Five
“You’re late,” Cam said, as I unlocked the office door and held it open for him.
“Yup.” I’d left with just enough time to get there by noon—Cavazos had to let me go to work for official clients, but didn’t have to leave me any spare time—but I’d stopped by my apartment first to shower. I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing Cam again with the feel of Cavazos still crawling on my skin.
Not with the memory of him calling me “clean” still echoing in my head.
I tossed my scuffed satchel onto the couch and headed straight for my desk.
“You really think that’s the best way to start this working relationship?”
“Nope.” I dropped into my chair and pulled open the bottom right-hand drawer, pawing through the contents as I spoke. “If you wanna work with someone else, I fully support your decision.” In fact, that was the only way I could get out of a direct request from Anne.
“You’re not going to get rid of me again, Liv. Unless you have a new vanishing act you’d like to try out.”
My fingers brushed smooth glass beneath a tangle of holster straps and receipts I’d really meant to file, and I pulled out a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey. The shot glass in my pencil drawer had eraser shavings in it, so I tapped it upside down on my desk until they fell out, then poured myself a shot.
I threw it back and closed my eyes, half wishing the alcohol still burned. I’d tried drinking before my weekly report to Cavazos once, and once was all it took. Turns out I don’t really want to be relaxed around him after all.
“What’s wrong with you?” Cam demanded, sinking onto the couch with his elbows on his knees.
“I had a rough morning, and based on your presence in my office, my afternoon isn’t looking much better.”
His blue eyes narrowed in anger, and I had to swallow my own regret before it surfaced as an apology—I couldn’t afford to let him in again. “When did you turn into such a bitch?” he growled, and my urge to apologize dried up and blew away.
“About a year and a half ago.” I poured another shot and pushed the bottle toward him.
Instead of taking it, he watched me slowly turn the shot I’d poured for myself, staring down at the contents. “Are you going to be like this the whole time?” he asked.
“Nope. Sometimes I’ll be irritable and unpleasant.” I downed the shot and reached for the bottle again, but he pulled it out of my reach.
Cam tilted the bottle to read the label, then set it on the desk again with a disgusted look. “I guess you really don’t work for Cavazos. He pays better than this.”
“What, you’re too good for my whiskey?”
“Yeah, and so are you. When this is over, I’ll buy you a real drink.” His arched brows were a challenge, but his eyes were serious, and so was the question he hadn’t really asked.
“I might let you. Because I like whiskey.”
He leaned back on the couch, crossing both arms over his chest. “Is that the best I’m going to get?”
“From me? Today? Yes.” I screwed the lid on the bottle and put it back in the drawer. “Where’s Anne?” I asked, when the fact that I was alone with Cam became too much to think about.
“You were late and she had to pick up Hadley. She left these for you, though.” He picked up a plastic grocery bag I hadn’t even noticed and tossed it onto the desk. I opened it and looked in to find several clear plastic bags, each smeared with blood on the inside from their contents.
“She took these herself, didn’t she?” I asked, trying not to be horrified by the thought of Anne on her hands and knees, taking samples of blood from the scene of her husband’s slaughter.
“She wouldn’t let me help.” Cam glanced at the floor between his knees. “She seemed to think she owed it to him personally.”
Damn.
I spread the bags out on my desk, looking for some kind of order, but they weren’t numbered or labeled, as police evidence bags always were. There was a swatch of cloth that might once have been plaid, an uneven square of excised carpet, a patch of stained denim and a formerly white athletic sock.
“Have you tried any of them?” I asked, turning the first bag over to examine it.
Cam shook his head. “You’re the blood expert.” Which is what had brought me to Cavazos’s attention…
I unzipped the first baggie—the plaid cloth—and reached inside with my bare hand. The blood was room temperature and still sticky. Fresh enough to be viable, and readable from a decent distance.
As the metallic scent of blood filled the room, I pulled the cloth from the bag and closed my eyes, fingering the material, focusing on the feel of the blood between my fingers, and the feel of it in my head. That mental scent. The energy signature of whoever’d spilled it.
