“I know.” And she did know it even when she could clearly remember what it felt like to be that scared little girl.
Parker pressed his mouth to her hair, and the comforting gesture soothed the old fear she knew couldn’t touch her any more.
“Chances are he knows exactly what you’re capable of and will be a lot more scared of you.” He stepped back, his hands falling to his sides, as though he didn’t have a doubt she could do this.
She reached back and squeezed his hand briefly, then continued forward through the crowd. Parker stayed close, stepping up to the bar next to her.
Burke didn’t look up right away, frowning at her when he finally did, like he was trying to place her. Recognition brightened his eyes moments later, and she thought she saw fear flicker there as well.
He approached slowly, the wariness imprinted on his face satisfying her more than she expected.
“Rae?” His glance slid a little nervously to Parker, before fixing back on her. “You’re all grown up.”
The subtle reminder of their former roles might have kept her off balance if not for the certainty that Parker was right. Burke was afraid of her.
The bartender fiddled nervously with his towel. “Wow, it’s been a while.” He gave her a quick once over, and she’d bet he was trying to figure out of she was armed. He leaned forward. “Demon activity bring you to town?”
“Not exactly.”
Seeming relieved, he gave Parker a longer look, noticing the way he stuck close to her. “You’re the hot-shot profiler, aren’t you?”
Parker frowned, not looking half as surprised as Rae felt. “Have we met before?”
Burke shrugged. “Not formerly, but I keep in touch with a few people in the network now and then.”
“What about my father?” Rae asked. “You keep in touch with him?”
Even under the dim lighting, Rae saw him pale. He waved to the other bartender. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Anxious to have this over with, she and Parker followed him through the crowd and out a side door. She waited until another employee enjoying a cigarette strolled further away from them before turning to Burke.
“I know you broke into the storage unit. What I want to know is why?”
Burke shifted his weight, hesitating. “I needed the cash.”
She frowned. “What money?”
“I knew he kept a stash of money in the false bottom of his lock box.” Burke shrugged. “I knew you put all his stuff in storage a long time ago. Figured if it was still there, you wouldn’t miss it.”
“So you trashed the place?”
“I got into some gambling trouble almost a year ago. I owed some bad people money, Rae, so I sort of panicked when I couldn’t find the box right away.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’ll pay you back. Really.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I like it here. Have a good job, dating a nice woman who doesn’t know anything about my past, and I’d like to keep it that way. We can work something out, right?”
“Where are the journals?”
He gave her a confused look. “Journals?”
“He kept his journals in that lock box. I want them back.”
Burke’s thoughtful gaze was almost sincere. “I don’t know anything about any journals.”
She exchanged looks with Parker, who shrugged. “Guess he wants it to hurt.”
Burke’s eyes shot wide. “Now, wait.”
“Do not lie to me.”
He licked his lips. “Okay. The journals were there, but I don’t have them anymore.”
“Then where are they?”
Taking a look around, he hesitated once more, then, “Your father has them.”
Chapter Ten
Rae wanted to shove Burke up against the wall and hurt him. Hurt him for his part in what had been done to her and all the other kids, hurt him for trashing belongings that held the few happy memories of her childhood she had. Hurt him…because she could. Because she wasn’t that trusting and helpless girl any more.As fast as the anger had churned inside her, it instantly turned to ice at the mention of her father—razor sharp ice that sliced across her lungs.
Parker edged a little closer to her, but his eyes turned flat and dangerous when he focused them on Burke. “When did you see him last?”
Burke swallowed, looking guilty. “A few weeks ago. Not long after I broke in and took the lock box.”
Red Crossing had certainly gotten a lot more crowded lately. “Is he living here now? Where can we find him?”
“No. I don’t think so. I hadn’t seen him since…” Burke’s gaze skated away from her, his thought left unfinished though they all knew he referred to the experiments. “And I haven’t seen him since then.”
“Did he tell you what he was working on?” Parker pressed.
Burke shook his head. “Working on? He left the network.”
She searched his eyes, certain that he was holding something back. “You were there, Burke. You know exactly what demons changed me, what I can do to you to get the answers I need.”
His pale face leached of more color. “You’re not like that.”
“Maybe once, but then you helped change that, didn’t you? Or maybe you’ve forgotten the hours I spent huddled in a box with a demon chained only a couple feet away, taunting me and feeding off my fear.”
Rae felt Parker’s eyes bore into her, but she didn’t look away from Burke, needing to hold tight to the part of her that wanted to lash out at what had been done to her and every other child all those years ago.
“I…I was following orders.”
She smiled coldly. “I’m going to ask you again. Did he tell you what he was working on?”
“No, but if he’s working on anything, I assume it’s the same thing he’s been looking for since he left the network.”
Nausea gripped her stomach. “He started running experiments on kids right after he left the network?”
No. She would have known. After the network had tried to take her away, he’d promised her over and over that he was done with it. Even though she knew now that he’d gone back on that promise, he hadn’t then. He’d been too preoccupied with his journals to have spent that kind of time away from the house.
