Hell or High Water (Gemini Book 3) (11 page)

* * *

E
liminating
the stores in town took us about three hours. We spent longer finding a decent hotel than we did crossing off each shop. There were no more visits from Charybdis, but he had done what he intended and shaken me.

My phone chimed an email indication, and I fumbled the device out of my pocket. I had hoped for a response from Thierry. What I got was a one-line note from Comeaux.

Your mother got a speeding ticket nine months ago in Hampton, Tennessee.

A quick Googling told me that was the town next door. Curiouser and curiouser.

Finished with the businesses on the left side of the road, I stood on the sidewalk to wait until Theo emerged. He did, at last, with a huge plastic bag of food dangling from his fingertips. He jogged across the street and lifted his arm. “Dinner,” he explained. “Our hotel doesn’t do room service.”

Warmed that he had thought of me, I paid him a smile for his kindness. “Did you have any luck?”

“No.” He tied the bag’s handles in a knot, an old habit of his. “From what I can tell, the only places that are still held by the original owners from our childhood are the general store and the gas station.”

Disappointing, but I had figured as much. “That’s what the clerks told me too.”

“It’s going to start getting dark soon. I’d rather we had a locked door between us and Charybdis by then.” He tilted his head back, searching the sky. “I vote we go back to the hotel, eat and pull out those archaic maps of yours.”

“We can start clearing the campgrounds tomorrow,” I agreed. “I’m familiar with his scent. I think I can track him.”

Unless he used an erasure spell, but I didn’t mention that. I got the feeling despite his protests to the contrary, Charybdis wanted to be found. Whatever trap he’d readied, he was prepared when he left me the trinkets. His actions seemed desperate as he burned the candle at both ends to spur me into action.

On the way back to the hotel, I filled Theo in about the text from Comeaux. “Charybdis threatened my parents the first time we spoke. After today, I can’t deny there’s a reason he chose this place.” My feet ached with every step thanks to a blister I had earned today. “I think they’re here. It makes sense, right? This whole area is full of memories for me. My parents loved it up in the mountains. What better place to fall off the grid than this?”

“Marshal Ayer came here before you got involved in the case,” he pointed out. “How could he have known about you then? About what you would cost him? It seems to me if he had, he would have come for you first so you couldn’t ruin his circle before he finished setting it.”

“Good point.” We reached the hotel, stepped into the elevator, and I leaned against the railing. “We’re missing something.”

“If you ask me, we’re missing a lot of somethings.” He snorted. “Still, it’s a possibility your folks could be nearby. You’re right that they had strong ties to the state, and they knew you guys were living in Three Way. Maybe they wanted to be off the grid but still have a safety net?” He tapped his phone’s screen in quick succession. “That would put you on opposite ends of the state, about seven hours apart. You could make that trip in a day if worse came to worst.”

“All these years,” I murmured. “They could have been so close, and yet never reached out to us.”

Theo clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Losing a family member is hard.”

“Losing your sister and your parents in the span of six months is harder.”

He didn’t have a response to that. We didn’t talk much at all as we set up to work in my room. We ate, studied the maps and planned out our routes for the next two days. More than that and I would have to reevaluate. Leaving Graeson behind while he was vulnerable made the pack’s anti-phone stance all the more frustrating. His absence was a constant ache throbbing on the edges of my mind. Separation from the others made me antsy. No pack bond meant I was locked in my own head, and the lack of ambient feedback starved me for a level of connectivity impossible to replicate on my own.

Sleep, when it came, tugged me under like a riptide. For once I was glad to be carried away.

* * *

A
metallic taste
in my mouth roused me out of a familiar nightmare where I bobbed in an endless ocean while silvery fish with blunt teeth chomped on my toes. Curling my legs under me, I massaged my feet to reassure myself I hadn’t lost any little piggies. Halfway back to sleep, the bitter taste intensified, and its meaning lifted the hairs on my nape.

Glamour.

I was tasting fae glamour so viscous air felt like pudding in my lungs, and any slim hope it might have been Theo making a late-night visit evaporated.

I eased upright and slid off the mattress. No sooner had I tiptoed across the room and pressed my back to the paneling beside the door did the knob twist. I held my breath as a slice of light from the hallway cut across the room and bisected the pillow where I had been sleeping.

All I could see from this vantage was a black leather glove, fingers splayed against the veneer as it nudged the crack wider. The ornate tattoo binding his wrists would have given him away as fae even if his scent hadn’t. I summoned my wolf without thought, the two of us fitting seamlessly together as we stalked our prey.

Silent as a whisper, he eased inside, his pale eyes dialing wide when he spotted me leaning there, watching him. Before he snapped out of his surprise, I slammed my elbow into his gut. He bent forward on a grunt of pain, and I fisted his hair, using my grip to fling him over my shoulder. He hit the floor on his back and coughed in shock while I shut the door quietly and locked it. The iron tang of blood from a scratch on his temple, courtesy of the sharp edge of the heavy wooden bedframe, whet my appetite.

Down, girl.

“Magistrate Vause sent me to fetch you,” he grunted.

“Is that right?” My jaw had gone tender as the wolf fought to surface, and my words slurred. “Prove it.”

“I’m going to get my phone out of my back pocket.” He rolled his hips and pulled out a slim, black cell then punched in a speed-dial combination. “Magistrate, yes, I am with Agent Ellis now.” He extended his arm toward me. “Talk to her. Get your proof.”

Warily I accepted the call. “Magistrate Vause?”

“You attempted to contact me.” Her clipped tone and cool delivery were as familiar as Aunt Dot’s hugs. “Consider this your callback.”

