Deadly Descendant (30 page)

Jamaal’s eyes were too wide, white showing all around the irises, and there was a glazed look to them. This wasn’t the way he looked when he was about to go Incredible Hulk, but I still got the impression that the Jamaal I knew had left the building. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own two eyes, but it sure as hell looked to me like he was afraid.

But of what?

“Jamaal?” I asked tentatively. “Are you all right?”

Stupid question; I could see that he wasn’t, though I had no idea what was wrong.

Stupid question it might have been, but at least it seemed to draw him back from wherever he’d disappeared to. He blinked a couple of times, and his eyes cleared. He glanced quickly in my direction, then averted his eyes and slid his hands into his pockets. His shoulders hunched a bit, and he turned away from me.

I took a deep breath to compose myself, then stood up and went to him, putting a hand on his shoulder but not making any more intimate gesture. His muscles quivered under my touch, like he was fighting the urge to pull away. I’d have been hurt, except I didn’t think whatever was going on had much to do with me.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I urged him, though I honestly didn’t know if a man like him was capable of sharing anything that might resemble intimate details. Even the things he’d told me about his past had been
lacking real depth, like he was giving me the Cliffs Notes version.

“It’s not you,” he said hoarsely, and if it had been someone other than him, I might not have been able to resist making some wisecrack about the famous cliché. “I just …” But he couldn’t seem to finish his own sentence, falling instead into a brooding silence.

I might not be a genius where relationships are concerned, but I could put two and two together with the best of them.

Jamaal’s back was riddled with scars. He’d pulled away abruptly the moment I had touched those scars skin-to-skin. Ergo whatever was wrong had something to do with the scars.

Was he self-conscious about them? He certainly had seemed to get prickly about me having seen them, but I didn’t think it was self-consciousness that had made him run away from me as abruptly as he had. This was something more visceral than self-consciousness.

Should I press him about it? Or should I just figure he’d tell me in his own good time?

I honestly don’t think of myself as a particularly pushy person. Sometimes I’m almost embarrassingly ready to ignore the elephant in the room and skip out on potential conflict. But with Jamaal, I was having a damn hard time finding my emotional balance, and I found myself incapable of letting it go.

“You don’t like when someone touches your scars,” I said.

Jamaal moved away from me, his body language screaming of tension. “Just leave it alone,” he said
tightly. “We have more important things to talk about, like—”

“Not right this second we don’t.” Yes, I did still have a sense of perspective. I knew figuring out a plan to stop Kerner was more important than having a Dr. Phil moment. I also knew neither of our minds would be fully in the game if we were both distracted by what had been left unsaid between us.

“Tell me what that was all about,” I insisted.

Jamaal’s eyes flashed, telling me he didn’t appreciate how I’d made that into an order. Not that I was in any position to give orders.

“It’s none of your business,” he grated.

“You can’t honestly believe that. Not under these circumstances.”

His glower became even fiercer. “I believe you need to back the hell off. We shouldn’t have let things get that far, anyway.”

He was sealing the cracks in his emotional armor with alarming speed, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. Maybe what had caused him to back off had nothing to do with me touching the scars; maybe he’d just been scared he was letting me get too close.

Curiosity, desire, and common sense battled within me, but common sense won out. I could see that Jamaal had fortified his defenses against me, and any further attempts I made to breach them would only make him dig in his heels more firmly.

It wasn’t easy to let it go, but I managed somehow.

“Fine. We won’t talk about it. Yet. But someday, when this whole mess with Kerner is over, you and
I are going to have a long talk.” My stomach knotted up as I remembered that when this mess was over, I would be hitting the road and wouldn’t be having any long talks with anyone.

Secure in his victory, Jamaal visibly eased back from the edge. He arched an eyebrow at me. “You think so?”

I nodded briskly and hoped my face hadn’t given away my sudden burst of gloom. “Yep.”

