* * *
“What are you talking about, Vallon?”
Xavier stood in front of her, crouched down as he had with Fi in the houseboat living room, concern on his face, and dammit, she wasn’t like Fi.
She was strong and didn’t need anyone. If she had a problem, she dealt with it. But right now she felt numb and it must have shown.
She forced herself up, feeling as if the entire houseboat shifted beneath her feet.
“Frigging Homeland Security. From what I know, they’ve been gunning for the AGS for a long time. If I can’t find out who’s doing this, they’re going to use me as the scapegoat. They’ll say I went rogue, and use the fact the AGS can’t control its own to take the agency apart.”
She grabbed the box, pulled it to her, and began pulling out files. “I need paper and pens.” He watched her silently. “For notes.”
He crossed to a desk near the door and retrieved what she needed. “They will not be helped if you fall apart, Vallon. Take a breath. Be calm.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Vallon?” Fi’s quavering voice; and dealing with Fi was about the last thing Vallon needed, but she couldn’t not help her friend.
“What is it, sweetie?” She set the files down and went to Fi.
“I’m so cold, Vallon. So cold, and I miss her so much.”
“Miss who, Fi?” Fi’s shivers had increased to horrible, wrenching shudders. Vallon stroked Fi’s hair, sat next to her, and wrapped arms around her.
“My Mama.” Fi said like such a small child it broke Vallon’s heart and stabbed her right through with old memories. She wondered how Fi had lost her mother. Had it hurt as much as the loss of her Dad?
“Let’s pretend I’m like your Mama for right now, okay? How about we get you to bed so you can have nice warm blankets on you. How does that sound?” She raised her gaze to Xavier and he nodded.
At Fi’s acquiescence Vallon helped Fi stand and led her up the spiral staircase and into a neat little guestroom, with pristine white walls with garden photographs and a bed covered in a white bedspread with ornately embroidered red and yellow and blue flowers around the hem and on the pillow covers. “Reminds me of Villas in—oh—maybe southern Europe. Spain?”
Xavier considered the room and then shrugged noncommittally as he drew drapes across the view onto the lake and Vallon pulled back the covers and helped Fi bed down. The girl shuddered so badly Vallon didn’t know what to do. “She’s so cold.”
“Wait a moment.”
Xavier disappeared out the door for a few minutes and came back with a hot water bottle wrapped in a plush towel that he presented to Fi. “This should help warm you up.”
She wrapped it in her arms and smiled. Vallon stood to go, the need to get the file box like a pulse in her head.
“Vallon, please stay.”
She closed her eyes. “Fi, honey, I have work to do now, but I’ll be just downstairs.”
Fear bloomed in Fi’s face. She shook her head, until Xavier intervened between them and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Fi, I swear an oath that in this place you are safe. I will ensure it.”
So formal, so serious, but then again, he was a serious kind of guy. Almost nice. In a most infuriating way.
The seriousness worked for him this time. Fi took a breath, and looked back at Vallon.
“You’ll be just downstairs. Okay.” She closed her eyes again and Vallon led Xavier out of the room and closed the door.
She swung back to Xavier and found him close enough she was forced back a pace. Damn him for always making her do it. Especially now when he seemed almost like a decent guy.
“That was nicely done.”
A raise of brow was all he gave her.
“You were kind to her.”
“As were you. She is so sad, like a half-empty shell. I do not like to see that.” He eased past her and down the stairs, leaving her to grind her teeth and stare after him. She -reached- for Fi, wanting to understand what he meant.
Fi’s Gifted flame was there, but the gold was stippled with black. When Vallon reached to touch it, it seemed as if her perspective were all wrong. She couldn’t triangulate or get a firm reading. It was like trying to use a magnet on non-magnetic stone. She pulled back and looked at the closed door to the room wondering if what was going on in the flophouse could leave you like that?
Considering the possibility and what it might mean, she followed Xavier down the stairs. “It’s almost like part of her is gone.”
Xavier glanced at her from where he sprawled in a chair sipping his tea. “Yes.”
“What could do that?”
“Loss.”
That she understood. After her father died it was how she felt. “But I’m still here and I’m not like that.”
Xavier’s intense regard said she wasn’t making perfect sense. “I lost my father. He’s in that box. But I don’t think I feel like that.”
A slight smile and shake of his shaggy head that made her want to push that dark tangle back from his eyes.
“No. You do not.” His voice was a low purr that brought her body to attention.
She tore her focus back to the file box waiting where she’d left it, open and too full. She sipped the now-tepid tea, looking at Xavier as she unloaded the files onto the table.
“The AGS figures whoever is doing this has to be from within the AGS. No one else has the power. Do you think their assessment is correct?”
He sipped his tea and gave that same sardonic smile of his that could make her either want to strangle him or jump his bones. She just opened the top file and started to read.
