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

I shut my eyes. “Don’t even joke about that. Do you know what a nightmare that would be?” The dead reaching for me with their curled-up hands, looking at me from rotted, empty sockets, begging me with maggot-ridden mouths to be their voice, their justice, their vengeance.

“Just a theory,” said Dmitri. “I’m going to go get some supper from the dining car. You want anything?”

“Something with caffeine,” I said. “I’m not falling asleep again if I can help it. Possibly not ever.”

Dmitri leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You got it.”

I blinked at him as he got up and ambled down the car, going through the folding glass door with a brief surge of wind and the sound of train wheels.

What the hell did Dmitri think he was playing at? His casual kisses and touches were somehow going to win me over, make me forget Will and my life back in Nocturne?

I sighed and pulled Grigorii’s laptop out of my bag. Right now, I was just glad of the company, glad that I wasn’t alone like I’d been during that horrible week with the Belikovs.

The search of the laptop didn’t prove any more fruitful than before, except now, with the train’s Wi-Fi and a latitude-longitude widget, I was able to tell where Grigorii had shipped each girl he’d sold. Moscow. Belarus. Bangkok. Pyongyang. The list wasn’t encouraging.

I looked at the notation next to Masha’s name again. It wasn’t a common one—in fact, she looked like one of only two girls sold to the same sort of thing.

Cold storage. What could that possibly imply? I looked at the rest of the list. Criminal codes aren’t usually overly complex, because your subordinates have to be able to understand them, and employees of organized crime bosses aren’t usually honor students.

I looked at the next notation, for a girl named Olivia. Wolf pack. “Wolf pack,” I murmured. Wolf packs ran together, slept together.

Hunted together.

Dmitri jostled my elbow as he slid back into his seat. “Ham sandwiches looked okay,” he said. “All they had was off-brand soda and some energy drink that translates into ‘Ultra Wakeup Juice.’ Hope that’s all right.”

I popped the top of the soda and gulped down a swallow before I spun the laptop to face Dmitri. “What does wolf pack mean to you?”

“Nothing,” Dmitri said. “Just like last time.”

“Wolf packs are pack hunters,” I said. “Look at this location they sent her to. It’s just a latitude and longitude. You don’t give that unless you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

I showed him the widget, pulling up a map of the southern corner of Ukraine with the coordinates the Belikovs’ records had given me. “Where is that?” I asked Dmitri.

He whistled. “That’s the Wolves Land.”

“Which is…?” I said, raising my eyebrow.

“It’s contaminated land from the Chernobyl fallout,” he said. “It’s been closed down since 1986—whole towns, all abandoned and empty. It’s eerie out there. Olya and I took a ride through, once.”

“You and your sister willingly exposed yourself to radiation?” I said. “That explains so much.”

“It’s not dangerous if you don’t stay,” he said. “You’re saying that wolf pack means…”

“They hunt the girls,” I said. “For sport.”

“But not my Masha,” said Dmitri.

“Yeah, fortunately,” I said. “But we still don’t know what cold storage means.”

The train slowed, and Dmitri tensed. “We’re at the border. We’ll find out soon enough.”

Two hours later, the train left us in a village too small to have a name that I could see, standing on a dusty rail platform under sun that made sweat trickle down my spine like thin fingers on my skin. A rusted sign peppered with buckshot told us the population and the number of the rail stop, left over from the Soviets. Stop 13.

“This doesn’t look like a hotbed of mob activity,” I told Dmitri, surveying the low brick buildings and the few sharp-faced citizens milling on the train platform.

“We’ll ask around,” he said. “There must be something here, or the Belikovs wouldn’t have sold her, right?” He looked to me, and I sighed.

“Give me Masha’s picture,” I said. “I’ll show it around. There’s a chance whoever bought her let her be seen.”

“I hate the way you say that,” Dmitri said. “Bought her.”

“We’ll get her back,” I said, even though it was beginning to sound hollow even to me.

“Gypsy cab,” Dmitri said, pointing at a broken-down ’55 Pontiac sitting by the tracks, dusty as everything else at Stop 13. Dmitri went over and spoke to the driver, gesturing back and forth. I took the time to look around and get my bearings.

Stop 13 reminded me of the poor pockets of the Southwest I’d driven through on a road trip with an old boyfriend who was a roadie for a crappy country-rock band. We did an Arizona and New Mexico tour one summer, hours in a Dodge van under the boiling pale blue sky. Every so often we’d pass a ghost town, trailers and shacks, maybe a diner or a filling station abandoned to time and the elements, skeletal specters of another era.

Here, the only difference was the few people still living. A rusted-out Ford pickup pulled by a pair of donkeys ambled slowly down the main street in front of the tracks. A cat sunned herself on the steps of the ticket booth and hissed when she caught my scent, puffing her tail and skittering under the platform.

“Luna,” Dmitri called. He and the gypsy cab’s driver had reached an accord. “He says he’ll take us to the local motel,” said Dmitri. “The family who owns it might know something about Masha.”

“What’s here?” I asked the cab driver. “Besides nothing, I mean.”

“Farmers,” he said, his accent thick. “A tire factory.”

“How quaint,” I muttered. “I wonder if I can find a spot to shop for authentic handicrafts.”

The driver knew more English than his accent let on, and he gave a snort, glaring at me in the rearview mirror. We rode the rest of the way to the motel in silence.

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