Cipher

Chapter Seventeen

Her head hurt.

No, scratch that. Her whole body hurt.

Kat groaned, then wished she hadn’t. The noise set off a throbbing in her skull, an impressive feat when her brain felt about as solid as cotton balls. The only thing that registered was pain—her wrists, her arms, her ankles, everything ached—and the fact that she couldn’t seem to pry her eyes open.

Drugged. She’d had surgery once, to have her appendix removed. She’d been just fourteen, but she’d never forgotten how it felt to claw her way back into consciousness through that terrifying haze. The anesthesia, making her so numb and confused that her senses had woken up at different times. Her ears first, and then her sense of touch, and she’d listened to her mother whisper to her father that they had to get her discharged before the charm wore out…

The charm. A silly bracelet with two wooden beads, and her parents had paid five thousand dollars for it. Kat remembered the brush of her mother’s fingers tying it around Kat’s wrist as she struggled to wake up, remembered the feeling—like a soft blanket wrapped around her empathy, cutting her off from the world. A desperate gamble, to bring an empath into a hospital when hormonal spikes put her powers beyond her control, but she’d been so sick, and her parents had been so scared.

She felt that way now. Sick, sore. Scratching her way into coherency as something coiled around her mind. Not a comforting blanket this time but cold steel, someone else’s psychic strength stifling her own.

Memories were too chaotic to grasp, but her brain was starting to move now. Falling into familiar patterns. Math.

Pain plus drugs plus psychic blocks equals…

Fuck. This time the groan was worth the pain. She deserved it, if she’d let herself get kidnapped.

“It’s about time you woke up,” a rough but familiar voice whispered. “We’ve got to get out of here, damn it.”

Ben’s voice, and raspy, like he’d been chain-smoking again. She’d heard it a thousand times over her headset, exchanging teasing insults as they hacked and slashed their way through online video games. Her eyes felt glued shut, but she managed to wet her lips enough to speak. “Ben?”

“Yeah. Hey.” Something jarred her chair, making the legs skitter across the floor with the grating sound of metal on concrete. “Open your eyes, Kat.”

That set off the pounding again, like an entire drum line practicing on the inside of her skull. “Ouch.

Fuck, Ben.” She got her eyes opened, and squinted at the floor between her feet. She had paint on her left boot, boring beige paint that stood out against the scuffed black leather.

Beige paint. “Julio. I was with Julio.”

“The guy they keep dosing with horse tranquilizers?” He jerked his head toward the corner. “They’ve got his chair chained to the wall, just in case.”

Without thinking, Kat tried to lift her hand to rub at her eyes and winced when metal dug into her wrist.

Handcuffs, cold and unyielding.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

In the end she settled for blinking until her vision cleared. Julio was slumped in the corner, but no one had taken a chance on handcuffs holding him. Chains held his arms to his body as well as his legs to the chair, enough of them that it would have seemed absurd if it hadn’t been so damn terrifying.

Kat looked back to Ben, who was scruffy and exhausted. “Where the hell are we?”

He shook his head. “All I know is I’ve been here for days. They’re holding Lia too, but they won’t tell me where. They just keep asking questions.”

Days. That was important for a reason, but her mind still wouldn’t make connections. “What are they asking?”

“The collar.” He grimaced. “They must have traced my activity somehow when I was pulling records.”

“Oh God, Ben—” For the first time, she understood shapeshifter guilt. It formed a knot in her gut and made it hard to speak. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t. I figured out the risk early and I kept taking it. I knew what I was doing.” He blew out a harsh breath. “But now we need to get the hell out of here so I can find my girlfriend and rain down some vengeance on these motherfuckers.”

“Fine. Guilt later, rage now.” Kat closed her eyes and slid her senses along the cool metal barrier holding her empathy in. “Are you blocked too? Or have I got some sort of bad magic mojo just on me?”

“There’s someone. He’s been keeping me locked in since I got here.”

“Damn it.” No empathy. She’d gotten so damn cocky about how nothing could touch her. She’d indulged in fits of moral crisis over how dangerous she was, had angsted that her power was so brutal she had to accept a bodyguard to save her attackers from her own lethal skill.

She should have been learning to squirm out of handcuffs.

It hurt, but she tried anyway, twisting her wrists as she looked at the corner again. “Julio? God damn it, Julio Mendoza, wake the fuck up.”

Nothing. Not a single groan, not even a whimper.

Ben swore under his breath. “Two of the cult whackos have been arguing about his drug dosages.

Whether they’ve given him enough to kill him.”

