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  “Way to box me in shamefully, Doc,” I said, sitting back on the couch. It wasn’t as comfy as the ones I conjured in my head for my ongoing sessions with Dr. Zollers. She lacked his more affable manner, too, as she tried to drill into my psyche by trying to put me at ease. “If I answer, ‘Yes!’ then I’m pretty sick, and if I answer, ‘No’, you take it as me hiding it, right?”

  “The mere fact you brought it up suggests you’re not hiding it,” Dr. Kashani said, shrugging slightly. “Whether you’re using it to deflect from other, less comfortable topics, well, that’s a more interesting question, at least to me.”

  “Nice,” I said, and offered nothing more.

  “Why don’t we talk about something a little less controversial?” Dr. Kashani asked.

  “Politics?”

  “Hardly.” She crossed one leg over the other, her white pants flawless. “You mentioned that you feel ‘blackmailed’ into taking this job—”

  “Because I was, quite literally, blackmailed into taking this job.”

  “Perhaps you might explain that to me.”

  I stared into her eyes. There was a lack of judgment there that most people might have really desired to see in a therapist. Hell, for all I knew, she wasn’t judging me at all. Maybe she was totally cool with everything I’d ever done in my entire life, even if I laid it all out in front of her. But I wasn’t likely to forget she worked for the FBI, not me, and that made this a hurdle I was crossing, not a chance to get long-buried secrets off my chest.

  “Sure,” I said, because why hold back? “It goes like this—the FBI Director said I should take the job or else, and I took the ‘or else’ to mean bad things would happen either to me or the people I love. Admittedly I’ve only been working here a few weeks, and my quickie version of the FBI academy at Quantico wasn’t exactly complete, but based on my limited knowledge of the law, that’s blackmail.”

  She stirred at the end of this, nodding. “It certainly sounds coercive. What do you plan to do about it?”

  I shrugged again. “I plan to do the job.”

  “And that’s it?” she asked, peering at me. She had one arm on her knee, and looked like she might just fall out of her seat. “You—the girl who just brought up your prodigious body count in a therapy session without prompting. You are just going to take this ‘blackmail’ lying down?”

  I forced a smile. It wasn’t hard. “See, here’s the thing about me, Doc—you ever heard the story of Brer Rabbit and the briar patch?”

  “I’m not familiar with that one.”

  “Well, let me give you the Cliff’s Notes version and leave out all the racist overtones,” I said. “Brer Rabbit gets captured by his mortal enemies, Brer Fox and Brer Bear, and they’re trying to decide how best to kill him. And Brer Rabbit, not wanting to be killed, decides to employ a little reverse psychology. So, for every torture they float as a possibility for inflicting on him he says, basically, ‘Go ahead and do that, just, whatever you do, don’t throw me in that briar patch over there!’”

  “I think I see where this is going.”

  “It’s not terribly sophisticated,” I said, “but the point is made—eventually Brer Bear and Brer Fox, neither of them the sharpest knives in the drawer, give in to their cruel nature and inflict upon Brer Rabbit the punishment that he seems to least want. Of course, he gives no actual damns about being thrown in the briar patch; it’s like home for him.”

  “How very illustrative,” Dr. Kashani said, nodding along. Her eyes met mine. “But I must ask—how does this metaphor tie to your current situation?”

  My phone buzzed in my jacket pocket and I pulled it so fast that Dr. Kashani blinked at the speed at which it was in my hand. For her it was probably like it had just appeared.

  A message glowed on the screen: NYPD Reports Metahuman Incident at Bentsen Bank, 50th and 8th.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I made the phone disappear into my pocket with the same speed and was on my feet just as fast. “Sorry, Doc. Duty calls.” I patted the pistol riding my hip as I smoothed my jacket back in place to cover it.

  “Just so I understand you,” Dr. Kashani said, calling out just as I reached the door. “Are you saying that this job, to you—it is your…‘briar patch’?”

  I smiled. “I’m going after criminals with the full sanction of the law, Doc.” I drummed my hand against the door frame, once, and disappeared through. The hunt was on. “Where the hell else do you think I’d rather be?”

