Alexei? Could the big guy in a suit be Russian?
“Thanks for coming,” said Kian.
“Yeah, well, Calahan said you were on the level and I trust his opinion,” said Mary. “Plus, we owe you.”
Kian frowned. “Owe us?”
Mary nodded at Carrick and me. “Owe you two.”
A memory started to stir, something that had happened at the end of the whole Volos nightmare, but I couldn’t quite connect it. I looked between Mary and Gabriella. Two women. Something about them being two women….
The waitress arrived and everyone ordered coffee. When she’d gone, Mary leaned across the table towards me. “That stuff you went through in Haywood Falls with Volos...remember how he made a call to his boss, in Austria?”
I nodded. Just thinking back to that day made my stomach twist in fear. I remembered hiding in the blood drains beneath the floor, looking up through the grate at Volos. Carrick must have sensed my mood because his hand found mine under the table and squeezed protectively.
“Well, we’ve been tracking that guy,” said Mary. “We’re trying to bring him down. And all the stuff you gave the FBI...that brought us a lot closer. So thank you.”
I drew in my breath. “You’re the Sisters of Invidia!”
The guy in a suit muttered a curse, then poked Gabriella. “I told you we should have changed name,” he said in a thick Russian accent.
Mary ignored him. “Most of them,” she told me. “Yolanda doesn’t come on field trips. Let me have a look at what you’ve got.”
I handed her the personality test.
“We need to find out where it was printed,” Kian said. “If we can get that, maybe we can find out who paid for it and track them down. But I don’t see how it’s possible. There are no clues on there, nothing like a name or the logo of a printing company.”
Mary smirked and dug in her shoulder bag. She pulled out a laptop festooned with stickers and a scanner that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a CSI lab. The coffees arrived as she plugged the two of them together. “There are all sorts of things that can be hidden in ink,” she said. She grabbed her latte and took a drink, then talked to us while the laptop booted up. “See, the government likes control. When there was just one printing firm in a town, if suddenly thousands of pamphlets talking about revolution started being passed around, it was pretty easy to figure out where they were coming from. But then the eighties and nineties rolled around and people started getting printers in their own homes...well, that wasn't good.”
She stopped for a second to enter a password, her fingers flying over the keyboard. “Suddenly, people could print leaflets, ransom notes, even fake currency, and the government had no idea where it was coming from. So they made all the printer manufacturers make their printers encode a unique code into everything they print.”
Kian frowned. “Really?”
“Yup,” said Mary. She opened the lid of the scanner and slapped the personality test face-down on the glass, then hit a key on the laptop. The scanner hummed and whirred, a blinding light escaping around the edges of the paper and lighting up the inside of our UFO. “They can tell that two documents came from the same printer. And if you register your details when you buy the printer, to get the warranty, they know who you are and where you live. Mostly, it was designed to track home users but even big printing firms use commercial printers so...yup, there we go.”
She spun her laptop around to show us the screen. Right in the middle of the front page of the personality test, dots that had been invisible to the naked eye had been highlighted and joined together into a pattern. “That’s the printer’s unique code. All I have to do is look it up in the database.”
Kian leaned forward, shaking his head. “But that database...that’s a government thing.”
“Fortunately, government databases and I have a long and intimate history.” She looked across at Gabriella. “Want to do it together?”
Gabriella beamed and pulled out her own laptop. Seconds later, they were both typing furiously while talking in indecipherable hacker speak. Before we'd even finished our coffees, they looked up from their screens triumphantly. “Henderson and Kolbech,” said Mary. “They’re right here in California. Bakersfield.”
Carrick leaned forward. “Can you hack them? Find out who pays them to print all the tests?”
Mary shook her head. “Already tried.”
“Their security’s too tight?” asked Kian.
Gabriella gave him a look. “Oh, please! We were in there in twenty seconds. What security?”
Mary nodded. “Yeah, the problem is: there’s nothing there. No customer records at all. They must keep everything on paper.” She wrinkled her nose as if that was an alien concept to her.
