Blood Bound

by Rachel Vincent

  But with Liv, it was different. I knew her name, and I knew her, and when I thought of her, sometimes I could feel what she was feeling. And all too often, that was pain. Physical pain. Emotional pain. Anger. Humiliation and degradation. Olivia wasn’t happy, and maybe it was egotistical of me to think that I could fix that—that being with me again would make her happy like we used to be happy—but ego or not, it sometimes took every single ounce of self-control I could muster to keep from tracking her and killing whoever was hurting her. Whoever was making her hate herself.

  In the end, when my restraint wavered, the only thing that kept me away from her was knowing that she’d hate me for interfering. For wounding her self-respect by ending whatever abuse she couldn’t—or for some reason wouldn’t—put an end to. Even if it killed me to let her suffer.

  In Hunter’s room, Liv knelt next to the body again, putting a clear end to whatever had almost happened between us. “I can’t figure this out.” She scowled at Hunter, as if he might open his eyes and submit to questioning. “He’s not Skilled. There’s no trace of it in his body. But the blood in my pocket is still humming with power—a low level, like his bloodline is diluted. Then there’s the sample Anne brought us—that one felt as Skilled as your blood. He was a shadow-walker. And now he’s not. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Well, staring at him isn’t going to change that. Come on, we need to get going. Find something to wipe down the guns with. And put these on.” I reached into the supply box and tossed her a set of surgical gloves, then I pulled on a pair of my own and scanned the wall opposite the bed. There it was, just above elbow height on me—a small round hole in the Sheetrock. It would have been just below shoulder height on Liv. In the center was the slug, smashed flat from impact with the fire walleight="0%">

  I took the folding knife from my pocket and flipped it open, then carved the bullet out of the wall, along with a two-inch-wide disk of the surrounding Sheetrock. Then I soaked the resulting hole with the spray bottle of bleach solution from my box of tricks, just to be safe.

  “Where’s your gun?” I turned, expecting to find Liv wiping down the pistol I’d lent her—mine were unregistered, filed free of serial numbers and equipped with silencers; an advantage of working for the syndicate—but she still knelt on the floor next to Hunter’s body. “Liv, we have to get out of here before the cops show up or you start bleeding through your bandages.” Or worse.

  She didn’t even look up. “His cell’s in his back pocket. We need to know who he’s been talking to, if we’re going to find out who’s behind the hit.”

  I twisted the Sheetrock and smashed the bullet into a paper towel and dropped the tiny, incriminating bundle into the plastic tub. Then I rounded the bed into the narrow space Liv had wedged herself into. But I stopped cold when I saw what she held between gloved fingers.

  “It was with his phone.” She lifted the photograph for me to see, but I pushed her hand away. I didn’t want to see the blue-eyed, dark-haired little girl smiling at me from some happy moment frozen in time. And I certainly didn’t want to dwell on the fact that I’d killed her father—even if he was a murderer.

  “Don’t think about it.” I reached down to help Liv up by her good arm. “He couldn’t have been much of a father—there’s no sign that a kid’s ever even been here. He probably hardly ever saw her.”

  “She’s not his,” Liv said, and I recognized both the angry set of her jaw and the stunned distance in her eyes. “This is Hadley.”

  “What? How do you know?”

  She flipped the picture over and showed me the back, which read Hadley, Kindergarten Class Photo. “It’s Anne’s handwriting, Cam. Anne wasn’t the target, and neither was Shen. The bastard was after their daughter.”

  My denial surfaced as confusion, and suddenly ignorance seemed like a blessedly blissful state. “Why the hell would Hunter want to kill a five-year-old?”

  “Because that’s what your boss paid him to do.”

  I ground my teeth over yet another reminder that she considered me a part of the problem. “You’re assuming Hunter was hired by Tower himself?”

  Liv’s brows shot halfway up her forehead. “Hell yeah, I’m assuming it, and until we come up with some reason to discount that theory, I’m going to keep assuming it, because Tower’s at the top of the pyramid. No one beneath him would spend this much money and order a hit on a five-year-old—a PR nightmare, even if it only got around by word of mouth—without his blessing. And that’s not all. Look at this.” She slid the photo into her own back pocket and dropped into a squat next to the body.

