The Witch and the Englishman (15 page)

“
So did you,” I said aloud, although quietly. No one outside of the car would have heard me.

“
Are you okay?” she asked.

“
I liked him.”

“
The Englishman?”

“
Yes,” I said.

“
He’s free now.”

“
He’s also dead. No offense.”

She nodded and didn’t seem offended, then reached out and took my hand. I mostly didn’t feel it, except for a small, warm tingle. I did my best to squeeze back, as we sat there together, watching the crime scene investigators pour in and out of the big, dark, demon-free home.

My phone whistled, startling me. A text message. I considered ignoring it, but instead, reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out my Galaxy Note.

It was a message from Samantha Moon.
You’ve been quiet.

I’ve been fighting a demon,
I texted back.

Did you win?

Of course.

Glad to hear it. Drinks tonight?

I thought you would never ask.

The kids are with Mary Lou. I’ll be there in an hour.

Drinks with a vampire after vanquishing a demon and sitting next to a ghost.

Yeah, my life is weird, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The End

Allison returns in:

The Witch and the Huntsman

The Witches Series: Book 3

by J.R. Rain

Coming soon!

~~~~~

Samantha Moon returns in:

Vampire Sun

by J.R. Rain

Coming March 27th!

Return to the Table of Contents

Also available:

Moon River

A Samantha Moon Novel

by J.R. Rain

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~~~~~

Bound By Blood

A Vampire Diaries Novel

by J.R. Rain

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The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo

the Spinoza Trilogy #1

by J.R. Rain

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Bad Blood: A Vampire Thriller

The Spider Trilogy #1

by J.R. Rain, Scott Nicholson

and H.T. Night

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Reading Sample:

Hear No Evil

The PSI Trilogy #1

by J.R. Rain and

A.K. Alexander

Chapter One

Eleven-year-old Hope Mitchell was running for her life.

She should’ve listened to her
mother
, listened to the rules...and now they’d found her. But God, being holed up in the compound. Day in, day out. The
doctors
. The
teachers
. “What do you hear Hope?” “If you focus here and
listen
, do you get anything?” No, I don’t get anything. Leave me alone.
Leave me alone
was what she always wanted to shout. Then the teachers. “You can do better than that, Hope. Here’s the correct way to write the character in Chinese. No, that’s not how you say it in French.”

The machines they hooked her up to, the tests...all of it...impossible and stupid, and she wanted out.

She thought for some time that she had them fooled. Thought if she played dumb, they’d let her go with
mother
. They had with that other kid—Joey Reynolds. Or at least, she saw them all get into a car one day and leave. One of the doctors and a teacher and Joey and his mother. Everyone knew that Joey didn’t have the gift. It didn’t take much or long to figure that out. Did they drop him and his mother off somewhere with a house and a pool and a neighborhood with normal kids who didn’t see or hear or know things that no one else did?

Feet pounded behind her and her heart raced. She couldn’t let them catch her. Tears started to cloud her vision. No. Don’t cry. Can’t cry. Keep running. Get safe and tell someone. Would anyone believe her? It didn’t matter. They had to.

“Hope. Stop. Come on. You’re a little girl. You’ll get lost out here. There’s hungry animals,” one of the men yelled.

Bushes scraped against her legs, scratching them. The smell of sage tickled her nose. She hated that smell—sweet, sour, strong. The teachers burned it all the time in the meditation room saying it was good to clear out any negativity. Negativity? Who were they kidding? They had to burn a lot of sage for that in that stupid place.

The mountain ahead of her was huge. How could she climb it?

The men continued shouting. “It’s okay. Stop, Hope. Stop. We won’t hurt you. Your mother wants you to come home.”

One of the voices came closer. The tears started again and this time they wouldn’t be shoved down. What if they hurt her mother? She didn’t want that. The woman was nice to her.

The feet were right behind her. She sped up and ran as fast as she could.
Don’t let them get me. I’m faster. I can do it. I can beat them and get my mother and then we’ll be okay. We’ll get a house. We’ll get a dog. I’ll go to a real school.

She pushed ahead and the voices grew farther away, still yelling for her. If she could get over that mountain she knew, she just
knew
,
she’d find somewhere safe to go because on the other side of that mountain was a highway. She knew it was there because she could
hear
people sometimes in their cars talking to each other, listening to the radio, or speaking on their cell phones.

Her chest ached and her stomach hurt so bad.
Don’t barf. Can’t barf. Keep running.

