Chosen by Fate (2 page)

“Don’t play coy,” Mahone snapped. “You’re a healer whose talent is as unique as it is inexplicable. You were a vocal supporter of Otherborn rights, even during the War. Plus you’re skilled in chemical weaponry. That’s a talent we can use—
if
it’s needed,” he emphasized.

“Any felines on this team?” Caleb taunted, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

He reached for his drink and took a swallow, draining more than half of it. “Smart, considering so many of them want to kill me.”

“Given how out of shape you’ve become, O’Flare, killing you might not be as hard as one would’ve thought.”

Mahone’s caustic statement almost made Caleb laugh. Almost. “Reconsidering your offer?”

“Considering accepting?”

Staring down a man who was far more sober than him turned out to be fairly difficult. “So who else?”

After a brief pause, Mahone said, “Two females. I’m targeting a mage and a wraith.”

“A wraith?” He frowned. He’d never seen one, not in all his travels or years of service. But he’d heard about them. No pulse. No blood. No body heat or need to eat. What they did have was a common gender—female—and a whole lot of angry going on. Oh, and immortality. “Some dead chick? I thought the few in that species were isolated up in Maine, in that compound they’d built.”

“This one’s an independent thinker.”

Right.

Or, put another way, she was an especially heinous bitch who couldn’t be killed and who wouldn’t die.

Nice.

Caleb studied Mahone. “By the look on your face, the ghost troubles you. Why?”

“Let’s just say she has an agenda, one I’m not sure I can help her with.”

“So your role is to fulfill agendas?” He smirked. “What’s mine?”

“What do you want?”

Caleb raised a brow at the man’s bravado. “Nothing you can give me.”

“Not even a name?”

What the hell was Mahone getting at? “What name?”

“The name of the person who masterminded Elijah’s death.”

Shock rattled through Caleb like Mahone’s words were a ball and Caleb the pinball machine.

Elijah—the feline prince. The bastards
.
Set him up and then use the situation to bribe him? He stood, palms pressed on the table, and sent Mahone a silent though unmistakable message: Do. Not. Fuck. With. Me. “Haven’t you heard? Elijah’s death was accidental. A foreseeable one, given he was being tortured at the time. But then, that was my doing, right? After all, I’m the one who could’ve stopped the questioning by confirming whether he was answering truthfully or not.” Caleb pounded the table so hard it shook. “No one masterminded his death, and the person universally blamed is
me
. Some made-up name isn’t worth anything at this point.”

Mahone shrugged with an obvious lack of concern. “Maybe. Or maybe the use of torture as a last resort was really an intentional execution, and your role began and ended as a convenient scapegoat.”

Caleb laughed, the sound mockingly bitter. Shaking his head, he sat down again. “How convenient. Too bad no one’s ever posited that theory before.”

“And that means it’s not true? Pity, but maybe you’re not as smart as I thought you were, O’Flare.”

“I’m plenty smart enough to smell crap when I hear it,” he muttered. “Go sell it to someone else.” He reached for his glass, then was shocked when Mahone reached out and tossed the contents on the floor.

Deliberately, Mahone set the glass back on the table. “You’ve had enough, son.”

Son? Mahone couldn’t be more than ten years his senior. Staring first at the man, then at the glass, Caleb gripped the edges of the table and struggled for restraint. The intensity of his emotions made his voice shake. “Get me another drink. Now.” But even as he uttered the command, shame washed over him. Shame because he needed the liquor with a biting intensity. Shame because he knew he was pissing away what could be his last chance to do something worthwhile with the rest of his life. But then he remembered . . .

“You saved lives, O’Flare. Fought for what was right.”

Caleb shook his head, rejecting his mind’s recollection of all the gruesome images it had collected over the years. “I don’t know what’s right anymore. And I took lives, too.”

“A few in combat. When you had no choice.”

“I had a choice toward the end.”

Mahone sighed. “One. One life. And it wasn’t deliberate.”

“One. One hundred. One thousand. Deliberate or not.” He swallowed hard. “Doesn’t matter. Culpability isn’t based on quantity. At least, not in my world.”

