“Why?” asked Smith. “Did she pull a Sibyl while you were talking with her? You know, turn around and walk off in the middle of a conversation without saying anything?”
No, she said “Excuse me.”
But her voice had sounded so…strained.
“Jump at nothing?” suggested Mitch. “She’s so damned serious you forget, and then
bam!
Skittish as a deer.”
Faline,
thought Trace, and scowled.
“Did she explain how Elvis is still alive?” tried Smith.
“Actually, she doesn’t say he’s alive,” Mitch laughed. “She thinks he faked his death, but that it doesn’t grant the man immortality.”
“You boys be nice,” chided Greta from the stove, less affection in her tone this time. “Not everyone gets to grow up safe and well off. Yes, Trace, Sibyl is doing fine. Some personal damage just takes longer to heal.”
Smith and Mitch had the good grace to look ashamed. Honestly so, even.
Trace growled, “Who damaged her?”
Other than me?
“That’s none of our business. But she’s got us now. She’s being social—something she seems rather new at—spending time with me, and at the rec center with Arden and Valeria. Even arguing with you boys. It’s all good for her. Let her move at her own speed.”
Would that be the speed that had her wrapping her legs around his waist and inhaling his tongue into her mouth? Or the speed of someone with big, frightened eyes who didn’t know how to free a guy from his jeans? Damn, Sibyl didn’t need someone as clumsy and stupid as Trace. Not if she was damaged. She needed…she needed…
But Trace couldn’t imagine trying to pair her off with anyone else, not even Mitch who, despite all his jokes, was maybe the nicest guy he knew. The mere thought of it made him want to smash nice guy Mitch senseless.
Mine.
Crap.
And now his friends were staring at him, confused—and, in Mitch’s case, kinda worried. Time to change the subject.
“So you think the sword’s Com—” Trace stopped himself, cursing the day he’d ever thought joining his wealthy father’s hereditary secret society was a good idea. Greta was listening.
Mitch cleared his throat. “
Schmomi
tatus.”
“—yeah, that it’s one of their swords?”
Smith said, “You know? If we knew more about the connection between swords and the society, we might be able to figure that out.”
“So, tell me, tough girls,” asked Val Diaz’s voice, from the large meeting room across the hallway from the computer “lab” where Sibyl worked. Labored, anyway. Between her low overhead—squatters don’t pay rent—and her need to “stay off the grid,” she didn’t keep a steady job. Someone with her computer genius could always find short, well paying projects when needed. “Some wannabe gangsta grabs you from behind—like this!”
One of the girls let out a squeak, so Sibyl assumed Val had acted out the attack.
“What do you do, huh? Tell me your options!”
Sibyl hesitated and cocked her head, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. She hadn’t come to Arden Leigh’s rec center to eavesdrop on a self-defense-for-women lecture. She’d come to wipe and reconfigure the hard drives on a batch of used, donated computers.
Yes, her. Doing favors. For the daughter of a Comitatus leader.
But Sibyl figured, if Arden let her work on the computers at the center, maybe next she’d ask Sibyl to help with her computers at her house. Her house where her late father had conducted so much of his Comitatus business. That information on
those
hard drives could be a gold mine. Somewhere, someday, Sibyl
would
find what she needed to understand her father’s death, her own life’s ruin.
And in the meantime? Sibyl kind of liked it here.
In answer to Val’s question, a girl called, “Shoot the bastard!” The others laughed.
“Stupid,” whispered Sibyl to herself.
“Uh-huh,” drawled the unseen Val, making it sound like a synonym for
stupid,
which almost made Sibyl smile. “Where’ve you got the gun? Up your sleeve? I didn’t think so. Also, it’s illegal, ’cause y’all are too young for a carry license. Also? This neighborhood sees too much collateral damage as it is.”
Sibyl glanced at the five donated computers, all of which were slowly reformatting large-capacity hard drives. It’s not like she had anything to do in here for a while, other than torture herself for not having followed up on the opportunity that was Trace Beaudry-LaSalle. Curious, she drifted across the bright-yellow hall while another girl asked, “What’s collateral damage?”
“Accidentally killing a two-year-old bystander instead of the scum-sucker you meant to shoot, that’s what.” Val Diaz stood with her forearm loosely across the neck of one of the teenagers. Of the half dozen high school girls clustered around her, most of them already stood taller than Sibyl. Many had more curves, too.
