hellcat 05 - come hell or high water (8 page)

The new-and-improved Gabi was a constant work in progress, however. So it took time to think through the fury, to talk herself into a better mental state.  When it all seemed overwhelming, she practiced her meditation skills.  Whether it was her newly discovered maturity or the breakthrough when she was being tortured by Mariska and Dantè, she’d found a meditative state much easier to reach lately.  When the tightness in her chest eased, the adrenalin ebbed and the buzzing in her brain quietened, she blew out one more deep breath and called down to him.

“You can come up here now,” she said, not raising her voice despite the distance down to him.  The old oak was a fantastic climbing tree, and she was probably a good thirty feet off the ground.  Her back rested against the sturdy main trunk, and her legs stretched out before her on a branch as thick as her waist.  One of the squirrels that called the oak home was curled up asleep in the crook between her neck and shoulder.

Instead of climbing the tree, Julius chose to levitate himself up to her.  She still found the sudden upsurge in his Magi abilities disconcerting, and levitation was the most unsettling of the lot.  He was a Fire-bender, one of the strongest that Athena had ever encountered, as well as an Air-Bender.  Air-benders were capable of amazing feats, including deflecting flying bullets, removing an element like oxygen from the air around someone or affecting the pattern of the weather. And levitation.

“Show off,” she grumbled as he stepped gracefully onto a branch to the right of and slightly below hers.  The squirrel stirred, noticed the newcomer, and immediately scampered away, chittering noisily as it fled. 

“Sorry,” he said.  “I warned you that Rocky was an exception to the rule, the rest of them hate me.”  Julius once told her he’d tried to befriend squirrels as a child, but had never even come close to success.  Gabi, of course, had an unfair advantage.

“I want to know the real secret,” she said without further ado.  “The one you’re not telling me.  The one you’re trying to hide from everyone.”  She could sense the immediate slamming of his mental shields, but she wasn’t about to be deterred.  “You’ve been keeping something from me for weeks now.  It has something to do with the Princeps and me.  Tell me, be completely forthright, no more lying by omission, and I’ll agree to stay here.”  She knew that she had to dangle a huge carrot in front of him to make him open up, a threat wouldn’t work, he’d just find a way to negate it, but this promise was a difficult one for her to make.  If his secret involved danger to his own life, she would be hard put to keep her promise.  She was counting on the threat being to her life instead. 

His jaw worked, the muscles tensing and untensing in the pale moonlight, his gaze avoiding hers.  His mind remained tightly shut down from hers.

“I want your word that you’ll tell me everything,” she reiterated.  His word was everything to him, if he gave it to her, it was as good as written and signed in his blood.  He slowly folded himself down until he was sitting on his branch. She could see every line of his face.

“Alright,” he finally said.  “But I’ll have your word that you will stay here and not fight me on this or find a way to follow me after I leave.”

Gabi gritted her teeth and prayed that she wasn’t making a fatal error in judgement. “I swear I’ll stay in the City while you are concluding your current meeting with the Princeps.”  She added a time frame to her promise at the last second, in case he had other ideas of keeping her here on a permanent basis.  A wry smile lifted one side of his mouth as he acknowledged her limitation.

“Fair enough,” he agreed. “Can we do this inside, though?  I would prefer to keep this from everyone else for the meanwhile.”

“Your private lounge?” she asked.  In the new rebuild of the mansion, Julius had a suite of rooms, a decadent upgrade from his previous bedroom with en suite.  His new suite included a sumptuous living area and a kitchenette for Gabi’s use.  It was also soundproofed with a specialized padding from his inventor friend Savannah.  The soundproofing was so advanced that not even Vampire hearing could penetrate it. 

“May I?” he asked, before swooping her up into his arms and gently lowering them both to the ground.  It was a vastly different experience to the last time he’d done that.  And the end result was Julius still conscious and no mansion in fiery ruins around them.  A marked improvement.

A fire danced in the marble hearth, not the smoky, wooden kind, but the cleaner, gas-fuelled kind.  It wasn’t really cold enough for one, but it added a warmth and comfort to the room, something Gabi felt she needed as she prepared to hear what Julius had been hiding from her.  He pressed a large wine glass into her hand, half filled with a rich, ruby red merlot. She unconsciously drew the plummy aroma deep into her lungs. 

