Chapter 17: The Reason is You

Not quite an hour passed before Storm emerged from the Queen again, and the cold had made Kitara irritable despite the alley shielding her from the worst of the icy wind. She observed the silverblood silently, planning to follow him when he cleared the dark strip.

So when he slowed at the entrance to the alley, then stopped, her adrenaline surged as his ice-cold gaze lifted to hers. He glanced over his shoulder, then meandered halfway down the alley to where she stood, invisible.

Kitara held her breath.

Impossible. Just…impossible.

She’d stood inches from other immortals oblivious to her presence. Maybe she was overreacting.

Storm eyed her shadowy outline with skepticism. “You can drop the disguise,” he muttered. “I know you’re there.”

Adrenaline gave way to fear which gave way to rage. Kitara’s aura exploded to life along with surging dark power. She slammed him back against the wall. Unprepared for her fiery revelation, the movement knocked the breath out of him.

“I’m turning you in,” she spat as smoke curled around her fingers, “since you apparently weren’t smart enough to listen when I told you not to come here again.”

His icy eyes studied her. “Go ahead. You’ll be doing my dad a favor. I imagine he’ll appreciate an excuse to pull you from the field.”

Kitara opened her mouth to retort, then closed it again. The muscle in her jaw twitched as she ground her teeth. She let him go.

Storm made a show of brushing out imaginary wrinkles left by her grip, unaware of how close she had come to burning up the fabric, and him with it. “I thought as much.”

Kitara spat an expletive at him.

“It’s a neat trick,” Storm said. “Never seen anything like it before.”

Kitara took a deep breath, willing her pulse to calm and the darkness in her to settle. “Not here,” she muttered. “We need to get somewhere safe. No one can see us together.”

“Seems like no one can see you at all, at least sometimes,” Storm noted. “Except me, apparently.”

Kitara’s nerves screamed to escape such an exposed area, even as those same nerves yearned toward the warmth of Storm’s aura. The flurry of conflict dizzied her. Without a word, she turned and headed down the alley, not wanting to be spotted emerging with Storm beside her. She wound down a handful of side streets, finally ending up on a road with a higher percentage of humans.

When she was confident they weren’t followed, Kitara led them back to her flat. Once inside, after checking locks and windows and surveying the parking lot, she spun to confront Storm.

“What—”

“Don’t,” he cut her off with a frown. “I don’t need any more sanctimonious lectures from you, thanks.”

“No, what you need is to be court-martialed.”

He smirked. “Which we both know you won’t do.”

“I’m not refraining for your benefit,” she retorted bitterly.

“Sure, whatever.” Storm waved a hand. “Point is, if you really believed that bullshit you’re spouting, you’d turn me in regardless of the consequences.”

“I believe wholeheartedly you have a death wish.” Kitara crossed her arms. “Where’s Declan?”

“Not here.” Storm spread his hands. “Obviously.”

“So you came alone, too? Nearly getting massacred the other night wasn’t enough?”

“If you’d waited another two minutes, I probably could have taken care of the rest,” he retorted. “But you showed up in that shadowy ghost form you have, and I was too distracted trying not to charbroil you.”

“You shouldn’t have known I was there at all.” She leaned back against the wall.

“I take it that’s unusual.”

“Very.”

“Is it a Sleeper thing? Some special tech?”

She took a deep breath. “No,” she said quietly. “It’s a ‘me’ thing. Did Declan notice it?”

Storm shrugged. “I doubt it. He was too focused on the demons.”

“How?” she asked. “How do you do it?”

“How should I know? Your aura’s like a miniature sun: you’re probably lucky the demons didn’t notice you too.”

Kitara blinked. If he shared her heightened awareness, maybe her ability wasn’t as infallible as she thought. The idea made her uneasy. “A…miniature sun?”

Storm’s scowl relaxed into something resembling curiosity. “Yeah. Your aura is a lot more vibrant than…well, everyone else’s.”

