The Isis Collar

7

The road to ruin is the one that’s smooth and paved, and the fastest cart to carry you is good intentions. Words of wisdom from Gran and they were oh so true today.

I’d sworn never to use my psychic abilities again to torture or coerce, but what Rizzoli was suggesting wasn’t precisely either one.

I stared through the two-way mirror at the slender middle-aged man with the pockmarked face. He glowered at the bearded Asian agent in the room with him but didn’t speak a word, no matter how hard the agent tried to convince him to do the right thing and not hurt innocent kids. The layered black clothing on the captive spoke of an extremist religious order, perhaps one of several that had arisen in eastern Europe lately. The heavy salt-and-pepper eyebrows and Roman nose made me think of Croatia or Bulgaria, but I could be wrong.

Rizzoli leaned close to my shoulder and whispered, “All you have to do is suggest he cooperate with us. It’s not torture and doesn’t change anything that’s happened. But we’ll know where the other bombs are and what they do.” Then Rizzoli did the one thing I’d been praying he wouldn’t do. He pulled out his wallet and flipped it open to a posed family portrait. His wife was blonde and a tad chubby but pretty in a pale blue silk dress. A little girl, still a toddler, sat on Rizzoli’s lap while an older boy, obviously Mikey, stood at his father’s side proudly, a hand on his shoulder. Damn it. The kid had his father’s dark good looks. Rizzoli’s hand tightened on my shoulder with something approaching panic. “Celia. Please don’t let anything happen to my son.”

He’d never called me Celia before and it made me let out a pained sound. What were my morals worth? What price, ethics? “What if he doesn’t know anything? What if he’s just an innocent dupe you picked up by accident?”

The voice in my ear must have been the same one that accompanied the apple in the Garden. So reasonable, logical. “If he doesn’t know anything, he can’t tell us anything and he’s free to go.”

Free to go. Even though he’d already admitted to being involved with people who put an exploding death curse on him. Not freaking likely. No, he knew something and I didn’t figure that somehow the guy in black was going to be allowed to go back to his buddies. Maybe it wouldn’t be the FBI proper who did the deed, but they’d find someone who would. Still, why was it little Mikey’s fault? What did a kid who just wanted his first two-wheeler have to do with stupid, ugly politics?

I grabbed the wallet out of Rizzoli’s hand and stared at the happy family, not the man in black or the distraught father standing next to me. Was it wrong for me to want a child I’d never met to be safe? Didn’t I have the right to want him to grow up happy and healthy? Couldn’t I want it … a lot? That wasn’t coercion or torture. It was just me, wanting people to be happy in a way I’d never been lucky enough to have in my mess of a family.

Movement erupted from the corner of my eye, but I kept my gaze hard on the photograph. I could look at the photo and worry and fear for those sweet kids. More, I could care whether they lived, free from harm.

The longer I stared, the more the toddler resembled my little sister when she was a baby. I’d lost her early, at the hands of greedy, thoughtless assholes who thought kids were easy targets and could be used or abused at will. Maybe if her kidnappers had cooperated she’d still be alive.

Rizzoli’s hand covered mine and eased away the wallet that I’d nearly crushed in a supernatural grip. “That’s enough, Graves. He’s cooperating.” Rizzoli’s voice was soft, sympathetic—the voice a person uses in the hospital or to bring a person down off the ledge. “That was even more than I’d hoped for.”

Huh?

I shook my head and blinked back the tears I hadn’t realized were rolling down my face. When I could see again through the film of salty water, the man in black was crying openly, his thin shoulders shaking, his face on his folded arms. The Asian agent was blowing his nose into a large cloth handkerchief.

Um.

“Did I do that?”

Rizzoli wouldn’t look at me, but his voice was harsh and scratchy. “That’s a hell of a talent, Graves. I thought maybe you’d worry a little and he’d feel remorse, but this is a lot better. They made me your handler because they said your siren abilities wouldn’t affect me.” He cleared his throat. “Maybe I don’t think of you sexually after getting snipped, but I’m still getting a charm made. You might want to get tested to see if you’re a projecting empath.”

My handler? I wasn’t a dog or a trained seal. But it would make sense to have him be my contact if he’d had a vasectomy. Infertile men weren’t affected by a siren’s psychic talents. I didn’t really understand that. Logically, it should affect them, since they’re perfectly capable of sex. But magic is weird sometimes.

