Blood Bound (11 page)

“I know.” Better than most. “But I also know that the closer you stand to the monsters, the more human they start to look.”

And perspective was something I could not afford to lose.

Seven

“H
is apartment was empty, but there was blood in the bathroom. His, not Shen’s,” Liv said into her phone, one boot propped on my dashboard. “We think he was hired. Someone wired a big chunk of cash to his checking account last week.”

Anne spoke during the pause, but I couldn’t hear much of what she said over the traffic noise as I turned onto Third Street, the main drag and the heart of Tower’s empire.

“Not yet. Cam thinks he knows someone who can trace the account, but for now, we’re still trying to sniff him out the hard way. Any idea why someone might want Shen dead? Something to do with his work, maybe?”

Anne spoke again, and I nodded through the window to one of Tower’s men on the street, his four rust-colored chain lengths showing beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt. He nodded back, then glanced at Liv in my passenger’s seat. If he recognized her I saw no sign, but being seen with her was good enough. It was proof that I wasn’t trying to hide anything. And that she wasn’t, either.

“Okay, just let us know if you think of anything,” Liv said, and a second later, she flipped her phone closed.

“How is she?” I asked, cruising slowly down the street toward the next checkpoint four blocks away. Tower’s eyes were everywhere, and hiding from them would look like guilt.

Liv shrugged and brusd long brown hair off her shoulder. “Fine, considering. I think Hadley was in the room though, ’cause she didn’t say very much. It’s like she doesn’t have the luxury of truly mourning, with the kid around.”

“She sounds like a good mother.” Though it was hard for me to picture Annika as anything other than the twenty-two-year-old small-town free spirit she’d been when I’d met her. Back then, she’d been more committed to vegetarianism than to any man she’d ever met—holding on to a relationship must have been hard for someone who could taste every lie—but I hadn’t seen her since the night Liv dumped me. In the middle of that damned party. It’s amazing how much can change in six years.

And how much stays the same.

“How did she get in touch with you?” Liv asked, sliding her phone into her pocket. “If she couldn’t find me, how did she find you?”

I exhaled slowly. “I still have the same phone number.” Because I wanted it to be easy for Olivia to get in touch with me, should she ever decide to.

Liv suddenly gripped the armrest built into the passenger’s side door, as if she hadn’t even heard me. “Is this Third Street?”

“Yeah. You still like Greek? There’s this great gyro stand on the corner, about a mile—”

Her gaze hardened. “You’re headed west. Deeper into Tower’s side of town.”

“That’s where the gyro stand is….” I began, but she wasn’t buying it. And she didn’t miss my nod to the next sentinel, on the corner.

“You’re parading me down the fucking gauntlet.”

“I’m taking preemptive measures,” I insisted. “If they think I’m hiding you, they’ll assume you have something to hide, and you’re going to be checked for a mark by every initiate we run into.” And if we ran into anyone with more than three chain links, I wouldn’t be able to prevent a more thorough search, and we both knew Liv wasn’t going to simply submit to one, either. Her trigger finger was looking a little twitchy.

“Which is why we should be heading to the south fork,” she said. Toward the only neutral-controlled part of town. Which was where she both lived and worked, in spite of the higher rent.

“Olivia, Hunter lives on the west side, and so does my computer guru. I don’t think any of the leads are going to pull us toward the south today,” I said, but she looked unconvinced. “What’s the big deal? You’re unbound, and you must’ve done work on this side before.”

“Yeah, back when I worked for Rawlinson, but I haven’t been here since… Since I quit.”

“Well, that’s too bad, ’cause the gyros are awesome.” I pulled into the last available spot at the curb and shifted into Park. “Let’s just relax and have some lunch while I track Van down.”

“Fine,” she said, one hand on the door handle. “But you owe me some answers, and unless you want to give them here, we need to find someplace more private to eat.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I texted Van from the line in front of the gyro cart: Got a minute? I need some help.

The response came a minute later, as Liv stepped up to the cart to order: Yr place, 1 hr.

Fifteen minutes later, I parked in a covered space in front of my apartment building and snatched the bulging white paper sack from Liv’s lap. She glanced at me in amusement—a good look for her. “What, you don’t trust me with the food?”

