I cleared my throat and took another sip of bourbon. “Professional admiration,” I lied. “I like the neck piece. Who did that one?”
“Someone in Anchorage,” he said, his expression blank, his eyes anything but.
“A woman?” I asked without thinking.
The corner of his mouth quirked, hinting at his usual smirk. “Why?”
I shrugged. “How long did you have to sit for it?”
“Six hours,” he said, a knowing glint in his eyes.
I licked my lips. “Just, um, one session?”
He nodded and turned to head into the kitchen.
“How much did she charge?”
Nik grabbed a glass from the nearest cupboard and returned to the table to pour himself a drink. “I didn’t pay her in money,” he said, glancing at me, more than a hint of a smirk now.
I tried my hardest not to react, but damn it, I could feel the traitorous blood heating my neck and cheeks. I lowered my gaze to stare at the bottle across the table and cleared my throat. “Where are you staying tonight?”
Nik chuckled, low and quiet, and my stomach did a little flip-flop that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.
I spluttered my bourbon. “I didn’t mean—” I stood partway and reached for the bottle. “You know what I meant,” I said, not quite sure that I knew what I meant.
Nik’s stare burned into me for a moment longer. “Sure, Kitty Kat. I know what you meant.” He turned and walked back into the kitchen. “I was hoping to crash here again—payment for a day’s work.” He opened the fridge, shook his head, then opened the freezer. “Pizza?”
I watched him for a moment, gathering my scattered wits. “You don’t want to go back to Bainbridge, do you?”
Bainbridge Island was the current territorial base of Clan Heru. Heru ruled over the entire Pacific Northwest, including Northern California from San Francisco up, extending all the way to Alaska. He owned the entire northern quarter of Bainbridge, where he, Lex, and their daughter, Reny, lived with several dozen other Nejerets. Nik’s mother, Aset, was among them. Hundreds of others passed through each year, as it was required for Nejerets from other clans to request permission and receive a license of passage or residency, depending on their intended length of stay in his territory.
Nik was quiet for a few seconds, his head in the freezer and the rest of him unmoving. I took it as an opportunity to ogle a bit longer. “They don’t know I’m here,” he finally said.
I blinked, surprised. “But you talked to your mom and—”
“I didn’t tell her I was actually coming back here to help with the search.” He pulled two frozen pizzas from the freezer. “Just that I’d look into it.”
“So nobody knows you’ve involved me, either?”
He shrugged one shoulder, then turned on the oven. “Who’s to say the Senate’s not involved in the disappearances?” He tore into one of the boxes. “It’s better for us both if nobody knows I’m here.”
“Except for me,” I said quietly.
Nik looked at me, the tiniest smile curving his lips.
My heartrate picked up, and I broke our stare, focusing instead on my empty glass. “You can stay.” I lifted one shoulder. “It’s only fair, with you filling in downstairs . . .”
He grunted a thanks. “So what’ve you found?”
“Hmmm?” About Dom. Right. “Oh, um, it looks like the missing Nejerets are linked to other disappearances. A bunch of homeless kids have vanished from the area as well.”
“What that cop came to you about this morning?”
“Garth, yeah.” I nodded and refreshed my inbox, using the computer screen as a way to avoid eye contact with Nik. “I’m just waiting for some files from him right now. Until I get those, I’m in a holding pattern . . .” I purposely didn’t tell Nik about Ouroboros. He was barely involved in this as is, aside from playing messenger, and I didn’t want to suck him in further. He still had people who would be devastated if he died, his mother, first and foremost. I respected Aset too much to get her only son killed. And then there was me . . .
“No plans for the night, then?”
I raised my eyebrows. “None that I’m aware of.” I laughed to myself. Really, did I ever have plans for the night? For any night?
Nik hoisted himself up onto the counter, where he sat, boots dangling. “I could use a few touch-ups. We could trade . . .”
