Face Off

CHAPTER 27

A LIGHT DRIZZLE fogged the air as Laura waited for Sinclair. Halfway up the block, two Guild security agents stood in front of Terryn’s apartment building. At the far end of the street, she had spotted a brownie watching the street from a car. As the drizzle turned to rain, she moved into the shelter of the awning over a deli door. Sinclair’s body signature moved up behind her. Laura wore a long raincoat with a hood, but he didn’t need to see her face. He sensed the shape of her essence, something he claimed did not change despite whatever glamour she wore. “Okay, now I’m confused. I thought you would be Mariel, not Laura,” he said.

“I was worried someone might be watching for Mariel. Laura Blackstone isn’t well-known to the Guild investigative branch,” she said.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She watched the street. “I don’t know. Cress agreed not to leave her apartment without Guild permission, and Terryn’s suddenly out of InterSec on leave.”

“What’s that got to do with stuff in my office?”

She leaned into the rain. “I don’t have a good feeling about it. If Terryn still has you off record, then we should keep it that way until he says otherwise, so I removed any trace of you.”

He dropped his voice into a saccharine tone. “You did that for me?”

She glanced at him impatiently. “Why do you read something into everything I do?”

He grinned. “I like to read. So far, you’re a good book.”

Dumbfounded, she stared. “That has to be the most corny pickup line I’ve ever heard. I think I’m in pain here.”

He pouted playfully. “Can we turn the page? I don’t like this chapter.”

She resisted the urge to laugh. “Jono, this is all nuts. They put Genda Boone in charge while Terryn’s on leave.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And, what, you’re pissed it wasn’t you?”

She poked him in the shoulder. “No. I don’t want to be in charge. I’m pissed because Genda has no idea what she’s doing, and that’s a dangerous thing in our line of work.”

“So what are we doing here?”

She turned her attention back to the street. “I have to talk to Terryn or Cress and find out what’s going on. Cress isn’t responding to my sendings.”

Sinclair peered up the sidewalk, rain glistening in his hair and on his face. “I’m getting interference. Probably a shield of some kind.”

“You can sense that far?” she asked.

He smiled. “Is that a conversational question, or are you taking notes?”

She elbowed him gently. “No games. I’m worried. You know leanansidhe are hated. I want to be sure Cress is safe.”

He shook his head. “I can’t sense anything beyond the shield. Why is she under guard?”

Laura followed his gaze up the street. “Because she’s a leanansidhe and an easy target for Rhys to make points. If she hadn’t agreed to the guards, he probably would have gotten the feds to detain her for trumped-up national security reasons.”

“She saved his life at the Archives,” Sinclair said.

“Gratitude isn’t one of his strong points,” Laura said.

A woman stepped out of the building and opened her umbrella. She hesitated when she saw the Guild agents, then walked between them.

“Why don’t we knock on the door and see what happens?” he asked.

She pursed her lips. “Because they might be looking for Mariel Tate to do that. Rhys is intent on discrediting Terryn. If he can take out another member of Terryn’s InterSec team for some bogus reason, he’ll do it. I don’t want to give him an opportunity.”

The woman from Terryn’s building passed them and continued around the corner. Laura took Sinclair’s arm. “Follow me.”

She pulled him along the sidewalk, moving fast enough to catch up to the woman. “You dropped something, miss,” Laura called. The woman turned and looked down. Laura muttered in Gaelic and tossed a pinpoint of essence at her. “Sleep.”

As the woman’s eyelids drooped, Laura grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling.

“What the hell are you doing?” Sinclair asked.

Laura cast furtive looks in either direction to see if anyone had seen her. “Take her other arm and help me get her coat off,” she said.

Sinclair did as she asked with a concerned look on his face. “This is technically assault and battery, you know.”

Laura shrugged out of her raincoat. “Good thing you’re not a cop anymore. Put this on her.”

She slipped on the woman’s coat. It was snug, but it wouldn’t matter in a moment. Rummaging in her own pocket, she pulled out a small garnet ring. Touching the woman’s cheek, she sampled her body essence. With a brief chant, she wrapped her own signature around it, pushed it into the ring, and slipped the ring onto her finger. Her features blurred and shifted.

Sinclair looked her up and down. “Wow.”

“How close am I?” she asked.

“Pretty close. You look like a cross between you and her.”

She shifted in the snug coat. “That’s good enough. I don’t have time for precision. I doubt those agents spent much time looking at her. Keep her out of the rain. I’ll be right back.”

Without waiting for a reply, she grabbed the woman’s umbrella and walked around the corner, lowering the umbrella to obscure her face. The rain accommodated her by falling more heavily. As she reached Terryn’s building, she pulled keys from the woman’s pocket. One of the security agents tilted his chrome helmet toward her, and she rolled her eyes dramatically. “I forgot my phone.”

They gave her room to enter through the unlocked outer door. In the close quarters of the vestibule, she hid her fumbling with the keys behind the open umbrella. She found the right key, closed the umbrella, and let herself in. A static prickle danced on her skin as she walked up the stairs, evidence of the shield spell Sinclair had sensed. She reached Terryn’s apartment and listened at the door but heard nothing.

