by Cat Adams
She glared at him again, but he was nonplussed. Then she turned back and met my eyes. “I’m not working with him. And I didn’t make any promises. I asked him for help. I wanted to ask you, Celia, but I … I was afraid.”
Okay, that hurt. “I’ve worked really hard so you would never be afraid of me, guys.”
Her slender arms crossed over her chest and her eyes went to the floor at my feet. “I know; I know. It’s just…”
Jones let out an annoyed sound. “He’s going to be dead before you finally get around to spitting it out, you know. We’re already hours late and sneaking in is only going to get tougher after dark.”
His words were soft but utterly serious. I turned my head and my friends did as well. “Who will?”
His hands were tucked in his pockets, casually. But his eyes … those eyes held anger, worry, and something dark and dangerous that I wouldn’t want to cross. Ever. He raised his chin toward Emma and I felt my stomach tie in knots. “Her brother. Still want to shop?”
Oh, fuck a duck.
2
A pained sound from Emma forced me to turn her way. I almost wished I hadn’t. How could I stare into her terrified face and still tell Jones no? Because I wanted to. I was angry beyond words at Kevin. He and his father had kidnapped me, trussed me up, and offered me up to a demented siren who wanted me dead. Yes, Emma’s life had been at stake, and yes, they had had a plan to save us both. But I would have volunteered to help if they’d only asked. I was still hurt and insulted at their behavior, especially since I’d considered Kevin and Warren to be two of my closest friends.
Now I knew why Emma had been so hesitant all day. She’d rightly assume my first instinct would be to say no. Plus, Kevin’s a werewolf as well as a black-ops commando. There isn’t much he can’t handle. I couldn’t imagine what I could do that he couldn’t do for himself. Still …
“What happened?”
Instead of answering, Jones turned and walked away. I was guessing he didn’t want to discuss whatever it was in the middle of the store, which made sense. I followed at his heels and Emma and Dawna followed me in turn. Our own little parade, without the floats.
The sun was right in our eyes as we opened the door. Damn. I’d thought it was earlier than that. Had we really been shopping long enough for sunset to approach without my noticing?
Jones walked straight to a nondescript gray sedan at the edge of the parking lot. I caught up to him so we didn’t look like we were playing crack the whip. “Jingle Bells” was playing from loudspeakers outside the store. Cool ocean winds and my ever-present flock of seagulls made the whole situation totally surreal. Even Jones looked up to watch the white birds swooping and dancing in the air above our heads.
“You have a very weird life, Graves. Did the gulls follow you before the siren blood activated?”
I shook my head. “The most attention seagulls paid to me before was to poop on my car. Can you see why me sneaking up on anything is impossible? My freaking feathered entourage goes everywhere. Can’t someone else help you with this?”
“I’ve already tried everyone else.” Emma caught up to us; she sounded both frustrated and afraid. “I had a vision last night. One of the strongest since I saw the vampires attacking you in the alley. I didn’t even know Amy had been captured, but Kevin went to get her out. She made it out safely, but they caught Kevin. Unfortunately, I didn’t know where he was—who they were. I just saw bars and heard screaming. I asked Dad, but he couldn’t find out anything. So … well, Jones was all I could think of.”
“And I found him. But there’s no chance of getting him out without your help.”
My head shook of its own accord. “I find that hard to believe and it’s even harder to believe that Kevin would want me involved.”
Emma smacked me on the shoulder, so apparently she was no longer afraid of me. “Celia! If Kevin needs help, we have to help him. He’d do the same for us.”
I didn’t let my jaw drop in shock, even though the comment deserved it. I didn’t even laugh sarcastically. Instead, I took a deep breath and let it out slow. For you, Emma. He’d move the world for you. Not us. I knew exactly where I stood with him—somewhere slightly lower than dirt.
I was still so angry with him, so hurt. Part of me wanted him to suffer. But another part, which I prayed every day was still the larger portion, wanted to rise above the pettiness and show Kevin and his father, Warren Landingham, what true friendship was. But it had only been three weeks since the night they’d betrayed me, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to face them.
