by Fiona Zedde
“You are one of us, but I haven’t seen you at a Conclave before.” Mandaia Redstone has not moved from her improvised throne, and she hasn’t taken her eyes from me during the entire time we’ve all been having our strange little conversations. “I’d remember if you had been.”
Whatever it is I’ve popped loose in her memory, she’s not letting it lie. But I won’t give her the satisfaction of any type of closure, especially since what she’s trying to recall is probably a time when she shouldn’t have noticed me.
“Pardon me, everyone.” A curvy and low-voiced woman wearing some sort of uniform—black pants and a white blouse—appears in the doorway. Once we all look her way, she bows. “Dinner is ready to be served.”
Saved by the dinner bell.
After a quick glance at his wife, Quinn Redstone gestures to the open doors of the salon. “Shall we adjourn to the dining room?”
I look away from Mandaia and her hawk’s eyes.
We all leave the room, following the uniformed woman into a small dining room a few doors away. The rectangular eight-seat dining table is set for seven, and the lights are brightly lit. Once Mandaia settles at the head of the table and her husband to her right, the rest of us flow silently into whatever chairs are left, leaving the opposite end of the table empty. Somehow, Caressa ends up sitting directly across from me.
Once we’re seated, more servants appear with food. They leave behind a basket of warm bread in the middle of the table along with delicate bowls full of what looks like pumpkin soup. Soup and bread. Before we left her apartment, Mai warned me to expect at least a five-course meal.
Five. Jesus…
Food doesn’t usually make me sad, but tonight is an exception. Only four more courses to go. The crisp white napkin I drape across my lap feels like a shackle trapping me in the chair.
Under the cover of the table, Mai squeezes my thigh. Her thoughts of comfort drift over me.
Why couldn’t we have stayed in bed all day reading to each other and making love like I planned? Oh, because I promised her I’d be part of this dumpster fire instead.
“So do you like teaching at the university, Xóchitl?” Quinn Redstone picks up a piece of bread and dips it into his soup. His flat smile begs me to grab this conversational ball and run with it.
The man obviously doesn’t want to be here any more than I do.
“I’m only there part time, but I do enjoy it, yes.” Following his lead, I take one of the hot pieces of nut bread, but instead of dunking it into the soup, I tear it into little pieces. Crumbs fall on the table in front of me. “The students are interesting and it’s fun watching most of them stumble all over themselves to impress Mai.”
“Is that right?” Cayman doesn’t look interested in the question though, like he can’t imagine anyone fascinated enough by his sister to try and impress her. Obviously, he lacks imagination.
“Yes. She brings out those sorts of feelings in a lot of people.” I show him some teeth, drop the pile of shredded bread into the soup, and slowly begin to eat it. “Me included.”
Mai bites the corner of her pouty mouth to hide her bashful smile.
“You guys are so cute! I could just eat you up.” Caressa meets my eyes as she takes a sip of her whiskey. Then winks at Mai.
Yes, trying way too hard.
“I respect that Mai inspires such affection in her students, but that’s the age when educators and students are so close in age and experience that it becomes dangerous.” Quinn continues on like the byplay between me and his son didn’t happen. Or as if Caressa hasn’t spoken. “Every other day it seems like we’re hearing about some terrible student/teacher goings-on.”
“It does happen, true enough,” I reply. “Practically every day rumors swirl around campus about some professor and a student, but usually nothing comes of it. The students are usually over eighteen, and the people who should punish these professors are so used to it happening that they overlook it.”
That sounds like something an invested educator would say, right?
“That’s unfortunate,” Mai’s father says. Obviously, he couldn’t care less.
The conversation tapers off after that, the silence broken only by the sounds of utensils against cutlery, wine being poured. Then the servants come again in another wave, taking away the empty soup bowls and replacing them with beet salads and more bread.
“Mai…” Mandaia’s fork sinks into the beets, and the deep red juice squirts everywhere, smearing red all over the white plate. “Did you know that Ethan’s hearing is coming up?”
