Oath Bound (Unbound)

Fourteen



Sera

When I came downstairs that afternoon, finally drawn from my room by the scent of homemade chili, Kris was at the kitchen table again, alone this time, his nose buried in that journal, his jaw clenched with some intense emotion I couldn’t define or understand. I wanted to talk to him, despite my lingering embarrassment. I wanted to know why he was so angry, and whether or not I was the cause.

I wanted to know if he’d found my family online. If he’d read about what had happened to them. To us. I wanted to know whether I’d see pity or anger in his gaze when it next met mine, so I could plan my response accordingly. I’d lied to him about what happened, so any anger on his part was probably warranted, and most people would think pity was appropriate, as well, but I couldn’t stand to see either. Not from Kris.

So I only watched him for a minute, knowing I should have been relieved by how focused he was on that stupid notebook. Keeping my distance from him would be easier with Noelle standing between us.

But I didn’t feel relieved. I felt...alone.

Kris didn’t notice me, so I snuck out with a smile and nod to Gran, who was stirring a big pot on the stove.

I hadn’t had chili in months. My dad had made it once a week, every winter of my life. He’d spent Saturdays soaking beans and Sundays simmering sauce on the stove, and if I asked nicely and used a clean spoon, he’d let me have an early taste. I’d missed weekend chili when I’d gone off to college, but every time I came home for winter break, I’d find a pot on the stove and a clean spoon waiting for me on the counter.

There would be no more of my dad’s chili. That hadn’t occurred to me until I saw Gran making hers, and as I fled the kitchen, I fought a sudden, irrational urge to dump her chili into the garbage disposal because it dared to exist when my dad’s chili never would again.

In the living room, Van was curled up in the armchair with her laptop, clicking away as if her fingers would never tire. She glanced up at me and smiled, and I found sympathy in her gaze. No—worse—empathy.

She’d found news coverage of my family’s deaths, at the very least. I could tell from the new way she looked at me, and if she knew, Kris knew. They might all know. But she didn’t call me over or try to ensnare me in some kind of bullshit therapeutic chat, for which I was eminently grateful.

Kori and Ian sat on the couch, talking in hushed tones with a map spread out on the coffee table in front of them. He was shirtless again, with a big white bandage taped over his shoulder. When he twisted to reach for a pen on the end table, I saw a matching bandage on his other side. The bullet had gone all the way through.

When Ian had winced and sucked in a sharp breath three times in less than a minute, Kori stood and tossed her pen onto the end table, mumbling something about stubborn-ass men who made no use of the available resources. She stomped down the hall and into the closet, where—presumably—she disappeared through the shadows, despite his protest.

Several minutes later, the closet door opened again and everyone who had a gun drew it, just in case. Then Kori stepped into the hall again with a woman I’d never seen before, but everyone else seemed to recognize.

“Meg, you really didn’t have to come,” Ian said, but Kori rolled her eyes and Meg waved away his congenial objection.

“You’d do the same for me or Steve.” This was Ian’s twin brother’s wife. Meghan. The Healer.

I watched, fascinated, as she sat on the center couch cushion and gently peeled off the bandage on the front of Ian’s shoulder. “Ready?” Meg asked, and Ian nodded, his jaw already clenched against the pain.

Meg took a small bottle of hand sanitizer from her pocket and rubbed a dollop onto her palms, then pressed her right hand against Ian’s bare, still-bloody wound.

He hissed again and Meghan stiffened, and a second later, thin black lines appeared on the back of her hand and across her arm, as though her veins were rotting from the inside out. I’d never seen anything like it, and could only assume that was normal for a Healer when no one else seemed impressed or upset.

A couple of minutes later, Ian’s jaw unclenched, and a minute after that, Meg let him go and slouched sideways against the back of the couch. When she’d caught her breath, she inspected the wound, which had closed but was still an angry red color, beneath smears of Ian’s blood. “That’s better.” She nodded, obviously satisfied. “Not perfect, but good enough that you should be able to use it, if you’re careful.”

