Cipher (27 page)

“A big reason Alec and Carmen had to get up there,” Jackson drawled. “Even if it left me holding the bag here.”

Andrew tapped the edge of the name placard on the desk. “Can you hire someone to help you?”

“I’ve got some feelers out,” he admitted. “With the kind of cases we get, it’s not really as simple as hiring a newbie with a fresh PI license. I need someone like McNamara.”

He was practically brooding. Andrew hid a smile. “So ask him to join up.”

“Can’t. He’s not one for operating inside the normal boundaries of the law, you know.”

“Right, that might be an issue.”

“You’ll find someone, baby.” Mac’s fond smile faded. “In the meantime…can I give Mr. Council here a piece of my mind, yet?”

“Only if you promise to keep it civil, darlin’.”

“I’m always civil.” But when she turned her gaze on Andrew, she looked damn near feral. “You know how Jackson and I have been chasing down rumors of orphaned cougars? Turns out it’s not as easy as it should be, because this country is lousy with orphaned shapeshifters.”

That he could believe. “What sorts of situations are you finding?”

“A lot of wolves. Some who have one or both parents who were turned, then ended up on the wrong side of the local pack structure. Some who are on the streets, or group homes.” She glanced at Jackson. “We found one in an orphanage last week.”

Andrew sat straighter. “Shit. How old?”

“Eight.” Mackenzie’s voice took on an odd note—almost like the protective purr of a mama cat over her cub. “Once Jackson’s got everything tied up here…I think we’re going back for him.”

If he grew up alone, there was no telling what would happen to the boy. “I think it sounds great. Where’s the orphanage?”

“Colorado.” She leaned forward again. “But it’s not enough. Even if we save one of them…we need something here, in town. While you and Alec are throwing around all this money, throw some at all the damn kids who get left behind because our screwed-up world keeps killing their parents.”

“I’ll check with Alec, see what we can do. When it comes to orphaned kids, though, finding the money might be the least complicated part of it all. Those kids can’t just disappear from society, so it’s all got to be legal.”

“People have been throwing money at problems like this for years,” Mackenzie replied. “And there’s Carmen’s cousin, Veronica. She’s got a legal degree from a top school and understands. I bet I can talk her into helping me. But the wolves are the only ones who can protect and fund it.”

“Kenzie’s already got it figured out,” Jackson said affectionately.

His wife smiled. “Because you helped.” Turning back to Andrew, she raised both eyebrows. “I was lucky. I got adopted by people who loved me and took care of me. Even if we can’t give them all families, we can give them chances. So help me make it happen.”

“All right. I’ll try.” Andrew’s phone vibrated and then rang, and he tilted his head toward the back room as he dug it out of his pocket. “May I?”

Jackson waved him back, his attention on his computer. “Knock yourself out.”

It was Patrick calling, and Andrew’s gut clenched as he answered. “Hello?”

“We fucked up, Callaghan.” Patrick’s voice was rough. Choked. “We missed something.”

The knot in his stomach seized. For one breathless, agonizing second, he was sure he was going to puke all over the boring office carpet, but his voice—when it came—sounded steady enough. “What happened?”

“Ben is missing, and I found his girlfriend in their apartment. Her neck’s broken.”

Lia. “Fuck.” Andrew’s hands started to shake. “Does it look like a burglary gone bad? Anything like that?”

“What it looks is well-planned.” A motor revved in the background. Patrick’s voice evened, turned cold and detached. “I’m about to get on a plane back to New Orleans. Can you call Anna and have her start trying to track down properties attached to any of the IDs we found? Or anyone related to them? Once I’m in the air, I’ll send her what I’ve got.”

“Right after I’ve called Kat,” he promised. “We’ll regroup when you get here. We’ll—” His throat closed. “We’ll find Ben. I swear that we’ll find him.”

Andrew had already speed-dialed Kat’s cell phone by the time he reached the doorway back into the office, and the pale faces that greeted him removed the last of his hope that Ben and Lia had run afoul of some new and unknown threat.

Jackson held up a faxed page. “My contact in Biloxi says the ME’s office started the autopsies on the bodies from Pass Christian. Two of them had already been autopsied once, so they rushed tissue samples through the toxicology lab and found significant amounts of embalming fluid in seven of them.”

