Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (63 page)

I had been in that crowd, only two months on the job as a cub reporter for the
Valley Gazette,
which was little more than a gossip rag. Trance had chosen me, of the dozens of people there, to ask her questions. The questions on all of our minds. The questions and answers were as fresh in my memory as the day they happened, reinforced by hearing and seeing it all again. I heard the awe in my own voice, the fear and excitement.

The camera was jostled, and a man’s shoulder came into view. The angle changed, getting out of the man’s way even as he spoke. Asking a question out of turn. Alan Bates, Channel 4 News. He cheated, and Trance ended the interview. The footage ended a few seconds later. It wasn’t raw, probably part of a news feed from six months ago, the same section the initial newscast would have aired.

“This was the first time we met,” I said. “For some reason, Teresa picked me, before any of you knew I had powers. It was the second most surreal day of my life.”

“What was the first?” Gage asked.

“Two days earlier, when I discovered my powers.”

“So what does this mean?” Simon asked. “How does this interview help?”

“Maybe it’s the starting point,” Gage said. “Some of those photos of Dahlia go all the way back to her first week with us. Maybe whatever vendetta this person has against her started that day, with someone who was there.”

“That has to be a hundred people,” I said, boggling at the idea of narrowing the list down.

“We’ll start with Alan Bates,” Gage said. “Maybe he’s still at Channel Four.”

I closed the video program and yanked out the flash drive. “There’s only one way to find out,” I said, standing up.

Instead of leaving
the hospital right away, we detoured to ICU to check on Teresa. Despite the assurances of the staff, Gage wouldn’t truly believe she was okay until he saw her with his own eyes. Simon volunteered to wait in the visitors’ lounge and call Renee with our latest update, while Gage and I went inside.

It was past visiting hours, but they let us in. Trance and Cipher’s romance had been briefly played up by the media back in early February. It was a good press angle, and it didn’t hurt that they were an extremely good-looking couple. Gage could have had the entire nursing staff eating out of his hand if he’d put any effort into it. But Teresa was his whole world, and I don’t think he remembered how to flirt with anyone else.

I hovered near the door outside Teresa’s cubicle, content to keep her in sight and let Gage have time alone. She looked so small on the hospital bed, surrounded by machines and equipment I couldn’t name, doing jobs I didn’t understand. Her left arm was nearly buried beneath wires and tubes—an IV, a pulse monitor, something else that seemed to be either draining or giving blood. The purple marks on her face were incredibly dark against her pale, pale skin.

She seemed at peace, no hints of new trauma.

And I hated seeing her in that place.

Gage crossed to the right side of her bed and gently took
her hand in his. His touch was so light, tender, as though afraid of squeezing too hard. He stroked her hand, her arm, then bent closer to brush his knuckles across her cheek. Whispered something I couldn’t hear.

“You’re scaring the hell out of me,” Gage said. His voice was quiet, but audible. “I need you back, baby.”

Teresa’s face scrunched, and he jerked. I stepped a bit closer to the door, heart pounding with excitement. She was waking up.

“Teresa? Can you hear me?” he asked.

She moved her lips, and he bent down lower. Listened. Smiled.

“We’re all fine,” Gage said. “Everyone’s too busy worrying about you to get into much trouble.”

It was a lovely sort of lie. She didn’t need to know how complicated everything had gotten. She’d want to try and help, and the only thing Teresa needed to do was get well.

“Even Simon came out to make sure you were okay,” he said. “Once you’re out of ICU, everyone can come visit.”

Teresa studied him. She said something I didn’t hear, but her face betrayed her disbelief. She knew he was hiding things. Her lips moved, and I swore she asked, “What’s really going on?”

“It’s nothing we can’t take care of, and this time you don’t get to override me. All you get to do, love, is heal. Understand?”

She seemed poised to argue, and when she opened her mouth, words became a yawn.

“It’s late,” Gage continued. “And you need to rest. I just wanted to see you and to say good night.”

She mouthed,
Good night.

He bent low and pressed a kiss to her forehead, and I knew I was intruding on a private moment. I just couldn’t look away. He kissed her forehead and both cheeks, then brushed his lips over her mouth.

“I love you,” he said.

“Love you, too,” she replied.

