“What happened?” Vanessa said from the end of the hall, and I could see Gran behind her, both of them drawn by Kori’s shout. Or maybe by my own heartfelt objection.
“I don’t know.” Kori stuck her head out of the closet and Kris pushed her aside so he could step into the hall. “I tried to travel, and nothing happened. It’s like the shadows are locked. We ran into the fucking door.”
Gran burst into laughter, then headed back into the kitchen, and briefly, I wondered what she’d heard that I hadn’t. Did Alzheimer’s make unfunny things sound funny?
Van turned from Gran back to Kori, frowning. “Has that ever happened before?”
“No,” Kris and Kori said in unison.
“Maybe you’re just tired,” Ian said, joining the rest of them in the hall.
Kori nodded. “I’m going to try it again.” She stepped into the closet alone and closed the door as I backed slowly, silently into the living room. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, but I was almost sure I’d done something. I’d felt it, right after I kicked the door. Maybe if I removed myself from the situation, things would go back to normal.
I sat on the couch, staring down the hall at Van, Ian and Kris as they watched the closed closet door. A second later, another thud came from within, and this time the string of expletives Kori shouted could have singed the hair off a sailor’s butt.
She tried to travel from the closet twice more, getting angrier and angrier with each failure before Kris insisted she give him a shot.
He ran into the closed door so hard he came out with a nosebleed.
I tried not to laugh. I really did.
After that, they turned off the lights in Gran’s bedroom—including the infrared bulb—and tried to shadow-walk from there, with no success. Then Ian called up the darkest darkness he could manage, and they both tried to travel through that, to no avail.
That’s when Gran stepped into the living room with a bowl of chili in one hand, a full spoon halfway to her mouth. “All three of you owe Sera an apology. Maybe once she gets it she’ll take us out of lockdown. Though I wouldn’t blame her for keeping you here, considering that’s exactly what Kris did to her.”
I gaped at Gran, wondering how she knew what I still hadn’t figured out. But she only shoveled that first bite of chili into her mouth, then laughed around it on her way back into the kitchen.
When I turned, four sets of eyes were staring at me. Kori looked beyond pissed off. Kris looked confused and a little wary. Van and Ian looked fascinated.
Kori rubbed the fresh bruise on her forehead, frowning at me expectantly. “What the hell is she talking about?”
I could only shrug. “In the two days I’ve been here, I’ve understood very little of what that woman says.”
“Gran, how old am I?” Kris stared over my head into the kitchen with a bathroom rag pressed to his dripping nose.
“What kind of dumb-ass doesn’t know his own age?” she called back, and wood creaked as she settled into the far chair at the table—I’d already grown to recognize the sound.
“My kind. How old am I?”
“Thirty, last May. Do you need a fucking diaper change, too?”
Vanessa laughed, and Kori rolled her eyes.
“Just checking.” Kris’s gaze settled on me again. “She’s coherent, which means she knows what she’s talking about. What the hell did you do?”
“I don’t know. I swear. I just...didn’t want you to walk through the shadows without me, and the next thing I knew, you were running into closed doors. Repeatedly.” My gesture took in the bloody rag he still had pressed to both nostrils.
Evidently I was the only one who could see the humor in the situation. Probably because I was the only one who kinda wanted to see Kris bleed. Just a little.
“Gran, what do you know about this?” Kori stomped past me to stand in the kitchen doorway, where she could see everyone all at once.
“More than any of you, apparently,” Gran said, and I shimmied sideways past Kori and into the kitchen, where Gran gave me a conspiratorial wink. As if we were in cahoots about the whole thing. Then she turned back to Kori. “If you want information from me, you better dig up some fucking manners, young lady.” Gran took another bite of chili, and I decided then and there that Alzheimer’s or not, she was the coolest grandmother ever.
I’d never even met any of mine.
“Gran.” Kris sank into the chair across from her. “We’re trying to go after Kenley. Remember? We need to get this fixed. Now.”
