Heir of Ashes (The Roxanne Fosch Files #1)

Chapter 7

We drove in silence. There was nothing to see but cacti and the endless desert. The steady hums of the engine and the AC lulled me to sleep, only waking whenever another vehicle passed by.

I was still aching somewhat, hungry, and needed to pee. To add insult to injury, the only clothes I had were bloodstained and rumpled. I promised myself to be decently dressed when I went to see my mother. How would she react when she saw me? How had she been all these years? Was she still a lab technician? Did she still live in the same neighborhood? The last time I’d checked, more than a year ago, someone else lived at our old address. Had she moved on because she couldn’t bear the grief of my absence and the flood of memories? Or maybe … maybe she was no longer among the living.

Often throughout the years, I had contemplated that possibility. And just like every time I did, I felt like a fist was squeezing my heart. Until I had proof otherwise, my mother was well and alive. My disturbing thoughts were interrupted when we stopped in front of a restaurant called El Ni?o. My stomach grumbled at the prospect of food. When was the last time I’d eaten?

Logan climbed out, and I glanced around. Where were we? A truck passed by, honking twice at a guy crossing the street. The guy shouted something at the driver, waved his hand, then nodded politely at Logan, took off his baseball cap, and pushed the door of the restaurant open. Across the street was a hotel, a boutique, a beauty parlor, and a bakery. I could see myself visiting all those establishments. First to the restaurant, then to the hotel for a shower, do some shopping, dye my hair back to its original color, and get some baked goods to go.

“You’re drooling,” Logan teased.

“Am not,” I retorted, following him into the restaurant, wondering what kind of food El Ni?o served.

We were greeted by a lot of noise and the enticing smell of greasy food. Ignoring the few stares my bloodstained clothes drew, I made a beeline to the small but tidy bathroom at the very back and relieved myself. When I returned, Logan was still waiting for me at the entrance, making it easier to find him.

El Ni?o, as it turned out, was a very popular and busy restaurant. Of course, it was also lunchtime. Aside from the solitary men eating fast food along the long stainless bar counter, families with shrieking and laughing kids occupied some of the booths. There were couples talking, some teenagers holding hands. Some were arguing, still waiting for their food; others were laughing and eating.

Logan led me to the back-most booth. I suspected he’d have chosen it even if it hadn’t been one of the only empty ones available. He waited until I was settled in before he sat across from me, with Logan facing the entrance while I faced a wall. I didn’t like leaving my back vulnerable, so I switched seats, my back to the bar, the crowded room to my left, and Logan to my right. I trusted that as long as Logan wanted something from me, he’d try his best to keep me safe, but I wouldn’t want to depend on him.

I picked up the laminated menu and absently scanned the options available. My thoughts drifted to his friend and why he’d merited the attention of the PSS, enough so that they had resorted to kidnapping him. He must be something of a commodity. Not that the PSS wouldn’t be glad to put their greedy hands on anything preternatural. I had learned the PSS did everything for a reason, but there were lines they didn’t cross. If the subject belonged to a clan or had someone to claim him, the PSS left them alone. Otherwise, they risked being shut down or faced serious lawsuits.

“Does your friend have any family?” I asked Logan after the waiter took our order of fries and cheeseburgers. There was no need to pick up a thorny route if an easy solution was available.

“Some. Why?”

“Curiosity. What about a clan? Does he belong to one?”

Logan’s eyes shuttered, and I regretted the intrusion right away. I hurriedly explained, afraid I’d just broken some unknown protocol with the question. “If he belongs to a clan, they can demand he be released. The PSS would have no choice but to comply or risk facing serious repercussions.” Unless they denied having him and were clever enough to hide the subject well enough that no amount of investigation turned him up. Maybe if Logan had proof; he certainly seemed sure enough.

“They didn’t believe me. Thought my friend decided to take off, get some time away from everyone and everything.” His disgust and frustration came out loud and clear.

“Do you know why the PSS took your friend?”

