Cipher

by Moira Rogers

  Kat froze, the seatbelt clutched in one hand. “Derek and Nick—” Oh shit. The faint hurt of not hearing it from her cousin personally was swallowed up by a far more intense emotion—sympathy. “Nick is going to kill him before it’s over. Derek has turned overprotectiveness into an extreme sport.”

  “Apparently, she’s fine but doesn’t feel great, so he’s freaking out.”

  That was Derek. “The first time I got the flu after he became my guardian, he took me to the clinic three times. Franklin finally had to tell him he was doing more harm dragging me back and forth than he would be by letting me puke my guts out at home. And that was before he got turned and got all the crazy shapeshifter instincts.”

  Andrew closed his hand around hers. “He’ll call you after he settles down. Alec only told me because there are rumors floating around already, and he only knows because Derek’s been asking Carmen for advice.”

  This time the spark of need was quiet enough to give her hope. Touching Andrew was magic, but maybe there’d come a time when it wasn’t too much magic. “I know. Derek doesn’t call me when he’s worried.”

  “‘Worried’ might be putting it mildly. I talked to Derek after the problems Michelle had with her pregnancy. I know he was concerned, especially since Nick and Michelle’s mom died in childbirth.”

  It probably didn’t help that Nick was tiny. Kat towered half a foot over her, and Derek was even taller. Child-birthing hips had never sounded like a compliment, but it suddenly didn’t feel so bad to have them. “Nick’s going to be okay, though, right?”

  Andrew fastened his seatbelt and started the engine. “From what I could gather, Carmen seems to think it’s no big deal.”

  “Okay. Then I guess that can go on the worry backburner. Except I really can’t call him and tell him I’m getting shot at by possible cult members.”

  “Which is why I didn’t bring that part up. If this thing gets to the point where we can’t handle it, we’ll get some help. Until then, we’re on our own.”

  The moment of truth, then. Time to deal with her shit like a grown-up, without having to worry about everyone she knew tripping over themselves to shield her from unfortunate truths. Sliding her hand to the bag, she traced the hard edge of the zip disk. “Then let’s go find out what we’re dealing with.”

  Chapter Nine

  They found the zip drive and appropriate cable in a stack in the corner of Alec’s home office, but one thing was conspicuously absent. “No power cord.” Andrew’s frustration boiled up. “Do you see one anywhere?”

  Kat lifted a tangled mess of cords in her fist. “Only about twenty of them. I’m guessing he puts every cord he finds in this box and forgets it.”

  “Damn it.” He angled the blue case toward her and tapped the front. “Check for the logo first.”

  She glanced at him, both eyebrows raised and her head tilted at an angle that almost screamed, No, really?

  It felt good because at least it wasn’t guarded, and he choked back a laugh. “Okay, Ms. Expert. You’ve got this. What do you need me for?”

  “Just stand there and look pretty,” she muttered, taking the drive from him. Two minutes and nine cords later, she let out a whoop of victory and shifted to her knee. “Got it, just have to plug this in now…”

  He stepped back to give her room. “If it doesn’t work, are we heading back to Birmingham to visit Ben?”

  “Mmm. We could, but he’s really better if the data’s encrypted or corrupted. He won’t be able to pull it off a disk that’s not connected to anything.” She plugged in the drive as she talked, every movement quick and efficient. “Honestly, I don’t really know how it works, and God knows I’ve tried to figure it out. Something with electricity though. Having a signal. He needs a way in, like a network or an access point.”

  It made Ben sound like a comic superhero. “He’s wireless?” Andrew asked, amused.

  “Uh-huh.” Kat scrunched up her nose, the look she always got when she was trying not to laugh. When she leaned forward to reach one of the cords at the rear of the computer, her ponytail slid away from the back of her neck, revealing the vivid black ink twining up toward her hairline.

  He stared at the ink for a moment before dragging his gaze away. “How likely is this information not to be somehow encrypted?”

