The Medusa Files, Case 3: Escaped From Stone

by C. I. Black

  Her heart skipped a beat. His look didn’t mean anything. It was her imagination. Besides, she didn’t have proof she could trust him. “Tell me about the Kin who killed her.”

  Gage sighed. “And when she got an idea stuck in her head, she wouldn’t let it go.”

  “I don’t like to ignore potential dangers.”

  “And ignoring your powers isn’t a danger?” A wry smile pulled at his lips, and he twisted the silver ring on his index finger.

  “Fine. I’ll petrify the daisy if you tell me about this Kin.”

  He pursed his lips.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “So am I.”

  Jeez, he was so literal sometimes. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Yes. Partially petrify, though.”

  “Okay.” She rolled her shoulders and cracked her neck.

  “Any time now.”

  “If you’re in such a hurry, you do it.”

  “Not my skill set.”

  “What is your skill set?” she asked, unable to keep the hint of flirtation from her tone.

  “Partially petrify it, and maybe you’ll find out.”

  A spark of attraction shot through her, and she dragged her attention to the task at hand. She could do this. She was calm, focused. Just a pinprick of power.

  Heat welled in her eyes. A little bit more. Just a beam, a narrow beam, right at the daisy.

  Gage shifted, brushing her shoulder and sending a spark up her arm. The power burst from her eyes, and the daisy exploded in a shower of granite dust.

  “Holy shit.” Gage jerked forward. “I said partially, not explosively. I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “That makes two of us.” Morgan forced her power back. “So what about your skill set?”

  “You were supposed to partially petrify and unpetrify it.” He tossed another daisy a few feet from her toes.

  “Now I have to unpetrify, too? You’re changing the rules of the game.”

  “My prerogative.”

  “I’m not fond of rules.”

  “I noticed,” he said, his voice low. “But if you want information, you have to play my game.”

  “Maybe I’ll get my information elsewhere. I’m sure Lachlin would be happy to play a different game.” She let a hint of seduction into her tone, making her suggestion clear.

  “Darling, that might be too much game for you.” His words were light, but the playfulness was gone. She’d hit a nerve.

  “I’ve managed Eoin’s charm. I’m sure I can manage Lachlin’s.” But even as she said it, she wasn’t so sure. “Besides, we’ve already established he doesn’t charm his lovers.”

  “If he knows it’s a game, consider it no holds barred. He doesn’t like to be played with.” Gage’s tone turned even darker than before.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Interesting. Was Gage trying to protect her, his secret, or his team? And where did she fit in?

  “Now prove you can control your powers and I’ll answer a question.”

  “Whether I can control my powers or not, you’re still going to need to tell me about my mother and the Kin who killed her.”

  “I know.” Gage twisted his ring again. “This Kin is extremely powerful, and only your powers can stop him.”

  “And he wants me dead because of this?”

  “I don’t know.” He shifted, his gaze locked on the flower by her feet. “His name is Ander. He’s the last unbound Djinn, and save for murdering your mother, he’s laid low since the last Kin war.”

  “War?”

  “Don’t think war is exclusively a human trait. In fact, some of us are probably guilty of encouraging it.”

  “And speaking of guilt, how do we bring this Ander to justice?”

  “We don’t. The Council doesn’t want to face off against a Djinn again, even just one, and I doubt he’ll want to face off against all of Kin kind. He’ll take a lot down with him, but inevitably he’ll go down. If he’s smart, he’ll continue to lie low like he has been.”

  “Save that he murdered my bio-mom.”

  “We never got solid proof he killed her.”

  “So he didn’t kill her?”

  “I’m pretty sure he did. I just can’t prove it.” Gage leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling. “There’s a status quo to the peace, at the moment. No one wants to go back to what it was before. Too many Kin died for the sake of power. Medusa’s line was almost completely destroyed.”

  “So we have the Kin version of the Cold War, and no one’s willing to find proof to go after a murderer.”

