Cipher (28 page)

For eight seconds she pushed against the barrier. It stretched with her, like a rubber band pulling taut, but didn’t snap. On the ninth beat, she eased back, as if giving up, and for the briefest moment she swore she sensed satisfaction lacing the walls of her mental prison.

Zola’s favorite trick—encouraging an opponent to underestimate her.

On ten, Kat gathered her strength and slammed it outward.

For one moment, one
heartbeat
, the iron cracked.

The man who slammed through the door held a gun in his outstretched hand. He pointed it in Kat’s direction for a moment, then lowered it. “That’s a bad idea, Miss Gabriel. Len is here to protect you and your friends, and you’re making that difficult.”

If it had just been her…but it wasn’t. Ben and Julio were just as helpless as she was. Gritting her teeth, Kat let the mental attack fade away. “Tying us to chairs and drugging us was part of the protection too?”

“Yes.” He held up the gun, its barrel pointing at the ceiling as he brandished it. “Otherwise, we may have no choice but to kill anyone who may not have the information we need.”

The collar, Ben had said. Clearly whoever had kidnapped him didn’t realize Jackson had already destroyed it.

If she told them, they might not believe her. If they
did
believe her…

Time, that was what they needed now. Time for Jackson to cast a spell or for Anna to use her contacts. Kat licked her chapped lips and winced. “May I have a glass of water?”

“No.”

Without empathy, Kat had to fall back on the lessons Callum had forced her to learn. Body language. She took in the blank expression, the cold eyes, the easy grip on the gun. This wasn’t a tense man, or a frightened one. This was a man so far gone into madness that he wasn’t even angry.

Dangerous. He was dangerous, and he clearly wanted her to start talking. Fast.

Kat swallowed. “What do you want to know?”

His jaw clenched. “Where is the
collar
?”

Truth or lie. She had a split second to decide. “I don’t know.”

The man shook his head. “Try again, Miss Gabriel.”

We don’t have it.
An answer guaranteed to make them all useless—and therefore expendable. So she met his gaze and put everything into the lie. “I told you, I don’t—”

His dispassionate expression didn’t change as he lowered his arm and shot Ben.

The sound was deafening. Like thunder in a closet, rattling through her almost hard enough to distract her from the sick feeling of something wet and warm splattering across her face.

The shot.

He’d shot Ben.

He’d
shot Ben
.

Shock held her rooted in place as the man turned without a sound and left, leaving Kat alone in a room with an unconscious shapeshifter and the lifeless body of her friend.

Chapter Eighteen

Most of the faint hope Andrew still harbored died when he found Kat’s cell phone wedged in a storm drain outside the warehouse. Julio’s car was still parked on the street, and there was no sign of either of them.

He kept it under control as he drove to Kat’s apartment. Mackenzie and Jackson would be checking any and all of the public places they could have gone, like Mahalia’s or Dixie John’s, so he could do this. With any luck, they’d be watching an old sci-fi movie with the lights down and the telephone ringer off, and they wouldn’t even realize Kat had dropped her phone.

The last shred of possibility, and it flared into desperation as he stood outside the apartment and heard movement inside. He pounded on the door. “Kat?”

He had to knock again before the door popped open. Sera stood there in sweatpants and an inside-out tank top, both clearly hastily donned. “Kat’s still at Julio’s…” She trailed off as she studied his face, then swore softly. “What happened?”

He gripped the edge of the doorframe. “They’re not here?”

“No.” Sera pivoted and got to the dining room table in two steps. She picked up her phone and flipped through the screen. “She texted me…this afternoon. Said she was going to help Julio paint a room, and they might go out later. That was the last I heard.”

If anyone had unearthed them somewhere, getting drunk and playing pool, Andrew would’ve gotten a call. “They’re missing.”

“Shit.” Sera shoved her phone into her pocket and snatched up a hair elastic from the kitchen table. “Where’s the last place anyone saw them?”

“I found Kat’s phone over at the warehouse.” His heart thumped painfully. “I was about to go back to Jackson’s office. He’s—he’s already looking.”

“I’m coming with you.” She shoved her foot into a shoe while twisting her wet hair into a knot at the back of her head. “Grab my keys off the counter, will you? Do we need something of Kat’s? For Jackson, if he needs to try to use magic?”

