[Southern Arcana 3.0] Deadlock (4 page)

Carmen couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled up. “He
is
hot shit. And I’m not upset.” Not like Kat thought, not at all, but her past romantic entanglements were hardly an appropriate topic of conversation. “It’s fine.”

“Okay.” She looked a little dubious, but she released Carmen’s hand. “And don’t give your brother a hard time. I really did ask for his number. He was…refreshing. He was in here five whole minutes and didn’t once promise to find the asshole who’d punched me and kill him. Shapeshifter guys can be kinda exhausting.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” Carmen was attracted to strong, dominant men. Shifters tended to fit the bill, but her relationships with them had a tendency to fail spectacularly, so she’d sworn off them entirely. That way, she didn’t have to spend weeks after every bad breakup cursing her own bad judgment, and she didn’t have to risk the sorts of matches her family might try to force her into.

She glanced at the door. She didn’t have a clue how Uncle Cesar felt about the Jacobson family, but if there was the slightest advantage to be gained, he’d probably jump at the chance to throw her at Alec.

Which only reinforced the fact that she had to stay far, far away from him.

Chapter Three

Alec didn’t bother looking for Jackson as he eased his truck into the small parking lot in front of Kat’s apartment. No doubt his partner had hidden himself behind his favorite spell as soon as his girlfriend had dropped him off, which meant Alec’s best bet was to park his truck and wait for Jackson to make his presence known.

He chose a space a few doors down from Kat’s, a spot next to a compact import that gave him a fair amount of coverage without sacrificing line-of-sight on Kat’s door.

There was a sudden thump on the passenger door of his truck, and Jackson stood there. Instead of motioning for Alec to open the door, he grinned and passed his hand over it. The lock disengaged with a dull snap.

“Got you a soda.” Jackson tossed a can at Alec as he climbed up into the truck.

Alec barely managed to catch the damn thing before it smashed into his face. “While you were invisible? If Kat hears rumors about a haunted snack machine, she’s gonna yell at us both.”

“Nah, I delurked long enough to hit the vending machines over by the laundry room.”

He didn’t have the faintest idea where the laundry room was, since his experience with Kat’s apartment building began and ended with the parking lot in front of it and a nagging concern that security there wasn’t nearly tight enough now that Kat’s cousin had married into the most important shapeshifting family in the country.

A worry for another time. Alec cracked open the soda and watched two teenagers stroll down the sidewalk in front of them. “I left Kat with the doctor at the clinic. The new one Franklin hired a few months back.”

“I remember.” Jackson snorted. “You’ve already bitched my ear off about how Franklin’s compromising his clinic’s neutrality by hiring on a member of the Mendoza clan.”

Alec fought a flinch. “It’s a valid concern. Her uncle’s spent the last six months putting his ducks in a row so he can get his hands on that empty Conclave seat. For all I knew, she was one of his ducks.”

“For all you
knew
, past tense?” He squinted at Alec and chuckled. “She’s cute, isn’t she?”

Smooth dark hair, smoky brown eyes, curves to make a pin-up jealous…
Cute
was puppies and kids. Carmen Mendoza was a guilty fantasy come to life. “Sure. Sending hot women to spy is pretty much an institution, isn’t it? Or is that just in movies? I can’t remember.”

“Oh yeah. I’m sure, between the sprained ankles and the nasal allergies, she’s gathering some
fierce
intel over there.”

Appearing casual was vital, since Alec had given Jackson hell over the man’s descent into idiocy whenever Mackenzie Brooks blinked those big blue eyes at him. Unfortunately, appearing casual had never been his specialty. “Fuck off, Holt.”

“Jesus, have a sense of humor.” Jackson stretched his legs out as much as the cab of the truck would allow. “Mackenzie said Kat liked her a lot. The doctor, I mean.”

It figured that Jackson’s girlfriend had already retrieved Kat. For all the complaints Alec got about his lead foot, everyone knew Mackenzie was the one who drove like she was looking to run the NASCAR circuit. “Not surprising. Doctor’s an empath. Low level, I think, but still.” He hesitated, but setting Jackson on the case of future trouble might mean he wouldn’t have to deal with it. “She also has a smarmy telepathic brother who’s already wheedled Kat’s phone number out of her.”

“Smarmy?” Jackson considered that for a moment. “From what I’ve heard, that’s par for the Mendoza course.”