Frowning, I nodded. As far as ideas went, it didn’t suck. Besides, I relished the chance to get a peek under his shirt—professional curiosity, of course. “Let’s eat,” I said, “then head down to my office.” I was already thinking about what I’d have him work on. I always had a gang of tattoos in the lineup. Unlike Nik, I didn’t just trace over my already-existing pieces, refreshing a static pattern. I liked to change it up. When one piece was faded enough, I just inked something new over the top.
I laid off the bourbon while we ate, and by the time we’d polished off the pizza, I was sober as a stone. Some might see it as a perk, but the metabolism that comes hand in hand with Nejeret healing can be the most annoying of burdens. When we need to eat, we need to eat. If we don’t, our regenerative ability will turn off until it has enough energy to fuel it, and we start aging or losing weight—rapidly. It’s the only way I’ll ever look any older than my physical eighteen years, however temporarily. On the plus side, our metabolisms also enable us to process alcohol insanely quickly. I could be ass drunk one hour, dead sober the next.
“Alright,” I asked Nik as he followed me into my private tattooing office. I flicked on the light switch on the wall, then turned on a secondary lamp. “What am I touching up first?”
He tugged his shirt off over his head, and I stared without blinking. His entire torso was a mass of black and graying ink over taut skin and hard muscles. It was chaotic and beautiful and impossible to take in completely in just a few seconds. I licked my lips, swallowing roughly as my heart rate escalated once more. So maybe it hadn’t been the alcohol fueling my attraction to him upstairs. Clearly, I needed to get laid.
Nik seemed oblivious to this round of gawking. “My left rib piece is probably the worst,” he said, lifting his arm and craning his neck to get a better look. “It’s nothing complicated—just a list of names.”
“I can see that,” I said, leaning in close and breathing softly. He smelled amazing—clean and fresh, with just a hint of something spicy and ancient that reminded me of the incense my mom used to peddle in this very shop. Aroused didn’t even come close to how I was feeling. “Only, um, a few of the names are in English.”
Nik laid on his back on the narrow, padded bed. “Well, since English didn’t exist for most of my life . . .”
“Right. That makes sense.” I turned away from him and started gathering up my tools, impressed by how tidily he’d worked in my space. “So, who are they? Or were they? People you cared about? Or people you killed?” I asked, projecting with that last guess. That was the list of names I’d ink into my own skin. It was a long list.
“Something like that.” Nik’s voice sounded distant.
“Sorry.” I set the ink and tattoo machine on a rolling table, along with a fresh needle and a few sanitizing wipes. “Didn’t mean to pry. So, why only black ink?” I’d never seen him with anything else.
Nik laughed under his breath. “I tried color once, back in the forties—didn’t like the look of it as it faded.”
I could relate. I only rarely incorporated color into my own tattoos, and even then, only as accents.
“But I do have one piece that isn’t done in black ink,” Nik said, rolling onto his side.
I sucked in a breath. “Holy shit . . .”
Nearly his entire back, from his broad shoulders down to his trim waist, was a cascade of hieroglyphs done in some impossible iridescent ink. It shimmered in the light, making his skin look like it had been inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
“Is that—”
“At?” he said. “Yeah. Made the ink myself.”
At was one of the two energies that made up everything in the universe. All of space and time was held together by At and its counterpart, what I’d dubbed anti-At. The closest human science has come to capturing the truth of things is through particle physics, with matter and antimatter. That’s the closest humans have come to understanding the universe—and it’s not very close at all.
For thousands of years, my people were gifted with the ability to leave our bodies and enter a higher plane of existence, one where those primal forces are visible as a swirling, rainbow miasma of the fabric of time and space. There, we’d been able to view almost any time, any place, from that other plane in what we’d called echoes. The echoes were closed to us now, had been for over three years, ever since the new gods abandoned us.
Nik had the unique innate ability to pull one of those otherworldly forces, At, into our physical plane of existence, courtesy of his sheut, his internal, magical power source. He was the only person alive who could do it, and there was just one person in the world who could do the same with anti-At—Mari, my old partner in crime—though her abilities were far more limited. And way more dangerous. A single touch of obsidian-like anti-At could unmake a Nejeret from the ba out, erasing their poor, dwindling soul from the timeline completely until it was as though they’d never existed at all.
