Sunroper (Goddesses Rising) Read online

  They sat for a few minutes, watching nothing happen. Not even a breeze stirred the nearby underbrush. Then lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Anson grunted and started the truck, causing Marley to focus on the car that rolled slowly past them. The car that said Deputy Sheriff on the passenger-side door.

  “Hell.” Marley adjusted her seat belt as Anson got back on the road. “Let him get farther ahead and just turn around. We’ll get a motel and come back later.”

  As soon as a curve in the road hid them from sight, Anson did a three-point turn and headed back the way they’d come. About ten minutes later they drove into the nearest “big” town, Valatie, and found a quaint little motel. Anson checked them in—it was too dark for Marley to wear sunglasses to hide her eyes, and they made her too recognizable.

  “Want to grab something to eat?” Anson tossed his bag into the room he’d just unlocked and prepared to close the door again.

  Marley glanced across the parking lot to a shopping strip across the street, anchored by a brightly lit pizza joint. “I’m just gonna order in. We’ll go back about midnight.”

  He nodded and stuck his room key in his pocket before strolling toward the sidewalk.

  Marley went into her own room and locked the chain behind her. She dug through the small pile of brochures next to the phone and called the pizza place to order a meatball sub for delivery. Half an hour later, showered and fed, she stretched out with her laptop to review the information Anson had sent her before they’d left for the wedding that morning. He’d gathered credit-card transactions, travel data, and property search results and fed them through some kind of program that sorted and compiled the info, then laid it all out in charts. Slick.

  As he’d said, the information indicated clusters of young Numina—some they’d suspected of being Deimons and some that didn’t surprise her even though she and Anson hadn’t had them on the list—spent a couple of days here around this time every month.

  The farm he’d pinpointed was currently owned by AS Services. Marley had never heard of it, but it was probably a DBA or a holding company or something. The guy who’d handled the sale a few months ago was a manager for a real estate investment trust, half of whose board of directors were Numina.

  None of this connected them to the rogue goddess directly, but Marley had gleaned enough from the cryptic Deimon discussions Anson had hacked into to know that new initiates had to go to a remote location and prove their worthiness to receive flux. It wasn’t just a pay up, take it, and leave sort of thing. The farm, as rundown as it was, fit the bill.

  An icon flashed in the corner of the laptop screen and a chime signaled an incoming video call. Marley frowned at it. She used the program to instant message with Anson but had never done a videoconference. Her default setting must be “Available,” but who would know how to find her?

  She rolled her eyes. That was a stupid question.

  She touched the icon to accept the call and the program swept over her screen. A tiny box with her chin and chest in it popped into one corner, and Riley’s and Sam’s faces crowded the center.

  “Hi, Marley.” Sam’s voice rumbled through her speakers. “Hey, adjust your camera. We can’t see you.”

  She didn’t move. They didn’t need to read her that closely. “You guys are supposed to be on your honeymoon. Or at least on a plane to get there.”

  “We leave in the morning.” Riley scowled. “Come on, this is annoying. Fix the screen.”

  Marley sighed and pushed the top of the laptop back until the camera was aimed at her face.

  Riley squealed. “I love the red! When did you do that?”

  “Seriously?” Sam turned to look at his wife. “We’ve got an assassin on lockdown and you’re talking about her hair?”

  “Sorry.” Riley sobered. A little. She had a twinkle in her eye that didn’t fit the reason Sam just gave for their call.

  “Why the hell are you guys calling me on your wedding night?”

  Riley raised her eyebrows. “Because you have a lot to tell us.”

  Marley sighed again and shoved herself back to lean against the headboard, pulling the computer onto her lap. “Not really.”

  “Oh, come on,” Riley scoffed. “We don’t see you for months, we barely hear from you. Then rumors start floating around about a vigilante going after baby Numina—”

  “Deimons,” Marley cut in. “They named themselves after Deimos. Personally, I’d have called them Numinauds, but they didn’t ask me.”

  “Numinauds?” Her brow wrinkled as she worked it out. “Numina frauds. Ha! Pretenders to their fathers’ legacies. Anyway, these kids have gotten into something not so good, and you’re involved somehow. You don’t RSVP to our wedding—”

  “That hurt our feelings, by the way,” Sam interjected.

  “But you still show up to thwart an assassination attempt with a freakish show of strength. All very nice, except you’re with Anson Tournado.” Riley paused, thinking, then moved the finger at the corner of her mouth to point it at Marley. “Let’s start there.”

  Marley shook her head. “That’s in the middle. The whole story would take hours, and you guys—”

  “Are on our honeymoon. Stop saying that.” Riley scowled. “Quinn’s worried about you and a little fed up. She’s not here,” she went on, obviously anticipating Marley’s question, “because she’s due in New York for another meeting with the Numina board, and she’s got one of Delwhip’s pawns in hand as ammunition to remove him from the summit negotiations.”

  “This could be an important break in the talks, a way to silence Delwhip,” Sam added.

  “How are things going down there?” Marley asked, partly because she didn’t want to talk about what she was up to and partly because she really wanted to know. What with dodging Quinn’s calls, she hadn’t been updated in a while.

