Hell or High Water (Gemini Book 3) (12 page)

Shoved into the spotlight, I wracked my brain for the most pressing questions. “How is Charybdis taking hosts?”

“Oisin and Fionn never left my side on days when I was scheduled for meetings. Not all fae are as respectful of their magistrates as they should be. That day Fionn remained in my chambers while Oisin positioned himself at the outer door. Before he attacked, he frisked a man who came bearing a package for me. One we have since determined to have been stolen off a mail cart on one of the lower floors. The delivery was a ruse. The man in question was nonresponsive when Fionn questioned him, much as Marshal Ayer was.” A weary sigh sifted through her. “I believe that was the point of contact.”

Twisting my bottom lip between my fingers, I pinched until it hurt to jumpstart my sleep-addled brain. “You’re saying Charybdis infects people by touch.”

Thinking back to the clerk at the gas station, even farther back to when he took control of Bianca, he had almost admitted as much, hadn’t he?

“That is the theory the evidence supports.” The pen clicked again. “Camille, I know it goes against your nature, but I must advise you that, should you encounter a host, you must kill it before it touches you. Otherwise you’ll never cut out all the rot.”

Too late, I almost admitted while my gut plummeted into the soles of my feet. I hadn’t touched Harlow, but Graeson had. Not that it mattered since I had tackled both Ayer and Bianca. That meant we were both at risk of infection.

“I can’t kill his hosts,” I growled. “They’re innocent people.”

“Who will harm other innocents until they are stopped. Consider your pack’s wellbeing if you care so little for you own. Until Charybdis is dead, your wargess can’t be left unsupervised. Certainly not while she’s pregnant. The temptation would prove too great for Charybdis to resist. He would have her kill the babe to feed off the agony—hers, the pack’s…yours. As attuned to the pack bond as he would be in her body, he could harvest the pain easily.”

Of all the wargs in our pack, he had targeted the softest and most fragile of us all.

“You’re a new pack. The babe represents a new hope. Wolfborn pups are rare, and you’ve already confirmed that’s what hers will be.” Confident in her information, the depth of her knowledge of us astounded me. “By harming her, he wounds the entire pack. By taking her mind, he’s infected your pack bond. It’s a conduit for him now.”

“Can he feed off the emotions of those who are connected to her?” Another idea chilled me. “Can he infect another mind while joined with it through hers?”

“Both are distinct possibilities.”

“That’s why you had your guard killed.” Despite her obvious attachment to him, Vause hadn’t hesitated to put him down when it came to his death or hers. “You couldn’t afford the risk.”

“One touch, and he could have taken me. Imagine the damage he could have wrought if he controlled a magistrate. I can’t be compromised. He has already killed to learn what I know, but what he’s gained is but a drop in an ocean of secrets. Things I would—and have—killed to protect.” Reading into my silence, she softened her tone. “Fionn would have killed me had he failed to prevent my contamination. It is the only way. Harden your heart to it now. This can only end one way, and that is in death.”

Harlow had survived Charybdis the longest. But Aunt Dot? Isaac? Mom and Dad? How did I earmark any one of them as an acceptable loss? I couldn’t. Even though my parents had broken my heart, they were still my family. As long as we were all alive, there was still hope we might reconcile in the future. Death was permanent.

“You don’t trust me—” she began.

I couldn’t stop the scoff burning my nose. “I can’t imagine why.”

“This union of yours with Cord Graeson is not an alliance I would have chosen for you, but I respect that you do have genuine affection for him, and him for you.” The other shoe hovered for a full minute. And then it dropped. “That doesn’t change the fact you must not return to him. Stay as far away from the pack and that poisonous bond as you can.”

Why further proof of her prejudice surprised me, I have no idea. “Graeson is the one person who has never lied to me, and you’re asking me to repay him by walking away.”

“Marshal Ayer was one of the guards for your parents, as I’ve mentioned.” The clicking pen returned with a vengeance. “We have reason to believe that first contact between Marshal Ayer and Charybdis when he stepped out of the portal in Wink is the reason why he targeted you.”

The shift in her narrative threw me enough I didn’t question the connection.

“As your recruiter, all reports on your family were to be given to me in person. Marshal Ayer had ended her six-week commitment and was required to check in with me prior to returning to her family. I was attending a mandatory meeting in Wink and granted her permission to visit me there despite the risk of discovery.” Her voice tightened. “I was in a meeting with the other magistrates when the portal breach occurred. Charybdis caught her on her way to my temporary quarters, and her knowledge gave him access to every piece of information we had on you and your family, and I’m sorrier for that than you can ever know.”

The room whirled. My ears rang. Air solidified in my lungs.

