“I’m not sure what I’m seeing, exactly. There are two brighter spots under the bed, or maybe one bright spot and an echo? Let’s see what we’ve got.” She skirted the bed, got down on her hands and knees, and followed the magic sparks to a long cut slit into the underside of the box spring. Gingerly, she reached inside. Her fingers found a reinforced envelope. She drew it out and stared down at it for a moment, wondering whether she was about to do something she would regret.
“Maybe we should take it straight back to Strike,” Lucius suggested.
She was tempted, but shook her head. “I don’t want to bring him something that turns out to be nothing.” Taking a deep breath, she flipped open the envelope and dumped its contents. And stared at the pictures that landed in her palm, quelling an urge to let them fall to the floor. “Okay. Ew.”
She didn’t have anything fundamental against porn. But these photographs were . . . unattractive. It wasn’t just that the guy in them was pudgy and unfit, and had too much hair in some places and not enough in others, either. Her squick factor came more from the sheer lack of artistry as he posed his way through a variety of odd contortions, all of which managed to aim his startlingly erect member at a camera she thought—hoped?—was on autopilot. Even worse was the scanned printout of a paragraph that came off as so demented, it took her a moment to realize she was looking at a very unfortunate personal ad starring the apartment’s primary tenant. The face matched the pics out in the other room.
“He’s trying to get a date? With
that
?” Lucius sounded like he was caught between horror and laughter.
“Either that or he’s been asked to participate in a psych thesis on why women are staying single longer and longer as the Internet age progresses,” she said dryly. “Okay, that was disturbing.” Stuffing the pictures back in the envelope, she filed the whole mess back in the box spring. “Why in the hell did he hide the photos if he intended to put them online? And why is there a power hot spot?”
“Maybe Rabbit found them and had a good laugh?”
“I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“More likely, the magic was attracted to the highly sexualized resonance of the pictures.” He paused, frowning. “Except that the pictures themselves aren’t sexual, unless the guy actually looked at them while he—” He held up a hand. “Okay. Not going there.”
Jade thought it was more likely that the magic was pulled to things and places that carried a significant emotional charge for the user, but it wasn’t the right time for her and Lucius to go
there
, either. She might be buzzed from the magic and excited by the breakthrough, but she was achingly aware of what she’d given up to get there. She was raw and needy, all too conscious of his every move and breath, and the way his raspy-edged voice brought a long, liquid pull of desire regardless of what he was saying.
Even as nerves sparked at the realization that her defenses against him were far too low, the magic dimmed around her.
“What about the second place you saw? The one you said looked like an echo?”
She shook her head. “It’s gone now.” And so was the magic, which had disappeared when her inner barriers came back up. That was going to be the trade-off, she suspected, and hoped she could find a way to strike a balance between vulnerability and magic.
“Okay, so we do it the old-fashioned way.” They spent the next half hour searching the apartment, focusing on places where her training suggested addicts—and deviants—would hide things they didn’t want their friends, parents, and other authority figures to find. They came up with a big fat nothing, which gave them two positive results to report back to Strike. Although they hadn’t physically put eyes on Rabbit and Myrinne, the landlady said they were around, and the apartment didn’t show any evidence of magic or other misbehavior. And Jade had managed to tap into the scribe’s magic and make it useful.
On the theory that the landlady was guaranteed to say something to Rabbit, Jade pulled a blank sheet of paper out of the printer in the main room—which wasn’t mated to a computer, suggesting that Rabbit and Myrinne were both schlepping their machines—and scrawled a quick note:
Strike sent me and Lucius to find out WTF is going on with you two. I’d suggest you phone home soonest
. She signed her name, left the note on the kitchen counter, and pocketed the motion detector.
Lucius held the door for her on the way out. As she passed him, he leaned in and whispered, “That was a hell of a kiss. What do you say we get on the road so we can stop sooner than later?”
The heat in his eyes twisted something deep inside her, making her want so much more than he was offering. Self-protection said she should find an excuse, but she was weak enough, wanting enough, that she smiled and hit him with a quick kiss that landed a little off center. “It’s a date.” Or, more technically, a booty call.
“Be patient,” Brandt said every time she brought it up. “Their safety has to be our first priority.” Which would’ve been fine if she’d truly believed that the boys’ safety
was
his first priority. Over time, though, she’d come to realize that as much as he loved her and their boys, he was bound to the writs first, with his family coming in a distant second at best.
“Fuck that. I need to see my boys.” Having exhausted all her bright ideas for getting what she wanted within the writs, or even within the quasi- human ethics Hannah had raised her with, she was going to have to take it the other way. Sneak. Lie. Steal.
Shit
.
