by C. I. Black
And she was dangerous.
Something brushed her shoulder. It settled on her forearm, a hand, sure and strong. Musk and mint slid across her senses. Gage.
“That’s it. Focus. Take a deep breath.” His voice eased over her, cutting through the roaring in her head, a cool balm on a sunburn.
She drew in a ragged breath. The pressure pulsed in her eyes.
“Another breath.”
The heat billowed but not as ferocious as before. She sucked in another breath. Her pulse slowed and the pressure eased even more.
“Lord and Lady,” Lachlin said. “Through the damned sunglasses even.”
The heat threatened to roar over her again. She forced in another breath.
Gage squeezed her arm. “That’s it. Just focus on being calm.”
“Calm?” The word came out edged with hysteria. “I turned my chair to stone.” And her painting and wall and that man who’d attacked her. Stone!
Gage’s other hand rubbed a gentle circle between her shoulder blades. “I know.”
“To stone.”
“It happens.”
“It doesn’t just happen. It can’t happen.” Gage had said the Kin were every monster mentioned in her mythology class, and the most famous one who turned people to stone was Medusa, one of three gorgon sisters. Her stomach lurched. “I can’t be.”
“Morgan,” Gage said, his voice soft.
“How can I?” Her gaze leapt up to the chaos and the crumbled stone that she’d made.
Lachlin winced, but Gage met her gaze as if he could hold her essence, shelter it from the storm inside her with just a look.
“Gorgons aren’t real. I can’t be— My reflection—”
“The mythology books don’t usually have all the details right.”
“Obviously, since looking at your reflection won’t turn you to stone,” Lachlin said.
The muscle in Gage’s jaw twitched. “Gorgon is a race. A very rare race, and the ability is only passed through the female line.”
“But what does that mean?” She didn’t want to know. And yet she’d just proven how dangerous she was. If she didn’t want to kill someone else, she had to know. “And what about the sunglasses? Why didn’t they turn to stone?”
“It’s all about focus,” Gage said. “Your gaze turns what you look at to stone. You’re looking through the sunglasses, hence your power goes right through them.”
“Except the tint in the glass and the fact they’re so close to your face is supposed to trick your powers into thinking something is in front of your eyes and hold your powers back.” Lachlin shifted, his indifference looking forced. “Obviously you’re an exception to the rule.”
“Let’s get you back to the house and I’ll explain everything,” Gage said.
She nodded, forcing her gaze down. Kate stared back at her from the phone forgotten in her hand. She couldn’t go anywhere. She had to pull it together. “No. Kate is the priority.”
“And Lachlin and I will find her,” Gage said.
“No. I won’t just sit around and wait.” She hadn’t hurt anyone since leaving the hospital, and just a few minutes ago, the hall outside her apartment had been filled with people and she hadn’t gone all eye crazy on them. Lachlin had pissed her off. The man in the alley had scared her and pissed her off. She couldn’t believe she was even thinking about this. “My temper is the trigger. I keep it in check, furniture stays normal.”
“You can’t just roam the streets,” Lachlin said.
“Stop telling me what I can and cannot do.” Heat flickered around her eyes. Furious, she ground her teeth and forced it back. “Kate is the priority. I can control this.”
And she wasn’t going to think about how the impossible had suddenly become terrifying reality. Kin were real. She was a monster. And none of that mattered. She needed to figure out if Kate really had been abducted and, if so, rescue her.
‘The Imperial March’ from Star Wars sounded, weak and tinny.
“What the hell is that?” Lachlin asked.
“My phone. My boss is calling.” She scanned the floor around her. She’d left the phone on her desk when she’d gone to get her mail. It had to be somewhere in the mess.
The tune chirped again. To her left? Under the shredded cushion?
Gage shoved aside the couch. Not under there. She tossed the cushion over it and gathered the papers underneath, blowing off bits of fluff.
Another chirp. There, a hint of light from the phone’s face under a book.