Happenstance? Serendipity? Fate?

That was her answer?

How many times had I combed over crime scenes or sat in on autopsies only to be present when the poignant answer to “why her?” was inevitably
wrong place, wrong time
? How often did the killer have no previous knowledge of the victim? Or swore he had subdued his dark urges until they combusted and devoured the nearest person?

The simplicity of that answer, the implication that any person, no matter how moral or just, could lose it all in a blink of unprovoked malice, had never satisfied. It sure as hell didn’t now.

A sharp
crack
perked my ears. I stared dumbly at the phone as it spun across the floor. A heartbeat later, my knees buckled and I joined it.

“Agent Ellis, are you all right?”

The guard’s question was drowned in the white noise rushing through my head. I had been so fixated on the why, I hadn’t absorbed the how. How Charybdis snared my attention in the first place. How he tailored his methodology to fit his target. How he hooked me, right from the start.

Charybdis had been in Ayer’s head. Possibly even Mom’s or Dad’s. He might as well have been in mine the way he had selected my worst fears and pitted them against me. Adding his own gruesome signature, he all but recreated Lori’s death with each victim the kelpie had taken.

All those girls were dead…because of me.

Marie’s blood was on my hands.

I drew my legs against my chest, wrapped my arms around them and dropped my forehead to my knees. I had come so close to having it all—a mate, a home, a future. All of that was gone, snatched from my outstretched arms in the span of seconds it had taken me to lose Lori, my parents, my family.

Graeson would hate me when he figured out I had cost him his sister.

I had cost him everything.

The honor of being chosen as his mate, the pride at being an alpha, left a cold place in my chest as those accomplishments withered. I would lose the place I had been carving out among the wargs, and my warg aspect would shrivel and die along with those dreams. A ragged howl tore through my chest, but I clamped my mouth shut over it. The she-wolf wasn’t real. She was just as much a figment of my imagination as the idea I could ever deserve to belong with a man like Graeson.

Rocking back and forth, I kept my jaw locked and swallowed convulsively to hold the acid at bay.

Vause’s guard squatted in front of me, a safe distance away. I watched him through the crack of my legs as he signed off with the magistrate and pocketed his phone. Lips mashed into a firm line, he scanned the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention. None came. None ever did. I could have told him that.

“I must go.” He went down on one knee. “I have left the magistrate alone for as long as I dare.”

Flicking my wrist, I shooed him on his way, hoping he would be quick about it so I could get my head on straight before guilt pumped my stomach contents.

“Forgive me.” He struck so fast his hand blurred. “I have my orders.”

The downy blanket of oblivion beckoned, and I curled into its embrace. The hard edges of the world went soft and muzzy until I could breathe again. There was no shame here, only acceptance and warmth. The swaddling blackness enveloped me, and the rest fell away.

W
aking
up on the carpet in my hotel room, muscles sore and hip aching, was not a great start to what promised to be a long day. I gritted my teeth, rolled over and pushed to my feet. An itch brought my hand to my cheek, where I found a ragged sheaf of notebook paper adhered to my skin. Using the bathroom mirror to guide me in its removal, I flipped it over and read the information written in elegant script. The words pierced my grogginess and made my heart pound faster.

I sent Theo a text to meet me at the Waffle Iron, the restaurant we had scouted for breakfast, then changed into fresh clothes and ran my fingers through my hair. I grabbed my phone, wallet and the paper and headed across the street.

Turns out I hadn’t sent him a wakeup call. He was digging into a stack of pancakes when I shoved through the doors. I strolled right up to his table and slapped the scrap of paper down beside his plate before collapsing on the bench seat across from him.

“You’ve got a smudge.” He rubbed a finger under his eye. “Right there.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I stole his glass of water, tossing it back with one hand while the other tapped the note. “That’s my parents’ last-known address.”

“How did you get that?” The fork slid from his hand and clattered to his plate. “I’ve had people digging for days, and they all came up empty.”

His club connections must keep him plugged into the Gemini community, but we were few and far between. There was a whole supernatural world out there, and sometimes it took organizations like the conclave, with their questionable morals, to deliver. That didn’t mean I had to like it.

“I had a visitor last night.” I gave him a quick rundown of my night, from Fionn’s arrival to waking this morning sprawled across the carpet where he’d left me.

Theo listened, fingers drumming the table, reminding me so much of Isaac when the urge to run struck him it hurt. He barely waited for me to finish before he shot his hand in the air and called, “Check.”

We paid and exited before my stomach got a chance to rumble at the scent of the bacon I didn’t get the chance to eat.

