Cipher sa-4

by Moira Rogers

  “Skip tracing,” Anna said from her position by the white board.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “We trace the paper trails. Known associations.” She drew a line between two names and capped her marker. “Hazelton has a sister with a Louisiana driver’s license, and one of the other cult members inherited her dead mom’s rental properties on the Gulf. If we track it all down…”

  “We could find where they’ve gone to ground.” Jackson rose and walked over to examine the board.

  “If they’re snatching people, they need a place to take them.”

  Mackenzie held up her phone. “Tell us what to do. Who to call.”

  He didn’t have a clue. This was Jackson’s specialty, Anna’s, anyone’s but his. He was an architect before he was a wolf, before he’d been tasked with taking care of everyone in his charge.

  He couldn’t do this.

  That’s complete bullshit. His mother’s voice, musical and determined. She’d never accepted the words from him, and she certainly wouldn’t if she were around now, with so much on the line.

  Andrew stood. “Can we find out when Patrick last spoke to Ben?”

  Anna didn’t have to check. “Four days, he said.”

  So they’d had plenty of time to find a place and hole up. “We keep looking,” he said finally. “We track down everything we can, every lead, and we check them all out.” In the absence of magic, it was all they could do.

  “How do we do that when each place could be hours away in any direction?” Miguel asked quietly.

  There was only one thing he could think of. “Wynne Albrecht. We’ll use the cult’s own tricks against them.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Her face was sticky.

  Kat dug her teeth into her lower lip to hold back a whimper. She wouldn’t break. Wouldn’t cry, and it didn’t matter that tears had been leaking out from beneath her closed eyelids for hours or days or weeks, however long she’d been handcuffed to this chair while Ben-No. She tried one of Callum’s calming breaths and regretted it, because everything smelled like salt and metal. Tears and blood, and it hadn’t been days because Julio was still slumped in the corner. He stirred from time to time, muttered sounds that weren’t quite words, but Kat couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. If he woke up, if he looked at Ben’s body, looked at her, then it wouldn’t be a dream.

  It had to be a dream. A nightmare. Something new to replace the terror of replaying Andrew’s near death over and over again. Catharsis. Her psyche spewing out the stress of the past weeks, like it did after controlled burnout. That was all it was.

  Ben was not dead. His blood was not on her face, on her body, in her hair. Just like before, just like with Andrew, only this time it wasn’t only blood but pieces of him, and Franklin wouldn’t come and save the day. Ben wouldn’t climb to his feet as a wolf because bullets didn’t remake lives, they ended them.

  Gone forever. Game over.

  No. Just a dream. Soon, she’d wake up. Wake up.

  Wake up, please wake up.

  Julio made another noise—a groggy sound that was almost a word this time—and a scream crawled its way into her throat, scratched and clawed until it burst free in one pained cry that raked across her nerves.

  This was it. This was what it felt like to break.

  “Kat.” Julio coughed and whispered her name again.

  Her irrational need for him to stay asleep vanished, swallowed whole by the desperate need to not be alone in her nightmare. “You need to wake up, Julio. It’s important. It’s really important, okay?”

  He raised his head, but his eyes were glazed and unfocused. “Where are we?”

  “In a garage, I think.” Her lips were dry, but she couldn’t wet them. Not when her face was covered in — Stop it, Kat. Stop it. “I think someone from the cult must have us. You and me and—and Ben.” Her voice broke on the name. “They shot him.”

  The words kindled no recognition, but his head snapped up. This time, his gaze focused on the chair beside her.

  On Ben.

  Julio made a low noise and jerked against the chains as he started to breathe faster. “They want the thing, right? The collar.”

  “Yes.” If they had a telepath, they would have plucked the thoughts from her head already. Or maybe they just hadn’t had one strong enough to break through the natural psychic defenses she and Ben had. It didn’t mean they didn’t have a clairvoyant…or a good old-fashioned bug. “They could be listening to us.”

