Page 3 of Brought to Light
Because I did believe him when he said the two assholes who’d shown up on his doorstep were the real deal. Jesse had been Air Force Intelligence before an explosion ended his career early and sent him home with about ninety percent of the body he’d started with. He wasn’t an idiot, and he wasn’t inexperienced.
I stuffed the phone into my pocket and walked further down the beach, staring out at the gray nothingness of the foggy ocean until my eyes burned. I kept coming back to the million-dollar question: why me? Why hire a mid-grade freelancer for a job when they could’ve easily done it themselves?
So if it was a setup, somehow—and I really, really had trouble picturing anything else—what did I gain by doing the job? I’d be getting fucked either way, I was pretty sure. So: kill the kid, get fucked, hate myself? Or leave the kid alone, get fucked, and know someone else would only kill him later anyway? The first option had a very slightly higher chance of getting me and Jesse out alive.
Was it worth it, though?
Fuck. I had to do it tonight if I meant to do it at all. The more I thought about it, the less I’d have the stomach for it.
With new determination, I strode up the beach and back toward town, ignoring the sharp, persistent feeling of wrongness that tightened my gut and stiffened my neck.
A few stragglers were trickling back to their cars and heading home for the night. I passed a stoned-looking guy sitting and dozing against the side of a darkened bait and tackle store, a young couple holding hands and eating ice cream despite the drizzly weather…and then my eyes caught and held. A block ahead of me walked a dude almost sketchy enough to be someone I’d know, wearing a battered brown leather jacket in the same weapon-concealing style as my black one and with shoulders almost broader than mine, too. He shot a quick glance over his shoulder from under bushy brows, and I instinctively sidestepped, flattening myself against the side of a building.
I crouched down and adjusted the laces on my boots, turning sideways so I could keep an eye on him and so that I’d be less likely to attract his attention if he noticed me…and putting myself in a good position to pull either of my guns quickly, too.
Because let’s be real, he’d recognize me, even without knowing me, the way I’d recognized him. Everything about this guy pinged my radar; he was another me, I’d have sworn to it. And it strained any credulity I still had left after the life I’d led—almost zero, in other words—trying to imagine there could be two assassination targets in this one small town.
He’d come here for John, same as I had.
He turned at the corner and went on his way without a second glance behind him. Cool as a cucumber, the motherfucker. He had to have clocked me in return, and if the possibility of getting shot in the back concerned him at all, he didn’t show it.
I stood up and licked my lips, tasting the salt of the ocean fog and a hint of chocolate and whipped cream. Double fucking fuck. The Cannibal Bean would be closing right now, John locking the doors and going about his business, mopping and putting things away, completely unaware that outside the little bubble of the café there were two ruthless killers hunting him like prey.
If I didn’t kill him, my opposite number would.
And if that asshole got to John before I did, Jesse and I would be in what passed for breach of contract in my line of work. Put another way, we’d be next up for a bullet to the back of the head.
Little as I liked it, I had no choice.
Gametime.
ChapterTwo
Linden
After a few months of repetition, closing up the shop had become automatic: shut the door and flip the sign, clean the espresso machine, wash the dishes, count the register, sweep and mop. Restock all the little things on the coffee bar. And so on and so forth.
That particular night, it was really lucky it had become such second nature, because I couldn’t have focused on work to save my life. The glaring overhead lights, so different from the lamplight and candlelight of my home, were giving me a headache, and the strange, prickling, pressurized sensation in the air didn’t help. It felt like it might’ve before a thunderstorm. But while the skies had been overcast earlier, they hadn’t heralded that kind of weather.
It wasn’t from the weather. It was something else.
My mind kept circling back to the customer from earlier in the evening, the big one, the obviously dangerous one, who stuck out in this small, sleepy town like a wolf in a flock of stoned sheep. I’d been warned not to use any magic while hiding out here. When Lady Lisandra, my mother’s employer, had told me to run, she’d made it clear that I had to live a human life. Magic could be sensed, could be traced; it would be a beacon for any of our people who crossed over to hunt me. I wasn’t powerfully magical, but the inability to use what little I had made me feel itchy in my own skin. Vulnerable, and off-kilter, and even more isolated, since magic was at the moment my only link to my home.
So using it when I made his drink had been self-indulgent in the extreme, and dangerous to boot. But I’d had to know if the man meant to kill me. After all, what would be the point of hiding if I’d already been found? Yes, our laws prevented us from doing one another harm while in the human realm. Direct harm. Harm that could be proved in one of our high courts.
But it would be very, very difficult to prove that my death by human means had been orchestrated by one of our own. We couldn’t lie, which meant we’d spent untold thousands of years honing our prevarication, omission, and evasion skills to a degree humans would be unable to differentiate from lying.
The man had felt like a killer, from his wary stance to his prowling gait to the way his eyes took everything in, cold and hard and observant. He repelled me nearly as much as he drew me in, pushing and pulling on my instincts with his intensity. Fear, after all, caused responses in the body nearly indistinguishable from powerful attraction. Men like that were best avoided, but what was best for me wasn’t always what I wanted. And he had such strength, such confidence and surety in every movement and even in the timbre of his voice. Half of me had wanted to drop my pitcher of milk and run, never looking back. The other half had wished I could leap over the counter and beg him to stand between me and anyone else who might want to hurt me. To give me at least the illusion of safety in this strange, foreign place.
I’d had to know which of my instincts to follow. So I’d put a trickle of magic into his drink. And it had tasted good to him.
He couldn’t possibly mean me any harm—if the magic didn’t lie.
Fae magic, like fae lips,couldn’tlie. But it could prevaricate, omit, and evade. It answered any question you asked, but it never, ever prompted you to change your question if you’d chosen the wrong one in the first place.
So I brooded, grinding coffee beans for the morning and setting the coffee carafes upside down to dry and seeing only that man’s harsh face, the look in his dark eyes as he’d tasted what I’d made for him. Should I run again? Where would I go? I could go home. Sick anxiety pooled in my stomach along with the latte I’d made myself right before closing. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want anyone I loved to die. I was so alone here, and if I died here, it would be without even the comfort of knowing I was mourned.
I put the night’s take in the safe along with the register float and shut and locked it. So close to being done here for the night, and then I’d have to really face the decision in front of me. I couldn’t go home. My mother would be in more danger if I did, along with Lady Lisandra and her entire household. Lady Lisandra’s nobility didn’t include importance. Nor enough influence to defend herself against a sorcerer with an army of fanatical followers—a man who’d worked himself up into a paranoid frenzy about the blatherings of a senile seer, interpreting them to mean that I was the one destined to end his life.
