Magic After Dark: A Collection of Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance Novels

by Margo Bond Collins

  “Something small,” Tomás said, toeing aside a pile of fabric. “Something that could’ve been hidden in a couch cushion or his underwear drawer.”

  Bron made a low sound of assent and was opening her mouth to speak when the suite’s phone rang.

  Chapter 4

  They both stared at the phone through a second ring, then Bron took a step toward it. She was already reaching out to answer it when Tomás grabbed her hand and pulled it away. “Who has this number?” he asked, his voice brusque.

  “No idea,” Bron replied, never taking her gaze off the blinking red light on the landline.

  “Think.” Tomás grasped her by the shoulders and turned her around to face him. “Do callers have to go through the front desk to call this suite?”

  Bron shook her head, her dark, short hair flying around her face. “No. I don’t think so. I think there’s a way to route around through a direct number. But I would have to double check to make sure.”

  Tomás nodded. “Okay. Answer it. But if it’s someone demanding a ransom, don’t agree to anything, and don’t let them know that you know anything, no matter who it is.”

  Although she would never have admitted it out loud, Bron was glad someone else had as bad a feeling about this as she did. She steeled herself for whatever bad news might be on the other end of the line waiting for her.

  “Jeff Watson’s suite,” she said, trying to make her tone as secretarial as possible.

  “We have your boss.” The voice on the other end of the phone was deep, growly, and male.

  “Who is this?” Bron asked.

  Tomás had moved closer to the desk with the nearest phone and pulled some kind of equipment from the brown leather bag he carried. When Bron glanced over at him, he nodded and waved his hand in a circle in the air, the gesture designed to tell her to keep the person on the other end of the line talking.

  “It doesn’t matter who we are,” the voice was saying.

  “What do you mean you have my boss? Have him where? And why?” Bron interrupted. She’d given up on making her voice sound secretarial, and had moved to “bimbo.”

  “If you want him back, you’ll follow our instructions precisely.”

  “Back from where?”

  Tomás had now begun attaching something electronic to the side of the phone and was still gesturing at her to keep the person on the other end talking, but Bron was running out of questions to ask—especially since the speaker wasn’t bothering to answer anything.

  “Shut up and listen,” the man on the other end said as Tomás plugged a pair of earphones into the small, square electronic device he had affixed to the suite’s phone. “…unless you want to see your boss dead,” the kidnapper finished. Tomás nodded and gave Bron a thumbs up.

  Instantly, she dropped back into her normal voice. “What do you need us to do?”

  “That’s more like it. For now, do nothing. In your boss’s bathroom, you’ll find a cell phone in the middle of the stack of towels. We’ll call it in an hour. We expect you to be waiting. Otherwise, go about your normal day. If you call any cops, he’s dead. If you tell anyone else was going on, he’s dead. In fact, if you do anything out of the ordinary, your boss is dead. We’ll talk soon.”

  The call disconnected.

  “Excellent,” Tomás said. “That gives us a lot of information to work with.”

  “What do you mean a lot of information?” Bron shook her head in irritation. “We hardly found out anything at all. He wasn’t giving anything away.”

  “Not true.” Tomás grinned at her, and Bron was surprised to discover that she wanted to return the grin, despite the circumstances.

  “We know that there are at least two of them working together—his use of ‘we’ was too natural for there not to be at least two people involved.

  “Also, we know that he’s had access to the suite fairly recently. Or else he’s bribed someone from housekeeping to place the phone for him.”

  “How does any of that help us?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” Tomás said, “but I am certain that we should gather all the information about them that we can come up with—and furthermore, we need to make sure that he doesn’t figure out what our advantages are.”

  “We have an advantage?” Bron asked dryly.

  “Oh, absolutely.” That lazy grin of his drifted across his face again, this time with more than a touch of smugness to it. “You have me, and all my experience. Also, these guys have no idea that I heard any of that. As far as they know, they’re dealing with a single security guard. They don’t know they’re dealing with a professional hostage negotiator.”

  With that, Tomás removed his equipment from the phone and strode toward the door.

  Bron watched him go, unwilling to scurry after him. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wouldn’t be leaving the hotel. She felt safe enough letting him wander around without her nipping at his heels, demanding to know what his plan was every five minutes.

  “I assume you’ll stick close to me so you can listen in when I get this all-important cell phone call, right?”

  “Oh, I don’t intend to let you out of my sight until we figured out exactly what’s going on here,” Tomás said.

  Before she headed back down to the pit, Bron put in a call to let dispatch know she wouldn’t make the security meeting. Vance didn’t like it—he preferred to think he had seniority over her—but since he couldn’t actually pull rank on her, she didn’t care what he thought.

  Through the next thirty minutes, Bron was surprised to discover how comforting she found Tomás’s presence. Every time she glanced up as she made her rounds through the casino floor, she found him somewhere nearby. Often he wasn’t even looking at her, but she could still feel his attention focused on her.

