Shit. The back and forth fury-to-worry-to-fury was making him nuts.
But whatever had taken out Senator Hathaway had been powerful. Cait said she was here on a mission. Something secret, something hidden.
She’d said she worked for the government, but not which government. Was she some sort of skilled operative, with a mission to assassinate US officials?
He’d trusted her on the phone last night. Had he been wrong? She’d trusted him, a little, then brushed him off. Shut him out.
He’d felt a connection with her. But what if he was letting a woman distract him from his work? Or skewing his objectivity? Again.
Truth time. The desire for a connection—a woman, a family he could never have—had always been Aiden’s Achilles heel. And the distraction in Atlanta had been named Marcia.
They’d grown close. Close enough that he’d been on the verge of telling her a little bit of who he really was. He’d grown arrogant in his power, believing that somehow he could protect a woman and keep her safe, despite the things that came for him.
It had been a horrible mistake. A deadly one.
But not for Aiden. And not a day went by that he didn’t wish it had been him who died. It should’ve been him.
Aiden had fallen hard for Marcia. He’d been with the sultry architect when the shit hit the fan that terrible night in Atlanta. Instead of going with his team, he’d gone to spend a long-planned evening with her.
When the call came in about yet more hogs being killed on a farm in Cobb County, three of the four trainee-adepts offered to take care of it. All three of those adepts—his friends, his responsibility—had died ugly, unseemly deaths at the claws of a monster more powerful than anything seen in Georgia in two centuries.
When he’d gone after it, far too late to save his friends, he’d nearly died as well.
He’d called Marcia, once the fight was done. She’d come at least, he’d give her that.
She’d raced into the field where he lay, taken one look, screamed, and run. Horrified at his condition, at the nightmare creature he had killed, she fled. She’d left him to bleed and die in a Georgia corn field.
The one saving grace was that his stupid mistake hadn’t killed her too. Four months later she married an English diplomat and moved to Romania.
He’d been stupid to think she’d cared.
Aiden paced the room. Was Cait a master manipulator? A murderer? All the evidence pointed to that.
Or could she be hurt or dead?
“Where are you, damn it?” He flipped his cell open again and dialed, only to hang up seconds later in frustration when the incessant ring of her unanswered line got on his nerves.
“Why would she disappear?” he questioned the air.
His subconscious answered with a fast list of ten reasons for her to fall off the face of the earth—literally or figuratively—starting with the murder of a second senator in Chicago. It was all over the news. He’d already contacted Joshua, the Adept Enforcer for that city.
Dammit. Had she played him? If she had, she was a danger to him, to the safety and security of his territory. She was a danger, period. She would have to be dealt with accordingly.
But what if she was for real? What if she was in trouble? How would he know? What if she was already dead?
Despair danced with fury again.
“What if she’s rogue?” he said out loud. His gut said no, but everything that had happened, from the timing to her evasiveness about meeting him today, then disappearing, said it was not only possible, but probable.
The phone rang and he nearly dropped it in his haste to see the number.
It wasn’t her. It was Joshua. Aiden swiped the screen and answered.
“Joshua. Tell me something good.”
“Hey,” Joshua said. “This is fucked up, Aiden. I have no magical signature on this one. Can’t really get near, but I did a scan and all I get is violent, brutal death. I didn’t even feel it in the area. Not till well after. As I see it, when the body was discovered, that’s when I felt it.”
Same way it had happened in DC. Right under Aiden’s nose.
Aiden gave him the lowdown and told him what he knew about Cait, then said, “I’m too close to it. Can’t see it objectively. It’s driving me nuts.”
“Gotta look at it logically,” Joshua said, his voice grim. “Can you read her?”
“No.”
“That right there is your primary evidence. Nobody can shield from a regular adept. Especially not from an Enforcer. And certainly not you,” he said emphatically. “Do you have proof that the shields are mechanical? Do you have proof she didn’t do the senator there?”
“No, but the timing’s tight, and I’m having a lot of trouble seeing her as dark.”
Joshua made a derisive noise. “Timing can be altered.” Then he paused. “You’re arguing for her. Are you letting your dick do your thinking?”
Shit. “No,” Aiden said.
“Then why aren’t you all over this?”
Good fucking question.
Aiden schooled his voice to a cool neutral. “It’s not about that.”
“You have to confront her, Aiden,” Joshua insisted. “I’ll put out feelers to watch for her here, but whoever gets her has to force her to talk. To reveal what she is. The timing of her arrival and the fact that you can’t scan her is too coincidental, and you know better than to believe in coincidence.”
He did know. “Yeah.”
“If she knows you’re onto her, she’ll run. I can’t back you up. I have to be here to keep the feeders from glomming onto the aftermath of this murder. You’ll get one chance to contain her. Don’t blow it.”
Aiden nodded. “No worries. I’ve got it.”
“And be careful. Very, very careful.”
Aiden hung up the phone.
Joshua was right. He had to put emotion aside. He had to stop feeling and think.
Every sign pointed to her being a rogue adept.
She’d said she wasn’t, but wouldn’t he have said the same, if he were setting up a murder inside an Enforcer’s shields?
