No Peace for the Damned (18 page)

The double beep of the alarm sounded.

We froze.

Theo cursed under his breath and lifted himself to stand. He swayed on his feet, then fell right back down on the bed.

“Stay here,” I said softly. “You need more than just a couple of hours of sleep.”

He wanted to argue, but he was completely drained. With a light push I got him to lie back down. I crawled from the bed and grabbed a T-shirt and cotton shorts. As I pulled them on, my faced burned. I had healed Theo, spent the night lying next to him, just had that unbelievable moment against him, and the whole time I wore nothing but ugly purple panties and a faded green camisole top. I didn’t even want to think about what my hair looked like.

In the kitchen, I poured myself a drink. Would Theo want one? Or maybe coffee? He probably didn’t drink whiskey for breakfast like me. I started up the coffee pot when the monitor beeped again. Jon fumbled at the door before he and Shane
charged into the house. Thirteen’s large form moved quickly in their wake.

“We want answers and we want them now!” Shane roared as soon as he saw me.

I shifted my weight, adjusting my grip on the whiskey bottle. Shane drew up short. Confusion and anger shaded all their thoughts.

“You have to know more than you’re telling us, Magnolia,” Jon said evenly. He stood across the table from me and leaned forward, both hands pressing onto the table’s ledge. “More Network members are missing. We have no clue where to find Banks, and if we don’t move
now
, more people are going to die.” He narrowed his eyes. “But maybe that’s what you want. Maybe Marie was right. Is that it, Magnolia? Are you just a plant for your family?”

My power sizzled under my skin. The cabinets rattled, the coffee maker popped. If I broke my new dishes because these two pissed me off…

“That’s enough.”

I looked at Thirteen on reflex, but he wasn’t the one who spoke. Shane gasped. Jon straightened. He looked over my shoulder to the hallway.

Theo towered in the doorframe behind me. His presence wrapped around me like a blanket. I relaxed a little because I couldn’t help it. Jon calmed down too, but a new annoyance surfaced in his thoughts. Almost like he did a mental eye roll.

“Theo! Oh, thank God.” Shane’s hands relaxed at his sides. “We went to your house when you missed the five thirty check-in, and the door was splintered just like Banks’s. We thought…well thank God you’re all right.”

His gaze passed over me and he tensed again—the look on his face even fiercer than before. God, even when I hadn’t done anything Shane was pissed off at me.

Theo didn’t answer. The tension grew thick but no one’s thoughts made sense. What was going on?

“Someone was at your home, Theo,” Thirteen said coldly. “Were you there when they arrived?”

Thirteen folded his big arms across his chest. He was concentrating on the break-in scene at Theo’s house but…was he
mad
at Theo? That couldn’t be right.

“I don’t know who took me,” Theo said. “I was asleep when they came. The explosion of the door woke me up, but before I could get my gun, I was shot with some kind of tranq. When I came to, I was at the Kelch estate.”

“How did you know where you were?” Jon asked.

“I didn’t. Not at first.”

I felt Theo rotate his shoulders behind me in some sort of stretch.

“You need more rest,” I said softly, keeping my eyes on Jon.

“Well, the standoff in the kitchen was kind of hard to ignore.”

I almost smiled. Almost.

“But she’s right,” he continued, “I do need more sleep.”

There was a gentle tug on the hem at the back of my shirt. No one else saw, but my whole heart soared. I stepped back toward Theo then suddenly froze in my tracks.

“We need to get through this first,” Thirteen said, his words clipped. “Go put some clothes on and walk us through
exactly
what happened last night.”

I heard Thirteen, but just barely. Jon had my full attention now: he thought Theo and I had had sex. In fact, he was sure of it.

My mouth fell open. My earlier vision of Theo and me together, only in real life—the thought spun my head. But that wasn’t all. According to Jon, finding Theo in a woman’s bed was as normal as cereal for breakfast.

Fabulous
.

I needed a drink.

For some reason, I couldn’t meet Thirteen’s eyes. Theo was still pulling his shirt over his head when he reentered the kitchen.

“You sure you don’t want to call the whole group together?” he said. “I’m not too keen on telling this story more than once.” He pulled out the chair to my left, swung it around, and straddled it. From the way he sat, the blood and tears across the back of his shirt were visible only to me.

“Why don’t you just tell us what happened and I’ll decide which details are appropriate for the rest of the team.”

My eyebrows shot up.

Theo spoke through gritted teeth. “Nothing happened, Thirteen, so how about you back the fuck off.”

Thirteen’s eyes narrowed. I looked back and forth between them.

After another long minute, Theo said, “Like I said, they tranq’d me with some kind of hallucinogen and took me to the Kelch estate. I assume they dressed me, too, since I was in boxers when I went to bed and in this when I woke.” He pulled his tattered shirt from his chest with two fingers. “The drugs had me seeing things that weren’t there, so I have no idea which one took me. As soon as they knew I was awake, they strapped me on a table and started slicing up my back.”

A need for vengeance washed over me so fast and so strong that the whole room turned crimson. The men, the walls, the light—everything red. I blinked and the room turned back to normal color.

Great…something else that never happened before. What was with me these days?

Theo continued, “After they’d been at it a few minutes, they stopped and one of them started whispering in my ear…in
French.
Qui est l’annuaire?
‘Who is the calendar?’ It didn’t make sense to me, but there it is.”