No wonder Trace had pushed her away when he’d learned she was a virgin. She’d probably made him feel like a pedophile.
“So what else can you do?” Val couldn’t look less like her socialite business partner. Yes, she and Arden both overshadowed Sibyl. But Val came from this troubled South Oak Cliff neighborhood, not Arden’s posh Highland Park. Val stood taller, sturdier, more athletic, with tied back, kinky brown hair and tawny skin and cheekbones like a stone idol’s.
Mestizo,
thought Sibyl.
Val regarded the girls drily. “Seriously? None of you has a better solution? You’ll just pass out?”
“Turn your head into the crook of his elbow.” The suggestion surprised Sibyl more than anyone, because she was the one who made it. Loud enough to be heard, even. Worse, now everyone in the small gymnasium turned to look at her.
“Thanks, Sib,” called Val, who’d certainly seen her around. Around here, and around Trace, Mitch and Smith. “Tell them why the crook of the elbow.”
“Relieves the pressure on the trachea.” Noting several blank looks, Sibyl clarified, “You can breathe.”
“Good. What then?” Releasing her original guinea pig, Val beckoned to her.
Since everyone stared anyway, Sibyl sidled closer. “Yell.” For allies. For guards. For anyone. It wasn’t like pride had any place in self-defense.
Several of the teens laughed. But one of them, a black girl with loop earrings and gorgeous fingernails, asked, “What if nobody can hear you?”
“Yell anyway. Gets you breathing.” Oxygen is fuel.
“What then?” Val held out one arm, eyebrows raised in a silent request. Or demand. Val was kind of alpha. In this, she vaguely reminded Sibyl of a fellow juvenile inmate named Wanda, the hulking drug dealer who’d taught her all this back in lockup. Sibyl had come to count on Wanda, marginally. That was
almost
trust.
Val was also the only person among Sibyl’s Dallas companions who had no ties to the Comitatus, other than Tra—
No. Val was the only one.
Sibyl stepped closer and pivoted, allowing the taller woman to put her into a loose headlock. She turned her throat into the crook of Val’s elbow. It almost felt like an embrace. “Then you bargain.”
“Bargaining is for wimps,” complained a skinny white girl with tight brown cornrows. “I’d kick his ass.”
“If enough of her friends are surrounding you, you can’t.” Sibyl noticed that Val loosened her hold even further, and realized what she’d said. “
His
friends.”
Bargaining was all that had saved her. Not
begging—please
just made predators laugh. But offering something?
I’m smart. I can help you get out of here.
She’d almost passed out by then, because she was so frightened. She’d only been twelve. She hadn’t learned the turn-your-head trick yet.
I can help you get your GED.
Wanda had let go and challenged Sibyl to earn her safety by doing just that. When a combination of tutoring and cheating got Wanda that degree, they moved on to get her an associates, and Sibyl got the protection of the toughest girls in the facility. Sibyl didn’t have to imagine what would have happened otherwise; she’d seen it happen to others. She’d hated watching, afraid and unable to help. She’d cried at night, from the guilt.
Maybe today, she could help just a little. “But if he’s alone, grab his pinkie finger and yank.” She illustrated the grab, if not the yank. “Even someone as little as I am can break a pinkie finger.”
“Good.” But something about Val’s tone had changed, like she was talking more to Sibyl than to the class, now. Almost gentle. “What else?”
“If you’re wearing shoes, scrape your heel down his shin.”
“That would hurt like hell,” Val agreed. “What else?”
“Once he lets you go—from the pain—slam the heel of your hand into his nose.” Sibyl turned out of Val’s loose grip to demonstrate. “Or clap your hands onto both his ears at once. Or pretend you’re going along with it, caress his face, then gouge his eyes out with your thumbs.”
The teens broke into a chorus of
“ew!”
Because eyeball goo was worse than being attacked or killed? Sibyl and Val exchanged dry looks at their disgust, like they were friends or something. But they weren’t friends. Sibyl didn’t have friends. She couldn’t.
She backed away from the older woman. “I…computers.”
Then, leaving Val with the teens, she hurried back to her original room. The computers still had a way to go before she could reinstall operating systems, but she preferred privacy. That had been…that had…
She shook her head. Arden and Val had taken it upon themselves to try to improve the teens’ lives, but Sibyl hadn’t. She couldn’t lose focus on her own mission.
