Breaker (Ondine Quartet Book 4) (27 page)

Her gaze flickered over us one at a time.

“I was told I’d be meeting three chevaliers.” Suspicious eyes took me in. “Why are you here?”

“I’m the third chevalier.”

She made a sound of disbelief but opened the door wider. “Well, come on. I don’t have all night.”

We followed her into a cold corridor. Ivory tiles dully gleamed under florescent lights and the sharp, acrid scent of bleach and sterile steel flooded my nose.

Eleanor strode ahead, the sensible low heels of her pumps clicking against the floor.

I hurried to keep up. “My name is —“

“I don’t care who you are,” she said in a rude tone that made me want to drop kick her. “I just want this over with.”

She led us into her office, dimly lit by a desk lamp. Along one wall, a glass window provided a clear view of the autopsy room.

“Well?” She sat at her desk and imperiously raised her brow. “What’s this about?”

“It’s about the death of an ondine you might have handled,” I began. “Two years ago. Went by the name Naida Durrand.”

“Here in Portland?”

“San Aurelio.”

“Oh,
that
one.”

Cam rocked forward on his feet. “You remember something?”

“It was the first death we had in San Aurelio. What a pain in my ass that was.”

“Oh?” I said coolly.

“It’s one thing to deal with paperwork, another thing entirely when you have to transport a body across state lines. I had to head down there with Barry and Reese to —“

“Wait.” Julian held up his hand. “You took the body?”

She glared at the interruption. “Isn’t that what I just said? We were told to go down to San Aurelio and bring her body to the Oregon coast.”

I blinked. “Someone ordered you to remove her body?”

She gave an irritated sigh. “You come here to ask about something that took place two years ago and you don’t even know the basics?”

“Why don’t you humor us and tell us what you know.”

She glanced at something on her laptop screen then turned back to us. “I don’t know anything else. I received a last minute call specifying details, including the address of the San Aurelio mortuary. The body had already been placed in a coffin and was scheduled to be buried the following day, so we needed to get it out immediately.”

“How did you ID her?”

She shrugged. “Mortuary records. Name on the coffin.”

“Nothing else was with her?” Cam asked. “Any belongings? Weapons?”

“No.”

“Where did you bring the body?” Julian crossed his arms. “Who did you bring it to?”

“No one. The job was to bring her to the beach along Route 9 and leave her along the coast. So we did.”

I stared. “You just left the body there? Along the water?”

“I don’t get paid to help elementals.” She turned back to her computer and I resisted the urge to grab that laptop and smash it against the nauseatingly sterile, bleached floor. “I help because my mother guilted me into doing something,” she raised her hands, “‘for her people’.”
 

Breaking her fingers for using air quotes probably wasn’t the best way to handle the situation.

Cam, thankfully, had as little tact as me. “So illegally dumping a body along the coast has nothing to do with you?”
 

“Human laws might have something to say about that,” Julian added.

Her lips thinned. “I have several reports I need to finish tonight.”

Her gaze flickered over us, impatient and insistent.
 

Silent, we stared back.

She gave an exasperated sigh. “Look, I get an order and do what I’m told. I did my job.”

“Who did the call come in from?”

“You expect me to remember? It happened two years ago.”

I leaned in and rested my hands on her desk. “Try.”

She paled slightly at the look on my face. “Female. Young.”

Julian tilted his head. “That’s it?”

“Why are you asking about a body from two years ago?” She stood, her voice tightening with suspicion. “And why did you come all the way here to meet in person? Haverleau’s Department of Justice usually handles inquiries over the phone.”

“That’s classified,” I said.

Her brow rose higher up her forehead. “Over some ondine’s corpse?”

Julian inhaled and I felt slightly reassured that he was just as outraged as me.
 

“Eleanor,” Julian said softly. “You’re speaking of someone’s mother. I suggest —“

A sharp crack came from the hallway.

We whirled, weapons in hand.

“That light has been giving me trouble all week.” Eleanor’s flat eyes took in Julian. “And spare me your lecture, chevalier. Humans know more about death than you ever will.”

