ShiftingHeat

by Lynne Connolly

It was almost a relief when someone else confirmed her growing suspicions. Ann nodded and sighed heavily. “Serena Duval.”

  Daria took over. “It shames me to think that one of my kind sold her fellow Talents for money. Not pride, not conviction, but money.” Her dark eyes gleamed and Faye glimpsed the banked power hidden there. Daria was a virgin too, but unlike Serena, she had passion and fire. “Sorcerers are taught to control their psi gifts and their emotions. Some of our kind are taught to subsume tender emotions and lock them away. With it goes our humanity. I believe that is what happened to Serena Duval.”

  Ann regained control, but just for that moment Faye had glimpsed the woman beneath the businesslike exterior. It made the head of STORM more accessible, more human.

  “Serena let other emotions control her. Jealousy, for instance. Greed. She had enough money, but the Talents who live many centuries often amass incredible wealth. When I spotted the pattern of this case it started to make sense that a Sorcerer was involved. This group was taking some of the oldest and the wealthiest Talents they could find. I thought at first their power attracted their kidnappers, but now I think it was their wealth. If they planned it right, they would gain far more than they would just by selling Talents.”

  Faye leaned back, not hiding her disgust that a Talent would do this thing. “And Serena did that. Well at least she got her due.”

  “That’s the worst of it.” Ann glowered and Faye sensed her frustration. “The body in Serena’s office? It wasn’t Serena Duval.”

  Silence fell like a pall except for Faye’s shocked gasp. Anything she thought to say sounded cliché. Were they sure? Well duh, STORM, yes. How did they know? Probably DNA testing.

  Ann kept Faye in her gimlet stare. “We don’t know the identity of the body we thought was Serena’s. Not yet. Serena must have dropped her watch to authenticate the body, stop us searching for her for the vital time it took her to get away cleanly. She could be anywhere.”

  “She’s in New York,” Daria bit out. “I can sense her. But I can’t track her down because psi has no sense of direction. I can tell if she is close, that is all. She doesn’t know I’m here, or how strong my psi is. That is an advantage for us.”

  Nick glanced at Daria. “I’m teaching a class at four, and I can stay on-site. Do you want to come into the field, sense the office?”

  Daria shook her head. “Not right now. The police have been there, leaving their traces behind. So have other people. I doubt I could discover anything new now.”

  Ann tapped the folder before her, drawing Faye’s attention to it. “I want complete honesty in this room. No secrets, you understand, Faye? Will you tell us the truth about your childhood, or shall I tell you?”

  The game was up. Faye had to confess. In a quiet voice she explained what she’d only told Andros before, about her family, the murders and how she’d gone back to confront Cardross and eventually kill him. “Will they see it as murder?”

  Ann’s eyes were clear again. “If it ever comes to light outside this room, I’d advise you to plead self-defense. But after all this time, there are no witnesses we know of, and the climate right now is not sympathetic toward Talents. It could be a rough ride.”

  She hadn’t needed Ann to tell her that.

  “When I uncovered the details of the old case of the death of Police Chief Cardross, things started to fall into place,” Ann said. She glanced at Daria. “Sorcerers aren’t the only people who can see patterns. I couldn’t understand why they’d use an old weapon at all, why Nordheim even had that Schofield. But with your act all those years ago, killing Cardross, I understood. The Cardrosses had a score to settle, didn’t they? And you had gone back to your original name when you took the post at the university. The weapon was from Cardross’ collection, I had it confirmed by a ballistics expert. Your entrance into Nordheim’s office was planned for and expected. They wanted you, not for their collection, but to even the score. They wanted revenge, and killing you with a gun from the Cardross collection was the message they’d leave behind.”

  “But wouldn’t that make it easier for the police?” Nick questioned.

  “Sure it would. But they’d get away with it, so what did they care?”

  Faye covered her face with her hand, then snatched it away. “What’s the connection?”

