Cipher

Mackenzie were both on the phone, and Anna was scribbling something on a white board in the corner.

Sera touched Andrew’s arm, just the slightest brush of fingers, but her energy swept over him like a warm breeze in a cold room. “She’s with Julio, and Julio’s not going to let anything happen to her. We just need to get to them.”

Somewhere to the left of Alec’s deserted desk, Andrew had lain on the carpet, bleeding. Dying. He had half-memories of Kat leaning over him, her tears splashing hot on his skin as she screamed herself hoarse.

“I told her this was over,” he found himself confessing. “I promised her better than this.”

“I know.” Sera pulled at his arm, planting one hand in the center of his chest to urge him to sit on one of the empty desks. “You sit, and you take a deep breath. Then you take another. Then you find out where the cult is, and you kill every person who had a hand in kidnapping Kat. And no one will touch her again.”

“That’s a damn bloodthirsty suggestion for someone who’s trying to calm me down.”

“We all have our roles. You don’t run with a lot of submissive wolves, do you?”

Jackson slammed down his phone and rose. “Not good news, I guess.”

Andrew held up Kat’s phone. “I found it outside our building. Can you…?”

The other man’s eyes clouded. “I tried a tracking spell already. I was able to lock on to Kat, but the location kept jumping all over the map. Someone’s scrambling it.”

Andrew squeezed his eyes shut. The cell phone’s plastic casing cracked in his hand, and he forced himself to relax his grip as he opened his eyes. “So what’s next?”

“Skip tracing,” Anna said from her position by the white board.

“What the hell is that?”

“We trace the paper trails. Known associations.” She drew a line between two names and capped her marker. “Hazelton has a sister with a Louisiana driver’s license, and one of the other cult members inherited her dead mom’s rental properties on the Gulf. If we track it all down…”

“We could find where they’ve gone to ground.” Jackson rose and walked over to examine the board.

“If they’re snatching people, they need a place to take them.”

Mackenzie held up her phone. “Tell us what to do. Who to call.”

He didn’t have a clue. This was Jackson’s specialty, Anna’s, anyone’s but his. He was an architect before he was a wolf, before he’d been tasked with taking care of everyone in his charge.

He couldn’t do this.

That’s complete bullshit. His mother’s voice, musical and determined. She’d never accepted the words from him, and she certainly wouldn’t if she were around now, with so much on the line.

Andrew stood. “Can we find out when Patrick last spoke to Ben?”

Anna didn’t have to check. “Four days, he said.”

So they’d had plenty of time to find a place and hole up. “We keep looking,” he said finally. “We track down everything we can, every lead, and we check them all out.” In the absence of magic, it was all they could do.

“How do we do that when each place could be hours away in any direction?” Miguel asked quietly.

There was only one thing he could think of. “Wynne Albrecht. We’ll use the cult’s own tricks against them.”

Chapter Nineteen

Her face was sticky.

Kat dug her teeth into her lower lip to hold back a whimper. She wouldn’t break. Wouldn’t cry, and it didn’t matter that tears had been leaking out from beneath her closed eyelids for hours or days or weeks, however long she’d been handcuffed to this chair while Ben-No. She tried one of Callum’s calming breaths and regretted it, because everything smelled like salt and metal. Tears and blood, and it hadn’t been days because Julio was still slumped in the corner. He stirred from time to time, muttered sounds that weren’t quite words, but Kat couldn’t bring herself to speak to him. If he woke up, if he looked at Ben’s body, looked at her, then it wouldn’t be a dream.

It had to be a dream. A nightmare. Something new to replace the terror of replaying Andrew’s near death over and over again. Catharsis. Her psyche spewing out the stress of the past weeks, like it did after controlled burnout. That was all it was.

Ben was not dead. His blood was not on her face, on her body, in her hair. Just like before, just like with Andrew, only this time it wasn’t only blood but pieces of him, and Franklin wouldn’t come and save the day. Ben wouldn’t climb to his feet as a wolf because bullets didn’t remake lives, they ended them.

Gone forever. Game over.

No. Just a dream. Soon, she’d wake up. Wake up.

Wake up, please wake up.

Julio made another noise—a groggy sound that was almost a word this time—and a scream crawled its way into her throat, scratched and clawed until it burst free in one pained cry that raked across her nerves.

This was it. This was what it felt like to break.

“Kat.” Julio coughed and whispered her name again.

Her irrational need for him to stay asleep vanished, swallowed whole by the desperate need to not be alone in her nightmare. “You need to wake up, Julio. It’s important. It’s really important, okay?”

He raised his head, but his eyes were glazed and unfocused. “Where are we?”

“In a garage, I think.” Her lips were dry, but she couldn’t wet them. Not when her face was covered in — Stop it, Kat. Stop it. “I think someone from the cult must have us. You and me and—and Ben.” Her voice broke on the name. “They shot him.”

The words kindled no recognition, but his head snapped up. This time, his gaze focused on the chair beside her.

On Ben.

Julio made a low noise and jerked against the chains as he started to breathe faster. “They want the thing, right? The collar.”

“Yes.” If they had a telepath, they would have plucked the thoughts from her head already. Or maybe they just hadn’t had one strong enough to break through the natural psychic defenses she and Ben had. It didn’t mean they didn’t have a clairvoyant…or a good old-fashioned bug. “They could be listening to us.”

His expression didn’t change. “Did you tell them you don’t know where it is?”

She couldn’t tell if he was lying, confused from the drugs or honestly didn’t know…and there was no way to ask. “Yes. They didn’t believe me.”

His gaze flickered to Ben. “How long was I out?”

“I don’t know.” Shame twisted with horror, made her queasy. “I freaked out, Julio. I’m still freaked out.”

“It’s okay.” He looked around the room for a moment and cocked his head as if listening. The chains shook again as his shoulders flexed. He strained against his bonds, grunting from the effort, then relaxed with a curse. “They must have used magic. These things are solid.”

“I’m handcuffed.” It was inane. Everything she said was inane, everything she thought was inane, but it was the only way to stay calm. To keep from following Julio’s gaze to where Ben sat a foot away.

No, not Ben. Ben’s body.

“Kat, look at me.” His tone brooked no argument. “I can’t break these chains. You have to tell me what’s going on.”

“Okay. Okay.” God, she would have given anything for a wisp of her empathy, for the power to reach out to him, to ground herself in his unshakable strength. “They’ve got someone here who’s blocking me. I can lower my shields, but it doesn’t matter. They’ve got me penned in.”

“We’ll figure that out. But you’ve got to stay with me, okay?”

“I know.” She had to get back to Andrew. If something happened to her, he’d never come back from it.

She dragged in a steadying breath out of habit, and wished she hadn’t. So much blood, and she had to