Logan looked straight at me and lied. “No.” His expression didn’t change, his eyes didn’t twitch, his nose didn’t grow, but something instinctive in me recognized the lie for what it was.

“Do they need a reason?” he asked.

“Well, yes. You see, PSS’s staff and guard members are mostly ordinary humans. Some of them, like those three back at the hotel, have an extra oomph, but that’s all. Sometimes, when the situation calls for it, they hire a preternatural consultant or mercenary, but mostly, the bulk of their security team are ordinary humans: Navy SEALs, Marines, veteran soldiers.” I paused, drawing imaginary patterns on the tabletop with my index finger.

“Go on.”

“What I’m trying to say,” I explained, “is that they lack the capability and manpower to go targeting preternaturals for the hell of it. It’s just not their way.”

Logan angled his head and studied me. “You don’t think the Society is capable of foul play?”

“Oh, but they are.” I picked a napkin and began rolling it between my thumb and index finger. There was something wrong here, something about this situation that didn’t click. I could feel Logan’s heavy gaze on me, waiting for me to say something else. The PSS was certainly capable of anything illegal—as long as they were certain they could get away with it. They sure had with me. Even if they had taken me by force, my mother had been present, standing there, doing nothing but watching me kick and scream. I’d often wondered about that, and as year after year passed, I had learned to resent it.

I looked up, straight into his gray eyes, and wondered again about his friend. “It’s just weird, you know?”

Logan leaned forward in his seat, his predatory gaze solely on me. His intense scrutiny, along with his close proximity, was very disconcerting. I had to stifle the urge to bolt for the nearest exit, and forced my focus on the problem at hand.

“How so?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, frustration making me sound sharper than I intended to. “Why your friend? Why not you or someone else’s friend? What’s so special about him? Something just isn’t right. For one, the PSS has resources everywhere. Let’s say they have a new test they want to conduct on a specific preternatural—a were, a mage, or whatever.” I waved my hand. “They start using resources. Some are volunteers, others come in for extra cash or protection, whatever.” I frowned when a new thought occurred. “Maybe someone pointed your friend out to the PSS, gave them a specific place and time where he would be, promised the PSS no one would be coming after him …”

I trailed off, considering for a moment, then began tapping a chipped nail on the plastic tabletop. “What about enemies? Would an enemy have enough information about your friend to get the PSS interested enough to risk their guards”—I raised a finger to make a point—“their human guards, to go after someone preternatural? And I mean something the PSS couldn’t gain from a more cooperative source instead.”

“Hmmm,” Logan replied noncommittally. I might have struck a chord there.

“Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe the PSS doesn’t have your friend. How can you be sure?” Something nagged at me, but I couldn’t place my finger on it.

Logan’s lips thinned and his expression became annoyed. “I’m sure,” he said in the tone of one who had been repeating himself over and over.

“How?” I insisted. “Did your friend leave a note behind or call you, telling you where he was?”

“I’m sure.” His note of final determination brooked no argument, and I didn’t give him any. Maybe he knew something and just didn’t want to share. I could respect that.

“Alright, then. The PSS carries out a retrieval op by two means.” I raised one finger. “One, someone tipped off the PSS about a time and place where your friend would be, and the Elite Team set up an ambush with plenty of their tranquilizers.” I raised another finger. “Two, they hired someone equally strong or even stronger to do the dirty work.”

During my entire stay at the PSS, retrieval operations only happened twice—not counting myself, though at the time I was taken, I hadn’t known there were different guard levels with different sets of skills and strengths, dispatched according to how dangerous a specific preternatural could be.

From the looks that crossed Logan’s face—interest, worry, anger, and the hard set of his jaw—I could tell he had someone in mind for either scenario. He leaned back in his chair and eyed me. I couldn’t say what it was about his direct gaze that left me unsettled and maybe even a bit alarmed. Maybe it was because I wasn’t accustomed to having a predator’s gaze fixed on me without it triggering my fight-or-flight instinct, and yet here I was, having lunch with one.

“You seem to be very familiar with their system.”

I shrugged. “That’s because I am.”

