Bound Guardian Angel (23 page)

Cordray stepped forward. “Everything’s fine.
Let’s eat. The bus will be here soon.”

With one more glance at him and Cordray,
Brenna and Mya carried their platters of food out of the kitchen
and into the dining room. The sound of chattering kids intensified
as they dug into their breakfast.

“You seem . . .off,” Cordray
said, stepping closer, invading his nostrils with that dark scent
of hers. “If this is too much . . .”

He didn’t need her closer, because it made
him want to do things to her. Naughty things. The kind of things he
shouldn’t do with kids in the next room.

Frowning, he took a step away. “I told you,
I’m fine. I’m not losing control or anything, so don’t worry you’re
pretty little head.”

Her head cocked to the side as she swayed
backward. “Pretty little head? Now I know something’s wrong with
you.”

“It’s a figure of speech. You know, kind of
like the one you used earlier. Don’t read anything into it.” But
he’d fucked up. When he’d said she was pretty, it hadn’t been just
a figure of speech in his mind. He’d really meant pretty little
head. Because in that moment, that’s exactly how he saw her. She
was pretty.

Beautiful really.

Desirable.

In the past twelve hours, he’d come to
realize she was a stunning female. Especially here. Her guard was
completely down around the kids. A different light shone around
her, casting her into his awareness in a new way. One that made his
heart beat a little harder and blood rush to his groin.

“Fine. Whatever.” She exhaled heavily and
headed toward the dining room, fatigue sagging her shoulders.
“Let’s just eat so you can get to work and get out of my hair.”

The dining room was alive with activity and
chatter, and somewhere upstairs, a dog barked. A moment later, a
tabby cat tore through the dining room, a small dog on its
tail.

Cordray snapped her fingers. “Roxy.
Out.”

The dog halted, turned, and trotted back
into the living room, where it dropped onto a small dog bed beside
a dark-green recliner.

The place was a study in controlled chaos,
but when he stepped into the dining room behind her, everyone
quieted. Forks suspended over plates, halfway to mouths, as nine
sets of eyes turned toward him, including those of Aiden, Null,
Brenna, and Mya.

“Who’s that?” said an older boy who looked a
year or two away from his transition.

“Leon, this is Trace,” Cordray said. “He’ll
be helping out around here for a few months.”

Leon’s expression hardened. He was the
oldest boy there, almost a full-grown male. No doubt he took it
upon himself to be the man of the house and didn’t like a strange
male invading his space.

Cordray took a seat at the head of the table
and heaped a stack of pancakes and sausage on her plate.

Null wiggled, waved, and motioned him over.
“Sit next to me, Twace.” He beamed proudly from his booster seat,
as if knowing who Trace was pushed him into a higher social
standing among the others.

Trace made his way around the table, the
stares of the other kids like ice sliding down his back. It made
his skin prickle and reminded him of when he was a kid.

In school, the other kids had never talked
to him. They had just stared and whispered to each other about what
a freak he was. They hadn’t known he could hear them, but he could.
It was just one of the oddities about him that had isolated him
from everyone else.

Freak.

A dark shadow had seemed to hover over him
everywhere he went as a child. The other kids had ignored and
avoided him as though he were a demon. He scared them. He scared
everyone. He still did.

Unlike Brak, who had been everyone’s friend.
No one had been afraid of Brak.

But then Mother had given his twin the gift
of white light, hadn’t she? She’d given Trace darkness. Wasn’t that
what she’d told them when they were about Null and Aiden’s age?

“While I carried you inside me, I gave each
of you powerful gifts,” she’d said. “To you, Brak, I gave the
light. The gift to heal. To create. To mend.” She’d brushed her
hand lovingly over Brak’s hair. “And to you, Trace, I gave the gift
of darkness. The power to destroy, to hide, to protect.” There had
been no loving caress through his hair. Just a hardness in her
expression, with the barest hint of compassion in her eyes. As if
he’d brought the darkness on himself rather than received it from
her.

He blinked away the memory as sadness tugged
at his heart, even as the kids around the table recovered from his
introduction and began eating.

