Poison Promise by Jennifer Estep
Perhaps it was a by-product of the vamp’s ability, but fear blasted over me like heat from a sauna. Oh, yes. I could feel every single scrap of Troy’s hot, sweaty fear, like burrs desperately sticking to my own skin, before Benson pulled them away and swallowed them whole.
“No,” Catalina whispered. “He doesn’t deserve that. We have to save him.”
She started forward, but I clamped my hand over her mouth and dragged her back against me, making sure that we were both still hidden behind her car.
“It’s too late for him,” I muttered in her ear. “And us too if you don’t be still and keep quiet.”
Catalina struggled for a moment before slumping against me in defeat. She knew as well as I did that Troy was already dead.
Poor bastard. I almost felt sorry for him.
• • •
It took Benson less than two minutes to suck out all of Troy’s emotions. And when it was done, and Troy’s now bald, skeletal head lolled to the side in death, the vamp let out a long, loud, satisfied sigh, as though he’d just enjoyed the finest gourmet meal. I half-expected him to belch, but apparently, he was too dignified for that.
Benson got to his feet. His eyes burned an electric blue from Troy’s pain and fear, the orbs brighter than all the lights in the garage combined. He smiled at no one in particular, and the glow from his eyes painted his fangs the same disturbing shade. None of the other vamps dared to meet his gaze, except for Silvio, who stood by patiently, no emotion at all showing on his face.
“Well,” Benson crooned. “That was a nice snack. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.”
Even his voice was larger now, bolder, stronger, and more nasal than ever before. The sound reverberated through the garage, making Catalina shiver beside me and the concrete wail and whimper with the last dregs of Troy’s fear.
With Troy dead, I expected Benson to get into his car and leave, but instead, he reached inside his coat and pulled a small notepad out of his shirt pocket, along with a pen. The click of him snapping his thumb down on top of the pen boomed as loudly as a gong in the absolute quiet of the garage.
He crouched over Troy’s body, examining it from all angles, and started scribbling on his pad. I grimaced. Benson was actually taking notes about what he’d done to the drug dealer, as though it were an innocent science experiment, instead of a brutal execution. Not only did he take notes, but he actually pulled out his phone, snapped several photos, and then held the device up to his lips and started murmuring his observations into it. I wondered if he had some sort of sadistic memory book of all the people he’d killed. It wouldn’t surprise me.
Silvio remained still and quiet behind Benson, although the other vamps shifted on their feet, staring at the oil stains on the floor instead of at their boss. Nobody wanted to think that they might be in Troy’s position one day—dead, drained, and deconstructed.
“We’re done here,” Benson finally called out, getting to his feet and putting away his phone, pen, and pad.
Benson snapped his fingers, and one of the vamps hurried to open the rear door of the Bentley. The others got back into the Escalades, but Silvio walked over to Troy, bent down, and started rifling through his pockets, taking Troy’s wallet, phone, and the bags of pills he had stuffed in his jacket.
Oh, no. Couldn’t leave those behind when another one of Benson’s dealers could sell them.
Silvio started to rise, but his gaze caught on something glinting off to the left: Catalina’s keys.
She’d dropped them when I’d startled her earlier, and they lay about five feet away from her car, in the middle of the floor, right out in the open. I tilted my head and ground my teeth together to hold back a curse. I was still peering around the back of the car, and the faint motion caught his attention. His gray gaze locked with my wintry one. Even worse, he spotted Catalina too, since I was still holding on to her.
Silvio’s eyes widened, and his lips puckered. Another second, two tops, and he would open his mouth and yell at the other vamps to drag us out from behind the car. Then his boss would either feast on our emotions or give us to his men to play with. Neither option was pleasant to contemplate. Oh, I could kill some of the men but probably not all of them. Not before they got hold of Catalina, and especially not with Benson looking like some roid-rage wrestler spoiling for a fight. Our best chance of surviving this was to hotfoot it out of here as fast as we could.
