Fired Up

five o’clock. She and Jack were accompanying Hector on his evening patrol. It was that mysterious time in a Seattle winter day, the hour when the city was enveloped in the strange half light of deep twilight. The streets glistened with rain, and the streetlights glowed like crystal balls in the mist.
    “Didn’t Fallon tell you?” Jack asked.
    “It’s remarkably difficult to get information out of Mr. Jones.”
    “He’s not much of a conversationalist,” Jack agreed. “The reason Damaris Kemble needs a bodyguard is that she’s the daughter of the founder of Nightshade.”
    “Good grief. She’s Craigmore’s daughter?”
    “He had her on the latest version of the drug. It was making her violently ill, probably killing her. After her father died Arcane offered her the antidote. She agreed to take it. In exchange she’s been telling J&J and the Council everything she knows about Nightshade.”
    “So the concern is that Nightshade might try to silence her.”
    “Right. Unfortunately, according to Fallon, she doesn’t really know all that much about the upper management of the organization.”
    “Because her father didn’t tell her much?”
    “William Craigmore was a secretive bastard. When he established Nightshade, he planned the organization so that no one individual or even a handful could bring down the entire operation. It’s damn brilliant when you think about it. Fallon says Arcane still knows next to nothing about the others at the top of the conspiracy.”
    She glanced at him. “But you said the money trail is a weak point.”
    “Money is always the weak point. It’s the blood of any organization. Cut it off, and things start to die.”
    “How are you doing tracking the cash flow from the gyms?”
    “Looks like the LLC that owns and operates them was, in turn, receiving funding from another privately held company located in Portland, Oregon. Cascadia Dawn. It’s a regional wholesaler that distributes nutritional supplements and health food products.”
    She smiled at the cool satisfaction in his words.
    “Sounds like a good cover for an organization that is making an illicit drug,” she said.
    “It’s a hell of a cover. Fallon isn’t rushing in this time. He’s going to put Cascadia Dawn under surveillance for a while. See if he can learn anything useful. But it’s probably just one more Nightshade lab like the others that J&J took down a couple of months ago. We might get some information, but I doubt that it will give us the guys at the top.”
    She smiled. “We? Us? As in you are now officially on J&J’s payroll?”
    “Are you kidding? J&J can’t afford my consulting fees. This is strictly pro bono work.”
    “But you like it.”
    He shrugged. “It’s a challenge.”
    “Which is just what you’ve been needing. Now what?”
    “Now we have to talk.”
    She froze in midstep, her fingers tightening around Hector’s leash. He halted and looked back politely to see why his routine had been interrupted.
    Jack stopped, too, and turned to look at her. She felt energy flare.
    “The other night when I carried you out of that Nightshade hellhole you told me that you loved me,” he said. “Did you mean it, or was that the fever talking?”
    And just like that, courage sparked inside her. Or maybe it was the realization that nothing mattered but the truth and the possibility of making a dream come true.
    She let go of the leash and put her arms around Jack’s neck. “With you, I always feel a little feverish. But, yes, I love you.”
    He framed her face with his hands. “Enough to think long term?” “You sound like you’re negotiating a business contract.”
    “I love you, Chloe. But I can’t do the short- term, serial monogamy thing with you. It’s all or nothing.”
    “All,” she said. “Definitely all.”
    He pulled her close and kissed her there in the winter dreamlight.

58
    FALLON JONES GAZED DEEPLY INTO THE COMPUTER, READING the report that Chloe Harper had just e-mailed to him.
    . . . The problem with the antidote is that it takes a sledgehammer to do what is essentially a job for a seamstress working with fine needles and silk thread. The hammer works, but in the process creates damage of a different kind. However, I’m sure that Damaris Kemble will recover most, although probably not all, of her natural para-senses.

    I’ll look forward to examining more cases for J&J. Please find my itemized bill attached . . .
    He filed the report and leaned back