Taken

by Jennifer Blackstream

  “Ms. Kaargra is concerned that I’m up to no good. She thinks I intentionally manipulated Shaun into teleporting me and Andy into your dad’s building as some very roundabout way of breaking the terms of the contract I signed.”

  “It would have to be a roundabout way in order to get around the magic of the contract,” Kaargra snapped.

  “Ms. Renard, what business do you have with the sidhe?” Dimitri interrupted.

  I gripped the bars with both hands. “I’m working a case that involves children being kidnapped from youth centers. I believe they’re being Taken.”

  “You are investigating a sidhe for Taking children?”

  “Yes. Three children were Taken last year, and three more were Taken today.” I curled my hands into fists. “Dimitri, one of them turned up dead this morning. I have to get out of here. I have to find the other five before it’s too late.”

  There was a long silence. Long enough that I worried Dimitri had gone.

  “How did you come to take this case?” Dimitri asked finally.

  I bit back a groan of frustration and tightened my hands on the bars. “The missing-persons case I was working when your father hired me belonged to Agent Bradford. His experience with that case—specifically finding out that his missing person was a ghost—led him to wonder if more of his cases might have an Otherworld component. I’ve been helping him go over some of them.”

  “You introduced him to the Otherworld?” Dimitri’s voice rose in surprise.

  I shrugged even though he couldn’t see me. “I had a feeling.” I didn’t explain further than that. Dimitri was old enough to know the importance of a witch having a “feeling.” A witch should never ignore her instincts.

  “I see.” Another long pause. “So your Agent Bradford picked this case. The agent you had a feeling about, a feeling strong enough that you told him about the Otherworld.”

  “Yes. Well,” I said, “sort of. He picked out a few stacks of cases, and we took them to an oracle. She’s the one who chose this specific case. She must have known Matthew’s body would be found—”

  “An oracle?” Dimitri said sharply. “What oracle?”

  I snapped my mouth closed, cursing myself for the slip. Andrea wasn’t in hiding, per se, but she didn’t advertise, either. And I’d learned the hard way that most people didn’t appreciate being brought to Anton Winters’ attention. If I spoke of Andrea to Dimitri, then the information would undoubtedly make it to his father.

  “Shade,” Dimitri said, his voice sounding far more serious that I ever would have expected from the hacker. “Tell me.”

  “She isn’t involved,” I said calmly. “She wants to be left alone. Forgive me, but your father has a rather well-known affinity for seeking out oracles and prophets.”

  “Ms. Renard, I can assure you, the likelihood that you know of an oracle in the area that my father isn’t already acquainted with is very, very slim. I ask for her name only because I am curious. And if you give me her name, you can leave now to find those children.”

  “Mr. Winters,” Kaargra said. “Your father—”

  “My father is not here. I am. And I’m telling you, if she answers my question, you will let her go.”

  Kaargra squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. Mr. Winters’ policy is crystal clear. Unexpected intruders must be held for him to meet with personally.”

  Dimitri didn’t respond. Instead, a heavy click sounded at the door, followed by a red flashing light on the panel beside it. Metal clinked somewhere overhead, followed by the unmistakable hissing sound of gas being pumped into the room.

  The telepath’s determination faltered, her hands falling to her sides. “What have you done?”

  “I’ve locked you in, Ms. Kaargra,” Dimitri said. “And the holding cell you’re occupying is filling with sleeping gas. Now, you can either agree to my terms, or you can fall asleep on the job. If you choose the latter, I will wait until you’re indisposed and send someone else to release Ms. Renard. And I will put you in Ms. Renard’s cell and leave you to wait as long as it takes for someone to find you.” A camera near the ceiling made an electronic whirring sound as it oscillated to take in the entire underground jail. “I see no other prisoners, so I have to imagine it would be some time before you were found.”

  Some of the color drained from the telepath’s face.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Dimitri said, his tone almost conversational, “you can rest easy knowing that I will assure my father you released Ms. Renard under duress.”

  To underline his sincerity, the gas hissed louder, as if another burst had been pushed through the pipes. I covered my mouth and nose with my shirt as my eyes began to burn.