“Something wrong, Silvio?” Benson called out to his second-in-command from the back of the Bentley.
“Get ready to run,” I muttered in Catalina’s ear.
Silvio stared at me for another heartbeat before dropping his hand down beside Troy’s body and then smoothly rising to his feet. “Of course not. Just making sure I got everything.”
He pivoted on his wing tip, strode back over to the car, and slid in behind the wheel, as if nothing had happened. But he’d seen us. I knew that he had. So why the hell wasn’t he screaming about our presence to Benson and the other vamps?
I thought it must be some sort of trick, some ruse to get me to lower my guard and lose any chance I had of sprinting deeper into the garage and getting Catalina to safety. But Silvio cranked the engine, turned the car around, and steered it down the ramp. The two SUVs followed him.
A minute later, we were alone, and the only sound in the garage was the dark muttering of the stone around us.
6
As soon as Benson and his vamps were out of sight, I got to my feet.
“Come on,” I told Catalina. “We need to leave. In case they decide to come back.”
Catalina continued to slump next to the rear tire. Instead of standing, she curled in on herself. A sob escaped her lips, and she just crumpled. She buried her face in her hands, making her long, wavy black hair spill over her shoulders, then pulled her knees up to her chest and started rocking back and forth on the dirty concrete as she cried.
I left her to her tears. For now. My knife still in my hand, I went over to Troy—or what was left of him.
It wasn’t pretty.
I’d once seen a water elemental pull all the moisture out of a giant’s body, leaving nothing behind but a wet deck and a sloppy pile of skin and bones. This reminded me of that—except it was worse.
It wasn’t that Troy looked particularly gruesome in death. Given his now hairless head and thin figure, he resembled a cancer patient more than anything else. And his bulging eyes and scream-frozen mouth didn’t bother me in the slightest, not given all the times I’d put that same shocked and horrified expression on someone’s face. But there was an . . . emptiness in his still body, as though he were nothing more than a brittle, hollow shell, like an egg without a yolk inside. I supposed that was exactly what Troy was now, since Benson had scooped out everything inside him worth taking. Being bitten and drained of blood by a vampire was bad enough, but what Benson had done, well, it wasn’t something I wanted a repeat viewing of—ever.
I slid my knife back up my sleeve, crouched down on my knees, and rifled through Troy’s pockets, even though Silvio had already picked them clean. Sure enough, I came up empty. But my movements shifted Troy’s body to the left, and a gleam of plastic on the concrete caught my eye. I reached down and pulled a bag out from beneath the folds of his jacket.
A single blood-red pill lay inside the plastic.
It was the same pill, stamped with the same crown-and-flame rune, that Troy had given to me at the college. I remembered how Silvio’s hand had dropped down to Troy’s side before he’d driven off with Benson. He’d deliberately left the pill behind. Why? He’d seen me and, no doubt, knew exactly who I was. So why hadn’t he told his boss that I was here? And why leave one of the pills behind? Whatever Silvio Sanchez was up to, it didn’t make any sense.
I got to my feet and held the pill up to the light, turning it this way and that, but there were no other runes or marks on it, and I certainly wasn’t going to swallow it to see what it would do to me. Maybe Bria would find it useful.
I slid the pill into my jeans pocket, then stalked over, grabbed Catalina’s keys from the floor, and rounded the side of the car. The sharp jangle-jangle-jangle of metal cut through her sobs, and she slowly lifted her head. This time, I didn’t take no for an answer. I put my hand on her arm and gently helped her to her feet.
“Come on,” I said, unlocking the car and opening the passenger’s-side door. “We need to get out of here. I’ll drive you home.”
“You’re not—you’re not just going to leave him there, are you?” Catalina croaked out.
She moved away from the car and headed in Troy’s direction.
“You don’t want to look at that,” I called out.