  “I didn’t say no one was willing to find proof. I said we didn’t have any.” Gage shoved up to his feet. “Keep working on the flower.”

  “Gage—”

  “The Kin are complicated. Even with the glimpse you’ve gotten, you should realize that. Work on the flower.”

  With that, their conversation was over, and she wasn’t any closer to knowing the truth about her mom or Gage than she had been before. Yep, her day could get worse.

  CHAPTER 8

  Morgan pressed her palms to her eyes. She’d been staring at the damned flowers for hours, and her eyes burned—the sand-in-your-eyes burn as well as the fire-of-her-powers burn. Even though she’d told Gage she’d need answers whether she managed to control her powers or not, she still wanted control. And more control than just keeping it back.

  Randy had swatted her gun out of her hand like it had been a toy, and with his greater weight and enormous strength, she’d been helpless. She’d been next to helpless against magic from Trina the spellweaver and Eoin with his seductive charm, and she never wanted to experience that again. If she was supposed to be one of the most dangerous Kin around, she needed to start taking control of that.

  She brushed her palms up into her wild hair and focused her gaze on the stargazer lily a few inches from her boots, nestled in a pile of granite dust—the remains of most of the flowers from the vase. The fire in her face stuttered, hot flashes smacking across her cheeks and forehead.

  Come on. Focus.

  The inferno stuttered again, evened out, then blasted from her eyes.

  Shit.

  It slammed into the flower. She struggled to yank it back, thin it out, narrow the beam… She had no idea what she was doing. She couldn’t ‘see’ anything, only feel that it was a wide, wild blast of power.

  The lily’s petals turned gray. A hairline fissure cracked through the stem, and the edge of one petal snapped off.

  Shit. Shit. Shit.

  She wrenched her eyes closed. Her power beat against her lids. Goddamn it, she could control this.

  The fire roared within her in response.

  She gritted her teeth and growled out a breath. Control. This was her power. She was in charge of it. It didn’t matter that there wasn’t anyone around who could completely understand what she was going through and could talk her through this. This was who she was, and it wasn’t going to control her. She was going to control it.

  The fire in her face ebbed. She couldn’t imagine going through this as a teenager. Emotions, thoughts, everything had changed so much when she’d become a teen. Her parents had made it clear from the beginning she’d been adopted, so there had never been that shock of learning that her parents weren’t her real parents, but the need to move, the desire to take action had kicked in along with the need to be alone.

  She’d been heavily into sports prior to that and had dropped out of every team. Her parents, everyone had believed it was a teen thing, but now that she thought about it, it was probably a gorgon thing as well. The only sport she’d kept was distance running. It fulfilled the desire to move and, more importantly, to do it alone.

  If every Kin had a pre-power period where things started to go sideways, then how much of Randy’s crime was Randy, and how much was the turmoil of becoming full Kin?

  She’d heard some people talk about going through puberty as a type of temporary insanity. Being Kin—at least from her exper
ience—magnified that. Frost giants were more aggressive, more angry than the average Joe. Randy had to be constantly battling a rage he didn’t understand.

  Which didn’t excuse his crimes, but perhaps explained them just a little more. It still, however, didn’t help her catch him, although if her theory was correct, it did rule out Gage’s belief that the Devil Riders and Stroud were connected.

  But it was all just theory, and none of this helped her control her own power.

  She sagged back against the wall and cracked her eyes open. The lily still lay at her feet. Half of the top petal had broken off and lay beside it in the dust, and the crack in the stem had deepened but not cut all the way through. This was a first. Every time before, her power had run its course and turned the flower to dust, either slowly or explosively.

  She leaned closer. Gage had said partially petrify and then unpetrify. She needed to turn it back to normal.

  How the hell was she going to do that? Of course, she didn’t really know how she turned anything to stone, either.

  A hint of fire licked across her eyes, and a trickle slid out. The flower’s stem cracked and turned to dust.

