Blood Bound (17 page)

“We didn’t break up, Liv. You ran out on me, right before…” He stopped, staring out the windshield at the city as we rolled through it slowly enough to annoy the cars trapped behind us.

“I’m sorry.” I glanced at him, but his gaze never left the road. “I don’t think I’ve actually said that yet, but I’m sorry for…the way it happened. But none of that matters anymore. What matters is that for some reason, Eric Richard Hunter went home again, and we need to make sure he never leaves.”

I could see his building now, and for a second, I worried that I might be tracking the same cold trail that had led me there earlier—the pull of his spilled blood. But then I remembered that I’d destroyed what he left. And that the name pull Cam was tracking could only lead to the man himself.

Cam parked in the unlit lot behind Hunter’s building. As the engine cooled and ticked, he watched me in the last dying rays of light, painting his dashboard red. “Sorry isn’t good enough.”

“What?” I frowned, trying to ignore the discomfort buzzing beneath my skin, now that we were so close to the goal, yet not actively pursuing it. “Good enough for what?”

“Not good enough for me. Not good enough for us. For what we still have, even if you’re too damn stubborn to admit it. You owe us better than a half-assed apology, six years too late.”

“I owe you…?” My words expired on a cloud of disbelief.

“No, you owe
us.
”

Itching to get going, I pulled my 9mm from the holster and released the clip to check it, though I already knew it was full. “There is no us, Cam. Not anymore.”

“The hell there isn’t.” He twisted in his seat to face me. “You can keep saying that if you want. You might even convince Anne. But you’re not going to convince me, and you’re sure as hell not going to convince yourself. You’ve had years to forget about me and move on, but you haven’t done it.”

“Yes, I…”

“No, you haven’t!” he thundered. His anger seemed to echo in the confines of the car, and that time, I didn’t bother arguing. “If you had, this wouldn’t be so hard for you. And I can see that it’s hard. I don’t know why you’re still trying to push me away, but it obviously isn’t because you want to.”

My next breath hurt. It ached in my lungs, as if my heart was bruised. “You’re right,” I admitted, but the truth didn’t set me free. It felt like a whole new set of chains. “This isn’t how I want it, but this is how it has to be.”

“Why?” he demanded. “i>us.are you doing this? I need to know, Liv. You owe me that much.”

He was right. Hiding what I knew when I could just walk away from him was one thing, but now that we were stuck together? Keeping my secrets—this one, anyway—was too much for us both. “Fine. But it’s a little complicated, and we need to move on Hunter now.” Before the buzzing beneath my skin ushered in full-scale resistance pain. Before Hunter stepped through a shadow and we lost his trail again.

“You swear?” Cam wasn’t happy, but was obviously willing to delay full satisfaction if he had my word.

“On my life. When this is over, I’ll explain why I left. Why I had to.”

“Fine. For now. But don’t think you can just disappear on me again. I know how to find you, and there’s nothing stopping me from showing up everywhere you go, until you tell me what I want to know.”

Actually, Cavazos would have been happy to stop Cam from showing up everywhere I went. But that was one secret I couldn’t give up. What little self-respect I still had would bleed into humiliation if Cam found out I was bound to Ruben. I didn’t want him to know what I’d agreed to. I didn’t want him to know about the things I couldn’t say no to, or how much worse it would be if—
when
—I couldn’t fulfill my contract.

I didn’t want him to know that the words on my back were just that: words. An ideal I’d failed to live up to.

“Are you ready?” I asked, one hand on the door handle. He nodded stiffly, and I pushed the door open and stepped into the parking lot. It wasn’t fully dark yet, which meant my gun would have to stay holstered for the moment. People on the west side almost never spoke to the police, but their silence wasn’t my license for carelessness.

Cam followed me across the lot and through the rear door, which opened into the opposite end of the long, dark hallway we’d entered from the front earlier. After a second to check the pull from Hunter’s blood, I pointed to the rear staircase with my brows raised in question. Cam nodded, confirming that the target’s name was pulling him upstairs, too.