  His expression didn’t change. “Did you tell them you don’t know where it is?”

  She couldn’t tell if he was lying, confused from the drugs or honestly didn’t know…and there was no way to ask. “Yes. They didn’t believe me.”

  His gaze flickered to Ben. “How long was I out?”

  “I don’t know.” Shame twisted with horror, made her queasy. “I freaked out, Julio. I’m still freaked out.”

  “It’s okay.” He looked around the room for a moment and cocked his head as if listening. The chains shook again as his shoulders flexed. He strained against his bonds, grunting from the effort, then relaxed with a curse. “They must have used magic. These things are solid.”

  “I’m handcuffed.” It was inane. Everything she said was inane, everything she thought was inane, but it was the only way to stay calm. To keep from following Julio’s gaze to where Ben sat a foot away.

  No, not Ben. Ben’s body.

  “Kat, look at me.” His tone brooked no argument. “I can’t break these chains. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Okay. Okay.” God, she would have given anything for a wisp of her empathy, for the power to reach out to him, to ground herself in his unshakable strength. “They’ve got someone here who’s blocking me. I can lower my shields, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve got me penned in.”

  “We’ll figure that out. But you’ve got to stay with me, okay?”

  “I know.” She had to get back to Andrew. If something happened to her, he’d never come back from it.

  She dragged in a steadying breath out of habit, and wished she hadn’t. So much blood, and she had to tighten her neck and shoulders to keep from turning to look at Ben. “Can you hear anything outside of these walls?”

  “Footsteps.” His expression tightened. “Whatever you have to do, Kat. Remember that. Whatever—” The door opened.

  A woman this time, not the man from before. She carried a small leather case, which she set down not far from Julio’s chair. “Good evening.”

  Julio remained silent, even when the woman took an extra chair from the corner and brought it close to his, sat down and opened her case to reveal the wicked glint of metal.

  Staged. It was all perfectly staged, straight out of a movie script, and Kat knew it was meant for her.

  Not that they wouldn’t torture Julio—with Ben’s blood dried on her skin, she believed they’d do anything —but the precise movements, the slow reveal, the sheer theatrics of it all… They were trying to fuck with her head.

  It was working.

  Kat squeezed her hands together, even though she could barely feel her fingers. “I told you, I don’t know where the collar is.”

  “Really?” The woman pulled out a thin knife, almost like a scalpel. “From what we’ve heard, you planned to take it to Wyoming. Did you?”

  They knew too much, and yet not enough. Kat’s mouth went dry. The blade looked sharp, cold. The woman kept turning it this way and that, letting it catch the light. More theatrics, giving Kat ample time to speak as dread closed around her.

  She’d seen the movies. She knew all of her lines. Quips and taunts. Sorry, I was too busy banging your mom, or something even cockier. Is that the biggest knife you’ve got? No wonder you’re overcompensating. No, that one didn’t even make sense, because it was a woman, not a man, and how in hell was she supposed to laugh in the face of danger when danger wasn’t coming anywhere near her?

  No, they’d kille
d Ben, and they’d slice Julio to pieces next. Because she was the empath, the squishy-hearted one, and she’d break under someone else’s pain.

  The scalpel dipped toward Julio, and Kat let out an embarrassing squeak. “Wait. Wait, don’t.”

  Julio growled. “Kat, no—” The blade sinking into his skin silenced him.

  Chapter Twenty

  No more than a quarter hour after Andrew’s desperate, determined phone call, a willowy blonde stood in front of him. It didn’t matter that Wynne’s body was currently in Paris—she didn’t need it to help them investigate the addresses Anna had managed to locate. She studied the satellite map Mackenzie pulled up, closed her eyes and vanished.

  Andrew paced the floor anxiously. Astral projection allowed her almost instantaneous travel, but she had to exercise care in popping in and out of her target coordinates, or she risked exposure. They were dealing with psychics, and if they thought Kat and Julio had help coming, they might not hesitate to kill them both.