“Sorry. I’m starving.”

She laughed. “I couldn’t tell from the four gyros you ordered.”

“Don’t forget the dolmades.” I swung my car door shut and led Liv toward the exterior staircase. “They’re the best in the city. Trucked in daily from some restaurant on the east side.”

“Yeah. Karagas. The owner’s mother makes them every morning. They’re best fresh.”

I tried on a grin as we walked up the stairs. “What, you won’t set foot on the west side, but you’ll have lunch in Cavazos’s backyard? No wonder people are talking.”

Liv scowled. “People are talking because someone’s started a smear campaign. The rumors are malicious, and evidently aimed at the west side of the city. Someone’s put a target on my head. My guess is Travis Spencer. He’s had it out for me ever since I found the governor’s missing mistress.”

I nearly choked on my own surprise. “That was you?” It hadn’t made the local news, of course. Officially, no one was supposed to know that governor was getting some on the side. But Trackers had been rabid over that job, and I’d never heard who finally found the target.

“Yeah. Paid for two whole months’ worth of office space. But evidently it also earned me some enemies. Stupid rumor-spreading bastards.”

“Relax, Liv. It’s just a bunch of idiots talking, and all you have to do to prove them wrong is wear short sleeves.” I shrugged. “Besides, I’d go to Karagas for lunch every day if I didn’t value my life just a bit higher than good Greek food.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t signed over your free will in exchange for a paycheck, you could enjoy both your life
and
your lunch wherever the hell you want. Then you could be a part of the solution, rather than the problem. Wasn’t that the plan?”

“Plans change.” I kicked the door closed and dropped my keys on the coffee table, and when I met Liv’s gaze, I was almost bowled over by the pain and power of my own memories. This part of her hadn’t changed—this fiery temper threaded with innate goodwill. She would have been one hell of a lawyer, or a child advocate, or a…superhero.

“What happened to the FBI, Cam?” She took the bag from me and pulled out two cartons of dolmades.

I shrugged and took two plates down from the cabinet over the bar, avoiding her gaze. “Last I heard, they’re still out there fighting crime. Catching murderers and foiling terrorists.”

“And you’re here, wasting a degree in criminal justice o you can track losers for a Mafia boss.”

“Yeah, well, it turns out the FBI can hold its own without me.” I pulled two forks from the drawer to my right and gave her one while I used the other to slide three dolmades onto my plate.

“What happened to the interview? Did you even go?”

“No, Liv, I didn’t go. Okay?” I dropped my fork on my plate, and the clang of metal against glass was louder than I’d intended. “I didn’t go on the fucking interview. I didn’t join the FBI. I don’t fight on the side of truth and justice, and frankly, having been out in the real world for a while now, I can say with some measure of certainty that it was a dumb idea in the first place. Just the stupid dream of a stupid, idealistic kid with a shiny diploma and no clue how the world really works.”

At twenty-two, I’d thought I was going to change the world. Or, at the very least, I was going to clean it up. I was going to join the FBI and use my Skill—secretly, of course—to track serial killers and pedophiles, and make the world a better place, one conviction at a time.

“It wasn’t dumb,” Liv insisted. “A little naive, maybe, but you could have pulled it off. You
should
have pulled it off.” She pushed one of the bar stools out with her foot and sat. “So what happened? How did you get tangled up with Tower instead?”

“I got shot.”

“What?” Her fork hovered over the open carton.

“I got shot. The week I moved here.” I took my first bite while she stared, obviously trying to decide what to ask first.

“How? What happened?”

I shrugged and swallowed, my favorite food suddenly tasteless with the memory. “I don’t know. I was walking down Hyacinth, about four nights after I got here, all farm-fresh and clueless—”

Liv frowned. “Hyacinth. That was in my neighborhood.”

“I know.”

She stabbed a dolma with her fork and the leaf started to come unwrapped as she gestured with it. “Do I even want to know what you were doing two blocks from my apartment?”

