The rose-gold metal under my skin was unlike anything the doctors had ever seen. They had no explanation for how it got there except for speculation on a tribal rite that didn’t hold water given there were no records of such a thing being done, let alone to children, in Mississippi. And that was before they cut out a piece for testing … and it grew back.
The human body didn’t produce metal, and it sure as heck didn’t regrow it when it was harvested. If Dad hadn’t used every ounce of his influence to steal me away before they had confirmation I was other, I might never have seen the light of day again.
“I wasn’t there, so I can’t say for sure. We kept an eye on you, but Edward Boudreau had already adopted you before the NSB put serious resources into learning more.”
“Don’t you get it?” I searched his face. “That possibility makes it worse, not better. My skin is crawling, imagining what some asshole might have left stitched up inside me.” But no, unlike Santiago’s trick with Wu, that’s not how Bruster worked. He was a power, not a tech. “This is a soul-deep issue, right? It’s not like I can just cut it out. Whoever did this, it’s permanent.”
“We need to go.” He ushered me into the Pinto, and I let him. Behind the wheel, he sighed. “We should check in with Deena, let her know there’s a mess to be cleaned up.”
“A mess to be cleaned up,” I repeated.
Charun, in general, didn’t value human lives. I was used to that. Okay, so I would never accept it, but I expected the disdain from them. Bruster? He was charun. He had consulted with Kapoor and the NSB, if not Wu himself, yet Wu spared him less pity than he might show a squirrel who darted in front of a tire.
“You care too much,” he said into the quiet.
“No.” I angled my head toward him. “You don’t care enough.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Adam braced for the moment Luce entered the dealership to find Sam slumped over his desk, blood dripping down the sides from the slit across his throat. Her ragged gasp made his stomach clench in a way the fresh death hadn’t bothered him.
After so long plotting his revenge, he was disconnected from the mechanics of achieving his goals. Through Luce, he experienced outrage, horror, and grief for the first time since … a long, long time ago.
“Goddamn it.” She rushed into the office, teeth bared. “Deena too.”
Wu joined her in the doorway and took in the scene as it must appear through her impassioned eyes.
Deena hadn’t gone easily. She clutched a dagger in her right hand, and her attacker’s blood crusted the undersides of her fingernails. The cause of death was obvious. Her attacker had snapped off a chair leg and rammed the tapered end through her gut. The ratty carpet gleamed crimson beneath her.
“We have a leak. This is proof.” Luce looked at him, her eyes cop-hard. “How else would they know to come after Bruster? Or Deena? They even killed a human to get to her.”
“I reached out to trustworthy contacts to trace Bruster,” Adam said slowly. “That’s how Deena knew we wanted him. It’s possible one of my other contacts turned on me. They might have fed the information to my father or one of his people.”
A frown gathered on her brow that he wished he could smooth away with his thumb. “I need a list of your contacts. We’ll have to eliminate each name to be certain we plug the right hole.”
“We don’t have time for this.” Wu admired her tenacity, but Deland Bruster, and the fallout from locating him, was a loose end to be tied up. Not unraveled. “We have to focus on our preparations.”
“You’re big on telling me the world will keep spinning after I’m gone, just like it’s rotating despite the dead bodies stacked around us. That’s fine.” She pointed a finger at him, as few would have dared. “But I want a record of this. If I’m a flash in the pan that’s going to fizzle out, I want the NSB to investigate these murders after I’m gone.”
“Write your report.” Adam couldn’t help the smile curling his lips. “I’ll file it with Kapoor. He can get it to the right people when the time comes.”
Assuming he survived. The odds weren’t in his favor. He had done too much, helped too much, to walk away from this free and clear. And that was before Father decided to use him as a messenger. But that was the cost of revolution, a price they would all pay in the end.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The farmhouse didn’t feel much like home these days, but I was still grateful for the familiar when Cole landed in the driveway. Not even the dragon wrapping his tail around my ankle could yank me out of my sour mood.
No Bruster. No Ezra. And now Kapoor was officially MIA.
“Got him,” Santiago yelled, trotting to us. “Took me long enough, but I found him.”