But it was already too late. Catalina’s face paled at the sight of her ex-boyfriend lying on the cold concrete and the horrible way he’d died. She clamped her hand to her mouth, staggered away a few feet, and threw up.
I sighed and leaned against the side of the car. When she finished, Catalina straightened up, pulled a tissue out of her jeans pocket, and used it to wipe off her mouth. I hoped that she would hurry over to the car and that would be the end of things, but instead, she went right back over to Troy’s body, with disgust, guilt, and grief tightening her pretty features as she stared down at him.
“We need to call somebody . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“And tell them what?” I asked, my voice more sarcastic than it should have been. “That we witnessed Beauregard Benson, one of the most dangerous men in Ashland, kill one of his own dealers? It’s not exactly a news flash. What we need to do is get out of here and forget this ever happened.”
Catalina whipped around, her hair flying around her shoulders, her hands balling into fists. “I’m not leaving him!” she screamed.
The concrete around her let out a single sharp wail that melted into low, gravelly mutters of determination. The sound matched the mulish expression on Catalina’s face. I thought about knocking her out, shoving her into her own car, and driving away with her. But I had the feeling that if I took so much as one step toward her, she would start screaming again—or, worse, bolt out of the garage.
If she did that, someone was sure to see her, and word would get out about Catalina running away from the scene of a gruesome murder with me chasing her. Then we’d both be in more trouble than we already were. Maybe I should have been more sympathetic to the trauma Catalina had witnessed, but I had enough problems already without attracting the attention of Beauregard Benson.
Since I couldn’t get Catalina to leave and I didn’t want Benson and his men to come back and find us, that left me with only one option.
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll call someone. Look, I’m doing it right now, see?”
Catalina stared at me, still angry and suspicious, so I pulled my phone out of my jeans pocket and hit a number in the speed dial. Three rings later, she picked up.
“Coolidge.”
“Hey, baby sister.”
“Hey, Gin.” Bria paused. “What’s up?”
“Why ever would you think that something’s up?” I said in my best, most innocent, I-haven’t-killed-anybody-in-hours voice.
“Because you never call me at work unless your work has somehow become my work,” she said, a teasing note creeping into her voice. “So who is it this time, and how many bodies are there?”
The fact that she could joke about it was something of a miracle. Detective Bria Coolidge was a good cop, and my being the Spider was something that didn’t exactly sit well with her at times. But we’d slowly come to an agreement ever since she’d returned to Ashland. Bria would never like my being an assassin, but she understood why I did it, the same way that I understood her being a cop and wanting to help people, even if the law was a running joke in our city and the only justice most folks got was what they made for themselves.
“Just one,” I said, answering her question about bodies. “And it isn’t even one of mine.”
“What?” she asked, her voice still light. “Did Finn kill someone instead? I bet he just loved getting his new Fiona Fine suit dirty.”
“No. It wasn’t Finn. It was Beauregard Benson.”
I expected another teasing comment, but Bria went immediately completely quiet, so quiet that I could hear the faint hum of her phone.
“Where are you?” she growled.
I frowned at the odd, intense tone in her voice, but I told her about the parking garage.
“I’ll be there in ten,” she snapped, every word sharper and louder than the last. “Don’t move, don’t let anyone see the body, and don’t touch anything.”
“What—”
I started to ask her what was going on, but she’d already hung up on me.
• • •
I stared at my phone, wondering at Bria’s unexpected angry reaction. My sister dealt with criminals on a daily basis, some of whom wore badges and called themselves cops. But the mere mention of Benson’s name had made her go from carefree to nuclear in five seconds flat. What could possibly be going on with Bria and Benson—
“Who was that?” Catalina asked, seeming a little calmer than before.
“Bria. My sister, the cop. You’ve seen her at the restaurant.”
She nodded. “She’s nice. Polite. A good tipper. Pretty too.”
“She’ll be here soon. Probably with Xavier,” I said, referring to Bria’s partner on the force.