It came from a man. Gender was easy to discern, but race and age took more experience—exposure to and study of a variety of samples. Fortunately, I’d had plenty of experience.
The blood came from a man of Asian descent. I couldn’t pin down his age without a fresher sample, but I knew two things for sure. The blood held no power, which meant its owner was not Skilled. And the blood held no pull—no psychic thread connecting it to the man who’d spilled it, through which I could Track him. Which meant the owner was dead.
“It’s Shen’s,” I said, resealing the cloth in its bag.
Cam sat straighter. “How sure are you?”
“As sure as I can be, without having met him. It’s either his, or another dead Asian man with no Skill.” Which could easily have been one of about a billion other people—if we didn’t already know Shen’s killer was a Traveler.
I stood without touching anything and crossed into the bathroom to wash my hands with the bar of lye soap on the left side of the sink. It was hell on my skin, but lye destroys blood, which would keep me from confusing one sample with another.
In my chair again, I opened the second bag—the denim—and knew almost immediately that the blood in this one was also Shen’s.
Another hand scrub, then I opened the third bag. The carpet. And that one was interesting. Shen’s blood was there, but it wasn’t alone. Two people had bled on the carpet, and the second person’s blood held both power and pull. He was both Skilled and alive. But with the samples so thoroughly mixed, I couldn’t tell what kind of Skill it was, nor could I get any specific direction from the pull. I didn’t even know for sure that the owner was male.
I sealed up the carpet and washed my hands again, then sat down with the last sample—the sock. “The carpet, I understand. But how the hell did Anne get bloody clothes from a crime scene? Why didn’t the police take them for evidence?”
Cam sighed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “The house was locked up tight when Shen was found, and his keys weren’t missing. The cops know the killer was a Traveler, and they know they’ll never find him with only county resources.” He shrugged. “It’s no surprise they’re not dedicating much time or effort to a case they know they can’t solve.”
And there were more of those every day, it seemed. Sure, some cops were Skilled, but the police department couldn’t legally use resources that weren’t officially recognized by the government, which meant they were crippled in the investigation of any crime obviously committed by a Skilled perp.
Victims and loved ones who could pay would come to people like me for answers the cops couldn’t give them. Some independent Trackers—like Spencer and his associates—also offered vigilante justice, of the variety Anne had requested, for a huge fee.
Those who wanted justice but couldn’t afford it in monetary terms would turn to either Tower or Cavazos, who were happy to take payment in the form of an IOU—a dangerously vague contract sealed by one of their own Binders. And just like that, one by one, private citizens fell into debt to one syndicate or the other, signing away their souls—or at least their free will—for one short moment of visceral satisfaction.
What they didn’t know was that half the time, the very syndicate they turned to for help was responsible for the crime they wanted avenged. I’d seen it happen. If Cavazos wanted a Traveler or a Reader who refused to sign on, he’d have the target’s spouse or parent killed—never a child, thank goodness—then sit back and wait for a desperate knock on the door.
And people kept falling for it, devastated and naive in the face of engineered tragedy.
I held up the bloody sock, mentally crossing my fingers that what had happened to Anne was nothing of that sort. That this was something we could put an end to without making powerful enemies. Then I closed my eyes and inhaled.
Score.
One bleeder, with both power and pull. This blood almost certainly matched the second bleeder from the carpet, and with only one scent to concentrate on, I was able to pin down some details.
“Male, and he’s a Traveler.” Just as Anne had guessed. I’d found the killer. Or, at least, I’d found his blood, and since it hadn’t completely dried, the pull from it was strong.
Cam sat straight again and glanced from the sock to my face. “Anything else?”
“A general direction.”
He was already on his feet, keys in hand. “I’ll drive.” I glanced at him, my gaze narrowed in suspicion, and Cam scowled. “What, you don’t trust me? Don’t you think it should be the other way around? How do I know that you’re not just going to ditch me again and move to another city, without even a goodbye?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I snatched my worn satchel from the couch and filled it with supplies from the cabinet behind my desk so I wouldn’t have to look at him.
“Well, then, why don’t you tell me?” he demanded, and when I didn’t answer, he grabbed my arm and tried to turn me around. “Why are you so angry? You’re pushing people away. People who care about you. What happened to you, Liv?”
