Thirteen
I followed Cam into his apartment and he closed the door behind us. The scrape of the dead bolt sliding home sounded louder and more final than it should have—a reminder that I was somewhere I shouldn’t have been, doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, even though I was no longer being compelled. Anne had never officially asked me to help protect Hadley. But I couldn’t just let a five-year-old—not to mention the family hiding her—get slaughtered. And I couldn’t protect Hadley from the Tower syndicate without whatever information Cam would be able to give me about his own employer.
And that was assuming I’d be any good to them at all. At the moment, with an open, bloody wound, I was a walking target for any blood Tracker. My arm stung, and ached, and throbbed, and every movement pulled the makeshift bandage, which tugged on the wound itself.
“Have a seat, and I’ll get my stuff.” Cam pulled out a bar stool on his way past the kitchen, and I sat, resting my arm on the counter. He opened the front closet and hauled out the huge duffel bag taking up most of the floor space, then hefted it onto the bar with a solid thunk, while I surreptitiously studied the way his arms and still-bare chest bulged with each movement.
Training agreed with him. A lot. So much, in fact, that I had to focus on the pain in my arm and the duffel bag on the counter to keep from staring. Again. He was going to have to put a shirt on.
“That’s your first-aid kit?” I glanced at him in amusement. “You could fit a body in there.”
“Most of one, anyway,” he said, and it took me a minute to realize he was joking. Cam unzipped the bag and started pulling out supplies. Alcohol, gauze, medical tape and several small bottles I didn’t recognize. “There’s some extra bandages and splints and stuff in the bathroom.”
“Do you really need all this?” Or had somebody turned into a hypochondriac?
Cam’s brows rose in amusement. “My job’s a little more adventurous than your average nine-to-five.”
So was mine, but my first-aid kit would have fit in a bread box. Of course, I was free to turn down the jobs most likely to get me killed, but Cam wasn’t free to do much of anything.
“Okay, let’s take a look….” He sat on the stool next to mine and gently peeled the duct tape from my arm. The paper towels had started to stick where the blood was drying, and I winced when he carefully tugged them free. “It looks like the bleeding’s mostly stopped. Which is good. But we have to clean it, so it might start up again, a little.”
Blood had saturated both sides of the makeshift bandage, and he set the entire mess on a paper plate, which would be easy to dispose of along with the bandage.
He leaned over the counter to pull a clean dishrag from the top drawer, then laid it across the counter beneath my arm. “This is gonna sting, but it’ll help prevent infection.” Cam unscrewed the lid from a bottle of alcohol, then poured a thin, clear stream directly into the front of the wound.
Flames lapped at my arm and I hissed, then bit my lip against the pain. Tensing made it worse, so I tried to relax, but there was no way to relax with Cam this close. Even if he was only touching me to clean the wound inflicted by a syndicate hit man hired by his boss to kill a mutual friend’s young daughter.
Yeah, no stress there.
“First bullet wound?” He twisted my arm carefully, then held the towel beneath it to catch the alcohol as he dribbled it down the back side of my arm, over the exit wound.
“Yeah. Had a couple of knife wounds and two broken hands, though.”
Cam blotted the drips of alcohol, then laid the towel on the counter and started digging through the duffel again. “So you’ve had stitches before?”
“I am familiar with the concept, yes. But I’m not a fan.”
“Don’t worry.” He set a sealed hypodermic needle next to a small bottle of clear liquid capped in rubber. “I’m going to give you a local. You shouldn’t feel anything but some tugging.”
“Are you…um…qualified for this?” I asked, trying not to squirm as he stuck the needle through the rubber cap and drew liquid into the syringe.
“Six years’ experience in battlefield triage. Of sorts.” He tapped the syringe, just like nurses on TV. “Because some injuries you don’t want to have to explain, even to very discreet doctors.”
