Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“You aren’t a witch, Luna. You’ll kill him if you try and we both know that to be the truth.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” I demanded. “What is it you want?”

“To see you,” he said with a grin, fangs glimmering in the low light. “To tell you that I’ll be seeing you again. Sooner than you think.”

I opened my mouth to threaten him again, but then Dmitri blinked and his eyes were his own.

“What happened?” he asked. “What did I do?”

“Nothing,” I said, easing myself out of his grasp. “Nothing happened at all. You just faded out there for a minute.”

He rubbed his forehead. “I’ve got a bitch of a migraine. Kirov.” He walked over to his pack mate and got a pull from Kirov’s flask.

I dropped into a chair, gripping the arms to stop my hands from shaking. I had never seen a daemon take possession of a person like that.

Of course it was possible. Dmitri had been standing close enough to kiss me, speaking in the voice of the one daemon who wanted to take a pound of flesh out of my hide.

My panic attack was interrupted by Jocelyn, who snapped her head up. “We’re in.”

“That was fast,” Dmitri said.

“Technomancer who put the wards on this machine wasn’t careful,” she said. “Left a hole as big as my head in his working. You really want people to stay out, you get someone like me to write a custom spell for your needs.”

“We’re looking for business records,” I said. “Sales, financial transactions, that kind of thing.”

“That’s your department, peaches,” said Jocelyn. “I’m just a locksmith. And I like to be paid promptly.”

Kirov drew an envelope out of his pocket and passed it to her. “There you are, my dear.”

Jocelyn saluted with the envelope of cash. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

“That laptop belongs to some nasty people,” I spoke up. “Watch your back, Jocelyn.”

“Dude, if the caster witches couldn’t catch me, some chain-smoking gangsters who can scribble spells aren’t going to be a problem,” Jocelyn said with a smirk. “I am that good. Catch you later, Dmitri.” She dropped him a wink and walked out.

I snarled. Did every woman in Kiev know him intimately?

Dmitri turned the laptop toward me. “Take a look.”

“The records are in English,” I said in surprise.

“Not the first language around here,” Dmitri said. “Smart, when you think about it.”

There were hundreds of spreadsheets on the hard drive, all coded with initials and strings of numbers that meant nothing to me.

“This is absolutely no help,” I said. “Look at this.”

Dmitri frowned over my shoulder. “Code.”

“Well, we knew that was coming,” I said. “These notes in the column must be where they took the girls, or who bought them, or some sort of relevant information. You don’t just leave gibberish.”

The notations were one or two words, nothing overtly threatening.

Bad weather.

Underground.

Charm school.

“And the numbers?” Dmitri said.

I blew out a puff of frustration. “I’m a cop, not a mathematician, Dmitri.” I scanned the columns. “Three numbers in one, two in the other,” I said. “Locations and girls, I’m guessing, but I can’t crack this. I’m not a cryptographer, either.”

Kirov pointed at the two-number notation. “Latitude and longitude,” he said. “Simple. A way to find a location that anyone knows. All you need for an address is a GPS.”

“Perfect,” Dmitri said. “Now we just need to crack the names and we’ll find Masha.”

“But it wouldn’t be names,” I murmured, thinking of Lola and her insistence that she not know me. “We gave them fake ones, and they never bothered to learn our real ones. How do you keep track of a bunch of women with no names?”

I pressed my finger against the screen. 1-23-140. Not a birth date. Not a state ID number. No one cared when the girls were born or who they were before. They only cared that they looked good enough to make a buck …

“N-1,” I said. Dmitri cocked an eyebrow.

“Meaning what?”

“When I get my hair touched up at the salon, N-1 is the color my stylist uses,” I said. “One is black hair color in salon speak. And twenty-three, that could be her age, and one-forty—weight.” Hair, age, and weight. All that would matter to a man like Grigorii Belikov. All that would matter to his customers.

“Masha has red hair,” Dmitri said. “She’s fourteen and she weighs, oh, I don’t know, one-twenty at the most. Look for that.”

I searched for 2-14-120.

One entry popped up in my search box. Kirov pointed to the location. “That’s Kazakhstan.”

Dmitri gave a snarl. “Why the fuck take her there?”

I thought the more important question was what were they doing to Masha Sandovsky once she got there. Her notation was unlike any of the other girls. Unlike the innocuous notes, this one was frightening.

Cold storage.

My admittedly disturbing train of thought was interrupted by a screech of tires outside and a moment later, the thud of footsteps in the fire stairs. “Someone’s here,” Kirov said.

Dmitri snarled and started for the door. “Bastard sons of flea-bitten bitches—I’ll make them tell me what they did with Masha.”

“Wait!” I snapped. “You getting killed isn’t going to help this situation.”

I slapped the laptop closed and shoved it into my bag along with its power cord. “Kirov, is there another way out of here?”

“Fire stairs,” he said. “But they seem to have already covered that…”

A pounding started on the door, and then two bullets blew out the lock.

“Window,” I said, slinging my bag over my shoulder. I pushed up the ancient sash and swung my leg over the decorative balcony. There were no handholds on the pockmarked brick face of the hotel.

Kirov gave a yell as the first gangster burst into the room and tackled the man, fighting for his gun. “Dmi tri, ” I yelled. “Come on!”

“Go,” Kirov shouted, having liberated the gun. He got off a few shots, causing the remaining pair of thugs to duck for cover.

This was going to suck. I aimed for the long black sedan that the gangsters