Authors: Kate Pearce
He stared at them for a long moment. If he refused, would it get back to Feehan and more importantly his Russian boss? His conduct had to be exemplary and Ella needed to be protected. Mentally he strengthened his shields. He could manage a quick trip back to Otherworld. He’d be in and out before anyone or anything picked up a trace of him. At least, he hoped he would.
“Where’s the nearest portal?”
Ella took out her phone and clicked on the app. “The one at the end of Embarcadero near the ball park is still open. We can walk there.”
If he hadn’t have been too busy thinking up gruesome ways to slaughter his extremely hard-to-kill Fae partner, Vadim would have enjoyed the walk more. The sun was shining and despite the brisk breeze blowing in off the bay, the walkways were thronged with a mixture of tourists and office workers seeking a late lunch.
Ella led them through a complex route of backstreets that brought them out close to the walls of the ballpark. He stopped to admire the statue of an unknown baseball player.
“Who is this?”
Ella gave him a look. “It’s Willie McCovey, dude.”
“It might surprise you to know that outside America, baseball isn’t such a big deal.”
“Maybe not in Russia.” Ella held up her phone. “Where is this damned portal?”
He pointed at a spot close to the brick wall. “It’s there.”
Liz gave him a surprised glance. “You can see them?”
“Sometimes when I’m close,” Vadim admitted. “Shall we get on with it?” He headed for the portal, his hand outstretched, and felt the wall dissolve at his touch. When Ella and Liz stood beside him in the small circle of light, he closed his eyes and spoke out loud.
“Registry at Merton, please.”
Although his body didn’t appear to move, he was aware of a strange whooshing sensation in his head. When he opened his eyes, the circle of light had turned green. He touched the nearest solid surface and pushed through it to find himself outside an old-fashioned brick building four stories high with a double fronted black door. There was no one else on the cobbled street and a light rain had begun to fall. A sign on the door told any caller to use the side entrance. In small print at the bottom it also said “at your own risk,” but that was a pretty standard disclaimer for Otherworld.
“I haven’t been here before,” Ella said.
“I have.” Liz shuddered. “Prepare to whisk yourself back fifty years in time.”
Vadim walked around the side of the building and his magical senses flared to life. He pushed open the side door and a bell jangled somewhere deep within the building. The hallway opened up into a large, dimly lit room that appeared to be empty. A long high countertop made of gleaming oak divided the space neatly in half. Lamps with green shades cast inadequate light into the dark corners where things listened and lingered.
“Where is everyone?” Ella whispered.
Liz headed for the counter. “God knows, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all done with bits of paper anyway.” She took a sheet of the yellow lined paper and a pencil from the pot and started to write. “You have to be very careful how you phrase your request or you end up with something you didn’t expect.”
“We want a list of my graduating class from six years ago, and if they have it, lists for all the other colleges in the same time period.”
“Right, and we also want copies of any correspondence between Otherworld and either of the two victims,” Liz added.
As the women discussed what to ask for, Vadim prowled around the space, trying to keep his shields up and yet delicately sense what was going on. A shadow flitted by him, brushing his face, and he almost recoiled. He had the unwelcome sensation that something was already inside his head, delicately peeling back the layers of his defenses until he’d be exposed in his true form.
“How long will this take?” he asked Liz.
She pointed to a clock set on the countertop. “What time’s the next pick up?”
He squinted at the cloudy glass clockface. “In about three minutes.”
Liz handed him the sheet of paper. “Put it in the basket next to the clock and step away from the counter.”
Vadim did as she asked and, for good measure, retreated behind Ella. “Do we need to ring the bell or something?”
“God, don’t do that.” Liz shuddered. “You really don’t want to make them angry.”
A door opened at the back of the official side of the room. Vadim turned his attention to the young man who approached the desk. He looked quite human, his hair a nondescript brown and his eyes hidden behind a pair of thick glasses.
“Don’t acknowledge him,” Liz whispered. “Let him get on with his job.”
The man took the paper out of the basket, scanned the contents and then reset the clock. He disappeared back through the door without saying a single word. Vadim waited until the door shut until going back to check the clock.
