Tracking the Tempest (13 page)

Ryu contemplated the box like he'd just been given a great big gift horse, one he now had to look in the mouth. He finally bent over and started rummaging.

Camille came over to Silver, and I could feel her glamour reaching out to him, trying to soothe and relax him, magically buttering him up. She sat down on the ottoman next to him.

“You were in charge of everything until a few years ago,” Camille said gently, staring Silver in the eyes. “Why did that change? Who took over the lab once you left?”

Silver shrugged, blinking slowly. “I don't really know. Until a few years ago, we were basically functioning as Conleth's guards. With his powers, he couldn't be released into the general population. So even though we weren't experimenting on him anymore, the government paid us to keep him. We knew how to handle him. We were the only thing he knew. I think he considered us family. But then we got word from our corporate offices in Chicago that we'd been bought out by a new company and that we had a new sponsor. A private sponsor. That's when everything changed.”

“Changed how?”

“It started small. New nurses. Who weren't really nurses in my estimation. Then new technicians. They were rough and they started doing their own ‘experiments' when I wasn't there. Things that could not really be called… science.”

“Such as?”

“Strange things. Invasive. And that couldn't have been pleasant for Con. I started looking into it and voicing my opposition, and was I summarily fired. They replaced me with the worst of the new technicians. He was… off. I don't know what his deal was, but he wasn't right. On any level. I don't know what they did to Con for the last few years, but it must have been horrifying. The boy I left wouldn't have done those things. He wasn't really a prisoner to us. And I think he loved us, and we cared for him, in our own ways. But now… Whatever they did to him changed him, completely.”

Silver took a deep pull from his drink as we fell silent, each wrapped up in our own thoughts, until Camille spoke again.

“Do you have any idea who this company, or this sponsor, was?” she prompted, trying to tease his memory with both her questioning and her glamour. I could sense her magic probe, but every time she did so, Silver's face went slack. I realized his mind had already been messed with, and not by us.

The old man's jaw worked, as if he were forcing himself to speak. “The company's information is in one of those files. Well, what I could find, which wasn't much. It seems to be a shell organization, hiding God only knows what. As for the new sponsor, when we first got the news, there was a liaison sent to look everything over. She spent a lot of time with Conleth.” Silver frowned, his gaze losing focus. “It's… fuzzy. She's… hard to remember. I know I met her, but…” He fell silent as his face went blank. “What were you asking?” he said suddenly, looking at Camille as if he wasn't sure when she'd sat down.

Oh yeah, he'd been fucked with, all right. His memory was shot full of holes so big Ryu could have driven through them.

I'm surprised he even remembered she was a woman. At least that's something
.

“Did you ever meet the actual sponsor?” Camille asked, knowing that Silver would never remember anything about the female liaison.

Silver shook his head. “Only the higher-ups, the money people, ever met him. Which is why Con must be working with someone,” he insisted. “Someone who knows the power structure.”

“We haven't found any evidence that Conleth
is
working with anyone,” Ryu said, soothingly. “Everyone from the laboratory he's attacked, he's attacked on his own.”

“Well, then, who's killing the others?” Silver demanded, his voice rough with fear and grief.

“Others?” we all asked together.

Silver stood, slowly and stiffly, and walked to the box. He took out a sheaf of papers.

“These are from a woman named Dr. Donovan, who went between Boston and Chicago. She worked for the old company that owned us, as the person who approved the testing. And she's the only person I know who stayed on after corporate changed hands. For the few years I worked for the new company, she's the only one I ever dealt with. Everything came down to me, to our lab, through her.”

Ryu took the papers. “And?”

“Brenda and I worked for years together. She was always in and out of Boston on business, and we spent a lot of time together. We… we had an affair, briefly. But even after the affair, we stayed friends. We trusted each other, and she had my private e-mail, my addresses, everything. But we had a falling out over the new administration after I was fired. I wanted her to tell me what they were doing to Conleth and she refused. She was ambitious… Anyway, we lost touch. Which is why I was so surprised to get that first e-mail, there.” Silver pointed to the paper on top of the stack. “She sounded so scared. That came about a week after Conleth escaped.”

