Cipher (29 page)

It was working.

Kat squeezed her hands together, even though she could barely feel her fingers. “I told you, I don’t know where the collar is.”

“Really?” The woman pulled out a thin knife, almost like a scalpel. “From what we’ve heard, you planned to take it to Wyoming. Did you?”

They knew too much, and yet not enough. Kat’s mouth went dry. The blade looked sharp, cold. The woman kept turning it this way and that, letting it catch the light. More theatrics, giving Kat ample time to speak as dread closed around her.

She’d seen the movies. She knew all of her lines. Quips and taunts.
Sorry, I was too busy banging your mom
, or something even cockier.
Is that the biggest knife you’ve got? No wonder you’re overcompensating.
No, that one didn’t even make sense, because it was a woman, not a man, and how in hell was she supposed to laugh in the face of danger when danger wasn’t coming anywhere near her?

No, they’d killed Ben, and they’d slice Julio to pieces next. Because she was the empath, the squishy-hearted one, and she’d break under someone else’s pain.

The scalpel dipped toward Julio, and Kat let out an embarrassing squeak. “Wait. Wait, don’t.”

Julio growled. “Kat, no—”

The blade sinking into his skin silenced him.

Chapter Twenty

No more than a quarter hour after Andrew’s desperate, determined phone call, a willowy blonde stood in front of him. It didn’t matter that Wynne’s body was currently in Paris—she didn’t need it to help them investigate the addresses Anna had managed to locate. She studied the satellite map Mackenzie pulled up, closed her eyes and vanished.

Andrew paced the floor anxiously. Astral projection allowed her almost instantaneous travel, but she had to exercise care in popping in and out of her target coordinates, or she risked exposure. They were dealing with psychics, and if they thought Kat and Julio had help coming, they might not hesitate to kill them both.

In less than ten minutes, she reappeared. “Nothing there but a vacant lot. I checked the adjacent ones too, just to be sure, but nothing.”

The bell above the door jingled as Patrick shoved through it, a massive duffel bag over his shoulder and a smaller one in his hand. He stopped short and blinked at Wynne, then looked to Andrew. “You found an astral projector?”

Jackson scratched his head and eyed the white board. “It’s the only way to check all these places out without splitting up in half a dozen different directions. A hell of a lot quicker too.”

Wynne barely raised her head to smile absently. “I’m off again.” With that, she disappeared.

Patrick swung the large bag off his shoulder and dropped it on the desk in front of Andrew. “Weapons,” he said shortly. “I flew private and brought everything.”

Andrew dropped to one knee and unzipped the duffel. Just about every kind of gun he could think of lay inside, along with several intricate-looking blades. “Magically silenced like your others?”

“Silenced, untraceable, warded ten ways to the underworld and at least halfway back.” Patrick turned to Jackson. “I know your spell wouldn’t lock on Kat, but I brought some of Ben’s things.”

Jackson nodded. “Give me the thing he handles the most and I’ll try.”

Patrick retrieved a laptop computer barely bigger than his hand and held it out. “This.”

“Got it.” He retreated to his desk and the map laid across it.

Anna beckoned Patrick over to the board. “I’ve narrowed down these possibilities. Does anything strike a chord, maybe something one of your contacts mentioned?”

“Not Tennessee,” Patrick said at once, pointing to an address south of Memphis. “Not Georgia either. But I got hits on movement in Mississippi and Louisiana… I tried to get a guy on those bank accounts, to follow the money, but I’m used to having Ben.”

“Either they’re still traveling or they couldn’t have gone far,” Miguel observed.

It all depended on what they wanted—information, or something far more violent and personal. “Closer means less time,” Andrew told him. “They’d have to consider that we might—” His breath cut off as magic whooshed through the room and lifted the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

He turned to find Jackson’s entire desk awash in golden, glaring light. Even after it died down, the wizard stared at the map in confusion, his brows drawn together.

It was Sera who spoke, her voice soft and worried. “Jackson? Was the computer warded? Kat has a ward on one of her laptops…”

“No, it’s…” He trailed off and shook his head. “Are any of those addresses up near Covington or Goodbee?”

Anna whirled and snatched up one of the files. “Yes! A foreclosed farm in St. Tammany Parish. The motherfucker’s in the middle of nowhere.”