  Sam and Riley gave her identical looks that said they knew what she was doing.

  “Slow,” Sam admitted bluntly.

  “We’ve established which guys have broken away from the main,” Riley added. “And now we’re starting to discuss what those splinter groups want and how they plan to get it. Which means rehashing everything that happened in the last five years. Which brings us,” she said pointedly, “back to Anson.”

  Marley drew a deep breath. This was her fight. Her chance at redemption for all the pain and fear she’d made possible. Telling them, having them come to her rescue, would negate everything she’d done to earn back their trust, to be worthy of it. And they were on their friggin’ honeymoon!

  She reached for the top of the laptop’s touch screen, a little desperate to disconnect the call and escape. But before she could close the program, Sam said, “I know where you are. If you hang up on us, we’ll just come there and really get involved.”

  “All right, all right.” She thudded her head lightly against the wall behind her, tears prickling her eyelids. It almost overwhelmed her that he knew her so well.

  She missed them. Missed having people to share with, ones who cared about what happened to her.

  “I’ll tell you what I’m doing, but you have to promise not to tell Quinn. Unless you have to,” she added, not wanting to ask them to full-out lie. “She doesn’t need the distraction or the worry with the summit.”

  “If it’s vital information, I won’t keep it from her,” Sam said. “Especially if it’s putting you in danger.”

  “I don’t want her position weakened,” Marley insisted. “I’m handling this.” When they both nodded, she took a deep breath.

  “If you’re going back to the beginning,” Riley said softly, “what happened the night you left? Sam won’t talk about it.”

  Marley stared at him, surprised that he’d withhold anything from Riley.

  His jaw came forward, his gaze off to the side of the screen. “There’s nothing to talk about. I don’t know what happened.”

  But the fact that he wouldn’t look directly at Marley told her he had his suspicio
ns.

  And, she realized, he deserved to have them confirmed. “I don’t understand what happened, either,” she said, “but I think our magic is broader than we ever understood.”

  They gaped at her use of the word “magic,” which was an undeclared taboo in the goddess community.

  “Giving Anson my power, then having the rest of it ripped away from me, created some kind of void.”

  “Hmm.” He curled his hand around his chin. “Okay.”

  “I didn’t really know it was there. Quinn could sense it, but she called it my empty vessel. I thought it made me permanently normal,” she said. “I never realized there was anything else to it until after that last transfer.”

  “And what about Sam?” Riley looked between them, but her expression didn’t change. So she, too, had figured some things out. “I didn’t see anything happen during the transfer, but there was something later, a shadow or…” She shook her head. “I don’t know, I thought I was imagining it. But…” Her voice cracked slightly.

  Marley wrapped her arms around herself and pressed her lips together, remembering the horror of that night. Sam, the son of a goddess, the only one capable of accepting Marley’s poisonous energy, had insisted that Quinn give it to him. He’d been so sure he could handle whatever it did to him. He’d been wrong.

  “I didn’t expect touching you to do anything,” she said to Sam. “I just wanted to let you know you weren’t alone.”

  “But you took it away when you did,” he marveled.

  She shook her head. “Not intentionally. I thought at first it totally disappeared, but it’s more that it became inert, and maybe…infused me? It’s made me stronger without giving me any goddess-like power.”

  “And?” Sam pressed. “You can suck the energy out of other people now, too?”

  She nodded. “I can nullify it, remove it from anyone who’s not supposed to have it.”

  “That’s…incredible.” Riley looked amazed and maybe a little envious. She leaned forward, eager. “How do you know who has it and whether they’re supposed to or not?”

  “Well, the energy—the Deimons call it flux—has its own signature,” Marley said. “Once I found the first one of them and nullified it, I could tell who was regular Numina and who was different. I don’t know how, but I can sense the flux.”

  “And how did you learn this?” Sam demanded. He didn’t sound thrilled with her revelations so far. Too bad, because it was only going to get worse.

  Unless she didn’t tell them. Her finger brushed the track pad. The part of her that craved their approval, that couldn’t handle their disappointment, wanted to just shut down the computer and claim technical difficulties later.

  But dammit, she was supposed to have changed. What happened to never being a victim again? That meant not making herself one, either.

  If she wanted to be different, she had to do things differently.

  She folded her arms and looked directly at Sam. “I tracked down Anson and nullified him the same way I nullified you. I wanted to make sure it worked.”

  “That was the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Sam barked.

  Marley kept her expression still. “And I’ve done some very stupid things,” she said softly.

  Riley elbowed Sam, who looked abashed. “I’m sorry. But why wouldn’t you come to one of us? We’d have gone with you if we couldn’t find another—”

  His wife, who seemed to have intuited a lot from Marley’s response, talked over him. “Why did you stay with him, though? After everything he did to you? To Quinn?”

  “I needed help, and he wanted to give it. Make up for the past, I guess. Plus, he had hacking skills and inside information, and he knew at least some of the parties already.”