“Is that why you went into hiding?” Ryu asked.

“I didn't know what Con would do when I knew he'd escaped. So yes, I hid from Con at first. But he only killed people from
after
my time. There are tons of employee files I have there, in that box. The people who were with Conleth from the beginning, but who were fired by the new administration, are still alive. I've checked up on them. So at first I hid from Conleth, yes. But then I hid because of what Brenda told me in those e-mails.”

“Which is?” Ryu prompted.

“She starts off by telling me that something isn't right, asking me questions about who and what Conleth could have known about people in corporate. I tell her that he couldn't have known anything, unless things had changed that much since I was in charge. Hell, I didn't even know anything about who had taken over, and I was at the top in Boston. She e-mails me back saying she was wrong to get in touch, nothing was happening, and she'd just been overtired. Then she starts writing me letters…”

I watched as Ryu flipped through the papers, nodding at Silver's words.

“Brenda writes to tell me that her e-mail is monitored and so are her phones. Hence the letters. She tells me that the people above her are disappearing. That they're showing up dead. Burned. She asks me how Conleth could have known about the people in Chicago, who worked with her in corporate.

“But he
couldn't
have,” Silver insisted. “Everything was set up so it went through Brenda and me, or whoever replaced me. We were as high as anything could be traced, and Brenda was the buffer keeping even
me
from knowing anything. I know because I tried like hell to find out more about that company even before I was fired, and I've got some pretty impressive contacts. Nothing could be discovered. Nothing.”

“But you'd been replaced,” Ryu interjected, gently. “Maybe things had changed.”

“Bullshit,” Silver swore. “There's no way a company puts that much effort, money, and influence into remaining invisible just to rip off the veil one day.”

“What happened to Donovan?” Ryu asked.

“Last page,” Silver said. “The photo.”

The photo showed a picture very similar to the ones Ryu had shown me at the laboratory. Dr. Donovan was dead, her body burned.

“You're sure it's her?” Ryu asked.

“Dental records,” was the only response.

“When was this? And where?”

“Right after Conleth killed his family here. But Brenda was killed in Chicago.”

“It looks like one of Conleth's kills,” Camille said from behind us. She had moved to peer at the picture from over Ryu's shoulder.

“It
looks
like one of Conleth's kills, but it isn't,” the old man insisted, shaking his white head adamantly.

Ryu crooked his eyebrow. He didn't believe Silver.

“Damn it, boy,” Silver said, and I almost smiled. Ryu might look about forty years Silver's junior, but he was actually around two hundred years older than the human in front of us. Silver stood up, painfully, to go stand in front of Ryu. Taking the sheaf of papers away from him, Silver flipped through till he found what looked like a report.

“That's Donovan's autopsy. Her body was obviously very badly burned, but they still found evidence that she hadn't just been killed and then set on fire. She was abused first. Brutally.” Silver pointed to one line buried in the middle of the report. One word had been highlighted.

The word was “tortured.”

I shuddered, as Ryu read the report.

“How did you get all this, sir?” I asked, giving Ryu time to read and trying to keep my overactive imagination from dwelling on that single, horrible word.

“I had a contact in the police I pumped for information when I hadn't heard from Brenda in a while. Her letters just stopped and I knew she was in trouble. So I came back to the States.” The gray-haired head bent as Silver stared at his hands. When he finally spoke again, his voice was dark with competing emotions. “She was an ambitious bitch in a lot of ways. But she didn't deserve to die. Especially not like that.”

Ryu finished reading, and he put the autopsy report at the back of the sheaf of papers as if to get it out of sight.

“Conleth's changed his MO,” he said. “He's even more dangerous than he was before. He needs to be caught
now
.”

Silver peered at Ryu as if he'd just claimed that cream cheese was made of moon spooge.

“Have you listened to a word I've said, boy? Whoever killed Donovan made it look like Conleth, but there's no way Conleth did that. Whoever killed that woman was something else entirely. Con's a murderer but he's not, yet, a monster.”

“Sir, you said yourself that Conleth had changed.”

“Not that much, damn it. And none of the murders in Boston are like this. He kills, but he doesn't torture!” Silver was getting increasingly irate and I, for one, was glad he no longer had his shotgun.

