Lover Behind Enemy Lines

by Liv Olteano

  “Do you want to take me to prom first? I hate to burst your bubble, but it came and went a long time ago. Well, maybe not that long for you—you’re two hundred years old, after all.”

  “Since we missed the prom opportunity, I’m thinking about a few dates at least.”

  “A few dates? Oh my God, you’re a really old-school guy. Aren’t you?”

  My cheeks warmed up. “Would that be such a bad thing?”

  “Anything keeping me from your body is a bad thing right now,” he muttered, then laughed a bit.

  “I like how brazen you are,” I admitted. “But you move very fast, and I’m in slow-motion mode. I’m asking you to please meet me halfway.”

  “I’m trying, but my libido doesn’t have brakes on it. In fact, I’m having very brazen thoughts right now—positively scandalous.”

  “Care to share?”

  “Well, that wouldn’t be fair if we’re not going to put them to good use.”

  “I hope we will put them to good use. Just not yet.”

  “Then I hope I’ll share those thoughts—just not yet.”

  I chuckled. “Very mature.”

  “You’re plenty mature for the both of us. As far as I’m concerned, we’re moving so slowly that we’re standing still. What you need is someone who’s fun and impulsive—some spice in your life.”

  “And that would be you?”

  “To say the least,” he muttered, and pecked my lips.

  I leaned my forehead against his, just to enjoy feeling his scent for a little bit longer. He was the spice of my life already. And after such a long time of blandness, it took some adjusting to.

  What would take considerably more adjusting to would be us becoming a thing in the eyes of my teammates. I wasn’t yet a hundred percent sure about Nathan’s allegiance. My gut feeling told me that he wasn’t on our side as much as he was on the side of putting a stop to the havoc that his sister was causing. It didn’t necessarily mean he was on our side—or that he’d be on our side at any point from now on. Two different agendas could have coinciding bullet points on their lists and entirely different end goals. What I needed was a plan that would help me become sure about him. And since I knew which of my teammates was the most hostile toward Nathan, it was clear whose help I needed to enlist to make that happen. If Taka combed through Nathan’s life and found nothing worth worrying over, then maybe I was worrying for nothing.

  But right now, I had a more pressing matter on my mind. “How about we have early dinner together?”

  He leaned back a little and looked at me strangely. “Early dinner? Walk me through the concept.”

  “We do our thing at night. So we have dinner early, like sevenish. From about 10:00 p.m. we could be busy, and we’re all here ready for it.”

  “You’ll have to give me details on the being busy part at some point. I’m fascinated by the very notion.”

  I swatted his arm in jest. “I mean working.”

  “I know, I know. But by having dinner—early dinner, I’m sorry—do you mean like going out? I’m not sure that’s prudent. My sister’s people could see us together. If we have any chance at benefiting from the element of surprise with her, then we can’t squander it away. She might not know I’m here, and I don’t want to tip her off about it. At least not yet.”

  Good answer, I thought. “I agree. But we can have dinner at home too.”

  “Oh. Yeah, sure. Your room or mine?” he asked and waggled his eyebrows.

  “We do have a dining room,” I said as seriously as I could.

  “Yeah. That’s not exactly my idea of a dinner for two. Your friends would hover and ruin the mood, unless we’re going for a buddies mood.”

  “We’re most definitely not going for a buddies mood.”

  His gaze glimmered with pleasure. “Awesome. Then it has to be your room or mine.”

  I thought about it for a moment.

  He blinked his long eyelashes at me a few times. “Are you afraid I’ll do something untoward?”

  “It wouldn’t seem so outside the realm of possibilities,” I replied in a perfectly serious tone.

  “Well, then, it might be better to have dinner in your room. Just in case we need some kind of supplies.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  I leaned in and gave him a lingering kiss, enjoying the feel of his lips against mine. “Dinner in my room at sevenish, then,” I whispered. “I’m going to a meeting and I hope to be back in time.”

  He shrugged. “No worries. I’ll be here.”

  I smiled, looked into his eyes, then got up. “Okay. See you later. I’ll give you some privacy now. If you’re hungry, feel free to go to the kitchen and raid the fridge. That’s what we all do.”

  “Thanks.” He smiled. “Can I take such liberties with the training room too?”

  “Sure. Make yourself at home.”

  As I was getting out of the room, I heard him say softly, “I just might.”

  Chapter Six

  BACK in my bedroom, I looked over the brief for the team leaders’ meeting I had to attend in about an hour and a half. It was fairly basic stuff: progress reports by area, actualizations for worldwide maps, optimization of our growing network of worldwide teams. We also shared information we gathered, especially when it was new.

  The fact that Taka had come up with our scrolls database—that reunited all of the ancestors’ sacred texts, plus information from various other sources such as folklore, witches’ library elements we could get our hands on, and ties to databases of any and all sources of pertinent or helpful information—had helped a lot of teams in their time of need.

