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23

THE SHADOW

B lack walked into the jump station, and didn’t bother to announce himself. He glanced over the rows of seers and humans, frowned at glimpses of monitors and projections, including some that were augmented reality and depicted in three dimensions.

Next to each of those human-type recordings, a seer sat paired.

He didn’t see Nick, Mika, or Ace.

Good. That meant they were still at the Gorren house.

He knew they’d do a thorough job, but it was still reassuring to know it was being taken care of, and by three of his better agents, especially now that Dalejem was essentially worthless.

Black sent them to Gorren’s to give them options for that night, assuming they were still going forward with the raid on Prometharis. He didn’t like the idea of kidnapping the lead counsel for Rucker Enterprises right out of her own home, but he wanted this thing done, and he would do it, if he had to.

Like Miri said, the girl was more important.

He’d do it to get the implant out of Aura.

But he wanted to know risks, and the collaterals. He wanted to know who else lived in that house with her. He wanted to know if she had kids, a husband, a bunch of yappy dogs. He wanted to know everything about her security system, including cameras.

Nick understood the assignment perfectly.

He’d also seemed more than a little grateful for the job, not like Black was surprised after that shit-show earlier. Nick could hardly be blamed for wanting to put a few miles between himself and the girl, and probably his mate, as well, at least until he’d cooled down, assuming that was even possible at this point.

Whatever Nick thought was going on with Jem, the vampire practically thanked Black for giving him an excuse to leave the building for a few hours.

As Black scanned through faces, he didn’t see Dalejem in there, either.

Good, he thought again. That better mean the seer had gone to see Miri. Jem turned off his damned comms after he first left the room, likely to avoid him, Black, but also possibly his mate. That, or Jem had tranq’d and kidnapped Nick, taken them both on the run, and now they had a whole other nightmare on their hands.

That last thought was mostly dark humor.

Mostly.

Gaos, it better be.

The main thing that made it unlikely was that, mated or not, Nick was still a vampire and still stronger than Jem. The only way Jem could kidnap Nick was if he managed to hit him with a dart full of that special vampire horse-tranquilizer, then smuggle him down the elevators without anyone noticing, then lock Nick into a cage strong enough to restrain a vampire before Nick woke up. Which, incidentally, would happen in about twenty minutes, no matter how big of a dose Nick was given.

You couldn’t just pump that drug into vampires over and over again, either.

You had to wait a good hour before a dose worked on them again.

All of which meant Jem kidnapping Nick was unlikely in the extreme, and not only because Nick weighed a friggin’ ton. Like all vampires, his bones weighed as if they were made of steel and cement.

Black focused on the monitors and exhaled.

The problems and delays around the op that night seemed to be mounting.

He’d really wanted both Nick and Jem with him when they entered Prometharis that night. Now it looked like they were going with a scaled-down team. Black’s seers managed to work out that Prometharis had scientific crews working on staggered, twenty-four hour shifts at the research building on Oyster Point, so that was something, at least.

It was also the reason Black had Nick looking into possibly kidnapping Gorren out of her house wearing a bathrobe and her fuzzy slippers.

Black grunted, unable to not find humor in the image.

He cleared his throat when no one had looked up, despite how long he’d been standing there. He pinged the seers with his aleimi when he realized they all wore headphones.

About half the people sitting there looked over sharply.

The humans, seeing the seers turn, followed their eyes.

“Anything?” Black asked, once they were all looking at him.

He had them looking for the shooter, since they were pretty much ready to go for the Prometharis thing that night. Black needed something, anything to go on, in order to track him.

Right now, he had diddly-squat.

Worse, the best infiltrator he had was in the midst of a dugra a’ kitre nervous breakdown. Despite what he’d told Jem, Black absolutely didn’t want Jem to quit. It wasn’t until now, when the older seer decided to become fucking useless for the indeterminate future, that Black realized just how much he’d grown to depend on him.

Dex cleared his throat, drawing Black’s eyes.

“We’ve got something on the surveillance at Rucker’s house,” Dex said. “It looks like his security team missed it.”

Black walked over to where Dex and Rafe sat as a paired team.

He looked at Rafe, then back at Dex. “When?”

“Three days ago, boss,” Dex said.

Rafe chimed in. “I’m not surprised they missed it. It’s a fucking miracle Dexter noticed the nighttime one, just with his eyes. But we were able to find a second incident during the day after we nailed down that first one.”

The green flecks in Rafe’s dark-brown eyes shone in the overhead lights.

“Dex was the first one to notice anything,” Rafe said, a little proudly, maybe because Dex was his partner. “Even with four of us looking at the same tapes, he saw the flicker in a night camera, something the rest of us dismissed as an insect or a flash of light. Then Sully glimpsed a light shadow in the backyard cams, not far from the pool. We did time jumps to verify both, then looked for other angles and managed to piece together their rough movements. Someone was definitely watching the house, boss. At least a few days. Whoever it was, they were shielded tight as a drum. That’s why it didn’t come up in the original scans or time jumps. I only found them through secondary sources.”

Rafe let out a faint laugh, glancing at Dex, who grunted back at him.

“Mostly by the reactions of birds,” Rafe said, looking back at Black. “And a few other animals in the garden. We tried to get a camera angle on the intruder, but no luck. They definitely did surveillance prior to getting that close. They knew how to avoid every camera, even the hidden ones. The dogs didn’t bark, either.”

“Seer?” Black asked.

Rafe shrugged. “That, or the dogs already knew them.”

