Blood Bound (34 page)

Her tears were flowing freely now, and each breath was a hiccuping sob. I tried to pull her close, but she backed out of reach again and banged her hip on an end table. “No. Don’t touch me. I don’t want your sympathy or your pity. This is your fault, Cam, and you
will
help me fix it.” She scrubbed her cheeks with the palms of both hands, then stood straight to wag one finger at me like my grandmother had done all my life. “So you…get Kori back here, and you make sure she has Hadley with her. Or I swear on my own soul, Cam Caballero, I
will
kill you and go after her myself.”

Twenty-Two

C
am was sitting on the couch in the dark when I opened the door, hunched over with his elbows on his knees and his head hanging low. He looked up when a slice of light from outside fell over him, and my first thought was that he’d aged ten years in the half hour since he’d walked into the shadows with Kori.

If she weren’t dead yet, I’d kill her myself for what she’d done, not just to Anne and Hadley, but to Cameron, too. And to me by extension.

“Any news?” I asked, when I’d closed and locked the door.

“I left Kori two messages—the second much angrier and more demanding than the first—and Anne left one of her own, outright asking her to bring Hadley back, but Kori hasn’t responded. I don’t know if she’s even heard them yet.”

I flipped the switch to the left of the door and light from overhead flooded the living room as I set my bags on the floor. “How’s Anne?”

For a second, Cam just blinked at me, clearly trying to decide how to say something I wasn’t going to want to hear. Then he stood and grabbed the duffel I’d filled with food from his apartment. “I…um…” He set the bag on the table and started pulling out boxes of toaster pastries and mac and cheese Hadley wasn’t there to eat. “I had to kind of…sedate her.”

“You
sedated
her?” I repeated, hoping I’d heard him wrong. But he only nodded, opening the freezer to shove several still mostly frozen pizzas inside. “With what?”

“Diazepam.” He lined up the food boxes on the counter next to the fridge, in descending size order.

“What’s that?”

“Valium. Liquid solution, in a glass of Coke,” Cam said, and he spoke over me before I could ask where the hell he’d gotten liquid valium. “It’s left over from what the doc gave me for Van, when she was…hystericalked the on’t worry, it’s mild, and I gave her a low dose. She’ll wake up in a couple of hours.” When I only watched him, silently demanding more of an explanation, he sighed and leaned against the short kitchen bar. “I had to. She was flipping out, threatening to kill me and go after Hadley herself. I couldn’t just let her storm out of here and get herself killed. And I was afraid the neighbors would hear her shout.”

I closed my eyes and sank into one of four chairs around the small breakfast table. “Okay…” He’d done it to keep her safe, and even if that wasn’t how I would have handled the situation, I couldn’t fault his intent. “Talk while we work.” I bent to pull two rolls of duct tape from my bag and tossed him one. “What’s the best way to get to Hadley? Do you have any idea where Tower would keep her?”

Cam shrugged and turned the tape over in his hand, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. “I assume he’d keep her wherever the project is headquartered, but I have no idea where that is.”

“It’s for the windows,” I said, holding up my own roll. I crossed into the living room and stood on a chair to tape the thick blackout curtains to the wall on first the left side, then the bottom, then the right, leaving the top open, because it was higher than the glass. Cavazos’s men wouldn’t be able to see anything that way.

“Won’t this look suspicious?” Cam asked, moving to help me tape the second living-room window.

“Nah. I tape my own windows sometimes, when I know he’s watching. They’ll assume I just want some privacy.”

“You should know I’m fighting an overwhelming urge to pull Cavazos’s intestines out slowly, though a small hole in his navel.”

I scrounged up a small smile. “You should know I’m fully committed to that same urge.”

Together, we taped the small bathroom window and the one in the only bedroom, then started turning on lights. I’d spent a grand total of ten minutes in the apartment before, but I remember thinking when I first saw it that it was perfect for keeping Travelers out. Of course, at the time, I’d assumed I was seeing the home of a target I’d need to track, and that he or she had been hiding from Travelers. But now I’d
become
that resident, hiding from Travelers—yet desperate to get my hands on one shadow-walker in particular.

