Vaughn crossed to one of the plush silk chairs angled on either side of the fireplace. A real fireplace only with green ferns in it now instead of a fire.
“Stone’s going to be pissed with you,” Jaylene remarked from her place on the huge couch, one that dwarfed even the six-foot black beauty. Kelly always felt like the plain duckling around these women.
Vaughn eased herself into the chair, trying not to wince. She failed but her voice sounded more like leader Vaughn than hurt Vaughn as she waved one hand and said, “If I listened only to Stone, I’d be spending all my time in the Maryland compound, watching computer monitors.”
“Which is where you should be,” Stone growled.
Kelly jumped, never hearing the door opening again. Their instructor always moved like that. Quietly, like a big, dangerous, predator cat. Not a housecat stalking mice kind of cat.
Stone moved to where Vaughn sat. He acknowledged Kelly with a raised brow, Jaylene with a nod, but when he reached Vaughn, he lifted one hand to her shoulder and let his fingers brush against her. A move so quick it should have meant nothing. But Kelly wanted to sigh.
For a man who showed so little emotion, unless it was to kick behinds in training, that subtle action spoke volumes.
Vaughn must have thought so too as her eyes softened, her lips curled in a half smile. “I’m fine. I promise.”
Isn’t that what they’d all been saying since they’d limped back from the brawl they’d had at the Palace of Versailles? One that wasn’t even a team mission. Just helping a friend. Alex. Lot of good that did.
“Where’s everyone else?” Stone asked, looking at his watch as if he didn’t know to the second what time it was already. Patient was not what Kelly would call their instructor.
“They still have five minutes,” Kelly said, earning an eye roll from Jaylene. “What? They’re not really late. Not yet.”
“I’d have thought you’d have learned by now that there’s relative time and then there’s Stone time. The minute he walked through that door,” she jerked a thumb toward the exit leading to the hallway, “we’ve been running on Stone time.”
Kelly shrugged as she eased back down on the couch. As far as she was concerned, she could use the extra minute or two to pull her shawl of composure around her. Better that than to have another hissy fit in public. Her folks would have been appalled.
Just as it looked like Stone was going to say something, a loud knock pounded on the door. Kelly jumped up to open it.
Mandy, the last of the original team was standing there giving a who-invited-you look to the new woman who’d been at the gym and the young man who looked like he should be a junior in high school, but had stopped the two shifters.
It was the new woman who stepped forward first, brushing past Kelly as she said, “Nice to see you again, Barbie.”
Kelly had introduced herself once, even managed to get the woman to the hotel, so what was up with her tone? On the other hand, some people didn’t catch names as easily.
“My name’s Kelly.” But Kelly was speaking to her back.
“Whatever.” New Girl snagged one of the empty chairs, leaving the remainder of the couch for Mandy and the young man. Wasn’t he named after a Greek warrior? Hercules, that was it. What a strange name to give a child, but after teaching kindergarten for years, Kelly shouldn’t be surprised by names anymore. Some of them were actually very fun.
“Her name’s Kelly. Get it right.” Mandy jumped to Kelly’s defense, which surprised Kelly. Except for Carrie, and Alex, she wasn’t used to that, especially from the Latina beauty who had butted heads with Alex constantly. And that sharp, the pain of loss returned.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kelly said, wanting to soothe ruffled feathers and move beyond the grief. If this was to be their new teammate, they needed to work together. At least if they were going to continue to be a team.
She was just in the process of closing the door when Ling Mai arrived. It seemed strange that the director entered her own hotel room after everyone else. Sort of like the Queen entering the palace after all the footmen and guards. And Ling Mai was regal. Not tall, not even as tall as Kelly who was barely five feet five inches, but Ling Mai carried herself in that royal way, as if born to power and prestige.
“Good to see everyone here,” the director said, after casting a smile at Kelly. A look Kelly was used to as the school principal used to have that same expression: a combination of surprised to see you but not expecting to see you around look.
