Night Shadow (24 page)

“True. Stone placed a protective shield around you, and froze Ginsberg. I

was there.”

The room spun in a sickening swirl, and she squeezed her eyes shut,

fighting for control. “I saw the fight.” She opened her eyes and looked at

the others. Why would they all lie to her? To protect Alex? “I
saw
it. Two

guys watched practically the whole thing before they—”

“Who were these guys, Lexi?”

She shrugged. “I don’t
know.
A couple of older members of the choir

perhaps?”

“How old?”

“Seventeen? Eighteen? What does it matter?” She turned to the others.

“Alex was in an insane fury—Ginsberg . . . I
saw
them.” She remembered

how scared she’d been that Ginsberg would hurt Alex, the two men had

been insane with rage—She remembered the smel of blood and sweat on

Alex—She remembered—Dammit, she remembered the fight.
Al
of it.

Alex squeezed her shoulder. She froze under his touch. “I believe you,” he

told her quietly. “But what you think you observed didn’t happen. I swear

to you.”

Lexi turned her head, her gaze going to his neck. The thin scar from

Ginsberg’s knife was stil a faint white line at the base of his throat where

a steady pulse now beat beneath his tanned skin. Wizards healed quickly.

But Alex would always wear Ginsberg’s scar.

“He cut you. Your throat, your arm, your thigh.” There’d been a lot of

blood. He’d clearly been in a great deal of pain—

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Night Shadow

“No. He stripped you of your LockOut then cut
you.
I took your wounds to

keep you from bleeding out, and spare you the agony you would’ve felt

when you came out of . . . whatever you were in.”

Lexi licked her dry lips as her eyes locked with his. His green eyes bored

into hers.
Believe me.

She glared.
Get out of my damn head!

Trust me.

Logic told her this was all bul shit. Her heart, dammit, believed him. Lexi

dragged in a shuddering breath. “What’s going on? Who’s manipulating us

like this?”

Kiersted leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “You believe us, yes?”

“I don’t know what I believe anymore,” she said feeling icy cold and more

confused than she’d ever been in her life. “I do know that both Stone and

myself believe what we
think
we saw. Neither of us is lying. That means

that one of us was made to
perceive
something that didn’t happen. And

yeah. I hear you guys when you tell me you also saw what you saw. But

whoever is capable of doing this type of sophisticated mind control could

just as easily do it to several people as to one. Right?”

“Stone has a point,” Alex said behind her. He stil had his hand on her

shoulder, and she took comfort from his closeness. This was crazy. Way

too freaking woo-woo for her liking.

“I saw those men, too. Twins, right?”

Lexi nodded. She had a vague recol ection of two similar-looking guys just

standing there.

“What connects the Sydney Opera House with a school?” Lu asked,

sticking his feet, ankles crossed, up on the scarred coffee table.

“The same tango threat?” Daklin offered.

“There’s that. I saw the school bus and the school when I was dealing with

the fight backstage. Saw them as if I were standing on the curb in real

time, watching.”

Lexi placed the plate of food on the cushion beside her, her hunger gone.

“A vision?” She picked up the jettisoned sandwich off the floor and tossed

it onto the plate, then wiped her hands, the grease churning in her

stomach.

“No, I was right there.”

She frowned. “You mean you left the stage?”

“You were in two places at once,” Daklin offered.

“Yeah. Same as when I was in the gym. That’s why I conjured the eye

patch. I saw fine from my right eye, but I was seeing someone else’s view

from my left.”

“At the same time?” Lexi asked. The room was warm, but she had the

urge to rub her arms to chase away the chill goose-bumping her skin.

“Yeah.”

God, she didn’t want to ask. “Whose eyes were you seeing through, Alex?

The tangos’?”

There was no hesitation, although his voice was grim. “Without a doubt.”

Lexi’s heart beat hard and fast. Worse and worse. IA’s suspicions that he

was turning rogue were correct. Did it matter that he seemed to have no

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Night Shadow

control over it? “Is this one of your normal powers?” As if there was any

damned thing normal about having powers in the first place!

“No.”

If their roles were reversed, Lexi would be pacing. Alex however,

remained where he was. Tension radiated off his large body in pulsing

waves that she realized no one else saw or felt. Wow. Lucky her. His inner

tension transmitted to her on a private wavelength; it made her heart

race and her palms sweat.

Alex reached down and snagged one of the sandwiches Lexi no longer

wanted to eat. “There’s a visceral link between the tangos and myself.

And whatever it is, we’d better figure it out fast. What do the bar codes

tel us other than longitude and latitude of target cities? What do the other

numbers represent?”

“Date of birth?” Lexi offered.

“Date of death?” Lu suggested, materializing a steaming mug of coffee in

one hand, and an unlit cigarette in the other.

“Another location?” Daklin mused. “City of birth, perhaps?”

“Why would anyone care where they were born?” Lexi wanted to know.

She shifted away from the heat of Alex’s body, moving to the other end of

the long sofa. Now she could try to read his face and perhaps his

thoughts. Unfortunately, both were annoyingly inscrutable.

“What’s unusual about these guys?” Alex wasn’t asking, he was thinking

out loud. “They’re all left-handed. So, I might add, am I—”

“Seven to ten percent of the population are lefties, the one true minority,”

Lexi pointed out, horrified to hear her own voice sound a little combative,

a little desperate. “Left-handedness is more common in males than

females. And statistically, left-handed people are of higher intelligence.

Not to mention that in comparison to the general population, being left-

handed happens more frequently in twins. Don’t you have a fraternal

twin?”

