It was a rare ability, but it shouldn’t be enough for him to run circles around me like he was now.
“No one’s going to find out I was here,” I said through gritted teeth. “Because I’m going to smash your head into pulp.”
More laughter. My blood boiled.
I delivered a swift roundhouse kick. It took apart the bedpost, but I also felt the give of human skin.
“Mierda,” the man groaned. “That hurt.”
“That was the point, moron.”
I pounced. There was the distinct sound of flesh meeting titanium. I heard the rustle of clothes. The man bucked and writhed beneath me, but I was immovable.
If it wasn’t for the smallest changes in his coloring, I would have sworn I was wrestling with someone invisible. My vision just caught the way his body made subtle adjustments to blend into his surroundings. His head, which was crushed against the wall, was the same green color as the paint. His feet were camouflaged perfectly with the floorboards.
“Give me the envelope,” I demanded, roughly searching the man for the feel of paper.
“You know,” he taunted, seemingly unconcerned that he was pinned by a Steel. “Normally, I’m all about the foreplay. But I’m in a bit of a hurry right now.”
At that moment, I felt the crumple of the envelope. I yanked it out of his pocket.
“Ha!”
I slammed my fist at the Chameleon. Instead of connecting with the man’s skull as I’d intended, my punch went right through the wall.
“Better luck next time,” the man’s laughing voice said. Impossibly, it sounded like it was coming from the ceiling.
“Come here,” I ordered the insufferable Chameleon, not really expecting him to obey. If I could just get a lock on his voice….
“My pleasure, cariño.”
I searched through the cobwebbed recesses of my high school Spanish vocabulary lists for the translation.
Darling? Oh, hell no.
The breath whooshed out of my body as the man’s feet connected with my back. I slammed to the floor.
Wooden boards cracked beneath me. I felt no pain, unless a bruised ego counted.
“How did you—” I began, when the envelope was pulled from my hands once again.
I screamed in rage as the man’s weight—and the envelope—were gone.
“That’s mine, you bastard!”
I saw the man’s profile as his body flickered from the green of the bedroom wall to dark shadows. He slipped out the door and into the hallway.
I don’t think so, buddy.
Two leaps closed the distance between us. I tackled him.
We collided, but my momentum was too much for either of us to stop. We tumbled down the staircase, locked together.
A multitude of Spanish curses flew out of the man’s mouth before we hit the ground floor. I came out on top, straddling the man who now blended into the oriental rug.
“Dios, you’re heavy,” he wheezed.
“I’ll have you know titanium is far lighter than most metals, and forty-five percent lighter than actual steel.” I settled my weight more firmly on my camouflaged opponent, making sure to put pressure on his lungs. “And haven’t you heard it’s the unwritten fourth high law to call a girl fat? Most women would tear your head off before you even finished your sentence. Lucky for you, I’m not most women.”
“I’ll say,” the man replied, still struggling for breath.
I bent lower to feel for the envelope. That was when I caught a familiar scent on the man’s skin. Cinnamon.
“It was you,” I said in disbelief, as he squirmed and slapped ineffectively at me in a pathetic attempt to free himself. “You’re the one who’s been digging up the graves.”
I felt, rather than saw, his surprise. For a second, he stopped fighting me.
“It’s bad to litter,” I informed him, taking advantage of his momentary stillness to reclaim the envelope.
As I waited for the man’s comeback, I realized I was unnecessarily prolonging our fight…because I was having fun. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fought someone who could actually give me a run for my money.
It must have been Brent, when I was five and he was fifteen…and he only beat me because he took advantage of my ticklishness.
“What are you talking about?” the man replied. The teasing in his voice had been replaced by wariness.
“The gum wrapper you left in the cemetery,” I told him as I got to my feet. I yanked him up with me by his shirt.
The man laughed.
“Pretty and clever. You are full of surprises, Bri Hammond.”
