Shadow of Temptation (Asylums for Magical Threats #2.5) (11 page)

The woman in the chair gasped and opened her eyes. She blinked a few times and then looked Watkins in the eye. “I think I’ve pinpointed her location.”

“Where?”

“Not far from the zoo. I can see the row of small rectangular houses, but I won’t be able to pinpoint exactly which one until I see it.”

He nodded. “Right. Take my team of men and women, as well as the Siren. Use her if you need to, but just bring me Sabrina Ono. Salazar is secondary, but both I and the Collector would reward you if you could bring him in as well.”

The woman’s face was blank as she nodded, which was the normal expression for any of the Collector’s long-term soldiers. Watkins signaled to his men in the room to assist the Locator out. Once she was gone, he brought up the video conference program on his computer and waited for the Collector to answer. As always, her face was shielded from view, but her voice was clear when she asked, “Did you find the woman?”

“Yes. Your Locator is on her trail, and no doubt Salazar is with her. Did you need both of them alive?”

“For now. The Shadow-Shifter has his uses, but it’s the woman I want. Rumors have been floating around the
Feiru
Liaison offices about a tip from James Sinclair, and this woman might give me the edge I need to keep Sinclair otherwise occupied.”

Watkins didn’t know—nor care—about the Collector’s other plans, but in the interest of keeping civil, he nodded. “I’ll pass on the message. I wanted to ask for some reinforcements so I can focus on the bombing whilst your people take care of Ono and Salazar.”

“They’re already on their way. Contact me when everything is complete.”

The screen went blank and Watkins picked up his cell phone to call his bomb makers. He just might be able to pull this all off before breakfast tomorrow.

Jorge waited behind the large wooden desk in his shadow form. Any minute now, his target would enter and he’d have only seconds to engulf the man, knock him unconscious, and absorb him into his mist.

The target was a local police detective sympathetic to the
Feiru
, a man named Julio Reyes. Jorge wasn’t supposed to know why Reyes was the target, but while sniffing around and determining the best way to kidnap the man, he’d learned of Reyes’s current investigation into some
Feiru
-related crimes.

He didn’t know all the particulars, but some of the crimes were by prominent gangs in the area, gangs that had been previous targets of the Collector. Jorge’s best guess was that the Collector didn’t want any of the human authorities putting their noses into her business.

He almost felt bad for the human, but if Jorge failed this assignment, he knew his sister would be tortured again. No matter what it took, he couldn’t allow that to happen.

The lock turned and Jorge watched the door, but instead of Reyes, he saw Harry Watkins holding a knife to his sister Alejandra’s throat. He moved toward Watkins, but the man slit Alejandra’s throat before he could reach the pair. Jorge watched in horror as his sister’s lifeless body was tossed to the floor. Watkins kicked her and stared straight at him. “You’re no different than me. You’ve killed innocents, and so have I. Remember that.”

Watkins vanished and Jorge watched his sister’s blood cover the floor, unable even to cry out at his sister’s murder.

Jorge jerked awake and sat up, heaving in deep breaths. Something touched his back and he rolled off the bed to the side and took a defensive crouch. He looked up to see Sabrina staring at him with a mixed expression of puzzlement and concern.

Her voice was soft when she asked, “Are you okay?”

He drew in a deep sigh. He’d been dreaming. Alejandra was safe with DEFEND, not dead on the floor.

When he still didn’t answer, Sabrina moved to where he was crouched and kneeled on the floor in front of him. She reached a hand toward him and he suddenly yearned for her comforting touch, but then she pulled back and he wondered why. She asked, “How do you feel? Were you just having a bad dream or a negative reaction to Neena’s drugs?”

Neena.
The crazy woman’s name brought him back to the present and what had happened. He did another quick scan of the room, but he didn’t see Neena anywhere. “I’m fine. It was just a bad dream, don’t worry about it. What happened to Neena? Tell me what happened after that woman drugged me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t look fine to me.”

“Sabrina.”

She put up her hands. “Fine, I’ll drop it for now. As for what happened, you’re probably not going to like it.”

Now that his heart rate had calmed a little, his head ached. He slowly stood up and realized the sluggishness from earlier was gone. “Tell me anyway. It’ll give me a chance to try to pull myself together and shake off any aftereffects of the drugs Neena pumped into me.”

She also stood up and watched him for a second before she finally replied. “Well, Neena and I had a chat.”

“A chat? Seriously? With the crazy lady who drugged me unconscious?”

She shrugged. “Hey, I was ready to knock her out cold until she said some things that forced me to take her seriously. Did you know she can see visions of the future? The woman has abilities I can’t even name.”

He took a step toward Sabrina. “I may have heard something about that, but enough about Neena’s abilities. Just tell me what she said.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “She gave me the information we needed to take down Watkins tonight.”

“Exactly how is this supposed to happen? I can’t even shift until tomorrow morning.”

She shook her head. “You’re wrong. I don’t know how your abilities work, but if you can ‘check’ on your power levels, they should be at full capacity thanks to a mystery drug.”

He gave her a skeptical look. “I’ve never heard of a drug like that. If it existed, I’m sure the Collector would’ve used it.”

“Just check, okay? For me? If what Neena told me about this drug recharging your powers is true, then I’d feel more confident about using the other information she gave me.”

He stared and she stared back. He could tell the woman wasn’t going to back down.

The human had guts; he’d give her that.
Human.
He’d nearly forgotten about her earlier revelation, but for some reason it didn’t seem to bother him as much as he’d expected. Probably because of the way she’d looked at him when he’d fallen to the ground earlier. It’d been a long time since someone had shown any concern or worry for him.

