by Rose O'Brien
“That’s cool,” he said, trying to relax the tension in his shoulders. “Is there are chore wheel I need to sign up for, or something?”
She laughed. “Nah. Alayna hired a local shifter mom to come in and do the cleaning around here. It used to be my job, though, and it kind of relaxes me. Especially when I’m having a hard day.”
Lu finally looked up as she trudged to a closet and tucked the broom inside. Her shoulders were a little slumped and she had dark circles under her eyes.
“Hard day?”
“Well, worse than some, but not as bad as others,” she said cryptically, a small smile tugging at one corner of her mouth.
She visibly shook herself, almost like a dog, and her expression brightened a little.
“Alayna asked me to put you through some skills assessments, see what you bring to the table besides your investigative skills, a complete disregard for personal safety, and your good looks.”
Alex tensed. He was so far out of his element that he wasn’t sure how he was supposed to react to the “good looks” comment.
“Uh…” was all he could manage.
“Chill, dude. I’m not coming on to you. I don’t poach.”
One of his eyebrows went up quizzically. He wasn’t seeing anyone, but decided to let the comment slide. Integrating with new teams could be so awkward.
Lu moved around him and headed down a hall.
“Gun range is up first,” she said over her shoulder as he followed.
She keyed in a code on a numerical keypad and they stepped into a room. The lights came up as they entered, controlled by motion sensors. An impressive array of firearms and weapons filled the walls.
“Welcome to the armory. Pick a handgun and an assault rifle and we’ll get started.”
He pulled back his jacked to reveal the 1911 holstered under his arm. Lu nodded and tossed him a box of .45 hollow points and some extra mags. Setting them aside, he headed straight for the M-16 and pulled it off the rack. It was like shaking hands with an old friend. He collected more extra mags and ammunition and sat on a stool to start loading. Lu joined him, snapping cartridges into a magazine with practiced efficiency.
Before the silence could stretch, Alex dove in with a question. Lu was a talker, and he hoped he could find out more information about this team he’d be working with.
“How did you end of working for Alayna? You said you started as a cleaner?”
Lu breathed out a laugh and said, “That crazy puta saved my life.”
Alex kept his eyes on loading up the mags.
“She scraped me off the floor of a meth house on the east side, strung out and bleeding from the beating my drug dealer boyfriend had just given me.”
Lu launched into the story. Max had been a shifter and Lu’s boyfriend/dealer/pimp. Alayna’s team had come busting into that meth house like dark angels. Seems Max had killed a street level pusher and Alayna got wind of it. As the team came tearing through the house, Lu had actually taken a swing at Alayna, who’d put the shifter on the floor as easily as breathing.
“She was such a fucking badass. Max ran a pretty ruthless crew of shifters, and Alayna and the team put every one of them in handcuffs or a body bag that night.”
Max had ended up under the Mountain, the maximum security prison the Council maintained for magical creatures. Lu had been offered a choice: jail or rehab.
“I picked rehab. Alayna drove all night to this center way out in West Texas that caters to magical creatures. I thought that would be the last time I saw her, but she wrote to me, came to visit. I walked out of that place with a plastic grocery sack with some clothes and a toothbrush and not a dollar to my name. I had no idea where I was going to go,” she said, pausing to slap her thigh. “And there was Alayna, waiting at the curb, leaning on that fucking Mustang of hers.”
She’d offered Lu a job cleaning the HQ and one of the dorm-like crash rooms to live in. It turned out that cleaning really relaxed Lu. It was sort of like zen meditation, she said. As she focused on her recovery, Alayna had showed her how to get her GED online, take college classes.
“Alayna always encouraged me. It was like there was nothing she thought I couldn’t do.”
Pretty soon she was ordering and maintaining equipment for the team. She and Alayna also started working on Lu’s shifting ability. Lu had been raised by wolf shifter parents, but as they started working, she discovered she could do birds, cats, small mammals, just about anything. That kind of ability was unheard of in the shifter world.
“When our last recon guy quit the team, Alayna offered me the job when he was barely out the door.”
“She sounds like an amazing boss.”
“You don’t know the half of it. It’s actually really unusual to have non-mages on a Mage Corps team. All of us have pasts that are, shall we say, problematic. Except for Burdock. He’s a Boy Scout,” Lu said. “But it was a big career risk for Alayna to hire us, and she did it anyway.”
That info made Alex’s ears perk up.
“Does she usually take a lot of risks?” He asked, careful to keep is voice neutral.
“Only with herself,” Lu replied. “Nature of the beast I guess.”
When his eyes snapped up to meet hers, Lu looked ever so slightly panicked, like she’d said too much.
“Air mages,” she said with a shrug. “Never look before they leap. Because they can kind of fly.”
Alex was pretty sure there was more to it than that, but decided to wait for more info.
Snapping one last cartridge into a magazine, Lu rose from the bench.
“Come on, bato. Let’s see what you got.”
***
Alex ran into Alayna as he emerged from the range, his button-down shirt splattered with fake blood.
“Cut it a little close?” She pointed to the simulated gore.
“Close enough,” he said. “Lu is a tricky range master. One of her little contraptions snuck up behind me and almost took me out at the knees before I could tag it.”