“Thanks, Meghan.” Ian squeezed her hand and Kori took his bloody bandages to the bathroom, where she would burn them in the sink to destroy the viable blood sample. Gran brought two smaller clean ones, and Meghan carefully taped them over the wound again.

Then Kori took Meg back to wherever she and Steven were staying while he finished recuperating.

“Liv and Cam got called in,” Vanessa said when I settled into Gran’s rocker across the room. “They’ll be back, though, and hopefully I’ll have something for them to go on by then. The police questioned a couple of possible suspects in your case, both parolees with convictions for breaking and entering and burglary. But neither of them match your description, and neither have a history of violence.”

“So, no other leads?” I tried not to sound as disappointed as I felt.

“Not yet. But the police have plenty of...physical evidence. All the blood they found belongs to...your family. But it’s possible that Liv can find something they missed. She only needs a drop or two to get a feel for the owner, so if he bled on anything, she’ll be able to tell us if he’s anywhere within her range. The tricky part will be getting our hands on the evidence. Not impossible for a group with our varied talents. But too complicated a project for today.”

“Of course.” I had to remind myself that I was in no hurry. Kenley was in immediate danger, so her case had to come first. The sooner we found her, the faster they’d be free to help me hunt down and kill the bastard who’d taken my whole life from me.

“How can I help?” I said when Ian looked up at me and smiled. “What are we doing?”

“Van got us a partial list of the Tower syndicate’s real-estate holdings, so we’re going through the list of warehouses, looking for one that could possibly work for the blood farm.”

I stared at all the red circles on their map, trying to make sense of names and places I’d never seen before. “Any luck?”

“Too much luck.” Kori walked out of the closet and closed the door, stepping into our conversation as easily as she’d stepped out of the shadows. “Tower owns nearly two dozen warehouses in the city alone, and who knows how many in other areas. I’ve been to several of them, and the truth is that any one of them could house the blood farm. Julia has the money to set up all of the necessary supplies and equipment anywhere she wants, and it could take us days to search all of these individually.”

“And this is just a partial list,” Vanessa added, peeking over her laptop screen.

Ian looked grim as he studied his list, then circled another point on the map. “We need some way to narrow them down.”

“That’s what Kris is working on.” Skepticism was thick in Kori’s voice. “Did he tell you about the notebook?”

“Yeah. And about Noelle.” Did I sound bitter about the fact that she’d had him for so long, but I never would? I must have—Kori’s pale brows rose and I swear she almost smiled. “You guys are all messed up. Your relationships are, like...twisted.”

Ian laughed, but Kori only nodded. “Sometimes when you’re tied too tightly to the people you care about, the strings get tangled. You can either cut them loose or pull them tighter. I’m sure you can figure out which one we chose, based on the knot we’re in now.”

Yeah. They were tied so tightly together I couldn’t tell where one relationship ended and the next began—siblings, lovers, friends, caretakers, defenders and coworkers. They were everything to one another, and I could see that sometimes those bonds chafed, but from where I stood—a single thread dangling alone in the wind—their tangled knot looked pretty damn secure.

“So, do you think he’ll find anything in that notebook? Do you think it’s even possible?”

Ian and Van looked to Kori for an answer, and I found myself doing the same. Kori shrugged. “It’s more than possible. I never knew Noelle to be wrong. But the chances of anyone figuring out what she was talking about in time to be useful are slim to none.”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t put money on that, because I’d own every cent you have right now,” Kris said, and I could practically hear the smile in his voice. When I looked up to find him standing in the kitchen doorway, his index finger marking a place in the closed notebook, I could also see the spark of excitement in his eyes.

“You found something?” The rational part of me wanted to be happy for him. That other part wanted to poke him in the eyes to get rid of that spark, put there by a dead girl he’d loved and who might be trying to tell him to kill me, either to put an end to the Tower empire, or because even in her grave, she was a jealous bitch.

My money was on the latter.

