Did that mean Jamie planned to return home later or had last night been good-bye?
Heat hit me like an open furnace when I stepped across the threshold of our grungy headquarters. Sweat broke out along my scalp, and I tugged my beanie from my head and stuffed it into my jacket pocket. The scarf followed. Sharon’s flat brown eyes tracked me. I gave her a grimace, which was the closest I could muster to a real smile. If she noticed the difference, she didn’t give any indication.
Stripping off layers, I threaded through the plastic tables. Only Will sat at his desk, and his attention was riveted on his computer, the soft click of keyboard keys barely audible over the rattling hum of the overbearing heater. I hadn’t seen him or his sister Joy since we’d relocated offices, but their absences were commonplace. Though Will looked like an attractive human guy somewhere in his late twenties, his friendly face unlined by wrinkles, and his brown hair perpetually mussed, one look at his soul identified him as Illuminea. In Primordium, he radiated with a sun’s healing light, so warm and inviting that I’d had to stop myself more than once from curling up against him to soak in his rays. From what I’d been told, Illuminea were beings of pure lux lucis who had chosen to take human form to better influence the world. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around it, but I didn’t doubt it. Will exuded the calm, caring energy one might expect from the love child of a charismatic Buddha and an ancient redwood. In other words, he personified walking, talking lux lucis.
I tossed a “hi” in his direction and received a glancing smile in return, but nevertheless felt warmed and welcomed. Such was the power of an Illuminea—and the reason I avoided him: He didn’t deserve to be subjected to my foul mood.
Brad looked up from his computer, his expression registering mild surprise when I stomped into his tiny office.
“No, I don’t know where Jamie is,” I said before he could ask.
Brad closed his mouth and swiveled away from his computer to face me. I plopped into the folding chair on my side of the desk, and it groaned as if criticizing my weight. In my head, I broke the chair in half and fed it to a cannibalistic cushioned chair that didn’t have such a judgmental attitude.
“The inspector put a tracker on me,” I spat.
“For your safety.”
His soft words abraded already-raw nerves. My left leg jittered. I considered and dismissed getting into an argument about the tracker. The inspector outranked Brad; if she wanted the tracker on me, the tracker would stay.
“Jamie came by my apartment last night. He’s gone again already.” I threw the words at my boss like a challenge, the opening salvo to the argument I wanted to have. If he started yelling at me, I could yell back, and I badly wanted to yell at someone.
“You’re looking for him?” Brad asked.
“As much good as it’s going to do me.” My leg bounced up and down, and I shoved to my feet, pacing two steps before running out of room. “Why is it so hot in here?”
“I had to leave the back door propped open for the prajurit. Peace talks begin in a few minutes.”
I waited for him to get angry about the talks, but his uncharacteristic serenity remained unruffled. Irritated, I slammed the folding chair closed and shoved it against the wall to give myself more room to pace.
“Where’s Niko?” If he was already tracking Jamie—if he had any way of tracking Jamie—I deserved to know.
“Right now, probably sleeping. He helped the enforcers in Auburn bring down two sjel tyver last night.”
“Two?” People were killing the tyver in their regions while I couldn’t even find the one in mine? Guilt piled on top of agitation. The urge to act, to fight or hunt or do something—anything—productive built inside me like a jack-in-the-box spring, ticking, ticking, ticking, set to explode without warning.
When I spun to face Brad, I caught a flicker of compassion in his eyes, and it tightened the coil of anger in my gut.
“I can’t feel Jamie or the tether. I don’t want to run around chasing my tail all day looking for him. He’s faster than me. He doesn’t have to let me catch him; he just has to stay close.”
“True,” Brad agreed.
I waited for his instructions. He was my boss. He loved to tell me what to do. When I was smart, I even listened.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Well what?”
“Tell me what to do!” The words roared from me. If we’d been in a cartoon, Brad would have been blown through the wall behind him, and his tuft of friar hair would have smoldered.