“You mean the shit with the oldest one? Julio?” Alec couldn’t help but laugh, though he didn’t feel particularly amused. “Gotta give the Mendoza propaganda machine their due. Only Cesar Mendoza could spin the fact that his little brother snuck off and played house with a psychic for over a decade. Talk to the man for more than ten minutes, and he’ll find a way to let you know the Mendozas are so badass that they father shapeshifting sons on human women. Asshole.”

“It is quite the manly feat, if you overlook the part where Diego dumped his wife as soon as his big brother told him to.”

Alec knew Jackson hadn’t meant anything by it, but he still tensed. Some things he’d never forget—his cousin, telling him that the family wouldn’t stand for the embarrassment of Alexander Jacobson the Third being married to a human. That night, he’d found his wife on the kitchen floor, surrounded by half-thawed bits of broccoli.

A few years ago, the memory would have paralyzed him. Liquor would have been the only cure. Now he took refuge in temper. “Because we all know staying is a brilliant fucking plan.”

Jackson stared at him for a moment and turned his attention to the building in front of them. “Best description Mac was able to get out of Kat was that the attacker was tall and blond. Her date, on the other hand, was shorter, with dark hair. If either shows up, it shouldn’t be hard to tell them apart.”

There was no question Jackson was pissed, but Alec didn’t have the emotional reserves to navigate an apology or—worse—a conversation about Heidi and the past that felt too raw today. Instead he accepted the tacit change of subject and tried to turn it into a peace offering. “Kat did real good. Zola says she’s been working hard, and obviously she has. She held off the guy with her stun gun.”

“Yeah.” Jackson pulled out his phone, punched a few keys and held it out. “That’s the date. I ran a check on him already. Nothing in the NCIC database, but that doesn’t mean he’s clean.”

Alec took the phone gingerly. It was the exact same model Kat had purchased for him at the beginning of the year, after she’d proclaimed them both woefully out of date and behind the times. Jackson had adapted to his just fine. Alec had gotten a week’s worth of silent treatment from Kat for trading his back in for a phone that didn’t try to load up the internet or play music every time he wanted to make a call.

He’d hated the thing, but he had to admit it had its uses as he studied the picture. A young man, probably midtwenties, smiled back at him. Dark hair, dark eyes, nothing remarkable about his face aside from a tiny bump in his nose. Probably a shapeshifter, unless Kat had broken her habit from the last five dates. If he was a shapeshifter, he didn’t come from any of the prominent families. “What’s his name?”

“Christopher Gilbert.” Jackson hesitated. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Everything I could dig up on him is too neat. There aren’t any holes. Like someone sat down and came up with his story all at once.”

“Kat would have run his info…” Alec sighed. “But she wouldn’t notice that. Damn. You should be the one to tell her.”

Jackson tapped his knuckles against the passenger window. “Yeah, I’ll handle it.”

Still pissy. Alec scrubbed his hand against the side of his face and forced himself to apologize. Kind of. “Sorry, man. It’s been a shit day. Kat showed up while me’n Andrew were still at the dojo.”

“That couldn’t have been pleasant.”

“I keep hoping I’ll turn around and she’ll be over it. So far…”

“She’s doing the best she can.” Jackson flashed him a knowing look. “And, from the looks of it, so is Andrew.”

Great. The supernatural gossip mill was operating at full speed. The fact that Andrew’s best friend was married to Jackson’s best friend didn’t help matters. “You got an earful from Nicole on the subject, I’m guessing?”

“She says you’re being insufferable again, and someone should smack you for it.”

“According to half the town, that’s pretty much business as usual.”

“You could try to—” Jackson’s words cut off as magic shuddered through the truck. “Someone just set off the wards I laid around Kat’s balcony doors.”

Alec popped his door open. “Take the front. I’ll circle around to the balcony.”

Jackson grinned. “He shouldn’t be too hard to run down.” With those cryptic words, he slid out of the truck and disappeared.

Once Alec rounded the side of the building and got a good look at the courtyard under Kat’s window, he figured out what Jackson had meant. A tall blond man lay huddled on the grass a few feet away from one of the downstairs neighbor’s plastic chairs. Whatever spell Jackson had twisted into the wards had clearly triggered as soon as the man had gotten his hands on the railing.