  If she had known how much she would like being stalked by a giant cat shifter, she would’ve arranged for it much sooner. She had expected him to keep track of her the entire hour as she waited for the next phone call. However, when there were only about ten minutes left in the hour, he walked up behind her and took her elbow. Leaning in, he whispered, “I have a location for that first call.” Wrapping her arm around his, as if he were escorting her somewhere, he strolled across the casino floor, leaning in and smiling as he spoke just enough to look more flirtatious than serious.

  “You follow their instructions exactly as they are given. Don’t look down. I’m bugging your shirt right now—it’s attached to your cuff, and looks like it’s part of the button. Find a way to repeat the important information during your conversation with him, and I’ll make sure someone is there to watch you. In the meantime, I’m arranging to follow up on my lead.”

  Bron glanced up at him, outraged, ready to tell him exactly what he could do with the plan that left her alone to deal with kidnappers—and that cut her out of the most important pieces entirely.

  Before she could say anything, however, Tomás held up one finger and dropped it lightly over her lips. “Don’t let it ruffle your feathers, little bird,” he said with a grin. “Let me do what I’m good at. We’ll get your boss back.” With that, he let go of her arm and backed away with a small, flirtatious, slightly mocking bow.

  Bron watched him go without comment. She had no intention of allowing him to deal with this problem on his own, no matter how much more experience he might have with these kinds of situations.

  As she turned to make her way down the rows of slot machines, she glanced down at her watch. Five more minutes. If the kidnappers actually planned to stick to the schedule the caller had given her, they’d be calling soon.

  At the end of the slot machine row, she cut across toward the exit out into the hotel, walking casually, her unhurried pace designed to avoid calling attention to herself. Normally, she would take the employees’ elevator to another floor. But it wasn’t entirely unusual for the guards to stroll the hotel, either. One floor up, she stepped off the escalator and moved toward the bathroom.

  When the phone ran
g, she was ready and moved into the slight protection offered by an indentation between two columns against the wall.

  “Hello?”

  “Don’t talk. If you want to see your boss alive again, you follow our instructions precisely. In his office, there’s a ledger. You’ll need to bring it to exchange for his life.”

  “A ledger?” Bron had been through Jeff’s office and hadn’t seen anything that might count as a ledger.

  “Where in his office?” The question was as much for Tomás as it was for the man to whom she spoke. Now at least the cat shifter she was working with would have an idea of where to look.

  Whoever was at the other end of the line growled—an animalistic noise, one that left Bron in no doubt that she was dealing with a shifter, probably a predatory one.

  It was too bad, really. Those kinds of shifters often took advantage of others, though they were far from the only ones.

  “Once I have the ledger, where should I bring it?”

  The kidnapper gave an address not far from the casino.

  It seems stupid to Bron for the kidnappers to hold Jeff so close to the Cibola. Then again, Bron wasn’t in the business of kidnapping for ransom, so what did she know?

  He kept talking. “Also, come alone. Do not call the police. Do not tell anyone at all what you’re doing. Any of that will get your boss killed. Got it?”

  “Just me, no cops, no one else, or Jeff dies. Got it.”

  Another growl from the kidnapper, and then the line went dead.

  Under the guise of wiping her hair away from her face, Bron spoke into the receiver she hoped was truly attached to her cuff button.

  “Did you catch all that? I don’t know what they might need that ledger for, but I’m going back up to Jeff’s office to see if I can find it.”

  She stood there shaking her head over the problem she had discovered in Tomás’s system—although she could communicate with him, he had no way of reciprocating.

  Of course, that might only be a problem for him. Without talking to him again, she felt no compunction about ignoring Tomás’s earlier instructions.

  “Do exactly what the kidnappers tell me,” she muttered as she entered Jeff’s office for the second time that day.

  Once inside, she again seated herself at Jeff’s expensive, dark wood desk. This time, she cast her gaze across it with an idea what she was actually looking for.

  Still nothing.

  Narrowing her eyes, she tilted her head and leaned sideways until she could see the underside of the middle drawer. Uncertain what had caught her attention, she let her eyes go out of focus and waited to see what leaped out at her.

  There. In the middle, barely perceptible, some kind of… button? Lever? With a shrug, she slipped her hand into the chair well and gingerly felt for the small, metal protrusion.

  When pressing it did nothing, she snagged it with one fingernail and pulled it toward her gently. To her right, something clicked. Pulling her hand out from under the desk, Bron opened the center drawer.

  Nothing.

  Okay, then.

  Starting at the top, she opened each of the right-hand drawers systematically.

  The first two revealed nothing more interesting than they had the first time—office supplies, a notepad with a few cryptic scribbles on it, pens and highlighters.

  The bottom drawer, however, this time didn’t actually open at all. Instead, the front panel of the drawer swung out as if on hinges, revealing both the original contents of the drawer that she had seen before and a slim compartment at the bottom, thick enough for one small, leather ledger.

  Holding her wrist up to her mouth, she muttered toward the button, “Found it. I’ve got what they want. I’m supposed to deliver it.” She added the address, then went back to staring at the hidden book. Honestly, it seemed like a casino owner ought to be able to come up with a better hiding place for something important enough for kidnappers to be willing to kill for.