“And how did he get to Chicago, anyway? And then back to Boston?” Silver looked like he'd played his trump card, but I'd seen Conleth go rocket blaster. I wasn't sure how far he could sustain such power, but his getting to Chicago wicked fast wasn't an impossibility.

“Conleth has ways of traveling great distances.” Ryu's voice was still gentle, but it was also obvious that he didn't believe a word Silver had said. And the old man knew it.

“If you won't listen, you won't listen,” Silver said, finally. “But I'm warning you: You're making a mistake not looking beyond Conleth for something more. I'm not saying he's an innocent; God knows he's committed crimes. But this isn't one of them. And I have no doubt that once you begin digging, you'll find other bodies, other murders. And they won't have been Conleth, either.”

The old man poured himself another brandy and then settled himself on his sofa. His white head bowed and he stared down at his hands. He looked defeated, but his voice was strong when he finally spoke.

“Now get out of my house and let them come for me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

O
f course, we hadn't just let them come for Silver. We'd left a pair of Stefan's most powerful deputies to watch him. He was, after all, a well-baited trap as well as an innocent in need of protection.

Well, relatively innocent
, I thought as I remembered everything that had been in those files.

We'd gone from knowing virtually nothing about Conleth to knowing
everything
—down to his preference
for boxers—in one evening. We should have been euphoric at the break in the case. But the “break” had just led to a billion more questions.

We finally discovered exactly how Conleth had ended up in that lab. He'd been abandoned at a convent when he was a baby, which he proceeded to burn down, killing everyone inside. Rescue services had found the baby—perfectly unharmed—sitting in the smoking ruins, still burping fire.

Which is how he'd ended up in a laboratory. One reason he'd never come to the attention of the supes is that the FBI labeled him a different code word than the one they usually used for their brushes with the supernaturals. They'd genuinely thought he was some Rosemary's baby devil-child and had code named him “Firecrotch,” a stonkingly inappropriate name for a being one supposes is the Antichrist. Any supe in the Bureau at the time probably thought it was a dirty joke involving a redhead.

So, through a series of accidents, Conleth had gotten swept away in bureaucracy, to be forgotten about until he'd come to the attention of this mysterious donor. The records petered out then and stopped with Silver's having been fired. But, from what the old doctor had said, that's when things had really gotten bad for Conleth.

Unfortunately, we had no easy way of investigating Silver's claims about the murders in Chicago. The supes were all very territorial, and both Nell and Ryu had drilled into me their supernatural geography. Most of what humans considered to be northern Illinois was firmly entrenched in an area the supes knew as the Borderlands. Much like the mountainous regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Borderlands between neighboring territories were lawless places, ungoverned by the Alfar. Chicago, however, was an extreme case. The city and its surrounding suburbs were a sort of black hole for the Alfar: They sent spies in, but no spies ever emerged. This huge urban area that everyone knew was there, and functioning, and even Google mappable, was invisible to the Alfar and their pure-blooded subjects.

I imagined it must drive the Alfar crazy, but apparently there was nothing they could do about it. With the fertility issues and their already low numbers, compounded by the nagas' treachery—Orin and Morrigan's territory had lost a lot of people fighting Jimmu and his nestmates—they simply didn't have the manpower to charge into the Borderlands willy-nilly.

So we were at an impasse, in terms of that aspect of the investigation. Ryu had no contacts in the Borderlands. There was no supernatural power structure that he knew of to call and question. So he'd set Camille to calling the human police. But with only a very limited ability to glamour them over the phone, they were unlikely to give up any sensitive information. Ryu had also set Julian to hacking into the Chicago PD's computer system. He'd search for bodies that had been burned, hopefully giving us a place to start.

Silver's files had, however, yielded some extra clues for our Boston investigation. After Ryu took me for a quick swim off a pier near the New England Aquarium to recharge my batteries, we'd pored over Silver's files all night, trying to get a bead on Conleth.

