Thank the Spirits the doctor answered because I still couldn’t find my tongue.
“I’m sorry young man, there’s nothing we can do. Did he have a heart condition? Health issues?”
“No. None.”
That’s when it hit me. I glanced at my ring, not trusting the heat I felt from it. But it glowed almost pink against my skin. The dead man was a preternatural of some kind. So were others nearby. Very close.
I shot a glance at the young man who was shaking his head in grief, an anguish so deep it made it hard to look at him. “I’m sorry,” I said, speaking to his pain. An automatic gesture. “The paramedics or whatever they’re called here have been summoned.”
His gray eyes seemed to focus then, latched on to my face as if searching for something.
“You’re not French?”
I shook my head. “No.”
I understood this response to shock. The tendency to grab on to whatever one could, the more mundane the easier until you could shore up too volatile emotions.
The man cocked his head at me as if really seeing me for the first time. “Did you know him?”
Another head shake. “No.” Then before a lot of messy questions could be asked I said, “It’s obvious you did. A friend? Relative?”
“The best friend I ever had or could hope to have.” He turned back to the dead man.
The words startled me for their stark simplicity and raw pain. Could one wish for a better epitaph. Then I realized what I was doing. Ignoring the man’s final words.
I stumbled to my feet, needing some air. “Excuse me. I must go.” I smiled at the man still crouched at his friend’s side. Until he rose beside me.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“Alexis Noziak.” I extended one hand. “Though everyone calls me Alex.”
His handshake was half-hearted, as if going through the motions, but he didn’t release my hand as he said, “Thank you for being with him. At the end.”
What could I say to that? “Not a problem.”
“Did he say anything? Any last words?”
Nothing that needed to be bandied about came my gut response. So I shook my head again, adding a, “Sorry, no.”
There was something off here, apart from the whole stranger knowing my name and dying in my arms bit. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Foolish of me to ask.” The younger man quirked a wobbly smile as he glanced at his friend. “I just hoped for some last something. To hold onto.”
Made sense. Might not be my way but who was I to begrudge this guy what he needed.
I wanted to leave but it seemed rude to just jerk my hand out of his so I gave him a shaky smile. “You didn’t mention your name.”
“I didn’t?” he looked like he was stumbling around in a fog. ”Forgive me. Pádraig Byrne.”
“Nice to meet you.” I could have kicked myself for sounding so banal given the situation but thankfully I was saved by the arrival of two men and a woman all dressed in black with orange vests. Must be the French emergency response service, which gave me the excuse I needed to tug my hand away from Byrne’s and step back. I don’t know if he even heard my mumbled excuses.
Didn’t matter. I still needed that air and space to think. But leave it up to Bran not to give me either.
He must have been right behind me as he snaked a hand around my waist and propelled me toward the rear of the house, not as noisy, and less in an uproar. I wasn’t sure if he was treating me like a wilting flower because he thought having a total stranger die while I was holding him was going to undo me, or if the act was for show. Either way the second we entered what looked like an empty kitchen I pulled away from him, practically swatting his hands away.
Not that I didn’t like being pressed up against his hard body. I did. Too much and that was the problem. I had too many things to deal with already tonight; I didn’t need one more.
“Enough,” I said, stepping back to put space between us. “I won’t faint.”
“Never thought you would,” came his quick response, but one without heat. “You want to tell me what you were doing rushing to Philippe Cheverill’s side like a long, lost friend?”
“He called me,” I said before I realized the words were going to escape. Bran’s arched brow gave me some backbone as I clarified. “Not call as in speak but he seemed to summon me. With his hands.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. I’d never met the man before.” Bran gave me a perplexed look I didn’t understand. So I added, “He appeared in distress, from across the room, and then when he fell it seemed like everyone was moving away from him, just when he needed help.”
That I could relate to, especially in my complicated relationship with Bran. But now wasn’t the time to point fingers or create more antagonism between us. We had enough painful memories for a lifetime. Instead I shrugged. “He needed help and I thought I could help.”
“In what way?”
Why was he being so difficult? “I don’t know. You might have been able to do something.”
“Meaning?”
I looked around though we were the only ones in the room. I lowered my voice anyway. “That whole bring-someone-back-from-the-dead-thing you can do.”
He stared at me for a moment until he jammed one hand through his hair, then shook his head. “Just for your information I don’t go around reversing death every chance I can. That’s as unnatural and dangerous as what you did this morning with your power-amplification act.”
That hurt. In the space of one sentence he turned my good deed, to help a stranger, and twisted it around to make me an abomination. On the other hand the fact he once returned me to life after I’d died made me feel better about what he was willing to do for me. That was then though, this was now.
But he wasn’t finished. “Death is as much a part of life as birth. Reversing that has consequences.”
“I know that.” What did he think I was? A total idiot? I understood the cost of magic, better than most, so he didn’t need to rub it in my face. “So I’m a freak. You’re not. I get it.”
“Not what I said.”
