Broken Elements (16 page)

Brian knocked me to the ground. I landed on my stomach, and he immediately fell on top of me, protecting me with his body. I heard soft thuds as several pieces landed on his jacket, then silence.

I was almost immobile, but I still tried kicking him awkwardly with one leg. I did not want to be protected. I wanted the freedom to fill this bastard’s lungs with the entire contents of the lake.

Brian grunted and moved off me. We rolled to standing position and scanned the campsite. Again, it was absolutely quiet. Using hand signals, he indicated we should move in opposite directions and meet on the other site of the clearing. His face and neck were scratched and bleeding from the ice pellets I had escaped, thanks to his protection. I immediately felt guilty for stomping on his foot. I touched his cheek gently, a silent thank you. He placed his hand atop mine for a moment, and then he smiled and disappeared into the trees.

I stepped softly, and what little noise my feet made was covered by the wind’s howling song. I moved as quickly as I could from tree to tree, trying to be as stealthy as our prey.

Every moment, I expected him to jump in front of me. I waited to feel the chill of his magic snaking through my chest, reaching for my heart, and fear crept into my mind. I fought against its intrusion, needing to maintain the concentration that allowed me to access my magic. I stopped behind a tree and took several deep breaths in an attempt to calm myself and find equilibrium.

A voice rose above the wind, a voice so horrible and piercing it could cut through any storm and dance its way into my very nightmares. It was a voice I remembered with perfect clarity. “Aidan Brook! Where are you, Aidan Brook? Don’t hide from me. There is so much I want to tell you.”

I didn’t want to respond, to encourage him in any way. I didn’t want to ever hear that voice again.

I felt the words slither into my ears and take up residence in the darkest part of my soul. As much as I wanted to plug my ears and whimper helplessly, I needed to know where he was, and there was only one way to track him. Unfortunately, it was the same way that he could track me.

“I’m here. Tell me.” I instantly moved ten feet to the left, eyes scanning the campsite the entire time. Only the trees moved, but each waving branch appeared to be an arm stretching toward me, magic at the ready.

“So impatient. I need to see your face when I tell you. I want to see the look in those big grey eyes. I want to see your joy.”

It was almost impossible to pinpoint the source of the words. The wind instantly caught the voice and carried it through the forest. I wasn’t even certain I wanted to find him, considering how easily he’d thwarted my earlier attack. At this point, I only hoped Brian and I could reach him at the same time and just plain tackle him, and maybe Brian could counteract his magic just enough to keep our hearts from freezing. It lacked finesse, but it was marginally better than cowering up a tree.

“You’re such a tease. What could you know that’s so important?” Again, I hopped behind another tree. We were moving closer to the road and to the other campers, a potential danger I needed to avoid.

“I know many things, Aidan Brook. Many things others do not, but wish they did.”

“Give me a hint.” Great. I was playing games with a megalomaniacal, insane killer. This seemed unlikely to end well. I moved in the direction I guessed the voice had come from, ten feet closer to the road, and only hoped Brian was heading the same way.

“A hint? Very well, Aidan Brook. Who’s your daddy?”

I froze. He was right here. His last words had been whispered, so quietly he couldn’t be more than two or three feet away.

The wind chose that moment to rush through the clearing. I turned slowly, peering into every shadow, feeling my heart stutter with every movement it caused. The wind’s howls and whistles covered all other noise. Long moments passed, and I stood in silence, waiting to be attacked by an unseen man. Time stretched, and still nothing happened.

Finally, a figure detached itself from the trees not four feet away from me. I instantly pushed the largest wall of water I could gather toward him, and this time there was no barrier. The water crashed directly into him, and only my last second realization kept it from flowing into his nose and lungs.

“Mac?” I said quietly.

He gave me an exasperated look and shook his head, spraying freezing water everywhere. He might have been annoyed, but he certainly wasn’t an idiot. Instead of roaring at me, he indicated the surrounding area and mouthed, “Is he here?” I nodded, and a moment later he vanished into the trees. He was surprisingly quiet for his size.

I waited another five, ten minutes, my entire body on alert and waiting for the next attack. Nothing happened. “Hold your fire,” called Mac. “It’s just us.” Mac and Brian joined me, making no attempt at stealth. “This is the only person I found out there. Whoever was here before, he’s gone now.”

“You’re sure?” I asked, continuing to turn in circles, desperately looking for any glimpse of peering eyes or a telltale puff of warm breath against the cold air. There was nothing. We were alone.

