Chapter Fifty – Kris Cole

 

“So what’s this about?” Hunter asked Kris as they sat at their secluded corner table.

“Why does it have to be about anything?” Kris asked, just before taking a sip of her bourbon and water. It might not have been as delicious as the liquor she’d decanted from the colonel’s bottle the night before, but at nearly twenty dollars a glass, it was damn close. “Can’t two colleagues enjoy a nice lunch and a drink together?”

Kris was positioned across from Hunter Jackson, a seeming ocean of white linen tablecloth separating the two of them. More than that, of course, divided them. For instance, Kris was wearing her conservative work clothes she’d bought off the rack for when she was in the office. As soon as she was out of Full Moon for the night, she’d be changing into her jeans and a t-shirt.

Hunter, on the other hand, was in one of his tailored suits and shirts. After work, he’d change into something more casual, but just as bespoke and well-appointed. In all the years she’d known him, Kris had never seen him in less than the best.

Which was why she’d opted for the fancy restaurant when she’d more or less ordered the handsome dragonkin shifter to lunch with her, figuring it would make it easier for him to accept. He preferred the finer things in life, she’d realized over the years, which normally translated to Michelin-starred restaurants. But, seeing as Michelin only rated places in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, or D.C., she had to settle with promising him a nice steak and a few afternoon cocktails.

“Seventy-five-dollar steaks are a little more than I’ve ever seen you spring for, Kris,” he said, pausing to take a sip of his cognac before continuing. “Even with a hoard hidden somewhere, you’re still as stingy as an old miser. You make Ebenezer Scrooge look like a philanthropist.”

She smiled a little as she set her drink aside. Hunter was right. Of course, she preferred the term frugal to stingy. But, as her father had always pointed out, the best way to become rich was to never spend money on anything. So, rather than tapping into her reserves of precious metals and gems, she just lived off what she made at Full Moon. Besides, it was easier to deal with the IRS that way.

But now, as he stared out at her with those gray eyes of his, his square jaw firmly set, she knew she was going to have to come clean about her ulterior motives for bringing him here. If there was anyone in Full Moon Security that could see right through her attempts at subterfuge, it was the shifter seated across the table from her.

Hunter had, after all, had a career as a con artist and thief for years before Col. Harrington had plucked him from the wild and brought him onto the Paranormal Research Board. He’d been more than successful at it, too, making an infamous name across Europe and most of North America as “The Gray Fox” over the course of more than a decade of cat burglary, art gallery thefts, and museum break-ins. How Harrington had originally convinced him to come on board with the Research Board, and Full Moon Security afterwards, she had no idea.

She reached into her pocket and fished out just one of the many storage keys she’d found in the false bottom of Col. Harrington’s desk drawer. “Any idea what this is?” she asked as she held it up.

“A key?” Hunter asked, eyebrow raised. “Probably a special key, though, from the look on your face.”

“Found it at the colonel’s place the other night,” she replied as she slid it across the pristine tablecloth to him, “along with a collection of others.”

“So the colonel has a penchant for collecting keys?” he asked as he took it from the table, holding it up for inspection. “Not even particularly pretty keys, either, from the looks of them. Average keys, to train lockers and such. Not even a treasure chest, or some cabinet or hidden door to another world. Kind of surprising for the colonel, considering his eclectic taste in everything else. Where did you find them? Didn’t we go over that place?”

“That’s the interesting part.” She told him about the false-bottomed drawer, about the call Sam had picked up a couple days prior about the case down in Texas. About how it had led her to search the colonel’s home again.

“Think they have something to do with his disappearing, then?”

“Might be a clue, at least.”

He cleared his throat as he leaned forward, eyes boring into Kris’s. “So, you want me to track down where all these keys belong? Somehow? So we can—what? Scooby-Doo it up? Do I need to buy a Mystery Machine, now, get a pot-smoking dog? Oh, does that make you Velma?”

“I was thinking more Sherlock and Watson. And, besides, you know what the colonel always says about clues.”

“I do, unfortunately,” he said, his eyes focused back on the key pinched between his fingers. When he spoke again, his voice was an impersonation of the colonel’s rough vocal track: “You never know if a clue is really a clue, until you track it all the way down.”