Unfortunately, there were only two people left alive who'd worked at the laboratory during the years the new sponsor had been in charge. One was a receptionist who had straddled Silver's reign and the new sponsor's regime. Conleth had developed a rather serious crush on her; one she hadn't reciprocated. Eventually, he'd turned violent against the scientist that he was convinced she fancied. She'd either quit or been asked to leave and was replaced with the woman who Con toasted with her boyfriend. If Con was that mean to somebody who merely worked the front desk, I shuddered to imagine what he'd do to someone who'd also rejected him.

That's what had brought us to Allston, and the apartment where Tally Bender, the former receptionist, had moved. She'd been tough to track down, as she'd been living with an ex and had been in the process of moving out when she had quit. Not to mention, Allston was populated almost entirely by students from either Boston University or Boston College, so a lot of renting was done through sublets, or moving in as a roommate on somebody else's lease. But once we had a Social Security number from Silver's files, Julian was able to get a fix on her.

I was perched on the hood of Ryu's car, parked a few houses down, as the others made their way to Tally's. Julian was with me, and we'd been tasked with making sure our friends weren't followed into the apartment. Worried for the girl's safety, Ryu and his team were going in hard and fast, so they really meant “stay out of the way.” It sucked, but I had to agree. I'd gotten good at defense, as Ryu's leaving me with Julian acknowledged, but offense was still not my strong suit.

“Sorry you have to babysit,” I said to my fellow halfling, as he cleaned his glasses on his shirt.

He grinned at me, the ridiculously long lashes framing his sea-green eyes waving a friendly “hello” as he blinked.

“No problem. I'm not really all that big on the action,” he said. “If this were a human movie, I'd be the hacker. The one bent over the keyboard, sweat dripping down my face, the music crescendoing behind me to disguise the fact that all I'm really doing is typing.” He finished wiping his specs and put them back on. “Of course, the hacker usually dies in those films, so I hope I buck that trend.”

I laughed. “What is it with you people and pop culture? Don't you have your own stuff to quote?”

“I'm a halfling, too, remember. So I'm curious about my human side. But the purebloods all love human stuff. Humans know how to live. I'd get philosophical and say it's because they know they're going to die, but someone already wrote that book.”

“
The Human Stain
, among others.”

“Interesting choice. Wouldn't figure you for a Philip Roth fan.”

“I know, women are supposed to hate him. But I love me some Roth. He's brutal, but he's honest.”

“You read a lot, don't you?”

“That's how I lived, for a long time,” I said, as I pulled my sleeves down lower over my scarred wrists, my thoughts turning to Jason and the years I'd grieved for him. The pain would always be there, but now it was manageable. “Anyway, yeah, I read. A lot.”

Julian used his elbow to poke me in the ribs, kindly if awkwardly. “Well, now you're living enough for three people.” I snorted in agreement.

We sat in companionable silence till I broke it with a question I knew was probably inappropriate but I was dying to ask.

“Can I ask you a rather invasive personal question, Julian?”

“Probably. Depends. What is it?”

“Did you know your human father?”

Julian met my eyes, and for a second I thought he was going to plead the fifth. But then he took off his glasses for another round of his nervous-cleaning gesture.

“No, I didn't know him at all. I don't think my mother really knew him, to be honest. He was basically a human sperm donor.”

Julian's voice wasn't bitter exactly, but there was an edge to his normally warm tone.

“I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked.”

“No, it's fine. We halflings all have our stories—”

Julian's words were cut short by a shout from Ryu.

“Back!” my lover roared, just as holy hell broke loose.

A burning figure was launched from the second floor of Tally's apartment house. It hit the floor with a disgusting squelching sound as, a second later, her apartment blew heavens to Betsy.

Julian's slim body covered mine, shielding us with his power. We were two houses down from the blast, and yet, when he dropped his barriers, we could still feel the heat on our faces.

“Holy shit,” I breathed. Julian's face was as white as mine in the orange glow.

“Stay here,” he murmured, darting toward the blaze. The others were kicking down the front door of the building, with Daoud frantically pulling fire extinguishers out of his jeans and passing them around. Tally's building had at least five other apartments in it, and it was dinnertime on a Monday night. People would be home.