My hand tightens around my fork, but I keep eating as if I don’t feel Mai tense beside me. Her mind was calm and coasting along on good feelings and positive thoughts just seconds ago. Now it’s buzzing with some unpleasant emotion. She’s trying to hide it from me but doesn’t quite pull it off.
My fork pierces through a mound of sliced beets. The tines are bloody red.
“Yes.” Under the table and out of sight, Mai’s hand comes to rest on my thigh. “But I don’t see how it concerns me.”
“Your testimony is what put him in front of the hearing in the first place,” Cayman says after exchanging a look with his mother. “Remember?”
“That’s not something I’ll ever forget,” Mai says dryly. “You should remember that Ethan was trying to kill me when enforcers caught him in the act. I didn’t have to say anything for them to take him away.”
“Maybe that was all a misunderstanding.” Caressa tilts her head, looking at Mai. “You know how excitable Ethan can get.”
“Misunderstanding?” Mai echoes with a twist of her lips. “I don’t think so.”
“There is some doubt in the family that he killed Stephen. Ethan was a lot of things, but I do know for a fact that he loved his father.” Mandaia speaks quietly between precise bites of her food. “Which means there is also doubt he is the Absolution Killer.” She pauses, her lips tightening briefly. “That’s why I’m going to testify in his defense, and I think you should, too.”
Is this woman serious?
The knife and fork clatter from Mai’s hands even before her mother finished speaking. Abi’s mouth drops open. She opens and closes it a few times, but nothing comes out. Mai slips her hands into her lap and pins first her brother then her mother with an unforgiving gaze. I grip her trembling fingers. They are as cold as her mother’s heart.
“Mom, think about what you’re saying!” Abi finally gasps out. “You know what Ethan did. It’s not some made-up story you can just ignore. People are dead. Children are dead.” Her fingers dig into the expensive wood of the table, and the sound is nails-on-chalkboard loud. “He tried to kill Mai!”
Mandaia makes a dismissive motion that’s meant to silence her younger daughter. It works all too well. Not so much on the older one, though.
“Is that why you invited me here tonight? To ask me to testify in Ethan’s defense?” Mai’s voice rings out in cold judgment. Her back is an iron rod. But I know her mother had just cracked her open and spilled out her insides for anyone to see.
“It wasn’t the reason at first,” Mandaia says, her face absolutely calm with no awareness of the damage she’s doing to her child. Or maybe she just doesn’t care. “But when we received the news about the hearing finally being scheduled after such a long delay, this seemed like the perfect time to have the conversation.”
Quinn Redstone is looking at his wife like he doesn’t recognize her. “You told me you weren’t going to the hearing, Mandaia.” His voice is a soft reprimand. “Much less try to convince Mai to go. You know what she went through with your brother and then with Ethan.”
Caressa seems stunned but regards Mandaia with approval. Only Cayman looks completely unsurprised by this fucked-up turn in the dinner conversation. Watching the way he interacts with his mother, he seems to lean into every shift of Mandaia’s breez
e, supporting any agenda of hers, no matter how stupid. Or dangerous.
I abruptly put my fork and knife beside the plate and drop my napkin beside them. Under the table, I grab Mai’s hand again and prepare to stand up. This has gone on long enough.
“You don’t have to stay here and listen to any of this,” I tell her, not bothering to keep my voice low.
Mai’s fro quivers as she shakes her head. “It’s okay. I need to hear this. I need to hear exactly how my mother plans to convince me to testify for someone who terrorized me and would have killed me if the enforcers hadn’t come to stop him.” Her chin juts out and a hint of a darker color appears along her jawline, then a rippling of skin as she unconsciously begins to transform.
Pain slices into my hand gripping hers. Streams of warm heat drip down my fingers. A quick glance under the table confirms what I’m feeling: blood, dark and red, floods between our joined hands and onto my dress.
