Obfuscate (16 page)

“I’m not finished, and I have put a considerable amount of time and energy into the research we’re going to share with you.” Forcing down my irritation, I inhaled a calming breath and counted to five. With a carefully controlled tone to my voice, I continued. “Instead of turning off the game, we’re using it for gathering intelligence. Already, we have a list of trails to where potential illegal blood orchards are located by their eCommerce transactions.”

Briggs held his chin in his hand, seeming to pensively think about the idea. “So you went all NSA with
ExsanguiNation,
’uh? What about gamer privacy rights?” He tipped his glass at me with a half-warning, half-threatening tone in his voice. “If anyone learns what you’re doing, dzen you’ll ’ave a lot more dzan some silly vampire queen on your ass.”

Torchy bounced Khai to quiet his fussiness. It would be feeding time soon. “Aye, but what about the privacy rights of the Supes and the people who’ve been involuntarily held against their will to fill the bloodwine orders? Knowing what I do now, I dinnae want to sell that kind of shite in my Super Market stores. I want to know if the product is certifiable volunteered, ya kin?”

Sheridan spoke up. “You’re correct, Briggs. I’m sure the queen will eventually get word, so we’ll need to find a way to gather intel without anyone knowing who is doing it.”

Khaldon
hrmphed
and sarcastically added, “Ya think?”

I pulled my mouth over to the side and began to give him what for, but I pushed down the emotion and ignored his obvious irritation. I grinned a fake smile and felt the feelers of angst crawling out of my gut.

I wish I had more of those herbal pills Ichi had given me. I needed to relax.

Beano sniffed and nudged my hand searching for more tasty morsels. “I’m sure there’re thousands of legitimate merchants and consumers such as Torchy and myself. I’m not worried about people like us.”

Walking back to the counter, I gathered up a small bite of sausage for Beano. The final sip of Cognac drained from my glass and I grabbed for the bottle. “I wrote a program for the checkout pages, sniffing out the purchaser’s IP address. This code identifies and tracks the seller’s shipping activity.”

I opened the crystal decanter and Sheridan held the bottle down, thwarting my efforts for a refill. She knew what brandy did to me. My
don’t test me eyes
spoke volumes, and she released the decanter. I poured myself another glass and turned to face everyone again.

“Briggs, I figured this kind of intel work might be right up your black market alley, ya know? We can hire some Ghoulie thugs to ‘collect’ more information on who’s buying and who’s selling the latest bloodwine. Find out what’s the word on the street.” I finger quoted “collect”, accentuating my double-entendre meaning.

Briggs toasted his glass with a wry smile. Normally, he had powerful, opalescent eyes which spewed confidence, but for some reason, I sensed a bit of hesitancy and a deeper layer of darkness or remorse that wasn’t present before.

Sheridan shook her head, possibly shaking off bad memories, and she took Khai from Torchy and held him in her arms. She played with his little toes and vocalized in mommy-baby talk. “The second thing we did is programmed PADME to find the geo-locations where a lot of women have gone missing. Oh yes we did.” Khai squealed with a laugh and her whole face lit up with a motherly love. She then looked up at us and spoke normal again. “Queen Civetateo is still kidnapping women like me and Dakota for her dhampir breeding regime. We need to expose these places and rescue those women. We must contact the authorities to tear them down. If
we
don’t do something, who will?”

“This is just bloody pish ridiculous! Are you listening to yourselves? Just what sodden authorities are you planning to report to?” Khaldon placed his glass on the table beside him with a loud
clang,
and I thought for sure it would explode under his force. His voice raised in volume along with hand gestures. “These are the queen’s private facilities.” He pulled on his hair as though he were trying to communicate his frustration further. “You aren’t thinking straight. We’re powerless against the queen and her generals. Do you honestly think anyone under her, any lord and lady, are going to defy her wishes of building this dhampir army?” His hands vibrated showing his frustration. “I can almost guarantee you Civetateo is using the commerce from these blood orchards to finance her new troops.”

“She doesn’t need to know who tips off the cops.” I held my hands on my hips and defended my point of view. “We just have to provide the information on where they’re located.”

