“Nope.” “I’ll shield you, you bastard. They’ll think I’m talking to a guest.”
“Thanks, but I can handle myself.”
“No point riling them. Not yet, anyhow.”
Since the sight of two men staring at each other in silence might give an onlooker a clue, Jay turned back to vocal speech. Unless the stable behind them was wired, nobody would overhear them. “Found anything?”
Nathan shook his head. “No more than yesterday.” He looked relieved.
Jay returned to the first point. “What were you hiding? Do you know something?”
Nathan gazed at the clear blue sky as if it would give him inspiration. “Nothing you really want to know. But yeah, I do. I knew her mother. In the biblical sense.”
“What?” Jay’s turn to look away. “You fucked her? When?”
“Last month.”
“Fuck, man, are you kidding me?” Not possible. “Lucille’s mother is one of the…people we’re looking for. I assumed she was dead, killed by the cell.”
“You can give that up. She’s as alive as we are.”
“How do you know for sure?” He was clutching at straws now.
Nathan grimaced. “When I saw that gorgeous bush for the first time. Lucille’s mother keeps a tuft at the front. Sure, she’s not the only woman in the world with blazing-red hair, so I didn’t think anything of it. There are other similarities.” He paused and waved a hand dismissively. “Never mind that. They have the same family sigil.”
“And you’re telling me you only recognized that last night?”
Nathan jerked a nod. “I never read Lucille before then.”
“You should have stopped it, man.” He’d take a swing at the shithead if he said any more about last night.
Nathan shrugged. “I didn’t put it all together until it was too late. I didn’t check the sigil until then.”
Jay held his temper in with an effort. “Tell me about Lucille’s mother.” He needed to know. He’d assumed the cell had murdered her mother and father. Their disappearance, so quickly, and with no contact, wasn’t down to the Thorndykes; he’d already ascertained that. Was her father alive too?
“Trixie Allardyce she calls herself. She told me she’d gotten bored with the country. She didn’t say which country.” His mouth settled into a straight line. “Fuck, I didn’t realize until well into our scene, and by then I couldn’t have stopped if you’d cut my dick off.”
Jay was coming down from his fury. He really needed to know this. How the fuck could he tell Lucille about this? “Go on.”
Nathan wiped his hand down his face, the bristle from a day’s growth rasping against his palm. “She’s a madam, one of the biggest organizations in New York. Other Talents mainly. They enjoy slumming, as they put it. That was why— Never mind. We connected when I visited New York on business, just a pickup in a bar, I thought. Didn’t think anything more of it until she tried to recruit my clubs and me. Not my scene.”
Jay was fast putting the clues together in his head. Red hair, recent soaring fame, or rather, notoriety, eyes as blue as a Texan summer sky—shit. She’d just featured in a notorious court case. How had Lucille missed that? Then he understood.
Likely she’d looked much different here in Taken. Older, for a start. And Trixie had the Dita Von Teese thing going, all fifties glamour. She wouldn’t have here either. So even if Lucille had seen the news, the glamorous woman with half her face covered in sunglasses might not have registered. He’d never seen a photo of Lucille’s mother when she lived in Taken. She didn’t have her parents’ photos displayed in her apartment, probably more of that fucking security they’d instilled in Lucille and Drew. “I thought the name was vaguely familiar.”
Nathan nodded. “That one. The one accused of exploiting third-world immigrants. Of course she fucking did. They weren’t as young as she was making out. A hundred years old masquerading as thirteen.”
Jay growled low. “But she brought attention to the Talented community, and a shitload of people were nearly outed. Do you know what kind of traffic we’ve been seeing recently? The cells are going insane.”
“Yep. She said she needed to make money. She was sick of having nothing, and this was the fastest way. I never imagined. So what do we do now?”
Jay scratched his head. “Fuck knows.”
“I say we don’t tell Lucille. What good would it do?”
Jay could see the advantage in that, at least while they were searching for her father. That was the coward’s way out, and he wouldn’t do that. He just had to work out how to tell her. “She needs to know. She’s no child.”