Jones was watching me with an odd expression. He leaned on the car door and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have to admit you’ve surprised me, Graves. I expected I’d have to hold you back, not convince you to help. Can you at least tell me where he is in the facility?”
I felt myself rear back in surprise and the looks Dawna and Emma gave me said they were clueless as well. “What facility? How am I supposed to know where he is?”
Jones raised his brows like he didn’t believe me. Apparently he believed I was kidding and was about to announce that I’d take him straight to Kevin. But that wasn’t going to happen. I stared at Jones while the sun continued to lower and my stomach growled. My gaze moved from his eyes to his neck. His body started to glow faintly and I felt my breathing growing shallow and my muscles tensing. He very carefully didn’t move, but his center of gravity shifted just a bit, preparing.
“Okay, this is getting ridiculous!” Dawna finally exclaimed, exasperation plain in her voice. She grabbed my hand and shoved the yellow bottle into it. “You. Drink this before you go nuts. It’s been nearly four hours since you ate and you exerted yourself with that robber. Hold your nose if you have to.” She turned to Jones.
“You. Tell them why Kevin might die and what facility he’s at. I’m going to go back inside the mall and get us all something to eat. Apparently it’s going to be a long night—whether you plan to take me and Emma along with you or if we’re just waiting by the phone.” With that, she turned and started to jog back toward the mall entrance.
I shuddered and blinked and then grimaced at the bottle. She was right, of course, but I didn’t have to like it. Jones was already starting to look yummy, and that would be counterproductive on a number of fronts. I twisted off the lid, held my nose, and literally poured the drink down my throat, successfully avoiding most of my taste buds. I managed not to choke or gag, which was a plus.
Jones sighed, then opened the back door of the car and pulled out a sealed four-pack of chocolate Ensure, still in shrink-wrap. He tossed it toward me, but I let the bottles hit the ground at my feet. I’d wait for Dawna. Her I trust.
Emma spoke, her voice filled with anger fueled by fear: “Where is my brother? You still haven’t told me. You owe him your life, you know.”
“Several times over,” Jones agreed. “But I still find it difficult to believe Celia doesn’t already know the details. I thought all you’d have to do is mention you ‘saw’ the capture and she’d be racing to his side.”
“Believe it,” said a new voice. I jumped. I couldn’t help it. Even with my super new senses I hadn’t heard our newest member approaching. Damn it. I hate it when real vampires join the party. I hissed and moved back as Edgar, an extraordinarily powerful vampire, simply appeared in the shadow of a nearby palm tree.
If you saw Edgar walking the streets of L.A., you’d assume he was an ordinary businessman on his way home from the office. As long as you didn’t catch sight of the fangs peeking out from under his upper lip, you’d never have a clue he was the most dangerous person in a fifty mile radius. The fact that he was out in nearly broad daylight told me he was even more powerful than I’d realized, and I’d already put him at nearly the top of the list.
“She’s not lying, John. I’d know.”
Jones and Edgar were on a first name basis? Terrific. Why wasn’t I surprised?
Jones hadn’t even flinched when Edgar arrived, whi
ch meant he’d either invited him or could sense him. “She’s his Vaso, Edgar. She has to know. She’s blocking the connection or lying.”
“Vaso.” The word rang a bell, but it had been too long since lycanthrope cultural studies in college, so I turned to the resident expert, Emma. My questioning look made her nod and respond with lecturelike precision. “A werewolf often chooses a human partner, called a Vaso, to maintain its energy level. Excess energy is one of the leading causes of off-moon shifting and aggressive tendencies. In order for a werewolf to maintain a human appearance in normal society, the energy must be bled off periodically.”
Okay, that made sense. “Meaning Kevin has a Vaso, since he worked in IT at the university for a couple of years and nobody but us ever caught on that he’s a werewolf.”
She nodded. “Kevin always hinted that you served that role.”
That was news to me. He and I had never really talked about his condition. “Wouldn’t I know? I mean, that’s sort of personal, isn’t it?”
