The Temptation of Four

by Eva Chase

  Up until now, I’d been so focused on finding her that I guessed I hadn’t given myself enough room to sort out my varying reactions.

  “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” John said, still way too calm about the whole scenario. “To find out what she’s up to and what her grand plan is. Sherlock may very well be right that she was under external pressures.”

  “That doesn’t absolve her of the crimes she committed,” I said. And I was pretty sure no “external pressures” had forced her to seduce me. But at the same time the thought that she might have been escaping some kind of danger brought a sympathetic twinge into my chest.

  I just had to keep reminding myself that the woman I’d met wasn’t real. The Jemma Moriarty I’d gotten to know was a figment she’d created to con us. The true Jemma Moriarty—

  I hesitated, leaning closer to the glass and narrowing my eyes. The shade of the awning over the pub’s window made it possible to see inside, all the way to where the overhead lights gleamed off bright red hair.

  The true Jemma Moriarty was sitting on a stool just a couple feet away from Sherlock.

  I stiffened. “They’re talking to each other. That wasn’t the plan. He said he was just going to watch her and see what she did and who she was meeting.”

  John followed my gaze. His stance didn’t change, but his hand tightened around his walking stick. “She must have recognized him. He was so pleased with that disguise too.”

  “He shouldn’t have gotten that close.” She hadn’t been conning us about how sharp she was, clearly. I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I couldn’t make out much from this distance, but it looked like they were just sitting there chatting. “If she’s made him, she’ll know we’re here too. Why the hell are we hanging around over here like a couple of idiots?”

  “Garrett,” John said in protest, but I was already heading out the door. Halfway across the sun-drenched road, he caught up with his slightly uneven gait, his stick tapping against the pavement. “I’m not sure this is the best idea.”

  “I don’t want Sherlock doing all the talking for me,” I replied. “Especially when he couldn’t even manage to keep up his ploy for five minutes. It’s about time we put some pressure on her.”

  I had to see her as she really was, face to face, and then maybe any other feelings still lingering would burn away.

  That was the plan, anyway. I stepped into the dimmer space of the bar ahead of John, sour and weirdly savory smells washing over me, and Jemma looked up. She smiled.

  Just like that, I was seeing double: the woman who’d told me so earnestly how much she appreciated the risks I was taking and what I now recognized as the sly confidence of a master grifter. My feet stalled for a second before I pushed myself onward.

  Other than the air of confidence that came across a little more overtly than it had in London, she looked essentially the same. The scarf she’d pulled over her head had fallen to her angular shoulders, exposing her scarlet hair that caught the eye even when pulled back into a braid. The banded light-and-dark gray of her deep-set eyes stood out as starkly as ever against her pale skin.

  It didn’t matter that the fullness of her lips didn’t totally match that pert nose and pointy chin, or that I knew her deceptively slim frame could topple a man twice her size—I couldn’t turn off the part of me that sparked to life at the sight of her. That insisted I’d never met another woman quite so appealing.

  “Look who’s joined the party,” Jemma said in her soft but precise voice, sounding unruffled and if anything mildly amused. “Scotland Yard could spare even you, Garrett?”

  “These two wouldn’t be here either if it wasn’t for me,” I found myself saying. I snapped my mouth shut before any other careless remarks could slip out. That competitive impulse, the urge to show I was better than my much-celebrated colleagues, was what had made me so vulnerable to her machinations.

  I had to be better than that. I’d thought I was better, at least enough to put the past behind me, until six weeks ago.

  Jemma arched an eyebrow at Sherlock, who was still wearing his wig and his droopy moustache.

  He raised his shoulder in a light shrug. “Garrett found one of the key pieces of info that allowed us to narrow down your location. It wouldn’t have been fair to exclude him from the expedition.”

  His tone made it clear that he would probably have excluded me if given the option. Sherlock might have preferred to work with me above any of my police colleagues, but mostly he preferred to work alone.

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” I allowed myself to add. “I had plenty of vacation days saved up.”

  The chief hadn’t minded me taking off on a vacation of indeterminate length in large part because of my role in bringing down Stefan Richter. He didn’t know that Jemma had handed the international menace to us on a silver platter. The fact that I couldn’t really take credit for even that victory niggled at me too.

  We needed to sort things out with her, figure out how much of a threat she was and deal with any other crimes she was involved in, and then I could go home and put her behind me like I had all the transgressions of my youth.

  “I’d still like to know what the three of you are hoping to accomplish by dropping in on me.” Jemma cocked her head. “You have no legal footing to arrest me. If you were hoping to carry out a less official sort of revenge, I should mention that I have a colleague with a pistol watching right now to make sure nothing happens to me.”

  Sherlock’s gaze darted to the back of the pub. A curtain hung over the doorway there, just enough ajar that someone could have gotten a clear shot at any of us if they’d wanted to.

  I couldn’t make out any figure standing in the shadows there, but a prickle quivered through my nerves. I didn’t think she was lying.

  “Do you really think I’d come here to rough you up?” Sherlock said incredulously. Revulsion at the idea congealed in my stomach, but it sat uneasily next to the churn of my anger.