Wait a minute. What?

“French?” I asked. “Are you sure?”

He looked over his shoulder at me. “Yeah, pretty sure. I only took a couple of years of it in college, but I think I can recognize it when I hear it. Why?”

“It’s just that foreign languages—yeah, not my family’s forte. The only foreign language any of us are remotely familiar with is Romanian, and that’s just because Grandmother lived there when she was younger.”

“So you’re saying that
none
of your family speaks French?” Theo asked, his voice rising. “So, what? Either I was tortured by someone not in your family, or I hallucinated the question.”

I exchanged a frown with Jon then looked over at Shane. He was just as confused. Finally, I turned to Thirteen. His face was ghost white, his expression more void than I had ever seen. And before I could even get a read on his thoughts, he leaped from his seat and raced out of the house.

The rest of us just stared at each other. Then all at once, we jumped to our feet and flew out the door after him. We were just in time to inhale the cloud of dust left behind as Thirteen sped up the gravel driveway.

I went to my car, ready to follow him, when Theo called out, “Mag!” I spun around. All three of them were still on the porch, watching me. What were they waiting for?

“He’ll be back,” Theo called. The hum of Thirteen’s car was fading. We had to hurry. “He’s done this before,” Theo continued. “He’ll come back when he’s ready. We just have to wait.”

I listened again and the hum was gone. I couldn’t even tell which direction he’d driven.
Shit!
I glared at Theo and the
others as I stomped back to the house. When I got to the door, I slammed it, leaving the guys on the porch.

I needed a drink. Damn it, something was up with Thirteen and I hadn’t caught it. And if Theo was right, all I could do was sit here and wait.

I stayed on the love seat by the front window, ignoring all the others and their patient confidence. All assured and accepting. Their “he’s fine” and “he’s done this before”—it was wearing on my last nerve. Wasn’t
anyone
worried about Thirteen?

No. All they cared about was what information had him acting as he had. They worried about being out of the loop, not whether Thirteen was still alive or not. Bastards.

Theo’s image wormed past my mood. Sprawled out over my sheets, his broad chest rising as he slept. I was glad he’d gone back to bed, but the need to join him distracted me. I pushed it away, downed another drink and kept my thoughts strictly on Thirteen.

It was almost nine o’clock that night when Thirteen finally pulled into the drive. Relief washed over me; air filled my lungs once more. The whole team was here now. I pulled my legs up
under me. No reason to rush out to meet him. After all, he hadn’t even said good-bye. Or called. Or texted.

He ambled through the front door. I nearly choked on my drink. His hair was disheveled, his eyes ringed with dark circles. He looked as if he’d aged ten years in a day. With barely a greeting to anyone, he lumbered into the great room and sat heavily in one of the love seats. His head hung forward to rest in his hands.

“Um, would you like something to drink?” I asked quietly.

He lifted his eyes to mine and smiled. “That would be wonderful, Magnolia. Thank you.” I moved to the kitchen in a blur. The next moment I was back at his side, fresh OJ in hand. He took the glass. I took my seat and waited with everyone else. Theo leaned against the wall behind me, a warm weight at my back.

Thirteen finished his drink then clapped his hands together. He took a deep breath and began. “When Theo was in the confines of the Kelch estate, he was asked a single question: ‘
qui est l’annuaire?
’ His translation was correct, but there is another, broader meaning to the term
l’annuaire
. Directory. In this case, the Network directory.
L’annuaire
is the living compilation of our entire membership. Every piece of information about every single member of the Network, present and past, is housed in the well-protected
l’annuaire
…a man named William Broviak.”

“William Broviak is
l’annuaire
?” Theo asked after a pause. “A
man
is this directory?”

“That’s correct,” Thirteen said. He sounded tired, resigned. “You see, William has a special gift, a psychic talent that he has spent the majority of his tormented life trying to alleviate. William sees relationships.”

A relationship psychic? Well, let me just add that to my growing list of “what-the-hell-is-going-on.”

Thirteen continued, “He has the unique ability to instantly see the connections between individuals the moment he meets someone.
For example, in meeting Charles he would know that he is married to Marie, has two brothers in the military; his father, his mother, his coworkers, everyone he knows and has an emotional tie to would be imprinted in William’s mind. So when he first met a certain member of the Network…”

“He knew the identity of every Network member,” Cordele finished his sentence.

“Exactly.”

Hmmm…I glanced back at Theo.

“But none of us knows
all
the members,” Charles argued. “We only know those we directly work with. Everyone else is an anonymous face in the crowd. ‘You could pass a fellow member on the street and not even know that you both worked for the same elite organization.’ Isn’t that what you told us from the beginning?”

“
You
don’t know every Network member,” Thirteen corrected him. “But I do. At least the ones in my division. As a chief in the organization, it’s part of my job to recruit and work with every member on their assignments. William was discovered by one of my predecessors nearly twelve years ago. His ability was revealed to the chief at the time and he was put immediately under the care and protection of our agents. And has remained under that protection ever since.”

“Wait,” Heather said, waving a hand in front of her. “You took him from his life and just kept him? Made him the Network’s prisoner just because he had some ability that wasn’t his fault?”

She had a point. And I could see where the situation might hit a little too close to home for Heather. Still, she wasn’t the only one trying to work through this new information. Everyone’s mind was reeling, processing. I took another drink.