Andrew’s knees wobbled, and he grabbed the edge of a desk. “That’s it?”

Jackson began to hurriedly fold the map. “That’s it.”

Mackenzie shoved her phone into her back pocket and turned to Sera, who’d already reached for her jacket. “You’re staying here, honey. Someone needs to wait for Wynne, and you know what’ll happen in a fight.”

The coyote tensed, anger flashing across her face, chased quickly by frustration. “It’s Kat.”

“It’s Kat,” Mackenzie agreed. “Which is why we can’t have you underfoot, giving our instincts hell.”

Sera jerked her coat off the desk and looked at Andrew. “I’ll stay in the car. I just…I can
help
. We can leave a note for Wynne.”

He couldn’t imagine being left behind with his friends in trouble, and the pleading look on her face was one emotional straw too many. “You stay in the car and stay
down
, for Christ’s sake.”

She nodded with the blind obedience of a submissive shifter, so effortless he knew it was instinct. As Sera slid into her coat, Mackenzie gave him a searching look, then turned to the white board and scribbled a note with the address.

It couldn’t be more than fifty or sixty miles, less if they crossed the lake over the Causeway, but the thought of getting stuck in traffic on the bridge with no way out of it…

No fucking way. He hit the door, shouldering it open. The glass wobbled in its metal casing, maybe even cracked, but all Andrew could think of was getting out of the city.

Getting to Kat.

Chapter Twenty-One

Julio didn’t scream.

He gritted his teeth. He clenched his fists. Kat felt every slice like it was cutting into her own skin, and she was crying long before the first tears of pain leaked from the corner of his eyes.

But he didn’t scream.

Kat did. Ten minutes, twenty—she didn’t know, and she couldn’t keep track, but it didn’t take long for her begging to give way to fury. Julio healed fast, his skin closing up to present a fresh, unblemished surface, if you could ignore the blood. She screamed as her fear turned to rage, as pressure built until the constriction of the psychic barriers locked around her turned claustrophobic.

She couldn’t get enough air, and maybe that was what broke her. Suffocating while Julio suffered in silence, and when she finally snapped, the truth tumbled from her lips in a tangled rush. “We destroyed it already, it’s gone, it’s
gone
.”

The woman froze, leaned back carefully out of reach of Julio’s teeth and eyed Kat. “I don’t believe you.”

Of course not. Too little, too late, and she didn’t know if it was brilliance on her part that she’d managed to confuse the issue so thoroughly, or if the truth would be what got them killed. “Why would we keep it?”

“Why
wouldn’t
you?” the woman demanded in turn, rising from her chair. She snatched up the bag and stalked out, slamming the door behind her.

A rough noise vibrated out of Julio, and it took Kat a moment to recognize it as a rusty chuckle. “You like to piss people off,” he rasped.

If she started laughing, she might never stop. Blind hysteria wasn’t an option. “I don’t try, it just happens.” There, a joke. They were back on script.

Then Julio coughed, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Use it,” he said finally. “You do what you have to do, I mean it.” Then his head rolled forward until his chin rested on his chest, and he went still.

Her heart stopped.

“Julio?”

No response, and panic swelled until she realized his chest was moving. He was breathing. Slow and shallow, but he was
breathing
, damn it, and Kat counted the breaths. Counted ten, and then started to worry that they were too slow. She tried timing them, but keeping track of the seconds in her head and the breaths on her finger felt as natural as patting her head and rubbing her stomach, and as useful.

So she counted, as her body ached and terror settled around her. Every ten breaths she said his name and got silence in reply.

All of the guilt seemed stupid now. She’d spent so much time cursing her gift and punishing herself. She’d wallowed and moped and done everything but etch emo poetry into her arm, because she was
so
dangerous and
so
dark. Now she was handcuffed to a fucking chair, locked into her mind, and she’d give anything for a spark of that deadly power.

She’d never felt so helpless in her life.

Julio’s chest rose and fell three hundred and seventy-four times before the door opened again to reveal the woman, returning with her damned bag. She laid it at Julio’s feet and slapped him once to rouse him. When it didn’t work, she frowned, sat and retrieved a larger knife, one with a serrated edge.

