Shifting Selves (20 page)

To my relief, Frank didn’t look doubtful or angry. He wasn’t a handsome man. He had a skinny build, heavy features, and eyebrows that put most mustaches to shame. He made up for it, though, with the permanent sparkle in his eyes and the way he had of looking at you as if you were the only woman in existence. With my words, that charm disappeared. He looked worn and empty, and when he finally met my eyes, he couldn’t manage anything more than a dull, confused expression.

“You know how, whenever some calm suburban man goes around the bend, the neighbors talk about how nice and normal he seemed? It’s kind of like that. I wish it wasn’t the case, Frank. More than anything, I wish I could tell you something other than what I’m telling you.”

He nodded, one terse nod, indicating I should go on.

“He held me against my will and drugged me. I’m okay,” I said quickly, when I saw the heat rising in his face. “Nothing happened, but I had help. I think others are being drugged the way I was, and they need help, too.”

“You want to know if I know anything about the drugs.” He got right to the point. When you show up after not having seen someone in ten years, odds are good you want something.

“I don’t think you know anything about the actual drugs,” I clarified hastily. Frank might drink too much and smoke the occasional joint, and he definitely flirted with every woman who walked through the door, but that was as far as it ever went. “I thought you might know who Brian’s been hanging out with the last couple months.” I felt queasy speaking of Brian in the present tense, pretending he still lived.

Frank looked at the bottle, as if debating pouring himself a third drink, but he refrained. “I never saw him outside the bar, but he worked here for over a decade. I thought he was a nice guy, Aidan.” I didn’t point out that was what I’d told him he’d say. He needed time to get there.

His hand twitched several times, then he gave up and poured another drink. He topped mine off, though I’d yet to finish the second one. I was definitely going to need a taxi home. He leaned against the bar, his face heavy and weary. “You like to think you know someone.”

“He was just your employee. He was my friend. I really should have known. I guess life is full of surprises, huh?”

Frank tapped his glass against mine, an ironic toast. “Ain’t it just? I’m trying to think what to tell you. I don’t remember much unusual going on. Brian served drinks to the college students and the locals. He poured strong and got big tips. He flirted with the women.”

“He sounds like your mini-me,” I said.

“But not as handsome, right?” Frank wasn’t the sort to stay down for long.

“Of course not.”

“You know, I did notice him hanging out a bit more with a woman I didn’t know. She’d wait in that booth over there, the one closest to the back hallway. Pretty woman, though I only ever got a quick look at her. I might not even have noticed, except she was a redhead, and Brian had always shown a preference for blonds before.” He tried hard not to give me a pointed look, and I did my best not to show how much being Brian’s type had cost me.

I felt my heart jump. I’d only met one redhead during the last week. “Could you recognize her if you saw her again?”

Frank grinned, and the earlier weight all vanished from his shoulders. I didn’t know if he was resilient or just really good at compartmentalization, but his grief about Brian already appeared to be a thing of the past. “Aidan, I may forget my anniversary, what I had for breakfast, and my own middle name, but I will never forget a pretty woman. Get me a picture, and I’ll tell you if it was her.”

I performed a quick image search on my new smart phone, but found no photos of Diane. Just my luck that our primary suspect was as averse to social media as I was. Even so, I felt an undeniable excitement and even happiness for the first time that day. I knew this was the answer. It was the only thing that made sense. She would have been an unexpected source of help to James and Pamela, she was a nurse, and she was a redhead. Still, it was best to be thorough.

“Was she...?” I held my hand off the floor, trying to indicate Diane’s height. After two and a half drinks, my hand wavered somewhere between 5’5” and 6’. “With hair this long?” I put my hand to my shoulder.

Frank shook his head. “Don’t remember seeing her stand up, and her hair was longer than that.”

Of course, these meetings would have taken place weeks or even months ago, and Diane could have cut her hair since then. The pieces still fit.