  2.

  Olivia Brackett

  I could think of a lot of places I’d rather be than Minnesota in the late fall. Any one of a number of Caribbean islands came to mind (though I’d never been), maybe Southern California—even my native Florida, though there were some unpleasant memories associated with that one.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” Tracy Brisco, his dark hair long around the sides but thin at the top, hung over the cubicle wall between us, looking down at me. I’d been working here first, but when he’d come along, malingering after Reed had brought him down from his prison in the sky, he’d settled into the cubicle next to mine for…some reason.

  The muscles in my neck were tense, tautness flowing like an unbroken stream down my back, as though someone had knotted every one of them. I sat in my chair, trying to face my computer, parsing through a crime report from Nevada that had a couple funny things about it. I didn’t dare look at Tracy. “No idea.”

  As far as replies went to his incessant inquiries, that was one of my longer ones.

  “Who’s the new lady, y’think?” Tracy asked.

  I kept my head down, looking over a crime scene photo of a smashed-up convenience store. “I don’t know.”

  Don’t look, don’t look. Don’t feed him attention. I didn’t know, anyway. Reed was in with some woman with red hair that had been dyed to hold back the grey, I suspected. Miranda was in there, too, and they’d been talking. No one was near his office door or they’d have been able to hear every word, given that we were all metahumans here.

  “I don’t like this,” Tracy said. His attention was on the meeting in Reed’s office. “The boss seems tense.”

  I gave him a sidelong look. He could notice that Reed seemed tense, but not notice that I’d been avoiding and stonewalling him every day for the last ten months? “You don’t say.”

  “Have you noticed?” He stretched his large frame and stood, pretending to stretch against his cubicle wall but taking care not to rip it down with his meta strength. “Something’s up.”

  I shook off his observation. This crime report looked like a meta to me, and I grabbed a pen out of the coffee-cup-turned-pen-holder on my desk to put that thought in writing. Whatever was going on with the boss was above my pay grade. My job was to stop metahumans from committing crimes, not monitor Reed’s meeting schedule. “Whatever,” I said under my breath, putting down the first words of my summary of findings.

  “Why don’t you just type that up in an email?” Tracy asked. He’d turned his overlarge head back to me and was hanging over the cubicle wall.

  I gave an involuntary shudder. A lump rose in my throat, and my pulse quickened.

  “Because I don’t want to,” I said, trying not to look up at him. Focus on what you’re writing. Keep your breathing level easy.

  My hand shook.

  “He’ll reply to an email faster than—” Tracy started.

  The pen accidentally shot out of my fingers and launched right at Tracy’s face. I watched it go with surprise as it blasted off like a missile, but lacking the fiery contrail. Propelled by my meta powers of momentum, it flew unerringly at his chest—

  Where it lost all speed just an inch from his skin, barely tapping against his right pec, not even hard enough to click the retractable ball point. It fell and he caught it, offering it back to me. “That just keeps happening, huh?”

  With you around, yes, I thought, heart hammering in my ears like a frenetic drum beat. I stared at the pen, extended in h
is fingers. He had dirt under his fingernails, which reminded me of—

  Oh, God.

  My breath.

  I couldn’t catch—

  Thunder in my ears.

  My chair shot from beneath me and crashed into the cubicle wall behind me. I ripped the yellow paper I’d been writing on from my pad. My note was unfinished: “Convenience store robbery in Paradise, Nevada”—and that was it.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Tracy asked, still holding my pen out to me.

  I waved a hand at him without looking and half-staggered my way to Reed’s office, the yellow page crumpled in my fist.

  With every step I took away from him, my heartbeat seemed to subside.

  Every breath got easier.

  By the time I’d reached Reed’s office door, I felt almost—almost—in control of myself again.

  I knocked carefully, breathing slowly. No need to risk triggering my powers and accidentally wrecking his door.

  Again, I mean. Last time I’d accidentally crashed it closed so hard it launched the glass out of the window like a shotgun blast of glittering shards.

