Blood Bound

Leaving blood around like this was beyond careless. If found by people with the right Skills—or people who had access to people with the right Skills—fresh blood samples could be used to track the donor, or bind him to … well, anything. At least for a while. Blood not freely given wouldn’t bind someone forever, unless the Binder was extraordinarily gifted. But it would work long enough to compel the donor to turn himself in, or keep him from going to the authorities, or whatever the Binder wrote into a contract and sealed with the stolen blood.

This wasn’t the kind of mistake anyone with Skill would make. In fact, fewer and fewer of the un Skilled were leaving viable blood samples undestroyed, as the truth of our existence persevered despite the lack of official recognition from the government. Any government.

“Something’s wrong here, Cam.” I glanced around the bathroom for something to prod the trash with, and didn’t find so much as a plunger. So I donned the latex gloves from my pocket and used them to lift bandage after bloody bandage from the trash can. They were all the same.

“Fresh …” I said, laying the first piece over the edge of the tub next to Cam. He stood to make more room. “He’s only been gone an hour. Maybe less. And you’re right, he’s hurt pretty badly.” Based on the amount of blood alone. “But why would I be drawn here, instead of drawn to him? Whoever he is?”

“Maybe he’s dead,” Cam suggested, leaning over the sink to pull open the medicine cabinet.

“If he were dead, his blood would have no pull. He’s still alive, somewhere, and leaving his own viable blood around like he wants to be found, whoever he is.”

“Eric Hunter.” Cam held a prescription pill bottle down for me to see. “Three of them, and they’re all prescribed to the same man, at this address. Antibiotics, antidepressants and anti-inflammatories.” He set the bottle back on its shelf and closed the cabinet. “Mr. Hunter, you were obviously depressed, inflamed and … biotic. But why did you kill Shen Liang?”

“My guess is that he was hired. But who would hire someone to kill a work-at-home husband and father?”

“Maybe something to do with his work?” Cam suggested. “Did Anne mention what kind of software he designs?”

I shook my head. We were no closer to the why, but the how was obvious. The killer was a Traveler—a shadow-walker, capable of stepping into one shadow and out of another one, anywhere in the world, if he were powerful enough. Certainly anywhere in the city, based on the strength of the blood sample Anne had brought.

“And why did he leave his blood …?” I thought aloud, staring at the mess he’d left. And that’s when I realized why the whole thing felt so weird, beyond the presence of so much viable blood. “It’s fading.”

“What’s fading?” Cam asked. “Is it drying already?”

“Not the blood, the power. The Skill.” I stood, stunned by what shouldn’t have been possible, but was quite obviously happening anyway. “Feel this.” I thrust a blood-soaked dish rag at Cam and he took it reluctantly in his bare hands. “Do you feel it?”

He shook his head slowly, and his blue eyes widened. “I’m not as good with blood as you are, but I should be able to feel something. If he’s Skilled.”

“Exactly.” I pulled off my gloves and laid them over the edge of the tub. “I can still feel it, but it’s nowhere near as strong as it was. As it still is, in this sample.” I pulled the bagged sock from my pocket. “But it’s definitely the same blood. Which means that somehow, his Skill was stronger when he bled on the sock than when he bandaged the wound here at home, about seventeen hours later.”

Cam ran water over his hand to rinse away the blood. “How is that possible? How can Skill fade?”

“I don’t know.” And I still couldn’t figure out why I’d be pulled to a trash can full of bloody rags, rather than to the man who’d left with even more of it in his veins.

The squeal of hinges froze us both, and Cam laid one finger over his lips, warning me to be quiet. As if I didn’t already know.

“Who’s in there?” a male voice called, and I shoved the sealed sock back into my pocket with one hand while I drew my gun with the other.

Hunter? I mouthed to Cam, but he shook his head, and I read recognition on his face.

“Nick, is that you?”

“Who’s that?” the voice from the living room called. “Cam Cabellero. We’re coming out.”

“Who’s we?”

Cam motioned for me to put my gun up and follow him out of the bathroom. I holstered my pistol, but left my jacket open so I could get to it in a hurry.