Instead, the biggest reaction I got was the appearance of the squiggly vein in Brad’s temple, a precursor to anger but nothing close to the real thing. He smoothed a paper on his desk, not quite meeting my eyes, not quite looking away. I threw up my hands and resumed pacing.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Other than everything.
“I can’t tell you what to do. You’re the one linked to Jamie. What do you think would bring him to you?”
“Here. I thought the familiarity of the office might make him show up, but that seems stupid now.” Why would he want to surround himself with lux lucis people? Especially now. “I thought if he felt comfortable somewhere, he might stay long enough to talk, and we could . . . The parking garage!” I smacked myself on the forehead. I should have thought of his birthplace first.
“Did the handbook have any ideas what the pooka’s fourth form might be?” Brad asked, interrupting my inner monologue of reproach.
“He’s still mulling it over.” That sounded better than admitting to our passive-aggressive fight.
I stalked out of Brad’s office before he could ask a follow-up question.
“Hey, Madison. I heard about Jamie,” Will said, cutting short my sprint for the front door.
“Is there anyone who hasn’t?” I snapped. When I met Will’s concerned expression, I heaved a sigh and apologized.
“How are you holding up?” Will asked.
I laughed. The sound edged close to tears, so I cut it off and shook my head. Giving voice to my internal turmoil wouldn’t help. I didn’t remember moving, but somehow I stood next to Will. Not too close, and with my hands to myself, keeping my metaphysical soul-bathing discreet. Go me.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“My favorite thing: the office budget. Whoever invented Excel is my hero,” Will said without a drop of sarcasm.
I peered over his shoulder at a chart filled with alarming red numbers and a lot of negative symbols. “That doesn’t look good.”
“We’ve had more expenses lately than normal,” Will agreed.
I flinched at the offhand accusation, though I knew he hadn’t meant it as one. Pretty much everything wrong that fell under the heading “lately” could be blamed on me.
“The destruction of our headquarters really set us back,” Will continued. “Then the expansion of our region brought a lot of extra expenditures we hadn’t budgeted for. But we’ve already got a solution. Joy and I have declined this month’s salary, and I’m looking into other discretionary expenses we can defer. The region will prevail.”
Other discretionary expenses? Alarm spiked through me. I hoped he didn’t consider my salary elective.
“Um, how exactly does this office get funded?” I probably should have thought to ask the question earlier, but I’d been busy with a demon and a pooka and a region that went up in flames one week and froze solid the next. I decided to cut myself a little slack.
Will wriggled in his seat like a happy puppy. “It’s all rather fascinating. I like to think of the CIA financial system as a series of nesting dolls, each one snuggled inside the next. It starts at the federal level . . . No, it’s bigger than that, but I’m rusty on the global structure. At those heights, it changes from nesting dolls to something more like a series of fish that take turns swallowing each other. Or maybe it’s more like an endlessly folding blanket; sometimes it starts from the right and covers the left an
d sometimes it folds diagonally . . .”
My eyes glazed over, but calculating how long it’d take me to recover from a month without pay snapped me back to the moment.
“I mean,” I interrupted, “how do we make more money? What do we need to do for our region to change all those red numbers to black?”
Pink flushed Will’s cheeks, but he made embarrassed look attractive. “I was rambling, wasn’t I? I get so excited about the complexities of economics, I get carried away.”
Especially with the metaphors. I kept the comment to myself and urged him to continue.
“To get out of the red, we need to get our region out of limbo. Best-case scenario, Pamela approves of us taking over the larger region. When she does, the expansion would come with an increased budget and all our financial problems would be solved.”
“Just for fun, let’s say Pamela denies us the expansion.” I shifted my weight to my right foot, feeling the tracker loosen around my left ankle. I tried and failed to picture a future in which Pamela decided I was qualified to handle more territory. “Would we still . . . Would you go back to getting a paycheck?”
