Following Fabian (13 page)

He hung up.

The only noise in the room was the sound of Mr. Tolvaj drumming his fingertips atop the tabletop.

“Fourteen,” Dana said.

Mr. Tolvaj worked his jaw left to right, and nodded. “If they are all Visas, that means two more have defected since my and I brother left, but fourteen is still a substantial amount. You may not be able to tell who is who if they shift.”

“But some are better at shifting than others, right?” Sarah asked. “I mean, you’re good. Your brother is good. But some of those guys can only shift partially. They don’t have your discipline or talent.”

Mr. Tolvaj held up his thumb and index finger and held them a centimeter apart. “All they need to do is cause a
little
confusion. Long enough to make you doubt your gun’s aim. Long enough to make you unsure.”

“Good point.” Dana paced some more.

Astrid squeezed Fabian’s wrist.
“She’s not a pacer. She must be freaked
.
”

She should have been.
“Mr. Tolvaj is right. I’ve seen the way the Visas can disrupt arrest attempts. The police will come in and they could never tell who was captive who was captor. They’d confuse law enforcement long enough that Jacques and his right-hand men could get most of the troupe away. Then he’d pay off the cops from wherever he landed to free his henchmen. Without fail, every time.”

“Good thing we’re not cops
.
”

“You definitely don’t play by the same rules,
dragón
.”

“Did he call back?” Sarah asked. “And why did he mention me by name?”

“No, not yet, to answer your first question,” Dana said, “and I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know how people find out about us. I guess our reputation precedes us in certain pockets of society. Anyway, we need to pack up and be ready to move out in the next two hours, and when he calls back, we need to give our FBI friends on the ground in the Midwest the heads-up so they can call their buddies and get their paddy wagons ready to fill.”

Astrid’s fingers tensed briefly.

“What’s wrong?”
Fabian asked.

She didn’t respond.

He could guess. She was probably thinking of one FBI
friend
in particular.

“We need to keep this operation clean,” Dana said. “Be doubly careful that who you’re hitting or shooting is dirty. If you can’t tell, go with the less aggressive form of force. We’re going to break up into small teams and flank the troupe from as many sides as we can. We’ll figure out who’s with whom while we’re in the air. Tolvaj, can you call your brother, please? See if he’ll join us?”

Tolvaj bowed his head. “Of course.”

“Tam?”

The blonde already had her phone out. “I’ll call Bryan and see if he can get a flight out of Asheville.”

Dana paced some more. “I feel like that’s not enough bodies. We need more weight on our side.”

Drea cleared her throat.

“Speak up, honey,” Dana said. “If you’re going to work with us, you’re going to have to learn how to get a word in edgewise.”

“Uh. Right. Um.” The timid Were-bear shifted in her seat and just barely met her boss’s gaze. “Well, the Ursu brothers are around somewhere doing business for their father. Also, Bryan keeps saying he wishes he could find stuff for Dustin to do because he’s been stir-crazy ever since he had to leave his job at the strip club. I don’t know how trainable he is, but he follows instructions pretty well under Bryan’s supervision.”

“Can Dustin shift on will like Bryan and the Ursus?”

“He can, but…” Tamara groaned and put her thumb over her phone’s speaker. “He’s a made-Bear. If he forces a shift, he’ll be a sitting duck the moment he shifts back to his human form. We’d have to drag his ass out of the line of fire if something happened to him. Still, he’s strong in his human form. He could be good muscle.”

“All right. While you’re on the phone with Bryan, see if he can help you track down Dustin and your brothers.” Dana gave Drea a little thump on the back. “Any more ideas?”

“Fresh out.”

“Got anyone for me, dirty cat?” Dana asked her husband.

Patrick shook his head. “My strongest Cats are female and they can’t fight worth a shit, so they wouldn’t do you any good. Sorry, love.”

“We’ll have to make due and try to get in touch with the local weirdoes. Maybe they’ll be willing to send us some muscle. All right everyone. Go home and pack up. Keep your phones on.”

As the staff filed out of the room, Astrid loosened her grip on Fabian’s arm and poised herself to stand.

Doc got behind her, barring her exit, but she was looking at Fabian.

Astrid craned her head around and stared at her. “Oh, God. Here we go.”

He rested his hand on the back of Astrid’s naked neck and massaged. “What?”

“Oh, nothing. She’s giving you the lab-rat look. I guess Felipe got tired of all the analysis and cut her off.”

“What does she want to know?”

“This is really odd,” Doc interjected. “You’re speaking English, he’s speaking Spanish—I’m guessing that’s what that is, anyway, my ear for Romance languages is rusty—and yet you understand each other.”