“I’ve got her phone.”

Sera hopped on one foot and pulled her other shoe on. “What about Julio’s phone? Maybe her friend from Birmingham can track the phone to Julio, if he’s still got it. Trigger the GPS or something?”

“Ben’s missing too.” He shoved her keys at her and turned for the door. “We’ve got to move.”

She did, grabbing a leather jacket off the back of a chair without bothering to find a warmer shirt. “Is Anna on her way?”

“Should be.” And Patrick too, someone with reason enough to hunt down the bastards who’d done this. “I’m driving.”

He counted the streets and turns between the apartment building and Jackson’s office, trying to find a way to keep himself centered and calm. Using the little things to distract himself from disaster.

Anna’s car was parked in front of the office, but it was Miguel who met them at the door. “Nothing?”

“No,” Andrew said shortly. “Jackson?”

Miguel shook his head. “Patrick sent Anna some info, and Jackson’s been helping her run some of it down.”

The inside of the office didn’t
look
like chaos had descended. Jackson and Mackenzie were both on the phone, and Anna was scribbling something on a white board in the corner.

Sera touched Andrew’s arm, just the slightest brush of fingers, but her energy swept over him like a warm breeze in a cold room. “She’s with Julio, and Julio’s not going to let anything happen to her. We just need to get to them.”

Somewhere to the left of Alec’s deserted desk, Andrew had lain on the carpet, bleeding. Dying. He had half-memories of Kat leaning over him, her tears splashing hot on his skin as she screamed herself hoarse.

“I told her this was over,” he found himself confessing. “I promised her better than this.”

“I know.” Sera pulled at his arm, planting one hand in the center of his chest to urge him to sit on one of the empty desks. “You sit, and you take a deep breath. Then you take another. Then you find out where the cult is, and you kill every person who had a hand in kidnapping Kat. And no one will touch her again.”

“That’s a damn bloodthirsty suggestion for someone who’s trying to calm me down.”

“We all have our roles. You don’t run with a lot of submissive wolves, do you?”

Jackson slammed down his phone and rose. “Not good news, I guess.”

Andrew held up Kat’s phone. “I found it outside our building. Can you…?”

The other man’s eyes clouded. “I tried a tracking spell already. I was able to lock on to Kat, but the location kept jumping all over the map. Someone’s scrambling it.”

Andrew squeezed his eyes shut. The cell phone’s plastic casing cracked in his hand, and he forced himself to relax his grip as he opened his eyes. “So what’s next?”

“Skip tracing,” Anna said from her position by the white board.

“What the hell is that?”

“We trace the paper trails. Known associations.” She drew a line between two names and capped her marker. “Hazelton has a sister with a Louisiana driver’s license, and one of the other cult members inherited her dead mom’s rental properties on the Gulf. If we track it all down…”

“We could find where they’ve gone to ground.” Jackson rose and walked over to examine the board. “If they’re snatching people, they need a place to take them.”

Mackenzie held up her phone. “Tell us what to do. Who to call.”

He didn’t have a clue. This was Jackson’s specialty, Anna’s, anyone’s but his. He was an architect before he was a wolf, before he’d been tasked with taking care of everyone in his charge.

He couldn’t do this.

That’s complete bullshit.
His mother’s voice, musical and determined. She’d never accepted the words from him, and she certainly wouldn’t if she were around now, with so much on the line.

Andrew stood. “Can we find out when Patrick last spoke to Ben?”

Anna didn’t have to check. “Four days, he said.”

So they’d had plenty of time to find a place and hole up. “We keep looking,” he said finally. “We track down everything we can, every lead, and we check them all out.” In the absence of magic, it was all they could do.

“How do we do that when each place could be hours away in any direction?” Miguel asked quietly.

There was only one thing he could think of. “Wynne Albrecht. We’ll use the cult’s own tricks against them.”

Chapter Nineteen

Her face was sticky.

Kat dug her teeth into her lower lip to hold back a whimper. She wouldn’t break. Wouldn’t cry, and it didn’t matter that tears had been leaking out from beneath her closed eyelids for hours or days or
weeks
, however long she’d been handcuffed to this chair while Ben—

No. She tried one of Callum’s calming breaths and regretted it, because everything smelled like salt and metal. Tears and blood, and it hadn’t been days because Julio was still slumped in the corner. He stirred from time to time, muttered sounds that weren’t quite words, but Kat couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. If he woke up, if he looked at Ben’s body, looked at her, then it wouldn’t be a dream.

