Heavy Metal (A Goddesses Rising Novel) (Entangled Select)

by Natalie J. Damschroder

  “Maybe he didn’t want the power,” Quinn offered with a hint of anxiety when Sam didn’t say anything. “Or he didn’t know how to handle it, or was resistant to change or something.”

  Or maybe it was like an addiction. If he’d had a need to replenish it but didn’t fulfill that need, Sam imagined the result could be something like a sickness of the heart.

  What would happen when they did this three times? Jennifer, Chloe, and Tanda all had similar but different power sources—flowing water like the Mississippi River, the ocean, and rain. If each left a residue in him, how much ability would come with it? And what would happen if he used it? He didn’t want to become like Anson.

  Not that he was worried he’d suddenly become a monster. Anson had planned everything, sought the power Marley gave him with the intention of stealing more. Reports on him after Quinn took it back indicated he’d been his normal, charming—and asshole—self.

  “What are you thinking?” Quinn asked. Sam shook his head, and she didn’t push. Instead, she picked up a notebook from the table and looked at it, though he was positive she’d memorized everything in it. “The trickiest thing is isolating which parts of the power belong to whom, and separating it for transfer. I’ve been practicing that.”

  “Seriously? You can feel it that way?”

  She nodded. “I always could, to some degree. When I’m near the creek, for example, I can sense Jennifer’s power. It rises up, almost has a taste in the back of my throat. It took some time to be able to deliberately sense it and pull it away from the rest.”

  “But I thought the power wasn’t in you,” Sam said. “Marley’s instructors talk about the source allowing you to tap into worldwide living energy or whatever.”

  “Well, yeah, but I’m different.” She grimaced as if she were being immodest. “It’s not just that. It’s almost like there’s a repository inside of us that holds capacity. Like our brains hold brainpower and need oxygen to work right. The leech pulled out that capacity. The repository is still in there, in the goddess. So, if I can heal it and then isolate the capacity I have, I can transfer it back to them.”

  “Not all of them,” Sam pointed out quietly.

  Quinn shook her head. “No. Beth’s energy is dissipating. That won’t be a problem.”

  It took Sam a moment to remember that Beth was the goddess from South Carolina. “And Marley’s?”

  “No idea. I can’t give it back.” Her eyes were dark with pain and regret. “Marley damaged herself when she did the original bestowment, and when Anson leeched her, it made it permanent. I won’t be able to heal her like I can do the others.”

  “How do you know that?” Sam pressed. When Quinn’s eyes filled with tears, he cursed. “I’m sorry. Of course you wouldn’t just assume you couldn’t.” He could count on one hand, without using any fingers, the number of times he’d seen Quinn cry.

  “Every time I’m with her, I try,” she admitted. “When I said I’d been experimenting…I thought if I could heal her, I could definitely heal the others. I found the damage, and it feels so different from Tanda and Chloe.” She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and sniffed, staring out the window. When she spoke again, her characteristic strength was back. Her gaze meeting Sam’s was as steady as her voice now. “You know that bowl that was my mother’s? The one with the lilies that my dad gave her for their twentieth anniversary?”

  Sam pressed his lips together and nodded, wincing. He and Quinn had gotten careless in her apartment and knocked it off its shelf. It had fallen eight feet and hit the corner of the entertainment center. Some of the china had been literal dust.

  “It would never have held water again. Marley’s like that, but worse. More than just holding it, she won’t be able to accept it. That part of her has been completely nullified.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that, but he supposed that was a bridge they’d have to cross later. “So, where do I come in?” he asked. She shifted her position again, and this time Sam thought she looked uncomfortable, as if trying to ease pain.

  “The power has been in me so long it’s contaminated, in a way. If I transfer it to you, you act like a filter, disconnecting it from me so that when you then transfer it to the original goddess, it recognizes its origin and zooms right to it, without sticking to what it’s mingled with for three years. In theory,” she added. “Obviously.”