Kelly closed the door, then returned to her seat beside Jaylene as Ling Mai settled into the room’s remaining chair. The one facing everyone else—Kelly, Jaylene, Mandy and the boy on the couch. New Girl and Vaughn in the two chairs at an angle to the couch, directly in front of Ling Mai. Stone perched on the arm of Vaughn’s chair. No doubt ready to protect, as he hadn’t been able to at Versailles because he wasn’t there.
“Let us get down to business, shall we?” Ling Mai said with a faint lyricism to her words, as if an accent that had never quite been lost. Kelly had noticed the director never used contractions in her speech pattern either, which made her always sound a bit formal and standoffish. But it suited her.
“Introductions first.” Ling Mai nodded toward the new girl. “Please?”
“Nicki Yarblanski,” came the response, followed quickly by, “like I told you all in the gym before Barbie huffed off.”
Kelly had never huffed in her life. She felt Jaylene stiffen next to her and saw Vaughn raise one perfectly arched brow.
Ling Mai continued as if nothing was out of the ordinary, “Tell us where you’re from, Miss Yarblanski.”
Oh, oh, that wasn’t a good sign. The director only called a recruit by her formal name when there was trouble. Too bad New Girl didn’t know that.
“West Virginia,” came the bitten-off words, as if she was daring someone to say something about them.
“I’ve never been there,” Kelly jumped in, wanting to kick herself for being such a lightweight, but she recognized that tone, and the way the new girl sat pulled in as if hunched for a blow. Self esteem issues most likely. Or she’d been hurt in the past. Hurt badly. “What part of West Virginia?”
“Mason City, Mason County.” Nicki looked at her with a what’s-it-to-you twist to her lips. “Not that it matters.”
“That where all the football players are able to rape underage girls and post the pictures on Facebook?” Mandy asked, her tone deceptively calm. Ouch!
“Nah.” Nicki shot Mandy a smile that didn’t climb all the way to her eyes. “We don’t have enough computers in my town to be all that effective. If you’re going to be debased we post it on telephone poles or in store windows.”
This wasn’t going well. Not at all. If Alex were here, she’d be able to stop this Yarblanski woman from digging herself into a deeper hole. But Alex wasn’t here. And that was part of the problem.
“My name’s Hercules,” the young man jumped in, either knowing what it felt like to be the new kid in school, or nice enough to help diffuse the tension. “Hercules O’Brian. But everyone calls me Herc.”
“O’Brian?” Jaylene snagged the lifeline the boy offered. “Why not call you Finnegan or Taranis? At least they’re Celtic deities.”
“Guess my old woman didn’t think I looked much like a god of thunder, and my da knew all the words to the ballad.”
“What ballad?” Kelly found herself asking.
“There once was a man named Finnegan.
He had some whiskers on his chinnigan.
The wind blew them off.
And they grew in again.
Poor old Finnegan.”
The boy actually had quite a nice voice. Plus, Nicki Yarblanski wasn’t scowling anymore, and both Jaylene and Mandy’s shoulders had eased.
Nice job, Herc.
“Hercules here will be working closely with the team to create offensive and defensive weapons for us,” Ling Mai said.
“You made whatever sto
pped those shifters?” Mandy asked, disbelief staining every word. This time it was Nicki who suddenly went still and tense, more than she had been, which is why it snagged Kelly’s attention.
“Sure did.” Either Herc was a natural at deflection or self-preservation, which given the way he looked had probably kept him alive on school grounds. “And I have more devices I’ve been working on.”
“Before we get into that,” Ling Mai pulled back control of the conversation again, “why don’t you tell us where you’re from?”
“Here and there,” came the evasive reply, combined with a head duck that had his soft blond hair falling across his forehead. An effective hiding technique.
“Where were you born then?” Stone asked. More demanded, but then that was just Stone’s way. Like a bulldozer.
“I was born in Ankara,” the boy said, his voice low. “Lived in Italy, Germany, Hungary, Texas, North Dakota. All over really.”
“Air Force?” Stone asked. Leave it to a former Special Force member to pick up on the meaning of the locations.
“Yeah. My dad was Air Force.” The way he said it meant don’t ask a lot of questions.