She hadn’t fooled them at all. Had she? Trying to play dumb, getting bad grades, sitting in the headmaster’s office being punished. They told her to stop it, they knew what she was doing and they knew she wasn’t dumb at all. If she helped them she could go back to her apartment and watch television. But if she didn’t help them...

They never said what would happen, but she knew it had to be bad. So she told them everything she’d heard. It was scary. She didn’t understand it, but after she told them, they let her go back and be with her mother and she was so happy to see her and be held by her. Mother smelled like peaches and vanilla from this lotion she bought at the compound store, and that night she’d made Hope her favorite meal—tacos. Then they’d laughed and watched
Survivor
on TV. That’s what she was now—a survivor—and she’d win. She had to. It was worth way more than a million dollars.

And now, since she’d told them, they wanted more and more from her. But she was smart. Wasn’t she? She’d watched, waited and planned how to get out and away.

No alarms had gone off. No dogs. Nothing. She’d done it, made it under that super small space she’d seen in the fence the other day when she’d walked home with her friend Teresa Spiro. And then, ten minutes later, the men shouting and running after her. How did they know? How did they find her?

When she’d crawled under the fence it cut into her back. The pain meant nothing now. Not compared to the blood pounding in her ears, making it sound like a river rushing between them, and her heart still racing and her feet thudding along the ground. No, pain did not matter. Freedom mattered. Hope understood that a price couldn’t be put on freedom. The voices were yet farther away. She was halfway up the mountain. She was getting out. She was going to make it!

“Where is she?” one of the men yelled. Then lights, bright flashlights scanned the side of the mountain. “There. Right there. Get her.”

Keep running. Don’t look back.
But she did. She looked back, and then she tripped.

A fierce hot pain shot through her leg like nothing she’d ever felt—not like a bruise or a scrape. A white flash rushed in front of her eyes. Her mind dizzied into a swirl of bright lights, shouting voices and her own voice telling her to get up and run. Keep going. She got to her knees. Oh God. It hurt. Her leg twisted up and would not follow directions. Stupid leg. The tears came freely as a man stood above her and knelt down.

“You’re okay. We’ll have that fixed up soon.” He lifted her up and walked toward three other men.

She didn’t recognize these men. They weren’t any of the guards she was so afraid of. Maybe they were here to save her. That had to be it. Thank God. Yes. The man was so nice. That’s why they were here. She sighed and even with the shooting pain soaring up her leg and throughout her body she breathed a sigh and leaned against the man’s chest. His heart thumped through his army green shirt.

Then her relief suddenly changed when she
heard
one of the other men already inside his car speaking into a cell phone. “We’ll have her on the helicopter in fifteen. She’s hurt. Looks like a decent cut on the leg. Have a doctor meet us at the airstrip. Yes, we’ll be there by tomorrow.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and started to squirm.

“Hey, some sedation over here. She’s agitated.” Another man joined them. They kept walking at a fast clip. The man held on tight to her as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp. His voice raised, not so gentle this time. “Knock it off, kid.”

They rolled up her sleeve. Alcohol burned her nose as someone rubbed it onto her arm with a cotton swab. Then the sting of the needle. The pain in her leg lessened, a tickle fluttered and settled through her body, numbing it. Closing her eyes, she knew that these men were not from the compound. She would’ve been so much better off if they had been.

Hope Mitchell was quite aware that the one thing she’d been warned of, that all of the kids had been warned could happen to them if they ever tried to leave, had happened to her.

Chapter Two

My wrists ached from the tightened knot around them behind my back. This was really not good at all. In fact, this was really, really bad.

Domingo Rodriguez stood above me, his reddened eyes bulging and hateful. “You filthy whore,” he screamed. “You thought you could fool a man like me? How stupid are you and whoever it is you are working for.”

Pretty stupid, I was afraid. I really wanted to kick this guy in the balls for calling me a whore—and a filthy one at that. But, saving my life was looking to be taking precedence at the moment.

Where was the team, dammit? Hadn’t they realized by now that the locator device I’d worn inside my bra was no longer working? Only moments before the lovely fuckwad Domingo had torn off my shirt, reached his massive hands inside my bra, which really hurt considering that I am PMSing and ripped out the dot bug. Yeah. Kylie Cain, PSI agent screwed. Big time.

