Face Off lb-2 Read online

  Still propped on his hands and toes, Sinclair cocked his head at her. “What?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. Let’s go again.”

  He hopped to his feet and tensed his body, ready to shift in any direction. Laura lifted her hands, starting to fire at his left shoulder but going for his feet again. Sinclair moved to his right and jumped, the jagged streak of white light passing beneath him again. Laura put her hands on her hips.

  Sinclair landed on his feet. “Something’s going through that mind of yours. What’s up?”

  “Let me try one more thing,” she said.

  A head shot, she decided, shifting to his chest at the last moment. She fired. Sinclair ducked again, but this time kept going until he was crouched with his knees almost to his ears and his arms thrown to the sides for balance. He stood. “Okay, that was one more thing. What’s going on?”

  “Describe how you react to my shots,” she said.

  He rocked his head from side to side. “I watch the shape of your body signature. Before you release essence, it . . . I don’t know . . . sort of dimples.”

  Everyone had essence signatures—even humans. Most fey sensed essence in one way or another. Druids had more sensitivity than most and could determine species with a secondary vision that registered essence as vibrant colors in their minds. Fairies sensed body signatures, too, but they had to physically touch the person or an object the person had come in contact with in order to read the energy. Sinclair did neither of those things. He sensed the shape of a body signature, which he claimed was like a fingerprint, unique to the individual. Neither Laura nor anyone else had ever encountered that type of ability. But what Sinclair described had to be true. It was how he had discovered Laura—by sensing her shape under its various glamoured disguises, something no other fey could do. “And that’s how you know how to anticipate the direction of the strike?”

  “Yes.”

  Laura’s talent for creating glamours so detailed and tangible made her invaluable as an undercover agent for InterSec. Her skill was so high, she had never been discovered. Until Jonathan Sinclair met three of Laura’s personas and recognized the same shape in each one. With her secret exposed, Terryn threatened to detain Sinclair indefinitely.

  Sinclair had a secret of his own. The one species Laura—or any fey—could not create a glamour for was human. Humans had weak body signatures because they weren’t from Faerie. Laura’s glamours hid her druid essence under those of other species, obscuring one powerful body signature for another. A fey body signature, though, shone through a human glamour persona like a bonfire. For everyone except Sinclair, the grandson of a fire giant, registered as completely human. His fey essence was so subtle, Laura’s sharp skill didn’t see it unless she concentrated and knew what to look for. Sinclair wiped his forehead with a towel.

  She backed away, setting herself into position to resume the practice. “Pay attention specifically to the change you see in the shape of my body signature this time. Try to focus on the whole thing, not just the dimple.”

  She spread her hands, planning to wedge him between two fans of essence, then changed her direction to his feet. Sinclair spun sideways and jumped up, avoiding the strike. “Why did you turn sideways?”

  Catching his breath, he placed his hands on his hips and looked down in thought. “Before you let loose, I thought you were going to squeeze me between two strikes, but when the dimple formed, it was aimed at my feet.”

  “Why did you think that?” she asked.

  A smile crept onto his face. “There was a change in the shape that looked like it was about to dimple, but it didn’t. Wow.”

  His pleasure at the thought pleased her. “You can sense at such an acute level that you react subconsciously.”

  His smile turned into a grin. “And you thought I had no abilities.”

  Amused, she twisted her lips. “I never said that. You did.”

  “Yeah, I guess I lied.”

  Laura folded her arms and leaned against the wall. With her truth sensing, Laura knew he meant he hadn’t known, not that he had hidden the ability. Sinclair was an enigma to her—confident, assertive, yet cautious. He had spent his life hiding his fey nature. Humans and fey did not interbreed successfully. Sinclair’s grandfather knew that his grandson would be the subject of intense scrutiny, so he gave Sinclair a spell to hide the small hint of his feyness. The spell was bound to a medallion that Sinclair always wore. It hid excess essence, which for Sinclair meant his fey nature. He read human to her senses—and everyone else’s.