  Sam nodded, picturing the transfer. “So it’s like separating a solution. I’m a strainer. Or a centrifuge.”

  “Something like that. The magical equivalent.” She smiled.

  Sam grabbed a pen and a blank legal pad off the table and started making his own notes. “Have you talked to Jennifer yet? Are we ready to do this today? What kind of prep do we have to do?”

  “Yes, yes, and not much.” Quinn flipped a few pages in her notebook. “I have everything written out, but it’s really just making you two comfortable and then I do all the work. It shouldn’t take long overall.”

  “Okay, good.” Sam scribbled a few thoughts. “What about afterward? Any idea of the effects? How long will you need me to stick around?”

  He sensed Quinn and Nick sharing a look, but his mind was already on Riley and how quickly he could get back to her. He’d call her on the way to Jennifer’s to see how she was doing and let her know when he’d be there.

  “Well, we want to give it a day to see how Jennifer takes it,” Quinn said slowly. “And then we can go straight to Rhode Island.”

  Sam’s head snapped up. Both of them were watching him warily. “What do you mean, straight to Rhode Island?”

  “Once we start these,” Nick said, “we have to get them all done. This is unprecedented, Sam. I told you, we don’t know what it’s going to do to Quinn as she takes this apart.”

  Sam shook his head and stood. “I told Riley I’d be back as soon as possible. I can’t leave her alone with Anson and Millinger still a big unknown.”

  Fury tightened Nick’s features, and he would have stood if Quinn hadn’t put her hand on his leg. Sam let his hands curl. Nick might want to clobber him for daring to refuse to follow their timeline, but Sam was no pushover, and Nick knew it.

  Quinn looked at the books and papers on the table. “We can wait. It’s already been three years…”

  The note of despair in her voice made Sam falter, and it nearly did Nick in. His temples and jaw pulsed with the pressure of gritted teeth, and he evaded Quinn’s hands this time to stand and face Sam.

  “Dude, you’re going to have to make a choice.” His tone very clearly told Sam that there was only one choice to make. He sank back onto his chair and passed a hand over his face.

  “I’m not going to make you wait, Quinn. But there’s got to be a compromise. You’re driving to Rhode Island?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said almost belligerently. “Quinn hasn’t been doing well with flying, and—”

  “And you know how much he hates airplanes.” The note of despair was gone from Quinn’s voice, and Sam knew she’d seen where he was going.

  He spelled it out anyway. “I’ll fly back to Boston, get Riley, and meet you at Chloe’s.” She wouldn’t have gotten very far with her education and training, but that was going to have to be a secondary concern until he knew she’d be safe doing it. If he had to traipse all over the country on this transfer mission, he wanted her with him.

  For more reasons than he was ready to reveal, though the way Nick and Quinn were looking at him right now, they already knew.

  …

  After too many hours and four hundred miles later, Riley followed late-morning traffic into Atlanta and found public parking near the downtown address of Millinger.

  She slid the gearshift into park, climbed out into a gorgeously mild day, and stretched. Man, that felt good. She’d pushed hard, taking few breaks and downing a lot of energy shots. Traffic had been heavy enough through most of the drive that she’d kept her phone turned off. She would have a hard time ignoring it if it rang, and as much
as she wanted to hear Sam’s voice, she had a feeling she knew what he’d say about her trip. Better to wait until she was done.

  A few people hustled up and down the sidewalk, but on a Sunday morning, this low-rise business district was eerily free of traffic and pedestrians.

  Riley leaned back into the car and snagged the printout of downtown Atlanta. Squinting at the street signs on the traffic signal supports, she found her location on the map. Millinger was a couple of blocks away. She tilted her seat forward to reach into the back for the stuff she’d bought at a hardware store yesterday. Walking around carrying a big pipe was kind of stupid. She’d look like she was spoiling for a fight, or about to smash in her cheating boyfriend’s windshield or something. The hammers had appealed to her, with their heavy, dense heads, but she wanted to be able to have her hands free. She ended up buying some lengths of mid-gauge chains and carabiner-style clips. She wrapped a chain a few times around each of her arms and clipped them in place, liking the sense of availability they gave her. They were heavy, though, and she didn’t know if the extra effort to carry them would negate the energy she drew. Hopefully, she wouldn’t need to find out.