She grabbed it and turned it on. “Jacobs.”
“You all right?” her boss, Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Ed Waters, asked. “I just got word about your apartment.” His gruff voice was even more gruff than usual, which meant he’d been worried… or it had been too long since she’d heard it and she wasn’t used to it anymore.
“I’m fine. I was out when it happened. Looks like—”
“Don’t get him involved,” Gage hissed.
She glared at him, realized what she was doing, and jerked her attention back to the floor.
“Looks like what?” Ed asked.
“Like complete chaos. The police are on it. I’m sure they’ll do their job.”
“I’m sure.” Ed’s tone darkened even more. Yeah, she didn’t like the idea of letting someone else handle any of this either, but marshals didn’t deal with break-and-enters. “You got a place to stay for a while? And don’t tell me you’re staying there. We don’t know if this is case related or not.”
She bit back a snort. She was pretty sure it wasn’t case related. “Fine. Is Kate there? I’ll stay with her.”
Gage’s feet shifted closer. “What are you doing?”
“She called in sick this morning,” Ed said. “Well, actually, emailed. It was pretty early when she sent it.”
Shit. So the photo on the phone could be true. “I’ll try her at home.”
“You call if you need anything.”
“I will.”
“And Jacobs…”
“Yeah, Boss?”
“You better be coming back.”
That was the closest she was going to get to him confessing he missed her, and she had no idea how to respond to that. “I gotta go.”
“Unhunh.”
The line went dead and she turned to Gage, keeping her gaze just past his shoulder. “Kate emailed in sick early this morning.”
“Is there any doubt the photo is real?” Lachlin asked, his casual arrogance returning.
“I don’t believe everything I see. And maybe she is just sick. I’m going to her house to find out.” She pocketed both phones and picked her way to her door.
“You can’t just let her roam the streets,” Lachlin said.
“We’ve already proven you can’t stop me.” And she sure as hell wasn’t going to sit back and let these strangers look for Kate, FBI, Kin, or whatever the hell they were.
CHAPTER 5
Kate’s house only confirmed she’d been abducted. The front door had been unlocked, the key table in the foyer knocked over, and her cell phone smashed into pieces beside it, giving evidence of a struggle. Aside from that, however, there was no indication who was responsible or where Kate might be.
They returned to the estate in Old Town to a room Gage called the situation room. Rika took the kidnapper’s phone, transferred everything on it to a computer set into the large table in the middle of the room, and handed the phone back. Then she perched on a stool at the far end and tapped on the table’s surface.
The picture of Kate appeared on the big screen monitor at the back of the room, blown up to ridiculous proportions. Everything but Kate was dark, and there were only hints of a cinderblock wall behind her. There wasn’t even a window in the shot. The blood on Kate’s temple had caked to her skin in a thick line to her jaw, pasting a lock of blonde hair to it, so she’d been upright when it had dried, which only proved if she’d been unconscious it hadn’t been for long.
Rika pursed he
r lips. Her ears turned pointed and her features more delicate, and stayed that way. She rolled a purple spike of hair between her fingers and stared at the screen embedded in the table.
Clayton sat on the stool beside her, his dark, hulking presence becoming unnaturally still. Morgan didn’t know anyone who focused to the point where it looked as if he didn’t breathe.
“This is going to take a while,” Rika said without looking up. “I’ll run an algorithm that’ll hopefully extract more detail, but until it’s done, it’s normal eyes at work.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Clayton said, his deep voice a soft rumble.
“Good. There’s got to be something there.” Gage draped his leather coat on the back of a chair, leaned over the table, and examined the computer screen embedded in it.
Lachlin strolled in with a mug, steam curling over the lip. “So what’s the plan?”
The rich aroma of coffee wafted over Morgan’s senses and her stomach growled. She hadn’t had anything to eat since dinner last night. Funny how she’d thought to get her sidearm from the gun safe in her bedroom but hadn’t thought to grab anything to eat. Guess she now knew what her priorities were.
