Blood Bound

“Well, the power understood us.” And our ignorance didn’t make that binding any less real. Or any easier to undo. We’d bound ourselves together so tightly that as we grew up, the bonds chafed, wearing away at our friendship until nothing was left but resentment and anger.

I pulled the bathroom door closed and sank into my desk chair, fending off a battery of memories I’d thought buried. It felt weird to see Anne in my office, out of place in my adult life when she’d been a central figure of my youth. Part of me wanted to hug her and get caught up over drinks, but the stronger part of me remembered what went down that night six years ago, the last time we’d all four been together.

A reunion wasn’t gonna happen. Ever. And not just because Elle was dead and Kori was MIA. Anne had disappeared when I’d needed a friend. I could have tracked her, but why, when a dozen unanswered calls and messages said she didn’t want to talk to me? So I’d struck out on my own, and never once looked back at the past. Until now.

“What are you doing here? Is a third ghost from my past going to show up and take me to my own grave?” But that possibility struck a little too close to home, and I had to shrug it off.

She sank onto the couch and her composure cracked, then fell away, revealing raw pain and bitter anger, and suddenly I wanted to hurt whoever’d hurt her. In spite of what she’d done to me—what we’d all done to one another—I wanted to protect her, like Kori and I had looked out for her as kids, and that impulse ran deeper than the oath connecting us. Older. All the way back to the day Anne and I had first met, before Kori and Elle even moved to town.

But it wasn’t that simple. I knew what she was going to say, even though it shouldn’t have been possible.

“I need you, Liv. Will you help me?”

No! Shock sputtered within me, synapses misfiring in my brain as I tried to make sense of what she’d just said. Of what she shouldn’t have been able to say.

“How did you …?” But my voice faded into silence as the answer to my own question became obvious. “You burned it. You burned the second oath.” Damn it! “We swore, Anne. We swore to let it stand.”

In spite of unshed tears shining in her eyes, Anne’s gaze held no hint of shame or regret. “You’re the only one who can help me with this and I couldn’t even ask you with the second oath binding me.”

“That’s why we signed it!” I leaned forward with my arms crossed on the desktop, and my chair squealed in protest.

That second oath was our freedom. It couldn’t truly sever the ties binding us, but it prevented us from tugging on them. In the second oath, Anne, Kori, Elle and I had sworn never to ask one another for help, because once asked, we were compelled to do everything within our power to aid one another. Which, we’d learned the hard way, could only lead to disaster. And resentment. And expulsion from school. And arrest records.

“I’m sorry. I really am,” Anne insisted, tucking one coppery strand of shoulder-length hair behind her ear. “I know you probably don’t believe that, and I can’t blame you. But I truly had no choice. Will you help me,

Liv?”

“Hell no, I’m not going to help you!” But as soon as I said the words, breaking my oath to her, the pain began. It started as a bolt of white behind my left eye, shining so bright that everything else seemed dim by comparison. When I closed my eyes, the light sent pain shooting through my skull, and in less than a second, it was a full-blown migraine. Then came the muscle spasms—a revolt of my entire body, the consequence of going back on an oath signed voluntarily and sealed in blood by a child who’d turned out to be the most powerful Binder I’d ever met.

Defaulting on an oath sealed by an amateur—or even a weak professional—could put you in the hospital. Defaulting on an oath sealed by anyone with real power and/or training could kill you.

First, your brain sends warnings in the form of pain. Migraines. Muscle cramps. General abuse of the body’s pain receptors. Then it starts turning things off, one by one. Motor control. Bladder and bowel control. Sight and scent. Hearing. But never the sense of touch. Never the nerve endings. They remain functional so you can feel every second of your body’s decision to self-destruct.

I’m a little fuzzy on the order of betrayal by my own internal organs, but among the first to go are the kidneys, liver, gallbladder, intestines and pancreas, any one of which would probably kill you eventually. Then the big guns. If you hold out long enough, you’ll lose respiratory function, then circulatory. And without those, of course, your brain has only minutes—minutes—for you to try to think through the pain and humiliation and decide whether you’re going to stick to your word, or die breaking it.