Burke shook his head so hard something inside could have rattled. “As far as I know your dad left those experiments behind him. Not that he was ever the same after that.”
“Do not feel sorry for him.” Feeling sorry for him changed nothing. Never had. Never would.
“He did love you, you know.”
Just not enough to have protected her from his own scientific ambitions. “I’m really not in the mood to deconstruct my relationship with my father.”
Burke looked annoyed with her. “He wanted to make sure you were safe in case he was wrong.”
A fresh layer of apprehension coated her insides. “Wrong about what?”
“The gatekeeper.”
“The what?” Parker asked, voicing the same puzzlement.
Burke released a nervous smile. “Funny.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “Am I laughing?”
Sobering, Burke shot a disbelieving look between them. “You two really don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?” He shook his head and sighed. “Shouldn’t surprise me I guess, seeing as the network had lost faith in your father by that time, lost faith in a lot of things.”
Burke wouldn’t be the first to have left the network when paranoia about the evil he knew existed made him start playing conspiracy theorist. For weeks she’d been worried Parker was on the same self-destructive path.
“What’s the gatekeeper?”
“Not what,” Burke corrected. “Who. Given how some within the network were so skeptical of the whole thing, I guess it was just a matter of time before they buried it.”
Patience wearing then, she snapped, “Buried what?”
“You guys know your Destroyer history, right? How it all started thousands of years ago with
two brothers, one of them king. Jealous younger brother slaughters his niece, the king loses it and banishes him and his followers from the kingdom.”
Parker nodded. “And cursed them to no longer feel any emotion so they’d be as cold and empty inside as he was without his daughter. Making them shadows of their former selves.”
This was the closest they’d come to locating her father, and Burke wanted to play bedtime stories? Frustration warred with her curiosity to know where he was going with all this. “Just get to the point.”
Burke’s expression turned stubborn, but before she felt justified to mention the kukri strapped to her back, Parker continued the abbreviated tale.
“Powerful in his own right, the younger brother then gifted those loyal to him with the ability to feel other’s emotions, making them crave them like a drug.”
And that was putting it mildly considering the lengths demons went to incite fear in their victims, thriving on the high, before they inevitably took things too far.
“And so began the war,” Burke added. “The King’s last act before his death was to gift his people with the ability to absorb Shadow Demon abilities.”
Rae sighed strictly for Burke’s benefit. “Basically the creation of the Destroyer gene that has been passed down through all our ancestors.” Strangely enough being able to trace her heritage back to an ancient race had been the easiest part of becoming a Destroyer. “We know all this.”
“And then you also know that after centuries of the two groups warring, a direct descendant of the king came along with enough power to strip Shadow Demons of their physical bodies and permanently lock them away in their prison realm. Not that he didn’t screw up somewhere or you two wouldn’t have a job.”
“Get to the part about the gatekeeper.”
“It’s a prophecy as old as the one that predicted a descendant of the king would lock the hostiles away. The gist of it hinted that if trapped, the demons would find a way to breach the walls of their prison, and that another would come along with the power to either seal the walls between realms permanently, or bring them down for good.”
Later she’d try to figure out why the network acknowledged that the first prophecy had come to pass, but kept quiet about the second. “So this gatekeeper prophecy, that’s what my father was working on. Did he believe it?” She suspected she already knew the answer, but asked anyway.
“Sometimes he believed in it a little too much.”
Parker crossed his arms. “And now?”
Burke shrugged. “Couldn’t say. His faith was shaken when the network put an end to his research.” Suddenly looking tired, he closed his eyes. “Sometimes faith can drive you to do things you never imagined yourself doing.”
“Is that supposed to excuse you of any wrongdoing?”
“I wasn’t talking about me. I knew full well there would be consequences for what we did back then.”
So who was he talking about? Her father? The others who’d been involved? Her frustration shot past the boiling point. “And yet you ultimately didn’t care that it was wrong, you did it anyway.”
Burke sighed. “For some of us, the end justifies the means.”
She opened her mouth to ask him, “What end?” and froze.
Icy awareness slithered across the back of her neck and she whipped around, scanning the parking lot.
Next to her, Burke tensed. “What is it?”
Taking a few steps away from him and Parker, she concentrated on opening her senses.
Parker stayed close to the would-be bartender, but she could feel him watching her intently. “Rae?”
She closed her eyes, fighting to pinpoint what felt so…off. “Do you feel anything weird?”
He paused, then, “No. Nothing.”
Her gaze swept the area one more time. Was she just being paranoid? Had tangling with the storm demons and then talking about the experiments made her jumpy?
“I really need to get back inside.” Burke was at least smart enough not to make a move toward the door as he said it. “I wish I could tell you more, but without knowing exactly what your father is working on…” He trailed off, then dug into his pocket. “Since you tracked me down here, then you probably already know where I’m living.” He pulled out a pen and scrawled a number across it. “If there’s anything else you want to know that I can help with, I’ll do what I can.”
