Fuck, you’re as jumpy as a virgin bride on her wedding night! When it was clear there was no threat, I holstered the gun so that I didn’t accidently hurt Toni or someone else who just happened to chance by at the wrong time.
“Something tells me you’re going to be trouble.” She leaned forward onto her knees to catch her breath.
“Trouble is my middle name,” I said with a grin. “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here though, so let’s get back to the car.”
We took turns sleeping in the car while the other kept watch and listened to the scanners for anything suspicious, but nothing out of the ordinary happened. Throughout the night, and into the next morning, there were no kids reported as missing. We both considered it something of a win, but it also made me suspect that we might have been right about the mystery woman the day before. After grabbing another quick bite to eat, we returned to the park, more covertly this time, and waited for the return of the raven-haired woman.
Toni insisted on using the hag-stone and sat next to me holding the small stone in front of her eye. A few times, she turned toward me with an odd look on her face and asked more about my family’s history and our place within the Rain before turning back toward the park, which was mostly empty because of the drizzle of rain that had set in sometime after the sun had risen.
For my part, I just watched each person who entered the space, particularly those who didn’t appear to have any children with them.
A little after noon, the raven-haired woman returned. She crept around the edges of the small groups of people. To anyone else, she probably would have blended in and disappeared, but to my trained eye she stood out like a sore thumb.
“Check your three,” I muttered under my breath to Toni, who swung back to look where I’d indicated.
“Fucking bitch,” she murmured before tossing me the hag-stone. “We’ve got her!”
I grabbed the stone, wondering what she’d seen that made her so certain that it was the black annis. When I lifted the small hole to my eye, I saw two worlds compressed together. In one world the woman was the blue-eyed woman of understated beauty, in the other she was a blue-faced old crone with wicked teeth and metal fingernails. I dropped the stone as my mind struggled with the sight and nausea swept over me.
Toni bent to retrieve the stone. “I should’ve warned you, seeing the ethereal plane can be a bit disorientating. I would have thought you might have been used to it though.”
“I told you we don’t use those things back home.”
She pressed her lips into a hard line and frowned. “That’s right. Sorry, I forgot.”
“Let’s try to be discreet about this, shall we?” I asked as Toni screwed a silencer onto her Glock.
She grinned. “Trouble might be your middle name, but mine’s discreet.” She winked before rushing off toward the black annis with her gun barely hidden at her side.
“So much for fucking discreet,” I muttered as I rushed after her with my piece still holstered.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“GOD, THAT WAS a rush.” Toni grinned even as she stood panting over the corpse of the black annis. Although it had taken the lead, Toni had been so close behind it that it hadn’t stood a chance.
Even if it had managed to elude Toni, I’d been close behind.
As soon as we were free of the crowds, Toni had fired two silenced shots into the base of the creature’s neck, and it had fallen instantly. Even with the silencer, the noise of the shots had rung out around the playground, but no one had run off screaming at the sound because it wasn’t obvious gunfire.
“I could really use a drink and a wind down after that,” she said.
“Agreed, but don’t you think we should at least try to find the kids she took?” If it’d been my mission, I would’ve tried to take the black annis alive until we knew for certain the kids were dead. Even if we were sure they were, a living, breathing creature could be tortured for information about the location of the bodies, so we could at least give the families some closure. As much as I hated torture, and the Assessors’ methods in general, sometimes the ends justified the means.
“I already have a team taking care of that.”
I thought back to the previous morning at the Dove. Everyone else had been assigned a case. It was possible Toni called one of them in, but that didn’t make sense when we were already so close and had been tracking the creature. My face must have shown my uncertainty because she winked when she glanced at me.
“I told you already. I work a little differently to the others.” She tossed the hag-stone at me and indicated that I should look through it.
Confused, but willing to play along, I looked through the restricted view and could barely believe my eyes. Even with the limited vision the stone offered, I could see no less than three fae warriors, with their wings of varying shades of blue stretched high behind them, making their way from house to house.
“That’s bullshit!” I cried, tossing the stone away as if it was tainted—which it was in a way.
The instant I’d moved the stone, the fae world—the ethereal plane—disappeared completely, leaving the fae unseen once more. When I turnd my gaze on Toni, I had no doubt that my eyes flashed with every bit of anger that swarmed my body.
“How can you do that? How can you team up with that . . . that scum!” Using fae technology for the Rain’s benefit was one thing; having them help was something entirely different. It was a betrayal to everything the Rain stood for.
A sarcastic chuckle escaped from her. “You’re kidding me, right?” When I didn’t answer, Toni placed her hands on her hips and watched me with pursed lips and a knitted brow. “I really thought you’d understand.”
“Why?” I snapped. “Because I’m the freak who fell in love with a monster?”
She blinked in surprise. “No, I—”
“I get it,” I cut her off, finding it impossible to silence the storm that bubbled inside me. “I’m the laughing stock of most of the Rain because of my choices.” If they even were my choices. “But at least I’m not asking the enemy to help me with a case. You’ve got fae trying to find fucking children for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you ever heard of a goddamned changeling?”
