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

“Luna?” Masha swallowed a sob. “What do we do?”

I got to my feet, and for her sake tried to hide the fact I was shaking. Dmitri was gone.

The fact sat in my belly like a stone. Like the creature had reached into my chest, too, and taken something vital away.

I wasn’t in love with Dmitri anymore, but he was gone. And he’d done it for me, and for Masha.

I’d been wrong about him. That hurt most of all.

“I don’t want to stay here…” Masha said, louder. She was panicking. She should be.

Dmitri wanted me to take care of her. He’d let us get away. It was up to me to make sure we did.

“I know,” I said. My mind was already compartmentalizing, my cop-brain, my trauma-brain, shoving what had just happened down under layers of numbness that anyone who works in my profession has to develop, or go crazy. “Neither do I.” I reached out and pulled her away from Dmitri’s body. His eyes were open, and I crouched and shut them.

Then I stood up and turned my back. “We have to do something before we leave, Masha. Can you handle that?”

She nodded. Too slow, dopey. The shock would keep her moving, I hoped, and get us out of here before the full horror of what had happened came back. I hoped it would work for me, too.

“You said there was a file room,” I said. “Take me to it.” I wasn’t shaking anymore. I felt cold, singular, driven in my purpose.

“What’s the point?” Masha muttered. “Couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t stop them from…”

“Belikov and his gang made this happen,” I said. “We’re getting the evidence of what they were up to before we leave here.”

I took Masha’s hand again. “Come on. Show me where the doctor took you.”

She shook her head, trying to sit back down near her father’s body.

“Masha,” I said. “I know you’re strong. You shouldn’t have to see this, or remember this, but I need you. You’ve got to keep it together just a little longer. I’m sorry to ask, but we need these files if we’re going to make your dad doing what he did mean anything.”

After a moment, she jerked her head at a nearby door. “Here,” Masha said, pushing through to the file room, which was an Indiana Jones-esque maze of file cabinets, some on their sides, set at odd angles like slumbering sharp-cornered beasts. Papers blew around my bare ankles in the air stirred by our passage, and dust hung like sunbeams in the stale air.

Only one file drawer had handprints in the layer of grime that coated everything, and I opened the drawer. There were stacks of files, the results of blood tests and DNA typing, which were gibberish to me but that I was sure Dr. Kronen would be very interested in.

“Photographs,” Masha said. “Grigorii had pictures that he liked to look at, during. He showed me one.”

I dug deeper into the files and found a stack of pictures, each neatly labeled with the date and the code for the subject of the photo.

They were horrific. I worked Homicide for five years and saw plenty of crap that would send a normal person to therapy for the next decade, but these—there was a malice to them, the photographer glorying in the monster he had made. “And what monsters they are,” I murmured. I shoved the litany of deformed limbs, lesions, the marks of torture and pain, the fusion of were and human gone wrong, back into a folder. “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Masha. “And get you home.”

CHAPTER 24

The train ride back to Kiev was interminable. Masha slept, the heavy coma sleep of trauma victims who can finally relax and allow themselves to feel safe.

She would need a counselor, medication, possibly for years to deal with the nightmares that would come.

But that wasn’t up to me now. I would give her back to her mother and I’d go home. I’d done what Dmitri had asked of me.

Margarita folded Masha into her arms at the train station in Kiev, crying and stroking her hair. She didn’t notice I was alone for a minute, but then her face went slack.

I explained, as gently as I could, what had happened. What she would need to do for Masha. I don’t think much of it sank in, but by then the numbness that I’d let steal over me was real. I couldn’t muster the strength to do more than hug Masha good-bye.

I wasn’t needed anymore.

I walked out to the cab line at the front of the station, where I managed to convey to the bemused driver that I needed to go to the United States embassy.

Explaining things to the consul was less trouble than I expected, possibly because I was dirty, covered in scrapes and sporting two major injuries.

I had to call Bryson to verify my status as a cop and he let out a yell. “Wilder! Fuckin’ a! You’re all right!”

“As ‘all right’ as can be expected after two weeks in Kiev,” I said. “I’m going to put the consul on the phone, David. Try not to swear at him, all right?”

After I convinced the diplomatic liaison that I was who I said I was, he issued me a temporary passport and I booked a flight back to California. First class. I felt it was the least I deserved after being kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery and then putting a stop to inhuman scientific experiments funded by the Russian mob.

So much for my resolution to cut my spending after my cottage burned down. If that wasn’t a sign to downsize, I didn’t know what was.

I flew to Munich, and from there to San Francisco, taking a puddle-jumper flight to Nocturne International.

Will was waiting for me at the gate. I had planned to be calm, and stoic, but I practically fell into his arms and buried my face against the lapel of his suit—the gray