What’s New Pussycat(64)
Tears were streaming down Dianna’s heart-shaped face, but her eyes still latched onto Martine’s, communicating something Martine just couldn’t grasp. Yet, she said nothing.
Martine swallowed the hard lump in her throat, fighting tears, fighting fear. “So if I’m so valuable, why don’t you want me anymore? Why would you want my mother?”
“Because you’re all used up, pretty girl. You don’t have anything I want anymore, and I can’t afford to take a chance you’ll tell anyone what I’ve done with you all these months. Stealing magic is a no-no in our world, sunshine. But you have a bargaining chip. Your mother. She ensures not just your life, but your everlasting silence, and if she doesn’t come with me, I will kill you.”
Perfect. Bargaining chip officially useless. Fear threatened to swallow her whole, yet she tried to stay calm.
Twisting her neck around to look up at him, she asked, “But what does any of this have to do with my mother? Why not just kill me to shut me up and let her go?”
Escobar paused a moment, his eyes narrowing, changing the entirety of his cherubic face to an ugly mask of evil. “Let her go? After she so selflessly offered herself up in return for your life? Offered to do my bidding for eternity if I let you live? Why, that would be like throwing away a winning lottery ticket. But I’ll do it if you come any closer, Dianna. Make any attempt to trick me to save your daughter, and I’ll slit her throat!”
A lottery ticket? He’d gone mad. Surely he was as drunk on his quest for power as her father was on a bottle of Jack.
Escobar waved the shiny knife under his nose, his scoff ironic. “After all these years, all this time, I can’t believe I didn’t know, Dianna. You hid well, dear. But none of that matters now. So let’s do this amicably. We make the swap and Martine lives. Do we understand each other?”
Dianna nodded, taking a step closer, but Martine cried out. “Wait!” What did “after all these years” mean?
Her mother paused, shooting more signals to her with her eyes, but Martine wasn’t letting Escobar take her mother. So she stalled by using her complete confusion as a tactic.
She held up a shaky hand covered in scratches, her voice trembling. “Explain something to me. You owe me that much after all this time, Escobar. Why me? I know nothing about magic—I don’t know the first thing about being a familiar. Obviously you know that, as evidenced by the way I always return from the realm like some drunk. What did I bring to the table that any other familiar couldn’t?”
His smile was doting now, almost fond as he wrinkled his nose. “You are precious. I mean utterly adorable. How can you not at least know the laws of the familiar? You’re more in the dark than even I realized.”
She shivered, fighting the desire to pass out from his tight grip on her neck, the way he bore holes into her as he glared down at her. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, her hands were cold and clammy, but still she pushed. “Meaning?
“Meaning this,” he grumbled. “Do you know how often a familiar is willing to steal magic from others for someone? Never. That almost never happens. It goes against everything we’re taught as familiars. It’s against our laws, in fact. But when your father offered you up in his desperation for some cold hard cash, I poked around and found out something very interesting. You hadn’t cultivated your abilities. That, in and of itself, can be useful to someone like me. You were weak, but in your weakness, you were also malleable. I knew with a spell or two, I could turn you into my little puppet. So I nipped and took Gavin’s bait.
“That you came back from the realm with some very useful magic was a pleasant surprise, and led me to believe your father was misguided all these years about just how powerful you really are. He had no idea what he’d sold me, which is par for the course with your drunken sod of a father.”
Her chest heaved as she gasped for air. No matter how horrible her father had been, hearing Escobar lay it all out on the table made him so much worse.
Forcing herself to focus, trying to contain the quiver in her voice, she asked, “So I brought back powerful magic. Why wouldn’t you want me to keep bringing you powerful magic? What does my mother have to do with this?”
He clucked his tongue before directing his next question to Dianna. “She has no idea, does she? How can it be that she’s been kept out of the familiar loop all this time? Maybe because you kept her that way?”
Martine watched her mother stiffen then for the first time, flinch, and she knew whatever she was “out of the loop” about was bad.