Chaos Lives in Everything - 5. Chapter 5

Vanessa Holland did not look like a dangerous woman, not at first glance. She looked like a business woman, dressed in a fine business suit, her blonde hair glistening, her nails manicured and perfect. She was in her early fifties but looked to be in late thirties. She was a defense attorney, the kind of person that one might expect to have integrity, morale.

But Skold knew that she had none of these qualities. She was a woman of greed who only wanted power and money. She did not get these things through hard work and perseverance. She obtained these things by stealing it from others. She fought for the killers, the rapists, the child molesters. She didn’t care that these vermin had ruined the lives of others, often beyond repair. No one suspected the truth about her, that she was involved with organized crime. But Skold knew. He knew a predator when he saw one. He admired her a little, a rare occurrence when it came to mortals.

He did not care about her sense of morale, her reasoning for why she was the way she was. He had long ago learned that there isn’t always a reason for everything. Not every change in one’s life is predetermined (and there are many things that are). Some souls come out bad, rotten to the core. They knew of no other way to be, no other way to exist. It was just in their nature.

“So, you’ll do it?” she asked, in a cold, steady voice.

“What makes you think that I wouldn’t?” He turned away from the window and glanced at her. They were standing in her large, luxurious office. Her office was at the very top of the building. Holland worked for Crest & Holmes, one of the largest, most prestigious law firms in the United States. Only the richest of the rich could afford their surfaces, people who were often associated with the same kind of people that Holland was. Her office was large, with large windows that showed a breathtaking view of the city. Skold supposed that the view, in of itself, was the sell point. The furniture was expensive of course, the best that money could buy. There was fireplace and a bathroom with a toilet and walk-in shower. Though Vanessa had decorated it herself and made it look appealing to the human eye, to Skold’s much sharper eye it was cold and deeply impersonal.

Water dripped from his hair and his jacket glistened. It was raining again and it would rain for a while. Though he was cold, he did not shiver, did not show any physical signs of weakness. When he looked at her it was not as a human being but as an object. She was a client, she had a job for him. He would do the job, she would pay him and then he would be done with her. He most likely wouldn’t see her again, unless she decided to hire him a second time. His clients never hired him a second time, Reynolds being the exception.

“I don’t know, I was just making sure.” She slid a photo towards him across the desk. He stepped away from the window and examined it.

“He’s a man. A human man.”

“He looks like a man but he isn’t. He’s Fae.”

“So, he disguises himself as a human, using a glamor spell?”

“Yes. He’s a fury.”

Skold sneered. “That’s interesting. A fury that disguises himself as human and is awfully comfortable around mortals.”

Vanessa laughed coldly. “Don’t let the guise fool you. What he does is just a ruse, just as much as every bit of what I do is a ruse. He uses the occupation to hide what he truly does and what he truly is. He is a cold-blooded bastard. He hates humans. He’s involved with a harvesting operation. Guess what he harvests?”

“Humans.”

“Right.”

Skold scanned her face. “So let me guess, he took someone from you? Someone who you cared about?”

“Yes.”

Again, he sneered. He didn’t care who this person was, but still found it amusing. “And here I thought you were incapable of caring about someone.”

“I am human, a flaw of my species. I can’t help it. Do you not feel emotion? Fae feel emotion just like humans.”

“Most of the times. But I was made to be nothing more than a weapon.” Skold took the snapshot and studied it one last time before tucking it away. “I will kill him and get back to you before the end of the night. Make sure that you have the money ready.”

Vanessa promised that she would have the money. They would be in touch shortly.

Before leaving he said, “You do realize that if anyone were to realize that you hired to kill someone to kill a member of the fae community and a rather high ranking one at that. If someone catches wind that you hired a bounty hunter to kill him, it’s not going to come back on me. It’s going to come back on you.”

“You almost sound like you care.”

“You know that I don’t. Frankly, I could care less. But I am giving you a warning.”