Nick turned out to be in his early twenties and unSkilled, with a thick build, dark hair and a black Glock 9mm, which he was shoving barrel first into the waist of his pants when I stepped into the living room. His eyes widened when he saw me, but in surprise, not recognition. So far, so good.

“Lady next door said someone kicked in the door to 210. I’m guessing that was you and …” He glanced at me expectantly, waiting for me to fill in my name.

“Liv Warren,” Cam said reluctantly, when I remained silent. I could have punched him. Why the hell had he given out my real name?

“Liv …?” Sudden comprehension wrinkled Nick’s forehead and when he crossed his arms over his chest, one of the short sleeves of his dark T-shirt rode up, revealing a single thick, rust-colored link of chain tattooed on his upper arm. He was one of Tower’s grunts—no surprise, considering the neighborhood. Like most of Tower’s men—and more than a few women—he’d probably grown up on the west side and discovered after high school that his employment options consisted mostly of greasy fast-food service and manual labor.

Like the typical syndicate employee, Nick had likely signed on for a five-year term of service with the potential for renewal and advancement if he proved useful. But even if he opted not to re-up at the end of his service commitment, he would never be able to work for another syndicate or work against Tower, thanks to the lifelong loyalty and noncompetition clauses he would have been required to sign and seal with his own blood.

“Aren’t you on the wrong side of town?” Nick demanded, staring down at me as if I was worth less than the crud stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

Nick’s single mark said he was in his first term of service; the cocky grin said he’d been in just long enough to think he was badass. I was itching to prove him wrong—to take out some of my unspent anger at Cavazos on this little prick’s face—but I knew better than to start shit with one of Tower’s men in his own neighborhood. I’d be outnumbered before I could throw my second punch.

“She’s an independent,” Cam said, meaning that I wasn’t bound to any syndicate. Which was mostly true—I worked for Cavazos alone and owed no loyalty or obedience to any of his syndicate members. “She’s working freelance and I’m helping her out.”

“She got a badge?”

“I’m not a cop.” Why wasn’t he browbeating Cam? And how did Cam happen to know one of Tower’s grunts?

“Then I gotta check her for marks.”

I drew my gun and flicked the safety off with my thumb. “You’re welcome to try.”

“No, he isn’t.” Cam met my gaze with a heavy one of his own. “You’re going to put the gun away.” Then he turned back to Nick. “And you’re going to back the hell off. I already told you she’s an independent.”

Independents were a dying breed in the city, even before I’d defected from their ranks.

“She broke into an apartment, she’s armed and I have it on good authority that she’s bound to Ruben Cavazos. I gotta check her for marks, Caballero. You don’t like it, you take that up with Adler. It’s over my head.”

Cam’s jaw clenched. “My word’s not good enough?”

Nick shook his head. “Not this time.” He turned to me. “Take off your jacket.”

My temper flared. “Go to hell.”

“Liv, just show him your arm,” Cam said. “You’re not marked. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that I don’t owe him anything.” And I was tired of being forced to strip.

“Fine. Then do it for me.” Cam frowned, but the lines around his mouth were fear for me, not anger. Something was wrong—beyond the obvious. “You owe me, Liv.”

He was wrong about that. I’d already made up for what I’d done to him, several times over, but I couldn’t tell him that.

The real question was why he wanted me to cooperate with this arrogant little grunt in the first place.

And that’s when I finally understood. “Push your sleeve up.”

Cam exhaled slowly, but didn’t even try to deny what I’d just figured out. He uncrossed his arms and pushed his left sleeve up with his right hand. And there it was. Not one, but three thick, iron-colored links of chain circling a quarter of his upper arm.

“You son of a bitch….” I whispered through clenched teeth. Cam was well entrenched in Jake Tower’s infrastructure. Halfway up the ranks. No wonder he’d been worried about my rumored affiliation with Cavazos. We couldn’t work together. We couldn’t even safely be seen together by anyone who knew about our respective bindings.

And that little bit of understanding brought Cam’s current predicament into clear focus. He’d brought me—a potential enemy—into his neighborhood and if I refused to prove I had no opposing affiliation, he would be held responsible.

My heart pounding, I holstered my gun and slid my jacket off my shoulders, then let Cam pull my shirt sleeve up to show off the unmarked flesh of my upper left arm.