Having my pity party interrupted derailed me for a second. “Kapoor?”
Utter disdain dripped from his words. “How many other hostages are we looking for?”
I narrowed my eyes on him, but it only made him smile. “How?”
“I have my ways.” He scratched his cheek. “You might also be interested to know the top dog didn’t inspect the blast site at the enclave bunker. He sent a fresh host of Malakhim to scout the area and report back.”
“You had a head injury.” I frowned at him. “When did you have time to mount cameras?”
They sure hadn’t been there before since we hadn’t known the place existed until Wu enlightened us.
“Rescue took forever.” He rolled his eyes. “What was I supposed to do? Lie there and hope I didn’t die?”
“Yes?” That’s what a normal person would have done, but he wasn’t normal, and I had doubts if I could classify him as a person. “You’re telling me you’ve been monitoring the bunker site all this time?”
“That is what I just said, yes.” He lifted the tablet. “My job is to cover the bases. I covered them.” He threatened the power button with his thumb. “Now, do you want to know where they’re holding Kapoor or not?”
“Hit me.” I braced for the verbal smackdown.
Santiago lost his smirk and spun the tablet in his hand toward me. “Does this look familiar?”
“It’s a hospital room.” The list of recent visits to such institutions crowded my head. “Nicer than the one Jane Doe stayed in. Same for Jay Lambert. Not big or plush enough to be a maternity suite.” He panned the room. “This is too nice for a public hospital.” A sour taste coated the back of my throat when I spotted the view out the window. “This is the room where Wu recovered after Famine stabbed him with a poisoned blade.”
Dad had been at this same charun-run facility, and that had me tasting bile.
“I don’t see Kapoor.” I studied the screen. “Where is he?”
Santiago angled the screen to give me a view of the ceiling. “There.”
A shocked gasp stole my breath when it all clicked in my head, and I rubbed my eyes to see if the view changed. It didn’t. I was seeing this. This was real. Kapoor was … Malakhim. Half Malakhim. And I wondered if that’s why his wings were the black of coal dust instead of the white of cumulus clouds.
Blood dripped onto the tiles from his hands where the nails pierced his palms. More pooled underneath the wounds in his feet where they crossed at his insteps. The worst might have been the stains from where his beautiful wings had been pinned behind him in a macabre display, a cruel mockery of flight, a nod to the avenging angel fallen.
“Wu needs to see this.” Voice tight, I ripped my gaze from the screen. “Can you forward it to him?”
“Already done.”
“Good.” I knuckled my eyes, but Kapoor still hung there whenever they closed. “It’s a trap, an obvious one.”
“He chose an easily identifiable location for a reason,” Miller agreed. “He might have thrown up some barriers to make finding him difficult, but he meant for you to recognize where Kapoor was being held. How else would he lure you there?”
“He chose Wu’s room, not Dad’s.” Both, thank God, had been vacant. “Is this an attempt to
corner his son? Or me? Or both of us?”
“He wanted a meeting with his son,” Miller reasoned. “He asked Wu to bring you along. This tableau was tailormade to ensure neither of you had any trouble finding Kapoor, or him.”
“There’s no version of this that ends with me surviving without Wu in tow.” I massaged the kinks out of my neck, wishing I could rub my own shoulders. “We wait for him, and then we strategize.”
Santiago was already shaking his head. “You’re risking your neck going anywhere with him as backup.”
“She doesn’t need him for backup,” Rixton announced from behind me. “She’s got me.”
Snarl in my throat, I spun toward him. “Where the hell did you come from?”
“Is that a PC thing for a demon to ask? Just curious.” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “And my ride is black and white. Hard to miss. Might look familiar to you? Oh, unless you’re too busy stomping and raging in your driveway to hear me roll up and get out.”
Lucky for him, the charun in residence would recognize a police car and its contents weren’t edible.
“Who are all those people?” Rixton scanned the area. “There are dozens of them. Are they all … ?”
“Charun, yes. Coterie, no.”
“Coterie,” he repeated, and I could tell he was committing the phrase to memory.
