Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
T his was bad. This was worse than bad. This was an ice cream sundae of terrible , drizzled with what the hell and topped with a sprinkle of what the actual f ?—
Cassander made a slight mewling noise, and I rolled off him. I had expected to land on soft carpet, so when I shoved us both down, he had taken the brunt of a pretty hard impact on concrete.
I tried not to focus on how good his body had felt under me, on exactly how nice it felt to be stretched out on top of him. I looked him over.
“Are you hurt?” I couldn’t drag my eyes away from his expression, the pull of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes.
He sat up, shoulders going back, chin raised. “Fine. I always enjoy it when a potential paramour gives me a concussion. The trip to the doctor really gets me going.”
“Right. Nothing says romance like flowers and the ER.” I looked around.
We were behind some kind of store, clearly an employee parking lot, based on the beat-up cars parked. Movement in a couple of large dumpsters next to the back door indicated rats, the scent of rotting garbage making my nose twitch. A chain- link fence created a boundary between the broken asphalt and an empty lot. In the distance, I could see brown mountains; the hot sun had baked all plant life off them except for a hint of pale green desert plants.
The sun beat down, hot and impossibly bright.
Cassander followed my gaze, more annoyed than scared, and blood rushed hot into my ears. He had done this.
I pushed myself up, dragging Cassander up by the shirt as he struggled to stand, the fabric of his shirt straining, trying to hold his weight. My hands burned, holding him up, and I slammed him into the back of the building.
“What did you do?” My fists tightened, and I shoved him harder into the building. “What artifact do you have that can do this? Did you steal it from your brother?”
Cassander bared his teeth, raising his hand and grabbing my jacket tight, dragging me in close to him. “ I didn’t do anything!”
“Well, it wasn’t me that did this. That leaves one other person who’s been jumping around like a flea on a world map!” I pushed him back again, and he hissed when his back impacted the wall.
Cassander pushed up, bringing his face close to mine. Our bodies were pressed together, our hands trapped between us. I could feel the tight strength of his muscles, the pressure as he tried to move away from the wall, and I held him down.
“If I did do something, I saved your life. You should show a little more gratitude.” Cassander’s words sent a shiver of anticipation up my spine. “ If I did. But I didn’t because I have no artifacts with me. ”
For a second, I pressed him harder against the wall, the expectation building between us. He gazed at me, his brown eyes challenging, and I wanted to dip myself in that gold like an illuminated manuscript.
Shaking my head, I pushed away from him. He leaned wantonly against the wall, his hand still gripping my lapel tightly. Heat seemed to radiate between us, hotter than the desert sun above us, hotter than the concrete we’d landed on.
“Are you okay?” I asked, swallowing, desperately needing moisture in my mouth. I knew agents at the SPA sometimes played fast and loose with interrogations, but I never had. I had never needed to pull out fingernails when I knew how to ask the right questions.
I’d never even been tempted, so why did I want to grab Cassander’s hair and pull until his throat was on full display?
“I’m fine.” Cassander’s eyes crinkled at the corners, and he opened his hand, pressing down to flatten my lapel back into place. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I looked him over. “We need to figure out where your artifact brought us.”
“I don’t have a magical artifact ,” Cassander said. “It begins to make me think you don’t even know what one is. No artifact that I know could do this.”
“I once saw an artifact make a guy invisible before it let him climb walls like Spider-Man, but sure, let’s say that one couldn’t teleport us.” I waited. “If you weren’t trying to use an artifact, what was up with the jazz hands?”
Cassander frowned, his eyes searching my face. “Perhaps I enjoy modern dance. I’ve never seen an artifact with this much power.”
A crow screamed from overhead, passing just above us and landing next to the dumpsters, picking at some unseen piece of food.
It was hot here, the air desert dry. It was familiar, too, in a way I didn’t like at all.
I cleared my throat. “It’s completely possible that there is an artifact that can do this. Unless you want to try to make me believe you did it with your mind.”
“No, of course not, and again , I don’t have any magical artifacts with me. I don’t imagine it’s the sort of thing you carry around.” He raised an eyebrow. “Unless you are very foolish.”
I thought about my briefcase full of magical artifacts, handed over to Green Scales. I thought about the number of men I had sold artifacts to over the years. Sure, the SPA had gotten all of those back, but how many had we missed? How many had fallen through the cracks?
“Yeah. You’d have to be an idiot.” Another crow joined the first, and they bickered, snapping at each other until they both found something of more interest in the form of discarded French fries.
“So we are no longer in… Québec,” Cassander said. “Where are we?”
That was a very good question. The desert feel, the mountains, we could be any number of places. But the writing on the dumpsters was in English, and the license plates on the employee cars pegged us as in California.