Kris nodded eagerly. Kori scooted over and he sat next to her on the couch, then set his journal on the coffee table, open to a page about a third of the way through the notebook. “Ned said they were moving everything to a warehouse, right?” Kris said, and I nodded. I was the only other one who’d heard Ned. “Well, there it is.” He underlined a passage several lines from the top with his finger.

We all leaned in for a closer look, and I had to read upside down from my chair on the other side of the coffee table. Fortunately, the line was short, and Kris’s script was a neat, masculine cursive, with long narrow letters. Easily legible.

“Blood in the trees,” Ian said, echoing the phrase as it played in my head. “What the hell does that mean?”

Kris rolled his eyes and snatched the printout of Tower’s real estate holdings from his sister’s hands. “That one. The warehouse on Sycamore Grove, in the south fork. See?” But no one saw. “It’s the only one with trees in the address.”

“Kris, that could mean anything....” Vanessa said, but he spoke over her.

“Look. It’s in here again.” He flipped more pages to a point farther back in the notebook, marked by his own folded copy of the property list. “‘Hidden in the grove.’”

“Kris, there’s no rhyme or reason to this.” Kori frowned at the notebook. “It looks like those two phrases were spoken months apart.” But it was closer to a year, if the glimpse of the dates I’d gotten could be trusted. “How do you know those two are even related?”

“I don’t.” Kris leaned back on the couch and crossed his arms over his chest, and I did not think about how, the day before, I’d seen him without a shirt. And touched his stomach. I didn’t think about that at all. “What I do know is that we’re looking at a list of more than twenty warehouses, and those are just the ones Vanessa’s been able to verify as Tower’s. But nothing else on that list sounds like anything I’ve found in here after reading and rereading the damn thing for nearly two hours. But two of these phrases could be pointing at the warehouse on Sycamore Grove.”

He flipped back to the first passage and spoke over another objection. “Blood in the trees.” Then he looked up, eyeing each of us expectantly. “We’re looking for a blood farm. A hidden blood farm.” He flipped back to the second passage, still marked with his index finger. “Hidden in the grove.”

“It can’t hurt to look.” Vanessa shrugged and closed her laptop. “We have to start somewhere, and that’s one of only two properties that won’t take us into Julia’s territory.”

Kris sat up straight on the couch, enthusiasm echoing in his very bearing. “Which is more evidence that Elle was right. Julia knows we’d expect her to hide her most valuable assets in her own territory, where it’s easier to protect them. Relocating to the south fork is ballsy. But then, so is Julia.”

“The south fork?” I glanced around the room in question.

“The south side of town, defined by a fork in the river that divides the city,” Ian said. “Tower rules the west side. Cavazos has the east side.”

“They’ve been fighting over the south side for years,” Kori added. “But so far, neither has a foothold. The south side is your best bet if you want to avoid syndicate entanglements.”

“So, if the blood farm is on Sycamore Grove, Julia’s effectively hiding it in plain sight?”

“Well, I doubt she hung up ‘Coming Soon’ signs or set out a welcome mat.” Kris smiled at me, and I looked away, and when he continued, his voice was...different. Disappointed, maybe. But not angry. He wasn’t mad that I’d lied to him, but I’d almost rather see his anger than his pity. “But she’s definitely hidden it where we’d be least likely to look for it.”

“Where anyone would be least likely to look.” Van glanced from me to him, then back to me, silently questioning the change between us. But it was nothing I could explain to her, or to any of them without further embarrassing myself.

“Why are Seers always so damn obscure?” I flipped through the notebook absently. Casually. “What good are her predictions if they’re too vague to be used?”

“She wasn’t always vague.” Kris took the journal from me and closed it. “Her waking predictions were usually much clearer, like what Hadley told us the other day. But when Elle was asleep, she couldn’t elaborate, and when I woke her to ask, she never remembered what she’d been dreaming.”

“Okay. So we’re going to do this.” Van closed her laptop and stood.

