Cursed Moon (Prospero's War) (22 page)

I held up a finger. “I’ll do the talking. You say nothing unless specifically asked to provide a response.” I glanced out of the corner of my eye in time to see him nod. “First of all,” I continued in a conversational tone, “when did you invite John to speak?”

He kept his eyes downcast. “At your surprise party.”

“Have you two been in touch besides the night of the party?”

He nodded reluctantly. “But only to set up the time for him to come to the school.”

I let out a little sigh of relief. Some part of me had been imagining a conspiracy between those two behind my back. “Okay,” I said. “Now what about lying to Mr. Hart about how I couldn’t speak? I offered to do just that the night you told me you wanted to join.”

A teenager shrug.

“Were you embarrassed to have me speak in front of your friends?” My gut tightened at the thought. I kept forgetting that at some point I’d gone from being Danny’s hero to his humiliating mother figure.

He shook his head. “Figured you wouldn’t show,” he mumbled.

“What the hell does that mean? I wouldn’t flake on you, Danny.”

His head jerked up then. “Bullshit.” The word zinged round the room like a bullet.

I pointed to the curse jar. “Cough it up.”

He slammed out of his chair and threw a five in the jar. My eyes widened, but before I could say anything he took off.

“You act like you’re such a fucking selfless saint, but you’re never around anymore. You don’t care about me or DUDE. All you care about is looking good in front of your damned team and earning promotions. And the only reason you’re mad at John is because you’re jealous you’re a shitty wizard and he’s such a badass.”

If he’d punched me in the gut, I wouldn’t have been more in pain than I was from those hateful words. “First of all,” I started in a slow, calm tone totally at odds with the lava simmering in my gut, “I don’t act like I’m selfless. I act like a woman with lots of responsibilities. At sixteen, I can’t expect you to understand the concept of having to worry about anything more important than when the update to your favorite video game comes out. But I assure you, it’s no fucking picnic.”

“Jar,” he snapped.

“You had a credit left, so I took it.” I shook my head. “Now, as for me not being around, that’s only temporary. Once we get past the Blue Moon, things will even out.”

He snorted. “Until your next big case.”

I threw up my hands. “What do you want from me, Danny? I can’t tell the criminals to stop killing people because my little brother needs some quality time.”

His jaw set. “Jesus, sorry I’m such an asshole for wanting to see you.”

I sucked a cleansing breath into my nose, hoping it might dispel some of the bitterness in my throat. “You’re not an asshole.” Neither of us commented on the profanity. From the looks of things, we’d both be bankrupt before midnight if we kept paying the jar.

He crossed his arms and folded his lips into a frown. “It’s not just the late nights. You’ve always had a crazy schedule. It’s just that since you started the task force, when you’re here you’re not really here, you know?”

I frowned at him. “Have you been talking to Pen?”

He shook his head, looking confused. “No, why?”

“Never mind.” I waved a hand. “I’m sorry I’ve been bringing my stress home. I’ll try to do better.”

He nodded but didn’t look convinced I’d be successful. Since I doubted it as well, I moved on.

“Now, about the other thing.” I licked my lips to stall for time. This next conversation wasn’t going to be as easy. “It pisses me off that you believe the reason I have issues with Volos has anything to do with who’s better at magic. It has nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with morals.”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Here we go again. You think you’re all high and mighty because you don’t cook. But you know what, Kate? If it weren’t for John’s use of magic, I’d be dead right now.”

There. Right there. A tectonic shift. A rift exposed in the bedrock of our relationship.

“That’s not fair, Danny.”

“I don’t give a shit,” he yelled, that man-child voice cracking. “You would have let me die to save your precious principles.”

My ribs got too tight to contain the hot, swelling, pulse of my shattered heart. How in the hell could this kid believe I’d just stand there and let him die? “I would never let anything happen to you.”

He sat up straighter, looked me in the eyes, and delivered the deathblow. “You let Bane hex me.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My tone was so icy, even Danny shied away. “You wanted to hurt me? Congratulations. Mission accomplished.” I tried to breathe over the pressure in my chest, but each inhalation felt thin and cold. “But if you think I’m going to let that distract me from the fact you snuck behind my back and lied, you’re sorely mistaken.”

His face fell. “I—”

I slashed a hand through the air. “I don’t care about your excuses or your reasons. I don’t care about anything except letting you know that you are grounded until further notice. No phone, no games, no TV, no fun, no freedom, no DUDE.”

When his gaze jerked upward, it was sharp as daggers. “How are you going to enforce that, Kate?”

The bald rebellion in his expression stole my breath. This boy, this rebel, used to be a sweet little toddler who’d give me sticky kisses and bring me crushed dandelions he’d found in the sidewalk cracks. Now he was staring at me with the defiance of an enemy combatant.