  The magic world we were dealing with was an ever-growing, ever-evolving area. Casters like Vivian Gallagher were rare, to be fair, but her kind—the creative evil mastermind—was still out there. Everyday casters tried to come up with new ways of stealing life force from unsuspecting victims. And the more we all knew about it, the better our chance to level the playing field.

  For today’s meeting, I had a report to share. It contained what information I’d gathered from Nathan Gallagher about his sister’s childhood and natural tendencies toward what he called necromancy and what we called spaga activity. The fact that she used both death magic and ley line magic made her one of the most formidable opponents we’d encountered lately. And her ability to enhance her spirit servants and, Nathan said, her human cronies was also a new development on the battlefield.

  Casters were by and large solitary creatures. They didn’t tend to mingle, and others tended to give them a wide berth most likely because their instincts told them there was something off with that person. A caster having a human gang around them was a new and troubling idea. A caster being able to enhance them via magic was a terrifying notion. The guys who had chased me and Drew from Denny Park a while back had certainly seemed off as far as regular people were concerned. They shouldn’t have been able to keep up with us, let alone chase us around Seattle until we’d grown tired enough to decide to confront them in broad daylight.

  Dealing with spaga was our kind of fight; it left no bodies, since they were spirit servants: when they died, they simply vanished back to whatever hell-dimension they were a natural fit for. Fighting human beings, magically enhanced to boot, would present a lot of issues for us dreamcatchers.

  I drove my SUV into the downtown area, going down Fifth Avenue until I could turn on Cherry Street. I left my car in the parking lot on Sixth and Cherry Street, then walked to the building at Seventh and James Street, where we were holding today’s meeting. For safety’s sake, each team leaders’ meeting took place in another part of Seattle. We rented places under a team-building guise, using one of our many front companies.

  This time, we had a large conference room with a huge table surrounded by chairs. We did need a lot of space, after all: we were about 130 people; a team leader for every neighborhood, more or less. When I got there, maybe half of them were there already, clustered in little groups and chattering. Someti
mes a neighborhood had more than one team dealing with it, if and when the case arose.

  The number of team members fluctuated, and the general rule was when we did find candidates, we’d take on less juniors on the team than we had seniors. If some dreamcatchers decided to leave our ranks, and it happened quite often considering our life spans, some teams would be pretty short on senior members and wouldn’t be able to take on too many juniors even if they had candidates on hand. So another team would chip in to help when there were more attacks than could be covered.

  We often had at least one “floater team” that was always on call to jump in when any of us needed the extra help, and at least two “special intervention” teams that were our special ops guys, more or less. They were even better prepared than we were, and focused their training on strenuous circumstances like big attacks or—ancestors forbid—one truly massive one. We were prepared for everything the spaga could throw at us, we liked to think.

  It took about half an hour more for everyone to get there. When we were all finally there, everyone sat down. We took turns in being the speaker and organizer of the meeting. Today it was the turn of Magnolia’s team leader. She cleared her throat subtly and everyone fell quiet.

  “Welcome, everyone. May the ancestors bless our meeting and help us achieve everything we need to.”

  “May it be so,” we all replied.

  “So, on today’s agenda: thirty-three team leaders have some new information to share. Let’s begin with Lorelhurst’s team leader.”

  As he cleared his throat, I did my best to focus on the information that was shared. My fingers flew over the keyboard of my phone. I relayed the information as I heard it via our team’s chatting app. I was twenty-third in line to speak, and despite my best intentions to stay focused, my mind kept drifting to the date I was scheduled to have tonight.

  It had been a long time since I’d had a proper date, and one in my bedroom was an even rarer occasion. In fact, I couldn’t remember actually doing it at all until now. All my affairs had been conducted well away from our headquarters.

  If Nathan and I became a thing, we’d technically be living together from the get-go. Being a hallway away from me didn’t amount to living separately, after all. My heart fluttered. Would I be able to handle all of this? Handle my confusing feelings about Menewa and his memory, my even more confusing attraction to Nathan, and not betraying my team’s trust? I kept running through scenarios in which at least one of those things went sideways. How would I handle that?

  “Claw?” I suddenly heard someone saying as my arm was touched.

  I twitched, startled, and looked to my right.

  The team leader of Victory Heights, who was sitting next to me, leaned over discreetly. “Everything okay?”

  I cleared my throat. “Sure. I just spaced-out for a moment.”

  “It’s your turn to speak.” She smiled awkwardly.

  Everyone was looking at me. Well, crap.

  “We’ve had some interesting developments since our last meeting,” I began. “The caster who’s been terrorizing our area has been identified. We have a source of information—someone from her inner circle.”

  “Can we trust this person?” one of my fellow team leaders asked.

  “Yes. He’s bound by a truth spell. If and when he lies, there’s a visible sign of it.”

  “Interesting spell. I think it’s one from the ley line witches’ arsenal?” another followed.

  “Yes. Napeva’s Tooth.”

  “Oh, I was under that once. I trust its results,” our speaker piped up.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” I replied easily. “Our caster has both spaga and ley line magic abilities.”

  That stirred up some reactions from the crowd. Some were chatting between themselves, others were trying to get my attention to ask one thing or another.

