“Better?” Caleb said, still frowning.
“Much. Thank you.”
“I had no idea you’d been shot. Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Didn’t want to bother you. It’s just a little thing.”
“A little thing? You’ve got a dozen stitches in your arm.” He shook his head.
I glared at Jackson. “You said it wasn’t that bad.”
“It’s not.” He couldn’t meet my eyes. “Relatively speaking.”
“You are the most stubborn man in the universe. Next time, I’m driving you to Caleb’s instead of the hospital.”
“Thank you, Mina,” Caleb said. “If anyone can talk sense into him, it’s you.”
I hmphed and sat next to him on the couch. Jackson sighed and joined me, grumbling something about being outnumbered.
“I’ve been trying for years.” James raised his drink in salute. “Good luck to you.” Jackson rolled his eyes, and I elbowed him in the ribs.
I heard a toilet flush, and Sebastian came out of a door on the far side of the loft. He was wearing faded jeans and a long-sleeved gray T-shirt with ragged wing-holes cut out over the shoulders.
“Oh, good,” he said, catching sight of me. “You’re here.”
Everyone sat down except Sebastian, who paced in front of the couch. This didn’t seem to bother anyone else. He walked back and forth, muttering to himself, wings dragging the floor in an arc every time he turned. James topped off his glass.
“We’re not sure who we can trust,” Sebastian said, surprising me by stopping mid-circuit and facing us. “To be honest, I think the jury’s still out on you three.”
James laughed. Jackson sipped his drink. I contemplated hiding behind the couch.
“But we have to work with what we have,” he added.
I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by this, or terrified. I was glad Caleb was on the Trust List, but I was dismayed that Malik and Simon were missing from this little meeting. I’d had to lie and say I was sick to get out of my shift. Our circle of trust was narrowing.
“So,” Sebastian said, going back to pacing, “what we have here is some sort of...of drug ring.”
“You’ve been watching too many cop shows,” James said. “We don’t know there’s a ring.”
Sebastian narrowed his eyes at him. If he’d looked at me that way, I would’ve ducked behind the enormous wood-block coffee table with my hands over my head, but James only grinned and sipped his whiskey.
Sebastian held up his thumb. “Greg.” Another finger. “Turner.” Another. “Thomas.” One more finger. “And Conner. That’s four. And who knows how many others.”
“There’s that guy who dropped dead in the bar,” I supplied.
“Exactly!” Sebastian sounded pleased. “This has to stop.”
“With this much—” Jackson looked at the duffel, “—inventory, Conner must be the supplier. We find him, we may find out how deep this goes.”
“Well, we can’t ask Bridget,” James said. “I’d hate to think she was involved, but...”
Jackson rubbed the back of his neck. We’d discussed this on the drive over. I couldn’t imagine she’d ever been within ten feet of an illegal drug, but Conner was her brother. She might not be above lying to protect him.
Sebastian stood up. “Someone has to go to Alex.”
The room went silent. Someone’s ice melted and fell in a glass with a quiet clink.
“I’ll go,” Jackson said. “I think I have the best shot.”
Sebastian nodded once. “Good luck.”
* * *
Half an hour later, Jackson and I were driving north over the Golden Gate Bridge. It was my first time over the bridge in a car, and I couldn’t help craning my neck to look up at the spans. The traffic was terrible, so I had plenty of time. To my right, a mass of pedestrians trudged along the walkway, making the pilgrimage to the other side. I’d done it, too, after a month or so in the city. Not many of them had dressed for the cold or the wind—also just like my first experience.
“It’s a shame we can’t ask Bridget,” I said. “You don’t really think she’s involved in this, do you?”
“It’s pretty unlikely. But this thing is starting to get more serious.”
I had to agree. The cash, the guns. I definitely wasn’t going to be touching Jackson anytime soon. He glanced over at me.
“We’ll manage.” His smile quirked up, and my body heated all the way to my toes.
After the bridge, it was another hour of winding roads through towering conifer forest before we got to Alex’s. Jackson parked on the soft shoulder of a gravel road. When we got out, the smell of the trees hit me in the back of the throat, and I realized how long it had been since I’d been out of the city, how long it had been since I’d been in green space like this. To the left of the road, the ground sloped down gently. Redwoods towered overhead, mixed in with something else, maybe eucalyptus? The ground was carpeted with needles, and I could tell it would be soft to walk on. I stretched and inhaled.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Jackson said.
“I love it.” The road wound deeper into the woods, and I wondered how far it went. Did it end at the ocean? I thought I could smell the sea mixed in with the sharp scent of the trees. I was so intent, I didn’t notice Jackson had come up behind me until his hands circled me and pulled me against his chest. He nuzzled my shoulder through my sweater and stroked my upper arms.
“We should come back, when all of this is over.”
“It’s going to be over?”
He laughed, and I felt his chest move against my back. “We should come back anyway.”
I turned to look at the little cabin we’d come to visit, about fifty yards back from the road on a dirt footpath.
“Come on,” Jackson said.
It was cool under the trees, and it got dimmer the farther we walked. The cabin was situated at an odd angle, as if it had been built to avoid clearing any trees. When we got closer, Jackson slowed and moved in front of me, as if he was shielding me.