Most people never get that far. I’ve never gotten that far, as evidenced by the fact that my heart continues to beat, in spite of several times I would have declared it broken beyond repair. But everyone has a limit. A point past which you can’t be pushed.

“Please don’t do this, Olivia,” Anne said, when my fingers began to twitch on my desk. A second later, my legs began to convulse, banging against the bottom of the pencil drawer, but I only stared at her through the ball of light in the center of my vision, breathing steadily through the pain. “I’m not going to take it back, Liv,” she insisted, leaning forward on the couch. “I can’t. Not this time. Will you help me?”

Her repetition of the original request escalated the process, and I gasped at the pain deep in my stomach. I couldn’t identify it, but I knew what that pain meant. One of us would have to back down in the next few minutes, or the last thing I saw would be her bright green eyes, full of tears and regret, and her stubborn lips sealed against the sentence that could make it all go away.

“Please, Liv,” Annika begged, and this time her voice came from behind me. Water ran in the bathroom. A second later, she leaned my chair back and laid a cold, wet cloth over my eyes and forehead, and my hands twitched violently in my lap. “You don’t even know what I need you to do.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I gasped, helpless to keep the rag from slipping down my face. Until I gave in to the compulsion to help her, I would feel nothing but the systematic shutdown of my entire body. But still I fought it. She had no right to make me do something I didn’t want to do, no matter what stupid mistake we’d made as children! The compulsion was like having my free will stripped. It was humiliating, and infuriating, and it was the reason we’d all gone our separate ways after high school without even a glance in the rearview mirror. “The point—” I growled through a throat that wanted to close around my words “—is that I … have … no … choice.”

Leather creaked as she sat on the couch again, and the hitch in her breath said she was fighting sobs. “I’m sorry, Liv. If I could ask you without compelling you, I would, but I don’t have that option.”

She was right—her very request triggered the compulsion—but that didn’t help. And neither did the regret obvious in her voice. “What do you want?” I whispered with all the volume I could manage, as pain ripped through my stomach again, and my arms began to contract toward my torso.

“I need you to find someone.”

No surprise, considering I was a Tracker, both by birth and by profession.

The rag slipped from my eyes and I saw her wipe tears from her cheeks with an angry stroke of one hand. “I need you to find the bastard who killed my husband and return the favor.”

Two

For a moment, I could only stare at her, and as my resistance began to fade in the face of surprise, so did the pain, though it wouldn’t completely subside until I’d said the magic words.

“Whoa, you got married?” I couldn’t picture it, and I hadn’t even noticed the wedding band that now seemed glaringly obvious on her left hand. Did she have a house in the suburbs? A mortgage? A dog in the backyard?

I frowned and sucked in a deep breath, relieved to feel the convulsions in my arms downgrading to mere spasms.

“Yes. Then I got widowed,” she said, and more tears fell, even as her jaws clenched in some powerful combination of rage and devastation. “I need you to track the murderer and kill him.”

“That’s … that’s not really what I do, Anne,” I said, careful not to refuse—so soon after that last refusal, anyway. I stared at her, surprised by the vengeful impulse in a woman who, when we were kids, was a turn-the-other-cheek kind of girl. “I just find people.

That’s it.”

Anne blinked, as if she hadn’t heard me. As if she didn’t want to hear me. Then she plucked her purse from the center couch cushion and dug through it with trembling hands. “Here.” She produced a wallet-size photo album and flipped to the second page, already pulling a picture out before I realized what she was going to do.

“No, don’t … “ Show me a picture of your dead husband … That was a low blow. But before I could finish my sentence, she’d leaned forward and slid the photo across my desk. I looked at it, against my better judgment, and found a handsome Asian man with a nice smile, one arm around an obviously happy Anne.

It was like staring at a ghost, though I’d never even met the man.

“His name was Shen Liang. He was thirty-four, and the nicest man I ever met. He wrote proprietary software for a company here in the city, but they let him work from home. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him.” The tears were back, and I stared at my desk to avoid seeing them.

“What did the police say?”

“They’re investigating. But, Liv, his killer was Skilled. A Traveler. The police aren’t going to be able to find him, and even if they could, without traditional physical evidence, they can’t make the charges stick. You know what they’re up against.”

