She cupped his face in both hands and kissed him on the lips. “My parts appreciate your concern. Would you and your parts care to join me in that big tub?”
“Of course. You’ll need someone to wash your back.” He pulled her onto his lap as she wrapped her arms around his neck. “Are you ready, my lady?”
She kissed his jaw. “I love you,” she murmured, hugging him tightly.
“Ah, Mae. You make me your slave when you say that.”
“Not my slave,” she murmured. “My man, my lover.”
He gathered her in his arms and stood. “Your shield against the world, then. I am yours, sweet Mae.” He felt the kiss of her hot tears against his neck as he carried her to the bath, and knew he’d spoken true. He would die before he’d let Sotiris’s evil touch her.
Several hours later, they were all gathered around the conference table in Nico’s big house. It was nearly as big as the palace Nico had owned back in their own time, though only Nico and Lili lived here permanently. There were plenty of rooms for visitors and other offices, however. According to Kato, these were used by Nico’s network of agents when they were in town, although they were more often traveling around the world, seeking out magical artifacts, especially those with the potential to be dangerous in the wrong hands. There were, naturally, some that were far more dangerous than others, and it was those that Damian and Casey spent most of their time seeking out and reclaiming.
Sotiris was busy doing the same, which meant the two sorcerers were still locked in their ages-old battle. Dragan thought again of the chance occurrences which had seen him and his brothers freed as a direct result of that continuing battle. And he suspected the fates, as usual, were have a grand old time playing with their human toys.
Maeve passed him a photo at that moment. It was so blurry that it was barely discernible as a picture of anything, but it was the only image they had of Sotiris’s infernal device. It meant nothing to him, so he passed it to Kato, who sat next to him and would know far more about magical devices than Dragan.
“Can Lili clean this up?” Kato’s question drew his attention, though it was directed at Nico. Kato had considerable magical strength, which had come to him through the blood of his mother, a witch so powerful that she’d been known throughout their world as nothing more than the Dark Witch. She hadn’t intended to pass her magic to her only son, but power frequently had a mind of its own. And when Kato had left his home behind to join Nico, the magic had gone with him.
Nico was staring at the blurry photograph. “I had Lili working on it most of the night.” He looked up when Maeve made a sound of protest. “Not to worry, Maeve. Lili doesn’t need much sleep, and she prefers to work on this sort of thing at night, when there are fewer interruptions.”
“Yes, I do,” Lili said in her cheery way, as she breezed into the room and placed a sheet of paper in front of Nico, before distributing copies to the others. “That’s the best I could do—which is damn good—without erasing all useful detail. The rest is up to you guys,” she told Nico. “I’m taking an hour or two downstairs. But if you need me, call.” She glided out of the room as lightly as she’d come in, her feet barely seeming to touch the ground. Dragan didn’t remember Lili from before, but it was obvious from the way she dealt with Nico that she’d worked for him a long time. It was also obvious, to him anyway, that she wasn’t completely human. He didn’t know what she was, but it wasn’t human.
Maeve tapped the page in front of him. “Does that look familiar?”
He studied it dutifully. This sort of plotting had never been his strong suit. Give him a map and a diagram of the enemy’s forces, and in minutes, he could tell you where to deploy your forces to maximize their effect and defeat the enemy. But this. . . . He’d never say it, but it bored him. Once Nico had decided what the fucking thing did and where the threat lay, he’d rejoin the conversation.
However, his Mae was waiting for his opinion, so he studied the damn image as if it meant something to him. What he saw was a fancy box, roughly rectangular—though just barely—made of some dark wood that gleamed as if oil-rubbed, and with gold symbols and embellishments all around the top border. A knife edge shone sharp and deadly from one end, the blade made of bronze, rather than hardened steel, which told him it had been crafted for something other than fighting.
“What do you think?” she murmured, resting one arm on his shoulder, as she leaned close.
“I think your breast is very soft,” he whispered against her ear.
“Dragan!” she gasped, and started to pull away, but he held her in place with an arm around her waist and a quiet chuckle.
“What? It feels nice.”
She tsked. “You’re so bad. We’re supposed to be working here.”
“My work comes later.”
As if in support of his claim, Nico cleared his throat to draw their attention. “I need to see this in person. Or at least, the place of its making and the materials used. He must have a workroom, a laboratory somewhere.” He looked at Maeve. “You know more of his movements than any of us. Find him.”
Dragan drew breath to protest on Maeve’s behalf, but she placed a gentling hand on his arm and faced Nico directly. “He owns a few homes in and out of this country, but the one where he seems to spend the most time, based on where his calls come from, is in New York City. He always drove to the lake house in a car with New York plates and a window sticker for a private garage in Manhattan. My guess is that he has a penthouse nearby. The day Dragan and I took off, he was only hours away—I’d added myself to his locate app, so I could track him. But it’s unlikely he’s still using that cell. He’s not a super techie, but he’s smart enough to change phones. Still, if you give me a little time with my computer, I might be able to give you an address.”
