Page 17 of The Deeper Game
We went up and stood with Odin, the three of us peering into the box, which contained a plastic baggie with a feather and some gloppy, partly dried, dark reddish-brownish fluid inside of it.
Not shoes, then.
The feather had once been white, but was now half-stained with the fluid, which, let’s face it, looked an awful lot like blood. Some of the fluid clung to the sides of the baggie.
“Not really my style. I mean, what ever would I wear them with?” I said, going for the joke, like that might make this less alarming.
My guys weren’t amused. Odin carefully unfolded the note. It read, “YOU ARE MINE.” In that same blocky, childish lettering.
Okay, now I was scared.
“Do you think this is related to the Abe Lincoln warning?” Thor asked.
“All I know is that I’mfucking-ggoing to kill somebody,” Odin said, yanking out his gun. “You stay here with Ice and keep a good eye on the surroundings. I’m taking a walk around, then inside.”
“Got it,” Thor said, weapon at the ready.
“Then we’ll print it, though I don’t imagine we’ll find much,” Odin grumbled. “I can think of a dozen people who know we’re here, and none of them would be stupid enough to leave prints.”
“Nobody we know is stupid enough to do this in the first place,” Thor said. “Maybe somebody is off the rails.”
“Maybe.” Odin headed off to the side to make a check of the area around the house.
“Oh, my God,” I said, heart pounding. Just the writing was so bizarre. And the blood.
“Pig’s blood, I bet,” Thor said. “Because this paper, it’s butcher paper.”
“It’sblood.”
Thor looped his arm around my shoulder. “We’ll keep you safe, Isis. Nothing and nobody comes between us. Ever. Got it? You know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, though I couldn’t stop shaking. In all the mayhem that was our life now, the one place I’d felt secure was this hideout.
He pulled me tighter. “This shit does not stand.”
After a few minutes, Odin came out the front door with a handful of large plastic Ziploc baggies. “Nobody’s here.” He and Thor bagged the stuff separately and we went in.
“It could be worse. It could be your real name,” Thor said once we were safe inside.
That freaked me out even more. If anyone knew my real name, it meant that they could get to my sisters. They thought I was dead, though I sent them money by buying up the wildly overpriced “Paris Hilton” model of sheep wool comforter. It’s possible they suspected it was from me, but that’s as much as I could do.
He set the package on the kitchen table next to what looked like a tackle box, except it was full of brushes and tiny bottles. A fingerprint kit. Thor pulled on a pair of latex gloves and spread out the paper.
“We have a fingerprint kit?” As soon as I said it, I realized it was a stupid thing to be surprised by. I knew Odin and Zeus as bank robbers and thought of them that way, but they’d come out of intelligence. Spies.
They’d been super cops once.
“You’d be surprised how handy something like this is,” Thor said. “Though the last time Zeus used it, it was to find out who pissed in the bird bath during a poker night.”
“Zeus was mad as hell,” Odin said.
“I’d think that was more the realm of a DNA test,” I said, watching Odin brush powder off the butcher paper.
“There’s a pole next to the birdbath,” Thor explained. “People were drunk. He figured whoever it was would’ve held onto it for support. And he was right. He made the guy come out and scrub it.”
“But, to run fingerprints you need a database of fingerprints,” I said.
“There are a few federal databases we can still get into,” Odin said.
