Karma Patrol (36 page)

“As long as you’re all right, I’m all right,” he promised her. “I’m so sorry, Jade. I was standing right next to you and I still couldn’t protect you.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, sounding astonished as she touched her fingers to his lips. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Feels like it from over here,” he replied, and a reluctant smile tugged at the corners of her mouth.

“A smart man once told me that the only one responsible is the bastard who pulled the trigger,” she informed him.

He started to respond, but the SWAT team was leaving the building behind them, and as several of the officers walked by, someone reached out and touched his shoulder.

“You two okay?”

It was Aaron, he realized. His partner was looking at both of them expectantly. Jade leaned into Luke’s side, making no effort to reply.

“We’re all right,” Luke said finally. “Did you find anything on the body?”

Jade stiffened in his arms at the word as Aaron shook his head.

“No wallet, no identification. Not even a cell phone.”

“Where’s my gun?” she asked, finally noticing its absence.

“One of the SWAT guys has it,” Aaron replied. “It has to go into evidence until the investigation is over, and then you can have it back.”

“You didn’t shoot him,” Luke said, confirming it even though he’d watched the shooting play out with his own eyes from a crack in the wall between the hallway where SWAT hid and the room where the prophet held Jade hostage. “He shot himself. Right?”

She nodded, shuddering. “I’ve never—I mean, I’ve hunted before, even though I don’t like it, so I’ve seen animals die, but I’ve never seen a person blow their brains out like that.”

“It’s awful,” Luke agreed softly. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”

“At least it’s over. He kept ranting about all this crazy stuff, about fate and destiny. He was completely out of his mind.”

“We heard him,” Aaron agreed, glancing at Luke, who kept his expression carefully neutral. “We heard you talking to him about it, too.”

“I learned from watching crime shows that if someone puts a gun in your face, you’re supposed to go along with whatever they’re saying.”

Her earnest innocence was convincing even to Luke, who knew for a fact that she was lying. Aaron fell for it without question.

“Well, you did a great job,” he told her, reassuring. “Come on. Let’s get you checked out by the paramedics.”

“I wasn’t hurt. I told Luke already that all he did was talk to me.”

“It’s department policy,” Aaron informed her.

Over her protests that she was fine, Luke’s partner guided her over to a waiting ambulance, Luke trailing alongside her without argument. Aaron gave her a meaningful look that she couldn’t interpret, but before she could ask him what he was trying to communicate to her, one of the paramedics came over to inspect the gash on the back of Luke’s head. Jade’s eyes widened with understanding and Aaron nodded at her. He hadn’t been pushing her over to the medics so that she could be checked out, or at least that hadn’t been his primary motivation. He’d done it so the paramedics could get their hands on his injured partner.

Once she realized that her cooperation made it easier for the paramedics to get Luke to accept their care, she became as compliant a patient as they could have asked for. Their cursory check revealed the bruises starting to form on her arm and her neck where the shooter had gripped her, but otherwise she was uninjured.

Luke hadn’t fared as well as she had, and she heard the words ‘concussion’ and ‘head CT’ being muttered by the paramedic checking his pupils. Luke looked like he was inclined to disagree with that assessment, but she’d managed to shake off her shock enough to remember that she still hadn’t checked the details of the all-clear alert on her phone, and a quick glance at the Karma Division app confirmed his non-life-threatening concussion in impersonal lettering. He might not want medical attention, but she knew for a fact that he needed it.

Jade’s hand on his forearm stopped his argument with the paramedic before it could start.

“Let’s just go to the hospital,” she said, not bothering to hide her exhaustion or concern. “I need to rest, but I won’t be able to do that until I know you’re all right.”

In response, he leaned down to press a kiss to the top of her head, his fingers tangling in her soft curls.

“If that’s what you want,” he agreed, recognizing that she’d reached her maximum stress tolerance for the day. His partner was left to gape in amazement as Luke climbed willingly into the back of an ambulance for the second time in two days, his hand in Jade’s as the paramedics prepared to transport both of them to the ER.

ade lay awake in Luke’s bed, her hand resting on his chest as she watched him sleep. They’d gotten back from the ER around nine and he’d promptly collapsed into bed, waving off her anxious hovering with a kiss and the reassurance that the doctors had told him he’d be fine as long as he got plenty of rest. She was suspicious, but a quick check of his jacket pockets after he was asleep turned up a copy of his discharge instructions from the hospital, which confirmed what he’d said. The instructions also said he’d been prescribed pain medication for his headache, but given his reluctance to take anything after he’d been shot, she doubted he was going to agree to take it now.

At least the pain didn’t seem to be keeping him awake. He slept like a rock, but she spent the night lying awake in the darkness, memorizing the pattern of tiny cracks in the ceiling of his apartment as she waited listlessly for morning. She tried to sleep, every muscle in her body complaining of exhaustion after the stresses of the past few days, but her mind stubbornly refused to turn off, and she stayed up all night with the chaos of her own thoughts threatening to tear her apart.