“Maybe that’s why Aeternus uses them,” I said. “More secure.”
Kian nodded. “Maybe.” But he was frowning, as if there was another possibility. “We’ll just have to pay them a visit.”
“Pay them a visit?” I echoed. “You mean break in?!” I looked between Carrick and Kian, hoping I was wrong, but they didn’t disagree.
I looked at the other side of the table for support but Mary put her hands up defensively. “Hey, don’t bring me into it. What you do with the information’s up to you. I stay strictly behind the keyboard, these days.”
My heart sank and I turned to Carrick with big, pleading eyes. What if he gets caught? Arrested? He could wind up in jail, like his dad. But I couldn’t ask him not to go, not when this was our only lead.
Carrick hugged me close and kissed the top of my head, then buried his nose in my hair. “It’ll be fine,” he told me. “Won’t be the first time I’ve broken into somewhere. We’ll be in and out. No cops.”
He smiled at me and I gave him a nervous smile back but I didn’t feel any better.
And I was right to be scared. It wasn’t the cops we should have been worried about.
36
Sean
Where the hell was she? I'd checked everywhere but I still couldn't find Louise. I'd even gone to Aedan and Sylvie's room but had stopped outside when I heard their low voices inside: Sylvie's strained and cracking, Aedan’s low and reassuring. The door had been ajar and I’d glimpsed them through the crack, her face nestled in his chest, his arms wrapped around her. “No one’s ever going to hurt you again,” Aedan said. His voice was soft but his face was a mask of cold rage and his eyes were closed. Imagining what he was going to do when he got his hands on one of the cult members.
I'd checked our room, the living room, the kitchen—nothing. I knew she wasn't in the garden because a few hours ago, the heavens had opened and a heavy rain was battering against the windows. So where? This was the first time the house had been really quiet in days. With Aedan and Sylvie in their room and everyone else out, maybe I could finally talk to her.
Talk. Like I’m any good at that. But I had to do something. Seeing her so tense and withdrawn broke my heart. Was she worried about something? Ill? I thought of what had happened to Kayley and my stomach lurched. It would be just like Louise to keep illness a secret, too worried about looking after her sister to focus on herself….
I had to know.
But first I had to find her. Where would she go when she was feeling bad? Back when I first met her, she'd used to go up to the roof of our apartment building, where she kept her plants.
I finally figured it out and ran through the rain to the little greenhouse at the end of the garden. Louise was down on her knees, leaning over a tray of seedlings. I stopped just inside the doorway, shaking raindrops from my hair. God, she was beautiful. Surrounded by plants, she looked even more like some goddess of nature: that gorgeous soft, pale skin, the long red hair gleaming against the backdrop of green.
Every time I saw her, every single time, I was just so taken with her: that same sudden rush of emotion, that same need. I wanted those soft lips against mine, wanted to lose myself in her sweetness and fragrance. I wanted to feel the soft
warmth of her breasts as they brushed my chest. I was desperate for her. Part of me wanted to forget the talking and just kiss the hell out of her.
No. I steeled myself. My girl was hurting. I had to find out why.
She wasn’t planting or moving the seedlings to pots. She was just staring at them, stroking each tiny leaf with a fingertip. She didn't even seem to notice I was there until I closed the door. Then she looked up, caught my eye and immediately turned away. Shit. I’d never felt so clumsy, so useless. “I know something’s up,” I said, my voice low in my chest.
She shook her head, copper hair tossing in a way that made me catch my breath.
I bristled, the frustration building. No. No way. I wasn't going to let it go, not this time. We were private, for once, cocooned in the little glass house and then isolated a second time by the rain. No one was going to bother us for a while. As thunder sounded overhead, I walked over and squatted down next to her. “Louise?” I said slowly. “What’s going on?”
But she still wouldn’t look at me so I lifted her to her feet. She came easily at first and then tensed up, resisting. By the time I got her upright, her body was tight and hard, twisting away like a plant determined to grow in the other direction. “Louise!”
