Friday Night Bites (37 page)

I pointed to the first document. “This is the e-mail from Peter about the paparazzi.”

Luc looked the e-mail over, a frown pulling his features. “Sure,” he said. “He sent it to me from his Cadogan e-mail address. I printed it out.”

“I know. I gave the e-mail with the threat against Jamie to Jeff Christopher. He traced it back through multiple addresses, all bogus. But at the end of the chain was this one.” I pressed my finger onto the list Jeff had given me a few minutes ago and pointed at the final e-mail on the list—Peter’s Cadogan e-mail address.

Silence for a moment, then unmitigated swearing.

“Son of a
bitch
.” Luc looked up, jaw tight, nostrils flaring as he realized the betrayal. “He’s been playing us. The whole time, playing us.”

Luc put his palms flat on the table, head bowed. Then, without warning, he pulled back and punched a fist into the tabletop with a
crack
that split the air like thunder—and notched a fist-sized divot in the wood.

“Luc,” Lindsey said. She popped up from her chair and wrapped an arm around his waist, her other hand on his shoulder. “Luc,” she repeated, her voice softer.

I bit back a small smile; I was beginning to think that Lindsey protested too much about our intrepid guard captain.

“I know,” he said, then looked up at me, his eyes blazing. “He’s not in this alone. Not to turn against the House after all these years. If he’s in this, it’s because someone else is pulling the strings.”

I thought of the “she” who’d left a message for Nick. “I know,” I told him. “I think you’re probably right about that.”

“Would it be too much for me to ask that in addition to having this evidence, you have a sly plan to nail this little asshole?”

I smiled coyly. “Of course I have a sly plan. I am a Merit, after all.”

Two minutes later we were on the first floor. Luc had Kelley deliver an update about the Breckenridge threat to Peter’s room, confirming he was still in the House. We also alerted RDI, who were told to stop him in the event he tried to bolt.

Ethan’s door was closed. Luc rapped knuckles against the door, but didn’t wait for a response before opening it.

Ethan was behind his desk, flipping closed a laptop as if preparing for dawn himself. “Lucas?” he asked, brows furrowed at our entry.

I looked at Luc, who nodded, then made my request. “I need permission to kill two birds with one stone.”

Ethan arched an eyebrow. “You need permission to kill fowl?”

“She’s serious, Ethan.” Luc’s voice was quiet, severe, and it drew Ethan’s eyes and put a look of surprise on his face. I was surprised, as well—I’m not sure I’d ever heard Luc refer to Ethan by his name.

They exchanged a look, then Ethan nodded and looked at me. “Sentinel?”

“It’s Peter,” I said. “He sent the threat to the Breckenridges.”

I watched a bevy of emotions cross his face, from shock to denial to a fury that filled the air with an electric tingle, and narrowed his eyes into slits of glassy green . . . and then quicksilver.

“You have evidence of this, I assume?”

“He sent the e-mail,” Luc said. “The message to Nick that threatened Jamie. It was routed through a lot of fake addresses, but originated in Peter’s Cadogan address.”

Ethan adjusted his jaw, and when he finally spoke, his voice was low, thick and dangerous. “He sent a threatening e-mail to a shifter from this
House
?”

He stood up, then pushed back his chair with enough force
that it continued to roll after he’d walked away toward the conference table at the other end of the room. I snapped my gaze to Luc, who shook his head. A warning, I assumed, not to interfere.

Ethan paced to the bar along the wall with the slinking intensity of a panther, grabbed a glass from the bar, and with a turn and windup of his torso, propelled it across the room. The glass flew, then crashed into the wall on the other side of the conference table. Glass fractured, shattered, and splintered to the ground.

“Liege,” Luc said, quiet but stern.

“In my
House
,” Ethan said, then turned back to us, hands on his hips. “In my goddamn
HOUSE
.”

Luc nodded.

