Page 4 of Cast in Shadow (Drenched in Darkness #1)

4

I ran along the sidewalks and through alleys until my lungs burned and my legs ached, but it did nothing to rid me of Emerson’s presence surrounding me. No matter how much some damaged part of me still wanted him in my life—damaged and fatally stupid, apparently—nothing between us had changed.

I’d already fooled myself into believing I could read him once. That wasn’t a mistake I would make again.

I slowed to a walk, sucking in stinging breaths but still not ready to stop moving. The swell of the ribbon was waning, swirling and curling out of my part of the world and into the next.

It would be back. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. It never stayed away for long. In the meantime, I had work to do. Starting with questioning my team on how we’d managed to miss Megan’s latest acquisition of power. If I could find out more about the coven she’d murdered, maybe then I could figure out her endgame .

I stopped for a second, pulling my earpiece from my jacket pocket and slipping it into my ear. When I tapped the button, it crackled to life. “Dennis, you there?”

“At your service, boss. How’d it go? Is the Wicked Witch of?—”

“We missed something,” I said, cutting him off. I had too much on my mind, and I definitely wasn’t in the mood for a cheery exchange with my comms operator. “I’m on my way in. Round up Nguyen and Shayla. I need you all in the conference room when I get there.”

“Shit. You okay? Do I need to send?—”

“I’m fine.” Angry and confused, but still breathing. In my book, that counted as fine.

There was silence on the other end of the line for a few beats. “What do you need?”

“Just get the others. I’ll be there shortly.” I disconnected and checked up and down the quiet street.

This wasn’t a part of the city where taxis were a frequent sight at night, but there were certain perks that came with living in the modern age with a fortune at my disposal. I pulled out my phone, honestly a little shocked that Emerson hadn’t taken it, and pulled up the exclusive black label ride-hailing app. In five minutes, I was sinking into the plush leather seat of a late-model Audi with windows tinted as dark as night and a driver who knew the rules.

He was clean cut, dressed in a dark business suit, and he didn’t bother with the typical chatter that so many rideshare drivers were prone to. That was part of the service with the black label business. No muss, no fuss, and no questions.

I had him drop me four blocks from the historic hotel I’d remodeled into Lexa’s headquarters. Standard practice was to park in the structure down the block from the hotel and take the secure underground tunnel straight to headquarters. Now that Emerson knew I was alive and well, I took a more circuitous route, just to be safe.

The hotel was a genuine business. High end, complete with luxury suites, three rooftop pools situated at different levels, a top-notch staff, and a healthy bottom line. Because of the clientele we attracted, it didn’t raise any eyebrows that our security was better than what you’d find in some banks. Which made it the perfect cover for the covert supernatural organization located beneath it.

I stood in front of the private entrance—a beat-up, rust-spotted steel door tucked away in a blind alley—and glared up at the security camera until a small green light flickered next to the lens. A half-second later, the lock clicked, and I went in.

There was a comm system with voice recognition tied to the camera, but Mimi, the AI running the facial recognition, rarely needed that added layer of security. The exception was when agents came limping in with gashes and rapidly swelling bruises that marred their features, not to mention a broken nose or jaw. Those made things a little tougher for her.

Dennis and the others were waiting for me when I stalked into the well-lit conference room. I gave them a perfunctory nod and shucked my jacket, draping it over the back of the nearest empty chair.

“You look like you’ve had a shit night,” Nguyen said, looking a little worse for wear himself.

My second-in-command was built like a mountain, as was the case with most bear shifters, but he was big even amongst that small circle. With his dark eyes and a brutish jaw, he wore intimidation like a second skin.

“You could say that,” I offered. “Did you get any sleep?”

He waved me off, so I politely ignored the dark circles under his normally sharp brown eyes and the fact that his oversized black coffee mug—emblazoned with the words “Have a nice day” in bold white letters on the side and an image of a hand with just the middle finger raised on the bottom—was already almost empty. Everyone knew he was in a mood when he pulled out that mug.

I glanced over at Shayla, his polar opposite, who was buzzing like she was on a three-day meth bender. “You okay, Shay?”

She nodded quickly, her dark blonde ponytail bobbing as she paced in front of the smartboard. “I’ve been testing a new batch of stimulants. This one seems promising.”