“Yes.” Kris stood and slid the notebook into his duffel bag on the floor by the couch. “But you’re staying here.”

“No way.” Vanessa clutched her laptop to her chest. “Kenley needs me.”

“She needs you to stay alive and unharmed. You have no combat experience, and I don’t want to leave Gran alone if I don’t have to.” Kori glanced at me as she lifted a shoulder holster from the arm of the couch and slid her arms through the straps. “You, too.”

Vanessa looked as if she’d argue, if she didn’t already know it would do no good.

I knew no such thing.

“I’m going.” If Kris was right and the blood farm was at the Sycamore Grove warehouse, then there was every chance in the world that I could cull a couple more indentured servants from Julia’s bonds, and a couple of guns made loyal to us—or at least removed from Julia’s arsenal—could mean the difference between life and death if Kris and his crew found themselves outnumbered.

Beyond that, I was not giving up another chance to test my newly inherited bonds and to free more of the poor bastards bound by them.

Of course, I’d have to do it without anyone seeing, but I was up to the challenge.

“She’s right,” Kris said, and I turned to find him wearing a double holster, armed with a gun on each side. Could he shoot left-handed? “You’ll be safer here.” There was no malice in his eyes. He wasn’t just trying to cut me out of the action.

“I thought you needed me to jam your psychic signal. I can’t do that from here.”

“That’s a moot point in this scenario,” Ian said, and I decided, for the moment at least, that I hated every single one of them. “We can’t break Kenley out of a secure building we’ve never even seen before without being noticed by the enemy. In which case they won’t have to track us. They’ll be able to see us.”

“But couldn’t you use an extra hand? Holding an extra gun?”

Kori shrugged a jacket on over her shirt and shoulder holster, then gave me an almost sympathetic smile. “You don’t shoot. Guns, at least. And this time I doubt they’ll leave bottles of spray cleaner around to tempt you.”

I glared at Kris. He didn’t have to make me sound like such an...amateur. Even if I was one.

“Liv and Cam can’t make it right now, but they’ll check in later to see if they’re still needed,” Kori said, reading from her cell phone screen.

“Fine. Don’t give me a gun.” I followed them into the hallway, pissed off even further over being forced to beg like a puppy. “I’m not bad with a knife, and I know you have extras.”

“Not this time, Sera.” Kris held the closet door open while Kori and Ian stepped inside.

“Don’t you dare close that door!” I demanded as he stepped in after them. Kris gave me an apologetic look, then closed the door in my face. “You are not going without me!” I yelled at the closed door, my hands balled into impotent fists.

Furious, I kicked the door, and something inside me...slipped. It felt like the mental version of bumping into a dresser and knocking one of the drawers open a few inches.

My kick to the door was followed by a louder, deeper thud from inside the closet.

“What the f*ck!” Kori shouted, and the closet door swung open so fast I had to jump back to keep from getting smacked by it.

“What happened?” Vanessa said from the end of the hall, and I could see Gran behind her, both of them drawn by Kori’s shout. Or maybe by my own heartfelt objection.

“I don’t know.” Kori stuck her head out of the closet and Kris pushed her aside so he could step into the hall. “I tried to travel, and nothing happened. It’s like the shadows are locked. We ran into the f*cking door.”

Gran burst into laughter, then headed back into the kitchen, and briefly, I wondered what she’d heard that I hadn’t. Did Alzheimer’s make unfunny things sound funny?

Van turned from Gran back to Kori, frowning. “Has that ever happened before?”

“No,” Kris and Kori said in unison.

“Maybe you’re just tired,” Ian said, joining the rest of them in the hall.

Kori nodded. “I’m going to try it again.” She stepped into the closet alone and closed the door as I backed slowly, silently into the living room. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, but I was almost sure I’d done something. I’d felt it, right after I kicked the door. Maybe if I removed myself from the situation, things would go back to normal.

