Page 2 of Capitol Matters (Marionette #2)

I thought about making a break for it.

The gang could handle late night interlopers, but I couldn’t risk being seen here. As far as the Capitol and the general public was concerned, I had learned from my near-execution experience and turned from my wicked ways. In ten short hours, I was scheduled to report for duty as a criminal consultant, paying penance for my life of crime by helping bring about the end of the Bloody Hex.

It was Grimm’s idea, or maybe his way of bringing me to heel, but it seemed risky. Certainly not an assignment I would have given myself. I knew how unreliable I could be.

Before my escape plan fully formed, Vinton returned, dragging a struggling man and a woman alongside him. At first, I thought their shapeless garments were medical scrubs. Closer inspection found them to be janitorial uniforms. The overnight cleaning crew had arrived.

I slid the tray of medicine back into the fridge and let the door swing shut.

Beams from our flashlights bounced around before settling on the distraught cleaners.

The pair looked at us with their eyes stretched wide, then started sputtering protest.

“We didn’t see anything!” the man said, covering his face. “You weren’t here. Neither were we. We won’t tell a soul, I swear!”

The woman burst into tears.

“Why’d you bring them back here?” Ripley snapped at Vinton.

“Now we have to kill them.” Avery shrugged.

Vinton nodded. “Tie ‘em up, Donnie.”

Donovan searched the room before asking, “With what?”

I snorted a laugh.

Vinton turned to me, hauling his human cargo by the collars of their shirts. “Why don’t you hold them still, puppet boy?” he said more than asked. “Might as well make yourself useful.”

A smug smile spread across my face. They needed my help after all, and we’d only just arrived.

I elbowed Donovan. “Does that count?” I asked. “Check the time.”

Avery approached while pulling rope from his sleeve like a magician’s scarf trick. He wound it into a loose coil and offered it to Donovan, who looked stunned.

“Thanks,” Donovan mumbled.

Vinton shoved the female janitor at him. She collapsed and crumpled on the floor, sobbing. Donovan stepped back, staring at her while holding the rope limply. With nothing to bind them to, I assumed he would hogtie her wrists and ankles. That thought seemed to elude him, so I grabbed the rope myself.

The woman shuddered and sniffled as I crouched beside her. Donovan watched from above.

“Hang tight,” I whispered to her. “Let them bumble around a bit, then you’ll be on your way.”

We had no reason to kill these people. They might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but they were harmless. As far as what they’d seen and heard, that could be dealt with. Murder wasn’t the answer to every problem, regardless of what Avery believed.

The woman stared at me, aligning my face with her tear-streaked one. Did she recognize me? I’d done very little to change my appearance, despite the news broadcasting my mugshot nonstop. I imagined a mental checklist scrolling through her mind: young guy, blond, tattooed, with a lip ring… Oh, and he was in the company of the bunch of thugs currently arguing in the background.

About the time I finished my self-assessment, she must have done hers.

“M-Marionette?” she gasped.

“In the flesh,” I replied with a grin.

The expression she returned was pure terror.

Donovan reached around me to take the remaining length of rope. “I’ve got it.” He grabbed the woman’s companion and started tying him up.

Across the room, Ripley had discarded the medicine bottles and stood with his arms crossed. “Now what?” He glowered at Vinton, who flapped a dismissive hand.

“Lemme think.”

“Don’t strain yourself,” I muttered.

The bald man looked around. Other than the medical equipment strewn across the floor and the sniveling janitors now tethered together, nothing had changed. So, I didn’t quite track his train of thought when he said, “Let’s make it an accident.”

“Come again?” Ripley’s eyebrow arched up into the curtain of his black hair.

“What if they had an accident?” Vinton waved at the cleaners immobilized on the ground. “There’s plague all over this place. If they got too much exposure, they’d die.” His angled glance at Ripley asked for confirmation but received none.

I fought the urge to laugh again. “You think they would have done that while mopping, or…?”

Vinton turned his hulking form toward Ripley. “Breathe on them.”

The two men squared off. I snickered at the sight of Vinton—six and a half feet tall and two hundred plus pounds of muscle—and Ripley quite the opposite, posturing at one another.

The scrawny teen didn’t budge as he huffed a breath. “No,” he said. “And this is taking entirely too long. If you’ll excuse me, I have a zombie to check on.”

He started walking back the way we’d come in, but Vinton surged forward and caught him by the wrist. Ripley jerked immediately free, then whipped around to scowl at the muscular man with such venom it silenced the room. I’d seen enough in the past three weeks to know better than to invade Ripley’s personal space. Forget breathing on the cleaning crew, he could lip lock with Vinton right now and flood him with poison like a living balloon.

“Do it, or he’ll make you.” Vinton stabbed a gnarled finger at me.

I leaned close to Donovan’s ear to brag, “That definitely counts.”

The two continued their stare down as I approached on tiptoe. I circled around behind Ripley, preferring to be opposite the receiving end if he decided to attack.

“I want no part of this,” I began. “But, if I did, how exactly am I supposed to make him spew plague? It’s not like twisting his arm.”

“Try something,” Vinton seethed, talking to me without breaking eye contact with Ripley. “You’ll figure it out.”

Priceless. Definitely one of my better decisions to tag along on this job. Where else could I source this kind of quality entertainment?