Simon Lamrey’s file included notations on every case he’d ever worked. His career spanned much farther back than she’d known, and she realized he had been closer to her father’s age than her own. Weird she hadn’t noticed. He was that well preserved. He’d actually served with Janet Hunt and her father and Rebecca Murdoch, Fi’s mom.
A little queasy feeling settled in her stomach. Was she that poor a judge? Was she doing what more than one school counselor had told her, and trying to find a new father?
“There are more than your AGS who would know how to do this, but I believe your killer is AGS-based.”
“Pardon me?” her thoughts were blown right out of her head as she looked up at him. “You are going to answer my questions?”
“Where it does not compromise other things, yes, I think I may.”
“Now that’s an understatement of equivocation if I’ve ever heard one.” She crossed her arms. “So? Who else could be doing this? What do you think’s going on?”
He shook his head, his hair rustling like feathers around his shoulders, but he would not meet her gaze. “I do not know much more than you. I truly am here as a guardian, a watcher only.”
She wasn’t going to let him off the hook, because he knew things—things that might obviate her having to read every one of these files. “I notice you aren’t telling me about any others, but let’s hold that thought for a moment. Why are you here?”
“Very simple. Because here is where you are—the AGS, all the others, all based here in Seattle and—I—knew of it.”
The way he’d caught himself said there were others like him out there, but she’d let that go as well. For now. “So you’re here to guard us from something?”
Another one of those too-intense smiles. “Yourselves, mostly. Guard you from yourselves.”
“You sound like some sort of parent—or a government oversight committee, or those friendly aliens we see in Sci-Fi movies. And you certainly did more than watch when you broke down the door to my house.” She raised her chin at him, daring him to answer.
“That was—unfortunate, but necessary.” His gaze was locked on her now, taking her measure—probably to decide what he could say.
“Hmm. I wonder what that makes me.” She looked down at the file containing all Simon’s testing at Landon’s behest. Psychological, em
otional, physical. A perfectly healthy specimen until he woke up inside a concrete wall. “Did you have anything to do with the change at the parking garage?”
“No. Though I was there.”
“Why didn’t you save Simon?”
At that he looked away to the water for a long time. Finally he looked back at her. “Perhaps I am not a guardian. Perhaps I am an observer. I am not supposed to intervene.”
“But….”
“I broke—you would say, protocol—when I assisted you, yes.”
Vallon wanted to ask why, but looked back at the file, anger heating the afterburn. Simon could have been alive—heck, all of these people could have been alive, if someone like Xavier had intervened.
“You mean my father could have been saved, but no one bothered.”
It came out as almost a soft growl, but Xavier didn’t even seem to notice the danger he was in.
“Your father. That was long ago. He was the first. No one knew or was prepared. It was the changes that took him and a few others that drew—my attention to Seattle. It is why I am here.”
It would explain his presence if he represented some more powerful group of Gifted. So she had to accept his story—at least for now. “I saw you at the garage.”
“Yes. And I would have spoken to you that night, but you were followed and I did not wish to be seen.”
That set her aback. “Followed?”
“By your detective. Don’t worry. He saw nothing.”
“Except you disappear!” She stood up. “And a fine surprise that was. Damn it Xavier, what are you? Who are you, and who do you represent? How do you just disappear? For that matter, how did you save my house? I know what you had me do, but no one can access that kind of earth power and live to tell the tale. I’ve tried.”
That got a rise of his brows, but he didn’t respond. Refusal, or picking his words?
She began to pace the room, kneading her forehead. The Janet Hunt file was on top of the stack and she picked it up and began to read as she walked. And walked. And walked, hoping to release her anger and released some of the built up energy of the afterburn.
All Janet’s cases lay here. Addressing Mount St. Helen’s eruption. Ameliorating the great drought of 1988. She’d been part of the panel who had discussed whether to use the Gift to ‘fix’ the Alfred P. Murray Building blown up by Timothy McVeigh, and thus remove the damage to the American psyche. She’d been part of the AGS senior agents who had warned the government to prepare to defend against other acts of terrorism—like 9/11. Janet Hunt had been, along with Vallon’s father, one of the legendary founding agents of the AGS as it was today. Another point Vallon hadn’t known.
“You can access the power if you know how to protect yourself. I believe someone has either learned the method or developed a new one. Perhaps the latter, because these changes feel different to me.”
Xavier leaned back in his chair, the window with its view of the lake at his back so his head and shoulders were silhouetted against the blue. He cocked his head at her.
“I think I tell you more than I should.”
Shock that he’d actually answered and the force of his regard seemed to tug her across the floor. Or perhaps it was the afterburn. At the last moment she turned away and rounded the sofa to stand at the window.
“And yet it doesn’t help me at all.”
“Perhaps there is another way.”
Vallon nearly leapt out of her skin. He was right behind her, and how the heck had he moved so quietly? But now his aura of incense and cedar sent the afterburn roaring. She turned around, barely kept her hands to herself to ease past him. When she had enough distance that her mind worked again, she turned back and caught a strange look in his eyes—desire?—quickly masked.
