Underground Warrior (13 page)

No violence against those
of the blood,
even after exile, except as ritual—an official combat or an overlord-approved execution, when an individual became a danger to the whole. Smith Donnell, Mitch Talbott, even Greta Kaiser remained safe as long as they posed no threat.

A bastard like Trace Beaudry, though, or a no-blood like Isabel Daine?

Dillon Charles could do anything he wanted to them, with his nobility intact.

Yet another benefit to being the best and the brightest.

Chapter 8

S
mith had a plan. He was bossy that way—he always had a plan. Sometimes Smith’s plans even worked.

Trace wouldn’t have put money on this one, not even at the point of no return, as he and his friends strolled into one of downtown Dallas’ marble-floored, glass-windowed, chrome-trimmed lobbies, all but deserted on a Sunday morning.

All except for the security guard manning the granite-countered station facing the front doors.

“Donnell et al, here to see Dillon Charles,” announced Smith, all hoity-toity, as if he were wearing a five-thousand-dollar suit instead of jeans and a T-shirt. Trace sometimes wondered if having been raised with money would have given him the same way of walking, of talking, of holding his head and clipping his words. Just as well he’d escaped that particular flaw. He didn’t want anything more to do with the upper crust, damn it. So how did he keep ending up on jobs like this?

While the guard glanced over his papers—as if he had so many notes, on a weekend—Trace leaned closer to Smith and Mitch and whispered, “He’s gonna double-cross us.” He didn’t mean the guard.

Smith managed to kick him, without a single ripple in the charming-as-hell, you-want-to-help-me smile he’d turned on Security Guard Guy.

“Not until he authenticates the sword,” whispered Mitch back, patting his messenger bag. They’d taken pictures of Trace’s sword from several angles, then printed out 8x10 copies.

Trace scowled, less than sold on this part of the plan, as well. But when Charles contacted Smith through Smith’s dad—head of the local Comitatus—that’s how this meeting had gone down. Charles wanted to see “whatever that was that Trace stole from the LaSalle bungalow.”
Stole.
Which made Trace want to pound the guy into the ground almost as much as the fact that he hadn’t heard from Sibyl for half a week, not since she’d bolted out of Greta’s the morning after when Dillon Charles showed up. Charles wanted what Trace had, and Smith wanted information about it, so they were having a big meet about it, blue bloods to blue bloods.

Red-blooded Trace hadn’t been invited—surprise! He guessed Charles thought that was some kind of insult, but he figured he’d breathe a lot better without being around the stench of way-too-expensive aftershave and even-more-expensive entitlement.

When the guard gave them instructions for how to reach the meeting room, Trace got into the elevator and rode up to the twentieth floor with his friends. But he was just as glad to stay in the hallway, still around the corner from the suite that Charles had commandeered for this face-to-face. Hanging behind. Keeping watch.

That didn’t make him a coward, did it? It made him first line of attack, unless Charles had an ambush set up in the conference suite. And Dillon Charles was the kind of guy who liked to keep his own hands clean.

“Wish us luck,” whispered Mitch as he and Smith turned the corner.

Trace just snorted. He wasn’t even sure what “luck” would look like, here—except for everyone getting out in one piece. It wasn’t likely Charles and his crowd would threaten Smith and Mitch with real violence, exiles or not. But you never could tell.

One thing he’d learned over his decade as a secret-society misfit was that what people said the rules were, and how they actually behaved, weren’t always the same thing. Hell, they were hardly ever the same thing. Usually, the rules just provided a way for jerks to rationalize their jerkiness.

Only a few months back, one young, hotheaded Comitatus had taken it on himself to stab a member of the inner circle—Arden’s father. So, no. Despite Charles’ veneer of civilization in setting up this official conclave, not even Smith and Mitch trusted the guy to keep his word.

Trace waited. He folded his arms. After a while, he unfolded his arms, and his healing ribs still felt tender. In the imaginary paintball fight Smith had described, he’d now lost to the reds and yellows instead of the purples and browns.

And he’d lost Sibyl.