Yeah. I knew. Nearly half my business came from victims trying to catch people the cops couldn’t identify. “I’ll find him for you.” I had no choice about that. “But the rest.” The killing … “It’s not that simple.” Even if I found the suspect, and even if I was one-hundred-percent certain that he was guilty of cold-blooded murder, I couldn’t just kill him—not if I valued my own life—until I knew for sure what his connections were. Who, if anyone, he was bound to. “We have a daughter.”

“No …” I shook my head when she started digging in her purse again. No more pictures …

“Hadley.” More tears, and when her jaw began to quiver, something inside me twisted painfully. “She’s five years old, and tomorrow I’m going to have to tell her that her daddy is dead. I can’t let her grow up knowing the man who killed her father is still out there. You have to help me. I need you to find Shen’s killer and kill him. I’m asking you, Olivia.”

I groaned out loud. Those were the magic words. This had gone beyond a general request for help: it was now a specific request that I commit murder, regardless of the cost to me, personally. Now, unless I could somehow talk her out of it without actually refusing to do what she’d asked, I’d have to either kill her husband’s murderer or die fighting the compulsion. Or die when the police caught up to me. Or wish I’d died if the murderer turned out to be connected and his connections caught up to me.

Motherfucker!

“Annika, I’m asking you to rethink this.”

There. Two could play that game. Or—technically—four, since there were four bloody thumbprints on that old oath, wherever it was.

Anne flinched, and her hand twitched. She was resisting, and I could practically see how badly she wanted to rub her own forehead. So I tossed her the cool rag.

“Fine. State your case.” She leaned back on the couch and placed the folded rag over her forehead and tear-swollen eyes.

I took a deep breath, but was careful to keep it silent. I didn’t want her to know how important it was for me to get out of the assassin part of the favor she was asking. “I don’t have a problem with your husband’s murderer dying for his crimes.” The state would give him the death penalty anyway, if they could prove his guilt. “And I’m perfectly willing to find him for you. But once he’s found, you need an expert for … whatever comes next. And I’m no assassin, Anne.”

I was an amateur at best….

She sat up, clutching the rag in one hand. “Olivia, I don’t need you to cut his throat with a scalpel and frame the governor’s personal physician. I don’t need the best. Hell, I can’t afford the best. Proficiency will suffice, and from what I’ve heard, you’re more than proficient.”

What? “I don’t care what you’ve heard, I do not kill people for money!” Much. Anymore.

Not just for money, anyway.

My head throbbed again, but this headache was stress-induced. She wasn’t backing down, and I couldn’t tell her why I needed her to. And thanks to the original oath, I couldn’t just ask her not to ask me to kill someone. Noelle had called that the no-wishing-for-more-wishes clause—like a contractual paradox. It couldn’t be done.

Anne frowned. “But you work for Ruben Cavazos.”

“Freelance. I freelance for Cavazos.” Which was precisely why her request was so dangerous for me. “And for Adam Rawlinson, and for anyone else who can pay.” Except for Jake Tower. Working for both sides of the Skilled black market would be like putting a bullet in my own head—only more prolonged and painful. “But all I do for them is find people.” Usually. “What the client does with the target after that is their business. I don’t get involved with that side of it.” Not without a very good reason—and money doesn’t count.

“So Cavazos doesn’t … own you?” She blinked through her tears, watching me carefully, and if I hadn’t known her most of my life, I might not have realized what she was doing. What she was looking for in my eyes.

Anne was a Reader—a human truth detector—born with an ability most law enforcers worked years to develop. Only her Skill was virtually infallible, and it couldn’t be turned off. Which was why she hadn’t dated much in high school—turns out sometimes ignorance really is bliss. Or at least temporary consolation. Shen must have been the most honest man on the face of the planet.

“Say what you mean, Annika.” I knew what she meant, of course, but … “If you’re going to come in here and pull on the strings of a fifteen-year-old oath, you could at least have the guts to ask me what you really want to know.”

