Oath Bound (An Unbound Novel)

by Rachel Vincent

  “Kori didn’t mention straps, and these gurneys aren’t equipped with them. She says they keep the donors sedated via IV drip and they never take enough blood to kill. Tower was very interested in the renewable aspect of his...resources.”

  “The bad guys are going green?”

  “Only if the color refers to cash. They’re trying to milk every dollar they can out of each body before it finally gives out. The Towers are motivated by two things—money and power. The only things they like better than money and power are more money and more power. I think it’s some kind of chromosomal abnormality. They lack the genes for compassion and morality.”

  Sera scowled and her green eyes darkened.

  “What now?” I’d thought we were making progress. She was speaking to me again, and as soon as I had a moment alone with her, somewhere other than an enemy warehouse, I was prepared to declare myself an idiot and apologize for the night before. So why was she getting angrier with every word I spoke?

  “Nothing.” She started across the warehouse toward the bathrooms.

  “Sera, wait,” I said, and when she finally turned to face me again, her scowl had etched deep lines in her forehead. “Okay, I know you’re mad about what I said last night, and I know I deserve it—”

  “I’m not mad. You were right.” Her gaze met mine with what looked like considerable effort. “I’m not in the best state of mind, and if I’d been thinking clearly, I wouldn’t have thrown myself at the first available warm body.”

  “I was just the first available...” Ouch. I tried to pretend it didn’t sting to hear that mine was a bed of convenience. That any port in the storm would have done.

  “Yeah.” She shrugged, but the motion looked stiff and insincere. Or was I imagining that? “So...thanks. You saved us both from a big mistake.”

  A mistake? My jaw clenched. Was she throwing my own words at me out of anger, or had we really switched positions so quickly?

  “Anyway, you’re off the hook,” she continued, oblivious to my confusion. “I won’t be throwing myself at you anymore. I promise.”

  “Um...okay.” I hid disappointment behind what I hoped was a casual smile. “But to prove I have no hard feelings, if you change your mind and decide to throw yourself at me again, this time I promise to catch you.”

  Her brows rose in surprise. “Are you flirting? Because you should know, that kind of comes off as a mixed signal, after last night.”

  “Sera, I’m so sorry about last night. I had my wires totally crossed, but today they’re all straightened out. I swear.”

  The crook in her eyebrow said she was intrigued, but the downward tilt of her lips said she was also feeling cautious. I’d never wanted to turn a frown upside down so badly in my life. “I’m not sure what that means, Kris.”

  “That means I want to be here for you. Whatever you need.”

  “Thanks, but seriously, you were right. I shouldn’t jump into anything right now. I think we’d both regret that.”

  She was wrong. But... “Hot chocolate, then. With or without the Peeps. Or a shoulder to lean on. A hand to hold. An ear to bend. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just promise you won’t dial me out next time you need something. Okay?”

  Her frown finally died, but that caution still swam in her eyes. As if she wasn’t sure she could trust me.

  I chuckled. “You really make a man work for it, don’t you?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Work for what?”

  “A smile,” I said, and her suspicion disappeared. “All I want is a smile. And you’re really making me work for it.” Okay, a smile wasn’t all I wanted. But it’s what I wanted first. I wanted to be able to make her think, just for a minute, about something other than what she’d lost. How she’d nearly died three times since meeting me. How we were no closer to finding the man who’d stolen everything from her.

  I wanted to give her something. And I would start with a smile.

  “This isn’t the kind of place that inspires smiles,” she pointed out. “And this isn’t exactly a happy time. There’s a dead man in the hall.”

  “I’m happy he’s not you.”

  “I’m happy about that, too.” She glanced at her hands for a second, then met my gaze again, and I could see it in her eyes. I almost had her. “I’m also happy that he’s not you.”

  And finally she smiled.

  I felt absurdly triumphant, and I’m sure my own goofy grin reflected that. Even if neither of our smiles would last. And they couldn’t, considering where we stood.

  With another glance around the warehouse, solemnity returned, and Sera was all business again.