Her gaze when it rested on the sorcerer was one of immense satisfaction, as if he’d tossed the gauntlet and she’d thrown it back at him. Dragan wanted to grab her up and kiss her breathless.
Nico only gave a slight smile and said, “Anything you need. You can use one of the desks in Lili’s office. That’s what they’re there for.”
“Good.” Maeve nodded once, then rested a casual arm on Dragan’s shoulder again, as if she hadn’t a care in the world.
“Okay, that’s it for now. None of you are novices at digging out information, so go dig. Anything you find, pass on to Maeve. Let me know when you have a target for me.”
Chapter Fourteen
MAEVE ZIPPED THE hoodie she’d retrieved from the SUV, then pulled on the fingerless gloves from the pocket. Dragan said Lili wasn’t human, though he didn’t know what she was. But whatever, she sure did like her office cold. It was a common complaint in offices with a lot of electronics. Engineers tended to set the temperature to suit the machines rather than the people. Guys in long sleeves and suit jackets, and women in the pantsuit version of the same, tended to do fine. But this wasn’t a formal office, and she wasn’t dressed for sub-zero temperatures. An exaggeration, she admitted, but it was still damn cold.
She and Lili had introduced themselves with an exchange of techno-babble, while Maeve admired Lili’s extensive array of computer hardware, thus establishing her own tech bona fides. She then sat down and opened her laptop, while Lili stuck a bright pink post-it with the wi-fi password on the desk beside her.
“Just in case,” Lili said brightly, leaving unsaid that the “case” was the possibility that Maeve had forgotten the password in the less than twenty-four hours since last night when she’d logged on to Nico’s wi-fi to call the hotel. As if. But Maeve smiled, and took it in the spirit it was offered. Lili was, as Hana had said, quite shy, but didn’t seem protective of her space or equipment the way some people were.
As Maeve bent to her work, she began with an assumption, with good reason, that the location where she met Sotiris for her first inte
rview had been his Manhattan office. That didn’t mean his workshop would be there, too, but if she started there . . . She began typing. It had to be close, if not in the same building.
Dragan, wonderful man that he was, had brought her hot tea and a muffin from somewhere. She hadn’t seen Lili eat anything, but someone in this damn house must eat real food. The guys all did, so Nico probably did, too. Well, Gabriel didn’t, she amended, but Hana would.
She’d snooped more than a little during her years with Sotiris, often out of sheer boredom. It had been appallingly easy to break through the security on the computer he’d kept locked in his office. As if locking away the hardware had anything to do with securing the data. It was linked to the same network she’d used when living there, and whether he knew it or not, it had regularly backed up data to an off-site storage location. It was a common safeguard, and one she herself used, albeit with a different provider. All she’d had to do was figure out Sotiris’s password and log-in and she could access all his backed-up files.
She’d been honestly disappointed at the lack of challenge involved in breaking in, and then disappointed again at what she’d discovered. Given his rather extensive collection of weird and strange things, and his shitty personality, she’d expected at least a witches’ circle of dark magic or something. But there’d been nothing but routine financial data of all sorts, including balance sheets, annual reports, tax returns from multiple entities, and a variety of other data.
Fortunately, her gaming experience had taught her that everything mattered, and even small pieces of data might prove useful when you least expected it. That piece of fruit you’d ignored could turn out to be the one bit of magic you needed to enter the dragon’s lair. So she’d backed up all that disappointing data onto her own computer, which had promptly backed it up to the cloud, so it was there for her to use now.
She scanned through the financials rapidly, not knowing exactly what she was looking for, given her new focus, but confident she’d know it when she found it. As was her habit, she considered the problem while she worked. For her, the first pass of any data collection was always more about organizing—doing a quick look at what she’d found and ranking it in terms of utility. She did the same thing with Sotiris’s files, but with the added input of what she knew about the man. She knew nothing of magic, except what little she’d learned over the last few days with Dragan. So, while keeping that avenue of research available, she focused on the data she could use more readily, and as the entries flew by, one item caught her attention over and over again. Something so simple that people all but ignored it, often paying without looking. Utility bills. Specifically, electrical.
Everyone needed electricity to power the endless electronic devices they depended on, and more simply, to light the house. It had been obvious, from even the blurry photograph, that there’d been some ordinary crafting involved in construction of the device. Basic measuring and cutting, fitting pieces together, that sort of thing. That meant electricity to cut the box parts, to etch the design, and shape the gold symbols. Although maybe that last part had been done with magic. But there was also air-conditioning, if he’d created it during summertime, which seemed likely, given the timing. And he couldn’t have done the task in the lake house, since she’d been there for all but a week or two every year, when she’d worked for him. That left the other properties he owned.
So first thing she did was pull up the latest utility bills. Geez, she thought immediately. There were a fucking lot of them. How many houses did one man need?
But okay, moving on.
She began sorting utility bills into the various properties, and eliminated the foreign properties. She could always go back, if necessary, but she was convinced he’d spent most of his time lately in New York, or very close by. His California house was ruled out next. It was obviously empty most of the time, with short visits a few times a year. And appeared to have been mostly unoccupied for all but a few weeks the previous year, which coincided with when she’d been told Sotiris had attempted to kidnap Hana.