Wiping his hands, Alex nodded. “My sister Tory. But she’s not left-

handed.”

Something crossed his face, a cloud of thought that he quickly and

expertly banished from his expression. Whatever thought had just

occurred to him, he wasn’t sharing, either verbally or mentally. And how

freaking unfair was that? He could apparently communicate telepathically

with her whenever he felt like it, but slam the door on her when he didn’t

want her to know what he was thinking?

She’d fol owed Alex Stone’s career with T-FLAC for
years.
His record was

exemplary. There’d never been even a hint of impropriety. Not a whiff of

wrongdoing. He might not fol ow the rules to a T, but he had an admirable

code of ethics that many less experienced operatives strove to emulate.

He was a hero, dammit.

Alex’s gaze met hers. A private moment in the middle of the debriefing.

Lexi’s throat tightened.

“Those stats don’t cover several
hundred
men,” he said, breaking eye

contact to encompass the rest of the team. “Al in the same place. The

odds of that are—Impossible.”

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Night Shadow

“True. They also all look to be about the same age. Eighteen to twenty.

They all have green eyes. They all—” she hesitated before stating the

obvious elephant in the room. “They all look like you. Even the guy who

attacked me in Rio was a younger you.”

Kiersted shifted in his seat and his lips twitched. “I’m guessing that you

didn’t make enormous deposits in a sperm bank fifteen-plus years ago?”

“No. I d—” Alex’s phone buzzed. “Stone. Yeah. Hang on.” He put El icott

on speaker.

“The lab results are in. I have the DNA results of your black dust.” The

Control’s husky voice sounded grim. Lexi’s heart ricocheted in her chest.

“You want the bad news or the really bad news.”

“Bad news first,” Alex told her flatly.

“The results are conclusive. The DNA of our tangos indicates
identical

alleles. Not close. But
identical
in every way.”

“Which means they’re from a single source. Once we find it, we can

eliminate it. So what’s the really bad news?”

There was an unnaturally long pause. “These tangos aren’t related to you,

Stone. They
are
you.”

The bottom dropped out of Lexi’s stomach.

Lu whistled long and low.

“Holy-fucking-hell.” Daklin sat forward. “They’re clones.”

“Wel , that just puts a whole new spin on this dance, doesn’t it?” Kiersted

grumbled. “What now, Stone?”

Alex gritted his teeth, his jaw working furiously.
I’m a liability.
Lexi heard

the unguarded thought.
I have to get to lockdown at HQ before I fuck

anything up or get anyone kil ed.

You aren’t going to. We trust you. I trust you.

Alex swiveled, his green eyes meeting hers.

“Hel o? Anybody home? We’re in mid-debrief here.” Daklin broke the

moment.

Both Lexi and Alex turned to stare at the team.

“I think this gives me a pretty damn good reason to suspect that my

powers flickering isn’t just a phase I’m going through.” Alex tossed the

napkin onto their shared plate. “It’s a direct connection to these clones.”

Suddenly the greasy cheese in Lexi’s stomach did a somersault backflip

and stuck in her throat. She pushed away the plate and mug of congealing

soup. “They may be genetically identical to you, but they’re being

control ed by something else.”

“Yeah, did you see those guys move like the Borg on steroids or drone

bees? I bet if I’d kicked one in the nuts they al would have gone down,”

Kiersted offered.

Lexi’s head pounded. “Kiersted has a point. If we can find the trigger to

control them, or find some weakness they al possess, then there’s a

chance at annihilating the entire infestation at once. Drones can’t survive

without their queen. They can’t maintain their hive or feed themselves

without her pheromone directives. What if these clones operate the same

way?”

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Night Shadow

She glanced at Alex. “When you were out of it, having your vision, or

connection or whatever it was, did you see a control? Do you have any

idea who might be pul ing their strings?”

Alex frowned. “Nada. Al I could see was what they were seeing in their

current position.”

Lexi drummed her fingers on her thighs, her mind swirling, flipping

through the vast files in her photographic memory marked miscel aneous.

“The only way we’l find out who’s control ing these things is if I let them

take—”

Furious, terrified, Lexi jettisoned off the sofa as if she’d been hit with a

cattle prod. “
No.
Absolutely freaking
not.
You’re not going to let them do a

damned thing to you.”

“If I’m bait, the rest of you will be able to keep track of where I go and

who I’m with. We’l have access to whatever is control ing them, we can

find it and target it.”

“You want to let them, it, whatever it is, take you over? Use you? What if

you can’t get back, what if you become one of them? God, Alex. Think of

the implications!”

“She’s right. What if once you’re under they can access everything you

know about T-FLAC?” Daklin said.

Kiersted brushed a hand over the back of his neck. “Shit. Then they’d be

able to yank our dicks in any direction they pleased while they just sat

back and laughed.”

“They’d be able to exercise control on any one of us,” Lu muttered.

Alex spoke to the group, but it was Lexi he was looking at. “What if they

already have?”

Fourteen

Wizard

Council

Alex materialized—not in Montana, but twenty feet in front of a desk the

size of a barn. Behind it, framed by plush velvet drapes, was a low, raised

platform shrouded in darkness. Other than the dramatic addition of the

dais, the Council Chambers looked like the offices of a prosperous law

firm.

He looked around. He was alone.
Lexi.

She’d been with him when he’d teleported from Sydney. Mentally he

reached out for her. His heart knocked harder when he couldn’t sense her

anywhere close. Couldn’t sense her at all.

He mentally reached out again, searching for any trace of her.
Lexi, where

the hel are you?
There was nothing. No one knew where the Council