Betrayal's Shadow (21 page)

“No, you don’t need to worry on that scale. Once the child is born, we’ll have DNA to test against Alex’s. Then we can narrow down options further. Don’t worry.”

“I see.” Yep, definitely wanted to puke. “Then you don’t need anything from me for the time being?”

“Just your consent for us to proceed. I’ll keep you informed, and if anyone tries to contact you directly, send them to us.”

“Thank you, Ed.”

“I’m sorry you have to be dealing with this, Mia. We’ll try to take care of as much as possible.”

She thanked him again, hung up, and made it into the bathroom before she vomited.

“So much for a good start to the morning.” Mia wiped a damp cloth over her face.

“How about we start again?” She took a deep breath and changed into sweats and a T-shirt.

In spite of the revolt of her stomach, she needed to blow off some steam. She picked up the weighted mock sword she’d used for defense class and headed out to the garage.

Slipped between the back and screen door of the house was the courier’s packet. With a snort, she tucked it under her arm. Once she’d pulled back the double doors of the old two-story garage, she flung the packet to the far side. It slid down a pile of old magazines and landed upside down on the floor.

Fresh perspective, that’s what she needed. And a lot of space. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath to compose. Musty air greeted her, free of gasoline and motor oil. There had been no cars in the garage for thirty years, the space having served as her grandfather’s grandiose toolshed. Now it served her.

A few years ago, she’d hung a boxing bag in the corner. Other exercise equipment ringed the edges of the cleared, forty-foot radius of concrete. Light poured in from the large window over the garage doors, casting sun squares across the dark gray surface. For her sword practice, the windows provided plenty of ambient light during the day, and ancient tin lights strung from the rafters handled nighttime needs.

Six full-length mirrors hung from the support pillars that braced the overhead beams for the attic level. The mirrors reflected back her stance and posture to keep her honest, or disgusted, depending on her performance.

Faked calm in place, she moved to the center of her practice area, closed her eyes, and dredged through the lessons Turen had coached. The first one had emphasized stance. Later he’d helped her find the right distance for attacks and pivots: how to evade, how to recover, how to consider beyond each step.

Combining his instructions with those from her daytime instructor, she’d developed a fast-paced workout. The process took all of her concentration and left little energy or brain space for the bile cutting into the fringes of her life.

More importantly, Turen’s presence blanketed her practice. She could almost feel him beside her, adjusting the motion of her swing, giving comment.

Her warm-up steps progressed into a blur of arms and legs. Similar to a gymnast in a floor routine, she maximized her use of the space and transferred her momentum into calculated movements, forward and back. When to speed up or slow down, the pacing of segments and positions, was key to maintaining the process for a good forty-five minute drill.

Sweat coated her skin as she rounded from her last pivot. With a twist of her wrist, she raised her sword for a defensive block. Flames of green and orange ripped from her fingers and along the wood to hit a spot on the garage floor some ten feet before her.

With a yelp, she dropped the practice weapon.

A quick shake of her hands confirmed there was no damage. She’d felt no heat, yet black soot marked the floor and smoke lingered in the air.

Holy shit.

Slowly she walked to the scorch and scraped the soot mark with her sneaker. A narrow smudge streaked the tip of the light gray suede. She picked up the wooden practice weapon. A charred layer covered the outside, yet the structure appeared undamaged.

One more try?

She moved slower this time and painstakingly monitored her maneuvers in the mirrors. Weariness bore down on her, but determined, she shook it off. Almost ready to quit, Mia gasped as flames leapt again. She bit the inside of her cheek and held the weapon, resisting her instinct to freak and run. Objectivity and analysis, the words of her trade, drummed through her mind.

Still she incurred no pain or damage to her skin. In fact, it appeared as if the flames erupted from within her. More confident, she removed one hand from her practice weapon and moved in concert with her routine. The rainbow-colored flame lived along her fingers, and with a spin she inflicted another bolt of fire on a new patch of concrete.

The mirror reflected a narrow ripple of fire dancing from her fingertips. With her execution completed, the fire extinguished.

She dropped the weapon at the edge of the ring. The wood had sustained too much heat damage to be useful for anything but compost.

Freaky. Though no more strange than having ancient text appear in her kitchen.

She glanced at her clenched fists. No evidence remained. Could she leverage the flames without a blade? Could she control the discharge? Were there consequences to her being able to do this?

Mia frowned at the potential unending list of questions. Frankly, she was tired of consequences. If she could harness these flames, then so be it.

Her grandfather had passed away years before she was born, but her grandmother had kept all his tools and gadgets. After Gran’s death, Mia couldn’t bear to part with any of their belongings.

She dug through the stacks of boxes and chests, finally settling on an old fish fillet knife in a leather holster and a metal coffee table leg. Two and a half feet long and narrow, with minimal weight, it was ideal for her purposes. She set the knife aside, not prepared to work with anything sharp, and went back to her stance with the table leg. The slender shape fit easily into her grip. The metal was rough, so the combination of her sweat and the spins wouldn’t allow it to slip.

The routine progressed slower this time with her energy flagging. Her focus intensified on the sequence and the sensations until she gained confidence in her ability to control the sparks.

Thoughts of rage and anger accentuated the flame and made it difficult to control. Calm enabled a consistent delivery. Practice awarded her minimal control of the intensity and brilliance of flame.

Sweat saturated her clothes by the time she sank, drained, to the concrete floor. She reveled in the refreshing cold against her back.

How to bring this up to Turen or should she?