“I appreciate that, really I do. But whatever the price and whatever the repercussions that come from this, it is worth it. All that matters is knowing that this person-this fiend-has been dealt with.”

Rebecca staggered through Roc City’s night crowd, holding a large bottle of rum b Ay the neck. Drinking was a habit that she did not often partake in, but tonight, since she had drank half of the bottle by herself, she was fall-on-her-ass drunk.

She remembered something about not drinking in public. Something about public intoxication. But just when she was about to put the two words together it slipped from her befuzzled mind. Ah, who gives a fuck? She knew that she needed to go back to her apartment, behind closed doors, where it was safe. But her apartment no longer felt safe. It felt just as dangerous and ominous as the street whose hide she walked on.

Rebecca kept telling herself that she needed to go to Skold’s; that’s where she had meant to go all along. And yet she kept putting it off. She had gone into a liquor store and bought the bottle of rum. It had cost her twenty dollars, more than what she could afford really. She had hid the bottle in her bag and slunk into a dimly lit bar, sitting in a booth tucked far away from the rest of the bar, the juke box where nail-scraping country music played. She drank, alone with her own thoughts and sipped from the bottle. Many times within that three hour and a half she contemplated whether or not she should forget this whole thing with Skold, just let things happen as the universe would decide. She realized that she was not a happy person. The way she styled her hair, the way she dressed and put on her makeup and her bubbly personality was all a distraction from how she truly felt, which was exhaustion. She was twenty-three and she found herself dealing with the physics of a world that she really had no business being in.

She had always been good with computers, even when she was a little girl. She had always been good with technology, always good with taking things apart and putting it back together and making something new out of something old. She had never been like those girls that wore pretty little dresses and did girly things and said stupid girly things. She often wondered if her mother and father hadn’t been such shitty parents, if thing would have turned out differently. These were things, like the night that Skold had saved her from being raped and possibly murdered, that Rebecca did not want to think about. They were the ghosts that dogged her.

Though she thought of herself as a woman with morals, many of the people that had helped get her business started as a private investigator were not. Somehow, within the messy, tangled web of her life, she had embroiled herself in a troublesome situation with Bajork. How that had happened she couldn’t quite remember. Through him she had been able to find certain high profile clients that were in need; through him she had been able to carve herself a reputation. At first she had helped people who did not deserve to be helped, people who were getting what was coming to them. Once she had the money and reputation to be able to do so, she had surgically cut herself from the underworld of crime both human and fae. She helped those who had been wronged, stolen from, blackmailed, cheated. But the world of crime was not done with her. It had caught up with her in a way that she could have never happened.

How did this happen? she thought. How did my life turn into such a fucking mess?

Now Rebecca could see the building where Skold lived. She had known where he lived for a long time. He lived in a tall building made of glass and metal, in a penthouse apartment. In those two years, he did not relocate, not once. Rebecca thought that this was a curious thing. Many of the fae that she came across, the ones that were more humanoid in appearance, especially the elves, lived vainglorious, luxurious lives. They did not stay in one place for long. Why would they? The fae were immortal creatures, the elves being of no exception. So naturally, they didn’t stay in any one place for long. It didn’t take them long to get bored. Skold was different. Rebecca could only assume that he did not care about the things that most other fae cared about. But even then, Skold was not like other fae, or so the stories went.

Just go see him, Rebecca told herself. She took a particularly long swig from the bottle of Captain Morgan. You need his help. You don’t have any other choice.

She turned the corner onto a different street, taking a shortcut to Skold’s apartment. This street was deserted, save for a few cars going this way and that. She could hear voices behind her. Three men strolled along behind her, laughing. She immediately felt nauseated, her pulse quickening. Her preference towards women had a lot to do with her fear of men; ever since that night two years ago she could count the number of men that she had slept with on one hand. She gripped the neck of the bottle so hard that her knuckles had turned white. Things are different now, she thought. I know how to defend myself. I’m not the same girl that used to let people walk all over her.