“Please tell us,” I added.
This time Gran looked surprised when she met my gaze. “You don’t know?” I shook my head and she turned back to her audience, and I could tell by her solemn expression that she now understood the stakes. “Sera’s a Blocker.”
“No, I’m a Jammer.” That was one of very few facts I was sure of.
“What the hell is a Blocker?” Kori asked, and everyone else looked just as clueless.
“It’s a myth, that’s what it is.” Gran dropped her spoon into her bowl and pushed it back as Kori and Van sank into the chairs on either side of Kris, who kept looking at me, then looking away when I noticed. Ian and I stood against the wall, on opposite sides of the doorway, and every gaze in the room was glued to Gran. “I’ve never actually met one,” she continued. “Most people don’t believe in them.” She shrugged. “But then, most unSkilled don’t believe in Skills, either, so who the hell are we to say what’s real and what’s not?”
No one had an answer, but she wasn’t really looking for one.
“Sera’s real, and she’s a Blocker.” Gran leaned back in her chair, easing effortlessly into that instruction-mode only perfected by raising children. My mother had done it well. “My grandmother always told me that blocking was a piggy-back Skill—that it only manifests in someone who already has a primary Skill. I’m guessing she was right, considering that you’re a Jammer, too.”
I nodded.
“So, she can block other people’s Skills?” Kris asked, and I knew he was right the moment I heard the words. That’s what I’d done. I’d blocked his ability to travel. I’d kind of mentally bumped both him and Kori and knocked their Skills out of alignment. Or something like that.
Gran nodded. “My grandmother theorized that there were more Blockers out there than anyone really knew. Her idea was that most of them never discover the piggy-back Skill, because they don’t know they can do it, and they stop looking for abilities once their primary Skill manifests.” Gran shrugged, and her steel-colored hair caught the light. “Maybe she was right. Maybe Sera never would have discovered she could block you if she hadn’t really wanted to keep you here.”
Everyone was looking at me with a certain kind of aggravated respect now, and I would have thoroughly enjoyed that...if I’d intentionally done the thing they respected.
“She can take it back, right? She can just...turn our Skills back on?” Kori looked to me for an answer and when I didn’t have one, she turned back to Gran, who could only shrug.
So we tested it out. Kori tried to travel out of the front closet for at least the fifth time in the past quarter hour, to no avail.
“I’m sorry,” I said when she emerged angrier than ever. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t even know how I’m doing it. I just...don’t want you guys to go without me.”
“That’s it.” When we all turned to look at him, Ian wore a quiet smile, but it appeared to be all for me. “It’s just like Kenley and binding. She has to truly want to break a binding, in order to remove her will from it, and you have to truly want us to go, for us to be able to leave.”
“But I don’t want you to go without me.” Kris and Kori started to object, but I cut them off. “Arguing isn’t going to help. And I’m not going to feel guilty for insisting that you treat me like an equal. I may not be able to shoot the wings off a fly at forty paces, or whatever, but I can do things none of you can do. Useful things. So...either let me join in your reindeer ga
mes, or it looks like no one’s going to play.”
Vanessa chuckled. “You’re going to have to take her with you.” She shrugged. “At least until she learns how to control the blocking. That’s how it works for all Skills, right? They take practice to control?”
Kori nodded reluctantly, and Kris looked almost amused. “I have to admit, that’s impressive.” He grinned as if he’d forgotten about the night before. About how kissing me was a mistake. “Your psychic temper tantrum put the lockdown on this entire house.” He turned to Kori and Ian before I could object to the characterization of something I couldn’t yet control as a child’s fit. “Maybe we need her with us after all.”
Kori didn’t look pleased and Ian seemed reluctant to put me in any more danger—they all did, since they’d found out about the smiling man’s knife and the weeks I’d spent in the hospital. But when neither of them could think of a logical reason to object, I knew I’d won.