“I tried your private number. Magistrate Martindale answered. He seems to believe you vanished and that foul play was involved.” I slid my attention back to the deadly fae lying on the floor. “He mentioned one of your guards was killed.”

“Yes.” An uncharacteristic low note imbued the word. On another woman, I would have named it remorse, but Vause regretted nothing in my experience. “He attempted to kill me, and we couldn’t allow that to stand.”

“Why would he do a thing like that?” I drawled, making it clear I could imagine several reasons.

“He was taken as a host.” Deftly, she deflected my sarcasm. “Oisin had been with me since he was forty. He died at eighty-nine. A mere babe.”

Familiar with her habit of slipping away without notifying her Unseelie counterpart of her itinerary, I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Is it safe for you to be on your own?”

“I was attacked in my office, by one of my own people.” Her haughty scoff further reassured me she was, in fact, Vause. “Is it safe for me anywhere? Now, what was the reason you called? Understand I won’t be reconsidering your leave, so I’ll save you the breath for asking.”

I was so far past worrying over my job and performance record I couldn’t spot them in my rearview mirror if I squinted.

“Charybdis has taken my aunt and cousin.” I ground my teeth to keep from snapping at her. “He’s threatened my parents and attacked members of my pack. I called to ask for your help.”

“Can you stop making that noise?” She managed to sound offended by my growl. “It’s quite distracting and sure to draw unwanted attention.”

I throttled back the rumble in my chest. “Better now?”

“Marginally,” she allowed. “I am sympathetic to your plight, but I’m not certain how much I can help you. I have my own oaths to uphold and my own safety to consider.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

Silent moments ticked past, and I imagined Vause deciding which version of the truth to share.

“For the good of the organization, the conclave keeps meticulous records on our employees and their families.”

I bit my lip and managed an “Mmm-hmm” that sounded a few degrees less murderous than the roiling in my gut.

“I expected you to reach out to your parents,” she said at last. “Their last-known whereabouts were in the Butler area.”

“I see.” There. That sounded civil. “Are you saying the conclave lost track of them? My own resources have confirmed they’re keeping a low profile.”

More silence lapsed. This time it was deafening.

“Your parents were kept under surveillance from the time you entered marshal academy until a few short months ago.”

“Why?”

“You’re an anomaly. A mature Gemini without a twin. We were curious how your skills would manifest over time, and I must admit, I was wrong about Cord Graeson’s influence on you. Thanks to your connection to him and his wargs, we’ve gained valuable insight into the workings of Gemini physiology.”

My back hit the wall. It was all that propped me upright. “You’re saying I’m a science experiment. That you’ve been tracking my family, Graeson, the wargs, all of them. Do you honestly not get what a huge invasion of privacy that is?”

Not to mention how pointless it was to surveil my parents when we had no relationship. Unless she thought their particular combination of DNA was the cause for my survival.

“You signed the paperwork,” she reminded me. “You gave us freedom to complete a thorough background search, among other things.”

“A background search is not the same as ongoing surveillance,” I gritted out. “Why waste the resources? I’m not that interesting. Gemini avoid the conclave. It’s not like cataloguing me will help your recruiting efforts.”

Employment with the conclave had been the first stepping stone on my path to atonement. I joined because I was broken and lost, and they promised me meaningful work and a place to belong.

“I made an oath, Camille.”

The simple, unadorned statement gave me chills. “What can you tell me?”

“A rotating detail was assigned to monitor your parents.” The
click-click-click
of a retractable pen button being pressed filled the line. “When the last marshal scheduled to report for his six-week shift failed to arrive, I sent agents to their last-known address.”
Click-click-click.
“The marshal was found dead, and your mother and father were gone. No evidence could be obtained from the scene due to a series of cascading erasure spells set off at the time of his death.”

“Erasure spells?” I thumped my head against the wall, sifting through everything I knew about Charybdis, about my parents, but it did nothing to jog my brain. Piecing the timeline together, I finally hit on a connection. “Wait.” I pushed off the wall. “Marshal Ayer had receipts in her pockets from a trip to Butler.”

“I won’t ask how you came by that information since it would require me to dismiss you from the Earthen Conclave.”

That was not a no. It bolstered me to make an investigative leap. “Ayer killed the other agent.”

“Yes.”

“Is she aware of what she did?” Our time with Harlow had been too brief to determine how much she retained of what she’d done. “Is that why she turned herself over to the mental hospital?”

“Marshal Ayer was catatonic when she was discovered at your parents’ home. The marshal responding thought she was a victim too, a survivor, at first, until she attacked him. She had been there for so many days prior to discovery, she was half-starved, and the temptation of a fresh blood supply proved too much for her. She had to be restrained and sedated at the scene.”

“I want that address,” I found myself saying, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted it at all.

“I expected as much. I gave Fionn permission to share it with you.” Her chair groaned as she readjusted. “Regardless of how cognizant Ayer was of her actions, I made the decision to admit her to Edelweiss so that she couldn’t be used against us again.”

A sense of foreboding slithered through me that perhaps what Mai and I had done was far riskier than we had imagined at the time.

“What she knows or does not know is uncertain at this point. She’s being kept sedated to prevent Charybdis from revisiting that host.”

I drew myself upright. “Sedation prevents Charybdis from reentering a host?”

“We believe so, yes. Even after contamination, he seems to require consciousness to seize control of his victims.”

Meaning this might be the solution for taking down Harlow the next time we met. Or, gods forbid, any family and pack mates he might have infected.

The guard who had kept his composure all this time raised his head off the floor. In one lithe movement, he sprang to his feet and prowled closer. “The time for questions has come to an end.”