“Yeah, one each.” Marley fell in next to Riley, who pulled a carry-on size, hard suitcase that looked like it was made of metal. “How long have you guys been here?”
“About half an hour,” Riley said.
“You didn’t have checked bags?” Marley sounded skeptical, even suspicious. “For your honeymoon?”
“We shipped some stuff home, thinking it would be better to travel light from here on out.”
Marley nodded, and the women moved ahead as a squabbling family shuffled between them, trying to get to the now-moving but still-empty conveyor belt.
Sam added a backpack to the messenger bag he already carried and walked next to Gage. “I did some digging while we waited for you guys. I think I know where your brother’s staying.”
He couldn’t hope it was that easy, but Marley had said Sam was a master of research-fu, even better than Anson. “Yeah?”
“Yeah, there’s a block outside Hollywood called the Fiametta. It’s mostly high-end apartments over trendy boutiques and eateries. Brad’s family owns it through one of their private business subsidiaries.” They wove through the crowd to an open space near the end of the carousel. “We booked a place down the street a little. Couldn’t afford the same block, even if they had anything open.”
“I’ll finance this mission,” Gage said immediately. “It’s my brother we’re trying to save. I’m trying to save,” he corrected.
But Sam shook his head. “The stakes are much higher than that. Of course we want to prevent anything from happening to Aiden, but even with Quinn’s condensed explanation, it’s not hard to envision the potential fallout.” Then he smirked. “You don’t need the excuse. You can still pay for everything.”
Gage cleared his throat. “Thanks. I guess.”
“Sure.” Sam checked his watch but used the move to examine the crowd. “We can talk more about this in private.”
Gage spotted his leather duffel, with Marley’s less well-traveled but somehow more battered-looking bag several feet behind it, and stepped forward to retrieve both. “There should be a car waiting,” he said when he got back to the others. He let Marley take her bag and slung his own over his shoulder.
“A service you always use?” Sam asked.
Gage shook his head. “Aiden’s probably watching for me, and he knows my habits well enough. Maybe better than I’d have guessed a week ago.”
Sam nodded his approval and motioned for Gage to take the lead. But there was still a stiffness in his demeanor, and Gage stopped in front of him. “Do you have a problem with me?”
Sam didn’t seem bothered by Gage’s bluntness. “I don’t know yet.”
“Why not?” Gage shoved his hands in his pockets. “What have I done to make you reserve judgment?”
“You mean besides drag me away from my honeymoon and put my wife in danger again?”
“Uh-uh. I didn’t do that. Marley did. Or her sister did, if you have to put blame somewhere. Marley didn’t want anyone’s help. So why are you acting like her big brother or ex-boyfriend or something?”
Sam laughed. “Definitely not ex-boyfriend. Brother works, though.” He sighed and adjusted the strap of the messenger bag slung across his torso, eyeing the women standing at the door waiting for them. “I don’t know. She certainly seems capable of handling herself now.”
“You think I’m going to hurt her?”
Sam refocused on him. “Can you?”
Interesting. He didn’t ask if he would, but if he could. He was questioning Gage’s feelings for Marley and vice versa. “I don’t know. She’s holding back.”
Sam nodded, seeming to evaluate the way Gage had spoken. Maybe he even read truths Gage wasn’t sure of. He’d found himself thinking far more about Marley’s well-being than his brother’s in the last few days. If she was able to defeat Cressida that would probably sever Aiden’s ties with the goddess. And with Gage, though he’d take that over his brother being addicted, injured, or worse.
But then he’d think of Marley getting hurt again trying to save Aiden. He knew that wasn’t her only motivation, but dread had settled deep into the pit of his stomach.
“I passed Nick’s sniff test,” Gage pointed out. “Why isn’t that enough?”
Sam leaned closer, leading with his jaw. “It’s been four days since she met you. Four. Days. Do you know what happened the last time she fell for someone?”