Julius took a seat in the suede sofa next to hers.  He wasn’t facing her but the flames of the fire as his eyes went distant, and the solid mental wall between them began to disintegrate. 

“A few weeks after we left the Princep Court, I got word from Xavier,” he began. 

Gabi remembered the dark-haired human very well.  He was fiercely loyal to Julius and determined to stay at the Court to gather intel for Julius rather than accept the comfortable life here at the Estate that Julius had offered him.  Gabi sipped her wine as she waited for Julius to go on, hoping the alcohol would calm her roiling stomach.

“One of Santiago’s Clan found a hair in his apartments.  Shortly after the time he met the true death,” he said, the words falling slowly from his mouth as if it was difficult forming them. 

Gabi froze with a mouthful of wine, suddenly unable to swallow it.  Santiago had been a Princep.  She’d met him when she and Julius had been called in front of the Princeps to explain why a Master Vampire had knowingly been harbouring a Dhampir, and to account for the ‘murder’ of Julius’s brother, Dantè, after the Dark Magus Mariska had outed them, hoping to exact revenge for Dantè’s death.  At a formal dance Gabi had discovered Santiago’s sick, dark perversion: his love of young girls, and that he’d been allowed to Turn some as young as eight or nine years old.  She’d known, the instant she recognised him for what he was, that she would find a way to kill him.  And it hadn’t taken long to discover that she wasn’t alone in her revulsion.  She wouldn’t have been able to achieve her objective without some help in several crucial areas.  She’d included a handful of people in her dangerous scheme, including a few members of Court staff, but she’d been very careful to keep everything from Julius.  She’d been determined to ensure that he could not be held personally accountable if she was caught or killed in the attempt to end the Princep’s existence. 

Miraculously they’d pulled it off and had even managed to leave Court before being questioned.  Her team had thought of everything, including cleaning up and destroying evidence.  She trusted them to be thorough, for the sake of the young girls he’d been abusing if not for her.  Gabi knew it was widely surmised that she’d been the one to kill him, but she’d been confident that there would be no way to physically tie her, or the small team that accompanied her, to the crime.

Julius had figured it out within seconds of hearing the keening wails of Santiago’s Clan members, he’d responded instantly, mind-controlling Vampire guards so they could all escape the castle before questions could be raised.  Though his disappointment in her actions had been clear, he’d never spoken of the incident other than to reassure her that it didn’t change how he felt about her.

But it seemed like she’d been wrong about the evidence; she already knew who the hair belonged to.  She forced herself to swallow the mouthful of wine.

“According to Xavier, it is a long, auburn strand,” he continued, his voice now carefully neutral.  “They have yet to turn it over to the Princeps, as they fear the evidence will be disappeared or switched out before a likely suspect is found to compare it to.  Even they know he was despised by most of his peers and that his death is not high on their list of priorities.  Xavier has tried to gain access to it, but they’ve removed it from the Castle and have it stored somewhere secure.  So secure that Xavier hasn’t been able to locate it yet.” 

Some of his anxiety and anger was trickling into his tone.  “Their plan is to wait for you to be summoned back to Court on some other matter.  Once you’re there, where they can force our hand, where there is little room for us to manoeuvre, they’ll demand a DNA comparison to determine your guilt.  I’m not convinced it wasn’t planted there by someone; this fits in too well with the Shadow group’s schemes, and it would be exactly the kind of upheaval that would suit them.” 

He rubbed a hand over his face, his concern for her radiating through her mind.  “Planting of evidence would be our only defence, with no idea which way the eventual vote would go, now that there are two new Princeps appointed.  The fact that your name is on everyone’s lips in regards to his death, and the open confrontation you had with him at the ball, is likely to sway the vote.  I am not prepared to take the chance.”

He fell silent as he finally looked her way, his disconcertingly beautiful sapphire eyes boring into hers, daring her to contradict him.  “I also would prefer that you stay here, at the Estate, instead of your house while I’m away.  Without the protection of Irene’s ward around your property, you’re completely vulnerable there.”

The wine glass that Gabi had been holding shattered, spilling wine and shards of broken glass across the sofa and the shag pile carpet underfoot.