Gage kissed her again, and I walked away from the cubicle, giving them the privacy they deserved.

Simon had information
for us the moment we stepped into the visitors’ lounge.

“I called Alan Bates’s old boss at Channel Four,” Simon said as we headed toward the elevator. “He was fired right after the incident at the construction site. It seems at least a dozen other producers made angry phone calls to the station, so they canned him.”

“How’d he react to that?” Gage asked.

“He was furious. He made threats and stormed out of the office, and no one at Channel Four has had contact since. The boss said he was a mediocre reporter, at best, so he was probably blackballed from the industry.”

“For asking a question out of turn?” I asked.

“It was a pretty important interview,” Gage said.

“True.”

Simon hit the elevator button. “His firing certainly gives him motive for shooting at Dahlia.”

I opened my mouth to respond to that, and it turned into a yawn. A forceful, eye-watering yawn. “Sorry, I haven’t slept much,” I said.

Gage’s phone rang just as the elevator arrived. Three other people were already on it, so we spent the entire ride down to the lobby listening to him make the occasional comment on a mostly one-sided conversation. As soon as the doors opened and we got off the elevator, he hung up.

“Well, this just keeps getting better and better,” Gage said.

“No good conversation ever started like that,” I replied.

“Renee ran a current address on Alan Bates.”

“Dead?”

“Worse. He’s in jail.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“For what?”

“Aggravated assault.” Gage wrinkled his nose. “He beat up his girlfriend and the guy she was cheating on him with. Put the other guy in the hospital and gave her a bloody nose and a cracked rib.”

“How long has he been in?”

“A week. He couldn’t post bond so he’s in custody until it goes to trial.”

“Sounds like the man has a temper,” Simon said.

“He does,” Gage agreed. “He even took a swipe at his arresting officer.”

I tilted my head to the left. “Something in your tone tells me we know the arresting officer.”

“We do, and we even know the girlfriend.”

“Do tell, the suspense is killing me,” I deadpanned. I wasn’t going to like what he had to say, but it was another puzzle piece in this slowly widening mosaic of images and events.

“Detective Peter Pascal arrested Bates, and the girlfriend is Pascal’s partner, Liza Forney.”

I stared. “Seriously?”

“Yes.”

The day in the alley, when we first found John Doe’s—no, Joel Stevenson’s—body, Forney had been there. Annoyed and quiet and wearing too much foundation beneath her eyes, she had moved slowly. Cautiously. Hindsight was twenty-twenty on the memory, no doubt. It also made me wonder about the scar running the length of her left cheek. Had Bates been responsible for it, too? Was Liza Forney just attracted to the wrong kind of guy?

“So,” Simon said, “can we chalk Bates up to a big fat coincidence and move along to our next dead end?”

“I don’t like coincidences,” Gage said. “But I also don’t particularly like the idea of invading Detective Forney’s personal life, especially when we’ll have to explain why we’re investigating Alan Bates in the first place.” He sucked in his lower lip. “It’s still on the table, but I want to hit any other possible leads harder.”

“We’ll go over the footage and collate a list of names of the people at the construction site that day. We’ll go over them one by one, and hope someone can lead us to the next stepping-stone.”

“In the morning?” I asked, hopeful. No, more like desperate.

“Yeah.” Gage slipped his arm around my shoulders. “In the morning sounds good.”

Morning sounded great, in fact. And so very far away.

Eighteen

Glamour

M
orning was further away than I expected. Sleep avoided me, offering no relief from the storm of emotions at war inside me. I dragged my tired, battered body out of bed and curled up in my comfy chair with a blanket.

Someone out there wanted me dead. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know how he or she had convinced King and his brothers to help. They knew, but they refused to tell me. Noah refused, a fact that hurt more than anything else. It was a betrayal of my feelings and of the trust he claimed to have in me. I didn’t return his trust. How could I?

A shaft of silver moonlight trekked slowly across the unfinished wall in front of me, inching its way toward the door. Branches from the tree outside created spiderweb patterns that tricked the eye. They bent, shifted, thinned, and thickened as they traveled.

Footsteps shuffled in the hallway outside. It was probably someone heading for the bathroom, the one downfall of choosing the room directly across from it. A shadow fell
across the bottom of the door. The footsteps stopped, followed by a gentle knocking.