Gage had to hide the burn of satisfaction at the implication of Marley’s feelings. “Yeah, I know what happened. And I understand why that would make her friends protective of her. But she’s more likely to hurt me than the other way around.”
He didn’t know what it was. The words or the way he said them, or maybe it was the fear behind them, but Sam rocked back on his heels and grinned. “Okay then. I guess we have nothing to worry about.” He took off across the tiled floor, leaving Gage to collect his bag and follow, bemused.
…
Half an hour later, they spread out into the motley, furnished collection of rooms Sam had rented. Gage wasn’t a snob. He’d stayed places in Africa and South America and the Middle East that made Sam’s choice look like a palace. He’d dealt with primitive accommodations because of custom or circumstance. But those things didn’t apply here. The entire unit could have fit into the living room of his parents’ place in New York. He wasn’t sure it qualified as an apartment. Storage space, maybe.
He had to admit it was lighter inside than his parents’, with gleaming white walls and scuffed pine floors, but he wasn’t sure it was possible to sit on the lumpy, burgundy sofa or the matted area rug in front of it without contracting some disease. The living room and kitchen were actually one room split by the flooring. A doorway led to two bedrooms and a bathroom so small he could touch all four walls without moving his feet.
“Why’d you pick this place?” He tried to figure out if a stain on the arm of the couch was coffee or blood.
“Free neighborhood Wi-Fi,” Sam answered promptly. He set a sleek laptop on the chipped particleboard coffee table and opened it.
Gage had to be impressed. He was involved with every aspect of his business, including security and the electronics that went along with it. Sam’s laptop was an upcoming model and the stuff he plugged into it—encryption units and signal blockers, among others—wasn’t the kind of equipment you bought on the open market.
“A network of surveillance cameras we can follow all the way back to the Fiametta,” Sam continued, not pausing in setting up. “Proximity to City Hall if we need to get into their records. Cheap food.”
“Okay, I get it.” He wouldn’t try to convince them to move. If things went well, they wouldn’t be here very long. “What’s the next step?”
“Find your brother.”
Gage tried not to bark at Sam for stating the obvious in such an unhelpful way. Tired of standing, he dragged the single battered wooden kitchen chair onto the living room side. The curling, black-and-white linoleum cracked under his feet as he walked across it. He set the chair next to the coffee table, straddled it, and rested his arms along the back.
Voices rose in one of the bedrooms. Marley and Riley had been locked in there since they arrived, and this wasn’t the first time they seemed unhappy with each other. “You think one of us should go referee?” They weren’t quite loud enough to tell if they were actually arguing, but it was definitely too loud to be casual conversation.
“No.” Sam stretched, leaning back from his laptop, seeming unconcerned about what might be growing—or living—in the sofa cushion he leaned back on. “Okay, here’s what I was thinking.” He focused on Gage. “If Aiden’s in the Fiametta, and we can pinpoint where he’s staying, we can set up surveillance to track when the place is empty. Then we can slip in and see what we can find about their program.”
“How are you going to tap into the surveillance and databases you need?”
“From my work with the Society I’ve obtained a special-investigator’s license and gov
ernment clearance.” He checked a setting on one of the units. “It stems from Anson’s assault conviction and the reports of the board and security team. There are public databases most people have no clue exist, and I can get into utility records and the reports local businesses make to credit card companies, stuff like that.”
Gage nodded. “Maybe we can pinpoint when Aiden would be alone. Instead of trying to illegally search the place, I can talk to him.”
Sam looked skeptical. “Do you think he’d tell you anything?”
“Yes.” Gage refused to believe that after all these years Aiden would pull away that completely, that permanently. He was still Gage’s baby brother. Some part of him had to still want Gage’s friendship, his approval—or at the very least, to try to recruit him onto his side. “If he doesn’t, I’ll convince him I want in.”
Sam thought about that and nodded slowly. “Okay, yeah, that could work. It’s worth a try.”