“So what do you say?”

Hunter put the key flat on the tablecloth, slid it back over to her. He didn’t say a word, though, just looked at her.

Kris’s eyes darted down to the key, then back up to his face. “Should I take that as a no?”

“Take it any way you want,” he said smoothly, reaching for his drink. “I just don’t think hunting down a few keys will amount to any more than our chasing after some wild geese. Why should I bother wasting my time on a fool’s errand, when we both know full well that the colonel won’t be found if he doesn’t want to be found?”

But, Kris could see something there in Hunter’s eyes. A certain kind of smugness. No, not smugness. Satisfaction, maybe? Like he was perfectly happy with the colonel having gone missing.

She settled back in her chair, crossed one long leg over the other. She eyed him as she took another sip of bourbon. “You don’t want him to come back,” Kris began slowly, “do you?”

He raised an eyebrow at her, turning his head just slightly so they weren’t completely facing each other. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, I just think that if I were to take this to any of the other guys, they’d be completely on board. I mean, the reason I brought this to you was because I figured you had the best skill set. You used to track financial information, and you’ve broken into more places than I can count. I’m just operations; you’re more investigative. I figured this would be more in your wheelhouse, that’s all.”

“Just because it’s up my alley, that doesn’t mean I think anything will come of it.”

She narrowed her eyes a little. He was hiding something, she could tell. And she had a feeling she knew exactly what it was.

“You know,” Kris said, beginning slowly and choosing her words carefully as she went, “I’ve never really given much thought to how you were brought on board with the PRB. One day, we needed a new infiltration specialist who could run a long con for a job, and a week later you were there. I just assumed Harrington had brought you on board somehow, using the same strategy he had with all of us. He told us your background, about how you’d been running all sorts of operations around the world, that you were an international thief, and that you were, above all else, incredibly qualified. So, the rest of the guys and me, we all just went along with it, because the colonel always seemed to know exactly what he was doing.”

“Yes?” Hunter asked as he, too, settled back in his chair and crossed his legs. He folded his hands on the table in front of him, nodding for her to continue. “Do go on.”

“But that’s not exactly the way it happened, is it?”

He smiled.

“And you’ve never offered up any information to the contrary, have you?”

His smile widened. “But you’re doing such a wonderful job on your own, Kris. And you say you’re just combat and operations? You’ve given yourself too little credit.”

As she sat there, piecing things together in her own mind, it was like a curtain was being drawn back, like an early morning mist was being burned away by the sun’s rays. Now, suddenly, she was able to see behind it, to see the facts that were perfectly laid out in front of her, and, by extension, everyone else in the agency.

She shifted in her seat, sat a little bit more upright. “Holy shit,” she whispered as she looked around the table, avoiding those deep gray eyes of his. “That’s it. Harrington had something on you, didn’t he? He had evidence of who you really were, or something along those lines, and was keeping you working with him?”

A slow realization began to creep in at the back of her mind. A realization that somehow Harrington had been hiding the truth about.

He relaxed back into his seat and took a sip of his drink. “You're seeing it, aren't you?”

She stopped, considering the sudden change. “He did something to us, didn't he? Something…magical?”

He clapped a soft golf clap, his smile widening a little more. “Very good, Kris. Looks as if you’ve broken through the little fog the colonel put over all of you.”

“But why?” Kris asked, planting her elbows firmly on the table as she leaned forward a little to better look him in the eye. “Why would he do something like that to all of us? And how?”

“No clue,” he said, smiling a little at his pun. “Though, I suspect it may have had something to do with his not wanting you to distrust me out of hand. Or maybe he preferred for you all to not immediately question the deep hypocrisy of using something to compel us all to work together. For instance, I’ve only now been able to discuss this for the first time with you.”

“He had you under, too, then?”

“Of course. The compulsion you and the others were under wouldn’t do much good, or offer him any value, if I was able to just blurt out my true reasons for being around. Now would it?”

“Is that why you don’t want to help me find him, then? You think if he stays gone long enough, you’ll be free? You’ll just be able to waltz out that door?”

He took his glass of cognac away from his lips, swallowing his small mouthful of the fragrant liquor. “That’s the hope, yes.”