“Watch yourself,” I said in my best cop voice.

“I mean it,” he said. “You’re never here. I could invite an entire coven of wizards over and you’d have no idea.”

My fist slammed into the tabletop like a gavel. “You spoiled little shit. You think you’re tough? You wouldn’t last five minutes in the Cauldron. Those wizards you admire so much
would eat you alive and leave your bones for the Ravens to pick over.”

“John isn’t like that.”

“Grow up, Danny. He’s worst than most.”

Danny stood up so fast, his chair flew back and skittered across the floor. “It’s not like that! At least he talks to me.”

My eyes widened. “You said you haven’t been talking to him.”

Danny threw up his hands. “I lied!”

“Well, that’s just fucking great.” I slammed my hands on the tabletop. “I’ve been out busting my ass to keep us housed and fed and you pay me back by lying?”

His eyes narrowed. “Sorry I’m such a burden. Say what you will about John, but at least he gives a shit.”

His words were like fists attacking my most vulnerable spots—the ones where I kept all my insecurities about raising the kid. They also made it clear Danny had been lying about the extent of their interactions. “If I didn’t give a shit about you, I would have started teaching you magic years ago. If I didn’t give a shit about you, I would have let you stay in the Cauldron in Uncle Abe’s care. If I didn’t give a shit about you, I wouldn’t be so angry right now that I want to punch something.” I swallowed hard. “John Volos is not your friend, Danny. He wants you to think he is because he wants to use you somehow.”

Danny crossed his arms and set his jaw in a stubborn angle I recognized from my own mirror.

“You can’t trust a wizard, Danny. Especially not that one.”

“You used to be one, too. Does that mean I can’t trust you, either?”

Another crack. This time I felt it in my conscience.

No, he couldn’t trust me, I realized. Maybe John had flattered the kid, but I’d lied to his face. But my sense of
self-preservation reared up and reminded me that I’d lied for the kid’s own good.

And your own, my traitorous conscience added.

I pulled out my phone. “Call him and tell him he won’t be speaking at DUDE next week.”

His teeth ground together with tectonic plates. Teeth I’d paid a fortune to straighten when he was eleven. “No!”

“Call him or I’ll call Mr. Hart and tell him you’re grounded from DUDE for the rest of the year.”

“I hate you!”

“Join the club!” I shouted back. I wasn’t sure who else exactly I included in that club, but my inner voice had an idea and I didn’t like what it said about my mental state at all. I swallowed that uncomfortable realization and thrust the phone at Danny. “Call him.”

He snatched the phone and punched the numbers so hard I was worried I’d have to raid the curse jar to buy a new one. Then the phone was at his ear and his toe tapped angrily against the linoleum. He sat there long enough for me to realize the call was going to voice mail.

“Hi, John,” Danny said in the most put-upon voice I’d ever heard. “It’s Danny. Can you, like, call me back and stuff? Bye.” Then he punched the End button.

“Happy?”

No, I wasn’t. I wasn’t sure how long it would be until I was again, but it wasn’t worth pointing that out to the little shithead.

“Go to your room until I call you for supper. We’ll discuss the rest of your punishment then.”

The look he gave me before he stomped out made my heart sink. A seismic shift had occurred in the foundations of our relationship, and damned if I knew how to repair the damage.

October 29

Waxing Gibbous

T
he call came just after midnight. One minute I was dreaming about swimming away from a beast with sharp teeth, and then next the shrill ring of my cell woke me. Getting away from the dream was a relief, but the information Morales called to tell me was not.

“Chaos at the college. Pick you up in fifteen.”

“Wha—”

“Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty. We’ve got an orgy to stop.” With that he hung up.

I scrubbed a hand over my face. My brain wasn’t working at full thrusters yet so I was basically moving on autopilot. I threw back the cover and went to pee and brush my teeth. I made it all the way to washing my face before the words really
sunk in. I reared up, splashing water droplets all over the sink. “Orgy?” I said out loud. “What the fuck?”

I glanced at my phone for the time. Now I only had eight minutes before Morales came pounding on my door. I threw on a pair of cleanish jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with my boots. Over that went the leather jacket I’d snatched at a yard sale a few years back.

By the time Morales pulled up out front, I’d already gone to tell Danny. Music seeped out from under his door, but when I knocked he wouldn’t open it. The only response I received was a grunt when I told him I was leaving. I’d called Baba, too, and she’d said she’d head over in a few minutes to stay with him.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said, my guilt rising once again.

“Nah, it’s fine,” she’d replied. “I haven’t been sleeping well because of my arthritis. Besides, there’s a marathon of
Blue Devils
on tonight.”

Blue Devils
was her favorite cop show. Since she didn’t own a TV, she usually didn’t mind hanging at my place—she could catch up on all her stories.