She finally looked up at me and I saw how those moss-green eyes were shining. I was getting mad, now. Not angry with her, angry at myself for being so bad at this. “What is it? What’s the matter?!”
She bit her lip, about to tell me. Looked up into my furious eyes and twisted away again. I growled, put my hands on her waist and lifted her into the air, sitting her down on a table top so that she was eye-to-eye with me. “Goddammit, Louise, tell me!”
I saw her chest twitch, that last warning sign before the tears would break free. I’d done it again. I’d made the woman I loved cry. I stayed silent but, inside, I was screaming at myself for being a big, clumsy fucker. I felt like I was made of stone, a hulking great statue come to life, trying not to hurt the fragile human I held in my hands. I’d come here to help but I was just making things worse. Why am I so bad at this?
And Aedan’s words came back to me. Talk to her.
I’m useless at that.
But I had to try.
I opened my mouth to speak but I couldn’t find any words. So I did it with touch, instead. I loosened my hands on her waist so that I wasn’t pinning her in place anymore. I pushed closer and slid my hands up and around her back, wrapping her up and drawing her to me.
She stayed tense and hard for a moment. Then she softened and her soft arms were sliding around my shoulders, vines entwining my stone statue. But I could still feel the heat of her chest, the damp of her eyes against my neck.
“Louise,” I said. And then the words just ran out. I closed my eyes for a second and reached down deep. Trying to connect what I was feeling to my mouth felt like trying to get a pipe onto an oil well. But I finally managed it and then it all came pouring out. “I love you,” I blurted. “I’ll never stop loving you. And I know I’m not good at this stuff.” The Irish was thick in my voice now, brought out by the emotion. “But I’ve got to know what’s up with you. Are you ill? Is someone bothering you? Bothering Kayley? Louise, whatever it is, it’s okay. There’s nothing it could be that would stop me being crazy about you. Tell me. Let’s face it together.”
I stopped, the words still echoing. For a second, there was just the sound of the rain hammering down on the glass.
Then Louise moved back enough to look into my eyes. “I’m pregnant.”
37
Louise
He froze. The man everyone feared, the man people used to run inside their homes and slam the doors to shelter from. All that strength, all that muscle and attitude and I’d stopped him dead with two words. I could see the shock change to raw fear in his eyes.
It was my greatest fear, come to life. I’d lost him. And now I was—
I couldn’t even think the word: it was too terrifying. I slid off the table and past him and walked out into the rain. It was hammering down and the heavy drops were freezing cold, scouring all the warmth from the air. To me, they were a welcome relief. They chilled my burning cheeks, cooled the eyes that had gone liquid and hot.
I marched through the meadow, where we’d spent so many long, hot summer afternoons. The grass was soaking now, the long stalks soaking my jeans as I pushed through it. It wasn’t his fault. He’d changed more than anyone could have expected. He’d put down his sledgehammer and left his old way of life behind. He’d gone straight, got a job, moved in with me and settled down. He’d even become like an older brother to Kayley. And now, by getting pregnant, I’d pushed him too far, too soon. I was—
My stomach lurched: I thought I was going to throw up. I couldn’t think that word. I focused on the rain coursing down my face and mixing with my tears. I focused on the swing, the rain dripping from the wooden seat in little waterfalls. But it was no good. I couldn’t hold back the thought any longer. Mom is gone. Dad is gone. I have to look after Kayley and the baby and I’m—I’m all—
I’m all on my own.
A hand grabbed mine from behind and spun me around. I slipped on the wet grass and almost fell but he didn’t let me go: he lifted his arm and took my weight and I dangled there for a second, feet skittering, until I got my balance. I looked up into Irish blue eyes and gulped.
The fear was gone. He was angry, staring down accusingly at me, his chest stretching out his soaked white tank top as he took big, shuddering breaths.
“You daft feckin’ mare,” he snapped. “Where are you going?”
My breath caught and hitched on sobs. “You—You’re scared! I s—scared you off!”
