Blood Bound (30 page)

By the time I pulled into the parking lot of Cam’s building, I’d decided I
had
to know. If we were going to give this another shot—if we were willing to risk our lives to be together—secrets weren’t going to cut it. He knew mine. Reciprocation was only fair.

On my way into the building, I glanced around the lot, looking for Ruben’s men. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were there. Watching. And for once, that would actually help, rather than hinder, my plans.

I knocked on Cam’s third-floor apartment door, then tapped my foot impatiently for the fifteen seconds it took for the door to open. “Okay, why do you have Kori’s number?” I asked, before he could even invite me inside.

His brows rose in amusement, and he visibly fought a grin. “I wondered how long that would take.”

“You don’t have to look so smug.” I stomped past him when he stepped back to let me in.

“Are you kidding? I’m surprised you resisted this long.”

“So?” I set the convenience-store bag on his counter and my satchel on a bar stool. “Why do you have her number?”

Cam closed the door and crossed both arms over his chest. “I think the real question is why don’t you? Most people don’t leave their friends just because they leave town.”

Ouch.

“I didn’t mean to lose touch with everyone. I just… I needed some time to myself.” To process the fact that I was suddenly without Cam, under threat of death. “And by the time I felt like getting back in touch, Elle had disappeared. I tracked Anne and Kori just to make sure they were alive, but by then…so much had changed I was afraid I wouldn’t even know them anymore.” And they wouldn’t know me.

“Well, now you’re getting a second chance. You ready?”

“Yeah.” Though being ready didn’t really matter. Anne and Hadley would arrive in half an hour, and we needed to be ready for them. “What’s her number?”

Cam recited and I dialed. Then the phone rang. And rang. And rang. Then my call went to a voice-mail system answered by a computer-generated voice.

I hung up.

“She hasn’t recorded a voice-mail message,” I said, scowling at my new phone as if it had personally betrayed me. I hadn’t expected Kori’s message to provide her real name, but hearing her actual voice would have been nice. “How do I even know I have the right number?”

“It’s the right number. She doesn’t usually pick up if she doesn’t recognize the incoming number. You’ll either have to bug her until she answers or call her on my phone.”

I hit Redial. I hadn’t spoken to her in six years—I didn’t want to know she’d only taken my call because she thought it was Cam. I got her voice mail again, but when I called back a third time, she answered on the first ring.

“Who the fuck is this?”

I smiled. It was good to hear her voice, and from the sound of her greeting, Kori hadn’t changed a bit.

“Five seconds, then I’m hangin’ up and blockin’ your number,” she snapped.

“Kori, it’s Liv—willyouhelpme?” I ran the words together in my rush to be heard before she could hang up.

Silence. Then a deep intake of breath, and I flinched, knowing what was coming—I’d been pissed, too, when Anne asked for my help. “You
bitch…
” Kori muttered, and I smiled again, surprisingly nostalgic over Korinne’s all-purpose greeting/curse/compliment. “How did you get this number?”

“Hey, Kor,” Cam called, by way of explanation.

“You soft-skulled, marble-balled motherfucker. I’m going to kick your ass next time I see it.”

Cam laughed. “You know, my grandmother always said no woman with a decent vocabulary would resort to profanity.”

Kori huffed. “
My
grandmother said, ‘Get the hell out of my house, bitch, before I throw you out on your ass.’”

“Well, you did set the kitchen on fire. Twice. With her in it.” Kori had slept on my couch for two weeks before her grandmother finally took her back the second time.

Another impatient huff from over the line. “I fail to see how the facts are relevant here.”

“Don’t you want to know why I called?” I asked, leaning back to prop my boots on Cam’s coffee table, over scarred marks in the wood, proving he’d obviously done the same thing.

“I figure you’ll get to it eventually.”

I grinned at Cam—if I were speaking to anyone else, I’d have felt guilty for how much I planned to enjoy tugging on Kori’s binding. “I need help. Will you please come to Cam’s so we can talk?”

“Hell no—oww,
fuck!
” she cried, and I could practically see Kori clutching her head from the unexpected pain—proof that our original oath was still intact. “What the hell, Liv?”

