“Ugly, but thorough,” Scott said, going down the hall. He still had his gun out and peeked around the corner with his weapon first. “Kitchen.”
I followed him past the kitchen and into bedrooms, my pistol drawn now as well. I didn’t think we’d find either Century or Morales, but I’d been trained that it was better to be safe than sorry. We swept through the house, clearing it before we searched in depth for clues to the whereabouts of Antonio Morales.
Once we were sure no one was there, we ended up in a bedroom that looked to have been re-purposed as an office and a garden. There were dozens of potted plants, and every pot had been smashed. Clay fragments littered the wood floor like broken pieces of Antonio Morales’s life. There was a computer here, too, and it looked like it was the only thing that hadn’t been smashed and overturned. Scott gave it a nod then touched the mouse to wake it. “What’s up with this?”
“Probably searched his computer as best they could,” I said as the screen turned right back into a desert landscape. “Looked under the table rather than turning it over, and just left it when they were done.”
“Huh.” Scott leaned over and opened the browser. “History’s clear. I guess Antonio covered his tracks pretty well.”
“Yeah,” I said and gently put a hand on him. He looked up in surprise and I pushed him aside. Not hard, more like a suggestion to move. With a minor amount of force. I reached down and typed an IP address into the bar at the top of the browser and hit enter. I saw it load then enter a blank screen as I pulled out my phone and dialed a contact.
“Hello, Boss Lady,” came J.J.’s high voice from the other end of the line. He sounded awfully peppy.
“I just pinged your site from a computer I need searched,” I said.
“Ahhh, I just got an alert about that,” J.J. said. “Henderson, Nevada, huh? Put a dollar in the slot machine for me, will ya?”
“I’ll get right on that,” I muttered. “Give me something, J.J.”
“Hmmmm,” he said. “Looks like somebody worked this computer over. Twelve days ago a buttload of files were erased, browser history cleared. Six days ago someone nosed around looking for stuff, copied the remains of the hard drive to a flash drive. Doesn’t look like they found anything.”
“And will you find anything?” I asked.
There was a laugh on the other end of the line that bordered on boastful. “I already have, because I’m not some amateur loser that gets halted in his tracks by a blanked-out browser history. I am—”
“I am not renowned for my patience,” I said, cutting him off, “so let that be your guide in whatever you say next.”
There was a moment’s silence from the phone. “Right. Yes. Okay. So, I have his search history, thanks to some back doors we have with the big providers—”
“English is my primary language, and it would help me greatly if you’d speak it to me,” I said.
There was another pause. “Okay, well, short answer—I don’t have anything for you right now.”
“Remember what I said earlier about patience?”
“But I can get you some analysis!” J.J. said. “I just need some time. I’ve got his search history, I’ve got some files he failed to erase properly, I mean there’s a lot of stuff for me to work with. Give me a few hours to sort it out, okay? Please?” Now he sounded like he was begging.
I held my breath for effect, and I imagined I could hear him doing the same on the other end of the line, but for entirely different reasons. “Fine,” I said. “Hurry.” And I hung up.
“You were kind of harsh with J.J.,” Scott observed as we made our way down the darkened hallway toward the front door. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you manage anyone else like that.”
“J.J. is special,” I said, thinking of something pretty gross that I’d inferred from something he’d told me about his cat. Scott was right, though; I didn’t usually lean on people—at least not my allies—the way I’d just leaned on him. Maybe the stress was getting to me.
“Uh huh.” I could hear the reticence in the way he said it.
My phone began to ring. “See?” I said, but I didn’t smile. Dammit, he’d actually made me feel bad about how I’d treated J.J. I looked at the faceplate but didn’t immediately recognize the number. It had a 702 area code, which I knew meant it was local. I slid my finger across the answer button. “Hello?”
“Hi, is this Sienna?” There was a kind of nervous tentativeness in the voice. “It’s Lauren over at the morgue.”