There were very few adepts. But nothing else he knew could shield at that level, and anybody not known to the Council usually had a reason to hide.
That fact that her shields held him at bay was damning. He had only her word that they were mechanical. For all he knew she was on her way to her next target, whoever was next after the senator in Chicago.
But his gut said she was an ally.
Your gut was wrong in Atlanta.
Joshua hit it dead on. Aiden was the most powerful adept in this generation, just as Gregory, his teacher, had been in the previous generation.
Did he want that to be his legacy? That he hadn’t stopped the deaths in Atlanta, and if Cait was rogue and a killer, that he hadn’t stopped her either?
Do you want more people to die while you wait for proof to walk up and smack you on the ass?
The Council consistently tried to reassure him that no one could have known the creature eating feral livestock and chickens in rural Georgia was a Nightflyer. Nothing that dangerous had ever appeared in that area, before.
Still. He should have known. He—the one with the uncannily strong abilities—he should have known.
To whom much power is given, sacrifice is required for the greater good.
If he’d gone for the monster sooner, gone himself, it would have been different. Maybe he’d have died, yes, but it would have been only him. Just him and the Nightflyer.
Not three barely-trained adepts.
He had to assume the worst about Cait. He had to be sure she wasn’t a rogue adept in a highly-skilled disguise.
At the same time, he also needed to be sure she wasn’t lying dead in her apartment, victim of the same thing that killed the senators.
That image drove him as he made his preparations, gathered his things and shoved what he needed into a duffle bag. Four email messages went out in quick succession. One to h
is counterpart north of Baltimore, one to Joshua in Chicago, one to Sam in Richmond, and the last to the Elder on the Council who oversaw the East Coast. If something happened to him, they would know and they would come a-hunting.
With a nonchalance he didn’t feel, Aiden left his apartment and stepped across the hall. Under the interested gaze of the guard on Three-A, he made a great show of using a key to open Cait’s door. In reality he used a spell to bypass the wards he felt, the tell-tales he could sense.
“Have a good evening,” he said to the officer as he prepared to enter.
The guard grinned. “You too, man. You too.”
So much for getting in. The shields were still there, impenetrable to magic alone, but not to his magic-infused physical body.
The irony sucked. He couldn’t read her, or her space, but he could damn sure break and enter without a flicker of a problem.
Inside the apartment, Aiden looked around. For a moment, he let himself be glad that she wasn’t dead, bloody and torn on the floor as the security had been, or nailed on the wall, like the senator and his aide.
Heavy canvas packs sat next to undecipherable equipment in neat rows against the wall in the living room. In the second bedroom, her office held a computer and printer. A stack of receipts sat next to the keyboard. In her bedroom, the clothes Cait had worn last night were in a pile by the dresser and a crumpled towel lay on top of them.
In the bathroom makeup was strewn across the counter as though she’d tossed it aside as she left in a hurry.
But the bed was neatly made.
He’d been right. She was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
She must have left as soon as she’d hung up.
Prowling through the condo, Aiden saw only three things he knew for certain were missing—Cait, her coat, and her purse.
A can of Coke sat open on the kitchen counter.
He took the things he needed from his bag, then sat down in the silence. Aiden pondered the situation, going over every possibility, as he built his trap. Using the copper piping that ran through the walls as his framework, he magically locked down everything that could be a potential weapon. There was a lot of it, which increased his surety.
If and when she returned, he would be waiting.
His gut churned with bitter acid at what he was about to do.
But he couldn’t have more lives on his soul, not after Atlanta. He had to be sure. For everyone’s sake, not just his own.
He couldn’t leave it to his gut. He had to know.
It was time to hear that long story Cait had mentioned, whether she was ready to tell it or not.
If he was wrong…
But he wasn’t. He’d followed the trail of logical evidence. He’d called in a double-check as he’d laid it out with Joshua. To do anything other than what he was doing would be to ignore his responsibility and risk other people’s lives.
On the slim chance he was wrong, he hoped the gods would forgive him.
Because one thing was certain. Cait Brennan never would.
* * *
A haze of depression settled over Cait as she rode home in the FBI sedan. An hour ago, Chavez had paused in his relentless, repetitive questioning to take a phone call. Cait had used her PDA to listen to it. The more she heard, the more pissed she’d gotten.
Chavez had found a Dr. Cait Brennen who worked for the CIA and assumed it was her. The asshole had hauled her downtown and grilled her for seven hours because he hadn’t bothered to check that her name was Brennan. With an A.
Nor had he checked to see if that other Dr. Brennen—with an E—was even in the country.
He’d been so sure she was a spook. CIA.
He hadn’t admitted that of course. But he’d screwed up, and now he was sweating. She had him by the short hairs if she wanted to pursue it, but that would be stupid. More contact with police or press was not the goal right now.
Every mission Cait had run as an ST had, up to now, gone well. Sure, there had been issues. Hell, seven months tracking the Meena Pal fugitive wasn’t exactly a chop-chop performance, but she’d found him. It was a big planet. Hell, it had taken the US military nearly ten times as long to find Bin Laden.
This mission, though? Her performance was sucking wide.