“Move slowly. He doesn’t like to be startled.”
“Won’t he recognize you as we walk up?”
“Alex doesn’t use his powers for things like that.”
Jackson knocked on the door, and I heard something hit the floor inside. I stood on tiptoe to look over Jackson’s shoulder, peering through the curtained window in the front door. Jackson shifted. “You should stay behind me,” he said. I did as he suggested, wondering what was so dangerous about Alex. Then he opened the door.
I’d expected him to be old—maybe even ancient—but he was a relatively young man, maybe thirty-five, with unlined light brown skin. He was a little shorter than Jackson, and he was thin in the way marathon runners are thin. Wiry and strong. His dark brown hair was trimmed short, and he’d shaved recently. He stood in the doorway, wearing a pair of faded jeans and a green sweater. His feet were bare.
“Who’s she?” he said. I smiled and tried to think nonthreatening thoughts.
“A friend,” Jackson said. “Her name is Mina.”
Alex didn’t acknowledge me. He didn’t even look at me. “Well, since you’re here, you might as well come in.” He backed away to let us pass through into the cabin.
It had looked small from the outside, but once I was in it, it was almost claustrophobic. There was only the one room, with a door in one corner that I assumed led to a bathroom. But it wasn’t the size that made the place feel tiny. It was the decor.
All four walls were lined with shelves, and every shelf was crammed with stuff. Most of it looked to be bundles of fabric, but when I looked closer, I saw it was actually women’s clothing, everything from blouses to belts to lingerie. One shelf held stacks of drugstore makeup. There was a whole section full of hair
brushes and clips. Even creepier, on some of the lower shelves were toys: a train set, a collection of stuffed animals. I shuddered. Jackson would never have brought me here if Alex were some sort of insane serial killer, but the sight of it all still weirded me out.
“Tea?” Alex asked. I jumped.
“That would be nice,” Jackson said, sitting down on a green futon in the center of the room. It was the only piece of furniture in the place except for the shelves. I sat down next to him, getting as close as I could without actually touching him. He put a hand on my knee and squeezed briefly.
Alex walked over to a little camping stove and lit the burner. “Almost out of water,” he grumbled, filling the kettle from a small cistern near the stove.
“I’ll bring you more before we go.”
He went about preparing the tea, and I realized, finally, that he was blind. He moved surely through the small, crowded space, and I felt that he’d looked at me when Jackson introduced me, but now I saw that his pupils were unnaturally constricted in the dim light, and he never looked directly at the items he reached for. While the water boiled, he measured out precise spoonfuls of green tea into three mugs, feeling the rims with one hand before he added leaves with another. He poured the water directly over the loose leaves, and they swirled in the cup like glitter in a snow globe. I nodded as he handed me mine, then said, “thank you” when I remembered he couldn’t see me.
“Last of the dragonwell,” he said, and I felt I should apologize for taking it. But Jackson only took his mug with a quiet “thank you,” and sat back down on the futon.
Alex stayed standing. “Why have you come here?”
I stayed quiet. He was clearly talking to Jackson.
“We need your help, Alex. We need to find somebody.”
“That much I discerned for myself. Why?”
“It’s a long story. You wouldn’t be interested.”
Alex sipped his tea. “Who is it?”
Jackson looked nervous for the first time since we’d arrived, but it didn’t show in his voice. “Conner O’Rourke.”
Alex’s face tightened. “Bridget’s brother?”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t she look for him herself?” he asked in a weary way, as though he already knew she’d failed.
Jackson confirmed it. “She’s tried. And...it’s complicated.”
Alex drained the last of his tea. I wondered if he’d swallowed the tea leaves. “Let me see.”
Jackson put his hand out, fingers spread, and Alex took his hand unerringly. They only maintained contact for a few moments before he rounded on me.
“Come on, then,” he said. “What about you?”
“I—didn’t know him.” How much should I explain? But Alex was already turning away from me. He sat on the floor.
Back home, I’d seen my uncle’s friend Janine do this sort of thing. Hell, I’d had it done to me. When I’d been missing, Janine had dowsed for me. It worked better when the dowser had more diverse memories to draw from, sort of like the way police made a composite sketch of a suspect from a lot of different eyewitnesses.
Alex arranged his legs in the lotus position and put his hands on his knees. He didn’t close his eyes. For an instant, something like sadness crossed his face, but then it was gone, and he was staring straight ahead again.
It took about thirty seconds, maybe less. Alex pulled open a drawer, dug out a green permanent marker and a creased paper map from a car rental agency. He ran his fingers along the edges, tracking them, then slid a finger west with a crisp, precise movement, stopping along a winding road north of the bridge.
“There. He’s dead.”
I gasped, and his head whipped around to face me. He had that same unseeing stare, and then, like a switch going off, his pupils dilated. For the first time, he looked right at me.
“Why so shocked?” he said. “People die.”
His gaze slid out of focus again, and he sat down on his couch, facing away from us. There was a scrap of red fabric draped across one of the cushions, and he picked it up and wove it through his fingers like a nervous man worrying a pen cap. It was a scarf, the thin, filmy kind a woman might wear knotted around her neck with a business suit.