Fear spell.
Alec had seen it enough times to recognize the aftermath, and it made it easy to drag the man to his feet. He stumbled as if drunk, which would hopefully explain to any onlookers why Alec was dragging him bodily around the yard. It wasn’t late enough for Kat’s apartment complex to be quiet for the night—not on a Friday—so Alec hauled his captive around to the parking lot to meet Jackson. “Upstairs or into the truck?”

“Depends. Are you going to knock him around?”

“He punched Kat in the fucking face.”

“Point taken.” Jackson reached for the stumbling man. “Load him up in the cab, and we’ll head to your place. I can keep him unconscious until we get there.”

At least there wouldn’t be any argument about whether or not the man deserved a good punch or two. Maybe it would teach him to keep his fists off of women.

And if it didn’t, he wouldn’t get a second chance to hurt any of Alec’s people.

Carmen managed not to drop her dinner as she wrestled her keys from her pocket and got the correct one in the lock on the front door. As soon as she did, the door swung open, and Lily reached for the tipping pizza box. “I heard there was trouble at the clinic. How bad?”

“Bad enough to call Franklin.” She dropped her keys and bag on the polished table in the entryway. “Did he come by?”

“After you called him off, yeah. He’s in the kitchen, making margaritas.” As if on cue, the soft whir of the blender drifted from the other room. “What happened?”

“A girl and her date were attacked and roughed up a little. Franklin knows her, apparently. Kat Gabriel?”

The blender stopped. A moment later Franklin appeared in the doorway, his usually mild expression exchanged for a frown. “You didn’t tell me it was Kat. Is everyone all right?”

“She’s fine.” But that wasn’t what Franklin was asking. “So are Tara and I.”

His steely grip on the doorframe eased somewhat. “If Katherine Gabriel comes in, you should always call me. And get her into a shielded room as fast as you can.”

“I know. She gave me her history.”
History.
The word seemed too innocuous to refer to the sort of death and psychic destruction Kat had mentioned.

Franklin seemed to echo her thought. “Words don’t quite do it justice. I was there, in the aftermath. A Conclave strike team tore open a man’s abdomen, and she attacked them. They were catatonic when I arrived.”

Carmen dropped to the sofa. It was an extreme response, one born of fear, and that’s exactly what Kat would have conveyed to the attackers—fear. Gut-wrenching, mind-numbing
terror
. “She said she killed them.”

“No. Someone else did that, once we realized what we were dealing with. I saw it happen once before, in the eighties…” He shuddered. “They made the mistake of keeping the guy alive. Trying to heal him. Three weeks later a psychic finally broke through and figured out he’d been reliving that one moment of terror on an endless loop. There’s no coming back from it.”

Lily touched his arm on her way into the kitchen. “Shouldn’t she be getting help or training or something?”

Carmen frowned at the toes of her sneakers. “Alec said she had. Callum Tyler, the hotshot English empath, took on her case.”

Both of Franklin’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “Alec Jacobson stopped to chat? Did you have to tranq him?”

“Come on, Franklin. Give me a little credit.” She fixed him with her best stern glare. “That reminds me, why were you talking to him about me?”

“Because working with him helps me keep the clinic neutral. I can’t do it by ignoring all of the politics, no matter how much I want to.”

It was such a sensible reason that Carmen felt terrible for overreacting. “Sorry. I just got the feeling he thought I shouldn’t be there.”

“It’s not entirely personal. We had a little scuffle a few months ago when some lions immigrated here and brought a mercenary hit squad with them. The Conclave’s feeling defensive, and… Well, trust me when I say that’s not a good thing for anyone.”

“Because of my family.”
And the empty Conclave seat.

“Because of your family,” Franklin agreed. “But that doesn’t mean Jake’s got a problem with you. He knows a little something about having family members trying to claw their way into power.”

The name made her sit straighter. “Jake? Alec Jacobson is the army buddy you talk about?”

“I never told you that?”

“No.” Though there was no reason he should have. Carmen wasn’t interested in wolf politics, and she wouldn’t be interested in Alec if they’d met under more mundane circumstances.

Yeah, tell yourself that, honey.
She’d be interested, if only because he was attractive and commanding. It was a deadly combination, one that had never failed to ignite an intense, primal reaction inside her, no matter how much she tried to deny it.