I sat up straighter. Who would be coming in this late? I ignored the knock and waited for the intruder to leave. I wanted sleep, not a conversation. But the shadow remained, and the hand knocked again. I growled, mentally telling them to go the hell away.

The doorknob turned—too late I remembered I hadn’t locked it. It squealed, and the door pushed open. I froze, watching the shape enter the dim room, his face in shadows. He closed the door, and a bit of moonlight identified the visitor: Gage.

The hell?

He looked first at the bed, and then around the room until he spotted me on the chair. His head tilted to the side, observing. He didn’t move. He didn’t seem upset or panicked, so I didn’t suspect anything had happened to Teresa. I was both curious and annoyed at the intrusion.

“Something that couldn’t wait?” I asked, voice low even though we were on the other side of the house from the rest of the occupied rooms.

He stepped forward. “I had to talk to you,” he said.

The voice chilled me. Butterflies tore through my belly. He continued to walk through the shaft of moonlight. Silver-flecked eyes melted into emerald. His entire body shimmered and went out of focus. The jaw narrowed. Hair spiked out and brightened into a deep auburn. His muscles became more streamlined, sinewy versus toned, even beneath
the tight white T-shirt and jeans. Panic set in and my heart caught in my throat.

Noah-Ace crouched in front of my chair, and I couldn’t move. Shock and fear held me in place like iron cuffs, refusing to let me react. Run. Shout an alarm. He didn’t speak, just knelt there like a penitent churchgoer. Did he want me to forgive him? Six Hail Marys and an Act of Contrition? As if.

He sported a cut on the left side of his cheek, puffed up by a purplish bruise. I did that to him. Good. One small wound for all the things he’d done to hurt me.

Oh God, what had he done to Gage?

He must have seen and understood the panic on my face, because he said, “It was just a glamour. I shook his hand yesterday, so I could use his image to get inside.”

I exhaled hard, relieved. Until anger crept in and took over. “How’d you get through the gate?”

“I slipped in when you arrived home earlier, right before it closed. Nearly caught my foot in it, too.”

“Too bad.”

“I can’t believe you punched me.” He smiled.

I didn’t return the smile. “There’s a lot of things about the last two days I can’t believe, and punching you doesn’t rank anywhere on the list of things I’m sorry about, Noah. Or Ace, or whoever you are.”

He flinched. Good.

“I just came to talk, Dahlia.”

“We don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Yes, we do.”

I wanted to bolt out of the chair and climb into bed, pull
the sheet over my head, and pretend it was all a nightmare. He wasn’t really here. I was imagining him in my sleep-deprived, drug-addled mind. Hallucinations. Everyone had them at some point in their life, right?

He touched the blanket, very close to my knee. I jerked, and he withdrew his hand, hurt very clear in his eyes. Hurt was good.

“Fine, we do have one thing to talk about,” I said. “But you and your brothers refuse to discuss it.”

“We have our reasons.”

“Of course you do. So why don’t you take your reasons and shove them, you unforgivable ass.”

His jaw tensed. “Did you get the footage I sent?”

“Yes. And thank you so much for almost giving Gage a coronary with the whole Teresa’s-back-in-surgery thing. Real nice touch, that.”

“I’m sorry, but I needed to be sure you’d go.”

“Congrats. It worked, but I don’t really know what you wanted me to see. There are a hundred different people in that footage, Noah, so if one of them is who hired you, I’m going to need a little help narrowing it down.”

“I’ve given what help I can right now. There’s more at stake here.”

“More than just my life?”

“Yes.”

I narrowed my eyes, caught off-guard by the venom in his voice. Undiluted wrath, and it was not directed at me. “What else? What else is at stake that’s more important?”

“I can’t.” While his tone was adamant, his expression held
less conviction—were Noah and Ace battling this one out? Or did he (they?) really want to tell me and couldn’t? It didn’t matter. It was information I needed, and he continued to withhold it, the jerk.

“Right.” I lurched forward. He scuttled back, avoiding potential hits to the head. As I stood, I pulled the blanket tighter around my body, very aware of the flimsy tank top and short-shorts I had worn to bed.