But her fear only grew more intense as the men started to howl and make cat calls at her.

“Hey, you sexy thang…”

“Meow…Meow…”

They laughed stupidly, walking faster now, trying to catch up to her. She felt one of them grab her by the shoulder and whirl around. Gritting her teeth, Rebecca slammed the bottle of rum into the side of his face with all the strength that she could muster. A shower of glass and rum sprayed the ground. The man stumbled back, clutching at a rather nasty gash on the side of his face. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

“You stupid bitch,” he growled, starting towards her. His friends and he weren’t much older than Rebecca, college age, average height, not like the brutes that had almost killed her two years ago. She reached for her mace and aimed it directly at his face.

“I suggest you fuck off before I spray you in the face and claw out your eyes.”

The man froze; his friends stopped laughing. She was glaring at them with almost feral rage, her expression dark and murderous and cold.

“Come on,” the man said to his friends, and they slunk away without another word.

Yeah, Rebecca thought with an almost psychedelic rush. That’s just what I thought. Don’t fuck with me.

Each resident in the building had their own personal security code to let themselves in; without know the personal code there was no way of getting in. Luckily for Rebecca, it hadn’t been that hard to find out what Skold’s code was. It was a lax security system Rebecca thought; she assumed that Skold would want to be more protected. But then who was she kidding, Skold was a bounty hunter and had been around for centuries. He was more than capable of taking care of himself.

She the code into the key pad and let herself in. She nodded at the security guard who was sitting at the lobby desk and lazily eating a doughnut, and took the elevator up to the floor where she knew Skold’s apartment was. She knocked on Skold’s door three times. He never answered.

Rebecca cursed. She leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor. She was desperate enough that she would wait for Skold; she didn’t care how long she had to wait. She closed her eyes and drifted off.

The man that Vanessa had hired Skold to kill, who was not really a man, was Marcus Sloan. He was considered a veteran in his firm, a man of high moral fiber. Marcus was not his real name of course. He had changed names many times in the many, many centuries that he’d lived. He’d changed his name so many times that he could not remember what his real name was.

Sloan’s main clientele was the homeless, the disenfranchised, the kind of people that no one would notice if they went missing. Sloan worked as a civil rights attorney not because he cared about human life but because it gave him a huge advantage in harvesting humans. In his mind, and the mind of many fae, humans were like livestock. Unlike fae, they reproduced quickly. Even after the Paladin Wars, when their species had been pushed to the brink of extinction, their species flourished quickly. And when it came to the disenfranchised, the people that were left to rot on the streets, the orphans that were abandoned by their parents, there were many.

For the past twenty-five years Sloan, had disguised himself as a tall, narrow-hipped man with receding hair, a long narrow nose, and watery brown eyes. There was nothing overly handsome about this man and nothing overly ugly, which was the point. The more he blended in, the easier it was to work his magic. Humans were easy beasts to fool. Even when they had wards that protected them from dark magic they weren’t truly safe.

Sloan shut his computer off his computer for the night and grabbed his briefcase. It was late, now considered morning, when most humans would be asleep. None of his human coworkers knew that Sloan stayed late in the office, keeping up on paperwork; they had no reason to suspect that there was anything off about Sloan at all. He had always played his roles, whatever roles they may be, exceedingly well. He found that he liked working when the building was empty. It was quiet and he could hear himself think, feel the tension in his muscles, start to relax.

When Sloan first started disguising himself as human, he couldn’t stand it: Constantly being around them, listening to them whine and prattle about things that he would never understand. Whenever he went home he would strip out of his clothes and burn them and try to scrub their smell out of his skin. But as the years slipped by and the centuries passed like water seeping through his fingers, it became easier to pass for human. To match their expressions with his own, to talk about things like sports, politics, and question religion. He still hated humans. He would never be able to love or pity them, how could he? They were inferior to him and his kind.

