“Now, now, children, please stop fighting, at least until after we finish eating.” He gave them a mock exasperated sigh. “By the way, thanks for inviting me, Lizzie,” he said as he sat opposite from Jacob.
The redhead parked her hip on the side of her desk and pulled a lollipop from her front shirt pocket. “I had an ulterior motive inviting you here.” She unwrapped the sucker and popped it into her mouth.
“Really?”
“When you arrived here, I immediately started looking into your background. And you know what I found?”
Now, this was interesting. “What did you find?”
“Absolutely nothing.” She pulled the lollipop from her mouth and waved it around. “Zip. Zilch. Nada. Everyone these days leaves some kind of digital trace. You seem to be a ghost. Now”—she leaned down and poked him in the chest—“how is that possible?”
“Perhaps you’re not as good as you think you are,” he challenged.
“Uh-oh.” Jacob shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that. Now she won’t stop.”
Lizzie ignored her brother. “Of course I’m good. I’m the best. Even without my powers.”
Of course, she was a hybrid too, like her brother. “What are you going to do to me, then? Set my hair on fire?”
“Puh-lease.” She waved a hand dismissively. “As if I were so pedestrian.”
“Hey!” Jacob protested.
“Admit it, runt, my powers are much more elegant.”
“Talking to computers isn’t as cool as this.” Jacob snapped his fingers, and a small flame shot up from his hand. “What are you gonna do when someone attacks you? Throw a hard drive at them?”
“Wait a minute.” His gaze ping-ponged from one sibling to another. “What do you mean talk to computers?” Now his curiosity was piqued.
“She talks to them and tells them what to do,” Jacob offered. “And they talk back to her.”
“But isn’t that what a computer essentially does? Communicate?”
“Oh, you poor thing.” Lizzie sighed. “Anyone can use a keyboard or mouse or touchpad to tell a computer what commands to execute. What I do is so much more than that.” She made a grab at Jacob and swiped the phone from his hand. Ignoring his protests, she held it up and closed her eyes. A moment later, she let go of the device as if it was on fire. “Ew, gross! You’re disgusting, Jacob. I can’t believe you would watch that! What would Mom say?”
“Ha!” He picked up the phone from the floor and slipped it into the back pocket of his jeans, then fished out another phone from the inside of his jacket. “That was my dummy phone for when you try to snoop into my business. Do you think I’m an amateur? That I haven’t learned to keep a fake phone growing up around a technopath?”
A technopath. He’d never heard of such a power. Of course, he didn’t know many others who had powers, for that matter. “So, you can communicate with any computer and tell it what to do, just by touching it?”
“I don’t even have to be touching it, as long as I was connected to its network,” she said with a smug smile.
Interesting. “So, it must bother you then that you couldn’t find any information on me.”
Lizzie’s pert nose wrinkled. “Yes, but I’m also interested on how you managed to cover your digital tracks.” Wide blue eyes looked at him with manufactured guilelessness that almost made him snort. “If you could tell me, I would be grateful. It’s for you know … research.”
Hmmm, so little miss technopath needed info from me? Maybe he could use this to his advantage. “I could tell you, if you give me something in return.”
“What do you—” Lizzie recoiled, her face turning an alarming shade of red. “You pervert. I’m not going to sleep with you.”
“What the fuck?” Jacob lifted both hands, flames bursting from his fingers. “I told you if you ever tried—”
“Whoa, whoa, mes amis!” It didn’t even occur to him that that was what she would think. “I’m not talking about that.” He shuddered with disgust. Since arriving here, he had come to think of Lizzie as a sister. “I need something else.”
Lizzie placed her hands on her hips. “And what would that be?”
“I want you to help me access the elevator computer so I can get anywhere in the building.”
Jacob plopped himself back on the chair. “Oh, is that all? Why didn’t you say so?”
“Pshaw.” Lizzie waved her hand dismissively. “I can get around that easily. Why do you need access?”
“And why do you really need to know how I covered my tracks?”
She smirked at him. “Fine.” There was a knock on the door, and she yelled, “Come in!”
One of the young Lycan analysts walked in holding two large brown paper bags with “Emerald Dragon” printed on the side. The smell of fried rice, spicy chicken, and fragrant beef wafted in the air. Lizzie took the bags from him. “Thanks, Dan, you’re such a sweetheart.”
Dan blushed furiously. “Anytime, Miss Martin. If you need anything else …”
“I’ll give you call. See ya.”
Effectively dismissed, he left the office. She raised the bags. “Before we get down to business, let’s eat.”
After finishing their massive meal, Lizzie agreed to meet Delacroix by the elevators at seven o’clock that evening. Before going to meet her, he made sure to check that Mika’s car was still in the garage. As he’d observed in the last couple of days, she would usually leave early when he had afternoon training, and she left later in the evening during the time he would man the security booth while their usual guard was on dinner break. Tonight, however, he swapped with Jacob without telling anyone else.
She
