Chapter 18

“I could relocate with her to my family home.”

“No, Father wants to closely supervise her education and growth. She’s a Marshall and will remain a Marshall. That was part of our procreation contract.”

“She’s a child, Claire. Well-behaved and intelligent. There’s no need to isolate her to fulfill the requirements of the Protocol—it works just as well if I raise her in the Faber home.”

“The decision is made, Miles. Unless you wish to challenge my father?”

—Conversation between Claire Marshall and Miles Faber (15 October 2062)

WITH DARKNESS NOT far off and the electricity to the facility non-operational, Yakov knew they only had time to do one quick sweep. All they discovered in that rapid sweep was abandoned equipment, cobwebs, and zero sign of any computers, tablets, or organizers.

“We aren’t going to find anything more today, especially with the light about to go,” he said to Theo once they were back on the ground floor. “I’ve caught no scents that indicate recent passage by humans, Psy, or changelings.”

Theo looked around, her gaze a touch wild. “We haven’t found anything.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Which in itself is a finding.”

He barely stopped himself from reacting when Theo turned back to face him—with eyes that had gone wholly black. It should’ve been eerie and it was in a sense, but it was also beautiful in a haunting kind of way. “We won’t do any good bumbling about in the dark. We need a plan and the time to do a deep search. Whoever scrubbed this place can’t have eliminated every single piece of data.”

“They’ve had a lot of time.”

“Yes, but it’s a large area and maybe not everyone did what they were meant to do.”

Theo, her eyes yet black, refused to move. Jaw tight and shoulders bunched, that humming anger yet alive in her, she said, “I can’t leave with only emptiness where answers should be.”

Yakov shoved a hand through his hair. “I didn’t want to tell you this while we’re in this damn creepy building while the shadows are getting deeper, but I spotted old blood in one of the rooms. It was cleaned up”—because the people behind this had had time, years of it—“but I have a bear’s nose. I hunted down the scent and found a large pool of dried blood inside a closet.”

Theo stared at him. “As if someone was hiding in there and died?”

“That’s what I figured. Body got removed first, and the cleaners either didn’t know about the blood or just forgot.” He folded his arms. “Either way, it doesn’t sound like a fully controlled transfer. Things get left behind in a rush, get forgotten.”

Theo stayed stubbornly put, as immovable as a bear. “What if someone enters now that we’ve disturbed it? They could have a silent alarm.”

Yakov hadn’t located anything of the like, and he was very good at spotting such security measures, but he wanted her out of here. Damn woman had started to tremble. The tremors were fine enough to almost ignore as being a figment of his imagination—except he knew they weren’t.

He also knew the tremors weren’t born out of fear. What he saw in Theo’s expressive face was fury at being thwarted . . . and the anguish of a trapped animal with no way out. Only in Theo’s case, it wasn’t a trap that held her but a hole in her mind populated only with echoes of terror and helplessness.

She wouldn’t sleep tonight if he didn’t figure out a solution.

Most people would probably say she risked another panic attack in her refusal to leave. Now that he’d been around Theo for longer, however, he’d bet on her pacing the room as she ran investigative search after investigative search while waiting for the sun to rise.

Pulling out his phone, he said, “I’ll give the clan a call and see if we have a couple of soldiers nearby who don’t mind keeping an eye on the place overnight. We’ll come back tomorrow to do a comprehensive search.”

As it was, he didn’t have high hopes of getting a yes. This place was so far out of the way. But he had to make the attempt—because otherwise, he had the feeling he and Theo would be sleeping in the car until someone could relieve them. His pchelka was in no mood to compromise.

His fears were proven correct. “No clanmates anywhere in the vicinity,” Zahaan said . . . then sighed. “You could ask the wolves.”

Yakov bit back a groan. StoneWater and BlackEdge were friends now. Mostly. They were friends who growled at each other over a distance, snarked at one another at every opportunity, and would turn up to help if the other was attacked. Once the fight was over, the growling and snarking would, of course, recommence, to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Yeah,” he said, shoulders dropping. “Let me check if that’s okay with Theo.”

“Theo, huh?” A waggle of the eyebrows that Zahaan somehow managed to put in his voice. “Have we got another Valya-Silver or Pasha-Arwen situation on our hands, hmm? Does she have a scary badass grandmother? It’s one of the requirements.”

“You need to stop watching daytime soap operas, you koala in a respectable bear’s clothing.” After hanging up on his chortling fellow second, he told Theo the option of calling in the wolves. “I’m not sure who you want aware of this location.”

Her response was an immediate shake of the head. “If we have to involve more people,” she said, “I’d rather we keep it to your clan. My brother spoke specifically to Silver Mercant to organize this, and we trust her.”

Which meant that, by extension, they trusted the bears.

Yakov got that. He was just about to bite the bullet and suggest they wait in the car while his clan sent someone to this location, when his phone rang in his hand. “Z,” he said, answering the call. “Update?”

