Her hand left his leg. He opened his eyes. She leaned over him now, staring into his face. If he had any sort of moisture in his mouth, he’d spit at her.
More footsteps on the stairs, these Xavier recognized as Michael’s. The guy who could split himself in two stalked over, hands in the pockets of his tailored black pants. He wore a pale gray button-down shirt still carefully buttoned at the wrists, his blue tie knotted neatly.
“What the hell do you want?” Xavier demanded.
Michael pursed his lips and rubbed his nose with his thumb.
“You can’t just take people off the streets and expect them to not be missed. After this week, with all those people you introduced to Cat—Helen and everyone else who shook her hand and bought her damn paintings—you expect them to believe she just up and disappeared? You fucked up, Michael.”
Michael knew it, too, with the way his jaw worked and the crazed look in his eyes. Taking Cat had been 100 percent emotional and impetuous.
“I told Helen I suspected foul play,” Xavier said. “I told her I thought you were involved.”
“I’m not worried about her.” Michael went to the end of the board and looked down at Xavier’s bound legs. “And now you’ve disappeared, too. Isn’t that going to seem like quite the coincidence, considering how an entire party saw you attack me and rip her away?”
“You’ve taken others, haven’t you? Other elementals, other Secondaries. Why?”
“I have my reasons.” Michael slid a look at Lea, who wasn’t affected at all. She continued to focus narrowed eyes at Xavier.
“Cat’s part of my collection now,” Michael added. “I found her. I made her. And now she’s perfect and worthy because I know she has magic. Raymond will love her. He’ll love me.”
“You sick fuck. You don’t need her.” Xavier rattled the handcuffs. “Whatever petty revenge or twisted fantasies you want to play out with Cat, just don’t, okay? Please. I’m the one who took her from you. Take it out on me.”
“I plan to,” Michael said.
“She just found out what she is. She knows nothing about the Secondary world. She’s completely innocent and you’ll destroy her. She’s lost in all this and you’re stealing her entire life. That has to hit you on some level. You’ve got to understand that. Please don’t do this to her.” Xavier didn’t care how the panic was making him sound. He wasn’t too proud to beg, not when it came to Cat.
“How’d you know she was Ofarian?” Lea asked.
“Wasn’t hard to figure out.” That was all he was going to give them. He had to think fast. “Look, you say you have a collection.” He nodded at Jase. “An air elemental, a couple of waters from what I understand. Maybe another Secondary or two. But what you don’t have is me.”
Michael laughed. He grabbed Xavier’s cuffs, gave them a good shake. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Yeah, but I’ll fight you. Any chance I get, I’ll revolt.” He licked his lips. “If you keep Cat, that is.”
Michael squinted. “What do you mean?”
“You heard me. Let Cat go and I’ll stay with you and whatever fucked-up circus you’ve got going on here. I won’t make a sound. Won’t say no to a thing. I’ll be like Cowboy over there, all ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir.’ I’ll do whatever you say, stand in front of whoever you want me to, as long as Cat has her life and her freedom.”
He hadn’t thought of the bargain before it came to his lips. The words just fell out.
Five years ago he swore he’d never belong to anyone ever again. Now here he was, offering himself back in chains. His life was nothing. Cat’s was just starting.
Lea made a sound of approval. Michael still didn’t seem convinced.
“Ask her.” Xavier nudged his chin toward Lea. “Ask her what I am. How many of my kind there are in the world.”
“He’s Tedran,” Lea said, her voice breathy.
Hands on hips, Michael bent toward her. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
“It means”—her eyes never left Xavier’s face—“that he’s the last one left on Earth. He’s one of a kind, Michael.”
“How valuable is that?” Xavier pulled against the restraints. “Who’s worth more to you? Me, who has something no one else has? Or Cat, who doesn’t deserve any of this?”
Lea and Michael exchanged a look, then she took his arm and pulled him to the other end of the room, out of earshot. She talked at him for several minutes, her gestures minimal but her eye contact severe. Every now and then she glanced over at Xavier and it made him feel oily.
He didn’t want to know what they were planning. In the Plant, it was better when he hadn’t known what they were going to do to him. The anticipation only made it worse.