I sat on the couch, staring down the hall at Van, Ian and Kris as they watched the closed closet door. A second later, another thud came from within, and this time the string of expletives Kori shouted could have singed the hair off a sailor’s butt.

She tried to travel from the closet twice more, getting angrier and angrier with each failure before Kris insisted she give him a shot.

He ran into the closed door so hard he came out with a nosebleed.

I tried not to laugh. I really did.

After that, they turned off the lights in Gran’s bedroom—including the infrared bulb—and tried to shadow-walk from there, with no success. Then Ian called up the darkest darkness he could manage, and they both tried to travel through that, to no avail.

That’s when Gran stepped into the living room with a bowl of chili in one hand, a full spoon halfway to her mouth. “All three of you owe Sera an apology. Maybe once she gets it she’ll take us out of lockdown. Though I wouldn’t blame her for keeping you here, considering that’s exactly what Kris did to her.”

I gaped at Gran, wondering how she knew what I still hadn’t figured out. But she only shoveled that first bite of chili into her mouth, then laughed around it on her way back into the kitchen.

When I turned, four sets of eyes were staring at me. Kori looked beyond pissed off. Kris looked confused and a little wary. Van and Ian looked fascinated.

Kori rubbed the fresh bruise on her forehead, frowning at me expectantly. “What the hell is she talking about?”

I could only shrug. “In the two days I’ve been here, I’ve understood very little of what that woman says.”

“Gran, how old am I?” Kris stared over my head into the kitchen with a bathroom rag pressed to his dripping nose.

“What kind of dumb-ass doesn’t know his own age?” she called back, and wood creaked as she settled into the far chair at the table—I’d already grown to recognize the sound.

“My kind. How old am I?”

“Thirty, last May. Do you need a f*cking diaper change, too?”

Vanessa laughed, and Kori rolled her eyes.

“Just checking.” Kris’s gaze settled on me again. “She’s coherent, which means she knows what she’s talking about. What the hell did you do?”

“I don’t know. I swear. I just...didn’t want you to walk through the shadows without me, and the next thing I knew, you were running into closed doors. Repeatedly.” My gesture took in the bloody rag he still had pressed to both nostrils.

Evidently I was the only one who could see the humor in the situation. Probably because I was the only one who kinda wanted to see Kris bleed. Just a little.

“Gran, what do you know about this?” Kori stomped past me to stand in the kitchen doorway, where she could see everyone all at once.

“More than any of you, apparently,” Gran said, and I shimmied sideways past Kori and into the kitchen, where Gran gave me a conspiratorial wink. As if we were in cahoots about the whole thing. Then she turned back to Kori. “If you want information from me, you better dig up some f*cking manners, young lady.” Gran took another bite of chili, and I decided then and there that Alzheimer’s or not, she was the coolest grandmother ever.

I’d never even met any of mine.

“Gran.” Kris sank into the chair across from her. “We’re trying to go after Kenley. Remember? We need to get this fixed. Now.”

“Please tell us,” I added.

This time Gran looked surprised when she met my gaze. “You don’t know?” I shook my head and she turned back to her audience, and I could tell by her solemn expression that she now understood the stakes. “Sera’s a Blocker.”

“No, I’m a Jammer.” That was one of very few facts I was sure of.

“What the hell is a Blocker?” Kori asked, and everyone else looked just as clueless.

“It’s a myth, that’s what it is.” Gran dropped her spoon into her bowl and pushed it back as Kori and Van sank into the chairs on either side of Kris, who kept looking at me, then looking away when I noticed. Ian and I stood against the wall, on opposite sides of the doorway, and every gaze in the room was glued to Gran. “I’ve never actually met one,” she continued. “Most people don’t believe in them.” She shrugged. “But then, most unSkilled don’t believe in Skills, either, so who the hell are we to say what’s real and what’s not?”

No one had an answer, but she wasn’t really looking for one.