“What did you get on the guys we found in the Pritchard Building?” Since Sam and Riley had only had to travel a couple of hours, he’d offered to find out if they’d identified the addicts and what their conditions were before leaving San Francisco.
“As of this morning, they haven’t ID’d all of them.” With the computer fully booted, he flipped some switches on the other equipment. Icons popped up and disappeared in succession on the screen. “Most were treated and released from the hospital, a few detained because of outstanding warrants. None were listed as missing persons.” He turned toward Gage. “I dug around on some of the names. Marley said these guys were all Numina?”
“Yeah. Well, she said there was a trace of the hum she senses in the rest of us. She guessed they might have branched out of the major bloodlines.”
Sam shook his head. “Maybe way out. I don’t know how Cressida is finding them. There’s no evidence they have any influence. None of them are all that successful. And they obviously don’t run in your circles.”
“So that’s one of the questions I’ll ask Aiden.” Gage leaned to tilt the chair on two legs. “Figuring out how we’re going to stop Cressida is our biggest challenge, but I doubt Aiden will know how, and even if he does, he won’t tell me. So we need to know as much as we can about their plans and motivations. How many followers does she have? How long has she been doing this? How are Aiden and the others involved? What’s in it for them if they’re not taking flux?”
Sam leaned to tap a few keys. “Right. That kind of information can tell us a lot.” He turned his head when the women’s voices grew briefly louder again. He shifted forward on the sofa and braced his feet under him but didn’t stand.
“I’ll go.” Gage swung off the chair. “I’m not afraid of them.”
Sam hit a couple of keys on the laptop. Lines of code swept down the monitor. “Go for it.”
Gage circled the sofa to go into the hallway. He halted a few steps in. Even in the pauses between bursts of clacking behind him, he couldn’t hear anything from the bedroom. With flimsy walls like these, he should hear at least a murmur, even if they’d lowered their voices. He raised his hand to knock but hesitated when Riley began talking again.
“So what’s up with you and Gage? He’s hot.”
He grinned at the compliment but backed away. No guy could resist eavesdropping under normal circumstances, but these were anything but. If Marley was going to dismiss him, Gage didn’t want to hear it.
Chapter Twelve
Reality shifts are harbingers of temporodimensional travel. Or encroaching insanity.
—LA Geek e-zine
T
he moment they hit the apartment, Riley had dragged Marley through the narrow main room into one of the bedrooms, where Marley had tried hard to keep the conversation off herself. She wasn’t doing a very good job of it. She and Riley glared at each other, Riley with her fists on her hips in a motherly pose.
A floorboard creaked outside the door. Typing drifted through the silence between them, but Riley and Marley locked gazes, both obviously sensing Gage’s presence.
“I told you to stop shouting,” Marley whispered almost inaudibly.
“So what’s up with you and Gage?” Riley asked. “He’s hot.”
They shared a laugh when Gage moved back to the main room, and it broke the tension.
But Riley dug in again. “Stop haranguing me about my damned honeymoon and pretending you want all the wedding details. We are not leaving this room, and you are going to be honest with me.”
Marley snorted. “Is that one of your powers now? Compelling the truth?” She pushed aside the bag she’d set on the bed and frowned. Gage wasn’t as tall as Sam, but neither guy would be comfortable on a bed this small alone, never mind with another body in it. Whoever managed the apartment had tucked the off-white sheets and a holey wool blanket in precision folds around the mattress. Flat pillows leaned against a scratched and gouged wall—no headboard. The four-drawer dresser continued the orphanage/barracks theme and was the only other furniture in the room. She sighed longingly for the big comfy bed and multihead shower in New York.
“I’m serious,” Riley said with less vehemence. “You know you have to stop, right?”
Why did people phrase things that way? The attempt at politeness always came out patronizing, instead.
“I’ll stop when what I do is no longer necessary.”
Riley rolled her eyes. “Like this is some noble quest, and you don’t care what it’s doing to you?”