Sure, if you ignored the fact that she was talking so fast I could barely understand her. I bet if I looked closely at her pupils, they would be little more than pinpricks. “Take a breath, Shay. And maybe try to slow down a bit.”

Another rapid bob of her head. “I might need to tweak the dosage.”

No shit. I pressed my lips into a flat line to keep from saying what I was thinking aloud. Shay was a unique creature. Human, at least as far as most people could tell, but her magical aura had a fine opalescent shimmer unlike anything I’d ever seen. And she was able to heal more quickly than anyone I’d ever met, including me.

That last part was the only reason I wasn’t concerned with her testing her concoctions on herself.

Okay, I wasn’t too concerned about it. We might not share DNA, but she became family the moment she walked into my life five years earlier. I couldn’t help worrying.

I could have put a stop to her experiments, but we reached an agreement about a year earlier. As long as she was careful and only tested her concoctions inside Lexa, where our med team could jump in if anything went wrong, I would stay out of the way as much as I could.

It was paying off, because she’d already come up with a couple of elixirs that had helped the teams immensely.

“I ran into a problem with the Navali case,” I said, dropping into the black, high-backed leather chair and swiveling to kick my boots up on the table.

Dennis left an empty chair between us along the curved oak conference table as he took a seat. He was only a couple of years older than Shay, a little under six feet tall, and the kind of lanky I’d come to associate with heavy gamers. “Mimi, show me everything we have on Megan Navali,” he said, projecting his voice.

The smartboard lit up, displaying a series of files as quick as lightning. I’d scoffed at the price of the initial investment for what had seemed like a glorified whiteboard, but that damned thing was worth its weight in gold. Or, you know, whatever was worth more than gold these days.

Maybe Instantanium? Was that a thing?

“You said we missed something?” Dennis asked.

“This is everything we were able to find on her up until yesterday,” Nguyen said. With that, he downed the last of his coffee and got up to pour himself another cup.

“I was under the impression she’s been covenless since the last circle booted her a couple of months ago,” I said, looking back at the board.

“That’s what the intel says.” Shayla stopped pacing long enough to study the screen. “But judging by your tone, the intel is wrong.”

“Or incomplete. I was informed tonight that she found a new coven, stripped their power, and murdered the entire circle about two weeks ago. ”

“Holy shit,” Dennis whispered.

“And she just gave this information up?” Shayla asked.

I hesitated. They needed to know the truth about what happened, but I was still trying to reconcile things in my head. The three of them knew about Emerson because our intelligence team was supposed to be keeping tabs on him. None of them knew our whole sordid history, but there was enough information in the files that they would know what happened tonight was a big deal.

“I ran into Emerson Bradach,” I finally admitted.

They all stared at me like I had a horn growing out of my head.

“ The Emerson?” Dennis asked.

Shayla inched closer, studying me with a hint of concern coloring her hazel eyes.

“The one and only.” I shook my head, still not fully believing it myself, then filled them in on the pertinent details of my failed mission. By the end of it, Shayla had two dozen windows open on the smartboard, researching the dead coven while Dennis and Nguyen worked on their laptops.

“Wait!” I jumped at Shayla’s excited scream. “I’ve got something. Jesus, it’s itty bitty. Just a little blurb in a backwater newspaper.” She expanded the window so it filled the screen.

TWELVE WOMEN DIE FROM CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING AT CHURCH LOCK-IN.

“Well, that’s one way to cover it up,” Nguyen said.

“Their bodies must have looked normal enough to get away with that explanation,” Shayla said with her back still to us. The article was brief, and it only contained images of five of the women. “They listed the names.” She started reading them aloud as the other two typed.

I didn’t bother listening to the roll call because I was trying to pull things together in my own way. Computers and smartboards were necessary investments if we were going to operate in the modern world, but I didn’t have the kind of skill with them that the others did. Having me jump in on the search would just be duplicating their efforts, only a lot slower.

What I could do was read the energy in the room. I could feel the flow and pulse of their respective magic, and at least one thing I knew for sure was that none of my closest people had betrayed me.