“Naive.”
“Maybe. But it’s her right to know. I’ll tell her.” His heart sank.
A guide arrived back, laughing and joking with the two women he had in tow. One of them, obviously a beginner, probably never sat on a horse in her life before. When she saw the two men standing by the hitching rail, she nearly fell off her slow and steady horse. The guy with them hastily dismounted and reached for her. She fell into his arms and made a great fuss, grabbing at him while her companion sat on her mount and sniggered.
“Fuck,” Jay said softly. “I thought you were shielding me.”
“I don’t have a cloak of invisibility. I just ensured the Wheelers wouldn’t recognize you. She can still see you, you dick.”
Jay grinned. “Hard graft, this ranching. I’m glad I decided to pay somebody to do it for me.”
“I’m glad I won’t be doing it long.”
Sighing, Nathan went forward to help the other woman. Seeing her friend’s success, she did the same thing, but this time on purpose. She slid off the horse, giving Nathan the choice of letting her plummet to the ground or of catching her. While not what Jay would call a gentleman, Nathan opted for the latter. Jay still felt like punching him out.
Or someone or something. That fucking animal looked too complacent for his liking.
Thinking of Lucille and her mother, he stepped away from the stable so the staff could deal with the horses and the women. He was sure the women were the main liability, and he was proved right. The horses stood waiting their turn while the women giggled and squealed. He was smiling when he got the tingle that shouldn’t be here.
Lucille. When he checked with her, he found her still asleep, peacefully unconscious in his bed back at his ranch. He sent her a warm touch but then returned and tried again.
He sensed a Talent with a signature he knew. Only a nudge, but there. He didn’t have his full faculties. He needed help. “Link with me. Feel what I’m feeling.”
Still wrestling with the woman in his arms, Nathan jerked his head infinitesimally but showed no other outward sign. Inside, Jay felt him enter, search, and take what he needed to add his more powerful psi senses to Jay’s. “You know her better. The signature isn’t the one I picked up yesterday, but this one is stronger. Give me a minute.”
Nathan got rid of his burden by the simple expedience of picking her up and carrying her into the barn. Whatever she expected them to do in there, it wasn’t Nathan making a fast exit, because Jay heard the squeals as he left her. “I’ve given her a light binding. She’ll be clumsy for the next few minutes.”
With a nod to his colleague, who gave him a grimace, he shrugged and moved away with Jay. Swiftly they strode around the building, and both realized the signal was stronger here. Without a word, they spread out, and Nathan held up a hand and beckoned. They both sensed it now.
“Alive or dead?” Nathan asked.
“No fucking idea.”
With several backtracks, they made progress until eventually the signal became too strong to assess. That was the trouble with psi senses. A close signal was even and regular, no way to evaluate its precise location. They’d reached a field with a group of trees to one side, planted to shelter the cattle, he guessed, from the heat of the sun. A road ran about half a mile away, and more scrub and trees lay in that direction. One building, a small barn. He set out f
or that.
Empty except for straw. Golden light gleamed through the planks that had shrunk with the sun, the atmosphere peaceful. “What do we do now?”
Nathan started to strip off his clothes. “I’ll go up. Maybe I can see something from the air.”
He ran out of the barn, already shape-shifting. Scales raced over his skin, greenish-blue with silver overtones. His jaw elongated, his legs transformed, his hands turning to claws, his body tilting forward. As soon as he had his wings, he took to the air, sweeping up and fuzzing at the same time.
Jay fought the blurring of his mind and prowled the barn, more of a shed from its size. A few feed sacks lay in one corner, and he sensed mortal activity there, but apart from that, nothing except that maddening presence that reminded him of Lucille. But it was not her, now that he could pick up more of it. Subtly different in a way he couldn’t define. He did a physical search. Then he did another mental one.
Then Nathan was back, grabbing his clothes and dressing swiftly. “Come on. I saw something.”
“What?”
“Someone’s disturbed the earth here.”