“Oh, hey,” I said as I got into the car. Scott fired it up and the air conditioner started blowing at full blast, warm air that hadn’t had a chance to cool just yet. “What’s up?”
There was a pause. “Huh. Kind of weird to hear an FBI agent ask ‘what’s up?’”
I felt my face crease in a frown. “I’m young yet. What can I do for you?”
“I was calling about your aunt’s autopsy report. We got back something … interesting.”
“Oh?” I reined in my desire to tell her to get on with it, too, and just waited.
“Yeah, about that wound on her abdomen.” I could hear the shuffle of papers in the background. “It was really weird.”
I waited to see if she was going to make me guess. “Tell me more,” I said, not entirely without sarcasm.
“Well, it’s not a knife wound,” she said. “Not a blade at all. In fact …” She paused, and I could hear her taking a breath, marshaling herself as though she were about to deliver bad news, “… it looks like it was delivered by a fingernail, or something similar, like—”
“Like a claw,” I said and felt a chill even though the car was still blowing nothing but hot air.
Chapter 15
“So who do you think it is?” Scott asked after we’d parked in the Palazzo’s garage and walked inside. He hadn’t said anything on the ride back to the hotel, giving me time to collect my thoughts.
I felt my skin readjust to the cool air inside the Palazzo and pushed my lips around. It took me a second to realize I was probably making a duck face, so I stopped. “I don’t know. Lots of metas have claws, or something like them. Wolfe did, Bastet did.”
“Mmhmm,” Scott said, almost unconsciously. We walked down the hall, and I admired the white granite-looking tile. Wait, was that actually granite? These casinos went all-out. “What about this Antonio Morales guy?” Scott asked. “What kind of powers did he have? Tree skin?”
“Something like that,” I said. I hadn’t really seen anything quite like it, other than Clary. “Walked like a tree, developed skin like a tree—you ever heard of anything like that?”
“Dryad, maybe?” Scott said with a shrug. “Sounds like something I read about once.”
“Dryad.” I tried to remember where I’d read about them. The Directorate had always been pretty cagey about their knowledge of specific meta types, something I’d always thought odd until Old Man Winter betrayed me. I had wondered more than a few times since if his goal had been to keep us in the dark so we wouldn’t assume someone was a certain type and get blindsided by a surprise power, or if he had more sinister reasons for keeping types a secret. “Like a wood nymph?”
“Sort of,” Scott said, and his face was all frown. We passed by a restaurant and the smell of lovely fried things caught me in its thrall. I wanted to eat, right now, and make it ALL THE FOOD. My stomach tugged me in one direction, my feet kept me moving toward the elevator bank, through the casino floor. “You hungry?”
“Unbelievably,” I said. “But I should probably check in with Ariadne and see if we can get some info on this dryad or whatever, and maybe see if we can wrangle up a possible explanation for this claw mystery. If we could even narrow it down a little, it might give us something to go on—”
“Yeah, it’ll be a great list of metas with long fingernails,” Scott said with a weary sigh. “This being Vegas, maybe it was Howard Hughes.” The sound of the slot machines jingled and jangled all around us. “I’m starving.”
I realized for the first time he looked more than a little disheveled. His eyes were drawn and tired, and his usual color was off by a couple degrees. He’d been up since long before the break of day trying to hunt down leads for me, and he’d endured last night in worried silence thanks to me. “Why don’t you go get something to eat? I’ll go back to the room and try to get these things nailed down. It’ll probably only take a few minutes, and I’ll come back to join you.” I was also feeling really sweaty and wanted to change clothes and shower, but that wasn’t information he needed.
“Yeah, all right,” he said, and I could feel his reluctance. Whether it was because he didn’t want to part from me or because he didn’t want to eat lunch alone, I didn’t push. “I’ll … just go in here.” He pointed to the café we’d just passed, eight rows of slot machines back. “Come on down when you’re done. I might, uh … play for a few minutes first while I wait for you.”
