Whisper of Shadows (The Diamond City Magic Novels)

Bell Bridge Book titles from
Diana Pharaoh Francis

The Diamond City Magic Novels

Trace of Magic

Edge of Dreams

Whisper of Shadows

The Crosspointe Chronicles

The Cipher

The Black Ship

The Turning Tide
(coming soon)

The Hollow Crown
(coming soon)

Whisper of Shadows

Book 3 of the Diamond City Magic Novels

by

Diana Pharaoh Francis

Bell Bridge Books

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-720-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-702-1

Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 by Diana Pharaoh Francis

Published in the United States of America.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Background (manipulated) © Unholyvault | Dreamstime.com
Woman (manipulated) © Julenochek | Dreamstime.com
Woman (manipulated) © Avgustino | Dreamstime.com

:Msws:01:

Dedication

To my husband, the love of my life,

and the Boy of Size and Girlie.

I couldn’t do this without you.

Chapter 1

I HAD A WHOLE lot of questions for the man standing in front of me. All of them starting with
why
.

Why did you leave, Dad
?

Why didn’t you tell me where you went, Dad
?

Why did you abandon me and the rest of your family, Dad
?

And probably most important of all:
Why did you put a psychic bomb in my brain to kill me if I breached your carefully constructed walls locking away my memories and my ability to trust, Daddy Dearest
?

That last question probably should have been the first. Having to ask the question at all says something about my life, as does the fact that the bomb in my brain wasn’t even my most recent near-death experience of the last few days. I’d come close to dying at least twice since the brain bomb, plus had my thumb cut off.

I’ll admit I wasn’t in the most charitable frame of mind as I stared at my father. For ten years I’d had to wonder whether he was dead or rotting in prison somewhere or even living on Mars. Someone else might have gotten through all the emotional baggage and given him a big hug. Mostly I just wanted to kill him. Except killing him wouldn’t get me the answers I needed.

While I tried to calm down from the shock of finding him in my stepmom’s living room, standing there like he’d never ditched us, I rubbed a finger over my thumb knuckle just to make sure it was still there. Maya, a tinker friend who was quickly earning enough from me to build a vacation home in the Bahamas, had reattached it after a madman cut it off. The reattachment between my dad and me wasn’t going to be so easy. Inwardly, I snorted. Impossible was more like it.

He’d been the last person, place, or thing I’d expected to see tonight. I don’t see the future. I’m a tracer. I can see the magical trails people leave behind by merely existing. I can even see dead trace, which makes me unique and dangerous to all the wrong kind of people. My abilities are the modern-day equivalent of a chimera or a Sasquatch or a snipe. Only I actually exist.

My last couple of cases “outed” me. Now everybody wants a piece of me—whether to hire me, to enslave me, or to kill me. I’d formed an uneasy truce with Gregg Touray, the boss of one of the most powerful Tyet organizations in Diamond City. His half brother Clay Price is my . . . boyfriend of sorts, a former detective who’d traded his own freedom for mine, and quit the force to work for his brother as part of the bargain for Touray’s leaving me alone.

Tonight was about finally introducing Price to the half of my family he hasn’t met—namely, my stepmom Mel and my stepbrother Jamie. He’s already met my sister, Taylor, and my other stepbrother, Leo. Since I’ve never in my life brought a date to dinner, it’s a pretty big deal.

Actually, it was more like a gauntlet, where my metal-working stepbrothers would wrap him up in a cage and either threaten him if he hurts me or tickle him to death. They aren’t exactly predictable, and even though they are older than me, they still have a healthy teenage practical-joker streak going on. That, or my stepmom Mel decides to get in on the action and interrogate him about, well, pretty much his entire life. As an FBI reader, she can read emotion. She’s also an Einstein-level psychologist, so pretty much she’s a walking lie detector who can get anybody to spill their guts about every last little thing. Another reason I’d been avoiding her since the whole thing with Price started. I couldn’t keep secrets when she turned her detection skills on me.

On top of that, I had planned to announce that Price and I were moving in together. Silly me, I’d thought that last tidbit was going to be the shocker of the evening. Then my dad shows up. Now I had to wonder if he was planning to try to kill me or kidnap me. It wouldn’t be the first time for either.

My stepmom felt the need to warn us. When she opened the door, Mel acted kind of cold, which is not her. When she shook Price’s hand, I could tell she did something. As a reader, she can also transmit feelings when she wants to. Whatever she sent to Price morphed him into stone-cold-brutal mode.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

Mel gave a brittle smile. “We have unexpected company for dinner tonight. It’s quite a surprise.”

