Enraged: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Unturned Book 4) Page 11

  What a fucking pig.

  The air smelled of cooked greens and cigarette smoke. Almost every surface in the kitchen shined with a layer of grease, nothing wiped down in years from the looks of it.

  I didn’t see any sign of Tree Man. Didn’t hear anything when I cocked my ear either. If this pasty-faced, skinny-assed, tat-wearing motherfucker had a real job and was gone for the day this early, I would have been amazed. More likely, I would go down the hall and find him passed out in bed. Assuming he had a bed. Maybe the roach slept on the floor.

  “What the hell you doing?”

  I spun around. Out on the porch a young black girl, no older than ten, stood with her arms crossed and her hip cocked. She had on a puffy pink coat and mittens with kitten faces on them. But she wasn’t wearing a hat like she should have in such cold weather. She had her hair in braids and beads that hung to her shoulders. The look in her eyes went twenty years beyond her actual age. In that way, she reminded me of Toft. But she wasn’t a vampire. She did look like she might bite, though.

  “I’m looking for Horton.”

  “Mm-hm.” Her breath puffed in the winter air. “You need to break his door down like that? You a cop? You look too skinny.”

  “I’m no cop,” I said. “But my business with Mr. Plutskinst is private.”

  “Yeah, well, he ain’t here.”

  “I appreciate that. I’ll check myself, though. Just in case.”

  She rolled her eyes and cocked her hip in the other direction. “I’m telling you he ain’t here, ‘cause he’s with my momma.”

  I froze, processing. I didn’t want to involve any outsiders. I wasn’t planning on treating Tree Man so well. I figured I’d need to shake him pretty hard to get any straight answers—like a confession that he had killed Sly. So I needed a way to get him alone without spooking him at the same time. If he knew Sly well enough to want to kill him, he might have seen me around, too. If so, the second he saw my face, he would bolt (if he was smart).

  I softened my voice as best I could. “Can you take me to him?”

  She moved her gaze to the door on the floor. “I don’t think so.”

  “Can you tell him I’m here waiting for him? I just want to talk.” That last sentence hurt to say. I didn’t like straight-up lying to a young lady.

  “You might have to wait a while. He and Momma got a special relationship.”

  Okay, that sounded weird. And maybe a little gross. “Um…”

  Her skeptical frown broke into a toothy smile. She practically beamed. “You should hear them. Like a couple hippos. You know, I seen hippos at the zoo doing it. Momma tried to cover my eyes, but I seen it.” She giggled into her hand. “Yucky.”

  I had no idea what to say to that.

  “You know. I changed my mind. Come on. Let’s go visit the hippos.” She waved a mittened hand at me to follow, then turned and skipped off the porch and headed down the sidewalk, leaving scuffs in the snow behind her.

  I stood stuck for a stunned second, then shook it off and went after her.

  I jogged up to her side as she skipped along. “What’s your name, kiddo?”

  “Queen Latifah.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  She laughed. Her beads bounced around her shoulders as she skipped. “You a stranger. I don’t tell strangers my name.”

  “That’s probably a good idea.” We rounded the corner at the end of the street. “Is there a reason you changed your mind about taking me to see Horton?”

  “It’s gonna be funny.” She stopped all at once, and I went on a few steps before realizing. I turned to her. She had that big grin on. The cold didn’t seem to bother her a bit. Meanwhile, my ears had started to burn from the bitter air. The little girl had defused my anger with her silliness, so I didn’t have that heat to keep me from freezing anymore.

  She said, “You promise to break down the door to momma’s bedroom like you did over there.” She aimed one mitten in the direction we’d come. “That’ll be the best.”

  Once more, the girl left me speechless.

  She narrowed her eyes. “You one of them, ain’t you.”

  “One of who?”

  “The special people. The magic people.”

  Interesting. Seemed the girl might know a little about the paranormal. Made me wonder if her mom was a practitioner, too. Maybe she and Horton were working more than the standard magic in the bedroom. Sex could work as a powerful source of magic if you knew how to harness it.