So no shapeshifter, either. Just her and her brain—not even the most useful parts of it. Kat drew in a calming breath, dragging the air deep and holding it as Callum had taught her.

“I don’t need to learn how to breathe, ” she’d told him.

“Most people do” had been the typically Callum-esque answer.

Breathing didn’t help her situation, but it did help her fear. A minute later she craned her head to look at Ben. “Okay, we’re smart. We’re a couple of geniuses. Let’s rescue the shapeshifter and get the hell out of here. Are you handcuffed or tied?”

“Cuffed.” Ben scooted his chair closer to hers. “Near as I’ve been able to tell, we’re not in a city.

Sometimes when it’s quiet I can hear crickets outside, but no cars unless someone’s coming or going.

That’s all I’ve got.”

She wiggled, but the chair was solid. Maybe Julio could have bent the metal to free his arms, but Kat was just as likely to dislocate something. “Blocking our powers takes expensive charms or sustained effort. Have you got a charm tied to you somewhere?”

“Not a damn thing.”

So somewhere, not too far away, a spell caster or a psychic was watching their power drip away as they fought to keep Kat and Ben contained. “Then I’m going to make life hell on whoever’s shielding us.

I’ve got psychic fuel to burn.”

Ben’s eyes gleamed with a surprisingly feral light. “Together, we can make one hell of a headache.”

Across the room, Julio stirred with a low grunt. His chains rattled, and he mumbled something unintelligible.

Relief surged. Whatever they’d done to Julio, he was strong enough to survive it. All they needed to do was get free. “Wake up, Julio. Wake up. There’s beer. And naked women.”

Another mutter was all she got as his head fell back and lolled to one side.

Kat closed her eyes and gathered her will. Slowly, like a hard drive spooling up, until she was wound tight and damn near vibrating with the need to let go. To push. “Ready?”

Ben’s handcuffs clinked as he clenched his fists. “Ready.”

“Me first,” she whispered. “Give me ten seconds, then throw everything you’ve got at them.”

“Got it.”

Maybe she’d learned something from watching the wolves circle, but her strategy was pure Zola. A testing jab against the shields, then a strong push with half of her strength. No projection—not when breaking through could injure Ben and Julio—but every scrap of sensory empathy she had.

For eight seconds she pushed against the barrier. It stretched with her, like a rubber band pulling taut, but didn’t snap. On the ninth beat, she eased back, as if giving up, and for the briefest moment she swore she sensed satisfaction lacing the walls of her mental prison.

Zola’s favorite trick—encouraging an opponent to underestimate her.

On ten, Kat gathered her strength and slammed it outward.

For one moment, one heartbeat, the iron cracked.

The man who slammed through the door held a gun in his outstretched hand. He pointed it in Kat’s direction for a moment, then lowered it. “That’s a bad idea, Miss Gabriel. Len is here to protect you and your friends, and you’re making that difficult.”

If it had just been her…but it wasn’t. Ben and Julio were just as helpless as she was. Gritting her teeth, Kat let the mental attack fade away. “Tying us to chairs and drugging us was part of the protection too?”

“Yes.” He held up the gun, its barrel pointing at the ceiling as he brandished it. “Otherwise, we may have no choice but to kill anyone who may not have the information we need.”

The collar, Ben had said. Clearly whoever had kidnapped him didn’t realize Jackson had already destroyed it.

If she told them, they might not believe her. If they did believe her…

Time, that was what they needed now. Time for Jackson to cast a spell or for Anna to use her contacts.

Kat licked her chapped lips and winced. “May I have a glass of water?”

“No.”

Without empathy, Kat had to fall back on the lessons Callum had forced her to learn. Body language.

She took in the blank expression, the cold eyes, the easy grip on the gun. This wasn’t a tense man, or a frightened one. This was a man so far gone into madness that he wasn’t even angry.

Dangerous. He was dangerous, and he clearly wanted her to start talking. Fast.

Kat swallowed. “What do you want to know?”

His jaw clenched. “Where is the collar?”

Truth or lie. She had a split second to decide. “I don’t know.”

The man shook his head. “Try again, Miss Gabriel.”

We don’t have it. An answer guaranteed to make them all useless—and therefore expendable. So she met his gaze and put everything into the lie. “I told you, I don’t—” His dispassionate expression didn’t change as he lowered his arm and shot Ben.

The sound was deafening. Like thunder in a closet, rattling through her almost hard enough to distract her from the sick feeling of something wet and warm splattering across her face.

The shot.

He’d shot Ben.

He’d shot Ben.

Shock held her rooted in place as the man turned without a sound and left, leaving Kat alone in a room with an unconscious shapeshifter and the lifeless body of her friend.