She couldn’t let it change anything. He wasn’t her cowboy or her white knight, wasn’t her best friend, wasn’t her partner, wasn’t anything. She had saved his life by putting his ass in jail long enough for Fallon to get the guys who were gunning for him, and then cutting the deal that had gotten him out again. Word had it that he’d even straightened up—to a point—while he’d been inside. She doubted he had found God, but she had hoped he had found some perspective, and maybe even a few shreds of the guy he’d been at twenty.
That had evened them up. A life for a life. Which meant she didn’t owe him anything.
Her stomach rumbled. Some people snacked when they were bored. She binged when things got out of control.
This isn’t your problem. She didn’t need to get involved—hell, she shouldn’t get involved. She should pass along the info, and let the task force decide what—if anything—to do about it. And if the thought brought a twist of grief and regret, she made herself ignore them both as she dug into her carryall, going for the false bottom where she kept a second set of IDs and a credit card that ought to keep her off the radar unless Strike and his people had major clearance, or a big-assed back door into the system.
Given that they were looking for Dez, the latter seemed a far stronger possibility. He hadn’t been—wasn’t? —an acronym kind of guy.
Dez. God. Could he really be alive? Her throat closed and a sob rattled in her chest, but she made herself keep going, her fingers shaking as she popped the bottom of the carryall. But then a strange tickle shimmied down the back of her neck and her instincts kicked hard.
Her heart lunged into her throat as she spun in a full circle without seeing a damned thing out of place. But then an electric crackle laced the atmosphere, displaced air whoomped, and Strike freaking materialized right in front of her.
As Reese stared in shock, he glanced around, locked on her, and looked profoundly relieved.
Relieved? What the hell?
She went for her .38 as her mind scrambled, but before the gun was clear of her waistband, his expression shifted to one of fucking-get-it-done determination. Moving fast, he grabbed her wrist, twisted and chucked her gun, and then said, “Sorry about this.”
Sudden vertigo slammed into her, tunneling her vision.
“What . . . ?” She reeled, tried to run, and staggered drunkenly instead.
Her brain went fuzzy and she felt herself falling, felt strong arms catch her in an impersonal grip. And the world went dark.
CHAPTER THREE
Some immeasurable time later—maybe a few minutes, maybe a few days—Reese struggled back to consciousness. But instead of making it all the way there, she found herself caught, vulnerable, in the woozy dream state between asleep and awake, where she knew she should be afraid but couldn’t muster the energy for panic.
Even more disconcerting, she wasn’t alone inside her own skull. There was a strange presence there with her, controlling her. An unfamiliar voice echoed in her head, saying: Show us.
She was dimly aware that she was lying on a couch in a room that smelled spicy, like scented candles or incense. Strike was there, along with a younger, sharp-faced man who stared down at her, his gray eyes so intense they seemed silver. He was the presence inside her, she knew, without knowing how she knew it. Show us the night of the storm, he whispered in her mind.
She didn’t want to go back there, didn’t want to remember. But without meaning to, she did.
The images unspooled: She saw Dez, his eyes hot and wild as he kissed her and carried her to his bed, saw the lightning, heard the thunder, felt her body go cold as he headed for the door. Then things sped up in a scatter shot of images and sensations: She heard Jocko’s warning; felt herself racing through the storm, only to arrive too late. She saw the mad glee in Keban’s scarred face as he leaned over Dez, gloating; felt the pain as he turned and shot her. Then there was Dez’s rage. Chaos. Lightning. Thunder. Screams. Things happening that couldn’t be real.
The memories sped up, becoming a blur of the weeks that followed and the growing pain that came, not from her healing injuries, but from the way Dez had changed, how he kept trying to call magic that didn’t exist, and how each failure had pushed him further over the line. His temper sharpened. He quit his job, then got pissed when she cornered him about it.
Show me, the inner voice said. And she did.
“Don’t you get it?” he snapped, boots thudding an angry staccato as he paced the apartment like a caged animal. “The ‘work your way up’ thing is a fucking pipe dream. The only way people like us can get what we deserve is by being creative.”
In the past few weeks he had gained a good thirty pounds of pure muscle, shaved his head, and gotten tattoos to cover the handcuff scars: twin bands of strange symbols done in dark blue-green ink. He was turning into a stranger, and a scary one, but that didn’t stop her from putting herself in his path, making him choose between stopping and mowing her down. He stopped very close to her. Glared at her.
She glared right back. “And by getting creative you mean working ‘security’”—she scorned the word with finger quotes—“for the highest bidder?”
“How did—” He bit it off. “Shit. You fucking patterned me.”
It was her uniquely odd skill, an almost savantlike ability to put together seemingly unrelated pieces of information into a pattern, and from there a prediction that Fallon’s gang task force could use, like where and when a drug drop was likely to be, whether a particular drive-by was random or part of a larger whole, or—and this was something she was keeping far away from the cops—that Dez was hiring himself out as muscle for the Smaldone wannabes.
The two-bit mobster types were trying to step into the vacuum left by the demise of Denver’s once-great crime family. They didn’t seem to get that there wasn’t any vacuum; the gangs had already filled the niche. But while the Smaldone Lites were figuring that out, they had a habit of getting messily dead. Thus the bodyguards.
She shook her head. “Jesus, Dez. How could you work for those guys after everything we’ve done to clean things up around here?”
His face settled into the impassive mask she had quickly come to hate, the one where shadows darkened his eyes to an unfathomable murk. “The money’s good.”
“It’s a shortcut,” she snapped, drilling a finger into his chest. It was like poking a building. “Your job—”
“Wouldn’t have gotten me what I need in time,” he interrupted.
It was the first she had heard of any deadline. Oh, shit. Now what had he gotten himself into? Or, she had to ask herself, was he trying to buy himself out of something?
“You’re getting a place of your own.” She made herself say it. She had known he didn’t like the way she had gone from practically throwing herself at him to “let’s wait until we’re getting along better,” but she hadn’t thought he would bail.
He looked offended. “Hell, no.”
The tightness in her chest went down by half. “Then what is it? Tell me what you need the money for. Did you lose a bet? Are you trying to do something? Buy something?”
Her mind, stupid optimist that it was, flashed on the ring he had caught her trying on the other day in the local pawnshop. Not girlie—far from it—it was a finely detailed snake that curled around her finger and knotted around a polished black stone. Obsidian, the guy behind the counter had called it. She hadn’t cared that it had probably belonged to one of the Cobras—to her it wasn’t a cobra, it was a snake, like his given name. She had cared, though, that the pawnbroker wanted close to four months? rent for it.
“I need firepower,” Dez said flatly.
That was so far off the ring fantasy that she just stared at him for a few seconds. “We’ve got guns.”
“I don’t think they’ll be enough.” He hesitated, then reached for her. This time he made contact, tracing a
