Kai said something in response.
But I was already too exhausted to hear him.
I woke up to a gentle nudge from a strong hand. Warm blue light flooded my eyes.
I rolled over, the scratches from the crows stinging.
“It’s time, Eden.” Kai’s baritone sounded like a blaring alarm to my tired ears. A cool glass pressed against the back of my palm. I accepted the water.
“Sure we can’t reschedule?” I said.
“It’ll be over before you know it.” Slight rings hung beneath his calm eyes. He hadn’t slept. I should’ve felt flattered, or grateful, but I was more embarrassed about the lack of self-reliance than anything else.
After stretching my tired limbs, I scanned the room. Khan was lying feet up in the corner. Even in sleep, the cat looked more grouchy than peaceful, his white-striped nose wrinkling at random.
I drained the water and handed the empty glass back to Kai. “Any unexpected guests?”
“All clear.” Then his face darkened ever so slightly. “You should know something.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“Rayna will try to trap you.”
My heart sank. “Rayna’s giving the evaluation?”
“I just got the text an hour ago, Eden. She wants to do it personally.”
“Shouldn’t a shrink do it?”
“She’s a trained psychologist. Worked as one for years. Still does.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“She’s the Regional Director of the Atheas Field Office.”
“I thought she was your partner,” I said, even if it wasn’t much of a surprise. Rayna had a domineering manner—like she’d been born to lead, never to follow.
“She likes to supervise on the ground.” He flashed a small smile. “Very hands on.”
“And you get stuck with her? Lucky you.”
“She’s okay.” Kai checked his phone. “We need to be at the Getaway in thirty.”
I shed my torn t-shirt without giving Kai a warning. The agent turned around to give me privacy. Hooray for chivalry. Like I cared that much. I found a wrinkled black tank-top that proved to be the least dirty out of my mountain of clothes.
After brushing off what dust I could from my jeans, I headed to the kitchen sink.
A shower would take too long.
The water splashed against my dirty skin. I glanced up, adjusting my hair in the mirror next to the front door. For someone who’d had a long night, I didn’t look so bad.
“I’m ready,” I said, checking to make sure I had the Reaper’s Switch. My phone and the money clip were along for the ride, too.
A quick look revealed a text message from Renard. The kid wanted to meet me. He’d found something related to the “PP.”
I told him I’d meet him at the usual spot around ten.
I reached beneath the sink and took five grand out of the coffee can at the back. I didn’t usually spend my entire weekly stipend, but Renard’s help wasn’t free.
Kid needed to go to college, after all.
“Ready?” I called to Kai as I slipped the wad of bills into my back pocket.
The agent followed me out the door and up the black sand beach.
The warm morning sun beat down from a placid, cloudless blue sky. Toucans talked lazily as they awoke to a new day.
Ten minutes later, we were rolling into the city.
Downtown wasn’t exactly a thriving metropolis, but its population was edging closer to the six-figure mark. Hell, with a new mayor, maybe we’d get there by the end of the year. We passed a special election poster—set for November 2018—plastered to a sticker-battered light pole.
The old office was vacant, thanks to the last mayor’s demise.
Don’t shed any tears. Guy was a creepy serial killer with a trophy shelf of skulls.
“Any tips?” I asked as we approached the FBI’s headquarters.
“Would you listen if I gave you any?”
“Nope.”
Every car in the parking lot looked the same as we pulled in: black and boring.
The clock ticked over to eight as Kai pulled in between two doppelganger SUVs.
A knock at the tinted window startled me.
Rayna Denton smiled a wolfish grin, her wavy blonde hair looking red carpet ready as ever in the perfect sunshine.
“You’re late, Hunter,” she said, her voice like a diamond-studded knife, “but I won’t hold that against you.”
We hadn’t even started, and already I was about to be devoured by the lioness.
27
The Getaway—as the FBI had cleverly dubbed their converted-hotel regional office—wasn’t in what you’d call the nice part of town. Not quite as bad as the slum where Johns lived, but still not great.
The wide boulevard it called home was pockmarked by potholes and wispy bags. The buildings next to the five story structure had been demolished since the summer and paved over for a parking lot.
I slipped in the entrance behind Rayna.
She didn’t hold the door.
The brief journey across the tight, small lobby felt like a trip to the gallows. A receptionist who looked older than the converted hotel glared as I walked past.
Rayna didn’t stop at the two elevators. I followed her straight back through a narrow hall that terminated in a single door. A long-faded sign displayed a picture of a barbell and a swimming pool.
She turned the knob, and I braced myself for a blast of gross humidity—that trademark of cheap hotel pools everywhere. Instead, I saw a large room filled with gray cubicles. Where the pool had once been, there was instead a rectangular outline filled in by fresh concrete. At the back, a faint line marked where a dividing wall between the pool and the gym had been replaced with glass.
Those were the cushy offices for the higher-ranking government drones.
Clacking keyboards and clandestine calls scored my journey through enemy territory as Rayna led me to a corner office.