But instead of applying it to Julio’s flesh immediately, she cast a glance at Kat. “None of the others believe you, either.”

Then the sharp teeth of blade bit into Julio’s shoulder, he jerked awake with a muffled grunt—and Kat felt it.

Not garden-variety human empathy and not her imagination. Her power, his pain, so clear she jerked and stared at her arm as a choked groan escaped her. Her skin was unmarked, but she felt the next cut just as deeply, so bright and hot that she threw herself instinctively outward, battering against the prison that had become a trap. Emotions could come in, but she couldn’t get out.

Not even when the torture began in earnest.

Maybe it was a blessing that she’d already screamed herself hoarse. Her own whimpers would have been a distraction from marveling over how Julio could feel this much agony and not make a sound. Maybe he was the god that Sera painted him in her weaker moments, when she got drunk on too much vodka and explained to Kat in agonizing detail that Julio was the sort of man a girl drowned in because he wouldn’t let anything happen to her ever again.

Sera was never going to forgive Kat if Julio ended up with a bullet between his eyes.

Kat shivered. Shivered hard enough to rattle the handcuffs against the chair, because it was so damn cold she couldn’t feel pain anymore. Just the beautiful numbness that brought back memories of the last time she’d been helpless while a man bled for trying to protect her.

Their captors had made a mistake. A terrible, wonderful mistake. They’d given her Julio’s pain and mixed it with her own rage, and the bastard trying to keep her locked into her own mind didn’t know how very, very soon he’d be dying.

Kat didn’t know how long it went on, only that Julio never broke. Not on the surface, anyway, but his pain filled the vast reservoir of her gift until she wondered whether anyone who could suffer so deeply, so silently, wasn’t a little broken to begin with.

She was past broken, careening into deadly. And maybe the woman torturing them knew it. This time, when she put away her knives and turned to face Kat, that triumphant little smile slipped away. Kat didn’t need empathy to see uncertainty in the woman’s eyes or fear in her too-quick steps as she retreated to the door.

As it slammed shut, Kat spent one idle, bemused moment wondering just how insane she looked.

Julio met Kat’s gaze, his face pale and ashen. “Hold on to it,” he urged softly. “Just for a little while. Keep it.”

Her lips cracked when she smiled, and she didn’t care. “I’m bringing you inside my shields. Don’t fight me.”

He didn’t return her smile. “I don’t think I could.” Then he added cryptically, “I need time.”

She was already dismantling what was left of her battered shields so she could rebuild them around Julio. “Time for what?”

A spasm of coughs wracked him. “To heal up. Then we fight, no matter what.”

“All right.” Brick by careful brick, she built her own wall around them. “I’m not getting out of these handcuffs, but I might be able to get you out of those chains.”

“Did you get all telekinetic on me, sweetheart?”

No, she’d gotten ruthless. “Try pharmaceutical. Ever overdosed on adrenaline?”

Chapter Twenty-Two

There were no cars, no lights, nothing to indicate Kat and Julio and Ben were being kept anywhere on the property. No signs, until Andrew and Patrick circled a stand of dead pecans and caught sight of a small freestanding garage.

“They painted the windows.” He gestured, guiding Patrick’s gaze. “Obscuring the light.”

“Wards too, all the way around that building.” Patrick rubbed at the back of his neck as if it itched. “Jackson’ll take care of those. Can you get a scent?”

All Andrew smelled was wet earth, dead grass and motor oil. “They’re in there.” And only the knowledge that it could get them killed kept him from rushing in. “We need to check with Miguel, see if he got anything.”

They carefully retraced their steps back over the rise down the road. Miguel had already returned, resumed his human form and pulled on his jeans. “They’re here,
somewhere
. I tried to get through to Kat, but I don’t know if she heard me.”

“A lot of magic in the air,” Patrick said, scratching at his neck again. “Did you smell any other wolves, Miguel?”

“I don’t know. A few times, I thought maybe…but it was hard to tell.”

Anna slid her phone shut and hopped down off the back of the car. “We have a problem. One of my friends out west heard of some big freelance job in these parts. Magic and muscle. Apparently, it drew hardcore interest, got some hires.”

Mackenzie rocked to her toes, then unzipped her jacket. “So we fight. Jackson, baby? How big a racket do you think crossing the perimeter will make?”