Blood Bound (21 page)

Cam frowned at me in the mirror as he moved to my other side. “How the hell do you know all that?”

“I have a television and I pay attention. How do you
not
know?”

“No time for TV.” He cut up the side of my right sleeve, quicker this time, since there was no bandage to work around. “You’re reading too much into the damn track marks, Liv. Maybe he just donated blood.”

My right sleeve parted down the middle and peeled back in either direction, leaving me to clasp the top of the shirt to my chest. Which was kind of pointless, considering he was about to cut the rest of the material off anyway. “No way,” I insisted, as Cam squatted next to me and took the hem of my T-shirt in one hand. Skilled people can’t donate blood. It’s a shame, from the perspective of the medical community, but a necessity from any other angle. We can’t risk leaving even
drops
of our blood lying around—imagine what entire
bags
of it in the wrong hands could do?

Samples of it could be distributed to an entire army of Trackers, who could find you in no time. That much fresh blood would give even a mediocre Binder the ability to bind you against your will, at least temporarily. You could be compelled to do just about anything.

“You said it yourself—he’s not Skilled.” Cam cut up the right side of my shirt, and I shivered as the dull side of the cold lower blade brushed my side. “And he clearly has no idea what can be done with a drop of blood.”

“But he
was
Skilled,” I insisted, as he lifted my good arm for better access to the material. And that’s when the epiphany hit me, like a bolt of lightning straight to the brain, and suddenly the whole thing made horrifying, earthshaking sense. “Holy shit.” I grabbed Cam’s chin, rough with pale stubble, and lifted his head to force eye contact. “What if he wasn’t giving blood? What if he was getting it, instead?”

He blinked in surprise and the scissors went still against my skin, but he made no move to pull his chin from my hand. “Liv, he looked like a human pincushion. That adds up to a lot of blood transfusions, and he dids

“He’s not sick.” I let go of his face, but Cam’s gaze never left mine. “He’s not Skilled, either. But a few hours ago he
was.
And a few hours before that, he was even
more
Skilled—before the power began fading from his blood….”

It took a second for my implication to sink in, but when it did, he sat down on the bathroom tile, stunned, leaving the last couple of inches of my shirt unclipped. “No, that can’t be right.” The scissors clattered to the floor and he stared up at me. “Is that even possible? Gaining Skills from a blood transfusion?”

“I don’t know.” I’d certainly never heard of it. “But that’s the only thing that explains the dropping Skill levels in his blood. That’s what would happen as the new blood cells die out or are absorbed by his body.”

Cam picked the scissors up again and lifted my arm to snip the last bit of material. “So it doesn’t last.”

“Which would explain the whole pincushion-arm thing.” With my good hand, I pulled the T-shirt off and dropped it into the bathtub with the other bloody materials, and I was then nude from the waist up, except for my bra. “You’d have to keep doing it over and over to maintain the Skill.”

“No wonder he didn’t know better than to leave viable blood all over the place—he’s new at this.” Cam stood. “Fortunately, we’re not.” He gave me an efficient once-over, and I was suddenly very aware that I was half-naked. And that he didn’t seem to have noticed. “Your bra and jeans have been compromised. Throw them in the tub, and you can wipe the blood off your skin with these.” He held up a packet of antibacterial wipes.

“My bra and jeans are
compromised?
So…what? They agreed to share and play nice?”

Cam’s mouth twitched in an almost-grin. “You know what I mean.” He set the wipes on the counter. “I’ll find something else for you to wear.” Then he was gone, and I was alone in the bathroom, trying not to be offended by the fact that his gaze hadn’t lingered.

What did it matter? I winced at the pain in my arm as I unhooked my bra, then dropped it into the tub. We couldn’t be with each other anyway, so we were both better off not looking at what we couldn’t have. But knowing that didn’t make his ironclad restraint any easier to take.

I took off my boots, then unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them to the floor one-handed, while metal scraped metal from down the hall—Cam sorting through the clothes hanging in his closet, by my best guess. I emptied the contents of my pockets—a convenience-store receipt and a handful of change—onto the counter, then dropped my pants into the tub.
What a shame.
They were my favorite pair.

Fortunately, my underwear looked “uncompromised.”

