“You think she’s hurt?” he asked.
Cat pushed away her exasperation and fingered the watch she’d slid into the pocket of her slacks. Rugged in condition and techie in design, the slim and feminine timepiece she’d found near the stairs matched Mariah’s psychic signature. But that’s all she could sense. If Mariah wanted to be found, Cat’s special gift with objects might have allowed her to key into her location. But as it was, the last thing the woman wanted was for anyone to know her whereabouts.
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to at least get a bead on the state of her health. Enough people had gotten hurt in this quest to reunite the Forsyth brothers and stop the K’vr from possessing the magic of the formidable Lord Rogan. Mariah didn’t deserve to die just because she’d been greedy in stealing the stone when Ben had warned her to leave it alone.
Truth was, if Ben had been Cat’s ex-lover rather than her current one, she might have ignored his advice, too.
“She’s fine,” Cat replied.
Ben glanced at her with wary eyes. “You’re certain?”
She gave a noncommittal shrug. “Well, you know her better than I do, but she’s proved resourceful so far. I don’t think you need to worry about her too much.”
Ben blinked, as if shocked by her suggestion. “I’m not worried about her.”
Cat turned and headed into the bathroom. She and Ben didn’t need to have this conversation now, especially when she knew that confronting Ben’s residual feelings for Mariah meant she’d have to confess her own growing sense of insecurity. Best just to focus on the task at hand.
After paying a hefty bribe to the night clerk, they’d learned that the police had found one man unconscious after the people in nearby rooms had called the front desk to report a loud disturbance. Another witness reported seeing a woman matching Mariah’s description tearing out of the parking garage, alone but in a damned big hurry. Though the cops had taped the room off, Cat’s donation to the bored employee manning the front desk gained them ten minutes to look around. And they were running out of time.
Cat couldn’t help but wonder if following Mariah was worth the trouble. She’d beaten them to an artifact in that dank and dense forest of Valoren, but neither Cat nor Ben knew exactly what she had. For the past six months, they’d been trying to find artifacts associated with Valoren, Lord Rogan or the Forsyth family. Ben had checked with some of his old contacts and, to his surprise, learned that his former partner in crime had flown to the exact part of Germany where the little-known Gypsy enclave had once been. Convinced this was no coincidence, they’d followed. They still didn’t know how or why Mariah had come to learn about Valoren, unless, as Cat suspected, she’d been tracing Ben’s reemergence in archeological circles and had simply tried to beat him to an important find.
Which she had.
Unfortunately, the item she’d nabbed for profit meant much more to Ben than financial gain. It could contain a connection to his family—a family he didn’t even know he had until a year and a half ago.
Suddenly, Ben’s hands slid over Cat’s shoulders, his fingers kneading into the knotted muscles at the base of her neck. “What’s wrong?”
“Men shouldn’t ask that question unless they really want to know the answer,” she replied. “Don’t expect a coy ‘nothing’ from me.”
Despite her mild annoyance, his chuckle did more to alleviate the stress in her body than his increasingly delicious massage.
“Only an idiot would associate the word ‘coy’ with you, sweetheart.”
“True,” she conceded. “Maybe it bothers me a bit that we’re spending all our time tracking down your ex.”
“She has something we need,” he replied simply.
“And she’s your ex.”
“With very good reason,” Ben said, with more laughter in his voice than she appreciated at the moment. “You met her, Cat. She’s not exactly pining after me. She nearly shot my foot off.”
Mariah’s pining for Ben wasn’t her worry. Ben’s unresolved feelings for his ex were. The thought of losing him, either emotionally or physically, was quickly becoming a major concern. And Cat didn’t like it one bit.
She pulled away from Ben’s amazing hands and the solace they imparted, and went back into the bedroom. She’d come to depend on him too much. Her life and his had been inexorably intertwined by both their professional interests and their personal attraction for too long. But now, over a year since they’d first met, they were still in the same place—hunting down artifacts, making love when it suited them and never planning for any future that focused on only the two of them.
“So,” she said, needing to change the subject, “what do we do next?”