I jerked my arm from his grasp and met his gaze reluctantly. “Nothing I can’t handle.” Yet. But he didn’t understand that, and I couldn’t explain it. “Fine. You can drive. It’ll be easier for me to concentrate on the blood that way anyway.” Which was probably the reason he’d offered in the first place.
The last thing that went into my satchel was a spray bottle of ammonia, then I zipped the bag and set it on the desk. I shrugged into my good holster and pulled my jacket on over it, then checked the clip and the safety on my favorite 9mm and dropped it into the holster. I sealed the sock back into its bag and shoved it into my right jacket pocket. With my phone in the opposite pocket and my satchel over one shoulder, I shooed Cam out the door and locked it behind us.
“It’s good to see you again,” he said, following me down the narrow staircase at the end of the hall. “Even if you’re not talking to me.”
“I am talking to you.” I pushed open the door at the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the bright parking lot, squinting against the glare of the sun. I’d rather work at night, when there were fewer of Cavazos’s eyes around to see me with Cam, but Anne’s blood sample wasn’t getting any fresher.
“You’re talking, but you’re not really saying anything,” Cam insisted, digging his keys from his pocket.
“You’re doing enough of that for both of us.”
His car—the one he’d tracked me down in the night before—was parked near the end of the front row, and as we approached, he unlocked it by remote.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked, dropping into the passenger’s seat.
“It’s been six years, Liv. I don’t even know you anymore.” When I didn’t know how to respond, he sighed and started the car. “Is this what you do now? Freelance Tracking?”
I nodded, and the knot of tension inside me eased just a little. Work questions, I could handle. “I was on Adam Rawlinson’s team for three years. They taught me to shoot and fight—Rawlinson himself trained me on the nine mil—and I quit last year and went into business for myself.”
Cam stopped at the parking-lot exit, the car’s V8 rumbling all the way into my bones. “Which way?”
I set the sock on my lap and opened the bag, then ran my fingers over the damp, sticky material and closed my eyes. “West.” Shit. Tower’s side of town. Not a promising start to the afternoon.
“What happened with Rawlinson?” Cam asked, turning left onto the street. “You didn’t like the company?”
“No, it was nice.” Good money, decent benefits and an upstanding boss. Rawlinson had a sterling reputation and got the bulk of the business from anyone who didn’t want to get tangled up with either Tower or Cavazos. Including a lot of unofficial police “consultations.”
“So why’d you quit? You obviously took a cut in pay….”
I laughed, and it almost felt good. “Is that a dig at my liquor cabinet?”
Cam smiled. “That wasn’t liquor, it was swill. And that wasn’t a cabinet, it was a drawer.”
“The money will come, once I get my name out there.” For too many years, I’d been known only as Rawlinson’s top Tracker, “You know, that girl.” I’d almost started answering to the unofficial title.
“So you quit over money?”
“No.” I glanced at him, looking for judgment in his eyes, because there’d been none in his voice. “I wanted to be my own boss.”
The irony of my lie stung. Good thing I wasn’t bound to tell the truth.
I’d quit my job after Cavazos inked his mark on my thigh and ruined my whole life. I did it to keep Rawlinson and the rest of his employees safe. He would have fired me anyway if he’d found out. No syndicate-bound employees—that was both company policy and common sense. Never hire someone whose loyalty belongs to someone else. Especially someone with the power not only to kill you, but to make the world forget you ever existed. And that was only one of the reasons I had to keep my binding secret.
“Well, then, I guess you got what you wanted.”
Hardly. I stared at my lap. I hadn’t gotten a damn thing I’d wanted since that night six years ago.
When the road curved to the right, I looked up. The blood wanted us to go straight. “Take the next left and veer toward the market district,” I said, staring out the window to avoid looking at him. Being with Cam was harder than I’d thought it would be. Some things hadn’t changed—he still smelled like good coffee and cheap shampoo—and some things were totally different. Like that dark, scruffy stubble, as if he hadn’t gotten a chance to shave. And maybe he hadn’t. The stubble made him look older, and at first that had bothered me, because it reminded me how much had changed since we’d been together. But now that stubble was kind of growing on me.
