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She was well aware that this was nowhere near normal behavior for the dedicated lawman. In her sessions with him, she had come to realize that his attachment to rules and the law bordered on a neurosis. He defined himself almost entirely by it. And she suspected that one of the reasons he was having such difficulty letting go of Chico’s death, outside of the obvious understandable attachment issues, was that in the moment of his
canine partner’s death he had seen a side of himself that did not fit with his lawful perceptions. And until he faced that, until he coped with it and accepted it for the natural thing that it was, he was never going to move onward. But he was a reasonably well-adjusted man, for a cop, and she had faith he’d find his way eventually. But then why the need to shadow him?

The reason was perhaps as simple as that she hated the idea of seeing him self-destruct before he got the chance.

It’s not your responsibility, Mari,
she lectured her-self for the thousandth time. But as with most things, she had a follow-up question.
If not me, then who?
In a world full of people foisting responsibility onto others, no one was stepping up for their fellow humans and humanity. They were all waiting for others to step in. Well, she was an other. She’d always lived by that belief, and she wasn’t going to stop now, even if it cost her a little more than she was willing to give in the long run. At least she’d be able to sleep soundly, knowing she’d done the right thing.

Even if the right thing meant driving toward 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

She parked the car and they both sat there for a moment, staring up at the house through the windshield, listening to the silenced engine tick in the quickly creeping cold.

“Well, no rest for the wicked,” Jackson said, grabbing for the door handle as he handed Marissa her purse from the floorboards between his feet. He looked down at her feet for a moment and then sighed audibly before pushing out of the car. She looked down at her boots and bit her lip for an instant. He had a point. She wasn’t going to look very official in polka-dot boots. That was so unfair. He could get away with jeans and cowboy boots and a leather jacket … which, by the way, made
him look ridiculously hot. How was that, anyway? He looked hot half the time without so much as trying. Damn him.

She toed off her boots, fished into her bag for her heels, and stuck them on. She winced as she stood up. The rule of heels was that once you took them off, it really hurt when you put them back on, since it gave your feet a chance to swell.

She slipped, yelping when ice and ass meeting seemed imminent. A strong hand under her arm jerked her upright, holding tight as she got her feet back under her. He held on tightly to her as they negotiated the icy patches between the car and the door.

“Christ, don’t these people believe in ice melt?” she muttered.

“One could argue a sensible pair of shoes,” he said dryly.

“Yeah, well, you weren’t complaining when you were staring at my ass half the day today,” she shot back.

He pressed his lips together in an unrepentant smile, and his eyes went light with a streak of life she hadn’t seen in them in quite some time.

Jackson rang the bell and then followed it up with a knock just in case electricity had not been restored to that part of the house. The door opened after what seemed like the longest damn minute in the history of man.

What he saw just about took his breath away.

Docia.

“Oh, I hardly think they’re going to come up and ring the doorbell,” she was calling over her shoulder before she turned to look at him. There was barely an instant for them to see each other and react, to absorb and recognize, before a large hand was circling her arm and jerking her away from the door, leaving the portal to fall open.

Jackson’s weapon cleared his holster in a heartbeat, his instincts and reactions the stuff of cowboy legends to Marissa’s eyes.

“Let her go!”

“Like hell!”

The big blond man thrust Docia out of Jackson’s line of sight, and aggression raced through every line of his body.

“Whoa! Whoa!” Marissa cried, thrusting herself between Jackson and the other man when she read the out-of-control hostility bucking over his features. He had been pushed past all points of reason, and he was going to do something very stupid. She just knew it.

“Back the fuck off, Marissa!” he shouted at her furiously when she denied him the pleasure of a target. “And you let my sister go, fucker, or I’m going to smack a bullet into the back of your worthless skull!”

“Jackson! Knock it off!”

Docia dodged the hands trying to protect her and skipped around Ram’s efforts to contain her, joining Marissa in the wall between Jackson’s weapon and Ram’s vital parts.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she shouted at her brother as only a younger sister could. It got through, jumping him back a peg, his fingers feathering off the grip of his gun a second before he tightened it once more.