Jones cut in. “Precisely, because the partnership isn’t just a physical thing but a mental link. The human has to know where and when to find the wolf when he needs to have energy drained. So, you should know where he is.”
“But it makes no sense that I’d be the Vaso. Even when we were speaking, we barely spoke, and I sure as hell didn’t come running at his command.” I’d considered him one of my closest friends, but we weren’t close in the commonly understood sense. “Since when do you two chat? I thought Edgar was a hard target and you were hunting him.”
The organization Kevin had worked for in the past, and had gone back to work for recently, was some sort of quasi-governmental agency that ran black ops and hunted supernatural criminals—hard targets.
Edgar shrugged. “We live in a world of shifting alliances. Now that you’re out of play I figured helping get Landingham out will make him less likely to actively hunt me.”
Jones nodded and reached into the car to pull out a file folder. “Hewitt here is one of the best there is at getting inside locked buildings and removing people. So he’s useful even if he’s no longer affiliated with the Company.”
I was confident I didn’t want to know the history of either statement, so I didn’t reply or ask for details. But it was handy to know Edgar’s last name. It made him feel, oddly, like less of a threat. Weird.
“Besides,” he added, instantly quashing the whole idea of him being less than a threat, “I wasn’t there when you killed either Lilith or Luther, Celia, And I’m very curious about just how tough you are.”
In other words, did I do it alone or had it taken an army to kill two vamps, one more than a thousand years old? I didn’t answer, just raised my brows. Luther I’d done myself, but a devout reverend had held Lilith at bay with a glowing cross while I tossed a magical knife at her. Edgar had never seen my knives and I wasn’t about to share the details. Let him wonder. Just like he was letting me wonder how he had so much intelligence. That wasn’t supposed to be possible for vampires. How was he sane and smart enough to trust in an operation? And how had he traveled to the parking lot while it was still daylight? It was nearly sunset, and he was keeping to the shadows, but still.
My sire had been powerful enough to be able to be awake in daylight, but he couldn’t be out in it. Could Edgar? That was a very disturbing thought.
“If you’re done having a ‘who’s tougher’ lovefest, could we get on with saving my brother before he’s dead?” Emma’s voice was as sharp and angry as I’d ever heard it. Not that she had the right to be. We’d been shopping for the better part of three hours and she hadn’t said a word. So now it was my fault? I raised my brows at her and she blushed.
Jones handed me the manila folder and I flipped it open. Emma was beside me instantly, her golden hair brushing my arm in contrast to my own pale blonde as she leaned in to read the documents inside.
There were stacks of paper paper-clipped together and I quickly realized that they were dossiers of people. The first was for Ronald Tarnique, father of two pretty dark-haired girls. I frowned as I read about his perfectly normal life. What was I missing? “Okay, so he was a corporate executive for one of the major charities, nice house, good income, happy family. So?”
Jones flipped to the final page of Tarnique’s dossier. It was a court order sentencing Tarnique to life at the California State Paranormal Treatment Facility—aka “the zoo.” It was the very facility I’d fought not to be sentenced to. It was located in the desert outside my hometown of Santa Maria de Luna; I’d watched TV exposéon the place that would curl your hair and heard rumors that would make you lose your lunch. According to the paper, Tarnique had gone on a rampage and slaughtered forty people at a school bake sale. I flipped back to the original police report, which had the man—as a werewolf—chewing kids’ limbs off and then eating said limbs covered with cake frosting.
Emma grabbed the file from me and read the first few pages again. “This doesn’t sound right at all. Something doesn’t add up. Lycanthropes can’t put on acts this good. To raise a family, exist in the corporate world long enough to become a manager, participate in society, and then … this.” She looked at Jones with haunted eyes. “What sent him over the edge?”
“Therein lies the question.” He tapped a finger on the edge of the folder. “All of these cases didn’t add up. Amy got suspicious. She told Kevin and said something was very wrong.” Amy, Kevin’s girlfriend, is also a werewolf. “She said the one thing all of these people had in common is that they’d recently visited the zoo. Tarnique had been interested in having his charity provide resources to the facility to better the lives of the prisoners.”
