Alec took the phone gingerly. It was the exact same model Kat had purchased for him at the beginning of the year, after she’d proclaimed them both woefully out of date and behind the times. Jackson had adapted to his just fine. Alec had gotten a week’s worth of silent treatment from Kat for trading his back in for a phone that didn’t try to load up the internet or play music every time he wanted to make a call.
He’d hated the thing, but he had to admit it had its uses as he studied the picture. A young man, probably midtwenties, smiled back at him. Dark hair, dark eyes, nothing remarkable about his face aside from a tiny bump in his nose. Probably a shapeshifter, unless Kat had broken her habit from the last five dates. If he was a shapeshifter, he didn’t come from any of the prominent families. “What’s his name?”
“Christopher Gilbert.” Jackson hesitated. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Everything I could dig up on him is too neat. There aren’t any holes. Like someone sat down and came up with his story all at once.”
“Kat would have run his info…..” Alec sighed. “But she wouldn’t notice that. Damn. You should be the one to tell her.”
Jackson tapped his knuckles against the passenger window. “Yeah, I’ll handle it.”
Still pissy. Alec scrubbed his hand against the side of his face and forced himself to apologize. Kind of. “Sorry, man. It’s been a shit day. Kat showed up while me’n Andrew were still at the dojo.”
“That couldn’t have been pleasant.”
“I keep hoping I’ll turn around and she’ll be over it. So far…..”
“She’s doing the best she can.” Jackson flashed him a knowing look. “And, from the looks of it, so is Andrew.”
Great. The supernatural gossip mill was operating at full speed. The fact that Andrew’s best friend was married to Jackson’s best friend didn’t help matters. “You got an earful from Nicole on the subject, I’m guessing?”
“She says you’re being insufferable again, and someone should smack you for it.”
“According to half the town, that’s pretty much business as usual.”
“You could try to—” Jackson’s words cut off as magic shuddered through the truck. “Someone just set off the wards I laid around Kat’s balcony doors.”
Alec popped his door open. “Take the front. I’ll circle around to the balcony.”
Jackson grinned. “He shouldn’t be too hard to run down.” With those cryptic words, he slid out of the truck and disappeared.
Once Alec rounded the side of the building and got a good look at the courtyard under Kat’s window, he figured out what Jackson had meant. A tall blond man lay huddled on the grass a few feet away from one of the downstairs neighbor’s plastic chairs. Whatever spell Jackson had twisted into the wards had clearly triggered as soon as the man had gotten his hands on the railing.
Fear spell. Alec had seen it enough times to recognize the aftermath, and it made it easy to drag the man to his feet. He stumbled as if drunk, which would hopefully explain to any onlookers why Alec was dragging him bodily around the yard. It wasn’t late enough for Kat’s apartment complex to be quiet for the night—not on a Friday—so Alec hauled his captive around to the parking lot to meet Jackson. “Upstairs or into the truck?”
“Depends. Are you going to knock him around?”
“He punched Kat in the f**king face.”
“Point taken.” Jackson reached for the stumbling man. “Load him up in the cab, and we’ll head to your place. I can keep him unconscious until we get there.”
At least there wouldn’t be any argument about whether or not the man deserved a good punch or two. Maybe it would teach him to keep his fists off of women.
And if it didn’t, he wouldn’t get a second chance to hurt any of Alec’s people.
Carmen managed not to drop her dinner as she wrestled her keys from her pocket and got the correct one in the lock on the front door. As soon as she did, the door swung open, and Lily reached for the tipping pizza box. “I heard there was trouble at the clinic. How bad?”
“Bad enough to call Franklin.” She dropped her keys and bag on the polished table in the entryway. “Did he come by?”
“After you called him off, yeah. He’s in the kitchen, making margaritas.” As if on cue, the soft whir of the blender drifted from the other room. “What happened?”
“A girl and her date were attacked and roughed up a little. Franklin knows her, apparently. Kat Gabriel?”
The blender stopped. A moment later Franklin appeared in the doorway, his usually mild expression exchanged for a frown. “You didn’t tell me it was Kat. Is everyone all right?”
“She’s fine.” But that wasn’t what Franklin was asking. “So are Tara and I.”
His steely grip on the doorframe eased somewhat. “If Katherine Gabriel comes in, you should always call me. And get her into a shielded room as fast as you can.”
