Tayla nodded grimly. “Sounds to me like they might be working together.”
“There’s a nightmare scenario. Oh, hey, a weasel!” Wraith swept up Mickey, who had been circling at his feet.
“I need to contact Kynan,” Tayla said, though she seemed to be talking to herself.
“Kynan? Kynan Morgan?”
Tayla spun around to Gem, who had gone utterly pale. “You know him? How?”
“He’s a slayer?” Gem’s mouth worked silently for a moment, as though she couldn’t process her own question. “He’s one of them?”
“How do you know him?” Tayla repeated.
“He’s a regular at the hospital. Comes in every Tuesday to see a friend.” Gem exhaled slowly, the way Tayla did sometimes, when she was trying to keep it together. “Oh, my God . . . Holy shit.”
Tayla hugged herself, shivering even though the heat was on in the apartment. “Dennis. He’s known Dennis for years.” She heaved a grateful sigh as Eidolon wrapped her in his jacket.
Gem moved like a snake, her desperation obvious in the way she clamped her hand down on Tayla’s forearm. “You’ve got to talk to him. Tayla, you’ve got to go now. Ask about my parents.”
“I can’t. The Aegis either thinks I’m dead or wants me dead. I can’t go waltzing into headquarters right now. It’d be a suicide mission.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Gem insisted.
Tayla casually peeled Gem’s fingers away. “Tuesday . . . that’s tomorrow. He’ll be at the hospital. If you can arrange for me to talk to him in private, I can catch him unprepared. Without backup. That’s the only way this will work. I’m still not sure what’s going on at The Aegis and who is involved.”
“We’ll work something out,” Gem said, her voice barely a whisper. “Damn, I still can’t believe he’s Aegis.”
“He’s more than that. He’s a Regent. The leader of the New York cell. What did you think he was?”
Gem toyed with her dog collar, her fingers trembling slightly. “He tells everyone he runs a halfway house.”
“That’s the cover.”
“Do you . . . do you think he’d know anything about my parents?”
“No,” Tayla said fiercely. “The leaders aren’t in on it. They can’t be.”
“You’re sure that waiting to talk to him tomorrow is the only option?”
“Absolutely.” When Gem nodded, Tayla cocked her head and studied her sister. “How did you know where to find me tonight, by the way?”
“I sensed you were in trouble.” Gem touched a hand to Tayla’s shoulder. “I’ve always been able to sense you if you were close enough to me.”
Tayla stood there, avoiding eye contact with her sister and looking more vulnerable than Eidolon had ever seen her. He fought the urge to wrap her in an embrace and protect her from all of this. Which was insane, because he’d never seen a female so capable of protecting herself.
“Eidolon, if I were to do the integration thing, would I be able to sense Gem, too?”
He almost smiled at the wariness in her tone. His little killer had to question everything. “Probably.”
Her gaze caught and held his for a long moment as she considered what he’d said. “Okay, but one thing I don’t understand . . . Gem said her parents sensed demon in her when she was born, but not in me. If we’re twins, why did she develop her demon half, but I didn’t?”
“I’d probably need to run tests on you both to answer that, but my guess is that since you are fraternal twins, you don’t share an identical genetic code, and you developed differently. Her DNA merged. Yours didn’t. But we can fix that.”
When she didn’t respond, Gem broke the silence. “You need to decide, and fast. The changes I’m sensing in you are all over the place. You don’t have much time.”
Tayla’s eyes narrowed into slits, as if she questioned Gem’s motives. “I’m not sure I trust you.”
“I don’t trust you, either,” Gem shot back. “So where does that leave us?”
“It leaves you in what’s called a family, girls,” Wraith drawled. “Get over it.”
Twenty-one
After spending two hours in Eidolon’s den talking to Gem, Tayla decided that she didn’t like her newfound sister. It wasn’t that Gem had grown up in a mansion, had attended private schools, and had lived an outwardly normal life despite being raised by demons. It wasn’t that Gem was smart and educated, having entered college two years early, where Tayla was a high-school dropout who had a GED only because Kynan insisted that all Guardians have a basic education.
No, Tayla hated Gem because she kept saying “our mother,” when Gem had never known her. She didn’t have the right to call our mother anything but Teresa.
“You seem distracted,” Gem said, when Tayla pulled Eidolon’s medical text off the shelf and began thumbing through it. She couldn’t read a word of it, but the illustrations were interesting, if disgusting.