Kai hadn’t been exaggerating.
She ran this ship.
I took a seat on the perfect leather couch, which I quickly determined was fake.
Rayna shuffled papers on her desk, barely glancing at me. I turned my attention to the FBI operation buzzing outside, counting at least twenty-five cubicles before I got bored. After the Supreme Court decision, the Feds hadn’t wasted time getting their operation up and running. Give them another year, and they’d probably fill every floor of the building.
An assistant knocked on the door, carrying two coffees. She set them on the messy desk.
Rayna took one and pointed at the other, steam rising from its plastic lid. “You look tired. Have one.”
“I prefer shitty coffee.”
“I want you sharp for this evaluation, Hunter.”
“Did you pay for it?”
She looked exasperated. “Cost me four bucks of my government salary, Hunter.”
“How can I resist?” I took the cup and sipped it. Black, no sugar.
Figured she’d know how I took my coffee.
There was a slight sour tang that struck me as odd. But maybe I was so used to the battery-acid instant stuff that I’d just forgotten what actual coffee tasted like.
She smiled and said, “This interview will be recorded for your official file.” There was a pause, and then she added, “Its purpose is to ascertain whether you are psychologically fit to serve the Bureau in a consultative capacity.”
I sipped the coffee. “Let’s get this dog-and-pony show started, then.”
Her perfect teeth glinted as the tape recorder clicked on.
I kicked things off. “So, you didn’t tell me that you ran things around here. Very impressive.”
Rayna bit her lip, clearly annoyed. “Miss Hunter, you realize it’s more appropriate that I ask the questions, correct?”
“Oh, I’m Miss Hunter for the official record?”
Steam
was about to start pouring out of her ears.
Point: Eden.
Rayna brushed the top sheet off her paper stack with her perfectly manicured hand and gave me a small smile.
Maybe I’d called things too soon.
“Let’s start at the beginning, Miss Hunter.”
“How far back are we talking?” I asked, caught slightly off guard.
“When you arrived on Atheas. That must’ve been a…challenging experience.”
That was one way to describe suddenly rising from the dead in the back of Aldric’s SUV.
“You’ve seen my file,” I said. “You know the story.”
“Are you refusing to answer the question?”
“There wasn’t a question.” I leaned forward, placing my elbows on my dirty jeans. “Just a statement.”
Rayna wrote something down on a yellow legal pad. When she was finished—it was quite the lengthy note—she smiled in that way therapists did.
I hadn’t had a good run with therapists. They’d mostly found me uncooperative and insulting.
It’d been an accurate assessment.
“How did you feel when you were trapped inside Stefan Cambridge’s cellar with Agent Taylor?” Rayna raised one eyebrow—but just barely.
“Cramped,” I said. “Also, that’s not the beginning.”
“Is sarcasm your default defense mechanism against trauma?”
“Nope,” I said, already wanting the evaluation to be over, “just stupidity.”
More writing. I shifted uncomfortably, trying to read her notes. But I was too far away.
If I’d told the truth, almost suffocating in the now deceased mayor’s creepy murder cellar had been terrifying. What the hell else would it have qualified as? We’d escaped, and the bastard had gotten his just deserts, so it had all worked out okay.
I didn’t have nightmares, if that was where the evaluation was going next.
That was not where it was headed next.
Rayna finished her note with a flourish and tapped the table twice with the butt of her pen. Then she leaned back in her office chair, eying me with detached curiosity.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand, Miss Hunter.”
“Just one, huh?” I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting—a written exam, maybe a couple questions about my childhood. How I liked my colleagues. But this was unlike any session I’d ever had, which left me scrambling for purchase in an avalanche of confusion.
“There’s that razor wit again.” Rayna’s expression conveyed the disdain her words could not, this being for the public record and all. “You see, I just don’t understand you, Miss Hunter.”
“You said that already.”
“Of course.” She let the unknown simmer. All part of her technique.
I could see why the Bureau had sent her to the island to head things up. Even if I hated her, I had to admit one thing.
She was capable as hell.
I gripped my free hand tightly around the cushion, like I was clinging to a life preserver.
“I don’t understand why you would bring your sister into small-time scams. And then this happens in New Orleans?” Rayna dug out a crime scene photo. She’d shown me a picture of my body before.
This one was of Sierra, lying dead, her throat cut in a Bourbon Street alley.
Resisting the urge to either throw the half-empty coffee at her, or ask why she was hunting for Drake’s treasure with a band of thieves—which couldn’t have been FBI-sanctioned—I said, “You don’t know what happened.”
Rayna tsked me, like she was scolding a misbehaving puppy. “You cut a deal for her life. A deal with a—”
“You’d better stop while you’re ahead.” I didn’t need Lucille’s status as a goddess becoming part of the public record. News of a goddess on Earth would not go down well.
“You haven’t answered the question,” Rayna said, tenting her hands together, like she had me checkmated.
“What was the question, again?” I gulped the coffee, glaring at her.