Kelly jumped in, “I thought what you did at the gym was very impressive. But I couldn’t really see how you stopped those two.”
Herc cast her a grateful smile. “I got the idea from Spiderman,” he said, his smoky-gray eyes lighting up. Oh, he was going to be a heartbreaker this one, once he grew out of his geeky, gangly stage. Mamma, don’t let your girls off a very short leash.
“The comic character?” Stone’s question earned a hard nudge from Vaughn to which he said, “What? Just asking.”
“It’s how you’re asking.” She shook her head and turned to the boy. “Hercules … I mean Herc.”
The boy was practically drooling, which wasn’t sitting too well with Stone.
Vaughn ignored the Doberman next to her to continue speaking to the puppy across from her. “Did you really mean the comic book hero?”
Oh, the hero word went down real well with Herc as a flush lit his cheeks. Vaughn had better watch it or he’d be trailing after her. “Yeah, you know how Spiderman could cast nets from his wrists. Well, I did something like that. Only they weren’t really nets. More like a fine spray mist that could interrupt a shifter’s neurological system for a short period of time.”
“Why shifters?” Nicki asked. “Why not Weres or warlocks or other nasties?”
“Shifters are pretty nasty in my book,” Jaylene murmured.
“Then you need a new book,” Nicki snapped back.
Unsteady ground, but Kelly wasn’t sure why.
“You got a reason to tap dance around shifters?” Mandy prodded.
Nicki leaned forward on her seat but it was Ling Mai who answered, “Miss Yarblonski is a shifter.”
Chapter Nine
Kelly glanced around the hotel room, very aware of the stunned silence greeting Ling Mai’s words. New Girl was a bona fide shape shifter.
“Got a problem with that?” Nicki snarled, her gaze cutting to everyone.
Jaylene cleared her throat. “About time we get somebody with fighting power behind them,” she said. What she didn’t say was, now that Alex is gone. But Kelly thought everyone heard it.
Except Nicki, who’d never met Alex.
“Before you, Alex was the only member of our team with her own preternatural abilities as a fighter,” Kelly said to Nicki. “She was a shaman and a witch with amazing abilities to cast a spell.”
“When it suited her,” came Mandy’s quick response.
“That’s not fair.” Kelly was tired of Mandy taking snipes at Alex, especially now when Alex couldn’t defend herself. “Alex was our best weapon. Much better than my stupid ability.”
“Which is?” Nicki asked, sounding curious more than defensive. A first since she’d walked into the room.
Kelly sucked in a deep breath, though her answer still came out on a whisper. “I turn invisible.”
“What?” Herc glanced around as if trying to figure out what Kelly had said, or if she had been speaking the truth. “Like the Invisible Man?”
“Or woman, in her case.” Jaylene knocked her shoulder against Kelly to let her know she wasn’t alone.
“That’s awesome!” Herc whistled.
“It would be if she could control it,” Mandy said, keeping her dark gaze on Kelly.
Kelly couldn’t reply. Not when Mandy was speaking the truth and everyone knew it. Being able to turn invisible sounded like a great thing, but before Kelly had turned three, she’d learned that wasn’t the reality. By the time she’d turned six she’d discovered just how bad invisibility could be. And that was before she’d discovered the two doors.
“Ladies,” Ling Mai called the room to order. “We’re not here to tear the team apart. We’re here to move forward. Anyone not willing, or able to do that, may depart—now."
No one looked at Kelly but she knew this was her cue. Her put up or shut up time, as Alex would say.
So why was she such a big ‘fraidy' cat? She’d already talked to Jaylene about her concerns, and it was the black woman who told her to bring the issue to the group. So why hesitate now?
“I think we need to hear what Kelly saw at Versailles,” Jaylene broke the silence, keeping her eyes straight ahead but opening a door for Kelly to walk through.
“When?” Mandy demanded.
“The day Alex disappeared.”
A weighted silence descended on the room. The kind when someone made such an obvious social faux pas that no one knew quite what to say.
Vaughn was the one who gently said, “Alex is dead, Kelly. She didn’t disappear.”