Now he made his way to the parking garage across the street, whistling the tune to an Elvis song. In his years passing has the lawyer, Sloan had even come to respect classical rock music. Not just Elvis but Johnny Cash, Billy Joel, Elton John, and David Bowie’s early career before he decided to go industrial.

While his job as a human lawyer was over, his job as a fury, his real job he had to remind himself, was not. He climbed into his classic 1987 Buick with the wide, coffee-brown dashboard. He sang along with Tom Petty as he drove to a large skyscraper, where he was to meet with the others.

Once inside the building he took the elevator to the very top floor. He stepped out of the elevator into a grand high ceilinged room. Two dozen of his true colleagues sat around a long, polished table. They watched and nodded respectively as he took his seat, sitting at the end of the table. Though they all looked as human as he did, everyone sitting at the table were of Sloan’s species. Furies. Of the fae, furies were the able to create the most powerful of disguises, easily altering their appearance and even, in some instances, reality.

“Welcome, Valik,” said the oldest of Sloan’s congregation. Sloan felt something inside of him coil at the mention of his own name, a very human emotion of disgust. He hid the emotion behind a smile, bowing back at the leader of his organization.

“Pyrius,” he said.

“So good of you to join us.” Pyrius smiled. He was disguised as a heavyset man with a double chin, with fat, pudgy hands. Though he appeared to be in his early fifties, he had a round, childish face. His right ear was pierced with a silver ring. “Just the man that we were waiting for. We were just talking about the excellent work you did with the last shipment that you gave us. Our employer was very pleased, very pleased indeed. Once again you have proven yourself to be very useful in your position.”

There were murmurs and nods of agreements.

“It is always a pleasure to serve,” said Sloan. “Is everything going as planned?”

“Of course. Our master works tirelessly to put his plan in place. He’s already started the process,” said Pyrius. “Just weeks from now the fae will rule the world as we were always meant to.”

This time there was applause. There was a different sort of air in the room, not so conservative and business-like. The next hour and a half of the meeting continued as it usually did. Pyrius went over the budget and the quota that needed to be met before the next meeting. “Our employer will be proud,” said Pyrius. His eyes scanned the faces before him, a triumphant smile spreading across his face. “We are very close to the end. Can you not taste it, ladies and gentlemen? The taste of power, the taste of victory. Is it as strong on your tongues as it is on mine? Soon the age of the fae will begin, an age without humans.”

Though the meeting had gone exceedingly well, certainly the best one that Sloan had attended in a long time, he was more than happy to return to his cozy little apartment. It was the perfect place for a bachelor such as himself. He lived on the seventh floor of a building that was rented by other doctors and lawyers, divorcees and bachelor and bachelorettes, people who did not have time for romance and families. Sloan looked forward to sitting before the television and watching his favorite shows such as Friends and South Park. Very rarely did he go into the bedroom, very rarely did he lay in the bed. The bedroom just like most things in the apartment were for comfort and misdirection. Just as his flesh appear to be human, so did his apartment. Sloan did not need sleep, did not need to eat. In just a few hours he would go back to the firm he would go back to his job as an attorney, serving the disenfranchised.

Upon walking in through the door, Sloan hung his jacket in the closet and grabbed an unopened bottle of wine from the refrigerator in the closet. He grabbed a wine glass from the cabinet, along with a bottle opener. He set these items on a red Coca Cola tray and carried into the living room. Sinking into his favorite armchair he turned on the TV to his favorite channel and pulled the cork out of the bottle with the bottle opener. He bought only the best, most expensive wine, a luxury that he could easily afford when most could not.

