As victories went, it was probably a minor one, and yet I still allowed myself to experience a slight surge of satisfaction. I certainly wasn’t going to tell him the truth, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t mess with him if given the opportunity.
The bastard deserved it.
I shrugged and ventured, “Maybe I just…know things.”
Once again, his mouth tightened, possibly in a slightly more pronounced manner this time, since I noted the way the lines that bracketed his lips grew slightly deeper. However, the cool, neutral timbre of his voice never changed. “That’s not your talent, though. We’ve been observing you for some time, Ms. Grant, and you’ve never shown the slightest hint of psychic abilities. Your talent for interacting with meteorological phenomena is well-documented, but it seems that’s the only arena where your particular gifts lie.”
“That you know of,” I returned.
“Perhaps,” he said, his tone still mild. “If you’re psychic, then go ahead and tell me what I’m thinking.”
Damn. Well, he had me there, because I wasn’t any more psychic than the next person, despite being one of the Wilcox clan’s witches. That wasn’t how our talents worked. I hadn’t gotten the chance to ask Jake if there were any actual mind-readers in my newly discovered family, but I knew I sure as hell wasn’t one.
Still, I thought I might as well try to bluff my way out of this and see what happened. Maybe I’d get really, really lucky and guess correctly. “You’re wondering why, if I can control the weather, I haven’t zapped you with some lightning to get myself out of here.”
An eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch, but that was his only reaction. “Close. Or rather, I considered that possibility a while ago, when you were still sleeping, even if it’s not what I’m thinking now. However, I suppose I should let you know that you won’t be able to use those gifts here.”
“Why not?”
His head tilted to one side, but he didn’t smile. “Why don’t you tell me?”
No need to close my eyes, not when I could simply let my gift awaken and reach out to the world. Or rather, while I could vaguely sense that somewhere far above me was a sky with clouds and possibly — just possibly — a bit of rain some place off in the distance, I couldn’t really do anything with those clouds. The room where I lay felt as though it must be hundreds of feet below the surface, which meant I was dangerously disconnected from the weather far above. Maybe if I sweated and strained, I could reach out to those clouds and coax the lightning from within them, but that lightning would only hit a building I guessed was shielded against electrical surges. It wouldn’t do a damn thing.
Panic wanted to swell within me, but I told it to take a hike. I couldn’t lose my control now, not with Randall Lenz watching me with something close to amusement in his glacier-hued eyes. He knew he had the upper hand.
For now, I told myself. You know Jake will find out what happened to you, and then he’ll do whatever he has to in order to get you the hell out of here. I’d like to see what Mr. Smug over there will do when he’s face to face with a bunch of pissed-off Wilcox witches and warlocks.
That mental image helped to steady me. Voice calm, I said, “This room is a hundred feet underground, so I can’t use my weather powers effectively.”
“Very good.” He leaned forward slightly, although his hands remained clasped on his knee. “So, you can still sense the sky, even when you can’t see it?”
If I answered him, I’d only be giving him something he wanted — namely, more information about me, about how I used my gift. Maybe I was already fighting a losing battle, but I resolved right then not to give the bastard anything he could work with.
I said, “Is there any water? I’m thirsty.”
For a second, he didn’t respond, only continued to observe me in silence. Then his shoulders lifted, and he rose from his chair. As I watched, he left the bedroom and went out somewhere — to another room, I supposed, since I got the feeling that my prison cell was some kind of suite, maybe designed to look like an upscale condo so I wouldn’t feel so out of place.
Of course, the joke was that I couldn’t think of many spots where I’d feel more out of place than in an upscale condo.
He returned, a glass of water — an ordinary tumbler like you’d find in a regular house — in one hand. Still without speaking, he handed the water to me.
There wasn’t much I could do except take it. Actually, I hadn’t been lying — I really was thirsty. So, I lifted the glass to my lips and swallowed some water, which was sweet and cold, welcome against my dry throat.
Finally, he said, “Maybe now you can take another guess at what I was thinking.”
He wasn’t going to let it go, was he? Then again, if I’d learned anything about Randall Lenz, it was that he’d proved to be the most tenacious person I’d ever met.
Well, except for Jake Wilcox.
“That grabbing me will get you a nice raise?” I ventured, even though I had a feeling that whatever the reason for Agent Lenz’s pursuit of people with special powers, it had very little to do with filthy lucre.
Maybe just the faintest twitch at one corner of his mouth. “I’m afraid not. I had my last evaluation only three months ago, so it’ll be a while before I’m due for another raise. But no fear — the government pays me well for what I do.”
Why was I not surprised? He probably got six figures for traveling around the country and wreaking havoc in people’s lives, while those who actually did some good in the world — nurses and teachers and firemen — made a hell of a lot less than that.
“No,” he continued, not giving me a chance to reply, “I was actually thinking about your friend Jake. Why don’t you tell me about him?”
Suddenly, my mouth felt dry, despite the water I’d just swallowed. Trying to hide my racing thoughts, I lifted the glass to my lips and took another sip before saying, “There’s not much to tell.”