  I glanced at the man I’d killed, then looked away again. Yes, he was a murderer, and yes, I’d probably saved Liv’s life by tak">

  “What am I supposed to be looking at, exactly?”

  Liv huffed in exasperation, then grabbed Hunter’s limp right wrist and pulled his arm up as far as it would go without actually moving the body. I bent for a closer look and finally saw what she was getting at, there in the crook of his elbow.

  “Track marks.”

  “Fresh track marks,” she corrected.

  “Some of them, yeah.” I shrugged. “So he was a junkie.” I rounded the corner of the bed and picked up my tub of supplies.

  She followed me into the living room and when I shoved a clean shop towel into her gloved hand, she started wiping down her gun at the table. But a minute later, she set the gun down next to the one I’d cleaned and pulled the photo from her pocket. “Why would anyone want to kill a five-year-old?”

  “Silencer, too,” I said, trying not to think about the little girl who could have died. Who could still die if Tower sent someone else after her. I needed to think about cleaning up our current mess and getting us both the hell out of there. We couldn’t be caught with guns the cops could match to bullets from Hunter’s body, so the guns would have to stay at the scene—without our fingerprints. Mine weren’t on file—yet—but hers would be, because she’d worked for a licensed bail bondsman.

  Liv pulled the silencer from her pocket, wincing at the movement from her injured arm as she wiped it clean, still staring at the photo she’d laid on the table. When she finished, she set the silencer down and grabbed the picture again, and a second later she turned to me, sudden excitement firing like sparks in her eyes. “She isn’t Shen’s!”

  “What?” I set my clean silencer down and frowned at the photo she held up.

  “Hadley isn’t Shen’s daughter. Not biologically. She can’t be. Look, there isn’t a drop of Asian blood in her!”

  Reluctantly, I glanced at the photo one more time—then couldn’t look away. Liv was right. Hadley had curly brown hair and deep blue eyes. But… “That might not mean anything. Genes are complicated. I’ve seen a bunch of kids who look nothing like their parents.” And that was the case here. It had to be, because if Hadley wasn’t Shen’s daughter…

  No. I did the math in my head, my heart pounding so hard it echoed in my ears.

  Hadley was five. I wasn’t sure how close she was to turning six, but either way, if Anne wasn’t already pregnant at the party—the one six years ago; the night Liv left me and never looked back—then she got pregnant very soon afterward. Maybe even that very night…

  No.

  No.

  I’d know if I had a kid. Anne would have told me. She would never have hidden something like that from me, even knowow I felt about Liv.

  No!

  “We have to get out of here.” I plucked the picture from the table and slid it into my own pocket, then shoved a plastic canister of antibacterial wet wipes at Liv. “Wipe down the bathroom. Faucets, toilet, sink. Anything either of us might have touched. I’ll be there in a minute with the alcohol.”

  Olivia looked at me as if I had brain damage and it might be contagious. But she took the wipes. While she worked on the bathroom, I did a quick, thorough job on the kitchen and the table where we’d worked on Liv’s arm. Then I dumped everything that had her blood on it
in the tub and doused it with alcohol, which would destroy the blood as well as fuel the flames. Finally, I smashed the smoke alarm with one fist. Then I lit a match.

  It was a brief, beautiful blaze of glory, and once I was sure the blood couldn’t be identified by the police or tracked, I turned on the shower to put out the flames. Then I dropped Hunter’s laptop into my plastic tub and followed Liv out of the building. But I didn’t relax enough to breathe normally until we pulled out of the parking lot, unassailed by police, local criminal elements or neighborhood vigilante mobs.

  Two blocks away, I made the call from a pay phone—a dying resource, still favored by criminals everywhere. I kept it quick and simple: Hunter’s address and apartment number. When the police arrived, they’d find the body and do the cleanup we hadn’t bothered with. We didn’t care if they ID’d him, and with any luck, we hadn’t left any viable traces of ourselves for them to find. And if anyone had seen us, our descriptions would be reported to Tower’s men—de facto neighborhood security—rather than the police.