Right now, on the television, they were showing a Geico commercial; one of the ones with the lizard that talked with an Australian accent. Sloan always laughed when he saw him. The lizard was so ridiculous yet cute. After so long of disguising himself as a human being, Sloan had long since grown accustomed to the mortals’ need for humor, to disguise the truth of their unsavory ways through puns and jokes. No one liked paying their car insurance no matter what the difference of the price was or what mascot you used to advertise the product. However, it was because of that cute little green lizard that spoke with the Australian accent that people chose Geico instead of all of the other car insurance agencies that were available.

Raising the glass to his lips, Sloan was about to take the first sip, when a voice suddenly said from behind him, “How interesting. A fury that thinks he is human even though humans are the very thing that he despises the most.”

Sloan jumped to his feet so fast that wine sloshed onto the front of his dress shirt and the wine glass fell from his hand. The wine glass slammed against the edge of the coffee table, shattering the top half of it. Sloan looked up at his intruder. His heart was pounding in his chest, thundering in his ears.

There stood Skold, shrouded in shadow. He wore his long black, leather trench coat. Rain water dripped from his long, matted hair. The blue glow of the TV barely touched him. He watched Sloan, amused. “You are a very interesting creature,” he said thoughtfully. “I wish I had a little longer to study you. It’s a pity that I have to kill you so soon.”

“Who are you? What are you doing in my apartment? Get out of here before I call the police!” The look of fear on Sloan’s face was very convincing, very human Skold thought. The way the eyes bulged, looking as though they would explode from their sockets, the way sweat started to drip from his forehead. It was the perfect disguise, sure to fool any human. But Skold knew that underneath the falsely made flesh, underneath the glamor, Sloan was anything but human.

“You should really invest in a better security system,” said Skold. “A powerful ward or two at the very least.” He tilted his head to the side, studying Sloan. “Not that it will matter much after tonight.”

Sloan started for the phone, it was over by the television. But before he could reach it Skold was barring his way. He had moved so fast that he almost seemed to materialize before him. Sloan’s expression changed, going from fear to dead pan, showing Skold his true nature.

“I know who you are, bounty hunter,” Sloan spat. The disgust on his face was evident, undisguisable. “Exile, eunuch. You are a blight upon the world, a disgusting creature. You are not full fae, you are not even half fae. You are nothing.”

If Sloan’s words angered Skold it did not show. When he spoke his voice was calm, almost flat. “At least I know what I am. I do not try to hide my ugliness. The same could not be said for you, Valik.”

Immediately Sloan’s face began to shit with anger, becoming more creature-like and less human. The pupils turned into slits and he roared, showing row upon row of razor sharp teeth. A long serpentine tongue fluttered out of his mouth before disappearing back into his mouth. He glared at Skold. “I no longer go by that name. I will kill you just f or calling me that.”

Skold ignored his threat. It was empty, meaningless. Sloan posed no danger to him, not in the slightest. “Are you familiar with Vanessa Holland? She’s the woman that hired me to kill you. You should be familiar with her, after all you are the one that is responsible for the death of her little sister.”

“That little bitch?” Sloan’s nostrils flared. “Someone paid money to avenge her? Right before I processed her, it was like taking a pig to a slaughter house, she was nothing more than skin and bones and a hollow shell. All of the drugs she’d taken had turned her brain into rot. A cockroach in an endless sea of cockroaches. She was sitting in a jail cell and not once did the world know or care, least of all her bitch of a sister.”

“You were her defense attorney. She depended on you to get her out. She had no idea of what you truly are. Personally it is of no matter to me. You know how humans are, always avenging their owns, even the ones that they find repulsive and care nothing about. I do not ask questions. I just do the job that they hire me to do and tonight my job is to kill you.”

Skold moved quickly, reaching for the Uzis strapped to his belt. But before he could take aim a ring of fire exploded from Sloan throwing Skold against the wall. Skold watched as the flames melted Sloan’s glamor-skin like wax, pieces of it drifting to the carpet. The creature standing before him was longer Sloan, but Valik. Wings six feet long sprouted from Valik’s bat, leathery and very much like a bat’s. Valik’s tail swished back and forth between his legs, covered in spikes. His nose was made of two vertical slits that flared with rage. Horns poked out from the sharp ridges beneath the thick, grey flesh of his head. Violent red light glowed from his eyes.

