Cipher

by Moira Rogers

“I’ve chased down a rogue psychic or two in my day,” he agreed. “We better assume they know they’ll be facing shapeshifters, though. The question is if they’ll underestimate your friend Andrew, here.”

  “Most people do.” He was a new wolf, barely a year made. A mongrel mistake. “Not as many do it twice.”

  Patrick lifted his bag. “Well let’s not give them a second chance.”

  The bayou was just remote enough to be creepy without being remote enough for a supernatural showdown, which was the perfect recipe for a nerve-wracking clusterfuck.

  And Kat couldn’t get her bangs to stay out of her eyes.

  In lieu of calling off the vital mission until she could get a grown-up haircut, Kat settled on unfashionable but practical pigtails. Fussing with her hair as they waited for the others to arrive didn’t seem very heroic, but at least it put her somewhere between her two companions on the fidgety scale.

  Andrew was calm and unwavering as he leaned against the bumper of his SUV, his arms crossed over his chest. Julio, on the other hand, was taking advantage of the fact that half the outside lights were out at the tiny bait shop off Little Caillou Road, and pacing broodingly in the shadows.

  Finally, he scraped his boot into the dirt and sighed. “I don’t like the skulking. I think that’s the part that gets me.”

  “Being sneaky,” Kat corrected, the words muffled by the ponytail holder held between her teeth. She finished gathering the rest of her hair and tied it off into a second pigtail just high enough to keep her vision unimpeded. “Shapeshifters should do it more often. Not everything has to be a full frontal assault.”

  “If this freaky-ass cult had mounted that sort of attack, we wouldn’t be hanging around in the dark. And the cold, damn it.” He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “We’d be done and out for beers already.”

  Kat turned to pick up her gun and glanced at Andrew. “Is that what we’re doing after we save the world from psychics? Getting beer?”

  “Sure.” He was looking off down the dark highway, and the drone of a car engine materialized. “That’s what we always do after we save the world.”

  They were night and day. Julio edgy and intense, Andrew utterly motionless. She remembered the jittery moments after she’d been shot, when color had faded from the world around him. “Are you all right?”

  He smiled suddenly, and she knew he was trying to reassure her. “I’ll be better if I don’t have to get naked in the bayou tonight. Julio’s right. It’s cold as balls out here.”

  Nothing sexy about nakedness when it was a prelude to a fight. “I’ve never seen you as a wolf, you know.”

  “No.” He straightened from the bumper as the noise of the engine drew closer. “No, you haven’t.”

  He hadn’t even paused to consider. Just no, and now she wondered if it was deliberate. If he was hiding that part of himself from her.

  Tonight, if things went badly, he might not be able to hide. Kat checked her handgun carefully, deciding in the end to leave the safety engaged. “Anna’s car?” she asked. “Or is that Patrick? I can’t really tell cars from motorcycles.”

  “It’s both,” Julio answered as headlights came into view over a small rise. “Anna’s little sportster and one mammoth bike, from the sound of it.”

  Sera was safely ensconced at Dixie John’s for the late shift, and Anna had left from there with Miguel in tow. Three shapeshifters, one telepathic shapeshifter, an empath and a bounty hunter whose tattoos held more magic than anything the Ink Shrink had ever created. Ben had hinted once that his brother’s ability to compete with shapeshifters was due to some sort of mystical exchange, a boon paid for in blood and ink, but the one time Kat had pressed for details, Ben had become evasive to the point of avoidance.

  Not that it mattered why the tattoos worked. Patrick held his own against monsters every day. Andrew and Julio were council members. Anna had been trained in combat by the Conclave. Kat and Miguel had psychic power to burn between them, and gifts that lent themselves well to offensive attacks. The gun clutched in her hands might make her feel secure, but it was nothing compared to the power of her mind. Whatever waited for them in the frigid night, they were equal to it.

  If she repeated their qualifications enough times, maybe she’d even believe it.

  Swallowing, Kat slipped her hand into her pocket and pulled out her phone. She’d copied the GPS location from Andrew, because someone who wasn’t going to end up on four paws needed to have it. “I did a quick sweep a few minutes ago to check for followers, but Miguel can do one too, when he gets here. He’s got a wider receptive range than I have.”