As I watched him mull over my words, a thought came to mind, startling me into a new light. What kind of man would risk his life for someone else’s? A lover? I studied his profile. His black eye was completely healed; no doubt, he had shifted to his alternate form—probably to heal the knife injury to his stomach—and, despite not having shaved, he looked good. He had dark, thick long lashes surrounding his black-ringed gray eyes, giving them a more definite shape. His hair was a little long, carelessly mussed and a little curled on the edges, with reddish streaks here and there, depending on the angle of the light. His jaw was square and strong, but it didn’t detract from the soft look and shape of his lips, which twitched as I watched. My eyes flew to his, catching the suppressed humor in them. I averted my gaze, blushing furiously. Ugh, he’d just caught me ogling him.

I almost kissed the waiter when he arrived with our food, grateful for something to focus on besides the man sitting to my right. I attacked the fries first, but before my hand could leave the basket, Logan caught my wrist.

Startled, I looked at him, wondering if he mistook my scrutiny for romantic interest. But he was looking down at my hand.

My blistered, awkwardly bandaged hand.

“You never told me what happened here,” he said softly.

I hadn’t forgotten about it, not at all, but I’d just given in to the temptation to box the pain away into a tolerable background ache. Just for a few hours, I had told myself. It wasn’t a preternatural ability to do that. At least, I didn’t think it was. It was a skill from the days when pain was my daily companion. Back then, I had to learn how to live with it or let it consume me.

I learned to live with it, teaching myself how to push the pain to a back corner of my brain, compartmentalizing it, then closing it shut so I could concentrate on whatever the Scientists were doing at that moment. Depending on the intensity of the pain, I could almost block it completely. Of course, it could be dangerous—not feeling the pain could result on the body shutting down. It actually happened to me. Once reminded about the pain, that compartment exploded open—and it was like the injury had just happened, and all the pain came back with a vengeance. Now that Logan pulled my attention to my burning hand, the grip on that background meditation broke, the pain bombarded my senses, and I almost passed out from its suddenness.

Logan glanced at me once and began untying the ribbons one by one, sometimes having to unstick some of the cloth from the blisters. By the time he was done, he was swearing with such variety that it actually broke through the haze of pain.

“How did this happen?” he asked, his voice tight.

I swallowed bile twice before answering, “Back in the penthouse, I opened a door.” I caught his confused frown before understanding smoothed it away.

Without concern for appearances, I grabbed my ice water, fumbled with the plastic top, and stuck my hand inside, exhaling with the relief it brought me. Water sloshed over the top of the cup, but the relief was too great for any shame. Logan motioned to the waiter, ordered another drink, and started eating as if nothing had happened.

“Guess the door was warded, huh?” he asked, popping a French fry into his mouth, chewing slowly and thoughtfully.

“Yeah.”

“Couldn’t you, you know,” he twirled a fry in the air, “like, feel it?”

I shrugged. Water sloshed. “I wanted to make sure Remo Drammen wasn’t bluffing.”

Logan’s expression turned incredulous. I found myself blushing for the second time in less than five minutes. He must think me a dolt. But I had never in my life seen—or felt—a ward before. Needless to say, it seemed like Logan had. And hadn’t he known whose penthouse I had been in? Hadn’t he mentioned something about it? At the time, I had been preoccupied with PJ Tyler and the media and wasn’t really listening.

I eyed Logan suspiciously. “You know him.”

“Yes.”

“Personally.”

“Yes.”

“Old friends, casual acquaintances, family?” I prompted, and Logan scowled at me.

“Guess that’s a no, huh?” But if they’d crossed paths and he knew Remo’s defenses … I told myself it was none of my business and restrained my curiosity.

He popped another fry into his mouth and eyed me. “What did he want from you?”

Again, I shrugged my answer—sloshing more liquid—and he didn’t press for details.

The waiter brought another cold drink, politely refraining from staring at my hand inside the cup.

“Is your friend your lover?” I blurted before I could stop myself. This was so none of my business. But, again, what kind of man risked his life for someone else’s?

