Blind Heat

by Nara Malone

  “What search?”

  The sudden tension, not evident in body but crackling in the air around Seth, made Allie stumble.

  The guard caught Allie’s elbow. Seth paused, sent Allie a questioning look.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “What search?” Snodgrass asked.

  “I was told that you searched her place.”

  “Yeah? Who told you that?”

  “She’s free to go?”

  “Why are you changing the subject?”

  “A more interesting question might be did you ever tell my client she could leave anytime she wanted?”

  Snodgrass shrugged. “She never said she wanted to leave.”

  “Right.”

  Seth aimed a megawatt smile at Allie. “Hey there, Allison. How’d you like a ride home?”

  Allie could imagine that was the kind of smile that coined the term “winning smile” and she didn’t doubt it must have swayed a jury or two. She nodded but held her silence until they were outside breathing sweet, spring air. She turned her face to the sun, eyes closed, and savored the moment. She never thought she could be so desperate for the sky above her and the smell of fresh air.

  “You’ve rescued me again.”

  “You’re sure winding up in some rough places lately.”

  Seth’s winning smile was back. She wondered how to ask, politely, how much all those megawatts would cost her. She imagined legal fees would eat up any extra salary she was earning for the next several months.

  As if he’d read her mind, Seth said, “A mutual friend mentioned that you’d been answering questions at the Greyville police station for an awfully long time. I just dropped in to check everything was okay.”

  “I appreciate that and I can handle things from here. Please send a bill for your trouble.”

  “The mag—” he stopped himself and started again. “Marcus sends his best. And trust me, if you wind up needing anything more than just me reminding the officers they have to respect your legal rights, he can afford to spring for your fees.”

  “Tell Marcus to go to hell,” she said in a calm whisper. “I pay my own way.” She walked off. She hadn’t spent much time in this part of town and had no idea where she was going. She went into a bakery and talked the owner into letting her use the phone and then sat with a muffin and coffee while she waited for Lila to come and get her. She took no comfort in the fact that Seth was watching over her from a car across the street. When she and Lila stepped out through the door an hour later, he tipped his hat and drove away.

  Chapter Ten

  If she had even the tiniest doubt that Marcus was responsible for getting her thrown in jail, or that he was behind the break-in she was questioned about, it was gone now. He hadn’t even bothered to show up with Seth. Was he afraid he’d be recognized?

  Lila handed over Allie’s purse when she got in the car. “I hope you don’t mind that I got your key from your purse and went through your apartment. I didn’t snoop, but I took anything in the way of paperwork or whatever that might give cops a reason to hold you.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I remembered what you said about your dad. I was afraid something you had might tie you to something he did. Anyway, I handed it all over to Franny. I don’t think the Greyville police want to take on the most popular woman in town.”

  Allie leaned her head back against the seat. “Thanks.”

  “There’s more. Franny went back later and she found someone had torn the place apart.”

  “Would cops do that? Go through it without a warrant?”

  “I don’t know. They aren’t supposed to. This whole thing, your card at a crime scene, your place torn up. Could it be your dad?”

  Allie shrugged. If she’d had a choice, she’d rather it be Eddie than cops. She wondered where she’d gone wrong in rebuilding her life that Eddie came out looking like the best option when things got tough. The answer to that question was always the same. Marcus.

  Advance knowledge didn’t prepare Allie for the sight of her apartment, belongings strewn over the floor, overturned.

  “What the fuck?” Lila stopped just behind Allie, gripped her shoulders. “I didn’t see this, Allie. I only heard about it from Franny. You can’t stay here.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you know who?”

  The scent of male sweat was strong, but she tasted a lingering anxiety in the air. She didn’t think cops had anything to be anxious about. None of that could be shared with Lila, however. She shook her head, bent to gather her drawing box, the contents tossed across the floor. The company camera was under her bed, out of the case, lens broken.

  Lila took the camera from Allie. “Elaine’s going to freak.”