“Probably not for the next three or four months. Oh, don’t look so worried. I pay next to nothing for my place and my friends are more than happy to keep me fed. And don’t worry about yourself, either. Your salary is secure. However, Brad ran through his savings when he bought the handbook.” Will gestured to Val resting against my hip. “So I suspect we’d get to call this place home for another few years.”
We both surveyed the grungy office. I couldn’t help but feel as if our new headquarters were a metaphor for the whole region—soiled and falling apart—and I was the root of the problem. Fresh guilt heaped on top of my internal avalanche of failure and frustration.
The front door whooshed open with a broken-bell clank and Sam sauntered in.
“Yo, yo, yo, Will-My-Man! And Mad-Dog Madison, in the flesh.” He tossed a gesture in our direction, a cross between a wave and a finger point, and strutted past Sharon.
The receptionist’s body remained glued in place, but her head swiveled to track the swaggering teen. The quality of her stillness altered, and beneath her drab polyester pantsuit, I suspected her muscles were primed to pounce. Oblivious, Sam tossed her a wink. He tugged a black beanie from his head, unleashing a riot of carrot-red hair that emphasized the flush on his pale cheeks.
“Oh, Sam, what did you do?” Will asked, his tone caught between horror and pity.
Sam scanned his own body, admiring his brand-new jeans and jacket. Slicking his hair back with one hand, he looked up through his lashes at me, his expression a masterful and practiced blend of innocence and sin. It might have worked better if he hadn’t been ten years too young for me. Will received his own version of the look, a cocky-contrite grin topped by wide-eyed innocence.
“I’m just ridin’ high on jolly Jesus cheer,” Sam said. “It’s the Christmas season.” He stripped off his jacket to reveal a tight blue T-shirt so new it still had creases from being folded on a shelf.
I’d never seen Sam in anything remotely new. From what little I knew of his home life, he and his family lived in poverty, or at best, poverty adjacent. He could no more afford that new name-brand jacket than I could a Bentley.
I blinked to Primordium and sucked in a sharp breath.
Thick black atrum coated his hands, flaring up his arms to his shoulders in intertwining patterns reminiscent of Celtic knots. More spirals twined up his neck and around his mouth and jaw like the most grotesque facial hair design ever.
Only yesterday, the worst blemish on Sam’s soul had been a smattering of soft gray. He would have had to work pretty hard to have acquired that much atrum in a day. Or had help.
“How’s Jamie?” I asked through numb lips, following my hunch.
Beside me, Will stiffened.
“My boy is goals as fu—” Sam caught himself and gave me a cheeky grin. He dropped his beanie onto the desk in front of Will’s and took an obnoxious amount of time arranging his jacket across the back of the chair, lingering to admire it when he finished.
“You two were together this morning?” I asked, drawing his attention away from the jacket I suspected he’d “purchased” with a five-finger discount and the help of a pooka.
“Sure, sure. We hung out. Had some fun.”
“What kind of ‘fun’?”
“The kind that makes me lit.” Sam pointed to his ear-to-ear grin.
I fought to control my revulsion as atrum melted from his mouth down his chin. “Where is Jamie now?”
“Why you sussin’?”
“Just answer the question.” In English, preferably. I understood about half of what came out of the teen’s mouth.
Sam crossed his arms, his attempt to look tough ruined when he admired his own biceps encased in soft, never-washed cotton. “He said he had to fly.”
I bet he did.
“I figured he’d be back with you. Aren’t you two, like—” Sam wriggled his eyebrows, his smile shining again at full strength. “I get it. I totally ship you guys.”
My life was complete. Sam approved of me and Jamie and whatever that caterpillar mating dance his eyebrows had implied about our relationship.
I crossed my arms, ignoring the gouge of the soul breaker into my ribs and forearms. Part of me wanted to shake Sam until some intelligence broke free inside his brain, but mostly I wanted to give the boy a hug and apologize. The point of Sam being in our headquarters, under the protection of the CIA, was to wean him off his addiction to my lux lucis infusions, not so he could become Jamie’s pawn. Sam deserved better.
