Cipher (18 page)

“I always thought Nick was an exception. That Alec treated her like an equal because she was the werewolf princess. Because her dad’s the Alpha.” Kat’s slid her fingers off the edge of the book to twine with his. “But now I’ve seen him around Zola, and you’re right. It’s not gender. It’s power. He treats Miguel and Sera the same, because they’re both weaker than he is.”

His mother, who had dedicated her life to studying power differentials in all their forms, would have been fascinated—once she understood. “It seems complicated until you’re in it, I think.”

“Because there’s shapeshifter power and family power and emotional power…” Amusement laced her voice. “Sexual power. It’s like the most complicated dance in the world, and no one teaches you the steps until you’re getting your toes stomped on.”

“Or you’re the one doing the stomping.”

Kat settled her cheek against his shoulder. “I think we step on each other’s feet a lot.”

“Doesn’t matter, though.” He stroked her hair and smiled. Her proximity had always excited him, but now it soothed him, as well. “We’re figuring it out as we go.”

“We are.” The tension seemed to be leaving her, drifting away as her body relaxed more fully against his. Attraction was there, and the barest hint of arousal, but she seemed content cuddled against his side, almost as if she was savoring the physical contact. Even her fingers made slow circles over his, tracing his knuckles and up to his wrist before meandering down again.

A quiet moment, the sort of thing most people would take for granted. But not Kat, who was obviously starved for the simplest of contact.

He could give her that. It couldn’t last forever, not with the shadow of whatever they’d uncovered on that zip drive looming over them, but for now…

Yes, he could give her that.

Chapter Eleven

Three days of peace shattered with the rumble of a motorcycle engine.

The warehouse’s downstairs kitchen was close enough to the main entrance that Andrew heard not only the engine, but the dull thump of boot soles on the pavement outside. He didn’t drop his dishtowel until the side door rattled and the bell buzzed.

Kat glanced up, peering at him over the top of the laptop she’d opened on the island. “Are you expecting someone?”

“Not particularly, but sometimes people show up.” He waved her back, walked to the door and opened it.

The man on the other side looked like trouble, from his scuffed boots to his sunglasses. His leather jacket was unzipped just enough to reveal a shoulder rig, and tattoos climbing down the sides of his neck and disappearing beneath a black T-shirt. He had a duffel bag over one shoulder and a grin that outdid Alec at his most arrogant.

He also had an aura of magic that felt like nothing Andrew had ever encountered before.

When he spoke, it was in the flat cadence of TV newscasters, though a hint of southern drawl lurked around the edges. “You must be Andrew Callaghan. I’m looking for Kat. My brother sent me.”

Ben’s brother, the one who liked to play with swords. “Patrick, I guess?”

“Patrick McNamara,” he confirmed, holding out his free hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too. Come in.”

As the newcomer stepped into the warehouse, Kat appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her eyes lit up, and she took two excited steps forward before jerking to a halt. “Oh shit. How bad
is
it?”

Patrick McNamara looked like trouble—or like the kind of guy you’d send in to deal with trouble. Andrew laid a hand on Kat’s shoulder. “Maybe we should all go sit in the kitchen and talk.”

Kat didn’t move, but her shoulder was tense under his fingers. “How bad is it?” she asked again.

“Bad, Kat.” The man nodded to Andrew and lifted his bag higher. “I’ve got the printouts in here. Ben didn’t want to take the chance they’d get intercepted.”

Andrew hesitated. “Want to lay them out on the counter, Kat? We can look at them together, or you can have some time.”

She drew in a steadying breath before shaking her head. “If it’s big enough for Patrick to drive over here personally, it’s not just about my family.”

Despite the truth of the words, no one else had quite so personal a stake in the information contained in those printouts. “Did Ben give you a rundown before you left?”

“The basics.” Patrick followed them across the open entryway to the kitchen tucked in the front corner of the warehouse. “I read through the highlights. There’s a lot of information here, and it’s a crazy kind of scary.”

Kat cleared her laptop out of the way so he could start pulling out files. “Information about…”

“Psychics.” The folder he pulled out looked like the one Ben had given them with fake identification. “Kids, mostly, or people who were kids ten years ago. Whoever drew up these files was looking to build an army of psychics and planned on using them to break the world wide open.”