  I decided to play it straight with my new little friend.

  “I’m a sorcerer.”

  She smiled again. “That how you broke the door.”

  “It is.”

  She clapped her mittens together and did a little bounce on the balls of her sneakered feet. I noticed one of those sneakers was missing its laces. “Momma gonna be soooooo freaked.”

  I crouched to her eye level. “There’s more to this than being funny, isn’t there?”

  She struggled with it, but her smile faltered. That stern stare she gave me when we first met returned. She answered with a question of her own. “You don’t wanna just talk to him, do you?”

  Again, I stuck with the truth. Those extra twenty years in her eyes told me she could handle it.

  “No.”

  “Good. ‘Cause he and Momma make weird things happen.”

  “What kind of things?” I asked.

  “Bad things.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  As promised, I blew down Momma’s bedroom door, but only after the little girl—still insisting I call her Queen Latifah—promised me she would stay outdoors while I did what needed to be done.

  As the door flew across the room, my anger reignited, a fresh flame in my belly, and a hard pulse in my head. I charged in after the door and found Horton and Momma.

  They were on the floor, surrounded by a circle of salt with a pentagram drawn in red on the dirty beige carpet. A limp, headless chicken lay in a bare corner of the room, blood spattered across the wall, and more droplets peppering the floor. Didn’t take a genius to figure out they had drawn the pentagram with the chicken’s blood.

  I had a wonderful view of Horton’s skinny bare ass as he took a rather large black woman on her hands and knees from behind. They were both completely naked, except Horton still wore a pair of saggy gym socks with blue stripes around the calves. They also wore a fair amount of chicken blood painted in streaks across their bodies.

  Like little Miss Latifah had said, they grunted and moaned like a pair of wild animals. Unlike her, I had never witness a pair of hippos going at it, so I couldn’t confirm that specific sound.

  The pair were so wrapped up in their ritual, neither of them had flinched when the door sailed off the hinges and to the far wall, cracking the plaster before it dropped to the floor. Horton had his head thrown back as he thrust away. He chanted in Latin with the occasional name, Steve Anders, slipped in among the words. A rough translation had him calling for horrible pain to befall Steve.

  Then I noticed the torn fabric clutched in Horton’s thin, knuckley hand. Probably torn from a shirt or other piece of clothing belonging to poor Steve. A long distance curse needed something personal from the target, something cherished. In this case, probably Steve’s lucky t-shirt or something.

  In that moment, I had no doubt Horton—and maybe his mate there—had caused Sly’s death. That fire inside of me flowed from my stomach all the way to the ends of my toes and the tips of my fingers. I could have thrown a fireball and obliterated the two of them in a single flash. Only two things kept me from doing so.

  First, the little girl. I couldn’t murder her mother while she waited just outside the house. I didn’t know if the woman had any involvement in Sly’s illness either. But it did bother the fuck out of me that she would practice this kind of black magic around her young daughter.

  Second, I had to ask Horton Why? What possible thing could have angered him enough to kill Sly? I couldn’t turn him
to human bacon until I got that answer from him.

  Still didn’t mean I couldn’t throw around a little fire.

  I started by kicking at the salt on the floor, breaking the circle.

  Momma threw her head back and screamed as if I had stabbed her in her sweaty back.

  Horton coughed and clawed at his throat, the breath knocked out of him. That’s what happened when you practiced black magic. Bad shit happened when you lost the protection of your circle. I didn’t get the impression from Horton’s chant that they were summoning demons, but if they had been, when I broke that circle, one or both of them would have been as good as possessed.

  Horton flopped onto his side and writhed as he tried to catch his breath.

  Momma rolled onto her back. Her large breasts sagged apart. A roll of flab creased her waist. She panted, but it looked like her shock of pain had already passed. She lifted her head to see me, and her eyes went wide. “What…fuck…you…doin’,” she said between rushed breaths.

  I flicked the fingers of one hand open dramatically and filled my palm with deep orange fire. “You’re a sick woman doing this kind of magic around your daughter.”