Wonder what it feels like…
I’d actually pulled my hand from the plastic bag before I realized what I was doing, and when he glanced at my bloody fingers, I felt myself flush.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did you lose the pull?”
“No.” I shoved my hand back into the bag and ran my fingers over the stiffening material, staring straight out the windshield. He couldn’t guess at my thoughts if he couldn’t see my face. “Just keep heading west.” Deeper and deeper into Jake Tower’s side of town…
“So…how long have you been bound?” Cam asked, when I motioned for him to take the next left.
My heart jumped so high I could practically taste it on the back of my tongue. “I told you, Cavazos doesn’t—”
“I meant Anne. How long have you and Anne been bound to the others?”
Oh. Yeah.
I tried to relax, but that was hard to do, considering I was clutching the bloody evidence from a murder scene, riding into the territory of a man who’d kill me as soon as look at me and sitting next to the man I’d thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. “Fifteen years. Since I was twelve.”
Cam whistled, as if he was impressed. Or horrified. “So, the whole time we were together, you were bound to your three best friends?”
“And vice versa.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“After high school, it didn’t seem to matter. We hardly saw one another.”
“Anne said it was an accident…?” he prompted, and I wondered how much else she’d told him.
“Yeah. We didn’t know what we were doing. Some guy at school made Anne cry, so Kori made him cry. Then we went back to Kori’s house to comfort Anne with junk food, and we wound up swearing lifelong loyalty and assistance instead.”
“How do you accidently sign and seal a lifelong binding?”
“We didn’t know it was a binding.” I twisted to half face him, and only then realized how comfortable that felt. How easy talking to him had become—again—as if we could just pick up right where we’d left off.
But we couldn’t. Ever. And forgetting that would get one of us killed.
“It was different then, you know?” I made myself stare out the window to avoid looking at him. “The revelation was still recent, and our parents hadn’t told us we were Skilled. They were afraid that if we knew, we’d be in danger. Turns out ignorance is more dangerous than the truth.”
“It usually is,” Cam said, and suddenly my throat felt thick. He was talking about his own ignorance, about all the things I still couldn’t—wouldn’t—tell him.
“We were just being kids. Best friends standing around the kitchen, making promises we probably never would have kept, just to make Anne smile. But then Kori’s little sister, Kenley, came in and overheard us, and she wanted to help. She said it wouldn’t be official unless we wrote it down.”
Cam’s brows rose halfway up his forehead, and he looked away from the road long enough to make me nervous. “Kenley Daniels was your Binder? Sixteen years ago?”
I nodded. “If we’d known that ran in her family—turns out her mother’s a Binder, too—we probably would have realized what she was doing, even if she didn’t.”
“Displaying the first instinctive manifestation of a very serious Skill?”
I couldn’t resist a smile. “Good guess.”
“How old was she?”
“Ten.”
“Damn. It doesn’t usually show up so early.”
“I know.” I’d met more than my share of Binders since that day fifteen years ago, and not one of them had displayed a stronger Skill or instinct than Kenley Daniels had at ten years old. Without even knowing what she was.
“So…she what? Scribbled a promise in crayon and told you to sign it?”
I laughed again, but more out of nerves than amusement. He wasn’t far off. “It was pink glitter pen, actually. And after we signed, she said it still didn’t feel right. She said it wouldn’t be ‘real’ unless we used blood.”
The four of us had been losing interest by then, but Kori had perked up when she realized that meant she’d get to use her knife. And I have to admit, I was curious—perhaps the beginnings of my own talent with blood.
“Oh, shit!” Cam glanced at me again, then back at the road. “Kenley’s a blood Binder? I thought she worked with signatures….”
“Actually, it turns out she’s a double threat.”
Blood binding was a much rarer Skill than name binding—binding a written oath with a signature—and those who could do both were rarer still. And someone with the power to do both at such a young age was almost unheard of.
“So, I’m guessing that contract is ironclad…?” Cam said, flicking on his turn signal when I pointed toward a side street ahead.