He looked at me with a blank expression, then understanding flashed in his eyes, and he smiled. God, did he think I was flirting with him? But misassumption aside, wow, what a killer smile. It just transformed him. I could see women and men alike throwing themselves in his path left and right, and by the way he held himself, his arrogance and confidence, he was well aware of the effect he had on them.

Not me, though. He was attractive, yes, but so had many other men been, ones less dangerous than him. I hadn’t stayed under the radar for so long by relaxing my guard, and I wasn’t going to start now.

He was still smiling, so I decided to set him straight. “I know it’s none of my business, but it’s just because, you know, you seem kind of”—frantic? desperate?—“possessive, the way you’re worried and angry, so sure about things.” I was on the verge of babbling, so I looked away—spilling more water on the tabletop—and tried not to look like a fool. Almost as an afterthought, I added, “Seems like an intimate relationship to me.”

He shook his head, took a bite of his cheeseburger, chewed a couple of times with deliberate slowness, then swallowed and said, “No, he’s my friend, but he used to be my mentor.”

An alpha werewolf? Maybe a very old one to warrant the PSS’s attention.

“What kind of experiments does the Society run on their subjects?” Logan asked after we finished our meals.

I frowned and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear. I had taken my hand out of the cold water, dried it with a couple of napkins that were currently littering the table along with the wet cloth strips. It likely reinforced Logan’s belief of me being a pig who never learned table manners, but I couldn’t dredge up any discomfiture. The pain was still there, pushed back to a tolerable level. I was aware I shouldn’t push my limits, but I needed a few more hours until my fast healing kicked in a bit more.

“It depends,” I answered evasively.

“On what?”

“Many things.”

“Like?”

“Like what he is, how strong, how many like him they’ve had a chance to experiment on before, his cooperation, the environment, the scientists present, among other factors.”

Logan was thoughtful for a moment, eyeing me with sympathy. “What did they do to you?” he asked in a gentle tone.

I swallowed and glanced down at the table. I wished I was the one facing the door. I didn’t want to talk about my past, but his simple question stirred a desire to share some of the misery and horrors I’d been through. Michelle had been a good friend, but I couldn’t tell her anything without sounding deranged. The journals I’d started back in my early days in the PSS had brought some relief, but after the third had been confiscated, I stopped bothering.

Now Logan was offering me a chance to talk to someone who might understand what I went through. But as much as I longed to do that, he was just not the right person—at least not yet. Maybe he was offering friendship, and it was tempting, but I didn’t know him well enough to start talking about my deepest secrets, my deepest fears.

“It’s in the past now. It doesn’t matter anymore,” I said, but the long silence told him otherwise.

“Suppose my friend is really strong, to a degree they have never seen before, and he’s very uncooperative. What would they do to him?”

“It’s hard to speculate. I haven’t actually seen their subjects firsthand, but I know for sure they’ve experimented on probably every preternatural out there. I don’t really think there’s anything they haven’t encountered and thoroughly researched before.” I knew this for a fact because I’d read about the preternatural types in Dr. Maxwell’s journal. The only thing that I knew for certain was rare was myself, and even I had no idea what kind I classified as. I was sure I was no were, vampire, zombie, ghoul, witch, or any other thing that could shape-shift. Unless being able to shift hands into talons meant I was some shifter with extreme limitations. But a shifter who couldn’t shift was weak and according to the PSS, I was far from that. Unfortunately, Dr. Maxwell’s journal didn’t mention anything about me. That was a different journal altogether, one I thought I’d grabbed when we left that day from the PSS for my last driving lesson. Ruling out all of the above left me with few options, some of which I had tried to research on the internet among creatures of myths, but nothing I came upon seemed right.

“What is he?” I asked, not because I wasn’t curious, which I certainly was, but to gauge whether he was something special in the eyes of the PSS.

It took Logan a while to answer, and when he did, I thought he was changing the topic. “The Society described you as a dangerous specimen to be treated with caution and aggression and if faced with no other choice, to be terminated on the spot to ensure the threat is nullified. I believe they would consider my friend just as dangerous, if not more.”