That’s when Kelly straightened her spine and jumped off the edge. “That’s not what I saw. Alex was alive when the two Weres carried her off.”
She didn’t expect everyone to be happy with her news, but she wasn’t prepared for Stone to be the first to jump in. “And you’re only telling us this now? What about the after action report? Did that mean nothing?”
If there’d been a hole, Kelly would have jumped into it and pulled the opening closed behind her. But there wasn’t.
“You mean the meeting we had in the hospital? Waiting to find out how bad Vaughn was hurt?” she asked, her voice low but steady.
Stone still glared. “Yeah, that one. You were there. Why didn’t you speak up then?”
Kelly glanced at her hands—held so tight her knuckles turned white—before she notched her chin and aimed it at Stone. “Because you were in such an all-fired hurry to call Alex dead and bury her that I couldn’t get in a word in edgewise. That’s why.”
Chapter Ten
If Kelly thought the hotel room had been quiet before she dropped her verbal bomb, it was nothing to the strain afterwards, with gazes skittering around the room, not quite meeting before they danced away.
“Well, hot damn. You can fight.” Jaylene whistled, helping to ease the tension a smidge, but only a smidge if Stone’s granite expression was a clue.
“Explain,” he demanded. He always was the most black and white thinker of their group. “We were told she died.”
“No.” Kelly threaded her hands together in her lap to still their trembling. She looked directly at Vaughn, too afraid to glance toward Ling Mai who had been the one who’d officially announced Alex’s death. “Remember when you, Mandy and Jaylene were fighting the Weres, and someone you couldn’t see started hitting them from behind?”
“Saved our asses,” Jaylene mumbled.
“That wasn’t me,” Kelly explained. “I’m sure you thought it was, but it wasn’t.”
“But you’d become invisible.” Mandy sat up straighter. “If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
“Alex.” Kelly released the single word as a sigh.
“She hadn’t ever turned invisible before.” Mandy’s tone said she was going to be the hardest to convince. Plus, the fact she clung to the past tense of the word. To her, Alex was dead.
End of a difficult relationship.
“Doesn’t matter,” Jaylene shot down her friend. “Hear Kelly out.”
All gazes cut to Kelly. After years in front of a classroom, you’d think speaking in front of a group would be easier. But it wasn’t. Not with this particular group at least. She swallowed and thought about Alex, who needed their help. Which she’d never get if Kelly couldn’t tell everyone what she’d seen.
“It’s true. Alex was near you three, and I was farther away. Across the grass and closer to where Alex’s brother was. At least I’d assumed it was her brother.” She’d never met him but the man she’d watched change from human to wolf had Alex’s ink black straight hair, tanned skin and stunning good looks. Or he would have if he hadn’t looked so gaunt and exhausted.
Plus, three other men had him wrapped in chains. So it had to have been Van.
“Go on, Miss McAllister.” Ling Mai nodded in Kelly’s direction. Sort of like having an executioner giving you the go-ahead nod.
Kelly swallowed past the hard rock in her throat and continued. “As I said, Alex was alive when I saw the two Weres carry her away.”
“You’re sure?” Stone asked.
Kelly nodded. “The Weres said so, but …”
“But what?” Vaughn prodded.
“Alex had been bitten by her brother and was bleeding. Badly.”
“Fuck a bunny,” Jaylene breathed.
“Don’t think that’s a good idea,” Mandy shot back, but Kelly thought it was meant as a joke and not an accurate assessment. Plus, it reminded her of something Alex would say, which gave Kelly a small reason to smile.
Stone looked at Ling Mai, his expression dark and closed. “How trustworthy was the information you received about Alex’s death?”
It wasn’t a straight-out accusation, but close.
Ling Mai remained calm and poised, but then the room could be crumbling around them and the director would probably act the same way. “I would have said very trustworthy.” She then looked at New Girl. “Tell us, Miss Yarblonski, based on your knowledge of shifters, how likely is it for someone bitten by one to survive?”
INVISIBLE FATE BOOK THREE: ALEX NOZIAK (INVISIBLE RECRUITS) Page 5