  “Why do you think they left these two gurneys?” she asked, but she’d already drawn the same conclusion I had. I could see that in her eyes as she ran one thumb over a dark spot on the edge of the thin white sheet. “These two didn’t make it, right?” She looked up at me, and I could only shrug. “They poured bleach over the blood—I can smell it—but it’s still damp. We didn’t miss them by much. The cleanup crew, anyway,”

  I couldn’t tear my gaze from that spot of blood. Until I noticed another one. And another, leading to a larger stain where the donor’s elbow might have been. Had the donor woken up and struggled? Had something gone wrong with the IV? Had Julia simply cut her losses on a couple of the more fragile donors, who might not be worth the trouble of moving?

  “I’m sure Kenley wasn’t one of them.” The compassion in her voice drew my gaze.

  “She wasn’t. Julia can’t afford to let her die.” But she wasn’t truly letting Kenni live, either. “Stay put while I check the bathrooms.”

  Sera’s brows rose over what she evidently saw as an order.

  “Please,” I added as an afterthought, and she gave me another small smile.

  “See? That word really can work magic.”

  I laughed, and as I crossed the floor toward the bathroom, I began composing a mental list of every possible way to use her “magic word” in my own favor. The entries were not all G-rated.

  The men’s room door was open widest, so I checked that one first, careful not to turn my back on the ladies’ room, even with Sera there to shout if someone tried to sneak up on me. The men’s room was small and empty, and far from fresh, in spite of the fact that Julia’s people obviously kept plenty of bleach on hand.

  The ladies’ room was just as small and empty, and only marginally cleaner.

  With the restrooms clear, I crossed the room to tug on the padlock bolting the exterior door, then gave the rolling bay doors a tug, too. Everything was locked up tight, from the inside.

  “Well, the cleanup crew didn’t go out this way,” I said, but when I turned to glance at Sera, she was gone.

  “Damn it!” I drew my gun again and rechecked the bathrooms. “Sera!” I hissed, on my way up the steel grid steps, but the office and its supply closet were both empty. She hadn’t gone past me into the warehouse, so the only other option was...

  “Sera!” I called again in an angry whisper as I backtracked into the well-lit hallway. The doors Kori and I had checked were still open, and all of the rooms were still dark, except for...the bathroom we’d traveled into. The door was barely ajar now, and the light inside was brighter than the hallway.

  Would it have killed her to tell me if she had to pee? Or to go in the warehouse restroom, where I knew there was no one waiting to decorate the walls with our splattered brains?

  I did a cursory scan of the rooms between me and the bathroom to make sure no one was luring me down the hall, only to sneak up behind me, and I was two doors from the lit restroom when I heard Sera’s voice. Whispering.

  “You don’t have orders to kill me, do you? That’s why you hesitated,” she said, and my trigger finger twitched. Who the hell was she talking to? “That means you know who I am, right?”

  Who she was? A Jammer? A Blocker? What did those have to do with why someone—Julia’s someone, most likely—had no orders to kill her?

  I edg
ed forward slowly and peered into the dark room on my right, but no answer came from whoever she was talking to—no verbal answer, anyway—and I was starting to wonder if she was talking to herself in the bathroom mirror. I hoped she was talking to herself, because if this was a trap, and she’d walked into it, she had no way to defend herself. Not without a spray bottle and a toilet plunger, anyway.

  So why didn’t she sound as though she needed to be defended?

  The room on my right looked empty at a glance, and a glance was all I had time for, if Sera was stalling, waiting for someone with a gun to show up and bail her out.

  “And if you know who I am, you can’t kill me, can you? Not even if she tells you to. You can’t even raise a hand against me, right?”

  Silence met her latest question and my heart beat harder as I crossed the hall silently to peer into the last room between me and Sera and...whoever was in the bathroom with her, real or imaginary.

  “I think I’m starting to figure this out. You can’t hurt me, just like you couldn’t hurt her. Same game, new dealer, right?”