“I’ll explain when you get here. Will you come, please?”

“Like I have any choice.”

A second later, the bathroom door squealed open and I turned to find Kori stomping toward me from the darkened hall, still holding her cell. She flipped the phone closed and shoved it into the pocket of her ripped, artfully ratty jeans—like us, she was fully dressed and obviously wide-awake at one in the morning—and propped both hands on her hips in the living-room doorway.

“You better tell me what the hell is going on, or I swear I’ll kill you justn taon’t have to listen to you.”

I laughed. “Good to see you, too.”

She shoved wavy, white-blond hair back from pixieish features twisted into her usual angry scowl. “I’m not fucking kidding.”

“Me, neither.” I’d actually missed her crass, sarcastic affection. Kori only yelled at people she liked. She didn’t bother with anyone else. “It’s been too long.”

“No, it hasn’t been long enough. What the hell happened to the second oath?”

“Anne burned it.” Cam tossed her a beer and Kori caught it one-handed, without even looking. She’d always been eerily well-coordinated, though I could find no correlation between that and her Skill as a Traveler.

“That mousy little
bitch…
” She twisted the top from her bottle as she crossed the room, then tossed the cap onto the coffee table and dropped onto the couch next to me. “Make this quick.”

“Okay, the short version…” I couldn’t quite escape the feeling of déjà vu. We’d sat just like that—with Anne and Noelle—all the time as teenagers, sharing an honesty everyone else in my life seemed to have outgrown.

Everyone except Kori.

“On Thursday night, Anne’s husband was killed. She asked us to track and kill the murderer, so Cam and I did. But it turns out he was after her daughter, not her husband. Somehow, the Tower syndicate is wrapped up in this….” I said, and she glanced briefly, pointedly at Cam. Did she know about his binding? “But we’re not sure how, or how far up it goes, except we have reason to believe that whichever high-level initiate hired the killer also paid for him to have some kind of blood transfusion—of Skilled blood.”

Kori blinked. Then she took a long, long chug from her bottle, and I couldn’t help wondering if she was just stalling until she could come up with some clever, curse-riddled response. “Do you always jump right into the deep end?” she said finally. “What happened to wading in a little at a time?”

“Wading into what?”

“Into trouble, Liv.” Kori set her bottle on the coffee table and gave me a half amused, half exasperated look. “You’re swimming with the fuckin’ sharks, and you’re too stupid to even know it. Those fins circling you? Those are warning signs. Take heed, and get the fuck out of the water before they eat you alive.”

“I didn’t jump in, I got pushed,” I insisted. “And I can’t just crawl out. We’re talking about Anne’s
child,
Kori.”

“Anne has kids?”

“One. A daughter. She’s five.”

Kori shrugged. “Well, she musta been an accident. Last time I saw Anne, she was in grad school, taking a bunch of sociology and psychology classes, talking about how pointless it was to bring another kid into the world, when there were already thousands of them in this country alone who didn’t have homes, or a fuckin’ thing to eat.”

“Well, things change.
People
change.” I shrugged. “Now Anne has a daughter, and Jake Tower is trying to kill her.”

Kori leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest. “Okay, first of all, if Tower wants Anne’s kid, it’s not so that he can kill her. It’s so he can keep her.”

“
Keep
her?” The horrifying conclusions that accompanied that thought were too awful to fully focus on, so I pushed them aside for the more immediate question. “How do you know what Jake Tower does or doesn’t want?” I wasn’t sure I really wanted the answer, but I was suddenly absolutely
convinced
that I needed it.

She downed the last third of her beer, then waved the empty bottle at Cam, wordlessly demanding another. “Okay, look,” she said finally, turning back to me. “I take this little command appearance to mean that I don’t have any choice but to help you with this.”

“That’s right,” I said, as Cam twisted the top from a fresh bottle and handed it to her.

“Fine.” She took the bottle and drank the neck in one gulp. “The truth is that I won’t hate doing what I can for Anne and her unlikely progeny. If we’re keeping score, I probably owe her anyway.”

In fact, if we were keeping score, Kori would be in debt up to her hair follicles to me and Noelle, too. If Elle were still alive.