  After rummaging in her bag for a shirt with sleeves loose enough to cover the chains, she shoved her wallet into her back pocket, her keys into the front—more metal ready to grab if she needed it—and strode down the street. The sun glinted off skyscrapers and parked cars, and a light breeze sent a single french fry container dancing past. She smiled at a guy talking to the Bluetooth in his ear, but he never even glanced at her.

  The narrow, old building Millinger was in had a taxi circle in front but no doorman. Riley headed purposefully for the entrance, pulled open the door, and cut straight across the lobby as if she’d been there before and knew exactly where she was going.

  The lobby wasn’t empty, which meant Riley didn’t look suspicious. A guy stood looking out the front windows, probably waiting for someone, and a couple of women sat on a bench by a giant square pillar, drinking coffee and talking.

  The bank of elevators was right where she expected, dead center lobby. She hit the up button and scanned the company listing on a large placard between the two sets of elevator doors. Millinger was on eight.

  The elevator dinged. A group of men and women in suits stepped off, not even noticing Riley in their squabbling about jury selection processes. She stepped onto the car and waited. The doors stayed open. Her heart rate picked up. Seconds ticked in her head, sounding like minutes before the panels closed.

  Slumping against the wall, she jabbed “eight,” and the elevator began its ridiculously slow climb. Riley grimaced at her reflection in the mirrored walls. Over the past several months she’d grown used to not paying attention to her appearance. Her hair could look artfully tousled even when she’d slept in her car for two days, but her shirt was more wrinkled than she’d thought. Oh, well, it wasn’t like she was here to make a good impression on anyone. She stopped fussing and watched the floor number fail to change. What would she find when she got to eight?

  If she ever got to eight.

  She realized that was the same floor the Society was on in its building back in Boston. Deliberate or coincidental? It would take a lot of effort to find an available office on the eighth floor, but from what Riley had heard, Anson was that obsessive.

  The car groaned past six and headed toward seven. Marley had done some reconnaissance while Riley traveled, pretexting a call to the building management office. She’d pretended to be a client having trouble getting through on their phone system. According to building staff, Millinger didn’t have open business hours. They’d advised her not to bother coming during the weekend because no one was likely to be there, which was exactly as Riley had hoped.

  But she had her chains just in case they were wrong.

  Finally, the elevator slid to a halt. She stepped out onto a serviceable, industrial-grade, dark blue carpet in a very basic hallway as a gleeful young woman passed her. Riley noted the satin-padded notebook she clutched—she must have been at the florist listed on the placard downstairs.

  Riley looked to her right, and saw two doors on opposite sides of the hall, each with half-glass panels set in them. One had flowers painted on clear glass, and Weddings by Marci in gilt lettering in the center. The other had frosted glass with a guy’s name and the letters P.C. after it, with no indication of what kind of professional he was.

  She looked left, where there was a full-glass door with a matching glass window looking into the copy shop. At the far end of the corridor was a plain wooden door with a golden handle and Millinger mounted dead center. That was all. Shrugging, Riley headed toward it.

  The door was locked. A good sign, but now what? She hadn’t developed enough finesse in her training with John to slide a bolt or whatever that she couldn’t see. She checked to make sure no one was in the hall and gripped the handle tight. All the metal she touched infused her with power. She closed her eyes and pushed down hard. There was a crunch, and the door opened. Tiny shards of wood littered the carpet, and the latch plate hung crooked in the jamb. The door wouldn’t latch again, never mind lock, so they’d know someone had been here. She’d better find something to make this worthwhile, and find it fast.