Brad marched from his office but stopped after two steps. He took in Sam, turned to glare at the propped-open back door, and then barked, “Will, clean him up and get him out of here. Pamela’s on her way in.”
A jolt of dread zinged down my spine, and I shuffled in place, checking the exits.
“Should I wait?” I asked.
“Only if you want to.” Brad took one last look out the front windows to the parking lot, then retreated into his office.
I bolted for the front door and jogged to my car. Will would fix Sam’s soul. He didn’t need me to hang around to watch.
Peeling out of the parking spot before I’d finished buckling my seat belt, I gunned it for the mall. If I didn’t find Jamie at the parking garage, I was screwed and so was my region.
20
Inconceivable!
Trolling for a parking spot at the crowded mall ate through my threadbare patience. I didn’t have time to waste; Jamie needed to be brought back in line yesterday. As if helping out the tyv wasn’t awful enough, Sam’s condition this morning confirmed that Jamie spending time away from me only made him worse.
I wedged my Civic between two Priuses in a spot on the edge of the mall’s grounds and marched past idling traffic, joining the flow of people streaming toward the massive shopping complex. A long outdoor courtyard jutted from the center of the mall, funneling patrons past loud-mouthed teens skating on the mini ice rink and toddlers shrieking on the all-weather jungle gym. While everyone else squeezed through the bank of glass doors into the welcoming jaws of Tiffany & Co., Burberry, and Louis Vuitton, I veered from the crush, stomping down an empty walkway between two expensive restaurants that wouldn’t open until lunch.
The narrow brick walls muffled the irritating cacophony of the courtyard, and I breathed a sigh of relief, my breath frosting the air. Ice coated the right side of the cobblestone walkway, snaking frozen tendrils toward the opposite wall. I stuffed my hands deeper into my coat pockets and watched my step, not stopping until I reached the chain-link fence blocking the far end of the walkway.
Six stories of a half-built parking garage towered on the other side of the fence. The last time I’d seen the garage, the fence had been closer to the steel beams, the whole framework had been wrapped in enormous sheets of plastic, and a handful of CIA employees had stood witness to Jamie’s birth and ou
r bonding. Today, it bustled with machinery and construction workers in bright yellow vests and matching hard hats.
My hands fisted in my pockets as I took in the scene. A giant crater at the center of the garage floor had once marked Jamie’s underground location, but it had been filled in and sealed with a thick concrete slab. Jamie had spent years—decades—under that very spot, incubating in the burgeoning atrum and lux lucis supplied by Roseville’s expanding population, and in a few sweeps of a bulldozer, all signs of his birth had been erased as if it had never happened.
The nostalgic yearning to re-create a literal hole in the ground ate at my stomach with an almost physical pain.
Hello, bond.
A scuffle of a foot against the cobblestones behind me echoed against the walls, pulling me around. Jamie stopped halfway between me and the courtyard behind him. He’d arrived in human form, his glossy black hair falling across his forehead to shadow his golden eyes. A new coat—wool, black, double-breasted—hugged his body. He’d paired it with pale jeans and bright red sneakers. My pooka had style, all of it stolen.
The bond roared to life, pulling me two steps toward him before I regained control. I dug my fingernails into my palms, using the pain to override a wild surge of protectiveness, telling myself he was dangerous and in need of a reprimand, not a hug. It didn’t work. Holding myself still and separate from Jamie hurt my heart—but not as much as the wariness in his expression.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey.”
“I’d hoped I’d find you here.” I hadn’t expected him to appear human. The drive from the office to the mall exceeded our tether range, and to keep up, he would have had to fly. He’d never been able to retain his clothes through a change before, so how had he shown up dressed?
Jamie walked past me to the fence, hooking his fingers through the links and staring at the place of his origin. His expression remained closed, but the bond had given me a good idea how the sight would make him feel. I had to cross my arms to prevent myself from reaching out to touch him.
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