“I know. She gave me her history.” History. The word seemed too innocuous to refer to the sort of death and psychic destruction Kat had mentioned.
Franklin seemed to echo her thought. “Words don’t quite do it justice. I was there, in the aftermath. A Conclave strike team tore open a man’s abdomen, and she attacked them. They were catatonic when I arrived.”
Carmen dropped to the sofa. It was an extreme response, one born of fear, and that’s exactly what Kat would have conveyed to the attackers—fear. Gut-wrenching, mind-numbing terror. “She said she killed them.”
“No. Someone else did that, once we realized what we were dealing with. I saw it happen once before, in the eighties…..” He shuddered. “They made the mistake of keeping the guy alive. Trying to heal him. Three weeks later a psychic finally broke through and figured out he’d been reliving that one moment of terror on an endless loop. There’s no coming back from it.”
Lily touched his arm on her way into the kitchen. “Shouldn’t she be getting help or training or something?”
Carmen frowned at the toes of her sneakers. “Alec said she had. Callum Tyler, the hotshot English empath, took on her case.”
Both of Franklin’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “Alec Jacobson stopped to chat? Did you have to tranq him?”
“Come on, Franklin. Give me a little credit.” She fixed him with her best stern glare. “That reminds me, why were you talking to him about me?”
“Because working with him helps me keep the clinic neutral. I can’t do it by ignoring all of the politics, no matter how much I want to.”
It was such a sensible reason that Carmen felt terrible for overreacting. “Sorry. I just got the feeling he thought I shouldn’t be there.”
“It’s not entirely personal. We had a little scuffle a few months ago when some lions immigrated here and brought a mercenary hit squad with them. The Conclave’s feeling defensive, and….. Well, trust me when I say that’s not a good thing for anyone.”
“Because of my family.” And the empty Conclave seat.
“Because of your family,” Franklin agreed. “But that doesn’t mean Jake’s got a problem with you. He knows a little something about having family members trying to claw their way into power.”
The name made her sit straighter. “Jake? Alec Jacobson is the army buddy you talk about?”
“I never told you that?”
“No.” Though there was no reason he should have. Carmen wasn’t interested in wolf politics, and she wouldn’t be interested in Alec if they’d met under more mundane circumstances.
Yeah, tell yourself that, honey. She’d be interested, if only because he was attractive and commanding. It was a deadly combination, one that had never failed to ignite an intense, primal reaction inside her, no matter how much she tried to deny it.
Lily walked out of the kitchen with a plate of pizza and an open bottle of beer. She put both on the coffee table in front of Carmen and stared at her.
Carmen took a gulp of her beer, then another. Finally, she sighed. “What?”
“Nothing.” Lily’s gaze shifted to Franklin in a barely perceptible glance. “Is the girl all right? What happened to her attacker?”
“Kat will be okay. And I guess Jacobson was going after the guy who did it.”
Franklin hooked his arm over Lily’s shoulders and tugged her against his side. “Jake’ll take care of it, but we should follow up with Katherine. Just to make sure she’s doing okay mentally and physically.”
It was community medicine at its finest, and exactly why she’d chosen to work with him. Carmen nodded. “I’ve got it covered, unless you’d rather take it.”
“Better if you do. There’s a lot she might not tell me.” Franklin hesitated, and tense pain spiked strongly enough for Carmen to sense it from across the room as he continued in a quieter voice. “Kat and Sera were close.”
Carmen ached for him. His daughter was barely twenty-one, right around Miguel’s age, but she’d dropped out of high school and run off just before her eighteenth birthday to marry another coyote, an older man. Franklin had to physically restrain himself from hauling her back home, maintaining a fragile sort of peace, but at least this garnered him monthly phone calls about her well-being.
The pain rolling off Franklin didn’t subside, and Carmen closed her eyes against it, drawing slow, even breaths as she blocked it. “Kat was comfortable with me. She seems like a nice kid.”
“Kid,” Franklin agreed quietly. “She used to be a nice kid. Even though she was older than Sera, she was always…..young. But shit, she grew up fast this year. Life made her grow up.”
He still missed Sera. Lily closed her hand around Franklin’s in quiet comfort, and Carmen looked away.
After a minute of silence, Lily spoke. “Your dad called again, Carmen. From a local number, not his cell. Is he in town?”