Khaldon slammed his hand down on the table again. The liquid from his glass sloshed and spilled, puddling in a pool of emotion that matched my own. “Don’t you get it? There are no bloody coppers to report to. You’re being ridiculously naïve and just begging for a death wish if you keep going down this path. There’s no way to keep you safe.”

The calm breathing I’d been using to control my emotions escaped me. The edge of control I’d been maintaining was gone and I spilled my own drink gesticulating my reactions to his inhuman words.

“Naïve? Naïve?!” The tone of my voice grew incredulous. “You have the fucking nerve to call
me
naïve when I’ve found a solution? At least I’m trying to do something instead of rolling over dead and taking for granted we can’t do anything.”

Unexpected words loaded with pent-up energy exploded before I could stop them. “Keep me safe? Seriously? If I recall, all three of you had very specific words.”

“‘Everything will go as planned,’ you said.” My hand gestured toward Briggs.

“‘Nothin’s gonna hurt us tonight,’ you said.” I looked at Harris and he winced with every angry word I punctuated.

My hands shook and gulped another shot of cognac.

“‘Our plan is solid,’ you said.” I stabbed my fingers into Khaldon’s chest, spewing my words. “How dare you call
me
naïve when I was the one who said we weren’t prepared. Dakota is dead because we needed more help and you all refused to listen.” My hands gestured in the air as I encircled the room. “I told every one of you on that beach I didn’t think we had enough support, but you convinced me to believe otherwise.”

Khaldon didn’t say a word, but his laser-focused eyes met my own. Seething, my inner vampire came out as my fangs slowly descended. “Dakota is dead! Ludovic is dead, and we barely made it out alive because I
was
naïve. I trusted all of you to protect us.”

I stared Khaldon down with a heated agenda. His own fangs had dropped at the energy attack. “And you—you had a team of experienced fighters at your disposal. Vhalencia, Devden, Chuck, and Ichi. Why didn’t you ask for their help before we landed on that hellhole in the first place?” My vision tunneled in on me as the depth of my words hit inside my solar plexus chakra. “I asked you this on the day you introduced me to them and you never answered me. Why didn’t you tell me about your progeny?”

Khaldon’s lips pulled tight to the side of his mouth and he broke the stare-down. He walked out to the edge of the patio where I’d stood earlier, and quietly drank his Cognac.

He kept his back to me, not responding to my accusations or questions.

“Fine, turn your back on me.” I cried out to everyone because I just couldn’t hold it in any longer.

I walked around the room and stumbled over a bar stool.

I lowered my voice back down to a dull roar. “Look, guys, I can’t stand feeling this way, but these awful questions keep haunting me. What if Ludovic hadn’t used that gawd damned key, setting off the bomb? What if we had cut her away from all the chains first? What if we had inspected her for wires? Could we have kept it from exploding? Could we have saved her?”

The patio fell silent. Even the seagulls had lowered their voices and listened to my rantings. I stole glances at others, and everyone looked at their feet or stared into the depths of their glasses. Beano rubbed his head inside my hand and leaned against me. I inhaled cleansing breaths—in and out—for a long, slow minute. I had more bitter, evil, and terribly unkind words I wanted to spew at every single one of them, but my conscience argued with me as to how to handle the situation. There was nothing I could say or do to erase the sting, the pain of what I just said. I was angry at myself and everyone else. We all were to blame for her death. There was no ocean vast enough to hold the guilt I swam in every day.

The silence in the room was deafening. When Briggs and Harris did meet my eyes, their faces told me volumes of what they were feeling too.

Without a word, Torchy stood and poured another Cognac for himself. He lifted the decanter, asking the room if any of us wanted a refill. I ran into a chair and then stuck my glass out to him as did everyone else, except Khaldon. He remained at the edge of the patio as far away from me as he could get.

The amber liquid tinkled the ice against the side of my glass. I downed the refill and held out the cup again. Torchy raised a single eyebrow and then gave me a slight nod of his head and refilled it.

Sheridan reached for my other hand and pulled it in under her chin and squeezed. She took my finger and ran it down Khai’s sweet nose. Looking at me with her blue eyes, she tried to give me a small smile. But I knew deep inside that she too was blaming me, thinking I didn’t do enough to help Dakota. I knew that she knew how much I had failed her.