“Right.” I dragged the word out. “So, how about I squeeze him really hard and see what comes out?”

“Blood, probably,” Donovan whispered.

My cackling laugh shattered the tension in the room. Both Vinton and Ripley looked at me with varying shades of aggravation.

“This is ridiculous.” I shook my head. “You wanna trash this place? Blow it up. As for these poor schmucks—” the janitors gawked as I gestured their way—“bring them with us. We’ll go to Bitters’ and pick up some magical roofies. We can drug them, then drop them off somewhere. You’re making this whole thing harder than it has to be.”

And I might have been making it too easy. Our friendly neighborhood alchemist, Nicholas Nash, had a potion for every problem, but the plague had been hell on his business, for which he rightly blamed us. The question was not if he could help us with this problem, but if he would .

“We’re not taking them anywhere,” Vinton said. “Too much work.”

I aimed my flashlight between his beady eyes. “I know you’ve got a hard-on for death, but there are other ways of dealing with people. They don’t need to die.”

“Have you been practicing that rhetoric, Capitol man?” Avery shot me an impudent grin.

I recoiled from the accusation as he continued.

“But I do think you’re onto something. Let’s blow the place.” He nodded to the janitors. “And them with it.”

The bound duo started bawling and blathering a chorus of “please, no” and promising not to run to the authorities the first chance they got.

Worry crept in. This situation was slipping quickly out of hand. Avery’s dig about my divided loyalty did not sit well with me. The other men turned my way, watching to see how much further I would take my protest. Outnumbered as I was, I could only say so much, but surely they would hear reason.

No one would hear anything, though, if the cleaners continued their pitchy pleas for mercy. Their petering wails strained my nerves until I snapped a gruff command.

“Zip it!”

Magic accompanied the words, closing their mouths so abruptly their teeth clicked together. I looked away, but not before the woman’s expression of betrayal twisted a knife in my gut.

“I hope you have something in mind,” Vinton told Avery.

The conjurer beamed. “You want explosives? I’ve got twenty.”

He clapped his hands then spread them, producing a large black ball with a lit fuse. It hissed and spewed smoke, burning rapidly down toward detonation. In a blink, it vanished. Avery stepped over to Donovan next, patting his shoulders as a bulky black vest materialized on his chest. Bricks of C4 were strapped across the front, connected to a digital screen ticking quickly through numbers.

Avery held a remote, which he raised dramatically before pressing his thumb against the single button.

My heart stuttered as the vest disappeared, and I realized how differently the gag could have ended.

“Hey! Fucking cool it, man!” I shouted, sending out a wave of force that knocked Avery off his feet. He tumbled backward onto the pile of broken computer parts, then sat there, his chest heaving with laughter.

“You’re a sick fuck, Avery,” I grumbled, then glanced at Donovan, checking for injury despite knowing I would find none. My brother echoed my concern, patting his torso before looking to where Avery lay sprawled on the floor.

Vinton watched the conjurer, as well, impassive. “Do it,” he said at last.

“ Don’t do it!” Thoughts churned through my mind, alongside the awareness that too much pushback would put a target on my forehead. Like Donovan pointed out, I wasn’t relocating to the Capitol. I still had to live with these psychopaths.

“What’s Grimm gonna say?” I blurted, appealing directly to Vinton. Our boss’s approval was always his biggest concern and might be the opinion needed to sway him. “He sent you here to make a little mess, and you’re going to leave it as a hole in the ground?”

Vinton didn’t react, pretending I hadn’t spoken.

I turned pleading eyes on Ripley, who let out a low grumble.

“I’ll be in the car.” He was already halfway out of the room. After only a few steps, the only thing visible of him was the beam of his flashlight, rapidly fading.

Donovan remained my last hope of an ally. Despite his earlier assurance that he’d been managing his newfound villainy with ease, I wasn’t convinced. He was awkward and unsure, not to mention the new punchline of Avery’s practical jokes, but he wasn’t malicious or cruel. I knew he didn’t want to kill a couple of innocent bystanders. He wasn’t that far gone.

My pointed stare in his direction went unanswered until I prompted him.

“Donnie?”

He saw me, then, suddenly aware as though pulled from a trance. His lips parted, taking too long to form the reply I least wanted to hear.

“Whatever Vinton says.”

His words punched the breath out of me. I scanned the lab, my gaze settling on the cleaners straining against their bonds.

In my experience, people died one of two ways. They either fought for every breath till their last or embraced their end with unnerving calm. The second type bothered me most. It showed a strength of will that was a shame to snuff out. Here we had one of each. The man stared stonily at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused and expression resigned. The woman, however, howled behind her sealed lips, stringing tears and snot as she writhed on the floor.

She’d been doomed even before recognizing me. This wasn’t my fault. It would have happened whether I’d crashed this party or stayed at home. But at least if I’d stayed behind, I wouldn’t have had to watch. Quite the going away present for my last night with the gang.

Avery rose from the pile of clutter, conjuring an old school, ticking bomb, wires and all. It looked straight out of a cartoon: red tubes taped together with a countdown clock on top. I couldn’t read the time remaining on the analog dial, and I didn’t want to.

He passed by the cleaners, dropping the explosive in the man’s lap and giving him a pat on the head.

“Better hurry,” Avery told the rest of us as he skipped past. “I have no idea what the blast radius of that thing is.”