Catalina nodded again and looked at Troy. She hesitated, then let out a breath and slowly sank down onto the floor next to his body, not caring about the dirt, oil, and other grime she was smearing all over her jeans. She reached out, as if to touch his withered hand, but thought better of it and ended up resting her palm on the concrete next to his.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” she said. “But I can’t leave him.”
“I know he was your ex, but he was trying to force you to deal drugs, and he followed you here tonight. He was going to hurt you bad, Catalina. Maybe even kill you.”
She sighed, her face suddenly decades older than her twenty-one years. “I know. But he was still my friend. From before my mom died.”
She looked at the back wall of the garage, but her gaze was even more distant. Jo-Jo sometimes got that same look, whenever she was peering into the future and hearing whispers about it. But Catalina wasn’t an Air elemental, so the only thing she was seeing was the memories of her own past with Troy.
I lowered myself to the floor on the other side of his body. “Your mom died last year, right? Killed by a drunk driver?”
“Yeah,” Catalina said, her tone flat. “In the spring. The drunk guy died too, so I didn’t even have anyone to be angry at, you know?”
Yeah, I knew all about the anger that came with losing a loved one, especially so suddenly, so senselessly.
She drew in a breath. “My dad split when I was a kid. I never knew him. But my mom was great. Before she died and I . . . moved, we lived in Southtown. On Undertow Avenue.”
I let out a low whistle. Undertow Avenue was one of the roughest streets in all of Southtown, the kind of place the cops wouldn’t even go, unless there were at least a dozen of them and it was broad daylight. Even then, they’d still be outnumbered by the gangbangers, dealers, and other violent folks. Undertow Avenue also happened to be in the heart of Benson’s territory. No wonder Catalina had known who he was. She’d spent her life living in his shadow.
“Troy lived in the house next door to ours,” Catalina said. “His dad was a mean drunk who beat him and his mom, so he would always come over to my house to hide out. My mom would feed him cookies. Troy loved her chocolate-chip cookies so much.”
She smiled, but tears streaked down her face. “Troy watched out for me, you know? Even when we were little, he’d walk me to school and keep the other kids from hassling me. When we got older, we were more than friends. I loved him. At least until . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Until he started dealing drugs for Benson,” I finished.<
She shrugged. “I can’t really blame him for it. In our neighborhood, that’s what a lot of people did to make money. It was just another job to them, and him too.”
“So what happened?”
Instead of looking at me, she traced her fingers over a black skid mark next to Troy’s hand. “Being part of Benson’s crew, there was always pressure to meet his weekly quotas. Troy was always stressing and scrambling to keep up. One day, we were arguing. He wanted me to start selling to help him out, but I didn’t want to. He hit me.”
Her hand rose to her left cheek, as if she could still feel the sting of that long-ago blow. Maybe she could, deep down in her heart.
“He said it would never happen again, but I’d seen that story too many times before, so I broke up with him. A month later, my mom died, and I . . . had the chance to get away, from the neighborhood, from Troy, from all the memories of my mom, so I took it. Maybe that was weak of me, but I took it, and I haven’t looked back since.”
I wondered what she wasn’t saying, like exactly where she had gotten the money to escape from all the haints that haunted her in Southtown. But I stayed quiet, wanting to hear the rest of her story.
Catalina’s hand fell back down to the concrete. “Everything was fine until the fall term started a few weeks ago. That’s when I saw Troy again. He’d started dealing on campus, and I ran into him on one of the quads. He begged me to give him a second chance. I told him the only way I’d do that was if he quit working for Benson and got a regular job.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t like that at all. He said that I was a traitor, that I’d moved away and didn’t remember what life was like in our neighborhood. I told him that there were lots of good, honest, decent, hardworking folks where we came from. I told him that my mom had never dealt drugs to make money. He said that I didn’t have any loyalty to him, to everything we’d been through together, to how he’d protected me all those years.”