The only bed, where Anne was cringing in her sleep, was built on a base of drawers, so there were no beneath-the-bed shadows to worry about. All of the closets were equipped with hardwired lights, so eliminating shadows there was as easy as pushing all the clothes—Cavazos had furnished some kind of creepy Barbie dream-date wardrobe for me—to one side. The kitchen cabinets all had glass fronts, which let light in and killed potential shadows. I pulled back the shower curtain and opened all the bathroom cabinet doors—you can never be too careful.

None of the living-room furniture cast a shadow big or dark enough to let someone in, and I’d just turned on the light in the small pantry when Cam spoke up from a bar stool behind me. “Maybe we should leave an opening,” he said. “For Kori.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, watching him. “You really think she’ll just bringadley back?”

He shrugged. “She won’t have any choice once she hears Anne’s message. And even if she doesn’t, I don’t think Kori wanted to take Hadley in the first place. I think she’ll be looking for an opportunity to make this right. We’ll have to trust her.”

“Like we trusted her half an hour ago?”

“She’s in a tough spot, Liv,” he insisted, but I could see beyond what he was saying to what he was actually thinking—his inner conflict was clear, from the deep lines carved in his forehead.

“Just like you are.”

He looked up, and his gaze was heavier than I’d ever seen it. “If she was given a direct order, she had no choice.”

“And you think this hypothetical order justifies what she did?”

His gaze hardened and he leaned forward with both elbows on the counter. “First of all, that order isn’t hypothetical, or theoretical, or mythical in the least. We both know Kori would never do something like this if she had any choice. She’d never hurt a child.”

Well, I couldn’t argue there, even though the facts seemed to be arguing for me.

“And second, no, I don’t think orders justify what she did. There’s no way to justify that. But I think she’s eager to make it right. To make up for it, if possible.” He hesitated. “We owe her the chance to do that. Leave her a way in, Liv. We’ll work on finding Hadley from our end, but we need to leave Kori a way to bring her back, if she gets a chance.”

I thought about that for a second, then nodded. “Fine. She can have the bathroom. But if someone else shadow-walks into this apartment, you better be prepared to shoot.”

“I always am….” He smiled and pulled back his jacket to show me the gun in his custom holster.

“Well, now you’re extra prepared.” I leaned over the back of the couch and picked up the backpack I’d dropped on the center cushion and tossed it to him. He caught it with an “oof,” unzipped it, then “oohed” at the contents.

“Okay, this one’s mine,” he said, pulling his own .45 out, along with a box half-full of the corresponding shells. “But if the rest of these are yours, I have to admit my manhood is slightly threatened here.”

“Yeah, but you’re a little turned on, too, right?” I sat on his lap to start lining the weapons up on the table. Three extra 9mm guns, a .38—I’d brought that one for Anne—and one truly badass, guaranteed-to-blow-a-hole-right-through-you .50-caliber monster.

“More than a little…” Cam muttered, gripping my hips from behind. Then he spotted the .50 caliber and I was all but forgotten. “Christmas, already?” He reached for it, and I slapped his fingers.

“Hands off, little boy. That’s a very grown-up piece of equipment.” Overkill, probably, but you never know when you’re going to need a really big gun.

Cam laughed. “Are we hunting
bears?
You got an elephantcket to shn there, too?”

I twisted to grin down at him, feeling guilty for the moment of levity, even as I seized it. “I like power—when I’m wielding it.”

“Mmm… I like it when you’re wielding it, too.” His lips found my neck, and I indulged in one more moment of pleasure before pulling away to bring us both down to earth.

“Okaaaay, back to work.” I slid out of his lap and onto my own chair while he started loading extra clips. “I assume you’ve actually been to Tower’s house. Or…estate, or whatever…?”

“Yeah. It’s not as…overdone as Cavazos’s address, but it’s a good-size property.”

“Big enough to hide an operation like this Skilled transfusion thing?”

“I honestly don’t know.” He shrugged. “It’s not like they let you just wander around the grounds. Well, not like they let
me
wander. Kori might have wandering privileges.”

“Speaking of which…” I jogged into the bathroom, where I turned off the light and pulled the door halfway closed, leaving more than enough darkness for Kori—and hopefully Hadley—to make a triumphant return.