“Oh, I think there is.” Lenz leaned back in his seat, expression so bland that I knew I wouldn’t be able to detect a single thing about what was passing through his mind right then. “Obviously, he’s someone you’re close with. Or are you in the habit of going off with complete strangers when the mood takes you?”
That question made me smile, despite my lingering dizziness and a very real fear about what Lenz and his team planned to do with me. As far as I could tell, Angela and Connor’s amnesia spell — for lack of a better way to explain the magic they’d used on him — appeared to be holding. If Randall Lenz had actually been able to recall what had gone down in the interval between the day when he’d tried to collect me at my house in Kanab and the evening when he’d confronted me in Flagstaff, then he probably would have known I’d been in Jake’s company the whole time.
And actually, since Connor had found Lenz’s Ford Taurus parked down the street from the cottage, that meant he’d most likely been surveilling me the entire evening, waiting for a chance to swoop in. I remembered how I’d walked with Jake to the front porch, how we’d drawn close for a lingering kiss.
If I’d known the entire encounter had been happening under Randall Lenz’s pale, watchful gaze, I might not have been quite so abandoned in that embrace. At the moment, I could only be glad that he clearly didn’t remember a single second of it.
“Well,” I said, “you nearly convinced me to leave with you, and it wasn’t as though we were exactly besties.”
Not even a blink. “True. Still, it seems you were in Jake’s company for several days. If his only motivation had been to get you out of my clutches, one would think he would have left you to your own devices once he’d determined you were safe.”
About all I could do was shrug. Because obviously, Jake’s primary goal had been my safety, but besides that, he’d wanted to make sure he got me to Flagstaff so I could meet my family…the family I hadn’t even known existed.
No way could I tell Randall Lenz any of that. Bad enough that he was holding more than a dozen witches and
warlocks in the same facility where I was currently imprisoned; there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that I would ever let him know his “subjects” weren’t flukes or genetic anomalies or freaks of nature, but witches and warlocks with the bad luck to have grown up outside a clan’s protection. Because they hadn’t known who — or what — they were, they hadn’t understood the importance of keeping their magical gifts hidden. Being a member of a witch clan was all about keeping things on the down-low. But if you hadn’t been schooled on that very important fact, then you wouldn’t realize how much danger you might be in if you weren’t discreet about using your powers.
However, just because I had no intention of telling Randall Lenz about witch clans didn’t mean I couldn’t do my best to mess with him a little. My mother had told me more than once that I had an overactive imagination; this seemed like the perfect opportunity to put it to use.
I lifted an eyebrow and leaned against the pillows. The water I’d drunk seemed to be helping, or maybe it was only that I’d been awake long enough for the effects of the knockout drug Lenz had given me to wear off. Either way, the dizziness had subsided, and right then I realized how hungry I was. Very likely, I’d been unconscious for hours and hours. I had no way of knowing what time it was, not with the room where I sat located far underground, hiding me away from the sun and the sky. No clocks, either; I was pretty sure that omission hadn’t been an oversight.
“What makes you think you’re the only agency interested in someone with my abilities?” I inquired, then sipped some more water.
His eyes narrowed for a second. Because he had thick lashes a few shades darker than his mid-brown hair, the icy glint of those eyes was obscured briefly. But then he tilted his head to one side, and even smiled.
“Who’s he working for?”
“He wouldn’t tell me,” I replied. “But I heard him talking on the phone once, and he wasn’t speaking English. I think it might have been Russian.”
No mistaking the frown that creased Randall Lenz’s brow at that revelation, and I had to hold myself still so I wouldn’t let out a chuckle that gave the game away. It seemed I’d hit a nerve with my little lie.
However, his tone was still calm as he said, “You’re sure it was Russian?”
“No,” I said, figuring it was probably a good idea not to sound too emphatic. “I mean, it’s not like I speak Russian or anything. That’s just my best guess based on what I’ve seen in the movies or on TV. I suppose it could have been another language that sounds similar to Russian.”
“Did he ever tell you his last name?”
“No,” I replied. “Honestly, I’m not even sure ‘Jake’ is his real name. I mean, if he’s a Russian spy or something, then he would have given me an alias, right?”
“Most likely.” A pause as Lenz appeared to consider what I’d just told him, and then he said, “What happened after he took you from Kanab?”
“We went to Las Vegas.” I figured it was safe enough to tell Lenz that, since Jeremy had already said that the agent had tracked Jake and me to Vegas. Maybe Randall Lenz didn’t remember anything about that part of his pursuit, but even if his memories came back, it wasn’t as though I was giving away state secrets. However, it had been two weeks since he’d appeared on my doorstep in Kanab — well, unless I’d been knocked out for more than twelve hours, in which case I had no idea what day it was — and so I knew I’d better think fast to come up with a plausible story that would explain the passage of so much time. “We were there for a few days — we kept moving to different hotels.”
“And after Las Vegas?” Lenz inquired. If he thought it strange that a Russian operative had taken me to Sin City and then kept me hopping from hotel to hotel while we were there, he didn’t give any indication of it.