“Don’t wait on my account; I could be a while.” I tried to smile sweetly, but I suspected my face didn’t allow for that. It probably came off as a cringe. “But if you do end up playing, put in a dollar for J.J., will you?”
He gave me a nod and turned around as I headed off without him. The elevators were ahead, past a rolling wheel of rainbow-colored lights. It spun around and around, a number up in the millions lit next to it. I thought about that amount of money for a moment and then promptly dismissed it. I was pretty well paid at this point, as I had always been. Even if I had all that money, it wouldn’t solve the problems I had. The genocide of my people and my impending status as Sovereign’s sweetheart weren’t going to be solved no matter how many zeroes I added to my bank account.
I stepped into the little alcove containing the elevator bank and stood there after pressing the button. My stomach was bothering me now, irritated that I’d fed it nothing but grease so far today. It rumbled at me, and I turned to look longingly at the casino floor, where, somewhere down the line, the restaurant waited.
I pressed a sweaty palm against my jeans and wiped them against the denim. I bitched about the cold when it was winter in Minnesota, but this heat was just too much for me. I could feel the sticky film of dried sweat all over my body. I shifted my stance, staring onto the casino floor as I waited for the ding to herald the elevator’s arrival. This morning’s stale coffee still dominated my taste buds. It was funny how I hated the stuff, but I still drank it by the gallon since I had taken my new role.
My eyes alighted on a woman just outside the elevator alcove as I heard the dinging sound I’d been waiting for. She was stocky, with longer hair, and features that were in sharp clarity. She was watching me, it took me only a second to realize, and once I realized it, she snapped into a blurry field in the middle of my vision, like someone had nearly erased her from my sight.
I felt my muscles tighten and my hands clench. I thundered out of the elevator alcove to find her already gone, whether because of the mind game she’d just played on me or because she’d moved, I wasn’t sure.
I looked down the casino floor as I ran. Slot machines spun and whirled in a musical chorus. My feet pounded against the granite floors and I dodged tourists left and right as I ran at full speed back toward the café.
I threw up a hope that I wouldn’t be too late as I rounded the last corner and barely avoided colliding with a waitress carrying a tray of drinks. She cursed at me and I leapt over her. Cries of surprise and awe came from behind me and I ignored every one of them.
I caught sight of Scott as I reached the apex of my jump. He stood on the tile walkway that ran through the middle of the casino, at the center of a triangle made up of three men in suits. Three burly men. Like Trenchcoat.
Surrounded.
Chapter 16
I was only about twenty feet away from him when the pain racked through my skull like someone had split it open with a fire axe. I dropped to my knees like I’d lost all muscle control. My momentum carried me into a roll and I crashed into a slot machine.
Metas run fast. I’d been clocked once by Dr. Sessions at slightly north of thirty miles per hour on a sprint. I wasn’t going quite that fast when the telepath shut down my legs for a second, but I had to be going at least fifteen or twenty miles an hour. In a car accident, even with seatbelts and a metal chassis to protect you, a twenty-mile per hour collision is still nothing to sneeze at.
For an unprotected body, slamming into the ground so hard you roll into a metal and glass machine? Ouch.
I hit the base of the slot machine so hard I felt it rock. Glass shattered and showered down on me. There were spots in my vision that couldn’t be accounted for by the flashing lights of the casino. The world seemed to be moving, and I wondered if the machine was teetering.
Then it fell on me.
I thought about the time Wolfe had grabbed me by the throat and tried to throttle the life out of me. I thought about a fight I’d had with Bjorn that felt like the world was ending around me. About the time I’d gotten punched by a guy named Henderschott who was wearing a metal suit.
I’m not sure any of them were worse than the slot machine landing on me.
My arm went immediately numb from mid-humerus down to my fingers. Like it had been cut off. I wondered if it had been severed, and if there should have been phantom pain. All the pain I was feeling elsewhere was as decidedly un-phantom as you could get. My ribs screamed at me like someone had split them open with a maul down my right side. Blood filled my mouth.