  “We don’t really know each other all that well, do we?” Jemma took a sip of her drink. “I’ve already told you I’ve got nothing to discuss with you.”

  Sherlock shook his head. “That’s not a good enough answer.”

  “You involved us,” John said. “We need to know exactly what you’ve gotten us mixed up in.”

  She flicked her hand dismissively. “Your part in any of my plans is completely behind us. I know you’re smart enough to understand what already happened.”

  As if it were that simple. As if she couldn’t have taped our conversations or gathered other evidence of the crime we’d committed—as if all our livelihoods might not rest on whether or not she decided to dabble in blackmail sometime in the future. Did she really think we could forget about that looming possibility?

  Did she really think we could just shrug off the way she’d used us, pretend it hadn’t mattered at all?

  Jemma’s eyes found mine as if she’d read my thoughts. Her expression wasn’t quite the same as when she’d glanced at me as I’d come in; something more studied and pensive had come into it. Her gaze stayed on me even when Sherlock spoke again.

  “I think you’re smart enough to know we won’t be shaken that easily.”

  “Well, if you’re going to insist on sticking around…” She slid off the stool and slung her purse over her shoulder. “I’ll have to get on with my responsibilities as if you’re not here. Do whatever you want in Zagreb. It’s a lovely city. Just keep away from Pametno Pohranjivanje.”

  She turned to head out the back. To simply walk away from us after we’d spent six weeks chasing her down. My gut twisted, and my body moved, stepping forward so I could catch her arm.

  Jemma’s slim forearm was warm against my hand. She stopped and studied me. “I wasn’t bluffing about my friend with the gun. What do you think you’re going to do with me, Garrett?”

  I couldn’t have said there was anything suggestive in her voice, but somehow just those words sent my th
oughts spinning back to the things we’d done together before—in my hotel room, up against the desk with her legs splayed around me and her gasps in my ear. A different sort of heat flooded me from the groin up.

  Before I could figure out how to answer her, she swiveled her arm in my grasp, curling her fingers around my wrist in turn. With a little tug, she leaned in to speak close to my ear.

  “You’ve got nothing here to prove,” she murmured. “I’ve known from the start that the work matters more to you than it does to those two adventurers.”

  That wasn’t at all what I’d been thinking about, and yet somehow the words cut straight to my core. “Jemma,” I said, still groping for that perfect verbal blow to knock her down, to shake her confidence the way she’d just shaken me.

  She slipped my hold and strode past the curtain with an insistent swish of fabric.

  “What was that about?” John asked behind me.

  I jerked back around. “Nothing. More of her games.” Telling me what she’d managed to determine was exactly what I needed to hear. “Are we just going to let her leave?”

  Sherlock showed no sign of concern. He motioned for us to follow him out to the road. On the sidewalk, he glanced around and spoke in a low voice.

  “I’ve seen to it that we’ll know if she leaves the city—but I very much got the impression that she has unfinished business she needs to attend to here. I’d like to know what it is. It may provide us with the leverage we need to get our answers.”

  “She warned us away from Pametno Pohranjivanje,” Watson said, his Croatian pronunciation much more badly accented than Jemma’s had been.

  “That’s obviously a ploy,” I said. “She wants us to look into them for whatever reason. She wouldn’t give away a detail that specific otherwise.”

  Sherlock nodded. “Garrett has it exactly right. Unfortunately, it’s for that exact reason I think we should investigate. Not because we assume she doesn’t want us to, but to determine why she’d have wanted to point us in that direction. It’s a lead in its own way.”

  I couldn’t deny with the logic of that. “What about keeping an eye on her?”

  A smile crept across Sherlock’s face. “I have a few ideas, one of which is already in motion. But if we do our work right, next time she’ll be the one coming to us.”

  Chapter Three

  Jemma

  The helicopter jerked with a gust of wind as the pilot guided it along the mountain’s slope. “This is as close as we can safely get,” he hollered back to Bash and me over the stuttered roar of the whirling blades.

  “I guess we don’t have to worry about those three Londoners trailing you up here,” Bash said dryly, his light green eyes trained on the treetops beneath us. They formed a blanket of green across the range we were cruising over, only a few peaks of pale gray rock poking up through the vegetation. Not even hikers came out to this isolated stretch.

  “I gave them something to keep them busy.” A smile curled my lips at the thought of Sherlock and the others grappling with the piece of information I’d so blatantly handed them. They wouldn’t trust it, but they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from investigating either.

  “You don’t think we need to worry about them making trouble with any of our business?”

  “I’ve always been very careful that nothing can be traced back to me.” I turned my smile on him. “Don’t tell me you’re worried about them after how easily we played them back in London.”

  “They seem pretty determined to make things more difficult for you, that’s all. They’re not going to want to head home empty-handed after working so hard to find you.”

  The evenness of his voice, more careful than it usually sounded, made me wonder if there wasn’t more to his concern. He knew I could handle myself.

  Back in London, he’d suggested I was starting to like the trio. Was he more worried about what I’d do with them around than what they would?

