Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels)

by Diana Pharaoh Francis

  I didn’t read the names. Instead, I opened myself to the trace. Nothing. Not even the gray of dead trace. I handed her back the bag. “They were nulled when they touched these. I need something else.” If necessary, I’d try to dig harder to see past the nulling. See if my mother was right that I could, but not here, not with Arnow watching me.

  “I’ve got more in the trunk.” She tucked the balls back inside her coat.

  “You think they are still alive, don’t you?”

  “If they were going to be killed, I wouldn’t have gotten balls on the table. I’d have gotten their heads.” She shook her head. “I’m supposed to play the game. Whatever it is.” The vulnerability in the way she said it floored me. Arnow was made of steel wrapped in Teflon with a core of liquid nitrogen. She plowed forward with all the confidence of a runaway train. Only now she’d gotten in over her head, and she knew it.

  I didn’t say anything more. A headache throbbed in my forehead, like someone swinging a pickax against the inside of my skull.

  We were only a couple miles from Mel’s house. Something had been niggling at me all night. Several somethings, actually.

  “Why did the FBI come after Price? They must have known he had a talent for a while now. Why go after him now? Why him and not his brother?”

  Arnow made a face. “I’m not sure. Dante’s running the op—Dante Wolfe. He’s senior agent in charge of the Diamond City territory. A couple months back, when I reported I’d had a couple run-ins with you and your boy, he asked a lot of questions, wanted updates on Price as the case progressed, wanted to know if I’d seen any evidence of his talent.”

  “But Price doesn’t even know he has a talent or what it is.” Touray had said Price didn’t know, and I believed him. I needed to believe him, otherwise Price had lied to me, and that possibility hurt too much to contemplate. “Why did Wolfe think he’d be using a talent?”

  She shot me another of those sidelong glances, her eyes narrowed like she was debating something. Then she hitched one shoulder in a shrug.

  “Stop me if you’ve heard this. When your boyfriend was three years old, he was kidnapped.”

  She glanced at me, and I nodded for her to continue. “At least, that was the assumption at the time. His parents never reported it. Word got to the streets, however, and the city boiled. People feared an all-out Tyet war. At that time, his father served as a senior lieutenant of the Clavage syndicate. They were at the height of their considerable power. Taking Easton Touray’s kid occurred at a crucial time. A deal was going down between Clavage and Sandoval Corp. Together, the two would have dominated Diamond City. Maybe all of Colorado. Easton Touray was the architect. With his son missing, he wasn’t going to be there to hold it together. The Bureau figured at the time that the kidnappers were maybe using the boy as leverage to queer the deal. They’d string Touray along, get him out of the way, and then Price would turn up dead.”

  “But he didn’t,” I said, my stomach clenching with pointless fear. This had happened before I was born. Maybe even before Arnow was born.

  “No, he didn’t. The deal did fall apart and pretty quick, Clavage and Sandoval went head-to-head. Nobody could figure out who took the boy—was it someone on the inside trying to block the merger? Or was it someone on the outside? Was it someone who hated Easton Touray? There was no end to suspects.

  “The FBI figured Touray knew, though he didn’t say anything. He left Clavage and within a year put together his own business. It was a turning point. He was out for blood and his methods were brutal and merciless. Within five years, he’d wiped out both the Sandoval Corp. and the Clavage syndicate.”

  “What about Price? How did they find him? What does all this have to do with his talent?”

  “The FBI put every team they had into the field, hoping to prevent all-out war. It would have been Armageddon. Then word comes that your boy was home. No explanations how. At that point, since everything calmed down, none of the FBI big shots cared much what had happened to him. They were just relieved to get out relatively unscathed. A couple stubborn agents disagreed. They figured that just because Easton Touray got his kid back, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to get revenge in a big way. They wanted to know who’d taken Price and how, and how he’d been retrieved. They believed the future of Diamond City depended on figuring it out.