  “You don’t have to help, Lila. I don’t have all that much. It won’t take me long to put it right. I don’t see my laptop anywhere.”

  She looked around. “Me either. Maybe we should call the police. I can’t believe they would do this.”

  Allie was on the floor checking under the bed. She sat back on her heels and stared at Lila.

  “Yeah, well, maybe that is a bad idea. Come home with me then. We’ll swing by Franny’s, show her you’re safe, then you can get a shower and some sleep. We’ll deal with this later. Until we figure out what happened, I don’t feel good about leaving you here alone.”

  Allie’s fight was all used up. With a last look in the wardrobe, and still no sign of her laptop, she let Lila lead her away.

  * * * * *

  He was there. A quick cut of eyes toward the back of the diner from Franny told Allie so, but she had felt his presence even before that hint, a prickling awareness over her skin, a quickening of her heart, a heating in her blood. She knew he was watching when she didn’t look his way.

  Franny came ’round the counter and nearly squeezed the life out of Allie. “Damn, baby, I’ve been worried sick about you.” She stepped back, kept her hands on Allie’s shoulders as she studied her. “You doing okay, sweetie?”

  Cops Allie could deal with. Marcus she was just angry enough to handle, but the compassion in Franny’s touch made her bottom lip quiver. She clamped it between her teeth, nodded, sniffed and dove for the door. She ran into the brick wall that was Jake outside.

  He caught her wrist before she could spin away.

  “Save your breath,” she hissed between clinched teeth and tried to yank free.

  “He shouldn’t be out of bed. He’s been sitting here for a couple of hours. Just—”

  She stopped struggling. “Why shouldn’t he be out of bed? What happened?”

  “That’s not important. Just—”

  “Not important? Does why he should be in bed have something to do with why the police interrogated me for twenty hours? Because I think that’s pretty freakin’ important.”

  Jake turned his back to the window, put a hand to her shoulder and guided her to just in front of him so that he was between her and the window.

  “He’ll be furious at me for saying so, but he was just trying to save lives no one cares about. It nearly got him killed and in the end it was all for nothing. They died. Just go talk to him. Let him say what he has to say, see for himself you’re okay, and I’ll take him home.”

  She wasn’t okay. Talking to Marcus would make her less okay. She did it anyway.

  Pain thinned Marcus’ smile, glittered in his eyes as he apologized. “I am sorry. So sorry.” He put his hand over hers, the squeeze, once bold and demanding, was now a light flutter of fingers that went limp.

  She tried to numb him out, remain distant. She tried to hold on to the image of that interrogation room, cinder block walls, speckled tile, scarred table. Endless hours spent wondering if she would walk out of there free or be locked away in a cell. If they had locked her up, started digging, she’d have been locked up for a lot of years. She couldn’t afford friendship with Marcus anymore.

  She put her other hand over his, cupping his hand between both of
hers, and for the first time that she could recall, her hands were warmer than his.

  “What happened to you, Marcus?”

  Between her palms his fingers took on a vague quality, blurriness as if he might fade away. An aura of pain shimmered in the air around him. For just a moment she wished she were a sponge, imagined that she could soak up his pain the same way she could mop up spilled coffee. He looked up at her, their eyes locked. His features sharpened and his hand was so warm she was startled into looking down. He pulled away from her. Looked away. She could see the edge of gauze bandages peeking from just under the cuff of his shirt.

  “Tell me what happened, Marcus. And I want the truth. You launch into some lie and I’m walking out.”

  He looked around as if worried about who might hear, but the diner was nearly empty, the midmorning lull before the early lunch crowd trickled in.

  He dropped his voice so low that Allie was more reading lips than hearing his words.

  “You know what parahuman research is?”

  She frowned, thought a minute. “Like the science fiction comics, Spiderman?”

  “Close. Researchers are combining human genetic material and animal genetic material to create new species. The claim is that it is medical research.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “It’s not always about medical research. Sometimes it’s about power. How much power one group can have if they can make a predator, an animal like a tiger with enough human intelligence to be used as a weapon.”

