Cipher (10 page)

It was exactly the way they’d always talked to each other, but the ease was gone. She might as well be writing her own dialog in script format. Smile here. Laugh there. Insert pithy pop-culture reference. She was a walking, talking parody of the girl who’d died the night she’d killed.

So she broke script. “You’re here. You’re helping. Right now, that seems pretty heroic to me.”

He stared straight ahead, even as he reached out and grasped her hand. “I always will, no matter what happens between us.”

Callused fingers against her skin triggered a rush of need totally out of proportion with the gentle touch. She knew the pleasure of his touch now, and her body wasn’t going to let her forget it. Her cheeks heated, and she squeezed his fingers once before easing her hand away. “Maybe we shouldn’t touch while you’re driving.”

“Good plan.” He started the engine, backed out of the parking space and angled the vehicle toward the main road. “Back to the hotel, then, and we’ll figure out the next step.”

A solid enough plan, but even she could tell that Andrew was headed in the opposite direction from their hotel.
Back to the hotel
apparently involved complicated evasive maneuvers, another piece in the overall puzzle of the new Andrew.

Carmen had taught him first aid. Zola and Walker had taught him how to fight. Alec… The Devil himself might prefer not to ponder Alec’s skill set, which had always seemed geared more toward covert ops than private investigation. They were surrounded by dozens of supernaturals with unique skills, and Andrew had been collecting them like a kid with Cracker Jack toys.

That isn’t who I am, Kat. Why I train.

Not to be a hero. She couldn’t imagine any other reason.
So ask, dumbass. Just ask.

“Andrew—”

“Check your seatbelt and stay low in your seat.”

The words were calm. Composed. The faint buzz of background nervousness that she’d barely noticed faded until the SUV was a quiet pool of emotional silence. Not the terrifying blankness from before, but a studied focus that reminded her of Alec at his most calculating.

It scared her enough to obey without question. She tugged her seatbelt until it pulled tight across her chest, and hunched down for good measure. “What’s going on?”

“Someone’s following us.” He’d realigned the rearview mirror earlier, but she’d thought nothing of it. Now, he seemed to be watching the road and the mirror simultaneously. “Tried to shake them, but they’re persistent.”

Fear made her skin prickle. Kat curled her hand around the door handle and fought not to twist and look behind them. “This is why you made me pack everything up and bring it with us, isn’t it? Because you knew we might not be able to go back.”

“Looks like Andy and Kate Normanson had to leave town on the spur of the moment.” He tightened his hands around the steering wheel. “Do you need to go anyplace in particular?”

There was only one thing she could say for sure. “Not back to Birmingham. We can’t lead them to Ben and Lia.”

“Someplace no one else knows, then.”

Her brain wouldn’t settle long enough to think. “How do you think they found us? Ben’s IDs are always flawless.”

“Maybe we were followed. From Mobile, even, and they’ve been waiting for us to lead them to the box.” He glanced over at her. “Better warn your friend.”

Ben’s line rang five times before sending her to voicemail, so Kat left a brief message, then powered her phone off, just in case someone was using the GPS to track them. “Maybe we need to go back to New Orleans and regroup. We’ve got resources there. And backup.”

Andrew nodded. “How long will it take from here? Seven or eight hours?”

She reached for her phone before she remembered it was off. “If we go back the way we came? Yeah, I think so. Maybe a little longer?”

He hadn’t sped up or made any turns, and now he looked at her, his face tense. “There’s still some morning traffic left on the interstate. I’m going to try again to lose our tail. If I can’t, it could get rough.”

“If you can’t…” Kat drew in a breath. Let it out. Trusted him. “There’s something I could try. It’s dangerous…but I’m a human, Andrew. My survival probability for a high-speed chase isn’t as high as yours.”

“If I can’t pull this off, it’ll be time to break out whatever we can use.”

This
proved to be waiting until they’d reached a crowded part of the interstate. Andrew maneuvered the SUV in between two trucks while Kat focused her attention on reinforcing her shields. Brick by brick, piece by piece. She’d had two good nights of sleep since the burnout, but it would take one more before she would be at full strength again.

All the better for this. No matter how much she’d trained with Callum, the idea of unleashing her empathy as a weapon made her queasy.