“Me?” he demanded. “Who the hell is this guy? Who are all these people? You’ve been missing for days, Docia, and I just saw him yank you back—”

“He’s doing what you’re trying to do, you dork! He’s protecting me!” She walked up to him, knowing he wasn’t going to shoot her, and reached out to smack him on the side of the head.

“Ow! Hey!” Jackson’s stance dissolved, his weapon lowering. The others in the room exhaled in relief. “What the hell?” He reached out and took her by the
arm, unable to contain the need to touch her or the need to shake her in poorly contained fury. “Do you have any idea how sick with worry I’ve been? You just disappeared off the face of the earth!”

“I called you, Jackson Waverly. And I am not two years old. I’m a grown woman who has every right to go anywhere, do anything, and make friends with whomever she damn well pleases!” She seized his arm in return, turning aside and pointing to Ram. “This man protected me from some lowlife with a knife trying to gut me in the street. In my book, that makes him a friend. He brought me to Windham and I like it here. Well, I did until the house blew up. But then he took me somewhere else, again, to keep me safe. I would have called you then, but we kind of left in haste and I didn’t have a phone. I was just about to come find you after Henry told me you were looking for me and seemed upset.”

“Well, when I find said lowlife with a knife gutted on the sidewalk, you’ll forgive me if I’m slightly freaked out. And that phone call sounded nothing like you,” he said, hedging insecurely now, shifting his attention to Marissa, the woman who could very well yank him off the street for his recent behavior, especially now that she was hearing it was completely unfounded. “And you,” he said to Ram, jerking back into the mode he was most familiar with. The mode of a cop. “You have a lot of questions to answer about a dead guy in the street!”

“He wasn’t dead when we left him,” Ram said simply, a shrug of a shoulder telegraphing his lack of concern. Then he smiled smugly. “And I have
your
sister as a witness to that.”

Jackson was forced to look into his furious sister’s eyes. “Is that true?” he asked needlessly.

“Yes,” she said, dropping the word icily.

Jackson dissolved.

“Ah, c’mon, Docia,” he all but whined to her. “You can’t stand there and blame me for worrying. It’s my damned job in life. And Leo was just as worried as I was and he doesn’t get worked up any more easily than I do.” He pointed at her, realized he still held his gun, and hastily holstered it. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Well, look, I’m fine,” she said, gesturing to herself. “Now you can stop worrying.”

And there it was, that little flicker in her features, the downturn of her eyes for a second, and her lifelong tell of scratching behind her ear on the left side. She was lying to him. She wasn’t fine.

“You’re lying to me.” He jumped on her, getting right in her face, staring dead in her eyes. She clearly forced herself not to look away, and any idiot could hear the slightest quaver in her voice at the beginning of her next sentence.

“I am not!”

“What’s going on, Docia? I’m your brother, I raised you, for God’s sake. You don’t think I know when you’re lying to me? I’ve been catching you in fibs since you were five years old and you tried to tell me your hamster died in a tragic fall from his cage, so I wouldn’t get mad at you for squeezing him too hard after warning you a hundred times not to.”

“I was hugging him!” she said defensively, just as she did every time he brought it up. “I miscalculated. I was
five
! And will you stop regurgitating that story every time you want to throw me off?”

Jackson watched her face flush in embarrassment as she turned her head to look over her shoulder. It was just a glance, brief, really, but it flipped on a light of understanding in his head.

She
liked
this guy. And now that he was looking for it, he could read reciprocal intent off the other man. His
fists were knotted, as though he were working very hard at not coming to retrieve her, his facial muscles tight with defensiveness as Jackson attacked her verbally and made her uncomfortable, and in his eyes …

Ah, crap.

“Docia, are you kidding me? You’ve only known this guy for two days. At best!” He jerked a hand toward the other man, pointing at him aggressively, as though he wished his gun were still attached to the end of his arm.

“Says the former king of the one-night stands,” she scoffed with a snort.

Embarrassment went both ways. He flushed hot under his skin as he looked at Marissa, who was watching the entire exchange with far too much fascination.