Beyond her control, Mai’s body is reacting to her stress and shock, becoming a weapon, becoming armor.
“It’s okay, baby.” I pour the calming whisper directly into her ear and slowly release her hand. “Try not to let them get to you.”
The sharp gray spines that erupted from her hand slip out of my skin. Sluggishly, my flesh begins to knit back together. My fingers flex on my thigh, and the pain recedes like it never happened.
My silk dress is ruined. I know that much without looking too closely.
If I thought anything would come of it, I’d send the attempt at dry cleaning directly to Mandaia Redstone.
Just then, one of the silver bracelets on my arm vibrates, abruptly dragging my attention away from the drama happening at the dinner table. With a light tap of my bloodied finger, a long and narrow screen appears along the bracelet’s edge. It’s work. The “standby” about the Vegas blood drinker has become a “come get his ass.” I’ve never been so happy for a rampaging, murderous Meta in my life.
But I want Mai to come with me.
After sending a quick reply, I tip my lips close to Mai’s ear again. “I’ve got to go,” I say softly. “You should come with too.”
“I can’t. Not yet.” The pain is so raw in Mai’s voice that I want to burn this whole house down and bury the entire family under the ashes.
Not that Mai will let me. This damn sense of duty she has…
I curse softly as my bracelet chimes again. “You don’t owe them anything.”
“But I owe this to myself.” Her chilled fingers brush along my bare arm. “Go and take the car. They need you. I’ll see you back home soon if they don’t keep you.”
“Fine.” I get to my feet. “But you keep the car. I already have a ride.” We’ll talk soon, I tell her silently. “Thanks for the…interesting experience,” I say to the table at large, stepping away. “But now I’m needed elsewhere.”
“Right now?” Disappointment tugs down the corners of Abi’s mouth. “But Mai needs…” She looks at her sister with obvious concern, which makes me almost like her.
“I know.” But I have work to do.
Caressa looks from Mai to me, her forehead wrinkled in sympathy and some other emotion I can’t name.
After a light kiss on Mai’s frozen lips, I head for the front door, hating with every step that I’m leaving her behind to deal with this den of jackals on her own.
Behind me, a voice rises up. Cayman sounding disgruntled and petulant. “Where is she going in such a hurry?”
“It’s work,” Mai says coolly, and my heart squeezes at how broken she sounds.
“For real? Is there a grading emergency or something?”
“Stop being such a dick, Cayman.” Abi’s annoyed voice drifts after me. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately but it’s not cute.” Her throat clicks as she swallows. “Mom…”
I tune out the rest. It’s pain by proxy, and I can barely deal with it. Not with leaving Mai there and knowing it’s the type of pain she’ll always run toward just because it’s being inflicted by her family.
The front door of the mansion slams shut behind me, and I take in a lungful of breath, preparing to slip away. But a flash of awareness freezes me where I stand. There’s someone very nearby who I didn’t notice before. A Meta. They feel familiar, like they’ve been hovering at the edge of my attention for hours now. Maybe days.
As casually as I can, I turn and peer into the darkness but barely catch a brief outline of a figure before whoever it is darts away, running soundlessly over the grass and disappearing around the side of the house. My legs twitch, ready to give chase. But I can’t. Not right now.
Spine rigid with tension, I look back toward the front door I just walked through.
Someone was just lurking on the grounds of the Redstone mansion. And there’s no doubt in my mind that they followed Mai and me here.
Chapter 8
“I feel hot as fuck, and not in a good way,” Caleb mutters, adjusting his smooth black mask one more time, although I’m sure he doesn’t really need to.
Through my own mask, he’s a dark and effective-looking shape on the hotel roof near me. The lab-created material on all of our faces is completely breathable and designed for our comfort. Caleb is just fidgeting. As the best of us at mentally crafted illusions, he could just call up a blank image in front of his face for anyone who looks at him. But he wears a mask because we all wear masks.