  “I have skills,” Sam grumbled. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

  Riley blew out an exasperated breath but this time stayed silent. How could Marley answer without sounding accusatory or at least hurting their feelings? The problem wasn’t them. It was her.

  “It turned out to be mutually beneficial with Anson,” she finally said, trying to steer the conversation away. “We researched everyone associated with Numina. I figured my ability was only worth something if one of the kids we dealt with last spring got ambitious enough to become a leech.”

  “That’s always a risk,” Sam agreed. “We have a database of potentials, but—”

  “Not enough time to track them all,” Marley finished. “I had to act on instinct.”

  Riley sat back, looking serious. “We knew something was going on, but had no clue what until we interrogated Gashface. Well, Nick interrogated him. We were dancing.” She flashed a tiny grin and motioned between herself and Sam.

  “I’m sorry,” Marley said. “I didn’t want anything to interfere with your wedding.”

  Riley waved it off. “Never mind that. So this flux is like bestowing power? Like my great-grandparents did?”

  Marley had helped Riley research her family when she first came to the Society. They’d figured out that her great-grandmother had given power to her husband regularly, draining herself to such a point that her daughters never came into their own abilities. Neither did Riley’s mother. They weren’t sure why the dormancy ended with Riley, who was a very strong goddess with metal as her source.

  “Exactly like that,” Marley confirmed. She couldn’t sit still anymore. She spun the laptop sideways and got off the bed to pace in front of it. “It took us a long time to piece together how they were getting the flux. It was clear nullifying them individually wasn’t going to work for very long. There were always going to be more than I could get to, and I was worried about how far some of them would be willing to go. We had to stop it at the source. We eventually determined that a goddess is bestowing small amounts of power to these guys.”

  “So she’s like a drug dealer,” Riley said. “Who would do that?

  “And in return for what?”

  Marley spread her hands at Sam’s question. “We don’t know. We know she’s probably the one who went rogue so many years ago. That goddess’s power source was the sun—that’s the only thing I think is strong enough to give someone so much power to dole out.”

  Sam’s jaw tensed even more. “Cressida Lahr,” he ground out.

  “What?” Riley turned to him, surprised.

  “Her name is Cressida Lahr,” he repeated.

  “How do you know that?” Marley asked. “We haven’t been able to track down any detailed information about the goddess. We’ve had to come at this from the Deimons side.”

  Sam rubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve done a lot of reading while we digitized more of the archive files. I knew about the rogue goddess from when we first went after the leech, and since the Numina splinter groups are kind of a rogue organization, I wanted to see how the Society had handled her back then.”

  “And what did you find?” Marley prodded.

  He shrugged. “Not much. She had access to a lot of power, obviously. She started using it against anyone who displeased her. When the Society tried to discipline her, she disassociated. She did something unforgivable, too—they didn’t document what, but it had to be the equivalent of felonious assault, at least, because they sent a security team after her. Probably would have done the same as they did with Anson and turned her over to the mainstream authorities, but she’d disappeared.”

  “And now she’s bestowing power on these kids.” Marley paced faster. “The amounts I’ve taken from them have been small, probably too small to give them the ability to leech anyone. But that could change.”

  “As long as she provides a regular supply,” Sam said, “there’s no reason for them to consider turning leech. That would be dangerous, not to mention a lot of work.”

  “There could be another reason.” Marley’s hands curled until her nails dug into her palms. “I knew Gash was going to attack because his friends were talking about it. They said he’s changed since he started taking the flux, that he ha
d a new edge.”

  Sam’s brows puckered. “Did you see that in him?”

  “Oh yeah. He was crazed. It didn’t help him much.”

  “How much flux is available to them?” Riley put a hand over her eyes. “Please stand still, Marley. You’re giving me a headache.”

  “Sorry.” She stopped in the middle of the floor and faced the computer. “It might be unlimited. I don’t know. We don’t have anyone to ask.”

  “There aren’t any other goddesses who use the sun?” Riley looked to Sam, but Marley knew the answer from her days managing the goddess roster and non-member records in the Society’s offices.

  “Barbara was the only one.” Barbara Valiant had been president of the Society when Anson first went on his leeching spree, and she was the only one in a century—besides, apparently, Cressida Lahr—to have the sun as her source. She’d been very old, very controlled and contained, and could have been invaluable in this quest. “I wonder if Lahr waited to do this,” she mused, “until after Barbara died. If she thought Barbara was the only one who could stop her.”

  “It’s logical.” But Sam didn’t seem to be thinking about Barbara. “Who else knows about all this?”

  Marley shrugged. “No idea. I doubt the higher-ups in Numina do, or they’d have nailed the Society over it already. That’s another reason I’m trying to stop her before it gets any bigger.”

  Anson’s usual triple knock hit the door. Crap. She’d lost track of time.

  “I gotta go,” she told the others, bending to pull on her boots.

  “Where?” Sam demanded. “It’s midnight. Where are you going?”

  “I’m just checking out the site we found. No big deal.”

  “What site? Marley!” Riley actually reached up a hand as if she could stop Marley from closing the laptop.