  Sinclair lied about himself. So did Laura. Having that particular character trait in common was not the best basis for a relationship. She knew she could be trusted. She didn’t know if Sinclair could. More and more lately, though, she thought he was worth the risk. “You didn’t know.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. She watched and listened as he spoke, testing the nuances of his speech. His words and tone indicated truth. Laura had limitations on certain of her abilities, a fact that she had shared only with Terryn macCullen and Cress. For one thing, the field range of her sensing ability was limited for someone with her power. The more important secret, though, was that that limitation seemed to result in a huge advantage. Instead of a wide-ranging sensing ability, her short-range skill included truth sensing. Sinclair was telling her the truth; he hadn’t known about his own acuity.

  Or so she hoped. He had managed to hide his fey nature from her, something that was hard to do. She took no solace in the fact that he had hidden it from everyone. Not for the first time in the last few weeks did she wonder, If he could do that, could he evade her truth sensing? Could he lie to her?

  Terryn assured her no one else knew about her skill, so theoretically no one would know to counter it. She had never realized how much she had taken for granted knowing when someone spoke truth. Until she trusted Sinclair enough to believe him, she had to assume he was lying. She felt deaf or blind around Sinclair and wondered how people functioned without truth sensing. She didn’t like it.

  “You would be surprised what I know,” she said. It was a bluff, but only she knew there was something to bluff about. Sinclair couldn’t know about her ability. She thought. Hoped.

  He sauntered up to her, crossed his arms, and smiled playfully down at her. “Surprise me.”

  She looked away with her own smile. He couldn’t have been more physically appealing to her with his dark blond hair and warm honey skin. The unusual lightness of his brown eyes made them look like rich caramel or amber. Warm eyes that said, Trust me. She liked his height, almost a full head taller than she, another thing she wasn’t used to. She wished he wasn’t so appealing. His attraction sparked something in her, made her realize how shut off from a personal life she had become. He made her think about things that made her afraid. If he had been less appealing, she would have felt safer.

  Sinclair stepped closer, close enough for the body heat he radiated to touch her skin. He had that look on his face that said he was going to kiss her. He knew it would annoy her if he did. Not because of the kiss, but because someone might be watching. She didn’t want people to know they were becoming involved, not yet, not until she knew what it meant. A chime sounded, breaking the moment. They stared at her duffel in the corner of the room. Laura retrieved her PDA and read the message.

  “Time to go. Terryn’s got a job for us in town. He wants us to shake up the police at a crime scene,” she said.

  Terryn had been tracking a recent series of attacks against the fey and fey businesses. In the previous weeks, fey entrepreneurs around the city had been mugged and assaulted, and their businesses vandalized. The incidents were too frequent to be random. He wasn’t liking what he was seeing—particularly since his sister Draigen would be arriving soon and there was a lack of any concrete investigation from either the Washington, D.C., police or the Guild. His text message had passed word that another fey business had been attacked. The new attack had resulted in deaths.
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  Sinclair pushed his lower lip out. “He’s got bad timing.”

  Laura smirked as she lifted the duffel. “Or very good.”

  CHAPTER 4

  AS SINCLAIR EXITED the freeway into downtown D.C., Laura toyed with her necklace, an emerald on a gold chain. She wore it always, both as a memento of the person who had given it to her and as a tool for creating glamours. Light glamours—like enhancing her skin tone or adding a glow to her hair—she produced with a simple manipulation of her body signature. More complex ones, ones that changed her appearance to someone entirely different, required a talisman to hold a template for the persona. Gemstones were ideal to use because their crystalline structure retained templates better than anything else. Once the template was set, her body signature powered it with no additional effort.

  As they drove the local streets, she allowed her body essence to interact with the stone. The essence activated the template embedded within—the characteristics of Mariel Tate, her InterSec persona. As Mariel, she was a well-known InterSec agent, distinct and unconnected to Laura Blackstone. Physically, they bore little resemblance to each other, Mariel’s willowy figure and long dark hair a stark contrast to Laura’s more toned shape and wheat blond hair that fell to her shoulders. As the essence field activated, a soft tickle of static swept over her as the glamour settled. Her InterSec uniform remained since she had changed into it at Stafford.