“I was in my twenties!” he argued defensively. “It’s a guy thing! And stop deflecting the point!”

“I will when you stop being a controlling ass!”

Brother and sister glared at each other hard, both breathing bullishly and looking as if they were about to physically butt heads. Since he wasn’t sure how far she’d healed from her cracked skull, Ram decided to step in. He moved forward and reached for her hand.

“Come on, Docia. He’s just worried. Don’t be mad at him for loving you.” He looked at Jackson. “I’m sorry. I should have brought her straight to you after the attempted knifing. But I wanted some time to find out who was after her.”

“A drug dealer named Marcus Degrain.”

They all turned to the open doorway, where Leo stood leaning against the frame, casually picking at his nails with a wicked curved hunting knife. No one there was stupid enough to think he had even a speck of dirt concerning him under those nails. It was a display. A warning.

“Yeah. Apparently, Docia, your boss is laundering
drug money for Degrain. About three weeks ago, you found a series of anomalous invoices you weren’t supposed to see and brought them to the attention of your boss. He got scared and told Degrain. Degrain decided not to take any chances, seeing as how you’re the sister of a cop.” Leo shrugged. He didn’t need to say anything else about it. They could all connect the dots. It was such a stupid, stupid reason to almost die.

“Everything all right, Jacks?” Leo queried archly, the tip of his knife scraping slowly around the crescent of his thumbnail.

Docia watched her brother hesitate in answering for a long minute, his entire body bunched with tension and the desire to say no now that he had reinforcements. He knew Leo would back him up in his concerns, no matter how skewed or outrageous. The thing was, as hard as it had been for him, Jackson had let her live her own life, let her make her own mistakes, relegating himself to the role of comforter and adviser … no matter how difficult that could be sometimes, protecting her only when necessary. All he needed to do was remember that, to ease himself out of this hypervigilance on her behalf, to fall back into what had once been routine. Docia and Marissa both knew that was asking a lot of him, after an accident and disappearance over the past week had threatened to rob him of the only family left to him. Actually, both women could date it even further back than that, when he’d lost a partner that had sent him into the unpredictable world of grief.

“Everything’s fine,” Jackson said with a sigh.

Then, a violent beam of red energy struck him dead in the chest, propelling him out the door behind him, past Leo, past the columns of the porch, and onto the hood of his car, shattering the windshield and decimating two of the bones in his neck.

* * *

Ram whirled around, once again thrusting Docia behind him, knowing exactly what the threat was and that there would be no misunderstandings this time.

“I beg to differ,” Odjit/Selena said, lowering herself to touch down on the marbled floor, others of her brethren behind her. An extraordinary number of them. Ram wondered how no alarm had been raised, yet again. The driveway was lined with Gargoyles for a reason. They were bound by ancient law and duty to be the protectors of the Bodywalkers. They stood as sentinels to all the safe houses
. Where were they?

“You have something of mine,” Odjit/Selena said, pointing to Docia. “That woman is a Templar, and she belongs with me.”

Ram had arrived with Docia only a few minutes before Jackson’s arrival. He had not yet had time to talk to Kasimir and the rest of the Bodywalkers in the house about Docia and Tameri. Ram felt several sets of surprised eyes turning toward him, the most intense being Kasimir’s. He was head of this household; it was a sign of heavy disrespect and could even be perceived as treachery to bring a Templar onto his premises who was not obviously a prisoner.

“She doesn’t want to go with you,” Ram defended her sharply, ignoring the others and standing his ground in front of her.

“I’m afraid it’s hardly her choice,” Selena scoffed. “These grooves were carved long ago, and we must go where we belong.” She laughed. “I hardly think any of these others will lift a finger to stop me from taking her,” she said, indicating the tense forms of Kasimir, Felicity, and Asikri.

“Take her,” Felicity sneered. “I knew she was no good from the minute she stepped foot in this house. Look at us, Kasimir. Look at what she has brought down on this house … your home … which we will now have to
abandon because of her. And she masqueraded as our queen, pretending to be Hatshepsut!”