Page 8 of Snag (Conduit #2)

I always suspected it was the same reason that made me near impossible to track via tech. The same reason Rought was unable to find me, no matter the years he spent searching across his own screens and keyboards.

“I know,” I murmur soothingly. To Coda. I’m still not managing to keep my own whirling mind from perpetually hovering at the edge of what feels like unhinged chaos.

Back turned and still ignoring me in favor of the monitors, Coda huffs belligerently.

“Thank you for coming.” Following a whisper of a knowing, or maybe it’s just my subconscious stepping in to defuse the tension, I gently lay my hands on Coda’s shoulders. “Thank you for being here for me when I needed you, but didn’t know how to ask you for something so … personal.”

Coda shudders under the touch of my energy, and the tech awry’s fingers fall still on the keyboard. It’s rare that I touch anyone without invitation, and Coda might honestly be touch-phobic. But they don’t flinch away from me, so I maintain the contact.

Their head drops forward, hair falling all around their sharp-edged jaw.

“I should have come sooner. I’m sorry. I …

I knew something was wrong, and I didn’t even …

ask. I felt it, under my fingers, in my mind …

not a disturbance but a shift in the fundamental energy that …

” Coda trails off, but out of reluctance to continue rather than confusion or a lack of understanding.

“I wasn’t ready then.” I level my gaze on the glitching screens arrayed on the three walls surrounding us.

“Tell me what you need of me,” Coda says hoarsely, almost pleading.

And for a moment, it sounds like more than a simple request.

It sounds like … prayer.

I push that sense away. I want to be Zaya with Coda. Not the Conduit. Not some goddess to be worshiped. “Find me the dire mage. Chains called her Bellamy.”

Energy shifts under my hands, spreading across Coda’s shoulders.

The tech awry shudders again, fingers twitching.

The screens before us blink awake. Or at least that’s how it appears.

Coda lurches forward, excited and instantly focused.

My hands fall to my sides.

The energy of the intersection point settles into a quiet hum under my feet.

It’s difficult to distinguish between that endless reservoir of power and my own essence while I’m on the property — or perhaps those two energies are now so enmeshed that I can’t feel the difference without reaching for it.

Either way, I didn’t realize it was so agitated before.

Perhaps Coda, being awry, needed a more formal invitation onto the estate.

“Give me a starting point,” Coda mutters, already pulling various feeds up on their screens.

A wall of text is scrolling over another.

Some sort of coding, maybe. “I got rough highlights from Rought about your last twenty-four hours, and I’ve got the tracking off your phone.

” Coda casts a narrow-eyed look at me over their shoulder.

“You know, keeping the fucking phone on you would be way more helpful.”

“For stalking purposes?” Rought mutters from behind us.

“For cleaning up your fucking messes,” Coda snaps, focusing back on the multitude of screens.

“A beauty salon in town. In Newport, I think,” I say, ignoring the minor pissing contest taking place between the two techs. “Yesterday afternoon at best guess. Cayley’s family owns the chain. The … um …”

“The Nail Bar,” Rought says. “On First Street.”

Before the shifter even finishes speaking, Coda’s screens are already flashing through what appear to be vid feeds along with multiple social media profiles.

“Kitsune,” Coda mutters, flicking their eyes behind their blue-tinted glasses over various screens as if they’ve pulled Cay’s background up somewhere, though I don’t see it.

It’s also possible the tech is simply recalling the info.

“Cayley Harvey, sister of Kiki. Both interconnected with your timeline, Zaya. About eighteen months ago, when you rescued Kiki and the other teens from the shifter-trafficking ring in Tokyo.”

Rought’s arm jerks, as if he’s just stopped himself from grabbing for me. “That was you? You’re that fixer?”

Coda cackles. “The universe has a sense of humor when Zaya is involved.”

“I’m not laughing,” Rought snaps.

Coda shrugs one shoulder, eyes still glued to the monitors. “That’s a choice.”

Rought’s gaze is heavy on me. “I tried to pick up the kids and Cay from the airport, but fucking Reck got there before me, flashed his badge, carted them off. Were you … were you on that plane?”

The real question he’s hesitant to ask is: Was his older brother hiding the fact that I was alive from him?

“No,” I say. “I was … otherwise occupied.”

“Dead, she means,” Coda interjects unhelpfully. “Fell right off the fucking grid. Took me three days to find her. And only then because Muta got a little feisty at the morgue.” The tech cackles.

