Page 73 of Redeemed
“Do you have his phone number?”
“Text David’s phone.”
“Um, can you give me that number?”
I glare at Brodie, although it’s myself I’m angry with. “Yeah. Sorry.” I shoot him David’s contact information, making a deliberate choice to ignore the leer that crosses Brodie’s face.
After a minute he says, “All done.”
“He better respond before we get to the car.”
Brodie stretches up from his crouch, phone still in his hand. “I’ll tell him that, too. We ready to go?”
When Brodie’s acting the grown-up, shit’s bad. He scrambles down the hill and I follow. Sheena meets us at the car. By the time we’re buckled in, Marcus has promised to meet us at Duke’s and Sheena’s registered her displeasure. Or torn me a new asshole. One of them.
“How many people do you guess Jacques has with him right now?” I manage an adult-adjacent tone of voice and put the car in gear.
Sheena’s in the passenger seat, glaring a hole through the front window. “I counted at least forty.”
“Sounds about right,” Brodie says, from the rear seat. He’s sprawled at an angle that won’t allow a seat belt to buckle. Whatever. He’s part djinn. If we get in a wreck, he’ll bounce.
“Three of us against forty-ish opponents of unknown type, with an unknown number of weapons. We don’t have a floorplan for the house, so we’ll be going in entirely blind. I can think of many outcomes for this situation, but none of them are good.”
Sheena grunts, which I take as permission to leave.
Las Flores Canyon Road is dark and winding. Keeping us on the road gives me something to think about besides what’s happening to David. If Jacques was going to kill him, they wouldn’t have brought him back to the house. He’d be dead. Abby was there, too, and so was Cliffe. He’s not alone.
Hoping I’m not delusional, I steer us across the Pacific Coast Highway and into the Duke’s parking lot. At this time of night, it’s mostly a big stretch of darkness except for a couple pools of light from the streetlights. The ocean sounds close enough to touch. We wait five, maybe ten minutes, until a car takes a right off the highway and pulls up next to us.
Marcus is at the wheel. He’s not a lot bigger than David, but he’s got broader shoulders, more like Randolph Collins. If he didn’t look so starved, I’d think he got the family’s husky genes. He’s got a baseball cap pulled low, as if the brim will hide the ugly scar where one eye used to be.
Whatever else happened, he’s lost his eye patch. Not good.
He gets in the back seat, next to Brodie. “Tell us what happened,” I say. I’m not friendly, but then part of me wants to take the guy’s dick off, for a couple different reasons, so he can deal.
“They got David, Abby, and your other friend.”
“Who’s they?” Brodie asks.
Marcus just shakes his head. “We went down to the beach. There were some No Trespassing signs, but…we did it anyway. David, Abby, and Trajan went into the cave and left me and Cliffe keeping watch. While they were gone, a bunch of guys showed up, so we hid behind the pyre.”
His voice isn’t steady and really, he’s kind of pathetic. David once said they’d been best friends, so I reach across and put my hand on his knee. “No judgment, okay. You’re not at fault here.”
The kid shrugs, his aura a sad grey thing. He’s wearing a pair of baggy shorts and was probably lucky to have found those. “When David and the others came out of the cave, Trajan was carrying someone, the Princess, I guess. The guys saw them before we could tell them to hide. David had us shift, and when Trajan took off with the Princess, one of the guys followed him.
“The vampire was fast as fuck, and after a while I lost him entirely. I took care of the other guy, and made sure no one else had followed, then went back to the beach. They were making David and Abby get into one of their SUVs. I wanted to stop them, but we were pretty badly outnumbered.”
“So you just watched them go?” He flinched, and I smacked myself for kicking a dog when he was down. “Probably a good thing. Either you’d be dead or you’d be with them, and at least now we’ve got information that we wouldn’t otherwise have.”
He nods, and if his expression isn’t hopeful, at least it’s not quite so bleak. Sheena gives me a “what’s next” head tilt and I shake the hair out of my face like that’ll somehow give me an answer.
Brodie leans back in the seat, stretching his legs. “Tonight’s the big bad, right?”
“According to the witch, it is,” I say. “If Trajan’s really got the Princess’s body, maybe we can work a trade for David.” I’d trade places with David in a heartbeat, whether we have the Princess or not. “I’m just not sure I can stand to wait till Trajan gets back.”
“I get that, man, but we might not have a choice. Besides, there were a bunch of night crawlers in that house with Jacques. They won’t make trouble for David during the day.”
I almost don’t recognize this new and sympathetic Brodie. “I hope not. I sure as hell hope not.”