“All the more reason for you to get involved in what I’m offering. And you’re right about one thing. I don’t have proof that Prince Elijah was murdered, but I’m following a lead. If it pans out, you can be privy to the information I collect or not. Serve on the team, and I give you an IOU. If you decide you want something other than my intel, and it’s within my power to give it to you, it’s yours.”

Caleb ripped his gaze from the empty glass to stare at Mahone. An IOU could come in handy someday, but that was assuming Mahone was a man of his word.

“So what’s it to be, O’Flare?” Mahone pressed. “You can take another drink, or you can listen to what I have to say. What I have to offer. If you want to tell me to piss off, at least do it with all the information. That’s something you didn’t have before, isn’t it?”

The low blow took Caleb unawares. No, he hadn’t known Elijah was the prisoner being tortured for information or that his own refusal to act as a human lie detector would result in Elijah’s death. In his mind, doing the latter had been tantamount to condoning the methods used to extract Elijah’s confession. A lot of good Caleb’s principles had done Elijah in the end.

He hadn’t known Elijah very long before the War had started, but in the months he’d dated Elijah’s sister, Natia, they’d formed a swift bond. Caleb had liked Elijah’s humor and charm, and he’d respected Elijah’s loyalty to his family, especially to his sisters, whom he’d doted on. Despite Caleb’s place of honor within the reservation, his position as shaman had distanced him from his people. In many ways, being around the royal feline family had fed Caleb’s need for normalcy and affection and acceptance, things he’d missed after his mother and father had died. In truth, if forced to choose between his friendship with Elijah and his relationship with Natia, Caleb would have chosen the friendship. In the end, he’d lost both. He’d lost everything.

Caleb’s gaze returned once more to the glass on the table, then to the bottles of liquor Nick kept stored behind the bar. The amber liquid called to him, promising not forgetfulness but a type of lessening.

Forgetfulness was what he craved.

If he couldn’t have that . . .

The vision came upon him without warning, causing Caleb to close his eyes. He heard the whispers of his ancestors. He saw six auras, their forms ebbing and flowing, first together and then apart, pulsing so their energies sparked a riotous kaleidoscope of colors. His was there, burning a bright green, gravitating toward another shadow comprised of darkest black and purest white, the colors not cleanly divided but rather bleeding into one another.

Destiny
.

Cursing softly, he opened his eyes, willing the whispers and vision away.

He had no idea what it meant. Whether the shadow’s duality represented another being or another manifestation of himself—light and dark, good and evil, healer and murderer.

As Mahone studied him with a cocked brow, Caleb sighed. He didn’t know what the vision meant, but he knew it had something to do with Mahone and the team he was forming. Caleb had a role in it, and for the first time in a long time, his body sizzled with anticipation.

Of course, he couldn’t let Mahone know that.

Kicking out the chair in front of him, he jerked his head toward Mahone, then the chair. “Talk fast before I change my mind.”

C
aleb’s hands moved swiftly and efficiently as he set up the mobile radar equipment he’d spread out on the roof. The building below his feet had been swept and a perimeter established. Now all Caleb had to do was determine who was in the room with Mahone and whether Mahone was still alive.

Briefly, he glanced at Ethan Riley, leader of Hope Restored Team Blue, and the four men, skilled in entry and perimeter surveillance, who’d accompanied them here. Only hours had passed since Caleb had left his teammates in the Vamp Council’s chambers in Oregon and, despite the grueling activity of the last few days—which had included parachuting into North Korea, hiking miles in the snow, rescuing several Otherborn, and tracking down what just might be an antidote to the vamp vaccine—Caleb felt the same focused energy he always did when on a mission. “Did you get in touch with the Para-Ops team?”

Riley looked up from checking his rifle. “They’ve detained the vampire Dante Prime. Devereaux tried to teleport here, but he’d depleted his powers in Korea . . .”

Caleb snorted. “No shit.” Although vamps could teleport to and from anywhere in the world, provided they’d been there before, that kind of travel drained them. Before Knox Devereaux and the rest of the team had interrupted the Vamp Council to question Dante Prime for treason and conspiracy to commit murder, the dharmire had spent several hours teleporting between North Korea and the U.S. Each time, he’d carried a wounded Otherborn or one of his team members back with him. Beat him how the vamp was even capable of talking at this point. Add everything else that had happened to him—

“Is it true you found his father? And that he’d been turned into a vampire?”