  In less than ten minutes, she reappeared. “Nothing there but a vacant lot. I checked the adjacent ones too, just to be sure, but nothing.”

  The bell above the door jingled as Patrick shoved through it, a massive duffel bag over his shoulder and a smaller one in his hand. He stopped short and blinked at Wynne, then looked to Andrew. “You found an astral projector?”

  Jackson scratched his head and eyed the white board. “It’s the only way to check all these places out without splitting up in half a dozen different directions. A hell of a lot quicker too.”

  Wynne barely raised her head to smile absently. “I’m off again.” With that, she disappeared.

  Patrick swung the large bag off his shoulder and dropped it on the desk in front of Andrew.

  “Weapons,” he said shortly. “I flew private and brought everything.”

  Andrew dropped to one knee and unzipped the duffel. Just about every kind of gun he could think of lay inside, along with several intricate-looking blades. “Magically silenced like your others?”

  “Silenced, untraceable, warded ten ways to the underworld and at least halfway back.” Patrick turned to Jackson. “I know your spell wouldn’t lock on Kat, but I brought some of Ben’s things.”

  Jackson nodded. “Give me the thing he handles the most and I’ll try.”

  Patrick retrieved a laptop computer barely bigger than his hand and held it out. “This.”

  “Got it.” He retreated to his desk and the map laid across it.

  Anna beckoned Patrick over to the board. “I’ve narrowed down these possibilities. Does anything strike a chord, maybe something one of your contacts mentioned?”

  “Not Tennessee,” Patrick said at once, pointing to an address south of Memphis. “Not Georgia either.

  But I got hits on movement in Mississippi and Louisiana… I tried to get a guy on those bank accounts, to follow the money, but I’m used to having Ben.”

  “Either they’re still traveling or they couldn’t have gone far,” Miguel observed.

  It all depended on what they wanted—information, or something far more violent and personal.

  “Closer means less time,” Andrew told him. “They’d have to consider that we might—” His breath cut off as magic whooshed through the room and lifted the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

  He turned to find Jackson’s entire desk awash in golden, glaring light. Even after it died down, the wizard stared at the map in confusion, his brows drawn together.

  It was Sera who spoke, her voice soft and worried. “Jackson? Was the computer warded? Kat has a ward on one of her laptops…”

  “No, it’s…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Are any of those addresses up near Covington or Goodbee?”

  Anna whirled and snatched up one of the files. “Yes! A foreclosed farm in St. Tammany Parish. The motherfucker’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  Andrew’s knees wobbled, and he grabbed the edge of a desk. “That’s it?”

  Jackson began to hurriedly fold the map. “That’s it.”

  Mackenzie shoved her phone into her back pocket and turned to Sera, who’d already reached for her jacket. “You’re staying here, honey. Someone needs to wait for Wynne, and you know what’ll happen in a fight.”

  The coyote tensed, anger flashing across her face, chased quickly by frustration. “It’s Kat.”

  “It’s Kat,” Mackenzie agreed. “Which is why we can’t have you underfoot, giving our instincts hell.”

  Sera jerked her coat off the desk and looked at Andrew. “I’ll stay in the car. I just…I can help. We can leave a note for Wynne.”

  He couldn’t imagine being left behind with his friends in trouble, and the pleading look on her face was one emotional straw too many. “You stay in the car and stay down, for Christ’s sake.”

  She nodded with the blind obedience of a submissive shifter, so effortless he knew it was instinct. As Sera slid into her coat, Mackenzie gave him a searching look, then turned to the white board and scribbled a note with the address.

  It couldn’t be more than fifty or sixty miles, less if they crossed the lake over the Causeway, but the thought of getting stuck in traffic on the bridge with no way out of it…

  No fucking way. He hit the door, shouldering it open. The glass wobbled in its metal casing, maybe even cracked, but all Andrew could think of was getting out of the city.

  Getting to Kat.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Julio didn’t scream.