Null reached toward him and wrapped his tiny
fingers around one of his. The moment he did, all sadness vanished
from his mind as if blown away on a breeze. Calm and peace swept
over him, and he turned his gaze toward the little boy.

Null smiled up at him, his blue eyes
shimmering, his irises shifting as if they were tiny oceans. Then
they shifted back to normal.

“Bettew?” Null said.

Trace nodded weakly, not sure what to make
of those eyes, then glanced at Cordray, who was watching them. The
curiosity must have shown on his face, because she raised her
fingers as if to tell him she would explain what had just happened
later.

He certainly hoped so, because he felt like
he was in an episode of
The Twilight Zone
. Asylum sure was
living up to its name.

Chapter 13

“What have you got?” Micah stood behind Io at the
massive computer console that looked like something out of the
movie,
The Matrix
. Six monitors displayed frozen images from
various security cameras around or near the Sentinel.

Io swiveled in his chair to face him,
pulling a cherry Tootsie Pop from his mouth with a slurp. “You owe
me for this.”

Io normally didn’t stay at AKM during
daylight hours, especially not since he’d mated King Bain’s
daughter, but Micah had implored him to stick around after his
shift to help hack into the city’s security cameras.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll buy you a fruitcake for
Christmas. Now, what have you got.” He crossed his arms and glanced
from one screen to the next, trying to figure out what he was
looking at.

With a snort, Io spun his chair to face the
monitors as he shoved the Tootsie Pop back in his mouth and tucked
it against his cheek. “I hate fruitcake.” The hard candy knocked
against his teeth as he tapped a couple of keys on his keyboard.
The top left monitor sprang to life. Io slurped the lollipop as he
pulled it out of his mouth again and used it to point to the
screen. “Okay, here’s our boy at your place, playing
Spiderman.”

Micah watched as Skeletor’s dark image
glided down the side of the building, placed his hand on the window
of his apartment, and then a moment later, the glass shattered.

“What did he use to break the window?”

Io tapped another sequence of keys and
brought up the image of a small device that looked like one of
those hand buzzers people pranked their friends with back in the
fifties, only this was larger, flatter, and matte black. It had
what appeared to be a small speaker in the center. The contraption
looked military grade.

“My guess is that he’s using one of
these.”

“And this would
be . . .?”

“It’s called an oscillator. I found this one
on the Dark Net.”

The Dark Net. The black market. Where
society’s criminal element did their online holiday shopping.

Io brought up several more images as he
continued explaining. “The idea is, you hold one of these babies up
to a pane of glass, activate it so it gives off a sound at the
right frequency, and”—he popped his fingers open as if mimicking an
explosion—“Boom! Broken window.” Io crossed his arms. “But ones
this small and this powerful ain’t cheap. Your guy is well
funded.”

Great. Just what Micah needed. A rich cat
burglar with nothing better to do with his time than to break into
his apartment and steal ancient artifacts.

He should have put the ankh in one of the
two seventeen-thousand-dollar Fort Knox safes in his home in the
burbs. That’s really where the damn thing belonged, not in the
small, easily cracked safe in his apartment. But through centuries
of despair after losing Kat, he’d lost his ability to give a fuck
and had tucked everything into the small safe without much care
over what happened to it. When he mated Sam in January and finally
bobbed back to the surface to breathe again, he’d all but forgotten
about the safe. Besides, he’d grown complacent with the idea that
if no one had stolen his priceless heirlooms in nearly a thousand
years no one ever would.

He’d been so wrong, and now he was paying
the price.

But hindsight was twenty-twenty. Once he got
his father’s ankh back—and he
would
get it back—he would
rectify his mistake and put it where it should have been in the
first place.

But first, he had to get the damn thing
back.

“Okay, so what else have you got?”

Io grinned, leaned forward, and typed out
another command. Another monitor came to life. “Okay, here’s your
boy in the alley fighting that drag queen, Cordray.”

Micah smirked. “Drag queen. You’re
funny.”