In the kitchen again, I grabbed two sodas from the fridge—no telling how long they’d been there—and set one in front of Cam. “The way I see it, we can sit here and wait for Kori to bring her back—” which wasn’t going to happen, no matter how hard we wished or how many happy thoughts we threw out into the universe “—or we can track Hadley ourselves.”

We could have tracked Kori—I’d certainly done it before—but we had no way of knowing that Hadley was still with her. For all we knew, she’d turned over the child, then been reassigned. If she heard Anne’s message, she’d have to respond, but we couldn’t afford to sit back and wait for that. What if she never checked her voice mail, or had been ordered not to listen to messages from us?

Cam popped the top on his can and took a long chug. “The real question isn’t whether or not we can find Hadley, but how do we get her back, once we’ve found her. We can’t just go ring the doorbell.”

“You’re crossing bridges we haven’t come to yet. First, let’s find her. We’ll worry about the rest of it then.” I kicked out the chair between us and propped up my feet. “For the moment, at least, we don’t have a blood sample for Hadley, so we’ll have to start with name-tracking.”

“For the moment?”

“Anne may have one.” I’d been thinking about that for the past hour. Some Skilled parents kept blood samples of their children—under lock and key, of course—like normal parents kept their kids’ fingerprints and current picture. As a precaution, for the worst-case scenario. “But if she does, we can’t get to it until she wakes up. Fortunately, we have Hadley’s name, and that should be enough, right?”

“Assuming they haven’t put her on a plane? Yeah.” Cam took another drink from his can, then set it aside. “Do we have her middle names?” he asked, and I sook my head. Anne hadn’t mentioned them, and it would have been rude to ask. Though now that we officially needed it, she would be more than willing to divulge the necessary information—once she woke up. “Okay, then, we’ll start with first and last.” He closed his eyes, blocking everything else out to aid his concentration.

“Hadley Liang.” Cam whispered her name, and I couldn’t help wondering if he felt anything, beyond the normal tracking senses. Would he know it, if he were tracking his own daughter? Would saying her name aloud trigger some kind of primal response deep inside him, even if she did carry some other man’s surname?

After a long couple of minutes and lots of slow, careful breathing, he opened his eyes and frowned. “Nothing. It’s like she doesn’t even exist.”

No.
I closed my eyes, fighting down nausea at the thought. “Tower needs her. He wouldn’t kill her as long as he can use her, right?”

Cam shrugged miserably. “I like to think he wouldn’t kill her anyway. She’s just a kid. So…I’m thinking we don’t have her real name. Not all of it, anyway.” Which wasn’t unusual, for Skilled adults. Most of us took on fake names or obscure nicknames once we were old enough to have to sign official documents, like drivers’ licenses and tax forms. But few children had reason to use a fake name.

Then suddenly I understood what he was saying. “Her last name. Shen adopted her, but his last name won’t actually be hers. She’s not a Liang, she’s a Lawson, like Anne.”

“Let’s hope.” He closed his eyes and whispered the new version of her name, and again I waited. And again, quicker this time, he sighed in frustration and opened his eyes. “Nothing. If I knew her personally and already had a feel for her energy signature, I might be able to get at least a blip to let us know she’s alive. But I only met her for a couple of minutes, and her name…just isn’t working. I feel like we’re missing something.”

Oh, shit.
“Try Caballero,” I said softly, and Cam’s entire frame went stiff. “If she’s yours, it’s possible Anne gave her your last name.”

“Why would Anne give her my name, but not tell me about it?”

“I don’t know. To protect her?” From exactly what
we
were doing… Because if Cam didn’t know she had his name, no one else would, either. “Just try it, and we can deal with whatever the result tells us later.”

Cam closed his eyes again, demonstrating a level of concentration he wouldn’t have needed for most other trackings—which just showed how difficult this one was proving. “Hadley…Caballero,” he whispered, and I held my breath, not sure how to feel about the possibility that his paternity might be revealed through a routine tracking. I wasn’t sure how he felt about that possibility, either, which made my nerves a little harder to control.

But a minute later, he looked at me again, this time with an odd mixture of disappointment and relief. “Nothing. If she’s mine, she doesn’t have my name.” He grabbed his soda again and drank as if he was wishing for something stronger. “How the hell does Cavazos expect you to find his kd with one name, when I can’t even find Anne’s with two names?”