Fucking hell, Maggie groaned.
“Nick, aren’t you in prison?”
“I am.”
I looked at the clock on my phone. “What are you doing making a call at this hour?”
“Never mind about that,” he said. “I’ve only got thirty seconds. You need to come see me tomorrow at the OtherOps prison in Medina. Visiting hours are between ten and two. Be there at ten.”
I rubbed my eyes with one hand. “Nick, I don’t have time to drive down to Medina tomorrow. What the hell is this about?” I did have time, actually. But I didn’t want to deal with his shit. He’d tried to kill me, after all. I could feel Maggie fuming in her ring, the very sound of Nick’s voice setting her off.
Should have let me kill him when I had the chance, she grunted.
Nick said, “Kimberly Donavon is dead. That means that the spell keeping me from talking about why she hired me is gone, which means that I can make a deal with OtherOps now. I’m either going to talk to them, or I’m going to talk to you. Make the choice. I’m out of time.” He hung up.
I stared at my phone. “Seriously. No goodbyes. You okay, Mags?”
She was silent for a few moments. I could feel her sudden trepidation. This is bad.
“Should I call Justin and confirm that Kimberly is dead?”
No, Nick was telling the truth. We need to shut him up, and do it fast.
I nodded. I guess I was driving to the prison in the morning. I had no idea what I could offer Nick that OtherOps couldn’t, but I had better find out quickly.
Chapter 8
I was trying to consider a half dozen different problems on the way to the Medina OtherOps prison in the morning. Jacques Williams was testing my professional and personal ethics. I was still exploring the online world of genealogy to try and find my parents. The most immediately pressing of my problems was that Nick the Necromancer could now spill the beans about Maggie’s presence to OtherOps, which we’d already decided we needed to prevent. But the one that kept flitting around the back of my head was my run-in with Boris the night before.
“You really think he’s that powerful?” I asked Maggie.
I do. Some vampires are naturally powerful – guys like Lord Ruthven and Dracula. Most, however, slowly get stronger with age. Boris isn’t running with the Vampire Lords, which means he shouldn’t be anything special, and he’s only been a vampire since the forties. You should be able to take him in a fistfight. The fact that he manhandled you …
“You don’t need to bring that up,” I grunted.
She went on over the top of me. The fact that he manhandled you so badly and he was able to walk off the blast I gave him means he’s much stronger than he should be.
How?
No idea. Vampires can gain strength a handful of ways – time and progeny are the most common.
Like, from their thralls?
Yeah. Each vampire pulls a little strength from their thralls and former thralls. But they’re not allowed to have more than four at any time. Since Boris isn’t that old, it can’t be that.
“So he might have some other way of gaining power. Do you think that has something to do with why Lord Ruthven wants an excuse to wipe him out?”
Quite possibly. The Vampire Lords don’t like a challenge to their authority. Boris being a free vampire would normally just annoy them. But if he’s figured out a way to gain power independent of simply living a long time, well …
It explained a lot about the situation – or at least why Jacques and his boss had it out so bad for Boris. I knew there were more layers to this than I’d been told. The blood tally Michael stole when he ran away was involved somehow. But I couldn’t connect the dots as I pulled into the OtherOps prison in Medina. I put all of this out of my thoughts and headed inside, fiddling with Maggie’s ring while one of the guards filled out the visitor forms. After a few minutes, I was shown down the hallways and into a cafeteria-like room where a couple of inmates were talking with their families or just watching one of the TVs mounted on the walls.
Nick was sitting in the corner. He looked odd without all the black makeup. He had a severe haircut, an orange jumpsuit, and a bored look on his face. It reminded me that Nick might have been a wildly powerful necromancer, but he was still a nineteen-year-old kid. He nodded to me from across the room, and I went to join him. As I sat down across the table, I noticed that I’d read that bored expression wrong. He was reserved, maybe even a little haunted. He leaned forward.
“Were you followed?” he asked.
I was surprised at the question. “Who the hell would follow me here? It’s not like it’s a secret where you’re locked up. Speaking of which, I thought they sent you to New York.”
“My great uncle has some pull with OtherOps. He paid for this prison to get a high-level suppression team just so they’d transfer me back here.”
“Rich uncle. Nice.” I crossed my arms. I did not want him to think we were chums. Maggie had agreed not to make a scene, but I could feel her watching Nick like I might watch a spider on the ceiling. She might not be able to kill him right now, but she was going to keep an eye out for the opportunity. “Okay, you got me here. Talk.”
Nick hunched his shoulders and glanced toward the other prisoners. “They shanked Kimberly.”
“I heard about that.”
“No, I don’t think you did. It happened right before I called you last night. She was under guard, in the hospital wing, and someone finished her off in the hospital. Like I said, my uncle has pull, so I get to hear things really fast. As of this morning, they still have no idea how someone got in to kill her. There’s literally nothing on the security cameras.”
I felt a cold chill on my spine. Getting past an OtherOps guard detail and the cameras meant that she’d been targeted by high-level sorcery.
Matthias.
“You’re worried that you’re next, aren’t you?”
“Of course I’m worried that I’m next,” Nick hissed. “Originally, I thought that Kimberly hired me on her own. But I’ve been putting the pieces together since she first got shanked and I’m guessing Kimberly was hired or coerced or something to hire me. That person is now trying to cover their trail so OtherOps doesn’t get a whiff of them. I’m guessing the only reason I’m not dead is because of the high-level suppression team.”
I realized two things at once: first, that Nick didn’t have nearly as much information as I did, and second, that he was a much cleverer guy than I’d given him credit for. He put all this together with the whispers he could get in prison. “So Kimberly’s death has removed the compulsion that keeps you from talking about why she hired you. Why aren’t you already in witness protection?”
“That’s my second option,” Nick said. His eyes flicked around the visitors room once more and he took a deep breath. “Personally, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in some OtherOps safe house, under guard, always watched and protected. And … I know that you don’t want OtherOps to find out about your ring. About your jinn friend.”
I touched Maggie’s ring without thinking, then forced my hands flat on the table. “So?”
“So I’m giving you first shot at an alliance.”
Maggie snorted loudly in the back of my head. I said flatly, “You tried to kill me, and now you want to team up?”
“That was just business,” Nick said. There was a flash of something across his face, and it took me a moment to realize it for what it was: pure terror. “It’s not business anymore. It’s personal. Kimberly wasn’t a bad person. She just wanted revenge for her brother. And now she’s dead, and I’m next in line.”