Cipher

They found the zip drive and appropriate cable in a stack in the corner of Alec’s home office, but one thing was conspicuously absent. “No power cord.” Andrew’s frustration boiled up. “Do you see one anywhere?”

Kat lifted a tangled mess of cords in her fist. “Only about twenty of them. I’m guessing he puts every cord he finds in this box and forgets it.”

“Damn it.” He angled the blue case toward her and tapped the front. “Check for the logo first.”

She glanced at him, both eyebrows raised and her head tilted at an angle that almost screamed, No, really?

It felt good because at least it wasn’t guarded, and he choked back a laugh. “Okay, Ms. Expert. You’ve got this. What do you need me for?”

“Just stand there and look pretty,” she muttered, taking the drive from him. Two minutes and nine cords later, she let out a whoop of victory and shifted to her knee. “Got it, just have to plug this in now…”

He stepped back to give her room. “If it doesn’t work, are we heading back to Birmingham to visit Ben?”

“Mmm. We could, but he’s really better if the data’s encrypted or corrupted. He won’t be able to pull it off a disk that’s not connected to anything.” She plugged in the drive as she talked, every movement quick and efficient. “Honestly, I don’t really know how it works, and God knows I’ve tried to figure it out.

Something with electricity though. Having a signal. He needs a way in, like a network or an access point.”

It made Ben sound like a comic superhero. “He’s wireless?” Andrew asked, amused.

“Uh-huh.” Kat scrunched up her nose, the look she always got when she was trying not to laugh. When she leaned forward to reach one of the cords at the rear of the computer, her ponytail slid away from the back of her neck, revealing the vivid black ink twining up toward her hairline.

He stared at the ink for a moment before dragging his gaze away. “How likely is this information not to be somehow encrypted?”

“No clue.” Powering up the computer resulted in a buzzing whir, clearly loud enough that even Kat heard it. She frowned as she turned on the monitor. “I guess it depends on if my mom put the data on there, or had someone else do it. She was okay with computers, but I was fixing her hosed SMTP settings by the time I was nine. I doubt she was messing with data encryption.”

Apparently, she’d been tangled up in a lot of things Kat hadn’t known about. “Only one way to tell, I guess.” He gestured to the drive. “Look and see.”

Kat made a noncommittal noise as the screen came to life, the boxy operating system at least five years out of date. Instead of navigating the windows, she pulled up a command line and stared at the blinking white cursor, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.

Her heart beat too fast, and the shallow, quick breaths she drew spoke of real fear as well as nervousness. Andrew slid his hands over her shoulders and leaned down to speak. “I’m right here. I’m with you.”

“Thank you.” The words trembled, almost as badly as her hands as she began to type. Slowly at first, then with growing confidence, too fast for him to follow what she was doing as blocks of text scrolled past in response to her short commands.

It took a few minutes, her shoulders growing tenser under his hands. Finally she cursed softly. “There are a ton of files. No extensions, no fucking clue what they are. But I can get at them, at least. Transfer them and send them to Ben. The only one that’s different…” She typed something, and a plain text file popped up.

A letter.

Katherine, If your father gave you this letter, it means I didn’t survive to see you turn twenty- one.

What I’m doing now, I’m doing for you. I need you to understand that I believed in this cause. Our world is broken. Spell casters and shapeshifters scorn us, use us, hurt us and discard us. Psychics have huddled together and bowed their heads for decades, as if our powers mean nothing. They told me they were working to change that, and I believed them. I fought for them. I killed for them.

I know that can’t be easy for you to see. What you are is why I have hope for you. The more powerful you grow, the more you understand the suffering of those around you. Maybe your empathy will keep you from denial. I convinced myself I wasn’t hurting people who didn’t deserve to hurt. I believed I was building a world where you could be powerful without needing to be brutal. Instead I helped create a world where your power can be used against you.

If I die, it’s because I fought to stop that. I can’t look in your eyes and know I helped make a weapon that could turn you into a killer.

I know the lessons I’ve already taught you seem harsh, but your life will be hard. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the risk of passing this legacy on to a daughter. Your uncle’s too afraid to have another child, afraid that he’ll have a daughter and pass the Gabriel curse on to her.

But I can’t regret you. I love you more than anyone or anything on this earth, and there’s nothing I won’t do to keep you safe from my mistakes.

Your heart is so big, I still have hope you’ll forgive me for them.

Mom An emotional bomb, with so much that could either hurt Kat or set her free, and Andrew’s eyes zeroed in on one word: weapon. No time to feel guilty about that, not when Kat drew in a shaky breath and came to her feet in a jerky, uncoordinated movement.

She ducked under his hands and took a few steps away, leaving him staring at her back as the sound of her heart pounding thundered in his ears. “Whatever I am is so terrifying that Derek’s father wouldn’t have more kids. And Nick’s pregnant.”

If he let her continue down that path, give in to those thoughts, he’d lose her. “Kat, stop. You don’t know that’s true. Even if it is, your mom…” He struggled to find the right words without hurting her even more. “Your mom had shit going on. Do you blame him for being scared? It had nothing to do with you.”

“I don’t blame anyone for anything. I can’t.” She pivoted so sharply her hair whipped around, and the gaze she fixed on him was just short of wild. “Don’t you get it, Andrew? I get all the noble suffering of a martyr and all the guilt of knowing I wouldn’t be so damn selfless if I could keep everyone from shoving their pain down my throat until I give them whatever they need. I’m a fake. I want to be selfish.”

“You want a choice in the matter. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Color filled her cheeks, and the room pressed in on him. Anger—helpless, bitter anger, and not his own. “Why not? Why doesn’t anything make me a bad person? Not being selfish, or petty and jealous? I killed people, and all anyone can do is rush to tell me I’m not a bad person. Am I a bad person if I’d do it again?”

He didn’t stop to think, to analyze. “Maybe so. Maybe that means you’re just as low as the rest of us, and that’s the part we can’t stand.”

Silence. Her fists clenched, and she shook her head. “I can’t live up to that. You want me to be happy and loving all the time, and no one can be that.”

“It’s not about not wanting you to bum me out, Kat.” Everything between them had always been so fucking hard to explain. “If you think people aren’t worth saving, I believe you. You see inside them, know what they’re hiding way down at the core. You of all people have to think there’s something good here, or what the hell are we all scrambling so hard for?”

“Oh, Andrew…” For a moment she seemed at a loss. She crossed her arms over her chest—not an aggressive stance, but a defensive one. “It’s not… People are worth saving. They’re petty and confused and so many of the horrible ones are only afraid. Like me. I’m petty and confused and afraid.”

“I don’t need you to be perfect,” he said again, the words a harsh grind in his throat. “I need you not to think it’s all a total loss, including—no, especially you.”

Her gaze slid past him. Fixed on the computer. “I need to know what I am. What’s in my genes that turned my mother and all the other women in our family crazy, and whether it’s going to do that to me. Or Derek’s kid.”

“You need to know,” he agreed, “but don’t give it too much power. Everyone’s different.”

“I’m not so different.” She eased around him to settle in front of the computer again. Flexing her fingers, she took a deep breath and began to type. “I’m powerful. Callum taught me how