“It’s the truth,” I said flatly. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Huh.” He finished his coffee, then leaned back in his chair again. “How do you expect me to find someone the Directorate—with all its resources—cannot? They have some of the strongest telepaths in Melbourne in their employ. What could I get that they can’t?”
“They’re tackling the situation from a criminal angle. I have people tackling it from a computer angle. What we need is someone on the street.” I paused, and my smile held only the slightest trace of bitterness. “And we both know just how much you love digging the dirt in the street.”
“You should do that more often,” he said. “It suits you.”
I stared at him for a heartbeat, totally confused. “Do what?”
“Smile.”
Something twisted inside again. Old pain, old love, churning together, one fighting the other. Bastard, I thought. It was hard enough fighting the memories without him muddying the water by throwing compliments.
“I may want your help, Jak, but I don’t want anything else from you. I don’t like the way you treat your lovers.”
He shrugged. “It was only a comment, not a flirtation.”
“Well, keep such comments to yourself. I don’t need them. I just need your help.”
“Which I can’t give if I don’t actually have a starting point—other than the name of a man no one can find.”
I reached into my purse and pulled out my phone. “You still have the same number?” When he nodded, I attached a file and sent it to him. His phone beeped from the depths of his pockets. “That’s all the information we have, on both the consortium and the three men.”
“What about the people they were threatening?”
“Also there.” I hesitated. “If you talk to Fay and Steven Kingston—the parents of the little girl—don’t mention the soul stealer. They don’t know the truth about their daughter’s death. They don’t know that the threats and Hanna’s death are connected.”
“Really?”
His gaze seemed to intensify, as if he were trying to get inside my head. Which he had no chance of doing, thanks to the super-strong nano microcells that had been inserted into my earlobe and heel. Nanowires—the predecessor of the microcells—were powered by body heat, but for the wires to be active, both ends had to be connected so that a circuit was formed. Microcells were also powered by body heat, but they were contradictory forces that didn’t need a physical connection. Once fully activated, the push-pull of their interaction provided a shield that was ten times stronger than any wire yet created.
With them in place, no one was getting inside my head. Well, almost no one. The reaper who’d been assigned by the powers above him—powers he refused to name—to follow me around seemed to have no problem accessing my thoughts, and neither did Lucian, although at least Lucian was hit-and-miss.
The one test the microcells hadn’t yet passed was Madeline Hunter, who was not only one of the strongest vampire telepaths around and the woman in charge of the Directorate, but also—technically—my boss. Which wasn’t a situation I was happy about, but then, that’s what I got for agreeing to work for the high vampire council.
Of course, working for them and actually helping them find the keys—which they wanted not only so they could maintain power, but also so they could use hell itself as some sort of prison—were two entirely different things. But it was a precarious balancing act, simply because half of the high council thought it would be better to kill me than use me. All that stood between me and them was Hunter herself. Which meant that, like it or not, I would do what I had to do to keep her happy.
Jak blinked, suggesting that he’d given up attempting to squirrel into my thoughts. “So why didn’t you tell them the truth about their daughter’s death?”
“It was bad enough that their little girl died. They didn’t need to know that it wasn’t just her flesh that had passed.” I eyed him warily. “And if you tell them, I shall beat you to a pulp.”
He laughed softly. The sound shivered down my spine, warm and tingly. “You’ve gotten a little aggressive since we parted. Hope it’s not my fault.”
I snorted. “Don’t give yourself any credit, Jak. I’ve had far worse traumas in my life than you using me to get a story on my mother.”
And given that she’d been torn apart by an unknown assailant, that was the understatement of the year, to say the least.
Jak didn’t say the obvious—Sorry about your mother’s death—and I was glad. I might just have given in to the temptation to hit him if he had.
“So, I track down any and all information about this consortium and the man no one else can find—then what?”>“I have different gifts than my mom had, but that doesn’t make them any less powerful.” Although admittedly, being able to walk the gray fields—the unseen lands that divide this world from the next—talk to souls, and see the reapers who guided the souls on to the next life weren’t exactly the most usable psychic gifts in a normal, everyday life. But my life of late was as far from normal and everyday as you could get.
And those were far from the only gifts I had.
Jak raised an eyebrow. “Meaning you can use the ley lines?”
“I can’t even see them.”
“So why is it so important to you that the consortium be stopped?”