CHAPTER 5

Certain people just set Gabi’s teeth on edge.  Often there wasn’t even a reason for it, like in the case of Athena.  The High Magus and Gabi had detested each other on sight; for years they’d only just been civil to each other when they were required to work together.  Only the events of recent months, including Athena helping to save Gabi’s life, had changed their relationship from barely concealed antagonism to mutual respect, bordering on a tentative friendship. 

In Kimberley’s case Gabi had more than reason enough to despise the younger woman; she’d betrayed her race as well as all the other supernatural races, and almost caused the deaths of three of Gabi’s closest friends.  On top of clobbering Gabi hard enough to crack her skull.  She’d used her gift to bluff her way past the ward that protected Gabi’s house.  A ward that helped Gabi sleep at night, that gave her a sense of security in her own sanctuary after Vampires and Demons had attacked her there.  A ward designed and maintained by Irene, one that rendered a magical, John Cena-strength body-slam to uninvited supernatural beings.  A ward that had died with the High Magus.  No other Magus had the ability, or cared enough about Gabi, to recreate the ward.  At one point that ward had been all that kept her sane.  Now it was gone, and she hated to be reminded of its absence.  Hated it because it reminded her of her human vulnerabilities, of the fact that she was still terribly, intrinsically mortal.

So far, Julius had slept alongside her every night she’d spent at home since the ward had fallen.  They alternated between her place and his; she was stubbornly clinging to keeping her own space, as much for her pets as for herself, and desperately trying to not lose herself in Julius entirely.  She knew that Razor wouldn’t bat an eyelid at being moved to the Estate, and Rocky the tiny squirrel would settle in easily enough as well.  Her concerns were for Slinky, her ferret, who’d never quite seemed to recover his normal personality after Gabi’s abduction from the house, and Roman, the patient, obedient, adorable Rottweiler Gabi had taken on from Trish when her friend had been infected with Lycanthropy.  Dogs and Werewolves did not see eye to eye.  Gabi feared that Slinky would regress further into himself if she moved him, and that Roman would struggle to cope with the number of Werewolves that lived and worked at the Estate. 

A small rustle reminded her that Kimberley was still there.  She sighed inwardly, shelving her domestic worries for the meanwhile.  They could wait another few days.  Rose had just last week told Gabi that one of her nieces had left high school and was studying to be an animal behaviourist; and she was at the age where she couldn’t yet afford her own place, but was butting heads with her mother, so she’d be only too happy to house- and pet-sit whenever Gabi needed her to.  Gabi had already asked Rose to bring her around to meet the pets.

“What do you need me to do, Kimberley?” she asked the other woman, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice.  Kimberley had arrived at Gabi’s house a few minutes ago, shortly after Gabi herself got home from the Estate, and Rose had made them coffee before bustling on with the housework, leaving them to talk without interruptions.  Rose was a true gem. 

“Just continue your day,” Kimberley told her again, with irritating pleasantness.  “I just need to watch how you walk and talk, see your mannerisms when you approach other people.  Please, try not to mind me and just go on with what you would normally do.” 

Gabi’s teeth clicked together, and she fought to breathe evenly.  The woman didn’t just need to be able to mimic her exactly, Gabi also had to lend her clothes and boots.  And not only because Kimberley owned nothing that looked like it belonged to Gabi; part of Kimberley’s Doppelganger gift was the ability to erase her own scent, but she wasn’t able to replicate another person’s smell.  The clothes would help to conceal the absence of Gabi’s actual body odour. 

Kimberley was going to be tested after the sun went down.  She would have to fool Julius, Alexander, Kyle, Patrick and Fergus; otherwise they’d be at this for another twenty-four hours.  Gabi had no intention of subjecting herself to another day of this stranger’s scrutiny, so she would make damn sure she got it right the first time.  Razor shifted in his seat next to Gabi, his tail twitching and his flat stare trained on the Doppelganger.  Kimberley’s eyes flicked to the big cat and she swallowed convulsively.  He didn’t trust the woman one little bit and was making his feelings perfectly clear.  Gabi couldn’t blame him. After all, it had been Razor who’d known that Kimberley was concealing herself with Kyle’s body all those months ago, and he was fully aware of her gifts and tendencies.  Realising that hanging around at home wasn’t going to get them anywhere, and Razor was going to distract Kimberley from what she was supposed to be doing, Gabi stood.