“Yeah. And what’s worse is that she had plenty of Skill, but no training. It was really more an oath than a contract. Just a promise that we would help one another whenever asked. There was no expiration date, no stipulations and no exceptions. There weren’t even enough words to form a decent loophole.”
“Why didn’t you just burn it?”
Burning it to ashes was the only surefire way to destroy a blood-sealed contract, which is why certain notorious crime lords had started sealing their employee bindings in the flesh—literally—with tattoo marks as a fail-safe in case the corresponding written contract was destroyed. Fortunately, Kenley hadn’t foreseen that advancement. I wasn’t even sure she was capable of flesh binding, not that any of us knew what that was fifteen years ago. Her first sealed contract could easily be destroyed—if it could be found.
“By the time we realized what we’d done—the first time Kori’s grandmother had to pick her up from the police station—the oath was gone. We looked everywhere. Our parents got together and tore the Danielses’ house apart, and when it wasn’t there, they searched their own houses. But we never found so much as a scrap of powder-blue paper or pink glitter pen.”
“You think someone took it?” he asked, and I could only shrug.
“It didn’t walk off on its own. But I have no clue who could have taken it. Or why. Until Kori got arrested, only the four of us knew about it—Kori, Anne, Noelle and me. And Kenley, of course. And we all wanted it destroyed.” Badly, by the time we got to high school. “We explored different theories over the years. A parent trying to teach us a lesson. Kori’s brother, Kristopher, being a pain in the ass. Their dog burying a new prize. But no one ever admitted anything, and Anne didn’t know she was a Reader yet, so it never occurred to her to look for a lie. And every time we tested it, the binding was still intact, which meant that the oath was still whole, wherever it was. And obviously it still is now,” I said, gesturing to the entire car to indicate our current vigilante mission.
“That sounds like a total pain in the ass.”
“Worse. We started hating each other. Even the most offhand, ridiculous request became a geas—a compulsion that had to be obeyed, to the exclusion of everything else. We wound up cheating, and lying, and stealing, and starting fights for one another. We got hurt, and arrested, and kicked out of school. And the cycle was self-perpetuating. Anne would get pissed at Kori for making her help cheat on a test, so she’d ask Kori to go to the drugstore and shoplift only hemorrhoid cream and Vagisil, knowing that when she got caught, she’d be humiliated.”
Cam laughed. “When I met them, the four of you seemed to get along pretty well.”
“Part of that was the fact that we rarely saw one another after high school. The rest of it was the second oath.”
“There was a second oath?”
“Yeah. My senior year, Kenley got tired of all the bitching and backstabbing. And I think she felt guilty, because she was the reason for the trouble in the first place. So she conned us all into the same room long enough to show us a new oath she’d penned, which basically made us swear never to ask one another for anything.”
“So, did you sign?”
“Hell yes! We fought over who got to sign first. After that, everything was fine. We weren’t best friends anymore, but we didn’t hate each other, either. We just kind of…left each other alone. That New Year’s Eve party six years ago? That was the first time we’d spent more than an hour together since high-school graduation. It was also the last time I saw any of them. Until this morning.”
“Because Anne burned the second contract?”
I scowled. “You were eavesdropping?”
He shrugged. “I could only hear bits of it from the hallway.”
After a moment of hesitation and concentration, I motioned him through the next red light, but I could tell his thoughts were no longer on the drive. “So, why did you guys let Anne keep the second oath?”
“We didn’t,” I said. “It didn’t seem fair for any one of us to have it, so we let Kenley keep it. She was the only neutral party, and she was the one who sealed it.”
“Well, Anne must have gotten ahold of it somehow, if she burned it.”
My hand clenched around the bloody material. I hadn’t thought of that. “And she must have gotten to it quickly….” I mumbled, mentally counting the few hours between Shen’s murder and the moment Anne showed up in my office. And she’d found Cam even before that. “Maybe she’s still in contact with Kenley….” I began, then realized that we’d rolled to a halt three cars back from a four-way stop.
“Which way?” Cam asked, and I forced my mind back to the energy signature I was tracking.