“What is she saying?” Fabian asked.

“Doc is commenting on the nature of our communication. She’s a scientist and the psychic stuff flummoxes her,” Astrid said.

“Yes, it does,” Doc said. She looked at Fabian. “He and Felipe are absolutely identical, not fraternal?”

Fabian nudged Astrid.

Astrid said, “You and Felipe are identical, not fraternal, right?”

“Shared a placenta, supposedly. At least, that’s what the old ladies in the troupe told us.”

Astrid nodded to Doc. “Identical.”

Doc made a
hmph
sound and walked away casually, her hands stuffed in her blazer’s pockets.

“What’s up with her?” Fabian asked.

Astrid finally stood, removed his hand from her neck, and grasped it in her own. “That’s just Doc being Doc. She’s extremely curious about what makes the Shrews tick. I don’t think she ever thought she’d encounter natural mutants—and I apologize if you don’t like being called that—like you and Felipe.”

“I’ve been called worse things,
dragón
.”

Hand-in-hand, they exited the conference room and headed toward the suite exit where the Castillos waited.

Astrid dropped his hand as Felipe said in Spanish, “You can ride with Sarah and me to the house. Dana managed to swing a charter flight, so we can take more weapons than we would have otherwise. We need some help packing up.”

Fabian scrunched his forehead. “You know how to use all those things? Guns?”

Felipe shrugged. “I’m licensed to carry and am prepared to use one if I have to, but I generally get my job done without having to draw.”

So many surprises from this twin of his. Here Felipe was putting down roots, speaking English, and playing secret agent, and Fabian was sofa-hopping and most of the clothes he had to wear had come from his brother’s closet.

In the past, he hadn’t minded sharing. That was their life, and having nothing of their own was par for the course. But now, Felipe had moved on without him. He had everything, and all Fabian had was a tiny bit of righteous indignation directed at Jacques and a bit of money on the way from his late mother’s estate.

That was it.

He’d get a little cash, and then what? Where would he go?

And more importantly, who’d go with him?

Astrid prodded him from his mental meanderings by slipping her hand up the back of his shirt and pressing her palm against his spine. She rubbed, and he fairly melted into her touch. “See you in a couple of hours? Might have time to grab an early dinner before we get the call.”

“Yes. Sure.”

He would have loved to have dinner with her, but hadn’t he preyed on her enough already? Used up far too much of her energy and pity? Perhaps it’d be best for both of them in the long run if he gave her some space. Felipe could do his translation from now on, until Fabian mastered fluency for himself.

Astrid brushed her long bangs aside and widened her hazel eyes at him. “I promise it won’t be torture.”

It was so unfair that she was so pretty and so smart. Worse, that the Fates thought it’d be so goddamned funny putting him into the path of such an extraordinary woman and to have him be so utterly inferior to her.

That was cruel.

Hell, that was his life.

“Of course it won’t be torture.” He worked her hand out of his shirt and held it at his waist as they followed Sarah and Felipe down the office stairs. He added in whispered Spanish, “Not in the way you’re thinking, anyway.”

Astrid expected a bit of ribbing or teasing on the plane, but the Shrews were blessedly aloof as to her proximity to Fabian. Maybe they’d already gotten it out of their systems, but whatever it was, she was thankful for it. Maybe that would make things easier. It was Fabian who seemed to be giving her the hard time now. The moment the plane had leveled out at cruising altitude, he’d abandoned his seat next to her and moved to the rear of the plane where Felipe and the other men were conferring.

She sat there for a moment, twiddling her thumbs and staring out the window before Maria popped her head over the back of the seat in front of Astrid. Maria cleared her throat.

“What?” Astrid asked.

“You want to talk about David? You said you didn’t before, but I feel like you need to get the feelings out.
Literally
feel.”

Astrid rolled her eyes and slouched farther in her seat. “Come on, don’t do that. I really don’t want to talk about him.”

“Why? You afraid that if you let the anger go you might accidentally be cordial around him?”

“You say some crazy things, but that one may top the list, honey.”

Maria pursed her lips and shrugged. “Anger is a weapon for us. A tool we can use to make people behave how we’d like. Sometimes, it doesn’t work as well as we intend. We hone it too sharp. The damage is too severe.”

Astrid sighed. Once the hippie started talking, it was easiest to let her finish her spiel. “What are you suggesting?”

“Only that it’s possible to talk about what happened without immediately forgiving him. No one’s asking you to do that. Even I’m not in a place where I can completely forgive my ex, but he knows that. I told him how angry I was at what he did to me. How much it hurt that he wanted to change me.”