“You should go now,” he said. There was no malice in his tone, but it frightened me anyway. “You should leave.”
“Thank you,” Jackson said. “I won’t forget.” But Alex wasn’t listening anymore. Even I could tell. We went.
* * *
“Well, that was completely and totally weird,” I said as we got into the car. Jackson had spent half an hour filling buckets of water from a well a hundred yards into the woods. He’d filled a reservoir on the front porch and left the bucket upside down in front of the door.
“He’s not really blind,” Jackson said. “He just doesn’t see what’s around him anymore. It happens sometimes, with dowsers.”
“You mean he made himself that way? On purpose?”
Jackson nodded. “His wife and daughter went missing out here. It was about...I don’t know. Maybe eight years ago.”
I made a soft “oh.” I suddenly understood the clothes, the toys.
“He’s been out here ever since, looking for them. Keeps their stuff around to act as an anchor.”
“They never found them? Not even their bodies?”
Jackson shook his head. “My father and I went out on the search party. It’s likely they drowned, got washed out to sea and out of his range. But Alex has never given up.”
“That’s so sad.” I looked into the forest again, seeing it differently now.
“Yeah. He was devoted to that little girl. And God, he was a powerful dowser. He still is, obviously, but...Well, you saw.”
“He didn’t seem to think much of Bridget.”
Jackson frowned. “Yeah. When Michelle went missing, Bridget and few dowsers from L.A. tried to help. They didn’t find her, obviously, but Alex...he wasn’t thinking clearly. He blames the other dowsers. Says they interfered with his perception.”
“Does that happen?”
“I don’t think so. He was grief-stricken.”
“It must’ve been horrible.”
“It was.”
We got back into the car, and Jackson sat with the map and his phone, planning out a route. The place Alex marked was close-by, in the undeveloped area north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
“Here,” he said, handing me his phone. “Navigate.”
I directed him off the main road to a deserted two-lane shadowed by redwoods on either side. There were only a handful of houses, and all of them were set back from the road and framed by arched gateways. Money. Jackson’s phone buzzed every five minutes with email and text alerts.
“I don’t mean to pry, but someone named Sarita has texted you three times in the last ten minutes.”
He laughed. “My secretary. Text her back and tell her to let the Redgraves know I’ll call them tomorrow.”
I did as he asked. “How many days have you taken off, now?”
“I told them I had a family emergency. And this project doesn’t even have a deadline yet.”
“Another warehouse?”
“No, this one’s actually interesting. A community center down in San Bruno. This retired couple is bankrolling it and I’m donating the plans.”
“Your company lets you do that?”
He gave a sheepish grin. “They don’t exactly know about it. Sarita’s sort of a partner in crime on this one.”
I shook my head at him. “Who knew you were such a rebel. Moonlighting as a charity architect and lying about family emergencies. Tsk tsk tsk.”
“That’s me. Living on the edge.”
“Yeah. When was the last time you took an actual vacation?”
&n
bsp; He considered for a moment.
“If you have to think that hard about it, it’s been too long.” I looked down at his phone. We were almost to the spot. “Turn right...no right up there.”
He turned on the road I’d indicated, a narrow one that looked as though it had been paved in the sixties. It hugged the cliff, and there were guardrails in place, dented every so often. I looked away.
“Not too many roads like this in Louisiana,” Jackson said.
“No.”
We were quiet for a while, Jackson watching the road and me watching my hands and the blinking GPS dot on his phone. The stretch of winding road didn’t look long on the map, but given how slow we were driving, it was going to take a while. It was getting darker, and under any other circumstances, the thought of watching the sun set over the ocean would’ve been romantic.
Finally, almost an hour after we’d left Alex’s cottage, we got to a turn in the road right next to the green dot on the map. Jackson parked on the crumbling shoulder and pulled the parking brake. I thought about telling him to hit the flashers, the realized it was probably a bad idea to call attention to ourselves. Jackson popped his trunk and pulled out a flashlight and a machete. I stared.
“Hey,” he said. “You never know.”
“You never know when you might need to hack through underbrush to get to a body?”
Jackson shrugged. I shook my head at his back as he walked straight into the shrubs alongside the road. I shouldn’t have been surprised. This fit with everything else I’d learned about him.
If anyone had been this way before, they hadn’t left any sign of it. I’d laughed at the machete, but a quarter mile into the underbrush, I was glad he’d brought it. I was used to thinking of California as dry, almost barren compared to the lush greenery of Louisiana, but here, in the fog-drenched hills, the underbrush grew thick and wild. Jackson went first, clearing a path through scrubby bushes with powerful swipes. I followed in his narrow wake. It was nearly half an hour before he stopped, consulted his phone and the map, and turned right.
“Almost there,” he said over his shoulder, and started hacking again. Moonlight shone off the blade of the machete. I could smell the ocean more strongly, salt and the slightly fishy odor I associated with quiet beaches. Another few yards, and we broke through onto a rocky shore. The ocean was about fifty yards away, shushing as it broke over the stones.
Broken Shadows Page 21