Ben shoved his hands into his pockets, and Cat watched a disappointed look skitter across his face, then disappear. “We keep looking for Mariah.”
“What about your father?”
“What about, him?” he asked sharply. “Does he still not want to be found?”
Cat slipped her hand into Ben’s back pocket, taking a split second to revel in the fine muscles of his glutes, and retrieved the photograph of Ben’s mother that he’d been carrying around for months.
“Hey,” he protested, his expression somewhat abashed.
“I knew you had it with you,” she replied.
“That’s the danger of living with a psychic.”
“That’s the danger of living with someone who pays attention,” she countered.
After Paschal had disappeared, purportedly on some sort of mission with outcast K’vr princess Gemma Von Roan, she and Ben had searched his Texas home for clues to his whereabouts. Of all the items in his house, she’d gotten the strongest psychic vibrations from this tiny picture. He’d kept the locket-size photo with him ever since.
“I didn’t want you to think I was a mama’s boy,” he said.
She laughed. “Your mother’s been dead a long time. I don’t have to compete with her, too, do I?”
“You don’t have to compete with anyone,” he assured her, but Cat ignored his obvious attempt to alleviate her insecurity and focused on the photograph. Unlike Paschal, who used psychometric power to connect items to specific events in the past, Cat’s ability allowed her to zero in on the owner’s emotions and, with extreme effort, their current location.
If
they wished to be found. From touching the picture, she knew that Paschal had loved his wife deeply and had been committed to her happiness until the day she died. But that was all she got.
“Still nothing.”
Ben pressed his lips together. “But he’s alive, right?”
Cat blew out an anxious breath. Paschal wasn’t a young man, a fact both Ben and she accepted but rarely discussed. That he went willingly with Gemma—a known enemy—was disturbing enough. Factoring in his advanced age made it hard to remain optimistic.
“I’m not sure,” Cat admitted, “but I think if something happened to him, we would know. Besides, Gemma needs him, for whatever reason. She won’t let anything happen to him until she has what she wants.”
He snorted, but without humor. “That’s the problem. We don’t know what she wants. She might already have it. My father could already be—”
“He’s not. You know he’s not.”
Ben didn’t reply, and his eyes, gray like his father’s, were stormy with his unspoken fear. She couldn’t blame him for worrying. The danger to Paschal was very real, just as was the danger to Mariah. Anyone connected with the Valoren curse put their lives on the line, which made Cat feel all the more like a stupid girl for concerning herself with the state of her relationship with Ben when his elderly father had run off with a woman of dubious alliances, and Mariah had disappeared from a trashed hotel room with blood on the floor.
“Where do we go next?” Cat asked.
Ben ran his hands roughly through his thick, dark hair, breaking Cat’s heart with the sense of loss that surrounded him.
“We go back to the beginning,” he answered.
“Back to Valoren?”
He grabbed her hand, reeled her in and kissed her with such passion, Cat decided to let her doubts about their future melt away with the heat. “No, back to my office at the university, where we first met.”
The light in his eyes was one she knew well. He wanted to make love, and far be it from her to deny such a request. “The university still considers you an employee?”
He shrugged. “Last I heard, they haven’t moved our stuff out yet. Officially, Dad and I have applied for a sabbatical to do research on the Romani culture that will be the stuff of legend, or so I told the department chair. And I think it’s time to put some truth behind that statement. Until Mariah tips her hand. She’s smart, but she can be sloppy when she’s under a lot of pressure.”
“You mean that business with Hector Velez? You still don’t want to contact him, maybe find out what he knows?”
By his immediate frown, she knew he wasn’t yet willing to poke that sleeping dog. “Men like Velez don’t give up information on the cheap. I’d rather not tangle with him if we can avoid it.”
“And if we can’t avoid it?”
“Then once again, we’re in big trouble.”
***
Morning did not bring the answers Gemma had sought. She and Paschal had spent most of the night on the floor of the repository, sleeping off a fatigue Gemma hadn’t experienced since she’d battled the flu. By four o’clock a.m., she’d regained enough energy to drag herself and a barely conscious Paschal up to the first-floor bedroom. She dropped him on the bed, covered him with a blanket, then grabbed a quilt and cuddled into a ball on a chair at his bedside. When the sun defied the drawn wooden blinds at sunrise and flooded the room with light, she awoke with a start.