Not one-sided. Shit.

What did it mean?

Kitara rubbed her forehead wearily. “Brilliant,” she muttered. “That’s just…brilliant.”

“Who else knows? My dad, I guess?”

“That doesn’t matter.” She looked up with a frown.

“It might,” he said coolly.

Kitara crossed her arms over her chest. “It makes me very effective at my job, which means it’s a life-and-death secret. You can’t mention it to anyone.”

Storm returned her fierce stare, refusing to back away first, and she tried not to let his faux-blue eyes—and thus the uncanny resemblance to his father—unnerve her. Seeing the challenge in his expression, she stepped closer. “Swear it.”

He held his hands up in surrender. “All right. I swear.”

Hopefully, the threat of mutually-assured destruction would ensure he kept that promise.

“Was there anything else?” she asked tightly.

“No,” Storm said. He paused, an expression of indecision mingled with anger flashing across his features before he backtracked. “Actually…yes.”

“What?”

“The details in your file are cut and dry…and missing a few details. I know a lot about you, but not how you became a Sleeper.”

She raised an eyebrow. “There aren’t many dark immortals in the AIDO, so every Sleeper they can train is necessary.”

“Unless they’re revealed to be a traitor or a threat,” he countered. “Then they’re a liability.”

“And I’m none of the above.” A louder note of warning reverberated in her voice. “You said I didn’t know anything about you. Well, keep this in mind before jumping to conclusions, Storm Avensäel: you don’t know as much as you think you do about me, either.”

“Then explain it. How did you become a Sleeper?”

Kitara fought to keep her hands relaxed at her sides. “Saoirse took an interest in me and invited me to join the profession; the rest is history.”

He hesitated for a beat. “Saoirse’s the High Sleeper.”

Kitara raised an eyebrow. “And?”

“Are you implying…the High Sleeper was your…?”

“Trainer? Mentor? Yes. Do you really think she emerges from deep undercover for every reassignment?”

Storm shifted uneasily. “I just figured that was standard for new hires at headquarters—”

“No.” Kitara shook her head. “Saoirse left the field specifically—at great risk to herself, might I add—to facilitate my transfer from Spokane.”

Storm’s eyebrows knitted together in surprise, his expression betraying a range of emotions—shock, disbelief, perhaps even a touch of envy. “Why?” The question hung in the air between them. “Why would she do that for you?”

“I’m not discussing that,” she replied flatly. “If that’s your next set of questions, you’re wasting your time.”

He scowled. “You seem to waste my time a lot.”

“No, you waste your own time because of your apparent inability to believe I can do my job,” she snapped.

Storm’s grasp on his composure slipped. “Believe you?” He scoffed, bitterness infusing the laughter. “Hilarious.”

Kitara raised her hands in a frustrated gesture. “Stars and hellfire, what is your fucking problem?”

“You want to know my problem?” he spat out. “It’s the fact that you, a child of the Fallen, somehow emerged from the ashes of your parents’ treachery to become a Sleeper. Saoirse’s protégé. Not only unblemished by the sins of her family but appreciated for it.”

She gaped at him. “You cannot be serious right now.”

His eyes bored into her with quicksilver rage. “Appreciated, celebrated, even, when your parents weren’t worth the feathers they Fell with.”

Kitara’s own anger straightened her spine, and her expression went flat. “My mother was Moriah Orinokë, you pretentious asshole. And you are unworthy to even speak her name.”

She met his stunned expression with an unflinching gaze. Storm grappled with the name for a moment as what he thought he knew collided with the statement in a moment of cognitive dissonance.

Moriah Orinokë? The…legendary Emissary?

He schooled his astonishment into a hard expression. “That’s impossible.”

“Not impossible,” Kitara muttered. “Just improbable. And unthinkable to some.”

“Moriah never Fell,” he said in an accusatory tone. “So you can’t possibly be her daughter.”