The contraptions had been made from ballistic gel and red corn syrup. Targets of various sizes were rigged on tracks along the floor, walls and ceiling. They were designed to come whistling out of the darkness and scare the crap out of anyone on the range floor.
“He did really well, Commander,” Lu called from behind him. “He’s as good as Burdock,” she continued, dropping her voice to a whisper, “and maybe a little better. His scores put him as the top marksman for the team.”
Alayna whistled, clearly impressed.
“I thought you were a medic. Why does a medic need to shoot well?”
He laughed. “My personal brand of preventative medicine was rounds downrange. Fewer bad guys means fewer ways my people could get hurt.”
“Change into something comfortable and meet me on the training mat. You’re handy with a gun—let’s see how you are with hand-to-hand.”
That had Alex smiling. Hand-to-hand had always come easily to him throughout his Army and FBI training. Alayna might be in for a bit of a surprise.
After changing into a pair of sweatpants and T-shirt, he found Alayna already on the mat, still wearing the black cargo pants and matching T-shirt that he was beginning to think of as her uniform.
“Shoes on or off?” he asked.
“How many street fights have you gotten into in your bare feet?”
Leaving his running shoes on, he stepped on to the blue training mat, which was inset into the concrete floor of the warehouse. Alayna waited in the center, her stance relaxed.
A palm-heel strike was flying at his face before he could blink. It looked like his new boss wasn’t wasting any time in trying to take his head off. He dropped his head and torso to the right to avoid the strike, his right hand coming across his body to deflect the blow.
He allowed his momentum to carry him further right, stepping close to try for an elbow to the side of her head. She dodged beneath it and aimed a punch for his kidney, but he was fast enough to twi
st and move his opposite forearm to block.
It continued like that for several minutes, each landing a rare kick here or a punch there. Suddenly, Alayna dropped low and swept her leg across the back of his ankles, catching him off guard and landing him flat on his back. The breath left his lungs in a rush and he struggled to roll to his side.
Alayna was on him in an instant, completing the roll for him, slamming his face into the mat. Without rising from her crouched position, she snaked an arm beneath his neck and around his windpipe, cutting off his air. One knee pressed into the small of his back, bending him backwards and her right leg wrapped around his hip.
He struggled for a second before realizing that he was truly stuck. He tapped her arm three times as he started to see spots.
She released the hold, but her hands lingered on him, heating his skin through his T-shirt. Her breath fanned the back of his neck, and he almost shivered.
“You have to be faster,” she said sharply, disengaging so fast she nearly pushed away from him.
“I was holding my own,” he replied as he caught his breath and wiped sweat from his face.
“I was warming up,” she said.
They continued like that for nearly an hour. Alex could hold his own in a stand-up fight, but Alayna had a bag of dirty tricks that would make Navy SEALs envious. She was able to throw him into two joint locks and pinned him twice more.
As they stood once again, she said, “Last shot. Give me everything you’ve got, cowboy.”
He moved in next to her, deflecting a strike at his head, and twisted her into a wrist lock that she shouldn’t have been able to get out of. She flicked her fingers in his eyes in a loose strike that had him dodging and she was able to slip the hold. A backhand strike landed squarely in his throat and he staggered back, gasping as his trachea nearly collapsed.
He found himself on his back again, not knowing how he got there. Alayna was straddling his waist, pinning his wrists to the mat. He couldn’t breathe, and not just because of the throat punch. He could feel the heat of her against his stomach through the pants she wore.
His pulse pounded, and if he was honest with himself, it wasn’t just from the exertion of the fight. Her clean scent, like mountain air in winter, wrapped around him. Strands of her platinum hair had escaped from her ponytail and fell over her shoulder to tickle his face.
Those eyes locked with his and heat bloomed across his skin, pooling in his limbs, making them heavy.
“We’re done,” Alayna said, springing to her feet.
She picked up a towel from the edge of the mat and dabbed her face, though she didn’t appear to be sweating.
She turned, tossed him a towel and said, “I think you’ve got a good shot at not getting your throat ripped out on the first day, but those hand-to-hand skills need some work. The whole point of bringing you on was to keep you from getting killed. Four days a week, I want to see you for an hour on the mat, understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he responded, a small smile touching his lips.
As bruised as he was, he would be glad to let her toss him around. She could pin him anytime she wanted. But it was as close as they could ever get. As soon as this case was over, he was going back to his real life, he reminded himself. This was not his world, and he did not belong here. This training session had proved that.
Alayna hooked the towel around her neck and headed for the locker room.
“Don’t feel too bad,” Dumeril’s voice said from the garage area.
Alex turned to see his tall, dark-skinned form roll out from under one of the cars on a mechanic’s board. He stood with languorous grace and sauntered over to where Alex was massaging a sore shoulder that Alayna had nearly yanked out its socket.
“She happens to be one of the most accomplished hand-to-hand fighters in the Mage Corps. She’s trained with masters in Karate, Kung-Fu, Krav Maga and more styles that I can’t pronounce,” he said. “She’s had to.”
“I don’t understand. If she can do magick, why does she need this stuff?”