He crossed the room and pulled her stack of files across the table, sorting them into two separate piles. Then he shoved one of the piles across the table to her.
“Here. We both sense the person we are after is a woman. These are the files of the female agents.”
Vallon considered the stack of files and looked at him. “Now why didn’t I think of that? Oh, I know. Maybe it’s because these are the victims?!”
“Perhaps. So perhaps you read the men’s files and I will read the women’s and we will point out the interesting points to each other.”
It was as good a plan as any. She dug into the files. Simon Lamrey. Rafe Goodman. Jasper Brook, Ethan Silverman. Others. She kept burrowing back and back into the early years of the AGS, making her notes, so she felt like she could almost see and feel the excitement of the AGS as it shifted from being an almost-forgotten experiment in the US Geological Survey, looking at the ability of a few Agents to influence the landscape, to suddenly being troubleshooters for natural disasters and all the changes that can undermine a nation of people who do not understand the power they hold.
“Heady days, those.”
She met Xavier’s gaze. “Yes. They were. My father told me about them many times. How they thought they could change the world, given enough time.”
“How do you say? Idealists?”
She looked down at the last file in her stack. “I suppose you could say that. I think my father was one, although sometimes I think he was starting to lose faith.”
“Perhaps it was only his generation finally growing up.”
“Maybe.” She thought back to her father, his smiles becoming less and less. Fewer hours to spend with his daughter. “Or maybe the job was more than he expected.”
“Or less.”
She met his gaze. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
He shrugged. “It is like most of our lives. As I read these files there are many similarities among the agents. Most were there close to the beginning. Many worked the same files. All seemed to be as you say, idealists. They had a great purpose. But as I look at the files, I see the cases they worked on become more—how do you say it? Mundane? When you lose your joy in your work, perhaps you lose your edge as well. You become easier to kill.”
“Mundane? But the AGS has a purpose to protect. There are terrorists out there and there are attacks on our soil. That’s why Homeland Security is there, why we’re there. How can that be mundane?”
Xavier cocked his head at her. “Perhaps there is another way. Perhaps someone saw what was happening in this country and chose to take action to keep their edge. They would take the battle to the threats.”
“Learn to kill?” To hide her shock, Vallon picked up the last file, her father’s, hesitating before paging through it. But the pattern Xavier mentioned was there as well. Great purpose to the mundane. Could it drive someone to the viciousness to do what was happening?
She knew how her father felt. She’d had such excitement when she graduated and joined the AGS. Now it wasn’t much more than being a beat cop. It was why she’d established her little workroom in the basement. Why she tried new things: to keep advancing.
Had her father felt the same way before he died? But to kill others to make yourself feel alive. Or perhaps the killer was helping dissatisfied agents escape.
At that thought she shivered and looked at Xavier, suddenly sure she knew why he was here.
“You were assigned to see what we did with our Gift. I don’t know who sent you, but someone did, and you were watching me because it was happening to me, but I fought it. I was looking for new outlets for it and you couldn’t be sure what I’d do.”
It was as if a mask dropped over his face. Gone were the signs of any partnership. He was a mysterious foreign force studying an enemy. A scientist with a subject, just as she’d always been. At least she understood that type of relationship, but for some reason it renewed an old ache she’d thought she long ago destroyed.
“So. I have it right.” She smiled. “Oops, underestimated me again, did you?” She kept it light, and plucked the file he held from his fingers, liking the fact she had him on the run. Rebecca Murdoch, she read, and a knot
formed in her belly. She flipped through it: the investigation into her disappearance at three forty-five on December fifth, ten years ago. Someone had taken out the entire road she was driving. She’d barely had a chance to call the AGS as she died. Something like what had happened to Janet Hunt, Vallon supposed. She stopped. Something wasn’t jiving.
She sank down onto the couch and looked at her notes.
“There’s something. There was a spate of deaths ten years ago. Then the number reduced to a trickle, but they picked up in frequency two years ago.”
She looked back at Rebecca Murdoch’s file and started reading more closely. Fi’s mother had also been there when the AGS was young. Psychometric testing showed significant Gift, as well as high scores on ethics and innovation and attention to detail. All important to work in the AGS, especially under its revised mandate to monitor for and block all Gifted activities and potential foreign incursions. As with all these files, the key aspect seemed to be that she was an agent important to the AGS.
Experienced. Long service. Whoever it was, was taking out the AGS’s best. Which meant they had a grudge against the agency, or else they were trying to cut it off at the knees. So this wasn’t about the specific agents. This was about the agency as a whole.
Vallon flipped through the last form and stopped at the physical health records. Three children. Girls. No names, but numbers cross-referenced.
All her focus on the investigation fell away at the notation.
Cross references:
* * *67 S. Lamrey
* * *35 G. Gleason
* * *23 F. Drake.
Chapter 21—Precursors