“Sera’s real, and she’s a Blocker.” Gran leaned back in her chair, easing effortlessly into that instruction-mode only perfected by raising children. My mother had done it well. “My grandmother always told me that blocking was a piggy-back Skill—that it only manifests in someone who already has a primary Skill. I’m guessing she was right, considering that you’re a Jammer, too.”

I nodded.

“So, she can block other people’s Skills?” Kris asked, and I knew he was right the moment I heard the words. That’s what I’d done. I’d blocked his ability to travel. I’d kind of mentally bumped both him and Kori and knocked their Skills out of alignment. Or something like that.

Gran nodded. “My grandmother theorized that there were more Blockers out there than anyone really knew. Her idea was that most of them never discover the piggy-back Skill, because they don’t know they can do it, and they stop looking for abilities once their primary Skill manifests.” Gran shrugged, and her steel-colored hair caught the light. “Maybe she was right. Maybe Sera never would have discovered she could block you if she hadn’t really wanted to keep you here.”

Everyone was looking at me with a certain kind of aggravated respect now, and I would have thoroughly enjoyed that...if I’d intentionally done the thing they respected.

“She can take it back, right? She can just...turn our Skills back on?” Kori looked to me for an answer and when I didn’t have one, she turned back to Gran, who could only shrug.

So we tested it out. Kori tried to travel out of the front closet for at least the fifth time in the past quarter hour, to no avail.

“I’m sorry,” I said when she emerged angrier than ever. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t even know how I’m doing it. I just...don’t want you guys to go without me.”

“That’s it.” When we all turned to look at him, Ian wore a quiet smile, but it appeared to be all for me. “It’s just like Kenley and binding. She has to truly want to break a binding, in order to remove her will from it, and you have to truly want us to go, for us to be able to leave.”

“But I don’t want you to go without me.” Kris and Kori started to object, but I cut them off. “Arguing isn’t going to help. And I’m not going to feel guilty for insisting that you treat me like an equal. I may not be able to shoot the wings off a fly at forty paces, or whatever, but I can do things none of you can do. Useful things. So...either let me join in your reindeer games, or it looks like no one’s going to play.”

Vanessa chuckled. “You’re going to have to take her with you.” She shrugged. “At least until she learns how to control the blocking. That’s how it works for all Skills, right? They take practice to control?”

Kori nodded reluctantly, and Kris looked almost amused. “I have to admit, that’s impressive.” He grinned as if he’d forgotten about the night before. About how kissing me was a mistake. “Your psychic temper tantrum put the lockdown on this entire house.” He turned to Kori and Ian before I could object to the characterization of something I couldn’t yet control as a child’s fit. “Maybe we need her with us after all.”

Kori didn’t look pleased and Ian seemed reluctant to put me in any more danger—they all did, since they’d found out about the smiling man’s knife and the weeks I’d spent in the hospital. But when neither of them could think of a logical reason to object, I knew I’d won.

A minute and a half later, Kris and I stepped out of the hall closet and into a small, dark bathroom in the warehouse on Sycamore Grove—the only patch of darkness in the whole building. Kori and Ian stepped out of the deep shadows behind us a few seconds later, and we tiptoed toward the line of light we could see beneath the door.

Kris opened the door carefully, and when no one burst in aiming guns at us, he pushed it the rest of the way open. Then nearly choked on shock.

The rest of us peered around him, and my entire body went cold when I saw what was waiting for us in the hall, facing the door we’d just opened in the only dark spot in the building.

A spot that had been left dark for us on purpose, I realized, as I stared at what Julia Tower had left behind.

Ned-the-guard. Dead, with a neat-ish hole in the center of his forehead. Nude and propped up in a sitting position, with a paper note safety-pinned to the flesh above his heart. His dead eyes stared up at us, and I knew what he was meant to be even before I read the note, which appeared to have been written in blood. Probably his.

Ned was a message from Julia Tower. To me.

I should have known she’d kill him if he was no longer useful to her. And if she knew I had set him free, then she knew I’d figured out exactly who I was and what I could take from her.

Pretense was over. The battle had just begun.

Only one of us could survive.