Fragile Brilliance (Shifters & Seers) (18 page)

It was nearly midnight when they made their way back to the parking lot on the other side of campus. They were both too tired to talk, but it was a silence Charlie welcomed. His coyote had settled, but for once he didn’t feel empty in its absence. Instead, he felt content for the first time in a long, long time. His therapist had been harassing him to go out and make friends outside the Alpha Pack, and he’d resisted, thinking he would never be comfortable around someone who hadn’t trudged through hell beside him, but the exact opposite was true. He was comfortable with Maggie because they weren’t haunted by the same memories. He didn’t have to worry about what dark corner her mind had wandered into, and even though she might ask him something that would make him uncomfortable, it was only his discomfort he had to contend with. There was no shared pain threatening to break through the surface with a single thoughtless comment.

He’d parked the Humvee, his official work vehicle, on the edge of the lot, beneath a light pole. It was a good habit for anyone, but especially for people who were the target of a crazy psycho killer. Constantly being aware of your surroundings was another one of those good-for-everyone-but-especially-potential-horror-movie-extras things Charlie was very into these days, which is why he noticed there was no light shining down on the Humvee the moment it came in view.

“Maggie.” His voice was barely above a whisper as he slowed his strides. She didn’t ask questions. She just fell in step beside him, close enough he could grab her if need be, but not crowding him so much he couldn’t move if he had to. “Taser in one hand; pepper spray in the other.” She located both in her bag within a matter of seconds. Still, she didn’t say anything. Her eyes showed fear, and the hands clinging onto the weapons Joshua gave her trembled, but she kept walking with an even, confident gait. “Remember, a Shifter’s hearing is sensitive, especially with the moon getting closer to full every night. If someone grabs you, scream loud and high. You may be able to shattered his eardrum.”

They were about ten feet away from the Humvee when the scent finally hit him. Strong. Chemical. A dozen perfumes piled on top of one another.

The exact same scent he’d been following on the day they found Barros’s body.

Charlie steered Maggie towards a burger shack well known for their cheesy tater-tots and 24-hour operating schedule while punching an emergency code into his phone. Ten minutes later, Talley and Scout were standing at the edge of the booth they had procured.

“Liam has called a Bronies meeting across the street,” Scout said, snagging the Cherry Coke Charlie had bought so they wouldn’t get kicked out of the restaurant, which had a very strict no-eat-no-stay policy. “They need you, Apple Blossom. They need your pluck and good ol’ southern common sense real bad.”

Charlie looked at Maggie, who hadn’t said much in the past ten minutes. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was freaked out, or if she realized anything they said to one another might be overheard. He knew staying in the restaurant where she was surrounded by a crowd of college students clinging desperately to the last hours of the weekend was for the best, but still he hated to leave her alone. She wasn’t a Shifter. She wouldn’t know if there was a danger until it was stabbing a knife into her chest.

Even though she wasn’t touching him, Talley saw the direction his thoughts were going. “You and Twilight Sparkle run along. Maggie and I will stick around and finish off your cheesy tots for you.”

“Are you sure? What if something—“

“We’re covered,” Talley said, patting the purse where she kept her carry-and-conceal. “Anyway, Liam thinks whoever was there is long gone. The danger is less than clear-and-present.”

Charlie had come to the same conclusion earlier, but he still thought it was best to be overly cautious. He was living with enough what-ifs and I-wish-I-would-haves already. He wasn’t about to add onto the list if he could help it. Leaving Maggie with Talley, whose love of handguns was only a little alarming, seemed safe, but he still felt a bit like he was abandoning her as he slid out of the booth.

“Wait for one of us to come back and get you,” he told her as Talley took his spot. “I’ll text you to let you know what’s up as soon as I can.” And then, because he thought he might do something crazy, like kiss her, he turned around, linked his arm with Scout’s, and said, “To Ponyville!”

“Someone cut your brake line,” Jase cheerfully told Charlie when they reached the parking lot.

“Someone human,” Scout clarified since she could smell them underneath the stench of perfume. Once, when they were eleven, she had accepted Jase’s dare to go through a department store and spray a sample of every perfume they had on her arm. She ended up with a headache for two days and they were both grounded for a week. The way her arm had smelled the entire drive home had been tame compared to the stench surrounding Charlie’s Humvee.

“Two someones human,” Joshua added. He was crouched down beside the driver’s door, doing something with what appeared to be a make-up brush.

“Did you know our in-house Immortal has a fingerprint kit and knows how to use it?” Liam asked, either noticing where her attention had turned or picking up on her thoughts the way he sometimes did.

Not that he ever picked up on the
right
random thoughts. Or maybe he did and just ignored them. She really wasn’t sure which way was worse.

“It’s Joshua. He’s like two hundred years old,” she said, leaning against her mate as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “He’s had like five lifetimes to learn all this crap. Try not to be impressed. It only makes his gigantic head even bigger.”

“One,” Joshua said, whipping out a black light, “I’m less than a hundred, thank you very much. And two, it’s not arrogance if you’re actually that damn good.”