Gage tapped on the table and swiped across it. The picture of the man-monster took Kate’s place, along with his rap sheet. “We have an I.D. Daryl Matas. Assault, possession, and possible gang ties.”
“And we still don’t know if the attack on me is related to Kate’s abduction,” Morgan said.
“It’s too much of a coincidence not to be.” Gage crossed his arms, straining his T-shirt across his broad shoulders and around his biceps. “We have to assume the goal of the abduction is to get another chance at you and we have to assume, because Matas was involved, it’s Kin related.”
“And we have to assume they want you dead.” Lachlin hooked a waist-length strand of black hair behind a pointed ear.
“But why would any Kin want me dead? I didn’t even know they… you existed a few hours ago.”
“Gorgons are rare and extremely powerful,” Gage said.
Lachlin snorted and took a sip from his coffee.
“Some Kin react badly to that kind of power and see you as a threat. Because you’ve come into your power, anyone who sees you will know you’re a gorgon.” Gage wasn’t saying something. It was subtle in his tone and how the others glanced at him—save for Clayton who didn’t move—before they turned back to their work, or in Lachlin’s case, his coffee. Maybe everyone was waiting to see if she’d lose it and turn them all to stone.
“So sometime in the last four months I’ve run into someone who recognized what—” God, she didn’t want to say it. “—what I am?”
“Exactly. I know it’s tough, but there has to be someone. They probably acted surprised when they saw you,” Gage said.
It wasn’t going to be tough. She hadn’t communicated with a lot of people in the last four months, and she’d looked at them even less when talking with them, although in the hospital— “There were tons of people in the hospital after I…”
“Used your power,” Lachlin said.
“Yes.” The image of her attacker crumbling to dust flashed into her mind and a hint of fire licked at her face. She slid her gaze to the wall beside the big screen and forced the fire back.
“It would have taken at least a few weeks for your power to fully manifest,” Gage said.
Power she didn’t want.
“After that, you’d be recognized as Kin,” Lachlin said.
Well, that narrowed it down. She hadn’t spent long in the hospital and she’d only ventured outside in the week after. The fear that she was dangerous had been so overwhelming, she’d found her new apartment and cut ties with everyone who knew her even on a casual basis, including her best friends, her job, and her parents. She’d sequestered herself, determined to keep everyone safe until she’d figured out what was going on. “There hasn’t been anyone.”
“Well, there has to be someone.” Lachlin set his cup on the table and Rika picked it up, glaring at him with bright purple eyes.
God, Morgan was never going to get used to that.
“What about your neighbor?” Gage asked. “He recognized you.”
“We’d just met last night. Just before you showed up.”
“Not enough time for him to call someone and have them send Matas after you,” Rika said, extending the cup closer to Lachlin.
“Maybe enough time for a kidnapping.” Lachlin took the cup back. “Perhaps they are two separate incidents.”
“No, it feels more like your friend’s abduction was a result of Matas’s failure,” Gage said. “We need to figure out who saw past your glamour.”
Lachlin rolled his eyes. “Anyone could have seen past her glamour. It’s completely blown apart.”
“Glamour works on Kin as well? I thought it just worked on humans.”
“If you’ve got control of it, most Kin won’t be able to see past it,” Gage said. Which made her wonder if what she saw was really him or his glamour.
“Unless you’re one of a few special Kin who can see past almost anything,” Lachlin said, his tone clear he was not one of the special Kin. “Like a gorgon.”
“Or you will it away,” Clayton said, still frozen and staring at the big screen.
“But that only works on Kin because no matter how hard you try, you can’t will all of it away. Most humans can’t see past even a fraction of glamour,” Rika said.
“So someone, a Kin, has seen past my glamour.”
“What little you’ve got,” Lachlin said.