  A silver car slowed—barely—and whipped into the gravel lot, kicking up dust. It had barely stopped before Anna shut off the engine and climbed out. “Someone tell me this guy on the bike is with us.”

  Kat bit her lip to hold back an entirely inappropriate laugh. “Yes.”

  Patrick made a less showy entrance. He parked, dragged off his helmet and smoothed down his dark hair. “You drive like a maniac, lady.” It sounded like a compliment.

  Anna rolled her eyes and started to turn toward him. “Yeah, I drive the way I…” The words faded away, and she snapped her mouth shut. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”

  Basic shields didn’t block out surges, but Kat wouldn’t have needed the tingling shock to recognize attraction that intense. Anna looked discomfited, maybe even pissy, but Patrick just grinned at her and swung his leg over his bike. “Anna Lenoir. You screwed me out of three grand last year. I chased McPherson across seven states before you put him down.”

  Whatever else, she recovered quickly enough to shrug. “When he showed up in Vegas, that made him mine.”

  “That’s what my client said when he refused to pay up. Don’t suppose he cut you a check?”

  “No such luck, cupcake.” She pounded on the roof of her car. “Out, Mendoza.”

  Miguel stepped clear of the passenger side door with a sigh. “Want me to listen for company, Kat?”

  Kat hesitated, then glanced to Andrew and Julio. Four shapeshifters, and if there was one thing she’d learned from Alec, it was that wolves lived by their hierarchy, whether they wanted to or not. “Who’s calling the tactical shots here?”

  Andrew squared his shoulders. “Kat, you and Miguel are on lookout. Patrick and Anna too, only more with eyes and ears and less with psychic ability. If there’s trouble, it’s not the kind we can plan for very well, except that they’ll probably bring a shifter or two. So we fight.”

  “And if we’re outnumbered?” Anna asked quietly.

  “Then we need to make damn sure that, no matter what else happens, these crazy fuckers don’t get what they’re after. So someone needs to take responsibility for it, and cut and run if necessary.” He looked around. “Any volunteers?”

  None of the shifters looked like they wanted to offer to run away from the fight. Neither did Patrick. Kat braced her feet and met Andrew’s gaze squarely. “I can do it. I’m not that fast, but I don’t need to be. If I can get clear of the fight, I can make sure no one can get close enough to matter.”

  Andrew dug his keys out of his pocket and held them out to her. “You keep whatever we find,” he whispered, “and if things are bad out there, you get gone.”

  “You better follow me,” she replied just as quietly. She reached for the keys and caught his hand as well. “I can agree. I can promise. But you shapeshifters don’t have the monopoly on blind instinct.”

  He nodded, with only the barest movement of his head. “Now, where is this thing, anyway?”

  Kat pocketed the keychain and retrieved her phone. “A quarter mile northwest of here.” She indicated the tree line behind the ramshackle shop. “That way.”

  They made their way quietly in the darkness, past a dilapidated storage shed and two cars that hadn’t run in any of their lifetimes. It grew darker when they entered the trees, and the steady, low drone of the gnats on the swamp faded.

  In its
place rose another kind of buzz, one that she thought she was imagining at first. The itch started at the base of her neck, then skipped down her spine until goose bumps dotted her arms. “What is that?” she whispered.

  “Magic,” Patrick replied quietly. “Big, scary magic.”

  “We must be close.” Julio looked unusually pale in the scant moonlight.

  The backlight on her phone had shut off. Kat used her thumb to activate it again and squinted at the display. “Twenty feet or so? At this point, the buzz is more accurate than the GPS.”

  Andrew hefted his shovel and spun in a slow circle, finally settling on a direction. Five sure steps later, he stopped. “Here. It’s right here.”

  He began to dig.

  Kat slipped her phone into her back pocket, tightened her grip on her gun and stepped close to Miguel. “Have you picked up anything?”

  “Nothing,” he whispered. “But I don’t like it. It’s not—not quiet, exactly. It’s…silent.”

