I See You (Oracle 2) (20 page)

Blackwell eyed the marshal’s outstretched hand. Then with a shallow nod, he shook it.

“Oh, I like you so much better now,” Kandy said.

“We’ll talk,” Henry replied with a wink.

Kandy barked out a laugh, then gave Beau a shove so he’d follow Blackwell out the back of the building.

“Wait,” Beau yelled after Henry. “At least tell me you got your hands on that Byron bastard.”

“Byron who?” the marshal called back without pausing or turning around.

“Redmond. He runs this crew.”

“I’ll let you know who I’ve got when I’ve booked them.” The marshal gave us a wave but continued on toward the entrance.

“Rochelle?” Beau asked me as we found the back door and tumbled out into the parking lot hand in hand.

“I don’t know, Beau. But I didn’t see him.”

CHAPTER NINE

“Taking us back to some sleazy motel and shoving us behind wards accomplishes nothing, asshat,” Kandy snarled at Blackwell. We were back at the sedan, and the two of them were currently wrestling each other for the right to open the driver’s door.

I glanced at Beau. He shrugged his shoulders. As we’d walked back from the bank, Blackwell and Kandy had argued the entire time.

“It’s your blood, werewolf,” Blackwell snarled back. “You want to be an idiot about it, it’s your funeral. But I won’t have the pack place the responsibility for your death on my marker.”

“Speaking of the pack,” I said, not even remotely loud enough for Kandy to hear me through her ranting, “Desmond texted —”

“I should rip your head off,” Kandy growled at Blackwell. “Call in that ‘marker,’ you evil son of a bitch.”

“You currently appear practically too weak to move, wolf,” Blackwell spat back. Then he grimaced regretfully.

Kandy let go of the car door. Blackwell stumbled back a step, caught himself, then closed his eyes for a moment as if reining in his emotions.

Sirens sounded, not that far away.

Blackwell opened his mouth.

“Shut it!” Kandy snarled. Then she stalked around the car to the front passenger side.

I grimaced at Beau. He nodded, silently agreeing with me. Calling a werewolf weak was a really, really bad idea.

We climbed into the back seat together. I scooted across until I was sitting behind Kandy, tucking my satchel between my feet.

Blackwell folded his long frame into the driver’s seat.

“I blame you.” Kandy didn’t glance over her shoulder, but it was obvious her vitriol was now directed at me. “I owe you nothing, sorcerer.”

“Apparently, that is the way of the pack.” Blackwell’s tone was once again smooth and cultured.

“I have no idea what you’re referring to. This is about you and me. There is no debt to be wiped between us. There’s only blood on your hands.”

Speaking of having no idea what anyone was talking about, I still didn’t have a firm grasp of what the pack — or Jade Godfrey — held against Blackwell. I glanced at Beau. He shook his head, just as ignorant as I was.

In the early visions I’d had of the dowser, I’d often seen her in conflict with Blackwell. But I was fairly certain their ‘bad blood’ had something to do with her sister, Sienna, who’d gone dark. Actually, ‘blood frenzied’ was the term Audrey had used when I asked her. The beta had been more open to answering questions than anyone else in the last year and a half. Apparently, Adepts didn’t talk about magic. How that was supposed to be healthy, I had no idea.

“Getting you behind wards would be the best next step.” Blackwell started the car, continuing the conversation from outside as if it hadn’t been interrupted.

“You don’t give a shit about us,” Kandy spat.

“But I do give a shit about Rochelle. And I’m more than a little intrigued by this.” The sorcerer set the diffuser into the dashboard shelf in front of Kandy. The werewolf leaned away from him as he did so.

He ignored her to pull away from the curb as the approaching sirens got louder. Flashing lights were accumulating around the bank two blocks away.

Blackwell awkwardly turned the car around in the narrow street, driving away as Kandy fumed.

Beau reached over and folded my hand in his. I shuffled as close to him as I could with my seat belt on, laying my other hand on his forearm.

“So much to talk about,” he murmured to me.

“And no time to talk about it,” I whispered back. Then I smiled at him.

Looking relieved, he pressed a kiss to the back of my hand.

“It doesn’t smell like magic.” Kandy spoke up again from the front seat, begrudgingly opening up a discussion about the diffuser.

“No?” Blackwell responded. “How did it make you feel?”

“Like nothing at first.”

Obviously, the two of them had mutually and silently decided they were going to act professional now.

