Second Nature (20 page)

Xander grinned as I returned to watching the
two men in question. Dylan made a rather impressive shot but ruined
it by spreading his arms and posturing like a peacock. His eyes
fell on me in the window and gave me a cocky grin, but I rolled my
eyes. Nate glanced over his shoulder and saw me watching. Not to be
outdone, he rebounded the ball and attempted to dunk it, but a
little shy of six feet tall, he missed. Dylan barked out a laugh,
which didn’t sit well with the Gaia. He took the ball, and they
continued to play one of the most physical games of basketball I’d
ever seen. I made a disgusted noise in my throat and walked away
from the window.

“You know, most girls would be flattered to
have two good looking men fighting over them.” Xander’s eyes
sparkled.

I eyed him a long moment, wondering if he
was being candid or waiting for me to set him up for the punch
line. I didn’t want to play
Whose Line is It Anyway
. I
didn’t want to play games at all. “What do you think I should do,
Xan? On one hand, Nate and I have history but he hurt me pretty
bad. Dylan is sweet and kind, and he doesn’t expect anything from
me. I care about them both and don’t want to hurt either. I don’t
think I can make a decision between them until I figure out my
life—and not just the part where men are concerned.”

Xander scrunched his nose a little as he
thought. He shrugged, looking at me as if he wanted to say
something but couldn’t find the words. He was spared having to
answer though, by Russell’s timely arrival.

“I think I’ve uncovered the reason Leslie
disappeared after her father’s death.” He paused for dramatic
effect before continuing.

I looked at him and gave him a slow turn of
my hand. “And?”

“It took a lot to uncover the truth behind
the murder. It seems someone went to some serious trouble to cover
it up. But he was killed by Leslie.”

I couldn’t imagine murdering your own
father. Had it been an impassioned rage or something cold and
meticulously planned? What could possibly cause her to hate her own
father enough to kill him? “Did he abuse her?”

“No, quite the opposite. He walked away from
her and her mother. He only acknowledged her in the end because she
was a Librarian. Only one of our children can inherit the gene,
though there’s no rhyme or reason to which child is chosen. After
his third child with his wife was born human, he reached out to the
witch he abandoned for a more prosperous marriage—one that got him
promoted to the head of the largest Library in the US.”

“The Library of Congress?”

Russell laughed a moment like he thought I
was joking, then cleared his throat when he realized I was serious.
“Really?” He slanted his head forward and eyed me strangely. I
glanced at Xander who was rubbing his hand across his forehead in
embarrassment.

“What?”

“We let humans think they have the largest
library. You ever heard of the Library of Alexandria? Yeah, not
destroyed. We created that myth to remove a lot of information
about the Otherworld which had become common knowledge.” Xander
shrugged, as if it should be common knowledge to me. When would
people realize I couldn’t know what I wasn’t told? “And the largest
library in the United States is actually in Ithaca, New York,
though it doesn’t appear so in any human records. How do you think
Cornell came to be an Ivy League School? It’s in the middle of
nowhere!”

Russell sighed and shook his head. “Really,
Lia, you ought to come to the library. Direct some of your reading
to real events, rather than the fictional prattle you absorb like a
sponge.”

I opened my mouth to defend myself, but
Xander was a little quicker. “Hey, it’s not her fault. Sometimes
less knowledge is better

“Ignorance is
never
protection!”
Russell’s expression was shocked and horrified. “How could you
think depriving the girl of necessary information could be in any
way construed as protection?”

Xander’s mouth gaped, and I could tell by
the look in his eyes he had no real answer. Russell turned to me,
his dark eyes intent. “I’ll tutor you, Amelia. I think you need to
learn everything we can cram into your head about the Otherworld.
It’s the only way to
truly
keep you safe.”

“I knew I liked you, Russell.” I patted his
shoulder with a smile. “But I think we got sidetracked. Leslie’s
father?”

“Right, right.” Russell removed his black
framed glasses and wiped them on the tail of his plain gray tee
shirt. “Anyway, Daniel Taylor reached out to Leslie’s mother and
sure enough, Leslie was a Librarian. All of a sudden, she was the
apple of his eye, and he tried to force her into the life of
debutants and country clubs.” He set the glasses back on his face,
fidgeting with them until they sat the way he liked them. “I don’t
know if Leslie was already twisted at this point or if his attempts
to manipulate her caused it, but all of a sudden, she started
having trouble in school. Not grades—Librarians devour knowledge to
the point school is generally boring for us.” He smiled, and I
could see the nostalgia in his eyes. I wondered if I had given my
approval a little too quickly. Sariah couldn’t be with a nerd!
“Fighting earned Leslie unwanted attention, and her father knew
there was a problem. It wasn’t until she broke a kid’s nose because
someone paid her twenty bucks to do it, that her father realized
the magnitude of the problem. So he forced her mother to send her
to live with him.”

“Yeah, like that would work.”

Russell glared at me, the professor
displeased at being interrupted. Note to self—don’t help tell the
story. “I guess it did make it worse. He refused to let her off the
grounds, hiring a private tutor and limiting her contact with the
outside world. Leslie was always independent, and she was stifled
under his strict control. Less than a month after she moved into
the manor, there was a loud argument between her and her father. A
short time later, Leslie ran out of the house with nothing but the
clothes on her back.”

I cocked my head and opened my mouth to ask
a question, but Russell held up a finger to forestall me.

“The staff thought it was odd when they
didn’t see Mr. Taylor at all the next morning and went in search of
him. It took them three days to find the body. And it’s why the
went to so much trouble to hide the details, despite the detailed
journal Taylor kept. Leslie put his body in stasis, so everyone who
touched him was put into stasis as well.”