Skold leapt to his feet, the uzis back in his hand. He opened fire, light flashing rapidly from the muzzles of his guns. The fury moved with an amazing agility that Skold did not expect, ducking and weaving out of the way. Skold emptied both guns and tossed them to the side. They were useless to him now. He lunged forward and lashed out. Before he could touch the creature, Valik hit him with a powerful swipe of his rings.

Skold crashed through the door of Valik’s apartment, rolling head over heels. Barely winded by the blow, Skold rose to his feet again, splinters of wood that had once been the door crunched underneath his boots. The fury was top of him again, moving faster than a bullet. Like an acrobat, Skold flipped out of the way, dodging swipes from the fury’s wings and claws and tails. He stopped several feet away from the creature, now at the end of the hallway.

A ball of fire appeared in Valik’s talons. Snarling, he threw it at Skold. Skold could not dodge it in time. It slammed into his chest and sent him flying through the window behind him.

Skold plummeted towards the ground from seven stories high. Like a cat, gravity was on his side. Four stories from the ground he flipped so that his feet was facing the ground. He braced himself for impact, landing on top of the hood of a car. His feet barely made a dent in the hood or a sound.

He looked up, rain splattering against his forehead. Like a bird of prey, Valik was soaring towards him, talons outstretched. Skold’s muscles tensed. Bending at the knees he leapt up just as Valik was almost on top of him and grabbed his talons, latching on with all of his strength. At the last second before crashing into the ground, Valik gave one great powerful beat of his wings and began to rise above the ground.

Quickly they rose higher and higher with Skold hanging on for his life. Within seconds they were soaring above Roc City, up in the clouds, the city below them little more than specs. The wind beat at Skold ruthlessly, blowing his hair in his face. His feet dangled thousands of feet in the air with nothing but death below them.

In the distance he could see a church, the very church that he had passed just days before when Reynolds had called him to deal with the troll; and next to the church was the familiar shape of the museum, the one with the unimpressive black plague gallery. In seconds they would be past the church and in a minute outside the limits of Roc City. What if the fury decided to take him higher into the air where the temperature dropped and freeze him to death or suffocated him to death with the lack of oxygen? Skold was not afraid of death but he simply didn’t want to die yet. He had to act.

Gritting his teeth, Skold yanked on the fury’s talons with all of his strength. For a moment Valik and he plummet rapidly before Valik uprighted them with another beat of his wings. Valik started to zig zag and spiral around and around, trying to throw Skold off of him. Still Skold clung to him, his fingers digging into Valik’s flesh. Taking a risk, Skold used one hand to reach for one of his Colts. They were almost directly above the church now. It was now or never.

Skold took aim at one of Valik’s wings and pulled the trigger; this time Skold did not miss. Valik’s wing crumbled into Ash and again they plummeted. This time there was nothing that Valik could do to stop them. For a moment Skold lost his grip on Valik’s talons, the wind battering at him, blowing him towards the sky. He fumbled and managed to grab a hold of Valiks tail, wrapping his arms around it.

Skold did not feel fear as he and the fury fell thousands of feet towards the earth. His father, Kane, had taught Skold not to know fear or love, not to feel anything. It was Kane who had castrated him, taking both his cock and balls.

Lightning flashed above them, scarring the sky with vicious blue streaks of light. They now a hundred or so feet above the church. Now Skold let go of Valik’s tail, grabbing the other Colt. As they continued to fall, Skold emptied both Colts into Valik right before the fury crashed through the roof of the church.

Skold threw himself into a rolling motion as he hit the roof, rolling onto his feet before plummeting through the hole in the roof himself.