Taking a deep breath and manning up, she crossed the last distance along the hall and let herself into Strike and Leah’s quarters. Nausea was a low- grade companion as she shut the door and slipped across the entryway, ninja-style. For all that she’d imagined herself a warrior as she’d trained endless hours in the dojos Hannah had brought her to, she hadn’t truly understood what it meant to be a warrior until that first fight against the
Banol Kax
. And now, she realized, she truly understood the other half of her training: stealth. She strongly doubted Hannah had meant for her to use it against her own king, but once she was inside her doubts sloughed away, leaving her determined to achieve the single goal she’d set herself: Find her kids. Strike knew where they were, or at least how to contact them; he was the only one, though. He hadn’t even told Jox, because the royal
winikin
had a history with Hannah. Leah might know, but she made Patience more nervous than even the king did. The queen had a
look
that went right through her. Patience wasn’t sure if that came from cop work, magic, or something else, but she gave the queen a wide berth. And now, as she crossed the royal couple’s sitting room and beelined it for the dining room, where papers were strewn on a dining table turned to office space, she knew she was running a hell of a risk. If she were discovered . . .
You won’t be
, she told herself firmly.
Just do it
.
Working fast, she rifled through the papers on the dining table, looking for an address she didn’t recognize, a note in Hannah’s handwriting. Something. Anything. But no. She pawed through Jade’s reports on Kinich Ahau and a bunch of satellite photos of the Ecuadorian cloud forests, but didn’t see anything she could connect with Hannah, Woody, or the twins.
“Did you really expect that he was going to leave it lying around?” she murmured. “Maybe with a big arrow highlighting the phone number?”
She’d thought it through often enough, trying to figure out how to find what she sought. She’d never come up with much of a plan beyond a flat-out physical search, though. The Nightkeepers didn’t put anything important on the Internet-connected computers. Iago’s people had already shown themselves plenty capable of hacking, and a well- made
makol
could command the thoughts and memories of its human host, meaning that the
Banol Kax
could usurp their own hackers. Ergo, the sensitive stuff was kept on non-networked machines. Patience was assuming Strike and Leah had at least one of them in the suite. But where was it?
A quick but thorough search of the living space turned up a big, fat nothing. No paperwork, no computer. She forced herself through the bedroom, which boasted glass walls on three sides and was dominated by a big, sybaritic bed that made her decidedly uncomfortable. But not uncomfortable enough to give up the search. She pressed on, skimmed through the closets and bathrooms, her nerves notching higher with each passing minute.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Where could it be? They wouldn’t have taken the safe machine with them to the gun range. It was in the suite somewhere. Heart pounding, she checked the doorways leading along a short hallway that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose . . . until she got to a door about halfway down and hit pay dirt.
As she opened the door, gas torches flared automatically to life, lighting a bathroom-size chamber lined with stone veneer and holding a
chac-mool
altar. Adrenaline zinged at the sight of a blond woman looking back at her; it took her a half second to recognize herself, wild-eyed and nervous, reflected in a highly polished obsidian disk hung behind the altar. The king’s heavily carved ceremonial bowl sat on the altar, with an unfamiliar knife beside it, weighing down a short stack of the heavy parchment that was used for small blood ceremonies. The room was imbued with magic, and a weighty sense of history. Under any other circumstance, Patience would’ve backed her ass out of there and pretended she knew nothing about Strike’s private place of worship. And she would have done that now . . . if it hadn’t been for the laptop case tucked in the corner of the ritual chamber. It was hidden, she suspected, not so much from Leah but from Jox.
Last chance
, a little voice whispered inside Patience.
You can still take off. Nobody would know you’d been here
. Which was true . . . except that
she
would know she’d wussed out. And that wasn’t an option for her, either as a warrior or a mother.
Her legs shook a little as she knelt; her hands trembled as she fumbled open the case and powered up the little mininotebook. There was no password or security—why would there be? Strike wouldn’t have imagined anyone would break into his quarters, into his freaking
shrine
, and fire up his machine.
“Come on, come on!” she chanted under her breath as the stupid thing took precious seconds to boot, longer to bring up the Windows screen, with its reassuring blue background. The desktop was stripped down to the absolute basics, just a couple of folders. She opened one labeled KINGLY CRAPOLA, which was pure Strike.
It contained six subdirectories, none of them obviously what she wanted. She opened each of them and quickly scanned through, discarding anything with last-update codes well before the middle of the prior year, when Strike had ’ported Hannah, Woody, and the twins away from Skywatch.
Nothing. Nothing. Still nothing. Oh, gods . . .
She struck gold on subfolder number four; she couldn’t remember the name, knew only that she was looking at a reference request and credit check on Woodrow Byrd, who was applying to rent a four- room apartment in Seattle. The first name was right. The date was right. And Strike, with the help of the Nightkeepers’ tame PI, Carter, had made sure the credit checks all came back fine without linking to anything substantive. More, there was a second file in the subfolder: a lease agreement, signed for a year in Woody’s name . . . but in Hannah’s handwriting.