“Who?”

“Come see.”

From the way she and Price acted, the unexpected company was also unexpectedly
bad
. Price edged in front of me, lacing his fingers tightly through mine, using that connection to angle me behind him as we followed Mel into her expansive living room, which was nowhere near big enough to hold the tension.

My brothers, Jamie and Leo, stood on opposites sides of the room. Leo’s expression was harsh, like he was made of rage. He had long dark hair that he combed back in waves. His face was chiseled. The only thing that kept him from looking pretty was that his nose was crooked and the bridge was flat.

Jamie had reddish-brown hair he kept clipped short enough to stay out of his face. Like Leo, he couldn’t be bothered to shave more than every few days, if that, so he constantly had five o’clock shadow. He also usually had dimples, but right now, he looked like he’d never smiled in his life. He flicked a glance at me as I walked in. His jaw knotted.

Taylor sat on a stool at the mahogany bar. She looked shell-shocked. Not a look she wore often. She was a pilot and had worked in Iraq and Afghanistan for several years, flying for private security firms and other businesses. She usually had nerves of ice, but right now, she looked like she’d been stabbed in the chest a dozen times. Her hand held a glass, her knuckles white. I didn’t think she even remembered she was holding it.

The focus of everyone’s agitation sat in a hobnailed leather chair near the fireplace.

Dad.

“Look who’s here, everyone. Riley and her beau,” Mel announced, her tone carefully neutral.

My father stood as I walked in. The air went out of the world. A hurricane spun up inside me. I couldn’t begin to tell what I felt. I wanted to hug him for a split second. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. Then I wanted to hit him. Instead, I stood there, drinking him in.

As far back as I could remember, he’d had short red-blond hair. Now it was more silver than blond. His eyes were the same sleepy blue, but red-rimmed now, and he had crow’s feet. He was tanned, like he’d been in the sun recently. He barely scraped six feet and looked fit—no paunch dewlapping his belt. It seemed that the last ten years had been kind to him—that is, as far as I could remember. But then again, I couldn’t trust my memories about him, could I?

He’d made me forget things—I didn’t know what, just that he’d done it. When his little brain bomb had gone off in my head, a dreamer friend, Cass, had gone into my head to put me back together. She’d saved my life, but she couldn’t retrieve what my father had taken. All she knew was that real memories had been uprooted and fake memories had been planted. Maybe he’d done the same to the rest of the family. The thought was enough to loosen my tongue. Anger does that for me.

“Dad. You’re back.”

He smiled. “Riley. It’s good to see you.”

I wondered if he expected me to jump into his arms. I wondered if that was part of the programming Cass had yanked out of my brain. I tipped my head to the side, glaring. “Tell me, Dad, will the rest of us be remembering this little chat or are you going to fix that before you disappear again? That’s what you do, right? Play with people’s memories? Mess with their lives, and then go your merry way?” I asked.

Whatever he expected from me, that wasn’t it. From the way his lips flattened, I could tell he didn’t like the sarcasm. Or maybe it was the truth he hated. Probably it was the truth. Too fucking bad. Point for me.

That’s when I noticed Dalton. He’d been my shadow for weeks. I’d thought that Price’s brother, Gregg Touray, had hired him to keep me out of the “wrong hands.” That meant any hands but Touray’s. Unfortunately, he turned out to be my father’s henchman. Point for Dad.

Dalton was handsome in a not-quite-finished sort of way. His face was long, his nose strong and blunt. He had high cheekbones like he might be part Native American. The weird thing about him was his eyes. They were discs of silver, and sometimes the edges would glow different colors. They were tinker mods, but I didn’t really know what he could see. It gave him an eerie inhuman quality. If I hadn’t already distrusted him, his eyes would have done the trick.

As I scanned him over, my brain kicked into high gear. A whole lot of dominoes started falling just then, and I could barely begin to grasp the meaning.

Dalton had come around with a security squad just after my secret talent as a tracer had been exposed. He’d said he’d been anonymously hired to protect me. At that point, I’d stupidly assumed that his boss was either Touray or Price, neither of whom I’d been talking to at that point. I’d been too stubborn and idiotic to pick up the phone and ask them. Instead, I did my own background checks, which didn’t trigger any red flags, and when Dalton had known details about me only Price or Touray could have given him, I’d let him hang around.