At fifteen minutes on the dot after he called me, I locked the kid inside and jogged out to Morales’s car. When I climbed in, he handed me a large coffee and watched me gulp down a few steaming mouthfuls before he spoke. “Better?”

I gasped over my burnt tongue and nodded. “What’s this about an orgy?”

In the darkened car his white teeth showed up like a Cheshire Cat’s. “Yes, ma’am.” He sounded way too excited. “According to Gardner, who took the call from Eldritch, a couple of sororities started an orgy on campus. When the campus cops stepped in, the girls began attacking them and all hell broke loose.”

“By attacking them you mean—”

“Fucking them.”

I nodded slowly. “Are you trying to tell me there is a sorority sex riot at U of B?”

My partner put the car in gear, rubbed his hands together, and hit the gas. “Best call ever.”

As much as I wanted to find humor in the situation, I couldn’t. “Morales? Dionysus stole a rape potion from Aphrodite, remember?”

His smile faltered as he pulled up to a red light.

I raised my brows and looked out the windshield at the fat moon overhead. “It’s only a couple of nights until the Blue Moon.”

“Fuck.” All traces of amusement disappeared. He punched the window button and reached down to grab the siren from under his seat. A second after he slapped the light on the roof, he kicked the gas. “Get Mez and the others on the phone. We’ll need backup.”

At University of Babylon, the sororities were all grouped together on a street called Sorority Row. Across the street from the line of McMansions was a large park with a playground, baseball diamond, and tennis courts. Every available surface was covered in naked bodies contorted into positions that made the Kama Sutra look like Dr. Seuss.

“Jesus H.,” Morales breathed. He practically smashed his face against the windshield for a better view. Close to the road where we’d parked, some co-eds were holding down a campus cop. One girl was sitting on the guy’s face and another on his crotch. The way the guy’s legs were kicking and his arms strained against the delicate hands holding him down, he wasn’t having the time of his life.

My phone buzzed at my hip. “Prospero.”

“It’s Mez. I called in a favor at the sheriff’s department. They’re bringing in a riot tank.”

I watched five women chase down a pair of large frat boys and bring them down like sacrificial lambs to the slaughter. “That thing have a salt-cannon in it?”

“Yep.”

“Good. Get here fast.”

As I hung up, red and blue lights flashed on the perimeter of the park as some of our backup arrived. Once we’d told Eldritch that we suspected the city’s most wanted was behind the scene, he’d pulled several black-and-whites off patrol to help subdue the crowds.

I looked over at Morales. The sense of wonder had disappeared from his face. Now he looked pale as he absorbed the reality of the situation. I’m sure most red-blooded heterosexual men would tell you they’d love to get gang-raped by sorority girls. But the scene before us wasn’t sexy: It was grotesquely carnal. The air vibrated with masculine screams and the scent of violent arousal. And judging from the horror on Morales’s face, he was having trouble reconciling the fantasy with the ghastly reality.

Over the years, I’d arrested my share of sexual predators. The thing was, rape was never about lust. It was about power. To an alpha male like Morales, seeing a group of young women exerting such power over an entire campus of men had to be unsettling as hell.

We’d already pulled on our bulletproof vests and loaded down with weapons—mostly salt flares and extra canisters of S&P spray. Our goal wasn’t to kill any of the attackers, but to subdue them. Now that we were there, it was obvious these women were freaking on dirty magic. I nudged Morales. “Let’s roll.”

We climbed out and met up with the dozen unis Eldritch had sent us. Not nearly enough but better than nothing, especially since Mez was on his way with heavy metal. The fourteen of us formed a line—each about arm’s length away from the next—and started pushing our way into the crowd. The only benefit to wading a group of naked people was that it was easy to see none of them was armed.

The first grouping I met up with was a pair of girls—one blonde and one redhead—who were using a sex toy to violate a boy who couldn’t have been older than nineteen. Judging from the tears rolling down his face, he wasn’t enjoying the ministrations. “Back away, ladies!” I said in my command voice.

The blonde looked up but kept her hands busy on the boy’s shaft. She smiled and licked her lips. “Ooh look, Rachel, a lady cop.”

The redhead pushed the sex toy deeper, eliciting a pained groan from the kid. “You can sit on his face.”

I raised the S&P canister. “Stand down or I’ll spray you with sodium capsicum spray.”

The redhead laughed, a deep, throaty sound. Then she slowly pulled the phallus back out before slamming it home again.

The spray hit her right in her face. She sucked in a breath, forcing the stinging mixture deep into her lungs. She shrieked and fell to the side, her naked body convulsing in pain.

I turned the can toward her friend. “You want some, too, Blondie?”