I gave my left side a once-over with one of the wipes, then dropped it into the tub, too.

The hangers went still, and a moment later, Cam’s footsteps echoed from the hall. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my arm, I sat, arms crossed over my chest, legs crossed in a vain attempt to lookmal, while sitting on a toilet in my underwear. And as he rounded the corner into the bathroom, wearing a clean shirt and critically eyeing the one he carried, I glanced down at myself self-consciously and noticed the black ring tattooed on my left thigh.

Shit!

As he looked up, I recrossed my legs in the other direction, covering the tattoo. My heart raced from the near-catastrophe. He couldn’t know. Ever. I’d rather cut the mark out of my own skin than ever let Cam know I was bound to Ruben Cavazos.

“Van left these here after she…” Cam blinked, and his next words were lost to us both as he stared. He hadn’t seen the mark, but he was seeing everything else. Finally.

For both of our sakes, I shouldn’t have let him look. And I certainly shouldn’t have
enjoyed
letting him look. But mistakes are just another kind of choice, and saddled with two bindings, I’d had precious few choices lately. So I let him look, for several long seconds.

“After she…?” I prompted finally, fighting a smile at his reaction, and at the fact that I could still provoke it.

Cam blinked again, and I could practically see the return of upper-level reasoning as blood was diverted back into his head from…wherever else it had been. “After she got her own place,” he finished, glancing at the clothes he held to avoid looking at me. “You guys are about the same height, so this should work until you can grab a change from home.”

And there was nothing stopping me from doing that. I could throw on Van’s clothes and make Cam take me back to my office right then. I could even explain why I’d left him in the car. But I didn’t want to go. Once this was over, I’d have to leave him again, but until then, I had a justifiable excuse for hanging around. And a dark spot of guilt on my soul for not entirely hating the circumstances that had brought us together.

“Here.” Cam handed me a black baby-doll-style T-shirt. On the front was a beautifully detailed golden dragon clutching a human skull with one clawed foot. The crinkled, gauzy black skirt was ankle length, and heavier than it looked. It wasn’t something I would ever have bought for myself, but I couldn’t afford to be choosy, considering the alternative.

But there was no bra.

“Thanks.”

When he turned to give me privacy—which I would have found pointless, if not for the mark on my thigh—I stepped into the skirt first and didn’t fully relax until it was tied at my waist, my secret safely hidden.

“Okay, assuming you’re right about these transfusions, where’s Hunter getting the blood?” Cam asked, as I carefully pulled the shirt over my head.

“I don’t know. But the implications of this are beyond terrifying.” I tugged the shirt into place, trying to ignore the pain reawakening in my arm, then tapped him on the shoulder. Cam turned and met my gaze in the mirror as I ran my hands through my hair, trying not to look at the rest of me. Blood loss and exhaustion were
not
good looks for me. “I mean, if the resources are there, men like Hunter—or anyone else—could be Travelers one day, Blinders the next and Seers the day after that. Men like Tower could hirne thug and get a whole series of Skill sets. Maybe even more than one at a time. Though I’m not sure how that would work.”

I wasn’t sure how
any
of it would work, but the concept alone was staggering. It was world-changing. And if the government couldn’t even officially recognize the existence of Skills, it would never be able to regulate the renting of them.

Rented Skills, like everything else private industry couldn’t legally provide, would be offered up to the black market on a silver platter. And presumably, those who could provide the rarer Skills—Seers, Bleeders and Jammers—and those with extraordinary ability in any of the more common Skill sets would be in high demand.

And worth even more to the syndicates than they already were.

“Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s clean this mess up, then we can figure out our next move.” Cam doused the contents of the tub with rubbing alcohol while I took a match from the box. When he was done, I lit the match and tossed it onto the pile.

Flames erupted immediately, and the fire burned hot and fast. Cam flipped on the ceiling vent to suck out the smoke, and when the flames started to threaten the shower curtain, I pulled the plastic liner out of reach. Thank goodness for porcelain tubs—fiberglass would have burned right along with the clothing and bandages we needed to destroy.

