Hour of the Dragon - Heather Killough-Walden Page 0,112
made good puppets.
Piper Maddox heard the transport magic erupt in the room, and her head snapped up as he solidified beside the chairs. Price had re-gagged the girls before he’d left to claim his prize at the dimensional decoy area, so she couldn’t distract him with her pointless yelling or screaming or name-calling as Victor closed his eyes and allowed his mind to reach out into the alley.
Once there, he moved through and around the bodies either sitting or laying on the sidewalk around the trashcan fire. Most were young, no older than forty or fifty, though they appeared as old as seventy due to exposure to the elements. One had been a realtor once upon a time. Another had literally been a hedge fund manager. But the other four were not so varied in their fortune.
Of the four, there were three men and one woman. All three men were insane. Their weak minds would have made easy pickings, and he was pressed for time. But all three of them were also tainted. Having them do what he needed them to do would not produce the energy he desperately required.
Two of the three had been involved with the rape of a runaway teenager.
It was almost a given that if you were female and you were on the streets, the prospect of rape would eventually force itself into your lap. The third of the three males was guilty of raping another male.
Apparently the prospect of sexual assault could fall into your homeless lap either way.
But the woman was interesting. And fortune smiled on him that she happened to have a pocket knife in one of her many jackets.
She had neither been involved with anything like sexual assault, nor had she been sexually assaulted. In fact… her mind was quite sound, and her heart seemed genuinely pure. Sure, she’d used drugs – as a homeless person, she’d be stupid not to. They were the only thing that could keep the pain, cold, loneliness and despair at bay. And she’d definitely “stolen” things out of people’s trash. Once, she’d even walked right into a Starbucks, picked up the nearest waiting drink someone had ordered, and walked right back out with it. She’d had a headache at the time and was simply desperate for caffeine.
It still made her feel guilty, though, which was why it was a surface thought and easy for Victor to pick through.
She never wanted people to hurt. He could sense that so deeply ingrained in her person that it not only resided subconsciously, it was part of her conscious existence too. It was simply a part of her altogether.
In fact… she’d recently aided the police in an investigation. And that investigation felt familiar to Victor. He wondered if it involved Price.
But Victor didn’t try to dig deeper and garner any further information on the matter because he didn’t want to waste a single ounce of the magic he currently had remaining. He’d used too much setting up the dimensional decoy for Price. He needed a hard flush of it right away if he was to have any hope of escaping the wardens breathing down his neck.
While he would most likely have enjoyed delving more deeply into the woman’s past, for now it was enough to know that she would serve his purposes.
“Come to me,” he whispered, sending the command into her mind. He experienced the briefest push-back, as if she had at some point had some kind of shield over her thoughts, and its remnants yet remained. But that was surely impossible. And after a moment, the command slipped into her consciousness.
Outside in the alley, the homeless woman opened her eyes.
Very pretty, Victor thought unexpectedly. He experienced a moment of surprise at the randomness of the thought – and then he experienced surprise that he was surprised by something random. Being the chaos god and all.
But he brushed it all off and concentrated on the woman. She looked like she might have been in her late thirties, by far the youngest of the group. And underneath all of that grime, he even imagined she might be attractive. It was just that she was so filthy, he couldn’t even tell what color her hair was.
But he was right about her being strong. Her brow furrowed as if she questioned whether she’d heard his call or imagined it, and she exercised a good deal of will by not getting up and coming to him as he’d told her to.