  Ann shrugged. “That I don’t know. Yet. They were so money-hungry, perhaps someone paid them to do it. They’d have made it look like self-defense, arranged it so you shot Serena and she shot you. Like the first situation, perhaps?” Faye nodded and groaned. It did sound familiar. She’d confronted Cardross at his desk and he’d had a hidden gun trained on her. But her reflexes had made her move fast and he only winged her, whereas her shot was true. Change that scenario a tad and the scene in the office that day could have been altered to look as if it had played out the same. Without Andros, that was. He’d been a game-changer that day.

  Ann’s phone rang. She picked it up with an annoyed, “I told you I was in conference.” Then she listened. A quiet “Send him up” concluded the conversation.

  A few moments later, a tap on the door heralded the entrance of someone Faye knew wasn’t Andros. If it had been, she’d have sensed him. They were too close now not to know when the other was nearby.

  But she hadn’t expected to see the university’s resident vampire enter. “Sergiu?”

  Ann raised a brow. “Let’s be honest here. Harry Gossett, a.k.a Harry Johnson, a.k.a Sergiu Tanase. Isn’t that right?”

  Sergiu-Harry shrugged, the shoulders of his impressively packed black jacket rising. “If you like.” He wore typical vampire gear—black shirt and slacks, a black leather jacket. Black biker boots with studs completed his outfit. He wore his hair long, and it was the regulation black, although in the light it was possible to discern chestnut glints. “Harry will do. I came out of the goodness of my heart to tell you who I saw half an hour ago.”

  “Go on.”

  “Serena Duval. I thought she was supposed to be dead? Then I recalled that you guys are hanging around the place. What, you think I didn’t know?” His full lips curled in a sneer. “What do you think I’m doing there?”

  “Working for the Bureau,” Ann said.

  Harry rolled his eyes. “When my bosses talk to other peoples’ bosses it would be a good thing sometimes if they let us in on the setup. I’ve been working my guts out for the last six months in that place, and you walk in and nearly wreck it all. I don’t do this for my own amusement.”

  “Do they know you’re a vampire?” Ann demanded. “Not just pretending?”

  “Some do. Most don’t. I guess we’re looking for the same people for different reasons.”

  “Probably. Tell me what you saw.”

  “Serena Duval and Andros Zelinski leaving campus together.”

  Nausea churned in Faye’s stomach. She swallowed and tried to control her whirling thoughts, slow her mind down and think. “Something wasn’t quite right about Zelinski, but I didn’t use my psi because the woman’s a Sorcerer. The way she used her psi on me at the meeting she came to…” He shrugged again. “You can tell.” He leaned against the door and shoved his hands in his pockets. Faye took a couple of deep breaths and studied the vampire, concentrated on him while she processed what had just happened.

  Harry Gossett without his Sergiu persona seemed a far more dangerous character. His movements were less florid, less studied, but meant a whole lot more. And he was ripped. Without the pose, the deliberate “I am a vampire” trappings, he seemed stripped down to the bare essentials, the danger of the vampire readily apparent now, even though he wouldn’t come into his powers for an hour or two. He leaned against the wall by the door, not attempting to sit or become part of the group. This man was a loner. “The Bureau told me the Sorcerer was dead. So I thought I’d better find out from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.” He cocked a dark brow. “Was I right?”

  “We thought she was dead but we were wrong,” Ann told him. “She fa
ked her own death then had her accomplice, Professor Nordheim, taken care of. One of my agents killed him when he drew a weapon.”

  “Let me read you,” Daria said. “I can perhaps find traces. Did you know her well?”

  “She came to the club and teased me, did it more than once but I sensed the coldness under her approach and I wondered what she was at. She let me drink from her once, and I managed to get a hold on her then, but I think she wanted to get a hold on me.” He grinned. “She underestimated me. Vampires can give orgasms as thanks. I nearly pushed one on her but she said no, and at the time I thought she was one of the good guys when she said she worked for STORM.”

  “We thought she was too.”

  Faye couldn’t stand it anymore. Scraping back her chair, she sprang to her feet. “Well what are we waiting for? We have to find him!”