At that moment, the jukebox shifted over, and Heart blasted through the speakers, Ann Wilson’s powerful voice ripping through the room. Frank’s head jerked up, something abruptly occurring to him. “You know how Brian always listened to that modern alternative shit? Boys in skinny jeans and girls with shaved heads. The sort of music I’ll never let within a hundred feet of that jukebox?” I waited for him to continue. “I have no idea what this could possibly mean, but in the last couple months, he started putting on that Heart song all the time. ‘Magic Man,’ you know it? At least once a week, he’d play it. Just that one song, never anything else. Maybe he finally got some decent taste. No idea. But that’s all I saw that was different.”

A signal. I had absolutely no doubt that’s what it was. Brian hated classic rock, but he’d had a twisted sense of humor, and he’d loved hiding his power in plain sight. He was telling someone else what he was—or what he had in stock. The drug that controlled magic.

I thanked him for his time and said my farewells, promising not to wait ten years before my next visit. I still needed to sober up, and I figured I should spend the next half hour or so down by the lake. I needed to recharge before calling the agents and suggesting they invite Diane into their interrogation room. After all, she was human. She belonged to them.

I made it one step toward the door before it opened, letting in a short, wild-haired fire elemental who, based upon her quickly concealed look of surprise, hadn’t expected to find me here—and wasn’t happy that she had.

“Felt like a drink?” I asked drily. We’d been doing a decent job of rebuilding our friendship, but we’d find ourselves experiencing a massive backslide if she wanted to pretend she wasn’t avoiding me. I had enough people who claimed to love me but still opted not to tell me the truth.

Thankfully, Sera didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about. “I had a good reason.”

I could only think of one thing that would cause Sera to risk our still delicate friendship. “If you’re about to say you were protecting me, know that I will punch you.” She said nothing, just stared at me. “Well?”

“I’m thinking of a way to phrase this so I won’t get hit in the face.”

I groaned, an exaggerated noise that involved a massive eye roll and a brief beseeching gesture directed in the general direction of the sky. I meant to play it as comedy, but it felt worryingly sincere. “What? What could it possibly be now?”

Rather than answer, Sera moved to the bar. “Hey, sexy. I’m gonna need a bottle, I think.” She pulled her water-stained wallet from her jeans pocket and started counting bills.

Frank grinned at her. “Top or bottom?”

She returned the smile, suffusing it with a fair portion of naughtiness. “You know I always pick top, Frank.”

He stretched onto his tiptoes, reaching for the top shelf liquor. “It’s a good thing for you I’m married, Sera. Otherwise, I’d be forced to show you what you’re missing, and I’d ruin you for all other men.”

Sera kept the smile on her face, but something about it felt forced. She was going through the motions, flirting the way Frank would expect, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Then I’d just have to move on to women, wouldn’t I?”

His laugh was big and boisterous, conceding that round of their game to Sera. She tilted her head in silent acknowledgement, then grabbed the bottle and returned to me. “I assume you were here to learn who Brian was hanging out with. You get what you need?”

“Yeah, I’m done. You know I don’t like tequila, right?”

She looked at the bottle of silver Patron in her hand. “You’re not drinking anymore. This is for me. I really don’t want to have this conversation, and neither do you. And, for that reason, you are going to stay sober and in control for the foreseeable future, understand?”

I did understand, and her nervousness triggered my own. Whatever she was about to tell me, I knew it was going to be bad news.

I had no idea.

CHAPTER 19

The snow was still lightly falling, and we walked through it in companionable silence. We headed toward the water, both obeying an unspoken desire to wait as long as possible before having this conversation. It was cold, but it didn’t matter. We were elementals, and if we were going to have a difficult conversation, it would happen outside, in nature.

With the change in weather, the lake was mostly empty but for what looked like a few local hippies. When Sera pulled out the tequila, one of them gave her a thumbs up and looked like he might be considering joining us, at least until he caught Sera’s expression. Her eyes were as hard and dark as iron. He scooted quickly away, leaving us alone.

“Put your feet in the water,” she instructed me.