I fought for a breath, and every second of it hurt. I gasped and the bloody spittle shot out of my mouth, flecking my face. There were voices around me, but the pain was so great I couldn’t pay any attention to them. I could feel my left hand and arm, jutting out from beneath my body. The rest of me was pinned.
Sounds of panic, of angry shouts, reached my ears over the dinging of another slot machine. The sound of coins pouring out of somewhere was like a staccato rain—unending in its intensity. Funny, it didn’t feel like I’d won the jackpot for anything but agony.
I tried to move my trapped arm again, to no avail. Bright lights shone down above. White, constant lights, a contrast to the multicolored, flashing ones that surrounded me from the gambling machines.
The pain.
Ohhhhh, the pain.
“Sienna,” came a voice from above me. I tilted my head to look up. There was a face standing between me and the bright, white light above. “Don’t worry. We won’t hurt you.”
I would have replied, something snappy, something witty, but I couldn’t get enough breath to do it. Or enough wit to come up with something worthy. Instead I grunted.
“What’s that?” There was far too much amusement in that voice for my taste. I saw her face; it was that damned stocky telepath. She wasn’t even bothering to blur it anymore; she knew she had me. If I hadn’t been trapped and in agony, I would have—
“Oh, but you are trapped,” she said, almost cooing. “I think we’ll just leave you there after we finish with your friend.”
Damned telepaths. Always one step ahead. Except …
She’d stepped closer to me for comic effect, wearing a satin sundress that probably did more to help her manage the heat than anything I had in my wardrobe.
But it also left her calf exposed.
I clamped my left hand around her ankle and ripped it from underneath her. She went down, hard and awkward. Hell, if I hadn’t been trapped underneath a slot machine fighting for every breath, I would have been laughing at her. Because misery, that’s why.
I couldn’t see her hit the ground, but I heard and felt it. She made a satisfying smack as she landed. I twisted her ankle until I heard it break, until I heard her scream. Then I twisted it further. I felt the resistance as her knee reached its limit, and then I pushed past it.
I felt the tendons and flesh rip as I put a hold on her dancing career. Then I shoved, hard, pushing her tibia out through the hole I’d made in her skin by the kneecap. I was pretty sure she was in th
e most agonizing pain I’d ever put anyone in.
Oddly enough, I was totally okay with that.
The taunting telepath dealt with, I turned back to the slot machine crushing the life out of me. I was one of the strongest people on the planet, dammit. I wasn’t about to be trapped under a reverse ATM machine while Scott was blindsided by Century. No matter how heavy it was.
I gave it a hard push. The numbness I had felt in the middle of my bicep turned to pain in one hell of a hurry but I gritted it back. Hadn’t I beaten my way through a metal door a year ago? With my bare hands?
I pushed again, grunting. I expelled all the air in my body and felt the machine rock slightly.
I needed leverage. It rolled back onto me, making my ribs cry out again. I rolled back, trying to get enough momentum to turn it onto its side. It tilted, and I forced it up harder.
I felt the weight of the slot machine leave me, and it was the greatest feeling ever. It was like someone had pulled a bulldozer off my body after leaving it parked there during a weekend bender. They’d run me over a few times before they managed to get the damned thing gone.
After it was off, I lay there for what felt like a year, but was probably less than thirty seconds. I rolled to my knees and started working my way up, very slowly. My legs seemed to be unharmed, probably because my arm and chest had taken the brunt of the machine’s impact.
I looked up and Scott was there, in the middle of the three Century metas. He had one by the face, palm cupped around his nose and mouth, and I could see water spraying from the meta’s eyes and from behind Scott’s iron grip on his face. After a few seconds he stopped resisting, and Scott let the body drop to the ground. I watched bloody water seep across the granite floor.
Destiny: The Girl in the Box #9 Page 7