Trace wished he knew what to do about that. He’d tried leaving messages for her, but she never called him back. He’d even gone by her condo, only to have the door answered by a middle-aged yuppie with a golfer’s tan. Luckily, Trace had hesitated, torn between fear that this might be Sibyl’s new lover and confusion that maybe this was her dad, long enough to
not
damage the guy before learning that he was neither. The condo’s owner had never heard of Sibyl. Or Isabel. Or anyone matching her description. And no, he hadn’t hired anyone to house-sit while he was out of the country.

Could Trace have dreamed her? And if he had, couldn’t he have dreamed a less complicated woman?

Now, waiting in the hallway of the downtown Dallas high-rise, he shifted his weight on the plush carpet. He checked his phone, in case Sibyl had called. Nothing. He strained to hear any kind of commotion from the meeting rooms, fairly sure that either Smith or Mitch could yell loud enough to get his attention if they needed him. Nothing.

Damn.
Even if he came across as desperate, he had to try calling Sibyl again. He had to know that she was okay. Trace pressed the speed dial button he’d set for her.

A ringtone version of LeAnn Rimes’ “Right Kind of Wrong” played out from behind him.

He spun. And there she stood, just outside the door to the stairs, blinking at him like she had even less idea what to say than he did.
Sibyl.
She looked good—better than he remembered, which was saying something, though maybe the fact that she’d bled on him had colored his memory. She wore jeans for once, probably because December had arrived, and an oversize shirt, although he wondered what wouldn’t look oversize on a little slip like her. Her long brown hair threatened to curtain off her face from the rest of the world. Her big eyes, and that solemn, taking-everything-too-seriously expression…

Torn between diving at her to scoop her into a hard hug, versus snarling the first insult he could think of just to show that she hadn’t hurt him, Trace stared. He also shut his phone.

Her own phone stopped ringing, even as she dug it out of her pocket and, with a single beep, seemed to silence it.

“Hey,” he said finally. Good. Noncommital.

Sibyl looked down at the carpet, then back up. Most women would have smiled at that point, just to be polite. She stayed solemn. “Hi.”

“So…” God, he hoped she’d enjoyed their time in bed together as much as he had, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to win her over with his sparkling conversation. “What…?”

“How long have they been in there?” she asked, seeming to find her purpose again. She strode by him, glanced around the corner. “The meeting. I wanted to listen in.”

About a dozen questions crowded his head. Somehow, the one that slipped out first was, “How’d you even know about it?”

“Greta. She overheard some of the planning about the Schmomitatus.”

Oh, yeah. Since Greta’s father had been a member of the society, before his long-ago exile, they’d relaxed some of their vigilance around her—especially Mitch. How someone as chatty as Mitch had ever taken a vow of secrecy with a straight face, Trace couldn’t figure.

“So why do you want to listen?”

“Because I need to know.”

“It would be a lot safer to wait until we get back to Greta’s and ask us then. So where…”

But Sibyl’s examination of the walls distracted him. She said, “Don’t trust them.”

“Smith and Mitch?”

“Any of them.” Including him? That would explain a lot. But before he could ask her about that, she seemed to find what she was seeking. She dragged a cushioned chair over to the hallway wall, then stood on it and began to work on—oh. A wall vent. She used a Swiss Army knife to remove the screws, then lifted down a vent cover, careful not to make noise. The way she bent, so incredibly low, to brace the vent cover against the chair beneath her feet, was poetry. Then, stretching back up to grasp the edge of the resulting shaft with her hands and placing one booted foot on the back of the chair, she readied to boost herself upward.

In two steps, Trace caught her by the hips and lifted her well away, to the floor, instead. “Are you crazy?”

Her eyes flashed anger at the word, but all she said was, “I need to hear them.”

“By crawling through vents?”

“They’d see me if I just opened the door and leaned in.”

He hated the sarcastic edge he heard or imagined in her statement—the unspoken
duh.
So he wasn’t a genius like her, or even as educated as his once wealthy friends. But he had good survival instincts. So he put on his meanest face and loomed over her, as threatening as possible—pretty easy, considering their different heights—and snarled, “It’s dangerous.”

To his amazement, shy little Sibyl of the Faline eyes glared right back up at him, not at all cowed. “So’s cage fighting.”