  Sinclair cast curious glances at her as he maneuvered their car toward the northeast of the city. “Why Mariel?” he asked.

  “Why not Mariel?” she asked.

  He grinned. “We’re about to pull rank on D.C. cops at a crime scene. I seriously doubt that after you took over a police station, held a captain hostage, then flipped everyone off when you left, they’ll be happy to see Mariel Tate again.”

  Mariel had power and was not afraid to use it. Laura had designed her for brains, looks, and ability. Over the years, she had established Mariel as a force to be reckoned with, and the persona had become her default InterSec player. Laura enjoyed the persona because she was able to use her fey abilities without restraint—something that wasn’t appropriate in public relations. “I did not hold him hostage. I simply didn’t let anyone else in the room while we talked.”

  Sinclair chuckled. “Same difference.”

  Laura shrugged. “I got the job done. That’s all that Terryn asks. Terryn said to rattle some cages. Mariel rattles cages.”

  They passed through Logan Circle, a section of the city due north of the Guildhouse. “Isn’t this a local crime incident? Why didn’t he ask the Guild to send someone over?”

  Laura pursed her lips. “He probably did and got nowhere. Internal politics.” InterSec’s local authority in D.C. was tenuous at best—based on the fact that at least one of the victims in the new case was not a U.S. citizen. Not quite the explicit intervention protocol that InterSec’s international mandate demanded, but Terryn didn’t like the D.C. police dragging their heels.

  Traffic slowed as emergency lights flashed into view ahead. Sinclair double-parked near a paramedic van. They left the car, pausing to survey the scene. “I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Jono. After the Guild hears we were here, they’ll get involved. If there’s one thing Guildmaster Rhys doesn’t like, it’s being embarrassed in public.”

  A gaping hole puckered the front of the building up on the U Street corridor of cafés and boutiques. Wrapped bars of soap and lotion bottles in bright yellow-and-orange packaging lay scattered on the ground amid fractured-building char and debris. Odors tweaked Laura’s nose as soon as she left the car. Heavy soot, burnt herbs, crisped wood, and a touch of C-4 explosive.

  A plainclothes officer came toward her. “Agent Tate?”

  She stepped under the crime-scene tape with Sinclair beside her. “Yes.”

  “Mariel Tate?” he asked. She sensed annoyance from him, particularly directed at her. Someone wasn’t happy his case was being looked at by another agency.

  She cocked her head, letting him see her eyes, which glittered with the preternatural light of an Old One, a fey who had lived in Faerie. “Are you expecting more than one Agent Tate?”

  The look had the intended effect. The officer’s mouth closed as he paused. “Yes. Well, I mean no. We got word a few minutes ago that InterSec was sending someone.”

  She paced across the front of the building, not looking at the officer as she perused the damage. Follow my lead, Jono, she sent. “They have. This is Officer Sinclair. He’s consulting with us.”

  The policeman narrowed his eyes as he pulled out a memory. “Out of Anacostia?”

  Anacostia was Sinclair’s last posting with D.C. SWAT, where he was when he met Laura on a case. The entire D.C. police force knew that Sinclair was the only survivor of his squad. Rather than keep him in Anacostia with a new crew, he was officially on leave, an administrative lie that Terryn had put in place.

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “Surprised you’d be working with . . .” The officer glanced at Mariel and stopped speaking.

  Mariel tilted her head at him. “I didn’t get your name, officer.”

  “Willis. Detective Willis,” he said.

  She turned her attention back to the building. “Well, Willis Detective Willis, maybe we can skip the biographies, and you can fill us in.”

  Her sarcasm had the desired effect. Willis’s body signature glowed with anger. Good, Laura thought. He’ll grouse about her, and word will get back to the Guild that much quicker.