“That’s why they burned them.” The numb words seemed to come from someone else. Some
where
else, miles away. “Most of them were already dead.”

“And they staged it to look like a group suicide.” Jackson swore.

Andrew started as the ringing in his ear gave way to Kat’s outgoing voicemail message. “Try calling Julio. He’s with Kat, he’s—” Stupidly, he ended the call and redialed her number. “He’s with Kat.”

Mackenzie already had her phone out. “On it. I’m sure they’re—”

Her voice cut off. Julio’s outgoing message spilled out of her earpiece, quiet and even more damning because the phone hadn’t rung at all.

Andrew moved without thinking, straight for the door. “Get Anna on the phone. She and Patrick have to run down the leads they have left, see if they can find out where the cult might go to ground.”

Jackson swore again. “Fuck. Someone should stay here where we have database access just in case they come up with something.”

“I’m going to check the lofts and a few more places.” His heart was splitting apart, but he sounded so
calm
that he couldn’t help but marvel absently. “If I don’t find Kat and Julio, I’ll come back, and we can figure out where to go from there.”

“Shit, all right.” Jackson snatched up his phone receiver. “Be careful, damn it.”

“Yeah.” He took a deep, bracing breath as he stepped out into the chilly, early evening air. Kat was smart—even if she and Julio had gotten snatched, she’d know what the cult was really after. And she’d tell them whatever was necessary to keep them hanging on, waiting, hoping for a chance to trade her for their precious collar. They had Kat, but she—

They had Kat.

His key chain shattered in his hand, and the metal teeth lining his keys dug into his palm along with the shards of plastic as he sagged against the rough brick building.

He had to pull it together and
hold
it together, because the one thing more important than anything else was finding them soon—and alive.

Chapter Seventeen

Her head hurt.

No, scratch that. Her whole body hurt.

Kat groaned, then wished she hadn’t. The noise set off a throbbing in her skull, an impressive feat when her brain felt about as solid as cotton balls. The only thing that registered was pain—her wrists, her arms, her ankles, everything
ached
—and the fact that she couldn’t seem to pry her eyes open.

Drugged. She’d had surgery once, to have her appendix removed. She’d been just fourteen, but she’d never forgotten how it felt to claw her way back into consciousness through that terrifying haze. The anesthesia, making her so numb and confused that her senses had woken up at different times. Her ears first, and then her sense of touch, and she’d listened to her mother whisper to her father that they had to get her discharged before the charm wore out…

The charm.
A silly bracelet with two wooden beads, and her parents had paid five thousand dollars for it. Kat remembered the brush of her mother’s fingers tying it around Kat’s wrist as she struggled to wake up, remembered the feeling—like a soft blanket wrapped around her empathy, cutting her off from the world. A desperate gamble, to bring an empath into a hospital when hormonal spikes put her powers beyond her control, but she’d been so sick, and her parents had been so scared.

She felt that way now. Sick, sore. Scratching her way into coherency as
something
coiled around her mind. Not a comforting blanket this time but cold steel, someone else’s psychic strength stifling her own.

Memories were too chaotic to grasp, but her brain was starting to move now. Falling into familiar patterns. Math.

Pain plus drugs plus psychic blocks equals…

Fuck.
This time the groan was worth the pain. She deserved it, if she’d let herself get kidnapped.

“It’s about time you woke up,” a rough but familiar voice whispered. “We’ve got to get out of here, damn it.”

Ben’s voice, and raspy, like he’d been chain-smoking again. She’d heard it a thousand times over her headset, exchanging teasing insults as they hacked and slashed their way through online video games. Her eyes felt glued shut, but she managed to wet her lips enough to speak. “Ben?”

“Yeah. Hey.” Something jarred her chair, making the legs skitter across the floor with the grating sound of metal on concrete. “Open your eyes, Kat.”

That set off the pounding again, like an entire drum line practicing on the inside of her skull. “Ouch. Fuck, Ben.” She got her eyes opened, and squinted at the floor between her feet. She had paint on her left boot, boring beige paint that stood out against the scuffed black leather.

Beige paint. “Julio. I was with Julio.”

“The guy they keep dosing with horse tranquilizers?” He jerked his head toward the corner. “They’ve got his chair chained to the wall, just in case.”

