Branded (2 page)

“She thinks highly of your business.”

He waved a hand. “Nah, she’s all right. She knows what I really do. Frankly, I think she’d rather have the head shop be the legitimate business.”

“Well, I’m glad it isn’t.”

He guided me into the cluttered backroom. Cardboard boxes of various sizes lined every wall, stacked to the ceiling. They were all marked with a black Sharpie with cryptic lettering—abbreviations like WHIPR, and SNLZ. I didn’t understand the code in the least, but I knew it told Sly everything he needed to know to retrieve whatever he might require. What I didn’t know was how the heck he got into one of the boxes at the bottom of a stack.

Sly took up a position behind the workbench in the center of the room. It nearly stretched the entire length of the space, leaving only a couple feet to get through on either end. An assortment of lab equipment was neatly lined up on the bench. Everything from Bunsen burners to a centrifuge. Lots of vials filled with liquid of murky blues and bloody reds and milky yellow. It looked a little like a mad scientist’s lab from a cheesy 50s horror flick.

“Welcome,” Sly said, “to the apothecary.”

As if I’d never been there.

“Always a pleasure,” I said.

He clapped his hands together and rubbed them as if trying to warm them. Which, considering he must have had the AC turned down to fifty degrees, I could understand.

The sweat that had formed between the time I got out of my car to coming through the shop’s front door had turned to a cold film on my skin. I shivered.

“Sorry about the temp,” he said. “I have to keep my stuff nice and fresh. The fucking humidity could put me out of business if I let it get in here.”

“No worries.”

He held out a hand. “Give me the dust.”

I pulled the leather pouch out of my pocket and handed it over. He pulled open the drawstring top and sniffed at the contents.

His brow furled. “This get wet?”

I groaned. “I thought I had dried it out well enough.”

“No big deal. Won’t affect the potion, but…” He looked at me. “What happened? You take the vampire to a swimming party?”

“Don’t ask.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners. “Tell me. There’s a story here, I can feel it.”

“You know. The competition got in the way. And…well, I forgot I needed the dust until after I had crushed him in the Scott Fountain.”

“On Belle Isle? Nicely done. How did you get the dust out of the water?”

I held up both hands and wiggled my fingers. “Do you really have to ask?”

“Wow. Your dad would be proud of how powerful you’ve grown.”

I looked down. A film of dust coated the tile and looked like it had crusted on to become part of the floor. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“No maybe about it.” He cleared his throat. “But anyway. The task at hand.” He set the pouch of vampire dust down and pulled out a vial from a drawer in the workbench. He grabbed a bottled filled with a yellow translucent fluid, popped the cork, and poured some into the vial. He recorked the bottle and set it back where he took it from without having to look. Then he took a pinch of the vampire dust and dropped it into the vial.

“How much of this can I use?” Sly asked.

“Not too much. Vic will give me shit about collecting if it’s too light.”

Sly snorted. “Vic the Prick. Yeah, he’ll weigh it, I’m sure.”

“He won’t have to.”

Sly reached into the pouch and withdrew another pinch, let it fall into the vial, then another. And one more. After adding each bit he would shake the vial and the dust would dissipate into the fluid. Eventually the liquid went from clear yellow to a dirty brown.

Sly sniffed at the vial’s opening, shook his head. “Fuck me.”

“What?”

“It’s not taking. I don’t know why.”

I sighed. I had gotten my hopes up, now Sly was about to drop them on me. Not that I hadn’t gone through this emotional roller coaster a hundred times already. “Anything I can do to help?”

Sly screwed his lips up to one side. He hummed a tune I was sure was from the 80s, but I couldn’t place the song. I had missed that era of music by the skin of my teeth. Thank the universe for small favors.

“I need to add more dust.”

I glanced down at the pouch. I wasn’t sure how much he’d used already. It hadn’t seemed like a lot, but it also wouldn’t take a lot for Vic to notice.

But, to me, the potion was more important than the contract. I’d give up collecting bounties for good if it meant getting this to work.

“Take what you need.”

“You sure?”

“To hell with Vic. He wants to bitch about it, he can shove his contract up his ass and explain to the Ministry why he didn’t pay on a bounty.”