“Thought you’d like that.” Another monitor
unfroze as Io continued typing and sucking on his Tootsie Pop. “And
this is the shot from the alley. See, there he goes.” The thief
gunned his motorcycle and raced away from where he’d left Cordray
sitting on her ass in the rain. “And this”—Io pointed to another
monitor—“is the parking lot where you found the abandoned mask.
Watch.”

Micah leaned forward and rested his hand on
the desk beside the keyboard. A moment later, Skeletor rolled into
the parking lot. His back was to the camera, and he was hunched
over as if he knew it was there and wanted to hide his face. He
reached under his hood. A moment later, he tossed the mask in the
dumpster. Then he gunned the throttle, spun the rear tire around,
and sped away, keeping his head down.

Yep, Skeletor knew the camera was there.

But Micah caught the flash of skin around
his jaw. “Stop. Rewind.”

Io did as instructed.

“Now, go forward. Slowly.”

The image began to scroll.

“There. Stop.”

Micah leaned closer and narrowed his eyes.
Looked like Skeletor had a square jaw and black, close-shaved
stubble. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something. Add that to
what Cordray had said about Skeletor having vivid, grey-blue eyes,
and they at least had the start of a suspect’s sketch. Slowly but
surely, they were building a face to go with the mask.

Io squinted and leaned toward the monitor.
“Is he laughing?”

Micah pushed off the desk and stood tall as
he peered at the frozen image. “Yeah, he’s laughing. Little fucker.
He knew the camera was there. He knew we’d use it to track
him.”

“Which means . . .?”

“That he’s toying with us. He obviously
knows who I am, and he obviously knows I have resources to hunt his
ass down.” Which put Micah behind the eight ball, because he knew
exactly squat about Skeletor. Eye and hair color, and a square
jawline with black stubble weren’t a lot to go on.

“And he’s using those resources to taunt
you.” Io turned his attention back to his screens. The hard cherry
shell of his Tootsie Pop knocked against his teeth as he tongued it
to the other side of his mouth. “Ballsy little fucker.”

“You’re telling me.” And when he found this
sonofabitch with balls the size of an elephant’s, he’d teach him a
thing or two about respect the Micah Black way. Which involved
fists and maybe a pair of steel-toed boots.

“So,” Io said, “if he knew we would tap into
the city’s cameras to track him, what good is all this footage I
found? He probably staged his entire egress for maximum exposure to
ensure you’d follow him.”

“Exactly.” Micah leaned forward again,
placing his hand on the back of Io’s chair as he scanned the
monitors. “Which means he’s got an ego. And you of all people know
how egos are. They sometimes get in the way of smart
decisions.”

Io had been known to make some pretty
boneheaded decisions in his past, all because he thought he was the
bee’s knees. In fact, one of those decisions—going after Princess
Miriam—had almost gotten him killed a few weeks ago. It had also
been the reason Trace had spent two weeks in King Bain’s dungeon,
Tristan was still on house arrest, and Micah was in charge of the
team now. So yeah, it was safe to say Io knew the trouble an
inflated ego could cause, even if all had ended well when Miriam
turned out to be his mate.

A knowing grin spread across Io’s face.
“Hey, I resemble that remark.” He chuckled. “But you’re right. If
we’re patient, our boy will eventually screw up.”

“And we’ll be there when he does.” Micah
would personally lead the welcome party when Skeletor—or whoever he
really was—made his first wrong move and walked straight into
Micah’s waiting fist. “Show me the rest.”

The next screen came to life. “I followed
him through the city to this location.”

“That’s the Millennium Park parking
garage.”

“Yeah, and guess what?”

“What?”

“Less than five minutes after he pulled in
on his motorcycle, he came back out on foot.” Io sped up the
playback and stopped as a black-clad figure exited the garage,
headed north on Michigan Avenue, crossed the intersection at
Randolph Street, and disappeared inside the Heritage building.

“That’s a residential building,” Micah said,
frowning. “Do you think he lives there?”

Io shrugged. “Hard telling.”

Micah straightened. It seemed too easy. If
Skeletor knew Micah would tap into Chicago’s street cameras, why
would he lead him to where he lived?

“Did he come back out?”