The arousal of our little make-out session hadn’t fully faded yet, but I did the best I could to shove it to the background of my mind. Later, I’d probably regret letting things go as far as they had, and I’d be grateful that Jamaal had put on the brakes, but for now, I had to battle my own frustration.

Rebuttoning my shirt, I plopped back down onto the futon. I really wanted to go back to my own suite to pull myself together and lick my wounds—possibly even to do a little sulking—but I’d sought Jamaal out for a reason, and sex wasn’t it.

“All right, then,” I said with a sigh of resignation. “Let’s talk strategy.”

Not surprisingly, it was
a little hard to change gears back into problem-solving mode. Especially when Jamaal was brooding and I was suffering from an acute case of sexual frustration. I knew Jamaal still wanted to tell Anderson about Emma’s threat, but, at least for the time being, he was willing to respect my desire to keep Anderson out of the loop.

From hours of staring at my map, I had determined approximately where Kerner spent his days—or at least, I had a theory about where he spent his days. That didn’t necessarily mean I was right, and even if I was, I didn’t know which of the likely cemeteries Kerner actually hung out in. The fact that Kerner was most likely hiding in a cemetery made Jamaal into a less-than-optimal ally, but I had no other choice but to use him as my co-conspirator.

“I won’t go apeshit the moment I set foot in a cemetery,” he assured me. “It took a couple of hours for me
to lose control that first time. We’ll just have to make sure we don’t need that much time to track Kerner down.”

I bit my tongue to avoid pointing out that my power wasn’t as predictable as that. He already knew.

“So what do we do if we find him?” I asked. “I’d really rather not be a jackal’s chew toy again. That wasn’t fun.”

“If the jackals are a manifestation of Kerner’s death magic, then it’s possible they wouldn’t be able to hurt me; Emmitt’s magic couldn’t.” He frowned. “At least, it couldn’t when I countered it with my own. I’m not sure if I’d have to target Kerner or the jackals.”

Whichever one he didn’t direct his death magic at would be all over me. Assuming his death magic had any effect at all. Which sounded like a pretty big, scary if.

“I could act as a diversion,” Jamaal continued. “Draw off Kerner’s jackals while you take him out with a shot to the head. It wouldn’t kill him permanently, of course, but if you can knock him out of commission, that’ll take care of the jackals, and we can … do what we need to do.”

I found it interesting that Jamaal was unwilling to put into words exactly what it was we needed to do to keep Kerner contained. I couldn’t blame him, and I still hoped that somehow I’d be able to persuade Anderson to do the right thing. Which was almost certainly wishful thinking on my part, because Anderson was not an easy man to persuade, and he obviously felt very, very strongly about keeping his damn secret.

“But if you’re wrong about the death magic …” I said.

Jamaal shrugged. “If I’m wrong, then I get mauled. I’ll still be a distraction, and we know how to ‘cure’ the rabies. I’d rather not go through that, but I’m willing to if that’s what it takes.”

I have to admit, I was impressed at the nonchalance with which he offered himself up. No, he didn’t act like he was all eager or anything, but he was willing to put himself through hell—a hell he’d personally experienced before, so he knew exactly what he was getting into—to stop a bad guy. I like to think that I’d have been able to do the same thing, take one for the team if it were necessary, but I wasn’t so sure. I’m not a total wimp or anything, but I’ve never thought of myself as particularly brave, either.

“All of this assumes we can even find him,” I said, not at all secure in my ability to do so. All I had was a hunch that he was in one of two places. The cemeteries were relatively small, compared with, say Rock Creek, but if Kerner realized I was there, he could lead us on a merry chase, and we might never catch up to him. At least, not until the proximity to the dead pushed Jamaal over the edge.

“Maybe we need him to find us instead,” Jamaal suggested.

That might be the way it happened, whether we wanted it to or not. After having warned me off, Kerner would probably turn out to be a little grumpy if he saw me poking around. Maybe he would come out of hiding to show his displeasure. But I didn’t
know if we could count on it. He was crazy but not stupid. If he saw us looking for him, he’d know we were rejecting his deal, and he might play hide-and-seek with us, then go find some innocent victim on whom to take out his frustrations.