“I’d argue you couldn’t possibly be the son of one of the most iconic Myragnar known to us, given your general demeanor, yet here we are.”

Rage flooded Storm’s posture, sharp and crackling. “Don’t you dare talk about my mom.”

She might have laughed. “Right after you insulted mine?”

“You are genetically Fallen, Kitara! Moriah wasn’t; she died on a mission! I don’t know what game you’re playing, but—”

“The report on my mom was a cover-up,” Kitara snapped. “The High Council hid what really happened to preserve their reputation.”

“That’s preposterous,” Storm spluttered. “Falling is a huge deal. They don’t do it on a whim!”

“Don’t they?” she challenged. “There’s a Fallen on their High Council. Was that a mistake?”

“Nobody knows what happened to Robert,” he mumbled. “He won’t talk about it.”

Kitara threw up her hands. “And that is the High Council’s best line! ’Don’t talk about it.’ ‘Don’t tell anyone.’ ’If you talk about it, you’ll be executed for treason.’ Isn’t it suspicious that nobody talks about the bad things? You should know better than anyone, because whatever happened to your mom has been mysteriously covered up too!”

Storm’s temper visibly surged back to the surface, barely under control as he clenched his fists. Electricity danced over his taut fingers. “I told you not to talk about my mom.”

“Why not?” Kitara shot at him. “Do you know what happened to her? Because there isn’t a report Devika can find that explains it.”

“Don’t,” he warned, his voice suddenly dark and dangerous. “I mean it.”

“I thought not,” she scoffed. “One of the most powerful immortals in existence is comatose, and the cause is mysteriously unaccounted for—”

Reflexes honed over decades instinctively triggered a blade into her hand just before Storm seized her by the throat.

“Because of your family!” he bellowed, slamming her against the wall even as her knife kissed his jugular. “Nobody knows what happened to her because you were the only one who got out alive!”

She jerked back a little, confusion breaking through the adrenaline, and her grasp on her knife relaxed for the briefest of seconds. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Unfazed by her knife under his chin, electricity arced over Storm’s knuckles, a hair’s-breadth from Kitara’s face. The proximity of the current raised the tiny hairs on the back of her neck. A shallow line of silver blood beaded under Storm’s jaw where the edge of Kitara’s blade met his throat. A wisp of shadow, disguised by the flickering light of Storm’s power, twisted around Kitara’s fingers in response to the adrenaline spiking in her veins.

“I should electrocute you where you stand,” he seethed.

Her expression frosted over. “You wouldn’t be the first silverblood to try,” she growled. “And yet, here I am. So go ahead.” Her grip on her blade tightened again as coils of darkness looped over her wrist and the back of her hand. “Give it your best shot. See what happens.”

A tempest roiled in his eyes, evidencing the effort of the razor-thin control he wielded over his deadly power. She could end him with a flick of her wrist…but it would also undoubtedly snap that control. The resulting surge of electric current would probably kill her too. Still, Kitara’s gaze never wavered, even as Storm’s fingers fractionally tensed on her neck.

Their eyes met: a sparking, violent collision of emerald fire and quicksilver. Friction vibrated in the space between them, the air heavy with their clashing auras as they waited for the other to make a move.

Storm jerked back and broke eye contact, shoving her away. The sudden separation reverberated through Kitara’s mind like physical recoil.

He spun, wrenching open the door. “Go to hell.”

Despite still reeling from the encounter, Kitara lowered her blade and fired back a flippant retort. “That’s my day job.”

“It suits you!” Storm slammed the door so hard the whole apartment shuddered.

For a few moments, Kitara could only hear the thudding of her heart as it roared in her ears. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, glancing down at the knife in her hand. The edge shone a brighter silver than normal, wetted with Storm’s blood, but the material of the blade’s handle peeled and crumbled in her grasp, decaying beneath her touch. She dropped it with a curse, shaking out her fingers.

What the hell just happened?