  “No clue.” Powering up the computer resulted in a buzzing whir, clearly loud enough that even Kat heard it. She frowned as she turned on the monitor. “I guess it depends on if my mom put the data on there, or had someone else do it. She was okay with computers, but I was fixing her hosed SMTP settings by the time I was nine. I doubt she was messing with data encryption.”

  Apparently, she’d been tangled up in a lot of things Kat hadn’t known about. “Only one way to tell, I guess.” He gestured to the drive. “Look and see.”

  Kat made a noncommittal noise as the screen came to life, the boxy operating system at least five years out of date. Instead of navigating the windows, she pulled up a command line and stared at the blinking white cursor, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

  Her heart beat too fast, and the shallow, quick breaths she drew spoke of real fear as well as nervousness. Andrew slid his hands over her shoulders and leaned down to speak. “I’m right here. I’m with you.”

  “Thank you.” The words trembled, almost as badly as her hands as she began to type. Slowly at first, then with growing confidence, too fast for him to follow what she was doing as blocks of text scrolled past in response to her short commands.

  It took a few minutes, her shoulders growing tenser under his hands. Finally she cursed softly. “There are a ton of files. No extensions, no fucking clue what they are. But I can get at them, at least. Transfer them and send them to Ben. The only one that’s different…” She typed something, and a plain text file popped up.

  A letter.

  Katherine,

  If your father gave you this letter, it means I didn’t survive to see you turn twenty-one.

  What I’m doing now, I’m doing for you. I need you to understand that I believed in this cause. Our world is broken. Spell casters and shapeshifters scorn us, use us, hurt us and discard us. Psychics have huddled together and bowed their heads for decades, as if our powers mean nothing. They told me they were working to change that, and I believed them. I fought for them. I killed for them.

  I know that can’t be easy for you to see. What you are is why I have hope for you. The more powerful you grow, the more you understand the suffering of those around you. Maybe your empathy will keep you from denial. I convinced myself I wasn’t hurting people who didn’t deserve to hurt. I believed I was building a world where you could be powerful without needing to be brutal. Instead I helped create a world where your power can be used against you.

  If I die, it’s because I fought to stop that. I can’t look in your eyes and know I helped make a weapon that could turn you into a killer.

  I know the lessons I’ve already taught you seem harsh, but your life will be hard. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the risk of passing this legacy on to a daughter. Your uncle’s too afraid to have another child, afraid that he’ll have a daughter and pass the Gabriel curse on to her.

  But I can’t regret you. I love you more than anyone or anything on this earth, and there’s nothing I won’t do to keep you safe from my mistakes.

  Your heart is so big, I still have hope you’ll forgive me for them.

  Mom

  An emotional bomb, with so much that could either hurt Kat or set her free, and Andrew’s eyes zeroed in on one word: weapon. No time to feel guilty about that, not when Kat drew in a shaky breath and came to her feet in a jerky, uncoordinated movement.

  She ducked under his hands and took a few steps away, leaving him staring at her back as the sound of her heart pounding thundered in his ears. “Whatever I am is so terrifying that Derek’s father wouldn’t have more kids. And Nick’s pregnant.”

  If he let her continue down that path, give in to t
hose thoughts, he’d lose her. “Kat, stop. You don’t know that’s true. Even if it is, your mom…” He struggled to find the right words without hurting her even more. “Your mom had shit going on. Do you blame him for being scared? It had nothing to do with you.”

  “I don’t blame anyone for anything. I can’t.” She pivoted so sharply her hair whipped around, and the gaze she fixed on him was just short of wild. “Don’t you get it, Andrew? I get all the noble suffering of a martyr and all the guilt of knowing I wouldn’t be so damn selfless if I could keep everyone from shoving their pain down my throat until I give them whatever they need. I’m a fake. I want to be selfish.”

  “You want a choice in the matter. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  Color filled her cheeks, and the room pressed in on him. Anger—helpless, bitter anger, and not his own. “Why not? Why doesn’t anything make me a bad person? Not being selfish, or petty and jealous? I killed people, and all anyone can do is rush to tell me I’m not a bad person. Am I a bad person if I’d do it again?”