I closed my eyes and placed my hand flat over the tacky sock, inside the bag. The pull was still there, but fading as the blood dried. “Straight,” I murmured. “But slightly to the right…”
“There’s no slightly to it,” he said, and I opened my eyes as we rolled through the intersection to find the street sandwiched by tightly packed rows of buildings—mostly neighborhood businesses and apartments.
“Slow down.” I closed my eyes again and let the blood guide me. The pull was getting stronger, but not definitively so. “Stop,” I said at last, when the blood began to pull me from behind. “We passed it.”
He backed into the first available parking spot on the curb and turned off the engine. “Up there, maybe?” he said, twisting to peer through the rear windshield at the building on the right. “In one of the apartments?”
“That’s my guess.” I pulled a packet of wet wipes from my satchel and started cleaning blood from my hand. Again. The wipes wouldn’t work as well as lye, but they were portable and didn’t make me want to peel my own skin off to stop the burning.
Cam glanced at the slight gun bulge beneath my jacket as I stuffed the used wipe into a plastic sandwich bag in the side pocket of my satchel. “Are you really going to do this?”
“I don’t have any choice. Or did you forget what compelled means?”
“I haven’t forgotten anything, Liv,” he said, and I realized we were having two different conversations. “Do you have a silencer for that thing?”
“No, I don’t have a silencer. Because I’m not an assassin.” I dug through my satchel for a thin box of surgical gloves and plucked two from the slit on top, then shoved them into my right jacket pocket.
“Well, that’s too bad, because this is an assassination.”
“No, this is an execution.”
“The difference would be…?”
“Assassination is murder. Execution is justice.” I pulled a small, folding blade from my back pocket and flicked it open, then folded it closed again, satisfied that it was still in working order.
“So now you’re an executioner?”
“No, I…” Too late, I caught the hint of a grin and realized he was teasing me. I scowled. “Are we going to sit here and argue until he comes out and begs to be shot, or you wanna go in?”
“Honestly, arguing sounds like more fun. And on that note…you sure have a lot of weapons for not-an-assassin.”
I shoved the knife back into my pocket and met his gaze, the butt of my gun digging into my side. “Do I look dead to you?”
His grin grew. “You look all pissed off. It’s kind of hot.”
It took serious effort for me to stay focused when I realized he wasn’t joking. “I don’t know about your line of work—” I wasn’t even sure what he did for a living, come to think of it “—but most of the people I track don’t want to be found, and people who don’t want to be found are usually armed. And dangerous. And on hair triggers. So yeah, I’m armed. Because I don’t want to die.”
“If you’re the muscle, that must make me the brains of the operation.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re the chauffeur. Here’s the plan—find him, kill him.”
Cam laughed out loud, and my teeth ground together. “That’s not a plan. It’s not even a complete sentence.”
“You got something better?”
“How ’bout this?” He pulled back the right side of his jacket and showed me his gun. It was bigger than mine. And it was fitted with a long, barrel-shaped silencer in what had to be a custom-made holster.
“Nice,” I admitted, and his grin was back. But I couldn’t help wondering why the hell he even owned a silencer.
“I had a feeling you’d appreciate the reminder that I come well equipped.”
“I’d appreciate it more if I thought you knew how to use that,” I said, without thinking. His eyes lit up, and that’s when I realized I was flirting. We’d fallen back into that old familiar pattern as if the past six years had never happened.
“What, you don’t remember?” he teased, while I silently cursed myself.
“This isn’t going to happen, Cam.”
His good humor faltered, then resurged. “The execution?” He was as stubborn as ever.
“No, that’s going to happen. Then you go back to your life and I go back to mine.”
His grin vanished. “What life?” Cam demanded softly, his gaze holding mine like the earth holds the moon captive. “What could you possibly have now that’s better than what you left behind?”
Nothing. I had nothing now but the knowledge that I’d made a tough choice for us both, because I couldn’t live with the alternative. And neither could he. But that knowledge did little to ease the hollow ache in my chest or warm the empty half of my bed, and admitting regret now would only make the whole thing worse. So I closed my mouth, opened the car door and got out without a word.
Turning away from him this time hurt no less than it had the time before.