  “Honestly, your guess is as good as mine,” a man’s voice said, and I stopped in my tracks. Either she’d actually found someone, or the other half of her split personality was decidedly unfeminine.

  “You can call me Sera,” she said as I pushed that last door open, my pulse rushing so loud in my ears that it threatened to drown out her soft words. How close was she to getting shot? Why wasn’t she dead already? Was it true that he couldn’t kill her—whoever he was—and if so, why not?

  “What else?” Sera said as I stared at a vaguely person-shaped outline in the last shadowy office between me and the bathroom. “Can you lie? That’s a stupid question, isn’t it? Even if you say no, how do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “I can lie, unless you tell me not to,” the man said as I aimed my gun at the person-shaped shadow. It didn’t move, so I pulled a penlight from my left pocket and flinched when the power button clicked beneath my thumb. But neither Sera nor the man with her heard, and the shadow turned out to be a custodian’s uniform hung on the top handle of a filing cabinet.

  “Okay, then, let’s try this out. Are you here alone?”

  “No,” he said. “My partner took the other wing.”

  “Just one man?” Sera paused as I snuck back across the hall, and I had the feeling she was considering. “He doesn’t stand a chance.”

  I’d come to the same conclusion. Kori and Ian could dispatch a lone gunman in their sleep. What I couldn’t figure out was why Sera was still alive.

  “Okay. I suspect our privacy is nearing its end. Tell me where they put Kenley Daniels, and I’ll let you go. You have my word.”

  “Like you let Ned go?” At the mention of the dead man, I glanced at him, still propped up across from the bathroom, less than a foot from me now. “You can see how well that worked out for him.”

  I could see the speaker by then, through the crack where the bathroom door hadn’t quite closed. He was tall and fair-skinned. Reasonably thick, like most of Tower’s musclemen. But he had to be Skilled, to have gotten into a warehouse locked from the inside. Had he come through the bathroom, after we’d left it? Was that why she’d turned the lights on? To keep a Traveler from escaping?

  But that made no sense, because he still had his gun, which should have meant he was the one in power. Yet his gun was aimed at the floor, and he showed no more inclination to use it than she showed fear of it.

  “That wasn’t my fault. I set him free,” Sera insisted, and on the wall, the shadow of her hand pushed back the shadow of her hair, hanging over her silhouette.

  “Which is exactly what got him killed,” the man insisted. “You broke his binding, and she has no use for those she can’t control.”

  She? Julia? How the hell could Sera have broken Ned’s binding?

  That was the last unanswered question I could take. I shoved the door open and aimed at the man’s head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Sera gasped, and the man swung his gun up in my direction.

  “Stop!” Sera shouted, and he took his finger off the trigger. “Put your gun down. In fact, give me the damn thing!”

  To my absolute shock, Julia Tower’s muscleman clicked the safety switch on, then handed his pistol to her by its grip.

  Sera held it with the caution of someone who’s never pulled a trigger in her life. But to her credit, she didn’t set it in the sink behind her or drop it in the toilet to her left. Though she might have ejected the clip, if she’d known how.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I demanded, still aiming at the man’s head. “How did you break Ned’s bindings?”

  “Kris, stand down,” Sera said. “Mitch isn’t going to hurt anyone. Are you?” She glanced at the man with one brow raised, and Mitch shrugged.

  “That’s up to you.”

  She frowned. “Well, then...don’t hurt anyone.”

  “Ever?” He stared back at her in challenge and seemed to enjoy her moment of confusion. “Even if someone tries to kill you, you want me to just stand there and let it happen, if the alternative is hurting him?”

  “Of course not.” Sera glanced at me, then her tense focus slid to my gun before she turned back to Mitch. “Just...don’t hurt anyone until I say otherwise. Okay?”

  That time a shrug was his only reply.

  “Sera, what the fuck?” I demanded. “How did you break Ned’s bindings? You’re a Binder now? How many Skills to you have?”

  “Just the one. Er...two, I guess. But I’m not a Binder.”

  “You have two Skills?” Mitch said, and Sera’s forehead furrowed in sudden concern.