We had ended up too close to the road. With Mac’s arrival, the killer must have known the odds were turned against him. It would have been a simple matter to cross to the pavement and disappear in a waiting car. I groaned, loudly, expelling the tension that had built progressively higher, and sank to the ground, overcome by a combination of relief and frustration. I was safe and alive, but I’d let him get away again. The now unnecessary adrenaline coursed through my body, leaving me shaking and gasping.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got anything left in that flask?” I asked Brian.

He gave me a scornful look and drew a second one from his pocket. “What do you take me for?” I gulped down several slugs of whiskey, then hesitantly offered it to Mac.

“It’ll warm you up,” I said. He shook his head at me, the way someone does when they have no other polite response, but he still took the flask. “Why are you here, anyway? Weren’t you manning the next park down?”

“When you didn’t respond to Vivian’s text, I got worried. You didn’t get it, did you?”

I shook my head, thinking of my phone sitting in the bag on Brian’s back seat. “What is it?” I asked warily, fairly certain that nothing good would have brought him here. Whatever he was about to tell me, I knew I didn’t want to hear it.

“Vivian’s at the police station. Sera’s been arrested.”

Chapter 15

I wanted to crash into the jail, a punishing storm of righteous anger flowing into the building on white-capped waves, freeing Sera and running as far away from this mess as we possibly could. This felt like the final straw. Nothing we did made any difference. Bodies continued to appear with disturbing regularity. Our attempts at private investigation seemed, at best, to amuse the killer and provide him a welcome diversion. He taunted us at every turn, and we were no closer to identifying him than we had been when we’d begun this investigation.

And now, arguably our best asset was locked up, accused of murders she wasn’t physically capable of committing. I was ready to end this charade of us accomplishing a single damn thing and just get us all the hell out of town by any means necessary.

Fortunately for my future as something other than a fugitive from justice, Mac had a more sensible plan. “Has anyone called her father?”

That brought all avenging warrior plans to an immediate halt. It made sense for the man with more money than god and enough connections to influence the next presidential election to handle this. Plus, it was probably a better plan than flooding the jail. I held out my hand. “Phone.”

Brian handed me his cell phone. “It’s in the contacts.” I scrolled to the number and dialed. It rang five, six, seven times, a sound that seemed to grow angrier and tenser the longer it was allowed to continue.

Just as I was about to hang up and charge across town to pound on his hotel room door, he picked up. “What?” he answered, unmistakably angry and more than a little tired. Of course he was. It was four in the morning, I remembered.

“Sera’s been arrested.”

The anger and sleep left his voice immediately. “What’s happened?”

I told him all I knew, which was notably little. “I don’t know what they found, but they picked her up several hours ago. Her bail hearing isn’t for three days.”

He swore. “Too long. I’ll take care of it. But I suspect the delay means they don’t have as much evidence as they claim to have. They want time to build a stronger case. That’s good news, Aidan. You’ll be over there first thing in the morning?” He continued before I could agree. “Good. Try not to worry. I’d get her out even if she was guilty, and of course she’s not. I’ll take care of this.”

I hung up, the phone call having calmed my panic. It was a relief to have someone else in charge, because I felt like I was scraping the bottom of my personal barrel of strength and overall competence. With Josiah in charge, the only thing I needed to do was go home, curl up in bed, and sob helplessly for several long minutes. And that’s exactly what I did.

I awoke slowly to a world silenced by the snow that drifted slowly to the ground. Through my window, I could see only a wall of white, and I snuggled deeper into the duvet, relishing the warmth and peacefulness only found in a cozy cabin in the midst of a snowstorm. I indulged in a long, luxurious stretch, and as I turned my head, I caught sight of a cartoon devil resting on the bedside table. Sera’s keys.

I sat bolt upright, the events of the night before coming sharply back, reminding me of harsh reality. Though the worst hopelessness of the night before had been somewhat mitigated by the magical oblivion of sleep, I was horrified to think that I had been lounging in bed while Sera waited in prison. I’d slept far later than I intended, the late night and recent stress exhausting my body and forcing it to demand a reprieve at an inconvenient time.

Within minutes, I was dressed and heading downstairs, putting my hair up at the same time I navigated the staircase. Vivian and Simon were already awake. “Let’s go,” I announced, dangling Sera’s keys from one hand. I was impatient and irritated with myself, and I conveniently chose to ignore that they were waiting for me. The night before, I had walked directly to my bed, avoiding all conversation. I didn’t even know exactly why Sera was in custody.

