The knock at the front door jerked Vallon back from her notes and the kitchen table. Her chair screeched on the linoleum floor. Any arrival couldn’t be good, because nothing good had happened to her in the last two days.
She looked at her half-formed thoughts filling little balloons on the page. They’d flowed from her through the ticking afternoon. All the possible connections. Fi to the parking garage because her licorice taste lingered in the power. Simon’s death and the deaths of the two other agents. The intruder, who clearly had a great deal of power, possibly linked to whoever had changed the garage.
The knock repeated itself and her gaze snapped to the gingham-curtained window. The day was fading. She’d been at her mind-mapping a long time.
A third knock.
“I’m coming! Hold on!”
She stopped just before the door and -reached-. Flame on the far side, but familiar and with the very faintest of scents—like a whiff of almonds—but otherwise almost as if his presence were masked. A part of her twisted with impatience as she yanked open the door.
Landon Snow stood there under the dripping porch-eaves looking vaguely like an unwelcome gnome swathed in his green Gore-tex jacket and sodden knitted skull cap.
“About darn well time. You can’t hide, you know. I knew you were in there. Don’t you know to keep your phone turned on?”
She must have accidentally turned it off at the garage. She lifted her chin. “Why would I? No one I know would call.”
“Well Gleason tried.”
“What? He still trying to fire me? Well he can’t. I won’t leave.”
A large drop of rain splatted Landon’s forehead and he stepped in closer, trying for the miniscule cover of the porch. “I heard that. Listen, can I come in? We need to talk.”
She hesitated and didn’t know why, except the afterburn was like pepper in her veins. But Landon so rarely left the AGS compound this had to be important. She let him step inside onto the small welcome mat that belied her feelings right now.
Landon pulled off his cap and unzipped his jacket and she, belatedly remembering her manners, took them and hung them on a coat rack by the door.
“Gleason sent you, didn’t he?” She deduced because Landon had rarely come to her house since she’d been on her own, even though he’d been like a guardian when she was in the Academy.
She looked back at the little man in time to see him sniffing the air. When he saw her looking, he cocked one of his pale brows and she suddenly realized, though he might not have the Gift, he could smell the presence of power. A quiver of uncertainty ran through her, but she shoved it testily away.
“Well? What the hell’s going on, Vallon? You left the Agency like a bat out of hell.”
Typical. He was going to take Gleason’s side, just as he’d tried to counsel her to go easy with the attitude around Gleason.
“With good reason! Gleason was going to tear me a new one again and I wasn’t going to take it. Isn’t it enough he put me on desk for a month? But then you knew that, so why are you here?”
She was determined not to let him farther into her house, because she wasn’t going to let Gleason’s emissary get the better of her — even if it were Landon. Besides, he might scope out what she’d been doing in the basement.
Landon sighed and ran his hands through his hair, leaving it in its typical disarming, cockscomb. “Okay, Gleason did ask me to come, but then I’d have come anyway—to to keep you from hurting yourself.”
“You could tear yourself away from your work?”
“Yeah. Surprisingly, I could, Pigeon.” He shook his head. “I’ve got a lot of use for you. Not just because you’re your father’s daughter. You’ve got a lot of chutzpa and talent besides. I don’t want to see you self-destruct.”
“Right.” No one said those things unless they wanted something. “Talent enough to get myself in trouble by breaking the rules.”
“Rules are meant to be challenged. You just have to know how to do it. What do you think I do in my work?”
“Play with fire and magic potions?” It was an old joke—a line that he’d given her when she asked what he did for a living. Now it hung between then as an almost unfriendly taunt.
He waved away her attitude and looked toward the kitchen. “Look, could we sit down and talk. I could use a cup of tea. It’s damn cold out there. The forecasters are talking snow.”
“And what do you think?” Grudgingly she led him into the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and sat him down across from where she’d been sitting. She saw his gaze flicker to her notes and rescued the pad, then slid it into a kitchen drawer before filling the kettle.
“Freezing rain, maybe, but no snow.” Landon had always been amazingly good at weather predictions.
She set the kettle on the stove and turned back to him, arms crossed and feeling betrayed that he could act like her mentor one moment and then be Gleason’s minion the next. “Okay. You’re in my house. I’m making tea. Now what do you want?”
A look of forbearance settled like a weight on Landon’s face and she realized he was probably a much older man than she’d thought. The bright light overhead placed lines like alluvial fans out from his eyes, and deep canyons ran from his nose to his outer lips and down under his chin.
“You nearly ran Gleason down today.”
“That’s why you’re here? To reprimand me for that?”
“He was trying to stop you, Vallon.”
“I sort of figured that.”
“Well he wanted to talk to you. To work things out….”
And that had to be a lie. “Why? I said I’d work the desk—that’s what he wanted. I’ll take my punishment like a good little Agent. So what else is there to talk about?”
“Damn it, Vallon, would you listen a moment?” He stood up to face her, which was actually kind of funny given his stature. It was like having a miniature poodle growling at her and for a second she thought about slapping him down. The power to do it fizzled and frothed and popped inside her.
But then the kettle whistled and she turned away from him. “I’m listening.” She busied herself readying the teapot.