  Her wide gaze locked on my flame. “You…Ministry…? Hey, we just playing here. Sex stuff, ya know? Make it better.”

  There was such a thing as increasing the pleasure of sex with magic, but this bitch must have thought I had donated my brain to charity if she thought I would see this for anything other than what it really was. I kind of liked the idea she thought I was Ministry. I didn’t correct her.

  Horton coughed one last time and finally sucked air like a Hoover. His eyes bugged as they rolled around to see me and my fire. “Oh, shit,” he creaked.

  “Hurts, huh?” I kicked him in the ribs. Not as hard as I could have, but I wasn’t gentle either. “I’m gonna hurt more than your nasty magic, though.”

  Cringing in pain, he held his hands out close together, his knobby elbows sticking out at his sides like a pair of featherless chicken wings. “Hey, man. You don’t have to get all butt hurt. We wasn’t hurting no one.”

  “No?” I kicked him again.

  He curled up on his side, and with him naked like that, he looked like an ugly, overgrown fetus.

  “My Latin ain’t great,” I said, “but I recognize a death call when I hear one.”

  Momma whispered a curse under her breath.

  Horton was too busy squirming in pain to say anything.

  “You gonna take us in?” Momma asked.

  “If you didn’t have a little girl depending on you, I’d do more than take you in.” I threw a small fire bolt just past her head.

  She screamed and threw her hands in front of her face.

  The bolt burst against the floor behind her and started the carpet on fire. Before the little fire got out of hand, I directed my magic toward it, grasped control, and snuffed it out.

  “Get dressed and get the fuck out of here,” I said. “I need to talk to Horton here alone.”

  At the sound of his name, Horton looked up from his pain position. “Why me? This was all her idea.”

  “Why you son of a whore.” Momma rolled up to a sitting position then scooted on her wide, bare ass within striking distance of Horton. She started smacking him. Each slap against his bare skin sounded like a whip crack.

  I wasn’t about to get in there between them. The thought of touching either one of them made my skin crawl. But I had to break it up. I wanted to get my own hits in against Horton.

  I ignited my fist. “Hey!”

  She stopped smacking.

  He stopped cowering.

  Both of them honed in on my fiery hand.

  “I told you to leave,” I said to Momma.

  She nodded quickly, scrambled to her feet—giving me way too much of an eyeful—grabbed a wad of clothes off the bed, and hurried out, fat rolls jiggling.

  “What you want from me, hey?” Horton asked, voice cracking.

  I glared down at him. I wanted to slam my flaming fist right into his mouth, make his eyeballs boil, his face slough off.

  Not yet, though.

  “Get some clothes on before I puke.”

  He moved stiffly, wincing as he pulled on his jeans. I’d kicked him pretty good, but I thought some of his pain came from the side effects of a broken black ritual. All magic comes at a cost. The dark stuff liked payment in flesh or soul.

  Like Sly’s soul.

  That this fuck had poisoned.

  Once Horton pulled on his t-shirt, I kicked him in the stomach, doubling him over. I gave him a shove toward the bed and he bounced onto the mattress. I gave him another kick in the ass to coax him the rest of the way onto the bed.

  The bed was tucked in the corner, and Horton wormed his way along the bed into that corner, and pulled his bony knees up in front of him like a scared kid after a nightmare. “What you want, man? Just tell me what you want.”

  “Sly Petrie.”

  He ran a hand over his shaved head and absently streaked chicken blood across his scalp. His black eyebrows drew together. “Why the fuck would I know where that shit head is?”

  “So you know him.”

  “Yeah. He used to sell me good shit. This herbal mix blow your fuckin’ mind. I used it to slip into the astral plane, man.”

  I thought I saw where this was headed. “What did you do on the astral plane, Horton? You try to play incubus with some poor, defenseless girls asleep in their beds?”

  He pressed his thin lips so tightly together they practically disappeared. Shook his head.

  His eyes told a different story. Guys like this who managed to astral project, first thing they wanted to try was to rape a girl, only they didn’t think it was rape because it wasn’t with their physical bodies. Just some harmless fun, they told themselves. And the girls got a nice dream out of it.