  Allie rolled her eyes and started to get up. He grabbed her hand and said softly, “Please.” She sighed and waited.

  “They already use marine mammals for military defense, to find sea mines, to plant explosives in some cases. That program was just discovered and made public recently. Look it up yourself if you doubt me. But imagine if they could make animals as smart and clever at problem solving as humans. Imagine if they had a human brain in an animal that could stalk unnoticed like a lion, combine that with other powerful senses like smell and hearing. Only it’s not imaginary. And it’s happening in unregulated labs. Then imagine you have a female with a human brain, capable of all the emotions and longings that you have, capable of creating. Imagine she’s forcibly impregnated with hybrids and then held caged while they experiment on her offspring, torture them to death.”

  It wasn’t as hard to imagine as she would have liked it to be. She shook her head. “That’s terrible, but—”

  “The lab I broke into was a private pharmaceutical company. I rescued a leopard with a human-enough brain that she could communicate with me. She had a belly full of mutants.”

  Allie chewed her bottom lip. He thought he could communicate with a leopard. What was she supposed to do with this knowledge?

  “I can’t ignore them, Allie. I can’t pretend they don’t exist. They have to matter to someone. I guess I feel a kinship to them.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe because I know what it’s like to be unacceptably different.”

  An image of bars came to mind. An image of being locked up and at the mercy of whomever had the keys. Allie hugged herself. She couldn’t get involved in this. She came here to have an ordinary life, be like ordinary people. She didn’t know if Marcus was a lunatic or a crusader, but she knew he wasn’t a man she could afford in her life.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m glad you’re okay—” She stood, took a couple of steadying breaths and tried again to explain. Each word scraped like glass along a throat raw with emotion. “I can’t,” was all she managed to get out before she ran for the safety of Lila’s car.

  * * * * *

  Marcus had just tucked the blanket around Marisa when a white rabbit appeared at her side. Behind him his daughter-in-law sighed. Lilly was one of the teleporting rabbits Marcus had “liberated” from a lab in western Europe. The baby pressed a chubby palm to the rabbit’s fur and gurgled a greeting.

  “She needs to sleep, Lilly,” Marcus said, reaching to pluck the rabbit from the crib.

  Marie put a hand on his. “It’s no use. Lilly will just come back as soon as no one is looking and Marisa’s gotten to the point where she won’t sleep unless Lilly is with her.”

  Marcus leaned gently, bumping his forehead with the baby’s. Marie still held to some of her human ways, kissing the baby good night before she switched out the lamp. Downstairs Adam, Ean and Maya were laughing and calling out directions as they bathed and dressed the other six baby girls for bed.

  He couldn’t resist running his fingers through Marisa’s soft red curls one last time before he left her. “She still doesn’t sleep as well as her sisters.”

  It worried him, the fretfulness, but she was growing, not as fast as her sisters, but well enough and what she lacked in size she made up for in skills.

  “She sleeps more than the other girls during the day,” Marie said. “There’s something about the darkness that unsettles her. She starts to fuss as soon as the sun goes down. Having the rabbit helps for whatever reason, even though I’m not keen on the idea of a rabbit in her bed.”

  “She’s a Pantherian, much more resistant to germs and less prone to allergies than human babies. The rabbit shouldn’t be a problem if she helps the baby sleep.”

  He followed Marie to the door and she caught his hand when he closed it. “Come talk to me while the others are busy,” she said. A warning knotted his stomach, but he couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough to escape the arm that tucked into his and led him downstairs to Adam’s basement lab.

  “Let me guess,” he said when she pulled the door shut, “you’ve decided to pack up the family and go back to the mountains.” He must have sounded hopeful.

  Her lips twitched and humor laced her voice. “You had a little too much grandfather time lately, Marcus?”

