Thankfully, the cat had realized now wasn’t a time to be affectionate and weave between our legs. She’d taken one look at us and gone back to her favorite perch on the windowsill. I was just glad we hadn’t tumbled down the stairs. The treads are narrow and it wasn’t easy to keep our balance while he hobbled and hopped.

We paused by my office door for John to catch his breath. That’s when I found a note taped on the paneled wood.

Tenant Meeting on Tuesday at 10:00. Be there.

Ron

I yanked it off the door and crumpled it in one hand before throwing it on the floor. Yeah, I’d be at the tenants’ meeting all right. I couldn’t wait to see the look on Ron’s snotty face when he found out I was the new building owner. Maybe I’d kick his ass to the curb.