“Fine,” Anne said, and I recognized the rare flash of temper in her eyes. “Olivia, are you bound to Ruben Cavazos? Because that’s what they’re saying about you out there.” She nodded toward the window overlooking the street below. “They’re saying you quit Rawlinson’s team because you’re bound to Cavazos and he’s taking a cut of your freelance fee—along with whatever else he wants from you.”

My temper burned like indigestion, and I fought the need to stand in defense of my reputation—the only real asset a freelance Tracker has. “Who’s saying that?”

Anne glanced at her hands again, stalling. Then she looked at the door I still hadn’t locked. I followed her gaze as the glass panel swung open and Cam stepped in from the hall.

Damn it!

“Lurking in dark hallways?” I said, my hands hidden in my lap to hide how tightly they were clenched. “Isn’t that a little cliché, even for a stalker—I mean Tracker?”

“You wouldn’t have heard her out if you knew I was here,” he said calmly, and I couldn’t argue.

“You told her I’m bound to Cavazos?” I had to force my jaw to unclench as I stood, leaning with both palms flat on my desktop. “You used to be above spreading unsubstantiated rumors.”

“Those with Skills live and die by the word on the street, Olivia. Especially in this city.”

Yeah. It was that dying part that worried me.

“Look, I may be country mouse in the big city,” Anne started, still seated while Cam and I stood, “but I’m not stupid. I know Cavazos is selling blood and names on the black market, and I know he has his homegrown army out there doing the dirty work.”

But if that was all she knew, she really was country mouse.

“He’s not the only one. Jake Tower has this city by the balls, and everyone west of the river’s so afraid of his men—”

Anne stood, interrupting me smoothly with that same quiet confidence I’d envied in childhood, then hated in adolescence. “What I need to know from you is whether you’re part of that army. Is Ruben Cavazos pulling your strings, Liv?”

“Right now, you ‘re pulling my strings.” And pushing all the wrong buttons. “You need to back off, Annika. Before I have to push you back.”

“She has a right to know what you’re tangled up in, Liv,” Cam insisted quietly, and I exploded, as always, the roaring fire to his smooth, hard ice.

“Screw her rights. What about mine? You two can’t just ambush me, make me work for you, then question me like a criminal so you can be sure none of my dirt’s going to rub off on you.”

“Ask her to pull her sleeve up,” Cam said to Anne, though his gaze never left mine. “To see if she’s marked,” he added, when she hesitated in obvious confusion.

Anne sighed, but even the weary grief that had moved me earlier couldn’t calm me now. “Are you going to make me ask?” she said softly.

Hell no. I wasn’t going to give her—or anyone else—any more power over me, if I could possibly help it. “You wanna see?” I spat, gathering the hem of my T-shirt in both hands. I jerked the material over my head and dropped it into my chair, then stood watching them both, in only jeans and a bra. “Fine. Look.”

Cam swallowed thickly—the only outward sign that the sight of my bare skin still affected him—then his focus zeroed in on my arm automatically. “Cavazos’s first mark is a small black ring on the left bicep. She’s clean.”

I was clean? As opposed to dirty? “Fuck you!” Cam flinched, and I recognized the regret that flickered across his expression before he could hide it. “That’s not what I … I just meant …” He closed his eyes while I tugged my shirt back over my head, glad for the half second it shielded me from their scrutiny and judgment.

When I sank into my chair, dressed, but still pissed, Cam settled onto the arm of the couch. “I made Anne promise to let you out of this if you were bound to one of the syndicates.” Because, having lived in the city almost as long as I had—I was pretty sure he’d followed me there—he understood how dangerous and complicated her favor could make things for anyone sworn to serve on one side of the black-market divide.

It was very … compassionate of him, and it took real effort for me to deny the sudden rush of my own pulse. Because compassion was the last thing I needed from Cam Caballero. “I don’t want your pity, or sympathy, or whatever this is.”

“Fortunately, it looks like you don’t need it,” he said, with another glance at my now covered arm. “So let’s move on.”

Irritated that he seemed to be taking control of things, I turned back to Anne. “I’ll find your husband’s killer, and I’ll take you to him. But you can kill him yourself,” I said, careful not to actually refuse to do the second part of her request.