At, however, was different. Touching it wouldn’t harm a person, and Nik’s control over it was mind-blowing. He could make virtually anything out of the otherworldly material, including the sword stashed away upstairs in my closet with the rest of my forgotten assassin’s gear. He could create whole buildings out of At or restrain someone in seemingly living vines of At or turn an entire person into At, either to preserve or punish. Apparently he could make tattoo ink, as well.
“It’s the only way I’ve found to make a permanent tattoo,” he explained. “For us, I mean.”
I licked my lips. “Would you make me some of that ink?”
“Yeah, sure, Kitty Kat.” He extended his arm over his head in preparation for me to begin working. “Whatever you want. All you have to do is ask.”
Chapter Seven
The Ouroboros corporate headquarters were housed in the tallest building in Seattle, the Columbia Center. The skyscraper was intimidating for more than its height—it was a dark giant, an immense structure with an exterior as black and reflective as fresh-cut obsidian that took up an entire city block. The ground floor consisted of an expansive and varied food court, the second by a mall’s worth of shops. I may have stopped at the coffee shop near the entrance for a couple of donuts—a maple bar and an old fashioned—and a black coffee on my way in. Aaaaand I may have scarfed down both pastries by the time the escalator carried me up to the second floor, the lowest level reached by the elevator.
There was a sign at the top of the escalator advertising the Ouroboros open house, proclaiming that it was today, on the sixtieth floor. And would you look at that—they hope to see me there! So friendly, these evil, kidnapping, child-torturing corporate scientists . . .
I rode the elevator up with a handful of people of various ages. A man and a woman in their thirties stepped off on floor eighteen, chatting about people in their office, and an older, dignified woman in a tailored skirt suit left on floor forty-one, leaving me with a middle-aged man and a younger couple. We all rode to the sixtieth floor.
When the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, I hung back, scoping out the scene. A couple of greeters waited a dozen or so steps out of the elevator. Both were attractive men in the prime of youth, wearing identical gray slacks and navy blue button-down shirts. Nice subliminal advertising, these handsome, youthful fellas. They latched onto my elevator companions, leaving me to slink out unnoticed.
I’d like to point out that I even dressed for the occasion. I was wearing my nicest jeans—dark and totally hole-free—the one and only turtleneck I owned, and a charcoal-gray hooded trench coat, tied at the waist. I’d swapped out my usual combat boots for some black leather riding-style boots, and I’d even removed my lip piercings. By the time I returned home, the damn holes will probably have closed up already, which was a pain in the ass. I looked downright respectable . . . at least, to these kinds of people. But I felt ridiculous. Anybody from the shop would’ve spit out their coffee if they’d seen me like this. Which was precisely why I’d slipped out the back door.
The shimmering tip of my brand-new tattoo—an image of the goddess Isis very similar to the one on Nik’s neck, with the exception that this goddess bore a striking resemblance to my mom—peeked out from the end of my sleeve onto the back of my hand. All other tattoo ideas had gone out the window as soon as I’d seen the At ink piece on Nik’s back. I tugged at my sleeve as I walked across the lobby, hoping nobody noticed. It didn’t really strike me as the tattoo kind of place.
“Miss!” someone called after me. “Excuse me!” Fast footsteps carried the voice closer, and a third young man dressed just like the other greeters in gray slacks and a blue button-down shirt jogged my way. “Are you here for the open house?”
“Yes,” I said, splashing on a broad smile and airhead eyes. I blinked several times and pretended to scan my surroundings. “Am I going the wrong way?”
“No, but you do have to check in.” His brow furrowed. “Did you register online?”
“Of course I did,” I said, touching my fingertips to his forearm and meeting his eyes. “I can follow instructions . . . when I want to.” I gave him a wink. Too much?
“Great!” He pulled a sleek little smartphone from his pocket and traced a circle on the screen. “Name?” he asked, looking at me.
“Gen,” I said. “Genevieve Dubois. I just registered last night—it was sort of last minute.” I put on a worried expression. “I hope that’s okay . . .”