  Behind the wheel again, I glanced at Liv. “How’s your arm?”

  She lifted her elbow and glanced at the makeshift bandage in the glow from a passing streetlamp as I turned left onto a side street. “Starting to bleed through.”

  “I have real bandages at home. We’re only a couple of minutes away.”

  “I have everything I need at my office.”

  But I didn’t want to take her back to the south fork, especially her office, because now that we’d killed Shen’s murderer, Liv was no longer being compelled to work with me. She could kick me out of her office—and out of her life—whenever she wanted, and I couldn’t let that happen again.

  “My place is closer,” I pointed out, using logic to justify an admittedly selfish desire.

  Liv sighed. Then, finally, she nodded. “But only because I’ll be dripping blood all over your car by the time we get to the south fork.” She leaned to the left and dug her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m going to call Anne. Want me to put her on speakerphone?”

  No. Because Liv would ask her about Hadley’s father, and my worst fear in the world at that moment was finding out that I was—maybe—the father of Anne’s child. In front of Olivia. That potential complication would put a serious crimp in my efforts to stay in Liv’s life, and she should hear it from me.

  But not now, when there was so much else to worryabout.

  “Sure.” The most gutless word in the English language. Consent with no real feeling. The antithesis of certainty and determination. But if Liv noticed my lack of enthusiasm, I couldn’t tell. She scrolled through the recent calls on her phone and pressed a button, and a moment later, the electronic, bleating ring echoed in the confines of my car and the even tighter space inside my skull.

  The ringing stopped with a soft click. “Hello? Olivia?” Anne said over the speaker.

  “Yeah, it’s me. Cam’s here, too.” Liv glanced at me, but I couldn’t meet her gaze. Not knowing what she was about to find out. “We got him. Hunter’s dead.”

  Anne burst into tears, sobbing and sniffling over the phone. “Thank you. Thank you both so much….” Another wet sniffle. “Maybe I can sleep, now that it’s all over.”

  Liv met my gaze in the rearview mirror, and her disbelief echoed my own. “Annika…” she began, as I braked for a stoplight. “I don’t think this is the end of it.”

  Anne’s end of the line went silent, except for a crackle of static. “What do you mean?”

  “Are you where you can talk, free from little ears?”

  “Yeah.” She sounded scared now, and I couldn’t blame her. “Hadley’s watching TV with my mom.” They were staying with Anne’s parents, because she couldn’t stand the thought of taking her daughter home to the scene of her husband’s murder. “What’s wrong? Olivia? Cam?”

  Liv exhaled slowly. “He wasn’t after Shen. He was after Hadley.”

  For one long moment, there was only silence, as if she’d actually stopped breathing. “No,” Anne whispered at last, and I could practically see her shaking her head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would he want Hadley? How do you know?”

  “He had her picture,” I said, suddenly almost as desperate to know for sure about Hadley’s paternity as I was eager to keep Liv from finding out. “With your handwriting on the back.”

  “What picture?” Anne’s voice was low. Stunned. Pained. And I wondered if I should feel the same way. If Hadley was mine, shouldn’t I be terrified for her and ready to kill anyone who even tried to hurt the blood of my blood? Or something like that?

  “Hadley’s kindergarten school picture.” Liv glanced at me, and I had to force my jaw to unlock. I couldn’t even make sense of the storm of fear and confusion raging inside me. “It was wallet-size, and kinda beat-up. He had it in his pocket.”

  “Why?” There was a thin thread of panic woven through that one word, and it rang a harmonic chord in me. “Why would a murderer have my daughter’s picture?”

  “I don’t know,” Liv admitted, as I pulled into the parking lot in front of my building. “But someone wants her dead. If there’s anything you think we should know about Hadley, this is the time to tell us.”

  “What do you mean? What would you need da ” But her voice was missing the confusion her words tried to imply. She was hiding something, and I was afraid I knew what it was.

  Liv turned to me, as I pulled into my assigned parking spot, wordlessly requesting my participation, but I shook my head. I couldn’t ask what needed to be asked. Not with her listening.

