Department 57: Rubies of Fire (8 page)

“Close the door, Leon,” Cristos said. “This is supposed to be a closed meeting. Find yourself a seat.”

The man shut the door quietly. “Leonide Fiorentini, shape-shifting dragon,” he said softly, the gentle lilt to his voice proclaiming his Italian origin. “I have recently arrived in New York on a visit, and Cristos asked me to join his team.” He gave a devastating grin, slightly lopsided, revealing deep dimples in both cheeks. “It makes my business trip a lot more interesting.” A new presence entered the blended atmosphere of Talents existing in cautious harmony, a powerful, gleaming presence. Leonide Fiorentini was no lightweight. Neither did he lack in self-confidence.

Only Cristos’s sartorial elegance approached Fiorentini’s, which didn’t altogether surprise Roz, since they both looked as if they wore Armani. The cut and elegance of the design was unmistakable to the discerning eye. While Cristos wore a suit in dark charcoal gray, Fiorentini wore a blue a shade lighter than navy, complementing his tanned skin and gleaming dark hair. His eyes seemed to change in color as he passed under the lights, from gold to green and back. A prosaic observer would call them hazel. Roz thought them magical.

Leonide took a seat across the table from Roz and smiled at her, maintaining eye contact. She could do little except either smile back or accept his regard coolly. She chose the latter.

“I apologize for my late arrival,” he purred, his dark velvet voice rippling over her senses. “I was delayed.”

Beside her, Andreas’s body stiffened very slightly. He’d picked up her natural attraction to a handsome man.

A shape-shifting dragon added firepower to the team. Literally. And he wasn’t defined by the time of day, like vampires. Roz hoped they wouldn’t need his more obvious powers.

Cristos continued. “I want this done quietly, efficiently, and fast. I’ll bring Leon up to speed later.”

Cristos stared at them all, sparing a couple of seconds for each face. When it came to her turn, she felt him probe her mind swiftly, incredible power sweeping in, then out again.

Expending that power would have exhausted her. Cristos didn’t seem fazed in the least. After his swift examination, he faced them, Talents of awesome power, as their acknowledged superior. “There are traitors in Department 57, people. And one of them is in this room.”

Chapter Six

Andreas slammed his mental shutters down in instinctive reaction. The pain it dealt to him hurt him more than he’d imagined, but he couldn’t allow any further incursions until he knew more. Did Cristos lure Roz here so he could get her where he could examine her? It could be. And to teach Andreas a lesson. She had seduced him, after all, and he was well on his way to giving her his heart. After all his training he should have known better, but he’d read no subterfuge in her, no attempts to go deeper than he’d allowed. Which, after all, went almost all the way. What a fucking idiot.

Now the daytime meeting, Leon’s position by the door, and Fabrice’s stance near the sofa arrangement, blocking the bathroom exit, made sense. Had they known, or were they remaining cautious? He stayed between her and the window and waited on events, steeling his heart to any appeal she might make, but willing to listen and to defend her if he considered it necessary.

Bernard Knox knew far too much and suspected more. Not only that, but events last year had made Knox more than uneasy. But Roz hadn’t set foot in this building until today. Cristos fixed Roz with a knowing stare. “The deputy director there, Bernard Knox, has given Roz Templeton covert instructions to report back to him, and only to him. Roz is a spy.”

Although he knew, he still felt an instant of impulse when he heard the words. Worse still, he knew she’d felt it before he’d closed down. He wanted to reach for her, make it better, soothe her, but that would demonstrate disloyalty to everything he stood for, everything he believed in, and it would betray his colleagues. These agents were the best of their kind, and she needed to prove herself equal to them. “How do you know?” he asked his boss.

“Intel. Candy picked up an email when Knox sent it to her private address instead of her company address.”

“Sloppy,” Fabrice remarked.

Andreas turned to Roz. “When did you speak to him last?” he asked, his voice deliberately flat.

“This morning.”

“What did you say?”

She grimaced. “I told him I was coming here this morning for a briefing.”

“What will you tell him when you report back?”