Maybe the better option was to wait until she perfected the skill more. Practice in a calm, safe environment was very different from maintaining precision during panic.

She stood with a grunt as her muscles protested the move, and headed back to the house.

Fortified by a hot shower and a nagging new suspicion, she booted the laptop in the kitchen. She waited for the machine to grunt, beep, and whir to the point where she could bring up her file and started to type in her experiences with the fire.

Nothing rose in the air. No transparent screens. No gilded words.

The Archives were being stubborn. She kept on and entered her latest discussions with Turen and her questions about mates. Nothing.

She stood and circled around the kitchen. “Archives, just show me information about mates already.” The words and lettering shimmered before her. In shock, she backed up. The bump of her hips against the sink stopped her. She had shouted the command in frustration. The last thing she expected was compliance.

With a tap at a shimmering section of the dialogue on mates, the screen morphed and expanded into deeper detail. Mia suppressed an uncomfortable need to giggle at the Guardians’ unearthly version of a search engine and read over the open segment.

No explanations appeared, only an encyclopedic list. The screen displayed a record of personal entries that compared the differences and possibilities for mate markings.

Markings?

The first entry she selected was clinical in nature. It categorized the appearance, locations, and variations of the mate marks. Each mark replicated in identical fashion on their mate, though usually in varied, discreet positions of the body depending upon gender.

She checked several more listings. No pictures presented themselves, merely an ongoing litany of possibilities. One notation went on to review a child’s representation of their parent’s mark until they reached the age of maturity. Their mark then evolved in conjunction with their own skills. The entire list of entries delivered the information with the objectivity and distance of a doctor or scientist, unlike the earlier emotional segments by Rheanna.

Mia frowned.

If each Guardian carried a mark, what determined which mark transferred to a mate, male, or female, or both—perhaps similar to swapping rings?

She hadn’t seen marks on Turen, aside from his wounds. She’d really only seen his chest, shoulders and head and even then wounds or blood often marred his skin. Would she even recognize the mark if she saw one?

With a sigh, she crossed her arms over her chest. The only thing she knew for certain was that she bore no new marks.

***

The loud pitch of sirens split the murky darkness. Turen launched to his feet and pressed against the door as the two lights in the ceiling blacked out. Boots pounded along the hallway outside. The whining signal rolled high and then low.

A brief click and the door swung open with his push. Secondary lights embedded in the walls of the hallway flashed on, illuminating every twenty feet.

He glanced around. The immediate response to the siren seemed to have emptied his section. Several other doors were ajar, though a brief check confirmed no other residents in the cells.

With manacles still secured to his ankles, he didn’t have a chance of
folding
even if he could get free of the compound. Not that it would stop him from trying. Yet while he possessed some advantage over humans given his prolonged years of training, they carried guns, which stacked the odds in their favor.

However, even with the restriction of chains he could get through the mountain’s tunnels to Xavier’s lab.

A hard run brought him to the first stairwell. He tracked the circuitous path back to the compound’s top level. Unconscious during his delivery to his current cell after the drugging, he’d been unable to confirm the route. For once luck was on his side.

It took longer than he hoped. Not all the hallways were vacant. Avoiding capture required him to duck into nooks, crannies, and empty cells where necessary.

He reached the thick metal door that separated Xavier’s quarters from public access and prayed the power break associated with the sirens had affected this section as well. The door swung open under his touch. He hugged the inside of the rock wall and felt his way along to the lab door. An emergency light through a doorway confirmed the large table and the chair from his previous visit.

A fire flickered in the hearth in the corner, but the room appeared empty. He passed into a second room. Rows of cupboards, countertops and a refrigerator covered the walls. The fridge door snicked open with enough room for him to grapple through the contents.

The low visibility proved frustrating, but his tactile senses were primed from months in the darkness. He grabbed four filled vials and pulled them out to scrutinize in the low light. Three slashes marked each vial’s label, the same vials he’d witnessed Xavier prep after his self-dosing routine—finally, confirmation of Xavier’s blood. His instincts had better not be driving him down the wrong path.

From the bottom shelf of the fridge, he retrieved a silver pouch. It wouldn’t keep the vials chilled indefinitely, but his people at the Sanctum used the same composite material. An inner flexible lining maintained a constant temperature for several days.

The pouch would buy him enough time to get the vials to Mia. Shit. With a blink, he leaned against the fridge, suddenly off-kilter.

Dependence on Mia wasn’t the way to go. Just because she had aided him this far didn’t mean he should jeopardize her further. He would have to find another way to get the samples out of the compound.

The silver pouch safely in his pocket, he slipped back out of Xavier’s quarters the way he arrived. The modern section of the compound and his current cell lay to the right. The left housed the roughly hewn caves of his first cell.

He couldn’t risk discovery, yet those older walls held small recesses, perfect to hide the pouch. Crouching, he slid his hands along the wall. Around a corner, ten yards from Xavier’s door, he found a crevice below eye-level well suited to his purpose. He forced the pouch deep enough to avoid detection and counted the paces back the way he’d come.

The lights resumed their partial hazy luminance as he stepped through his cell door. Not registering the familiar click of the lock, he turned. A huge fist clocked him across the jaw and sent him to the floor. A steel-toed boot rammed into his rib cage, the first attack followed by a second and third kick. The blows came so fast he barely had time to roll, much less deflect the attack.

It did no good.

A rough grip on his hair yanked up his head. Shank’s face blurred before him. “Now you’ll tell me where you have been.”