She took another gulp, then continued. “But before you start officially asking me for help, you need to understand that there are certain requests I can’t carry out, and making those particular requests would be like pushing my self-destruct button. I’ll implode, like the fuckin’ Death Star.”

“Um, point of fact, I believe the Death Star
ex
ploded,” Cam said, leaning back on a bar stool, his elbows propped behind him on the counter. “Twice.”

“Congratulations. Your official super-nerd badge is in the mail,” Kori said, but I couldn’t get past the part about me accidently pushing her self-destruct button. Shit.
Shit, shit, shit!
“Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means….”

Instead of answering, Kori shrugged out of her jacket and twisted to show me the two black chain links inked on her upper left arm.

“Son of a bitch!” The pressure building inside me had no outlet—I felt as if the top of my head was going to blow off. “Both of you?” I glanced at Cam, and as I’d expected, he showed no sign of surprise. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

No wonder he had her number memorized and she knew where he lived…

“It’s not my place to tell you about Kori’s marks. That’s up to her.” He glanced at her and shrugged. “Or not, if she chooses.”

Kori rolled her eyes. “Like I had any choice but to show her.”

She didn’t. And I didn’t. And Cam didn’t. We were fresh out of choices, and probabl running out of time. Working with them was like playing Marco Polo, with all the Polos gagged.

“Does Tower know you’re bound to me and Anne?”

“No, but only because he hasn’t specifically asked. I was searched for marks when I signed on and forbidden to take on any more while I’m in his service. But so far, he’s assumed his are the only bonds I have.”

But if he asked, she’d have to tell him.

Beyond frustrated, I scowled at them both. “How the hell am I supposed to be any use to anyone if neither of you can do what I need done or tell me what I need to know?”

Kori shrugged, and the gesture looked well-worn. “Work around the bindings.”

I’d been working around my bindings to Cavazos for a year and a half, but I rarely had to work around anyone
else’s
marks….

Cam lowered himself onto the coffee table in front of me, and I didn’t miss Kori’s look of surprise when I let him take my hands. “Yes, our bindings to Tower complicate things. But your own professional life isn’t exactly simple at the moment.”

“My ties to Cavazos are nowhere near as restrictive as yours to Tower. And Ruben isn’t trying to kill a five-year-old!” Though if I failed to find his missing son in the next six months, I was going to wish he’d killed
me.

“Wait, what? She’s bound to Ruben Cavazos?” Kori’s eyes widened dramatically, then she grinned and grabbed her beer. “You two take the concept of
star-crossed
to a whole new level.”

“So glad we amuse you,” I muttered, trying to refocus my thoughts and work around her chain links. “Okay, instead of just flat-out asking you to do some things, which would
compel
you to do them, I’m going to ask you if you
can
do what I need done.” I’d rather her help us of her own will anyway.

Kori nodded. “Greatly appreciated.”

“Okay, here goes. When Anne and Hadley get here, can you take them and Cam through the shadows to an apartment if I give you the address?”

“How far away is it?”

“About six miles. Less, as the crow flies.”
Much
less, as the shadow-walker travels…

“No problem. Anything else?”

I inhaled, debating my next request. “I don’t suppose there’s any way you could…not tell your boss where she is, or that we have her?”

Kori frowned at me. “Have you really been here for years, ’cause you sound like you just fell off the truck, fresh from the fuckin’ farm.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m not green. I was just hoping you might be able to…work around your own bindings.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said. “But if Tower asks me a direct question, I’ll have to answer.”

“I know.ut we’d appreciate any sidestepping you’re able to do.” I shrugged and sipped from my bottle of water. “Hopefully, though, it won’t matter either way. We’re putting her deep in the east end, and I can’t see Tower making a move for her there, considering he’d have to physically break into the apartment once we get all the lights on.”

“So, what’s the plan after that?” Kori wore skepticism like some women wore jewelry. “Cower under a desk and hope nothing falls on your head? You can’t hide from Tower forever. Trust me.”

“I know. This is just to keep her safe while we figure out why he wants her and how to stop him. I don’t suppose you could help with any of that?” I watched Kori closely, expecting to learn as much from what I saw on her face as from whatever she’d actually say.