While Vivian grabbed their coats, I looked around the house. Everything was slightly different, moved a couple inches or placed on a different shelf. “They showed up not long after the rest of you left. She was still on the phone with her father. They searched the house,” she said. “And Sera’s car. They had a warrant. Those keys won’t do much good. They impounded her car.”

I had many questions about the arrest, but not at the expense of a delay. Having overslept, I was unwilling to waste any more time. I grabbed Brian’s keys from the counter but decided not to spare the extra minute it would to take to ask permission, instead hurrying to the car. As usual, Simon climbed in back and curled up neatly on the seat. Once we were driving south, I caught his eye in the rearview mirror. He was yawning and looked altogether too comfortable, considering the situation. “So, what the hell happened?”

He fixed green eyes on me, his lethargy and seeming disinterest immediately vanishing. “There was another body.”

“Where? We were at the site all night. And one of them was there!”

“It would appear our two-man theory is correct, then, because the second one was here.”

“What do you mean, ‘here’?”

I pulled around a slow pickup truck, punching the accelerator the moment clear highway lay before us and narrowly avoiding a car in the opposing lane. Vivian braced one hand against the dashboard but refrained from commenting on my driving. “Apparently, Richard Hill is no longer missing. Unfortunately, he was found dead, and in Sera’s car.”

“What?” I had to admit that I wasn’t a particularly intelligent-sounding member of this conversation, but none of the answers were what I expected to hear.

“The cops received an anonymous tip, and combined with the rest of the circumstantial evidence, it was enough for a warrant. They found Sera’s ex-boyfriend in a plastic bag placed amid all the soil in Sera’s trunk.”

“And he was killed by…?”

“Earth, of course,” said Simon. “And I would bet three of my whiskers that it’s the same brand of soil they found.”

“Only three?” I asked.

“I’m rather attached to them,” he shrugged. “My point being that someone planned this carefully, and it doesn’t look good for Sera. She now has a personal connection to the victims, access to the murder weapon, and a body found in a most inconvenient location.”

“When was the body planted?” We had filled Sera’s trunk with the leftover soil from the house and planned to dump it, but always found ourselves unwilling to remove Vivian’s best line of defense entirely. It had been weeks since anyone had looked in the trunk.

Vivian shook her head and looked ill. “They don’t know. I saw the body, when they unzipped the bag, and it hadn’t decomposed too much. Maybe in the last day or two?”

I shot around another car, driving dangerously fast in the still falling snow. Simon was right. This didn’t look good at all.

Between the choice of victims and Sera’s current situation, there was no doubt that the two of us were pieces in someone’s twisted puzzle, one we still had no idea how to solve.

The only clue was the bastard’s cryptic words about a father I never knew, if that was even what he meant, and I hesitated to place any value in a question clearly intended to taunt me. Frustration and despair welled within me. Sera and I were becoming this man’s living victims, and that was not a role that fit either of us well.

Wanting an escape from thoughts that spun in circles and refused to offer a sliver of hope, I turned on Brian’s stereo. Considerably more modern than Sera’s ancient tape deck, it still bore her influence. She’d clearly ridden in his car recently, because The Clash was cued up. For once, I didn’t try to change it, and we drove the rest of the way to the station with “I Fought the Law, and the Law Won” blaring through the speakers.

Sera had been right. She really didn’t look good in orange. In fact, with her black hair and eyes, she looked like nothing so much as a walking Halloween decoration. However, considering she was sitting on the other side of a glass pane, I decided this wasn’t the most tactful time to point that out.

Phones in hand, we looked at each other for several long moments. Fatigue and despair were etched clearly on her face. I’d never seen Sera without a glint of humor lurking in her eyes, and if I hadn’t already despised the men we were chasing, the face staring back at me would have been reason enough. She looked fractured.

“So, taken up smoking yet?” I asked, determined to remove that look from her face.

“It does help pass the time.” She snorted, lightly. “Dude, this is California. No one can smoke indoors in this state. It’s probably a good thing, too. It wouldn’t do much for my cover if I kept trying to put out everyone’s cigarettes.”

“Can I do anything?”

She shook her head. “My dad sent some shark lawyer this morning. He’s a smarmy asshole, and I’m fairly certain I despise everything he stands for, but he’s working on getting me out on some technicalities, so he’s my new best friend. Bail doesn’t look good. I live in too many different states, and the crime’s too serious. He thinks they’ll see me as a flight risk.”