  “I’ll do it,” the telepath said finally, the last word almost lost in a cough. “I’ll do it. Turn off the gas.”

  “Very well. Now, the name, if you will, Shade?”

  I said a silent apology to Andrea. She would understand. She’d probably known this would happen when she gave me the case.

  “Andrea,” I said. “Her name is Andrea—”

  “I’m familiar with the oracle of whom you speak. And a deal is a deal. Ms. Kaargra?”

  The telepath tapped out a rapid succession of keys on her computer, and another electronic whir alerted me that the lock on my door had disengaged. The hissing stopped, and a ventilation system kicked on, sucking the gas from the room. Kaargra stumbled around her desk before bending down to tap the circle with one manicured fingernail.

  The magic popped, and I winced, swallowing hard to equalize the pressure in my head.

  “This way,” the telepath said stiffly.

  The angry woman marched toward the door, stalking on her stiletto heels with enough vigor that every pace reverberated off my skull and sent a fresh wave of pain over my head. That was on purpose, I was certain, but I didn’t object. She could be as petty as she wanted, as long as she let me out of here.

  We passed through the door into a sally port where a silver SUV waited with all its doors open. The same two guards from before stood on either side, their black suits so dark that they swallowed the light from the unnecessarily bright fluorescent lights above the vehicle. The dark glasses kept me from properly reading their expressions, but I suspected they were as happy as Kaargra to see me leave.

  The telepath jabbed a finger at the left passenger door. “Get in.”

  I did. The lush interior of the vehicle provided a sharp contrast to the harsh discomfort of the cell I’d been in moments ago. The leather was soft and hugged me as I sat down, as if apologizing for my earlier exposure to the pathetic excuse for a bed. I let my head fall back and relaxed into the seat. I wanted to close my eyes, but I didn’t trust Kaargra that far.

  “Don’t speak about this to your partner,” she snapped, tightening her grip on the door as if resisting the urge to slam it. “For the safety of everyone involved, I’m going to tweak his memory. He’ll be dazed when he comes out, so don’t talk to him, don’t engage him. Just leave him alone. As far as he’s concerned, that sidhe teleported you back to his SUV. All right?”

  I didn’t like the idea of her messing around with Andy’s mind, but the alternative didn’t seem pleasant either, so I just nodded. Besides, we weren’t far enough from the jail that being returned to my cell wasn’t a possibility.

  She doesn’t like you, Echo said helpfully.

  Yes, I noticed.

  Do you know why?

  I can guess. My mind is hard to read, and most telepaths assume that means I’m being deceptive. They don’t like it.

  That’s the gist of it, yes. She also genuinely believes you want to tell Andy about Anton Winters.

  I crossed my arms, reminding myself not to sulk in time to keep from huffing. I most certainly do not. I want him to trust me. Our history already makes that difficult—the last thing I want is for him to find out that I agreed to work for a criminal. A vampiric criminal.

  It w
ould be awkward if he found out your bank account was largely provided by a man the FBI would love to see behind bars.

  I shifted uneasily. I don’t know for sure that the FBI knows Anton is a criminal.

  I do. I was in his head. The vampire’s name comes up too often in other investigations. Andy doesn’t believe it’s a coincidence. No one at the FBI does.

  Before I could react to that little revelation, a door opened on the other side of the sally port, and Kaargra led Andy through it to the opposite side of the SUV. He looked none the worse for wear, though his suit had a few uncharacteristic wrinkles. His sunglasses were tucked into his breast pocket, and his brown eyes looked cloudier than usual. He climbed into the SUV without looking at me. Neither of us said anything.

  The men in black shut our doors, then climbed into their seats in front. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the glass divider that separated the front and back seats. It was heavily tinted, as were the windows in the back. I couldn’t see anything beyond a vague sense of movement as the car started and we drove away.