He panted, drenched from head to toe. His muscles ached in a way that they had not done in years, centuries. He could not see the creature below because the fury was covered in debris from where part of the ceiling had collapsed. But Skold sensed that Valik was not dead. Badly injured, but not dead.

Just as he suspected, the pile of rubble exploded outward as Valik stood up with a roar. One wing was completely obliterated; the other flapped furiously as Valik tried to make a quick escape but the wing by itself was virtually useless. Quickly reloading one of his Colts, Skold vaulted through the large hole in the roof. Plunging a hundred and fifty feet, the elf landed on top of the fury with enough force to flatten the fury back on the ground. Eyes burning with silver light, Skold emptied the colt into Valik a second time.

Valik’s body crumbled into ash, blowing in the wind that howled through the damaged roof. Valik was now in the Abyss, the land of the Frrey Maan (the English translation, the Ferry Man.) The Abyss was what the humans would think of as the fae version of hell and the Abyss was the Ferry Man’s domain. Any soul that went to the Abyss was damned for eternity. Very few souls had been known to escape from the land of the Frrey Mann.

May he keep you there, shackled in chains Valik, Skold thought.

He stepped back and examined the large crucifix hanging in the altar, a symbol of the Christian deity known as Christ. Christ was an invention of the human mind, a religion that had been born not long before Skold’s birth. Skold would never be able to understand mortals’ belief in this deity, this invention of their imagination.

In all of the centuries that he had live, with all of the changes that he had seen the world go through and all of the long forgotten roads that he had traveled, Skold had not once encountered anything that resembled their God. And yet it was one of the most powerful religions in the world. Humans had fought each other over it (wars that the fae did not take part in but merely watched with amusement), killed and tortured over it.

After several moments, when the deity known as God did not try to reach out to Skold, he turned away from the crucifix and what was left of Valik, and stepped out into the night.

He had one last stop to make before he went home for the night.

Vanessa Holland awoke abruptly, aware that she was not alone. There was something in the room with her. She fumbled for the lamp and flicked it on, wondering if tonight was the night that she was going to die.

Skold was perched at the end of her bed like a bird, his leaf-shaped ears poking out through the matted sides of his silver hair. Her window was standing wide open, dead autumn leaves soaring on a wailing late autumn wind.

“The job is done,” said Skold. “The fury is dead.”

Vanessa did not know what to say. Part of her was more than sure that she was dreaming; another part told her that she was not. Skold was sitting at the end of her bed. Like a bird. She was too tired, too groggy to be pissed, pissed that he had just broken into her house without permission, without respecting the fact that was her property.

“Already?” was what she said.

He nodded. “I told you that I would have it done before the end of the night and that I would come to you when that time came. So here I am. Your sister has been avenged.”

Vanessa could not believe her eyes. Her heart was racing. She had never loved her sister, Rachael, had hated her from the moment she was born. But family was family and if someone killed one of your own, you avenged them, no matter how much you might want to kill them yourself. That was something her father, Bill Holland, also a man who had been involved with organized crime, had taught her.

“Do you have the information that I need?” Skold asked.

“Yes, his name is Draxis Sinclaire. He owns a hotel on the east side of the city. Because of his business revenue and the amount of cash he brings in he has many connections, both human and fae. He is a very powerful figure. He might have the information that you are looking for.” Whatever that information is, Vanessa thought.

“You better hope so,” Skold said. “Because if not I will be coming back and when if I do I am going to kill you.”

Vanessa felt a cold chill go up her spine. It wasn’t just the matter of fact way that he had said that freaked it her out, it was the fact that she knew he meant it. It did not matter that she was female or that she was a very well-to-do person in the criminal world.

“You won’t be disappointed,” she said, although she wasn’t so sure of that anymore.

“Let us hope not for your sake.”

With that Skold stood up and went over to the window. He glanced at her once before leaping through the window and out of sight.

Again, Vanessa shivered. Just when I thought that I wasn’t so easy to scare, he thought She did not sleep for the rest of the night.