Cipher (7 page)

“Yeah.” His own limited experience with alpha bastards—knowing them and being one—had taught him that. “There’s no avoiding instinct.” Then he proved it when the elevator door slid open and he urged her inside with a hand at the small of her back. “Sorry.”

Her gaze caught his for a moment and then skipped away. “Just don’t get protective and weird because of Ben. Or his girlfriend, since she’s probably more dangerous than he is. She’s some sort of priestess. Pretty sure she can smite people, though she probably wouldn’t do it in downtown Birmingham.”

He forced a smile. “Now why would she smite me?”

Kat’s expression stayed deadly serious. “Because I’m hurt, and Ben’s a stranger to you. And
you
are an alpha bastard, no matter how hard you’re choking it down. I don’t want anything to explode.”

“Least of all me?”

Her hand snuck into his. “I’d be sad if you got smited. Smote? What’s the past tense?”

Smitten.
He squeezed her fingers. “Don’t know. You’d better Google it.”

Because she was Kat, she shook her hand free, pulled out her phone, and did just that. She was still muttering under her breath when the elevator doors slid open, and she stepped forward without looking up. “Fourteen-C.”

“Got it.” The hallway was clear and the door solidly closed, so Andrew knocked.

Kat laughed her triumph just as the door opened. “Smite, smote, smitten!”

The pretty brunette on the other side of the door tilted her head. “You pretty much have to be Kat, which makes you Andrew. Come on in, Ben’s finishing up in his office.”

The front room of the condo was packed with expensive electronics. A longsword that looked like it had seen some use stood propped in the corner, and it drew Andrew’s eye. “Nice sword.”

The woman gathered her hair up into a ponytail and rolled her eyes. “His brother’s,” she said in a voice that made her disapproval clear. She picked up a badge and clipped it onto her scrubs, then braced both hands on her hips. “Now, Kat. Ben told me you’re hurt. Do you mind if I take a look?”

Kat glanced at Andrew, a quiet question in her eyes, and he swallowed the protest that rose automatically. “Bathroom?” At least if there were windows, they’d be covered, with no easy visual access from someone perched on a neighboring roof.

“All right.” Kat slipped her bag from her shoulder and held it out. “Admiring the weapons should keep you entertained until Ben comes out.”

He took the bag, and she disappeared with the brunette, leaving him alone in the room. Aside from the sword, he found two guns, a taser, a collection of knives, and a scuffed set of brass knuckles.

Soft footsteps warned him before the loft’s owner appeared. Ben proved to be a lanky redhead with a neatly trimmed beard and sharply intelligent eyes. His gaze fell on the brass knuckles, and he grinned. “My brother keeps some of his shit here.”

“So your girlfriend said.” He held out his hand. “I’m Andrew.”

“Ben. I take it Lia dragged Kat off to look at her arm?”

“Yeah. She’s wearing scrubs. Is she a doctor?”

“She’s a chief resident at UAB.” Ben jerked his head toward a smooth wooden table. “But she’s also an acolyte of Panacea. They’re a healing order of spell casters, and she’s good.”

“Couldn’t ask for better credentials, I guess.”

“Kat’ll be fine.” Ben dropped a folder to the table. “So, she finally jumped your bones, huh? Took her long enough.”

The last thing he wanted to deal with was five minutes of stammering apology or, worse, Kat killing the guy. “Yeah. Your brother’s really into weaponry, huh? What’s he do?”

“Bounty hunter, kind of. Takes care of dangerous witches and the occasional rabid beast. He’s over in Georgia, tracking down a rogue shifter who’s been causing trouble.”

Andrew was surprised he hadn’t run across him yet, since he sounded like exactly the kind of person Alec and Jackson would know. “What about you? Kat said you design software.”

“Mmm.” Ben slipped into a chair and flipped open the folder. “Not as cool as my monster-chasing big brother, but at least I can talk about my job at parties. Well, my day job.” He pulled out a piece of paper with a driver’s license and a credit card paper-clipped to the top. “This one, not so much.”

It looked like solid work, just from the glimpse he’d gotten. “Will the license records check out, or are they just for show?”

“Oh, they’ll check out. You’re Andy Normanson. Construction foreman from California. Kat picked the job and place, relevant details are attached.” He pulled out a second set of IDs, these with Kat’s photo attached. “Kate Normanson. Congratulations on your recent elopement. Elvis officiated.”