A satisfied grin spread over her lips. “Why you would bring your sister into the grifting life.”
“I read something interesting recently,” I said, leaning into the couch as I ignored the question, “it was a story about a little map.”
Rayna didn’t pick up her pen. “And what was this story about?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “How these people paid all this money to find it. Like millions of dollars, you know? And then, when they found it, someone stole it and wouldn’t give it back.”
“Sounds far-fetched.”
“I don’t know,” I said, glaring at her, “it has that ring of truth, right?”
A tense silence hung over the room before she reached over to stop the tape recorder.
“Was that as bad for me as it was for you?” I asked after the little cassette tape disappeared into her desk.
“You should know something, Hunter,” Rayna said, stepping out from behind her desk. She leaned over the couch, lips almost touching my ear. “Your file is public record, now.”
I kept myself from reacting. “That recording? I could give a shit.”
“You know which file. The one with all your little secrets.”
“You’re not that dumb.”
“Now everyone will understand the enigma that is Eden Hunter.” She placed a laminated ID card in my hand, raking my palm with her manicured nails. “Welcome to the FBI. “
Nothing like a little piss in your Cheerios to start the day off right.
I’d passed the evaluation but lost the war.
And probably my life, too.
This time, I did throw the remnants of the coffee against the wall. “You can’t do that.”
“And you can’t keep secrets from me,” Rayna said, crouching down to pick up the cup. “You tell me when you reap a victim’s soul.” She stopped in the doorway and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Tell your cat to refrain from tampering with government vehicles. It’s a felony.”
I looked down at my new ID card. A note was stuck to the back.
Tamara Marquez’s downtown address.
I watched Rayna glide across the converted pool room, and shook my head.
If I was an enigma, there wasn’t a word in the dictionary to describe her.
Well, one came to mind.
Bitch.
28
Kai was waiting for me in the converted hotel’s lobby.
My hangdog expression must’ve told the story, because his first question was, “What went wrong?”
“Let’s talk outside.” Once we were in the parking lot, I banged my hand against one of the cars and said, “Rayna totally blindsided me.”
“What happened?”
I gave him the executive summary of how the evaluation had gone down. When I got to the part about my file becoming public knowledge, he raised his eyebrow.
After I finished he said, “Maybe I can convince her to reconsider.”
“You didn’t see the look in her eye.” I shook my head. “She wants blood. My blood.”
“Didn’t that same file recommend the Bureau recruit you?” Kai scratched his strong jaw. “Why would she burn you?”
“No idea. She’s your partner.” I glanced at him. “Sorry, that was harsh.”
But my stress was justified. Rayna had gone nuclear on me—and the whole island. I was in for an exciting week when the public learned about a rain goddess who granted favors on an uncharted island in the South Pacific.
Well, one favor.
To me.
But that wouldn’t stop the loons from descending upon Atheas like a Biblical plague.
At least I had one thing going for me: No one read public domain government documents, not even the congressmen who passed them into law. They were better than two bottles of Nyquil and a handle of bourbon for grabbing a good night’s sleep.
Still, some intrepid reporter could stumble across my file at any time.
And
when that happened…well, Lucille didn’t have a reputation for being merciful.
“I’m sorry this happened, Eden.”
“Not your fault.” If only my old boyfriend Roan Kelly hadn’t taken two in the head right outside my house. He could’ve hacked the FBI and had the file disappear. And while my network was thick with unsavory characters and magical creatures, systems experts were in short supply.
Another thing to add to the growing list.
“Well, there’s one silver lining.” I held up the sticky note with Tamara’s address. “We can find out the extent of Tamara Marquez’s soul-reading capabilities.”
Kai shook his head. “I can’t, Eden.”
“What?”
“Reports to file about yesterday’s events.”
I squinted in the bright morning light. “Not everything, I assume.”
“No man will own me,” Kai said. “I’m sorry.”
“Think about it.”
But from the look on his tired face, he already had. Probably while he’d been keeping watch over me at the villa.
Goddamn did I hate his principles sometimes.
I just nodded and said, “Well, let me know how that goes.”
About as well as my file getting released to everything and everyone, if I had to guess.
In other words, it was liable to be a shitshow.
“Don’t visit that woman alone,” he said. “Tamara could be trouble.”
“Me? Get into trouble?” I winked as I bounded away from the parking lot. “Never.”
Somehow, though, I had a feeling today was going to get worse before it got better.
29
I turned my new ID card over in my fingers in the back seat of the taxi, headed out to meet with Renard Martin. The FBI hadn’t even needed for me to sit down and take a photograph. Rayna’s extensive records must’ve offered plenty of choices.
I wasn’t smiling in the shot, which summed up my general sentiment regarding the last four years. Covering my face—and the rest of the card—was a layered series of holographic FBI logos to prevent counterfeiting. My official title was simply FBI Consultant.
That she’d already had the ID strongly suggested the evaluation was a pretense to rattle my cage.
Soul Fire Page 12