“But we were knocked out, like Beau said.”

“Then super groggy,” Beau added.

“Yeah, and it never really wore off.”

“It’s easing now,” Beau said.

Kandy touched her neck. The welts from the stun gun were looking less red and puffy. “Yeah, a bit.”

“And those cuffs of yours?” Blackwell asked, not quite managing to keep his greed from seeping into the question. “They made no difference?”

Kandy twisted the cuff on her left wrist as she eyed Blackwell’s profile. The sorcerer didn’t take his eyes from the road. He’d negotiated us back to the main street.

Beau and I cranked around to watch the scene at the bank through the sedan’s back window. Police cars, ambulances, and a fire truck had blocked both lanes of traffic, but I couldn’t see any movement from the bank itself, or the marshal.

Kandy not answering the sorcerer’s question seemed to confirm my suspicion that Adepts didn’t like talking about their magic. What the werewolf probably didn’t know was that Blackwell had seen all my sketches. In fact, the sorcerer owned the bulk of them. Well, any that he decided were relevant to him. So he’d seen the cuffs in action. I was fairly certain werewolves didn’t lift thousand-pound boulders off their friends, namely Jade Godfrey, without some extra magical help.

We were now a few blocks down from the bank, the view growing smaller behind us.

“Fucking Byron,” Beau muttered, turning away from the back window.

“Does he know you’re a shifter, Beau?” I asked.

Beau shook his head.

“Then why place the diffuser in the room?” Blackwell asked. “It would have been smarter to simply lock you in the vault.” He glanced at us through the rearview mirror. “Why take your blood if he doesn’t know what you are? If he isn’t a practitioner himself?”

No one answered him.

Blackwell negotiated the sedan around a corner just past the Chinese restaurant where he’d picked up Henry. The diffuser slid to the other side of the shelf as he did.

“We’ve seen a diffuser like that,” I said.

“Yeah. That essential oils store on West Fourth in Vancouver sells them,” Kandy said.

I looked at Beau. “No. Today.”

He frowned, uncertain. So he hadn’t noticed the diffuser in his mother’s living room. I wasn’t surprised. He’d been livid.

“Where?” he asked.

“Ada’s,” I whispered.

“Ada’s,” he repeated hollowly. Then he slumped back in his seat. “Cy.”

“Cy what?” Kandy prompted, turning around in her seat to look at Beau.

“Cy’s new gig,” Beau said, his mouth twisted with scorn. “The one he was pitching me this afternoon. The shit he’s selling behind Byron’s back. I shouldn’t have assumed it was nothing.”

“Selling diffusers?”

Beau looked at me. His expression was so pained that my stomach twisted just looking at him, even though I wasn’t the one who’d hurt him.

“Maybe selling something that can be used to suppress a shapeshifter’s magic,” I whispered, putting the pieces together.

“If they’re willing to sit around on the fucking couch with it running all day, smoking and drinking … and watching fucking soaps,” Beau snarled.

“Your mother tries to suppress her changes?” Blackwell sounded shocked by this idea.

“Yeah.”

“And this Cy is an Adept?” the sorcerer asked.

“Barely,” Beau growled.

“Sorry, Beau,” Kandy said, then she turned back to face out the front window again. “Forget the motel. Take us back to the highway. I’ll tell you where to turn.”

“It’s your choice,” Blackwell said with a shrug. “Your blood.”

“Yeah. And I want it back.”

Beau leaned over and pressed his lips to my temple. “This is crazy,” he whispered. “We warned Ettie. I don’t want you around this shit anymore. We should just get to the Brave and go.”

Regardless of the prone-to-judgement adults in the front seats, I reached up and ran my hand down the side of Beau’s face and neck. “Yeah, I know you’re right,” I whispered. “But I need to see this through. I need to understand why I was shown what I saw. Plus we kind of got Kandy into this. And … well, Blackwell is … intrigued. Which can’t possibly be good left unchecked.”

Beau half-growled and half-sighed. Then he turned away to look out the side window at the houses and buildings blurring by. He wasn’t mad at me, but he was viciously mad with himself.

Again, I couldn’t fix anything. I could only be with him.

Or that was what I kept telling myself … over and over again. Because I was trying to ignore another reedy voice attempting to creep into my thoughts. It was bringing my well-cemented fears of being delusional, of being crazy, into the forefront of my consciousness. Once, I’d thought this voice sounded like my shrink, but it was just my id in disguise.