It had to be a dream. A nightmare. Something new to replace the terror of replaying Andrew’s near death over and over again. Catharsis. Her psyche spewing out the stress of the past weeks, like it did after controlled burnout. That was all it was.

Ben was not dead. His blood was not on her face, on her body, in her hair. Just like before, just like with Andrew, only this time it wasn’t only blood but
pieces
of him, and Franklin wouldn’t come and save the day. Ben wouldn’t climb to his feet as a wolf because bullets didn’t remake lives, they ended them. Gone forever. Game over.

No.
Just a dream. Soon, she’d wake up. Wake up.

Wake up, please wake up.

Julio made another noise—a groggy sound that was almost a word this time—and a scream crawled its way into her throat, scratched and clawed until it burst free in one pained cry that raked across her nerves.

This was it. This was what it felt like to break.

“Kat.” Julio coughed and whispered her name again.

Her irrational need for him to stay asleep vanished, swallowed whole by the desperate need to not be alone in her nightmare. “You need to wake up, Julio. It’s important. It’s really important, okay?”

He raised his head, but his eyes were glazed and unfocused. “Where are we?”

“In a garage, I think.” Her lips were dry, but she couldn’t wet them. Not when her face was covered in—
Stop it, Kat. Stop it.
“I think someone from the cult must have us. You and me and—and Ben.” Her voice broke on the name. “They shot him.”

The words kindled no recognition, but his head snapped up. This time, his gaze focused on the chair beside her.

On Ben.

Julio made a low noise and jerked against the chains as he started to breathe faster. “They want the thing, right? The collar.”

“Yes.” If they had a telepath, they would have plucked the thoughts from her head already. Or maybe they just hadn’t had one strong enough to break through the natural psychic defenses she and Ben had. It didn’t mean they didn’t have a clairvoyant…or a good old-fashioned bug. “They could be listening to us.”

His expression didn’t change. “Did you tell them you don’t know where it is?”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying, confused from the drugs or honestly didn’t know…and there was no way to ask. “Yes. They didn’t believe me.”

His gaze flickered to Ben. “How long was I out?”

“I don’t know.” Shame twisted with horror, made her queasy. “I freaked out, Julio. I’m
still
freaked out.”

“It’s okay.” He looked around the room for a moment and cocked his head as if listening. The chains shook again as his shoulders flexed. He strained against his bonds, grunting from the effort, then relaxed with a curse. “They must have used magic. These things are solid.”

“I’m handcuffed.” It was inane. Everything she said was inane, everything she thought was inane, but it was the only way to stay calm. To keep from following Julio’s gaze to where Ben sat a foot away.

No, not Ben. Ben’s body.

“
Kat
, look at me.” His tone brooked no argument. “I can’t break these chains. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay. Okay.” God, she would have given anything for a wisp of her empathy, for the power to reach out to him, to ground herself in his unshakable strength. “They’ve got someone here who’s blocking me. I can lower my shields, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve got me penned in.”

“We’ll figure that out. But you’ve got to stay with me, okay?”

“I know.” She had to get back to Andrew. If something happened to her, he’d never come back from it. She dragged in a steadying breath out of habit, and wished she hadn’t. So much blood, and she had to tighten her neck and shoulders to keep from turning to look at Ben. “Can you hear anything outside of these walls?”

“Footsteps.” His expression tightened. “Whatever you have to do, Kat. Remember that. Whatever—”

The door opened.

A woman this time, not the man from before. She carried a small leather case, which she set down not far from Julio’s chair. “Good evening.”

Julio remained silent, even when the woman took an extra chair from the corner and brought it close to his, sat down and opened her case to reveal the wicked glint of metal.

Staged. It was all perfectly staged, straight out of a movie script, and Kat knew it was meant for her. Not that they wouldn’t torture Julio—with Ben’s blood dried on her skin, she believed they’d do anything—but the precise movements, the slow reveal, the sheer theatrics of it all… They were trying to fuck with her head.