The rest of the team quietly snickers at his discomfort, me included. Caleb is right, though. Right now, at a few minutes past 9 p.m., Las Vegas feels about as hot as the day. The city’s blazing heat calls to the fire under my skin like comfort, and I know that Farr, the more powerful pyrotechnic on our four-person team, is in her element, too. Sitting in a corner on the hotel roof, she scans online traffic on a small handheld device for any signs of our perp.
“Still nothing,” she says without looking up.
“Good news for us.” Caleb grunts after giving his mask one last adjustment. Although Farr can scrub any digital information we don’t want leaked, the less we have to manage, the better.
My team has been called in to help the West Coast-based enforcers catch Winston Gales, a particularly powerful Meta who’d let himself loose on the thrill-seekers of Sin City.
Like most Metas, Gales is pretty enough to get away with anything where most humans are concerned. He’s been blessed with a sensual mouth, piercing eyes, and a body that’s still muscled and at the peak of masculine perfection at the age of sixty-three. Enviable if he were human; just average as a Meta. But until very recently, he hadn’t been trying his tricks on any Metas. It’s just dumb luck on his part that he lured in a young Meta who could easily pass for a human.
He probably drank her blood expecting…whatever human blood tastes like and was in for a shock when the girl’s very different flavor flooded over his tongue. He tried to hide the body but didn’t have much luck with that, either.
“He says he’s killing them because he loves them,” Pascale, my second in command and our main teleporter, says as he scans the street.
If he ever wanted to, he could be a sub-commander in charge of his own team, but for some reason, he prefers to stick around here with me and the rest.
I roll my eyes at Pascale’s words even though he can’t see it under the full-face mask. “Sounds like one of my ex-girlfriends,” I tell him from my crouched position on the very edge of the roof.
Settled in on top of a thirty-story hotel that blazes from top to bottom with pulsing lights, my team and I carefully watch the wide strip, searching for signs of the idiot we’re here to catch. Well, we actually know where he is; we’re just waiting on the main team in charge of the op to tag us in if things go south. From the urgent message we received that dragged us all out here, there’s no other direction for this thing to go.
I hate being backup. There are at least ten more interes
ting things I could be doing right now, the most important of which is to be there for Mai. But I have to be here.
“Speaking of exes,” Pascale says with his eyes still on the street below. Unlike the rest of us, he doesn’t need binoculars to see what’s going on down there. “Someone’s been poking around and asking questions about you.”
“I’m not surprised.” From the other side of the roof, Caleb double checks his pockets to make sure the tranqs he put there earlier are still there and ready to go. He’s always full of nervous tics while we’re waiting on things to start, but once the action gets going, he’s as steady as Gibraltar. “How many times has Xóchitl pissed off someone enough for them to want to stalk and kill her?”
I ignore him and the obvious amusement in his voice. “Who’s been doing the looking?”
“Don’t know.” Pascale shrugs. “They didn’t get very far but if someone already has an eye on you for whatever reason, you’re not doing a good job of blending in.”
“I don’t think blending in is my problem.” My mind flashes back to the uncomfortable dinner with Mai’s family. Was one of them suspicious enough not to dismiss me as just a garden-variety asshole fucking their once-golden child? Thanks to my runaway mouth, Mandaia is definitely curious enough to poke around in my life. But she wouldn’t have started before tonight.
“Just be careful,” Pascale says. “They didn’t get anything electronic or otherwise from us, but assume they’re still looking.”
“Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No worries.”
I frown down at the street, keeping an eye out for our perp, with my mind only ninety percent on the task at hand.
So, someone’s been investigating me. In all the years I’ve been crossing boundaries whenever I wanted and skirting the legal edges of my job to get that very job done, this is the first time anything has come to my front door. Probably another consequence of being with Mai. As much as her family treats her like garbage, I strongly suspect they’d rip anybody apart who tried to do the same.
