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?”
“You give me progress reports, and you let me see everything you have before you print said story.”
“Since this story looms so large on the Directorate’s radar, will I actually be allowed to print it?”
“They can’t stop it if they don’t know about it,” I said. “All you need to do is keep your head down.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be easy given what I’m investigating.” His gaze moved down again, narrowing slightly when it came to rest on my left arm. “Interesting tat.”
“Yeah,” I said dismissively, not even glancing down at the wingless lilac dragon that twined its way up my arm from my fingertips. I certainly wasn’t about to explain that it wasn’t actually a tattoo, but something far more deadly—a Dušan, a spirit guardian that came to life on the gray fields to protect me. “Have we got a deal?”
“Maybe. Let me dig around a little, just to see if there really is a worthwhile story in all this.”
“Just don’t take too long to decide, because we haven’t got a whole lot of time left.”
He nodded, finished his coffee in one long gulp, then rose. “I’ll let you know, one way or another, by tomorrow.”