We were way off the reason I’d tracked him down tonight. “Can we get back to the finding Vaverek and locating my brother discussion?” I asked, knowing even as the words left my mouth he was going to take offense. So I offered a carrot. “Won’t finding Vaverek help you if you have to go before the Council?”
He looked at me as if I was talking Swahili. “You really don’t know do you?”
“Know what?”
“Who Philippe Cheverill is . . . or was.”
I raised my palms to him in an I-give-up universal gesture. I wanted Vaverek. Bran wanted to beat a dead horse, neither of us particularly happy with the other one right then.
Just as Bran opened his mouth, and I assumed was going to tell me who the dead stranger was, Frank or François bustled into the room.
“There you are,” he said with a buzz of urgency beneath his voice and a minimization of his French accent. “I’d get out of here. Now. Before a world of hurt comes smashing down on you.”
I glanced at Bran who actually looked like he knew what François was babbling about.
Instead of cluing me in, he spoke to François. “She says she doesn’t know who Philippe Cheverill was.”
“I didn’t. I don’t.” I wanted to shake them both. “Why should I?”
Frank tsked, tsked as if dealing with a cranky toddler. He looked at Bran. “Leave it to her to get in the middle.”
Bran nodded, which made me want to kick them both. Not the best of moves when dealing with a powerful warlock and a temperamental shifter.
“Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I growled.
Bran gave Frank a nod. But Mandy came bursting through the kitchen door before he said a word. Did no one have anything to do except run into the kitchen in hysterics?
“Go! Go! Go!” she shouted at me. “Now!”
; Was this a trick? Have her scare me off only to turn around to Ling Mai to tell her I’d vamoosed? End of my short stay as an IR agent. “Alone?”
“I’ll come with you,” Bran said, shocking me more than everyone else yelling at me to run.
“Won’t that put you in more trouble with the Council?”
François grabbed my elbow. “Can’t get into much more trouble. I’m coming too.”
I knew I looked like an idiot standing there with my mouth open, wondering what all the hullabaloo was about.
Mandy was flapping her hands at me like I was a chicken escaped from the henhouse. François was dragging me toward the back door. Bran’s expression was so intense he scared me. And no one made sense, until Jaylene came slamming through the hallway door.
“Did you really kill him?” She looked only at me. “The head of the Council.”
“The Council of Seven?” I croaked, my whole body going numb.
“Of course, how many Councils do you know about?”
Four gazes lasered in on me as I stood there, a frozen wreck in the middle of a dark kitchen. “You mean the old man?”
It was François who answered with a nod. “Oui, ma cocotte, Philippe Cheverill was an arch druid. And the head of the Council.”
CHAPTER 22
The next hour was a blur. François gabbed one of my arms, Bran the other and hustled me out the back door into the brisk air of a spring night. The roar that was Paris echoed around us as a waxing moon peeked from behind scattered clouds. The old child’s rhyme came to me:
If you see the moon at the end of the day
A bright full moon is on its way
If you see the moon in the early dawn
Look real quick, it will soon be gone.
Latching onto the mundane, just as I had earlier. No way could the dead man be the head of the Council. That was like saying I’d held the President’s hand as he lay dying. Or the Pope’s.
So how did he know my name? Maybe he remembered it from the vote that sent me straight to prison when the Council decided revealing there were extenuating circumstances—of the supernatural kind—to the murder I was accused of last year, would create more harm to the larger preternatural community. I got it then, I was a small cog in a very large wheel of worldwide preternaturals trying to just get along.
Okay, maybe I was a little bitter, a little resentful of the Council’s decision. If they had a few more balls, and created their own policing force that kept lowlifes like the rogue Were in check, then they wouldn’t screw with the poor peon who was just trying to protect herself. Me being that peon.
But that was water under the bridge.
Since I’d never appeared in person in front of the Council I was surprised that the head of the group could remember my name from a file and maybe a mug shot. It had been a year ago and surely he’d had bigger issues to handle since then. Such as this whole Vaverek mess. And the Seekers. Though the old man had mentioned them.
But why in the world should anyone think I killed him? I’d only held his hand.
Unless someone had put who I was together with my past and found an easy scapegoat. But how likely was that? Nothing made sense.
I careened to a halt, making François and Bran pull up short.
We were in a bricked alleyway, the smell of boxwood hedges and ivy strong in the space barely wide enough to have the three of us abreast. The moon almost obscured by clouds so maybe we’d been running longer than I thought we had.
“I didn’t kill him,” I said, wanting to scream it from rooftops. My breath was chugging but my skin felt cold and clammy. If going through the human judicial system was scary it was nothing to facing the Council’s wrath if they really believed I’d killed one of their own. “Someone is setting me up.”
“Why, duckie?” François’ teeth gleamed in the near dark. “As much trouble as you create I could see someone wanting you out of the way, but what are the chances of that particular person being at this particular event?”
Damn, when he said it like that he made perfect sense. I dug my heels into the cobbled path, which wasn’t easy given I was still in stilettos. “But I didn’t do it. I’m innocent.”
