BROKEN BLADE (7 page)

I’d been in the middle of leaving town when I was kidnapped. Bags packed, door open, ready to climb in and head out…and then Xavier had appeared.

The last clear thought was stumbling back against my car, and the last clear emotion was terror.

Shooting Goliath a narrow look, I shrugged. “I’m pretty damn close. But don’t tell her.”

“It’s okay. When you freak out, you kick the things that scare you in the balls.” He tossed my keys at me.

Snagging them out of the air, I climbed in. “I haven’t been doing much of that lately.”

“That’s because the person you’re fighting right now is yourself.” He grinned at me and said, “I wouldn’t intentionally kick myself in the balls, Kitty. Takes a bit more work to fight that battle. But you’ll get there.”

I wish I was half as sure of myself as he was.

Without letting myself think it through any longer, I started the car.

East Orlando was a good forty-five minutes away and the longer I thought about this, the more likely it was I’d lose what little nerve I had left.

Think about the girl.

Don’t think about anything else. Just her. And maybe Sam. Because you’d
really
like to kick her in the teeth.

It was an easy job. I just had to track down a phone number and it wasn’t like I couldn’t do that, right? I’d think about her, figure out the steps to solving the job.

Forty-five minutes to plot out, figure out, try to decide just what her problem might be. I could do this…right?

* * * *

The girl in the coffee shop had just a little bit of magic on her. I felt it as I walked inside and automatically, I tensed, bracing myself.

She looked at me with so much terror, some part of me felt sorry for her. As her gaze dropped to the Desert Eagle strapped to my thigh then bounced to the blade riding on my hip, I wondered if I should have left the weapons locked up.

Gut response—
no
.

Somebody approached me, eyes wide with terror and I flipped out my ID card.
Fraud!
The voice was a scream in the back of my head but I wasn’t about to have my weapons taken away. “I work for the Assembly,” I said, tapping my finger against the badge. “I’m meeting somebody here on the job.”

“You can’t carry weapons in here like that.”

“I can.” I tucked the badge back away and slid my hands into my pockets as I held his gaze. I didn’t want to pick a fight with him. I wanted to go back home. “Assembly and human law are both clear on this. I’m recognized as an investigator under Assembly law and I’m often chasing after things that aren’t human. In order to do that job, I need my weapons. If you’d like to argue the fact, I can call Banner and the Assembly, you can call the human cops and we can argue it all out, right here in front of your customers, which isn’t going to reassure them. Or you can let me do my job and I’ll leave a lot sooner.”

Something ugly flickered in his eyes. “I’m not required to serve you. I have the right to refuse service to anybody.”

“I don’t recall asking for service.” I edged around him and started toward the girl. She looked even more scared now.

I felt him moving at my back before I heard him. Ducking and spinning to the side, I turned to face him. “You don’t want to put your hands on me.”

Nobody
would do that again. I itched to pull a blade. I hadn’t brought my sword, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t carrying other sharp, shiny objects. The knife at my hip would work just fine.

He thought the gun was scary?

His throat worked as he glared at me, then he shot the girl behind me a dirty look. “Make it quick.” He bit off the words like they tasted bad, his face twisted in a tight, ugly scowl.

I kept him in my line of sight as I moved over to the table. She’d picked a four-top. Instead of taking the seat across from her, I took the one at her left hand, keeping the counter—and the man behind it— in my line of sight. My new friend was shooting daggers at me.

I waved at him before focusing back on the girl.

She feels kinda witchy
. Now that I was closer to her, that was how she read to me. 
Kinda witchy
.

There was an odd twinge of magic in her blood that just felt strange to me. And there was something else.

I could feel the buzz of her soul, batting against my mind.

But it was more than that. She was terrified of me, but I caught an odd sense of hunger. Need. It flickered in the back of her eyes and as I studied her face, she licked her lips and looked away. Her hands, small and delicate, were clenched into bloodless fists.

Her respirations were too fast.

So was her heart.