Cam stepped forward, but stopped at my gesture.
 

She’s not worth it.

“Every corpse is someone’s father or mother, sister or brother, son or daughter. Doesn’t change anything. Once you die, you’re nothing more than a husk, an empty vessel of what once was but is no more.” Eleanor walked to her office door. “I deal with the dead. I should know.”

“Maybe you should try dealing with the living once in a while,” Cam muttered. “Might help your social skills.”

She opened the door. “If there’s nothing else?”

I moved past her first, my shoulder deliberately checking her. I may’ve resisted the urge to kick her ass, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t above a little reminder that I could have.

Another crackle echoed.
 

A few feet away, a ceiling light flickered out, leaving half the hallway in darkness.

“That stupid breaker keeps acting up.”

Muttering a string of complaints about employee ineptitude and lack of state funding, she pulled out a set of keys from her pocket and unlocked the double-doors next to her office.
 

Janitorial supplies were messily stored along one side of the large storage room. Electrical breakers lined the farthest wall.

Eleanor randomly began testing different switches, trying to find the problem plug.

“She’s something else,” Julian murmured.

“We need to go to San Aurelio.”

Cam looked at me. “Why?”

“To find out if what she said really happened.”

“She has no reason to lie.”

“I know,” I said, impatient. “But that doesn’t mean she’s telling us the truth.”

Julian’s gaze flickered over my face. “Kendra—“

“I don’t doubt she took a body to the coast. But she didn’t know who my mother was, what she looked like. She took a body based solely upon the name on a coffin. What if it wasn’t her?”

“I know it’s hard to believe something like that happened,” Julian said quietly. “But the likelihood it wasn’t your mother is even slimmer—“

“There’s only one way to find out.” I crossed my arms. “We have to go to San Aurelio.”

How much of my life had been a lie?
 

The police officer who’d brought me to identify her body had been the Shadow. I’d sat next to him in his cruiser, misread the iciness of his expression as a result of years on the job, not because he was the evil who’d plagued our world.

I’d gone to her grave once. She’d been buried in the same city cemetery with other intransients and indigents.
 

Someone without family. Without a home.
 

I needed to know.

Wariness crossed Cam’s face. “What do you want to do there?”

I took a deep breath. “Open that coffin.”

“No. I’ve done a lot of fucked up shit with you, Irisavie, but see this?” He swiped horizontally through the air. “I’m drawing the line. No way am I digging up your mom’s grave.”

Even Julian seemed uneasy. “I don’t know.”

“We need to know if she’s in there or not,” I said flatly.

Uneasiness pressed in. The answers we were searching for were in my mother’s grave. I was certain of it.

The suffocating energy grew against my skin and my Virtue awakened, the current restlessly coursing through my veins.

Julian and Cam tensed. They felt it, too.

Something was wrong.

Empath reached down the dark hallway, searching.

The air shivered.

The light suddenly flickered back on, a blinding flash of white after the prolonged dark.

Against the brightness, four shadows dashed down the hall.

The light gave out again.

Eleanor stepped out. “I think that plug is finally—“

“Move!”
 

Julian shoved her back into the storage room. Her shriek blended with the unnatural guttural roar of the first Aquidae.

He lunged, hand swiping the air where she’d stood moments earlier. Gold flashed through the air as Julian’s
kouperet
accurately made contact with its palm.

He reared back, then whipped around. Several more strikes and it dropped to the ground, its torso a bloody mess.

I rapidly blinked, my eyes struggling to adjust to the shifting light.

Three shadows raced down the hall toward us. Shit.

Cam pivoted, his back to me, arms braced to engage the left while I focused on the one in the middle.

Empath’s heated current flowed into my blade, my Virtue listening to the air as it whispered the truth.

Left.

I ducked. Arms narrowly missed my head. I kicked back hard, my foot grazing its ribs and smashing against the wall.

Gritting my teeth against the pain, I shifted, right arm arcing down from above. The blade tore through its back.
 