And right now, my id was whispering to me about how I made everything worse just by being there. Just by existing.

I tightened my grip on Beau’s hand and shoved the thought away … but once it had been articulated by my mind, I couldn’t unhear it.

∞

“Listen, it’s getting super late,” I said from the back seat. The moon was high in the sky as northern Mississippi blurred past outside along the edges of the interstate. We either weren’t far enough away yet from the light pollution of the city to see many stars, or they weren’t out. I was becoming increasingly and uncomfortably aware of how far away we were from the Brave. “You guys should eat something. And sleep. We should head back —”

“No,” Kandy said from the front passenger seat. She’d been texting furiously — from my phone — for the last thirty minutes. She didn’t even raise her head as she shut me down. “Next exit,” she said to Blackwell. “The house is a couple of blocks off the highway.”

The sorcerer obligingly changed lanes.

“You’ll heal faster.”

“Lean and mean is a thing, oracle,” Kandy growled. “Kitten knows what I’m talking about.”

I looked at Beau. He shrugged. “The sooner we lay hands on Cy, the sooner it’s done.”

“Left up ahead,” Kandy said.

Blackwell lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror, but I caught only a glimpse of the dark shine of his eyes.

I shuddered. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” I whispered to Beau. “This is supposed to be about saving Ettie … not everything else.”

“I know,” he whispered back.

Then the vision crashed down over my head and shoulders with no warning.

I convulsed with it, drawing my knees up, then slamming my feet into the back of Kandy’s seat.
 

“What the fuck?” the werewolf snarled, but I was beyond caring.

I clawed at my neck, attempting to pull my necklace free of my tank top, but was thwarted by the continued convulsions. The vision didn’t appear in a hazy mist. It was a blizzard, an avalanche.

Beau reached across me to undo my seat belt. “Pull over, pull over!” he was shouting.

I tried to breathe through it, but all I could see and feel was white, white, terrifying white. I was fighting the magic, though I knew I shouldn’t be. I had to calm down.

Beau pulled me into his lap, gently easing my sunglasses off.

“Is she having a seizure?” Kandy asked.

“No,” he said.

Kandy let out a string of curses. “There, there. That’s the house.”

Blackwell was muttering something in another language. The car abruptly swayed to the side, then stopped.

“I can’t see!” I cried. In the comfort of Beau’s arms, I had tried to calm down and let the magic have its way, but all I was getting was endless, driving white. “Why can’t I see?”

My door clicked open. The evening heat instantly blanketed me. The relentless white storm in my mind eased, though not enough for me to see. I seriously loathed air conditioning.
 

Beau tightened his arms around me. A low, rolling growl rumbled through his chest.

“Easy, shifter,” Blackwell said. “Getting her out of the car might help.”

“Are you crazy?” Kandy snarled from the front seat. “The neighbors will take one look at her, then at us mauling her, and call the cops.”

“We’re shielded, werewolf,” Blackwell said. “Try using all your senses.”

“You’re such a dick.”

Blackwell didn’t answer. I felt his cool hands on my upper arms, coaxing me forward. “Being on the grass might help. Even just your feet.”

“I’ve seen her have a vision in a freaking house, sorcerer,” Kandy said.

“Sealed into a metal box? Completely surrounded by man-made materials and recycled air?” The sorcerer was tugging at my shoelaces, pulling off my sneakers and socks.

Kandy didn’t answer, but Beau spoke up. “In the Brave …”

“Do the visions come easily in the RV? Or just better than now?” Blackwell’s tone was gentler as he addressed Beau than when he’d spoken to Kandy.

Beau didn’t answer.
 

I lowered my feet onto the grass, feeling Blackwell step away. I was already sweating in the residual heat of the day, but I felt instantly more settled with the dry grass underneath my feet.

“It’s okay,” I whispered. White mist flooded my mind for a brief moment, then parted, leaving me looking at a large room. Sunlight flooded in from the bank of windows to my right.

Not the alley? Was this a different vision?

Ettie was standing before a steel counter situated underneath the middle window. The counter was strewn with broken glass, twisted metal, and crushed plastic. Boxes, all featuring pictures of either diffusers or electronic cigarettes, were knocked asunder, half of them on the counter and half on the floor around Ettie’s feet. Beau’s sister was picking through the broken glass on the counter as if looking for something.