  “They can’t be more determined to pin something on me than I am to see through this task,” I said. “I don’t plan on letting anything distract me.” My scheme in London had bought me temporary freedom. If I succeeded here, I’d end any connection between me and the shrouded folk completely.

  Then I could get on with crushing their misty asses.

  “I don’t doubt that,” Bash said easily enough, so maybe I’d misread his tone with the racket the chopper was making. He cocked his head, still gazing out the window. “What exactly are we looking for down there?”

  I leaned close in case I could spot something right now to point out. No luck. “Anything that could indicate human habitation,” I said. “There isn’t likely to be anything as obvious as smoke from a fire, but a hint of a building between the trees, or a glimpse of a color you wouldn’t expect to be there naturally… Anything that looks like more than part of the wilderness.”

  Bash nodded. We both wore jackets against the cooler air at this elevation, but the warmth of his body seeped through to mine where my shoulder touched his solidly muscled arm. I couldn’t linger in it, though. I scooted over to the far seat to peer out the other side.

  My colleague hadn’t asked why I thought there might be people living secretly on one of these slopes, or what I wanted with them when we found them. That was the simple unspoken faith he had in me—that I had good reasons, and that when he needed to know, I’d tell him. Just as I had the simple, unspoken faith that when I did need him, he’d act without hesitation.

  It was hard to make out anything below through the dense forest. Of course, the people I was looking for would have picked a place with that kind of cover specifically for that reason. That was probably why they’d settled in a country where most of the mountain ranges didn’t tower too high above the tree line in the first place. Those sporadic peaks served the cult’s purposes just fine while their communes stayed hidden.

  Even if I spotted a hint of their presence, we’d have to proceed carefully. We weren’t equipped to storm in just yet. I was hoping a little more research would smooth my way there—the task I’d sent my trio on might help.

  The helicopter droned on. Nothing passed by beneath us other than rippling green. My body started to tense. The pilot had said that with the travel time out to this range and back, he could give us an hour in the air at most. At the slow pace I’d asked him to keep so we could really eyeball the terrain, we wouldn’t cover even half of this side of the range.

  That was all right. I had time. I’d bought myself that time by stealing the pieces of the gold cuff still clamped around my thigh. And even though I was ever aware of the mark on the back of my neck, it hadn’t prickled with Bog’s insistent presence since I’d put the cuff on. The shrouded one couldn’t reach me as long as I wore it.

  Bash tapped his window, but by the time I’d rejoined him, he was shaking his head. “Just a lightning scar on a tree,” he said. “Nothing man-made.”

  As I slid back into my seat, the helicopter veered a little higher. My gaze rose too, over the forest to the rocky ground above. The cult of the shrouded folk wouldn’t be so careless as to leave clear evidence out in the open. There was nothing up there but scattered shrubs amid the scree, a few patches of grass, and—

  And a sun-scorched slab of stone that would have looked like nothing but naturally bleached rock to anyone normal. Anyone who hadn’t seen those specific ragged markings come into being with the blaze of a shrouded one’s satisfied hunger, long ago.

  My pulse hiccupped. “Can you take us down over there?” I asked the pilot, pointing through the windshield. “As close as you can get to that smooth patch on the slope. I need to take a closer look.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  As he took the chopper around in a slow circle, checking for a stable place to land, I studied the forest below the bleached slab. It looked as lonely as the rest of this strip.

  The helicopter finally touched down on a flat plateau about a ten-minute walk from the bare stone. I hopped out the seco
nd the engine had stopped. At the edge of the plateau, I braced my feet on the rough pebble-strewn ground and pitched my way toward the spot more carefully, one hand clutching my purse strap.

  Bash followed with heavier steps, his head swiveling as he scanned our surroundings. “What did you see, Mori?”

  “I’m not totally sure yet.” The chilly wind tossed my hair into my face, and I swept it back, tugging up my hood. “It might not be anything all that helpful.”

  As we approached the stone, which pointed like a tongue toward the forest farther down the slope, a deeper chill sank into my skin. The mountain air smelled crisp and clean with a hint of evergreen, but an echo of a memory tainted my senses with dry rot and seared skin. I swallowed hard, but I couldn’t clear the awful flavor from my mouth. My hand fumbled in my purse for a sugar cube.

  With the pure sweetness melting over my tongue, my chest loosened a little. I inhaled fully as I reached the edge of the stone.

  For a second, I doubted my senses. Maybe the sun did just happen to hit the rock here at the right angle to make those streaks naturally.

  I circled the smooth patch and stopped by a boulder near the tip of the “tongue.” My throat closed up, the last fragments of sugar souring in my mouth.

  No, I hadn’t seen wrong. From this angle, from nearly the same angle as where I’d crouched all those years ago, I could see how the ritual had played out all too clearly. The memory that had hit me when I’d spoken to Sherlock yesterday swelled up from the back of my mind again. The blaze of supernatural light, the unending scream as the shrouded one had consumed the boy bit by bit…

  I shut my eyes. Bash came up beside me, his faint heat cutting through the chill.

  “Something happened here,” he said. Not a question. I wasn’t controlling my reaction as well as I’d have liked. But it was Bash seeing me, and Bash knew enough now that I could be at least partly honest with him.