  Not the direction she wanted.

  Another trickle slid out, and she yanked it back.

  She was too tired for this. She couldn’t concentrate, and really, she needed to be thinking about how to catch Randy. There was no way her powers were going to be reliable by the time they caught him… if they caught him. She was just going to have to keep her distance, ensure Kate kept her distance, and hope Gage and the others knew how to deal with Randy.

  But boy, would it be nice to not have to worry about killing someone just by looking at them.

  Another stream of fire slid out. Cracks ticked through the lily’s petals, so small she couldn’t see them, only hear them like a sudden frost growing across glass.

  She blew out a breath but didn’t pull the power back. If it was going to run its course, just let it. She was too tired to care.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The flower paled even more, as if it hadn’t been fully stone before. Her power eased, a steady stream, the warmth almost comforting if she didn’t think about what it was doing to a living thing. Just for this moment, while she was safe in the practice room, she could let go. She was tired of fighting it. Right now, it could do what it wanted.

  The heat across her cheeks softened. The biting inferno turned warm, soothing, comfortable, and what remained of the lily seemed to soften.

  She must be really tired. Now she was seeing things.

  A hint of pink bled through the grey.

  The frost-like snapping had stopped. She wasn’t sure when. More pink colored the petals, and yellow edged the stamens. The dark spots, like leopard print trailing toward the lily’s heart, turned brown.

  The warmth in her eyes eased, leaving her face glowing as if kissed by late summer sun. She inched closer to the flower. It looked real—with a mangled stem and tattered petals—but it didn’t look like stone.

  She poked a petal. It didn’t shatter. It flexed like a living flower.

  She’d done it.

  Somehow she’d turned the flower to stone and then turned it back. And if she wasn’t so tired, she’d run upstairs and tell Gage.

  Her phone chirped the Hawaii Five-0 theme song. Kate was calling.

  “Hey,” Morgan said.

  “Hey, you. I need coffee, or a brain transplant, preferably both.”

  “Well, the best I can do is coffee.” Morgan didn’t want to go out. She didn’t really want to get up and leave the practice room, either. But there was still a fugitive on the run, and Kate wouldn’t stop working until every possible lead dried up. And while she might not be Kate’s partner anymore, they were still best friends.

  “You sure brain transplant isn’t a part of your new skill set?”

  “Explosive petrification, yes. Brain transplants, no.”

  “I guess I’ll have to settle for coffee.”

  Morgan pushed up to her feet. “On the side of good news, though, I may have a lead on the key.”

  “Really? How’d you find it?”

  Morgan glanced at the cut on her finger. It had scabbed over. Guess it hadn’t been as deep as she’d thought. “It kind of found me.”

  “That’s starting to become the story of your life,” Kate said.

  “I don’t need a reminder of that.”

  “Let me know if it comes with another hot guy. Two is more than you can handle. A third would be impossible. As your friend, it’s my responsibility to ease your burden.”

  “If my two weren’t so dangerous, you could have them. Both of them.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  Unfortunately, she really didn’t.

  * * *

  Kate lived on the second floor of an eight-story, brown-bricked apartment building. The 1950’s structure sat on the edge of the business district and Old Town on a street with half a dozen matching buildings. Her windows overlooked the football field of a high school. Morgan couldn’t imagine spending every day constantly being reminded of high school, as much as she and Kate had had some fun times there.

  It was just after five in the morning, and the coffee machine had burbled and hissed, announcing it had finished brewing. Kate grabbed two mugs from her cupboard and filled them.

  “So our immediate problem…” Kate doctored her coffee with cream and sugar and sat at her rickety kitchen table, taking the chair with the one slightly short leg.

  “Randy Boyson.” Morgan sat in the ‘good’ chair across from her. “He’s got to be out of town by now.”

  “Except we’ve had men on all the major routes out of town: the highways, the bus stop, the train station, and the airport.”