Theo programmed the address into his phone’s GPS app then passed the note to me for safekeeping. I clutched it until the paper crumpled, but I couldn’t let go. This was it. I was about to see the place my parents had called home. I was about to see their new life firsthand, and I wasn’t sure if I hoped things looked the same as I remembered or if different would be simpler. Like if they had cut ties to everything it might be easier for me to stomach instead of life going on as usual for them, except without me in it.

The drive passed in quiet except for the robotic directions voiced at regular intervals.

“Are you sure this is right?” Theo threw the car into park in the driveway of a modest brick home positioned in the center of an older subdivision. The grass was overgrown, but there wasn’t a weed to be found, so the lawn had been cared for until recently. “This is so…permanent.”

I checked the paper for the hundredth time since discovering it, then matched the address to the mailbox. “This is the address Vause gave me.”

We stepped onto the sidewalk and approached the door side by side.

“The gate leading into the backyard is open.” He jerked his chin. “That gives us privacy from the humans.”

Nodding, I crossed the stepping-stone path that curved around the side of the house. Theo joined me, and I shut the gate and latched it to prevent any well-meaning neighbors from interfering. A set of French doors led out onto a tidy patio outfitted with a grill, patio furniture, the whole nine yards.

I checked the doors and the two rear windows. All were locked. There were no handy spare keys left under rocks or under mats, either. The conclave didn’t skimp when it came to cleaning up messes in human-populated areas. I didn’t know what to expect once we got inside, except I could guarantee all the surfaces would be sanitized and anything fae would have been removed.

The easiest way in was to break the panel of glass near the handle so we could reach inside and open the door. I reared back my elbow, ready to do the honors, but Theo caught my forearm.

“Let’s keep this quiet, okay?” He glanced left to right. “We don’t know how nosy the neighbors are here.” He gripped the handle and held on tight, the metal heating until it glowed. Theo pulled out a warped chunk of locking mechanism and dropped it on the dirt. “There. Wasn’t that better?”

His recalls weren’t as impressive as Isaac’s, but he did okay. Better than me. I almost asked what superheated creature he had used as a donor but decided it wasn’t my business who had been warming his bed lately.

“After you.” He swung one half of the patio doors open and stepped aside. “Be careful until we figure out if they set any spells after they left. We don’t want to walk into something nasty.”

Crossing that threshold left me shaken, but in a good way. As alien as the brick box acting as a home base for Gemini struck me, the interior reminded me of stepping inside my parents’ Airstream. The walls were covered with metallic paper. I ran my hand along the nearest panel, and my fingers bumped where someone had taken the time to hammer silver upholstery nails into the wall. The same pictures once screwed into the curved walls of the trailer hung from drywall in frames. The furniture was the same or similar, larger without a size restriction.

Theo turned a slow circle. “Have we entered
The Twilight Zone
?”

“It sure looks that way.” The living room flowed into an open-concept kitchen. Touches of the familiar adorned every surface in the most bizarre mix of past and present I could have ever imagined. “The bedrooms must be this way. I’m going to clear them.”

I examined a tidy half bath in the hall then entered the master bedroom. I touched the quilt at the foot of the bed, the one my maternal grandmother had handstitched as a wedding gift shortly before she and her twin passed. The en suite bathroom held no mysteries, and I left the oddly sterile rooms to explore the rest of the home.

The second bedroom had been converted into a storage room with metal shelves holding all sorts of medical supplies. Incontinence pads, tubing, syringes and alcohol wipes, clean sheets, bedding protection and plastic-looking underwear.

“Theo,” I called, my voice wavering. “Come look at this.”

What I really meant was
Don’t make me face this alone
.

The sharp ache shredding my chest intensified, and I wished so hard for Graeson that my wolf pushed a whine up the back of my throat. More than his sound advice, I missed him. His strength. His warmth. I didn’t want to face this by myself. Theo was family, but he and I had never bared our souls the way Graeson and I had despite knowing each other our whole lives. My jagged heart wanted its matching half, the one guaranteed to fit and make whatever we uncovered bearable.

“It will be okay.” Theo’s hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed. “Whatever this means, it’s going to be all right.”

Throat tight, I nodded and entered the hall to face down the last room. Quick as I could, before I lost my nerve, I shoved open the door. Ice incased my feet, anchoring me to the threshold. My knees locked, and I had to grip the doorframe to keep myself upright.

Rose walls, blush carpet. Stuffed animals and prissy dolls. Tattered books and bins full of toys that had been hand-me-downs from my parents. The entire room was a shrine to Lori and her favorite color.

“I don’t understand.” Again and again, my gaze was drawn away from the tiny details on the fringes of the room to where a full-sized hospital bed dominated the center of the space. “What does this mean?”

A few machines sat on built-in shelves to either side of the bed. There were nooks where more units must have been prior to Ayer’s massacre.