The Manhattan penthouse seemed most likely, for no reason other than Sotiris spent most of his time there. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the very latest utility bills, since she’d done her snooping about four months ago. It had taken her that long—more than two years—to feel confident enough in the big house to break a few rules.
It occurred to her then that she could quickly verify whether he’d been living in the penthouse more or less full time by accessing the security logs on that residence. Sotiris used the same company there as for the lake house, and the same password as the panel password at the lake house, too. But when she tried to check, she discovered he’d already changed it. It didn’t surprise her that he was smart enough to do that. Or maybe he was just paranoid enough.
So, back to the utility bills and what they could tell her. She thought it unlikely that he could have constructed the box in a few weeks. Sorcerer or not, he didn’t strike her as much of handyman, and she had to figure that magical devices required precision. Looking over the last six months that she had electrical bills for, it was obvious that someone—she hoped it was Sotiris—had been using the penthouse as a permanent home. The question then was could a sorcerer have a workroom, or laboratory or whatever, in a city penthouse? Hell, if she knew. But it was worth pursuing. Because if he was living in Manhattan, chances were his workshop was there, too. She’d look at the options, too. Give them the same critical look as she had the penthouse. But she’d bet anything the Manhattan penthouse was going to be the one.
IT WAS 3:00 AM WHEN the gang, as Maeve had begun to think of them, all sat around the conference table once more. These people had the strangest hours. She knew it had a lot to do with Gabriel being a vampire, but suspected Nico was a night person at heart. She was, too, but she’d never been part of a meeting like this, in the middle of the night. Honestly, she kind of liked it.
Once everyone was settled with their beverage of choice and the chatter had finally died down, Nico pinned her with his gaze. “So what’d you find?”
Dragan’s arm was draped loosely on the chair behind her, but his fingers brushed her shoulder in silent support. She leaned back a little, just enough to acknowledge his touch, then tapped her notes into a neat pile. “First, I have a question.”
Nico gave a little smile and rolled his fingers in a go-ahead gesture.
“You said Sotiris had to have a laboratory or workroom of some sort, right?”
“Yes. The device would require considerable fabrication, in addition to spell work. But even if he simply bought a pretty box to use—which is unlikely—the magic alone would demand a secure space where he could work. Secure, in this case, meaning magically null, to keep the spells from running amok.”
“And would he have that workshop close to his residence, or would it have to be far away, like in warehouse with, I don’t know, a concrete bunker or something?”
“Close to home,” he said immediately. “The kind of magics we wield . . .” He shook his head. “You can’t trust anyone just stumbling upon them.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, concealing her sigh of relief before nodding. “I think your target is his Manhattan penthouse. I can go over the reasons why I think—”
“No need. I trust you. Okay,” he said looking around. “It’s too late to do anything tonight. Manhattan’s too far. So we’ll go tomorrow night, first thing. Gabriel, what’s the earliest you can be ready to depart?”
“Sunset’s 8:30 or so. Give me thirty minutes and I’ll be ready to go.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. Besides, it’s three hours from here to New York, even by private jet. That gives me plenty of time to,” he grinned and flashed his fangs, “power up.”
Maeve didn’t think he was talking about morning exercises. She had to fight back a smile when Drag
an played his fingers against her neck, as if to say he’d had the same thought. What an interesting adventure this was turning out to be. Vampires and sorcerers and ancient magic. She’d have one hell of a story to tell her grand—
“Dragan and Maeve, I’ll need both of you. But there’s no need for everyone else to go,” Nico continued. “Gabriel definitely, in case Sotiris’s vampire bodyguard turns up. I’d really like to know where that vamp hails from, and if he’s sworn to anyone other than Sotiris.”
Nico was still talking, but Maeve couldn’t hear it above the storm of white noise filling her head. He wanted her to go? Her? To break into Sotiris’s penthouse? What if they were caught? What would her mother—?
“Breathe,” Dragan whispered.
She sucked in an obedient breath, and immediately began thinking of reasons why she couldn’t, shouldn’t, go. She had no military training, no urban assault training. Her closest experience was a fucking paintball tournament. And why her, anyway? Nico, sure. He’d have to deal with the magical stuff, assuming they found the workroom. And Gabriel was big and strong, apart from the vampire thing. And Dragan? He brought both magic and fighting skills to the party, so he’d be able to fight off any . . . she frowned. Wait. If Dragan was looking out for the others, then who was going to be looking out for him? Maybe she needed to go, after all. He needed someone who loved him enough to cover his back, no matter what.
“Maeve,” Nico interrupted her thoughts to say. “You’ll deal with any computers we find.”
“Wouldn’t Lili—?”
“Lili’s working on a million other things. I have a lot of people in the field. I need her here. I assume you have good reasons for your confidence that his penthouse is the best target, which means you know what to look for if he’s left anything to find. And I hate to say it, but that also means you know Sotiris better than any of us. Except maybe me, and we weren’t exactly best buddies. Besides, you won’t be alone.”
The Stone Warriors: Dragan Page 24