  “As the grave.” Anna began disrobing as she offered the words, kicking off her boots as she tugged her shirt over her head.

  Kat half-closed her eyes and cracked her shields, just enough to let her power ease out in a slowly growing circle. She brushed Miguel first, whose excellent shields couldn’t hide his unease—or his vague appreciation of Anna’s naked form.

  Patrick next. Kat pushed past him quickly, uninterested in sharing his far more intense interest. Julio was his usual pool of steady strength, and Andrew was quiet concentration. She flicked past Anna and got a sense of steely determination and the tiniest flicker of satisfaction.

  The circle widened. She used Callum’s trick of quieting the minds she’d already touched, relegating them to silence by imagining them each packed away in a cardboard box. Her own imagery—not as fancy as Callum’s chalices, chains and locks, but it worked.

  Beyond her group…nothing. Stillness that spoke of the utter absence of people. She could keep pushing. Test her limits, stretch herself thinner, like warm taffy. Eventually she’d find minds. She could dip into the hearts of every person in ten miles, taste their emotions and know their fears.

  Instead she held her power in a tight sphere. Five hundred feet in all directions, and if anything disturbed that quiet, she’d know.

  Magic zipped through the air, raising the fine hairs on the back of Kat’s neck, and a pale wolf shot off through the trees. Anna, making her own sort of perimeter sweep.

  Miguel reached for his shirt, and Julio stopped him. “You might need to use your words, baby brother.”

  But Miguel only snorted out a laugh. “It’s all right, Julio. If I need my words, they’ll be there.” He dropped the rest of his clothes, knelt and shifted. He was a lean man, tall and almost slender, and his wolf form reflected that.

  He ran off, and Andrew struck something with his shovel. The sound rang out, hollow and metallic, and Kat eased closer to Patrick. “Is this what it always feels like? Like someone’s about to jump out at you at any second?”

  “Sometimes.” Patrick had stripped off his leather jacket in spite of the cold, leaving his arms bare of anything but the full tattoo sleeves that ended at his wrists. Each hand held a gun. “These are the good times, though. The bad times are when it doesn’t feel like that, and they jump out at you anyway.”

  “Yeah, speaking of jumping…” Julio arched an eyebrow. “You really want to have a couple of honking guns at the ready? This isn’t exactly an unpopulated area.”

  Patrick grinned and lifted them both. “No one will hear these. Silent and untraceable. You don’t want to know what they run on the black market, though. I could have had a beach house in Malibu.”

  Andrew knelt and uncovered a battered metal container. “Looks like a fire-resistant lockbox.” He looked up at Kat and held her gaze. “It’s locked, but I can open it, no problem.”

  Opening it felt risky. So was leaving without being sure they’d gotten what they’d come for. “We should check.”

  He wrenched open the lid a split second before a howl shredded the night, and an even louder shout reverberated through Kat’s mind with an echo that felt like Miguel, smoky and smooth.

  “They’re here.”

  It was all the warning they got before emotion exploded five feet behind her. Feral anticipation, determined focus, and a satisfaction that crawled over her as she spun around. Two men stood behind her, one already in motion, lunging past her toward Andrew. The other…

  Shock held her in place. She recognized the dark eyes and floppy hair, that half-cocked smile that made him look like he was laughing at a joke he would share in the next breath. Christopher Gilbert. The man who’d taken her to dinner and discussed movies adapted from video games with such enthusiasm that she’d been enjoying herself for the first time in months—until a shapeshifter jumped them on the street and he’d vanished into the night while she’d fought off her attacker with a stun gun.

  In the aftermath, Jackson had broken it to her that there was something fishy about the guy. Bad news, the wizard had called him, but Kat hadn’t cared. She’d had Miguel by then, and the newness of their relationship, and little thought to spare for the sort of guy who’d run out on his date while she was being mugged.

  Run out—or teleported away.

  It took two seconds for the thought to form, and two seconds was already too long in a fight with shapeshifters.

  “Kat, down!” Julio surged past her, swinging the shovel, but the man vanished.