Sly grunted. “I hate politics.”

I gestured toward the pouch. “Take it. Whatever you need.”

Sly nodded and grabbed the bottle of yellow liquid. He added more to the vial, then added another fluid, this one purplish. Then he used a teaspoon to scoop up more of Darius Strong’s remains and deposited it into the vial.

The mixture hissed, and a wisp of smoke rose out of the vial.

“Nice,” Sly said.

I felt that ray of hope grow again inside of me despite all the cynicism I had saved up since the day my family’s life had been blown apart.

“Okay,” Sly muttered. He moved over to his centrifuge and put the vial in and started it spinning. The machine whirred.

“Couple more minutes and it’s done.”

“It worked?”

“The potion set, yes. But that’s still no guarantee.”

“I know.”

He reached across the bench and gripped my wrist. “I want to make sure you do.”

“You’ve already told me, Sly.”

“This is dangerous shit you’re dealing with. Not earth shattering or anything, but still…”

“I know,” I repeated. “But I don’t have many options left.”

Sly shook his head. “You don’t have
any
options left. If this doesn’t work, it could kill her.”

I pressed my lips together and took a deep breath through my nose. The air smelled bitter. I wasn’t sure if it was from the potion Sly had mixed up, or if it came from some combination of the things in the boxes surrounding us. Those boxes felt a lot closer now. A titch of claustrophobia crept in and rattled me. I found it hard to breath. I had even started sweating a little despite the freezing level of the air conditioner.

“I know,” I said one more time.

Sly looked at me intently for a couple more seconds. He came to some decision, nodded, then hit a button on the centrifuge. The machine slowly whirred to a stop. Sly retrieved the vial. It had turned a deep red. I had no idea what he had put into the potion that would make it turn that color, but potions didn’t work like paint.

He raised the vial to eye level and squinted at the contents. “That’s it.” He handed the position over. The glass vial felt cool. The moment I took it into my hand it changed color again.

It turned black.

I quickly looked up at Sly.

He frowned. Grunted.

“What’s it mean?”

“I can’t be sure. Sure as hell looks like a bad portent.”

“Thanks,” I said sarcastically. “Should I still use it?”

“That’s your call. Like I said, there’s no guarantees to this. Now, if I actually knew what had happened to her…”

He trailed off. We’d had this discussion before. The whole reason I needed this potion was because I
didn’t
know what had happened to my parents three years ago.

This potion was supposed to help tell me that.

I wrapped my fingers around the vial. The chilly glass sent a wave of cold up my arm to the elbow. I quickly tucked it in my pocket. “I owe you.”

“Yeah. About three grand.”

“You want me to write you a check?”

He waved me off. “I know you’re good for it.”

I’m glad he thought so. In fact, everyone seemed to think I was rolling in cash. Which was fine. I wasn’t hurting, but I had spent a lot of my bounties trying to solve one thing.

The mystery behind what had killed my father and left my mother nearly catatonic for the last three years.

Chapter Three

With traffic it took me about forty minutes to get out of Detroit and into Sterling Heights where the nursing home my mom lived was located. I approached the front counter and asked the nurse stationed there where I could find my mother. She directed me to the activities room, which I found amusing since my mother hadn’t done anything you could call an “activity” since three years ago when she was found mumbling nonsense over my father’s dead body in a crack house in East Detroit.

There’s a fond memory.

I entered the activities room and scanned the place for Mom. A large screen TV played a golf game and two gray-topped men sat on the couch watching some dude putt his ball into the hole. They were mesmerized by it. I couldn’t imagine.

A trio of women sat at a table by the window playing cards.

My mother sat in her wheelchair toward the back of the room, facing the sunlight coming through the window. She stared into space with a vague smile over her face.

A good day. Sometimes when I visit she has this intense scowl that deepens all the lines in her face. When she’s like that she looks like she’s plotting to destroy the world.

A water cooler sat just inside the door to the room. I took one of the paper cups in the attached dispenser, then crossed the room to Mom.

I scooted a chair over from an empty table that had a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of a giraffe on it. The remaining pieces sat in the cardboard box the puzzle came in. I sat down next to mom and looked her over. The nurses must have recently done her hair. It looked clean and the salt and pepper strands hung about the sides of her face in soft wisps.