  “Come in,” Reed said, peering at me from behind his desk. Miranda and the red-headed lady were still sitting, and I opened the door to find all three of them staring at me.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I said, my composure mostly returned. The moments like that, where I completely fell apart thanks to Tracy, had been blessedly few, but…

  They seemed to be getting worse.

  “It’s fine,” Reed said. He was propped back in his chair, lounging. He extended a hand to indicate the red-haired woman. Now that I was closer to her, I could see faint wrinkles around the edges of her eyes and mouth that suggested middle age. “Olivia Brackett, this is Ariadne Fraser. Ariadne is…an old friend.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said as she stood to offer me her hand. “Forgive me for not shaking. I have momentum powers, and I wouldn’t want your hand to come shooting back at you.”

  “Or your entire body to go launching past Olivia at a hundred miles an hour,” Reed said with a faint smile. “Which is how I met her.” He flicked his gaze to me, and there was a lot of amusement in his eyes. “Jogging, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and suddenly I felt like my voice was scratchy, and my face had to be tomato red, from the heat in my cheeks. “Accident.”

  “Oh, well,” Ariadne said, returning to her seat with a tight smile. “No, I wouldn’t want that. Nice to meet you, though, Olivia.”

  “What’s up?” Reed asked, attention back on me.

  “Meta incident,” I said, holding up the paper. “Vegas area. Trashed convenience store. Happened fast, according to the clerk. Not a normal human level of destruction.”

  “Why is it always the convenience stores?” Miranda asked, furrowing her brow as she looked up at me.

  “Target of ease and convenience, if you’ll pardon the pun,” Reed said. “People see them as places that have cash, and they’re small, one clerk usually, so it’s easy to control as a scene. Try to imagine robbing a grocery store with its twenty lanes and all that real estate in the back of the store where people could be hiding. Convenience stores are small. Fewer places to hide, ambush you. Lower risk, lower reward. If you want to step up to more complexity, then there’s banks. Not huge places, usually, but more money.”

  “Thanks for that fantastic insight into the criminal mind,” Miranda said, making a clicking noise that reminded me of a gun chambering a round. “I always wondered about that.”

  “Crooks are usually not that bright on an intellectual level,” Reed said, “but some criminals have a sort of preternatural sense about the cost-benefit analysis of their crimes. They follow the money and the ease, which produces mostly predictable crimes—and crime scenes.”

  “Well, here’s one,” I said, trying to draw the attention back to me. “What do you make of the vandalism?”

  “Without seeing it? Nothing,” Reed said, pulling his feet down off his desk to sit up. “Could just be fun for this crook. Or a genuine statement of rage. I’ll take a look at the scene photos once this is over.” He pointed a wavering finger between Ariadne and Miranda.

  “Do you mind if I go on this one?” I asked, feeling a chafing urge to get the hell out of the office. I glanced back through the window and caught Tracy watching me. I suppressed a shudder and anchored my eyes back to Reed.

  Reed’s eyebrows had climbed a little bit up toward his hairline. He was wearing a ponytail today. When his face broke from the deep thought, he did a full-body shrug. “Sure. If you want. Book a flight. Commercial, though, no private plane. I’ll see about sending someone from our West Coast groups to meet up with you.”

  “Why not Greg Vansen?” I asked. No private plane? That was new. But I’d worked with Greg a couple times. He was distant, professional, and damned useful, with his ability to shrink, grow, and carry just about everything you could need on his person.

  “He’s not officially on our payroll,” Reed said, shifting uncomfortably in his chair, “and I don’t think we’ll be using his services anytime in the near future.” He pursed his lips, then licked them. “Olivia…we’re going to be moving into a period of…there’s no easy way to say this…” He looked me right in the eyes. “We’re tightening the belt.”

  “Oh,” I said, blinking. That explained the lack of a private plane. “Okay.”

  “Hopefully it’ll be temporary,” Reed said. He blinked a couple times, glanced at Miranda, who shook her head. “What? I said ‘hopefully.’ We don’t know yet.” He centered his gaze back on me. “That’s what Ariadne is here for.”

  “I’m sorry…are we…broke?” I asked, trying to get my head around what he’d just said.