We took the steps quickly and quietly, and I let him lead. This was his neighborhood and the residents would be less likely to interfere with or report us if they recognized him. But both the stairs and the hallway were deserted, either because it was dinnertime, or because the occupants sensed that something was going down. TV applause and canned laughter rang out from behind some of the doors, and muffled conversation from others, but no one came out to investigate our soft footsteps.

On either side of Hunter’s door, we drew our guns, and I attached the silencer Cam had lent me. A seam of light showed around three sides of the frame—it was still broken from when Cam had kicked it in. I heard movement from inside. A scrape of something against the floor. Light footsteps. A quiet curse.

Hunter was alone, and he wasn’t happy.

I lifted one brow at Cam, and he nodded. So I knocked on the door frame.

Silence from inside. Then two more footsteps, and the floor creaked. I could practically hear his heart beating. His brain racing. Should he answer? Or just wait? Would he have time to go out the fire escae? Or simply step into a shadow and disappear?

Cam nodded, and I nudged the door open with one foot while he knelt in the open doorway, below typical firing height, gun aimed and ready. He held that pose for a single breath, then rose smoothly to his feet.

I peeked into the apartment. The living room was empty. But Hunter was still in there. I could feel the pull of his blood, stronger than ever. Yet somehow
different
than it had felt before.

Cam stepped inside and I followed him, then pushed the door closed. Or, as close to closed as I could get it, because of the broken door frame. I checked the right half of the room while he checked the left, silently clearing the possible hiding places and turning on lights to banish the shadows one by one. You can never be too careful about shadows when tracking a Traveler.

The living room and kitchen were both clear, the only remaining shadows too small for a man to fit through. The bathroom was open, the shower curtain pulled to one side to reveal the empty tub. That only left the bedroom. But surely Hunter wasn’t in there. Why
would
he be, when a Traveler can leave a room just by stepping into a shadow?

Yet his blood pulled me toward the closed bedroom door.

I tossed my head toward the door and gave Cam a questioning look. He closed his eyes for a second, meditating on Hunter’s full name, then nodded. Every tracking instinct we had said that, in apparent defiance of logic, Hunter was still in his room.

Possible explanations ran through my head while fear and doubt prickled my skin. Was this a trap? Had Tower found out about my mark and hired Hunter to kill me? If so, this would be the easiest hit in history— I’d actually tracked the man contracted to shoot me.

And what about Cam? Did Tower consider him a traitor? Was he on the chopping block, too?

Or was there a simpler explanation for why a Traveler would stay in an apartment with two people intent on killing him? Was his bedroom somehow devoid of shadows? Was he too weak from blood loss to travel? Could that have something to do with why the level of Skill in his blood had dropped between the sample Anne had provided and the one I’d found in his bathroom?

We took positions on either side of the bedroom door, and again, I knocked on the frame. “Eric, come on out,” I said.

Harsh laughter from the other side of the door, followed by a man’s voice. “They sent a girl. I’m not sure if that’s insult to injury, or a gift from above.”

I glanced at Cam. Hunter thought I was alone, which gave us the element of surprise. I chose to ignore his misogynistic underestimation of my abilities, but who were the “they,” who’d supposedly sent me? “I just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

Yes, I was lying. But considering I was about to commit vigilante murder, a half-truth felt pretty insignificant.

“Yeah, right.” Hunter laughed again, but this time sarcasm exposed his nerves. “Because you guys are known for asking questions first.”

You guys?
I mouthed to Cam. Who did he think I was?

Cam pushed up his left sleeve and tapped chain links on his upper bicep.

Oh, shit.
Hunter thought the Tower syndicate had sent someone to kill him. But why? Had he assumed that our break-in earlier meant the syndicate would rather kill him than pay him? Or had he actually given Tower a reason to come after him?

Was he running his mouth? Demanding more money? Threatening to turn state’s witness?

“So you know why I’m here?” I said, playing along, hoping for more information.

“Unless they’re sending singing telegrams now instead of mercenaries—in which case you should start warming up—I’m gonna have to assume you’re here to kill me.”

Funny. We might have been friends, if he weren’t a hired killer. But then, considering I was standing outside his door with a loaded gun, maybe we had more than sarcasm in common.

