Enforcer Ensnared (13 page)

“It’s more complicated
than we realized,” he started, unsure how much to say over the phone. “The
mayor is involved. He was a backseat party to some of the initial trials. He
pulled out but he’s in deep ass-covering mode. I think you’ll find a few cops,
no matter how well decorated, will be easy collateral damage to his mind.”

“Huh,” Chase replied
thoughtfully. “It does sound a bit complicated, then. Let me put you on to
Sage. Explain it all to her, and what you need, and we’ll do what we can.
Julian and Matthias are only a stone’s throw away as well. I think they’ll
enjoy doing something other than typing reports.”

Blade sighed but agreed.
He’d known they were a team, no matter what political bullshit had been thrown
in their way. He couldn’t pretend to be surprised. That didn’t mean the
responsibility weighed easily on him, however.

“Stop fretting like a
little girl,” Sage said as she came on to the line. Humor ran deeply in her
voice, making Blade laugh despite
himself
.

“You know me too well,”
he replied. “But while you might enjoy the thought of Chase getting his ass
canned, and Julian and Will too, most likely,
I
would much prefer they
keep their livelihoods.”

“Will has already floated
your idea of us striking out on our own,” Sage replied calmly, “and you’re a
great big pansy for talking to him about it first and not us. We have a few
suggestions to add onto your idea, but we think it could fly.”

Blade’s jaw dropped. He
had only casually asked Will few questions after the explosion. He had wanted
to sound out the possibilities—whether a merged unit would work in the human
world, and how their structure of private contractors differed. The references
had only been in passing and exceedingly brief. Frankly Blade felt stunned that
Will had connected the dots. The man was a strategic master, able to see the
big picture from only a few points of reference.

“Well, it was only the
germ of an idea and I simply wanted to know if it was feasible,” Blade finally
answered. “I planned to put the idea forward once we closed the case. Of
course, that was supposed to be a lot
more simple
than
what it’s turned into. Now all this extra mess has unfolded, other things have
snowballed on me.”

“It’s
okay,
I can thump you later for being such a baby and thinking we’d not want to join
in. What have you got?” Sage replied.

Eager to change the
topic, Blade quickly summarized what
Kincade
had
given them, finishing with Martine and her phone number.

“So you’d need to log in
remotely to our database and give us everything you have,” Blade finished.
“Jarred should be able to get us a home address, which is the perfect starting
point, but she didn’t come up in our preliminary search of
Sarke
.
We’re hoping she’s connected to a middle man, who should give us our link back
to
Sarke
.”

“That makes sense,” she
replied. “I’ll
beep
your pager with the code when
we’re ready to update you.”

“Thanks, Sage, and look,
make
sure Chase understands—”

“I know,” she cut him off
and in his mind’s eye
he
could see her negligently
waving a hand. “He knows. As do Julian and Matt—who, by the way, will both
likely want to kick your ass when they hear you called us and didn’t mention
anything about them. We’re a team, remember?”

“I know, but—”

“If you’d been given a
cease and desist you’d not comply. Not when your partners and teammates needed
help, would you?”

Blade rolled his eyes but
knew the witch had a point.

“Fine.
Tell them all. Hell, tell Will as
well. Let’s all get into grief over this. It will be just like old times.”

“That’s better,” Sage
answered, seemingly satisfied. “We’ll get back to you.”

Blade sighed as he hung
up the phone. Barely had the receiver crashed into the cradle before Flame
burst out laughing. Feeling a little hard done by, Blade glared at her. “What?”

“Sage had a decent point,
but you looked like a hen-pecked husband.” She chuckled. Blade drew her roughly
into his arms and kissed her fiercely. His tongue penetrated her mouth and
sucked hers into his own mouth. When he lifted his head he was breathing hard
and her cheeks were flushed a delicate pink.

“She’s often my
conscience,” he admitted. “I sometimes get overprotective of others. I tend to
take more on myself so they won’t wear the burden. She knows it and knows how
to push my buttons.”

“I could tell that,”
Flame agreed. “And let me warn you, up front—you try to pull that He-Man macho
bullshit with me and I won’t just scold you lightly like Sage did. I’ll knock
you down and stomp a hole in you. We’re partners.
Equals in
every area.
Work, home, sexually—everything. I’ll always trust you to
have my back, and you know damn well I will always have yours. Any decision I
make, regardless of the consequences, will be mine to make and you carry no
weight of blame or guilt.
Ever.”

Flame’s words freed him
in a way Blade had never known before. He’d always carried the weight of other
people’s expectations and responsibilities. His parents, his teachers, his team
leaders and work partners. One of the things he loved best about Flame was her
strength, the way she was his equal in every respect. He’d never accept less
from himself, so he could learn to expect the same from her.

Blade hugged her to him
fiercely, tightly. He never planned on letting her go.

“I love you,” he said
softly. The words were odd on his tongue, but more and more, as he spent time
with Flame, they were growing on him.
Becoming easier to
repeat.

“I love you too,” she
answered, and kissed him lightly.

Pulling back with a
slight jerk, Blade frowned, his hand instantly twitching so the knife strapped
around his wrist beneath his long-sleeved button-down shirt came loose. He
paused when he saw it was only
Jarred
walking back
toward them.

Quickly Blade pushed the
knife back up his sleeve and pressed it into the double-sided tape along his
forearm so it would stick in place until he needed it again.

“I’ve got an address,”
Jarred said.

Blade saw the brief
flicker in
Jarred’s
eyes, proving the ex-military man
hadn’t missed the way Blade had reacted to Flame or the twitch in his shirt
sleeve. Jarred shook his head but appeared to be pretending he hadn’t noticed
the small movements, as he mentioned nothing.