“What the hell’s going on? Vivian’s okay, right?” I’d just checked on her. I’d been told not to visit her, and I’d listened.

“Viv’s fine. Feet, Ade.”

Sera was completely and utterly freaking me out. “Simon?”

“Still by her bedside. Remove your fucking shoes or I will just throw you into the lake fully dressed.” She wasn’t joking. Whatever she had to tell me, this wasn’t the time to push her.

“Like to see you try,” I muttered, untying my laces. “You do know you’re the size of an Oompah Loompah, right?” The quips came out of habit, even as my brain was churning through options. Vivian was okay. Simon was okay. Sera was sitting right here. That only left one person. “No.” I whispered the word, not even sure what I was denying.

Sera was done waiting for me. She yanked the boots off my feet and pulled off my socks, even as I continued to repeat, “No, no,” over and over. She roughly rolled my jeans to my knee and thrust my feet into the water, letting the lake lap up to my calves.

“Reach out to it, damn it. I need you to connect your magic to the water. Only water, got it? That’s the only magic you possess.”

I nodded dumbly.

“Damn it, Aidan! No going catatonic right now. Repeat what I just said. Say it.”

“The water is the only magic I possess.” The words were dull, but as I spoke them, I felt the magic in my core reaching out, wrapping itself around the pure water of the lake. There was peace here, and my magic knew better than I did what I needed. It reached for that peace and delivered it to me, dulling the worst edges of my fear and paranoia. I was still terrified, and I couldn’t decide if I wanted Sera to tell me what she knew or if I wanted to treasure these last few moments of ignorance, but at least I was in control of myself.

I knew that’s why she brought me to the lake. More than anything, that told me something had gone very wrong. Sera had been watching me closely, ever since Oregon, but she’d never coddled me before.

“I’m okay.” I stretched my legs out before me and burrowed my toes into the lake bottom, letting her see just how connected I was to the water. “Really. You need to tell me now, before I go insane from the waiting. And wouldn’t that be ironic?” I managed a weak smile, which she didn’t return.

“If you twitch in the slightest, if you even think about removing yourself from the lake, I will tackle you. Do not doubt that.”

“Sera, I get it. You have sufficiently built suspense. Now will you just fucking tell me what happened?”

She took several deep breaths, followed by several long swigs from the bottle. Eventually, she met my eyes and held my gaze tightly, building a small, safe space where only the two of us existed. “Mac’s missing.”

“What?” I knew what she was saying, but my brain refused to construct a logical narrative from her words. “How do you know?”

“What I said in the note was true. I couldn’t sleep. I had a question for him, so I knocked on his trailer early this morning. Normally, I’d just let a sleeping bear lie. I don’t know why I chose this morning to visit him. But the trailer was empty. I waited, and he never showed.”

“He could have been out running. He sometimes shifts in the mornings, I think. There are lots of other explanations. Maybe some hunter shot him. He could be hurt, Sera, and we’re just sitting by the lake, drinking tequila? What the hell?”

I began to stand, and Sera lay a restraining hand on my arm. “What do you think I’ve been doing all morning, Aidan? I called Will first thing, and he’d scented the cabin before you even woke up. We’ve been tromping through the trees for hours, looking for any sign he was there. There’s nothing. Ade, we have to assume Mac’s been taken.”

Thought completely abandoned me. All I felt was the warm, hungry power stirring to life, wanting an outlet. It wanted something to destroy.

I gave it more freedom than I ever should have. I let the power stir through me, let the fiery magic expand through my body, reaching all the way through my fingers, stretching to my toes. It tingled and writhed, gleefully announcing its presence, and I felt the water struggle for dominance.

It wasn’t an easy battle, and if I hadn’t been in contact with the water, it was one I would have lost. Only the close proximity to the element I knew so well saved me—that, and the panicked look on Sera’s face as I struggled against the violent instincts of the fire. They were instincts she knew well, and loved for her own sake, but she dreaded what they meant for me. We both knew that madness lay at the end of that path, and so, with a tremendous effort, I pulled myself back. I sought balance again.