Not as queasy as the idea of a broken neck, though. She clutched at the door handle until her knuckles turned white as Andrew signaled for the next off-ramp. The wheels of the SUV were seconds from touching it when he whipped back across traffic, cutting off a red pickup that laid on its horn until they were in the far lane.

She didn’t dare look around. “Did it work?”

It took him a minute to answer. “I think maybe so.”

Kat blew out a relieved sigh and released her death grip on the handle, one finger at a time. “So where’d you learn defensive driving? Is someone in New Orleans giving Car Chase 101 lessons?”

“That?” He laughed, the sound only mildly shaky. “I learned that from your cousin.”

“Derek? Damn, I would have guessed Mackenzie. Have you ever been in a car with her when she’s late? I’m surprised she hasn’t had to take out a second mortgage on her dance studio to pay all the tickets.”

“I should teach her how to flirt her way out of those.”

Kat almost choked. “The officers of New Orleans love you lots, huh?”

“Sure, they—” The mirror drew his gaze again. “God damn it.”

Relief melted away. Terror took its place. Her stomach twisted into a tense knot, and she ignored it and tried to keep her voice steady. “Before I can do anything about it, we need to get to a place where there aren’t so many other cars.”

“Hold on.” He jerked across the lanes again, his jaw tight with concentration, and took the next exit, tires squealing on the ramp as it circled around. “How remote?”

“The fewer people, the less chance that I’ll hurt a bystander.”

“I’ll try.” The intersection was clear, so he ran a red light, though several horns blared in protest. “Damn it, I wish I knew this town.”

Kat twisted just enough to peek behind them. A dark car with tinted windows darted through the red light, almost sideswiping a station wagon. “I’m going to try to read them. Get a sense of what they’re feeling.” How big a threat they were.

“Go for it, but keep hanging on.”

Some of Callum’s lessons she’d excelled at. Burnout, synesthesia, building shields that could withstand the pressure of a thousand frantic hearts. This one, though… Well, strength came with its own drawbacks.

Callum could pick out people in a crowd and touch their auras with the precision of a sniper. Kat felt more like a grenade, sending shrapnel flying in every direction. Trying to narrow the scope of her gift was difficult enough under calm, stationary conditions. In a high-speed car chase, there was no way to narrow her reading to the car behind them.

Still, she’d endured worse. Kat closed her eyes and opened herself, fighting to keep the gap in her shielding focused on their pursuers. It didn’t work, of course. Andrew was a quiet knot of tension at her side. They zipped past someone who echoed shock and outrage so sharp it tasted metallic.

Two distinct sets of emotions filtered through. One, fierce concentration cut through with satisfaction and determination. The other, ruthless, unabashed pleasure.

Déjà vu made her dizzy. For one terrifying moment she wasn’t in the SUV. She was in her old office, watching a shapeshifter pound a fist into Andrew’s stomach over and over while ruthless pleasure drowned her.

“Kat?” Andrew took his hand off the wheel for a moment, dropping it to her knee for a little shake. “Kat!”

His fingers burned. The heat skittered up her skin, flames licking over her, struggling to find a way past the ice living inside her. Andrew was fire and passion and animal instinct, but nothing could eclipse the desperate need to protect.

Protect.
It resonated with the darkest places inside her. Tiny, weak girl, fragile psychic playing with the big bad shifters. They could break her body into a thousand pieces, but they’d have to get to her first.

It was easier than breathing. Stopping would have been harder. No need to worry about Andrew this time. He lived inside her. She could feel him under her skin. Her power would flow harmlessly past him, because he was already a part of her, whether she wanted him to be or not.

“You’re scaring me,” he whispered, just before she let go.

Not all the way. Not even that much, just a little of the pain that had lived inside her, a little of the rage that built at the thought of someone hurting Andrew. She braided them into a shining arrow of psychic power and sent it twisting back.

Distance was meaningless in the vastness of her gift. The heart traveled at the speed of light. She felt her attack slam home, slicing through the driver’s mind like a well-honed blade. When he lay open and vulnerable before her, she called up the one memory that would never fade.