A sob caught in Patience’s throat and the luminous screen blurred as tears filled her eyes. But when emotion would’ve put her on her ass, her warrior’s talent flared, clicking her over to logic and rationality on one level of her consciousness. That part of her fumbled out her family-only cell phone, punched in the address, and saved the precious information. Then she closed out of the files, powered down the mininotebook, and tucked it back into its case in the corner. Leaving the room as she’d found it, save for being a few degrees warmer, smokier, and lower on oxygen, thanks to the gaslit torches and her own hyperventilation, she slipped out of the shrine and shut the door, pausing to wipe the door handle, not because she thought anyone would be likely to dust for prints, but because . . . well, just because. Then, breathing shallowly through her mouth and moving on cat’s-paw feet, she retraced her steps through the royal suite.
Even as her body was going through those motions, though, her heart and mind were focused on her phone, and the treasure within it. An address. She knew where her babies were—or at least where they’d been. Rather than exultation or excitement, she felt numb with the emotional hugeness of it, the prospect that she might soon be watching them walk past as she stood nearby, invisible. Hungry for even the sight of them. Would they sense her? Would they somehow know she was there?
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she warned herself. “One thing at a time.” And just then, the one thing was getting out of there unseen. She’d been in the suite far longer than she’d planned, but a quick pause and scan at the main doors showed that the hallway was still empty, the coast still clear.
Once she was out in the hall with the carved door closed behind her, she exhaled a long, deep breath and inhaled its return, the oxygen making her suddenly light-headed. Her blood buzzed in her veins and she could’ve sworn her feet weren’t touching the ground anymore, though it was joy rather than magic making her feel that way. Laughter bubbled in her chest as she spun a full circle, her hands spread away from her body and her hair flaring out.
“Bullshit,” the king’s deep voice said, faint with distance. “I had you beat until the last set of targets. And you cheated.”
Patience froze, her smile turning to an “O” of horror.
“Gods, could you be any more of a sore loser?” Leah’s voice was light and teasing as the two of them continued their long-standing debate over who rocked the gun range. “I took out one more target with half a clip fewer jade-tips. And you shot one of the good guys; that’s an automatic forfeit.”
“I still say she looks like a shifty bitch,” he said of one of the new false-alarm targets Michael had installed in an effort to train the warriors to avoid collateral damage.
“She’s eighty if she’s a day, and she’s using a walker.”
“Not anymore she’s not,” Strike said with dry satisfaction. “Bitch is dead.”
Leah’s laughter burbled, but Patience felt only dread at the happy sound.
Oh, shit.
What was she going to do? The hallway dead-ended at the royal suite; the only other doorway along it led to the royal
winikin
’s rooms. Both of the suites had exterior doors, but if she could hear the royal couple’s footsteps, they’d be able to hear a door shutting—the heavy panels weren’t quiet, and it’d be far worse to be caught trying to escape versus bluffing it through. Going invisible wasn’t an option because the other magi could see right through the illusion; the magic worked only on non-Nightkeepers. So it was bluff time.
You can do this
, she told herself.
You’ve prepared for this
. She’d run through the scenario in her head a hundred times, thought of a dozen excuses for why she was in the royal wing univited. But as Strike and Leah rounded the corner and caught sight of her, their steps hesitating nearly in unison, her mind went completely and utterly blank.
“I’m—”
Sorry
, she stopped herself from saying, because that hadn’t been in any of the scripts. A hot flush climbed her cheeks and flop sweat spiked its way down her spine. “Uh—”
“Oh, good, there you are,” a new voice said from behind the royal couple. Patience boggled as Brandt rounded the corner, moving full steam ahead and looking purposeful. He nodded to her. “I was coming to tell you they weren’t still out at the gun range, but I see you found them.”
Leah sent Patience a sharp glance; Patience tried to replace the look of panic with one of purpose. “Well, technically I’d say they found me.” She hoped to hell they couldn’t see her hands shaking.
Strike seemed to buy it. He refocused on Brandt. “You need us for something?”
“It’s just an idea I’ve been kicking around. Pretty preliminary stuff, but I wanted to get your take on it.” He nodded toward the royal suite. “Do you have a few minutes now?”
The king nodded. “Sure thing.”
The three of them moved past Patience, but then Brandt paused very near her, letting the others get ahead. As she stared up at him, he looked almost like a stranger, all hard eyed and angry . . . until he leaned in and brushed a kiss across her cheek and whispered, “One of these days you’ll start believing we’re on the same side.”
Then he straightened and walked away, motions stiff and angry. But instead of dismay at his anger, or the irritation she’d so often turned to recently, she felt warmth unfurl in her chest. And as she headed back toward their apartment with her phone clutched to her chest in an unconscious hug, she felt, for the first time in a long, long time, that maybe she wasn’t so far away from putting her family back together, after all.