Even with the anesthetic, getting stitches sucked, mostly because seeing my torn flesh held together only by surgical thread was vaguely nauseating. But to his credit, Cam’s stitches were small and even—almost as good as the professional sutures my last knife wound had required. And, as usual, the worst part was having to sit still.
When I was stitched, rebandaged and still pleasantly numb, Cam set a glass of water and a pill on the counter in front of me.
“No painkillers.” I pushed the pill back across the counter toward him, careful not to move my left arm. “It doesn’t hurt that bad.” It would hurt like hell when the local wore off, but I couldn’t afford to be foggy-headed while we tried to figure out why someone high up in the Tower syndicate would want Hadley dead.
“It’s an antibiotic. To keep the wound from getting infected.” He set a large, opaque pill bottle in front of me and I squinted at the print. An off-brand of penicillin. “You’re not allergic, are you?”
“No.” I took the pill with a couple of sips of water. “Why do you have a bulk bottle of penicillin?”
“I actually have about a dozen of them.” He pulled a smaller bag from the huge duffel and unzipped it to show me more big white bottles. “Standard issue, from one of half a dozen pharmacists bound to the syndicate.”
“Because you’re no good to Tower if you die of infection?”
“Yeah.” Cam started loading supplies back into the duffel, but he left the pill bottle on the counter. “I don’t suppose you have a change of clothes in there?” He nodded toward the satchel I’d dropped on his couch.
“Nope. Had one in my trunk, though.” I knew I should have driven….
“I have something you can wear for now.” He piled everything my blood had touched onto the paper plate, then rolled the sides of the plate up like a big, bloody burrito and carried the whole thing down the hall. “Can you bring the syringe?” he called back over his shoulder.
I grabbed the disposable syringe, careful not to poke myself, and followed him toward the bathroom. But I missed whatever he was saying, because staring at the needle reminded me of the track marks on Hunter’s arm, and I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Something about it didn’t make sense.
In the bathroom, Cam pulled the shower curtain all the way back and set the paper plate in the middle of his tub. I sat on the closed toilet seat while he squatted in front of the cabinet beneath the sink, inches away, and I started a conversation about work to stop myself from asking why he ever bothered wearing clothes at all.
“So, what’s your theory on Hunter’s track marks?” I said, as he set a gallon-size bottle of rubbing alcohol on the floor.
“My theory?” He opened a drawer and set a pair of scissors and a box of matches on the counter. “I theorize that he’s a junkie who takes contracts most people wouldn’t touch—for instance, the murder of a five-year-old—to pay for his habit.”
“But that doesn’t add up,” I insisted. “Some of those needle marks were very fresh, but he didn’t act like any junkie I’ve ever met. He was coherent, and not too bad a shot, considering his view was partially obstructed, and his target was moving.” I lifted my arm as proof.
Shooting isn’t as easy as the movies make it out to be. Any decent-size gun packs a hell of a recoil, and aiming on the fly takes practice. An arm shot—a few inches from my chest—wouldn’t have been possible for anyone who maintained the level of high indicated by the number of tracks on Hunter’s arm.
Cam closed the cabinet and sat on the edge of the tub with the scissors in hand. “Okay, so he’s a very high-functioning junkie.”
“There’s no such thing.” I shivered as he slid the cold lower scissors blade beneath the bloody sleeve of the T-shirt he’d lent me. Since we’d have to destroy the clothes anyway, to keep viable blood samples from ever being used against me, it was easier to just cut the shirt off and avoid moving my injured arm any more than necessary. “And anyway, we tore his place apart looking for first-aid supplies. Did you see anything that even resembled drug paraphernalia?”
Cam frowned as he cut my sleeve up the outside, clear through to the collar, careful not to snag the fresh bandage. Or touch me, which was somehow both a relief and a severe disappointment.
“So he doesn’t shoot up there.” Cam shrugged. “Or maybe it’s not heroin. Maybe those are from his hospital visit. Allergy shots, or insulin. Maybe that’s why he goes to the public hospital.”