His words took me aback. I replayed them in my head, but their meaning didn’t change. My eyes narrowed. “You speak from experience. As if they’ve approached you with this information.”

“I went there to demand my friend’s release. They offered me your contract instead. I declined.”

I considered him for a moment. They had tried to hire him to come after me. If he was helping me now, it meant he had refused. Maybe they were holding his friend as leverage, pressuring him to take the job. Or maybe he’d accepted it, invented a story about his friend, and now was trying to lure me into a trap: get me to accompany him on a raid to the place where he was supposed to deliver me. I gave him a level look as the possibility that I had been fooled rolled over me like ice and fire, burning me from the inside, coldly numbing my emotions to act and kill if need be. The shock of what I was capable of doing came and went without a hint showing through.

“You declined?” I prompted.

He shrugged. “Yes.”

“You’re a hired assassin.”

Logan’s lips twitched, but this time it wasn’t in humor so much as displeasure. “I’ve been called many things, and ‘hired assassin’ isn’t one that I appreciate.”

“That doesn’t change what you are. A horse is a horse, no matter what you call it.”

His eyes chilled a few degrees. “Some might call me assassin, but I don’t go around agreeing to any job offered without consideration. You can assume whatever you like about me, but I never lose sight of my moral compass.” He smiled at me then, but the smile did not reach his gray eyes. “If I ever sign a contract, sugar, I go all the way through with it.” He gave me a meaningful glance, as if the statement meant something to me, then he added, “Which is something we can’t say about you, can we now?”

“Oh? And how did you deduce that about my character?”

“Isn’t that why the Society is after you? Because you took the money, stole from their archives, and skipped out on your contract? Didn’t you ‘behave’ so that when they let their guard down, you could take what you wanted and run away?”

I pursed my lips and considered him. “That’s the story they tell you people?” I snorted. “All of you hired mercs are just fooled by a bunch of scientists to do their dirty work, and you think you’re so tough and smart?”

I could see I had insulted him. Well, he’d just have to deal with it. “Why should I even believe you? What if this whole thing about your friend being in the hands of the PSS is just a ruse to get me to go with you? Say like, you heard about what happened to the last mercenaries that came after me and decided to change tactics? Make everything up and just have me follow you on my own?”

Logan’s face grew darker with every word, but his eyes remained cold. “Woman, I don’t care what you think about me, if you call me an assassin, a bloody mercenary, or a freaking monster.” He leaned forward, his eyes practically frosting me over, his voice low. “When I take a job, I go about it straight. I can shoot you looking right into your eyes or wait for you around a bend and jump you from behind. But if I take a job, I don’t fool around with it.” He leaned back in his chair, his cold gaze raking over me. I didn’t flinch. “If I was hired to come after you, believe me, Eliza Daniels, you would have known.”

I believed him. I might be na?ve, and I admit it sometimes—to myself only, of course—but I believed him, and God help me, I hoped I wouldn’t add fool to my list of flaws. I didn’t apologize though. Pride and ingrained skepticism wouldn’t let me.

“You think the PSS is keeping your friend as leverage? So you’d have no choice but to agree to come after me?”

He shrugged, his expression thawing a degree. “They denied having him, so no, not as leverage. All that matters to me right now is that they have him and I want him back.” There was a long silence before he spoke again. “If you didn’t break your contract, why are they coming after you?”

“I was kidnapped a long time ago. I escaped; they want me back.”

Logan paused, processing my words. “So, let’s say that my friend, under the circumstances, is considered more dangerous than you. Hypothetically speaking, if he’s also something special, what would they do to him?”

Any answer I gave would stem from my own experience. I eyed Logan for a moment. I didn’t think he was fishing for information about my treatment back at the PSS, but any response I gave would be exactly that.

“If he’s as dangerous as you think he is, then he’s in deep trouble.” My answer didn’t satisfy him in the least, but he let the topic drop, at least for now.