At the mention of the enraged death god trapped in the body of a snake, the gold-and-brown-topaz bracelet on my right arm gets slightly heavier.

“Muta’s still pissed about being curtailed,” I mutter.

“In defense of me, of course.” That last bit is sarcastic and aimed at the sulky bushmaster.

Because though the care and feeding of Muta has been passed down through my family for generations, he neither likes nor dislikes his minders.

Still, my waking in the middle of my own autopsy did seem to be what set him off that particular time.

Thankfully, when Coda and I are working together, the tech always has a line on mage-brewed antivenom, so no one died at the morgue. Not that it always works. Muta is rather powerful, and I was too incapacitated to get him under my control quickly.

“Perfectly understandable.” Rought’s voice rumbles through his chest. He’s crossed his arms, presumably because he wants to be doing something else with his hands.

I can literally see all the questions flitting through his mind in his sharp gaze.

Then he inhales deeply and lets those questions and concerns all drop away.

Because we’re living in the now , he and I. If only for today.

I, rather sappily, just grin at him .

An answering self-deprecating grin eases the remainder of the tension threaded around Rought, around us. “Why do you think the dire mage was at the nail salon, Zaya?”

“Something Kris said to Precious. Doc Z’s sister,” I add for Coda, just in case. “Last night after I picked the three of them up at the warehouse rave but before I brought them to the Outcast clubhouse.”

“Rave …” Coda murmurs, adding in the keyboard on the left and amazingly adept on it with only one hand. “I need access to your security, AD. Unless you just want me to crack it.”

In a blink, I can suddenly see cobweb-thin threads of essence twisting around both the tech’s hands, flowing through their fingers into the keyboard and its built-in trackpads.

Rought steps forward, leaning over the right-hand section of Coda’s main keyboard to pull up some sort of scrolling script on the monitor directly in front of him.

Coda grunts, pissed but keeping otherwise quiet about the intrusion.

“The clubhouse feeds are fried from last night, but here’s access to all the backups,” Rought says.

The threads twined around Coda’s hands feather outward to the keys Rought is touching. The gryphon shifter steps back, flicking his fingers as if he feels the touch of that essence.

I blink again, clearing my sight.

Rought steps to my side, brushing his hand against mine. I want to lean against his shoulder, to sink into him, to use him to anchor me.

I don’t.

I focus instead on the puzzle— and on the threat right before me. Working through that will hopefully give my system, my mind, the time I need to adjust to my now .

I’m not just the Conduit at least a hundred years before my time. I’m not just the holder and protector of one of only seven intersection points. I’ve been stripped of bonds I never knew existed for me. Soul-bound mates, who were supposed to —

I shove that unhelpful thought away. ‘Supposed to’ is as useless to me as ‘should’ and ‘should have.’

“Kris said she got a reading yesterday at the nail salon from a purple-eyed seer,” I say, clearing my throat and forcing my focus. “That reading prompted Kris to get Presh to the rave. Away from the protections I assume surround the main pack house.”

“You assume correctly,” Rought mutters under his breath.

Coda snorts derisively. “An awry seer? Hanging out at a nail salon on the edge of the wilds of Cascadia?”

“It’s pack territory,” Rought says, just a little irritated.

“Exactly.” Coda sniffs snobbishly.

“I also did the security on the salon …” Rought steps closer to Coda. “I can —”

Coda holds up their hand. “I’ve got it. You just gave me access to everything you’ve ever constructed, shifter.” The tech snickers derisively. “Should have thought twice before touching my tech.”

Rought shrugs. “Whatever Zaya needs.”

I expect another pissy rebuttal from Coda, but none is forthcoming.

Multiple feeds appear across the top center screens. An exterior shot of the Nail Bar, which appears to be closed. Plus two interior angles showing the salon and a small office. Both are also empty.

The windows and glass door of the salon have been boarded up.

“Break-in?” Coda asks. “This is the live feed.”

“Rath,” Rought says, sliding his gaze to me questioningly.

Rath? He means the celestial dragon. And he’s not certain how much I want Coda to know. “That was him? All the glass blowing out?”

All that glass shattered all over the streets as we fled the clubhouse with Chains and two berserkers on our heels.

From all the windows facing those couple of blocks of Newport.

Shattered by a single roar from a pissed-off celestial dragon.

Likely essence-enhanced, though I don’t remember feeling a specific push or tenor of essence at the time.