Not my finest decision. He’d freed—or maybe just stolen—the megalomaniac nutjob who’d infected me and my sister with Sparkle Dust and then cut off my thumb. That would be Percy Caldwell, a sociopath and the maker of Sparkle Dust, a magical drug that had been sweeping through Diamond City, killing just about everyone who chanced taking it. The drug was literally made out of drug addicts. Their bodies were harvested to make more SD. That meant, if Dalton was working for my dad, then my dad had Percy Caldwell and the key to making SD. Was he setting up to manufacture it?

The idea made my stomach twist. Weeks ago I’d have been able to say no way—my dad would never be a part of anything so depraved and horrifying. Unfortunately, I now knew better. If he was capable of killing his own daughter, nothing else, no matter how awful, could be off the table.

“What do you want?” I asked finally, when he remained silent, refusing to rise to the bait I’d thrown out about erasing memories.

He smiled again, a quick quirk of his lips. My heart twisted. I remembered that smile. Despite myself, I clung to the memory. Maybe everything about my childhood wasn’t a lie.

“Straight to the point,” he murmured. “Just like your mother.”

I flinched. Price’s fingers tightened on mine. I held on to his hard strength. He had my back. He always had my back.

“Where did you go?”

Taylor. Her voice came out in a rasp.

She stared at Dad like somehow she could cut him open and see what he was really thinking. The wounded look had faded and been replaced with animal fury. There was a wild edge to her that hadn’t been there a week or so ago. She’d seen her hangar invaded and then her friends and employees gunned down. A family in her waiting room had been slaughtered. Then she’d been exposed to Sparkle Dust. Cass—the same dreamer who’d mended my brain after Dad’s bomb went off—had fixed Taylor as much as she could be fixed, but the drug had changed her. I wasn’t sure what those changes were, but she didn’t usually lose her cool. Right now, it was probably good she didn’t make a habit of carrying weapons.

Dad’s face softened. I caught myself. Did I still call him that? It didn’t feel right. Calling him
Dad
implied love. Whatever I felt for him, love wasn’t it. His old name had been Samuel Hollis, but I doubted he went by that anymore. Not that he went by
Dad
anymore either. He’d quit that a decade ago.

He faced Taylor. “I’ve mostly been out of the country and traveling.”

“Why? Why did you leave?” Taylor swigged down the rest of her drink and set it down before standing up. She held herself still, her arms wrapped around her stomach, her gaze unblinking. “Why did you disappear and never call?”

Dad—Sam?—blew out a soft breath. “It was too dangerous to stay. For you. For all of you.” His glance gathered all of us in. “I had—I have—enemies who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you to get to me.” He looked at me. “One of them murdered your mother.”

Sometimes my mouth gets going before I have a chance to really think. “So Mom gets murdered. Your reaction to your bloodthirsty enemies is to get remarried, have another kid, play house for years, and then out of the blue, you vanish off the face of the earth, but not before taking the time to set bombs in my head. It’s like a Christmas movie. You’re amazing. I mean, if it had been me, I probably would have just taken my daughter and—I don’t know—gone into hiding with her instead of playing
Brady Bunch
for a decade. But clearly I don’t have the vision you do.”

“There are things you don’t know.”

“Yeah. There are. Things that some asshole scrubbed out of my head. Memories someone stole from me. The one thing I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that my dad raped my brain and then set booby traps to kill me if I broke through his walls. Thanks for that, by the way. Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch yourself go insane, to have your brain so terrified that it tells your body to quit breathing? Worse, you made it Price’s fault. You made the man who loves me so much he’d cut his heart out of his chest for me feel like I’d picked suicide over trusting him.”

Price’s hand clenched on mine so hard it hurt. Neither one of us were going to forgive my dad for putting us through that anytime soon. I tightened my grip reassuringly, never looking away from my dad.

“If it wasn’t enough that half the world was out to kill me, I got to have you doing it, too. So back to the question. Why are you here? Oh! Maybe you want to explain to your wife why you abandoned her? Did you at least bring flowers? Fancy chocolates? Expensive jewelry? What
do
you get your wife when you disappear? Copper? Wood? Plastic? Is there an abandonment anniversary gift chart?”

I was shaking. I don’t know if I was more mad or more in danger of falling to pieces. Price let go of my hand and put his arm around me. I leaned into him, grateful for his solid strength.

Mel, Jaime, and Leo still hadn’t said anything. I wondered what they were thinking. Mel had loved my dad. My memories said they’d been gloriously happy. But my memories could be lies. So could hers. All the same, this was her husband. A man who’d abandoned her and left her to raise four children alone. A man who’d made her promises and then tossed her aside like used toilet paper.