“Forget about this, all of it. Go home.” I slashed a hand through the air. “You can’t be part of this.”
“I need a signed permission slip from my wife before I do anything too reckless, but yeah. I can be. I am. I’ve been part of this since we met. I’m not backing out just when things are starting to get interesting.”
I remembered then, his dream of joining the FBI, working major cases. The life of a small-town cop had been meant as a stepping stone for him. But then he met Sherry, and she asked him not to climb the rungs. Since he loved her more than the job, he did as she asked in order to keep her, to make her happy.
This was a second chance for him. One I was in no rush to give him. He had a bigger stake in the outcome than the rest of us, truthfully. He was one hundred percent human. This was his world, and he belonged here. His family, friends, and life were all here, all meant to be here. I was the aberration, and I didn’t want to be the spark that breathed new life into old dreams.
“Sherry vetoed you joining the FBI. This is ten times worse than that on a good day.” I gestured for Santiago to share the screen with him. “This is not a good day.”
Rixton’s eyes hardened to blue marble. “Who strung up your recruiter?”
“You’ll die.” The whos and hows and whys didn’t matter when it came to protecting him. “These people … they don’t care about humans. They’ll kill you.”
“Humans don’t care about humans either,” he pointed out before singling out the worst possible co-conspirator. “Santiago, right?”
“Yeah.” Santiago flicked his gaze to me then back to Rixton. “What about it?”
“You like toys. You’re always walking around with something in your hand. Maggie says you can do anything, build anything. That you’re a big brain with a big mouth.”
Brows slanting in consideration of the comment, Santiago conceded, “She’s not wrong.”
“Forge me armor,” Rixton dared him. “If you’re that smart, make me the next best thing to charun.”
“We can’t exactly press pause on the Kapoor situation while Santiago starts daydreaming a prototype. It would never be ready in time.” As much as I admired his determination to join the cause, I was relieved to reiterate, “It’s not happening.”
“Well … ” Santiago rubbed his jaw. “Here’s the thing. Luce is right. I couldn’t come up with a design on the fly, not in time to fabricate it and test it.”
“Thank you, Polly, for repeating what I just said.” I glared at him. “Would you like a cracker?”
“Portia is emocarre. She requires a host. Inhabiting a walking flesh suit with no defense mechanisms whatsoever is dangerous. She could die a hundred different ways — a thousand — and it would be a true death unless she managed to leapfrog into a new host.”
“You’ve already been working on a design,” I surmised. “You’ve been getting it ready for when she would need it most, to protect her.”
“I needed a hobby,” he said with a growl that dared me to make a big deal out of it. “It was a challenge worthy of my time. It’s taken years to develop a prototype. Even then, it’s never been tested by its target audience.”
“You didn’t tell Portia, or she refused to field test it?”
The hard glint in Santiago’s eyes confirmed he had taken extreme measures, invested years of his energy into developing tech that might save her life, and he hadn’t said a word out of fear she would think a gift of such magnitude meant he valued more than her friendly rivalry.
“Let me test it.” Rixton played on Santiago’s weakness like a pro. “I’m happy to play guinea pig.”
“Luce is happy to separate my head from my neck too.”
“He’s right.” I raised a hand. “I am.”
“If it works,” Rixton wheedled, “Portia will see its value and ask for one of her own. She doesn’t have to know it was designed for her from the start.”
“Are you listening to yourself?” I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “You’re volunteering to be a crash test dummy. That’s how it feels when a Drosera plows into you, like you’ve been in a head-on collision, and these charun can fly.”
“Think about this,” Miller urged him. “Talk to your wife. Discuss the dangers.”
“You mean get out of your hair while you make your move without me.”
Frustrated as he made me, damn it was good having him back. Now if I could just keep him alive.
“With Thom recovering, we’re a man down.” Santiago eyeballed Rixton like a tailor sizing up a client. “Rixton has tactical experience. He knows the drill. Plus, you two worked together for years.”
“You want to partner him with me?” I gritted my teeth. “Forget it. I have enough trouble keeping myself alive and watching out for you guys. I can’t have my attention divided. It’s too dangerous.”