  “It took them over a year to piece together what must have happened. At the time of the kidnapping, Easton Touray and your boyfriend’s mother, Oriana Price, had been divorced a number of years. It was Easton’s second marriage. His first wife, Gregg Touray’s mother, died of trauma after a ski acccident.

  “After the divorce, Oriana Price continued living under her former husband’s protection with a generous allowance. Up until her son disappeared. It turns out she vanished at the same time.”

  I remained silent and tense. The story was riveting. There was so much about Price I didn’t know. He never talked about his parents. I knew that Easton Touray had died a few years back. That had been all over the news. But Price’s mother? I’d never heard anything about her.

  “The agents on the case figured that someone inside the Clavage organization helped to kidnap the two, most likely Irvin Borender, Kyung Kim, or Aldo DeLacerda. They each had access and motive. Possibly they worked together. The agents believed that mother and son were spirited out of the country into Belize.”

  I frowned. “Why Belize?”

  “When Agents Davy and Ellison couldn’t find any evidence in the US, they started looking around the world. The searched for just about anything, especially anything referencing magic and/or a three-year-old boy. They had a couple techs doing nothing but running down leads. Finally they hit paydirt in Belize. It seems that locals found an unconscious white boy beneath a tree on the edge of the worst disaster in Belize’s history. Half the mountain had been scoured down to bedrock. Several villages simply got scraped off. All the debris washed down into the river below and created a new dam. It’s so big they didn’t take it down. No one saw how the disaster happened because of a massive storm that moved in at the same time.

  “After, they couldn’t wake the boy—the only survivor. He was bloody and bruised all to hell. The local LEOs took pictures of the scene and the kid and sent them out over the wires, hoping to get a name. The next thing you know, the boy vanishes and the locals can’t seem to remember a damned thing about what happened.”

  “The boy was Price? And you think he was responsible?” My mouth was dry. What kind of power erupted in a three-year-old that allowed him to create such deadly destruction?

  “It’s impossible to tell from the pictures we have. But word of his return came just after that, and Oriana Price turned up in Wisconsin with a Belize passport stamp. She claimed amnesia. She’s never changed her story, though some suspect that she had a hand in the kidnapping. Anyhow, if Price was responsible for the devastation, you see why Agent Wolfe might be interested in his talent, and why we tend to be cautious around him. If he could do that at three years old, what could he do now that he’s a grown man?”

  “But why arrest him now and not years ago if they thought he was a threat?”

  “Maybe to put pressure on his brother. Maybe to lure you into working for them. Maybe they thought his power was manifesting. I don’t know.”

  At that point, Arnow pulled up to Mel’s gates. Or rather, what used to be gates. Since I’d left, they’d turned into a solid wall of plate steel with razor-sharp barbs all along the top. Jamie and Leo had been at work on them. I couldn’t see a seam where they might open, no rollers or tracks.

  Arnow looked at me. “What now?”

  I got out of the car and went up to the gray steel wall. I pressed one hand flat against the frigid metal, and knocked loudly with the other. Not that the sound made a difference. Jamie or Leo would be monitoring the wall for invasion or v
isitors. They’d be able to read through the metal that it was me.

  After a moment, a split crept up the middle of the wall, with hinges on the sides and room on the bottom to allow the new gates to swing open. I pushed them wide enough to let Arnow drive through. Before I could shut them, the steel drew back and reformed into the solid wall. I got back in the car.

  “Handy,” Arnow said.

  We drove around to the main house. Since I’d left, a new door had taken the place of the one the FBI had broken down. This one was made of steel. Price’s SUV was still parked outside. Taylor’s bright yellow Lexus slotted in beside him. Arnow parked next to Taylor, and we both got out. We’d gone about two steps when the door opened and Jamie, Leo, Mel, Taylor, and silver-eyed Dalton came out.

  I eyed Dalton warily. He gazed back without any expression. What was he doing here?

  Taylor pulled me into a hug, then stepped back, wrinkling her nose. “You smell,” she declared.

  “You try hiding out in a trashcan with spoiled food loaded up on your head, and let’s see how fragrant you get,” I returned, squeezing her tight.