“You know we’ll do whatever we have to do to get you out.”

She quirked one eyebrow at me, a touch of humor finally reaching her eyes. When Sera decided it was time to leave this jail, nothing would keep her here. The only question was how much collateral damage would be involved. “Let’s go through the system first, shall we?” she suggested.

“So, how’s the interrogation gone?”

“They seem to think they’re dealing with someone who hasn’t seen every episode of
Law & Order
. I just keep my mouth shut and give them my best inscrutable expression.” She demonstrated the expression.

I laughed, exactly as she intended, and was reluctant to broach the next subject. “He was there last night, you know. At the campsite.”

Her head snapped up, her features suffused with life as anger lit her up from within. In a voice made of stone and fire, she said, “Tell me.”

I filled her in on the previous night’s events, keeping it vague and using code whenever necessary. I didn’t care that they couldn’t use our conversation to build the case against her; there were still too many guards nearby, witnesses who should never know what walked this planet alongside them. Sera listened intently, and when I finished she battered me with questions, building a clear picture in her mind.

“Something isn’t right,” she decided.

“It would be harder to find what is right at the moment.”

“It’s all so convenient. And why is he so determined to interact with you, but he only wants me out of the way?”

“Because you’re the bigger threat?”

“Maybe.” She looked dubious. “He did the same thing ten years ago, remember. And that soil was in my car. Both of our exes might be dying, but you and I are being targeted in very different ways.”

“So why am I the lucky one who gets to talk to him?”

She shook her head. “No idea. It’s not like you’re the hot one.”

I smiled, never so relieved to be insulted. This was the Sera I knew, the indomitable spirit with thoroughly healthy self-esteem. “No pun intended.”

She laughed. “I mean, I suppose you have your charm, if someone likes the skinny no-ass look. But do you think that’s the appeal for him?”

“Well, he hasn’t asked me out yet. I don’t even know his astrological sign.”

“No, he just keeps teasing you with information. You think that’s his version of flirting?”

“Whatever he thinks he knows, he thinks it’s good news. He says it will make me happy.”

“Sadly, I don’t think we can count on good news. It seems more likely that his definition of happy isn’t the same as ours.” Once more, she looked somber, the ease of a few moments ago already passing.

“Well, there’s always that.” The guards appeared to be growing restless. I didn’t know how much longer we had. “We’re going to have to play his game, aren’t we? It’s all we have left.”

She grimaced. “I don’t like this. If we play his game, then he gets to make the rules.”

“I know, but I don’t know what else to do. I’ll start by answering his question.” Unfortunately, a fiery prison breakout seemed more reasonable than what I was about to suggest. “I guess it’s time to find out who’s my daddy.”

When I left the station, the weather was shifting once again. The sun was crawling out from behind the clouds, causing the pure white snow drifts to gleam in its light. The world was bright and silent. Any other time, it would have been peaceful. At the moment, it felt like a mockery of my inner turmoil. I knew I had to follow the only clue our tormentor was providing. I just wished my mother didn’t wait at the end of that path.

Simon and Vivian waited in the car, the engine on. It might have been warmer in the station, but considerably less private. “So, pancakes?” I asked. I might have things to do, but I’d be useless without some food in my stomach. It’s also possible I was procrastinating. A tap on the passenger window stopped Vivian from driving away. Carmichael stood outside, shivering despite his wool coat and scarf. As much as I wanted to demand Vivian stomp on the accelerator and get us the hell out of there, I took pity on him and rolled down the window.

“Ms. Brook. Do you have a few minutes?” Without waiting for an answer, he told the other two, “I’ll see that she gets home.”

It appeared that I had little choice in the matter. Vivian gave me an apologetic look as I climbed out of the car, but she still drove away, leaving me alone with the agent.

“This way, please.” He led me to a black sedan and held open the passenger door for me. Seeing no other option, I climbed in.

I wanted to play it cool and give nothing away. I said nothing while he pulled out of the driveway, wheels crunching on the new snow. I even tried to practice Sera’s inscrutable look. Unfortunately, he was equally silent, and the quiet proved too much for my control. “You said you thought we didn’t do this. What changed?”

“Other than a new body and a trunk stuffed with the murder weapon?”

“Please. Like that’s evidence.” He snorted and didn’t bother to respond. “And seriously, an anonymous tip? You don’t think that’s a little suspicious?”

“I find this entire case inexplicable. An anonymous phone call is the least of it.”