At last Michael’s head snapped up, a frightening clarity smoothing his features. He moved Lea aside and stomped toward Xavier. “Who’s going to miss you?” he demanded. “And don’t fucking lie to me or Cat is mine.”
Yes. This was going to work. Michael was a selfish enough bastard to want Xavier over Cat. He’d let her go. She wouldn’t go to the Primary police because she’d be afraid to endanger Xavier and all the other Secondaries. Michael would be banking on that. But she knew how to get a hold of Gwen—and neither Michael nor Lea had any clue she and Gwen had already spoken. Gwen and Griffin would protect her.
Gwen and Griffin would then come for Michael and Lea.
“If I did this,” Michael nearly shouted, “if I exchanged you for Cat, who would know you’d be missing? What would we have to do to clean up behind you?”
Xavier exhaled. He was doing this: willingly surrendering his freedom. And he’d do this and more if it meant Cat’s safety.
“Just Pam. At the restaurant.” He purposely left out Gwen, but the admission still left him empty. One person in the whole world who’d actually miss him? Pathetic.
Michael bent close to Xavier’s face. “You’ll call Pam. Tell her you went after Cat to Florida. Would she believe that?”
Xavier closed his eyes. “Yes. Yes, she’d believe that.”
So would Helen. It was the perfect excuse for him leaving town. The obsessed new boyfriend with a history of reclusiveness. The one who’d threatened to beat up Cat’s mentor. The one who staked out the gallery and then kicked the crap out of Helen’s wastebasket. Abso-fucking-lutely perfect.
Michael planted his fists on the particleboard. “You stay confined until we pick up shop and move back to L.A. You do what I say, when I say it. You don’t touch me or threaten me or say one word to me unless I talk to you first, or I send Lea after Cat. She’s really, really good at finding people. Even better at getting them to do what she wants. Got it?”
He looked to Lea, who nodded with a smirk. She’d taken at least two other Ofarians from their communities and done God knows what to deliver Jase into Michael’s twisted employ. Menace burned under that innocent facade. It reminded him of someone else from a long time ago: Nora, the old Tedran woman who’d broken him out of the Plant and then twisted his naiveté into blind trust. She’d been the most cunning person he’d ever met. Until Lea.
Michael got even closer, his hot breath whispering over Xavier’s face. Taunting him, telling him that he could get as close as he wanted and Xavier couldn’t do a damn thing to hurt him. “Do we have a deal?”
Captive again. A great shudder coursed through Xavier’s body. Let Michael see it. Let Lea see it. Let Jase see it. He rolled his head toward the stairs.
There, sitting on the third step from the bottom, was the Burned Man. He was grinning in his own horrible way, his scarred face contorting. He lifted his hands—one unmarred, one covered in melted, webbed skin—and he applauded.
“Yes,” Xavier whispered. “We have a deal.”
TWENTY-FIVE
When the younger guy named Sean removed Cat from the bedroom she’d been locked in for the past two days, she knew things were about to get much, much worse.
Sean pulled her into a huge bedroom that was larger than X
avier’s house. She fought him, kicking and screaming and biting, but he got the ropes around her wrists and tied her to one of the giant posts in the middle of the room carved to look like pine trees. The finely sculpted boughs dug into her skin, making new bruises.
The smell of old fire was less in this room, but still present. Sean wrapped a red handkerchief around her face, gagging her. As he tied it behind her head, she noticed him shaking. He even softly apologized when the knot tugged at her hair. Then he stalked out, leaving her alone in Michael’s bedroom.
His cologne clung to the air. When she craned her neck to the left, she could get a peek of familiar suits and shirts hanging in the closet.
Michael was a Secondary. This was his room and his house and he had kidnapped her.
Oh, God.
The ropes made it all finally sink in. Sean had been bringing her food and water and clothing for two days, but she’d been able to move about freely in that cell of a bedroom down the hall. Michael had visited her once. He and that Ofarian woman, Lea, who’d apparently sniffed Cat out that morning at Shed.
Lea had said nothing during that brief visit, but Cat had seen the gears in her brain churning. Dangerous, that one.
