Captive Heart (28 page)

From the corner of her eye, Andy saw Jack standing in the conference room doorway, watching. He seemed pleased. She could sense that emotion, along with leftover exhilaration and something like pride and admiration.

Stay focused …

Junior rattled off the addresses of three properties that weren’t in Seneca’s records. “They’re in my wife’s sister’s name, Tamlyn Jones.” He gave her social security number, birth date, phone number, and address of record. When he finished, Andy could tell he didn’t have anything left to offer. She stood and dusted a few wood fragments off the front of her leathers.

“He’s done,” Andy told Jack, and Jack moved in to take charge of the man and get him to whatever agency had the strongest claim to prosecute him.

As Junior got to his feet and made his way toward the door with Jack, Jack glanced back at Andy. The look he gave her said they’d talk about all this later—after a lot of touching, kissing, groaning, and definitely, definitely not talking. Not with words, anyway.

Good thing she didn’t need her focus anymore, because it evaporated like water droplets in the desert.

“No disasters,” she muttered to herself. “Nothing unexpected. Guess I’ll have to admit the son of a bitch was right after all.”

Saul and Jake went out the door behind Junior, and Bela and Camille and Dio came to a stop beside Andy.

“You’re still law enforcement,” Bela told her, “even though you’re a Sibyl, too.”

“You did good with Junior,” Dio told her. “Smooth. I was impressed.”

Before Camille could add any praise, Sheila Gray, Maggie Cregan, and Karin Maros filled the conference room doorway.

“What the hell’s going on?” Maggie asked, her strange green eyes bright with confusion and maybe a little fear. “We can’t sense you. It’s like you don’t exist. You’re all like those coins we found, the traps that nearly killed us behind that closed-down storefront restaurant. You’re giving off absolutely nothing.”

Andy saw that the other Sibyls from the raid detail had crowded in behind the East Ranger group. Apparently all of them had been surprised by the same thing and they wanted answers.

Camille’s lips tugged into a smile, unusual for her around a group of Sibyls. She was usually pretty shy, especially with her successes. “Guess my charms work,” she said to Bela. “Maybe we should have warned everybody before we field-tested them.”

Bela gave this a moment’s consideration before blowing it off by rolling her eyes. To Maggie and their audience, she said, “Camille and I have been experimenting with elemental treatments to repel projective traps.” She touched the copper crescent moon pendant around her neck. “They’re also designed to mute our signatures so hostile creatures can’t track us directly.”

“Well, Camille’s right. They definitely work.” Karin sounded impressed, but
impressed
didn’t describe the other expressions Andy could see.
Wary, worried, angry, suspicious
—those would be better words.

“If you got taken or got in trouble, we Sibyls couldn’t track you, either, no matter what kind of energy we used.” Sheila’s calm voice cut across the currents of agitation flowing between the Sibyls outside the conference room. “You should take that into consideration before using those charms on a regular basis.”

Andy wasn’t sure, but she thought she picked up a note of condescension in Sheila’s warning, and it irked her. They’d heard crap like that before from the Mothers when they all began to explore their projective talents, then again when Camille first started crafting her charms to help them with their projective energy.

Real Sibyls don’t need jewelry to fight battles
.…

“Yeah, thanks.” Andy took Camille by the elbow. “We’ll keep that in mind if we get snatched or dropped down a storm drain. I thought we were the big bad trackers, anyway.”

Bela started for the conference room door, and Sheila’s group stepped out of her way. All the Sibyls moved enough to make a path for them, but Andy sensed their stares as well as the curious gazes from OCU officers and technicians as she steered Camille through the crowd. Behind her, Dio’s wind energy picked up to dangerous levels for an indoor setting, and light fixtures and the pieces of the broken office doors started to rattle.

Not soon enough, they made it to the stairwell and started out of the building the same way they came in for the raid.

“I can’t believe there’s still so much prejudice against projective energy and improving the science we’re using.” Camille’s voice sounded young and vulnerable, making Andy feel even more protective.

“People can be assholes,” she said. “Even Sibyls.”

Camille sighed. “They have a point about us not being able to sense and track each other.”

