“But you won’t,” she finished for me, sighing in disappointment. But it didn’t last long. Her eye caught on Sam and she straightened. “What about you, Sam? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Sam assured her with a tight smile, but I knew Edie wasn’t convinced. “Have you found Koby?”
Edie offered a tight expression. “We have a team searching for him now.” Sam paled but Edie added, “We’ll find him. I promise you.”
Sam was silent, still tense and taut beside me, so I cleared my throat. “Did you get a chance to sit down with our friend RJ?”
Edie frowned. “No. He’s gone.”
I leaned forward. “Gone where?” I asked, my voice rising. Truthfully, I hadn’t expected CHAS to have him but I had hoped …
“We caught his trail soon after he fled, but it disappeared in town. I’m thinking public transportation, but no way of knowing for sure.”
I opened my mouth to point out the fact that CHAS had resources almost equal to the top government intelligence agencies, but she held up a hand. “I know what you’re going to say and we did locate him thanks to a very strong theory. We’re waiting to gather some more information before we move in.”
“A theory?” I echoed, my brows rising.
“A strong theory from some very insightful friends,” she corrected. I looked over the rim of the screen to see Jin’s lips quirk, and Edie paused. “Who else is there with you?” she asked.
“Some very insightful friends,” I shot back.
Sam was already tensing again, and I pulled her closer to reassure her. “Edie, if you know anything about what happened at that house—”
“According to Winters’ debrief, I know everything,” she put in.
“Breck is with you then?” Sam asked, leaning in toward the screen.
“He and Brittany both are,” Edie told her gently. “They’re doing just fine. Filling us in on everything we missed.”
Sam let out a breath. I didn’t bother to point out that Edie’s simple words really meant they were being detained and interrogated. And that “missed” really meant everything we’d done against official orders since the day Sam and the others had broken me out of custody.
I nodded at Edie. “Good. If you know the whole story then you can understand why I can’t tell you where we are. It’s not you I don’t trust.”
She groaned, but I could tell her frustration wasn’t with me now. “I know. The agency’s been compromised. We don’t know if it goes any further, but I can promise you we will find out soon enough and when we do, I will hunt down every last traitor I find—inside the agency and out.”
“We appreciate that,” I said.
Edie’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t appreciate too much. Breck and Brittany have told a very interesting story. And they’re not done yet. I’ll be in town cleaning things up for the next few days, but you two shouldn’t expect a warm welcome if you try to come to us for sanctuary.”
I’d suspected as much. “We aren’t asking for that. We just want to know where RJ is.”
She didn’t answer or even register my words. Her eyes narrowed as she seemed to look past me to the room visible in the background. “Edie. Our location—”
“Relax,” she said, blinking and refocusing on me again with a too-casual smile. “You’re safe for as long as you’re off the grid there.”
There.
She knew where we were.
Dammit.
“In the meantime,” she said, going on before I could think of a response to the secret between us, “I’d love for you to hear our theory on RJ from the source.”
“The source?” I repeated, trying to think who in the hell could have figured out where he might have gone before us—
“Someone you know well. Sam’s aunt Kiwi, actually. And Mirabelle, the Oracle.”
“The crazy aunts?” I asked before I could catch myself.
Sam shot me a look. “Kiwi knows where RJ is?” Sam asked.
“We just received satellite confirmation an hour ago.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Let me get Kiwi and Mirabelle,” she said and then looked at Sam pointedly. “They can explain it better than I can.”
“Tell them I—” Sam began, but Edie had already disappeared.
In the empty space she’d vacated were the non-descript furnishings of a hotel room: a chair upholstered in a paisley print, and behind that, a curtain to match beside generic wall art.
Sam gripped my hand. “Do you think she knows where we are?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” I told her honestly.
“Do you think she’ll report it?”
“No.”
Over the rim of the screen, Safar and Jin shared a look that felt full of some conversation I couldn’t decipher. Finally, they broke their stare and went back to sipping their tea.
There was shuffling and then the screen shook on Edie’s end. A hand appeared, swiveling a second chair into view beside the first. Then bodies. Two women sat and I got a clear look at their faces. One had a mess of dark waves that looked windblown and mussed from running a hand through it too many times. The other, Mirabelle, wore a banana-print bandanna that covered her hair and was pulled low on her forehead. It was a look I hadn’t seen before—but that didn’t surprise me. Not where Mirabelle was concerned.
“Aunt Kiwi! Mirabelle,” Sam said and I knew, again, she had fully returned to herself at the clear relief and affection in her voice.
“Hello, Samantha,” Kiwi said, smiling though her eyes were ringed in circles.
Mirabelle smiled at Sam and then sobered as she stared at me. “You’re wounded.”
I didn’t even bother to ask how she knew. These women officially scared me when it came to knowing things and also how to predict what they’d offer to share. Usually, it was very little in the way of anything concrete or helpful, so it surprised me that they’d been the ones to locate RJ. Not to mention that Edie had decided to let them brief us on anything involving this case.
“Yes,” I said simply—because simple was best with Mirabelle.
“Jin took care of it then,” she said and my jaw fell open before I quickly closed it again and tried not to look surprised or rattled.