It was not without cost. I felt my entire body shaking, the unrelenting shudders of someone fighting off hypothermia, wondering if they’d ever be warm again. The tremors ran from the top of my head to my feet, racking my entire body. My strength was depleting faster than I could recharge.

I submerged myself fully in the lake. When I got out, I’d feel the cold, but I was a long way from caring about that. I was just trying to get through each moment, one second at a time, and the only way I could do that was with the water’s help.

I broke the surface and shook the water from my hair and face. “Is there a chance it was something else?” My voice was calm and deliberate. I actually didn’t sound like a woman on the brink of going insane.

“There’s always a chance,” Sera said, but her doubtful tone let me know she didn’t believe it. I didn’t either. “He’s not a child like the others.”

“No, but he is a first-born.” I lowered my head to the water until it brushed against my chin, then gave her an especially baleful look. “And you thought I wouldn’t need a drink after hearing this news?”

She hesitantly held the tequila out to me. I wasn’t sure she believed I was stable. I wasn’t sure I believed it, either, but I supposed we had to work with the evidence in hand. For the moment, I was coping. Even so, I grabbed the bottle and took a swig, my grimace letting her know exactly what I thought of her choice of beverages.

“He was kidnapped.”

She nodded. “It looks like, though I can’t imagine who in this world is capable of taking down Mac. We’ve got to look on the bright side, though.”

“When the hell did you become the Pollyanna of the bunch?”

“They’ve all been returned,” she said. “They’ve all come back to us.”

“With their brains scrambled, their memories missing, and unable to shift. You can be Pollyanna if you want, but it really doesn’t suit you. I need to find him before he forgets I ever existed, and I know where to start. You with me?”

“Always.” Sera grabbed the bottle back from me and replaced the cork, then stood slowly. “Lead the way, H2O. Let’s find those mofos.”

I walked out of the lake. With each step I took, snow clung to my wet clothes and skin, bringing a chill with it. It was welcome. I needed to be cold. I needed to be frozen, an emotional block of ice. Anything to keep me focused on our task, to avoid the bursts of pure rage that hovered at the edges of my consciousness. I had to be a bundle of absolute, deliberate will, and I had to direct that toward the search for the one man I thought I might love someday.

Because if I didn’t find Mac, I feared I’d remain frozen forever.

Fortunately, a fire only has to remain drunk as long as they want to. The moment she needed her brain to function at full capacity, she simply burned off the alcohol still in her system, leaving her completely sober and able to drive us back to Reno.

She offered to do the same for me, knowing my fire side would protect me from any burns, but I declined. I had a fast metabolism and another hour to sober up, and I’d prefer to spend that hour as numb as possible.

This time, we didn’t climb the roof. We didn’t even bother to ring the doorbell. We marched up the driveway and walked directly into the house. When Diane met us with that fucking shotgun in hand, I simply strode up to her and grabbed the barrel with both hands, yanking it from her.

She let it fall, quickly reassessing my threat potential and seeing that I was, in fact, more than some incompetent investigator. I was a pissed-off incompetent investigator, and that could make all the difference.

“I think we need to talk.” Despite our dramatic entrance, Sera’s words were calm and even, something I never expected from any fire and even less from her. She was going against her very nature, trying to keep the situation under control, or, more specifically, to keep me under control. She never forgot what I could become.

It was a noble effort. I rewarded her by not smacking Diane upside the head with her own gun, choosing instead to walk back to the door and prop it carefully in the hall closet. I felt considerably better having the shotgun removed from play, as a shell capable of blowing off a large chunk of our heads was one of the few things that no amount of magic could repair. Its absence quite firmly gave us the upper hand.

To prove that point, I gathered a large ball of water and let it hover near Diane’s head. Sera rolled her eyes at my refusal to play calm and rational, but she also looked relieved at how easily I summoned the water. If I was connected to my water side, the fire was fully in check. She shrugged and called a fireball of her own, letting Diane know exactly what she was dealing with.