He just needed to be careful not to read too much into it.

He sighed. “Fine. I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I have a feeling you’ll argue with me until I do what you ask, so in the interest of saving time, give me a second.” He closed his eyes and focused on the hum of power he drew on whenever he used his shadow-shifting abilities. Normally, this close after using them, it would be nothing more than a whisper. But Sabrina was right—his energy was pulsing at full power.

He opened his eyes. “Usually shifting so close together would put enough strain on my heart to kill me, but my energy levels are back to full. I can shift again without killing myself. How is that possible?”

“The drug I mentioned was the one Neena injected you with, and it seems she was telling the truth about it speeding up your recovery process.”

He opened his mouth to ask how, but decided that wasn’t important right now. Instead, he said, “But there must be more you aren’t telling me because as awesome as I am with my abilities, they alone won’t capture Watkins.”

Sabrina couldn’t get the look of horror she’d seen on Jorge’s face when he’d jumped up from his bad dream out of her head. She wanted to wrap him in a hug and push him to tell her what it’d been about, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t say a word—if anything at all—until he knew everything Neena had told her.

Since it was only early afternoon, she just needed to get their plan for tonight formulated and then she would still have time to get him talking about his dream and maybe even about his reaction to her working for the
Feiru
Liaison office. He had yet to bring it up and Sabrina wasn’t going to go into a high stakes situations—like taking down Watkins at the school—until she was sure they could trust each other enough to work together.

She clenched her hands into fists to prevent herself from reaching for him and said, “Watkins is moving up the bombing of the school. According to Neena, he’s going to do it tonight.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Start from the beginning, and tell me everything Neena told you.”

She did—well, everything except for one secret she’d promised to keep from Jorge—and when she finished, he looked her dead in the eye and said, “You’ve been doing this double-life thing for years, so I’m guessing you’re good at telling whether someone is lying to you or not. What’s your professional opinion on Neena? Imagine you had a team’s life in your hands, would you still trust her and use her information?”

Sabrina had already given this a lot of thought. “Yes, I think she’s telling the truth. Her eccentricities are genuine and I get the feeling that most people think she’s lying because of them, when in reality she’s being herself. It’s kind of a brilliant cover, if you ask me. I wish I could just be myself and say whatever I wished, but then have people dismiss it out of hand because of my behavior. It’d be a hell of a lot easier than having to live two lives.”

He uncrossed his arms. “About that, what made a human take an undercover job with the Fed League for two years? How long have you even known the
Feiru
existed?”

She hadn’t meant to draw attention to her earlier revelations, but now that she had, she wouldn’t try to brush them aside. “I sort of discovered your existence by accident.”

He gave her a look and she decided they had enough time for her to tell him more. She hadn’t told anyone outside of the
Feiru
Liaison office this story before, but if she wanted any sort of trust between them, she needed to stop worrying about what her superiors might do to her. Especially since her identity was already compromised.

She took a deep breath and said, “During my first year at university in Brazil, I was returning from a late night at the library. It was a clear, warm night, but all of a sudden I heard loud splashes of water, as if there was a downpour. I went toward the sound and came upon a young man surrounded by streams of water dancing around him, and occasionally one of the water streams would hit the ground. Like any human, all I could do was stare. The young man was standing in the open, and there was no logical reason I could think of for the displays of water—no fountain, no hoses, nothing.

“I didn’t get to stare long, however, before I heard something like a gun go off. The young man went down, and the water instantly splashed against the ground to form a big puddle. As I tried to move away from the growing lake at my feet, arms grabbed my shoulders and spun me around. The woman was wearing a police-like uniform, but something about it was off.”

Jorge said, “She was a
Feiru
enforcer.”

Sabrina nodded. “Yes. I later learned they’d gotten a tip and had come to take care of the problem before someone could record the display of elemental magic with a camcorder or a video on their cell phone. The man was taken into custody, as was I.”

“And what did they do with you?”

Despite everything she’d seen, and everything she’d experienced in her current occupation, that night was still the most important in her life because from that day onward, she’d never been able to be truly honest with anyone. Keeping it a secret from all of her friends and family, including her sister, had nearly torn her apart.

But with Jorge, she could finally break her silence, and maybe start to heal her fractured psyche. After all, he was a
Feiru
, and talking about the enforcer procedures wouldn’t violate any of the agreements she’d signed. She might get in trouble with her boss back at the
Feiru
Liaison office, but she could handle that.

Besides, it was more than wanting to tell someone; she needed to tell someone. “At first, nothing. They kept me locked up and wouldn’t tell me why. I couldn’t even make a call to my sister to let her know I was alive. The thought of her and my friends thinking I was dead was one of the lowest points of my life.”

Jorge took a step closer to her and briefly touched her arm. “They must’ve let you out eventually, or you wouldn’t be standing here in front of me.”

He was looking at her, his face almost soft like it had been in the old days, and she wanted him to touch her again. “They would occasionally question me to try to find out what I knew. Eventually, a
Feiru
lawyer came and explained my options to me—I could either spend the rest of my life in a special type of relocation center, or I could agree to work with the
Feiru
Liaison office as a type of spy. Since I could still see my sister occasionally with the latter option as long as I didn’t tell her anything related to the
Feiru
or my new job, I chose that one.”

Jorge was less than a foot in front of her now. She had to look up to see his face, but his expression was unreadable. This close, she could smell the unique masculine scent that was Jorge, but he didn’t touch her or reach for her. Instead, he asked, “How old were you when this happened?”