No matter how much Cat had screamed at Michael, he refused to say what he wanted with her, why he’d taken her. He’d just stood there, watching her like she was meat and he hadn’t hunted in weeks.
“You’re perfect now,” he’d told her. “He’s going to love you. And you’ll always be safe with me. Always.”
She couldn’t cry anymore. Two days alone had dried her all out, and tears wouldn’t get her anywhere anyway.
Closing her eyes, she ground her cheek into the tree post. She’d done exactly as Xavier and Gwen had suggested—only trusting people she knew, always staying in public—and she’d still been taken. Of all the people in the world, Michael Ebrecht and his bloodhound Lea were the ones who’d been kidnapping Secondaries. And the worst part? Cat had all this magic inside her and no idea how to use it. No clue how to get herself free.
Xavier…he must have been out of his mind by then. He would’ve called Gwen. They’d be searching for her. Yes. Cat had to believe that. And Helen…her current show artist couldn’t just up and disappear without her noticing. Maybe she’d have called the police. Maybe the Primaries had gotten involved.
Then Cat remembered Lea had taken her purse and phone. Who knows what the other woman might have done with them, what sort of lies she’d spun?
The bedroom door opened behind her. Someone was walking across the carpet. Cat tried to nudge herself around the post to see, but the ropes wouldn’t let her. Her Ofarian sense was pinging all over the place, but that was nothing new. This whole house was filled with Secondaries.
Not Michael, she prayed. Please don’t let it be Michael.
The person stopped just behind Cat, out of her peripheral vision.
“I bet now you wish you didn’t know what you are.” Lea. She came around the post and crouched. She pulled the gag out of Cat’s mouth.
“Did you sense my signature when I came in?” Lea smiled out of one corner of her mouth and there was absolutely no happiness behind it.
“Yes.”
“But you couldn’t tell it was me. Jeez, you really are a virgin.”
“Teach me how to tell them apart.” Cat strained against the ropes. “Get me out of here and teach me.”
Lea laughed softly. “Can you sense the others?”
Sense wasn’t a good enough word. More like her whole brain had gone topsy-turvy. When it had been one Secondary—like Michael that day she met him in the art fair, or Xavier that morning by the street performer—the signatures had come across as familiarity. A weird feeling of kinship that had steered her wrongly.
“Sort of,” Cat said. “They’re really faint. Five, maybe six others. One of them”—she cocked her head toward where she remembered the garage being—“is pretty scary.”
Lea made a grunting sound of assent.
“Did Michael purposely send you after me?”
“No. He told me to watch you. Keep tabs on you. At the time, he didn’t know what you are. Neither did I, until I walked right past you in that restaurant. Sometimes when a lot of Primaries are around the signatures get muddled. In a crowd, you have to be pretty close.”
This was surreal, Lea talking to her so casually.
“Anyway,” Lea said, “I texted Michael and told him what I’d found out about you. He was shocked, to say the least, but really, really happy. He immediately told me you’d be our newest acquisition. So I took a little detour to Drift, posed as Michael’s assistant and got access to the vaults, tweaked some pipes, and left Helen’s assistant to find the damage and call Helen back to the gallery.”
“But why?” Cat pleaded. “What does he want with me?”
Lea cocked her head. “I think you can figure that out. Michael likes to own things he thinks are special.” Then she rolled her eyes. “He’s got other reasons, but even I don’t quite understand them.”
“He’s crazy,” Cat whispered. “He can’t own people.”
Lea chuckled. “Some people might argue that most driven, successful, narcissistic people are crazy. Even if he’d never found out about you, he would’ve pursued you in the Primary way. But once he found out you’re one of us—”
Cat gasped. “He’s Ofarian, too?”
“No. He’s something else. If there’s a proper name for his kind, it’s been lost.”
“And you’re helping him?”
“Who’s helping whom exactly? Little Cat, little Cat. He and I are helping each other.”
She wondered if Michael knew that, because he wasn’t the type of guy to let others rise above him. The fact that she gave no more explanation, and looked at Cat with that wide-eyed, faux-innocent face, made Cat shudder.
