Cowboy stretched and then leaned across the table to me. “You trust the Magelore?” he asked in an undertone.
“About as much as I trust you,” I said.
Dinah laughed and Cowboy drew back as if I’d slapped him. “Seriously?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t trust either of you. I said I trust you the same.” I reached for the food on the table and filled my plate. I needed food, real food, and then I would sleep.
Anita led a sullen Cowboy to another room so it was just me and Carlos at the table. I shoved food in my mouth, moaning as the flavors hit my tongue.
“Good stuff.” Carlos smiled as he cupped a coffee mug in his hands. “My Anita is quite a cook.” I kept on shoveling as he watched, his eyes sad. “If you are right about the demons, we are in deep trouble. But you will look for Rosita? When you are stopping this? Keep an eye out for her at least?”
I slowed my chewing and spoke around a mouthful of food. Telling him I wasn’t going after Rosita was a bad idea, so I figured I’d sidestep the question. “I need to check a few things, but I can find out if it’s a demon real quick.” I paused, then asked, “Are the tracers really destroyed?” The MRI machine had been almost too slick, too easy. And they found us at the hospital.
His smile slid off his face. “Yes. They are out of commission. But I hid you from the moment I realized who you were, what you were. It bought us time. Likely the vehicle you were driving had a tracer too. That is where I’d lay my guess.”
“Why did you hide what you were from us?” I asked.
“I was trying to protect my wife. You are known for your shoot first and never bother to ask questions style of working. I hoped that we would be able to appeal to you to go after our daughter. I have heard the stories of how you took down Mancini to save your own son.”
I tapped a finger on the table again. “That was when I worked for my father, I had no pull then. It was not my job to ask questions.”
“So you are a freelance assassin now?” His eyebrows shot up.
I sighed and kept eating. “I am a mother whose children are missing, Carlos. The same as yours.”
Children. No. Child. My gut clenched and I snapped my teeth shut to keep the food in my belly.
Carlos reached across the table and put a hand on top of mine. “My Rosita, I saw her the day before she went missing. You see from the picture she has her mother’s beauty and fire? She was determined to help the missing abnormals. Many of them were her friends. Those she’d grown up with. Good people.”
I stared at him as he stared down at the picture of his daughter. Her long dark hair had been caught up in the wind, and really, she looked like a model as she smiled coyly over her shoulder at the camera. Unusually bright amber eyes peered out from under long dark lashes, sparkling with laughter, with life.
“She said she had a lead. It didn’t take her to the facility that you were at, but somewhere else. She went there and now . . . she is gone. Her partner couldn’t find a trace of her. He has all her papers. Maybe together you two could—”
I was already shaking my head. “That’s not how this works.”
He barreled on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I wanted you to feel a connection to her so you would want to find her for us,” he whispered. “You are the Phoenix. You are the boogeyman of our world. If you cannot save us, who will?”
His fingers tightened on mine and I turned my hand over so we were palm to palm. “Please, find her.”
“Fuck,” I said. “I can’t help anyone. Don’t you get it? If they can do this to all our kind, what hope do I have of stopping them? None. That is the answer. None. They locked me up as if it were nothing, Carlos. Me.”
I’d seen Bear in trouble. My boy was afraid and angry, and that was what had driven me out of the facility more than anything else. My tolerance for waiting, for biding my time, had exploded in an instant. Nothing mattered more than my boy’s safety.
Because he was the only one I had left.
“I was giving birth,” I found myself telling him. “When they took me.”
Anita walked into the room and sat, a small box in her lap.
Dinah was quiet, and I could feel her listening. She hadn’t known I was pregnant with Killian’s child when I gave her to Easter.
“They did not use the mist?” Carlos asked.
“I was awake. They gave me an epidural for a C-section. Tied my arms down. Strapped my head back. I let them, of course, I did.” I started to shake, unable to stop the memories now as I slowly spoke through them.
My head was strapped to the operating room table as were my arms. Lower body numbed and useless from the epidural. But I could hear, and that torture was like nothing I’d ever felt before.
I could hear and do nothing as my world turned itself inside out.
“Tell him,” one of the nurses said. “We’ve got no pulse on the child. None on the mother.”
There was no cry of a baby, no first breath taken. Hands pushed on my innards as I was roughly put back together. I wanted to speak, to tell them they were wrong. I was alive. I was sure the baby was too. She was alive. She had to be.
I tried to pull on my wrists, needing to get up, but my body ignored me. The cold flush from the epidural spread through me again, up and