Damn. She was good.
“Edie says you two figured out where RJ has gone,” I said.
“We figured out more than that,” Kiwi said. “Sam, how are you? It’s been ages.”
“It’s been two weeks,” Sam said with a crooked smile.
Kiwi shrugged. “Exactly.”
“I’m okay. We’re … just shocked,” Sam admitted.
“About RJ,” Kiwi supplied and Sam nodded.
“I didn’t—” Sam began. “I mean, we should have seen it—”
“There was nothing to see. RJ hid his power and connection to Ea from us very carefully. We all missed it. Not just you. So don’t beat yourself up,” Kiwi said, her voice fierce with the conviction of her words. I appreciated someone else adding their words to this argument. Maybe she’d hear it better coming from her aunt, though I doubted it.
“This isn’t about guilt or blame, Sam. But if you’re going to understand, you must see this with more than your eyes,” Mirabelle said.
I bit back a question about whether she’d been drinking her own tea, because, really, a sentence like that was normal for these ladies. But still. Could we have a conversation about intel that involved practical intelligence? “Seeing with more than my eyes” was too much for my pain-addled brain to comprehend just now.
“Okay,” Sam said, squaring her shoulders as if bracing herself—or as if determined to solve a particularly hard puzzle which was apt for the situation. “What have you learned?”
“Well, Edie first looped us in a few hours after that showdown at RJ’s house. When we learned what he was, we about had double heart-attacks as you can imagine. We never saw it in him, all that time he was in Guam and at the store or the house. We really doubted our own s
ight, and you know for us, that’s saying something. I remember this one time in Key West when I was in college, and the sight led me to a small watering hole just north of—”
“Kiwi,” I cut in. “With all due respect, we’d like to hear the facts of the current situation.”
“Right. Sorry,” she said. “We knew there had to be a reason he’d been able to fool us all for so long. A way to misdirect Ea’s power.”
“Like using Indra,” I said.
“Similarly, yes. He clearly recruited her to be his eyes and ears—”
“Hands, actually,” I put in but Kiwi’s brows dipped.
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Continue.”
“Right then. Like I was saying, using Indra didn’t diminish his own possession of Ea’s essence,” Kiwi went on.
“He’s always been the vessel,” Mirabelle said, looking downright pissed about it.
“Right,” Kiwi agreed. “But now that he’s been outed, he needs to seat his power.”
That got my attention. It was the same wording Jin had used about Sam’s merge. Something to root the power and let her merge with the goddess so she didn’t lose herself.
“Wait. RJ needs to merge?” I asked.
“Precisely,” Kiwi said.
“Someone’s been doing his homework,” Mirabelle sang under her breath.
Kiwi didn’t answer that and continued. “So we began investigating all the ways he might have accomplished this and then we paired that with easily accessible retreats for him to complete the merge based on your location of that house.”
“Not a lot to go on,” I said. “There are a ton of places to hide within a night’s drive.”
“True but then we went inside the house,” Kiwi said.
“No. You went inside,” Mirabelle corrected. “I will never step foot in that hole.” She shuddered and I knew it wasn’t just for effect.
“I can’t blame you there,” Kiwi said and her expression became strained. I wondered what the heck they’d seen in that house. “Anyway, we found some items that helped us narrow down our ideas.”
“The sea creatures,” Sam said and Kiwi nodded.
“You saw them?” Kiwi asked.
“What sea creatures?” I echoed.
“The jars he stored in the room I used to heal things,” Sam said quietly, and I searched my memory for what she was talking about.
“His sister’s science experiments?” I asked.
“Those weren’t his sister’s and they weren’t for science,” Mirabelle said, mouth twisting in clear disgust.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Those were ritual items to hide the power of the ocean god,” Kiwi said.
“And also,” Kiwi put in, her gaze flicking to someone off-camera as if asking for permission to share, “RJ doesn’t have a sister.”
“Well, he did, but she died years ago,” Mirabelle corrected.
“Okay, what the—” I couldn’t even keep up anymore. We were bouncing around so fast and far … and my shoulder was killing me. Exhaustion from the pain was overwhelming, and I knew I didn’t have a ton of time left before my thoughts muddied and I lost the ability to wade through all their side trips as they tried to explain. “We’ll get to the thing you just said,” I told them. “For now, can you please just tell us where RJ is?”
“Of course,” Kiwi said, her voice softening and I wondered how bad I must look. Probably exactly how I felt.
Sam laid a hand on my arm. “Do you want to do this later?”
“No, I want to get to the damned point,” I said.
She nodded and turned back to the screen. “Kiwi,” she prompted. “What did you figure out at the house? Where is RJ?”
“Simple.” She shrugged. “He needed an energy point.”
Right. So fucking simple. I pinched the bridge of my nose against the headache that pounded harder and harder the longer I had to think.
“Why an energy point?” Sam asked.
“What the hell is an energy point?” I asked, but Kiwi ignored me and watched Sam pointedly.
“Think about it,” Kiwi said. “Where in the world have you most easily connected with the goddess?”
“Mount Lamlam,” Sam said, eyes widening. “A spiritual energy point,” she added, turning to me.