  “Bomb thrown through the window. Two bodies inside. The owner and a customer. An Inverni fairy and a normal.”

  He said the word without a hint of embarrassment, a feeble attempt to get a rise out of her. “Normal” was a mild dig. It meant human, as opposed to the “abnormal” fey. The fey used the same word, only their meaning was intending to convey someone, a human in particular, was nothing special. Laura didn’t like either sense of the word, but she didn’t rise to his bait. “This is the eighth fey business to be attacked in the last two months, Detective. Dead bodies mean this one is an escalation, don’t you think?”

  He frowned. “We’ve been looking at several leads.”

  Laura gave the shattered storefront a significant look. “Just looking doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”

  “You got something to say?” Willis asked.

  Laura gave him a bored glance. The Mariel persona had a stop-in-your-tracks attractiveness that prompted people to resent her or fall over themselves helping her. She used both reactions to her advantage. Willis was falling into the former category.

  Sinclair stepped between them with a feigned oblivious-ness. “Maybe we can take a look inside?”

  Willis hesitated, shooting one more glare at Mariel before leading them through the remains of the door. A uniform theme ran through the store design and product packaging, bright colors in a brightly lit space. The small shop sold skin-care products and beauty aids. Laura didn’t recognize the brand. The owner probably marketed his own skin-care line. Lots of fey with herbal expertise did. The scented air was an unlikely mix of burnt chemicals, flower oils, and blood.

  The apparent owner lay partially visible halfway down the room, crushed behind an overturned and destroyed counter. Against the wall on the opposite side of the shop, the mangled body of the customer slumped against the base of a shattered display case. Laura squatted to examine the line of scatter from the explosion. Pivoting on the ball of one foot, she peered toward the street, then back along the floor of the store.

  “Any witnesses?” Sinclair asked.

  “Not yet. We’re canvassing and checking for store-security footage,” said Willis.

  Laura pointed at the floor. “I don’t see any glass on the floor near the window. All the scatter is outside. The bomb wasn’t thrown in. It was brought in and detonated inside.”

  Willis slid his hands in his pockets. “I’m sure crime scene would have picked that up.”

  Yeah, but y
ou didn’t, Laura thought. She was getting a sense of why Terryn wanted InterSec to push the case along. If the officer in charge had such a bad attitude, she wasn’t surprised that the broader investigation into attacks against the fey wasn’t progressing much. She stared at the customer, the emotional part of her mind clicking off as she registered the extent of the damage. The bomb had savaged the lower half of his body until it was unrecognizable. She stepped around a fallen shelving unit for a closer look at the body.

  “The scene hasn’t been cleared yet,” Willis said.

  Ignoring him because she knew he was the type that hated being ignored, she crouched next to the body and slipped on latex gloves. With a professional detachment, she examined the destroyed body. Major damage. She pulled his torso away from the wall to peer behind him. Her senses picked up chemicals on his undamaged side that shouldn’t have been there if the bomb went off in front of him.

  “You’re disrupting a crime scene,” Willis said.

  “I think I know what I’m doing,” Laura said with enough inflection to imply Willis didn’t.

  More anger clouded his body signature. “Is this my case or not?”

  “Relax. We’re here to help,” Sinclair said.

  Willis shoved his hands in his pockets. “I didn’t ask for your help.”

  Sinclair gestured with resignation. “We didn’t ask to come. We’re all doing our jobs here.”

  Laura released the body, letting it fall back against the wall. Resting her elbows on her thighs so that her hands dangled, she pressed her sensing ability against the man’s skin and found traces of industrial oils.

  “This isn’t a customer. It’s the bomber,” she said.

  Surprised, the officer stared at the dead man. “You can tell that by looking?”

  She stood, removing the gloves. “Something like that. I’m picking up C-4 in the air, and this guy”—she gestured at the body—“has chemical traces on his skin that are in line with bomb-making materials. Given the body damage and the extreme coincidence of the chemicals, I’m comfortable with my assessment.”