“Tracking you. You owed me an explanation—and, frankly, an apology—and I’d come prepared to demand both. But obviously, I didn’t find you.” Not that night, anyway. “I found the business end of a bullet instead.” I stood and pulled up my shirt to expose the small, round puckered scar just to the right of my navel. “I never saw the shooter or the gun. I was just walking down the street one minute, then flat on my back the next, lying in a pool of my own blood. I was trying to hold my guts in with one hand and dig my phone out of my pocket with the other when these guys just showed up out of nowhere.”

“Tower’s men?” she asked, her food untouched.

“Yeah.”

Her brows rose in challenge. “You do know they’re probably the ones who shot you.”

“Probably.” I certainly couldn’t prove otherwise. “All know for sure is that they’re the ones who saved me. They took me to one of their doctors and paid the bill. They destroyed all the blood I spilled. Then, when I was released, they took me to Adler’s house—he’s my direct supervisor now. His wife put me in their guest room and took care of me for weeks, while I recovered. After that, how could I not sign with Tower? I’d come to town with nothing, spent more than I had on a hotel room I never actually checked out of. By the time I was able to get out of bed, I was flat-ass broke, unemployed and—”

“And you didn’t have a friend in the world to turn to,” Liv interrupted. “Because I wasn’t speaking to you.”

“That’s not what I was going to say,” I insisted.

“But we both know it’s true.”

I couldn’t argue. “Anyway, it was only supposed to be for one term. Five years. They’d lost their best Tracker and I needed a job—”

“Convenient…” she noted, peeling the foil back from the first gyro.

“At the time, yeah,” I admitted. “It seemed pretty damned convenient.” Fortuitous, even.

Liv swallowed her first bite and stared at me with her brows drawn low over those big blue eyes. “You know they set you up, right? They didn’t save you. They found you, assessed your potential, then shot you.”

“Liv…” I began, but she spoke over me—it almost felt like old times.

“By that point, they had you right where they wanted you. You were incapacitated and in their debt, and they had a
fucking huge
sample of your blood, which is probably on file in a room full of sensitive information somewhere. You didn’t really think they destroyed all of it, did you? Please tell me you’re not that gullible.”

“Of course not.” But wasn’t I? Liv was sitting in my kitchen, inches away, telling me what a fool I was, and all I could think of was how badly I wanted to kiss her—and not just to shut her up, though that benefit would
not
go unappreciated.

“It was a win-win for Tower from the beginning,” she insisted, dropping her gyro onto her plate so she could tick off points on her fingers. “He has you shot. If you die, at least you can’t sign on with the competition. If you live, he has a chance to recruit you, albeit through pretty damn vicious means. If you sign on voluntarily, he has one hell of a new Tracker. If you don’t, he has enough of your blood to bind you without your consent, at least for a while. Either way, you’re his, for the cost of a bullet, some gauze and a round of antibiotics.” She leaned on the counter with both elbows, eyeing me with the first sign of amusement I’d seen from her in hours. “You always were a cheap date.”

I laughed. “You’re one to talk.” On our first date, sophomore year in college, we’d split a carnival hot dog and a cherry slushy—which she’d then vomited all over us both on the Tilt-A-Whirl.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” Her nostalgic smile lasted as long as it took for me to pull two Coronas from the fridge. “Greek food, Mexican beer. Interesting combination.” She reached across the counteto pull the bottle opener/magnet from the side of my fridge, then popped the top off her bottle.

I watched her take a long draft, and when she set the bottle down, she eyed me pensively. Almost reluctantly. “Please tell me you already knew all that. About Tower’s unconventional recruiting methods. Because I thought that was just an urban legend until about ten minutes ago….”

“At the time, I didn’t know,” I admitted, popping the top off my own bottle. Suddenly I wished I’d poured something stronger. “But it didn’t take long to figure out. And it’s no urban legend.” Since my first binding mark, I’d seen two other Skilled members netted the same way, and rumor had it that syndicates in other major cities had caught on to the same recruiting techniques. Certain Skills—and the most talented in
any
Skill set—were in demand, and there was nothing those in power wouldn’t do to secure the services they wanted.

Liv took another drink, then stared at me through the half-empty bottle, as if the beer-bottle filter might reveal something she hadn’t seen in me before. “So, if you figured it out, why’d you re-up? How’d you get those second and third chain links so fast?”