Andrew studied the dossiers. Similar backgrounds to their own, similar first names. “You do good work.”

“Sure, and I do it real quiet, just like Kat with her brain-scooping lie-detector thing.” Ben’s eyes narrowed. “Psychics are the underdogs of the supernatural world. We have a habit of disappearing down rabbit holes if we prove too useful.”

“Is that a warning?”

“It’s a fact, that’s all. Kat’s got a serious blind spot when it comes to her empathy. She’s so busy angsting over the sort of damage she can do accidentally that I’m pretty sure she’s never considered the sort of havoc she could cause if someone made her do it on purpose.”

Painful because it was true and far too close to home. “If you know that much about Kat, you must know how many people would die before they let anything like that happen to her.”

Ben held up both hands, making a vaguely placating gesture. “I don’t know about Kat’s life outside of what she tells me. I know you two have a Lifetime Original Movie going on and that her cousin used to smother her a lot. I’ve always assumed she’s just fine over there, but if people are shooting at her…”

“I don’t think she was the target.” It was the conclusion he’d finally reached during the long hours of waiting for Kat to sleep off her exhaustion. “Whoever was doing the shooting was trying to silence Kat’s contact.”

“Who gave you guys a key. Listen, I started to do the research, but there are a ton of cities called Winchester, and a bunch of them have a Bank & Trust. So I got frustrated and cheated.” He tapped the side of his head.

Technopath.
He’d almost forgotten. “What’d you uncover?”

Ben lowered his voice, even though Kat was safely behind the closed bathroom door. “In 2002, an Alyson Gabriel got a safety deposit box at Winchester Bank & Trust in Huntsville, Alabama. Two weeks later, she died in a car crash in Boston.”

It sounded right. Andrew swallowed hard. “That’d be it, I think. Could you do some more checking, see if you can find out what she might have done during those two weeks?”

“Sure thing, man. Kat has my cell number now. Anything you need, call. I’m used to being the geek on tap.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

A shrug. “I owe Kat. She got my brother out of a jam once when I was laid up in the hospital with a very unheroic case of appendicitis.”

He had a surgical scar of his own, though it seemed like a few lifetimes ago. “Happens to the best of us.”

“All worked out okay.” The unmistakably goofy smile of a man in the grip of serious love curved Ben’s lips. “That’s when I met Lia.”

By complete and utter chance. Andrew had seen it over and over, events that spun off a single moment where one changed detail would have changed
everything
. “Fate, right?”

“On the days I remember to put the toilet seat down. The rest of the time I’m a test from her Goddess.”

“That just means you’re a typical guy.”

“Who can ask nicely and have computers do things for him.” Ben flipped the folder shut and shoved it across the table. “Kat can handle reservations for wherever you end up, but I was thinking I could make a few too. In Atlanta, maybe. I can ask the system to let me know if anyone else goes looking for you.”

Andrew nodded. “It’d be helpful. Whoever shot Kat and that woman is scared of what’s in that safety deposit box. If they knew where it was, they would have taken it already.”

“Atlanta, it is. Course, no one may be looking, but if they are, doesn’t hurt to have a false trail.”

Ben seemed like a nice guy, and Andrew was surprised his sword-wielding brother hadn’t already taught him the most important lesson of all. “Someone’s always looking.”

Kat didn’t have to beg. Andrew drove them to Huntsville and straight to the Embassy Suites, where he stretched out on the couch while she dragged a couple hundred bucks of Target loot into the bedroom. The king-sized bed was vast and immaculate, with a plush comforter and a stack of fluffy pillows that took up the top half of the mattress. Pretty enough, but nothing compared to the clean bathroom with its shiny counters and polished metal fixtures.

The tub was big enough for two, and she was pretty sure she could happily die there.

It took an hour of soaking before she felt clean, and another thirty minutes with the scented shampoo and body wash before she was sure she’d got every last bit of dried blood and covered the pungent scent of the dye Lia had used to turn the purple streaks in her hair brown again.

Scrubbed and buffed and smelling of almond and vanilla, Kat twisted her damp hair into a braid before pulling on her new flannel pajama bottoms and the first tank top she’d been able to find in her size—a baby-blue number with an absurdly cheerful butterfly embroidered on it in sparkly silver thread. It left her arm bare, and she ran her fingers over the mostly healed scar where the bullet wound had been that morning.