What I didn’t get was how he knew I’d get emotional. He apparently thought he had me pegged and damned if he didn’t. At least this time.

A heavily accented voice began to speak through the tinny microphone. “They chose me because I can do the timed-release spell on the children. The adults, not so much. But they said it was the children that mattered. I told them I hate children. But I lied. I hid my little ones away, told my wife to keep them from their schooling so they would not rot and pass on the illness.”

Rot? Illness? Just like that, my tears were gone and I turned my full attention on the room. Rizzoli nearly vibrated with contained energy beside me. His face was bathed in shadows, but the intensity in his body nearly glowed. It occurred to me that I didn’t know what his talents were, if any. There were certainly plain humans in the FBI, but most of the agents at Rizzoli’s level had some abilities.

The man cleared his throat again and snuffled, opening his mouth as though to speak. Now we were getting somewhere. I felt the tension dry up the rest of my tears.

Unfortunately, my change in mood also sobered the other two men. That wasn’t good, because the man in black abruptly went stony faced again, realizing he’d already said too much. He wiped his eyes angrily, probably wondering how the agent had caused him to speak. But the agent was still looking confused. I’d imagine FBI agents don’t often sob in front of prisoners.

“You’ve got to start crying again. It was working.” Rizzoli’s voice was an urgent hiss.

I couldn’t help but let out a frustrated sound and throw up my hands a tiny bit before whispering, “I don’t know how. The first time was a fluke. I swear.”

He turned his head and gave me an incredulous look. “Oh, please. Your life has sucked, Graves. I’m amazed every day I find out you’re not curled up in a fetal position in the corner with a gun to your head. If you don’t have reason to cry, nobody does.”

The sad part was, he was right. And yes, if I focused on all the bad crap that had happened during my life, I apparently could turn the men in the room into basket cases. “But do you really want him in a mood to hold a gun to his head? We don’t know if he can activate the curse without help.”

Rizzoli noticed I didn’t deny the occasional desire to curl up in a corner with firearms and reached out to squeeze my shoulder gently.

But I didn’t need sympathy. My life was my life and I owned it. My mouth opened to tell him just that when the temperature in the room suddenly dropped like a rock.

Um … that wasn’t good.

The two-way mirror frosted so suddenly that the room beyond all but disappeared. I should have been more careful than to evoke the memory of my little sister. Ivy might have died young, but she hadn’t moved on to a better place. She’d decided to remain here, on earth, hanging around her big sister. I didn’t know why, but I had a good idea.

“What the hell is wrong with the air-conditioning?” The annoyed New Jersey Italian started to head toward the door when I held up a finger to stop him.

“It’s not the building, Rizzoli. I think I accidentally invoked Ivy’s spirit.” The wind she raised in the room blew my hair until I had to pull strands from my mouth. “Ivy!” I hissed the word in frustration because she was out of control. Maybe it was because I’d been so emotional when I was staring at the picture, but she was in a full fury. The lights flickered wildly until they finally blew with a crack of frozen glass.

Rizzoli looked like he was totally out of his element and freaking out. His voice remained low, but it was gaining a frantic edge. “Do something, Graves. If she scares the prisoner, this whole place could become the new Ground Zero.”

Um. I hadn’t even considered that possibility, but he was right. Using the dead, ghosts, zombies, or vampires to scare prisoners into confessions was Torture 101.

I looked up into the dark, bitter wind that stung my cheeks. The only light was what was coming under the door and the faint glow from the next room. Yelling would only get Ivy more agitated, so I decided to go the opposite way. I forced my face into a smile that belied my worry and let out a little laugh. “You need to calm down, sweetie. See? I’m fine. Nothing wrong. I was just playing around. You don’t have to be worried. It’s all good.”

But she would have none of it. One of the problems with spirits is that they know things that are … well, beyond what the rest of us poor humans do. Ivy might not be able to read minds, but she had a good idea of where the source of my worry was. The wind that was my younger sister began to spin through the room and then slammed through the glass so fast I couldn’t stop her.

A rumble underfoot made Rizzoli grab my arm and yank me under a heavy metal table. “Get down! He’s going to blow!”

The drop to the ground did nothing good to my throbbing leg, but I crouched and covered my head like people did in the films of old air-raid drills I’d seen in grade school. Damn. This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my last few minutes on earth.