“I can sense all of you just fine.” Dio’s tone screamed
don’t listen to those uptight bitches
. “And we
are
the ones who would be doing the tracking. They’re just weaker in the elemental detection department than we are.”

“Or maybe since we’re all wearing the same charms except for the differences in the metals, we aren’t blocked from detecting each other,” Bela suggested.

Andy waved that off with one flick of the wrist. “I like Dio’s explanation better.”

They banged open the basement door, spilled into the dark space, and Andy had about two seconds to freeze, to choke, to realize the truth.

Here it was. This was it. The unexpected complication.

The disaster.

A wave of energy unlike anything she had ever experienced drove Andy to her knees.

It hit her hard, over and over, punches she couldn’t withstand, but couldn’t surrender to, either. The energy beat her, pulled against her, sucking her essence just like a projective trap—worse than that. Infinitely, horribly worse.

She tried to scream.

No sound.

She tried to breathe.

No air.

She pitched forward, barely catching herself on her palms. Some part of her mind was aware that her entire group had gone down with her. Fighting. But losing.

The charm at her neck trembled against her skin, then burned her as water coated her leathers. She didn’t know where the water was coming from, but she had a horrible feeling it was rising out of her own pores.

Life fluid
.

Leaving me
.

She tried to pull it back and couldn’t. She thought about Bela and Camille and Dio. Tried to reach out to them with her energy. Nothing happened.

The charm got hotter. God, she wanted to rip the thing off before it branded her.

Water poured off her skin now.

The charm burned her until she cried out—and this time, she heard the sound. Light flared and the ground shook—

And nothing.

The energy bruising her inside and out vanished with a dull, listless thump, almost like an explosion in reverse. Andy gasped deep and fast, gathering air, summoning her water energy, pulling her body’s fluid and essence back where it belonged. Almost instantly, she made contact with Bela, then Dio and Camille, offering what power she could to help them, but they all seemed okay—or at least as okay as she was.

Andy blinked at the dark basement, but couldn’t see anything near her. She couldn’t hear anything, either, but she smelled something sharp and earthy. Juniper, maybe, or some other type of evergreen. Her mind followed the scent, and the charm around her neck stayed hot as she rocked back to sit on her ass and grip the metal as her projective senses flooded around the room, searching, pushing at everything—

There.

Near the door.

Four of them. No, wait. Five. Six.

Whoever or whatever they were, they must have sensed her probing them, because they stopped moving.

“I know you’re there.” Andy forced herself upright. She staggered, but still managed to draw her dart pistol and gather more of her elemental energy. Water trickled into the basement through the floor, the walls, the ceilings. In a few seconds she’d have enough to hit the bastards with a cold blast like a fire hose if they didn’t start acting friendly.

Wind energy blended with her water, and Andy knew Dio had gotten to her feet. She heard the whisper of throwing knives drawn from Dio’s belt. Then came the whisper of a wicked, curved scimitar leaving its scabbard, suggesting Camille had shaken off the attack. The basement floor trembled again, and this time it was Bela who drew her serrated blade.

“You’ve got three seconds to start talking before we wipe the floor with you,” Andy said, punctuated by Dio’s menacing battle snarl.

One of the figures moved. Slowly. Carefully. As if deliberately trying not to incite Andy to fire or Dio to eat them.

Why couldn’t she see the thing better? Man-shaped, definitely. Tall and heavily muscled, but her usually keen Sibyl vision seemed to have deserted her. That, or the man-thing was made out of darkness and shadows.

It raised its hands, and a purple-black light kindled between its palms.

Andy started to squeeze the trigger on her dart gun before the thing could take them out with whatever weird fireball it was making, but Camille yelled, “No! Wait.”

The light over the man-thing’s head expanded until his features became more distinct, from his long black hair to his black jeans and shirt. He had arms like the most dedicated gym rat ever, and all the bare parts she could see had tribal markings that glowed black in the weird illumination. Those thighs—damn. The guy could probably crush skulls with his legs, and without much difficulty.

“His ears are pointed,” Andy whispered to Camille. “Like the Vulcans from
Star Trek
. What the hell is he?”