She stepped back as if I had slapped her. “No one outside of the Dove knows about this. No one! I only let you in because I thought I could trust you. Given your history, I thought you’d appreciate that not all creatures are evil.”
I shook my head and stepped away from her. “Maybe they’re not, but you have to have rocks in your head if you think the fae can be trusted.”
One corner of her mouth lifted in a wry grin. “Well, they haven’t let me down, lied to me, or double crossed me yet, which is more than I can say for some Rain operatives.”
My stomach twisted when her words struck me. I was doing just that. I’d lied about my reasons for wanting to join her team and planned to do whatever it took to get into Charles’s vault the first time an opportunity arose. Maybe I was no better than the fae. I blew out a breath. “I just don’t trust them. I can’t.”
“Maybe fae are different here?” It sounded like she was trying to offer a suggestion that would work for both of us.
“Maybe.” I doubted it. As far as I was concerned, fae were untrustworthy in every country in the world, but I didn’t want to burn the bridges that might get me closer to the information I needed to find out about Evie and her unnatural hold over me.
“Let’s get back to the Dove, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the partnership I have with them on the way.”
“What about . . .” I trailed off when I looked down to where the body of the black annis had been just a few moments earlier, but it was gone. “What happened to—”
Toni held up her hand to stop me talking. “If you don’t trust fae, you probably don’t want to finish that question.”
AS WE started the slightly more than an hour-long drive back to the Dove, Toni explained to me how her unlik
ely—and in my opinion stupid—alliance with the fae started.
She’d been hunting a small party of warriors—who’d apparently been causing havoc near the headquarters at Oxford Castle—only to be injured in the cross-fire as they attacked the real culprit: the leader of an Unseelie court nearby. The fae warriors that Toni had been tracking helped revive her—offering her enchanted food and taking her to their court healers who tended to her wounds before returning her to Oxford Castle unharmed and with the hag-stones as a way of finding them again.
The way she spoke of them, with awe and respect, was counter-intuitive to everything I knew about them. It was almost the same way Evie had talked about her stay at the court. The thought was unwelcome, so I pushed it aside.
In order to have Toni understand my side, I told her the story of Lou’s capture and torture at the hands of the fae in New York.
She frowned. “It just doesn’t gel with what I know about the fae. I could almost buy it from the Unseelies, maybe.” She was quiet for a moment. “Almost.”
“My sister was tortured for years, and the symbols carved into her skin are fairy magic.” I fell silent as the tense I’d used hit me. “Were fairy magic,” I added quietly as the reality of her death snuck up on me again and dragged away all emotions but sorrow.
There was pity and kindness in Toni’s tone when she spoke again. “Maybe we can agree to disagree on this one.”
“I’m not working with their kind. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“I’ll keep you away from them,” she agreed. “Although that’s as much for their safety as your sanity. I don’t want any of my friends killed by some hothead Yank.”
I nodded my acceptance of those terms. Even if I didn’t agree with her methods or choice of friends, I wasn’t willing to walk away from my chance at getting to her Grandfather’s vault over a few fae.
There was something else that made me agree. Hunting with Toni was almost like it used to be with my family before Charlotte. It was the thrill of the chase and the discovery of new information—saving lives—that mattered most. It wasn’t a battle over who was the biggest disappointment—not that there was ever a competition for that title after I had run to Evie the first time.
We were halfway back to the Dove when Toni spoke again, but not before releasing a lengthy sigh. “I was wrong about you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“After the warnings Granddad gave me about you, I thought that I’d finally had the chance of meeting someone outside of my teams who didn’t believe the rhetoric bullshit about all others being evil.”
Do I believe it? The tiny part of me that had resisted Evie’s pull for as long as I could was convinced she’d done something to ensnare me. Didn’t that prove the doctrine of the Rain was right?
Then again, having had a few months uninterrupted with my dream girl made the reality of my empty life that much harder to cope with. The part of me that missed her so desperately refused to believe she was evil.
Regardless of my personal feelings on the matter, there was irrefutable evidence in the report Zarita had shown me that phoenixes were a force for good in the world.
“I don’t. Believe that I mean,” I said after a pause, as much to convince myself as Toni.
“But you don’t think that it covers fae?”
I shrugged. “I’ve seen too much of the fallout from their actions.”
“Do you think humans are evil?”
Her question stilled me for a moment, and when I answered, it was with careful thought. “I think that some humans have a profound ability to perform evil acts, but I’m not sure that I would say humans are inherently evil.”
She turned her eyes off the road for a moment to quirk her brow at me.
I laughed. “Okay, okay, point taken.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You can ask, but whether I’ll answer is another issue.”
She chuckled. “Why did you want to come to Oxford?”
I went to give her the same answer I had given Charles, but she held up a hand.
“Not the official bullshit reason, the real reason. From what your dad told us, you’ve been traveling all over Europe for months, so why here? Why now?”
