[Southern Arcana 3.0] Deadlock (27 page)

Tires screeched behind them. Brakes squealed. The stench of burning rubber preceded a slamming door, then Alec appeared at the back of the ambulance, eyes as wild as the dizzying press of his emotions.

Relief sent Carmen tumbling into his arms, relief and a need she hadn’t known existed until just then. “They’re still inside. Julio and Franklin and—”

“Shh, it’s okay.” Warm hands smoothed over her hair. “What happened? Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. An explosion. Julio told me to get down, and it just—it blew up.”

“Franklin?”

“He’s hurt. They’re going to take him to another clinic.”

Alec frowned and glanced at Diane, who shrugged one shoulder without looking up. “Don’t ask me. I didn’t know Franklin had a backup facility until Madden told me.”

“Madden’s inside?”

Tension and fear spiked inside Diane, strong emotions that went wild at the mention of her partner’s name. “It’s only been a few minutes. Maybe—”

A loud noise that sounded like a pop shot through the night, and the building groaned as part of it folded, collapsing in on itself with a shudder. Carmen lunged, a scream caught in her throat, and Alec’s arms locked around her body, unyielding as steel. “Carmen,
no
.”

Either Julio had lied about the threat of fire or something else had happened, because orange fingers of flame began to lick out of the clinic’s ruined facade. “
Alec
.”

“Stay here.” He released her, only to strip off his jacket and shove his keys and phone into her hands. “I can try to find a way in.”

Fear melted into terror, but she didn’t have time to voice her protest before Diane stepped in front of them both. “There they are.”

The EMT led the way out of the smoke with Julio just behind him, Franklin balanced on his shoulder. Madden carried an IV bag, and Diane rushed to meet them with a collapsible gurney as more sirens pierced the night.

Julio’s shirt was ripped, and the blood soaking the fabric didn’t all belong to Franklin. “What happened?” Carmen asked.

“The ceiling fell.” He winced as she pulled his shirt away to reveal a gash across his back. “A beam almost caught us.”

Alec eyed the ambulance, then his truck. “We need to get the fuck out of here. Where’s this second clinic?”

“Outskirts of town, near the airport.” Madden spoke from where he sat, hunched over Franklin. “You three follow behind us.”

Alec was already urging Carmen toward his truck. Normally, she would have fought to ride along—she was board-certified in emergency medicine, for Christ’s sake—but this wasn’t a normal situation. Her boss and her best friend lay in the back of the ambulance, and she couldn’t treat them with the same necessary detachment as the EMTs. “Okay, we’ll follow.”

She ended up in the front of the truck, wedged between Alec and Julio. Pain, fear and tension made the front of the cab nearly unlivable as he gunned the engine and followed Diane. One cop car careened around the corner toward them, but Alec’s stream of curses cut off abruptly when a dark arm thrust out of the window and waved them on. “McNeely. He’ll cover as long as he can.”

Julio peeled off his shirt, and Carmen helped him tie it into a makeshift bandage around his wound. “What will he tell the others?” she asked.

“He’ll figure something out. McNeely’s quick on his feet.” The truck swerved as Alec took a corner too fast. “There are a few like him scattered across the city. Your brother probably knows.”

“Like hell,” Julio said. “If there was some sort of underground supernatural cover-up system in Charleston, no one ever clued me in.”

Ahead of them, Diane flipped on the ambulance’s siren, clearing a path. Alec frowned as he took the next corner. “Maybe Reed takes care of it.”

“No idea.”

It could be a measure of how far out of the supernatural loop Julio stayed—or an example of just how much Alec did in New Orleans in the absence of any official leadership. “I can’t even worry about any investigation right now,” Carmen whispered. “I only need them both to be okay.”

“I know, honey. I didn’t get a look at Franklin.” Tension threaded Alec’s voice, and true concern. “How bad is it?”

“His legs were broken. He’ll need surgery.”

Another soft curse. “I stay out of the clinic as much as I can. I don’t know who to call. Who we need.”

Neither would Wesley Dade, who had no doubt funded this other clinic, as well. “I know an orthopedic surgeon we can call. If it’s for Franklin, she’ll drop everything. There should be space where we can set up an OR, but I’ll have to make some calls, see if we can find a spell caster who can negate his healing while we work on him.”