“Two traitors in my House, Lucas. In
Peter’s
House. How? How is this possible? Is there anything I haven’t given them? Anything they’ve lacked?” His gaze snapped to mine. “Sentinel?”

I dropped my gaze to the floor, unable to bear the pain and fury and betrayal in his. “No, Liege.”

“
Liege
,” Ethan muttered, the word rendered a joke.

“Merit has a plan,” Luc put in.

Ethan looked at me, eyebrows raised, a bit of appreciative surprise in his expression. “Sentinel?”

“Killing two birds,” I reminded him. “It’s too late now, the sun’s nearly up, but I think I know how we can confront him without risking the rest of the vampires in the House. We’ll lure him out.”

“And how will we accomplish that?”

“We offer Celina as bait.”

His gaze went a little bit wicked, as if he fully condoned the manipulation. “Do what you have to do, Merit.”

“That’s permission?” I confirmed.

Ever so slowly, he raised his gaze to mine, then looked at
me, this Master of vampires, emerald eyes glowing. “Nail him, Sentinel.”

 

The plan set, and the sun glowing at the edge of the horizon, I returned to my room, and found my cell phone angry and blinking. Mallory had left four voice mails, each more consoling, slightly less angry, than the one before it. She seemed to have worked off some of her steam, but I couldn’t say that mine had lessened. The vampire drama had focused my attention elsewhere, certainly, but it hadn’t eliminated the dull current of anger. I just wasn’t ready to talk to her.

And that wasn’t the only thing waiting for me. I thought, at first, that the red paper on the floor of my room had slipped from the packet of mail I’d brought back from Mallory’s house. But I knew there’d been no crimson envelope on the hardwood floor when I’d changed clothes a few hours ago.

It was the same envelope as the card sent to Mallory’s, but this time it was addressed to me at Cadogan House. I picked it up, then lifted the heavy flap. No card inside this time, but there was something else. I upended the contents into my hand. Out came a rectangle of translucent red plastic about the size of a business card. It bore a single thin white line, the inscription RG, and a stylized fleur-de-lis.

The card in my hand, I went to the bed and sat down, then put the envelope on the comforter beside me. I flipped the card back and forth, held it up to the light, tried to read through to the reverse side. Nothing.

The envelopes had both been addressed to me—one at my old address, one at my new one. Someone had known where I’d lived and had discovered that I’d moved. Someone who wanted to give me random bits of paper and plastic? Were these supposed to be messages? Clues?

The sun rising, and my tolerance for mysteries having been exhausted for the day, I put the card on the nightstand beside my bed. I changed into pajamas—a long-sleeved, oversized Bears T-shirt—ensured that the shutter over the window was secure, and climbed into bed.

As it tends to do, the sun set again. Showered and dressed, I stood before the conference table in the Ops Room in my Cadogan black, katana belted and at the ready, preparing to, as Ethan had put it, nail my colleague.

Nailing Peter, of course, wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was going to be convincing Peter to nail whomever he’d been in league with, whether the “she” from Nick’s telephone call or someone else with insider information about the Breckenridges. The setup, of course, was easy. We’d send an e-mail to one of Peter’s fake addresses in the guise of the person we suspected was guiding his hand—Celina—and ask him to meet her at their “usual” location. If he took the bait, we’d confirm that Celina was the manipulator behind the scenes. We’d follow him to the rendezvous spot and, from there, take him in.

“Or that’s how it’s supposed to go,” I told the guards, my hands sweating as I explained the plan to the vampires around the conference table. This was, I guess, my first official op as Sentinel, and there were a million ways it could go wrong.

Among other potential problems, we’d gotten access to Peter’s
e-mails through the service providers; it wasn’t like we’d hacked directly into his accounts. So, we had no clue if Celina set up meetings with him via e-mail or, if so, what address she used. But we had a pretty good clue. Jeff, being ever resourceful, spent some of the daylight hours scrubbing the Web for data that might help us, and managed to find a cached image of Peter’s e-mail directory from a few weeks ago. Although we couldn’t actually read the e-mails, we noticed that one addressee looked curiously familiar: Marie Collette.