“I’m good at cage fighting.”

“And I’m good at sneaking!” She was? “But anything connected to the Comitatus is dangerous. So was setting up a blind meeting with Arden.”

“Yeah. You almost got flattened by a train.”

“But I didn’t!” Which is when something shifted in her gaze, something he hadn’t expected. She didn’t look any more frightened than she had before, just more…soft. “You were there.”

Her near miss with the train had scared the hell out of him then and he didn’t even know her! Now that he’d developed some kind of complicated feelings for Sibyl, remembering it made him dizzy. “And now—”

But she stopped him with soft fingers over his angry mouth. “You’re here now, too.”

And she smiled.

And Trace lost track of his argument.

Sibyl could barely breathe past the clicking into place of puzzle pieces…but for once, this wasn’t about solving an equation or answering a Comitatus-based riddle. This was significantly more…immediate. This was about Trace. She’d run from him, back at her first meeting with Arden, and nearly been killed. A few days ago, she’d run again, but not because she feared him, exactly—because she’d feared his connection to his bloodline, his…masculinity. The masculinity that had given her more pleasure than she could remember.

It had felt like a betrayal. The history of masculinity really was one of violence and domination and competition and conquest…. And protection. When one was truly lucky, when the man was truly decent. And some men had to be decent. Her father had been.

Sibyl felt the surprising pull in her cheeks as she smiled up at Trace, her lover. Her champion. “You’re here. Please boost me up.”

He blinked down at her, and she lay her hand over his heart, felt its thrumming beneath her fingertips. Life. Future? “Please?”

When he continued to hesitate, she turned from him and stepped back onto the chair—champion or not, he couldn’t be allowed to keep her from finishing her previous quest. And could she finish it? A sudden wash of optimism suggested she could.

Then, behind her, he spanned her hips with his hands and lifted, kicking the chair out of the way from beneath her so that he could stand closer to the wall. “Fine!”

She drew her feet up and used the platform of his shoulders to stand, to insert herself into the square metal tunnel. She wished she could smile down at him again—she, who used to go so long between smiles. But the vent didn’t give enough room to turn around, so she simply waved a blind hand behind her.

She hadn’t expected the warm, calloused touch that brushed her fingers, but she appreciated it more than she could’ve anticipated. Her champion…

No distractions. Knowledge is power.

Refocusing, Sibyl began to shimmy her way through the venting, her fingers quickly caking with grit, her face brushing the occasional cobweb. For a fancy building, its vents sure were dusty. She tried to hold her breathe, pausing only to breath through her sleeve or her collar when she had to. When she reached a small intersection, she turned toward the faint thrum of male voices.

Of course she recognized Mitch’s voice first. Mitch Talbott was a talker, relating their last few months with the area Comitatus. “…pretty much how it all went down. Smith’s dad seems to be head of the local powers, not that he has anything to do with us, ’cause…hello? Exiled? Greta and Arden know the menfolk are up to something, but as long as we keep them safe, they’re happy to stop asking questions.”

Hardly,
thought Sibyl, wondering if Mitch was lying or if he honestly believed his report.

“And what of Isabel Daine?” demanded Dillon Charles. He sounded different than he had nearly a decade earlier at the prep school where her scholarship, and her father’s willingness to work there, had once promised an unparalleled future. His voice sounded deeper. But he’d gotten older, too. “We attended the same classes at the academy. The coincidence troubles me.”

The fact that you aren’t telling them how your father and Trace’s—that is, Judge LaSalle—railroaded me is also troubling,
thought Sibyl, squirming just a little bit closer before stopping. The vents allowed her a partial view of the man from above.

“Wait.” That was Smith’s voice. “How old is she?”

“Like I know? She was pretty young, then. She’d skipped some classes, thought being some kind of prodigy meant she deserved our level of education.”

She’d once been impressed by his wealth and position. She’d even imagined some kind of Cinderella story, she from a lower-middle-class family being courted by the prince of New Orleans.

Except that she’d been stupid.

“Well, she’s just a little, lonely thing.” Mitch dismissed her that easily. “Someone Greta took in. She can’t be any threat to the Comitatus, right?”