  The drive didn’t last more than ten minutes, but when the car stopped and someone opened my door, we were back at Shannon’s Diner, parked behind Andy’s SUV. Peasblossom stirred in my pocket, but I put a hand over it, urging her to stay inside. I didn’t think the two guards were telepathic, and if they didn’t know Peasblossom was there, I’d like it to stay that way. Not that I didn’t trust them to keep their word, but still. Pixies were so much more effective when you weren’t expecting them…

  Andy got out and moved to his vehicle, sliding into the driver’s seat and closing the door without so much as a glance back at me. He was a stoic man by nature, but this robotic attitude rubbed me the wrong way. I started to slide out of my seat, but my guard stopped me.

  “He’s in a daze right now,” he said. He offered me a hand, and I let him help me out of the SUV. “Once you get in his car and close your door, he’ll snap out of it. Act like you just appeared there, and no one has to be the wiser.”

  “He was held in a separate cell than me,” I said, not moving from my spot be the silver SUV. “Did anyone talk to him? Do anything to him?”

  The large black man stared at me, the look intense enough that I felt it through the dark glasses. “Good day, Ms. Renard.”

  “If anyone talked to him, or did something to him, it’s better I know now in case he gets those memories back.” I widened my stance the way children did when they’d decided they were not, in fact, ready to leave the playground. “You work with a telepath. I assume you know how tricky mind-wipes can be.”

  The guard shook his head. “Above my pay grade. But if it will make you get in the car, I don’t believe anyone questioned your partner. He was unconscious the entire time. Kaargra woke him up to bring him out.”

  “As far as you know,” I said.

  He nodded. “As far as I know.”

  I wasn’t going to get any more information from him than that, so I waved a halfhearted goodbye and circled around him to Andy’s SUV. The men in black returned to their vehicle, and I watched them drive off before opening my door and climbing in beside Andy. I forced myself not to watch him as I slammed my door shut.

  Just as the guard had said, Andy blinked, shaking his head as if coming out of a fog. “What the—” He stared at the steering wheel, then swiveled his head to take in the rest of his surroundings. “He sent us back to my car?”

  I put one hand on my door and the other on the center console, feigning disorientation. “Seems like it. How do you feel?”

  Andy cursed. “Never mind. We need to get to the Memorial Center.”

  “Wait, let me call my contact. He was going to track them; maybe he found something.” I grabbed my cell phone but stopped when I looked down to see I had six missed calls. From Liam.

  I called, and the werewolf answered on the first ring. “Why haven’t you been answering my calls?” Liam demanded.

  “I didn’t get them until now. There must have been bad reception where I was.”

  “We’ll talk about that later. I’m going to text you the address of a youth rec center. Meet me there as soon as you can.”

  He hung up without saying anything else.

  “Did he have any luck?” Andy asked.

  I nodded, looking down at my phone when it beeped. I copied the address into my navigation app. “We’re going to a rec center. Liam has a lead on the kids.” I frowned. I thought he’d said he was sending Blake and Sonar?

  Andy nodded. “I hope it’s good news.”

  Chapter 9

  “So this werewolf we’re meeting is a ranger. A cop.”

  I shifted in the passenger seat. “Yes.”

  Andy tugged on the sleeve of his suit jacket without taking his other hand off the wheel. I suspected the wrinkles caused by his handling by Anton’s guards were upsetting him. I almost offered to use magic to smooth them out, but he continued, “How many werewolves work in that unit?”

  “There are at least four.” I paused, a roll of unease passing through my stomach. Not four. They’d added one. “I mean, five.”

  Andy glanced at me but didn’t follow up on the correction. “You said originally we were going to meet Detective Blake, and his…” He paused, searching for the right word. “His canine partner, Sonar.”

  “Yes.”

  “But Sonar isn’t a dog; he’s a werewolf.”

  “She. And yes.”

  “Is Sonar her real name?”

  I smiled. “No. And she wears a glamour collar so everyone sees her as a German shepherd. As far as the humans are concerned, she’s a dog. She has a real name, and a human form, but even I’m not allowed to know what it is.”

  “You need special clearance for that?”

  I drummed my fingers on the windowsill. The downside of not being the one driving was I had to deal with my rather severe tendency toward motion sickness. Reading in the car was the worst, but thinking and talking didn’t do me any favors either. I unzipped my pouch and dug around for some mints.