Charlie crouched down by Joshua, scenting the area around where Joshua was working. “Getting anything?”

“Other than prints I’m almost certain will match yours? No. It seems our humans know how to cover their tracks.”

Charlie nodded, probably picking up the faint smell of latex Scout could tease out of the other scents surrounding the vehicle. “Which begs the question, how the hell do humans know how to cover their tracks from Shifters?” he asked.

“Oh, I know the answer to this one,” Jase said, looking up from the video he was watching on how to repair a brake line. “Abram Mandel.”

“Mandel is hiring out humans to do his dirty work?”

Scout mirrored Charlie’s look of disgust. Since she’d spent the majority of her life as a plain, nothing-fancy-happening-here-under-the-moonlight human, she didn’t think of them as inferior like some Shifters did, but she did think of them as very breakable. It was both cowardly and stupid to send humans to take on the Alpha Pack. Any one of them could easily take on several humans at noon on the day of a new moon and still come out on top.

“When Imogen heard what we suspected her dad of doing, she shared some information about his business dealings,” Liam said. “It seems our fine, upstanding Mandel Pack Leader was working with the mob, so hiring out a couple of human thugs to make a few hits wouldn’t be as hard for him as your everyday citizen.”

“Are you sure there is really a mob?” Scout asked, not for the first time. The first time had been when Imogen came to find her and tearfully explained about the way her father managed to turn the Mandel Pack from one of the poorest packs in the country to one of the richest in less than a decade. Scout didn’t have trouble believing Mandel was a ruthless bastard, but she was so unconvinced mobs were an actual thing in the real world she made Talley use her Seer abilities to confirm what Imogen was saying. “I thought mobsters only existed in the 1930s and had names like Babyface and Big Ugly. They ran booze and flirted with flappers. Now you can get booze at Wal-Mart and I haven’t seen a flapper outside of Halloween in my life.”

Liam looked down at her. “Haven’t you ever watched
The Sopranos
?”

“No,” Scout said, “but don’t even try to convince me I should use HBO as evidence something exists unless you’re willing to argue that Bon Temps, Louisiana, is overrun by hot vampires and the Stark family is out there somewhere preparing for winter.”

A smile teased the edges of Liam’s lips and a burst of warmth blazed through their mating bond.

My Liam. My mate.

“What was that all about?” she whispered.

His finger trailed down her nose and then lightly tapped the tip. “You make me happy,” he said.

Thankfully, Jase interrupted that revelation with a muttered curse word. Otherwise she might have done something truly embarrassing, like throw herself into her mate’s arms and cry like a baby.

“What is it?” Liam asked Jase, not taking his eyes off of Scout’s. She imagined he was entranced by the little animated fireworks exploding there.

“I’ve got something.” Jase was standing on the passenger’s side of the Humvee, looking through the open door, his temper flaring.

Don’t let it be a dead body. Don’t let it be a dead body. Please, God, don’t let it be another dead body.

If she would have been thinking, she would have realized she hadn’t smelled a corpse, but she was too freaked out to be thinking, so it was with great relief she stood in the doorway and saw nothing more than a leather seat which would need to be replaced.

“Oh, look,” she said. “Someone engraved my name on the seat. How lovely.”

Not that she really tolerated being called a bitch, but since she was part canine, she figured she couldn’t get too upset over it.

“That wasn’t meant for you.” Charlie shouldered past her. The muscles in his jaws flexed with barely contained rage as he took in the slashed upholstery. “You’ve ridden in this vehicle, what? Three times in the past six months?”

“If not me, then…” It took a second, but then she understood. “Maggie. You think this is for Maggie.”

“I think whoever is doing this is gunning for her. Someone purposefully ruined all of the pieces she’d been working on this week, and now this.”

“But why would Mandel care about Maggie?” Jase asked. “I mean, it’s our guts he hates for dragging his daughter out of the closet in public and then releasing her from his pack, right? What does Maggie have to do with anything? She’s just a cute, hippy-dippy art chick. She’s about as offensive as sunshine and butterflies.”

Scout snorted oh-so-indelicately. “What does the crazy Shifter traditionalist have against the Thaumaturgic we’ve taken into the protection of the Alpha Pack? Gee. I can’t imagine.”

Charlie cut his eyes over to where Joshua was… measuring grass? “Hack into the surveillance cameras. Pull footage from Rosa Hall from two nights ago and get every angle of this parking lot from tonight.”

Joshua, who only took orders from Liam and Scout, and only when he was inclined to do whatever it was anyway, miraculously didn’t give Charlie detailed directions on how to find his way to hell.

“Can’t,” he said. “This campus is one hundred percent Big Brother free. There isn’t a single camera anywhere on the property.”

The muscles in Charlie’s jaws knotted. “Are you serious?”

“Sadly, yes,” Scout said, laying a hand against his back. “We checked into it before I enrolled. At the time, it sounded like a benefit. No cameras meant no super-smart Joshua-wannabes would be able to hack in and get footage of me. We didn’t think about what would happen if we needed to hack in and get some footage of our own.”