Bran snorted, but for once I didn’t feel like kicking him. I was running way low on allies as well as being too double-whammied by tonight’s events. And that didn’t include why the head of the Council warned me about my father, if that’s who he was talking about.
“Get a move on it,” came Bran’s terse response. No warm and fuzzies from him. “I can’t hold a cloaking spell out here for much longer.”
“You can do that? While we’re on the move?” I was impressed. I could barely do that when hiding in the shadows. Not that my rusty magic abilities were important right now. At least the simple spells. The suck-everyone’s-powers-around-me thing I could do, but not the simple stuff. I was so messed up, plus I was doing that focus-on-the-everyday-detail thing again.
“Come on.” François took my hand this time, handling me gently as if I were fragile. He was right. Inside I was splintering.
But Noziaks didn’t shatter. Implode maybe, but not until we fought back and I hadn’t even begun to fight back.
Ignoring François’ hand and Bran’s impatience shimmering through the night I bent to peel off one of my shoes.
“What are you doing?” Bran growled, as if I was intentionally being perverse.
“You try running in stilettos.”
“Do you have any idea how much those cost?” François moaned. “Those are Borgezie stilettos.”
I smiled, a real smile, the first one all night as I removed the second shoe and handed them to him. “Then you wear them.”
I thought I heard Bran choke back a laugh but it could have been a cat knocking over a garbage can lid. Either way I had started to run and it didn’t take long for Bran to catch up with me. I tightened my hand around my clutch, not wanting to lose my phone in it.
“Any idea where you’re going?” he said, as he jogged beside me.
“Nope.”
“Why should I not be surprised.”
I didn’t bother responding; my focus one hundred percent on pounding the ground, hoping there were few rocks or shards of broken glass around, and wondering what I was going to do next.
CHAPTER 23
It was after midnight when the three men returned to Van’s cell. Another change of routine that had him curious as to what was up and why.
All he could do was wait. Not one of his favorite pastimes.
The footsteps sounded faster now. Impatient. Two of the men were breathing heavily as if they’d raced a long way. The human’s hands were clumsy as he fiddled with the cell door lock. Van could smell his fear from across the room.
“I want to know his status. Now!” The one Van thought of as the power broker snapped. It sounded like he was finishing an ongoing conversation.
The doctor, Jean-Luc was it? No, Jean Claude, scuffled across the room, his nerves obvious by the pounding of his heart, the increase of his sweat, the shallowness of his breathing. Something was scaring these two. Something or someone.
The doctor was rough as he jerked Van’s head up, shining a penlight into his eyes.
“What the hell?” Van snarled, not having to work too hard to sound pissed.
“Ah, Mister Noziak, you do know how to speak,” the power broker murmured and yes, he was the same man from earlier. “Shall I share with you a little secret?”
Torment came in many forms. This man’s specialty, so far, seemed to be verbal torture. But if he felt chatty, and let something spill that Van could use, who was Van to let the opportunity pass.
He grunted an assent, knowing the other didn’t expect much more from him.
He was right, as the power broker nodded. “Bonne. I think you will like what I have to say.”
But the a-hole didn’t continue. Instead he waited.
The prick.
Van nudged him along with a taunt. “What makes
you think I care about anything you have to say?”
It worked like a charm as the other cleared his throat. “Even if the news I have concerns your sister?”
The growl ripped from Van this time was not feigned as he tugged at his restraints.
The doctor jumped back. “Do not aggravate him, I implore you,” he said, clicking his teeth. “Not if you wish the experiment to go as planned.”
So the trial was now an experiment. But what did that have to do with Alex? Did they really know something or was this just more torture?
“C’est la vie.” The power broker’s tone showed he’d learned what he’d wanted from Van.
When Van broke free he’d make sure this guy didn’t die quick or easy. It was his turn to taunt. “Big man, aren’t you,” he said, his voice husky and low. “Only a coward goes after a man’s family. But then I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.”
“That is a shame, Mister Noziak,” came the quick reply. “That you think I am only, how do you say, poking at you. For I just saw your sister a few hours ago.”
Van held himself very still. No way was Alex in Paris. She was in prison. It sucked, but at least she was safe there. So why was this creep saying otherwise?
“Like I would believe anything you said,” Van spat out, ignoring the doctor as the man slipped a blood pressure cuff around his arm.
“A suspicious man, I see. Would you believe me if I told you her hair is still waist length?”
“A photo could tell you as much.”
“True.”
The blood pressure cuff tightened.
“This is not good.” The doctor shook his head, before glancing at the other over his shoulder. “I must insist that you cease.”
The power broker released a sigh, as if he was finished anyway. “The shifter will discover in due time whether I speak the truth or not.” He stepped toward the door, waving the human forward. “Don’t forget the photo.”
Blinded by a flash of light, Van could do little more than scrunch his eyes closed to rid them of the dancing motes. “What the hell—“
“For your sister.” The power broker laughed. “A momento.”
INVISIBLE POWER BOOK TWO: ALEX NOZIAK (INVISIBLE RECRUITS) Page 9