Celina’s human name.

More importantly, the e-mail was dated only a week before we’d met Celina at North Pond and Ethan had confronted her about her role in the park killings. Peter and Celina had communicated, and they’d done it just before she tried to kabob Ethan. Coincidence? Maybe. Likely not.

But even if Celina hadn’t been the instigator for this newest betrayal, the fact that she and Peter had communicated increased the odds that he’d be curious enough to take the bait, especially since he’d been warned she would probably attempt to reenter Chicago. Either way, we could ensure that he was out of the House—and our vampires were out of danger—before we confronted him.

“Lindsey,” Luc prompted when I’d finished my review.

She nodded. “Since Jeff couldn’t get us into the existing ‘Marie Collette’ account, I’ve set up a new one using a different domain name. He’s got at least six operative e-mail addresses, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Celina’s got more than one.”

“We do what we can with what we’ve got,” Luc said. “We just need to get him out the door. And the message?”

I clicked a button so the text displayed on the wall screen across from the conference table, then read aloud: “You’ve been compromised. Rendezvous point ASAP.”

“We were afraid to pick a specific time since we weren’t sure when he’d see the message,” Juliet pointed out. “But assuming we’ve made the correct assumptions, and that Celina’s behind this, it’s not a bad plan.”

Luc nodded, then looked at me. “It’s your op, Sentinel. You ready?”

I thought of the betrayal in Ethan’s eyes, and nodded, left hand on the handle of my katana. “Let’s nail him.”

 

Lindsey and Luc were in her SUV outside the House, an eye on Peter’s own red sports car (which had been tagged by RDI with a tracking device), ready to follow Peter if he followed our plan. I stood beside the basement door, waiting impatiently for Juliet, who’d been assigned to drive both of us. Her vehicle, a black sedan, was apparently less noticeable than my orange Volvo, which Luc immediately vetoed as a surveillance car.

I heard footsteps on the stairs and stood straight, but it wasn’t Juliet who appeared around the corner. Blond hair tied at the base of his neck, his body snugged into a short-sleeved black T-shirt and dark jeans, katana in a royal blue scabbard at his waist, he smiled just so, one corner of his mouth tipped up knowingly.

“Don’t look so surprised, Sentinel,” he said, moving past me to type numbers into the keypad. “I can’t in good conscience allow you to have all the fun.”

“Where’s Juliet?” I asked.

Ethan opened the basement door and held it out for me.

“I’m still inside,” Juliet said, her voice echoing through my tiny earpiece as Ethan and I walked to the Mercedes. “Kel and I are keeping an eye on the House while you four play vampire A-Team. And speaking of fun, numbnuts is still in his room and Kelley’s got an eye out from the third-floor kitchen. Everybody else in position?”

“Car number one ready,” Luc said. “And Blondie’s here, looking pretty as always.”

I bit back a smile at the curses that lit through the earpiece.

“Third floor ready,” Kelley whispered.

“Car number two is ready,” Ethan said, chirping the alarm on the Mercedes. We climbed inside and Ethan started the engine, adjusted his mirror, and headed for the ramp.

“Sending the e-mail in three, two, one, sent.”

There was no sound but for the clank of the rising garage door and the hum of the Mercedes. Ethan pulled the car onto the street, this corner still dark and empty of paparazzi. He sidled into a parallel spot and put the car in park. We waited.

 

It took thirty-seven minutes. Time enough for Peter to check his e-mail, grab his sword, and sprint to the red sports car, which was parked outside the House. Luc and Lindsey were in the least conspicuous of the vehicles, so they took off first, pulling onto the street a hundred yards or so behind Peter. When they were a couple of blocks ahead of us, we pulled out, all of us following the would-be saboteur, who drove east, then jumped onto Lake Shore Drive.