Air of Darkness

by Rose O'Brien

“Can we talk?” He eyed the conference room and she nodded.

  He closed the door behind them, shutting out curious stares from Ellie and Lu, but he didn’t sit down.

  “You’re so jittery, you look like you’ve had six shots of espresso. What gives?” he asked.

  “None of your business,” she snapped, the words reflexively flying from her mouth before she could stop them.

  He held his hands up, defensively.

  “If it has to do with the investigation into my best friend’s murder, I’d kinda like to think it is my business,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully. “Who did you talk to? What’s got you shook?”

  She made the mistake of looking up at him. If she had found anger in his eyes, she could have matched it, raged at him. Instead, she found compassion. Damn it. Some of the tension uncoiled within her and she was suddenly reminded of that embrace they’d shared in the locker room earlier. It had started out as healing, but it had shifted to something else. The way they’d held each other had been far too intimate, had felt far too good.

  He put his hands down slowly, but his gaze still held hers.

  “I thought we were working on this together,” he said, closing the distance between them. His hand caressed her shoulder and moved down the back of her arm. His touch was an anchor, pulling some of the anxiety from her. “Maybe I read the situation wrong, but this was starting to feel a little like a partnership.”

  Alayna was quiet for a moment before she answered. “I’ve never had a partner. I don’t know how that works.”

  He was so close his chest was almost brushing her breasts.

  “A good partnership is based on understanding each other’s goals. I’m here to do two things: Find Blanca’s killer and learn enough to protect and conceal myself from the things that live in your world. That’s it.” He paused for a moment and leaned into her. When he spoke, his warm breath brushed her neck. “What do you want, Alayna?”

  She took a deep breath, struggling to control her hammering pulse. Her heart rate had nothing to do with his nearness, she told herself, closing her eyes to shut out the sight of his chiseled and deliciously stubbled jaw

  “I want to find this killer,” she said matter-of-factly. In a softer voice she said. “And I want to keep you safe.”

  His other hand rose to cradle the back of her other arm and she moved imperceptibly closer to him.

  “The more information I have, the safer I am,” he said.

  She finally opened her eyes and met his gaze.

  “It was better that you weren’t there,” she said. Her voice was husky, and she almost cursed herself. “My relationship with that source is…delicate. And your presence would have made an awkward situation worse.”

  He frowned at her, his eyes narrowing again as he assessed her. There was a startling intellect behind those eyes, and she’d do well to remember that. He might be devastatingly handsome, but unlike the sapien men she engaged in one-night stands with, Alex was not stupid.

  “Why don’t you fill me in?” he asked.

  She stepped back, needing distance from his touch if she was going to discuss this, and it suddenly felt ten degrees colder. Turning, she took a seat at the conference table. Alex didn’t join her, instead remaining on his feet, his arms crossed over his big chest.

  “I went to see Dominic,” she told him.

  “The owner of Revelations? The one whose office I had a magickal seizure in?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Why would that be awkward?”

  She hesitated before she continued, and she could see Alex making a mental note of that. “We used to work together. He was the team’s recon specialist before Lu.”

  “And the awkwardness has something to do with why he isn’t on the team anymore, am I right?”

  The guy was too good at interrogation. One question flowed into the next, and he was good at reading her. Too good for comfort.

  She fell silent and kept her eyes on his and off the muscular chest that stretched his T-shirt. That masculine spicy scent of his wrapped around her and went right to her head. He’d sensed a weak point and was moving to exploit it. A part of her wanted him to find it, wanted to talk about it with someone.

  “What happened, Alayna?” His voice was low, inviting her to open up and spill her secrets.

  She looked down, afraid he’d see the guilt and pain in her eyes, and sighed.

  “Dominic and I were best friends, once,” she began.

  She and Dom were thick as thieves for years, but not long after she’d taken over command of the team, their relationship changed from easy going to something else. Dominic became aggressive with his attention. There had been inappropriate comments, some in front of the team.

  “Then he came on to me.”

  Alex moved one of the chairs to sit across from her. His knee almost brushed hers as he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his expression neutral.

  “Dominic and I were both working late in the warehouse one night,” Alayna continued.

  Alayna had been stretching her muscles after a long session at the computer and standing at the window looking out at the city. It had been dark in the office, only the glow of the computer monitors and the lights of the city illuminating them.

  Dominic had come up behind her.

  “He said that we needed to talk,” she told Alex. “I knew it was coming. I’d seen the way he’d changed. What I wasn’t expecting was for him to grab me and kiss me as soon as I turned around.”

  Alex tensed at that, the muscles around his jaw standing out and something feral sliding through his eyes. When he stayed silent, she continued.

  She’d been horrified and pushed him away.

  “I asked him what he was doing, and he said we both knew what had been going on for a while. I reminded him that I was the commander and that I couldn’t have relationships with team members. It just creates too many problems. It can distract people in combat.”