  “No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “We’re not…” There seemed a wrestling cavalcade of emotion warring its way across his face. “Well…we’re not…yet.”

  “If you could keep this discussion to yourself,” Miranda said, a little tightly, and with a sideways glare at Reed before she turned a forced smiled upon me, “that would be quite helpful as we go through this process. Ariadne is an outside auditor, and she’s going to help us identify ways to make things flow a little more smoothly in the business side of this agency.”

  “Oh. Well. Okay,” I said, nodding along. I caught a distinct hint of relief from Reed as I did so. “Can I ask who you’re going to send along with me? From the West Coast group?”

  “Who do you want to go with you?” Reed asked, and there was a hint of hesitation in how he asked it. I caught another suppressed glare from Miranda and wondered what prompted that. Their whole discussion seemed to be about money. Did that mean certain members of our group were paid lots more than others?

  “Uhm…I don’t know any of them that well, I guess.” I tried to think about who worked the West Coast and the only two that came to mind were Kat Forrest and Veronika Acheron, neither of whom I had much experience with. Kat was famous but I’d never even bothered to watch her show. Veronika, I knew, but we weren’t exactly friends.

  Reed looked at Miranda. “Who’s cheaper, Kat or Veronika?”

  “Veronika is expensive,” Miranda said under her breath. “She’s one of the highest paid players on the roster.”

  I blinked at that. “Wait…you pay people different than—”

  “Based on experience, yes,” Reed said, looking deeply uncomfortable. “When you started with us—”

  “Entry-level, yeah,” I said, trying to stop him before he said something about how I was a babe in the woods before I’d joined them. And probably still. My cheeks heated up. “Makes total sense.”

  “Go ahead and book your flight,” Reed said, forcing a smile of his own. “I’ll get somebody out there with you.”

  “Okay,” I said, and stood. I looked at Ariadne and remembered my manners. “It was nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too,” she said, with a very pleasant if subdued smile of her own.

  �
��Oh, and Olivia?” Reed asked as I reached the door. “Try to keep the collateral damage to a minimum on this one?” He wore a slightly beseeching look. “Unless you can convince the Vegas authorities to take you on, I mean. Or Nevada state.” He gave it a moment’s thought, eyes looking toward the ceiling. “Actually, I might just call ahead to Nevada and see if I can arrange that. I know some people in their state law enforcement apparatus that we’ve worked with in the past, and it’d be nice to arrange a payday for this one in advance.”

  “Whatever you say.” I closed the door as quietly behind me as I could and headed back to my computer.

  Tracy was waiting when I reached my cubicle, hanging over the edge, looking at me with anticipation. “How’d it go?”

  I woke my computer with a brush of the mouse, my heart hammering in my ears. Was it from my conversation with Reed—and the revelations therein—or was it—

  “Fine,” I said, ignoring that thunder running through my veins as I steered my cursor to the navigation bar and typed in a travel website we used to book tickets.

  Tracy kept hanging over the cubicle wall as I typed. “Vegas, huh? I’m jealous.”

  “I bet,” I said, keeping my eyes on the screen, the tapping of my fingers against the keyboard speeding up into a maddened hammering as I tried to finish so I could get out of here, out of this place—

  Away from him.

  “Might be hot there,” Tracy said, leaning casually over the edge of the cubicle. “You should pack accordingly. Maybe some swimwear? Get a little lounge time at the pool? Or,” he snorted, “you could just wear a bikini down the street. You know you have the body for it.”

  Bile rose up in the back of my throat and I had to stop for a moment.

  Tracy’s guffaws were like the cawing of crows in my ear, sounds of a carrion bird circling the carcass that was me. I tried not to hear him, tried not to think about what he was saying.

  I clicked when I saw the ACCEPT button had loaded, my tickets a step from being booked.

  “Wish I was going with you,” Tracy said as I felt my phone buzz with the confirmation email. I glanced at the screen to be sure, then stood, the rattle of my chair’s flimsy wheels clacking like a train about to jump the tracks. I could smell fresh, peaty earth, even though there was none around. We were in an office, after all, not a swamp, like—