Night Shadow (12 page)

first colonized here spoke an archaic dialect. And the cottonwoods were so

spare and distinctive the name stuck.”

She paused. Not to gather her thoughts, Alex was sure, but rather to take

a breath and rol onto the next page of the encyclopedia lodged in her

cranium. “It’s the best educated city in the country, did you know that?

Sixty-eight point six percent of the over-twenty-fives hold an associate

degree or higher. Fascinating, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh,” he muttered noncommittally. For a moment he was profoundly

glad his powers didn’t include a photographic memory. God knows if he

had had the random bits of information stuck in his head that Lexi

apparently did, there wouldn’t be room to focus on their current mission,

let alone try to figure out why his powers were on the blink.

47

Night Shadow

She hadn’t asked why they hadn’t teleported, and he didn’t tel her it was

because he fucking wel
couldn’t.
Dammit to hell. He took the sat phone

out of his breast pocket as he drove, and thumbed in Mason Knight’s main

number. He had to find out what the hel was up with his fluctuating

powers sooner than later. Hopeful y, Mason would know and be able to fix

it.

But what the fuck was it? A type of wizard flu? Hel if he knew. Whatever

it was, he wanted it fixed yesterday. He was sick of his powers not

working without warning. Fluctuating? How about total y FUBAR?

He put the phone on speaker, holding it against the steering wheel as he

drove. It rang enough times to tel Alex that Knight wasn’t going to

answer. Without waiting for the recording he went straight to voice mail.

His dear old mentor needed a freaking assistant.

“Mason. Alex. Call me ASAP. Thanks.” He glanced at Lexi from the corner

of his eye.

She sat upright in the passenger seat, belted—of course—the shades he’d

given her perched on her nose. She wore a black T-shirt tucked into black

jeans. Alex’s lips twitched as he noticed her highly polished combat boots.

For such a tall woman, she had smal , delicate feet. And hands. And small,

plump breasts, and a succulent lower lip just begging to be kissed.

More than his powers were FUBAR. Try his sense of timing, his ability to

focus, and his knack for understanding women—all of it. FUBAR. Especially

around Lexi.

“Los Alamos National Laboratory is one of the world’s leading research

institutions,” she told him, adjusting the vent to suit herself. The sun

shone from a bright cloudless blue sky, but snow lay thick on the ground

and cloaked the trees along the road in a pristine cover of stark white.

Rio to New Mexico.

Hot to cold.

Wel , hel , that described just about everything happening to him around

Lexi. Would’ve been nice to spend a couple of days back in Rio helping

Lucas. With Lexi. In a bikini. Or nothing at all. Forget the helping Lucas

part. Fuck. Maybe whatever was screwing with his powers was turning his

brain to mush, too.

“Their advanced technologies are very twenty-first century,” Lexi informed

him. “Even though the primary responsibility of the Laboratory is, of

course, to maintain the effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear deterrent,

they also work on hydrogen fuel cel development, supercomputing, and

applied environmental resear—”

“Nice pre-tour, professor, but we aren’t visiting the Laboratories,” he said,

cutting her off. Just because the woman was a walking encyclopedia didn’t

mean he wanted to hear everything in that photographic memory of hers.

A man needed quiet to think. Shit. As if he could think of anything but her

in nothing but a tan.

With a frown she turned, tilting her sunglasses down to look at him over

the dark rims. Her long-lashed eyes were the color of baby rabbit fur.

Soft. Gray. Gentle. What in God’s name made her want to be in the field

48

Night Shadow

where every drop of softness, every atom of gentleness would be

smashed out of her in a heartbeat? Or worse, kil her.

“We’re not?”

“Not at this juncture in our investigation. No.”

“Isn’t this something you should have told me
before
we left Rio at the

freaking creak o’ daybreak?”

Staying in sunny Rio hadn’t been an option when he’d had a lightbulb

moment at five A.M. “You were half asleep when we drove to the airport.”

Half asleep, and damned sexy, al ruffled and heavy-eyed.

Maybe he should pul over, yank off his clothes and rol around in a snow

bank until his dick went back to normal and his hormones chilled out.

Sounded like an excel ent plan. Much better than the ice cold shower he’d

had earlier.

“My hearing was just fine,” Lexi assured him in that pithy tone that made

him want to haul her into his lap and kiss her until she shut up. “If we’re

not going to the Lab, where are we going?”

“Team is meeting us at a warehouse west of town.”

“I heard you giving the instructions before we left Rio,” she told him dryly.

“I thought that was just a meeting point.”

“I have a theory.”

She paused several seconds. “Okay. I’l bite.”

Fuck. Yeah—he wished.
Tangos, blood, broken bones,
anything but

thinking about her mouth and what he could do if she let him. “I’l fil you

in when I brief the rest of the team.”

“Hmm. Do you think we might visit the lab? Because I know things you

might want to know about it.”

The corner of his mouth tipped up in a lazy grin. “No. But if I think of

anything I don’t know, I’l be sure to ask.”

Her lips twitched. “Smart-ass.”

“Better than being a dumb-ass.”

Lexi snorted back a laugh and pulled her legs up on the seat, sitting cross-

legged as though it were comfortable.

“Do you do yoga?” The thought of her in some of those asanas was

enough to turn him on. He just liked the name Downward Facing Dog; it

conjured up al sorts of erotic images.

“Yeah, I do.” She gave him an enigmatic look that made Alex want to pull

the car to the side of the road and kiss her. Hard. And for a long time.

“Did you read my personnel file?”