  He gritted his teeth. He clenched his fists. Kat felt every slice like it was cutting into her own skin, and she was crying long before the first tears of pain leaked from the corner of his eyes.

  But he didn’t scream.

  Kat did. Ten minutes, twenty—she didn’t know, and she couldn’t keep track, but it didn’t take long for her begging to give way to fury. Julio healed fast, his skin closing up to present a fresh, unblemished surface, if you could ignore the blood. She screamed as her fear turned to rage, as pressure built until the constriction of the psychic barriers locked around her turned claustrophobic.

  She couldn’t get enough air, and maybe that was what broke her. Suffocating while Julio suffered in silence, and when she finally snapped, the truth tumbled from her lips in a tangled rush. “We destroyed it already, it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  The woman froze, leaned back carefully out of reach of Julio’s teeth and eyed Kat. “I don’t believe you.”

  Of course not. Too little, too late, and she didn’t know if it was brilliance on her part that she’d managed to confuse the issue so thoroughly, or if the truth would be what got them killed. “Why would we keep it?”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” the woman demanded in turn, rising from her chair. She snatched up the bag and stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

  A rough noise vibrated out of Julio, and it took Kat a moment to recognize it as a rusty chuckle. “You like to piss people off,” he rasped.

  If she started laughing, she might never stop. Blind hysteria wasn’t an option. “I don’t try, it just happens.” There, a joke. They were back on script.

  Then Julio coughed, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Use it,” he said finally. “You do what you have to do, I mean it.” Then his head rolled forward until his chin rested on his chest, and he went still.

  Her heart stopped.

  “Julio?”

  No response, and panic swelled until she realized his chest was moving. He was breathing. Slow and shallow, but he was breathing, damn it, and Kat counted the breaths. Counted ten, and then started to worry that they were too slow. She tried timing them, but keeping track of the seconds in her head and the breaths on her finger felt as natural as patting her head and rubbing her stomach, and as useful.

  So she counted, as her body ached and terror settled around her. Every ten breaths she said his name and got silence in reply.

  All of the guilt seemed stupid now. She’d spent so much time cursing her gift and punish
ing herself.

  She’d wallowed and moped and done everything but etch emo poetry into her arm, because she was so dangerous and so dark. Now she was handcuffed to a fucking chair, locked into her mind, and she’d give anything for a spark of that deadly power.

  She’d never felt so helpless in her life.

  Julio’s chest rose and fell three hundred and seventy-four times before the door opened again to reveal the woman, returning with her damned bag. She laid it at Julio’s feet and slapped him once to rouse him.

  When it didn’t work, she frowned, sat and retrieved a larger knife, one with a serrated edge.

  But instead of applying it to Julio’s flesh immediately, she cast a glance at Kat. “None of the others believe you, either.”

  Then the sharp teeth of blade bit into Julio’s shoulder, he jerked awake with a muffled grunt—and Kat felt it.

  Not garden-variety human empathy and not her imagination. Her power, his pain, so clear she jerked and stared at her arm as a choked groan escaped her. Her skin was unmarked, but she felt the next cut just as deeply, so bright and hot that she threw herself instinctively outward, battering against the prison that had become a trap. Emotions could come in, but she couldn’t get out.

  Not even when the torture began in earnest.

  Maybe it was a blessing that she’d already screamed herself hoarse. Her own whimpers would have been a distraction from marveling over how Julio could feel this much agony and not make a sound.

  Maybe he was the god that Sera painted him in her weaker moments, when she got drunk on too much vodka and explained to Kat in agonizing detail that Julio was the sort of man a girl drowned in because he wouldn’t let anything happen to her ever again.

  Sera was never going to forgive Kat if Julio ended up with a bullet between his eyes.

  Kat shivered. Shivered hard enough to rattle the handcuffs against the chair, because it was so damn cold she couldn’t feel pain anymore. Just the beautiful numbness that brought back memories of the last time she’d been helpless while a man bled for trying to protect her.