My ruined sleeve flopped forward, and I clutched the material to my chest, acutely aware how close Cam was, and how fully dressed he wasn’t. “You don’t go to the hospital for allergies unless you’re in anaphylactic shock, and if you’re that allergic to something, you keep one of those adrenaline needle pens on you all the time.” You’d think someone whose first-aid kit could supply a small country would know that. “But Hunter doesn’t have anything like that. Also, allergy shots go in your upper arm. Insulin can be given in your upper arm, stomach, hip or thigh, but not in the crook of your elbow.”
Cam frowned at me in the mirror as he moved to my other side. “How the hell do you know all that?”
“I have a television and I pay attention. How do you not know?”
“No time for TV.” He cut up the side of my right sleeve, quicker this time, since there was no bandage to work around. “You’re reading too much into the damn track marks, Liv. Maybe he just donated blood.”
My right sleeve parted down the middle and peeled back in either direction, leaving me to clasp the top of the shirt to my chest. Which was kind of pointless, considering he was about to cut the rest of the material off anyway. “No way,” I insisted, as Cam squatted next to me and took the hem of my T-shirt in one hand. Skilled people can’t donate blood. It’s a shame, from the perspective of the medical community, but a necessity from any other angle. We can’t risk leaving even drops of our blood lying around—imagine what entire bags of it in the wrong hands could do?
Samples of it could be distributed to an entire army of Trackers, who could find you in no time. That much fresh blood would give even a mediocre Binder the ability to bind you against your will, at least temporarily. You could be compelled to do just about anything.
“You said it yourself—he’s not Skilled.” Cam cut up the right side of my shirt, and I shivered as the dull side of the cold lower blade brushed my side. “And he clearly has no idea what can be done with a drop of blood.”
“But he was Skilled,” I insisted, as he lifted my good arm for better access to the material. And that’s when the epiphany hit me, like a bolt of lightning straight to the brain, and suddenly the whole thing made horrifying, earthshaking sense. “Holy shit.” I grabbed Cam’s chin, rough with pale stubble, and lifted his head to force eye contact. “What if he wasn’t giving blood? What if he was getting it, instead?”
He blinked in surprise and the scissors went still against my skin, but he made no move to pull his chin from my hand. “Liv, he looked like a human pincushion. That adds up to a lot of blood transfusions, and he didn’t look very sick to me.”
“He’s not sick.” I let go of his face, but Cam’s gaze never left mine. “He’s not Skilled, either. But a few hours ago he was. And a few hours before that, he was even more Skilled—before the power began fading from his blood….”
It took a second for my implication to sink in, but when it did, he sat down on the bathroom tile, stunned, leaving the last couple of inches of my shirt unclipped. “No, that can’t be right.” The scissors clattered to the floor and he stared up at me. “Is that even possible? Gaining Skills from a blood transfusion?”
“I don’t know.” I’d certainly never heard of it. “But that’s the only thing that explains the dropping Skill levels in his blood. That’s what would happen as the new blood cells die out or are absorbed by his body.”
Cam picked the scissors up again and lifted my arm to snip the last bit of material. “So it doesn’t last.”
“Which would explain the whole pincushion-arm thing.” With my good hand, I pulled the T-shirt off and dropped it into the bathtub with the other bloody materials, and I was then nude from the waist up, except for my bra. “You’d have to keep doing it over and over to maintain the Skill.”
“No wonder he didn’t know better than to leave viable blood all over the place—he’s new at this.” Cam stood. “Fortunately, we’re not.” He gave me an efficient once-over, and I was suddenly very aware that I was half-naked. And that he didn’t seem to have noticed. “Your bra and jeans have been compromised. Throw them in the tub, and you can wipe the blood off your skin with these.” He held up a packet of antibacterial wipes.
“My bra and jeans are compromised? So…what? They agreed to share and play nice?”