“See?” he said, as I shrugged the jacket back into place. “No binding.”

“That’s not the only place she could be marked.” Nick’s gaze wandered down from my arm before finding my eyes again, his own gleaming in anticipation. “Where does Cavazos mark his whores?”

I stiffened, but Cam didn’t hesitate. His fist flew, and a second later, Nick was on the floor, bleeding from either his nose or his mouth—I couldn’t tell which, with all the blood.

Out of habit, I pulled the bottle of ammonia from my pocket, but Cam shook his head. “Save it.” He plucked a tissue from a box on the coffee table, then knelt next to Nick and wiped the blood from his fist while the grunt pinched his nose, trying to staunch the flow. “You checked. She’s unmarked. Your job here is done.” He folded the tissue into quarters and held it up for Nick to see. “You ever disrespect her again, and I’ll consider it a personal insult.” Cam tucked the tissue into his front pocket. “And I’ll send this to Ruben Cavazos myself, along with your name and a suggestion of how best to use them both to make your life a living hell. Got it?”

Nick swiped blood from his face with the tail of his shirt—an idiotic move, unless he was planning to burn it later. “Sorry, Cam. I just … That’s what I heard….”

“What did you hear?” I demanded, snapping the cap back onto my spray bottle.

Nick hesitated, glancing at me for a second before refocusing on Cam. “I’m not saying it’s true, but word on the street is that she’s doing Cavazos. And reporting to him. Tower put her on the watch list.”

“Based on a stupid rumor?” Cam demanded.

The grunt shrugged. “He don’t answer to me. All I know is we got orders to check for a mark if she comes west of the river.”

“Since when?”

Another shrug. “Couple hours ago? Maybe less. You didn’t get the message?”

Son of a bitch. I’d left Cavazos a couple of hours ago. It had to be one of his men.

Cam’s frown deepened. “I haven’t checked my phone.” He stood and shrugged to me. “Doesn’t matter, though. You’re not marked.”

But it wasn’t that simple. Eventually someone who outranked Cam would demand a more thorough search, and then I’d be screwed. We both would.

“We’re done here, right?” I asked, already headed back to the bathroom.

“Yeah.” Cam pulled the grunt to his feet while I squatted in front of the bathroom sink to check for cleaning supplies. Nothing but an extra roll of toilet paper and a half-empty quart of bleach. But that was good enough.

“What should I report?” Nick asked, still sniffling blood while I stuffed one of Hunter’s soiled rags into an extra quart bag from my pocket, then dropped the rest of them in the wastebasket.

“The truth,” Cam said. “She’s here on a freelance job, for a private party, and I’m assisting. You checked her, she’s unmarked, and I’m personally vouching for her. If they want to know any more than that, they’ve got my number.”

He was vouching for me. Shit. I couldn’t let him do that—it could get him killed, if something went wrong—but I couldn’t make him take the words back without telling him I was bound to Cavazos. And if I admitted that now, Nick would try to haul me in front of Tower, and Cam would try to stop him, and that would lead to more violence and spilled blood, and then we’d both be on the run from the entire Tower syndicate. Which would make it really hard to search for a murderer who lived west of the river.

That slope was slippery, but unavoidable.

Trying to swallow the bitter lump in my throat, I opened the bottle of bleach and poured it into the trash can at arm’s length, to keep from splashing my clothes. Then I used the bottle itself to press the whole bloody mess down into the liquid that had pooled at the bottom.

Bleach doesn’t erase all evidence of blood, as any crime-scene technician will tell you. But it does destroy the energy signature that pulls a Tracker to it.

I wasn’t worried about anyone else looking for Shen’s killer—the human police couldn’t track like a bloodhound, and Anne wouldn’t hire anyone else, with me and Cam already on the case. But if Cam’s superiors found out about my mark from Cavazos, it wouldn’t be hard for them to deduce that we were tracking Eric Hunter, and they could use his blood to follow our trail.

Thanks to the bleach, though, all they’d have to go on was his name, which cut their chances of tracking him in half. At least.

When I left the bathroom, Nick was gone, and Cam was in the kitchen, labeling the thug’s blood sample with a black Sharpie. When he was done, he handed it to me, and I dated Hunter’s bloody bandage, then labeled it with his first name and last initial only, for security. It’s much harder to find someone—through either traditional or Skilled searching methods—without a last name.