“Except I haven’t talked to anyone in person for four months.” But that wasn’t true. Every Wednesday, she’d forced herself to open her apartment door and not make eye contact with the guy delivering her groceries.
Process of elimination. There wasn’t anyone else. It had to be him.
“I think we have a lead.”
* * *
Morgan’s delivery guy, Todd Redding, was indeed Kin and had a rap sheet involving petty theft and a few drunk and disorderlies, but nothing too serious. He lived in a small, sagging house on a street lined with small, sagging houses in a less than desirable part of town. The front yard was a mass of weeds and grass lying in matted lumps, still mostly dead from the winter, and surrounded by a rusted, waist-high metal fence. With the background of heavy grey clouds threatening rain, the whole lot looked tired and forgotten.
Lachlin and Clayton hustled down the narrow driveway to the back of the house while Gage reached for the gate separating the sidewalk from an overgrown path to the sagging front porch.
“Remember to keep your head,” Gage said.
“This isn’t my first rodeo, you know.”
“I know.” But he didn’t sound certain. He drew in a quick breath and twisted the silver ring on his finger. “All right, crash course. Redding is a Naga.”
“So a snake man?” She’d never expected that mythology course to be so useful. All she’d wanted was an easy elective to balance out her psychology classes.
“Exactly. A little stronger than your average human and a little faster, but not by much. What you need to watch for is their venom. If he opens his mouth, you get behind me.”
“I think I can avoid being bitten.”
Gage opened the gate. It groaned on rusted hinges and only opened halfway. “He can also spit it.”
“Now that’s disgusting. How deadly is it?”
“Depends on the Naga. Redding’s venom is a paralytic, so it won’t kill you right away, but if the antidote isn’t administered soon enough, it’ll work its way to your heart and lungs.”
“Wonderful. So death by suffocation.” And here she’d thought tracking violent offenders was dangerous. Poisonous spit wasn’t something handled in the marshal’s manual or basic training.
Gage settled his dark gaze on her, drawing a shiver of anticipation. “You might be able to control him, but I don’t want you to try unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Control him?” Lachlin’s words jumped to mind. She was a snake charmer, a gorgon. “Wonderful. So I can turn people to stone and snakes think I’m the bomb. I’m never going to get a date again.”
Something flashed across Gage’s expression, but he turned away before she could tell what it was.
“Oh, God, please tell me I don’t have snake hair.”
Gage gave her a sidelong glance, a hint of a smile pulling at his lips. “It’s fine. You don’t have snake hair. Now come on. I’m sure Lachlin and Clayton are in position.”
She followed Gage up the path to the porch, and stood slightly behind him. He rested his hand on his gun, ready to draw, and knocked on the front door. Morgan matched his position, hand on gun, and strained to hear any indication someone was inside.
Nothing.
Gage knocked again.
Footsteps thudded on the other side of the door.
“I’m coming,” a voice said. The door opened and the guy who delivered her groceries stood on the other side. She recognized him from his mop of sandy blond hair and the snake tattoo on the back of his right hand.
Her gaze locked with his and his green eyes widened. Time seemed to slow and Todd’s expression went from neutral to horror. A hint of fire tickled Morgan’s face. She ground her teeth against it, refusing to let it grow into the terrifying inferno. It simmered and didn’t billow. Maybe she could control it.
“Todd Redding?” Gage asked, shattering the moment.
With a squeak, Todd scrambled away from the door and down the hall.
Gage drew his gun and leapt after him. Morgan followed.
Todd rushed through the kitchen, yanked open the back door, and slammed into Clayton’s thick outstretched arm. Todd toppled back, landing on his butt, and Clayton’s enormous form filled the doorway.
Gage slowed, his weapon ready. Todd’s skin turned mottled green and his face flashed into a snake’s, with a stubby nose and lipless mouth. Thick flaps of skin flared from either side of his neck like a cobra’s hood and he hissed, revealing a pair of wicked long teeth.