Cam’s mouth twitched in an almost-grin. “You know what I mean.” He set the wipes on the counter. “I’ll find something else for you to wear.” Then he was gone, and I was alone in the bathroom, trying not to be offended by the fact that his gaze hadn’t lingered.
What did it matter? I winced at the pain in my arm as I unhooked my bra, then dropped it into the tub. We couldn’t be with each other anyway, so we were both better off not looking at what we couldn’t have. But knowing that didn’t make his ironclad restraint any easier to take.
I took off my boots, then unbuttoned my jeans and pushed them to the floor one-handed, while metal scraped metal from down the hall—Cam sorting through the clothes hanging in his closet, by my best guess. I emptied the contents of my pockets—a convenience-store receipt and a handful of change—onto the counter, then dropped my pants into the tub. What a shame. They were my favorite pair.
Fortunately, my underwear looked “uncompromised.”
I gave my left side a once-over with one of the wipes, then dropped it into the tub, too.
The hangers went still, and a moment later, Cam’s footsteps echoed from the hall. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my arm, I sat, arms crossed over my chest, legs crossed in a vain attempt to look normal, while sitting on a toilet in my underwear. And as he rounded the corner into the bathroom, wearing a clean shirt and critically eyeing the one he carried, I glanced down at myself self-consciously and noticed the black ring tattooed on my left thigh.
Shit!
As he looked up, I recrossed my legs in the other direction, covering the tattoo. My heart raced from the near-catastrophe. He couldn’t know. Ever. I’d rather cut the mark out of my own skin than ever let Cam know I was bound to Ruben Cavazos.
“Van left these here after she…” Cam blinked, and his next words were lost to us both as he stared. He hadn’t seen the mark, but he was seeing everything else. Finally.
For both of our sakes, I shouldn’t have let him look. And I certainly shouldn’t have enjoyed letting him look. But mistakes are just another kind of choice, and saddled with two bindings, I’d had precious few choices lately. So I let him look, for several long seconds.
“After she…?” I prompted finally, fighting a smile at his reaction, and at the fact that I could still provoke it.
Cam blinked again, and I could practically see the return of upper-level reasoning as blood was diverted back into his head from…wherever else it had been. “After she got her own place,” he finished, glancing at the clothes he held to avoid looking at me. “You guys are about the same height, so this should work until you can grab a change from home.”
And there was nothing stopping me from doing that. I could throw on Van’s clothes and make Cam take me back to my office right then. I could even explain why I’d left him in the car. But I didn’t want to go. Once this was over, I’d have to leave him again, but until then, I had a justifiable excuse for hanging around. And a dark spot of guilt on my soul for not entirely hating the circumstances that had brought us together.
“Here.” Cam handed me a black baby-doll-style T-shirt. On the front was a beautifully detailed golden dragon clutching a human skull with one clawed foot. The crinkled, gauzy black skirt was ankle length, and heavier than it looked. It wasn’t something I would ever have bought for myself, but I couldn’t afford to be choosy, considering the alternative.
But there was no bra.
“Thanks.”
When he turned to give me privacy—which I would have found pointless, if not for the mark on my thigh—I stepped into the skirt first and didn’t fully relax until it was tied at my waist, my secret safely hidden.
“Okay, assuming you’re right about these transfusions, where’s Hunter getting the blood?” Cam asked, as I carefully pulled the shirt over my head.
“I don’t know. But the implications of this are beyond terrifying.” I tugged the shirt into place, trying to ignore the pain reawakening in my arm, then tapped him on the shoulder. Cam turned and met my gaze in the mirror as I ran my hands through my hair, trying not to look at the rest of me. Blood loss and exhaustion were not good looks for me. “I mean, if the resources are there, men like Hunter—or anyone else—could be Travelers one day, Blinders the next and Seers the day after that. Men like Tower could hire one thug and get a whole series of Skill sets. Maybe even more than one at a time. Though I’m not sure how that would work.”
