Captive Heart

by Anna Windsor

  “I think it jumped,” Bela said. “The trace is much stronger where it hit the ground.”

  “Great. Just what we need.” Andy touched her dart pistol again for comfort and checked the ceiling one more time. “A homicidal Spider-Man.”

  “I can’t get a read on the energy, but it moves from there to the taped-off office.” Bela closed her eyes. “Then back out, but only once.”

  “To move the body into view and do the damage?” Camille asked, and Andy realized she was addressing the question to her.

  She turned her gaze back to the body parts and the area around them. “Kristo Foucci was already dead when the thing tore him apart. No blood spatter, just a lot of pooling. His heart wasn’t beating.”

  Camille knelt over the body’s torso and closed her left hand over her gold crescent moon pendant. Tiny beams of blue fire left the fingers of her outstretched right hand, probing the pieces of the body from its detached head to its discarded feet.

  Andy heard the outer door open and close. Footsteps came toward them, but Andy didn’t turn around because she didn’t want to see Jack Blackmore. Knowing he was in the warehouse threw her insides into a jumble of irritation and curiosity.

  She fidgeted with her iron crescent moon charm, hoping the metal would help her focus her own awareness, but even after long hours of intense training from Elana, she felt leery of using her aquasentience to explore the crime scene. Projective elemental energy could be extremely powerful and dangerous, and that’s what the charm most enhanced—and what she most needed in order to examine the body. When Andy tapped her projective abilities, she became a conduit for the power of water, letting it flow through her essence instead of summoning and controlling its course. She could gain so much valuable information by searching through what the water could tell her, but one mistake, one slip in concentration, and she could flood the building or, worse, most of Manhattan.

  Her pulse picked up as she sensed Jack getting closer to her, and damn it, her body started responding again. He was staying quiet, staying out of her way, but his presence felt like hot geysers firing through her from her toes to her cheeks. The bastard was making her sweat.

  Worse than that, she was sensing something from him. Something like concern. Or maybe … protectiveness?

  Oh, that pissed her off.

  She didn’t need his protection. She didn’t need anything from that man—and why the hell was she picking up his emotions, anyway? She barely had a handle on her own, or her quad’s, and she was supposed to be reading theirs.

  This was stupid. She had work to do.

  She strode forward and knelt beside Camille, studying the mangled corpse with a detachment she had cultivated during nearly a decade of working homicides. She gripped her charm and made herself breathe, slowly, slowly, until—

  Yes.

  That was better. She could hear water now, hear it all around her, from the ocean and the bay and the river, from sewer pipes and water pipes and even the whisper of moisture hanging in the warm summer air.

  More flickers of energy flowed into Andy’s awareness. Camille. Camille’s emotions swept across Andy like a sunlit river. Total focus. Total absorption in her purpose. Relaxed. Confident but with definite moments of self-doubt. And there was Bela, more like a cool mountain stream running deep in a rock-lined cavern, strong and determined and aware, perplexed by the data she couldn’t interpret. Dio—Andy held herself steady, but the force of Dio’s feelings nearly knocked her sideways. She couldn’t sort a single emotion from the whirlwind. The woman seemed to be made of wind and weather instead of flesh and flowing blood with its obligatory portion of water.

  Andy used her free hand to brace herself against the concrete floor and barely avoided swaying into Camille.

  I should … do something.

  She tried to ignore that thought, wanted to put it aside but couldn’t. She should act on what she was sensing. She needed to act on it, but she had no idea what to do.

  Strengthen Camille’s confidence?

  Relax Bela’s tension?

  And Dio—well. The best she would be able to do for Dio was make her own energy a buffer between Dio’s inner tempest and everyone else.

  The idea of intruding on anyone’s private emotions came close to disgusting Andy. Everything she had been raised to believe, everything she had learned in life, and everything she had always believed to be true argued against doing anything like what she was considering.

  Yeah, and until a few years ago, I didn’t believe in demons, either.