A minute and a half later, Kris and I stepped out of the hall closet and into a small, dark bathroom in the warehouse on Sycamore Grove—the only patch of darkness in the whole building. Kori and Ian stepped out of the deep shadows behind us a few seconds later, and we tiptoed toward the line of light we could see beneath the door.
Kris opened the door carefully, and when no one burst in aiming guns at us, he pushed it the rest of the way open. Then nearly choked on shock.
The rest of us peered around him, and my entire body went cold when I saw what was waiting for us in the hall, facing the door we’d just opened in the only dark spot in the building.
A spot that had been left dark for us on purpose, I realized, as I stared at what Julia Tower had left behind.
Ned-the-guard. Dead, with a neat-ish hole in the center of his forehead. Nude and propped up in a sitting position, with a paper note safety-pinned to the flesh above his heart. His dead eyes stared up at us, and I knew what he was meant to be even before I read the note, which appeared to have been written in blood. Probably his.
Ned was a message from Julia Tower. To me.
I should have known she’d kill him if he was no longer useful to her. And if she knew I had set him free, then she knew I’d figured out exactly who I was and what I could take from her.
Pretense was over. The battle had just begun.
Only one of us could survive.
Fifteen
Kris
“Oh, shit...” I tried to block the dead man from Sera’s line of sight, but I could tell by her suddenly rapid breathing that she’d already seen. She tried to push past me, but I refused to move. I’d already lost Kenley by letting her rush into an unknown situation, and I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. “Wait!” I whispered when she wouldn’t stop shoving. “It’s probably an ambush.”
“Bullshit.” Sera didn’t even bother to whisper. “They obviously knew we were coming—this was left here for us. If this were an ambush, they wouldn’t want us to know they knew we were coming.”
I had to think about that for a second; however, once I’d untangled her sentence, I couldn’t argue with it. But caution never hurts.
Kori and I fanned out for a quick search of the four other rooms emptying into the hallway, while Ian and his gun—fortunately, he’d been shot in his left shoulder—stood guard over Sera.
When we were sure the immediate area was deserted, I motioned for Ian to let her out of the men’s room. Sera shot an angry glance at me, but I was starting to get used to those. And I refused to feel guilty for trying to keep her safe. Angry-Sera was better than dead-Sera any day of the week.
Although agreeable-Sera would have been a nice change.
She knelt by Ned’s body, and when Kori and Ian took up posts on either side, I knelt with her to read the note pinned to the dead man’s bare chest.
His blood is on your hands.
“That’s Julia’s handwriting,” Kori said, and I looked up to see her staring at the note as if she’d seen a ghost. “She doesn’t usually get her hands dirty, but this time I’d bet my last drop of vodka that the bitch pinned it to him herself.”
“But how is his blood on our hands?” Sera said. “We let him live.”
Kori snorted. “That’s what got him killed.”
Sera stood and covered her face with both hands, then ran her fingers through her hair. Her hands were small. They looked softer than Kori’s and more feminine, with short rounded nails instead of bitten stubs. I wanted to touch one of them. Then she dropped them, and for a second she was looking right at me—until that seemed to make her uncomfortable and her gaze found the corpse again.
I tried not to be offended that she’d rather look at a dead man than at me.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, obviously collecting her thoughts. Trying to mentally move past the dead body. “My guess is that if your sister was ever here, she’s gone now.”
“Kenley was here.” I was sure of that. “They knew we’d figure it out, after talking to Ned, so they moved her and left him here for us to find. Unless you think Julia left us a rotting welcome gift at every warehouse we might think to search?”
Sera shook her head and I watched her, studying her intense focus. “You think Julia killed Ned because he didn’t kill us? Or because she knew it would upset you? Or because he told us they moved the blood farm to a warehouse?” It was a trick question, intended to test her growing understanding of syndicate life. The answer was: D. All of the above. Julia had killed him because she could.
“He’s dead because she doesn’t know what he told us,” Sera mumbled, rereading the note for at least the hundredth time, and I shook my head.