Magic. The serious business kind that knit human flesh together with a speed normally reserved for shapeshifters. Lia had confessed, almost apologetically, that healing minor wounds was the extent of what a priestess could do on her own. To Kat it had seemed like a miracle, and she’d expressed miracle-level gratitude at the absence of pain.

A peek into the other room proved that Andrew still slept, so Kat killed another two hours trying to catch up on her email and sending both Sera and Miguel reassuring but vague notes insisting everything was fine. Then she made herself filter through the responses from her latest round of queries in her unenthusiastic job search.

Job search. As she clicked listlessly through the emails, she decided she needed a better description. Obligatory resume exportation. Unwilling employment makeover. “Going through the motions” seemed to fit best.

Whatever she was doing, it wasn’t active enough to be called searching. Her qualifications and her thesis had earned her attention from researchers. Her gender had gotten her courted by every guilty tech company with a quota to fill. One of her professors had even tried to push her toward the NSA, and she’d enjoyed an evening of near-hysterical laughter trying to imagine Alec’s face if she announced she was going to work for the government.

She went to the interviews. She wore combat boots and T-shirts that were trying too hard to be witty and outrageous. Her hair stayed purple, and sometimes she twisted it into styles that should have been impossible outside of a comic book. She played edgy hacker and social misfit with a dedication that deserved an Oscar nod. Sometimes her passive-aggressive self-sabotage worked. The truly desperate offered her jobs anyway, and she’d started “forgetting” to call them back.

Career suicide in slow motion. That was what it had come to, since the restless need to do
more
had invaded her life. Maybe it had come from watching Julio navigate New Orleans’ supernatural community under Alec’s guidance, or from seeing Carmen and Alec sacrifice everything but each other for the chance to save the world. Things were changing—for the better,
finally
for the better—and she wanted to be a part of it.

Maybe. Somehow…if only she could figure out where. All she knew for sure was that her college trust fund—left untouched for years by scholarships and then grants—was starting to trickle away. The money would run out eventually, if she didn’t get out of her own way.

Whatever happened with the safety deposit box, it had to be her last self-indulgence. After this, she’d force herself back into the real world. Put the past behind her. Get a haircut, maybe a suit and a couple of nice blouses. She’d stop going to interviews in sweatshirts and steel-toed boots.

She’d get a job.

She’d grow the fuck up.

By nine, her stomach was starting to rumble. For about two seconds, she considered leaving the hotel room in search of a vending machine. For another five, she considered calling room service without waking Andrew.

Ten seconds after that she told herself to stop being a baby and made her way into their suite’s sitting room.

Andrew lay sprawled out in nothing but his jeans. Comfortable as the couch looked, he was too damn tall for it, and a dangerous tenderness stirred inside her. He was exhausted because he probably hadn’t slept a damn second of the fifteen hours she’d spent unconscious. Two straight days of driving, fighting and worrying, and the stubborn bastard wouldn’t even claim the bed when she was short enough to fit on the couch just fine.

Kat smoothed blond strands of hair from his forehead and smiled. “Hey, sleepy. Why don’t you get up and pass out someplace where your feet don’t dangle off the edge, huh?”

He mumbled something unintelligible and rolled over, almost pitching himself off the couch in the process. Kat planted both hands on his shoulders and pushed him back to the cushions. “Wake up, Andrew.”

His hands latched around her arms, and he lifted her clear off her feet and dropped her to the couch. The breath whooshed out of her, stealing her squeaked protest. When he loomed over her, his eyes were blank, dark. Unseeing.

Three heartbeats stretched out to a lifetime. Her stun gun was in the other room, but even if she had it in her damn hand she wasn’t sure she could have forced herself to use it on Andrew. Knowing it was futile, she couldn’t stop her hands from flying up, bracing against the dangerously hot skin of his chest. Pushing him was like trying to push a brick wall, and the first hint of real fear uncurled inside her. “Andrew—”

His eyes cleared, and a roar of fear eclipsed that tiny thread inside. His fear, not her own, though it vanished in the space of a heartbeat as Andrew released her. “Sorry, that was—sorry.”