  “All the usual suspects.” Morgan rubbed her eyes. They felt grittier than ever, and an ache throbbed across her forehead. “And all the usual holes in our net.”

  “Yep.”

  “Can’t cover even half of the back roads.” The urge to move, even though she was exhausted, wormed through her. Coffee in hand, she stood and paced from the galley kitchen to the living room window, unable to fight her gorgon-self right now. “I just—I don’t know. I feel like he’s still got unfinished business.”

  “He’s got cash, more if he’s managed to pawn the jewelry from the safe already without our noticing, and revenge. Now he needs to escape.”

  Morgan propped her sunglasses on her head. Outside, one weak orange streetlight glowed in defiance against the dark sky, lighting a path on the far side of the field. “Yeah, but I don’t think he’s thinking straight. He’s young, he’s about average intelligence, but I think he’s being controlled by really primal emotions.”

  “And I reiterate, he’s grabbed cash to run and has taken revenge on the friend who betrayed him.”

  “When I saw him at Brandon’s, he was still hanging around. If he was just out for revenge, why didn’t he start running as soon as Brandon was dead? There’s got to be something keeping him here.” God, she felt as weak and small and useless as the streetlight. Her instincts screamed Randy wasn’t thinking straight. Straight enough to organize theft and revenge, but something else was affecting him.

  “Okay, so let’s assume there is something keeping him here. What could it be?”

  “Gage thinks all this is connected to his father, Stroud, and the Kin.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think Kin might be right, but I’m not sure Stroud is involved. Randy has got to be battling the primal instincts of a fully developed frost giant now. If the pre-Kin emotions incited him to commit murder, what will the full Kin state make him do?” Morgan rubbed her face. “Why can’t I figure this out?”

  “Because you know next to nothing about being Kin.”

  Probably, but she couldn’t help but feel that maybe if she wasn’t so tired, she’d be able to see the answers. “Did Carol say anything about the attack?”

  “No. She was pr
etty out of it when she woke and could only remember bits and pieces. Nothing solid.”

  Well, that didn’t help. “Did Randy give an explanation for murdering Howard Cho?” Maybe they needed to go farther back, to when it all started, to figure out what Randy was after.

  Kate slid the case file from the centre of the table toward her and flipped it open. “Not really. His story kept changing from wanting money to how Howard deserved it to just because, and everything in between.”

  “So everyone assumed it was a burglary gone wrong and the rest was rambling?” Morgan shifted. The kitchen light behind her caught the window, turning it into a mirror. She’d retied her ponytail after Kate had called but the most persistent locks had already broken free. That softness only accentuated the sharp lines of her face.

  “Well, if he is running on instinct, what’s more primal than fleeing or revenge?”

  Morgan dragged her attention away from her reflection and slid her sunglasses back into place. There was only one thing she knew of that was stronger than flight or fight, and she was pretty sure Kin felt it, too. “What about love?”

  “Love? With who?”

  “There’s only one person all of his crimes have in common. Lisa Cho.” The image of Randy happy, hugging Lisa in the prom picture, flashed into Morgan’s mind. So, too, did the fact that Lisa had been between Randy and Brandon. “He’d said Howard Cho deserved it.”

  “Among other things.”

  “What if he thought Lisa was in danger somehow from her father?”

  “But there’s nothing to indicate that was the case,” Kate said.

  “Yes, but frost giants are aggressive. Randy’s Kin nature was just starting to manifest. It could have twisted the littlest incident into an attack on Lisa.”

  “Could it really?”

  “I locked myself in my apartment for four months and worked out like crazy. I thought I was insane, and I couldn’t sit still.”

  “You’ve always had trouble with that,” Kate said.

  “And it’s gotten worse.”

  “Really? Hadn’t noticed.” Kate raised an eyebrow, and Morgan realized she was halfway across the living room and headed back to the kitchen. She hadn’t even noticed she was pacing.