  He didn’t stop to think, to analyze. “Maybe so. Maybe that means you’re just as low as the rest of us, and that’s the part we can’t stand.”

  Silence. Her fists clenched, and she shook her head. “I can’t live up to that. You want me to be happy and loving all the time, and no one can be that.”

  “It’s not about not wanting you to bum me out, Kat.” Everything between them had always been so fucking hard to explain. “If you think people aren’t worth saving, I believe you. You see inside them, know what they’re hiding way down at the core. You of all people have to think there’s something good here, or what the hell are we all scrambling so hard for?”

  “Oh, Andrew…” For a moment she seemed at a loss. She crossed her arms over her chest—not an aggressive stance, but a defensive one. “It’s not… People are worth saving. They’re petty and confused and so many of the horrible ones are only afraid. Like me. I’m petty and confused and afraid.”

  “I don’t need you to be perfect,” he said again, the words a harsh grind in his throat. “I need you not to think it’s all a total loss, including—no, especially you.”

  Her gaze slid past him. Fixed on the computer. “I need to know what I am. What’s in my genes that turned my mother and all the other women in our family crazy, and whether it’s going to do that to me. Or Derek’s kid.”

  “You need to know,” he agreed, “but don’t give it too much power. Everyone’s different.”

  “I’m not so different.” She eased around him to settle in front of the computer again. Flexing her fingers, she took a deep breath and began to type. “I’m powerful. Callum taught me how powerful. I’m not a floppy little puppy who knows a neat trick. Empathy makes me vulnerable to the people I love, but it makes me dangerous to everyone else.”

  “Believe it or not, there’s a middle ground between floppy puppy and psychic warrior.”

  “There’s a middle ground between laid-back wolf and stone-cold alpha badass too.”

  A middle ground he couldn’t, for the life of him, seem to find. “Point taken.”

  “Really?” She bent over, slipped a flash drive from the side pocket of her bag and plugged it in without looking at him. “I don’t even know what my point was. Maybe my point is that we would have already gotten to the middle ground if we could. Maybe we should get used to being a psychic killer and a warrior alpha.”

  They used to be just Kat and Andrew, and now he wondered if he’d fucked everything up a long, long time ago. If sitting on his ass and waiting her out had cost him everything. “I guess.”

  Her fingers danced over the keys, the clacks coming so close together they sounded like one continuous noise. “I can send these to Ben once we get close enough to the city to get a decent signal with my aircard. Then, I guess we wait? See if anyone tries to kidnap or kill us?”

  It wasn’t funny. “We try to get back to some semblance of normal.”

  “Do I—” Her voice cracked. She swallowed and stared straight ahead. “Do you want me to go back to my place tonight?”

  She sounded so scared. “We shouldn’t split up.” He didn’t know how recently Jackson had buffed up the wards around her apartment, though part of him almost relished the thought of someone coming in to start a fight. “We can stay at my place again.”

  “At the council headquarters?” She jerked the flash drive free and twisted to look up at him. “I guess there’s plenty of room there. And good protections.”

  And an extra well-trained fighter. “Julio will be glad to have company for a few days. He can cook for more than just us.”

  “Julio likes to cook?” The thought seemed to amuse her, at least enough to tease her lips up into a half-smile.

  “Firehouse food. Gigantic pots of chili and spaghetti, stuff like that.”

  “Of course.” Sighing, Kat rose and began packing up her things. “After this, I think I should swing by the dojo. I’ve missed four lessons in a row. If I don’t drag my ass in there, Zola’s going to kill me before any assassins get a chance.”

  “You’ve been shot,” Andrew said firmly. “If she doesn’t understand why you might need to miss a few more sessions, I’ll set her straight.”

  But Kat shook her head. “No, the healing spells worked. My arm’s fine. And if things are going crazy, training’s more important than ever.”