Cress, it’s Laura. Are you alone? she sent.

The door opened a few inches, one of Cress’s whiteless eyes peering through the gap. She pulled the door open all the way, and Laura hurried inside. “I don’t have much time. Are you all right?”

In the dim light of the apartment, Cress looked small and forlorn. “They haven’t hurt me.”

“Where’s Terryn?”

She wrapped her arms around herself. “With Draigen. He’ll be back tonight.”

“What happened? Why did he take a leave?”

Cress lowered herself on the couch. “He didn’t. They suspended him, too. The Guildmaster agreed to say it was a leave because Draigen threatened to accuse him publicly of harassing her family.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on.”

Cress lowered her chin and frowned. “The Guildmaster accused InterSec of endangering the Guildhouse by granting me security clearance. I’m suspended while they investigate. I think I’m fired.”

Laura hugged her. The leanansidhe’s essence flared a moment, purple tendrils flickering out of her skin before she pulled them back in. Suppressing a shudder, Laura released her, trying not to appear as if she were pulling away. She knew the reaction was instinctive, but it made her uncomfortable, even if Cress didn’t absorb any essence from the contact. “You’re not fired. This is all Rhys’s political posturing while Draigen’s here.”

A sad smile creased Cress’s face. “I don’t have your confidence in that, Laura.”

“The Guild doesn’t dictate to InterSec. You’ll be cleared. Rhys is going to have to live with the fact that you are a good person.”

She compressed her lips. “Thank you for that.”

Laura squeezed her arm. “You are, Cress. Don’t let what other people think make you feel any different. The only opinions that matter are your friends’.”

A smile tweaked at the corner of her mouth. “Do I get to count you as more than one friend?”

Laura laughed. “I’ll be as many friends as you need me to be. Right now, though, you need a lawyer.”

“Resha is taking care of that,” she said.

Laura cocked her head. “Resha? I didn’t know you knew him.”

“He watches out for all the solitaries in the Guildhouse. He was the first person I called after Terryn,” she said.

Impressed, Laura shook her head. The seemingly inept merrow surprised her in interesting ways. “I’ll do whatever I can to help him.”

“You should go. Your glamour is fading,” Cress said.

The body signature was weakening, but she didn’t realize Cress could sense it. “Tell Terryn to call me as soon as he can.”

Cress placed her small hand on Laura’s forearm. “I need you to do something for me, Laura, that has nothing to do with any of this. I finished the autopsy on Draigen’s sniper before they escorted me out of the building but didn’t have time to write the report. There’s residual body essence on the corpse, but I’ve never met anyone who was at the arrest, so I couldn’t identify the signature.”

The Inverni Lord Guardian team had made the arrest. “I have.”

“That’s what I was thinking. You need to examine the body. Without me there, I don’t know how long the stasis field will preserve the body signatures. We need an imprint,” she said.

“I’ll have someone make the imprint, Cress, as soon as I get back,” she said.

Cress gripped her arm. “No! You need to do it. I don’t think it was a coincidence that I was banned from the building. They didn’t bring someone else in when they detained me. Something’s wrong there.”

Laura leaned forward and kissed Cress on the cheek. “Okay, I will, then. Call me for anything, and tell Terryn I want to see him ASAP.”

“I will,” said Cress.

Laura pulled the door closed behind her and hurried down the steps. She pushed more essence into the glamoured ring, but without a firm template, she had nothing to anchor the woman’s essence. Outside, the rain had turned into a downpour, and she exited the building by opening the umbrella into the nearest security agent’s face. “I’m sorry,” she called, as he twisted away from it. As she swung the umbrella to hide herself from them, the glamour faded.

Around the corner, Sinclair and the woman waited where she had left them under the awning of a small café. Without speaking, they swapped the raincoats and maneuvered the woman back onto the sidewalk. Wrapping the woman’s hand around the umbrella handle, Laura released the sleep spell. Sinclair slipped his hand into the crook of Laura’s arm and held his umbrella over them. The woman swayed. Laura steadied her. “Are you okay?”

She startled at the torrential downpour. “Wow, that came up quick.”

Laura held out her keys. “You dropped these.”

Surprise and relief crossed the woman’s face. “Thank God, you saw them. I’m lost without my keys.”

“No problem. Have a nice day,” said Laura.

“Everything go all right?” Sinclair asked, as they walked the block to Laura’s car.

“Yes and no. Cress is okay, but things are moving in directions I don’t understand. With any luck, Terryn will be able to clear it up for me. Do you need a ride?”

He shook his head. “I need to get back. I don’t think a limo driver showing up in a tricked-out Guild SUV would be good for my image.”

She chuckled. “Good point. We’ll talk later.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Dinner?”

She twisted her lips into an amused smirk. “Okay, dinner. I’ll call you.”

She leaned toward him on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Jono.”

He smiled in surprised. “For what?”

Her hand closed on the notes in her pocket, but she didn’t give them to him. “Just thank you.”