And that weird something—

“You’re pregnant,” I said as it clicked.

Her skin, a soft olive gold, flushed and she hunched her shoulders. “How did you know?”

“I’m just that good,” I snapped. It sounded better than
I don’t know
.

Groaning, I braced my elbows on the table and ground the heels of my hands against my eyes. “It’s a werecat’s kid, isn’t it?” No wonder she was so desperate to find him.

“Yes.” Her voice came in a broken little gasp and I lowered my hands, staring at her face as darkness roared in the back of my mind.

She was
terrified
.

“Did he hurt you?”

“
No
!” Her dark eyes jerked my way and she shook her head. “He didn’t. We were...” She bit her lip and looked around before scooting in closer. “We were seeing each other but my dad didn’t know. Then we…uh…he stopped calling me a few months ago. I...I didn’t realize at first what was going on. But now I can’t get a hold of him and I need to let him know and I—”

“Slow down,” I said as the words came spilling out of her.

Pulling out the paper that held the number, I tapped it. “This is his number? Or was?”

She nodded. “But that number is dead. There’s no forwarding address or anything. He...well, sometimes he used to hang out at the rec club on Bart Street.”

Bart Street.

My brain filed that away even as I processed everything else. She was hiding something. I’d caught that little pause. A fight, maybe? Made sense. Everything else added up, even how she didn’t know she was pregnant. Shifters carried longer and if she was carrying a baby with shifter blood, she’d carry longer, too. Typical shifter pregnancies, if I remembered right, were thirteen months and she might not have even noticed for the first four or five months. And it was a
damn
good thing she had non-human blood in her, otherwise we’d have an entirely different set of problems to deal with.

Swiping a hand down my face, I studied her and then braced my elbows on the table. “So when you couldn’t get a hold of him, what did you do? Try to find him? Go to his house?”

“I tried to call. Well… um. Look, we had a fight.”

Bingo
. I thought so.

She glanced around nervously and then gave me a sad, almost broken look. “I thought my dad knew about us and I was…I was scared. So I broke up with him. But when I found out about the baby, I tried to call.” She darted a look to the front of the coffee shop.

Fear spiked. Swelled.

Something lurked in the back of her eyes, a chained, caged beast looking out from behind her eyes. It wasn’t
her…
not entirely. But the baby inside her wasn’t human.

And it showed. In that odd, inhuman hunger, in the weird, not-quite-there look to her eyes.

The fear was the worst, though. It was gutting me. She looked like a girl who’d lived her whole life afraid. I knew what that was like.

Don’t,
I told myself. I was going to remain detached. This was just a quick and easy job because I was going out of my mind—I wasn’t getting sucked back in.

It was already too late.

I found myself reaching out before I could stop myself. My hand on hers. “Why are you afraid?”

“I’m not!” It was a high-pitched, strident whisper. And a lie.

Her eyes wheeled around and I saw as her gaze landed on the man behind the counter. The blood slowly drained out of her face. “You have to leave,” she said. “Please.” She scrawled a name on the back of the piece of paper. “His name is Kent. Call me when you know something.”

Lies... lies...lies
...

The air was thick with them, but her fear was growing hotter and thicker, clinging to me. “Are you okay?”

She gave me a desperate look. “Just please, leave now.”

I left.

Chapter Six

The rec club on Bart Street had an official name, but nobody used it. It was just the rec club. If you needed clarification, it was the rec club on Bart Street. The official name was used in legal documentation or on Chang’s credit cards, the bills, that kind of stuff.

Today was the first time I’d been here in almost five months.

I didn’t let myself count the exact days, although I could.

I could count them to the hour. My heart slammed away inside my chest as I climbed out of my car and stood there, staring at the unassuming pile of cinderblocks. I didn’t want to go inside, because if I did, they were likely to make me surrender my weapons and I didn’t think I could do my job without them.

Not since my sword—

Stop it,
I told myself.

