I dropped the wipes into the nearest wastebasket. “Alex, please. Do you really think I don’t know that? After what they did?” She opened her mouth to argue, but I kept talking. “I have to joke about it. If I don’t, I’ll lose my nerve. I can’t afford to do that. My job isn’t just what I do, it’s who I am. I believe in it. I’m good at it. And I am not letting these bastards take that away from me.”
18
Michelle Andrews was not my client. Nobody was paying me to take care of her, and some very scary people had made it abundantly clear that they wanted me to stay away from her. They’d let me know that I could be absolutely certain that my safety depended on it. There was no logical reason for me to protect her.
I’m not always logical.
She was a kid. Yeah, I know, she was in her twenties and I’m not all that much older. But I’ve lived a harder life than Michelle Andrews and it showed. I’d been less of a kid at twelve than she was at twenty-three. If I didn’t protect her, she was going to die. It was that simple. Besides, these guys had seriously pissed me off.
So I made what might, admittedly, be a stupid, self-destructive decision and called Kevin. After I filled him in, his first words were, “What do you want me to do?”
“Find out what hospital she’s in. Make sure the police have someone on her door. If they don’t—”
“I can stand guard until morning. But if it’s a magical attack, there’s not a lot I’m going to be able to do. Have you hired a mage yet?”
“Yeah, I did. Look, if we’re doing this, there needs to be a team and some organization. E-mail or text Dawna and me when you get the information. I’m going to be working on the other end of things, trying to neutralize the threat at the source. I’m putting you in charge of the team.” I still had to figure out who the hell was on the team, but hey, one thing at a time, right? “Dawna will coordinate things between us. Expect her to get in touch with the details after a bit.”
My next call was to Dawna. “Get your cousin up to speed and put her in touch with Kevin. He’s in charge of the team protecting Michelle Andrews.”
“We took the case? Michelle’s the client?”
“Not exactly,” I admitted. “Michelle got shot in the chest in front of La Cocina. I expect it’s all over the news. Kevin’s going to the hospital to make sure the cops are guarding her door. If they’re not, he’ll stay. We’re going to need to set up a team in shifts. I’m putting him in charge of it.”
“For a woman who’s not a client.”
“For a twenty-three-year-old kid whose mother was murdered and who just got shot by a sniper.”
She sighed, then said, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks.”
“We’ll need more than two people—particularly since you’re not going to be working a shift. You’re not working a shift, right? You just got out of the hospital.”
I grunted. I didn’t like admitting I wasn’t up to taking a shift, but I really wasn’t. Damn it. “I’ll deal with that tomorrow. I need to get some sleep.”
“All right. You rest up. I’ll take care of things.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
We hung up. I fed Minnie and threw a plastic bowl filled with beef juices into the microwave for dinner. When it was ready, I drank it, then used a double chocolate diet shake to wash down a pair of sleeping pills. It was still early, but I was exhausted. Too much had happened. I needed rest. So while I normally avoid taking pills, I gave in to the temptation in the hope that I might have a night of deep, dreamless sleep.
It was a wasted effort.
I knew I was dreaming. But I was too deeply asleep to control or change what was happening. So I had no choice but to go along when I found myself with my eye to the scope of a rifle pointed at the exit of La Cocina. I waited for my target, smiling in satisfaction when she … also me, stepped out into the light.
I aimed between the victim’s eyes, enjoying seeing the cheery little cherry red light dance over my forehead. Then I moved the sight to aim at my heart, knowing I could take either shot and have a perfectly clean kill. But that was not my objective. My job was to injure, not kill. So I lined the sight up with the victim’s right shoulder, an injury that would be painful and debilitating but not fatal. I pulled the trigger, waking with a scream as I heard the shot ring out.
I sat bolt upright in bed, panting, my heart pounding as I grasped at the right shoulder of the T-shirt I’d worn to bed with my left hand.
Holy crap, that had felt real. “It was just a dream, a nightmare. No biggie,” I told myself. But as I threw aside the tangled sheets and shambled down the hall to the bathroom, I couldn’t put the image out of my mind.
The more I thought about it, the more it seemed likely that my subconscious was trying to tell me something. So I slid on my shoes and went for a walk on my beach. I sat on my favorite rock, staring at the moonlight and starlight reflecting off of the ocean, letting the sound of the waves lapping the shore soothe me as I tried to figure out what was bothering me.
Michelle had been shot in the right shoulder with a rifle. The only spots suitable for a sniper had been close enough that even an amateur could have made the shot.
So why wasn’t she dead? Had it been, as my subconscious was telling me, a deliberate choice? The more I thought about it, the more I believed I shouldn’t ask Dottie to scry about it. It would be the easy solution, but it wouldn’t be right to risk her health. Maybe I could have Emma give it a try. Now that she had the mirror to use as a focus, she was able to do a lot more than most people with her level of talent. And she was young and healthy. Yeah, maybe in the morning I could ask Emma to take a look. But for now, I’d see where logic got me.
Okay, say the sniper had deliberately missed. Why would somebody shoot if not to kill? If he wanted Michelle dead, why not just kill her?
Bio samples can be used in a lot of negative magic. DNA can be determined from a blood sample as well. So I started asking myself what-ifs. What if the bad guys weren’t positive she was the right target and needed to make sure? What if they wanted a DNA sample so that they could do a spell that affected an entire family (as had been done to the Garza family at the wedding)? It would make sense. If they used what they thought was her blood to target the spell and got it wrong, the effort would be wasted. I wasn’t sure they’d care, but innocents would be wiped out. And in either case, the police would be on their trail.
Too, the type of spell that would target a family would take a lot of juice. Most individual mages couldn’t pull it off once without draining themselves dry and possibly dying. That was one of the main reasons spells like this were so uncommon. Self-preservation is a basic instinct. Fortunately for humanity, there haven’t been too many groups of homicidal mages willing to work together.
If I was right and Connor Finn was behind this whole thing … well, it seemed he liked things messy, liked inflicting pain. The spells he’d used against the Garzas before going to prison twenty-three years ago had been hideously violent. Leaving me in the sunlight had been truly effective torture. Abigail’s death hadn’t been clean. Slugger’s punishment had been torture as well, capped by his death. Just shooting Michelle wouldn’t be enough for someone like that. He’d want her to suffer.
Michelle was just a kid. She didn’t know about Connor Finn. She didn’t know about the feud, hadn’t done a damned thing to deserve being shot. But right now she was in the hospital, afraid and in pain. The only mother she’d ever known was dead.
It was wrong.
I’m no saint. I’ve done things I’m not proud of, made choices that I don’t like thinking too hard about. But if I let my fear keep me from protecting this young woman, whether she hired me or not—if she died because I didn’t shield her from the monster who was stalking her—I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.