“Did you feel better for it?”

“No, because he wasn’t contrite in the slightest bit. And knowing him as I do, I shouldn’t have expected him to be. But, over time, I started to compartmentalize my feelings about it. The SHREW study was something that happened in the past. We can’t go back and undo it or change anything. We’re here. We’re survivors. We can only go forward as the women we are now and leave the bullshit behind. You owe it to yourself, though, to let that monster out of the box. You can’t squash it if you keep it hidden away. It’ll keep beating at the box it’s in, demanding your attention. Bugging you. Why not go ahead and deal with it?”

“How did I end up being best friends with a hippie?”

Maria tossed a swath of her thick, curly hair over her shoulder and shrugged again. “For that matter, how did I end up being best friends with the unapologetic owner of a collectible Hello Kitty shotgun? I think the universe works in mysterious ways.”

Astrid chuckled drily. “That it does.”

“So, will you talk to him?”

“Maybe.” David was the man Astrid was less concerned with at the moment.

She unfastened her seatbelt and stood slightly to sight Fabian in the back next to his brother. All the men leaned toward the aisle where the Were-bear Bryan crouched with his laptop computer. They were probably relaying strategy in the same way the girls did.

Dana made her way up the aisle and sat next to Astrid.

“Can’t stop thinking about it,” Dana said. “We need more bodies.”

Maria harrumphed in acknowledgement.

“Since the meeting, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Five Shrews has always been enough until now.”

Astrid settled down into her seat again and draped her arms over the rests. She couldn’t let that perplexing acrobat distract her. “I don’t know. Five Shrews seems like a lot to me. Maybe what we actually need is auxiliary staff, and not more Shrews,” she said. “The five of us have some skill sets that can’t be duplicated, and so we’ll always do jobs that normal people can’t. But, if we hired on some regular investigators, they could take over the more mundane cases and free us up for the specialized stuff.”

“I agree. You know, Patrick and I have discussed expanding the business. Doing it now would slow down our plans to build a house and…” Her hand went to the end of her neat ponytail, and she twirled it, staring absently at the seat in front of her. “And starting a family. We were going to really try in earnest after the situation with the Bears settled down.”

“That’s good news!” Maria said. “More babies in our circle would be a blessing for all of us.”

Dana’s eyebrows bobbed. “Doc has been studying all of our latest genome data and trying to isolate the mutations that would make conception improbable. She has Sarah’s to look at, but data from one Shrew isn’t enough. It may not make a difference if I get pregnant on my own, but if I can’t, it’d be great to have a second reference from another Shrew who’s managed it.”

They sat quietly for a moment, letting the unsaid wish hang in the air. It was almost a plea for someone else to try and succeed.

“I think you should trust your body,” Maria said solemnly. “Look what you’ve survived. What we’ve
all
survived.”

“It’s hard to trust when you want something so much,” Dana said. “You’ll understand when you find someone who really does it for you. You’ll want to give him everything and create something together.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Maria said, and sank into her seat. She was quiet for a moment, then turned back to say, “Uh…you probably don’t want to hear this, but I think I left my gun back in Durham.”

“Damn it.” Dana stood. “I’m going to go check the log and see what we packed that has the same caliber. I don’t know why I bother. You probably won’t even use it.”

“The people I point it at will probably think the same thing. I’m just not a gun girl.”

Dana groaned and eased back down the aisle. “You’re not going to be able to get close enough to everyone to strangle them, though.”

“Fun trying sometimes.”

Astrid grimaced at her friend’s morbid predilection, and followed Dana down the aisle. They came to a stop at the manly bottleneck near the rear. The Bears parted and let them through.

Astrid slipped into the row in front of the Castillo brothers, studied both, and determined that
her
Castillo was the one at the window.

Right. Mine. Not sure he agrees.

She cleared her throat.

He raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest. “
¿Sí?
”

She looked at the watching men, who quickly averted their gazes and made themselves look busy.

“Can I talk to you?”

One dark blond brow crept up.

“You understood me.”

He nodded. “
Sí.
”

Their gazes clashed for a long moment, and he just sat there staring as if he were waiting for her to talk. But, how could she?

She held out a hand.

He stared at it and looked at his brother, who elbowed him.

Sighing, Fabian wrapped his fingers around hers.

“Well, don’t do anything that repulses you.”
It wasn’t like they’d shared a religious experience on the sofa that morning or anything.

“I’m not repulsed.”
He tightened his grip, and his forehead furrowed.
“I just figured you’d want some space.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Just…intuition.”