I wasn’t sure how any of it would work, but the concept alone was staggering. It was world-changing. And if the government couldn’t even officially recognize the existence of Skills, it would never be able to regulate the renting of them.
Rented Skills, like everything else private industry couldn’t legally provide, would be offered up to the black market on a silver platter. And presumably, those who could provide the rarer Skills—Seers, Bleeders and Jammers—and those with extraordinary ability in any of the more common Skill sets would be in high demand.
And worth even more to the syndicates than they already were.
“Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s clean this mess up, then we can figure out our next move.” Cam doused the contents of the tub with rubbing alcohol while I took a match from the box. When he was done, I lit the match and tossed it onto the pile.
Flames erupted immediately, and the fire burned hot and fast. Cam flipped on the ceiling vent to suck out the smoke, and when the flames started to threaten the shower curtain, I pulled the plastic liner out of reach. Thank goodness for porcelain tubs—fiberglass would have burned right along with the clothing and bandages we needed to destroy.
When we were sure all the blood was destroyed, Cam turned on the water and aimed the handheld shower head at the base of the flames. The blaze was out in seconds, leaving only the soggy, charred rubble in the tub and another layer of smoke on the ceiling—a common sight in most Skilled households.
Before he moved out, Cam would have to repaint the entire bathroom. As would I, in my own apartment.
I grabbed a contractor bag—a big, thick black garbage bag, like building contractors use—from beneath the kitchen sink while Cam dug up a couple of pairs of thick dishwashing gloves, and I held the bag while he scooped the wet rubble into it, so I wouldn’t have to move my injured arm too much. Then he walked the trash to the apartment complex’s Dumpster while I used the high-pressure setting on the showerhead to spray the remaining tiny bits of char and ash down the drain. After a final scrub with a disposable sponge and some bathroom cleaner, the shower was fit to use once more.
“Thanks for doing all this,” I said, settling onto a bar stool while Cam pulled open the fridge.
He glanced at me over the open door. “I’d do more, if you’d let me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said nothing.
“You hungry?” Cam asked, pulling two bottles of water from the fridge. “Fajitas wouldn’t take long….”
“Shouldn’t we focus on finding out who’s trying to kill Hadley? Or who’s selling Skilled blood transfusions to known criminals? Or both?”
Cam closed the fridge and eyed me across the counter, his hands flat on the tile. “You were just shot. You need rest, water and food.”
“I don’t have time for any of that.” The monster who wanted Hadley dead wasn’t going to put his horrific mission on hold just so I could take a nap.
“Okay, then, you grab my laptop, Hunter’s cell phone and his bank statement, and see if you can’t find out where he got this super-Skilled blood transfusion while I make dinner. Because I’m starving.”
I considered arguing that with his help, the detective work would go much faster. But I wasn’t entirely sure that was true—too many cooks in the proverbial kitchen. Also, he’d already started pulling beef and vegetables from the fridge.
And I was a little hungry…
“Laptop’s in my bedroom, on the dresser,” he said, when my lack of objection seemed to indicate surrender.
“Fine. But make it fast.” I waved one arm at the spread of colorful peppers, tomatoes and red meat now covering the kitchen peninsula. And only then did it occur to me that he hadn’t pressed for the explanation I owed him. I wasn’t sure why he’d forgotten—could that be attributed to the sight of me nearly naked?—but I wasn’t going to remind him.
I stopped in his bedroom doorway, surprised to realize that even after six years and at least one move, he still had the same furniture we’d shared for two of our three years together, in college. Same scarred upright chest of drawers, which he was still calling a dresser. Same weight bench in the corner, ancient free weights stacked by the wall. Same simple iron-frame headboard with stupid decorative balls topping the posts. I wondered if the mattress still squealed, or if he’d replaced it.
Curious, I almost sat on the bed to test it, but then my gaze found the laptop and its cord on top of the chest of drawers, and I remembered why I’d come in the first place. And it wasn’t to try out Cam’s mattress. No matter how hard memory and nostalgia tried to argue otherwise.