Jay grabbed a piece of jagged wood from a corner of the building that needed repair and raced after his colleague. The place Nathan had seen was across the field, around half a mile away, but they made the spot fast. It didn’t look remarkable to Jay, just tamped-down earth under a small thicket of trees.
Nathan partially shifted, extending his forearms to claws, and Jay just dug. He couldn’t have spotted the difference, but from the air Nathan would have seen better. His extra-sharp sight in his dragon form would have enabled him to spot any small disturbance in the earth.
They worked in silence, keeping all their energy to dig. After ten minutes the first evidence emerged. Soil-covered bones, mute witnesses to the evil that had been done to them.
Jay and Nathan scraped the dirt away from the complete skeleton, working in silence. Shreds of clothing clung to the body, blue material, probably jeans and a T-shirt, probably fashioned at least partly of artificial fabric, which was why it hadn’t rotted away completely.
Dead, one human being looked very much like another. The extra organ vampires possessed rotted away with the rest of the soft tissue. But the fangs remained. This skeleton had fangs, retracted into the tooth buds, but there. This vampire had made it to nighttime before they’d killed him.
Jay stood back and studied the rusted brown arrangement of bones. “He was killed somewhere else. Otherwise where are the shoes?” Nathan said. Anger gnawed at his insides.
Nathan swallowed. “No wallet or belt. Nothing to immediately identify the body.”
They didn’t need it. When they revealed the corpse, it had released the last of its psi, the lingering trace of the sigil that identified it, and the biology that Jay found unmistakable.
“This is Lucille’s father.”
He sat heavily by the body while Nathan prowled the area. “He’s not the only one. There are others here, at least six.”
“Do you think Trixie did it?”
“If it was just one, I’d say possibly, with regret. She could have done it in a temper. Trixie has a hell of a temper. But not all these. No, this was the result of a cell going hunting. I don’t know who the other bodies are. I have to contact Cristos, but he’s shorthanded.”
“He’s always shorthanded.”
Nathan raised a brow. “I didn’t realize you knew him.”
Jay gave a dismissive wave of one hand. “Everybody knows Cristos. I should have known about these fucks, stopped them.” He frowned. “Would Trixie have run because she found out about the cell?”
Nathan shook his head. “Not a chance, not and leave her kids here. She showed no guilt when I—when we—oh shit, you know. She’s a passionate woman, a lot of fun, but she’s not a sociopath. Just careless and hungry. She’d have left the kids with her husband, thinking they were safe. Only they weren’t.”
“No.” Jay got to his feet. “They attacked Lucille the first night I met her. The neckcloth I bound her with had silver in it. I’m not allergic, so I didn’t realize, but I never use silver, so someone planted that cloth on me. Then her brother was shot with a silver bullet. They know, all right. About Drew, but not about me, because I’m not allergic to silver. If anyone saw Lucille’s reaction to the binding, then they know about her too.” He paused. “The boy said nothing. They kept him for three days, tortured him, shot him, but he said nothing.”
Drew could remember very little because of the drugs they’d pumped into him, but he’d allowed Jay to search his mind, and Jay had found that nugget. He ached for the boy. Drew had gone through all that and not cried for help or called out mentally. He’d thought his sister would come running. He hadn’t known Jay was living close and could have helped.
Nathan watched him.
“We should take him to Lucille and let her give him a proper funeral,” Jay said.
“You know we can’t,” Nathan said. “Not yet, anyhow. If they discover he’s gone, that will tip them off. We’ll come back for him when it’s over.”
What he said made sense. Jay scooped up a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over what was left of Lucille’s father. “Rest well, brother.” He stared down at the grave, sending a silent blessing before he began to fill it in and restore it to what it had been before they’d started digging. Nathan joined him, backfilling the four-feet-deep hole they’d made. Jay’s hands were bleeding and covered with splinters from the scrap of wood he’d used to dig with, but he ignored the stinging pain. It didn’t matter.
By the time they finished, he could sense the onset of dusk. Lucille was awake. When she sent him a message asking where he was, he told her he’d had an errand to run, and he’d let her know when he got back.