  She had to keep reminding herself that this was her new life. Andy version 2.0, complete with sister Sibyls and elemental energy and duties to her fighting group.

  She allowed her water energy to flow out in small measure. A split second later, a hot shock rippled up her spine as she made contact with Camille’s angst.

  Great.

  She had no idea what to do next, but a voice in her head almost like Elana’s whispered, Just let it flow.

  Andy let her water power touch Camille’s fear and doubt, imagined the water soothing and cooling those emotions until they were nothing more than smoldering bits of debris. Camille’s shiver of surprise and the resultant burst of fiery gratitude felt like a reward. Bela’s earth energy joined the mix, and even a measure of Dio’s wind. Almost at the same time, the four of them relaxed and their energies blended seamlessly, like they had always been part of the same source. A strange kind of harmony settled through Andy, and the corpse she wanted to examine came into crystalline focus.

  Her eyes scoured each inch of the mutilated flesh, and bit by bit she pulled more water through her essence, reaching out with the moisture in the air and letting it rest on the body. New images and sensations came to her, from the stink of stale sweat and fear to the copper tang of blood. She saw each ragged edge of each wound anew, and if she’d had a pencil and pad, she might have been able to sketch out which limb got pulled off first and second and so on—she never knew what might end up mattering. All information was relevant.

  “Broke his neck first,” she said aloud so they’d all record it in memory. “That feels like the first point of damage. Quick and efficient and strong as hell.”

  Her thoughts shivered like ripples across a pond, and her attention focused on the bloodied sleeve pasted against the body’s torso.

  Something was there. She couldn’t see it, but her water energy told her foreign matter clung to that sleeve.

  “I need tweezers and an evidence bag,” she said, holding her awareness as still and tight as she could. Couldn’t lose this. Whatever it was, it was important.

  Camille scooted away from Andy, and someone bent down to hand her a bag and tweezers. She knew who it was. Her teeth ground together as she made herself keep her attention on the evidence.

  Jack withdrew quickly, giving her the space she needed to lean forward and follow her senses to … yes. Right there.

  She plucked a thin strand of something out of the blood and smeared it into the bag.

  “Hair?” Camille asked from behind her.

  “No idea.” Andy harvested the other strand she had detected, and this time she brought it closer, looked at it, and let her water touch it more completely.

  The world around her shivered.

  Then it blurred.

  A picture expanded in her mind like a watercolor filling itself in, center to edges.

  What the hell—?

  What am I seeing?

  The image tried to take over her awareness, and her lips moved almost outside her control.

  “Arms … too big. Legs … not human. The rage. Ah, God, the rage!”

  So betrayed. The energy seethed off the hair, hatred pure and cold. And determination to destroy every living thing in its path.

  Andy rocked backward, lost her balance, and would have splattered all over the warehouse floor if someone hadn’t caught her by the waist.

  The hands steadying her felt strong as iron, yet gentle and caring
, and new rivers of emotion flowed into her. Completely selfless concern. Gut-level apprehension. Genuine warmth and respect. It was enough to make her legs wobble. Her breath caught so deep she coughed, and she pulled away from Jack Blackmore so fast she almost fell a second time.

  Camille got her by the arm and steadied her, then pulled her away from Jack and the body they had been examining.

  Andy held herself like she’d been broken open, like her insides might burst through to the outside world.

  I’m a cracked dam.

  Her awareness spun. Images from the past, from this morning, from now washed through her mind, and she saw other pictures, too, of herself, of her quad, of Jack, of people she knew, the same but changed in ways she couldn’t understand. They were nothing but fast snapshots rising out of water, then turning and vanishing below the surface again.

  She could hear herself breathing, feel herself swaying as Camille’s grip on her arm tightened.

  “You okay?” Camille asked as Bela and Dio hurried over.

  “I’m not sure.” Andy’s mouth felt numb as she spoke.

  “I saw something, but I don’t know what it was. I didn’t expect it.”