“Look, I know you got your orders, and I know I fucked this up. But how ’bout, instead of killing me, you take him a message from me instead?”

Cam and I shared a look of mild surprise. The killer had messed up? “And what would that message be?” I called through the door.

“Tell him that if he kills me, he’s just going to have to hire someone else to clean things up. Or he can let me fix my own mistake—at no additional charge, of course.”

The man had balls—I had to give him that. But if I were under orders to kill him—and I was—going back to beg for mercy on his behalf wouldn’t even be a possibility. I’d be physically incapable of leaving until I’d done my best to kill him. Did Hunter really not know that, or was he speaking from desperation?

Cam looked as puzzled as I was.

“Why the hell should I put my ass on the line for you?” I asked.

“Because it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t do the recon,” Hunter insisted. “
Your
guy did that. How was I supposed to know she wasn’t going to be there?”

She?

With that, my mental fog lifted, revealing the truth in stark, devastating clarity. Hunter wasn’t after Shen. He was after Annika. He thought Tower wanted him dead because he’d missed his target. Which might well be the case—was that why the syndicate seemed content to let us go after Hunter? Because we were saving them the trouble?

“You should have known exactly who was in the house before you went in,” I said, the facts and implications still tumbling around in my head.

“Fuck you, I did my job,” Hunter snapped. “I’m not gonna pay for someone else’s mistake. You come in here, and you won’t go back out.”

I tossed my head toward the door. Cam stood and kicked it.

Wood splintered—as usual, the door frame was weaker than the lock—and Cam lurched out of the line of fire as the door swung open. A bullet split the air between us and I dropped into a squat, peeking carefully around the door frame. A suitcase lay open on the bed, already too full to close. Hunter was going to run.

So why was he still there?

“Okay,” I said, scanning what I could see of the bedroom for any sign of movement. “You have a valid point. Why should you be held responsible for someone else’s screwup?”

I waited out the quiet that followed; I couldn’t pinpoint his location until he moved or spoke. And finally, he gave in to the urge to fill the silence—most people can’t stand a vacuum.

“Especially when I’m offering to repair the damage for free,” he said, and my gaze found the narrow space between the bed and the dresser, just a few feet away from the window and the fire escape he could have climbed down—if the window weren’t obviously painted shut, a fire-code violation he was probably kicking himself for now.

Except that a Traveler shouldn’t be bothered by a window that won’t open.

The sun was down and Hunter’s bedroom faced an alley. Very little light shone through his window, and the room was lit only by a single dim bulb overhead. There were small shadows everywhere, and the floor beneath his bed should have been an endless, gaping void for a Traveler. He should have been able to roll into the darkness and roll out of another shadow somewhere else. Anywhere else he wanted to be, depending on how strong his Skill was.

So why the hell was Hunter cowering on the floor with nothing but a couple of mattresses between him and the barrel of my gun?

I was missing something. I had to be.

Careful not to compromise my aim, I slid one hand into my pocket. I took a silent breath, touching the stiff bandage in my pocket, and concentrated on the pull of Hunter’s blood. Every single drop of it called to me, drawing me like a magnet as long as I touched the sample in my pocket. The closer I got to him, the stronger the attraction.

And suddenly I realized what was wrong. I wasn’t the one missing something;
he
was. Hunter’s blood—the part still flowing in his veins—had no power at all. Somehow, incredibly, he was completely without Skill, though he’d been a Traveler only hours before. The blood sample in my pocket proved that, as did the one Anne had brought.

“So what’s the plan, Eric?” I let go of the bandage and aimed with both hands again, still squatting. “You were just going to…what? Get on a bus?”

Cam raised one eyebrow at me in question, but I couldn’t explain about Hunter’s mysteriously disappearing Skill. Not even if I wanted to—it made no sense.

“That was the plan.”

“So which is it going to be? Run, or fix what you messed up?”

“Does that mean you’ll deliver my message?”

I pretended to think about that for a moment. “Fortunately for you, I like your idea. And I really like the part where I get to be the bearer of good news. So why don’t you come out and tell me who really screwed the pooch. That way you can go work on damage control and I can go make a very powerful man smile.”