She couldn’t reconcile the things the prophet had said with her own personal view of the world. Or rather, she
could
, but not without challenging the handful of beliefs she held most dear. The things he’d said made an insidious sort of sense, but if she accepted them as truths, she also had to accept what they meant. Destiny Division using the DDS to eliminate any threat to the Grand Plan meant that the Fate Divisions weren’t just using their powers to guide people’s lives along the right courses. They were preemptively killing anyone they thought was likely to work against their interests.

Accepting that her own people were murdering innocent civilians because they were inconvenient was hard enough, but it paled in comparison to the realization that she’d only been given a soulmate as a means for the Powers to exert some measure of control over her. They didn’t want her to be happy. They wanted her to be docile.

If the prophet had given Luke the opportunity, he would have died to protect her. She knew it as well as she knew her own name. It wasn’t even because she was his soulmate; it was just the kind of person he was. He couldn’t stand idly by when someone was in danger, even if it meant he ended up in danger too. How could she continue on as his soulmate knowing that she would be putting him constantly in danger, threatening his life just by being a part of it? If the prophet was right and she was supposed to become one of the Powers, what sorts of cruelty might he be subjected to if she refused to toe the party line? If the prophet had told the truth when he’d said she was damaged now, that listening to his madness had tainted her ability to become what the Powers wanted her to be, what would they do to Luke when they realized she was no longer useful to them?

Luke was still asleep when she left, sprawled across the bed and snoring lightly. Her heart ached as she pulled the door shut, knowing that depending on how this conversation went, this might be the last time she saw him.

At least I found him,
she consoled herself as she shoved her hands into her coat pockets to defend against the chill in the crisp autumn air. At least she’d known what it was like to have a soulmate, even if she’d only had him for a few days. At least she was doing what she could to protect him, even if it meant she had to let him go.

She examined the karmic paths of the pedestrians she passed, watching the different shades of red and green and white stream past her on her way up to Eighty-First Street. She’d grown up seeing those colors, and she’d always thought it must be boring to be a Normal, to only see the everyday world without the added layer of karmic paths and auras. This could be the last time she got to see them, and her chest tightened painfully at the thought of becoming just another pedestrian, just one more boring traveler wandering down a path she couldn’t even see.

She reached the Bookkeeper’s house sooner than she would have liked, but she knew there was no use in dallying. She was here for a purpose, and adding unnecessary delays wouldn’t make it any easier.

The door was ajar, and she knocked on the frame as she pushed it open. The inside of the brownstone was comfortably decorated, a blue Oriental rug on the hardwood floor of the living room and a pleasant-looking woman seated behind an antique desk by the fireplace.

“You must be Jade,” she said, and Jade nodded silently. “The Bookkeeper has been expecting you. He’s waiting for you down the hall.”

Jade walked in the direction the receptionist indicated, down a narrow hallway and into another comfortably decorated room. This one had a roaring fire going in the fireplace, and beside it stood an elderly man in a tailored gray suit.

“Hello, Jade.”

“Hello, Bookkeeper.”

He stepped over to the bar, gesturing for her to have a seat in one of the armchairs next to the big bay window.

“Sit down and I’ll pour us a drink. You prefer bourbon, I assume?”

She nodded, not bothering to ask how he’d known. He was the Bookkeeper. He didn’t need to explain himself to her.

He set a glass down in front of her on the little table between the two chairs and took a seat in the other chair, leaning back against the cushions as he took a sip of his own drink.

“Rum and coke,” he informed her. “It’s not traditional, but I find I prefer it to any of the more classic gentleman’s drinks. Besides, what’s the use of being the Bookkeeper if I can’t drink whatever I please?”

She smiled politely, not sure how to broach the subject, and he gave her a knowing look.

“You’ve got a lot on your mind, Jade,” he said patiently. “I know the past few days have been difficult for you. I’d be happy to sit here as long as you like while you gather your thoughts, but I suspect you’d feel better if you just went ahead and said your piece, and then headed back home to your soulmate.”

“That prophet—” She faltered, not sure how to start, and he nodded sagely.

“Clayton Cowden. I’m familiar with him. Crazy, of course, like all prophets. It may interest you to know that he escaped about two weeks ago from a special holding facility run by Destiny Division. I’ve already spoken to them about the lack of efficacy on their part that led to Cowden being free to target you. Understandably, they are quite unhappy that Cowden was able to kill four of their own agents during his shooting spree. I’m convinced that they now understand the importance of controlling their people.”

It was nice to know that Destiny Division had faced some
sort of consequence for the negligence that had allowed the prophet to run around killing and kidnapping people. Jade had more pressing questions, though.