Before he went, he sat by the side of the grave and dropped his head, resting his forehead on his knees.
Nathan talked, and Jay listened. “Lucille and Drew will have to move on, and you can’t help them. You’re too closely associated with her, and if you move her on yourself, you’ll risk your whole operation.”
“I know.” He lifted his head and stared up at the branches above them and the way the setting sun shot filters of orange-red through to the grove. A beautiful peace lay here, but one enforced on its occupants. He’d tell Cristos, who’d take care of the bodies, identify them if he could. “I want these bastards. They’ve hurt me and mine, and I will avenge that.”
“Spoken like a true vampire, all passion and bloody-mindedness.”
“Seems appropriate.” His words were mild, but hatred bloomed in his heart. He knew, as did Nathan, who was responsible for this slaughter. Whatever it cost him, they would pay. “The team can clean up after I’m done, but the Wheelers belong to me.”
Nathan nodded. “It’s your right. I’ll help. It could be messy. You might have to start a new life.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” He didn’t care as long as he could keep Lucille with him. If she still wanted him after seeing his uglier side.
“There are six in the family. We’re assuming that’s the cell, since they don’t get much bigger.”
“How about Ryan?”
Nathan sighed. “We’ve both read him. I can’t find anything that suggests he knows about us. That time we faced off in the bar, he only wanted to break us up. I’d hoped to trap him then, get some emotion out of him, but he didn’t bite.”
“I’ve researched him.” Jay scuffed a pattern on the dry earth with the toe of his boot. “He wasn’t the best-behaved kid, and he ended up going to military school. After that he joined the army, had a respectable though not distinguished career. That means he spent a lot of time away from home. He seems to be like Michael in The Godfather, the kid the family keeps straight so they have someone to be proud of.”
Nathan regarded him, eyes narrowed. “And Ryan wants Lucille. That doesn’t make sense. A PHR member would kill himself before he went near a filthy Talent. They call us perverts.”
“Okay. Think about this.” Nathan concentrated on Jay now. “You have to be sure, Jay. And you have to be ruthless. Nobody can get away. Except for one, and whoever that is will wish he or she had gone with the rest.”
“What are you talking about?” he demanded irritably.
“The Department likes to keep one back for questioning. If we—they—get lucky. It’s one of the daisies, a link to lead us to the next cell. If not, that person still gets their mind stripped. Do you know what it’s like for that to happen? Every layer peeled away and carefully examined? That’s if they don’t cooperate. Few of them talk before, but after, we don’t need them to talk. Their minds do it for them.”
The process sounded good to Jay. Lucille had left only a trace of herself in his mind, that part he was growing to need rather than want. He suspected they were bonding. Unlike suck and fuck that faded over time, bonding was for life.
That touch brought his human side back to him, the compassionate part he hadn’t bothered with before he met her. “Is the procedure really necessary?”
Nathan nodded in affirmation. “They’re trained to hide their thoughts, and the information they hold could save many more lives, Talented and otherwise. Sorcerers do it.”
Jay shuddered at the thought of the most powerful beings on earth. Their extreme psi senses made them both vulnerable and powerful, and they kept their emotions at bay, deeming them dangerous. The scariest person he had ever encountered was a virgin Sorcerer who’d decided to focus everything she was on her psi senses. She could kill with a thought, destroy cities with more effort. If she wanted to.
The notion of someone like that in charge of dissecting a human mind forced even Jay to pause and regret what he’d vowed to do. Then he thought of this grove, and more like it. “They select the vulnerable among us. The young, the weak, the reckless.”
“They do. You can’t let a cell go, Jay. If you can’t do this, then pass the job to the professionals.”
“I might not be a member of some kick-ass secret service,” Jay said through gritted teeth, “but I have experience in killing. I’ve served in most of the major wars of my lifetime. I know how to kill a man more ways than most people realize exist. That includes the ones that have trained in destroying Talents. We need a plan, and we need to do this fast, before they realize we’ve recognized them. Before they recognize us as Talents.”
The Thorndykes 1: Dispossessed Page 15