  Dominic had stepped away from her, running his hand through his hair in that way he did when he was frustrated. She desperately didn’t want to lose her friend, but this was uncharted territory for her. Dominic had been the first man in her life to treat her like she wasn’t cursed. She’d never before been seen as attractive to anyone who’d actually known her. Or maybe she’d never let them get that close. Maybe it was a little of both.

  “I still remember exactly what he said to me ‘So you’re going to keep fucking sapiens you pick up in bars like a dirty slut when you know it’s me you’re supposed to be with?’”

  Alex grimaced at the coarse words.

  “I told him that I wasn’t going to defend my choices or live like a nun. If mage men don’t want me, I’ll get it somewhere else.”

  “Those men are idiots,” Alex growled. “If they can’t see past their hang-ups, they don’t deserve you.”

  His voice was low and fierce. Something inside her lit up at his words, but she pushed it down, not daring to acknowledge what he’d said and continued like she hadn’t heard him.

  “Dominic tried to apologize, but what he’d said hurt.”

  Alayna made the best of the situation she’d been dealt. Because of her status as a Whisperer, other mages regarded her with a mix of fear, suspicion, but mostly pity. In mage society it was typical for mages to start hooking up when they were still in the Academy.

  Their kind was fading, dying out, and pregnancies were so rare, but so important to the continuation of mage-kind—and to the balance between the shadow races. Most got started early.

  If she hadn’t been a Whisperer, Alayna would have been fending off offers from some of the most powerful mages out there. Her parents had managed to have four children, an extremely rare event. And each child was born under a different element. Something never heard of before.

  In fact, before she’d hit puberty and her powers had manifested as the Whisperer’s curse, many within the Council hierarchy thought that she and her siblings
, each of them able to control a different element, were the fulfillment of a well-known prophecy. The Blackwell children were supposed to save the world, restore balance, close the door against the darkness, and bring peace to the Earthly realms.

  Everything had changed when her curse had manifested. It had torn her family apart. It felt like other members of the Corps blamed her for being the one who ended their hope for peace. As a Whisperer, her days were numbered. It was why she chose casual hookups with sapiens she met in bars over wasting her time with relationships that could never work.

  Besides, she had her work. That was all she needed until her time came.

  “I told Dominic to get his feelings under control or he was off the team. He tried to argue with me that we should be together.”

  She never let the team see it, but she was angry, angry to her core. She was treated like an incompetent by her superiors, when she had more destructive power within her than any mage alive. Her family had been torn apart by what she was, her mother and siblings choosing to distance themselves from her and each other as a way to deal with her inevitable early death.

  Her loneliness had cracked her foundations and let anger sink in deep. She covered it well, but Dominic and his fucking attitude had brought it all to the surface. Her team members had been her only friends, and Dominic had been the closest among them.

  “I shouldn’t have, but I screamed at him that he couldn’t tell me what to think or feel. I was so angry at him. I lashed out. I called him a predator and said some bigoted things about vampires. I’m not proud of it.”

  The look of hurt that had crossed his face could still conjure horrible feelings of guilt within her. She could never claim to have broken anyone’s heart, but she thought she might have come close that night with Dominic.

  “He turned in his resignation the next day,” she told Alex.

  “And you’re still friends?”

  “We are now, but it’s taken a lot of work and years to get back to this point,” she said. “I think he understands now. And besides, he told me he’s with Camille. He’s over me.”

  Alex considered what she said for several moments before switching gears.

  “What did he tell you when you went to see him?”

  She filled him in on the conversation and told him about her plans to check out Hellraisers that night.

  “So, it’s a rough joint, huh?”

  “The roughest,” she told him.

  “And you trust Dominic’s intel?”

  “Absolutely. He even offered to go with us, suit up for old time’s sake. I told him no.”

  Alex nodded before rising to his feet. “Guess I better get my dancing shoes on. We going loaded for bear?”

  Before she could answer, Dumeril burst through the door. “Hey, we caught a lead,” he said.

  Burdock was right on his heels. They’d been out trying to pin down their victims’ time lines, as Alex had suggested. It had taken all day, they explained, but they had managed to track down some girls who knew two of the victims. The women had been turning tricks on the northeast side of town. Dumeril, had been able to tap some of his old contacts from the black market left over from his days as the underground doctor for Austin’s non-sapien races. They’d spoken to folks that knew the two women.

  “It looks like they didn’t know each other,” Dumeril said. “But they worked the same part of town.”

  The women had disappeared several months apart, and no one had thought they would turn up dead. In that crowd, girls left town, disappeared for months at a time, or set up in different parts of town. Neither victim had a pimp. Each had been an independent operator.

  “Several of the girls we spoke with said that before they disappeared, the victims had been approached by someone named James,” Burdock said. “When we showed them your sketch of our mystery vamp, they said it was the same guy.”

  “Why didn’t APD pick up on this?” Alayna asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, but in these situations I find it usually boils down to human laziness,” Dumeril said. “These women were undocumented and working the streets. They weren’t the kind of victims that catch a lot of attention, and the lack of physical evidence makes it hard to turn up any leads. These are the victims no one fights for and our killer was counting on that.”