“You’ve taken other Ofarians,” Cat said, turning her face toward the hall door, trying to pick out their signatures in the house.
Lea nodded with false pride. “Very good. So you’re starting to be able to differentiate them.”
Cat dug into her memory, trying to recall all that Xavier had told her in Shed when he’d revealed the world of the Secondaries. He’d mentioned others—other elementals, specifically. She closed her eyes, concentrated on the whisper of sensation across her body and the different kinds of twinges in her brain. “Is there an…air elemental? Maybe a fire?”
That condescending look of satisfaction melted off Lea’s face. “Quick learner.”
“Are they all working with you?”
Lea paused. “The fire is a little temperamental.”
“Wants to burn you alive, huh? I know the feeling.” Cat didn’t look away from Lea’s scorching look. Lea seemed to respond to being goaded, so Cat started to poke around. “So how in the world did you capture someone like that?”
“Not much can overpower water, you little bitch,” Lea hissed. “If there’s one thing you need to know about us, it’s that.”
Bingo.
“Ah. So that’s why you took the other Ofarians first. To collar a fire elemental?”
Lea stood up, looking down her nose at Cat on the carpet. She examined Cat like she was a lamb going to slaughter, and Cat feared she’d just poked the wrong person.
“Among other reasons,” Lea said, that smirk reappearing. She turned away, heading for the bed.
“You’re kidnapping your own people.”
Lea whirled back around, snatched Cat’s chin in her hand and wrenched it up at a sharp angle. “They are not my people.” Her nails dug in. “Whatever delusions you have about beautiful Ofarian people joining hands and singing sappy songs worshipping water are so wrong. They are not good people. They don’t care about any Ofarian unless they follow every one of their twisted rules exactly to the letter. It’s fascism, Cat. They control everything about you, and when you want to follow your heart, they rip it out, stomp on it, then abandon you.”
“What the—I don�
�t understand.”
Lea shoved Cat away, the back of her head striking a particularly sharp carved tree branch. Lea went to the dresser, where Michael had a neatly folded tie and a bottle of that awful cologne. Lea brushed her fingers over the tie. She took several deep breaths, each one more calm than the next, then turned back around. Leaning against the dresser, legs crossed at the ankles and arms folded at her waist, she said, “Let me tell you a story, Cat. It’s an oldie but a goodie.
“Once upon a time there was an obedient little Ofarian girl who did everything her daddy told her to. She said what he wanted her to say, she went where he wanted her to go. And as she got older, she always believed she’d marry who he wanted her to marry. Because that’s how the Ofarians worked, you know.”
Wait…what? Arranged marriages?
“Only when the betrothal announcement came, this girl had already fallen in love with someone else. And he wasn’t Ofarian. She gave in to the Allure—the itch to fool around with Primaries before you give yourself entirely to the Ofarian world. She thought it was going to be a one-night thing, as most Ofarians do, but there was something there. Something powerful and wonderful and stronger than anything she’d ever find with an Ofarian man. So when the time came for her to marry and her daddy marched in an Ofarian man she’d only met briefly once or twice before, she refused. She told her daddy she’d fallen in love with a Primary and that she was going to marry him instead.”
Cat didn’t move. The hardened, calculating Lea had suddenly become this desolate woman with tears shimmering in her eyes.
“You know what happened next?” Those glassy eyes focused on the carpet somewhere near Cat’s feet. “Her daddy made her choose: the Ofarians, or the love of her life. She chose love. And her daddy had his big bad soldiers grab her, inject her with about five needles of this potion that completely erased her water magic and said, ‘Bye, then. You made your choice. You’re never welcome back.’
“So she left with her love. Married him. Never thought twice about the backstabbing dad and sister who claimed to love her then threw her away when she longed for their support. Until she got pregnant and had a beautiful baby girl, and there was no one in the world she wanted to share it with other than her older sister. But her sister was rising in the ranks of the Ofarian Board, being groomed for the next Chairman’s seat, and the banished girl was forbidden from making contact. So she tried to forget about them and lived her life. Until everything was stolen from her. Again.”
A Taste of Ice (The Elementals) Page 23