“It doesn’t matter if I shield, or if they’re not already dead.” Her shudder made her entire body tremble.
“I’ve felt agony. I’ve known what it’s like to die from it. I thought it wouldn’t be as bad…but I can’t stop imagining what they went through. I can’t stop feeling it.”
Kat had more reason than most to turn away from this place. Not only because of the pain and death, but because their fates could have been hers. The thought left Andrew’s hands shaking as he kissed her head and released her. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
“I’m going to go stand with Mac and Jackson.” She managed a tiny smile. “No shame in that, right?
Mac’s a badass.”
“I’ll come with you,” Anna said quickly. “It’s a little much for me too, and I don’t mind admitting it.”
Kat brushed her fingers over Andrew’s before retreating, Anna at her side.
In the back he found Patrick snapping a picture of one of the corpses. The bounty hunter glanced up, his eyes numb. “You may not want to be back here. A shapeshifter sense of smell is not an advantage.”
“I can handle it,” Andrew lied. “Which one is the guy from the other night? The astral psychic?”
Patrick straightened and crossed the room, stepping over outstretched limbs and skirting spots where paper and wood still smoldered. “This one. We found their IDs on the desk in the back office.”
“Maybe they didn’t want to chance not having their families be able to identify them.”
Patrick shrugged. “We left them. Anna got pictures so we’d have the names and info.”
Andrew knelt by the corpse, the only one untouched by the flames. Foamy spittle flecked with blood had dried around his mouth, and his face was frozen in a rictus of pain. “They didn’t burn themselves alive, I guess.”
“Not quite.” Patrick gestured toward the far corner. “Looks like poisoning. There’s a tub over there, along with a few bottles—phenobarbital, cyanide and Valium. Jackson said—” His mouth tightened. “He was pretty sure whoever mixed it up had suicide in mind.”
The astral projector must have gone last, after torching the others. It’d take a crazy person, all right, to still want to chug poison after watching his friends die ugly, excruciating deaths. Crazy—or dedicated.
“Are there any other notes, documents? Anything in the office?”
“A lot of it burned. They had files, but they brought them in here.” Patrick nodded to a mess of ashes.
“Anna dug some stuff out of it. Not sure what else is salvageable, though.”
The last, desperate acts of people with no options. “The astral psychic must have told them what happened. There aren’t many bodies here, all things considered.” A quick, nauseating count. “Ten. Maybe not enough to mount another attack, especially if they sent their best fighters the first time around.”
“Maybe not, if they’re all psychics.” Patrick turned off his camera and pocketed it before giving Andrew a serious look. “Especially if they had Carmen Mendoza’s name on a list and thought her husband might have seen it.”
“Carmen? Shit.” The carnage Alec would have visited on the remaining cult members eclipsed the scene before them—and they would have known it. “That’s as good a reason to off yourself as any. It’d hurt less.”
“That’s the truth. And it’s not even taking into account what they’ve done to Kat. Making a move on her was a last-ditch effort, guaranteed to bring down a world of pain if they fucked it up.” Patrick nodded to the bodies around them. “Maybe they were ready for that.”
“Maybe.” Andrew closed his eyes and suppressed a shudder. “Do you guys have everything you need?
I don’t know—samples and pictures and stuff?”
“Yeah. It’ll take us a few days, running down the info and tying up loose ends. Anna’s going to check the IDs against what we found. But every lead we chased to get here seemed to indicate there were a dozen of them at most.” Patrick dropped a hand to Andrew’s shoulder. “I think it’s over, Callaghan.”
His tension didn’t abate. It would take time for him to believe it, to relax and let down his guard. “I’m not used to trouble being over,” he admitted.
“Because trouble’s never over,” Patrick replied, in a tone that said he understood. Completely. “But there’s trouble, and there’s catastrophe. And we’re on the other side of that now.”
“Yeah.” He couldn’t draw a deep breath, not until he’d gotten about a hundred miles away from the place. “Let’s get the hell out of here before the cops show up.”
Patrick actually laughed. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that…”
Sometimes, you either had to laugh or lose your fucking mind. “Me too.”
Outside, Jackson leaned against the sloppily painted wall, hurriedly pressing buttons on his phone’s keypad. Mackenzie and Kat were huddled around Anna and her phone.
Kat broke away as Andrew approached. “Some of the names on the ID match the lists. The list of kids to recruit.”
A mirror of her greatest fear, realized. “That doesn’t mean they were here voluntarily.”
She stopped a foot away, her hands fisted. “Voluntarily or not…it would have been me. If my mother hadn’t—” An unsteady breath, but she didn’t look spun now. She looked like she’d finally found somewhere firm to stand. “Whatever kind of crazy she was, it wasn’t this. She had lines, and that means I can find them too.”
The words gave him pause. “Was that even still a question?”
“It has to be, at least a little. As long as I’m asking it, I’m okay.”
She never wouldn’t ask it, and Andrew had to get used to that. He reached for her, pulled her close and whispered against her hair. “You’re okay.”
“I know.” This time, she sounded like she meant it. “Are we almost done here?”
Behind them, a squat building held death, the remnants of an obsession that aimed to destroy the lives of far too many people. But at the moment all he cared about was the woman in his arms—her life and her happiness. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter Fifteen
Two weeks. It had been two weeks since she’d spent any time in her own damn apartment.
Kat shifted, trying to find a comfortable position. The leather couch was the same one Derek had given her when she’d first gotten her apartment, though somewhat scratched and worn from lack of care. She’d spent hours on it every week, her feet propped up on the coffee table and her laptop balanced on her legs.
Three weeks ago she’d spent an entire Saturday afternoon in this exact spot while Sera worked her way through two DVDs of one of the eighteen billion CSI shows.
Two weeks, and it didn’t seem like home anymore.
Miguel arched an eyebrow at her. “You’re fidgety.”
Kat made a face at him and shifted again, tucking her feet under her. “It’s been a weird couple weeks. I don’t know if I remember how to relax.”
“You’ll figure it out.” He turned his attention back to the video game he was playing, though a particularly vigorous movement snapped the thumbstick on the controller. “Shit.”
It had happened enough after Miguel’s transformation to a full-blooded wolf that Kat had started keeping extra controllers in the closet. Of course, it hadn’t been happening lately, and that stirred worry.
“You doing okay? You were looking rattled the other day at breakfast.”
“I’m fine.” The words came too quickly.
With Miguel, she never felt guilty about snooping. Other than Callum, Miguel was the only person she knew with shields strong enough to keep her out if he wanted to.
And he did. Her gentle psychic touch slid across shining steel, slipping right past him. Worry twisted into concern, and she reached out to touch his arm. “If you decide you’re not…tell me? Please?”