She had her hands folded in her lap. I took one of them and sandwiched it between both of mine.

“Hey, Mom.”

She continued to stare in the distance beyond the windows. The sunlight coming through the window warmed the air. But it didn’t seem to bother her. At least there was none of the humidity in the nursing home. And they didn’t have it down to subfreezing temperatures either.

“I’ve been working a lot lately,” I said to her. “Sly says Dad would have been proud of me. I’ve kept up my studies. Practicing. Honing my craft. Have to admit, I’ve gotten pretty good in the arts. Better than the last time we talked about it.”

Which had been four years ago, when she complained that I wasn’t taking my gifts seriously. Mom was old school about the magical arts.

“Anyway, I’m here today because I have a present for you.”

She continued to smile. I could have been talking to a statue. Except that I could feel her presence inside her shell of a body. She was in there somewhere, the mother I used to know, the vibrant, talkative, sometimes cocky woman who had raised me.

The mom I loved more than life itself.

I glanced over my shoulder. No one was paying any attention to us. So I pulled out the vial of Sly’s potion from my pocket, uncorked it, and poured it into the paper cup.

I rested a hand on Mom’s shoulder.

“I have your pink lemonade,” I said. She used to love pink lemonade. And it had to be pink, damn it. None of that plain old yellow stuff.

Despite my tempting her with an old favorite, she didn’t respond.

I gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “Mom? You want your lemonade now?”

She sighed, like someone remembering something missed from long ago.

I held the cup to her lips. “Take a sip, Mom.”

She sat still. Didn’t even register the cup’s edge pressed gently against mouth.

I knew she could drink. She could eat, too, though the nurses had to feed her. But she could respond well enough to simple commands a lot of the time. She couldn’t—or wouldn’t—speak, but she could sip and chew and swallow.

The trick was getting her to start. The nurse had a way with her. I never got reports of her giving them a hard time at mealtime. Maybe that was the problem. It wasn’t time for a snack.

I took a deep breath to calm my frustration. But I had the potion poured and I didn’t know how much longer I could cajole her into drinking it before a nurse or orderly came by and noticed.

They might wonder why I was being so insistent on giving her a drink. They might even notice that what was in the cup was black. Not water. Definitely not pink lemonade.

I leaned close and kissed her cheek. Then I whispered in her ear, “Please, Ma. This could make you feel better.” Then I hit below the belt. “Dad would want you to drink this.”

She blinked a few times as if waking from a sleep. Her eyes watered. A tear ran down one cheek.

The far away glaze in her eyes left, but she didn’t look at me. She turned her focus to the cup I still held by her mouth. Another wisp of a smile touched her lips. Then she tipped her head forward and put her lips to the cup. She rested her hands on my hand that held the cup and together we tilted it back so she could drink. I had no idea how the potion tasted, but she swallowed it all down without any sign of distaste.

When she finished, I took the paper cup away and rested back in my chair to watch for any signs of the potion working. At first, nothing happened. Mom returned to staring out the window. The vague smile remained on her face. Some of the tears remained in her eyes, making them shine in the sunlight.

The low murmur of the announcer of the golf game on TV filled the silence. The only other sound was the flick of playing cards as the ladies at the table by the window set down their hands in turn. I couldn’t tell what game they were playing, but from a casual glance it almost looked like Texas hold ‘em.

A small cough drew my attention back to Mom.

A thin, glistening line of saliva ran from one corner of her mouth. Her smile had dropped away. Her face took on a pinched look as if something bitter rolled across her tongue.

I leaned forward. “Mom?”

She coughed again. A white saliva foam flicked off her lips.

Oh, gods, no.

My stomach clenched. A wet chill slid down my back like cold sewage.

Mom coughed once more. Then again. Until she couldn’t stop. The saliva dripped from her mouth turned a light shade of pink. I grabbed her hand in one of mine and rested my other hand on her back, patting gently, hoping this would pass, please it had to pass. I kept thinking about what Sly had said, how the potion could kill her if it didn’t work, and the realization that I may have killed my own mother nearly dropped me to my knees.