“You forgot strong.” I didn’t wait before kneeing where I estimated his groin was.
I missed.
There was a tearing sound, and I was left staring at a scrap of black fabric in my hand.
“Too slow again,” the man’s voice taunted from the ceiling.
That was all the warning I got before I was shoved against a stone fireplace. The Chameleon grabbed for the envelope in my hand as I crashed into the cinderblocks. The envelope tore in half.
“Give that back!”
He shoved me again. My body surged straight through a support beam in the wall. The whole house shuddered.
“Ugh.” I picked sticky, pink insulation off my titanium skin.
I’d just made it back into the ravaged foyer, when I felt the brush of the Chameleon’s sleeve. I didn’t wait. I shoved him.
Bricks crumbled, followed by a waft of cold breeze. A man-sized hole appeared in the side of the house.
Time to wrap this up, I told myself. Someone was bound to notice that a man had just fallen out of Pruwist’s house…if they hadn’t already heard all the crashing around.
The next time the Chameleon came at me, I stopped searching for him with my eyes. I felt for the crackling energy of his magic. I closed my eyes and breathed in the hint of cinnamon. Then, I lunged.
Before my limbs could connect with his vitals, the man caught my waist. He pinned me against the wall.
I could have thrown him off. Instead, I froze.
I couldn’t see him, but I felt every place where his body pressed against mine. His warm breath fanned across my cheek. I smelled cinnamon and sweat.
“Lose the titanium,” he said in a soft voice, his lips brushing my ear. “You’d enjoy this so much more if you could really feel me.”
I didn’t get hot or cold when I was titanium, and yet, a shiver went through me. Clearly, it had been a while since I’d been pressed up against a man.
“Ass,” I told him.
I struck out with my fist and connected. The man slumped to the ground.
Two things happened at once. My friends burst through the hole in the wall. And the man on the floor lost his camouflage.
“Ohmygod,” Yutika gasped, clutching her chest. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I said. I was breathing hard, too. It was something that rarely happened to me when I was titanium.
“Who in the world is this guy?” A.J. asked, bending over to inspect the man on the floor.
I stared down at my attacker, getting my first glimpse of the Chameleon without his magic.
His golden-brown skin and dark, wavy hair spoke to Latino heritage. He had the shadow of a beard that couldn’t mask the damage I’d done to his cheek and jaw. Blood trickled across skin that was already swollen and bruising.
I would have called him rugged, except his eyelashes were too long and his lips too full. His biceps swelled against the sleeves of his black T-shirt. The torn part of his shirt exposed a serious set of abs.
Damn.
I dragged my gaze away from his stomach. That was when I noticed his arms. I froze. The Chameleon’s arms were covered in tattoos. There was more ink than skin. As I looked closer, I realized they weren’t random designs as they first appeared. They were numbers.
The numbers overlapped and serpentined all the way from his wrist to his shirt sleeve. Feeling odd, I bent an
d shoved up one of his sleeves.
The tattoos went all the way to the tops of his shoulders.
A.J. crouched beside the unconscious man and started snapping pictures with his phone.
“Don’t bother,” Smith told A.J., staring in wonder at his computer screen. “I already know what they are.”
We all turned to Smith.
“They’re the IDs of every one of the Super Mags from MagLab.”
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but that wasn’t it.
“Why?” I asked.
“Also,” Yutika said, “what was he doing here?”
“Same thing as us, no doubt,” Smith said. “The better question is, how did he know what to look for?”
I thought again about the cinnamon gum wrapper at the empty grave. Whoever this man was, he knew about Agent S. That made him even more dangerous than his strange magic.
“We could take him with us and have Michael make him sing,” Yutika suggested.
We all looked down at the man. He was out cold.
“Or we can just let the cops have him when they show up,” Smith said. “It’ll give the police someone to pin the break-in on, and it’ll keep him out of our way.”