Caleb didn’t even look up. The Para-Ops team had trained with Team Blue’s aerial experts before dropping into North Korea. At the time, Knox’s father hadn’t even been on their radar—and for good reason—since everyone believed he was dead. How the hell news of Jacques Devereaux’s return had spread so fast, Caleb didn’t know. Still, Riley had to know how fruitless his question was. “No comment.”

He sensed Riley wince. “Sorry.”

Caleb shrugged. Just because a person expected a particular result didn’t mean he shouldn’t try to get around it. Caleb was always trying to get a different reaction from his teammate Wraith, regardless of how unlikely that was. For one horrific moment, Caleb felt the same fear that had constricted his chest when he’d realized Wraith planned to blow herself up to get them inside the North Korean compound. It wasn’t easy, but he pushed the feeling away.

Wraith was okay. He’d seen that for himself. He’d felt it when he’d pushed her down and covered her body with his. He’d savored it when she’d kissed him back, right before she’d kneed him in the balls.

Clearing his throat, he returned his attention to Riley and the other man’s apology. “No worries. I’m as human as you, remember?”

Now it was Riley who snorted, prompting Caleb to smile tightly.

Okay, so maybe he wasn’t quite as human as Riley. They shared the same DNA, but being able to communicate with his ancestors, hear the Great Song, and occasionally walk the Otherworld made him a little different.

Different didn’t always mean better.

His fingers moved faster. Almost there. Glancing at his watch, Caleb clenched his teeth. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple. He knew they couldn’t go in blind, but—

“What about your wraith? Was she what you expected her to be?”

Caleb paused for only a fraction of a second before continuing his task. “She’s not my wraith. She’s a wraith who decided to keep the name ‘Wraith’ just to be ornery. And she’s exactly what I expected her to be.” What he didn’t say was that she was also far more than he’d expected. A heinous bitch, yes, but one whose attitude and mouth were designed to hide something textured and complex and—

Disgusted with himself, Caleb pressed his lips together and once again pushed thoughts of Wraith out of his head.

Get Mahone out. That’s all he could think about right now.

“Finally!” Snapping the last wire in place, Caleb flipped on the power and adjusted the radar settings, then scanned the building’s interior until the radar picked up body heat. “Bingo.”

Caleb immediately zoomed the camera in and got a good look at Mahone.

Dear Essenia, he thought, automatically invoking the name of the Earth Goddess to give him strength. Although humans believed Essenia was an Otherborn deity, few knew Earth People—like Caleb’s own Native American tribe—had prayed to the same deity for centuries. Besides, from what Caleb saw, Mahone needed all the prayers he could get.

With his wrists shackled to chains hanging from the ceiling, Mahone looked like he’d gotten into a fight with a chipper machine and lost. His face and body were covered in blood, and what was left of his clothes hung in shreds from his battered body. From his position on the rooftop above, Caleb once again adjusted the settings on the mobile radar equipment. His adjustments made the image on the screen zoom out, losing detail and focus until it captured the entire room, providing grainy outlines of Mahone, a desk, a table, and one other individual whose silver hair, height, and slim build proclaimed him to be a vampire.

When Caleb and the five members of Hope Restored Team Blue had arrived at the isolated warehouse twenty minutes earlier, Caleb had figured Knox, leader of the Para-Ops team, had made a mistake by not sending any Others with him. That, or Knox simply had faith in Caleb’s ability to take down anything that got in their way, human or not. Either way, Caleb was getting Mahone out, and he planned for both of them to be breathing when he did it.

Caleb thought of the first time he’d met Mahone and the vision he’d had. He’d had the same vision several times since, and the moment he’d met Wraith, he’d become convinced that the black-and-white aura that hovered near his own had to be hers. Upon their meeting, he’d felt a sizzling arc of connection that had only intensified with time. Apparently she hadn’t. In fact, she seemed to have no use for him and spent most of her time pushing him away. Maybe the aura belonged to Mahone, instead, and the vision had been a premonition of this very moment—Mahone straddling the line between life and death, waiting to see whether Caleb could save him.