When we were sure all the blood was destroyed, Cam turned on the water and aimed the handheld shower head at the base of the flames. The blaze was out in seconds, leaving only the soggy, charred rubble in the tub and another layer of smoke on the ceiling—a common sight in most Skilled households.

Before he moved out, Cam would have to repaint the entire bathroom. As would I, in my own apartment.

I grabbed a contractor bag—a big, thick black garbage bag, like building contractors use—from beneath the kitchen sink while Cam dug up a couple of pairs of thick dishwashing gloves, and I held the bag while he scooped the wet rubble into it, so I wouldn’t have to move my injured arm too much. Then he walked the trash to the apartment complex’s Dumpster while I used the high-pressure setting on the showerhead to spray the remaining tiny bits of char and ash down the drain. After a final scrub with a disposable sponge and some bathroom cleaner, the shower was fit to use once more.

“Thanks for doing all this,” I said, settling onto a bar stool while Cam pulled open the fridge.

He glanced at me over the open door. “I’d do more, if you’d let me.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing.

“You hungry?” Cam asked, pulling two bottles of water from the fridge. “Fajitas wouldn’t take long….”

“Shouldn’t we focus on finding out who’s trying to kill Hadley? Or who’s selling Skilled blood transfusions to known criminals? Or both?”

Cam closed the fridge and eyed me across the counter, his hands flat on the tile. “You were just shot. You need rest, water and food.”

“I don’t have time for any of that.” The monster who wanted Hadley dead wasn’t going to put his horrific mission on hold just so I could take a nap.

“Okay, then, you grab my laptop, Hunter’s cell phone and his bank statement, and see if you can’t find out where he got this super-Skilled blood transfusion while I make dinner. Because I’m starving.”

I considered arguing that with his help, the detective work would go much faster. But I wasn’t entirely sure that was true—too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen. Also, he’d already started pulling beef and vegetables from the fridge.

And I was a
little
hungry…

“Laptop’s in my bedroom, on the dresser,” he said, when my lack of objection seemed to indicate surrender.

“Fine. But make it fast.” I waved one arm at the spread of colorful peppers, tomatoes and red meat now covering the kitchen peninsula. And only then did it occur to me that he hadn’t pressed for the explanation I owed him. I wasn’t sure why he’d forgotten—could that be attributed to the sight of me nearly naked?—but I wasn’t going to remind him.

I stopped in his bedroom doorway, surprised to realize that even after six years and at least one move, he still had the same furniture we’d shared for two of our three years together, in college. Same scarred upright chest of drawers, which he was still calling a dresser. Same weight bench in the corner, ancient free weights stacked by the wall. Same simple iron-frame headboard with stupid decorative balls topping the posts. I wondered if the mattress still squealed, or if he’d replaced it.

Curious, I almost sat on the bed to test it, but then my gaze found the laptop and its cord on top of the chest of drawers, and I remembered why I’d come in the first place. And it wasn’t to try out Cam’s mattress. No matter how hard memory and nostalgia tried to argue otherwise.

At the peninsula again, I plugged in the laptop and dug Hunter’s phone and bank statement from my satchel.

I started with the statement. I’d been over it several times before, but this time I was looking for a big expense, not a big deposit. I wasn’t sure how a Skilled blood transfusion would work but I was sure it would be expensive, and I was sure it would have to have been done—and thus paid for—very recently, considering how quickly it had faded from his blood signature.

Unfortunately, the period covered by the bank statement ended the week before—the payment from the Tower syndicate was literally the last entry. Which meant that any transactions made in the past eight days would go on the next reporting cycle, and until then, they’d be accessible online only.

“Hey, you said Hunter paid most of his bills online, right? Did you notice whether he has online access at his bank? Statements in his inbox, or something like that?” Though he clearly got printed statements, too…

Cam looked up from the peppers he was chopping. “Yeah, I think so. But you can’t log in without his password.”

“Fortunately, we have his account number….” I held up the bank statement, then set it on the counter and crossed the room to grab Hunter’s laptop from the box of supplies Cam had brought in to restock. “And if he’s anything like the rest of the country, he probably uses onepassword—or variations of one password—for most of his accounts. I’m guessing he’s smart enough to use something random, but not smart enough to keep all the variations straight. Which means he probably keeps a list.”