She faced him, ignoring the silent faces turned toward them. The stillness was palpable. “I will tell him that it’s difficult to discover anything. If he wants more, I will ask Cristos to provide me with a few false leads.” Those eyes shadowed with fear, her mouth turned down slightly at the corners, showed him how close to tears she was, but he couldn’t expose himself to discover why. Besides, Fabrice would do that. “Andreas, first above everything is my loyalty to my kind and my family. Talents know this is a place they can feel safe, even if they don’t know precisely what it does. Do you really think I’d compromise that?”

“Brava.” Cristos spoke the words softly, but he didn’t need to shout in the hushed stillness.

“Do you believe me?” She wouldn’t let Andreas look away. If he hesitated now, he’d lose her. He knew that for sure.

“Yes.” Everything he knew about her told him she spoke the truth. That, and everything he knew about himself. He’d read her so deeply that he couldn’t have missed anything. Impossible.

But he had doubts—he knew she saw it, even though he opened his mind to her once more. Too many betrayals, too much harshness had passed before his eyes not to let his cynicism rear up once more. That instinct had saved his life a time or two. And she had to know what he was, what being an agent actually meant.

She let him see what she felt, didn’t hide it. She couldn’t grow closer to a man who didn’t trust her, couldn’t let him see her deepest desires, her greatest fears.

SHE’D STAY, BUT she couldn’t deny that he’d hurt her. Andreas would prove an amusement, she told herself. When this case ended, they would drift apart, like most of her lovers before. She’d found some harder to shed than others, but after John died, Roz didn’t want to feel hurt like that again.

So why did she feel so disappointed? Why that deep pang of sadness? She had done that many times before—had an affair, moved on—so what made Andreas Constant so different?

She had no answer. Not when she was gazing into the dark eyes she’d watched last night as he’d come apart in her arms, fragmenting and re-forming in ecstatic joy.

He turned away at the same time she did. They didn’t touch.

“To continue,” Cristos said smoothly, just as though her world hadn’t shifted, and just as if it hadn’t, she looked up at him brightly.

“I’m here to do the best I can to find the people who murdered two members of my family. You should know that.”

He regarded her gravely. “I know it.” He already knew that was her prime objective, overriding everything else. She had no doubt he’d take it into account in his dealings with her. As she would in her dealings with him.

“We are, at least for the present, working on the same side. So we will, if you don’t mind, work as a team.” His cold gaze left her to sweep the other occupants of the room. “All of us. You can make that an order.” He glanced up. “Fabrice has more information for you.”

Fabrice strolled over, a cup of black coffee in one hand. He glanced around, his gaze lingering on Roz and Andreas. “I had to meet Andreas to give him the new interference bug, instead of our usual mental contact. Roz followed us, like a good agent, and we made her almost as soon as she walked in, but later, outside, we were attacked. Seven of them. They weren’t taking any chances. They were carrying powerful drugs, enough to knock out a vampire and kill me, and they had a hypo filled with Cephalox for any shape-shifters. So they weren’t sure what kind of Talents we were, but they came prepared. We took them on, and I—” He shrugged. “They weren’t expecting a virgin Sorcerer. I zapped ’em.” A chuckle rippled around the room. Fabrice smiled self-deprecatingly. “Yeah. I read them afterward, when they were lying on the ground. All mortal, but all under thrall. Some clever person had wiped that part, the identification. Sometimes you can tell with signatures, but not this time.”

Cristos spoke the words in everyone’s minds. “Black ops.”

“Possibly. Their orders were to take us, but I don’t know where, because they didn’t know. They were to take us and stow us in the back of a truck waiting nearby. They didn’t know any more than that. Probably deliberately, since whoever was controlling them knew to expect Talents.”

“They want what we have, and they aren’t prepared to learn by asking,” the dragon rumbled, voicing what they were all thinking. “So why should our communities continue to operate here? If someone is betraying us, wouldn’t the sensible option be to retreat from human society, as we have done before?”

Cristos showed no emotion on his features, but Roz felt a tightening in the atmosphere. She agreed with the dragon. Maybe this time Talents should withdraw cooperation with governments, go back to the insular ways that had served them well for so long.