“Absolutely not,” he said with just enough emphasis for verisimilitude. Hel

yes, he’d read it. Every damned word. Her parents currently lived in

Barrow, Alaska. As far north as they could manage and still be on the

continent. Their finances were a shambles. Yet somehow they’d managed

yet again to convince a bank, this time to back a mail-order cupcake

business.
Cupcakes
from Alaska? There might be a more stupid business

venture, but Alex couldn’t think of one off the top of his head.

They might have loved her as much as Lexi thought they did, but their

behavior indicated otherwise. They’d been selfish, irresponsible, and

oblivious to the lifestyle they’d forced on their only child.

49

Night Shadow

Lexi had gone to seventeen schools, a few steps ahead of collection

agencies and child protective services, before she completed high school

with straight As at age fifteen. Her academic record, and her photographic

memory, had earned her a scholarship to Stanford.

Humanities and Sciences had been her field, and she’d gobbled up the

courses in linguistics and philosophy, piling on letters after her name as if

she were hoarding them for an educational famine. In only five years,

she’d earned dual bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and history, a master’s

in English and linguistics, and a damn Ph.D. in linguistics with an

emphasis on French and Italian. Her dissertation on similarities in modern

comparative romance languages was presented in English, French, and

Italian.

At nineteen she’d taken her first lover, a twenty-nine-year-old science

major, name of Frank Hinton. The relationship had lasted eight months. At

twenty she’d been recruited by T-FLAC. She’d worked in the research

department in Montana for eight years.

Alex adjusted the visor to ward off the blinding sunlight bouncing off the

snow on either side of the road. He slid his gaze over to her gray,

assessing eyes. “Reading someone’s personnel file is against the rules.

Isn’t it?”

“It is. But that’s never stopped you before.”

Alex put a hand over his heart. “Alexis. You wound me.”

“You are so ful of crap.” She looked out of her side window. “There’s

some great desert hiking here. I’d—”

“No.”

He heard her teeth grind. “I was about to say I’d like to come back here

sometime on
my own,
and do some hiking through the Bandelier National

Monument wilderness area. I love hiking, how about you?”

“I like to
read
about hiking,” he said, just because getting her goat was so

freaking entertaining. He enjoyed anything to do with the outdoors,

although it had been awhile since he’d done anything like that just for the

fun of it. When he was hiking, it was somewhere inhospitable as hel with

jagged razor-sharp rocks or deadly snakes, and usual y with bad guys on

his ass, chasing him, guns blazing. Fun where he could get it.

“You don’t like communing with nature?”

“I like communing with a cold Coors and a hot redhead.” Forget the beer.

He had decidedly warm feelings toward a tall, cool-eyed blonde, with a

luscious, kissable mouth.

“I thought gentlemen preferred blondes.”

She was table dancing in dangerous territory. “I’m no gentleman.” He shot

her a quick glance as he turned down a side street heading west. “Is that

why you went blond?”

“Absolutely,” she told him cheerful y. “Blond hair is like catnip to guys. I

have to beat them off with a stick.”

He knew she was kidding. But for some reason the idea that guys were all

over Lexi pissed him off. Lover number two had been three years ago. An

ex-jock, and a clerk in T-FLAC’s legal division. That relationship lasted

eighteen months. Rumor had it Mike Love had wanted to marry her. Bad.

50

Night Shadow

She’d declined. Somehow they remained friends. Alex couldn’t begin to

imagine that having slept with Lexi, they’d be friends if they ever “broke

up.”

“T-FLAC’s a close-knit community,” he said, sounding a lot like her pastor,

and feeling a lot savage thinking about her with another man. “You

shouldn’t pee in your own pond.”

“That’s a disgusting analogy. And I don’t date people I work with.”

Apparently six foot six, black, ex-football player Mike Love didn’t count.

“Then who
do
you date?”

“None of your damned business. Isn’t that Daklin waving his arms like a

looney-bird over there?”

Yeah. It was Daklin all right and he didn’t look happy. The warehouse was

beyond a row of rental storage units about three hundred yards ahead.

Alex slowed the car, and shot Lexi an amused glance. “Is a looney-bird a

real bird?”

“Certainly,” she said straight-faced. “The looney-bird is found exclusively

on the Galápagos Islands. They’re from the order
Sphenisciformes,
family

Spheniscidae.
It’s twenty-six inches tall, and similar in shape to a female

penguin. Most of them are mild mannered, even docile. But the white-

winged looney-birds are
very
bad-tempered.”

Alex laughed as he stopped the car. “You just made that up.”

This was the first time Lexi had seen him really laugh. God. He was

already irresistible, but when he threw his head back and roared with

amusement, her heart did more than just calisthenics, it prepped for the

Olympics. She kept her thoughts off her face. “Are you sure?”

“That’s the problem. I’m not sure.” Stil grinning, he rol ed his window

down as Daklin jogged up beside the car. A blast of frigid air swirled

around the previously toasty interior of the car. “What’s up?” he asked the

other man, all humor gone.

Daklin opened the back door and climbed in, slamming the door behind

him. “We have trouble in River City.”

Alex turned to look at him blankly.

“A 1957 musical, then a movie,” Lexi enlightened him. “
The Music Man
?

Never mind. What’s the problem?” she addressed Dak-lin, whose face was

flushed with the cold.

“Apparently your wild woo-woo guess was right on the money,” Daklin

told Alex. He rested his folded arms between the two seat backs.

“What woo—” Lexi cut herself off. Perhaps better not to know Alex’s every

ability.

“The building, as you suspected, is locked down tighter than a—” he

glanced at Lexi. “Tight,” he finished. “Lu went ahead of us. Knocked him

on his ass. Unconscious. Pulse thready. Serious burns to his face and

chest. Ginsberg teleported him back to medical.”