“Yep,” he said cheerily. “I see your registration right here.” He held his arm out, telling me to head toward the single open door on the left side of the lobby, where a table was set up with name badges and a fanned-out stack of navy blue folders with the tail-eating snake emblazoned on the front in metallic silver. Two women manned the table, one in the increasingly familiar dark gray and blue—I was sensing a color scheme—the other wearing a smart black pencil skirt and a cream blouse.
“Candace will finish checking you in,” my greeter said, handing me off to the uniformed woman. “And lucky you, Ms. Dubois, you can meet one of the Amrita leads, Dr. Marie Jones.”
I glanced at the non-uniformed woman and froze. She was no “Marie Jones”; her name was Mari. She was my Mari—my ex-partner in assassinating the Senate’s enemies. The same one whose name had been counted among the missing Nejerets. Things hadn’t ended well between us, what with her calling me a coward the last time I’d seen her and me flipping her the bird. But we’d had some good times . . . and some dark times. Regardless of our past, or maybe because of it, I was genuinely glad to see her. At least I now knew that she wasn’t one of the victims.
Then, dread sprouted in my belly. If she wasn’t one of the victims, why was she here?
“Ms. Dubois,” Mari said, extending her hand. She looked awesome. Her sleek, short inverted bob offset her Japanese features beautifully, and her brilliant jade-green eyes had never been more striking. “A pleasure to meet you.” She grinned woodenly. “What brings you to our open house today? You couldn’t be a day over eighteen.”
I shook her hand, narrowing my eyes minutely. What game was she playing? “Twenty-five, actually. And it’s never too early to start planning for the future, at least that’s what my mom’s best friend Mei always said.” Mei was a Senate member and the leader of her own clan, occupying the Great Plains territory. But more importantly, she was Mari’s adoptive mother.
Mari’s cheek twitched. “How fascinating. Please”—she gestured for me to step off to the side with her—“chat with me for a moment. Yours is a demographic we’ve yet to really reach, and I’d love to get your input on a few ideas.”
I matche
d her, wooden grin for wooden grin. “Love to.”
Mari led me to a cluster of chairs in a corner of the lobby about as far as we could get from the check-in table and the elevator. “Just keep smiling pleasantly,” she said through clenched teeth as she smoothed down the back of her skirt and sat.
I did as requested, sitting in the chair beside hers and angling my knees her way. “What the fuck are you doing here, Mars?” I asked through gritted teeth.
Her jade eyes flashed with irritation. “I should be the one asking you that. Did the Senate send you?”
I shook my head, stupid smile plastered in place. “Nik showed up and told me that a bunch of Nejerets are missing. It’s looking like this place—you guys—are involved. But no, the Senate didn’t send me.” I laughed under my breath. “I’m sure the Senators would shit their collective pants if they knew I was here.”
Mari leaned in a little. “Nik’s back? I thought nobody had seen or heard from him for years.”
“They hadn’t,” I said, not bothering to tell her that he’d been in contact with his mom. “Mari, what are you doing here?”
“The Senate sent me in undercover about six months ago because they thought the corporation’s research was suspicious. I was just supposed to blend in . . . to monitor. But a couple months ago, when I heard about some of our people going missing, I started to actively investigate.”
It was my turn to lean in, elbows on my knees. “What did you find? Do you know where Dom is? Is he still alive?”
Mari’s eyes widened, her smile faltering. “Dom’s missing, too?” She shook her head, a crease forming between her eyebrows.
“You didn’t know?”
“Smile,” she reminded me. “And no, I had no clue about Dom. The most I’ve been able to find out is that there’s some sort of a shipment that goes out every couple nights—one that’s off the books. It might have something to do with all of this, but . . .” She shrugged. “It’s weak, at best. I tell you what—one of those shipments is going out tonight. Why don’t I text you the address and you and Nik can check it out? I’ll snoop around here to see what else I can find out and contact you in the morning.”
The Kat Dubois Chronicles: The Complete Series (Echo World Book 2) Page 6