“Isn’t there a phrase appropriate to this situation, Aidan?”

I coolly surveyed the new scene. “I believe it’s known as turning the tables, Sera.”

“I was thinking more that we were giving her a taste of her own medicine.”

“That works, too. I’m almost tempted to get the gun out of the closet, just so I can point it at her and say she’s been hoisted by her own petard.”

“You really want a valid excuse to use the word petard, don’t you?”

“Damn straight. There just aren’t enough reasons to refer to one’s petard, are there?”

While we ran through our routine, Diane’s face slowly shifted. She was still wary, but the nerves she’d displayed when we first threatened her with our elements evolved into impatient exasperation. Sera and I did have that effect on others.

“Just to be clear, are you here to kill me, threaten me, or annoy me until I tell you whatever the hell you want to know?”

“Still deciding.” Whatever levity I’d managed to fake while talking to Sera vanished the moment I spoke to Diane directly. So long as there was any chance this woman was involved in Mac’s disappearance, I could not view her as anything but my enemy, and my hard tone reflected that belief. When she looked at me, her impatience morphed back into unease, and I smiled to see it.

“Perhaps we should sit down,” said Sera. “I’m sure we can at least attempt to discuss this rationally.”

It was Sera’s voice, but the words coming out belonged to someone else altogether. Sera was many things, but she was not cautious or restrained. For my benefit, for my safety, she was suppressing her natural instincts. For me, she was denying who she was. I wondered how long this had been happening without me even noticing.

In the midst of my panic about Mac, I felt a rush of pure, absolute love for my best friend. She was willing to lose a part of herself, the impulsive, outspoken, badass I knew and loved, if doing so would keep me sane a bit longer.

It wasn’t a sacrifice I was willing to accept.

I took any rage I still felt and locked it tightly away. I was becoming worryingly good at compartmentalization, but so long as it allowed me to get through the day without setting anyone on fire, I would continue to do so. The occasional bout of emotional disconnection sure beat the alternative.

I joined the other two on the sofas, even as I continued to hold on to the water. So long as it hung in the air, it was a reminder that I was doing just fine, thank you very much. If I was visibly in control, Sera would have one less thing to worry about.

Especially since we really should be worrying about the woman sitting in front of us, her expression nervous and confused but not even a little bit guilty.

Since we were basically there to accuse her of being a nurse, perhaps she had good reason to look innocent. I opted for a direct approach. “You have access to medical supplies and other equipment,” I stated.

She nodded, her expression cautious. She appeared to have no idea where I was going with this. “I’m a nurse, yes.”

“So if, for example, shifters were being kidnapped and altered in some way—some medical way—you might be capable of providing the materials necessary for that to happen.”

Her caution disappeared, replaced quickly by equal parts anger and exasperation. “I thought I’d cleared myself in your eyes. Is your short term memory really that bad?”

“That was before I saw your shoes.”

She nodded, pretending to take my concern seriously. “Ah, yes, the smoking gun. Many a killer has been unmasked due to their choice of sensible footwear. If only I’d switched to sneakers, like so many nurses have, I’d have gotten away with it, too!” She ended her fake confession with an eye roll that would have done a teenager proud.

“It’s not the shoes. It’s the occupation. Whoever’s doing this has access to medical equipment, and considering you work at the local hospital, that moves you to the top of our suspect list. So, if you want to keep us from harassing you on a daily basis, I suggest you explain exactly why you can’t possibly be involved, and be really, really convincing.”

She sat up and met our eyes directly, looking at Sera and me in turn. “The kidnapper messed with the brains, right? That’s neuro. That’s years of schooling, and no nurse would be able to do that. I’m an orthopedic nurse. I help set bones. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with the other. And finally, I have no magic, no understanding of how your magic works, and no freaking motive. I have no idea why you two have become so fixated on me, but it’s time to get a new hobby. I’m not the one.”