Andrew, on the office floor. Her hands clutching at his abdomen, holding things inside that she’d never seen before outside of a biology textbook. Bright red blood everywhere, on her face and her hands and his clothes, and his life pumping out through her fingers as she sobbed and he flooded her with loss and pain that faded to numbness. A thousand missed opportunities slipping away, and her lips too numb to form the words she should have said.
I love you, I love you, I love you—

Pain. Pure, unrelenting terror. More than a year and she could still smell the metallic stink, feel the slick heat of blood drying tacky on her skin. Even with Andrew’s hand gripping her leg, for one endless moment she felt the loss of watching him die.

Her heart broke in two.

So did the driver’s mind.

Tires squealed behind them. Kat opened her eyes in time to see the dark car fishtail. It momentarily righted itself, then spun out. Gravel flew in every direction as it swerved onto the shoulder, then back, narrowly missing a giant red pickup truck. The driver of the truck wrenched his vehicle out of the way as the car careened through an intersection and into the ditch, rolling out of sight.

Kat.

The small things came back first. Fingers on her leg. A firm grip. Steady, considering the fear dancing up and down her spine, a wicked tickling like bugs over her skin.

“
Kat
, I swear to God, if you don’t answer me, I’m stopping right here.”

She followed the thread of his voice back to sanity, even though her own came out rusty. Hoarse. “Andrew?”

“Jesus Christ.” He was driving up a ramp, getting back on the interstate. “Are you okay? Do I need to stop?”

Her mouth was so dry that swallowing hurt. “They wanted to hurt us.” He had to understand. He had to believe her.

“I know.” No hesitation. No doubt. “We’re headed toward New Orleans now. I think we’ll be all right if you need to rest.”

She felt naked, laid bare to the world. She’d spent more power than she should have, certainly more than she should have had to spare. Rebuilding her shields and gathering the shreds of her self-control would take most of the endless drive back. If she concentrated on the ritual of it, the trancelike beauty of Callum’s waking dream, she wouldn’t have to face the stark, ugly truth.

Darkness lived inside her. Thrived, even. The slightest hint of danger to Andrew, and she lost her grip on morality. She maimed. She killed. Worst of all, she
regretted
it, felt the pain she’d caused, felt dirty and sick…and then she did it again.

All that training, and she was right back where she’d started. A broken girl with too much power and an unraveling grip on reality.

“Hang in there.” Andrew moved his hand back to the wheel. “Just hang in there if you can.”

“I’ll be okay.” Carefully phrased to avoid an outright lie, but maybe one anyway, if only because she didn’t really believe it.

“We’ll have to stop eventually, for restrooms or gas,” he murmured, “but we can take precautions.”

“Okay.” A shiver claimed her so hard her teeth knocked together. “I need to find the quiet place for a while. It’s like a trance, I guess. I need to rebuild my shields. As long as my breathing stays steady, I’m fine.”

The fear in the car spiked. “If you say so.”

Some tiny piece of her shattered, and her heart bled from it. “I won’t hurt you.”
Don’t be afraid of me.

He answered as if he’d heard her silent plea. “I’m not afraid of you, Kat. I never have been.” He glanced over. “I’m afraid
for
you.”

The hardest thing she’d done in months was hold out her hand. He took it and breathed a shaky sigh of what felt like relief.

Her body was too conflicted to stir with desire, her mind too fragmented. She moved their joined hands to rest on her leg and closed her eyes. “You can let go when you need to,” she whispered. “But it’s…nice. It makes me feel like I’m not alone.”

His answer was concise—and anything but simple. “I’m here.”

Waking Kat seemed like a bad idea, so Andrew drove. He drove for nearly two hours, straight down the interstate, and pondered taking the exit ramp into downtown Birmingham—and back to Ben’s condo. But he couldn’t guarantee they’d lost the trouble following them, couldn’t guarantee the safety of Kat’s friends.

He kept driving. The best thing to do would be get them home.

Home.

He finally had to stop just outside of Montgomery, and he reached over to shake her shoulder gently. “Kat, wake up.”

At least she didn’t seem too deeply asleep. Her eyes fluttered open, and she squinted against the early-afternoon sunlight. “Where are we?”

“A place called Prattville. On the way back home.”