The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(53)

Lauren cradled an ornate hairpin in her fingertips. One end was adorned with a cluster of pearls, and the other glistened with a drop of my blood. A warm, wet trickle ran down my neck.

“Sheldon, Tony, please retrieve the Box,” she said, crouching over me. Meadow whimpered in the corner, clutching her face, blood leaking out between her fingers.

Lauren showed me the pin, wiping it clean with a silk handkerchief before fixing it in her auburn hair.

“A paralytic of my own design, Mr. Faust. No worries, the effects are only temporary. Now, my preferred flavor of venom, on the other hand…”

Her hands, glowing with amber light, came down on my chest like a pair of defibrillator pads. Indescribable pain erupted along my spine, a blowtorch charring muscle and bone. I raised every psychic shield I knew, used every trick my frantic mind could muster, but she forced her energy inside me one writhing inch at a time. Finally, it ended. She pulled away with a gasp of pleasure. Something squirmed in my guts, feral and sick.

She took a bundle of hand towels from Spengler’s bathroom and tended to Meadow, gently pulling her hands away and pressing the cloth to her wounds.

“Fucker,” Meadow spat, her words slurred. “My face, what he did to my f*cking face—”

“I know, I know,” Lauren said. “It’s all right.”

Tony and Sheldon trundled up the hall, lugging the crate. My vision blurred, my head pounding and stomach churning like the world’s worst hangover. I wanted to throw up, but my stomach seized, trying to keep the sickness in.

“Get it in the van,” Lauren told them, helping Meadow to her feet.

“Want me to finish him?” Sheldon asked.

“No. Meadow’s losing too much blood. We need to get her to a hospital. He’ll be dead in an hour anyway.”

“An hour?” Sheldon said with a casual laugh as they hauled the crate out the door. “You’re losing your touch.”

An engine revved in the driveway, then silence. I lay on the blood-soaked carpet next to Spengler’s mutilated corpse and willed my limbs back to life. Slowly, a finger curled. Then a fist.

I pushed myself up on my knees. My guts twisted. Wave after wave of brutal nausea washed over me, and my throat and stomach tightened in response, my own body working against me.

What did she DO to me? I thought, feeling cut off from the currents of magic. My soul lagged behind my skin, body and spirit out of sync, crumbling around the edges.

First things first. I got to my feet, leaning against the wall as I took a few hesitant steps. So far, so good. I stumbled out onto Spengler’s porch, weaving like a drunk on a five-day bender. Streetlights bloomed in the dark, burning white phosphorus trails across my vision as I staggered toward my car. No telling if the neighbors had heard Spengler’s screams. I had to get away before the cops showed up. It took five tries to get my keys in the ignition.

The car lurched onto the street, jolted forward, stopped, then jolted again. I didn’t have enough coordination to work the pedals, couldn’t even remember what they were for. Lauren’s venom wriggled through my intestines like an eel covered in razor blades, knotting and slicing and twisting.

I pulled over to the side of the road, tires scraping the curb. My phone fell out of my hands as I tried to dial, bouncing onto the passenger side floor. I groped for it blindly. My fingers fumbled against the call screen.

“Daniel?” Mama Margaux said. Her Creole-tinged voice sounded a million miles away. Everything did. Sound, sight, touch, my senses eroding eroding into a winter wasteland of pain.

“Mama. I’m f*cked up. Don’t know…some kind of curse. Never seen it before.”

“Slowly, Daniel, slowly,” she said, on alert. “Where are you? I’ll come and get you.”

“Car. Outside Spengler’s house. Spengler’s dead. She put something inside me. Get Bentley. Something inside me. It’s killing me.”

“You just sit there! Sit and breathe. I’m coming—”

The phone slipped from my numb fingers, falling to my lap. She kept talking. I was gone.

? ? ?

I knew the room from a thousand nightmares. Every scrap of peeling powder-blue wallpaper, the cheap twin beds, and the plastic toy chest with its broken lid—all marked in my mind as indelibly as a backhand slap.

“Dan,” my brother whispered from his bed, “I think Dad’s gonna kill us.”

He was eight. I was twelve.

“I think that’s what happened to Mom,” Teddy whispered when I didn’t answer him.

I was twelve years old, and I kept a butcher knife under my mattress. It lay there untouched, night after night, a sinister artifact that called my name in the dark.

“I know,” I said, answering in two voices. Adult and child as one.

I lay on my back, small again, so very small, staring up at the ceiling.

“Teddy,” I said, reciting the words from memory, “you know I’ll always protect you, right? We’re brothers. You can count on me.”

That was the blackest lie I ever told, though I believed it at the time. Footsteps tromped up the stairs, rough and irregular, and my breath caught in my throat.

This isn’t real, my mind screamed, it’s a memory, a nightmare, I’m not there anymore.

Teddy whimpered and hid under the covers. I just watched the door. The knob jiggled and the door flew open, slamming against the wall. My father stood silhouetted in the doorway, a bear of a man with frazzled hair and a bloated gut.