Cristos sighed. “It isn’t as easy as it used to be before the age of computers and instant information. How do you open a special wing of a hospital ostensibly devoted to research, but in reality for the special needs of Talents, without government aid to smooth the way? How do you move Talents around the world, give them new identities, fake their deaths? It used to be easy, but it’s highly complex now, and if we tried to do it on our own, we’d be found out. The choices are, as they have always been, to expose ourselves completely, come out of the Talent closet, to withdraw from society and fight our corner on our own, or continue to live secretly alongside mortals.”

“Those always worked up till now,” Fabrice commented. But Fabrice was young. He’d never known life in an age before computers, before the telephone, even. Roz remembered.

Cristos nodded his agreement. “Using the agency’s help to move identities from one life to the next works well, and has for the past thirty years. But we’ve always faced this threat, that government investigators would discover more about us than we wanted them to know. None of the mortals who know about us have betrayed us. The first thing we did was check them out.” Roz wondered how, but also realized she might never know. “I’ve always been against withdrawal. It would engender the kind of hatred and bigotry we have seen for centuries. To reveal ourselves would lead to the same, plus the kind of hero-worship most Talents abhor. We are not better than mortals. We are merely different. And most Talents alive today don’t know how to live any differently. We have decided to continue as we are until it becomes impossible. We have unearthed this threat before it got out of control, and we have this chance to plug the leak.”

Cristos sighed and lifted his hand, forking his fingers as if he meant to run them through his immaculately coiffed silver hair, but dropped it before he made contact. “You have my word, you and all the Talents you represent, that I will withdraw before anyone exposes us completely. If there is a leak of such proportions that I feel we cannot cope, we will go into semiwithdrawal mode.”

Roz felt comfortable enough to ask, “And that means…?”

Cristos met her eyes with a cold, bleak stare. She would get no comfort or easy answers here, and that, perversely, made her feel better. “Obliterating memories, using Compulsion to make politicians and officials forget about us, and starting again as independent contractors. Destroying all official records wherever we find them, killing to protect ourselves if we have to. It’s a drastic step, but one we may have to take. Not a step I’d happily take.”

Roz thought of all the people she’d known, Talents and mortals alike: all the shape-shifters she wouldn’t have met if she hadn’t been able to move around freely, all the mortals who had lit up her life. One in particular. Pain hit her, the familiar wave sweeping through her mind. She suppressed it almost automatically. For all the pain his death had caused her, Roz counted herself blessed to have known and loved John Templeton. Other Talents should have that opportunity. The chance to make a free choice.

For the first time she was totally convinced where her loyalty must lie, at least until this crisis was resolved. “I’m with you. I’ll do whatever I have to to stop the leak.” She paused. “Some of my relatives would prefer to come out. They might want to force the issue. If this gets in their way, I’ll still do it.”

Cristos nodded. “I appreciate you telling me.” But she got the feeling that he knew already.

The others murmured their acquiescence. “One thing puzzles me,” the dragon said. “Why would you send a vampire in to mentally scan everyone in the DIB when you have a virgin Sorcerer available? He could have done the job in a week instead of taking a couple of months.”

Cristos shrugged. “Andreas is a full-time operative. Fabrice isn’t. He works elsewhere, and he’s relatively high profile. He can’t do undercover work the same way someone like Andreas can. And Sorcerers are rare. You can’t always rustle one up at a moment’s notice.”

Cristos crossed the room to the bar and reached inside the refrigerator for a bottle of water. He tossed one to Roz and another to Andreas. She left it untouched.

“Only the people in this room and Candy Irving are totally free of suspicion until we know more. So don’t trust anyone else. Don’t speak of the case to anyone. Keep in touch. I will issue you with your personal objectives in this mission. Roz is here, supposedly an operative for the DIB. I will give her enough information to persuade her boss to keep her here, but none of it will compromise us. Andreas is our operative at the DIB. Candy is also in place as of this morning. Fabrice is our contact man, and Leonide will back him up.”

He sighed and looked away, out of the expanse of glass that separated the Department from the world outside. Across the street, buildings stared back, as blank as theirs would appear from outside. Huge posters of characters from the latest sitcom emblazoned the building a little farther down the road, silent reminders of the world going on regardless.