Camille lowered her scimitar, then sheathed it and said something in Gaelic. Andy had no idea what it was, but the man nodded, spoke a few words in return, and a few seconds later, he grew wings. Big black ones. They had feathers, but not ragged bits of fluff like the Keres—real, with rounded tips and darker patterns etched into the black down at connecting points. The light he had made hovered over him now, and Andy saw the creatures with him. Four more men came to stand beside him, and one woman. They looked enough like each other to be relatives, except the five newcomers weren’t showing their wings. Every last one of them seemed so dark and beautiful that their appearance nearly moved Andy to tears.

“Everyone,” Camille said slowly and carefully, overenunciating like she needed to be sure she got every detail correct, “meet the Host.”

“Oh, shit,” Dio muttered, and her wind energy whipped down to nothing.

Andy lowered her dart pistol, but she didn’t holster it. Just because these creatures had some treaty with the fire Sibyls didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. The Keres could have easily killed her and everybody else who trespassed on their mountain back when she killed the Leviathan. Who knew what the Host might do if they didn’t get what they wanted?

“This is Mikeal.” Camille gestured to the Host showing his wings. “He’s like their captain. Prince, really.”

“I’m not bowing,” Dio said in tones so low Andy barely heard her. Bela didn’t say anything, but Andy realized she hadn’t sheathed her sword, either.

“We didn’t intend to harm you.” Mikeal was the one to bow, fast and graceful. “We didn’t realize you were so close to us. Why are you invisible to our senses?”

Camille held up the charm around her neck. “I crafted these for my fighting group to keep our energy signatures muted. They’re elementally treated to block your ability to pick up our essence. We have enemies trying to find us, so I wanted to keep us safe.”

Mikeal studied Camille for a few long moments, then gave Andy, Bela, and Dio similar scrutiny. As he spoke, his wings retracted, leaving him looking more human. “You have much of the old powers in you. All of you do.”

“We’re different from most Sibyls, yes.” Camille smiled at him.

Mikeal didn’t smile back. His attention shifted to Andy. “You are unique among your fellow warriors. We have encountered nothing like you in many, many centuries.”

“I’m a water Sibyl,” Andy told him. “One of the few.”

“Our people are accustomed to existing on the edge of survival.” The female member of the Host sounded almost sad. “We appreciate any creature in your position, fighting against extinction, but unwilling to cower in some distant cave just to stay alive.”

Andy wondered if that gave her special permission to ask questions. She decided to take a risk and find out. “Why are you here?”

Andy meant why were the Host in New York City, but Mikeal offered a more literal answer. “We have been tracking a group of sorcerers—those who pervert energies for their own purpose. They came here tonight after you did. They entered through this door. I believe they intended to trespass farther into this building, but something put them off. They fled.”

“In disarray,” the Host woman said, obviously disgusted by such a display of cowardice.

“The Coven was here.” Andy heard herself say the words, and gooseflesh rose across her neck. An almost-disaster. Was that what had set her instincts off about coming here tonight? “Do you know what they wanted? Do you know who or what they were after?”

Mikeal’s expression remained stony, made twice as severe by the strange lighting. “That we cannot tell you. We have no understanding of their purpose, only their whereabouts now and again, when we can detect their energy.”

Andy thought about asking him why he was tracking the Coven to start with, but opted for a less direct, hopefully more respectful approach. “What did you come to New York City to find?”

Mikeal didn’t answer, but Andy didn’t detect any malice in his silence. Whatever they were after, he considered it Host business and Host business alone.

“If we knew, we could try to help you,” Camille said.

Mikeal lowered his head in a quick gesture of thanks, but he said, “We don’t require assistance.”

Dio laughed. “Of course not. That’s why you’ve been poking around here for weeks murdering grass and squirrels.”

Camille and Bela flinched at Dio’s disrespectful tone, but Mikeal and his soldiers smiled. Maybe they liked insolence.

Good
. Andy allowed herself a measure of relief and holstered her pistol.
Then we’ll all get along after all
.

Mikeal’s eyes tracked Andy’s every movement. When she finished and folded her arms, he addressed her. “Explain the term
Coven
. Please.”