Night Shadow (32 page)

project to the scrolling list of Knight’s powers.

“Shit.”

“Fuck.”

“Damn.”

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Night Shadow

While Lexi knew all three of the men wanted go out there and find Knight,

Duncan Edge had kept a cool head, and his wil prevailed. There was no

point going off half-cocked when they had no definitive destination, and

before they came up with a viable plan.

She figured that al wizards had similar powers, in similar strengths. But

apparently that wasn’t the case. Knight’s powers and magical skil s put the

powers of his three protégés in the shade. And these were only the skills

they knew about from firsthand experience, and from documentation.

They were going to have to play this faster and much,
much
smarter than

the man who’d taught them everything they knew. Tall order. “Of course,”

Lexi had pointed out five cups of coffee earlier, “he
didn’t
teach you guys

everything
you know. You col ectively have more than forty years of T-

FLAC experience. Life experiences that you might have told him about, but

he didn’t experience with you. So he doesn’t know every trick up your

col ective sleeves, does he?”

While Fox, Blackthorne, and Alex hadn’t been exactly jazzed by that

observation, it had given Lexi something positive and concrete to focus

on.

Kess had come down a couple of hours before. She’d lingered looking over

Simon’s shoulder as he inputted information and then left to go to work.

Her job at HQ was too new for her to take any time off, although Lexi

could tell she was reluctant to leave Blackthorne. Even for a few hours.

Blackthorne walked her out into the entry hall to say good-bye before

teleporting her to work. That means of transpo had allowed Kess an extra

cup of coffee and thirty minutes to loiter. She was smart and intuitive, and

Lexi, who’d never really had girlfriends because of all the middle-of-the-

night moves, thought it would’ve been nice to have her with them.

Their good-bye had taken upward of eleven minutes, and Blackthorne

looked a little shel -shocked when he returned to the war room—
kitchen.

Seeing Kess and Blackthorne together had given Lexi a little ache of

jealousy in her chest, which she quickly tamped down. Clearly they were

in love, just as Fox and Sydney McBride were. The two men looked at

their women as though they’d hung the moon.

Far from giving her loverlike looks, Alex was always shoving her hair off

her face and scowling at her. So she needed a haircut, so what? she

thought belligerently. He paid attention in bed. But that was . . . sex.

Has this got anything to do with the problem at hand,
she demanded of

herself, blocking her thoughts from Alex—and Duncan Edge—as best she

could.
Absolutely not. Then focus, Stone. Concentrate on what can help.

The rest is immaterial.

The ache in her chest felt pretty damned lethal, but that wasn’t based on

logic. There was no proof that a broken heart could kill. It just felt that

way.

“Okay?” Alex asked softly, as people shifted in their seats, or got up to

stretch. Conversations would break out as one or the other brought up a

point for debate or analysis.

Lexi didn’t glance up. “Hunky-dory.”

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Fox’s fiancé, Sydney, wandered downstairs in the late morning, then went

off with the creaky and charming MacBain to the “sunroom” for tea.

Sounded boring as hel to Lexi, who’d rather be in the middle of this

strategic meeting than just about anywhere else.

Don’t?
What had Alex meant? Don’t stay awake guarding him? Not likely.

Don’t love him. That’s what he’d meant. Don’t love me. Why? Because he

didn’t return the feelings? Wasn’t going to make a damn bit of difference

in the intensity of
her
feelings. It sucked that he didn’t reciprocate, but

either way she wasn’t going to stop loving him. She couldn’t stop. Simple

as that.

“Hel , look at this.”

Alex’s exclamation made her jump. “Page?” Lexi asked. The little screens

flickered as the new pages became an additional popup window on their

monitors.

“Three-sixty-four.”

“Jesus,” Fox said softly as his eyes scanned the pages slowly scrol ing in

front of all of them. “This is proof that he’s amassing an army for hire.”

His voice shifted into an annoying imitation of an announcer in an

infomercial. “Got an enemy? A head of state? An annoying neighboring

country? For a fee, I’l take care of them for you. No need to deplete your

own resources. My tangos are a renewable resource, and have infinite

applications.”

“Wel , isn’t that just fucking green of him,” Blackthorne muttered.

“Look at the intel two paragraphs down,” Alex told the others. “Not just

money changing hands. Favors, like a fucking mafia. The son of a bitch is

asking that as a show of good faith the buyer take out someone else’s

enemy. You want to take out the government of Uzbekistan? I’l send in

my Vitros, in exchange you take out one of China’s enemies.”

“That doesn’t tel us
where
they are,” Blackthorne snarled, scrol ing

through the intel Alex had up. “Where are you, suckers? Where is he

keeping you? Where is he manufacturing you?”

“They’re human,” Lexi said quietly. “
Almost
human, anyway. Page two-

sixty-eight. Look at their makeup in this lab report. Al intel suggests that

he’s worked on making these clones—
Vitros
—as human as possible. My

educated guess is that he’s tried and failed, tried and failed. I showed you

that report of terrorist activities over the years with the black dust

residue, so we know he screwed up—a lot.

“Now we have warehouses of infants.” Lexi got up to pace around the

large kitchen. It was getting dark outside and someone had come in and

unobtrusively turned on the lights. She smel ed something savory cooking,

and heard the sound of female voices from another room.