“But don’t you enjoy it? Even a little bit?”

“Enjoy what? The parts where I steal things and don’t get to keep them, or the parts where ghosts and rogue shifters try to tear me apart?” He paused, rolled his eyes. “Or is it the fraud investigations I have to perform? I loathe this job, Kris.”

“But, at least you get to help people. You get to fight the good fight?”

“Oh, please. You all were fighting the good fight years before I came along, and you will be years after I leave. Why lose any sleep over it?”

“How much longer were you planning on waiting before you disappeared?”

A sly smile grew on his lips. “You have a few more months.”

“That’s it? Just two or three months, then you’d be out the door in the middle of the night, with not so much as a goodbye?”

He shrugged. “What more did you want? I needed to make sure he wasn’t coming back, didn’t I? After all, he did threaten me with a life of prison. One specially built for one of us, Kris. You know how he was. Is.”

She slumped back in her chair and grabbed her drink again. She was already getting near the bottom of her glass, and the waiter still wasn’t out with their lunch. As she sipped at her drink again, she considered the problem.

Hunter was the best for the job, of that there was no doubt. After all, he practically lived for finding concealed treasure. That’s part of why he was so good at his fraud and financial forensics investigations, which were as much about in-person interviews as they were about following money trails. The only problem was, where Col. Harrington could compel him to work along with the group, Kris had no leverage of her own.

Unless…

“Hunter,” Kris said, setting her glass aside. “I have a proposition.”

He sighed. “Really, Kris? There’s not much you can offer me that will make me reconsider my position. Harrington’s been a ball and chain around my ankle for years.”

“Now, hear me out. I want Harrington back, or at least to find out what happened to him. You, though, want what Harrington had on you. Correct?”

“Ideally, yes.”

“What if I help you find that? While we’re searching for information on his whereabouts, I mean? I know him a hell of a lot better than you do, Hunter, and have a better chance of figuring out where he’d store that kind of blackmail.”

“What do I get out of it, then?”

“The blackmail, of course.”

“So, I help you find Harrington, and I’m done? Cut free?”

“And, if we can’t find it, I’ll talk to him. I’ll convince him to cut you free, once we find him.”

Hunter eyed her carefully, his full lips pressed firmly into a thin, pale line. “That’s no guarantee.”

“It is if I threaten to leave the agency if he doesn’t let you off the hook, isn’t it? He’d know I’d do it, too, if I’d found out that he was blackmailing you into working for him in the first place. Why else would he have put some kind of spell on us? On all of us?”

He leaned back, seeming to consider her words. After a moment longer, he finally spoke. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Deadly.”

“You’ll make a pact to it, then?” he asked, extending a hand across the table to her.

Kris swallowed hard. Dragon pacts were something altogether different from those of other shifters. They were the kinds of agreements only one dragon could ask of another, the kind of thing that myths and legends were derived from. She’d never made one in her entire life, had never seen a need to.

But, something told her that finding Col. Harrington, and getting to the root of his disappearance, was going to be more than she could handle by herself. Why else would she have gone through the trouble of even trying to get Hunter on board with the search?

As she finished doing the mental calculus and finally decided that, yes, she’d do whatever it took to get Hunter, the Gray Fox, his freedom back, a silent thrum of power seemed to vibrate throughout her. Like the buildup of an electrical transmitter, a warmth that spread throughout her body.

This was it. This was what one of these must feel like.

She reached forward, clasped his hand tightly. “Yes. You have my word.”

And, just like that, the power seemed to dissipate, to just slowly drift away into the world as it released.

Pretty anticlimactic, if you asked her.

Hunter smiled as he shook her hand, his eyes glowing a subtle green. “Lovely doing business with you, Kris,” he said, as he released her hand and finished the last of his cognac. “I assume you’re still picking up the tab for lunch, right?”

Sighing, she just rolled her eyes and nodded.

At least, she thought, as their steaks were finally being brought to their table, this was a start. A real start. It wouldn’t take long for Hunter to find out where the keys belonged. Then, after that, they could move on to the next clue. And the next. And the next. Until, eventually, they both found what they were looking for.

Col. Harrington for her.

And freedom for Hunter.