  “It’s their way of protecting her cover. If I don’t know her as anything but Sonar, then I can’t accidentally call her by her real name. I wasn’t supposed to know she was a werewolf at all, but it’s sort of hard not to notice. For a witch, I mean. Either that or I caught her off guard because she hadn’t been expecting a witch to invite herself into a murder investigation.”

  I growled as my fingers tangled in a ball of yarn. I didn’t even knit—how the blazes had a ball of yarn gotten in there?

  “Is this the murder investigation you mentioned when I called you two weeks ago?”

  I stopped, mentally transported to that night. Sitting on my kitchen floor, surrounded by spilled soda, wondering if I’d made a mistake. If I wasn’t fooling myself playing private investigator. If a village witch was all I’d ever be. That case had almost killed me, both in the figurative and literal sense.

  The zipper on my pouch jingled as I shoved the yarn out of my way, simultaneously pushing free of the memories of that last soul-crushing case. “Yeah, that’s the one.” I squinted out the window at the highway. Orange construction cones taunted me from the distance, promising to make the short drive to the youth recreation center as long as possible.

  “You feel any better about that case?”

  I turned away from the cones but didn’t meet Andy’s eyes. “No. It still doesn’t seem right.”

  “Do you feel any pride that you followed the law and not your own opinion?”

  A humorless laugh escaped. “You don’t know witches. My mentor believes her opinion is the law.”

  “You don’t feel that way.”

  He didn’t say it like a question, but I heard it anyway.

  “If I did, that last case would have ended differently.”

  Silence filled the vehicle. I didn’t know if Andy was thinking about the case, about werewolves, or about me and my mentor. I didn’t want to know.

  “I caught them up as muc
h as I could on the cases,” I said, needing to break the silence. “If they find them, they’ll call us. If not, they’ll point us in the right direction.”

  “Let’s hope they find them.” He paused. “Anything I should know about werewolves?”

  I considered that, grateful to have more conversation fodder. “Well, werewolves vary by pack. You have some that rely on a lot of protocol and have strict hierarchy rules, then you have some that operate more like a family.”

  “And these werewolves?”

  “These werewolves operate like a military unit, perhaps because they’re cops. They’re disciplined, and if there’s trouble, you’ll see a solid hierarchy, but in terms of the day-to-day, they’re close friends who feel strongly about protecting each other, and the people in their jurisdiction.”

  “Weaknesses?”

  “Silver,” Peasblossom answered. “Silver is to werewolves what iron is to fey.”

  “She’s right,” I agreed. “Being around silver can give them anything from a headache to a mild allergic reaction, and an injury caused by silver will make them heal human slow.”

  “How fast do they heal if it’s not silver?” Andy asked.

  “Fast.” I cleared my throat. “Best not to injure a werewolf unless you have a solid means of escape, or confidence you can deliver a death blow.”

  “This sounds exciting,” Echo said from my pocket. “Take me out. I want to see where we’re going.”

  I reached into the pocket of my coat and withdrew a rubber My Little Pony. Peasblossom snickered as I set it on the dashboard.

  The pony’s plastic eyes glowed green as Echo growled. “She’s laughing at me again. I hate this thing. Can’t I ride in your mind?”

  “Echo, I’m sorry, that was all I had on me, and I can’t have you in my thoughts right now. You wanted something with a face.”

  “Don’t you have something more dramatic? The ceramic skull had a certain flair to it. This is a child’s toy.”

  Peasblossom’s snickers erupted into outright laughter.

  “Shade!” Echo whined.

  “Peasblossom, stop laughing at her, or there’ll be no more honey for a week,” I said. “And Echo, I’m sorry, but I’ve already inscribed the runes on this, and I’m not going to use more energy to repeat the process on something else when it’s likely I’m going to need all the strength I can get when we find those kids.” I didn’t add that she’d probably hate whatever else I offered. I didn’t carry a lot of objects with a face. Unless she wanted to ride in a small plastic replica of Sue the T-Rex.