“We also have enormous tanks holding thousands of gallons of liquid

human remains. We have wizards—and Halfs—donating sperm. Let’s say

he did some sperm-washing and has now come up with the Vitros, his

version of a mean-tempered pit bul . Is it possible that all the wizard . . .

remains used to feed—God that’s disgusting—feed these Vitros as they

grow, is it possible that they also got those donors’ powers? Is it possible

for Knight to have given some of his powers to the Vitros, do you think?”

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Night Shadow

“First of all,” Alex stood to stretch his legs after sitting so long. “These

aren’t wel -trained pit bulls. Vitros are ice-cold killing machines. Second, if

Knight could transfer his powers or those of the donor wizards, they’d be

more powerful. But they’re fairly easy to kil . Yeah, they’re trained. As wel

trained as we are to a certain extent. But basically they’re expendable

drones.”

“But they
don’t
have Knight’s powers. That’s the good news, by the way,”

Duncan added.

“Now you tel us?” Fox muttered.

“Seemed rather anticlimactic after the bad news,” Duncan answered.

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” Lexi perked up. “They don’t have Knight’s entire

range of superpowers. That’s actual y excel ent—What? Why do you all

have that same weird expression?”

“Because,” Alex told her grimly, “that’s something Knight
can’t
do for

whatever reason. Something he’s clearly tried and failed to do over the

last thirty-plus years, otherwise he wouldn’t need anyone else to make

this work. Knight
can’t
transfer his powers to the Vitros. But
we

apparently
can. That’s
why our powers have been flickering.”

Fox took a deep breath, held it, let it out. “Knight
has
a power source—”

He looked at Blackthorne.

Blackthorne looked at Lexi. “We’re the goddamn batteries for his little

army. We’re being fucking absorbed into the col ective.”

“What?! Wait. Are you tel ing me that the son of a bitch set up your

deaths thirty-six years ago?” Lexi demanded, incensed. “His insane

master plan al along was that eventually your minds, powers, and skills

would be absorbed by the collective? That the stronger the
Vitros
become,

the weaker the three of you wil become, until you’re completely absorbed

and
die
?”

Alex looked at his friends, turned to hold Lexi’s gaze. “That pretty much

sums things up in a nutshel . If we’re
lucky,
we’l die. The alternative is

he’l control us as easily as he does our clones. Bottom line? We’re to be

‘one’ with the collective. We’l become Vitro power chow.”

Eighteen

“We’re missing something,” Lexi muttered, her entire focus on her

monitor. “
I’m
missing something.”
What?
The fact that the kitchen was

fil ed with people—walking around, talking on their phones, opening and

closing the refrigerator, eating, drinking, didn’t impact her concentration

one iota. Being this close to Alex sent her mind spiraling, and she had to

constantly pull it back into focus.

“Come on come on come on. Where are you?
What
are you?” Somewhere

in this mass of numbers and charts and statistics and accumulated intel

was the missing key. All she had to do was
find
it.

“Lexi,” Alex squeezed her shoulder. “We can’t make whole cloth of this

many bits and pieces. Not without hundreds of hours of using what we

have to find him. We don’t have hundreds of hours to spare.”

“No, we don’t. But this is just one giant dot-to-dot. And I was always good

at those.” She shifted the bar code location to the side, and brought up

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Night Shadow

temperatures. Longitude and latitude. The ages of the Vitros. The ages of

Alex, Blackthorne and Fox . . . The DNA reports. Just bits of information.

Nothing connected the dots. Yet.

“Okay. Let’s see if we can pinpoint a location as a start,” Duncan Edge

suggested. He was a lot less intimidating out of his official robe and

wearing jeans and a sweater.

Great suggestion. Manageable, and instant gratification. “Good plan.” Lexi

let out a tight breath. This was her job. She was supposed to be able to

take countless pieces of unconnected data and form some sort of

cohesive—
something.
But first things first.

“Most of the world’s deserts are clustered between five to thirty degrees

north and south of the equator, in the subtropical zones. That covers a

considerable number of miles to search. A lot of miles, and—I think you’re

right—not a lot of time. Here’s where you guys need to look first.” She

enlarged the data to fil their monitors. “Page nine-eighty-one.”

Alex looked at hers over her shoulder. “Death Valley in Nevada, and while

whoever is there might as wel hit the area around Avondale, Arizona, as

wel .”

She added a graphic, because it helped make things more visual and

dimensional. “El Azizia, Libya. Situated right here.” She added another

little flashing beacon graphic to the northern part of the African continent

as wel . “And the Tirat Tavi area in Israel. Statistically these are the three

most likely places he’s breeding the Vitros.”

“Good job,” Alex said, then quietly repeated what she’d said into his sat

phone, presumably reporting in to El icott. For once Lexi was almost—

almost
unaware of him.

What am I missing? It’s here. Somewhere. If I just knew where to look . .

. Ack!
This incomplete data was as maddening as unraveling the mystery

was fascinating.

“We have the three most logical locations.” Alex brushed the back of her

neck, making her shiver, as he removed his hand from her shoulder.

“We’l divide and conquer. Split up, each take a psi team—we’l find him.”

“Uh-huh,” she muttered absently, her fingers flying across the keyboard.

If she moved this intel over here, then added this to that, and carried

these stats forward to go with the reports on the latest Vitro events and

cross-referenced the data on their expiration—Damn. It stil wasn’t

enough. They might know statistically where Knight would likely be, but

they had no way of knowing when he’d hit. One little puzzle piece was

missing.

Her computer dinged. Excellent. New data. “Shit!”

Edge, who’d come up beside Alex, moved to stand behind her chair. “What

do you have?”

“Check this out.” Heart pounding with excitement, Lexi’s fingers flew