I couldn’t think about that without the fear raging out of control and if that happened, I’d start smelling like dinner. It didn’t mean they’d want to attack. Shifters had serious control and they had to, but that didn’t mean I wanted to walk around smelling like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

I locked the car and headed across the street. The men at the gates were watching me. Like all Assembly territories, the grounds were marked. Ideally, the signs should warn humans:
ANH turf, people. Enter at your own risk
. But us non-humans had only been out of the closet for five decades and we were still struggling to be accepted as rational, thinking creatures capable of more than mayhem and murder.

It didn’t matter that we’d all been sharing the same world for more centuries than any of us could count. Humans had only known about us for a few years and they were still struggling to accept it. It didn’t always go well.

If a human got hurt inside those gates, even if he was trying to
kill
somebody else and the non-human—the NH—was acting in his or her own defense, it wouldn’t matter.

The NHs would suffer the consequences. That was why the NH population worked to keep all but a few humans on the outside. Why they built up the reputation for being homicidal and bloodthirsty. If they kept the humans away through fear, they had fewer idiots to deal with. Safer, in the long run.

But I wasn’t human.

“Ms. Colbana.” That came from the one nearest my left. He had one meaty hand gripping his left wrist and his gaze was locked somewhere around the vicinity of my toes. “Chang has said you’re welcome to go straight to his office.”

“I’d rather speak to him out here,” I said. Resting my hand on the butt of the Desert Eagle, I glanced past him to his cohort and saw that he was standing in about the same fashion. Hands in front, eyes on my feet.

What the hell was so intriguing about my boots?

“Of course, Ms. Colbana,” the older one said. Dude in the back. He didn’t look up as he gestured toward the guardhouse, just past the entry. “If you’d wait inside, I’ll call Chang.”

“I’ll wait here. I’m not removing my weapons.”

Older Dude shot me a look. “You needn’t remove your arms, Ms. Colbana. If you’d wish to speak to Chang here or inside, it’s all the same. You’re welcome to carry the weapons.” The eye contact lasted for ten seconds and then he went back to studying my toes.

What. The. Hell.

I couldn’t stay outside here where they wouldn’t look at me. It was hard enough being around people who looked at me out of the corner of their eyes and guessed about what had happened, but when they just wouldn’t
look
at me?

Without saying anything else, I headed inside. Just before I pushed through the doors, I glanced back. They weren’t watching me. They still had their gazes on their damn feet.

As did the men standing just inside the doors of the rec club.

This was the place where I’d once had a man grab my tits under the pretense of giving me a pat-down for weapons. As I started toward the security set up, one of them stepped forward, gaze downcast.

“Ms. Colbana.”

He gestured to the door off to the side. I knew where it led. Chang’s office.

I all but lunged for it, so relieved to get out of there. Away from people who couldn’t look at me.

Shame and disgust and fear and humiliation crawled inside me. It was like it was written on my skin what had been done to me. Was
that
why they wouldn’t look at me? Was that why they didn’t want to see me? Because of what Jude had made me into?

His bloodwhore
.

Bile churned in my throat and when a door caught my eye, I hurled myself inside.

It was a restroom, far more opulent than one would expect just from looking at the outside of the club, and even the general makeup of it. It was a teen’s club, made for them to roughhouse, run wild and cause trouble, all without getting into
too
much trouble. It wasn’t built with elegance in mind. But that was on the other side of the door.

This was Chang’s territory and his stamp was everywhere, even in the damned women’s room. Walls the color of burnt umber surrounded me as I leaned back against the door, sucking in one desperate breath after another. After about sixty seconds, I thought I could move without shattering, so I shoved away from the door and stumbled over to the sink. It was black marble, threaded with gold and cool under my hands.

Staring into the mirror at the pale circle of my face, I tried to understand what they’d seen that kept them from looking at me. Was it that obvious? Or did they just
know
?

They just know
…

This time, when the bile crowded up my throat, I couldn’t swallow it back down and I doubled over the sink, emptying my stomach. The sour, acrid stink of sickness wrapped around me as I convulsed, time and again.