Karma Patrol (32 page)

Jade stumbled across the street without regard for traffic, her legs numb and her mind whirling. Aaron knelt over Shannon, his hands covering the gaping hole in her chest as her blood ran in rivulets across the pavement. She was only a few feet from her fallen friend when a pair of arms closed around her waist like an iron vise, jerking her toward the building.

“No!” she screamed, struggling uselessly against the tight grip. “
No
! Shannon!”

“She’s gone!” Luke’s voice was harsh in her ear as he dragged her bodily toward the police station. “Damn it, Jade, move!”

She fought him, but it made no difference. Even injured, Luke was stronger than she was, and as they reached the door, two other officers grabbed both of them and pulled them inside.

Luke kept them moving even after they were inside the protection offered by the precinct’s brick walls, hustling Jade through the main lobby and past two startled uniformed officers into the break room, which was the closest room with no windows for a sniper to shoot through.

He guided her into a chair, his hands still on her waist. She sat without resistance, the fight drained out of her now.

“Jade. Jade, look at me.”

Luke moved his hands to her face, tilting her head up to meet his gaze. She looked at him, glassy-eyed.

“Jade, I need to go get Aaron, okay? I need to make sure he’s all right, and I need you to stay here while I do it.”

She stared blankly at him and he swore under his breath, going to the door and glancing down the hall until his eyes lit on someone likely to be helpful.

“Sykes!”

Sykes and another rookie stood at the edge of the lobby, both apparently clueless as the room filled with cops and panicked civilians fleeing the shooter outside. At his shout, they both came at a run.

“Detective Jackson—” Sykes began, but Luke cut him off.

“I need to find Sanford. My girlfriend is in the break room and she’s in shock. I think she may be a target, so I need you two to protect her. If she tries to go anywhere, you cuff her to the chair, and if anyone tries to hurt her, you shoot them until they are dead. Do you read me?”

“Yes, Detective,” Sykes replied hurriedly.

Luke gave him a nod and headed back outside, intent on finding his partner.

Jade felt hazy and disconnected, like everything was happening underwater. Her phone had chirped happily just after Luke left the room, signifying the end of the threat, but she didn’t feel anything at the revelation. She did recognize one of the cops who entered the room as the officer Luke had spoken to at her building, and she managed to give his female companion a weak smile when she put a cup of coffee on the table in front of Jade, but she couldn’t seem to summon the strength to reach out and pick it up.

Shannon couldn’t be dead. That wasn’t how things worked. Employees of the Fate Divisions had extra protection against accidents and violence provided as part of their benefit package. That was why they had the imminent danger alarm in the first place, and why their respective divisions tracked their locations. Fate and Destiny and Karma worked together to make sure the people enforcing their will would survive the experience. The protection extended to their soulmates, too; Luke had been shot last night, but although all of the other shooting victims had been killed, he’d escaped with a minor graze. Shannon had the same protection. She couldn’t be dead.

As hard as she tried, though, she couldn’t get the image of Shannon bleeding on the pavement out of her mind, and the three-tone chime of the Fate Divisions’ death notification echoed in her ears.

The door to the break room opened. Sykes and the other rookie both grabbed for their weapons, but relaxed when they recognized the two detectives. Jade looked from Luke, whose mouth was set in a grim line, to Aaron, whose shirt and slacks were liberally stained with blood, and her stomach twisted.

“She’s dead?”

The words sounded hollow to her ears. Luke gestured for the two uniformed officers to leave the room, but Jade only had eyes for Aaron. The sorrow and apology in his expression managed to penetrate the fog around her where nothing else had, and suddenly it was all real.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, tears slipping down her cheeks as her hands started to shake. “She’s dead.”

“I’m so sorry.” Aaron knelt in front of her chair and she shifted instinctively back, away from the bright red blood splattered on his clothes and his hands. “Jade, Shannon said something before she died. I need to know if you know what she was talking about.”

“Wh…” Her voice broke. She cleared her throat and tried again, not bothering to try and stem the flow of her tears. “What did she say?”

“She said, ‘She waited so long. I couldn’t let them take him away.’” He paused, then added, “My guess is that she was talking about you and Luke, but who is ‘them’? Is it Cowden? Did she know him? Was he working for someone who might want you or Luke dead?”

“Them,” she repeated blankly. “I don’t—I don’t know.” She looked down at her hands, which were still trembling, and then forced herself to look at Aaron’s hands, which were stained red with Shannon’s blood. “She stepped in front of Luke on purpose. She knew he was the target. She—”

Jade choked on the words. Shannon had known that Luke was the shooter’s target, that he’d been about to die, and she’d stepped in front of him to shield him with her own body. She’d died to keep Jade from losing the soulmate she’d waited her whole life to find.

“It’s my fault,” she whispered, her hands falling into her lap. “It’s all my fault.”

“Give us a minute, Aaron,” Luke requested quietly. His partner nodded, getting to his feet.

“I’m gonna go clean up.”

Luke knelt in the space Aaron had vacated, reaching out to trap her hands between his as the door shut again, leaving them alone.

“This isn’t your fault, Jade.”

“Yes, it is,” she replied, her voice strained. “She died to save you because you’re mine.”

“She died to save me because it was her job,” he said, sharply enough that it startled her out of her bleak self-recrimination.

“Her job?” she echoed dumbly, and he exhaled.

“Think about it. You told me she’s in charge of all of the soulmates in Midtown West, right?” At Jade’s nod, he continued. “That makes us her responsibility. I’m betting she got one of those danger alerts on her phone when the sniper showed up outside the precinct, and she came down here with the intention of doing whatever it took to keep me alive because protecting the soulmates of Midtown West was her job.”