“I’m not sure where we went,” I lied, then added quickly as he began to frown, “I mean, I think it might’ve been somewhere up near Lake Tahoe. There were a lot of trees, and the weather was cooler. But he took me there in the middle of the night, and I was asleep most of the way. Actually,” I said, hoping I’d injected the right amount of wounded surprise into my tone, “now I wonder if he drugged me or something to make sure I didn’t see where I was going.”
“That’s entirely plausible,” Randall Lenz said, expression smoothing itself once again. “So, you were up in the woods near Lake Tahoe.”
“If that’s even where we were. I’ve never been there, so I don’t really know what it’s supposed to look like.”
Did he buy my expression of — I hoped — puzzled innocence? Impossible to tell for sure, because his features remained as impassive as ever when he spoke. “For now, let’s assume it was Lake Tahoe. How did you end up in Riverton, Wyoming?”
“He thought it would be safe for me to lie low there for a few days,” I replied, which actually wasn’t all that far from the truth. “I don’t know exactly what was going on — I kind of got the impression that he was working on smuggling me out of the country, but it wasn’t going well.”
“And so he just left you alone in Wyoming while he went to work on his plans?”
Lenz’s aspect was still so flat, I honestly couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking. But since I’d already embarked on selling him this pack of lies, there wasn’t much I could do except continue and hope that he’d buy my story.
In a way, it was a lot less fantastic than the truth.
“Well,” I hedged, brain working furiously to come up with yet another plausible lie. “I’m not sure I was really alone, alone. I mean, I got the feeling that he had people watching me.”
“Which people?”
“I think they might have been members of the local tribe.” Actually, I was kind of proud of myself for coming up with that reply, since it would explain why there had been some Arapahoe men watching the house when Randall Lenz and his team — that is, I assumed he’d worked with a team to kidnap me, since Jeremy had made a comment about a team when I was back in Flagstaff — slipped me out of Riverton with no one apparently the wiser.
“Why would a Russian operative be working with a group of Native Americans?”
I widened my eyes in what I prayed was a look of bewildered innocence. “Maybe they didn’t know who he was. Maybe they were just glad to make a little money under the table.”
This theory seemed to meet with some measure of approval; at least, Randall Lenz gave the faintest nod, as if allowing the possibility. “Did he say where he was going?”
“No,” I replied at once. “He just told me to keep going in to work and that he’d be back in a few days.”
“About your work,” Lenz said. “Why did you go to work at the Wind River Casino if you were planning to leave the country?”
“Because Jake thought a job like that would provide good cover. People come and go at places like that all the time, so no one would probably have thought too much about it when I left suddenly.”
“Perhaps. Why didn’t you ask for help from someone at the casino? I’d think that once you were left on your own, you would have reached out to someone for assistance.”
Well, maybe. I had to admit he had me there, and I hesitated, trying to think of a believable reason why a woman taken someplace against her will wouldn’t have immediately gone to the authorities or at least told the tribal management what was really going on with her. Fear of retaliation against a family member made sense — or it would have, if I had any family members to threaten. As far as Randall Lenz knew, I was all alone in the world, now that my mother was gone. He had no idea that I was pretty much the opposite of alone, thanks to my position as the daughter of a Wilcox primus.
Still, even though I supposedly didn’t have a family to protect, that didn’t mean I’d want to drag innocent bystanders into my mess.
“I thought about it,” I said, hoping my brief hesitation hadn’t set off any alarm bells in him, “but then I decided it was too risky. Anyone who helped me would be in danger. I didn’t want that on my co
nscience.”
“Very noble of you.”
Once again, his tone was so flat that I couldn’t be sure whether he was being sarcastic or whether he was only making a simple observation. I shrugged, saying, “I don’t know about ‘noble.’ Besides, if I’d told anyone about what was really going on, they would have wanted to know what was so important about me that I’d get dragged across state lines by a Russian agent. I couldn’t very well tell them about my ability to control the weather, could I?”
“You could,” he responded. “Whether or not they would have believed you is, of course, an entirely separate matter.” His phone beeped from inside his pants pocket, and he paused so he could get it out and look down at the screen. Because of the angle, I couldn’t see anything of what might be displayed there, but apparently, it was something important; his lips thinned for a second, and then he put the phone back in his pocket and stood up. “I’m afraid I need to go. We can continue this interview at a later date.”
“How much later?” I returned, glad that my voice sounded steady. “I mean, how long are you planning on keeping me here?”
“As long as it takes,” he said, which did nothing to reassure me. After all, I’d seen the dossiers of the other test subjects held at the facility, and so I knew that some of those people had been held there for years.
I couldn’t be in that place for years. I’d go crazy.
Since I didn’t trust myself to make a measured response, I said nothing, only clenched my fingers in the thin blanket that covered me and prayed my rescue would come much sooner than that.
Randall Lenz paused at the door to my room. His wintry blue gaze held mine, and I tried not to shiver.
“Oh, and Ms. Grant — ”
“Yes?” I asked, willing my face to be as blank as his. The last thing I wanted was for him to see my fear.
“Next time we speak, try telling me the truth. Things will go much better for you if you do.”
After delivering that parting shot, he exited the room. A few seconds later, the door to the suite closed, a soft thud that contained a terrible note of finality.
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