I still wasn’t sure whether I could, or even should, trust her, so I didn’t want to give away too much. Then again, she’ll be your best ally if you can trust her. “How much do you know about what happened back in the States?”
“Just that you apparently lusted after something you were supposed to be hunting.”
I couldn’t believe that Dad had boiled it down to something so simple and yet so utterly incorrect.
“Does it bother you that I know so much?” she asked with an amused smile.
“No. What bothers me is how wrong all of your supposed knowledge is.”
She flourished her hand in my direction before placing it back on the wheel. “Well then, straighten me out.”
Was I really crazy enough to tell a second person the story of Evie and me in less than a month? Another virtual stranger. Worse still, another Rain operative—someone who wouldn’t think the story of Evie’s heritage was hokum and myth.
It was dangerous telling Toni everything, and yet in that risk, I might find an unlikely ally.
Toni’s words from two days earlier played at the edges of my memories. “Trust is a two-way street, and I don’t think I can ask for it without giving it in return.” Did I really care if she trusted me though? I sat debating for a little longer than was probably polite. It was the fact that I had ammunition against Toni as well that ended up forcing my mouth open and causing the words to spill out.
By the time we arrived at the Dove, I’d told Toni all about Evie, about how we met and how we’d been split apart twice by death. My story ended with me getting onto the plane to Europe to try to get over Evie, which I recalled just as we pulled into the parking bay beneath the building that housed the Rain accommodations. In the meantime, Toni had forgotten all about the question she’d asked that had prompted my honesty.
After Toni parked the car, she blew out a breath. “Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure whether to be in awe of your determination or question your sanity.”
“What?” After discovering her alliance with the fae of all creatures, I had hoped she would understand why I was drawn to Evie. My assumption regarding her acceptance of the reality I believed in—that Evie wasn’t evil—was part of the reason I’d admitted any of it to her. My jaw clenched and ticked as my frustration grew with her silence.
“You were stupid to let your family anywhere near her. You should have whisked her away from Charlotte before they’d ever had a chance to catch up.”
I found myself smiling as she blew away my expectations. “Maybe. But we were both too young then to have thought through all of the consequences. Who knows, it probably would’ve ended up the same way regardless. Eventually the dangers of my world were destined to drive her away.”
“She really broke your heart when she ran, didn’t she?”
I shrugged. There was no point trying to deny it, after telling our story for the last half-hour, my face probably revealed every bit of anxiety and sorrow I felt about Evie’s disappearance. About her running from me in Detroit and again in Missouri.
“I’m not surprised you’re unwilling to go home after suffering through that.”
I hadn’t told her about the relics, or about Zarita. I didn’t want to be that honest just yet. “The worst part is that my family just don’t get it, you know?”
“You wouldn’t believe how much I know about that. If Granddad found out about the fae, he’d have conniptions.”
“You don’t get along with him?” I was surprised Charles had assigned me to Toni’s team if he didn’t trust her to keep me in line.
“He thinks I’m everything I should be as an Elite, and outside of that . . . well, let’s just say that what he doesn’t know do
esn’t hurt him.”
I forced my face into a smile to let her know that her secret was safe with me—she had mine to guard now too. “I can understand that. Sometimes I wish things were that way with my family—it’d be better than the accusatory stares and constant guilt trips.”
“Let’s go get a drink. I think we can both use one.”
I couldn’t have agreed with her more.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE WEIGHT AND warmth of a hand rested steadfast over my heart. I shifted, not entirely sure if I was already asleep and dreaming or still awake and had an intruder.
Slender fingers, which radiated with an unnatural warmth, traced over a scar that ran the length of my ribs, starting just beneath my collarbone.
“Are you asleep?” A voice that was instantly recognizable called to me from across the vast expanse of the distance that separated us, whispering against the shell of my ear.
“If I am, then I’m dreaming, and I don’t ever want to wake up.” My own disembodied voice carried from my mouth, even though I hadn’t issues a single word.
Evie’s giggle echoed through the intimate space between our bodies. Instead of just hearing her laughter, I could feel it. The ripples of her joy rushed over every part of me—including parts that experienced pleasure in ways ears never could.
“But if you are, then it’s not really me doing this.” She placed a soft kiss over my heart, where her hand had rested a moment earlier.
“Mmmm, now that’s true.” I spoke again without consciously forming the words or moving my mouth. “And I like it very much when you do that.”
“How about this?” She pressed another kiss to the other side of my chest.
“Yeah, I like that too.”
“What about this?” She trailed three small kisses across my belly, each one lower down my abdomen than the last, each one lingering on my skin for a few beats more than the one before.
I listened to my voice reply in the affirmative, a strangled word hissed through teeth clenched tight as pleasure coursed through me. Anticipating her next move, I bucked my hips forward off the bed to give her access to the waist of my boxers but nothing happened. A chill settled into the air that had been warm moments earlier.
Among the Debris (Son of Rain #2) Page 16
