Karma Patrol (34 page)

“Why, then?” she demanded, the force of the question like a physical blow. “Why would you do this? Why kill a dozen people who weren’t slated to die? Why kill
Shannon
?”

“Because of you, Jade.”

“Me?” Jade was baffled. “What did I ever do to you? I don’t even know you.”

“It isn’t anything you did. It’s what you would have done.” At her look of incomprehension, he smiled. “You don’t understand. That’s all right; I didn’t expect you to. You’ve spent your whole life being indoctrinated by Karma Division.”

“What does Karma Division have to do with anything?”

“They never told you who you really are, did they? They never told you about their plans for you, about your Destiny.”

He said ‘destiny’ with an audible capital
D
, which Jade knew was wrong. Employees of the Fate Divisions didn’t have Destinies. Those were reserved for Normals, for people who were destined to have a huge impact on the world at large. People like Jade worked in the shadows, and their impact was only measured on small scales.

“I don’t have a Destiny. I’m an enforcer.”

“That’s what they taught you,” he agreed calmly, unwavering in the face of Jade’s anger and disbelief. “They told you that people like us have an effect that only people like us can see. What they didn’t tell you is where our effect comes from.”

Jade’s finger twitched on the trigger of her gun. He was crazy; there was no question about that. The longer she stood here listening to his delusional ranting, the more likely it was that someone from Destiny Division would figure out what was going on and show up to spirit their crazy prophet away. If she wanted to take her revenge, to kill him in exchange for what he’d done to Shannon and to Luke, then she needed to do it now. There was some part of her, though, that wanted to hear what he had to say. It was possible that he’d discovered some dark secret about the way the Fate Divisions worked, and the only way someone like Jade would learn something like that was from a prophet.

“What do you mean?” she asked finally, keeping the gun trained on his head and shifting a little so she could see the door out of the corner of her eye. If someone came in, she would see the movement in plenty of time to shoot the prophet before they could stop her.

“I mean that your abilities come from somewhere. The policies about karmic enforcement come from somewhere. The very threads of fate, the destinies that people are given from birth…all of it comes from somewhere. Haven’t you ever wondered where?”

“That’s above my pay grade,” she informed him, the same answer she’d given Luke the day she’d explained the Fate Divisions to him, and the prophet laughed.

“For now, Jade. But not forever, if they have their way.” The gun he was pointing at her bobbled a little, and she wondered if his arms were getting tired or if he wasn’t quite as committed to the idea of killing her as she was to killing him. “Everyone thinks the Powers That Be are mystical beings, the gods of the universe who deigned to establish law and order on our puny world. If you believe the legends, they created us as their special little helpers. I’m sure you were raised on that fairy tale, weren’t you? ‘Once upon a time, the Powers chose the best and the brightest of all the humans on the planet, and they gave them and all of their descendants the ability to see the Powers’ plans so they could help to maintain the proper order of things.’ We have to keep the rest of the witless human sheep in line, right?”

“You think the legends aren’t true? The Powers aren’t real?”

Whether or not the origin stories they were all told as children were true was a matter of debate, but Jade couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous than someone with the ability to
see
the Powers’ plans deciding that the Powers didn’t actually exist. If he wanted proof that the Powers existed, all he had to do was look around.

“Maybe they were, once. But even if they did exist, the omnipotent Powers That Be are long gone, and in their place are the current Powers. They choose their candidates from the ranks of the Fate Divisions, and if those candidates happen to be the lucky few who make it all the way through the process, they eventually become Powers themselves.”

Jade’s mind whirled. “Are you saying the Powers are
human
?”

“They are,” he confirmed. “Or they start out that way, but having access to that kind of power changes you. It turns you into something different, something not quite…human.”

“And they’re choosing people from the Fate Divisions to take their places?”

“There are nine Powers. Those spots are supposed to be evenly divided, three for each division, but my division managed to steal one spot away from Interpersonal Relations. If they can get one more spot, they’ll have a majority. I don’t know what they’ll do with it once they have it, but I can promise that you won’t enjoy being a karmic account enforcer under the iron fist of Destiny Division. They’re far less scrupulous than your people when it comes to making the punishment fit the crime.”

It was a nice way of saying some very nasty things, and she flinched away from the idea. The punishments Destiny Division handed down for people who interfered in the Grand Plan were far worse than a stolen purse or a ruined suit.

“I still don’t understand why you’re telling me this. I’m just a street-level enforcer. You should be talking to the Bookkeeper.”

“The Powers don’t want the Bookkeeper. They want you. You’re on their short list, Jade.”

That idea was laughable. “You’re saying the Powers That Be want to turn me into one of them? You can’t be serious.”

“It’s why I targeted you. Not to kill you, but to change you. To open your eyes to the Destiny they’ve plotted out in front of you. To give you the opportunity to choose another path.”

“So you killed all of those people—you killed
Shannon
—”

“I killed them to make you see the truth,” he agreed calmly. “Didn’t you wonder why almost all of the murders were in your catchment area? Didn’t you wonder why your soulmate was a target? I wanted to get your attention. Oh, sure, most of the people I killed had capital-D Destinies of their own, and I’ll admit I gave in to the urge to kill off a few of my least favorite destiny enforcers as well, but the crux of the matter was always you.”