Anne paled, and Cam stood, scowling at me across my own desk. “No, Olivia.”

“What, she’s brave enough to come in here demanding vigilante justice, but not brave enough to do the job herself?”

Anne glanced back and forth between us, her purse trembling in her grip, but Cam answered before she could even open her mouth. “She’s never even held a gun. Even if she had any chance of actually pulling this off, can you really send her back to her half-orphaned daughter with blood on her hands?”

His point was subtle, but it still stung. Anne wasn’t like me. We’d started on the same path, sure. Parents, school, friends, college. Then Anne had continued down that path toward a respectable career, civil responsibility and family, while I had jumped the track entirely and derailed my own life with violence, under-the-carpet jobs and solitude.

If I made Anne take the shot herself, I’d be dragging her from her mostly tidy suburban life into the gritty reality of my own existence. Most people can’t commit murder then go on living their lives, even if that murder was actually justice. And I had no doubt Anne was one of those people.

But I was not. And Cam obviously knew that.

“Fine. I’ll do it.” I sighed, finally fully resigned to her request, and the last of the resistance pain faded. “You have a name or a sample of his blood?”

“Well, he didn’t leave a business card,” she snapped, her anger currently winning the battle against grief. “But I can get you several blood samples from the house.” She sniffled, then visibly swallowed tears. “They found Shen holding a bloody knife, so I’m hoping at least one of the blood samples will belong to his killer.”

But that made no sense. Why would a Skilled killer—especially a professional—leave his own blood at the scene? Maybe he was interrupted?

“The police left a huge mess, and obviously I haven’t had time to have it cleaned yet,” she continued.

Obviously? “Annika, when did he die?”

“Tonight.” She frowned and glanced out the window, where the first rays of daylight had changed inky black to deep, dark blue. “Last night, I guess.”

“Last night?”

“Around eight o’clock”

“Your husband’s been dead for less than ten hours?” I rubbed my forehead, then let one hand trail though my hair. “Don’t you think you might be reacting before you’ve had a chance to really think about this?”

“No.” For the first time since she’d walked into my office, Anne looked at me as if she didn’t even know me. As if I was just some stranger she’d hired from an ad in the phone book. “And I would rather have this whole thing over with before I go pick up Hadley. I don’t want to have to think about this while I’m trying to decide how best to explain what happened to her father without scarring her for life.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what else to say—I wasn’t sure rationality would have had much attraction for me, either, in her position. I opened my mouth to name my one condition, but she beat me to the proverbial punch.

“Liv, there’s one more thing …” Anne hesitated, and I knew I wasn’t going to like whatever else she had to say. “I want you to work with Cam.”

I sucked in a long, slow breath, hoping she would deliver the punch line to the world’s worst joke before I had to actually say something. But she only watched me, waiting. “No,” I said finally. “No way.” I turned to Cam for support, but could find no resistance to the idea in his expression. Instead, I found … satisfaction. “This was your idea, wasn’t it?” I demanded He crossed both arms over a still-broad chest. “Does it matter? Is it going to kill you to work with me on one job? For Anne?”

Yes, it just might kill me. Or him. But there had never been a less appropriate time to explain why I’d left him. Why working with him could be more dangerous than hunting and killing a murderer on my own. And it didn’t help that while my brain protested on the basis of logic, the rest of me ached for this excuse to be near him again, if only in a professional capacity.

But that was a bad idea. The key to resisting Cam Caballero lay in avoiding temptation—a concept he seemed to personify for me more with every glance I avoided, every memory I buried.

“No.” I turned back to Anne, wearing my business face. The one that got me the rates and bonuses I demanded. The one that usually kept creeps off me when I followed criminals down dark alleys and through abandoned buildings. “No. That’s a deal-breaker.”

“There are no deal-breakers when you’re bound,” Cam pointed out calmly, and suddenly I wished I’d hit him when I had the chance. “You’ll do it, or you’ll die trying to resist the compulsion.”

“I haven’t actually asked you yet,” Anne reminded me, echoing the infuriating calm that Cam exuded like radiation—a slow, vicious poison. “But I will if I have to. Your choice.”