“We need to talk,” I said, while he blew on the print to dry it.

“Agreed. We also need to get something to eat and find Eric Hunter. Let’s wrap things up here.” He shoved the sealed tissue back into his pocket, then brushed past me on his way to the bedroom. “You look for a filing cabinet, I’ll check his computer.”

“What are we looking for?” I already had a more recent—if weaker—blood sample.

“His full name. Or as much of it as we can find.” Because the Skilled rarely used either of their middle names on official documents. But then again, they also rarely left a pile of bloody rags lying around for someone to find. “Look for documentation. A traffic ticket, an insurance card, an old college ID or even a magazine subscription. It’s a long shot, but I’ve gotten lucky like that before.”

Eric Hunter had no filing cabinet, and I couldn’t decide whether that meant he was smart enough to store all his dangerous personal information under lock and key elsewhere, or stupid enough not to keep track of it at all. But based on the shoebox full of unfiled receipts under his bed—an organizational method I was well acquainted with, personally—I was betting on the latter.

His kitchen trash—so glad I brought a pair of gloves—held an unopened bank statement, a two-week-old copy of Car and Driver addressed to Eric R. Hunter, several pieces of junk mail addressed to Resident and … a hospital bill, wadded into a tight, angry ball of crumpled paper.

Hmm … Yet another piece of Eric Hunter’s life that didn’t fit the profile.

Still wearing my gloves, I took the bank statement into the bedroom, where Cam sat at Hunter’s desk, clicking away at his laptop. “What’cha got?” he asked, without looking up.

“Couple of interesting things …” Unwilling to sit on the bed, I leaned against the door facing and unfolded the statement. “One of Eric Hunter’s middle initials is evidently R. And until last week, his personal financial crisis made the national debt look like small potatoes.” Four bounced checks all with twenty-five-dollar fees attached.

Cam finally looked up. “What happened last week?”

“He received a fifty-thousand-dollar wire transfer. I’m assuming that’s the up-front portion of the hit on Shen.”

“That must have turned his frown upside down. Where’d it come from?” Cam was already typing again, but the frustrated lines in his forehead said he wasn’t having much luck.

I shrugged. “There’s just an account number. Can you trace that?”

“Not without a crash course in criminal hacking and a few decades to practice. I might know someone,

Though….”

“One of your friendly neighborhood gangsters?” I asked, not quite surprised by the accusatory tone of my own voice, and Cam looked up at me again, his expression cautious, and difficult to read.

“I never said I wasn’t bound.”

“You never said you were, either.” I folded Hunter’s bank statement and stuffed it back into the envelope. “You made me show you my arm, but you never bothered to mention that you’re three chain links up Jake Tower’s ass.”

“We don’t have time for this right now.” He turned back to the screen, shoulders tense, forehead drawn low. “Did you find anything else?”

I had to clench my teeth to keep from yelling at him, and I only bothered because he was right—the longer we spent in Hunter’s apartment, the better the chance that Nick’s report would send one of his superiors our way.

“Just this.” I held up the bill, still wrinkled in spite of my best attempt to flatten it. “Hunter went to the E.R. for a broken arm four months ago and still hasn’t paid his bill.”

Cam frowned. “Why would he go to the E.R.?”

“Exactly.” Skilled people almost never go to the hospital, because of the compulsive blood-drawing policies and the staff’s utter refusal to let you incinerate your own biological waste onsite. Evidently setting fire to a medical wastebucket is a strict no-no.

Instead, we had our own doctors—certain legitimate private practices with access to all the same equipment as a public hospital, but run by people in the know. People who routinely gather everything you might possibly have bled on into one plastic bag and won’t look at you strangely if you take that bag home to burn in the privacy of your own apartment.

For the convenience of certain criminal elements, there were even private practices that were willing to overlook the legal requirement that they report gunshot wounds and other brow-raising injuries—for the right price. Or to comply with the binding that had provided the funding to open that specific practice in the first place. Syndicate-sponsored clinics were all the rage.

“Something isn’t right with this guy,” I said, and Cam nodded.