  “You can’t tell anyone that. Ever,” she said, and he scowled, then rubbed his own forehead, like he was getting a headache. Or thinking about breaching an oath.

  “Why is he taking orders from you?” I demanded. “Why hasn’t he shot you? How did you break Ned’s binding?”

  “While we’re asking questions, why was this fucker sneaking up on us?” Kori said from behind me, and I spun to find her in the hall, gesturing to Ian, who had an obviously dead man tossed over his good shoulder, dripping blood on the floor at his back. “How did you get in?”

  “The lights are on a remote,” Mitch said. “When our Tracker hadn’t picked up your signal after an hour, we turned this one off and popped in to check. Since you’re obviously here, the only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that your psychic signal is being jammed. Any idea how that might happen?” He was looking at Sera, but she only stared back at him, refusing to confirm either of her Skills.

  “Mitch. It’s been a while.” Kori eyed him and I realized they’d once been coworkers. Had she known Ned, too?

  “Hey, Kori,” Mitch said as if they’d just bumped into each other at the watercooler. “Listen, there’s a pool going, and I’ve got five hundred bucks riding on you gettin’ shot in the head, so when the time comes, could you do me a favor and hold still?”

  “You placed a bet on how she’d die?” Sera looked horrified, but Kori only shrugged.

  “That bet never pays out. You’d think they’d eventually learn.”

  “I feel like I’ve missed something.” Ian winced as he lowered the body to the ground and propped it up next to Ned. “What’s going on?”

  “Kori’s evidently having a mobster’s reunion, and this asshole’s taking orders from Sera and blaming her for getting Ned killed. Also, he may know where Kenley is.”

  “Where is she?” Kori dismissed everything else as unimportant. Sometimes I admired her single-minded focus. Other times, it drove me nuts. I couldn’t decide which kind of time this should be.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No lies, Mitch,” Sera said, and he turned to glare at her.

  “I’m not lying. After what happened to Ned, do you think Julia’s likely to hand out classified information to every peon with a gun?”

  “Speaking of guns, why haven’t you u
sed yours?” I glanced pointedly at his pistol, still in Sera’s unsure grip. “And why are you taking orders from her?”

  He deferred to Sera with a single glance and she cleared her throat nervously. “I...um...might have...inherited his binding. Kind of.”

  “You kind of inherited his binding?” Ian’s voice echoed my own confusion.

  “From Julia?” Kori frowned. “Does that mean she’s dead?”

  They were all missing the most obvious piece of the puzzle—how Sera could have inherited anything from Julia Tower—but she answered before I could ask.

  “Not that I know of.” Sera cleared her throat again and her hand clenched the edge of the grimy pedestal-style sink she leaned against. “I didn’t inherit from Julia. If I understand correctly, the bindings were never really hers in the first place. I inherited from Jake.”

  “Wait, bindings? Plural?” Ian’s hand hovered over the butt of his holstered weapon, as if it was the only thing he was really sure of at the moment. I knew exactly how that felt. “Not just this one?”

  “It’s...all of them.” Sera shrugged again, and her obvious confusion said she didn’t understand much more than we did. “Kind of.”

  “Kind of?” Kori frowned.

  “Julia still holds most of them. For the moment.”

  “How?” I lowered my aim—my arm was aching—but not my guard. “How the hell could you inherit anything from Jake Tower?” But as soon as I’d asked the question, the answer seemed obvious, and for the second it took to sink in, the world seemed to grind to a halt all around me.

  “Holy shit!” Kori actually staggered backward and stepped on Ian’s foot. “He’s your dad. Jake Tower was your fucking dad.”

  “No...” I said, but no one was listening. I’d heard it. I understood it. But I couldn’t make sense of it. Sera was beautiful, and smart, and she loved and missed her family more than anything else in the world. She couldn’t even be related to Jake Tower, much less sired by him, because the Towers were a nest of snakes willing to bite one another’s heads off if that’s what it took to climb to the top of the heap.