Page 9 of Cast in Shadow
I stood in front of the private entrance—a beat-up, rust-spotted steel door tucked away in a blind alley—and glared up at the security camera until a small green light flickered next to the lens. A half-second later, the lock clicked, and I went in.
There was a comm system with voice recognition tied to the camera, but Mimi, the AI running the facial recognition, rarely needed that added layer of security. The exception was when agents came limping in with gashes and rapidly swelling bruises that marred their features, not to mention a broken nose or jaw. Those made things a little tougher for her.
Dennis and the others were waiting for me when I stalked into the well-lit conference room. I gave them a perfunctory nod and shucked my jacket, draping it over the back of the nearest empty chair.
“You look like you’ve had a shit night,” Nguyen said, looking a little worse for wear himself.
My second-in-command was built like a mountain, as was the case with most bear shifters, but he was big even amongst that small circle. With his dark eyes and a brutish jaw, he wore intimidation like a second skin.
“You could say that,” I offered. “Did you get any sleep?”
He waved me off, so I politely ignored the dark circles underhis normally sharp brown eyes and the fact that his oversized black coffee mug—emblazoned with the words “Have a nice day” in bold white letters on the side and an image of a hand with just the middle finger raised on the bottom—was already almost empty. Everyone knew he was in a mood when he pulled out that mug.
I glanced over at Shayla, his polar opposite, who was buzzing like she was on a three-day meth bender. “You okay, Shay?”
She nodded quickly, her dark blonde ponytail bobbing as she paced in front of the smartboard. “I’ve been testing a new batch of stimulants. This one seems promising.”
Sure, if you ignored the fact that she was talking so fast I could barely understand her. I bet if I looked closely at her pupils, they would be little more than pinpricks. “Take a breath, Shay. And maybe try to slow down a bit.”
Another rapid bob of her head. “I might need to tweak the dosage.”
No shit. I pressed my lips into a flat line to keep from saying what I was thinking aloud. Shay was a unique creature. Human, at least as far as most people could tell, but her magical aura had a fine opalescent shimmer unlike anything I’d ever seen. And she was able to heal more quickly than anyone I’d ever met, including me.
That last part was the only reason I wasn’t concerned with her testing her concoctions on herself.
Okay, I wasn’ttooconcerned about it. We might not share DNA, but she became family the moment she walked into my life five years earlier. I couldn’t help worrying.
I could have put a stop to her experiments, but we reached an agreement about a year earlier. As long as she was careful and only tested her concoctions inside Lexa, where our medteam could jump in if anything went wrong, I would stay out of the way as much as I could.
It was paying off, because she’d already come up with a couple of elixirs that had helped the teams immensely.
“I ran into a problem with the Navali case,” I said, dropping into the black, high-backed leather chair and swiveling to kick my boots up on the table.
Dennis left an empty chair between us along the curved oak conference table as he took a seat. He was only a couple of years older than Shay, a little under six feet tall, and the kind of lanky I’d come to associate with heavy gamers. “Mimi, show me everything we have on Megan Navali,” he said, projecting his voice.
The smartboard lit up, displaying a series of files as quick as lightning. I’d scoffed at the price of the initial investment for what had seemed like a glorified whiteboard, but that damned thing was worth its weight in gold. Or, you know, whatever was worth more than gold these days.
Maybe Instantanium? Was that a thing?
“You said we missed something?” Dennis asked.
“This is everything we were able to find on her up until yesterday,” Nguyen said. With that, he downed the last of his coffee and got up to pour himself another cup.
“I was under the impression she’s been covenless since the last circle booted her a couple of months ago,” I said, looking back at the board.
“That’s what the intel says.” Shayla stopped pacing long enough to study the screen. “But judging by your tone, the intel is wrong.”
“Or incomplete. I was informed tonight that she found a new coven, stripped their power, and murdered the entire circle about two weeks ago.”
“Holy shit,” Dennis whispered.
“And she just gave this information up?” Shayla asked.
I hesitated. They needed to know the truth about what happened, but I was still trying to reconcile things in my head. The three of them knew about Emerson because our intelligence team was supposed to be keeping tabs on him. None of them knew our whole sordid history, but there was enough information in the files that they would know what happened tonight was a big deal.
“I ran into Emerson Bradach,” I finally admitted.
They all stared at me like I had a horn growing out of my head.