  “Simmer down, people,” our speaker-lady intervened. “Let’s listen to the info first, and discuss it later.”

  They settled down, so I continued. “It seems she was born with the ability to drain life force. While it was also developed in time, without a doubt, it seems to have been a part of her nature from the beginning.”

  “What kind of source would know such a thing?” the speaker-lady intervened, focusing her attention on me like a hawk.

  “The kind that we can trust now, for better or for worse,” I replied politely, and followed with a smile to soften the blow.

  I didn’t want to betray the trust of my fellow team leaders, but I wasn’t going to throw Nathan to the wolves either.

  “It seems she can not only enhance her regular spirit servants with abilities like mass draining—though not as efficient as single-victim draining—and teleportation on short distances, but she can also enhance regular human beings with the help of her powers.”

  That stirred up some chatter, of course.

  “Me and a fellow team member met such people,” I added in a louder voice. “They were able to chase after us in broad daylight and catch us, then fight. Regular human beings wouldn’t have been able to do that—I’m sure we can all agree.”

  Everyone around the table either nodded, grunted, or replied affirmatively.

  “It seems she has a gang of these enhanced humans,” I went on. “We’re not sure yet how many or just how enhanced. But we’ll do our best to find out.”

  I nodded at our speaker to signal I was done briefing. She went on to the next.

  The Victory Heights team leader beside me leaned closer. “I’ll share my notes up to this point of the meeting.” She grinned. “All I ask for in return is an hour of the time of one of your teammates: Taka.”

  “Financial issues again?” I asked, full of understanding.

  She shrugged, and we focused on our next speaker. At the end of the meeting everyone would get a report of the meeting anyway. But she took careful notes that included elements others didn’t give much attention to, like the facial expressions of the one sharing the information and the attitudes of other team leaders. That was useful sometimes too. And as my good friend Taka always said, there was never such a thing as too much information.

  The conclusions of our meeting left me with a bittersweet task: I had to work on a detailed report about the possible whereabouts of Vivian Gallagher and her crew. It was voted that since she was a much more considerable threat than other casters, we had to make dealing with her our top priority. While my team would go on dealing with her spaga spirit servants, one of the two special interventions teams would deal with her human cronies.

  One could only hope that it would also mean apprehending her. The less I had to do with that personally the better it was for me and Nathan in the future. My mind naturally oriented itself around our best interest—I acknowledged and accepted that. The bitter part of it, though, was that I had to get information from Nathan, whether he felt like sharing or not. I was hoping he would want to share, but I couldn’t know for sure.

  When I got home, I ran into Taka in the living room.

  He glanced up from his laptop. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I looked around. “Is your better half home?”

  “He’s downstairs, training.”

  “I need a word with him. But first, I have a favor to ask. Actually, two of them.”

  He closed the lid of his laptop and focused that laser stare of his on me. “I’m all ears.”

  “I know you’ve looked into Nathan’s past, but I want you to finecomb through it. If there’s any reason we can find not to trust him, I want to know about it as soon as possible. Try his family too: financials, any dirt you can find.”

  “On it. If I run into anything interesting, I’ll let you know. And the second favor?”

  “I’m going to have dinner with Nathan in my bedroom. Do you think you can whip up something nice for us? I’m hoping to make a bit of an impression. My forte is sandwiches—not exactly the stuff of dreams.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Geez, you think? But do you re
ally think it’s wise to go down that road?”

  “You don’t trust him, truth spell or not.”

  “Trusting the spell doesn’t mean trusting him. The fact he hasn’t lied so far makes him look good, I’ll admit. But I’m not so sure about his motives.”

  “How about doing it simply because I’m asking you, as your friend?”

  He sighed. “No problem. I’ll have something nice ready by let’s say sevenish?”

  “Fabulous. Thanks,” I said as I started to walk toward the basement door.

  I ran into Ginger as soon as I got downstairs. He was practicing with nunchaku, probably due to their similarity to his dreamcatcher weapon—a whip. I admired the grace with which he moved, no doubt gained through his years of training as a dancer. When he took a moment to catch his breath and drink some water, I walked over to him.

  “Hey.”

  “Nice work.” I nodded toward the nunchaku.

  He grinned. “Thanks.”

  “Has there been any change with the tarry connection you noticed going out from Nathan—the one we suspect links him to his sister?”

  “Yes. I’ve managed to thin it down to almost nothing. She must be so pissed.” He grinned.

  “So we’re assuming she’s not using his power anymore.”

  He nodded and leaned back against the wall. “But it keeps amassing. I’m not sure what to do about that.”

  “Someone used to drain his excess, so I’m not sure he knows what to do about it either.”

  “Is it harmful, though?”

  I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Has he been feeling different at all? Not well, tired—anything like that?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “It’s his power, after all. Maybe it won’t hurt him.”

  “What if it could hurt us, though?”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “What if he chooses to use it against us? He’s a ley line witch with a scary amount of power that keeps growing. I’m sure the possibility of him turning against us has crossed all of our minds.”