“What do you mean put into stasis?”

“It’s how Librarians are able to preserve
history—we can generate a stasis field to prevent the passage of
time.” He grabbed a pear out of the fruit bowl on the counter,
holding it out to me a moment before sitting it in his palm.
“Anyone not a Librarian who touches something in stasis is
suspended outside of time as well, including people.” He turned and
tossed the fruit to Xander who caught it reflexively, then froze as
soon as his hand touched it. “If it hadn’t been for his two sons
finding him together, who knows how much of his household the
stasis field would have swallowed. His youngest was smart enough to
call his grandfather who sat on the Council. He sent a team out
immediately. But by then, Leslie was gone. This is the first record
of her surfacing.” He grabbed the pear, and Xander closed his hands
over nothing, looking around blankly.

I’d heard enough. Obviously, it would be
essential for us to have Russell with us on this one. These stasis
fields were nasty. “She doesn’t take kindly to people standing in
her way, does she?” Russell shook his head. “Well, wait until she
sees what happens to the people who stand in our way.”

“I THINK I figured out how to find Leslie.”
We all perked up at Russell’s words, and he had our rapt attention.
We were just sitting down to dinner when the Librarian charged in
the door, the words tumbling out of him in an excited rush. “We
know Peter found her in a bar.” Xander started humming something,
and it took me a minute to recognize it as Rehab’s “Sitting at a
Bar” and rolled my eyes. Russell gave him a hard look, and Xander
stopped and looked sheepish. “So I started making the rounds,
trying to find out if someone knew what bar. Once I found out it
was Crosshairs—very fitting for an assassin, I might add—I was able
to track her from there.”

I opened my mouth to ask, but Sariah cut me
off, knowing the question forming in my mind. “The only person who
can track a Librarian is another Librarian. They have a distinct
feel to each other, and it leaves a trail where they have been.
Kind of an extension of how they track the rest of the
Otherworlders.”

“I get so tired of feeling like the dumbest
person in the room.”

“I still maintain it’s not dumb, but
protected.” Xander set his jaw stubbornly. “There’s a
difference.”

“If you’re splitting hairs.” I gave him an
innocent look while he glared at me in return.

“I have already told you I will take care of
that, now haven’t I?” Russell’s mouth was pressed into a firm line
as he gave us both a hard look. We looked appropriately remorseful,
and Russell continued. “I followed her to an area where her trail
crossed itself many times, so it’s a place she has spent a lot of
time. A little investigation, and I found a high class apartment
building nearby which was simply covered. I was able to follow the
more concentrated area to an apartment, but she wasn’t there.”

“She’s probably in the wind because the job
with Peter didn’t go so well.” Xander’s eyes flashed in anger. “I
don’t think finding her apartment is going to be much help.”

“Is it me or did we suddenly find ourselves
in a film noir?” Five sets of eyes were staring at me, and I held
my hands up in surrender. “Sorry.” I guess the more things change,
the more they stay the same. I might be turning into a new person,
but that new person still defaults to humor in a crisis, too.
Oh, God, I’m the wise cracking side kick!

“I think she’s holed up in the city
somewhere.” We all looked at Nate, and he started to fidget. “She
said she has other employers which implies other jobs.”

“There has to be a way to contact her,”
Sariah said. “Peter found her, so can we.”

Russell smiled and put his arm around her
waist, and she laid her head on his shoulder. He smiled at her
before looking back at the rest of us. “But what are we contacting
her about? I don’t think we’re going to get her to give up the tool
willingly.”

I pinched my lip in thought a moment but
nothing came to me.

Dylan squinted his eyes and cocked his head
a moment, then met Xander’s eyes. “I think we need to get a look at
her apartment. There has to be a clue about how to find her. If we
can find some sort of weakness we can exploit, maybe we can get her
to talk.”

Four of us piled into Xander’s Mustang as
Russell and Sariah followed in her SUV. Sariah approached the
doorman who fell all over himself to help her. She motioned us all
into the lobby as she tossed her hair and ran a finger across his
shoulder. With a flirty little wave, she followed us.

“Some guys are too easy.” Her smile said she
enjoyed it, maybe more than she should.

We quickly made our way to the apartment.
Glancing around quickly to make sure no one was around, Nate placed
his hand on the door. After a few heartbeats, the metal started to
rust until it fell away with a loud thunk. With one more glance
around, we opened the door and stepped inside.

When Leslie said she had a taste for the
finer things in life she hadn’t been kidding. Polished marble
floors lead to a full wall of glass. The window afforded a gorgeous
view of downtown Greensboro. The ultramodern furniture of white
leather and ebony wood had been arranged tastefully, accented with
turquoise and green.

“The roses are about two days old.” I
pointed to a crystal vase of white flowers on the coffee table. I
didn’t know I could tell something like how long ago flowers had
been cut. It also hadn’t occurred to me I would never be the kind
of girl who could be showered with flowers by potential suitors. I
could feel the flowers dying slowly which made me sad. It reminded
me of Gaia after the person they bonded with is gone. This line of
thinking made me regret the dandelion bouquets I brought my mother
as a child.

Sariah wandered into the bedroom as Dylan
started thumbing through papers on the desk between the living room
and kitchen. Xander stepped out into the hall to keep an eye out
just in case. Something struck me as odd about the living room, and
it took a bit for me to figure out what it was. There was no
television; a heavy duty bookshelf, the old fashioned kind with
elaborate carvings, sat in its place. The shelves were filled with
old books, most with leather bindings. I didn’t want to imagine
what the other covers were made of. I scanned the titles out of
curiosity. They ranged in age and subject matter. One of the oldest
I sensed was made of wood and leaves, and I reached for it.