“You need to check your gut.”

He made a non-committal noise.
“Did you need something, or did you just want to chat? We were discussing strategy.”

“Which is something I would have absolutely no experience with, right?”

“I don’t mean it like that, only that Jacques is my problem.”

She watched a lump travel down his throat and his nostrils flared.

“Mine and Felipe’s,”
he said.

She wasn’t convinced.

“So, we Shrews are just extra, huh? A means of transportation.”

“You’re jumping to conclusions.”

“That you’re building direct pathways to. All I’m doing is poking holes in your story like any good lawyer.”

“What’s gotten into you?”

She dropped his hand. “I could ask you the same thing.”

His eyes narrowed as he made sense of her words, and she eased herself past Bryan and out into the aisle.

Maybe that was all Fabian had wanted in the first place. A means to an end. Assistance reaping his revenge, and everything else was just noise.

Well, fuck that. She wasn’t going to be
just
noise
for a man ever again.

* * *

The Montana backcountry might as well have been Siberia as far as Fabian was concerned. At the moment, though, the icy temperatures on the private ranch they’d gotten permission to track Jacques across were far less bothersome than having to witness the congregation in front of him. For Astrid to supposedly have such pronounced disgust of Agent Marsh, she was certainly standing intimately close to him.

Maybe she doesn’t even notice
.

She did seem a bit distracted. She gnawed on her cuticles and fondled the butt of her firearm as she watched Agent Rodriguez talk.

It was evident Astrid wasn’t really listening as much as watching the other woman’s lips move. She’d been like that since they’d landed. He didn’t understand this emotion—this
jealousy
. He’d never had space for it in his life before. It made him irrational, and he didn’t know how to digest it.

He scraped his hair back from his face.
Fuck.

Marsh rested a hand on her shoulder, and when she didn’t immediately pull away, he found his feet moving toward her and his hand at her waist.

His
. How dare Marsh touch her?

No. Not his. She couldn’t be his. Still…

“
¿Estás bien, dragón?
”

She looked up. “Huh?”

Marsh’s hand remained on her shoulder, and the agent raised a daring eyebrow at him.

“Dragon.” Rodriguez laughed. “Do I even want to know?”

“Dragon sounds about right,” Marsh said.

Fabian pulled Astrid closer, and Marsh had no choice but to drop his hand. “
No puedes llamarla así
.
Ese nombre is mío.
”

Marsh turned to Rodriguez. “What’d he say?”

“He said that’s his nickname for her and we can’t use it.”

His
Shrew.
His
dragon.

His friend.

Not that guy’s.

Maybe there was a bit of
if I can’t have her, no one can
mixed up in that, but Fabian couldn’t help feeling petty.

“Huh.” Marsh tipped his chin up at Fabian.

Try me, asshole.

Astrid let out a breath. She nudged Fabian’s hand away from her waist, but when he pressed his palm to her back, she allowed it to remain there.

“Let’s get back to the discussion at hand, shall we? Here comes Dana now. We’ve always worked under the scope of the law when it comes to human targets, but the ones in our world—”

“
Your
world?” Marsh interjected.

Astrid’s body tensed, and she drew in a long inhale that seemed to relax her. She settled back against Fabian’s hand, increasing their contact. “Yes.
Our
world. The world that mutants and freaks live in. Don’t be dense, David. You know exactly what I’m talking about or else you and Rodriguez wouldn’t be in contact with Dana.”

Dana joined the huddle at exactly that moment. “I heard my name. What about me?”

Astrid canted her head toward Marsh. “I was just explaining to Marsh that sometimes the rules don’t apply when we’re dealing with beings who aren’t quite human.”

“Meaning what?” Rodriguez asked. “I know what you ladies do
in theory
because my agency contacts let me into the loop, but they didn’t explain that the rules of engagement would be different.”

Astrid scoffed. “Let’s put it this way. The Joker wouldn’t stop raising hell just because Commissioner Gordon or some other cop asked him nicely. Someone outside of the system always had to bring him down.”

“You Batgirl now?” Marsh grinned.

Fabian wanted to knock that smile right off his face. How dare he tease her?

“Something like that,” Astrid muttered. She pulled away from Fabian and shoved her hands into her coat pockets. “You talk to them, Dana,” she called back, and headed toward Maria at one of the rented SUVs.

Fabian had taken one step in her direction to follow when Rodriguez drew him back. “Mr. Castillo, should I assume you’re a little spooky, too? Just how many of you people aren’t quite human?”

He groaned.

Mierda.