“Maybe isn’t good enough,” I said. “We need to draw him out for sure, or we’ll get people killed.”

What would draw Kerner out of hiding?

The first thing that came to my mind was Konstantin. Kerner’s plan was to torment and terrify Konstantin by taking out his Olympians one by one, but it was Konstantin himself he hated most, and he might not be able to resist the temptation if he thought Konstantin was within his reach. Of course, there was the small problem that in order to use Konstantin to draw Kerner out, we’d have to get hold of him. Somehow I didn’t think that would be so easy.

“Do you think there’s some way we can trick Konstantin into meeting us at one of the cemeteries?” I asked, thinking out loud. “If we could jump him, we could use him as bait.” And wouldn’t it be a shame if we used him as bait and then didn’t manage to stop Kerner until Konstantin was dead?

I felt a brief twinge of shame for thinking like Emma, but all I had to do was remind myself what had happened to Steph on Konstantin’s orders, and I didn’t feel bad about it anymore. If we could kill Konstantin
and
capture Kerner, it would be an entirely satisfying mission.

Jamaal gave me an incredulous look that told me just how impressed he was with my idea.

“That was a joke, right?” he asked. “Konstantin would smell this rat from a mile away. And even if we could trick him out into the open, he’s a descendant of Ares. He could take the two of us in a fight with his hands tied behind his back. There’s a reason he’s been the leader of the Olympians for so long, and it’s not because he’s an easy target.”

I gave him a dirty look. “Come up with a better idea. Then you can criticize all you like.”

We mulled things over for a few minutes, both lost in thought. I could see the moment an idea struck Jamaal by the way his eyes suddenly sharpened with interest.

“You’ve got something?” I asked.

Jamaal frowned thoughtfully. “Yeah. I think. But you’d have to be willing to let someone else in on the plan. You willing to do that?”

I didn’t like that idea one bit. The more people who knew, the more likely someone was going to blab to Anderson, and that could be a disaster.

“Depends how good your idea is,” I answered cautiously. “And who the someone is.”

“Getting hold of Konstantin would be the next best thing to impossible. But getting hold of someone who could
impersonate
Konstantin would be doable.”

I had to think about it a second before I got it. “Jack,” I finally said. I still hadn’t taken the time to look up Loki on the Internet, but clearly Jack possessed strong illusion magic. And he could change into a dog. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine he could disguise himself as Konstantin.

Jamaal made a face—he couldn’t seem to help expressing distaste when Jack’s name came up—but he nodded. “He can create an illusion that no one would be able to see through.”

The idea had merit, I had to admit. “So we have Jack disguise himself as Konstantin, then we drag him out to the cemeteries and parade him around until Kerner makes an appearance.” A few more things clicked into place in my mind, and I found myself liking the idea more and more.

“We can pretend we grabbed Konstantin to hand him over so that Kerner won’t kill any more innocents on his way to his main goal. Maybe we can have Jack make his illusion look like Konstantin is in rough shape, extra vulnerable.”

Jamaal shrugged. “I suspect if Kerner gets a look at Konstantin, his brain will short-circuit, and he won’t bother worrying that it’s too good to be true. Some temptations are strong enough to make people forget to be cautious.”

He had a point, but I suspected we were getting just a bit ahead of ourselves. It sounded like Jack might be an extremely useful ally if we were going to take Kerner down, but …

“Are we really willing to make a plan that relies on Jack?”

I didn’t feel like I had much of a read on Jack. Being part of Anderson’s crew made him automatically one of the good guys—I trusted Anderson’s judgment where anyone but Emma was concerned. But his trickster heritage made him unpredictable. Would he
think it was more “fun” to rat Jamaal and me out to Anderson, thereby getting us into trouble he might find entertaining to watch? Not to mention the fact that he and Jamaal weren’t exactly the best of friends.