“He can’t be serious. How can it take half an hour to get the information?” Vadim didn’t want to stay there for five more minutes, let alone another thirty. Somewhere deep in his mind he could feel his mother stirring, reaching for him...
“Because they can’t use the internet here,” Liz explained. She gestured at the rows of filing cabinets that lined the walls on both sides of the counter. “Everything has to be typed out on a manual typewriter, photocopied or faxed.”
“Don’t forget all the illegible handwritten notes, as well.” Ella leaned her chair back until it balanced on two legs. “But you must know all this already, Morosov. You’re from here, aren’t you?”
Vadim refused to rise to the bait and instead took another hasty walk around the office. “Is there anything in these more public files that might help us?”
Liz looked around. “I doubt it, but it would give us something to do while we wait for the information.”
“I’m not sure why Ms. Walsh and I have to be here,” Vadim said.
“Because the officials like to know who wants the information and decide if they are going to provide it.”
“We haven’t seen anyone except the desk clerk.”
“Oh, they’ve seen us,” Liz assured him. “Can’t you feel it?”
Vadim could feel it all too clearly, but he didn’t want Liz or Ella to know that. He concentrated on maintaining his shields. “What’s in these more public files?”
Liz rose from her seat and walked over to him. “It depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you are seeking.”
“Typical Otherworld logic,” Vadim snapped. He jumped as the filing cabinet closest to him rocked back and forth. He’d better be more careful or he’d be bringing far worse than the custodians of the records room down upon them. “Maybe I’ll start by looking up references to the Siren.”
He walked along the rows, looking for the relevant drawer and eventually found one that included the letters S—Sl. It opened easily and he considered the neatly labeled alphabetical paper files. He wasn’t really surprised to see there wasn’t a nice file ready for him telling him all he needed to know about his adversary. That would’ve been far too easy.
Ella was looking at some files on the other side of the room and Liz was somewhere else. The clock on the countertop ticked loudly and was the only sound apart from the rustling of paper. Vadim shut the drawer, then went across to Ella, who hurriedly put the files she was looking at back and moved away.
He considered the drawer she’d been searching through and pulled it open again. A corner of a file labeled Morosov stuck up above the neat row. He took it out and opened it, but there was nothing inside. Had Ella taken something, or had someone from his family removed all traces of him? If so, why not take the folder as well?
“Did you find something interesting, Ms. Walsh?” He turned to study Ella.
She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Nothing so far. How about you?”
He considered her for a moment and then shut the drawer. “I wonder if there is a file about you?”
“There are probably several. I’m not the most popular human in Otherworld.”
“I don’t think they like empaths, so I wouldn’t take it personally.”
“I don’t.” She opened another drawer. “There’s nothing about Alexei here either.”
“It seems that the powers-that-be don’t want to help us with anything.” Vadim looked impatiently back toward the counter. “I wonder if we’ll get the information we need?”
Liz surveyed the rows of filing cabinets. “I suppose it depends if they want us to catch this killer.”
“As they don’t like empaths for opening up their world to humans, they might be quite happy to see the whole lot of us exterminated,” Ella said.
“That’s also true but we have to ask.” Liz sat down at the table again and checked her cell. Ella joined her. “Dammit, I can’t even play games on my phone while we wait.”
He took the seat next to Ella. For some reason, when he was near her, his sense of danger dissipated. As his anxiety grew, he wasn’t averse to taking any help he could get.
He tensed as Ella slid a piece of paper in front of him.
“Why is there a photocopy of a blurry bird in your file?”
“Ella, you’re not supposed to take things out of there!” Liz whispered. “Go and put it back
immediately
or we might not get our information.”
“Fine.” She picked up the sheet of paper and walked back to the filing cabinets. “I was just wondering what it was for.” She glanced back at Vadim, who had remained in his chair. “Hey, Morosov, are your family connected with Mother Goose or something?”
“Hardly.”
She opened the drawer that had contained his file and flicked through them. “Your file’s disappeared. Did you take it?”