“Good thinking.” I nodded. “If he tries to point the finger at us, we’ll just deny we were ever here.”
“Our word against his,” Yutika said.
I crouched down to yank the envelope out of the waistband of the man’s jeans. For a second, I wondered if he had put the envelope there deliberately to mess with me. Rolling my eyes at the unconscious man, I stuffed both halves of the envelope into my pocket.
Then, just for good measure, I grabbed a fireplace poker I’d noticed amid the mess we’d made of Pruwist’s house. I bent the metal so it held the serpentine unconscious Chameleon’s ankles together, just on the off chance he woke up before the cops arrived. Catching on, Yutika made a pair of actual handcuffs, which I took no small amount of pleasure in locking.
Good luck getting out of those, buddy.
“I’m just going to come right out and say it,” A.J. said, putting his phone back in his pocket. “This one’s a cutie patootie.”
“Eyelashes like that should be illegal,” Yutika agreed.
“He was trying to kill me,” I reminded them.
“True.” A.J. shrugged. “But that doesn’t detract from his cuteness.”
“He’s more than cute,” Yutika said. “He’s seriously sexy.” She thought for a minute. “I’m going to call him Sexy Cinnamon Man.”
I was feeling increasingly disturbed by the direction this conversation was headed, not least of which because we were standing over the man’s unconscious body and debating his hotness.
“You know,” Smith said to Yutika. “If I started naming women Sexy This or Sexy That, you’d call me sexist.”
“Ooh.” Yutika nudged him. “You think Starlight is sexy, don’t you? Do you want to start calling her Sexy Starlight?”
“That is not the point I was trying to make,” Smith said, color rising in his pale cheeks.
The blare of sirens ended their argument.
“Time to go, folks,” A.J. said, foregoing the front door and using the man-sized hole in the wall as an exit.
The rest of us hurried after him.
Once we were outside the house, it became obvious how much damage Cinnamon Guy—I refused to call him Sexy Cinnamon Man—and I had done. There was a giant hole in one side of the house. The roof was partially collapsed, which I didn’t even remember happening. Dust was leaking out of the various holes we’d punched through the walls. And the chimney was smoking for no reason I could fathom.
What a mess.
I blew on my fists as we sprinted back to the van. If there were any witnesses around, I didn’t want to make their job of identifying us easier by showing off my titanium skin.
“I killed the security cameras,” Smith said as we ran. “It’ll be like we were never here.”
We were just pulling out of the parking lot when a fleet of police cars streamed past.
“That was a close one,” A.J. said, fanning his face and tossing his shiny black hair.
“I’d like to see Sexy Cinnamon Man’s face when he wakes up in police custody,” Yutika said, craning her neck to watch the police cars as she drove.
“Yutika, focus.” I pointed to the road in front of her.
Yutika wasn’t the best driver when she was fully focused. She kept weaseling her way into the driver’s seat by claiming she wanted to improve her skills…or lack thereof. I thought the real reason was because she enjoyed making all of us car sick.
“I can’t find any records for a high-level Chameleon,” Smith said, frowning at his computer. “I’ll do a deeper search when we get home.”
“Another unMarked Mag?” A.J. waved his hand. “What a cliché.”
I turned on the overhead light and drew out the two envelope halves. The first half contained a single slip of paper. A GPS coordinate was hand-written across the page.
The tear mark at the bottom showed a pen line that had been cut off when the paper was torn.
I reached inside the envelope half I’d taken from Cinnamon Guy for the other half of the paper. My gut turned to stone.
The envelope was empty.
CHAPTER 10
Nothing,” Smith said, pulling out his earbuds. “The cops have been all through the house and didn’t say a word about the Chameleon.”
“He must have woken up in time to camouflage himself,” A.J. said.
“We left him in front of the front door,” I seethed. “The cops would have tripped right over him whether he was camouflaged or not.”
A.J. gave me a helpless shrug.