I raised both brows to let her know I still had no idea what the hell she was talking about.
Kiwi nodded. “Precisely. We outlined all of the possible energy points on this map.” She held up a world map printed in black and white. Several red dots decorated the continents, and I leaned in, trying to read their locations as Kiwi went on, “Based on the timeline since we last saw him in Oregon, and what we found at the house, we guessed he’d choose Mount Shasta—and we were right.”
“Mount Shasta?” I struggled to think. “Isn’t that a volcano?”
“Dormant but yes.” Kiwi nodded. “It’s also one of the Earth’s most powerful chakra energy points.”
I looked back and forth between Kiwi and Mirabelle who was still stoic and unsmiling about it all. “And chakras are…?”
“On a physical level, they are seven points in the body that house spiritual energy,” Kiwi explained. “Root, sacral, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye, and crown.” She pointed with her finger to various parts of her body as she spoke, illustrating where each one of them lived.
I shook my head, forcing my thoughts to remain clear through the burning in my shoulder. “And how does a physical location on the earth fit with chakras?”
“These locations—which are known as energy points—correlate with the body’s energetic chakras in the vibration they offer. It is thought that just by standing in their location, you can feel an electromagnetic energy that will allow you to align with the specific vibration your body needs to grow and evolve.”
“And Mount Shasta matches which one of these?”
“The root,” Kiwi said. “A place used to ground oneself. Spiritually speaking, it is known as the locational access point to our higher selves. For New Age Christians, it is said to be the place where you can reach the presence of God himself.”
Sam and I exchanged a look.
“RJ will use it to tap into Ea,” I said, and deep down I knew this was it. Mount Shasta was the last piece of this giant puzzle that was RJ. That was where the rest of his power would lie. He’d literally hidden it there in order to fly underneath our radar—and now he’d gone to retrieve it.
“We have to get there,” I heard Sam saying and my head came up.
I grabbed her wrist to keep her from shoving to her feet. “No.”
She turned to me in surprise and even Kiwi fell silent. I sat up, wincing at the stabbing it caused in my shoulder. “It’s what he’ll expect and probably even hope for. But if what Kiwi says is true and Shasta magnifies his connection to Ea, it’s not the best play.” I looked at Sam. “Not until you get a handle on your own goddess.”
Sam frowned, but she didn’t argue.
Kiwi’s gaze sharpened and she turned to study Sam. “Are you having complications with the goddess?”
Sam sighed and threw me an accusatory glare. “No. It’s not very complicated at all, really. I’m just becoming Hina—a lot faster than I’d like.”
The two older witches shared a knowing look that wasn’t nearly as surprised as it should be at the news Sam had just shared. Kiwi sighed. “We should have found a way to perform the merge already, but we thought we had more time. We do want to apologize for sending you off so ill-prepared for this.”
“It was Kiwi’s idea,” Mirabelle put in.
I rolled my eyes, but Sam was frowning and edging forward, and I knew they had her full attention. “Kiwi,” Sam warned. “What have you kept from me?”
“We didn’t lie and it’s important you understand that we did what we thought would protect you—”
Sam cut Kiwi off. “Kiwi!”
“All right, all right,” she muttered.
> But Mirabelle leaned in, cutting off anyone else as her voice boomed. “You are a witch, Sam. A supernatural being. And we knew that would make you a target to forces you don’t yet understand. We’ve kept certain details from you—from both of you—to preserve your innocence should things not go our way with the board.”
Sam shook her head. “What does the board have to do with any of this?”
“Everything,” Mirabelle said in a growl.
“Although, today, nothing,” Kiwi added sadly. “I’m afraid we’ve done all we can here to convince them to allow witches their official—and rightful—place at the table. But once again, CHAS has voted against it. We are not welcome.”
“And so we must fade back into the shadows as we have always done,” Mirabelle said. “Living apart and between.”
“But there is no hope for you to fade, Sam,” Kiwi said and desperation leaked into her expression. Worry. Fear.
And I understood. “With Hina inside her, the power makes her a target.”
Kiwi nodded. “Yes. Not just for Hunters who are threatened; there are other creatures too.” I wanted to ask what creatures she meant—she’d already covered the three I knew existed: Hunters, werewolves, and witches. What else did she think there was? But then she kept going and I put it aside. “But more than that, we wanted a seat at the table to allow witches to move in larger numbers without being disrupted by CHAS.”
“You asked them to lift the travel ban?” I guessed.
Kiwi nodded. “They denied us.”
“But why? Where do you want them to go?” Sam asked.
“By now, Jin will have spoken to you about the merge,” Mirabelle said and I scowled at her easy use of the name of our host. Our location was supposed to be a secret, but subtlety wasn’t something these women were good at.
“Safar told me a little,” Sam said. “What does the merge have to do with the ban on witches travelling?”
“Your rooting,” I said, recalling Safar and Jin’s conversation—and everything clicked into place. “They wanted to use the power of a large number of witches to seat your power.” I grimaced—both at the lost opportunity the witches provided and at the pain in my shoulder that had just gone from bad to worse.
Defiance (Heart Lines Series Book 5) Page 4