Liz shot to her feet and rushed over to Ella. “Of course he didn’t! You’ve probably just misplaced it.” After going through the entire drawer she looked as puzzled as Ella. “What did you do?”
“I just looked through the file and found this bit of paper. There wasn’t anything else to see.”
“Oh God,” muttered Liz. “Where are we going to put this now?”
Ella opened the next nearest file. “We could shove it in here?”
Liz grabbed her wrist. “Don’t do that! We’ll just have to put it in on the countertop and hope that nobody sees it until after we’ve left. What were you doing looking in Vadim’s file, anyway?”
She rolled her eyes. “Because he won’t tell me exactly what he is, and I can’t penetrate his shields. Why else would I be looking?”
“I can hear you, Ms. Walsh. I’m sitting right here.” He turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised.
“I know, so what?” Ella put the piece of paper on the countertop and returned to sit next to him at the table. “It’s all your fault.”
“For not blabbing my entire life history to you?”
“I’m not asking for it all, just the juicy parts.” He didn’t answer and she sighed. “So what’s up with the bird picture, then?”
“I have no idea.”
He shifted slightly in his seat and Ella got a sudden image of flying before his shields slammed shut again. Otherworld was certainly doing a number on him. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.
“You don’t like it here, do you?”
He finally deigned to look at her. “I like it about as much as you like elevators.”
“That bad, huh? What happened?”
“What happened when?”
“Don’t prevaricate. Why don’t you like being in Otherworld?”
His smile was bitter. “If I told you that, we’d be here all night.”
“We have time.” She sat forward and held his gaze. “Okay, shoot.”
The door at the back of the office opened and Vadim looked away from her. “Here comes the messenger of doom. He’s early.”
“Luckily for you.” Ella put her phone away.
Liz waited until the man deposited something in the box before she stood up, tucked her hair behind her ear and approached the counter. She froze, her hand poised over the message as the man spied the single sheet of paper Ella had put on the counter and picked it up.
“Sorry about that,” Liz said “It just fell out of something.”
She received no reply and waited smiling bravely until the door shut again. She exhaled with a whoosh and scooped up the sheets of paper.
“Let’s get going. Even if this isn’t the stuff we need, I don’t think we’ll be getting any more help today. We’ll go and speak to the administrators at the college next. It’s just up the street, so we can walk there.”
Ella looked up at the brick frontage of her
alma
mater
and grimaced. It hadn’t changed a bit. She’d spent two and a half years of her life being trained to suck out memories from both humans and Otherworld. Because of the shortness of their potential working lives, the trainee empaths received almost no vacation time to be with their families. It had just been constant work to get them out into the field to do their dangerous job.
Not everyone had made it.
She led the way into the building and turned left into the large administration wing. The two ladies who manned the front desk had been there for as long as anyone could remember. Ella had decided they weren’t actually human because they never seemed to age.
“Ella Walsh.”
She smiled at the dark-haired one who didn’t look terribly pleased to see her. “Yes, it’s me, Miss Vera. It’s just like old times, isn’t it?” She turned to her companions. “I was in here a
lot
.”
Liz hid a smile and approached the desk. “I’m Liz Smith. We have an appointment with Mr. Perry.”
Miss Vera checked the calendar in front of her. “I’ll just call and see if he’s available.”
“Thank you.”
Liz wandered away to look at the pictures on the wall. Unlike most colleges there were no trophy cabinets for sports awards, or outstanding academic brilliance. Instead, there were honor roll calls of empaths who had died for the cause. Ella had sat in the office for so many hours that she practically knew the names by heart. At eighteen, convinced that she had all the time in the world, she had scoffed at the idea of caring whether you died at twenty-seven or earlier.
Miss Vera put down the phone. “You may go in, now. I’m sure Ella remembers the way.”
Ella pointed at the door at the end of the hallway. “Follow me.”
She knocked and held the door open for Liz and an uptight Vadim to go in front of her. He hadn’t been kidding when he said that he didn’t like being in Otherworld. His shields were already struggling to cope with whatever was attacking him—and something was; she could sense it very clearly. It was another good reason to keep this meeting short so they could get the hell out of there.