A little of the tension in my chest eased with the knowledge, but the question of how no one on my team had been alerted to Emerson’s presence still lingered. “Do we have any idea how Emerson ended up in Brynworth without tripping any alarms?”

The click of laptop keys stalled, and they all looked at me again. “The last update I received was that he was in Italy tracking a wraith. That was three weeks ago,” Nguyen offered.

I couldn’t be too upset, could I? Sometimes we would go months without getting a ping on that particular member of the Brethren, but something about it still didn’t feel right.

“What about Megan?” Dennis asked. “Do you know what happened to her after everything?”

“I never circled back to the festival. Things were already dying down by the time I got away from him, but whatever she set out to do tonight, I’m sure she got it done.” I turned to Nguyen. “Speaking of which, my Jeep is still out there. Send out whoever is on watch to pick it up.”

He offered me a quick nod.

“Did he follow you?” Shayla asked, coming around the table and perching herself on the edge by me.

“I don’t think so, but I took extra precautions to be safe.”

“Are you okay?” She reached out and brushed a strand of dark hair out of my face. “Like, really okay?”

Was she worried about me? I was the one who was supposed to do the worrying between us. Especially when her pale skin was peeking through the knees of her torn white jeans and her light pink t-shirt with a faded Jolly Roger on the front hung a little too loose on her shoulders.

I opened my mouth to ask if she’d been forgetting to eat again but closed it before the question slipped out. That was a conversation we could have in private. So, I just nodded. She knew more about my connection to Emerson than anyone, but not the whole truth.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I lied.

“Was he surprised to see you?” she asked.

Was he? I replayed the night again in my head. “Maybe a little.”

“Then it probably wasn’t an ambush,” Dennis offered, as if that made it any easier.

“Either way, he knows I’m here.” I closed my eyes and leaned my head back. “And that I’m part of Lexa.”

Fucking Emerson Bradach. I should have known I’d never truly escape him.

If I’d lived a normal human life, maybe I could have avoided him. But my magic had changed, and one of those changes was a very slow aging process. The longer I lived, the more inevitable our reunion became. Especially since Emerson had the benefit of being immortal. He and the Brethren were truly unkillable. They could be beheaded, dismembered, burned to ash, and they would come back. It took time, sure, but they were a constant in the universe.

Eternal.

I let my feet fall from the edge of the table as another thought slipped through my frustration. “He said something else.” I stood and headed for the smartboard.

Knowing I was part of Lexa meant Emerson might try to use me to take down the organization, and from the way he’d sounded—trying to warn me off—taking us down was already on the Brethren’s to-do list.

“He thinks one of the Brethren was forced back to the Alius,” I said, cutting through my own worries to focus on the thing that had pulled me to my feet. “Mimi, show me everything you have on Theloneus Cahill of the Brethren.”

The open windows on the board shrank and a new column of files started populating. Internal reports, news articles, and police reports popped into view, along with scans of ancient texts that were undoubtedly taken without the permission of the countries and museums housing them.

Shay sidled up beside me, humming with stimulant-induced energy. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

Oh, it was, but breaking through the veil required more power than most covens could muster on their best night. “It sounds like someone found a way,” I said, ignoring the sharp twinge in my chest when my brain processed what that really meant.

No. I refused to believe my heart was this stupid. Or was it masochistic?

I left Emerson because he betrayed me. Because he said I was nothing to him. And because he didn’t so much as blink when he told his best friend he would take me out. It shouldn’t matter one iota if he disappeared from my world.

The hollow reassurance did nothing to ease that pinprick of pain. But why? Emerson and I had been over for generations. I had no reason to hurt at the prospect of losing someone who hadn’t been part of my life for so long.

An internal report from the Brethren flashed on the screen. “Mimi, stop. Expand the last file.”

I read the report in silence, barely hearing the hushed conversation between Dennis and Nguyen behind me. Each paragraph tightened the vice. My pulse picked up and the rush of blood in my ears grew louder. Whoever had done this hadn’t just framed Lexa, they’d set me up. My name wasn’t on the report, but it might as well have been.

I was still reading, glaring at the screen, when a cacophony of crashing equipment and yelling sliced through my focus, and I wheeled around to see one of my agents running down the hall, covered in blood.