Andrew took the proffered folder, thick with pages, and flipped it open. As soon as his eyes focused on the list of names on the cover sheet, he understood why Patrick had given it to him instead of Kat.

Psychics of Interest.
A list, and lengthy enough to be exhaustive. He recognized too many of them—ones he’d heard in passing, and even people he knew. Members of their community.

Not to mention the woman Kat’s mother had trusted with her daughter’s life. “Peace Kristoffersen had a power called psychic obscuration. That’s what she was talking about, why Alyson gave her the key. The cult literally
couldn’t
find her.”

He flipped the pages, and his blood ran cold. There were other lists—
To Watch
and
Eliminate
. Callum, Kat’s mentor, was on that one, along with a few others Andrew didn’t recognize.

The last section wasn’t a list but a collection of dossiers complete with pictures and a header on every page that left his hands shaking.

Of Particular Interest.

A much-younger Kat smiled up at him from one page. It detailed her strengths and weaknesses, as well as her most appropriate uses—
morale and personnel control
. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.

Kat was oblivious, her attention on another set of papers. “This is what she meant.” Her voice held an edge of horror. “Turning me into a weapon.”

Andrew shuffled the remaining papers. “There must be three dozen dossiers here.”

She caught his hand and pushed one paper toward him. “It’s not recruitment, Andrew. It’s enslavement.”

Patrick cleared his throat as Andrew stared down at neat specifications for a collar and an accompanying charm. “It’s a prototype, and according to the notes, they made one. Slap the collar on a psychic, and anyone with a whiff of psychic power can control them. Use their powers, do whatever they want.”

None of the information on the lists was groundbreaking. Even if Kat’s mother had taken it all, it would be easy to reconstruct, something the cult could have done ten times over in the years since her death. “That must be it, then. She must have taken it, and they have reason to think she wouldn’t have destroyed it.” He frowned at the schematics. “So why didn’t they build another one?”

“That’s just the user manual,” Patrick said quietly. “The wizard who built it died around the same time this disk was made. His house was razed. Ben’s pretty sure it’s the last thing Kat’s mother did before they killed her.”

“So this is their only shot.” If it wasn’t so damned dangerous, if Kat hadn’t been
shot
already, Andrew would have laughed. “All their eggs in this tiny basket.”

“They could be looking for another witch or wizard,” Kat pointed out. “They could be trying to make another one. But I think, if they’d managed? They wouldn’t be risking this much. Chasing me around has the potential to drag the Southeast council into this. And hell, Derek and Nick and Nick’s dad.”

“The whole Conclave would get involved in something like this,” he corrected. “Though they obviously meant to intercept the drive before you had a chance to decrypt any of these files, the fact that they didn’t has upped the ante. You could leverage this stuff into a
lot
of help.”

“There’s something that’s not in the files.” Patrick leaned back, draping his arms across his chest. “Ben didn’t print it out. Made me memorize it. GPS coordinates, and we’re pretty sure it’s where the collar ended up.”

Andrew pulled his phone from his pocket. “Did you run them?”

“Nope. Didn’t want a record left if something happened to me.”

Patrick rattled off the number for Andrew to enter as Kat opened the third folder, her eyebrows coming together. “They were outlining missions. Not vague goals either. This one uses Ben to obtain additional sources of funding by shaving interest off of thousands of corporate accounts.” She flipped a page. “These are detailed. Insanely detailed.”

“And useless without the collar.” The GPS search program on his phone returned the results. “It looks like a spot out in the middle of Terrebonne Parish, south of Houma. The back end of the bayou.”

Kat snapped the folder shut and pushed it away from her. “So we go find it,” she said quietly. “We go find it, then we fly to Wyoming and let Michelle Peyton use her badass Seer magic to erase it from existence.”

It sounded simple, easy. “We have to plan on being followed, one way or another, which means we plan for a fight.”

“Which means we bring Julio.” Kat glanced up at him. “And Anna. I don’t think we should waste time calling people back from all over the country. We should go as soon as we can round everyone up.”

