CHAPTER NINE
Callie’s knees slammed against the floor. The threadbare carpet did nothing to blunt the fall. Her hands fumbled to grab the phone.
Her fingers were unable to find the right button.
Unable to stop the muffled sound of her mother’s voice.
Unable to replay it.
Unable to do a goddamned thing.
Derek picked up the phone and tapped the pause button. He sucked his bottom lip in until his mouth was a bitten line of focus. Callie slid back over her heels and let her rear find the carpet, too. About right that she’d end up crawling before she could get Zara back. Pride didn’t do a thing when you were already broken.
Tears began to track down her cheeks. Her voice was a ghost. “We need to hear it.” I need to hear it.
Derek scooted close to her. His shoulder bumped hers. The almost-there movement a reminder she wasn’t alone. Most nights that was enough. Tonight wasn’t most nights.
She nodded toward the phone, and he started the message from the beginning.
“I am alive for now.” Zara’s first words were clear, but slow. The syllables were off. Zara hadn’t been much for reading aloud when Callie was a kid, and it was clear her practice hadn’t gotten better.
Zara sucked in an audible breath on the recording. Callie mimicked the action. She could picture her mother pointing at some scrawled word, and hoping for an out. She must not have gotten one, because her mother continued. “He wants his soul back. Did you really take it?” the second question faster, quieter, and laced with fear. A slap of skin against bone rang. Zara hissed. Her next words were stuttered through heaving breaths. “You can do better than that. You have a big supply of souls at the ready. You’ll bring him two extras.”
Zara started to speak, and then paused. The sound was a screech of regret Callie could relate to, but not one she’d ever heard from her mother’s mouth. Callie began crying in earnest. Derek draped an arm over her shoulders and pulled her tight to him, but they both remained fixed on the phone in his hand.
Adam’s phone. Nate’s words. Zara’s voice.
“His soul. Two backups. Bring them to the cathedral corner by 10 p.m. or...” her mother’s voice, shaking and soprano, shuttered.
It was replaced by the sour spit of Nate’s sneering. “Bring them or your mommy dies tonight.”
The recording was over, but neither she nor Derek moved. The last time Zara had been in this room, she’d been loud, she’d been angry, and she’d been vibrant. The woman on that recording was none of those things. Callie could count the number of times she’d seen her mom shed real tears—con job ones didn’t count—and the number of times her mom had been scared was half that. This was worse. She’d never heard this pale, reedy Zara. Her mom wasn’t an upstanding citizen. She had been far from the perfect mother. She didn’t deserve this, though. No one did. Callie tried to swallow the sick slosh of her stomach ripping its way up her throat, but her body no longer had room for anything but guilt and ire. She stumbled to the bathroom and ditched her earlier food.
Once certain she was steady—or as steady as someone who got her mom kidnapped and just heard her threatened could be—she splashed cold water on her face. Derek stood in the bathroom’s doorway. She was thankful he hadn’t pushed in, but the ticking vein in his temple suggested he’d been watching and he was thinking.
“Tell me you have a plan,” she said with the rasp of hot coals doused with water.
Derek’s fingertips turned white against the doorframe. His answer ground out between gnashed teeth until the simple words were bloody. “Give him the fucking souls.”
It sounded too simple. Probably was too simple, but Callie needed a direct line out of this mess. “Okay,” she started to nod slowly, but stopped a half second later. “One problem.”
His brows pinched together in question.
“Flask is empty. I don’t have shit to give him.”
Derek swore under his breath. “We’ll hit the Charmer’s.”
He had to realize how dumb of an idea that was. “You weren’t there earlier today. He accused me of stealing his magic and of working against him. I don’t need to get on the Charmer’s bad side, too. We can’t jack souls from his place.”
Derek scrubbed a hand over his face, pausing to squeeze his forehead for a moment. When his hand fell away the hollows beneath his cheekbones were deeper. She wasn’t the only one pushing her body to do more with less.
“I need to sit,” he finally said.
Derek moved to the couch. Callie stopped at the refrigerator to pull a couple cold beers from inside. She popped the caps, and then came to sit with him.
She handed him a beer. “I’m too freaked out to think.”
He drank down half the bottle in a single pull. She curled against him, and they leaned against the back of the couch and drank their beers. The ceiling fan overhead hummed a steady, slow buzz.
“So we need two souls.”
“Three. Something has to stand in for Nate’s,” Derek said.
Callie tried not to squirm.
He turned to face her more fully. Concern etching across his face. “Right?”
“Actually, I have Nate’s soul here. I snagged it last time I was in the back of the Charmer’s. We were getting so close, and he’s so squirrelly right now. I couldn’t risk him renting it out.”
The worry lines faded from her boyfriend’s forehead. “Smart. Where is it?”
“Hall closet.” She nodded toward the narrow, shitty, MDF door.
“So we need two souls in—” he peeked at his watch “—four hours or less.”
“We need to wring everything we can out of the phone. You said you thought we could make some calls? If Nate knows we have it, we don’t have much time.”
Derek cut his hand through the air. “He wouldn’t have tipped his hand with the voicemail if he hadn’t