Those heavy brows knitted in a deep frown. “I was shocked. You just told me I’m going to be a dad!”
And I realized that I hadn’t even considered that part. I sniffed, so much rain coursing down my face that I could barely breathe. “I didn’t scare you off?” I had to almost shout it over the rain.
He looked at me as if I’d gone mad. “Scare me off? You mean away from you?!” He shook his head, rain droplets scattering. “Louise, for feck’s sake. There’s not a thing on this earth that could scare me off you.”
Deep in my chest, a little flicker of hope crackled into life. But the worry I’d been carrying around pressed in on it, a freezing gray mist, threatening to snuff it out. I had to make sure he understood, had to get all my fears out there. I grabbed hold of his upper arms, looked up into his eyes and….“We’re having a baby!” Which was at the same time stupid and a perfect summary of all my fears.
Sean cradled my cheek in a big, warm hand. “Yeah,” he said. “It’ll be great.”
That little flicker of hope flared and rose, pushing back the gray. “But I don’t know anything about—it’s a baby! How do I—What if I—”
He cupped my other cheek. Gave one low command, granite-hard but warm with Irish silver. “Stop.”
I stopped.
“Swap all those I’s for We’s.”
I did. And then let out something between a hysterical hiccup and a nervous laugh. It all sounded better, with we’s.
Sean leaned down and touched his wet forehead to mine. “Louise, the only thing you did wrong, the only thing you can ever do wrong, is not telling me about stuff. I’ve been going out of my feckin’ mind!”
I flushed. But I was still jumpy inside, like when you wake from a nightmare and it still feels real. “I’m not on my own?” I asked, voice quavering.
In answer, he pulled me tight into his chest and wrapped his arms around me. Our clothes were soaked but the heat of his body soaked into me and, with his head lowered to kiss my wet hair and his arms hugging me close, I couldn’t feel the rain at all. And I let out a spluttering, tear-filled snort of joy and he moved back just far enough to kiss me.
The rain sluiced down our faces and washed my tears away and there was only his lips, hard and strong and certain, and his tongue teasing mine, and the solid weight
of his body, a warm mountain against me. And I cursed myself for being so stupid, for not trusting him.
I broke the kiss so that I could lean back and look at him. He was gazing down into my eyes with relief and frustration and...pride?
“You look feckin’ amazing, Louise,” he told me.
I blinked. “What?” I looked down at myself. I was drenched and disheveled, my hair plastered to my back. Wait...does he mean…. “I don’t look any different,” I said. “Not yet!”
But he just shook his head. “Yeah, you do,” he said. And his voice was heavy with lust and emotion. “And it’s great.”
I looked down at myself again and I saw myself through his eyes. I hadn’t thought about that part of it, either. I’d been focusing on the nausea and the mood swings. I hadn’t seen myself as being…. I blinked. Maybe I didn’t look any different but I sort of knew what he meant. I felt sort of...bountiful. Earth-motherly. And from the look in his eyes, he liked that. I flushed. Then his hand was on my belly, its warmth soaking into me through my wet clothes. And he just looked into my eyes and nodded, and everything was okay. Everything was better than okay. Everything was great.
He put a hand under my ass and scooped me up into the air, drawing me against him as he kissed me again, long and slow, and this time I could relax into it and give a joyous little moan of delight because I had my man back...and I realized I’d never lost him at all. We stayed there for a while, the cold rain soaking our backs and each others’ heat warming our fronts. And then the warm push of our bodies started to have an effect.
“I s’pose this means no sex for a while?” Sean muttered in my ear, each syllable a little rush of blazing, silver air.
“No,” I breathed, surprised at how urgently it came out. I could feel a sudden heat pulling at me: it had been suppressed by all the worrying but now it was rising up inside me, desperate to be released. I shifted position slightly and my soaking thigh grazed the hard bulge at Sean’s groin, the wet denim feeling paper-thin. I groaned and swept my hands up his back, tracing his muscles through his wet, clinging t-shirt. “It’s fine for six months, at least.”
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