Luke came awake all at once, with a pounding headache and the unpleasant sensation of being watched.

“He’s awake! Dude, stay down. We called 911.”

He almost recognized the pair of teenagers who were leaning over him, but he had no idea what was going on.

“What happened?” he demanded, or tried to. His tongue was clumsy and couldn’t quite manage to form the words.

“Some guy grabbed your girlfriend and took her into that building,” the blond kid said, pointing off across the street.

Luke tried to follow the gesture with his eyes, but the pain in his head spiked and his ears started ringing. He squeezed his eyes shut to avoid making it worse.

“We would’ve gone after her, but he had a gun. When we called 911, they said—”

“Holy crap,” the second kid said, his tone impressed enough that Luke took the chance of opening his eyes again in order to see what was happening. “The SWAT team is here. Man, this is like an action movie.”

It wasn’t his ears ringing, he realized belatedly as a dozen guys from the Emergency Service Unit hit the street, armed to the teeth and headed for the building where Jade had been taken. The noise he was hearing was the cacophony of multiple police sirens, and while the sound would usually have filled him with relief as backup arrived, right now all he wanted was to turn them off and stop the splitting headache—

“Jade,” he whispered, his brain finally catching up to what the kids had said, to the reason ESU was here. Whoever had knocked him out had taken Jade.

He tried to push himself to his feet, but his body refused to cooperate, and then the teenagers were replaced by his partner.

“Stay down,” Aaron told him, repeating the blond teen’s words as he put a hand on Luke’s shoulder. “Damn, that’s a lot of blood. I know head wounds bleed, but Jesus.”

“…’m okay,” Luke slurred, trying and failing again to get to his feet as his heart pounded with fear. “Gotta get to Jade.”

“The ESU team is already moving in,” Aaron promised him. “You know they’ll do everything they can to save her. You aren’t going to be any help like this, so just stay down and wait for the paramedics.”

The ESU team wasn’t him. Jade needed
him
. His chest throbbed with the knowledge that she needed him, that she was scared and hurt and alone, that his soulmate—

His soulmate. He had a soulmate. More importantly, he had a soulmate
bond
, a—what had Shannon called it? A ‘little piece of destiny?’ He’d seen Jade at work, so he’d seen what karma could do, the power it could wield. What would their little piece of destiny be willing to do in order to keep them together?

“I can’t help her like this.”

“You’re damned right about that,” Aaron replied, getting to his feet. His expression said he was grateful his partner had given in to common sense. “I’m gonna go find a medic. I’ll be right back.”

Luke hadn’t been talking to him. Maybe it was just the concussion, but he thought he could feel the soulmate bond turn its attention to him as he spoke to it, the pain in his chest becoming a question.

What?

“I’m hurt,” he told it, ignoring the overwhelming likelihood that this wasn’t actually happening, that he was hallucinating from head trauma and blood loss. If there was any chance this might work, he had to try, regardless of how crazy it seemed. “I can’t help her like this. I have to save her.”

Save her
, it agreed, that now-familiar part of his chest thrumming with need.
Save her
.

“But I can’t save her if I can’t even stand up. I need you to help me. Fix my head so I can go get her.”

It was mulling over what he’d said. He let it think, trying again to push himself up on his elbows and failing miserably as a wave of pain threatened to drown him in unconsciousness.

Fine
.

The word was uttered with so much disdain that he could actually picture the bond rolling its eyes at his uselessness, but a moment later, his headache was gone.

He sat up gingerly, expecting the pain to return, but he felt nothing except the overpowering urge to save Jade. As he got to his feet, the sticky feeling of half-congealed blood on the back of his neck barely registering, a familiar weight at his hip made him realize his good fortune.

The killer hadn’t taken his gun.

He made it across the street and to the front steps of the building without anyone questioning him. Aaron caught up to him as he started to climb the stairs, grabbing his arm to stop him, but he shook his partner off.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” Aaron hissed, and Luke gave him a level glare.

“If you want to stop me, you’re going to have to shoot me.”

Aaron sighed, tacitly acknowledging defeat, and gestured for his partner to precede him up the stairs.

“If you wanted to talk to me, you could have just told me,” Jade told the prophet, her voice flat. He’d murdered a handful of people in cold blood, including her best friend, in order to get her attention, when she would have been glad to hear him out if he’d just come to her and introduced himself. “Didn’t that ever occur to you? You’re from Destiny Division. If you’d come to me and said you had something important you needed to tell me, I would have listened.”

“When you heard what I had to say, you would have shrugged it all off as the mad raving of a crazy prophet,” he said with a wry smile. “Make no mistake, Jade. I am every bit as crazy as you think I am. Prophecy drives us all mad eventually…but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“So you’ve been following me around the city and shooting the people around me—”

“I didn’t have to follow you,” he pointed out, still amused. “I had a better method of tracking you.”

“What…” She trailed off, realization hitting her like a sledgehammer as she saw the cell phone clipped to his belt. “The app. You were using the app to track me. I couldn’t see you because Destiny Division employees don’t show up in the program at my clearance level, but you could see all of us. You just sat back and waited for us to be somewhere convenient, and then you started shooting.”