Defeat the Comitatus.
No matter what.
Across the hall, she heard Val asking, “So what do you do if nothing works? He’s overpowered you, or his friends are there, and you’re out of options. I hope this never happens, but y’all need to consider it. Do you fight, and maybe die, or do you give up, and maybe live? What do you do?”
The chorus of replies tangled together, so that Sibyl didn’t have to imagine which of the faces she’d just memorized was offering what possibility. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to calculate the odds, al ready factoring in details like the cast on one girl’s wrist, or the extra foundation another wore, like it could cover a bruise. These girls weren’t her responsibility, any more than the ones who’d screamed for help in front of her, not so many years ago….
“You survive,” she whispered to herself, answering Val anyway. “You survive, so that you can come back and destroy them. Destroy everything they love. Burn their lands, salt their fields and erase all memory of them.”
She’d developed a plan, damn it. Get close to Trace. Milk him for information about his birth father. Use it against the Comitatus who’d killed her own father, ruined her mother, stolen her life. All she had to do, to start was…see him again.
See him, and make him think she liked him. But not really like him. Because that way only lay pain.
Staring sightlessly at the blue bars on the churning CPUs, Sibyl hugged herself. She tried to feel better with her plan.
She felt very alone, instead.
Beckett Covington rolled his shoulders, trying to get control of his excitement. Before he walked through the mahogany door, into his boss’s office, he had to compose himself. Yes, he’d kicked butt on this assignment. Yes, Mr. Charles would undoubtedly be pleased. But if he wanted to advance in this society, Beckett had to play this off as business-as-usual.
One more deep breath and—there. Professional.
He knocked on the door and, at the call to enter, pushed through with the hand not holding the folder.
“I’ve found him, sir. He’s in Dallas, with two other exiles.”
Chapter 4
T
race had to spit nails—literally—to protest, “Greta, wait! Let me get it.”
“Nonsense,” chided his elderly landlady, continuing blithely in the direction of the front door. “You’re busy putting up the wainscoting.”
Trace dropped a still-unattached chair rail and ploughed across the dining room, barely dodging the barking dog, to completely block her path. “You’re an old blind lady harboring Schmomitatus exiles on the bad side of town. I’ll get it.”
Greta seemed immune to his size and scary growl of command, damn it. She said something about having been born here, as if South Oak Cliff was the same garden spot it had been so long, long, long ago. Trace glanced out the diamond-paned glass to preview their visitor—something Greta and her bad vision couldn’t do anymore—and stopped listening. Bad guys would have been simpler.
Sibyl. After a week of silence, Sibyl had returned.
She stood on the front porch, staring solemnly downward instead of scanning her peripheral like most sane women would. Apparently, she hadn’t noticed the kind of neighborhood Greta lived in either.
Trace yanked open the door. “You came here alone?”
He caught her by the shoulder and swept her easily inside, shutting and locking the door behind her as if they were under siege. Okay, so he was overreacting. They hadn’t been under siege for months. But damn! There she stood, looking small and vulnerable with too much sexy, bare leg showing between her short skirt and her cowboy boots…kind of a white trash look that just endeared her to him more, like he needed her kind of trouble. Only her green fleece hoodie acknowledged that it was mid-freaking-November already. Did she have no sense of self-preservation at all?
Considering that she’d almost slept with him? Probably not. But she’d shut him out afterward, so maybe.
Complicated
didn’t begin to explain her.
Now she looked up at him with those big, brown Faline eyes, and he wished he could tell if she was happy, or angry, or even bored to see him again. In return, he did his impression of a rock. A sweaty, sawdust-smeared rock.
Then Greta said, “Sibyl! How nice to see you again.” In unison, Sibyl and Trace looked at her. The awkward moment passed.
Except that Trace should probably let go of her shoulder, now. So he did.
“Hello, Greta.” Even that basic a greeting sounded measured, from the Shortstuff. Her “Hello, Dido,” came more easily as she sank into a crouch to catch the happy, spinning dog into an embrace. Trace watched how she relaxed into the animal’s affection. He noticed how the move showed off her bare knees, how her skirt bunched between her legs as she glanced back up at him with her old mask. “Trace.”