He shifted another paper-clipped stack to the top so I could see the picture of a pretty woman with a Farrah Fawcett–style hairdo. “Tamara Cornith, also a lycanthrope, went on a similar rampage—right down to the bake sale—in the same week, two hundred miles to the south. She’d been to the zoo months before to see her husband’s aunt, who was a guard. But they met in the parking lot, just long enough for the older woman to sign some papers. Cornith never even made it inside.”
“What does this have to do with Kevin? Has he been frequenting bake sales?”
Jones shook his head and opened his mouth, but Edgar spoke up. He was now leaning against the fender of the sedan and watching us with interest. “No. Amy apparently got curious and decided to talk to the people in the file.”
“She’d mentioned to me,” Emma added, “that she was going to try to get a visitor’s pass to the zoo. She thought something was going on there and she wanted to see for herself.”
“She got inside.” Jones let out a noise that was both annoyed and frustrated. “And they decided to keep her. They locked her in a cage and Kevin called me to help get her out.”
Emma’s outrage was immediate. “They can’t do that! They have to have a court order to put someone in prison. They can’t just keep them.”
“Are you sure?” Jones sounded amused. “Amy is a werewolf. Kevin thought they might have some sort of sniffer that alerts the staff. It would be a small matter to lock up a guest and ask for a sanctioning order to keep them. What judge would refuse if it was claimed someone went berserk inside the facility?”
“But they’re already overcrowded. Why in the world would they want more residents?” As the words left my mouth I realized that, while it made no sense, it also made perfect sense. There were plenty of people in the world who’d be happy to lock me up in there, just because I have fangs.
“We’re thinking there’s more at work here than overzealous right-wingers or bureaucratic red tape. Something a little more … sinister.” The way Jones said it made my stomach twist in knots.
Edgar smiled grimly. “Precisely. It would be a perfect place for a demonic being to set up camp. It’s well known that the mentally unstable are more open to possession. Add magical ability to that, and…”
Oh, hell.
Most people don’t like to think
about prisons. Consciously, everybody recognizes they’re necessary, and so long as nothing bad happens inside they remain just outside our perception of normality. But while the inmates were locked up, plenty of people came and went from any institution every day—from deliverypeople to friends and family … and of course, every guard. I’d experienced for myself just how persuasive a greater demon could be. Even knowing he was going to torture me, toy with me until I went insane, then kill me hideously, I’d had to fight not to walk willingly into his arms. Someone already unstable would be toast.
“You said Amy got out. Is she okay?”
Jones took back the folder. It was pointless to read any more. I knew what I needed to. “She’s not … she’s in a coma. She has brain function, but she won’t wake up. We don’t know what they did to her. Warren’s got the top experts in the field on it—including warrior priests who have already done at least two exorcisms.” He paused. “Kevin got her out, but they captured him.”
“And you had to get Amy to safety.” I understood. Anytime people in our line of work go on missions, whether guarding celebrities or getting people out of the line of fire, there’s a chance we won’t make it out. We have to make choices and I was actually glad Jones had made the same one I would have. You get the wounded out and leave those capable of taking care of themselves behind. It sucks, but then most things involving danger do. And as angry as I was with him right now, I also knew Warren had more resources than most. He knows everyone in academia who is involved with the paranormal, and I knew from personal experience that every religious leader in the world had begun to realize that California was becoming a hotbed of demonic activity. The militant arms of the Christian churches, along with Muslim, Jewish, and Hindu religious warriors, were all working together to confront a true hell on earth.
Warren would have no problem finding people to take care of Amy’s soul.
I stared into Jones’s eyes for a long moment while “O Come All Ye Faithful” played in the background, then nodded. I was terrified down to my toes, but I had to help. “Okay, I’m in. But if it’s a demon stronghold, we can’t risk going in without an army behind us.”