  “So now we just need to find this James guy,” Alex said.

  Dumeril nodded.

  “I may have a lead on that, too,” he said. “I put out my feelers to the more shadowy side of the black market and word is that this vamp hangs at Hellraisers most nights. In fact, he’s supposed to be there tonight for some backroom poker game.”

  Alayna groaned.

  “That’s the second time today that club has come up as our next stop,” she said, frustration evident in her voice. “And it sounds like we need to go tonight.”

  “Hellraisers is a rough spot, no doubt,” Dumeril said. “But if we’re smart, I think we can snag this guy and get out with a minimum of mayhem. Here’s how we do it.”

  Chapter 11

  Hours later, Alex sat in the passenger seat of the Mustang, parked on a deserted street in South Austin. The area was mostly warehouses, garages, and machine shops. It was after midnight and the area was eerily empty and quiet, the wind whistling between the white-painted industrial buildings.

  The team had spent the afternoon preparing for their trip to Hellraisers, examining maps of the area, blueprints of the building, checking weapons and talking tactics.

  It was so similar to the prep work Alex had done for missions in Iraq that he found himself reaching for the reassuring weight of his medic's bag and running through mental checklists of drugs and instruments.

  He'd almost asked Alayna if he should put together a kit, but thought better of it. He didn't particularly want to go there, not after what happened the last time he’d played paramedic. Fear gripped his belly at the thought of having to work on any of his new team members. Besides, Dumeril was the team medic, and from what Alayna had said, the Svarturan’s skills were beyond anything Alex could do with pressure bandages and IV lines.

  Hellraisers was down the street and around the corner from where they'd parked. To any casual observer (who couldn't see through glamours), the bar would appear the same as any other warehouse in the district. To anyone that could see through the illusions, the metal building looked like a combination of the scariest biker bar and some of the toughest gang hangouts he'd seen in San Antonio.

  In the dirt parking lot, there was a mix of motorcycles, muscle cars, and luxury sedans that screamed drug dealer.

  Alex looked through the back glass of the Mustang and saw the team's white panel van pull up a block and a half behind them, on the other side of the intersection.

  Alayna’s voice pulled him back around. “Remember, we’re going in to nab this James person and bring him in for questioning. We’re not going to get fancy. This is the roughest bar for a hundred miles. Keep your head down and head for the door if it gets crazy.”

  The black leather boots he’d seen her wearing that first night in the alley were back. The handle of her amazing expanding whip was in one boot and a wicked knife in the other. Tucked into the tops of the boots was a pair of supple black leather pants. They didn’t move like any leather he’d ever seen before. This was fairy leather, made in the Fey realms, she’d said. It hadn’t been cut off an animal; it had been grown and shaped. The material was expensive and hard to get, but it was almost impossible to cut, and any tears knit back together on their own. And it breathed like silk, she said.

  Right then, Alex had to fight the image from his mind of what it would be like slide them off her gorgeous legs so that he could concentrate on what she was saying.

  Don’t. Go. There. She’d made it pretty clear with her tale of Dominic’s hasty exit from the team that office romances were not in the cards. Hearing how the guy had treated her had set something hot and ugly smoldering in his thoughts. The list of people he
wanted to beat senseless wouldn’t fill a Post-It, but Dominic was officially on that list.

  It was getting harder to ignore his physical responses to her, but he needed to keep this attraction under control. It wasn’t just her ban on office romances that was keeping him from reaching for her. He had a bad track record of getting attached to the women he fought beside. Blanca’s death had set him on a perilous path of vengeance, and he’d never had so much as a lustful thought about her. Then there was Kelly. Her death had nearly torn him apart. It ruined his life.

  Alex couldn’t let that happen again. He’d worked so hard to put his life back together into something he could be proud of. As soon as this case was over, he was going back to that life. Gorgeous witches with moonbeam hair and dangerous jobs did not fit with that plan.

  As Alayna ran through her radio checks with the team and Alex double checked his weapons, the memory of her pressed up against him as they’d flown on Z’s back rose in his mind. There was no denying that there was a connection between them. It wasn’t just that they had managed to swap some memories during that botched memory wipe. When he looked at her he could sense the smallest tendrils of feelings for her taking root.

  She was such a mystery. One minute she was hard-hitting muscle and flashing weapons, kicking his ass on the mat. The next, she was touching him, melting against him, taking him on dragon rides. She seemed to love showing him new corners of her world and, if he was being totally honest, he loved going with her.

  Ellie’s voice crackled over his ear piece. “We’re good to go on your signal, Commander.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Alayna pressed a button, and the top of the Mustang began to retract. They got out of the car and she hit the button for her specialized alarm system as the rag-top finished tucking itself away.

  “Expecting trouble?” Alex asked.

  “You never know when you might need to make a quick getaway,” she replied.

  She drew her fingers over the hood, tracing a pattern and whispering a few words. There was a flash of red and the image of a Celtic knot blazed into existence for a moment before disappearing.