Theo examined the machines, the setup, and anchored his hands on his hips. “There are units missing, but what’s left is…” He raked his hands through his hair. “This wasn’t about convalescence. This room was setup for long-term care.” His lips pinched. “We’re talking life support here for a person with little or no cognitive awareness.”

“How do you know?” I croaked.

“I’ve seen these before.” He tapped small gems set into the silver railings near the head of the bed. A few had been pried out with claws or a tool, but most had shattered in the process. “There’s a clan of lesser dryads in Orlando who use them. When a tree is old and dying, or infected with pests, they’ll carve out notches in the trunk and embed bespelled gemstones to put the spirit in stasis so they don’t suffer the pain of a slow death.”

I made a circuit around the room, fingers brushing over old friends and familiar belongings. I stopped at the closet, half-expecting more supplies but discovering a treasure-trove of frilly nightgowns. The size was small, but adult. The colors were vibrant, the patterns varied but full of childish whimsy.

“This doesn’t mean anything,” I said as much to myself as Theo.

Prying myself from the cheerful clothes, I shut the door and leaned against it. If only shutting out the scramble of my thoughts was so simple. Across from me, Theo sat in a rocker I hadn’t noticed tucked on the far side of the bed. He held a yellowed, dog-eared copy of
Bunnicula
in his hands.

“There must be an explanation.” He stared ahead, voice empty. “Lori is dead.”

His voice rose at the end, making it a question, asking me to back him up on what we accepted as truth and fact.

“She’s gone.” The bedrock shoring up my life wobbled perilously. “I don’t know what this means yet, but it can’t mean that.”

Mom and Dad had abandoned me. I got that. I had moved on. Mostly. They cut me out of their lives, and I understood. I was a near-exact replica of what they had lost. They would look at me and see what might have been. I could forgive them that weakness thanks to Aunt Dot’s unconditional love.

But this…

This made my gut pitch with the possibilities. Lori was dead.
Dead.
Right? She was my twin. My sister. I would know if she was alive. Deep down, I would have known she wasn’t really gone. That’s how twin bonds worked, wasn’t it? That connection was the reason no twin outlived their sibling for long. I was a freak. All my life I had been the oddity, the outsider, the lone Gemini in a culture of pairs. Except… What if I wasn’t?

My parents wouldn’t keep something this huge from me. From us all. Would they? Did I know my parents well enough to make that call? Was any eight-year-old’s perception of their mother and father close to the reality of them? And what about Aunt Dot? She was an adult—my mother’s twin. She would have known. If this was what it looked like, then she must have been aware of their charade. My parents would have needed help that night, and after. No. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. That would mean Aunt Dot had lied to me every day by not telling me for years. Every breakfast, a lie. Every good-night kiss, a lie. Every time she told me she loved me, the worst kind of lie.

Head shaking, I backed out into the hall. “I can’t do this.”

I ran through the house, the ghosts of my past breathing down my neck, without a backward glance.

* * *

T
he drive
back to the hotel was heavy with things left unsaid. Escaping into the parking lot gave me room to breathe, but the reprieve was short-lived. I strode inside and made a beeline for the elevator.

“Ms. Ellis?”

I glanced over my shoulder to find the desk clerk trailing me. “Yes?”

“You received a message while you were out.” He shoved a piece of notebook paper at me. “The caller requested I place this in your hand myself.”

After taking another look at his neat-as-a-pin attire, I noticed the badge affixed to his shirt that identified him as a manager. “I appreciate it.”

“Here at the Comforting Inn, we take great pride in our guests’ satisfaction. Our goal is to ensure that every stay is as perfect as we can make it.” He pointed at the web address running along the bottom of the page. “If you don’t mind, could you visit our website and take a brief survey? It helps spread the word about our excellent customer service and allows us to continue to excel at—”

“Yes.” I spun on my heel. “I’ll do that.”

I jabbed the button for the elevator and studied the message. The area code was familiar, but I had contacts all over the country. When glaring at the ten digits failed to jog my memory, I scanned the bottom of the page and the hotel’s information. I tripped over their phone number, compared it to the handwritten message and sure enough, the area codes matched.

Who would be calling me from a local number? Only one way to find out. I retrieved my phone and dialed.

“Hello?” a soft voice answered on a rush of breath. “Cammie?”

A thousand childhood memories blasted to the forefront of my mind.
“Mom?”

“Yes, baby, it’s me.”

“I—” I stumbled into the hall when the doors opened, and sat on a bench underneath a mural. “I thought you were taken. Your guard was killed. Vause told me. Where did you—? Why are you calling now?” I slumped against the wallpaper. “What’s going on?”