Mark Del Franco - Face Off

She backed away, setting herself into position to resume the practice. “Pay attention specifically to the change you see in the shape of my body signature this time. Try to focus on the whole thing, not just the dimple.”

She spread her hands, planning to wedge him between two fans of essence, then changed her direction to his feet. Sinclair spun sideways and jumped up, avoiding the strike. “Why did you turn sideways?”

Catching his breath, he placed his hands on his hips and looked down in thought. “Before you let loose, I thought you were going to squeeze me between two strikes, but when the dimple formed, it was aimed at my feet.”

“Why did you think that?” she asked.

A smile crept onto his face. “There was a change in the shape that looked like it was about to dimple, but it didn’t. Wow.”

His pleasure at the thought pleased her. “You can sense at such an acute level that you react subconsciously.”

His smile turned into a grin. “And you thought I had no abilities.”

Amused, she twisted her lips. “I never said that. You did.”

“Yeah, I guess I lied.”

Laura folded her arms and leaned against the wall. With her truth sensing, Laura knew he meant he hadn’t known, not that he had hidden the ability. Sinclair was an enigma to her—confident, assertive, yet cautious. He had spent his life hiding his fey nature. Humans and fey did not interbreed successfully. Sinclair’s grandfather knew that his grandson would be the subject of intense scrutiny, so he gave Sinclair a spell to hide the small hint of his feyness. The spell was bound to a medallion that Sinclair always wore. It hid excess essence, which for Sinclair meant his fey nature. He read human to her senses—and everyone else’s.

Sinclair lied about himself. So did Laura. Having that particular character trait in common was not the best basis for a relationship. She knew she could be trusted. She didn’t know if Sinclair could. More and more lately, though, she thought he was worth the risk. “You didn’t know.”

“You don’t know that,” he said. She watched and listened as he spoke, testing the nuances of his speech. His words and tone indicated truth. Laura had limitations on certain of her abilities, a fact that she had shared only with Terryn macCullen and Cress. For one thing, the field range of her sensing ability was limited for someone with her power. The more important secret, though, was that that limitation seemed to result in a huge advantage. Instead of a wide-ranging sensing ability, her short-range skill included truth sensing. Sinclair was telling her the truth; he hadn’t known about his own acuity.

Or so she hoped. He had managed to hide his fey nature from her, something that was hard to do. She took no solace in the fact that he had hidden it from everyone. Not for the first time in the last few weeks did she wonder, If he could do that, could he evade her truth sensing? Could he lie to her?

Terryn assured her no one else knew about her skill, so theoretically no one would know to counter it. She had never realized how much she had taken for granted knowing when someone spoke truth. Until she trusted Sinclair enough to believe him, she had to assume he was lying. She felt deaf or blind around Sinclair and wondered how people functioned without truth sensing. She didn’t like it.

“You would be surprised what I know,” she said. It was a bluff, but only she knew there was something to bluff about. Sinclair couldn’t know about her ability. She thought. Hoped.

He sauntered up to her, crossed his arms, and smiled playfully down at her. “Surprise me.”

She looked away with her own smile. He couldn’t have been more physically appealing to her with his dark blond hair and warm honey skin. The unusual lightness of his brown eyes made them look like rich caramel or amber. Warm eyes that said, Trust me. She liked his height, almost a full head taller than she, another thing she wasn’t used to. She wished he wasn’t so appealing. His attraction sparked something in her, made her realize how shut off from a personal life she had become. He made her think about things that made her afraid. If he had been less appealing, she would have felt safer.

Sinclair stepped closer, close enough for the body heat he radiated to touch her skin. He had that look on his face that said he was going to kiss her. He knew it would annoy her if he did. Not because of the kiss, but because someone might be watching. She didn’t want people to know they were becoming involved, not yet, not until she knew what it meant. A chime sounded, breaking the moment. They stared at her duffel in the corner of the room. Laura retrieved her PDA and read the message.

“Time to go. Terryn’s got a job for us in town. He wants us to shake up the police at a crime scene,” she said.

Terryn had been tracking a recent series of attacks against the fey and fey businesses. In the previous weeks, fey entrepreneurs around the city had been mugged and assaulted, and their businesses vandalized. The incidents were too frequent to be random. He wasn’t liking what he was seeing—particularly since his sister Draigen would be arriving soon and there was a lack of any concrete investigation from either the Washington, D.C., police or the Guild. His text message had passed word that another fey business had been attacked. The new attack had resulted in deaths.

Sinclair pushed his lower lip out. “He’s got bad timing.”

Laura smirked as she lifted the duffel. “Or very good.”

AS SINCLAIR EXITEDthe freeway into downtown D.C., Laura toyed with her necklace, an emerald on a gold chain. She wore it always, both as a memento of the person who had given it to her and as a tool for creating glamours. Light glamours—like enhancing her skin tone or adding a glow to her hair—she produced with a simple manipulation of her body signature. More complex ones, ones that changed her appearance to someone entirely different, required a talisman to hold a template for the persona. Gemstones were ideal to use because their crystalline structure retained templates better than anything else. Once the template was set, her body signature powered it with no additional effort.

As they drove the local streets, she allowed her body essence to interact with the stone. The essence activated the template embedded within—the characteristics of Mariel Tate, her InterSec persona. As Mariel, she was a well-known InterSec agent, distinct and unconnected to Laura Blackstone. Physically, they bore little resemblance to each other, Mariel’s willowy figure and long dark hair a stark contrast to Laura’s more toned shape and wheat blond hair that fell to her shoulders. As the essence field activated, a soft tickle of static swept over her as the glamour settled. Her InterSec uniform remained since she had changed into it at Stafford.

Sinclair cast curious glances at her as he maneuvered their car toward the northeast of the city. “Why Mariel?” he asked.

“Why not Mariel?” she asked.

He grinned. “We’re about to pull rank on D.C. cops at a crime scene. I seriously doubt that after you took over a police station, held a captain hostage, then flipped everyone off when you left, they’ll be happy to see Mariel Tate again.”

Mariel had power and was not afraid to use it. Laura had designed her for brains, looks, and ability. Over the years, she had established Mariel as a force to be reckoned with, and the persona had become her default InterSec player. Laura enjoyed the persona because she was able to use her fey abilities without restraint—something that wasn’t appropriate in public relations. “I did not hold him hostage. I simply didn’t let anyone else in the room while we talked.”