Alterant (32 page)

He gave her a withering look. “I am showing you trust by bringing you here. I’m making a leap of faith that you’ll do as you say and not hand over those three and walk away with your freedom. And I wouldn’t be doing this if I had a choice. That’s more than you deserve after sending me back to the jungle when, if you’ll recall, Brina didn’t deny that I had been caged unfairly. I’m willing to do what it takes to get these three to a better place. My question is what
you’ll
do when faced with the decision of your freedom over theirs.”

She’d already told him her plan.

He could bite her boots. She was willing to fight to give these three a chance at life and freedom.

That had to be enough.

But she hadn’t survived to this point by lying down
for anyone. “I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know if a pantheon will ever consider a bunch of half-breeds. But if you think enough of those three Alterants that you’re willing to hand over your life to the Medb in trade, then why can’t you care enough to fight for the chance to be accepted as a true race?”

He dropped his head, staring down at the clover hugging the soles of his boots. “I have a lot more at stake besides these three.” He raised his head and his soul lay bare in his eyes. “When I can rest assured that everything that matters to me is safe, I’ll fight. But I’m not trusting anyone with what’s mine to protect until then.”

He turned and strode away. End of conversation.

She followed him. Who was he talking about that he had to protect? Now wasn’t the time to push him again, but she’d pry that clam open later when she had a way to keep it open.

He slowed as they neared another crossroads in the tunnels, then kept walking straight ahead where the path curved left, then right, then left for so long that Evalle thought for sure they’d gone in a circle.

Lights flickered along the corridor. She started to ask Tristan if he knew what that meant, when he held up a hand for her to stop and be silent.

She paused ten feet behind him and checked over her shoulder for brick walls, crazy guys with pitchforks or some new terror. When she turned back around, a figure wavered in front of Tristan, taking form little by little until it turned into a soldier, complete with a bayonet-tipped rifle, dirt-smudged Confederate uniform and a bloody rag tied around his head.

He looked to be in his early twenties until she took in his sad eyes, which had seen many years of hard miles.

Evalle remained very still to prevent disturbing the spirit. Nightstalkers like Grady were hard to rattle, but Grady was accustomed to dealing with humans and nonhumans.

She doubted that before meeting Tristan this soldier ghost had seen a human in the past hundred years. He’d probably never run across anything like Alterants or a Medb witch priestess.

Tristan asked the soldier, “Did you take my message to the witch?”

The young man nodded. He spoke in a sleepy voice. “She said iffin you don’t show up in a half hour she’s killin’ hostages.”

“A half hour from when?” Tristan asked.

The ghost stared off into infinity, then said, “Now.”

Tristan’s voice tightened with stress. “Where is the witch?”

“I kin show you, but she sent another message.”

“What?”

“She’s got a holt of four hostages. Says she’s goin’ to kill the new one last.”

Evalle had opened her empathic senses to see if she could detect something from the soldier ghost. She only picked up weariness and a sense of being imposed upon.

When Tristan asked who the fourth hostage was, the soldier said, “Petrina.”

Tristan roared,
“No!”
He raised fists with muscles bulging in his forearms. Bones popped . . . he was changing into his beast.

The ghost vanished.

TWENTY-SIX

Q
uinn grabbed at the air above his head.

Had to kill whatever was beating a spike into his skull with a sledgehammer. His fingers closed on empty air, hands hitting each other.

If he could just see it, but his eyes were shut.

He dropped his arms, fingers fisting the sheets.

Pounding started again, but this time it came from outside his aching head. He focused on the sound.

Someone was banging on the door.

What door? Why didn’t he know where he was? He knew how to access anything in a mind, especially his.

Reaching deep inside, he searched for the center of his control and found it ravaged. A wasteland of scattered thoughts and mental shields that had once been his safe zone.

What had happened to him?

“Quinn!”

Had to open his eyes, but they felt glued shut. His lids quivered and strained, but he forced each one open.

Darkness.

Bloody hell.

“Open up, Quinn!”
shouted at him from behind a door in another room . . . in his hotel suite. All at once, memory flooded into empty pockets.

Tzader was yelling at him.

Quinn rolled over and dropped his feet to the floor, sitting up on the edge of his king-size bed. Mistake of ginormous proportions. He grabbed his stomach and covered his mouth to stem the nausea.

Tzader couldn’t come in because . . .

Quinn had hung one of his Celtic Triquetra blades on the hall entrance door to his suite.

A Triquetra he’d had warded to block entry, even from someone with Tzader’s powers.

Lifting a hand that shook, Quinn kinetically flipped the Triquetra off to the side.

The banging noise disappeared, replaced by the sound of his door being shoved open.

Why did his head still ache? He could swear he’d slept soundly for a while. That should have taken the edge off.

Pushing himself onto wobbly feet, he reached instinctively for the belt on his . . . robe? What was he doing in his robe? He’d been in his dress clothes when he’d stretched out on the mattress with no intention of staying long.

The lights in the room flashed on, blinding him. He threw his hands in front of his face, but not before seeing Tzader barrel in.

“What’s going on, Quinn?”

“Turn. Off. Those. Lights.”

The room fell dark again with just a haze of light seeping in from the windows.

“Quinn? You okay?”

A question he couldn’t answer yet. “I will be. Why are you here?” He hadn’t intended for that to come out surly,
but his head and stomach threatened to unhinge what stability he had.

Tzader said, “Been trying to reach you telepathically for the past half hour. Were you blocking me?”

“No.” Quinn didn’t think so, anyway. “What time is it?”

“Going on ten thirty.”

“At
night
?” When he didn’t get an answer, Quinn said, “I assume by your lack of response that I’ve lost quite a bit of time.”

“Are you still having problems because of the probe?”