I started forward but fell back as I heard the wail of sirens in the background. A second later, the first of Stefan's supernatural police arrived in an inconspicuous black sedan. Then the humans arrived: both fire crews and police. The supernatural and human emergency services blended together seamlessly, the one controlling the other like master puppeteers while the other was totally oblivious to any intervention. I retreated to sit on the hood of Ryu's car as I watched the orchestrated chaos unfold, surrounded by neighbors drawn out by the explosion.

“What happened?” said a voice to my left. The question was repeated, and I realized the voice was aimed at me.

“An explosion. Probably a gas leak,” I improvised, not bothering to turn around.

“A gas leak? Wow.”

I was trying to wrap my brain around Conleth. Even as I stared in horror at the paramedics surrounding the ifrit halfling's victim, I felt such terrible pity for him—a pity only exacerbated by everything we'd read in the files yesterday. There was one file of crayon drawings in which he'd drawn pictures of a small stick figure—shaded with orange scribbles—holding hands with two larger stick figures dressed in white uniforms. A terrible parody of the “My Family” portraits I'd drawn in kindergarten.

The man next to me continued to speak, though I was very obviously not listening.

“… old buildings often have things wrong with them,” he was yammering.

I hunkered lower in my jacket, as if cold, but really because I wanted to play turtle and take refuge in my shell. There'd been letters to Santa covered in a scientist's notes on the psychological implications of Conleth's asking for a basketball and a Transformers figure.

“But that's quite an explosion for a gas leak.”

I sighed and finally looked at the man talking to me. He was tall and slender and, except for his height, entirely unprepossessing. His hair glowed very red in the light of the fire.

“Well, gas is highly flammable,” I answered, curtly.

He grinned at me as if I'd made the funniest joke he'd ever heard.

“Would you like to go get an ice cream?” he asked, causing me to start.

“Excuse me?” It was February. I was a stranger. There was a body on the sidewalk.

“Would you like to get an ice cream?” he repeated, as if we were the best of friends.

I stared at him, feeling my temper rise. What was wrong with this guy?

“There's a place around the corner in Brookline that has great ice cream. I love ice cream.”

“Thanks, but no thanks. I'm here with my boyfriend, there's a woman burned to a crisp over there, and it's way too late for ice cream, anyway.”

“C'mon, Jane. You'll love this place. They make this great mint chocolate chip, your favorite…”

I recoiled at the sound of my name.
What the fuck?
I thought, as I inched away from him.

He responded by grabbing my arm. His grip was tight and hot, even through the leather of my jacket.

“Come with me, Jane,” he repeated as I wrenched my arm away.

My fears were confirmed when I felt something burning. Looking down at my sleeve, I saw the charred imprint of a hand. My jacket, where the man had touched it, was smoldering.

“Ryu!” I shrieked, depending on my lover's preternatural hearing to save me.

Standing in front of me, the man's face shifted from one of easygoing neutrality to confusion and then to venomous anger.

“Why'd you call
him
?” he asked. “He's just getting in the way.”

I scrabbled farther back on the car hood, enforcing my shields as I attempted to put more distance between me and the no-longer-mysterious stranger.

“Jane? What's going on?” Ryu asked behind me, his voice calm but edged with danger.

“Ryu, meet Conleth,” I squeaked. “Conleth, Ryu.”

I felt my lover's hand on the waistband of my jeans as he tugged me backward off the car and to his side and then pushed me behind him.

“Conleth,” Ryu said, grimly. “I'm glad you're here. That we get a chance to talk. We know what's been done to you—”

Before Ryu could embark fully on his “why don't you come with us?” speech, the amiable, skinny everyman who'd asked me to go for ice cream was gone. In his place was a being sheathed in flames, his fiery hair whipping about in the maelstrom of power emanating from his wraithlike figure.

The human neighbors surrounding us all backpedalled furiously, only to be herded away and immediately glamoured by a handful of Stefan's deputies. Another few deputies threw up a thickly woven visual shield around us, deflecting any more attention from unwitting human eyes. Despite my influx of emotions at being confronted like this by Conleth, there was still part of me that couldn't help but marvel at the supes' efficiency in dealing with unwanted witnesses.