For the first time, she questioned the decision to become a Slip Traveler. Alone and alive had seemed better at the time than alone and dead. But Aiden, and the intense pull she’d felt last night to just spill it, tell him the truth about herself, made her feel her isolation so keenly.
But she couldn’t share what she did. His telling her about magic? In some ways that made it worse because she couldn’t reciprocate. Here was someone who might—just a little—understand.
“Thank you for your cooperation, Dr. Brennan,” Chavez said as he opened her door and let her out. They’d pulled up at the building and she hadn’t even noticed.
Damn, girl. You better snap out of that fog!
Cocking her head to the side, she assumed a haughty air and glared at him. “As I said, I don’t believe you gave me any choice. And I still don’t know what this was about.”
She was about to tweak the man’s ego further when the sense of quiet penetrated her consciousness. There were no reporters, no media vans crowding the driveway. A lone officer stood near a barricade, but he was obviously bored, with nothing to hold back and no one to watch over.
Chavez offered a comment, watching her as he did. “They’ve headed to Chicago. New story.”
“Vultures,” she said. But she wondered what could possibly pull reporters off the juicy bone of a dead, cheating senator. Her skin prickled. What the hell was going on in Chicago? “Goodbye, Agent Chavez.” As exit lines went, it sucked.
Tarik was on duty in the lobby.
“Oh, hey, Dr. Brennan. Got some deliveries for you.”
Some of her special orders had come in, and she could barely muster the energy to stack them up and carry them with her up the stairs. An hour’s sleep and nine hours of interrogation were more than enough to wear even the strongest woman out.
What the hell was she going to do? What excuse could she use to ward off Aiden’s questions at this point?
And what in the hell was she supposed to do about his power? Magic. Seriously? How was she supposed to cope with the very existence of something unpredictable, and so foreign to her knowledge base? Even the spooky stories her grandmother had told her and her brothers when they were little paled in comparison to what she’d seen him do.
Real magic.
Part of her wondered still if it was all done with smoke and mirrors. She wanted it to be fake. She had enough to contend with.
Her heart, and more importantly her logical mind, told her that no matter what she’d like to believe, no sleight of hand could create the symbol hanging in the air of Aiden’s kitchen. That had been as real as the Sh’Aitan, and just as inexplicable.
Cait hesitated in the upper lobby, thinking of knocking on his door, but the man sitting outside Three-A was watching her intently. She nodded a greeting, but didn’t speak.
The guard smirked a little, and nodded back.
What was that about?
The locks released and stepped inside, shooting the bolt as soon as she closed the door. She set the boxes on the floor and her hand was on the light switch when she realized that her implant hadn’t registered the infrared sensors’ usual bing when she got through the door.
Electricity fired through her. Ran over her skin like a lover’s caress.
An attack.
She reached for her bracelet and spun to look behind her as a cage of fiery beams encircled her. Her feet left the floor. She was dangling, encaged in light, her arms now pinned to her sides by some invisible force. She opened her mouth to shout, but shock sealed her throat. She couldn’t even scream.
Her prison lifted her, suspending her in the middle of the room. In its light she saw Aiden, standing with his feet apart, his hands spread. His hair was tousle
d, his expression desperate. Grim.
Fear sucked the breath out of her. Oh. Dear. God.
She’d underestimated him, big time. This was an adept. And this was magic. She couldn’t move, couldn’t get to her weapon. She was effectively immobilized.
Aiden’s impressive height brought him to eye level even though she wasn’t touching the ground. His shoulders were thrown back, the strength of his muscles evident as his hands wove complex, glowing designs in the air between them, his voice low and commanding as he chanted.
When he finished he simply stood, staring at her, his face unreadable. Finally, he spoke.
“How did you do it, Cait? Why did you do it?”
What? She opened her mouth, then closed it again. What was he talking about? What the hell?
“No quick rejoinder? I’m disappointed.” The bitter words flew out. “I’m doubly betrayed then, for spending so much energy arguing against the evidence. Arguing with myself that you were innocent. How did hide what you are? And how did you kill O’Reilly?”
Atavistic fear kept her silent as the reality of his magic crawled over her skin. She tried to move her hands, strained her muscles hard against the force that held her, to the point that she’d tear something if she pushed harder. She was no match for this. Here was the power of legend and myth.
It was like something out of a movie, but he held no weapon. No device. This was all him. All Aiden. In his dark eyes she saw a despair that matched her own, but it was directed at her.
Her brain caught up with the question. What? He thought she’d killed someone? Her mind raced. He’d asked how.
“I didn’t.”
He grated out a humorless laugh, a harsh tearing sound filled with anguish. “Didn’t what, Cait? Didn’t manipulate me? Didn’t brutally murder four people right under my nose? Or didn’t lie?”
“Neither, either. Hell, whatever you’re talking about, whatever it is you think I’ve done, I didn’t do,” she managed, through chattering teeth. No mission, no alien had ever displayed this kind of power without the assistance of technology. She’d come to accept aliens as alien, and they were out there, in space, but this was home. Earth. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Wasn’t supposed to be real.
Modern Magic Page 102