  There was no receptionist or cube farm inside. Just a wide entry at the top of a long hallway. A couple of standard waiting room chairs faced bare white walls, and a ficus at the corner needed dusting.

  Riley could see two doorways on each side of the hall, staggered so neither was directly across from the others. But she couldn’t see if the doors were open or had anything on them, like convenient nametags or department signs. She tried to picture the building from the outside, to gauge how big this set of offices might be. She wasn’t very good at that, but by her best guess, not very big. Two small offices, probably, if each of those doors went into its own room, and then maybe a larger conference room or workroom or break area or something through the other doors.

  She stood for a few minutes in case opening the door had set off an alarm, but all stayed silent, without even a clicking keyboard or music or voices. None of the doors opened, and no intercom or speaker was visible in the walls or ceiling. Nothing happened.

  She concentrated on drawing energy through the chains around her forearms. They clanked softly when she moved. The familiar sense of strength infused her, slowly seeping up her arms and down into the rest of her body.

  She moved down the hall, the carpet softening her footfalls. None of the doors were marked there either. Two were open, revealing a unisex bathroom and a combination workroom/kitchen. The other two were locked.

  She used less energy on the first handle than she had with the front door and managed to snap it open without doing as much damage. She closed the door behind her and dashed past the office’s massive desk to the tall, gray filing cabinet next to the window. After jerking open the first drawer, she ran her hand over the files there, glimpsing some goddesses’ names she recognized and plenty she didn’t. She closed the drawer and opened the other three, all empty.

  Back in the first drawer she flipped through the files, checking the labels. There—her name. And…Quinn Caldwell. There was no file for Marley Canton or Alana Mitchell, and there were so many names she didn’t know that she couldn’t guess which files would be most helpful. She paused at Tess Canton. Related to Marley? Her mother, maybe? Riley yanked the folder and added it to the other two in her hand. She wished she had time to look through the contents rather than take entire files with her, but a sense of urgency pushed at her, and she’d learned the hard way to listen to her gut.

  Voices rose in the hall near the main door. Crap. Riley spun frantically, but there was nowhere to hide in the sparsely furnished office except under the desk, and that would be stupid. The ridiculousness of the situation bumped the fear of being caught up to hysteria, but she took a deep breath to pull herself together and dashed through a side door without even checking to see where it led.

/>   Just in time. She heard the office door open as she pushed the side door mostly closed. She couldn’t latch it without making noise, so she froze next to it, hoping they wouldn’t notice the tiny crack. She slowly pressed her arms tight against her waist so the chains wouldn’t rattle. They would obviously know someone had broken in, but hopefully they’d think the perpetrator had left.

  The room she was in was narrow and didn’t have a door to the hall, just the one she’d come through and another directly opposite it. It must have been designed as a conference room between two offices, but it was completely empty. There weren’t even any marks in the beige carpet to indicate furniture had ever been there. Which hopefully meant no one would look in here.

  “I don’t care what his claims are,” said a male voice. “He can’t prove he was on company time. I’m not accepting a worker’s comp claim because he can’t stay on his bike.” The voice sounded young and pleasant, despite his clear irritation.

  “You need to talk to him,” another guy said. His voice was deeper, rougher. She knew that one—Vern. She wondered why they were continuing what sounded like an ongoing conversation and not discussing the break-in.

  “Why?” the first guy asked. Papers shuffled, and a chair squeaked. “He didn’t do the job I sent him to do. I’m not placating anyone for bad work.”

  “You should placate somebody,” said Vern. “Cal’s gone. Refused to stay after that woman balled him up in Connecticut.”

  Riley covered a snicker.

  “And Sharla said you’re not paying enough for this shit.”

  “What?” The first guy sounded interested for the first time. “She quit?”

  “This morning. Everyone’s bailing. How am I supposed to find Kordek on my own?”

  A loud, meaningful sigh. “You weren’t supposed to be on your own. But you also weren’t supposed to lose her in the first place, were you? Why did you let Sharla quit?”