“My phone’s in my pocket. Jackson’s on speed dial—number three. He’s got magical contacts. And he can round up Kat. Someone needs to track down Franklin’s kid, and Kat’s the one she’s most likely to listen to long enough to realize she needs to get her defiant little ass back to New Orleans.”

“Franklin gave me her number.” She reached into his pocket and retrieved his phone. “I can handle the call.”

Alec’s voice turned rough, tension bleeding through. “Don’t call Sera from my phone. Her prick of a husband will make them both disappear if he thinks anyone knows where they are.”

Her hand found his knee, seeking to soothe more than anything else. “I’ll do it in a little while, when I know what to tell her.”

“All right.” He glanced past her, at Julio. “You holding together?”

“It’s a scratch,” he answered simply. “I think it’s already knitting up.”

A quick check under the bandage revealed as much to Carmen. “I’ll still have to check it out.”

“Yeah, I know.” He went back to staring out the window.

Cold certainty settled over Carmen. “You knew, didn’t you?”

Julio grimaced. “Knew what?”

“What was going to happen.” More than anything, she remembered the fear that had paralyzed her. “When you got out of the car, it was because you knew.”

His skin had gone ashen. “Not soon enough,” he whispered, a small sound full of self-recrimination.

He’d seen it in time to stop her from walking up to the clinic doors. In her mind, she traced her steps, tried to judge how close she would have been to all that jagged, flying glass if Julio’s terror hadn’t frozen her in place. “I could have been killed.”

Alec’s low, furious growl rumbled through the cab as the truck lurched. He bit off an angry noise and steadied the vehicle. “Precognition?”

Her brother snorted. “You have no idea what I’d give to be rid of it sometimes.”

A familiar lamentation, one Carmen had heard from their mother dozens of times over the years. Even when her visions encompassed something she could change, a course she could alter, the lingering images had given her nightmares, sometimes for months.

Alec’s fingers tightened on the wheel. “I don’t want to ask this. I really don’t.”

Julio turned his head suddenly, his expression set, his gaze angry. “We were supposed to be at Cesar’s hotel. A meeting, me and Carmen, at eight sharp, not a second later. He said that—not a second later.”

A sob rose before Carmen fully processed his words. “
What?
”

Alec’s quiet, vicious curse cut through the cab. More alarming was the way his anger and worry circled inward, vanishing like water from a tub after someone pulled the drain. In moments, he was shut off from her. Quiet.

His voice was quiet too. “That’s it, then.”

“No.” Carmen repeated the denial, shaking her head. “Cesar wouldn’t have gone that far. Peyton could strip him of his council seat for something this careless, and you said it yourself, Alec. They won’t jeopardize their positions because they have too much to lose.”

“There’s one fatal flaw you’re missing in that equation. The one that got Noah Coleman killed and opened up this damn Conclave seat to begin with.”

“He’s not human, Car. None of us are.” Julio sounded as bleak as he was pissed off. “You can’t say Uncle Cesar wouldn’t have done it because he might have. If your boss challenged him enough, he could have completely lost it.”

Worse, Alec didn’t disagree. “We can plan. We can plot. We can have all the best fucking intentions in the world. If someone pushes the wrong button, none of it matters. We’re monsters when it counts.”

Any other time, Carmen would have tried to deny it. Now, she closed her eyes. “If Cesar did this, he’s going to pay.”

Alec’s steely façade cracked—just for a moment—and she felt the vastness of the rage gathering inside him. “I’ll add it to his bill.”

She wished she could feel more from Alec than blankness with the occasional flash of anger and pain. More than that, she didn’t want to face the fact that he’d pulled away from her again, or the possibility that this time he might have done so for good.

Chapter Seventeen

Nicole Peyton was five feet of snarly alpha wolf who looked nothing like her identical twin. Oh, on the surface Michelle and Nick shared similar features—big dark eyes, long brown hair and their mother’s slight stature—but Alec had never seen anyone mistake one for the other.

Maybe it was the clothes. Nick arrived at the block of mostly vacant warehouses in jeans and tiny little tank top that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a hip college kid. Or maybe it was just attitude. The Seer had spent years trying to fade into any background she could, but when Nick entered a room, you knew it.