“You found more than I did. He pays most of his bills online, but if he keeps a list of passwords, it’s either encrypted or saved under a name no one else would recognize. His emails are banal—no smoking gun there, which means we still have no idea who hired him, or why.”

“But we do have his first and last name, and one middle initial,” I pointed out. “You can work with that,

right?”

“Assuming the name’s real and he’s still anywhere near the city, yeah.”

“Good, let’s get out of here before we run into any more of your fellow hired thugs.” I hated the thought of Cam working for Tower. I wanted to go on thinking that the dirt of the city hadn’t touched him. That his hands were still clean. I’d come to the city to protect us from each other, and instead, here we stood, side by side in the muck.

Cam closed Hunter’s laptop and frowned at me. “They’re not all like Nick, you know. There are some decent men and women working for Tower. Sometimes good people get caught up in bad things, Olivia.”

“I know.” Better than most. “But I also know that the closer you stand to the monsters, the more human they start to look.”

And perspective was something I could not afford to lose.

Seven

“His apartment was empty, but there was blood in the bathroom. His, not Shen’s,” Liv said into her phone, one boot propped on my dashboard. “We think he was hired. Someone wired a big chunk of cash to his checking account last week.”

Anne spoke during the pause, but I couldn’t hear much of what she said over the traffic noise as I turned onto Third Street, the main drag and the heart of Tower’s empire.

“Not yet. Cam thinks he knows someone who can trace the account, but for now, we’re still trying to sniff him out the hard way. Any idea why someone might want Shen dead? Something to do with his work, maybe?”

Anne spoke again, and I nodded through the window to one of Tower’s men on the street, his four rust-colored chain lengths showing beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt. He nodded back, then glanced at Liv in my passenger’s seat. If he recognized her I saw no sign, but being seen with her was good enough. It was proof that I wasn’t trying to hide anything. And that she wasn’t, either.

“Okay, just let us know if you think of anything,” Liv said, and a second later, she flipped her phone closed.

“How is she?” I asked, cruising slowly down the street toward the next checkpoint four blocks away. Tower’s eyes were everywhere, and hiding from them would look like guilt.

Liv shrugged and brushed long brown hair off her shoulder. “Fine, considering. I think Hadley was in the room though, ‘cause she didn’t say very much. It’s like she doesn’t have the luxury of truly mourning, with the kid around.”

“She sounds like a good mother.” Though it was hard for me to picture Annika as anything other than the twenty-two-year-old small-town free spirit she’d been when I’d met her. Back then, she’d been more committed to vegetarianism than to any man she’d ever met—holding on to a relationship must have been hard for someone who could taste every lie—but I hadn’t seen her since the night Liv dumped me. In the middle of that damned party. It’s amazing how much can change in six years.

And how much stays the same.

“How did she get in touch with you?” Liv asked, sliding her phone into her pocket. “If she couldn’t find me, how did she find you?”

I exhaled slowly. “I still have the same phone number.” Because I wanted it to be easy for Olivia to get in touch with me, should she ever decide to.

Liv suddenly gripped the armrest built into the passenger’s side door, as if she hadn’t even heard me.

“Is this Third Street?”

“Yeah. You still like Greek? There’s this great gyro stand on the corner, about a mile—”

Her gaze hardened. “You’re headed west. Deeper into Tower’s side of town.”

“That’s where the gyro stand is….” I began, but she wasn’t buying it. And she didn’t miss my nod to the next sentinel, on the corner.

“You’re parading me down the fucking gauntlet.”

“I’m taking preemptive measures,” I insisted. “If they think I’m hiding you, they’ll assume you have something to hide, and you’re going to be checked for a mark by every initiate we run into.” And if we ran into anyone with more than three chain links, I wouldn’t be able to prevent a more thorough search, and we both knew Liv wasn’t going to simply submit to one, either. Her trigger finger was looking a little twitchy.

“Which is why we should be heading to the south fork,” she said. Toward the only neutral-controlled part of town. Which was where she both lived and worked, in spite of the higher rent.

“Olivia, Hunter lives on the west side, and so does my computer guru. I don’t think any of the leads are going to pull us toward the south today,” I said, but she looked unconvinced. “What’s the big deal? You’re unbound, and you must’ve done work on this side before.”