“She’s right.” Miller stepped in and saved the day. “He can pair up with me.”
The betrayal stung, and I wondered, just for a second, if this wasn’t payback for always letting Santiago partner up with Portia even though it meant Maggie went along for the ride, but that was crazy. Miller didn’t have a vindictive bone in his body.
That meant he saw Rixton’s determination, knew we couldn’t beat it out of him, and that if we left him behind, he would find a way to follow. As evidenced by his unannounced appearance today. With a farmhouse chockful of winged charun, that wouldn’t be hard to do. Miller was offering to watch Rixton’s back so I didn’t have to, and that was one of the reasons why he had been my first true friend in the coterie.
“Clear it with Sherry,” I warned, still in a mood. “She ought to get a say in when she collects your life insurance.”
“Ah, Bou-Bou.” Rixton wiped beneath his dry eyes. “I missed that sunny disposition, that can-do attitude, that — ”
“Shut it.” I pivoted at the sound of Santiago’s cackles. “That goes double for you.”
Ignoring me as usual, Santiago devolved into belly laughs. “I like him.”
“Of course you do,” I growled. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
Tired of them both, I marched off in search of Cole. I found him huddled with four Oncas and three Cuprina, all of them running down their security measures and protocols, most of which Santiago had put in place. He might be a jerk, but he was a damn fine tech.
The expression on my face caused Cole to make his excuses and join me for a walk. “What happened?”
“Rixton wants to be my partner again.” I kicked a rock skittering ahead of us. “He’ll die, Cole, and he doesn’t care.”
“Have you asked him why it means so much to him
?” Cole posed it as a question, and it came out sounding like one, but I got the feeling the answer was bundled in there too. “There’s got to be a reason stronger than friendship propelling him to risk his life when he has so much to lose.”
“He wants to protect his family.” I kicked another rock. “He’s paying me lip service about wanting to fight side by side with me, and I don’t doubt that’s true. You’re right, though. It’s not about me, and it’s not about our partnership. It’s about what happens to this town, to his family, if this situation isn’t dealt with and fast.”
“Talk to him,” Cole urged. “Get him to put his drive into words. Force him to explain himself. It will give him perspective. Verbalizing his motives to you will clarify them for him.”
“He’s asking Sherry for permission to join the crusade.” I sighed, accepting the heavy arm he wrapped around my waist. “She’s going to say no.”
Or so I kept praying.
Much to my dismay, Sherry signed off on Rixton testing the armor Santiago had devised. As tempted as I had been to snatch the phone out of his hand and plead my case, she hadn’t asked to speak to me, and I figured that meant she wasn’t ready to face my baggage yet. I couldn’t blame her there. I didn’t want to make eye contact with it, either. But, after Rixton got outfitted, I had to admit it was worth the price of admission to see him model the suit.
“Do you want me to take a picture?” I offered as I circled him. “Sherry would love to see this.”
Baring his all too human teeth, he snarled, “Snap a picture and die, Boudreau.”
Santiago being Santiago, and expecting to gift the suit to Portia, had made it both highly effective and highly offensive. The material was about the thickness of a dive suit with the same flexibility. Its matte black finish meant it could be worn alone, but Rixton would want tactical gear over this.
Because the customizations didn’t end there.
The material over the chest area puckered a bit where it was meant to cup breasts, and Santiago had added black sequin nipple covers in the center of each peak complete with tassels I was just waiting for him to tell me were motorized and whirled with the push of a button. The groin area had also been sequined over, giving Rixton a freshly vajazzled appearance, but that still wasn’t the best part. No, the winner of this whole fiasco of design was the ruched fabric in the rear that gave a defined line between his butt cheeks, which appeared to be lifted and separated more than usual, not that I paid his rear that kind of attention. A shiny line wedged in his crack that drew the eye like a train wreck and made me wonder if the bottom had been meant to represent a thong. Maybe he ran out of sequins before he added decorative straps over the hips?
Rise Against: A Foundling novel (The Foundling Series) Page 15