Paschal was watching her, a hint of a smile on his still-pale lips.
“What are you looking at?” she asked, instantly defensive.
“You snore,” he replied, implying that he’d been awake and watching her sleep for quite some time. His skin still looked as thin as paper, and the circles under his eyes made him resemble a raccoon.
She sat up, yanking at the blanket that had tightened around her. “Yeah, well, so do you.”
“I’m sure I don’t sound quite so cute when I’m doing it, though.”
“Cute is for puppies.”
“Yes, and so are food and water, if you get my meaning.”
She did. She struggled to her feet, and though she still felt as if she had not slept in a few days, she pushed herself out of the room and raided the kitchen. She found a wheel of cheese still encased in wax, some whole-grain crackers and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Wasn’t exactly the food of champions, but it would have to do.
Paschal didn’t complain. Several bites into their repast, his color seemed to return.
“I suppose you have a lot of questions,” he ventured.
“You have a talent for understatement,” she replied, sipping gingerly from her wine and then taking a hearty bite of the cheese. The shakes were still threading through her system. So much had changed since yesterday, but she couldn’t even begin to process it all until Paschal told her what he knew.
Everything
he knew.
“Why could I see what you saw?” she asked.
Paschal grinned. “Why am I not surprised that the first question you ask is about yourself?”
Gemma grabbed the blanket again and pulled it around her. The house wasn’t particularly chilly, having been closed up for days, but she didn’t like Paschal’s implication, even if it was true. “What else do you want to tell me about?”
“Aren’t you still curious about Rafe Forsyth?”
“Not particularly,” she replied. “You already told me he was an enemy of Lord Rogan. Something horrible happened to him. Serves him right.”
A flash of something close to anger played across Paschal’s eyes, but he covered by sipping his wine. “You do realize, then, that your ancestor was not a well-loved man.”
“He was feared,” she shot back. “To me, that means he was formidable.”
“He was that,” Paschal replied. “He was also ruthless and charming and determined to act on his own private agenda, no matter whom he hurt in the process.”
A chill shot up Gemma’s spine. “That’s the second time you’ve sounded like you knew him.”
“I’ve been studying him for years,” Paschal replied, a little too quickly. “I know him as well as any man can.”
She eyed him curiously, aware that Paschal’s attempt to meet her eyes boldly belied the truth. He knew more about Rogan than would just some researcher. She’d been through all the documentation on her infamous ancestor, and even she didn’t have much of an idea of what kind of man he was.
“To the K’vr, he’s always been something of an enigma.”
“Curious,” Paschal replied.
Gemma finished off the last of her wine, then draped the blanket over her shoulders and walked to the window. The light that had woken her less than an hour ago was already starting to fade from clouds rolling into the area. With so many shade trees huddled around the house, the atmosphere outside took on a quality of night even at the break of day.
Unbidden memories of her childhood suddenly struck her hard. She’d spent so much time here in this gloominess, surrounded by things that looked and smelled of age and decay. She rubbed her cheeks unconsciously, wondering for the first time how this place had infected her young psyche. She’d been the daughter of a man who ran what amounted to a cult, the eldest child denied her right to ascend to the leadership simply because she was a girl.
“Rogan’s life was never the concern of the K’vr,” she said finally. It was easier to talk about the group than to sort out her conflicted feelings about her family. “All we ever wanted was his magic, the power promised to his followers by his brother.”
Paschal slid the plate of cheese onto the bedside table. “And did anyone ever consider the fact that Lukyan Roganov might have been full of shit? That he lorded this reputed magic over uneducated farmers in order to control every aspect of their lives and incomes?”
“Of course,” she answered. “At least, I did. But the magic is real. Why didn’t Rafe Forsyth die when he tried to strike down Rogan’s mark? He was hit by powerful magic.”
“Magic you want for yourself,” he concluded.
She lifted her chin higher. “Of course I do. It’s my birthright.”