“We’re in America, so I hope you have your passport. Uncle Sam has a thing about undocumented foreign princes escaping coup attempts.” I smirked. “Last chance, if you want to show me how you got us from Paris to… wherever we are.”
“If I had a way to return us to my original destination, I would use it.” Cassander’s face seemed to narrow, the white of his teeth more threat than joy.
“Yeah.” I stepped back, finally releasing his shirt, my hands still hot, the nerve endings firing like I was touching a stove.
I couldn’t let down my guard. He said he didn’t have an artifact, and I certainly hadn’t felt one as we pressed against each other, but that didn’t mean anything. He had to be the reason my life had just imploded into a bullet-themed surprise party.
“So, where exactly in Uncle Sam’s domain are we?” Cassander’s voice was low, and I could feel the brush of his lips over mine, even though we weren’t actually touching.
“California,” I answered distantly.
Everything in me said that I needed to put some distance between us. Because that was one line I had never crossed. I had never read desire on somebody’s face and decided to use that in order to get them to do what I wanted, get them to give me the information that I wanted.
My phone rang, and I stepped back. Drawing it out, I frowned at the number, flicking my thumb across the screen. We’d only talked a couple of hours prior. Twenty-one would only be calling me if something had changed. I needed to tell her that she didn’t need to worry about extracting me from Canada anymore. California was a much easier pickup.
“Twenty-one, I have some news?—”
“Don’t speak,” Twenty-one said sharply. “There’s something wrong.”
I was about to agree, say something snarky like you don’t say or wait until you hear what happened on my way to the hotel carpet . But Twenty-one had never told me to be quiet before. And now, her glacier voice had a tinge of something like panic in it.
“We just got confirmation that your hotel was attacked. One security guard killed, fifteen civilians injured. No one should have known where you were. You traveled across a hemisphere in minutes, and the only people who knew your hotel were SPA.” Twenty-one stopped speaking. Her expensive microphone usually muted out any sighs at my antics, but I could hear her audibly take a deep breath, as though trying to calm herself. “The only people who knew your location were SPA agents.”
Around me, it felt like the world froze. I couldn’t hear the crows, the scent of garbage didn’t bother me, even the bright California sunlight wasn’t bugging my eyes anymore.
“Don’t tell me where you are. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going. Get rid of your phone, get rid of anything else that SPA can track.” Twenty-one sounded more calm when she was making a plan. “I’ll contact you in the drafts when I’m able to. Don’t try to come in from the cold. Anyone in SPA is suspect. If you understand, hang up and follow my directions.”
I hung up. Then, I stared at my phone for a second, the screen going dark. A headache throbbed behind my eyes, the muscles of my neck twitching and twisting into a complicated knot.
Finally, I pressed a button on the side of the phone, holding it until the entire thing turned off. That wouldn’t be enough. I dropped it on the ground, raising my foot and bringing it down over and over until the phone was just scraps of plastic and glass, microchips cracked and destroyed.
“Well.” Cassander looked down, nudging a piece of the phone’s frame with the toe of his leather shoe. “That was dramatic.”
“Yeah.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. I couldn’t exactly reveal that the secret government organization I was a part of was crumbling from the inside. Or that someone there clearly wanted me dead or framed for murder.
Only now, I was at a complete loss.
The SPA had been my entire life since they plucked me out of basic training. It was more than my life. It was my reason for getting up every morning.
Without the Strange Phenomenon Agency, I was no one.
But I trusted Twenty-one. I trusted her more than anyone else in the world, and I had never even seen her face. If she said there was something rotten in the state of Denmark, then we were fumigating the entire place.
She’d even used one of the codes that we’d come up with for a black ops mission. When I’d been off the grid and so far in the dark that I hadn’t been able to see the light, I’d received a courier message with an email username and password. I’d searched it and only found one note: a message for me in the drafts folder. Twenty-one had told me that if, at any point, I wanted out and our bosses wanted me to stay in, I needed to write a message and save it to drafts.
She’d get me out. No matter what Washington said.
That’s where I should be. I needed to head straight to Washington, walk back into the viper’s nest, help her root out whatever was going wrong.
“Is this where we part ways?” Cassander looked around, squinting into the bright light.
“No,” I said immediately. I couldn’t let him out of my sight. Whatever artifact he had was dangerous, and I couldn’t let it go. Yes. That made sense.
“Do you have a plan now?” Cassander asked. “Aside from destruction of property.”
“Hey, technically, it was my property. I can destroy it if I want.” Some of the glass glinted in the sun, and I should clean it up. I needed to make sure that no one noticed the evidence.
“So that means no. You don’t have a plan.” Cassander looked around. “I’m hungry.”
