Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THREE MONTHS LATER
Every time I walk into our office and see Lily’s empty desk, it’s like a punch to the gut.
For weeks, we left it exactly as it was before she died, but then her family wanted to retrieve her personal belongings, and security started nagging us about it, because apparently they needed to sign off on her file and archive it—which is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard.
Lily is not a file to be archived—and so we spent an afternoon going through her desk and packing it up.
At the time I thought it might be easier once we were done, but I was wrong.
Today, though… today’s going to be harder still.
Today, Percy wants us to choose a new team member.
I can’t use the word replacement, because nobody will ever be able to replace Lily, and I feel sick just thinking about it.
But we do need another set of hands. We’re still dealing with the aftermath of the CCA debacle—going through all the information we took from their servers and labs, using it to track other compounds and members who escaped the first sweep.
Making sure their hack into our system has been shut down.
Plus there’s the usual caseload—sadly, even with such a huge example of how attempting to take down the lucifer is futile, there are still people trying.
So we have a meeting in a few minutes to review the short list of qualified candidates.
We each had to nominate three people we’ve worked with who might be suitable—it was hardest for me, because my experience at CSG has been pretty much only here at head office and only for the past five years as opposed to everyone else’s fifty or more… much more.
Gideon comes up behind me and kisses my neck before going to his desk.
Discretion is not something he gives a shit about when it comes to me.
In fact, he puts his hands—and mouth—on me every chance he gets, no matter where we are.
Part of it is because he finds me irresistible, but it’s also because he’s possessive and jealous and likes the idea of showing people “I’m his.
” We had a huge fight when he said that, and I ended up kicking him out of my place and not talking to him for a day—okay, maybe it was closer to ten hours—before following it up with a lecture that even I admit was long-winded.
He hasn’t said it again since then, but I see the smug smirk he gets when he’s snuggling me in public.
I like being felt up by him, so I let it slide.
At first, I thought there might be trouble with us being openly together at work, but nobody’s said anything, and people are really casual about acknowledging our relationship. It makes me wonder if Gideon did his growly asshole thing and warned them all to be okay with it.
Meh. It works out for me either way, and I know if it was genuinely a problem, Percy would have said something.
He’s been busy lately, smoothing a lot of ruffled feathers in the community.
The information on the raids got out, but it’s been carefully filtered, because the last thing we need is anyone thinking there’s some shit-hot fertility treatment in the works and trying to restart the research.
So there are holes in a lot of our stories, and it’s pretty much only the fact that many, many community couples were abducted and subsequently found at CCA compounds that’s preventing widespread outrage.
On the plus side, we located Dr. Tish’s personal data store at the secondary compound where I was taken.
It’s actually where most of the experimentation was done in the past and seems to have been his primary residence and lab.
At least we can console ourselves with the knowledge that he has to find a new place to hole up.
And his notes on the project are incredibly detailed, so we know now what the CCA has been working toward—not domination or even annihilation of humans on the physical plane, but enslavement.
That definitely goes to show that people can be asshats no matter what species they are.
What makes it even more shocking and downright stupid is that physical species is not eternal, so if the CCA had succeeded, they could very well have returned to the physical plane as humans in their next incarnation and been enslaved by the system they established.
Talk about short-sighted.
Anyway, Tish, the two other sorcerers who helped him develop the weaves, and another senior researcher got away, with the asshole who helped kidnap me apparently driving the escape vehicle.
Our people have tracked them halfway across the country already, and I’m confident we’ll get them eventually.
There aren’t many places that are safe for them anymore, since we’ve been using the information we found in the raids to shut down all CCA strongholds and hideouts.
Noah was surprisingly helpful with this, as he’d overheard a lot of conversations while he was sneaking around the underground base that helped us narrow down locations.
Once we finished debriefing Noah and Percy confirmed that his intentions were definitely good, we set him up with an apartment and asked what he wanted to do next.
His life was basically a shambles, after all—his parents weren’t really his parents and upon handing him over to the CCA had taken their cash and fled; he’d been out of contact with all his friends from his old life for nearly two years and in that time had experienced things that made him unsure he could connect with them again; and—most importantly for Noah—he’d lost his college placement offers.
Part of him wants to get back to the life he’d been building for himself, and that includes a degree, but he’s now unsure if that life would still fit.
So he’s weaseled his way into an internship at CSG and is educating himself on the community while he considers his next steps.
I’ve kind of taken him under my wing. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that I was a human educating myself on the community.
And fuck knows I have experience with leaving everything in my life behind, including parents who turned out not to be.
Speaking of… in Dr. Tish’s research files were the names of my biological parents.
My mother was a human hired to take part in the project.
She was murdered by the CCA shortly after my birth—everybody who knew about the project and had been to one of the compounds was.
I’m not sure how big a loss it is not to have known her, though—she was hired to seduce my father and get pregnant, then give me up.
It’s literally in the contract she signed.
She was assigned my father as a target and initiated—Tish’s word, not mine—a relationship with him.
They lived together for months before she got pregnant with me and bailed back to the CCA.
My father, on the other hand… Aidan did some checking for me, and he’s apparently a decent guy.
Tish targeted him because his family line has a reliable genetic history of being able to partially shift, which definitely bred true in me and is now one of my favorite things to do, second only to licking Gideon’s abs.
He was single back then, but about ten years ago, he got married.
I’m not sure if I want to meet him or not.
I don’t even know if he knows I exist—Tish’s records show that my mother left without telling him, but I recently learned in a very embarrassing experience that I will never forget that pregnancy is something that can be scented very early on.
So he might have known and been waiting for her to mention it.
I can’t know if he was upset about her leaving or if he looked for her unless I ask him, although Gideon and the others have offered to do some low-profile digging.
I guess I’m just not ready to know.
On the plus side, I’ve got time to think about it. My life is a lot longer now than I ever thought it would be.
“Sam, you ready?”
I snap out of my deep thoughts and force a smile for David. “Sure, coming.”
In the meeting room, Percy passes around manila folders that have the profiles of the shortlisted candidates in them. “We’ll go through these in order first—a quick rundown, any questions you want to ask—and then at the end we’ll discuss who would fit better.”
I’m only half listening, though, because I already started shuffling through the profiles, and the third one stopped me in my tracks. “Um, excuse me, who nominated Alistair?” I look around the table.
“I did,” David says, just as Andrew wiggles his fingers in my direction and Elinor says, “Me.”
“Actually, Sam, everyone did except you. I was surprised by that.” Percy raises an eyebrow.
“You didn’t nominate him?” Gideon asks, draping his arm over the back of my chair.
“You did ? Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d thought about it—wanted to, because Alistair has the experience and it would be great to work with him again—but in the end it didn’t seem right to nominate my best friend.
Speaking of… I turn my ire on Elinor. “Isn’t there a rule about you nominating your cousin?”
She shrugs. “Not really. We all have to agree, in the end, and he was just one of the candidates I picked. He made it through Percy’s screening, and we’re not going to pick someone who can’t pull their weight, so why would we have a rule about it?”
There’s something not right about that, but I can’t quite figure out what it is, so I just glare at her.
“What’s the problem here, Sam?” Gideon takes my hand and squeezes it, studying me closely.
Ugh. I shrug. “There’s no problem. It just… it feels weird now. I have to try and be impartial when I really just want to vote for my best friend.”
“And on that note,” Percy cuts in, “why don’t we start reviewing these candidates so Sam can get this dilemma over with?”