Which left out most everyone she hadn’t already named. “And Miguel,” Andrew noted. “This is his fight too, whether he knows it or not.”

“What about that wizard you work for?” Patrick asked. “Jackson Holt, right? Isn’t he still in town?”

“He’s out west, helping his wife track down a relative.” The words were absent, most of Kat’s attention fixed on Andrew. “Are you sure about Miguel?” she asked, almost tentatively. “It won’t be complicated?”

It would be hell, especially if shit went down and they ended up in a fight where Miguel’s instincts might very well lead him to try to protect Kat. “I won’t love it,” Andrew admitted, “but we can’t afford to leave valuable people out of the loop because they make us cranky. It won’t be a problem.”
Nothing I can’t control, anyway.

Kat nodded and turned to Patrick. “And I guess that’s why you’re here.”

“I’ve chased down a rogue psychic or two in my day,” he agreed. “We better assume they know they’ll be facing shapeshifters, though. The question is if they’ll underestimate your friend Andrew, here.”

“Most people do.” He was a new wolf, barely a year made. A mongrel mistake. “Not as many do it twice.”

Patrick lifted his bag. “Well let’s not give them a second chance.”

The bayou was just remote enough to be creepy without being remote enough for a supernatural showdown, which was the perfect recipe for a nerve-wracking clusterfuck.

And Kat couldn’t get her bangs to stay out of her eyes.

In lieu of calling off the vital mission until she could get a grown-up haircut, Kat settled on unfashionable but practical pigtails. Fussing with her hair as they waited for the others to arrive didn’t seem very heroic, but at least it put her somewhere between her two companions on the fidgety scale.

Andrew was calm and unwavering as he leaned against the bumper of his SUV, his arms crossed over his chest. Julio, on the other hand, was taking advantage of the fact that half the outside lights were out at the tiny bait shop off Little Caillou Road, and pacing broodingly in the shadows.

Finally, he scraped his boot into the dirt and sighed. “I don’t like the skulking. I think that’s the part that gets me.”

“Being sneaky,” Kat corrected, the words muffled by the ponytail holder held between her teeth. She finished gathering the rest of her hair and tied it off into a second pigtail just high enough to keep her vision unimpeded. “Shapeshifters should do it more often. Not everything has to be a full frontal assault.”

“If this freaky-ass cult had mounted that sort of attack, we wouldn’t be hanging around in the dark. And the
cold
, damn it.” He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets. “We’d be done and out for beers already.”

Kat turned to pick up her gun and glanced at Andrew. “Is that what we’re doing after we save the world from psychics? Getting beer?”

“Sure.” He was looking off down the dark highway, and the drone of a car engine materialized. “That’s what we always do after we save the world.”

They were night and day. Julio edgy and intense, Andrew utterly motionless. She remembered the jittery moments after she’d been shot, when color had faded from the world around him. “Are you all right?”

He smiled suddenly, and she knew he was trying to reassure her. “I’ll be better if I don’t have to get naked in the bayou tonight. Julio’s right. It’s cold as balls out here.”

Nothing sexy about nakedness when it was a prelude to a fight. “I’ve never seen you as a wolf, you know.”

“No.” He straightened from the bumper as the noise of the engine drew closer. “No, you haven’t.”

He hadn’t even paused to consider. Just
no
, and now she wondered if it was deliberate. If he was hiding that part of himself from her.

Tonight, if things went badly, he might not be able to hide. Kat checked her handgun carefully, deciding in the end to leave the safety engaged. “Anna’s car?” she asked. “Or is that Patrick? I can’t really tell cars from motorcycles.”

“It’s both,” Julio answered as headlights came into view over a small rise. “Anna’s little sportster and one mammoth bike, from the sound of it.”

Sera was safely ensconced at Dixie John’s for the late shift, and Anna had left from there with Miguel in tow. Three shapeshifters, one telepathic shapeshifter, an empath and a bounty hunter whose tattoos held more magic than anything the Ink Shrink had ever created. Ben had hinted once that his brother’s ability to compete with shapeshifters was due to some sort of mystical exchange, a boon paid for in blood and ink, but the one time Kat had pressed for details, Ben had become evasive to the point of avoidance.