  Suddenly concerned about leaving fingerprints—or worse, wiping others away—Bron swung around to pluck a couple of tissues out of the box she’d seen on the shelf of the low bookcase to her left. Shielding her hands with the tissues, she slid the ledger out of its hiding place and set it on the desk in front of her.

  She flipped through a few pages, still using the tissues to guard the potential evidence, but she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Rows and rows of numbers. She needed an accountant.

  Not that she had time—not if she was going to go trade this for Jeff’s life. Briefly, she considered calling the police, despite the fact that it was against the kidnappers’ explicit instructions, not to mention against casino policy.

  Add to that the general shifter distrust of human policing techniques, and Bron had zero reasons to reach out to the Shreveport department.

  Nonetheless, this felt much bigger than anything she should be handling on her own.

  So does Tomás Nahual not count as help? an inner voice chided her.

  Not if he doesn’t show up soon, she admitted. Now she was supposed to take this ledger to meet the kidnappers by herself? Make the trade for her boss without any backup at all. Protect herself and Jeff. And all of this while Nahual was off following his own lead.

  Just thinking about it made her angrier and angrier.

  Still, she couldn’t afford to spend her time seething. Rolling her shoulders back to try to lessen the tension in the muscles there, she picked up the ledger and tucked it inside her jacket, where she could hold onto it under her arm without anyone noticing what she was carrying.

  When the phone rang as she was preparing to stand, she stared at it in shock, as if it were another shifter, prepared to attack.

  She laughed at the comparison. For all she knew, it really was an attacking shifter on the other end of the line. With a shake of her head, she picked up the receiver and held it to her ear.

  It had taken Tomás longer to find the lobby phones than he had anticipated. Most hotels had a bank of them near the elevators. Not the Cibola, however—theirs were tucked away by one of the restaurants. Still, despite his frustration finding a less traceable way to contact Jeff Watson’s office, he was still convinced it was better to leave as little trail as possible.

  He glanced up at the security cameras in irritation. He hadn’t intended to actually begin working for another full day. Kyle was supposed to bring the rest of the equipment, including the burner phones.

  That’s it. I’m never traveling without a full equipment set ever again.

  When Bronwyn answered, Tomás heard a tremor in her voice. He was certain that she wouldn’t appreciate having it pointed out, either, so he moved straight to business.

  “Found it?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I’m not at all sure what I’m looking at.”

  “It doesn’t matter—not if we’re going to trade it for your boss.” He didn’t know when this operation had changed to “we,” but he didn’t stop to correct himself, either.

  “I’ll meet you on the second floor, by the exit to the garage,” he said.

  He could almost hear her nod across the line. “I’ll meet you there in a few minutes.”

  That went well, Tomás said to himself as he hung up the phone and moved out of the phone bank, with its illusion of privacy.

  As he stepped into the main part of the lobby, two men flanked him, each linking an arm through his, and jabbing a gun into his side. It was a well-practiced move, one they had clearly used several times.

  “Come with us quietly, and there won’t be any trouble,” the one on his right growled into his ear. The one on his left, a virtual twin to the other one, with his overly muscular body and dark hair, simply nodded his agreement.

  The two hustled him toward the escalator, Tomás keeping an eye out for Bron the entire time, even though he was fairly certain she tended to use the employees’ elevator. For the moment, he was glad of it. Tomás didn’t have a clear handle on what exactly was going on here, and until he
did, he would rather keep Bronwyn out of it. He felt strangely overprotective of the little bird shifter.

  As the two men quietly and smoothly pushed him toward the parking garage, Tomás did his best to catalog every piece of information about them every way possible.

  First, he drew in air over the Jacobson’s organ on the roof of his mouth, parsing out what he could from the air molecules.

  There was something almost canine in these two shifters’ scent, though he suspected they would hate the comparison.

  Lupine.

  Wolves.

  It was all Tomás could do to keep from cursing aloud at the realization.

  Fucking werewolves. They were such assholes.

  Of course, Jeff Watson was a wolf shifter, too. But not a member of the major species of werewolves, most of whom were more like Timberwolves—or in this part of the country, gray wolves—than whatever subspecies Jeff belonged to. Red wolf, if Tomás remembered correctly.

  Well, if Tomás was really going to expand Big Cat Security into Louisiana, he would have to start figuring out what those various alliances might be in this territory. For now, though, he simply needed to figure out what was going on here. His nose wasn’t helping him with that—he hadn’t been able to learn anything more than the fact that these two wolves were the same subspecies, from the same pack, and probably either lovers or brothers. Their scents were completely intermingled.

  At the door leading into the parking garage, Tomás craned his head around to check one last time to see if he could see Bronwyn’s short, feathery dark hair and slight figure. He half-hoped she would catch enough of a glimpse of him to realize he hadn’t actually abandoned her but had been taken against his will.

  The other, less insane half of him was glad when he didn’t see her. Better to keep her out of danger as much as possible.

  “You know, guys,” he said conversationally, “you don’t have to go to all this trouble to get me go with you. I’d be happy to come along, even without the guns.”