  “A trash can?” Jamie repeated, next in line for a hug. He held me at arm’s length, looking me over. “Those aren’t the clothes you left in. What happened?”

  “I’ll tell you inside.”

  “Who’s your guest?” Mel asked, taking her turn at hugging me. My throat knotted as I pressed my cheek against her hair. She was my rock. I always knew I could depend on her. She was smart and calm and didn’t let her emotions get the best of her. I needed her to figure out what to do next.

  “This is Special Agent Sandra Arnow of the FBI,” I said as I reluctantly let go of my stepmom.

  Taylor scowled at Arnow. “What’s she doing here? With you?” Venom dripped from her words. I couldn’t blame her. Not after all that had happened.

  “She says she’ll help me with Price in exchange for me helping her to find some missing people.” I glanced at Jamie, Leo, and Mel. “You all might remember her from when she got Josh involved in Tyet affairs and attacked Touray’s stronghold with me in it, and set me, Price, and Touray up to get captured by a cohort of Tyet sociopaths.”

  I didn’t mention her holding me at gunpoint in the parking garage. I caught Taylor’s questioning look and gave a little shake of my head. At the moment, that detail wasn’t important.

  “Amazing. She doesn’t appear to be insane,” Leo said, eyeing the grungy-looking agent.

  “Obviously appearances are deceiving,” Jamie replied, his eyes slivers of blue glacial ice. “Otherwise she’d not show her face here.”

  Both of them knew full well all she’d done during Josh’s kidnapping.

  “She’s a psychopath,” Taylor said.

  “Likely,” I agreed. I glanced at Dalton. “She’s not the only one.”

  His mouth twisted downward. I turned away.

  “Can we discuss this inside where it’s warm?”

  I wasn’t worried we were being observed or that the FBI was listening in. I could feel the house’s security magic tracing through the air and knitting through the ground. For the first time since I could remember, all the systems were fully engaged. The equivalent of DEFCON We-Aren’t-Coming-Out-Alive. The density of the security web made every hair on my body prickle. Inside the house would be more insulated against the effects.

  “By all means,” Mel said, leading the way. She now wore wool pants and low boots, with an indigo sweater.

  Instead of taking everybody into the sitting room of the earlier debacle, Mel led us into a salon with white French-style furniture and a variety of purple accents. She called it the Lilac Room. Glass doors led out onto a red brick courtyard with a fire pit and intricately wrought benches, courtesy of Jamie. A Mother’s Day gift when he was in college.

  Mel stood in the doorway as everyone trouped inside. I halted on the threshold, eyeing the white sofas and chairs. “I know you don’t want me in here. I’m covered with dirt and who knows what else.”

  “Take a shower,” Mel said. “I’ll arrange some something to eat and coffee.”

  I hated to delay, but I needed a few minutes. I wanted to clear my head, and I wanted to see if I could reach out to Price through the spirit realm. For that, I needed privacy. I nodded. “I won’t be long.”

  I started to leave, but my gaze hooked on Dalton, who stood broodingly in a corner, arms crossed, and scowling. “What’s he doing here?”

  Mel’s forehead crimped and then smoothed. “Sam sent him. He thought Dalton could be useful.”

  “And you just let him in?”

  “They say you should keep your enemies close.”

  “Is he the enemy?” I wondered. Was my father? He’d tampered with my head, supposedly for my own good. Like Arnow, he thought any means justified the ends. Maybe Dad wasn’t the enemy right now, but as far as I could tell, he wasn’t a friend. I didn’t know what he wanted from me, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me have any choice about it. Not if the past was anything to go by. Of course, my dad was Mel’s husband. I had no idea how she felt about him turning up after all these years. If I were her, I’d be ready to cut his balls off.

  Mel’s brows rose. “You think we can trust him?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “We can trust him not to be trustworthy. He’s Dad’s minion through and through. On the other hand, Dalton has skills. I can’t afford to turn down any help at the moment. Not if I’m going to rescue Price.” I paused. “And Touray.”