Her husband herded Kat and Miguel toward the other end of the warehouse, to the bare-bones clinic where Carmen had begun organizing chaos through steely willpower alone. Alec gestured Nick over to the folding table where he’d spread out every cell phone he could get his hands on, along with his list of contacts.

Her frown deepened. “You look like hell, Alec.”

“You’re a ray of sunshine as always, Peyton.”

“I’m not here to blow smoke up your ass. I’m here to help, and I’m starting off by saying you look like you’re barely hanging in there.”

At least one thing in his life hadn’t changed—she was still an obnoxious alpha bitch. The constancy was almost soothing. “I’m trying to figure out how to challenge Cesar Mendoza without ending up with a council seat I don’t want.”

To her credit, she didn’t look surprised. “It’d be tough to pull off, especially if you expected the council to leave you any autonomy in New Orleans. They’d see denying the seat as weakness, for sure.”

“And if I leave another hole in the Southeast council, God knows who’ll fill it, or which one of those bastards will use the advantage to climb over the rest and onto the Conclave.”

“An unenviable position.” She sat on the edge of the table and nodded toward the other side of the cavernous warehouse. “Is that her? Carmen?”

Alec tensed, unsure if the emotion pounding through him was protectiveness or defensiveness. “Yes. That’s Carmen.”

“Damn.” Nick blew out a breath and flashed him a sympathetic look. “Puts you in an even tougher spot.”

Stress made him pissy. “You mean the part where I’m probably going to have to kill my new girlfriend’s uncle?”

It didn’t intimidate her. “Yeah, that part. It’d be hell on a relationship that
wasn’t
new, but this… This really sucks.”

His life in a nutshell. “Even worse, it’s tomorrow’s problem. Tonight’s problem is that the only safe place for supernaturals to get medical treatment just blew up, and I have no idea if we’ve got enough people to bury the weird details. Like the pool of Franklin’s blood we left behind, or who might have witnessed people dragging him out of the collapsed building.”

“Jackson and I are already on it. You’re not the only one who’s been a busy boy tonight.”

“Two-thirds of the shifters and spell casters in this town make their way through that bar of yours on any given weekend. You spreading the word?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“As long as it gets done.” One more thing to cross off his mental list. “Does your father know about this yet?”

She bared her teeth in a fierce grin. “Cesar Mendoza can sidestep you all he wants because you’re not the boss of him. Incidentally, my father
is
.”

John Peyton would come down on Mendoza like a brick wall. Censure would be swift, and punishment would follow. Its severity would depend on how outraged the rest of the Conclave was, and it would be a slow process. It would take time, because if the Conclave loved one thing, it was listening to themselves talk.

Alec didn’t have to wonder where it would end. They’d bicker. They’d fight. John would push for civilization. Some would side with him for favor. Some would oppose him out of pique. The Conclave would fail to find a consensus or present a united front, and whatever sentence they handed down wouldn’t be enough.

The Conclave wouldn’t solve the problem. But they’d keep Cesar busy. They’d keep themselves busy.

He’d use every god damn minute of that time to come up with a way to end this bullshit once and for all.

Nick watched him, her eyes wide and nervous. “You look scary.” Instead of turning it into a joke, she made the observation solemnly. “Alec, don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

For all her dominant tendencies, Nick wouldn’t understand. Her battle had been for a quiet life, the right to live outside her father’s legacy and her society’s rules. She had her people—her tiny little pack—all those faces in the cheerful family photos that lined the walls of Luciano’s ranch. Keeping them safe was her job, and she’d fight for it. She’d kill for it, if she had to.

Alec envied her that clarity. Not even thirty and she’d found her life’s purpose. He was on the wrong side of forty and only starting to realize he’d been hiding from his.

He looked away from Nick, toward the opposite end of the warehouse. The jumble of two-dozen voices made it impossible to sort out one from another, but his gaze found Carmen like she was magnetic north.

The helpless terror he’d felt in her earlier was gone—or so well hidden no one would believe it was there. She’d taken control of the makeshift clinic with the unwavering steel of any good drill sergeant, and people went running in whatever direction she pointed them. Life could knock the woman down as many times as it wanted, and she’d still get up and save the world.