Grateful not to have any
awkward questions or potential recriminations to deal with, Blade also
pretended he didn’t know Jarred knew.

“Sage and the others are
going to start looking into Martine—they’ll page me when they have something to
share,” Blade replied.

Together they climbed the
stairs up out of the subway.

“She lives in a small
condo on the edge of the city,” Jarred continued as he shared the address and
scanned the area as they came out onto the street. “I’ll swing by my office,
get my scope and lens as well as my recording gear. If we can tape anything of
interest she says, it will help build the case against her.”

“Chances are she’ll stand
trial before a section of the Magical Tribunal,” Blade cautioned, “but
still—collect your gear. Anything solid we have will still help. Flame and I
can start a slow perimeter and work our way into her condo. We’ll meet you
there.”

They
both
shook
hands with Jarred and watched the man walk away, soon swallowed up
by the large pre-lunch-hour crowd. After a moment they also moved down the
street toward the parking bay where they had left the bike.

“So what do you think?”
Blade asked, interested in Flame’s instincts.

“I think we’re only just
now managing to get a look beneath the tip of the iceberg,” she stated without
doubt. “And I also have the sense this will get a lot more complicated before
we get to the heart of the matter.”

Blade nodded. He had been
feeling a very similar sense himself. “You get the feeling the shit is going to
hit the fan with this one?”

“Oh yeah, and splatter on
everyone in its vicinity,” Flame agreed.

As they climbed onto the
bike and rode out of the city, they both remained lost in their thoughts. For
the first time ever his heart and soul—and not just his sense of duty—was
wrapped up in the safety of someone not known for her cautious, timid ways. He
hoped they’d both make it out the other end without too much drama.

* * * *
*

Number nine, Blade was
relieved to find, lay at the end of a small
cul
de
sac. While this made it hard to sit a house or two down the street and stake it
out in the usual way, it also meant Martine would find it almost impossible to
shake a tail. One entrance into her street meant there was only one exit. It
was a surveillance wet dream.

“I don’t like our chances
of getting closer and staying unrecognized for any length of time,” Flame
commented.

Blade shrugged his
shoulder. They were seated beneath a large oak tree on a bench with a clear
view down Martine’s street and when they shifted farther to the right they
could just barely see her front path and the entrance to her house.

“We’re not positive she’s
home,” he pointed out. “We might as well wait for
Jarred,
see what wand he can wave and work from there.”

An itchy, antsy feeling
crept over Blade’s skin. The paranoid feeling of being watched shook him and
with an effort he ignored it. Exposed like they were, it stood to reason his
mind was playing tricks on him. Besides, he hated stakeouts. Usually they were
dry, boring, thankless tasks and personally he hated sitting idle and
attempting to look like he was doing anything other than hunting someone.

“Did you feel that?”
Flame murmured as she took his hand in hers. Although they had decided to
stroll hand in hand and mimic the lovers they were, Blade felt himself react to
her touch. He stilled at her words.

“You felt that prickle of
being watched?” he countered.

“Doesn’t feel like some
nosey kid playing with field glasses,” she insisted.

Blade paid more attention
to his own instincts and less to his hungry cock. Carefully he gathered his
magic and tried to become one with the scene around them. His senses sharpened
and he became the hunter, the predator he always was beneath the surface.

He felt the prickle of
awareness run down his spine again and suddenly he knew where they were.

“The trees,” he said
softly, “behind us, a little to our right. Shit. They’re coming!”

Blade whirled around, the
solid
thunk
of an iron-firm hand coming down onto the
seat where seconds earlier his head had been. Only the grunt of pain indicated
that his opponent felt the connection between his hand and the solid wood, and
it didn’t slow him down for an instant.

The large man leapt over
the flimsy bench and hit Blade solidly in the chest. They both fell heavily to
the grass. From the corner of his eye as they scrambled to their feet, he saw
Flame and a tall, willowy woman with strawberry-blonde hair circling each
other, then beginning to duke it out hand-to-hand. Blade twisted his wrist, his
dagger sliding down his sleeve and into his hand.

A quick, vicious slashing
motion had the blade arcing around directly to his opponent’s chest. The
assailant nimbly dodged what otherwise would have been an eviscerating move. As
Blade quickly recovered, the sandy-blond man lashed out with his leg, and Blade
skittered backward. The kick missed his head—where it had been aimed—but
managed to strike it lucky and land on his wrist.

His hand opened at the
blow, his fingers numb for a shocked moment, and he dropped his knife.

“Asshole,” Blade grunted.
Hands outstretched, he rushed to tackle his opponent, knocking him back to the
ground. They two men rolled over the grass, fighting for dominance and pounding
their fists into each other.

The world narrowed to
just him and his attacker. Blade did not hear anything except his own labored
breathing and that of his nemesis. Pain radiated from his jaw and stomach,
where the light-haired man had managed to land blows, and if the wheezing
struggle of the other man’s breath were any indication, Blade’s hit to the
sternum had cracked something. His opponent’s eye had already blackened and
begun to swell.

A part of Blade urgently
wanted to check on Flame, help her with her own fight, but he knew he needed to
trust her. More importantly, Blade knew he needed to deal with his own problem
before he tried to play the hero and potentially landed them both in more
trouble.

When his attacker rolled
on top of him and lifted his knee, very nearly disabling him with a jolt to his
groin, Blade realized the gloves were off. Rolling away, jerking himself back,
Blade cast caution and discretion to the wind and gathered his power.