Without thinking, Kat tried to lift her hand to rub at her eyes and winced when metal dug into her wrist. Handcuffs, cold and unyielding.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

In the end she settled for blinking until her vision cleared. Julio
was
slumped in the corner, but no one had taken a chance on handcuffs holding him. Chains held his arms to his body as well as his legs to the chair, enough of them that it would have seemed absurd if it hadn’t been so damn terrifying.

Kat looked back to Ben, who was scruffy and exhausted. “Where the hell are we?”

He shook his head. “All I know is I’ve been here for
days
. They’re holding Lia too, but they won’t tell me where. They just keep asking questions.”

Days. That was important for a reason, but her mind still wouldn’t make connections. “What are they asking?”

“The collar.” He grimaced. “They must have traced my activity somehow when I was pulling records.”

“Oh God, Ben—” For the first time, she understood shapeshifter guilt. It formed a knot in her gut and made it hard to speak. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I figured out the risk early and I kept taking it. I knew what I was doing.” He blew out a harsh breath. “But now we need to get the hell out of here so I can find my girlfriend and rain down some vengeance on these motherfuckers.”

“Fine. Guilt later, rage now.” Kat closed her eyes and slid her senses along the cool metal barrier holding her empathy in. “Are you blocked too? Or have I got some sort of bad magic mojo just on me?”

“There’s someone. He’s been keeping me locked in since I got here.”

“Damn it.” No empathy. She’d gotten so damn cocky about how nothing could touch her. She’d indulged in fits of moral crisis over how dangerous she was, had angsted that her power was so brutal she had to accept a bodyguard to save her attackers from her own lethal skill.

She should have been learning to squirm out of handcuffs.

It hurt, but she tried anyway, twisting her wrists as she looked at the corner again. “Julio? God damn it, Julio Mendoza, wake the fuck up.”

Nothing. Not a single groan, not even a whimper.

Ben swore under his breath. “Two of the cult whackos have been arguing about his drug dosages. Whether they’ve given him enough to kill him.”

So no shapeshifter, either. Just her and her brain—not even the most useful parts of it. Kat drew in a calming breath, dragging the air deep and holding it as Callum had taught her.

“
I don’t need to learn how to breathe,
” she’d told him.

“
Most people do
” had been the typically Callum-esque answer.

Breathing didn’t help her situation, but it did help her fear. A minute later she craned her head to look at Ben. “Okay, we’re smart. We’re a couple of geniuses. Let’s rescue the shapeshifter and get the hell out of here. Are you handcuffed or tied?”

“Cuffed.” Ben scooted his chair closer to hers. “Near as I’ve been able to tell, we’re not in a city. Sometimes when it’s quiet I can hear crickets outside, but no cars unless someone’s coming or going. That’s all I’ve got.”

She wiggled, but the chair was solid. Maybe Julio could have bent the metal to free his arms, but Kat was just as likely to dislocate something. “Blocking our powers takes expensive charms or sustained effort. Have you got a charm tied to you somewhere?”

“Not a damn thing.”

So somewhere, not too far away, a spell caster or a psychic was watching their power drip away as they fought to keep Kat and Ben contained. “Then I’m going to make life hell on whoever’s shielding us. I’ve got psychic fuel to burn.”

Ben’s eyes gleamed with a surprisingly feral light. “Together, we can make one hell of a headache.”

Across the room, Julio stirred with a low grunt. His chains rattled, and he mumbled something unintelligible.

Relief surged. Whatever they’d done to Julio, he was strong enough to survive it. All they needed to do was get free. “Wake up, Julio. Wake up. There’s beer. And naked women.”

Another mutter was all she got as his head fell back and lolled to one side.

Kat closed her eyes and gathered her will. Slowly, like a hard drive spooling up, until she was wound tight and damn near vibrating with the need to let go. To
push
. “Ready?”

Ben’s handcuffs clinked as he clenched his fists. “Ready.”

“Me first,” she whispered. “Give me ten seconds, then throw everything you’ve got at them.”

“Got it.”

Maybe she’d learned something from watching the wolves circle, but her strategy was pure Zola. A testing jab against the shields, then a strong push with half of her strength. No projection—not when breaking through could injure Ben and Julio—but every scrap of sensory empathy she had.