  She didn’t say the rest, but it screamed through her mind.

  And I didn’t expect him.

  The plugged-in connection to Jack Blackmore and his emotions at the moment he touched her. The oh-so-undeniable confirmation from her own Sibyl abilities that maybe, just maybe, Jack wasn’t ugly on the inside. Once more she was way too aware of him standing close to her, but relieved and a little surprised that he didn’t shove his way past her quad to act on the worry steaming out of him like locomotive exhaust.

  She heard male voices murmuring, but Jack said, “Let them do what they do. No medical examiner will find more, and the ME will miss all the paranormal traces. They’ll tell us if they need our help.”

  “What is it?” Bela reached Andy, appraising her with the dark, steady eyes of a mortar and filling Andy with soothing earth energy. “What did the hair show you?”

  “A—an—I don’t know. It looked and felt human or human-like, but it wasn’t. The composition was wrong.”

  Dio jogged to a stop beside Andy, obviously hearing her explanation because she said, “What the hell does that mean? What about its composition?”

  “It wasn’t natural.” Andy glanced around the warehouse, glad it was coming into full focus again. “Whatever left those hairs behind, it’s not human, but not natural paranormal, either. I can’t say it any better than that.”

  “Unnatural paranormal?” Dio’s confusion showed on her face, and Bela and Camille looked just as perplexed. “What does that look like?”

  Andy thought about Elana again and all of her lessons in the Ionian Sea. “Vast freedom within vast limitations.”

  Not enough.

  Damn it, get it together, Myles.

  She fished for the right words, failed, sighed, and tried again to organize what she wanted to say. “I don’t completely understand it myself, but in the natural world, certain laws have to be followed and certain realities can’t be changed. Even in the paranormal world there are basic sets of energies and biological compositions, just like in oceans and seas and other ecosystems. Huge numbers of possibilities, but finite ways they can combine naturally.” She raised the evidence bag with the hairs. “The water in these, the water that’s moved through them—the flow was broken. This biology isn’t natural.”

  Bela, Camille, and Dio stood in silence, looking from the bag to Andy. She could tell they were trying, but nobody was getting it. Andy had no idea how to explain it better, and she felt as clueless as the first moment she had seen someone—actually, her OCU partner and best friend at the time—shift into a demon. She had no words to describe what her senses perceived.

  “The creature who shed these hairs is possible in nature,” she tried again, “but it never would have come about or arisen on its own. It’s like a hybrid, something human and paranormal, but not blended like half-demons or other paranormals we’ve encountered.”

  Okay, maybe that was a little better.

  Lights seemed to be coming on, at least in Camille’s face.

  “Like a turcock?” Camille asked.

  Then again, maybe not …

  Dio stared at Camille like Camille’s mind might have melted during one of her more intense play sessions with fire. “What the living hell is a turcock?”

  Bela put her hand on Camille’s arm. “What she means is, can you translate for those of us who don’t live in books and laboratories?”

  Camille, possibly the only fire Sibyl in history more bookish than an air Sibyl and more science-oriented than an earth Sibyl, warmed to the task with lots of expansive gestures. “Turkeys and peacocks both belong to the pheasant family, so theoretically and biologically they can produce offspring. Only they can’t mate and produce offspring in the wild. They can only make babies in laboratories with scientific help. So turcocks are possible, but they’d never happen in nature on their own.”

  As she finished, Camille smiled like a happy kid.

  “And you know this because …?” Dio’s tone suggested she was trying to keep her impatience in check.

  Camille shrugged. “Birds are interesting. I read about them in my spare time.”

  Andy felt grateful, because she never would have come up with an allegory that made any sense. This one might have been weird, but it worked.

  “So somebody, somewhere, somehow, made a turcock or whatever,” Bela said.

  Dio lifted one finger. “A man-eating turcock.”

  “Man-ripping,” Andy corrected. “It doesn’t eat its kill, which also doesn’t feel natural, since the act itself is so brutal it’s like a wild animal.”