Parker took the offered number. “Did you happen to look through the journals before giving them back to Hurst?”
“Even if I had, they wouldn’t have made much sense to me. Lawrence isn’t the most linear thinker and tended to add a lot of cryptic images.”
Remembering that much, Rae nodded when Parker looked at her, as if seeking any kind of confirmation that Burke was telling the truth.
“If you’re not being straight with us and run, you know you won’t get far, right?”
“I’ve got nothing to hide.”
Parker waited until Burke went back inside. “Think he’s holding out on us?”
“If he was involved with what’s going on now, he wouldn’t be working here.” Which was about the only thing she was certain of where Burke was concerned.
“You want to hang around town for a couple more days, see if anything shakes loose here?”
Hoping it wouldn’t come to that, she pulled her phone out of her pocket. Darcy picked up at the field office.
“Do you ever leave that place?”
Darcy snorted. “More often that you do.”
Only because she sent Darcy out on assignment, but now wasn’t the time to get into that. “I want you to get Blair to dig into every archive and database we have access to and see if she can find any mention of a ‘gatekeeper’.”
If Burke was right and the network had buried it, Blair would find it. The former journalist had proven herself an asset when it came to exposing the truth.
“Gatekeeper? Sounds very Dungeons and Dragonish.”
“Might be part of an old prophesy.”
Darcy scoffed. “Who comes up with these things anyway?”
Clearly overhearing her, Parker grinned. “Ancient soothsayers.”
A tiny smile tugged at Rae’s lips, fading when she added, “Apparently Hurst was in the area a few weeks ago.” Assuming Burke was telling the truth. “Might help narrow things down, or give you a more recent starting point with the search at your end.”
“Things might be looking up, actually. Braxton has been following up on a few rare equipment supplies Hurst would use while replicating his experiments. I’ll let you know if we get any hits.”
“Is Brax there now?”
“At the clinic, actually. Quinn got a little banged up by a homicidal war demon. Big war demon apparently, and Braxton is driving her crazy, hovering over her. Insisted she get checked at the clinic, but he’ll probably be back tonight.”
“Anything else?”
“Jordan and Drew are tracking a mimic demon a few counties over as we speak. And Adrian, you remember him, right? The boss who hasn’t been able to get a hold of you? He says he’ll be here waiting for his briefing when you get back tomorrow.”
Somewhere in the last thirty seconds her head had really started to hurt. “He’s back in town?”
Fingers tapped over the keyboard in the background. “He changed his mind about sticking around for a few days since locating Hurst is a network priority. But then you’d know that if you took his calls.” She paused. “Everything okay with you?”
No. “Yeah.”
“Wow. You might think about working on sounding at least halfway convincing, especially when you tell Adrian you weren’t intentionally dodging his calls.”
She could have said nothing, but the trace of worry she caught in Darcy’s voice wouldn’t let her. “I’ll work on it.”
“So you and Parker will be back in the morning?”
“Yeah, we should be in by noon or so.” With Gage held up in Rio for another day or so, they wouldn’t need to wait un
til tomorrow tonight to head back.
“Then I guess that gives you a solid eight hours to kill, huh?”
Anticipating where this was going, Rae took a few steps away from Parker.
“And I’ve got to say,” Darcy continued, “if I had a guy like Parker looking to get me into bed, I know exactly how I’d be spending those eight hours.”
“Night, Darcy.”
“Wait, you’ve been getting the birth control shot, right? Just in case Parker doesn’t have any condoms—”
Rae hung up and shoved her phone in her pocket. “God, I need a drink.” Something hard that would sting the whole way down and work on numbing every nerve ending left exposed after tonight.
“Not here.” Parker put a hand on the small of her back, ushering her away from the building.
She didn’t even try to shrug him off, her body dragging a little now that she was no longer pumped up on adrenaline and anger.
Parker eyed the bottle of vodka he’d dug out of the hotel’s minibar. “When you mentioned a drink, I was thinking something a little…bigger.” Something he couldn’t finish off in one swallow and might have put a dent in his killer headache. Something that would have gone better with the pizza he’d insisted on picking up on the way back to the hotel.
Food was usually good for putting color back in people’s cheeks. And after they’d finished at Wild Bill’s, Rae’s face had been pale as hell. Pale enough that more than once he’d wanted to say something to piss her off just so he could get a flush of red across her face.
He’d gotten used to angry, keep-your-distance Rae over the last several weeks, and he was pretty sure if she’d realized how lost she’d looked on the way back to the hotel, she would have wanted him to say something to piss her off too.
Not that he needed to now. By the time they’d gotten back with the pizza, that lingering vulnerability in her eyes had retreated, replaced by determination and a healthy interest in wearing tread marks into the carpet.
This Rae he knew. Keyed up and needing to move, the way she used to be even after coming home from a grueling assignment. Except the eight feet between his chair and the door adjoining their rooms wasn’t enough space for her to burn off a handful of calories, let alone the excess energy radiating off her every time she encountered his chair and whirled back around to pace in the opposite direction.
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