  Andrew had the other one on the ground, landing blow after blow, but a second later Gilbert reappeared, his boot already en route to Andrew’s face. It connected, and Andrew howled as his head snapped back.

  They were moving so fast, almost too fast to see. Magic snapped through the air, and at least a half dozen emotional flares burst into existence, staggered in a semicircle in the direction Anna had run. She caught her breath and shouted a warning as she raised her gun again. “More coming in from the road!”

  Vicious snarls rose in the night, the snaps and growls of more than one fight. Julio had managed to divest himself of half his clothes, and Andrew recovered enough to punch Gilbert in the side of the knee. The blow connected before he could dematerialize, and his grunt of pain hung in the air after he’d vanished.

  The shifter Gilbert had dropped on top of them rolled to his side, then reached for the box. Her gun was a weapon of last resort, but she had a more powerful one at her command. Eerie calm had settled over her, a tribute to Callum’s training, she supposed—or Zola’s. It seemed easy to touch the shifter’s aura, and it didn’t take much. A push. A whisper of danger, of the right flavor of fear, and instinct had the man scrambling blindly to his feet, poised to face a threat that wasn’t there.

  Which made him an easy target for Patrick, who proved his guns were silent by slamming a bullet between the man’s eyes.

  The fights in the forest drew closer—Anna and Miguel, undoubtedly pushing the interlopers closer to them. Closing the fight to a workable distance.

  Kat sensed Miguel before he tumbled out of the trees in a tangle of fur and limbs. He landed hard, rolled again and sank his teeth savagely into the other wolf’s throat. His opponent thrashed and fell still as Miguel reared back with a snarl.

  Another flash of emotion coalesced before her, and Gilbert reached for her only to be knocked aside by a flying form. Anna, who must have startled him, because she bore him to the ground and snapped her teeth shut on his arm before he disappeared.

  Julio hit the ground on four paws as Andrew rose, cold rage spilling from him. He barely moved, just stood, his hands clenched into fists and his head cocked as if listening for something.

  Kat concentrated on the people around them. Pain flickered from the dead and dying, but none of the gravely injured were their own. The interlopers were mostly fear and nerves now, with one pulsing light of rage barreling toward them from the direction of the road.

  “One coming in behind you,” she told Andrew, surpris
ed at how steady her voice sounded. How cold. “And he’s mad.”

  “Good,” he growled. “So am I.”

  The man broke free of the trees, and Kat got the second shock of the evening. If she hadn’t seen Gilbert, the features would have been naggingly familiar, the sort of echo that might keep her up at night wondering where she’d met him before. But there was no mistaking him here, now, as the anger inside him twisted up his face when he caught sight of her.

  He’d attacked her before, smashed her head into a car before she’d rammed her stun gun into his side and left him unconscious on the side of the road with a self-reliance that had given her back a bit of her own pride.

  Clearly he hadn’t forgotten. Neither had Andrew, who scooped up the shovel and launched himself past the fray with a roar.

  The man dodged his first swing and grabbed the shovel, snapping off the business end with a vicious jerk. Undaunted, Andrew swung the handle up and slammed the shifter across the side of the head.

  A soft pop and a laugh had Kat spinning again, her gun swinging up. Gilbert grinned at her. “Try to pull the trigger before I disappear again. How many shots will you get out here before someone calls the cops?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Patrick spin and lift his arm. His weapons were silent, but the movement of her eyes must have been enough warning. Gilbert disappeared again, and the bullet dug into a tree a few feet past where he’d been standing.

  Another growl jerked her attention back to Andrew, who dropped his opponent with one last blow. The remains of the shovel handle disintegrated in his grip, and he tossed the shards aside and bent low. “Get up. No cage to save your ass now, so you get up and fight me.”

  A snarl. The shifter twisted his head, gaze sliding over the small clearing. All of his allies were down. Anna, Miguel and Julio stood as wolves, tensed and ready. Patrick had his feet braced on either side of the unearthed box and both guns up.

  No rescue, not unless Gilbert popped in and out again. Sudden desperation spiked through Kat hard enough to force a gasp from her lips, leaving her breathless. “Andrew, look—”