? ? ?
Meg struggled to open the water bottle. After she got it open and managed a couple of sips, she felt the rough edge of the plastic screw top. Nothing a normal person would think about, but it might just be sharp enough to cut her kind of skin.
But not yet.
She screwed the top back on the bottle. She’d probably dump the water when she made the cut. She didn’t want to lose it, so she would wait. She needed to wait. She’d seen enough when Cyrus opened the trunk to know this wasn’t the right place to escape even though she’d heard voices and thought there were other people around.
Then the car made an odd turn and bumped hard. Because she was unprepared, her teeth snapped shut, catching the edge of her tongue—the spot that had prickled and burned a couple of times over the past few days.
Meg swallowed the blood, swallowed the agony, swallowed the words. She heard the warning blast of a truck horn and saw the moment when she would run away from Cyrus Montgomery.
? ? ?
Douglas Burke walked into the interrogation room, dropped a folder on the table, and sat down opposite Sandee Montgomery. They had taken her to Lakeside Hospital for treatment as soon as Monty called about the substance in the jar. Judging by the way her chest and shoulders looked, he thought the lab that tested for poisons and toxic substances would find a stew of caustic chemicals mixed into that skin cream. She hadn’t even noticed that something was wrong until she started to come down from whatever she’d taken, and he wondered what would have happened to her if she hadn’t gone outside when the kids were fighting, if Leetha Sanguinati hadn’t been injured from contact with her skin.
He had some thoughts about why she might have been targeted, but discussing that with the station chief would have to wait.
“Where’s CJ?” Sandee demanded.
“Not available,” Burke replied, giving her his fierce-friendly smile.
“I want a lawyer.”
“You can certainly call one, although you’re not being charged with anything.”
“Then why am I here?”
Burke sat back. “Where can you go?”
“Back to the apartment.”
He shook his head. “You broke the terra indigene’s no-drug rule and have been evicted, effective immediately. Your belongings are being held here at the station until you decide which train you’re taking tomorrow morning. Not a lot of choices first thing in the morning, but if you’re still in Lakeside when that first train pulls out, the Sanguinati will gather in force and hunt you down.” He opened the folder and put a handwritten list on the table, turning it for her to read. “These are the towns where you’re allowed to resettle. They’re still in the Northeast, but they’re all small. No Toland, no Hubb NE, no Shikago for you. Small, isolated towns where everyone will know your business before you have time to unpack. I imagine some of those towns would have need of a prostitute. That is how you earn a living, isn’t it?”
Her eyes flashed with anger, and she looked like she might try to rake him with her long nails. “You got no right to talk to me like that. You got no right to try to run me out of town. What about my husband, my kids?”
“I’m not the one running you out of town. In fact, the Others would like you to stay, if only for the excuse of killing you slowly. As for your children, Frances has been removed from your home for her own safety. Or weren’t you aware that your son was making the first moves to pimp his little sister?”
She knew. He saw it in her eyes before she looked down at the table.
“Clarence is an accessory to the abduction of a young woman, and he will go to prison.”
“What?” Fear, and a hefty dose of shock, filled her face.
“Cyrus Montgomery abducted a young woman around noon today. He managed to get out of the city with her. Every police department in every city in the Northeast is now involved in the manhunt. We will find him. The only question will be if Cyrus and Clarence are charged with kidnapping or with murder if the woman doesn’t survive.”
Sandee swayed. “What?” The word was barely a sound. “Clarence is a boy. He’s just a boy.”
“His crime is not a youthful mistake, Sandee. His actions, like yours, were an attack on the terra indigene. Going to prison is the only chance he has of surviving. The Others don’t often kill children, but I can tell you with no doubt at all that Clarence won’t last a day if we release him.”
He’d gutted her, finally got past her self-involvement for her to understand how bad things were.
“I want to talk to CJ,” Sandee said.
“No.”
“Twyla then. I want to talk to Twyla.”
“No.” Burke pulled out a photograph of the unlabeled jar of skin cream and set it on the table. “Want to tell me where you got this?”
“Piss off.”
He shrugged. “We’re testing it—along with all your other lotions—but I’m pretty sure this is what injured the Sanguinati who bit you. So you should know that, no matter where you resettle, the Sanguinati are going to be watching you from now on. They’ll know everyone you talk to, everyone you sleep with, every purchase you make, legal or otherwise. And sooner or later, they will kill you.”
“You’ve got to protect me!”
“No one is going to start a pissing contest with the terra indigene to protect you, not when it could end with the whole city being destroyed.”
“I’ll never be safe,” she whispered.
Burke leaned forward and tapped the photograph. “Tell me about this. Tell me where you got it, what you know about who’s making it—because this is a death sentence for the people of this city, maybe for people in every city. We’ll have corpses stacked floor to ceiling in the morgue just like we did after that storm last month. You tell me where you got this, and I’ll arrest you for possession of drugs and you can go to jail for a little while. Long enough for the Sanguinati to forget about you. You wouldn’t be free, but you’d have a place to sleep and three meals a day because the prisons have their own farms and grow most of their own food—and you’ll stay alive. That’s a better deal than you’ll get outside.”
In the end, she told him what he wanted to know and he arrested her for the drugs and had her taken away to be processed.
Already tired and knowing they had a long way to go before any of them could breathe easy—if they could ever again—Burke walked out of the interrogation room and found Commander Louis Gresh waiting for him.
“You heard?” Burke asked, tipping his head to indicate the observation room.
“Sometimes you’re a bastard,” Gresh said quietly.
“I got the information we needed, and I made the deal that would give Sandee and Clarence a chance to live.”