I shifted in the hard wooden chair inside Domingo’s bedroom. The samba CD he’d put in his stereo moments before played loudly within the room, decorated in colors of red and burnt orange. The cold floor under my feet was patterned together with adobe tiles.

The room smelled of cigars, expensive woodsy cologne and tequila, which we’d been drinking together moments ago. Right before things turned bad for me.

A sharp scalpel sewn inside a small pocket in the back of my panties pricked at my backside. The tequila softened my reflexes. Not good. What the hell had I been thinking to drink shots of tequila with drug kingpin Domingo Rodriguez? Oh yeah—I had been thinking that I needed this ass to keep believing my story, and that the team had my back. Damn though, because of the liquid poison, I apparently hadn’t been quick enough when Domingo grabbed me from behind as I’d stood to pour him another shot. My initial plan was to put some more of the barbiturate inside his shot glass, making it easier to take him down. So much for my initial plan.

I should’ve been more aware. Stupid mistake. I’d let my guard down. I was really wanting to blame the predicament that I was in on the tequila, but I knew better. Where the hell were Noah and Ayden?

“Tita Esquivel, huh? That’s not your real name. Interesting choice, though. You read
Like Water for Chocolate?
Yeah, me too.
”

Wonderful. A drug lord who liked decent literature, and a romance at that. Who knew? Yeah, I had chosen the name Tita Esquivel for this operation, thinking I was soooo smart, I combined the author Laura Esquivel with my heroine Tita in one of my all-time favorite books—for the recipes of course, because I think romance is basically a waste of time.

Domingo breathed heavily, beads of sweat forming around his graying temples, his large gut drooping grotesquely over his belt as he paced back and forth with a gun pointed right at me. “I would’ve bought all of it, your line, everything. I even liked your name. But women who look like you don’t become whores, especially not in my country. They become mistresses of men like me. Or, I turn them into whores. Like the girl I killed a week ago. Is that why you are here? Because of that girl?”

I didn’t plan on having a long discussion as to why I was here. I was here for many reasons. The main one was to take the son-of-a-bitch out. He was involved in human trafficking, sexual slavery, drugs, money laundering, pornography, and murder. You name it, this guy’s hands were all dirty. It was true that I knew he’d had a girl murdered who had once been abducted while on a church retreat years ago. He’d turned her into being a sex slave and in the porn business. In an ironic twist, a nice couple from Napa Valley and their family had helped lead to this moment. They’d tracked a killer as a couple of amateur sleuths. It takes all kinds to bring down the bad guys. I was glad that I had sent the couple—Nikki and Derek Malveaux and their family back to wine country the other day.

Domingo continued his diatribe. “That really should’ve been your disguise to try and
get
me, Señorita Esquivel.” He spat and laughed at me. He raised his arms and shrugged, his fingers wrapped around the gun that waved in the air like a butterfly made of steel. “So, when I see you, I think to myself, interesting name. I watch you as you pour the Tequila, and I think about our dinner. Not only did your magnificent beauty impress me but also, the fact you had some intelligence. Too much intelligence for a whore.”

What could I say? I’m a smart whore?

“I’m a wanted man,
Tita
,” he said, slurring his words. “Governments, bad men,
good
men, they all want a piece of me. I’m a simple businessman. I don’t like being picked on, especially by a stupid whore.”

First filthy and now stupid. Yeah. This guy was going to pay for that shit.

“You’re trying to pick on me, Tita. Not too good for you. Not too smart.” He shook his head and looked at me smugly, crossing his arms in front of him.

I thought about shouting, “Brilliant assessment, Dick Tracy.” He obviously knew books.

“Everyone wants me for their reasons. What’s yours? My pecker? All the ladies want my pecker.”

Right. That’s what I want. Your pecker. I tried not to roll my eyes at him, because I had not forgotten that this was some serious shit that I was in.

“I got something like fifteen kids, Tita. You want a baby with me, too. That’s what you want from me, huh? I got babies all over this country. What’s another baby? Let’s make a baby,
Tita.
” He snorted.

I observed him starting to sway while walking back and forth across the tiles. How long would it be before his henchmen came into the room? It was a well known fact that Domingo Rodriguez didn’t like to do any killing on his own. He left that up to the thugs he employed. I knew the layout of the villa, and I’d put money on it that at least one if not more bodyguards stood right outside Domingo’s bedroom door. A trickle of sweat slithered down my spine, and it didn’t feel good at all.