“I meant with the aleimi,” Black clarified.

“Well, we thought they might have had the implant,” Rafe hazarded. “We were holding off on calling their race until we knew for sure.”

A.J. added sourly, from a nearby station, “None of the seers want to call it, but the dog thing definitely makes me think seer. If the dogs knew whoever it was, at least one of them would go up to the person, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t ignore them entirely. And a dog’d bark at a vampire. I remember Nick saying that once.”

“Panther adores Nick,” Sully pointed out.

“Nick’s a freak,” Javier said. “A.J. meant normal vampires.”

A few people in the bullpen chuckled.

“One of them came during the day,” Alisha said, from another desk, her eyes still fixed on her own screen. “So probably not a vampire.”

“It could be one of Rucker’s people.” Dex looked up at Black. “Or they could have drugged the dogs. We need to know more about that tech, boss. Otherwise we’re just speculating. We don’t even know if it was the same person both times.”

Black scowled.

He appreciated the team’s thoroughness, but he got why A.J. was annoyed, too. It was probably a seer, but they couldn’t call it with the same certainty they would have a week ago. It all came back to those damned implants. Holo was looking at the one they’d brought back from Rucker’s place, but Holo had been waiting for Jem, and now Jem was bloody useless for that, too. Fucking unbelievable.

Kiessa, a female seer who now went by “Vixen” for some inexplicable reason, looked over at Black from her own console.

“We went through all the known contractors for a professional hit, boss,” she said, matter-of-fact. “That excludes a lot of people, of course, including probably half of Archangel, but we’ve managed to account for the whereabouts of the rest. Like you asked, we took a closer look at anyone on record who could’ve conceivably made a shot like that.”

“You mean humans,” Black clarified.

“Yes,” Vixen affirmed.

“None of them could have done it?”

“No one on record, sir,” Vixen repeated.

As if they’d coordinated this, Rafe jumped in.

“We’d like to start running scenarios for tonight,” he added. “Unless there’s something else you want us doing to find the shooter?”

Heads nodded around the room.

Black grunted, not without a tinge of dark humor.

It was funny almost, how much easier a lot of the humans on his team found it to pair with seers these days. He knew the Old World seers had done what they could to make that easier for them. They dressed more human now, wore their hair human, spoke English most of the time, and even other human languages. A number of seers, like Vixen, also changed their names to sound less alien to the humans here. It wasn’t only Kiessa, although her name change might be one of the strangest.

Rafe’s seer name had been Wurai.

Sutech now called himself “Sully.”

Zairei now called himself “Zach.”

Black hadn’t ordered them to do that. Really, he hadn’t even mentioned it as a suggestion. It was something they’d all decided to do on their own. More of the seers on his infiltration team were wearing contact lenses around their human counterparts, too.

Rafe was one of those who didn’t bother, but his eyes were less dramatic compared to a lot of seers. They didn’t freak humans out like Zach’s, for example, who had two different colored eyes, one silver and the other pale blue, each dramatic and inhuman on their own. Or Sully’s, which were bright sunset colors, and didn’t look human, either.

Black appreciated them making the effort.

At the same time, he hoped it was only a transitional thing.

The contact lenses, in particular, were fucking irritating.

“Let me see it first,” he said to Rafe. “I want to see the shadow.”

The seer nodded obligingly and connected him to the digital video of one of the sightings. He then added the Barrier recordings he’d made during one of his jumps, so that the layers overlapped, and Black could see both.

They showed him the nighttime one first.

Probably because he knew to look for it, Black saw it right off; he picked up the shadow even in the raw recording, which had to be where Dex first noticed it. Black studied the strange aleimic signature connected to the being standing there. He immediately saw what Rafe and the other seers were talking about.

The light there had been completely snuffed out.

It was shielded to the point of being nearly invisible.

The Barrier recording showed where birds startled out of the shadow’s way, mice and voles avoided its footsteps, a squirrel hung upside down from a tree, flicking its tail and staring right at where the shadow was. Bees flew around it, as did butterflies, dragonflies, another cluster of birds, while a cloud of gnats swarmed closer, intrigued.

When Rafe paused the frame, the outline of the shadow grew even more stark.

Still, that lack of aleimic footprint was even more jarring.

Only a astoundingly talented seer could have gone that dark.

If Black’s eyes couldn’t make out the human-shaped shadow caught on the tree and ground, or see a hint of its fingers as they wrapped around the trunk, he might have thought it was a stone statue, or a trick of the light.

Black couldn’t have done that, not even while he was Dragon.

He couldn’t have shielded that completely.

Which was the exact reason for everyone’s hesitancy.

If it was a seer, the individual was formidable.

But the very fact of how formidable made Black question whether it was a human with an implant, instead. After all, wasn’t that the more likely scenario? Just how many unknown seers were kicking around who’d been trained to Adhipan-like levels of skill?

Watching the recording play through a few times, Black felt his jaw harden.

He agreed with Dex, Rafe, and the rest of the team. While he leaned strongly towards seer, it was too close to call for absolute certain.

Which was infuriating.

“What about Rucker’s files?” he asked, glancing around the room. “Has anyone found the specs anywhere on those? For the implants, I mean?”

“Not yet,” Vixen said, a little sourly. She exchanged a look with Rafe, and then with Javier. “We were kind of waiting for Jem to help us with that. Any word on when he’ll be joining us? He’s the best tech guy we’ve got.”

Black grunted at that, noncommittal.

Even so, he felt his teeth grind until they hurt.