“The same reason the Army trains in hand-to-hand when they have guns: sometimes it’s all you have,” Dumeril replied. “And besides, Alayna’s a Whisperer. Her magick is not exactly a combat asset.”
“I don’t know what a Whisperer is, but I watched her take that vampire apart the other night by shooting lightning from her hands,” Alex said.
“And if Nick hadn’t just had the ass kicking of a lifetime, if he’d been just a little faster, Alayna might have had her throat torn out,” he responded. “The Whisperers are, at the same time, the weakest and strongest members of the Mage Corps.”
“Why is that?”
“Whisperers are labeled air mages, but they’re really not. Other mages can control one element with nothing but a thought. Whisperers can control all the elements, and then some, but they have to use their voice. It takes longer. That’s a liability in combat.”
He paused briefly, meeting Alex’s eyes with a steady look, like he was considering his next words.
“But given enough time, they can weave spells of terrifying power,” Dumeril said. “Hence, the weakest and the strongest.”
“So, why does she need to know how to fight so well when she could rain down holy hell on the bad guys?”
Dumeril turned and started to head back to the garage.
“Why drop a nuclear bomb when a knife in the dark will do?” he said quietly.
Chapter 7
Alayna stuck her head under the hot, pounding spray of the locker room shower and let it wash through her long hair and over her shoulders, taking the scent of Alex with it.
She’d been short with him at the end of the workout, but being that close to him had put her on edge. Everything about him, his dark dancing eyes, his easy smile, the feel of his hard muscles under her hands, had reminded her that it had been weeks since she’d gotten laid.
There just hadn’t been time lately to go out to the bars. Because she was a Whisperer, male mages wouldn’t touch her. Why get involved with someone who almost certainly wouldn’t live to see their thirtieth birthday?
So she picked up sapien men in bars. She’d pick out the best looking, shallowest guy in the place, have a few drinks with him, and strongly suggest they go back to his place. It wasn’t like they could go to hers. They never got her real name, but they always had a lot of fun. Come morning, she’d ghost before the guy woke up and promptly forget all about him.
But Alex was different. He was charming and funny, and she liked being around him. Too much. It was becoming hard to forget what his mouth felt like against hers. While it was tempting to act on her attraction, she wouldn’t. First off, she didn’t sleep with people she worked with. That was a hard and fast rule. Second, the guy had kind of put his life in her hands, and it would feel like taking advantage. Third, she was destined for an early grave, and it wasn’t fair to get involved with anyone.
And they would get involved, if she made a move on him. Alex was not the kind of guy she could just fuck and forget. He was the kind of guy she could care about. That would tie her to this world and that was a complication she could not afford.
He’d actually done surprisingly well today, given that he didn’t have the reflexes, strength, or speed of any of the magickal races, but she couldn’t let him know that. She’d lost good personnel because they got cocky, complacent or arrogant. That wasn’t going to happen to Alex. He would become the deadliest fighter she could mold him into, even if their workouts left her tied in frustrated knots.
Shutting off the water, Alayna quickly toweled off, used a few whispered words to draw the moisture from her hair and threw on a clean T-shirt and cargo pants. She found the rest of the team already gathered in the conference room. A freshly showered Alex was with them, his dark hair wet and glistening, some of it falling over his brow. Her fingers itched to brush it back.
“I’d like to review where we are so far with these murder cases,” Alayna said, mentally shakin
g herself and stepping over to a wall that served as a white board.
Pictures of the six victims were posted in a row across the top, their names, when available, were written beneath in different colored marker. Photos of the scenes were taped below them. Colored lines that corresponded to the different victims connected documents, photos and names written and posted on the board.
“I’ll do the victim rundown, since I handled the exams on the ones we found and reviewed the reports for the ones APD found,” Dumeril said.
Six dead bodies. All the victims were under thirty. Five women and one man. The first three victims had been found in very remote locations and Alayna and her team had gotten to them first. The last three had all been left around Lady Bird Lake, right in the heart of downtown. By some miracle, the team had gotten to them first. They hadn’t been so lucky with Blanca. All of the victims were Latina or Latino. All had signs of severe neck wounds. All had been in the country without documentation, except for Blanca.
Blanca Rodriquez was the aberration, as Alex had noted earlier. She was a fresh kill, hours old, dumped out in the open for any sapien wandering by to see. The other bodies had been moderately to severely decomposed when they’d been found.
Looking over the photos and scenes, it was clear their killer had a type.
“These body dumps have gotten progressively more brazen. That’s not a good sign.” Alex said, his gaze lingering on Blanca’s photo. “What else have we got?”
Ellie spoke up.
“Based on what the commander got out of Salvadin, I’ve been doing some checking—and by checking I mean completely illegal hacking—into some of Jimmy Medina’s businesses and accounts. Medina Trucking is a gigantic operation, so it’s going to take some time to go through everything, but my gut says not all of those trucks are going where they’re supposed to,” she said. “As for the bars and some of his other side businesses, those look mostly legit. All of his properties check out. But it just doesn’t feel right. I’ll keep digging, but unless we have a few years to wait around for the results, I’m going to need more to go on.”