  The corners of Mel’s mouth turned down in a slight frown. “Gregg Touray? Clay’s brother? What happened?” She shook her head as if the question wasn’t important. “Whatever has happened, he isn’t your responsibility. He’s got plenty of soldiers and staff.”

  Except he was. Embracing Price meant embracing the people he loved. Once free, he’d be off to rescue Gregg with or without me. On top of that, Touray had made himself a decoy tonight so I could escape. I owed him.

  I grimaced. “Yeah, Touray is my responsibility.”

  When had my life turned into a soap opera? Pretty soon I’d find out that an international billionaire-spy-sheikh uncle I never knew about had fathered Price and that Taylor was pregnant with Touray’s illegitimate baby, and Dalton was the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper.

  Suddenly I wanted a very strong drink. A shower was going to have to do. That, and coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.

  Mel’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure? You’ve spent your whole adult life avoiding the Tyet and the law, living under the radar. Now you’re bogging deeper into the Tyet world every day. Is that really what you want?”

  I lifted my shoulder. “I love Price. Price loves his brother. I don’t really have a choice, do I?”

  “You do, but the fact that you can’t see it means that you’ve already chosen. So that’s that. Hurry and shower.” She put her hands on my shoulders, meeting my gaze. “Understand one thing. You will not be doing anything alone. Whatever it takes, we are going to help.” It was both a promise and an order.

  I almost cried as I pulled her into a tight hug. “Thank you,” I whispered. It’s not that I had believed she wouldn’t help, but I’d expected that she’d put up limits for how far she was willing to go. After all, she worked for the FBI. She was a white hat and I, at best, was gray. Rescuing Price meant breaking laws. I’d expected she’d have lines she wouldn’t cross, not for me, and especially not for Price or Touray. But she’d deliberately given me a blank check. No conditions. It was almost more than I could handle without bursting into grateful tears.

  She squeezed me, then gently pushed me away. “Go. Time is nobody’s friend right now.”

  I nodded and went to clean up. Whatever my father had done to me, he’d given me an enormous gift in Mel, Taylor, Leo, and Jamie. He might be as reliable as a wet pape
r bag, but I could depend on them. They’d never let me down.

  Chapter 8

  MEL KEPT A ROOM for me complete with a variety of clothing and shoes, plus my favorite toiletries. I decided I’d shower before trying to find Price. I held out hope the water would refresh me. I needed all my brain matter to be as awake and energetic as possible. I downed a couple of aspirin before stepping under the hot water. I like it just on this side of blistering. Jets from all sides warmed my muscles and got the blood flowing. I soaped up and washed my hair. I was back out and dressed in under fifteen minutes.

  My headache had subsided a little bit, for which I was thankful. I sat on my queen-sized bed and folded my legs. I took several breaths to steady my scrambling pulse and dropped into trace sight.

  Everybody has trace. It’s a little streamer of colored light that follows you everywhere. You can null it out and it will disappear, but otherwise, any tracer can see where you’ve been. For most tracers, by the time a few hours have passed, they can no longer see the streamers. Very few can see dead trace—the gray ribbons of the dead. As far as I know, I’m the only one.

  I was wrapped in a tangle of ribbons. Mel’s dark pink rippling with pearl, Jamie’s dark brown spun around with egg yellow, Taylor’s scarlet and gold, Leo’s emerald, my own silver green. There were more—many more—but I focused on the most important: Price’s. A streamer of burgundy streaked with blue.

  I reached into the chill of the trace dimension and gripped it, wrapping it around my hand and drawing it back out. The cold went up to my elbow and shoulder, making them ache. That was fast. It had only been a couple of days since I’d been rescued from Percy and been healed. At least my body had been fixed up. I’d stretched my magic to its limits, and I still hadn’t fully recovered. Inwardly I shrugged. Bodybuilders stretched themselves all the time. The process built muscle. Runners pushed harder and longer and faster. Their pain was a sign of growth. Well then, I was growing.