The demon bellowed but slipped out of my grasp before I could rotate behind it.

To my left, Cam feigned a strike and attempted to shift behind the demon, but didn’t have enough room to gain leverage.
 

The hallway was too narrow. We needed to get outside.

I sprinted down the hallway toward the door, Julian and Cam fast on my heels.

The Aquidae closed in, the corrupt dark magic pressing against our back.
 

The hair on the back of my neck rose.

The door loomed ahead, red exit sign blinking like a beacon.

Please be unlocked. Please be unlocked.

“Move your legs, Irisavie,” Cam snarled. He pushed ahead by a millisecond and threw his entire body against the door handle.

It flew open.

Crisp, cool air greeted us. We raced to the center of the parking lot. I leaped onto a car hood, pivoted, and used the momentum to spring off.

The Aquidae was half a foot behind me.

My foot caught its jaw and its head snapped back with a satisfying snap.

Three strikes before it hit the ground. Blood gushed out of its Origin and seeped into the asphalt.
 

I looked up. Julian engaged with an Aquidae to the east, his movements assured and decisive.

Cam was about twenty feet in front of me, still fighting off the same Aquidae. He smiled, his eyes bright with bloodthirst and adrenaline, fury and heart and training visible in every slash of his
kouperet
, every thrust, block, and maneuver.

A movement from the right.

The first Aquidae who’d attacked exited the building, his body regenerated.
 

It headed straight for Cam.

I pushed myself off the ground and ran, willing my legs to pump harder, faster.

No.
 

The Aquidae neared.

I raced so fast I almost flew.

Fifteen feet.

Fear rose and clogged my throat. I wasn’t going to make it.

Cam’s
kouperet
pierced the Origin scar of the Aquidae he was fighting. His triumphant yell reverberated through the night.

Ten feet.

The Aquidae shot forward, inhumanly fast.

My mouth opened to scream a warning.

A hooded figure suddenly appeared from behind two parked cars.
 

The flash of a
kouperet
sliced through the air, catching the demon from behind. His eyes widened slightly in surprise and then he dropped with a dull thud.

Cam turned, his face blanching at the dead Aquidae at his feet.
 

My breathing slowed.

It’d been close.

Cam’s gaze shifted to the stranger, whose back was to me.

He went completely white.

What the
—

The stranger began walking away.

Instinct tugged at me.
 

“Wait!” I called out.

The figure paused, then slowly turned and pulled back his hoodie.

He was almost unrecognizable.
 

His hair, once always shorn close to his head, had grown slightly longer. But his bulk and the muscular form had faded, thinned as if the night had sucked it away. The streetlight of the parking lot caught the cool undertones of his dark brown skin.

“Gabe.”

For a long moment, he simply stared at me. “What are you doing here?”

His voice was rough as if he didn’t use it much.

“I —“ I shook my head. Gabe was here. Right in front of me. “I…um…Are you all right? I —“

“Why are you here?” This time, he directed the question at Julian.

“Work,” he answered tersely. “You were tracking them?”

Gabe nodded. “Been trying to find a way to separate them but they always traveled together. Tonight, they were at a nearby bar and suddenly took off in this direction.” His brow furrowed and for a second, I remembered the strict uncle who’d headed the training program at Lumiere. “They saw you.”

“My aura,” I murmured.

Julian caught my eye, but thankfully didn’t rub it in. “Did you sense their approach?”

I shook my head. Looked like the Shadow had gotten the word out to all his cells to use nix blood all the time.

“We’ve been fighting off large armies,” Cam said, his expression slightly uncertain as if he still couldn’t believe Gabe was standing in front of us. Couldn’t blame him. “They’ve all been cloaking themselves against us.”

“Against me,” I said bluntly.

An awkward silence fell. Gabe’s face hardened and he abruptly turned.
 

I reached out and grabbed his arm.

He stopped. But he didn’t face me, either.

He looked down at my hand, his gaze lingering on my chevalier mark.