At the peninsula again, I plugged in the laptop and dug Hunter’s phone and bank statement from my satchel.
I started with the statement. I’d been over it several times before, but this time I was looking for a big expense, not a big deposit. I wasn’t sure how a Skilled blood transfusion would work but I was sure it would be expensive, and I was sure it would have to have been done—and thus paid for—very recently, considering how quickly it had faded from his blood signature.
Unfortunately, the period covered by the bank statement ended the week before—the payment from the Tower syndicate was literally the last entry. Which meant that any transactions made in the past eight days would go on the next reporting cycle, and until then, they’d be accessible online only.
“Hey, you said Hunter paid most of his bills online, right? Did you notice whether he has online access at his bank? Statements in his inbox, or something like that?” Though he clearly got printed statements, too…
Cam looked up from the peppers he was chopping. “Yeah, I think so. But you can’t log in without his password.”
“Fortunately, we have his account number….” I held up the bank statement, then set it on the counter and crossed the room to grab Hunter’s laptop from the box of supplies Cam had brought in to restock. “And if he’s anything like the rest of the country, he probably uses one password—or variations of one password—for most of his accounts. I’m guessing he’s smart enough to use something random, but not smart enough to keep all the variations straight. Which means he probably keeps a list.”
Cam scraped the peppers from the cutting board into the skillet. “Well, if it’s on his hard drive it isn’t called ‘top secret keys to invading my privacy,’ or anything else convenient. And I didn’t find a notebook or calendar, or anything it could have been written on.”
I set Hunter’s laptop on the bar next to Cam’s and pressed the power button. “Nobody writes anything down on paper anymore. But what’s the one thing people never leave the house without?”
Cam looked up from the skillet, challenging grin intact. “Underwear. Or would you like to prove me wrong?”
I rolled my eyes and logged in to Cam’s wireless network. “Cell phone. Most of them have a notepad feature, and you know what most people keep on it?”
“I’m guessing passwords?”
“Yup. And grocery lists, and reminders, and anything else they need access to. Although, personally, my phone calendar is much more incriminating than my notepad.”
“So, if I want to know where you’ll be this Friday night, all I have to do is steal your phone?”
“Well, that, and figure out the code to unlock it. But his phone isn’t locked.” I opened a browser on Hunter’s computer, then clicked the drop-down menu listing his favorites. And sure enough, after three listings for what could only be porn sites, he’d bookmarked the power company, the water company, his mobile service provider and…his bank.
I clicked on the bank link, and while the page loaded, I scrolled through his cell-phone notes for anything resembling passwords. There weren’t many choices, and the third one, titled FNB, consisted only of a seven-digit alphanumeric code with a pound sign at the end.
“First National Bank. Got it.” Hunter turned out to be no smarter than the average bear.
I typed his account number into the bank site, then his password, and when the site had “verified” my stolen identity, I clicked on My Account. Where I discovered what I already knew—until the week before, Mr. Hunter had been in dire financial need, even more so than I. But his banking activity since the big deposit was sparse.
The bank had auto-removed the overdraft fees he owed, and he’d paid a couple of utilities online. But other than that… “Nothing.” I looked up to find Cam chopping peppers on a plastic cutting board. “There are no big withdrawals. His bank balance is just over $49,500. Nothing in savings.” I frowned as he scraped the peppers from the cutting board into the skillet. “So, what? The transfusions were free?”
“Or he paid by credit card.”
“There were no credit cards in his wallet, and based on his banking history, I’d say that’s because his credit is less than stellar.”
“So maybe the transfusions were free for him.”
“Someone else paid….” Shit. The only reason someone else would pay for Hunter’s superpowers was to help him carry out a job they’d commissioned. Which meant… “The Tower syndicate paid for Hunter’s upgrades. They didn’t just hire the monster—they created him.”