“Something has affected me, but I don’t know what exactly. Any time in the past that I’ve had a bad reaction to a mind probe, a little rest was all it took to ease my headache and bring me back to normal.”

Tzader crossed his arms. “How long were you out?”

“I remember lying down—fully clothed—and think I fell asleep after my headache went away. But your beating on the door woke me and I don’t recall putting on this robe.” A question about Evalle tugged at Quinn’s memory. Somebody asking about Evalle . . .

“I knew probing O’Meary was a mistake.” Grim worry tripped through Tzader’s voice. “Any chance Conlan is accessing your mind?”

“I don’t think so, but I’ve lost at least an hour, and I doubt I slept that whole time. This migraine was worse than any I’ve ever experienced. Maybe I just lost track of what I was doing. That happens even to humans.” Quinn considered turning on low lights but couldn’t muster the energy to try.

“But not you.” Tzader’s shoulders bunched with his
folded arms. Stress lines cut deep grooves at the bridge of his nose. “Any chance you can tap your subconscious and figure out what happened?”

“Maybe, but not until I’ve had some distance from this probing and get rid of this headache from hell. It’s not a matter of enduring the pain, which I would gladly do to get some answers. But I pushed it once in the past and lost my ability to mind lock for weeks. That taught me to wait until at least the pain went away, which should be soon.”

Holding his hand up, Tzader’s gaze focused past Quinn, as if he was listening to someone reaching him telepathically.

Quinn took that opportunity to walk past Tzader into the living area and the bar. He waved his hand at a lamp in the corner to turn it on kinetically and the light flickered. What the devil? He pointed a stern finger at the light and it came on. When he reached his bar, he pulled out a cold longneck Budweiser, popped the cap off and downed half of it at one time.

Tzader walked over to him. “Never seen you drink beer, much less horse-piss beer.”

“Lot of things we don’t know about each other,” Quinn pointed out. He, Tzader and Evalle had become close after escaping a Medb trap a couple years ago, but they still surprised each other at times. “When nothing else works I have a beer, and at one time this was top shelf for me.”

“Does it cure the headache?”

“No, just tastes good.”

Tzader chuckled. “Wait till Evalle finds out about the cheap side of your champagne tastes.”

Where had that blasted thought about Evalle come from? Who had wanted to know about her? Quinn pushed around in his mucked-up mind for anything on her.

How does Evalle
. . . do something? Something what?

He had a sick feeling the word he couldn’t pull up in that question might be seriously important, like giving him the identity of who had asked.

Quinn said, “Speaking of Evalle . . . any word?”

Tzader let out a weary sigh loaded with exhaustion and frustration. “Trey just checked in. He’s had Lucien, Casper and Devon searching for Storm and Evalle. Nothing yet.”

“What about the fog?”

“All we’ve determined is that the fog seems to be primarily in the coastal states, which is one reason it took so long to finger the fog as the catalyst for Alterants shifting.”

Quinn groused, “We don’t have enough people to fight something that spreads this fast.”

“Tell me about it. We could use Storm to track the beasts and Evalle to combat the Alterants shifting,” Tzader said. “But Sen won’t listen to any argument. Said it’s out of his hands and if the fog makes her shift, she’s dead meat just like the others. Hopefully, she won’t run into the fog.”

Quinn started to speak and a vision flashed in his mind, a fractured image, as if the transmission had been interrupted.

“What’s up, Quinn?”

“Nothing.” He waved off the moment, hiding the wheel of nervousness that started turning in his gut. He asked, “Has Trey found anything?”

“Not exactly. Trey’s been in contact with our Beladors who work for MARTA monitoring security feeds on highways and subways. He’s been sending out teams to hot spots. One of the security Beladors saw two people fitting Storm and Evalle’s description in a MARTA station. Trey’s on his way over to confirm if it was them in a downtown subway station, and he sent a small team to scour the other stations in the general area.”

“You talk to Sen about the MARTA surveillance?”

“What do you think?”

Quinn smiled around sore jaw muscles that ached from clenching his teeth against the pain that had racked him for so many hours. His head had eased some, but he couldn’t put his finger on what kept nagging him about Evalle. “I can only assume Evalle would not be in Atlanta if she was trying to evade the Tribunal, so she must be doing their bidding. Any idea what it might be?”

“Not yet.”

“What about Brina? Where does she stand on this?”

“I’m waiting until I have solid information to go to Brina. All I can tell her right now is that Conlan’s in lock-down but we don’t have proof of his being a traitor. We can’t accuse him of something he hasn’t done yet.”

“I agree. Any luck in trying to reach Evalle telepathically?”

“Nope. Not a sound from her. Trey can’t reach her either.”

“Since the Tribunal won’t allow Evalle to contact us, she’s probably blocking any telepathic communication we initiate,” Quinn said.

Tzader nodded, reaching in for a beer from Quinn’s refrigerator. “That’s what I figured.”

“Even our people might not be able to find her if she doesn’t want to be found, especially if she’s with Storm.”

“True. Storm’s another issue I’ll deal with when we find her.”

“He’s probably helping her.”

Tzader didn’t look convinced. “Maybe, but Sen brought him in, which makes Storm not entirely trustworthy in my book. He’s got a short-term lease on his apartment. Doesn’t look as though he’s planning to stay very long, so what’s on his agenda?”

Quinn had to concede Tzader that point. “Any sighting of Tristan?”

“No. That’s the only reason I’m a little relieved to hear that Evalle was spotted with Storm. Better him than Tristan.”

A female voice whispered in Quinn’s mind,
Where is Evalle?
Another memory of him answering questions in the dark fought to the surface. His lungs squeezed, making the next breath painful. Had he been talking to someone about Evalle? “We have to find Evalle.”