  “It should feed, but it doesn’t.” Jack joined the conversation without jarring Andy in the least, as if he had been watching, guessing, making deductions about the case—and learning on the spot how to better interact with her. “So either it can’t feed or it was engineered not to.”

  “Engineered,” Bela said, sounding far away as she stared at the body parts on the warehouse floor. “As in genetically. Or biologically, at least.”

  Bela’s husband, Duncan, came forward and took her hand, while John Cole and Saul Brent kept their distance. Andy let herself look at Jack. He had his jacket and tie off, and his sleeves were rolled up to his elbows. Casual suited him better than she would have imagined. He gave her a polite glance, nothing overstepping. This was work. He was at work.

  So am I. God, I’m hopeless.

  “Biologically engineered is more accurate,” Andy said, instantly annoyed by the slight tremor in her voice. “If the creature had been built from genes up, I think it would be using water more naturally, more evenly.”

  “So we’ve got ourselves a New Age Dr. Frankenstein,” Jack said. “Or maybe a bunch of them.”

  Andy gestured at the body parts. “And their monster, the mobster ripper.”

  “Ripper? Gross.” Dio’s delicate features twisted in disgust and a faint breeze stirred the cloying smells of old blood and older warehouse. “Don’t you dare start calling it the Ripper.”

  “I’ll settle for Frank.” Andy held up the evidence bag. “Will you and Camille take this back to the brownstone so Camille can start figuring out how Frank’s built? Bela and I can handle seeing what we can track from the leftover projective energy.”

  Dio grabbed the bag, still looking disgusted. “Have it your way. But I’m not sure I want anybody to find Frankenstein the Ripper.”

  “Better we sneak up on it than it sneak up on us,” Bela said as Jack put in a call for additional OCU and Sibyl backup.

  Dio and Camille took their leave with Saul Brent and John Cole escorting them. Andy watched them go, then closed her eyes. She let her awareness sink into dozens of nearby water sources—puddles, condensation, water pipes, mains, wherever water stood or flowed around the warehouse. She gripped her crescent moon pendant, and as she
had practiced so many times with Elana, she drew the water toward her.

  Not much. Just a little.

  Too much and the ocean will flow across Manhattan to say hello.

  She made herself breathe. Imagined being deep under the calming sea. The water’s energy touched her, caressed her, and—

  “There.” She pointed. The word she had spoken sounded like something out of a faraway dream, and she had to bring herself back to the real world enough to look at Bela and add, “The last water Frank touched in this building. We should go out that door.”

  Jack and Duncan Sharp moved out behind Andy and Bela, leaving the warehouse behind as the two women took turns sampling water and earth with their elemental powers. To casual passersby, they no doubt looked like two women in leather getups, model-style, walking slowly down the sidewalk in the summer sun. Both of them had their smaller weapons concealed, and Bela’s sword looked like a movie prop. Nobody gave them a second glance even though it was hot outside and most everyone who passed them had on short sleeves or no sleeves at all.

  Andy hesitated at a corner, then gestured toward Canal Street. Bela stood still for a moment, then agreed. Something—some sort of power—made Jack’s neck prickle.

  “Feel that?” Duncan Sharp murmured, keeping a close eye on the earth Sibyl he had married. “They’ve really got the scent now.”

  Jack nodded and kept walking. This thing Andy and her group did with their elemental energy—projection—impressed him. It also disturbed him. The Mothers had made it clear that projective energy could be very difficult to control, and a Sibyl losing her grip on such power could cause natural disasters of global proportions.

  “Have they got this?” he asked Duncan, knowing he’d understand Jack’s concern. Duncan had been around for a lot of the bruises Jack had taken from elemental energy and pissed-off Sibyls. “They’re in total control of that kind of power?”

  Duncan’s grin still made him look like a fresh-faced Army recruit. “They’re fine. And if they’re not, we probably won’t live to give a damn.”