“I can guarantee he wasn’t walking anywhere with that metal poker around his ankles,” Yutika said.
I paced around Kaira and Graysen’s study. My fury was a hot, living thing inside me. It didn’t matter how the Chameleon had gotten away. The point was, he was gone…and he’d taken the information I needed.
The Chameleon must have taken the slip of paper out of the envelope and stashed it somewhere else. Probably in his underwear, the bastard.
“Stop blaming yourself,” Kaira told me in a stern voice.
“If I’d gotten the envelope away from him sooner,” I fumed, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
All of the could’ves and should’ves were racing around my brain in an endless loop. I wanted to scream. I wanted another chance to bash Cinnamon Guy’s brains in.
“Cut yourself some slack,” Graysen said. “This is a crazy situation no one could have anticipated.”
I shook my head. It was precisely my job not to get thrown off by the unexpected. I could have taken Cinnamon Guy faster, if I hadn’t been distracted by his obnoxious goading. If only I’d opened the envelope sooner, I would have realized what he’d done.
Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.
“The obvious first step is to start with the information we do have,” Graysen said. “Smith?”
“GPS coordinate for a location in southern California,” Smith said without looking up from his computer. “Satellite images aren’t showing anything suspicious at that location. Just looks like uninhabited desert.”
“We’d better go there and check it out, anyway,” Kaira said.
A.J.’s face blanched. I tried to catch his eye, but he was staring at his shoes.
A.J. was from California, and I knew he didn’t have happy memories of his life there. As close as we were, he’d never said much about the first sixteen years of his life before he came to Boston.
For as much as A.J. fake-complained, he was quiet about the things that bothered him the most.
It was something we had in common.
“Let’s go in the morning,” Yutika said, yawning. “The late morning. I’ll handle our transportation.”
Kaira nodded. “And we’re going to need to track down the other half of this.” She held up the torn page between her fin
gers.
I inwardly cursed myself again.
“I can’t find anything on this Chameleon,” Smith said.
“Sexy Cinnamon Man,” Yutika corrected.
Kaira raised an eyebrow. I just shook my head.
“Like nothing,” Smith continued. “He’s not just unMarked…it’s like he doesn’t exist.”
I started a rep of jumping jacks, because if I didn’t, I was liable to bash my head through a wall.
And I’d already done that once tonight.
“I have an idea,” Graysen said, taking the useless envelope half off the desk where I’d tossed it. “Come on.”
We all followed him into the dining room. The Super Mags who had attacked Valencia and killed eight of her Nat followers were sitting at the table. Michael and the Hansley clan were interspersed among them. Each of the kids had a mug of hot chocolate in front of them. There were also mostly-empty bowls of mini-marshmallows, tiny chocolate chips, and homemade whipped cream.
Michael was speaking in a quiet voice to two of the kids. From their unglazed eyes, I knew he wasn’t Whispering to them. Still, their expressions were quietly attentive in a way I knew they wouldn’t be with anyone else.
Cora was reading Charlotte’s Web out loud to a few of the youngest kids. Desiree was playing a card game with another. Ma was refilling mugs, and Grandma Tashi was presiding over all of them at the head of the table.
Looking at the Super Mags like this, they seemed more like regular children than the most powerful and deadly Mags in the world.
“00466,” Graysen said.
The little girl sitting next to Cora glanced up. She returned Graysen’s warm smile with a shy one of her own.
00466 was an Animalist and the sweetest of the Super Mags. She’d helped us during the Boston Enforcement Party and had been one of the few Super Mags to keep in contact with Kaira and Graysen after the magic ripper started going after them. The shocking gold color of her eyes was the same as the lion who had helped me at the baseball game.
I gave her a friendly wink that had her grinning back.
Graysen held up the piece of envelope in his hand. “I was wondering if you and Sir Zachary might be able to help us with something,” he said to the little girl.
Steel for 5 (Mags & Nats Book 3) Page 7