  He appreciated that at least one member of the family found it easy to use his given name. “I love having you and all the girls around,” he said. “It’s the father time that can be trying. I have the uneasy feeling you’ve been assigned to put me in line over something.”

  She did laugh then. “I know there is friction between you and Adam, but deep down he worships you.”

  Marcus lifted a doubtful eyebrow but refrained from disagreeing directly. Adam had avoided him as much as possible since the leopard incident. Conversations, when they happened, were vague, one-word exchanges. “As much as I treasure the opportunity to spend time with all of you, I think it was smart that you moved to the mountains and I’d feel much better if you returned. There are things happening in this area, especially with hybrid research, that concern me. I’m worried about your safety.”

  “We’ll go when you’re stronger.”

  “I’m fine, the wounds are nearly healed.”

  “But the heart, it takes longer, yes?”

  “What heart?” He forced a smile, but the humor didn’t carry into his voice.

  “Maya said you had a girlfriend and it ended badly.”

  He waved his hand in the air, walked around Adam’s desk and sat in front of the computer. “I am too old for girlfriends. And I don’t share details of my private affairs with Maya.”

  “Or anyone?”

  He couldn’t think of a good answer—a good answer being one that would bring the prying to an end.

  “It sounds lonely, Marcus. Don’t you ever just wish you had someone to talk to?”

  “Someone to reminisce about the good old days? We could swap memories of the Renaissance, or comfort each other with the shared knowledge that no matter how bad things get, they’ll never be as grim as the dark days when the plague nearly wiped out most of the human population. Did you know we took in human children then? There were so many orphans. Pantherians took the little ones in and cared for them. Humans don’t live long. That was the hard part, watching them age and die so fast.”

  “You’re changing the subject, Marcus.”

  He poked at a couple of keys on the keyboard and the screen we
nt from black to light. He wished for Oliver. He settled for Marie.

  “Not to change it again, but are you good with one of these things?”

  “I write software for a living, so yeah, I’m pretty good with computers.”

  Marcus knew better than to ask what software was. “There is a test on facial recognition on the internet. I’d like to find that website.”

  As Oliver had, Marie brought up a page with the word Google in primary colors. She typed some relevant words in the small black rectangle at the center of the page and a list appeared. He pointed to the title he recognized. She brought up the page.

  “Hmm, prosopagnosia. I think I read about that in the newspaper,” she said.

  “Have you ever tried the test?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Would you give it a try, for me?”

  She looked at him, watched his face as she asked, “What’s this about, Marcus?”

  “Just a curiosity of mine. The test doesn’t take long.” He didn’t know why he pressed Marie with this now. It was a hunch he’d had. They’d discovered two therianthrope females living among humans. Could it be mere coincidence that they were living only a few miles apart? Could they be genetically related? It was a long shot, but face blindness was a genetic condition and this could prove a connection without the need for him to explain to anyone why he needed to know.

  For a moment he thought she’d refuse, but she finally looked from him to the screen and clicked the link that would launch the test.

  “You’ll need to concentrate. I have to check on something. I’ll be back by the time you’re finished.”

  It was only a slight stretch of the truth, but saying someone to check on would have generated more questions than Marcus was willing to answer. Marie was absorbed in her task quickly enough that she didn’t notice he ducked behind the screen beside the mirror portal, stripped out of his clothes and stepped into the transport dimension.

  * * * * *

  Marcus emerged in the pool at the park. He shook water from his hair and something in the action triggered the memory of Maya tumbling out of the mirror portal in Adam’s lab. Her transports weren’t graceful. It had been a learning process but he’d perfected the art of switching between the two mediums, glass and water. He could use them together or interchangeably as a means to transport between points in the physical world. Maya was the only other Pantherian who could do the same, an amazing feat considering females weren’t taught to use the portals. Maya had mastered the skill on her own and taken it to a level his own son couldn’t manage. She really did deserve to train with him. He made a mental note to take the idea up with her after Adam and family returned home.