“That,” Charlie said, pointing at the car parked in the spot next to the Humvee, “is a Porsche Boxter. One of those runs about fifty grand. And guess what? Not even close to the most expensive car in this lot. You really expect me to believe there aren’t cameras around here to make sure no one takes off with a car that costs more than most people’s houses?”

“Chinoe’s low crime rate is one of the major selling points for Sanders College.”

His growl was the sort that made the bad kind of goose bumps break out from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. The first time Scout heard it, she couldn’t believe such a harsh and terrifying sound could come out of her Charlie. Even now, years later, she was amazed he was capable of something so animalistic.

But even as part of her instinctively shrank back, her lips threatened to curve up into a smile. She’d gone over a year without hearing that growl, and now she was hearing it for the second time in just over a week. She wasn’t quite sure of what to make of Maggie McCray, but if she was making Charlie growl, then Scout was ready to do whatever it took to keep her around.

“Joshua,” Charlie ground out, “tell me you’re over there hacking into the Pentagon or White House or some shit like that and getting us some satellite images.”

“Sorry, man—“

“You have got to be kidding me!” The crack from his fist hitting the ripped leather was like a gunshot splintering the night.

“I’ll keep working on it,” Joshua said. He looked to Scout, and she nodded her agreement. Joshua could do a lot with a computer and internet connection - he was basically the MacGyver of cyberspace - but not always without complications. Hacking into those kinds of sites could direct some very unwanted attention their way, but it was worth the risk. Even if it wasn’t all of their lives on the line, Scout believed it was worth it to protect one innocent person. They could handle the fallout from a nosy government, but none of them could deal with knowing they could have done something to save someone’s life and didn’t because they were worried about getting into trouble.

“So, what do we do now?” Jase asked. “Listen, I know I’m in the minority here, but maybe this going to school thing is a little too risky right now. Why don’t we all just… drop out?”

“No,” Scout said at the exact same moment Jase’s phone dinged. He was standing at an angle that meant with her super-Shifter sight, Scout could easily read his screen. It was from Talley and only contained one word:
“No.”

Jase scrunched up his eyebrows and squinted into the neon glow coming from across the street. “How did she do that? Can she hear my direct thoughts through our mating bond now?”

“I doubt it,” Scout said.

“Then how did she know what I said?”

“It’s because I’m awesome,” came Talley’s reply from several feet behind Jase.

At a time when not a whole lot of things were funny, watching Jase jump up and do a 180-degree twist in the air while yelping like a little girl was somewhere beyond the line of hysterical. Scout thought she was going to pull a muscle or pee her pants before she stopped laughing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jase bellowed. “There is a psycho-killer running around cutting brake lines and slicing uninspired insults into the seats of locked vehicles. You’re supposed to be sitting
safely
in the freaking restaurant across the street until I come and get you.”

There was a time when Talley would have attempted to fold in on herself, mutter an apology, and promptly cry at such an outburst from Jase, but that was before they mated. Now, Talley knew Jase loved her, no matter what. It gave her a level of confidence that made Scout proud.

“One, Maggie was supposed to stay in the safety of the restaurant. Not me. I was there as her protection. Two, I’m just as much a member of the Alpha Pack as you are, so I get to sit in on whatever dangerous middle-of-the-night meetings I want. And three,” she shoved her phone into his face, “Some guys were creeping on us. Liam said it was safe out here, so we left.”

Of course, Jase wasn’t as easily defused by the mention of the Alpha Male as he should have been. “How do you know it’s safe?” he demanded of Liam.

Liam, who could have been a complete jerk and told Jase it was none of his damn business, just shrugged. “The perfume is dissipating. I can smell someone coming from a mile away, so it’s not exactly like they could sneak up on us now.”

Jase turned his irritation back on Talley. “Why didn’t you just walk directly across the road?”

“Because scaring you was funnier, right up until you got your panties in a wad.” Jase continued to glare, so she pranced over and gave him the sort of kiss people should only share behind closed doors, especially if they’re kissing someone’s brother. “I’m sorry I scared you,” she whispered, which meant everybody but Maggie and Joshua could hear it. “I know you’re just trying to protect me. I’ll try to be more considerate next time.”

Maggie, who had materialized out of the shadows beside Talley, moved away from the couple as they began yet another completely inappropriate display, and walked over to where Charlie stood.

“I’m not dropping out of school,” she told him. “I can’t.”

Charlie never seemed tall to Scout. Since she wasn’t exactly short for a girl and he was an average-sized a guy, there were only a couple of inches separating their height. But Maggie was roughly the size of a ten-year-old. She had to tilt her head almost completely back to look him in the eye, but she still managed to look fierce. It made Scout like her even more.

“I know,” Charlie said, clenching his hands as if he was thinking about using the ruined passenger’s seat as a punching bag again. “We’ll figure something out. I promise.”

And because she had known him forever, and because she’d spent the majority of her life studying him, she saw it. Charlie
was
going to find a way to make sure Maggie could stay in school. Not just because he promised, but because it meant something to her. Because Maggie cared, Charlie cared.

At the next available opportunity, Scout was going to give Maggie the world’s biggest tackle-hug.