Marley didn’t have a response. Denying it was doing anything to her would be lying, and lying to her friends was getting more difficult. Mainly because she could no longer lie to herself.
After the scene with Cressida, it had been easy to pretend the sheer volume of energy Marley had absorbed had combined with her injuries and fatigue to contribute to a momentary breakdown. But after a week of rationalizing away any odd little thing that happened, of telling herself she just needed to work through it, she had to acknowledge that she’d crossed some kind of tipping point, particularly in the past couple of days.
Half an hour ago, on the drive over here, she’d blinked and it was night. All the city’s lights were shining, car headlights bounced off closed storefronts, and the moon hovered at forty-five degrees. She blinked again, and it was day. The cabbie was only a few words further into his travelogue, and no one else had moved.
That was the worst one, but there had been others. More green mist drifting and swirling into shapes. A curb that seemed to disappear from under her feet, sending her stumbling into a—thankfully stationary—bus. A glimpse of…something out on the airplane wing, something that had been there long enough to convince her she saw it and gone before she knew whether or not it was real. Whatever it was, it definitely had wings.
“I don’t know.” She shoved her hands into her hair. “I get these weird…reality shifts.” That sounded better to her, more fantastical than frightening, than calling them what they really were. “They’re quick. Like flashes. I thought they were because of my injuries and fatigue, but they haven’t stopped.”
“You’re talking about hallucinations.” Riley’s voice rose. “It’s got to be the flux. Marley, you can’t—”
“Shh!” Marley moved her hand up and down. She didn’t want Sam and Gage to hear what they were saying. “Keep this between us.”
“No way!” But she’d dropped her volume. “You know what happened to Anson when he took in foreign energy and lost it. What happened to Quinn, and Sam—”
“That was different!” Marley had to bring her own tone down. “That was all due to live energy. Do you see live energy in me?” She held her breath, not sure what answer she wanted to hear.
Riley’s eyes unfocused and she tapped her lower lip before shaking her head. “No. I don’t see any energy at all. But you’re different. You don’t buzz or prickle like those with power do, but you don’t have the same low vibration of regular people. I could pick you out of a crowd of thousands.”
It al
most sounded like a compliment but felt more like a diagnosis of a brand-new disease. No, She couldn’t start thinking like that. “So it can’t be what’s causing these flashes. Maybe I’m just cracking up,” she tried to joke. “Too isolated for too long? Too much time in the company of a guy who never talked?” Whoa. Trying to lighten the mood just totally backfired. Her next indrawn breath shook and faltered, and of course, Riley saw it.
“You cared about him.” All judgment was absent from her tone, but Marley knew it was there, anyway. It didn’t matter. She judged herself for it, after all.
“Surprisingly, yeah.” She sank onto the end of the bed. It sagged halfway to the floor, unsupported by a frame that was obviously too short for the mattress. This was going to be fun to sleep on. “Not the same way I did originally, of course. Our relationship—the new one—was never emotional. It was all practicality. Common goals and all that.” Unless she’d read him wrong, and every indication was that she had, one way or another. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“Yeah, and he almost took you with him.” Riley paced in front of her. “How stupid was he, to take Cressida on himself?”
“He knew her,” Marley said.
“I know. Quinn told me everything you told her. But did he know it was her before he went in?”
“He told her he didn’t, but after Sam gave us his name, how could he not? Unless he knew her by a different name before.”
Riley whirled on her. “You wanted him to leech her, didn’t you?”
She wouldn’t feel guilty for that. “That wasn’t the plan. I considered it but never said it out loud. It shouldn’t have been possible for him to receive energy anyway, and if he could, the risks were too high.”
“Maybe you should have talked about it and then not let him go in there at all. He never should have had access to that much power.”
Marley stood. “What do you think I am? Stupid? I’d have nullified him immediately. He wouldn’t have had a chance to go on a rampage.”
Sunroper (Goddesses Rising) Page 21