My eyebrows crept up at his announcement. “Well, by all means, Your Majesty. Let me just whip up a five-star order for you. Do you take your caviar on the Kobe beef steak or to the side?”
“To the side.” Cassander smirked when I glared at him. “Well?”
“Right. Steak for His Majesty.” I bent, picking up the larger pieces of phone and tossing them in the nearest dumpster. When I returned to get more pieces, Cassander watched with his honey-brown eyes.
“You know you could help.” I gestured to the spray of glass littering the faded asphalt.
“I could,” Cassander conceded. “But I won’t.”
“He could, but he won’t.” I rolled my eyes.
With most of the phone cleaned up and everything else too small to be noticeable, I patted myself down. We hadn’t bothered with tracking devices for the mission in Paris. It was the first thing they checked me for, and I had no desire to be outed as an agent because I was wearing a bug that might as well have a stamp reading If lost, return to US government .
Nothing in my pockets except for a few coins collected from various places I’d traveled. Something heavier was in my left pocket; I pulled out the coin the con artist in Paris had been using. It reflected brightly in the sunlight.
“What is that?” Cassander asked sharply.
I looked up, surprised at his tone. He played the game even better than I did, and his tone set me on alert.
“What?”
“The gold piece. Let me see it.” He held out his hand, demanding.
Curious, I handed it over. His eyes lit, and he said, “Where did you get this?”
“Paris. That market we were at.” I waited for an explanation. “Do you know it?”
“Paris.” Cassander fisted the coin, but then his mouth twisted in frustration, and he handed it back. “You are lucky to have it. It reminds me of home.”
“Right.” I examined the coin again and tucked it back into my pocket. “Which is where again? Eastern Europe?”
“Yes,” he said, staring at my pants.
The only other thing I had on me was my wallet. I pulled out the cash and walked further down to toss the wallet into a dumpster further down and the credit cards into a third one.
Huffing out a sigh, I returned to Cassander, counting the bills in my hand. Most were euros, but I had two hundred in American cash. That would at least get us a couple of burgers and fries from a fast-food joint while I figured out our next move.
If we had to survive on two hundred dollars for a few days, it was possible, even though I had a feeling that His Highness wouldn’t like the accommodations we’d have to use.
Cut him loose , part of me thought. The part that sounded a lot like my mother. He’s no use to you now, and you need the money for yourself.
No. I was keeping Cassander close. He and whatever artifact he had might be my only chance to get back into the agency’s good graces.
“Are you done?” Cassander asked, his tone bored.
“Done,” I confirmed. “Let’s go get you some food.”
Cassander eating would mean Cassander not making catty comments, not making me doubt every decision I had made since I had seen him barefoot on a Paris street. Maybe if I had ignored him then, I wouldn’t have even been there when the armed men tried to take him out.
Or maybe they would have come after me. And I would have been lying dead on some Parisian street, no one the wiser.
Would the agency have even told my family what happened? Would they have sent my mother my death benefits?
Shaking my head, I jerked my thumb, walking around the corner of the building, coming up to the sidewalk, where I stopped so suddenly that Cassander ran into me.
I knew this street.
I knew this street.
Across the way was the McChicken restaurant, a McDonald’s knockoff, even though the M was an entirely different shade of yellow. Down the way was the bus stop, where students waited for the forty-minute ride to the closest high school.
And we were standing in front of the laundromat, where most of the town congregated, not because no one could afford a washer/dryer but because this was the best place to come and get gossip. This and the hair salon guaranteed that you were in one place for over an hour, which was more than enough time to hear about what was going on with the Hernandez twins and argue whether or not the Crofton sisters had married the same man or were just cohabitating to save on rent.
I knew this street. Because this was Desert Flower, and this ranked second in the “Places Damian Reyes wants to be least,” coming in second to a very medieval prison in Kazakhstan.
No, scratch that. If I was putting them in order, Desert Flower definitely was higher on the list than the prison in Kazakhstan, where I had acquired an acute case of pneumonia and a pop in my shoulder every time I shrugged.
Cassander was staring at me oddly, his expression warring between concerned and annoyed. “Are you just now realizing you don’t have enough money to feed both of us? If that’s the case, obviously, I should be the one who gets a full meal.”
“Obviously,” I said, but my heart wasn’t in the sarcasm because someone was coming out of the door of the laundromat, a basket of laundry weighing her arms down.
Gray hair showed at the roots, and she was checking behind her to make sure that the door wasn’t going to close on her open-toed heels. She still looked just as fit as ever. A snug V-neck shirt and tight khaki capri pants made her look fashionable, even balancing her load of laundry.
She looked up, her mouth dropping open.
“Hi, Ma,” I said.