“Yeah, turns out I was wrong,” Zahaan said. “I asked around and Moon and Elbek are on leave today and decided to head out that way to bird-watch.”

“Bird-watch?”

“I swear the assholes told everyone they’re bird-watching. I have no idea what they’re actually doing, but when I called them, they said they’d be fine with keeping an eye on your location—they’ll be there in ten, fifteen at the latest. They’re already equipped for an overnight stay. With hyper night-vision goggles and all.”

“For bird-watching.”

“Owls, they tell me.” Zahaan’s voice was deadpan. “Rare miniature owls.”

Lips twitching as he ended the call, Yakov shared the news with Theo. “We should meet them at the gate or they’ll try to climb it.”

“Right, of course.”

After closing up but not locking the facility behind themselves, they drove back into the gloom of the tree-shadowed drive.

This place would be pitch-black at night.

Good thing the two coming over had those goggles. Most changelings didn’t need anything like that even in low-light conditions, but the goggles would give them an extra clarity to their vision in this level of intense darkness.

He put the headlights on low as they moved down the long drive.

“Did you call your clanmate a koala or did I mistranslate?” Words so tense they hummed . . . and yet she’d been curious enough to ask the question.

Yakov relaxed into his seat. “No, you didn’t mistranslate,” he said. “I was insulting him.”

“Why would calling him a koala be an insult? As far as I know, most beings like koala bears.”

“That’s exactly it.” He pointed a finger at her. “Koalas are not bears. Koalas are marsupials. Yet those furry gray Aussies go around acting like bears. It’s not on.”

“Is there a rivalry?”

“Nah. Koalas are pacific vegetarians. One time a bear I know tried to pick a fight with a koala family—you know what those marsupials did?”

He saw Theo shake her head in his peripheral vision.

“They invited him to a tofu dinner and gave him a handwoven shawl as a gift! Then they plucked their cub out of the carry pouch they wear in human form and asked him if he wanted to hold her! She smiled and goo-goo-ga-ga’d at him! He had no idea what to do with himself!”

Yakov threw up his hands for a second, while maintaining full control of the vehicle. “That’s no kind of bear behavior! A man should be able to pick an honest-to-goodness fight with another!”

A strangled sound from Theo that he wanted to imagine was a stifled laugh, but knew he had to be imagining it. Especially when she went silent and still as they reached the gates a minute later.

Once he stopped, Theo got out to unlock those gates.

Leaning back against the grille of the vehicle, Yakov frowned. “I don’t want our people trapped inside if something goes wrong at night.”

Theo looked over, her face all angled shadows in the falling dark, a sudden evocative echo of his dreams. “You’re right,” she said as his bear’s fur bristled at the memory of Theo bleeding, dying while he lay helpless. “But we need to secure the area for their own safety—the current deadbolts can be pushed back as you did. Do you have anything suitable?”

“I might.” Heading to the back of the all-terrain vehicle while fighting off his urge to bundle her up and keep her safe, he lifted up the back hatch and looked through the toolbox that came standard-issue in most clan vehicles.

“Yes, here it is.” He grabbed the heavy weight of metal chain. “It’s meant to lock the tires if we ever run into an issue with the vehicle’s computronic security, but it can be used as a secure lock on the gate. Moon and Elbek will have the override code.”

After placing the chain in front of the vehicle as Theo opened the gates enough for it to exit, he stood and just watched her. His instinct was to assist, but he had a feeling Theo needed something on which to expend her energy. And for now, all she had were the gates.

So he just watched her move, this woman who had haunted him for years—and who was even more compelling in reality than she was in his dreams. That woman had been a fantasy. This Theo was real in every sense of the word.

Potent. Angry. Beautiful.

She wasn’t graceful, however, though she moved smoothly enough. It was the contained explosion in her. It added a taut edginess to her motions—and it made him wonder what exactly it was that had birthed that blinding rage in Theo Marshall. Because no one was that angry without cause.

One thing he knew for certain now: none of this was an act. Theo was too expressive to hide her thoughts well. Her only obvious Psy trait was the fury of her need to contain her anger. Any bear in her position would’ve torn up a room by now, probably broken a chair or three.

Not Theo.

A thread of scent on the night air. Rough brown. And there was the second. Warm umber. Clan. Both of them.

Maybe his twin alone would understand Yakov’s shorthand descriptions of his clanmates. He and Pasha had always seen scents in color. Apparently, their parents had only discovered their little quirk when they’d one day described their papa as sparkling red and their mama as juicy orange.

It had taken the two of them much longer to understand that their playmates didn’t see the world of scent in vivid color. But, because they were bears, their quirk had always been treated as a joyful gift. Friends often asked them to describe what their scent was in color.

Today, Yakov’s senses were dazzled in a deep, dark green with hidden undertones of ebony and sparks of flickering ruby. And that was just the first layer of the scent of Theo Marshall. A meld as secretive as the woman in front of him.

“Here they come,” he warned her.