Briggs sat down heavily in a chaise lounge with an exasperated sigh. “I’m so immensely sorry, Chey Chey.
Oui
, you are right. I ’ad no idea the Rakshasa were so well informed and ’ad been prepared for our arrival. Dzey were supposed to be simple natives. I’ve lost my precious Dakota because I failed ’er. I’m so angry Ludovic was such a lousy communicator dzat ’e couldn’t tell us more. I even miss dzat stupid bastard. I can never get my Dakota back and I may never regain your trust. I ’ave failed all of you.”

It wasn’t until I heard the level of guilt in his defeated voice that I realized just how much my words had stung him to the core. I shouldn’t have been so unkind, so ungrateful. He’d lost the woman he loved. That has to be a special form of self-loathing. Knowing you tried your best, or didn’t try your best, and failed? He had to have been beating himself up more than I ever could.

“If only I had—we could have—I knew I should have checked that cell for traps.” Harris hung his face in his hands and his shoulders shook. “But it looked so primitive it never occurred to me that anything electrical was down there.” His muffled words were a little hard to understand as he spoke to the floor. “I could’ve saved her if only I’d taken the time to investigate, scan, and secure the room before I left to find Tiffany. It’s all my fault. I didn’t clean the room like I should have.”

I had no idea they were blaming themselves for what happened.

They risked everything to help us. I’m such a jerk to be so angry.

I needed to sprout ears and be condemned to say “eee aaw” the rest of my life because of what an ass I’d been.

Sheridan handed the baby to Torchy, and he took over bottle duty. Her kindness helped ease the tension in the room. She put her hand on my shoulder, and with a squeeze, forced me to sit down on the bar stool. I looked up at her, and she gave me those
big sister
don’t test me eyes
right back at me.

The tone of Sheridan’s voice was full of empathy and had a soothing lilt that wasn’t condescending, but instead provided healing to my ragged nerves. “I know this is hard for each one of us. We’re all grieving in our own ways and trying to understand what happened.” She reminded me of our mother with her gentle kindness. “The
what ifs
are killing me too. If we’re going to survive this, then we have to keep moving and we need to do it together because we are all feeling the same thing. Dakota would not have wanted us to fight over how she died or how we failed, but she would want us to kill the motherfuckers who did this to her.”

Listening to my sister curse in the voice of a whisper gave it a deadly appeal. She walked out toward Khaldon and touched him on the back of the shoulders embracing him with both hands. She urged him to turn around. After a moment, with her kind insistence, he reluctantly came back to the group. His hand hid a bloody handkerchief and his eyes were crimson with emotion.

As she led him back, Khaldon sat down on the opposite side of the room not meeting my eyes. How could I look at him now for all the things I’d said out loud?

Sheridan addressed all of us. “I’ve been studying about it, and the stages of grief are interminably terrible. Every single one of us is going through those steps, but at different times and in very different ways. You’ve heard that old expression ‘dying from a broken heart’? People really die from this kind of pain every day. Whether we grieve together, with a support group, or alone, we have to stop blaming ourselves and each other for everything that’s happened.”

She picked up her own glass of brandy, sipped it, and studied me directly. “Truthfully, I’m surprised we haven’t already had this conversation or blown up at each other before now. I know my own emotions are so crazy, I’ve felt it’s just been easier to stay away from everyone. Some minutes I’m fine, and then others, I’m a complete basket case. Just ask Torchy.”

Torchy edged a small laugh to his voice. “Aye, those words will ensure me nothing but trouble. It’s best I tend the wee bairn for safety.” He winked at her and a rush of blush bloomed across her cheeks.

Sheridan gave him a sweet smile and continued to explain her own emotions in a way that honored my feelings. “I can’t tell you how ashamed I feel about myself. I’ve blamed every creature on this planet for what has happened.”

She refilled her glass and explained things I never knew about her. “The day I learned our mother was murdered was the day my life ended. Mom and I were closer than peanut butter and jelly, and she made me promise to always take care of you and Dakota. I prayed one day I would honor her with a beautiful daughter. I have failed her on both promises and I’m filled with so much guilt. Why did Teagan have to die? How did I fail her as a mother? Why didn’t my body make her a healthy one? Did I not eat the right kinds of foods? Did that one cup of coffee do it? Why didn’t the doctors tell me earlier about her heart defect? Couldn’t we have fixed it in utero?”