Thanks, Anna.”
“You’re welcome.”
Outside, the crisp January morning had her digging a scarf out of her bag. “Sera seems okay. I think Anna is really good for her.”
“I think so too.” Andrew rested his hand on Kat’s shoulder, drawing her closer. “I didn’t clear the trip out to Alec’s house, after all. He gave me a lecture about independence and initiative, so I said fuck it.”
“Go us. Breaking and entering.” Leaning into his side felt nice. Fuzzy, but nice. “It’s not like we’re going to trash the place or anything.”
“Unauthorized entry,” he corrected. “I have a key and security codes.”
“Spoilsport.”
“Would you feel better if we were likely to get arrested?”
Kat stepped off the sidewalk. “I guess not. So how was Alec? I haven’t gotten any email from him in a couple days. Not even the profanity-laced ones when he breaks something.”
“Up to his ears in Conclave crap.” He unlocked the doors and opened hers. “There’s some stuff going on right now.”
“Uh-oh. Worse than usual?”
“No, just—” He climbed in and slid the key into the ignition before falling still, his hands on the wheel.
“Derek and Nick are going to have a baby.”
Kat froze, the seatbelt clutched in one hand. “Derek and Nick—” Oh shit. The faint hurt of not hearing it from her cousin personally was swallowed up by a far more intense emotion—sympathy. “Nick is going to kill him before it’s over. Derek has turned overprotectiveness into an extreme sport.”
“Apparently, she’s fine but doesn’t feel great, so he’s freaking out.”
That was Derek. “The first time I got the flu after he became my guardian, he took me to the clinic three times. Franklin finally had to tell him he was doing more harm dragging me back and forth than he would be by letting me puke my guts out at home. And that was before he got turned and got all the crazy shapeshifter instincts.”
Andrew closed his hand around hers. “He’ll call you after he settles down. Alec only told me because there are rumors floating around already, and he only knows because Derek’s been asking Carmen for advice.”
This time the spark of need was quiet enough to give her hope. Touching Andrew was magic, but maybe there’d come a time when it wasn’t too much magic. “I know. Derek doesn’t call me when he’s worried.”
“‘Worried’ might be putting it mildly. I talked to Derek after the problems Michelle had with her pregnancy. I know he was concerned, especially since Nick and Michelle’s mom died in childbirth.”
It probably didn’t help that Nick was tiny. Kat towered half a foot over her, and Derek was even taller.
Child-birthing hips had never sounded like a compliment, but it suddenly didn’t feel so bad to have them.
“Nick’s going to be okay, though, right?”
Andrew fastened his seatbelt and started the engine. “From what I could gather, Carmen seems to think it’s no big deal.”
“Okay. Then I guess that can go on the worry backburner. Except I really can’t call him and tell him I’m getting shot at by possible cult members.”
“Which is why I didn’t bring that part up. If this thing gets to the point where we can’t handle it, we’ll get some help. Until then, we’re on our own.”
The moment of truth, then. Time to deal with her shit like a grown-up, without having to worry about everyone she knew tripping over themselves to shield her from unfortunate truths. Sliding her hand to the bag, she traced the hard edge of the zip disk. “Then let’s go find out what we’re dealing with.”
Chapter Nine
They found the zip drive and appropriate cable in a stack in the corner of Alec’s home office, but one thing was conspicuously absent. “No power cord.” Andrew’s frustration boiled up. “Do you see one anywhere?”
Kat lifted a tangled mess of cords in her fist. “Only about twenty of them. I’m guessing he puts every cord he finds in this box and forgets it.”
“Damn it.” He angled the blue case toward her and tapped the front. “Check for the logo first.”
She glanced at him, both eyebrows raised and her head tilted at an angle that almost screamed, No, really?
It felt good because at least it wasn’t guarded, and he choked back a laugh. “Okay, Ms. Expert. You’ve got this. What do you need me for?”
“Just stand there and look pretty,” she muttered, taking the drive from him. Two minutes and nine cords later, she let out a whoop of victory and shifted to her knee. “Got it, just have to plug this in now…”
He stepped back to give her room. “If it doesn’t work, are we heading back to Birmingham to visit Ben?”
“Mmm. We could, but he’s really better if the data’s encrypted or corrupted. He won’t be able to pull it off a disk that’s not connected to anything.” She plugged in the drive as she talked, every movement quick and efficient. “Honestly, I don’t really know how it works, and God knows I’ve tried to figure it out.
Something with electricity though. Having a signal. He needs a way in, like a network or an access point.”
It made Ben sound like a comic superhero. “He’s wireless?” Andrew asked, amused.
“Uh-huh.” Kat scrunched up her nose, the look she always got when she was trying not to laugh. When she leaned forward to reach one of the cords at the rear of the computer, her ponytail slid away from the back of her neck, revealing the vivid black ink twining up toward her hairline.
He stared at the ink for a moment before dragging his gaze away. “How likely is this information not to be somehow encrypted?”
“No clue.” Powering up the computer resulted in a buzzing whir, clearly loud enough that even Kat heard it. She frowned as she turned on the monitor. “I guess it depends on if my mom put the data on there, or had someone else do it. She was okay with computers, but I was fixing her hosed SMTP settings by the time I was nine. I doubt she was messing with data encryption.”
Apparently, she’d been tangled up in a lot of things Kat hadn’t known about. “Only one way to tell, I guess.” He gestured to the drive. “Look and see.”
Kat made a noncommittal noise as the screen came to life, the boxy operating system at least five years out of date. Instead of navigating the windows, she pulled up a command line and stared at the blinking white cursor, her fingers hovering over the keyboard.
Her heart beat too fast, and the shallow, quick breaths she drew spoke of real fear as well as nervousness. Andrew slid his hands over her shoulders and leaned down to speak. “I’m right here. I’m with you.”
“Thank you.” The words trembled, almost as badly as her hands as she began to type. Slowly at first, then with growing confidence, too fast for him to follow what she was doing as blocks of text scrolled past in response to her short commands.
It took a few minutes, her shoulders growing tenser under his hands. Finally she cursed softly. “There are a ton of files. No extensions, no fucking clue what they are. But I can get at them, at least. Transfer them and send them to Ben. The only one that’s different…” She typed something, and a plain text file popped up.
A letter.
Katherine, If your father gave you this letter, it means I didn’t survive to see you turn twenty-one.
What I’m doing now, I’m doing for you. I need you to understand that I believed in this cause. Our world is broken. Spell casters and shapeshifters scorn us, use us, hurt us and discard us. Psychics have huddled together and bowed their heads for decades, as if our powers mean nothing. They told me they were working to change that, and I believed them. I fought for them. I killed for them.