Lee Child - MatchUp

She arched a brow as a cold understanding settled on her. “Because whoever’s been watching me knew my reaction would be something more than human.”

He nodded. “And now he has both of us on video during the attack.”

“We need to get that camera.”

“The man who hired you, Danny. Do you know where we can find him?”

The human shook his head, his eyes closed, his mind still caught in the web of the trance. “I don’t know anything else. Ricky set it all up.”

Danny slumped and a cell phone screeched with a heavy metal ringtone. The grating noise filled the shop, although it didn’t seem to register with the dazed human at all. Lucan rifled through Danny’s pockets and found the bleating phone.

“Jackpot.”

He held the phone up, showing her the name on the screen.

Ricky.

He pushed the call to voice mail, silencing the racket. “We have everything we need now. I’ve got a plan.”

She pointed at Danny. “What are you going to do with him?”

He smirked. “Mind-scrub the little fuck, then toss him back in the gutter. When he comes to again in the morning, he’ll have one wicked hangover, but he won’t remember a thing that happened.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Not a thing.”

She walked over and punched the human in the face.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Much. Let’s hear your plan, vampire.”

AFTER DUMPING DANNY IN A side alley a few blocks away from the candle shop, Lucan and Lilliane hailed a taxi and headed to the Bywater to find one Richard “Ricky” Dubois.

A quick call to Gideon, the Order’s resident computer genius at the Boston headquarters, had been all it took to gather a full dossier on Danny’s erstwhile partner in crime. The GPS tracer Gideon placed on Ricky’s cell-phone signal now led them straight to the small-time thief’s location outside a seedy bar down at the river. The place was packed, never mind that it was also dank and dilapidated, a squat redbrick eyesore sitting about as far off the tourist maps as you could get.

Lucan didn’t have to guess which of the huddled, drowned rats smoking blunts under the tattered awning at the bar’s entrance across the street was the human he needed to find. He could still picture Ricky’s slack-jawed stare from earlier tonight. Judging from the way he weaved and swayed on his feet, Ricky had been trying to take the edge off his tattered nerves. Better that he ended up here instead of running to the police station with his eyewitness account of paranormal happenings. Although, given Ricky Dubois’s rap sheet, Lucan doubted he would ever approach the authorities on a voluntary basis.

He paid the cab fare, then looked at Lilliane beside him. “You sure you’re ready to do this?”

“I’ve never been ready for most of the things that have happened to me, and yet here I am. Hunting lowlifes with a vampire. Next stop, Disneyland.”

“Yeah. You could be one of the attractions.”

“I feel like I should be offended by that.”

“I’ll let you make jokes about me stopping off at the blood bank for a snack if it makes you feel better. In the meantime, we’ve got work to do.”

He wasn’t used to bringing civilians along on patrols with him, least of all an unarmed woman of questionable powers who might slow him down. As one of the Breed he could traverse miles in mere minutes. He would have done so on this mission, but Lilliane had made it clear before they left the candle shop that this was her problem as much as his and she wasn’t about to sit on the sidelines. So, like it or not, and for the record he didn’t, he was saddled with a partner.

“I repeat,” he said. “Are you ready?”

“Do it.”

They stepped out and the taxi rolled away.

He’d hoped to have the element of surprise on their side, but as they crossed the street, Ricky Dubois glanced over and spotted the incoming threat. His face paled to a ghostly shade of white.

Then he bolted.

Straight into the crowded bar.

“You take the front entrance,” he told Lilliane. “Flush him out toward the back. I’ll cover the rear of the building and make sure our little rat doesn’t slip his trap.”

She nodded and they split up.

He knew he didn’t have to wait and make sure she made it inside. The woman was strong and capable of handling herself. He only hoped she’d stick with the plan to collar Ricky so they could interrogate him, not coldcock the idiot into next week the way she’d done to Danny.

Not that he blamed her.

It wasn’t so long ago that his famous temper had ruled him too. He’d been angry at the world. Angry with himself for all the ways he’d failed in life, and for all the things he couldn’t change. Meeting Gabrielle had changed that. She changed him. He couldn’t help wondering if some of Lilliane’s fury might be from self-inflicted wounds as well.

In another place, another time, he might be interested to find out.

Right now, all he wanted to do was fix this situation, then get home to his mate and team.

Lilliane Smith’s problems were her own to solve.

Calling on his Breed genetics, he flashed past the crowd near the front entrance like nothing more than a chilled breeze. He was waiting at the bar’s back door when Ricky crashed through from inside and stumbled onto the rough gravel.

Lilliane emerged right behind him.

Her eyes glowed with that same unearthly fire she’d shown him when he first bared his fangs. For a moment the effect was so jarring, Lucan might have mistaken her for Breed.

But she was something else.

And this time she was truly pissed.

Lilliane pushed the human several feet in the air with a sweep of her hand. Screaming as he sailed high in the air, Ricky came down hard on a rickety old dock at the river’s edge. The rotting wood groaned from the crash, some of the boards cracking as they heaved and rocked over the dark water. Her hands fisted at her sides, she stalked forward onto the dock. Ricky’s wide eyes were locked on her in terror. Beneath him, the old dock swayed as he frantically crab-scrambled for the farthest edge. The wood started to break. The dock pitched violently to the side. Ricky lost his hold. The platform gave way, dumping him into the murky drink.

Only then did she pause.

No. More froze.

Watching, stock-still, as their quarry started swimming away.

Lucan plowed past her and dove in.

“YOU WANT TO TELL ME what that was about back there at the dock?” Lucan asked, shrugging out of his soaked black leather trench coat.

To avoid attracting any more attention, after fishing Ricky Dubois from the Mississippi they’d immediately brought the human to an abandoned house a few blocks away. Inside the neglected ruin that likely hadn’t seen inhabitants since Katrina, they’d conducted a tranced interrogation. He’d given them the name and address of the local private investigator who hired them tonight, but like his pal Danny, Ricky didn’t know how or why Lilliane had ended up on the PI’s radar.

Now, with Ricky mind-scrubbed and unconscious following his questioning, she watched as Lucan set his coat aside then pulled off his shirt and squeezed the foul water from his clothing. She couldn’t help noticing the complicated pattern of skin markings that danced and swirled over the Breed male’s torso and muscled arms. They weren’t tattoos, not the way their colors changed and moved.

There was a lot she didn’t know about his kind.

And vice versa.

Yet here they were, forced to work together to protect the secrets of both their people.