“But if I hadn’t—”

“Jade. The only person to blame for Shannon’s death is the bastard who pulled the trigger. Judging by what she said to Aaron, she might have known why he did it. Do you have any idea what she was thinking?”

She shook her head, frustrated. “She didn’t say ‘him,’ she said ‘they.’ I can’t think of any ‘they’ that would have targeted me.”

“Maybe not, but it wasn’t you being targeted this time. It was me.”

“So they were targeting both of us…” She blinked in surprise, but shook her head after a moment’s consideration.

“What?”

“No, it’s nothing.”

“Tell me, Jade.”

“It’s just—we weren’t supposed to meet when we did.”

“What?”

“That day at the first crime scene? I wasn’t supposed to be there. I didn’t know it until afterward, but Destiny Division had already told Karma Division to keep our noses out of the investigation.” She frowned, remembering. “Celia—that’s my boss—she gave me an earful about staying out of Destiny Division’s business. And Shannon said it was weird that she wasn’t there when you and I met at the crime scene, since facilitating the first meeting of soulmates is part of her job, and that maybe whatever Destiny Division was doing in Midtown West had screwed up the pattern you and I were supposed to follow. I—oh, God.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“She said there might be consequences.” She tightened her grip on his hands, in serious danger of crushing his fingers. “She said she wasn’t worried about it, that she wouldn’t let Destiny Division mess with any of her soulmate pairs. God, Luke, what if this is one of our own people? What if Destiny Division is trying to kill us because we screwed things up somehow by meeting too early?”

“Is there anyone who can help? Anyone you trust?”

“Celia,” she replied, already reaching for her phone. “I trust Celia. She’s been working to smooth things over with Destiny Division.”

“Call her,” he directed, grabbing an empty chair and pulling it over next to her as she dialed Celia’s number.

Celia answered on the second ring, and her tone fell somewhere between concerned and royally pissed off. “Jade? Where the hell have you been?”

“Shannon Carter is dead,” she replied, proud of herself for keeping her voice from wavering. Luke’s hand on her arm was a welcome source of support. “She sacrificed herself to keep my soulmate alive. Someone is trying to kill him
and
me, and I think it’s someone from Destiny Division.”

“Christ, Jade.”

“Tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re half wrong.”

“
What?”

Luke gave her a questioning glance and she pulled the phone away from her ear, putting it on speakerphone so he could listen in.

“Destiny Division is all over your territory because they’re hunting down a deranged prophet.”

There was a pregnant pause while Jade digested that information, and then she let out a string of expletives so descriptive that Luke was actually impressed. In several years of military service and a handful more in the police department, he’d rarely heard cursing that masterful.

“Yeah, you and me both,” Celia replied. “It took me a day and a half to get that much out of them, and they won’t tell me anything more than that. If he’s targeting you or your soulmate, your best bet is to shut yourselves in a bulletproof bomb shelter until Destiny Division catches him and locks him back up in the nuthouse where he belongs.”

“If he’s a prophet, we could be in that bomb shelter for
years
,” Jade snapped, furious. “We could both die of old age before they catch him. He’s a prophet; he knows all of their tricks already.”

“There is one other option, but you aren’t going to like it.”

“Find him and kill him myself,” Jade replied grimly.

“
Hell,
no. Under no circumstances are you to go full-on gun-toting demented Dixie chick. I swear to God, Bailey, I will strangle you with my bare hands if you so much as glance in this prophet’s direction.”

Luke choked on a laugh at Celia’s words, managing to smother the noise with his free hand to keep from giving his presence away. Jade glared daggers at him before she returned her attention to the phone.

“Then what’s the other option?”

“I don’t have enough power to override Destiny Division, but the Bookkeeper does.”

Jade winced.

“I know you’re making that ‘
who, me
?’ face right now, Jade, but the truth is that you’re one of the best enforcers in New York. The state, not just the city. If the Bookkeeper is at all inclined to intervene in this, he’s most likely to intervene on your behalf. And even if he doesn’t, you’ll be safe as long as you’re in his office.”

“All right,” Jade said finally, after far longer than Luke had thought it would take for her to agree. “I’ll go.”

“Good. Call me if anything happens.
Anything
, you understand?”

“Yes. Thanks, Celia.”

“You want to thank me? Stay alive.”

Luke gave her an expectant look as she hung up the phone.

“Who’s the Bookkeeper?”

“He’s the head of Karma Division for the state of New York. The Bookkeepers are the ultimate authority of the Karma Division, the next step down from the Powers That Be.”

He considered that information, comparing it to the structure of the police department the same way she had when she’d first explained the setup of her division.

“So he’s kind of like the police commissioner, only for the whole state.”

Jade gave him a curt nod. “Bookkeepers intimidate the hell out of me,” she admitted. “You only get called to go see them if you’ve screwed up so seriously that they’re revoking your karmic abilities.”

“I thought you were born with those abilities. Didn’t you say they’re genetic?”

“Just because you start out with them doesn’t mean they can’t be taken away,” she pointed out, squaring her shoulders as she wiped at the tear tracks that streaked her makeup. “But Celia’s right. The only person in our division with enough clout to protect us from a prophet on a killing spree is the Bookkeeper.”

“Okay, so how do we get to him?”

“We?” she repeated, startled. “You can’t go.”

“Why not? They’re trying to kill me too, right? Can’t I claim sanctuary or something?”

“It’s a brownstone, not a church,” she retorted, but gears were turning in her mind as she thought about what he’d said. “You know what? It actually might not be a bad idea.”

“So I can come?”

“Yeah, you can come,” she decided, shaking her head at her own audacity as she got to her feet and he followed suit. “We’ll go present our case to the Bookkeeper, and he’ll either help us or have us both killed for our impudence.”