  *

  Andros groaned before the realization of what had happened came back to him. Then he wished he hadn’t.

  “You’re back,” said a calm, female voice.

  He cracked one eye, then the other, cautiously peering at her. “I thought you were dead.”

  “I thought you were, for a moment back there. You succumbed to my suggestion very quickly.”

  Serena sat on a chair in a typical hotel room. A flat-screen TV stood on the vanity across from the bed and another, empty bed stood between the one he occupied and the window, over which the drapes were drawn. It could be any room anywhere, although from the coffeemaker he surmised they were still in America. His mind worked far too frantically. He couldn’t control it at this rate. His heart beat too fast—he didn’t like this, something was wrong.

  “I doubled your dose,” she said, as if he’d spoken aloud. Which, he supposed, he had, to her. “I will increase the cephalox and retain your other drugs. You will take them or I will make you.”

  He knew she could. With one thought she could do it. He searched his mind, found the deepest corners and relegated his inmost thoughts to that place. Chase Maynord had taught him a few tricks. So was layering a more innocuous train of thought over it. Not that it would help right now, but it might benefit him in the long term. If he had a long term. “You got me to take pills while I was unconscious?”

  “I did.” She got to her feet and strolled to the coffeemaker. “In case you were wondering, you’ve been unconscious for five hours, you’ve had one dose of pills, doubled to ensure your continued condition, and we have left New York.”

  Terrible news. He couldn’t use telepathy to contact anyone he knew. Likely she had blocked this room off, anyway. He couldn’t rely on his newfound powers to get him out of this. If he was going to get out of this.

  No, he couldn’t think that. He would get out of this. He had to.

  “What do you want from me?” And why, he wondered, was he still here? Why hadn’t she sold him? If she faked her own death it was because she was involved in the venal trade of selling her own kind to people who would torture them in the name of science. Venal. He liked that. Obviously loving a professor of literature was having a positive effect on his vocabulary.

  “The same as the others. I’ll move you on to someone else, when the time is right.”

  “When will that be?”

  She smiled and turned her attention to the coffeemaker. “When I think it’s right.”

  A significant word, that. I, she’d said. It could signal that she was in control of the whole operation. Or that she was working on her own here. Or both. “You don’t listen to your bosses?”

  “I have no bosses.”

  The first one then. But that didn’t rule out the second.

  She brought him the coffee and put it on the nightstand between the beds. He reached out, touched her and, in that instant before she suppressed it, felt a surge of something he shouldn’t have felt, not in this Sorcerer. Emotion. He couldn’t discern what kind, but it didn’t feel dispassionate. Far from it.

  He had something he could use. Now to find out what kind of emotion. She stared at his hand but didn’t move. “Let me go.”

  “I’m not stopping you moving away.” He had to take great care now. She wouldn’t believe any sudden declaration. It might take time. “But unlike you, I need human contact sometimes.”

  “You know nothing.”

  “So tell me.”

  She shrugged.

  With difficulty, because the extra drugs had increased the stiffness and pain in his body, Andros sat upright and shoved some pillows behind his back for support. He tried not to wince and fought to control his dizziness. “What’s it like being a Sorcerer, cutting yourself off from human emotion?”

  She stared at him. “I’ve always found it quite easy.”

  “You don’t get to talk very often, do you? Just talk.” He guessed that was part of her problem, and wondered if she’d recognize the right word if she heard it. Lonely, she was lonely.

  “I talk to many people.”

  But not socially. He had a hunch. “Were you brought up in one of those isolation schools we hear about but never see?”

  “What’s it like being ordinary?” she countered.

  He blinked. “I was never ordinary. Well, not for long. I was diagnosed with Becker’s in my teens.” Until then he’d been what she’d consider as ordinary, though. “I went to a regular high school, managed to graduate, had a few girlfriends. Lost my virginity at sixteen,” he said, not without a touch of pride. He’d done it with a girl who he’d thought at the time he’d spend the rest of his life with. It had lasted only two years, but it had been a good two years. He should get back in touch with her, just to see how she was doing. If he got out of here, that was. When. He meant when, not if.