  Only most women had nightmares instead. And they suffered all the psychological trauma of a rape victim, but they couldn’t comprehend what had happened to them. It was a sick practice, and not at all harmless like the assholes doing it tried to convince themselves.

  “Sly figure out what you were doing with his mix?” I asked.

  He shook his head again, mouth locked closed.

  “He refused to sell to you once he knew. And that pissed you off, huh? That’s what that argument was about. That’s why Sly said you made him sick.”

  Horton’s eyes glistened. His nostrils flared from his panicked breaths. He trembled.

  I had him, gods damn it. I had him.

  “So you decided you’d make him sick for real, huh? You already have charges for effigy possession.” I pointed at the bloody swatch of fabric Horton had dropped on the floor. “You pretty good at long distance curses? Your lady friend help you with Sly, too?”

  His mouth finally broke open. “She had nothing to do with it.”

  Which sounded like a confession. She didn’t have anything to do with it, but, by implication, he did. Holy hells, he had killed Sly. He’d done it, and here I was, my hand still in flames, only the center had turned sharp blue like a gas fire. I watched as that blue fed on the orange until the flame had taken on the color of the edge of twilight.

  My heart pounded. Sweat greased my skin, made my shirt stick to me under my coat. A feverish heat consumed me.

  Horton must have seen the rage in my eyes. He tried to squeeze himself deeper into the corner. “Look, man. I’m sorry. I just, I was pissed, man. But he’s gonna get better. No harm done.”

  My eyes nearly exploded out of my skull. My pulse raced double time. I could feel it in my face. In my gut. In my soul.

  “No harm done,” I rasped. “You killed him, you stupid fuck. You killed him.”

  I swung my flaming fist, but the bed was in the way. My right hook missed his nose by a couple inches. Fine. I wouldn’t miss with this.

  I cocked my hand over my shoulder, ready to pitch my fire right at his face. In my mind, he was already dead. Blasting his head off was mere
ly a formality.

  He pressed his fists against his eyes and curled into as tight a ball as his gangly limbs would allow.

  “It wasn’t supposed to kill him,” he screamed. “There’s no way, man. It wasn’t me. I didn’t—”

  The whoosh of my fire bolt drowned out his last words.

  After that, all he had left were screams.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The smell of cooked flesh followed me out of the bedroom. The taste of bile sat in my mouth. My stomach felt ready to send up more at any moment. I kept seeing Horton Plutskinst’s face melting within a torrent of blue flame.

  I stumbled into the living room and found Momma and Little Latifah on the couch. Momma, now dressed in a flower print blouse and a pair of navy slacks, clutched her daughter against her. The tears on little girl’s cheeks shined in the sunlight through the nearest window. She quivered in her mother’s arms. And when she saw me, she shrank away.

  She looked nothing like the sassy, silly girl who had asked me to blow in her momma’s bedroom door and interrupt the hippo lovin’. Hadn’t she told me she wanted them to stop doing their bad things? And hadn’t I given her just that?

  I held out a hand toward the girl. “Sweetie, I’m sorry if I scared you.”

  I realized how ludicrous that sounded the moment the words left my mouth. I had killed a man in her mother’s bedroom. I had set him on fire, and he had screamed until he died. I had lost track of everything but my rage. Now I had traumatized a little girl who only wanted the bad things to stop, and I had made the bad things worse.

  “Get away from my daughter,” Momma shrieked. She was in tears, too. “And get your ass outta my house.”

  I blinked, saw a flash of Horton’s head caving in, and gagged. I pressed my fist against my mouth and ran.

  Outside, the cold hit my hot lungs so hard I lost my breath. My chest seized. My heart seemed to stop for a second. The collection of sensations, on top of my nausea, knocked my balance out of whack. I shuffled along the sidewalk a few paces then fell to my knees on the front lawn. The frozen grass crunched under the snow. The snow itself seeped into my jeans. I shivered hard once, then bent over and threw up.