  She was determined, he had to give her that. “Okay. After we talk to Julio and get him up to speed, we’ll head to the dojo together.”

  “Good.” The letter from her mother was still up on the screen. She spared it one last look, then cut the power to the computer. “Let’s go.”

  Time. She needed it for everything right now—decrypting the information on the disk, dealing with her mother’s letter. Dealing with him.

  He took her bag and slung it over his own shoulder. “It’ll work out, Kat.”

  She smiled, and he couldn’t tell if she was lying when she said, “I know.”

  Andrew was building things.

  Fresh from the shower, Kat followed the faint noises down the stark, undecorated corridors of the Southeast council headquarters’ third floor. Cleaning up and converting Alec’s newly purchased warehouse had taken second priority after reestablishing the supernatural clinic last year, but signs of renovations were everywhere. She hadn’t wandered during her last stay, but now she passed several clean rooms with fresh coats of paint before finding Andrew and Julio.

  Julio was nodding along with the music undoubtedly playing on his earphones while he sanded a spot on the wall, and Andrew wiped his arm across his forehead as he picked up a damp rag. “Want to help?”

  “Sure.” The view might help her stop brooding, in any case. Explosive orgasms aside, she hadn’t managed to spend much time getting to look at Andrew without lust and empathy fogging them. As long as she didn’t touch him… “Toss me the rag?”

  He did, and the muscles in his arm flexed as he waved to the far wall. “That one. We’re not quite done sanding this side of the room yet.”

  Bare arms. He should always have bare arms. She caught the cloth and moved where he’d directed, but couldn’t resist the urge to peek at him again.

  He was beautiful.

  If life was fair, she’d be able to savor touching him. Instead of awkward, jumbled encounters, there could be slow seduction. Kissing. God, she wanted to kiss him, just feel his mouth on hers and enjoy a growing urgency that didn’t swallow them both whole. To have an orgasm that was more than misfiring synapses and emotional overload. She wouldn’t have the knot of worry in her gut, the fear that needing him had so badly damaged the foundations of her control that she’d never master her gifts when he was there to make the world fuzzy.

  The damp rag left wet streaks on the wall as she swiped it in slow, aimless circles. If life was fair, it would just be the two of them in the room. So easy to picture Andrew as he was now, sweaty and covered in plaster dust, muscles flexing, eyes dark…
The way he looked at her before empathy exploded, like he wanted to touch every inch of her.

  They’d never been naked. He’d never even gotten a hand into her pants, or under her shirt. She’d never felt that beard against her breasts, or her stomach, or—God help her—her thighs, and the mental image of Andrew coaxing her knees apart threatened to blow her brain into little pieces.

  She wanted life to be fair.

  His hand closed over hers as he corrected her technique. “Straight lines down the wall.”

  He was breathing too hard. So was she, but oxygen couldn’t be making it to her head, because the world was fuzzy around the edges. All she could see was her hand, trapped under his. If she eased her other hand up the wall, would he catch that one too? Pin her to the wall and skate along the darker edge of the fantasies she tried to pretend she’d never had?

  His fingers slid down to her wrist, closed around it firmly for a moment—and let go.

  In a second, she’d be panting. This arousal might be in her head, but it still twisted up her body. Tightened her nipples, made her ache. Made her wet. She rocked back and found Andrew still behind her, and arousal had curled around him too.

  His erection pressed against her, and she could see the dizzy, frantic series of events unfolding before her as if she had Julio’s precognition. His hips rocking against her ass, maybe one hand drifting around her body, into her pants, pressing between her legs until the rough touch of his fingers sent her—

  Julio. Oh Christ, if Andrew’s touch shattered her control, her projection wouldn’t just affect him.

  Kat tore away from his body with a whimper, stumbling so hard she slammed into the opposite wall.

  Julio jumped back and plucked one of the buds from his ear. “Kat, what the hell?”

  Air whistled through her teeth as she stared at him, taking in confusion in upraised brows and a hint of concern in his widened eyes—