  “Some would-be virgin Sorcerers go mad. They are treated so they recover.”

  “How?”

  “They are given orgasms.” She stared at him.

  “How?” His stomach churned at the thought that children were made to come. But it was either that or lose their minds. Orgasms reduced a Sorcerer’s power to manageable levels.

  “In noninvasive ways. Vampires are often used.”

  “That’s not much better. But maybe that’s the mortal talking. Before I met my brother-in-law I had no idea vampires really existed. Although I hoped.”

  “Why?”

  He grimaced. “I thought they could convert me and cure me. I was desperate for a cure.” He needed to draw her in, confide in her, make her trust him. If he could somehow avoid taking the cephalox, in twenty-four hours he could shape-shift.

  It would take too long. He could be dead by then.

  “Why do you want me?” He swallowed and made sure she saw his nervousness. Sorcerers weren’t always adept at body language. “Why not just kill me?”

  She nodded. “Reasonable questions. Two reasons. You interest me. I want to strip your mind, find out what it means to have a disability one moment and be cured the next. I don’t have to do it that way, but it’s faster and easier.” And from the spark of triumph he saw in her eyes, he thought she might enjoy rendering him helpless. “I’ll be careful—I’ll make sure there’s something left for the scientists. And that’s the other reason. I can get a good price for a dragon.”

  “Does betrayal of your own kind mean nothing to you?”

  She regarded him, her face as blank as if she’d been shot full of Botox and collagen. “I have no ‘own kind’. But I have a need to make money so I can live adequately.” She shrugged. “It’s a rational decision. Regrettably, I’ll have to cut the university connection, but I have other outlets.”

  He had no idea if Daria had the power Ann intimated, but he hoped so. Otherwise he was fucked. Though perhaps not. Ideas crowded the back of his mind, thoughts he pushed down so she couldn’t read them unless she forced herself in. He put a gentle thread of attraction in the front of his mind, let it wind around his other thoughts. Nothing too much, overkill would drive her away, he was sure. Careful.

  She responded. Just a gleam of interest in her eye
s. “You know the first person I took was a vampire. He tried to seduce me.”

  Shit, oh, shit. She’d noticed. He’d decided to attack her in the place where she had least experience and, being a virgin, that had to be personal relationships and sex. He didn’t like her smile. If a serpent could smile it would look like that. “You think I can seduce you?”

  “You can try.”

  Oh yeah, he got it now. Arrogance often reaped its own reward. Did he take her on, accept her challenge, or did he give in and just wait to be rescued? Or, as seemed more likely, killed. Well one thing was for sure. He wasn’t going to just take whatever she chose to do to him. “So what will you do?”

  “The workings of your mind interest me. You will doubtless give me an opportunity to explore it.”

  Yes, he would. He’d leave a gap, a space that she could get through but let her think she’d forced her way in.

  She bared her teeth in that awful simulacrum of a smile again. “Do you wish to turn this into a game? Try to seduce me and I’ll allow you to try. For each failure, I’ll take a little part of you away, explore that part of your mind. A duel, of sorts. Would you want that?”

  What were they waiting for? Why didn’t she just do it and have done? Or did she enjoy torturing her victims?

  “Can we eat first?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  She picked up her cell phone from the table by her side and pressed a speed dial number. Fuck, he’d hoped to see the keypad, or even get her to use the hotel phone that stood opposite him. If it was the kind that made noises, he was in, because he knew keypad sounds. She saw his glance. “I disconnected it. Don’t even try. And I threw your cell away. Doubtless they’ve put a tracker in it. So STORM should waste an hour or two discovering where I left it.”

  His heart leaped. All he needed was time. She hadn’t cut him, hadn’t discovered the tracker deep in his body. He’d inserted it six months ago, an experiment in planting undetectable trackers on agents in the field. Ann would remember it. She had to. He’d left the receiving equipment in his office at STORM. It couldn’t be tracked by conventional equipment. If it even worked anymore.