Page 30 of Cast in Shadow
“I’m working on something. Hang on a minute.”
I bit my tongue until I tasted the coppery tang of blood. “Dennis,” I said his name like a warning.
“Hold.”
It took everything in me not to yell at him. Instead of granting myself that small release, I tried to focus on the why.Why would someone take Shay and Nguyen? Why them and not the other agents?
There had to be a reason.
My first thought was that Nguyen might have been the target. Lexa was a covert organization, but that man’s reputation preceded him. Anyone who actually knew who he was, and knew his background, would also know taking him was a great way to end up dead.
Were they after Shay then? She could heal herself, but that was as far as her magical ability went. She couldn’t redirect her power to heal anyone else, and not for lack of trying. She also couldn’t harness it for any other use. We’d tested it, time and time again, in a hundred different ways.
The girl desperately wanted an ability that she thought was more useful than just healing herself, but it wasn’t in the cards. Which was why she’d started messing around with chemistry and creating concoctions that could help her be better or faster. No matter what anyone said, she couldn’t accept that she was perfect just the way she was.
Thinking about that need to prove herself ratcheted my anger higher.
She’d been that way since that very first day, and I couldn’t help wondering if I’d been wrong to let her worthless parents off the hook for abandoning her. She didn’t know I’d tracked them down or that I’d kept tabs on them over the last few years. I knew they were afraid of her magic, even though it had nothing to do with them.
They were both nulls. The pair didn’t have enough magic between them to light a candle. The fact that they’d managed to have a magical baby was a miracle in itself. Then they’d abandoned her for that miracle, and she’d doubted her own worth ever since.
They didn’t deserve her.
Maybe I didn’t either, but at least I was trying.
“For fuck’s sake, Dennis!” I yelled, pushing down the wave of guilt that rose at losing my temper.
“Almost there…”
“Almost where? What the hell are you doing?”
“Hacking proprietary software so I can track her watch.”
Oh.
Hope rang through my body. “You can do that?” I never would have thought to look for her that way.
I’d gotten her that watch for her birthday a couple months earlier. She’d been so excited about it. The thing wasn’t state of the art, but she’d wanted something quick and easy to monitor her heart rate and blood pressure when she was testing out new serums.
“It has GPS and it’s on, but it’s not moving.”
“That could mean they found it and made her take it off. Do you have a location?”
“I’m working on it, Senna. Can you just…”
Shut up and give him a damn minute. Yeah, I got the message. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from saying anything else. It wasn’t much help. All I could think about was what had happened to them. The pain in my chest imagining Shay hurt and scared almost made me double over in my seat.
Impatience tingled up my spine, but I could still hear the rapid beat of plastic keys clicking in my ear. I stared out at the road feeling more lost than I had in a very long time.
I’d almost forgotten how much I hated that feeling.
“I’ve got her!”
And just like that, everything else in the world fell away as Dennis started feeding me information from Shay’s watch. She was still wearing it, at least according to the data coming through, and whatever was happening to her, it had her heart rate and blood pressure spiking every few minutes.
“What does that mean? Is she just scared?” Dennis asked, his voice pitched high with worry.
Torture. That was what it meant. Repeated bouts of pain and panic underscored by a relentless torrent of fear. Whoever had her would pay for messing with my girl.