  Olivia rolled her eyes at my reluctance and turned back to the phone she’d laid on the dashboard. “Who’s Hadley’s father, Anne? We’ve seen her photo. There’s no way she’s Shen’s.”

  Anne’s sniffling grew louder, and for a moment I was afraid she’d hang up. Then she cleared her throat, and her next words were firm, her voice surprisingly steady. “Shen is her dad—the only father she’s ever known.”

  Her obviously unconscious use of present tense verbs made me ache for her loss, and her strength amazed me. I’d seen cold, hard men fall to pieces over the death of wives and children, and I couldn’t imagine how she was holding up so well under the extenuating circumstances Liv had just hit her with.

  “Okay, I understand that. And I know these aren’t the kinds of questions you want to answer right now. But, Annika, someone’s trying to kill your daughter, and if you want me to help keep that from happening, I need to know anything and everything that might lead me to whoever wants her dead. Or at least tell me why she’s been targeted. So who is her father, Anne? Her real father?”

  Another moment passed in silence, and my heart beat frantically, almost painfully. I was sure Anne was going to say my name. Or that she’d hang up to avoid having to. But instead, she cleared her throat again—a nervous habit—and springs squealed over the line as she sat down somewhere in her mother’s house, in a suburb thirty miles away. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?” Liv glanced at me, frustration and disbelief lining her forehead and outlining the corners of her mouth, and I could only shrug. My only possible contribution to the conversation was the question I desperately didn’t want to ask, and I could see no real benefit of asking it. If I were the father, knowing that wouldn’t shed any light on the real question—why Hadley was being targeted. And if I wasn’t the father, I’d have just admitted to sleeping with Anne—a drunken, reactionary mistake I’d regretted the moment it was over. And Liv would probably never speak to me again.

  Sleeping with random strangers years after we broke up was different from sleeping with her best friend the night Liv left. And at that moment, admitting what I’d done would only hurt everyone involved. Including Hadley.

  “I already had her when I met Shen, and he loved her like she was his own,” Anne finally admitted. “But no, I don’t know who her biological father is.”

  My grip around the wheel tightened until my knuckles stood
out, white in the glow from the parking-lot light overhead. Was she telling the truth, or just trying to avoid outing me in front of Liv? Either way, her silence on the issue was both blessing and curse. If I was a father, I wanted to know it. I wanted to know Hadley.

  Liv glanced at me again, and I avoided her gaze to keep her from reading the confliction surely obvious in my expression. She picked up the phone and held it between us. “Surely you have an idea. Like, a list, or something, that we could use to narrow it down?”

  “Liv…” I began, humiliated for both myself and for Annika.

  “No, I don’t have a list,” Anne snapped. “What I have is a very upset little girl who’s just lost the only father she’s ever known. She’s away from her home and all her things, and she doesn’t really understand why her dad won’t be coming home again. And now you’re telling me that whoever killed Shen will probably be coming back for Hadley, but instead of trying to help keep her safe, you’re interrogating me about my past sex life!”

  “I am trying to help,” Liv insisted. “But Hadley’s not a random target. Someone planned this, and paid for it, and is probably pissed off that his hired gun misfired. And if I’m going to keep the next guy from succeeding where Hunter failed, I need to know why someone high up in the Tower syndicate wants your daughter dead.”

  “I don’t know!” Anne cried. “She’s just a normal little girl. Happy, healthy, friendly. Loved by anyone who’s ever met her.”

  “Is she Skilled?” I asked, without truly thinking the question through. A child of two Skilled parents would inherit the abilities of one or the other, or possibly the Skill of a grandparent. But a child of one Skilled parent had only a fifty-percent chance of inheriting that Skill. If Hadley was a Tracker, I couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was mine.

  “I don’t know yet,” Anne said miserably. “She’s still so young….”

  “Okay, you need to hide,” Liv said, and I could tell from the slump of her shoulders that she’d given up on the paternity angle, at least for now. “Take Hadley and your parents, and go somewhere random. Someplace you have no connection to. Pay in cash and don’t tell anyone where you’re going.” That was so she couldn’t be easily found through traditional means. But what neither of us wanted to say aloud was that if Tower sent another Tracker, they’d eventually be found, no matter what.