Instead of answering, she lunged. Ready for her, I sidestepped and she face-planted into the grass. Removing a zip-tie from my waist, I made quick work of tying her wrists together. “Stay.” The redhead got the same treatment. I left them to two unis who ran up to help and went to intervene elsewhere.

I didn’t get ten feet before I ran into a cluster of bodies with pretzeled appendages. Diving in, I was grateful I’d had enough forethought to don a pair of gloves as I grabbed arms, hair, legs, whatever else I could get a handhold on and pulled people out of the pileup. Unlike the last encounter, I didn’t bother to warn them before spraying them with the saline canister. The salt water wouldn’t hurt them, which was kind of a pity, but I didn’t have as much S&P spray to waste on noncombative perps. Besides, I didn’t want to go overboard with the highly caustic spray and risk a lawsuit later from some spoiled sorority girl’s parents.

I was almost at the bottom of the pile where a male and a female were performing an enthusiastic 69 on each other when the sound of music nearby grabbed my attention. I looked up to see a shirtless, goateed man traipsing through the naked, writhing bodies. He wore a pair of fake goat horns on his head and woolly chaps on his legs, held up with suspenders. While everyone around him tried their damnedest to create sparks by furiously rubbing their genitals together, this guy pranced and played a pan flute.

It wasn’t Dionysus himself—this guy had blond hair and a potbelly. Plus he played the flute using his right hand, which made him a Mundane. Still, it didn’t take a genius to put the asshole in the chaps together with the satyr/Dionysus connection and come up with a whole lot of adrenaline.

I jumped over the 69ers, pulling my salt flare from my belt as I ran. “Morales!” He was wrestling a blonde wielding a massive black dildo like an extremely flexible baseball bat. “With me!”

He ducked the weapon and shot the girl right in her perfect nose job with S&P. She fell to the ground behind him as he pivoted to join me. “What’s up?” he called.

I pointed. “We got ourselves a satyr at twelve o’clock.”

My partner’s face hardened as he zeroed in on the satyr in question. Together we closed in on our prey, who had his back to us as he skipped around a particularly large moaning tangle of people. Morales lunged. The flute music cut off, quickly followed by an
oof
. The satyr and my partner were airborne for a second before they crashed to the ground.

I stood over the grappling pair with my salt flare ready for action. “Freeze!”

Unfortunately our goat-horned buddy was too busy hitting Morales with his pan flute to comply with my order. I reached down to grab Morales’s shirt and wrench him out of the way. At the same moment, the goat-man launched a knee right at my partner’s crotch. Morales sucked air and then froze before howling in pain and falling to the side.

“Freeze, asshole!” I shouted again. I didn’t want to use the salt on him if I could avoid it. At close range, it was liable to take off his face. Normally I wouldn’t have minded so much, but if he was indeed one of Dionysus’s followers we needed him well enough to speak. Tough to do with no lips.

But men who dress as goats and gallivant through sex riots playing flutes tend not to be the most logical people. As if to prove this point, the guy launched himself off the ground and took me out at the knees. Now it was my turn to hit the dirt. I lifted the salt flare—because, seriously, fuck his face now—but before I could pull the trigger he covered one of the holes on his pan flute and blew hard into the mouthpiece. A plume of powder exploded from the end of the flute.

Directly into my face.

In shock, I sucked in, pulling the potion deep in my lungs. I choked on the odd sweetness. A moment of panic when I realized what had happened. Didn’t last long, though, because a nanosecond later a curious heat began to spread through my
veins. Not painful. A rush. Yeah, a major rush of adrenaline shooting straight from my heart to strike like lightning in my groin.

From somewhere that sounded far away I heard a confrontation—two males shouting, a loud grunt. Didn’t care. I suddenly was very aware of a void in my center that longed to be filled. The need to swallow, to suck power from marrow. Take, take, take.

“Prospero?” came a deep voice close by. The delicious scent of sweat and heat and pheromones.

My eyes popped open and my vision filled with his face. A rock-hard jaw covered in scruff that I suddenly needed abrading my hot skin. Those full lips. The muscles. Good God, those muscles. I needed to feel them flexing under me.

Those chocolate eyes narrowed. A warm, calloused hand on my cheek. “Kate? Talk to me.”

The next part was pretty crazy, so my memory is blessedly fuzzy. But somehow, I ended up straddling that big body. Somehow I ended up shoving my tongue inside that hot mouth. Hands tried to push me away, but I circled my pelvis and kept at the mouth, stroking the tongue until his resistance melted. I moaned and went deeper. I needed to swallow him whole. To make him beg and plead before I conquered him completely.

He groaned and those arms went around my back, trying to take control. I reared back and slapped him across the face. The voice that emerged from my lips was mine and yet somehow not mine at all. “Take it, bitch.”