“He knows you’re a good Agent, Vallon.”
Landon came up beside her, watched her movements as if inspecting them. She tensed. Turned to the table and then grabbed two cups from the cupboard. “You said that already. He doesn’t show it.”
“And you don’t exactly show you’re a team player.” He sat down.
He waited until she’d settled across from him and poured the tea. He picked it up, sniffed.
“Mmm. Red Zinger. Always have had a weakness for rose hips.” Landon, always good with his nose, and that was a problem because the basement door and all it hid loomed behind him. She hadn’t even locked it.
She sipped her tea, but it couldn’t thaw the core of fear that lived even inside the afterburn’s heat. “So what? He’s going to fire me regardless?”
Landon met her eyes. “He sent me to check on you. He had a message and wanted me to make sure you weren’t going to do something stupid.”
“So I do stupid things.”
“Stop it. Would you stop looking for a fight long enough to listen to reason?”
His skin was even whiter in the glare of the kitchen light. His albinism had fascinated her as a child, and for some reason he’d been prepared to talk about it with her. It had led her to like Landon Snow, though you’d never know it given how she was acting.
She allowed a little of the stiffness to flow out of her neck, but the afterburn still gave her an edge.
“Alright.” Sipped again.
Landon shook his head and muttered something incomprehensible, but that seemed to calm him. When he looked back at her the red hue of his eyes had receded into the palest pink-blue.
“Gleason knows you’ve got the gift. Lots of it. Heck, it was clearly there even when you were a kid. All the precise drawings you used to do. The way you could orient yourself to true north all the time,
and find your way around the neighborhood like you had built-in GPS. Your Dad was terrified you’d wander too far too fast.”
He stood up to wander the room, scratched Maggie’s ears where she dozed under the window, but he paused in front of the basement door. Placed his palm against the wood, and even the afterburn couldn’t stop the searing cold.
“Gleason’s scared of the same thing as you, Vallon. But this incident at the garage—your efforts to rescue Agent Lamrey—have him rattled. First you say there’s someone out there fighting AGS agents. Then you use unsanctioned power with non-AGS tools. He wonders if maybe this whole thing is a cover-up—propagated by you—to hide the fact you really murdered Agent Lamrey.”
Fear and incredulity forced her to look away. “That’s a lie and you know it. So I had my own pens and vellum. If it hadn’t been for whoever created that garage, I’d have saved Simon and you’d all have been celebrating my foresight.”
“That might be. But he wasn’t saved. And you used unsanctioned power. Maybe it was you who created the garage as a lure. You were on desk.”
Landon’s familiar, gentle voice made every hair on her neck stand on end. Landon wasn’t here as a friend at all. He was here as an Agent. She should have known it when she saw him sniff the air in the house.
She pushed herself to her feet. “How many, Landon? How many Agents are waiting outside?”
“Four.” Another sip of the tea. “I thought I could probably do this without them, but you know Gleason. Has to have a backup plan for everything.” He set the cup down. “It’s like this, Vallon, and I don’t like this anymore than you do. You’re an Agent trained in the Gift. Inside the AGS we know what you’re doing and can forgive a little recreational use of the power, but not like this. What you’re doing is too much to be permitted outside AGS bounds.”
“I thought you theorized that there are others using power we might not even be aware of?”
“Yes, but you we are aware of. Now you have two choices. Relinquish what you have in the house and we get back to business as usual, or else—well—I ask the four agents in.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Vallon. I really am. I didn’t want to have to do this, but I figured there was more chance of you listening to me. I didn’t think you’d open the door for anyone else.”
She held her hand up to stop him and went to the window trying to sort through her reaction. Through the betrayal. “So the rumors are true.”
“Rumors?”
“That you’re Gleason’s pit bull. I never believed them anymore than I believed the recruitment line that once you were in AGS, you were in for life. I thought it was talking about job security.” She turned back to him grabbing hold of the afterburn’s searing heat to face down his threat. “So what happens if I choose the four agents?”
“They come in.” His palm stroked the wood as it had Maggie, and sent a chill through her. “They take away everything of consequence from the house. Then they get rid of the house. And then Gleason decides what to do with you.”
“I suppose quitting isn’t an option,” she said trying to keep up her bravado when the world seemed to be crashing around her.
Landon shook his head.
It was a drastic enough consequence that she knew whatever they did with her wouldn’t be good. Wiped off the map as if she’d never existed. Like her home and the heritage-blue house had been wiped. And here she’d thought the AGS fought to stop changes like that. A little hysteria weaseled up through her gut. Frankly the whole situation was just too damned funny, given everything that had happened today. Her mentor and the one man she trusted doing this to her.
She sure as heck hadn’t made the garage, so given what she’d experienced last night, Landon’s theory was correct—there were others out there.
“So this is all about paper and pens, is it?” She started to chuckle as she turned back to her old mentor and friend, but managed to catch it. No reason to make him think her unstable. Nope, she wanted him on her side when she was back on the desk, because no matter what he or Gleason said, she wasn’t going to walk around unarmed; and the AGS was the best place she could think of to get the pen and ink she needed.
“Of course I’ll relinquish what I’ve got.” She stood and went to the basement door. “There isn’t much.”