“Julia Tower is a Reader. The only way to keep her in the dark is to say nothing, and Ned didn’t have that option. He was bound to her.”
Sera started to argue—I could see it coming before she even opened her mouth—then seemed to think better of it. “Either way, they obviously knew we were coming. My bet is that this place is deserted.”
“Or they want us to think this place is deserted, so they can ambush us when we search it.” The warehouse was a trap. It had to be. If Julia wanted us dead—and she did—and knew we were coming—which she did—why not take advantage of the opportunity?
“Okay.” Kori glanced from Ian to me. Sera looked miffed that she wasn’t being consulted about the plan. “This hall has two exits.” The only two doors we hadn’t checked, because they were locked. “You two go left, we’ll go right. Stay together. If it gets dangerous, go home. Immediately.”
Ian could make his own shadows for them to travel through, but I’d have to destroy the infrared lighting grid for a chance to travel. “This isn’t my first rodeo,” I reminded her.
“Well, it is hers.” Kori shot a pointed glance at Sera.
“What, the last mostly deserted building doesn’t count?” Sera demanded softly. “If I hadn’t seen that guard in time, Ian would have been hit in the chest, instead of the shoulder.”
My sister scowled. “And if you’d known how to disarm him, Ian wouldn’t have been hit at all.”
“If I haven’t already thanked you...thank you,” Ian said.
Kori turned toward the door on her end of the hall and he followed her with a reassuring smile at Sera.
“Is your sister always so bossy?” Sera whispered as we headed toward our locked door.
“Yeah. We let her think she’s in charge, because it’s easier than arguing with her. But if her way isn’t the best way, I do things my way.” I shrugged and leaned closer to whisper near her ear, hyperaware that Vanessa’s strawberry-scented shampoo made Sera smell like she might actually be edible. And I wanted a taste. “Sometimes I do things my way anyway, just to watch her head explode. Though I usually save that for when the cable goes out and everyone’s bored.”
At the end of the hall, I tried the doorknob one more time, to make sure nothing had changed. It was still locked. I glanced back just in time to see Ian pull a deep column of darkness out of nowhere for them
to step through, then I holstered my gun and took a longer look at the door and lock.
It was an interior commercial door. Aluminum and hollow, with a standard doorknob lock. Easier to kick open than to shoot.
“Stand back,” I said, and Sera backed up to give me some space. Two heel kicks to the left of the knob, and the door swung open with minimal noise and no real mess.
I stepped into the dark interior office beyond and did a quick security check, then motioned for Sera to follow me inside. Though the only visible light came from an open supply closet, I could feel the infrared grid blazing above me, rendering every shadow shallow and useless.
The office held two metal desks, each with the drawers open and emptied. A laptop power cord trailed across the surface of each desk, but the computers themselves were gone, along with whatever information they’d contained.
The wall opposite the door I’d kicked in held a long glass panel overlooking the warehouse itself, a good six feet lower than the rest of the building. A quick glance inside showed that it was empty, too, except for a couple of abandoned medical gurneys and several scraps of tubing, IV bags, and other medical supplies on the concrete floor.
“They left in a hurry.” I crossed the room, toward the entrance to the warehouse. “Maybe that means they’re still setting up the new place.”
“Or that they already had it ready, just in case.” Sera followed me down the steel grid stairs into the body of the warehouse. There was a set of bathrooms on the far side of the huge room, both doors standing wide open, but other than that, I saw nowhere for anyone to hide.
“So, what?” She ran one hand down the length an abandoned gurney, and I wanted to tell her to stop—that there was no telling what she could catch. Then I remembered that Tower’s victims weren’t sick. They were kept unconscious for ease of handling. “They strap these poor people to the bed and drain them?” Sera looked horrified all over again now that she could see a little of what Jake Tower had started and his sister was continuing. “A little at a time, or all at once?”
Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel) Page 24