of several times I would have declared it broken beyond repair. But everyone has a limit. A point past which you can’t be pushed.
“Please don’t do this, Olivia,” Anne said, when my fingers began to twitch on my desk. A second later, my legs began to convulse, banging against the bottom of the pencil drawer, but I only stared at her through the ball of light in the center of my vision, breathing steadily through the pain. “I’m not going to take it back, Liv,” she insisted, leaning forward on the couch. “I can’t. Not this time. Will you help me?”
Her repetition of the original request escalated the process, and I gasped at the pain deep in my stomach. I couldn’t identify it, but I knew what that pain meant. One of us would have to back down in the next few minutes, or the last thing I saw would be her bright green eyes, full of tears and regret, and her stubborn lips sealed against the sentence that could make it all go away.
“Please, Liv,” Annika begged, and this time her voice came from behind me. Water ran in the bathroom. A second later, she leaned my chair back and laid a cold, wet cloth over my eyes and forehead, and my hands twitched violently in my lap. “You don’t even know what I need you to do.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I gasped, helpless to keep the rag from slipping down my face. Until I gave in to the compulsion to help her, I would feel nothing but the systematic shutdown of my entire body. But still I fought it. She had no right to make me do something I didn’t want to do, no matter what stupid mistake we’d made as children! The compulsion was like having my free will stripped. It was humiliating, and infuriating, and it was the reason we’d all gone our separate ways after high school without even a glance in the rearview mirror. “The point—” I growled through a throat that wanted to close around my words “—is that I … have … no … choice.”
Leather creaked as she sat on the couch again, and the hitch in her breath said she was fighting sobs. “I’m sorry, Liv. If I could ask you without compelling you, I would, but I don’t have that option.”
She was right—her very request triggered the compulsion—but that didn’t help. And neither did the regret obvious in her voice. “What do you want?” I whispered with all the volume I could manage, as pain ripped through my stomach again, and my arms began to contract toward my torso.
“I need you to find someone.”
No surprise, considering I was a Tracker, both by birth and by profession.
The rag slipped from my eyes and I saw her wipe tears from her cheeks with an angry stroke of one hand. “I need you to find the bastard who killed my husband and return the favor.”
Two
For a moment, I could only stare at her, and as my resistance began to fade in the face of surprise, so did the pain, though it wouldn’t completely subside until I’d said the magic words.
“Whoa, you got married?” I couldn’t picture it, and I hadn’t even noticed the wedding band that now seemed glaringly obvious on her left hand. Did she have a house in the suburbs? A mortgage? A dog in the backyard?
I frowned and sucked in a deep breath, relieved to feel the convulsions in my arms downgrading to mere spasms.
“Yes. Then I got widowed,” she said, and more tears fell, even as her jaws clenched in some powerful combination of rage and devastation. “I need you to track the murderer and kill him.”
“That’s … that’s not really what I do, Anne,” I said, careful not to refuse—so soon after that last refusal, anyway. I stared at her, surprised by the vengeful impulse in a woman who, when we were kids, was a turn-the-other-cheek kind of girl. “I just find people.
That’s it.”
Anne blinked, as if she hadn’t heard me. As if she didn’t want to hear me. Then she plucked her purse from the center couch cushion and dug through it with trembling hands. “Here.” She produced a wallet-size photo album and flipped to the second page, already pulling a picture out before I realized what she was going to do.
“No, don’t … “ Show me a picture of your dead husband … That was a low blow. But before I could finish my sentence, she’d leaned forward and slid the photo across my desk. I looked at it, against my better judgment, and found a handsome Asian man with a nice smile, one arm around an obviously happy Anne.
It was like staring at a ghost, though I’d never even met the man.
“His name was Shen Liang. He was thirty-four, and the nicest man I ever met. He wrote proprietary software for a company here in the city, but they let him work from home. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill him.” The tears were back, and I stared at my desk to avoid seeing them.
“What did the police say?”
“They’re investigating. But, Liv, his killer was Skilled. A Traveler. The police aren’t going to be able to find him, and even if they could, without traditional physical evidence, they can’t make the charges stick. You know what they’re up against.”
Yeah. I knew. Nearly half my business came from victims trying to catch people the cops couldn’t identify. “I’ll find him for you.” I had no choice about that. “But the rest.” The killing … “It’s not that simple.” Even if I found the suspect, and even if I was one-hundred-percent certain that he was guilty of cold-blooded murder, I couldn’t just kill him—not if I valued my own life—until I knew for sure what his connections were. Who, if anyone, he was bound to. “We have a daughter.”
“No …” I shook my head when she started digging in her purse again. No more pictures …
“Hadley.” More tears, and when her jaw began to quiver, something inside me twisted painfully. “She’s five years old, and tomorrow I’m going to have to tell her that her daddy is dead. I can’t let her grow up knowing the man who killed her father is still out there. You have to help me. I need you to find Shen’s killer and kill him. I’m asking you, Olivia.”
I groaned out loud. Those were the magic words. This had gone beyond a general request for help: it was now a specific request that I commit murder, regardless of the cost to me, personally. Now, unless I could somehow talk her out of it without actually refusing to do what she’d asked, I’d have to either kill her husband’s murderer or die fighting the compulsion. Or die when the police caught up to me. Or wish I’d died if the murderer turned out to be connected and his connections caught up to me.
Motherfucker!
“Annika, I’m asking you to rethink this.”
There. Two could play that game. Or—technically—four, since there were four bloody thumbprints on that old oath, wherever it was.
Anne flinched, and her hand twitched. She was resisting, and I could practically see how badly she wanted to rub her own forehead. So I tossed her the cool rag.
“Fine. State your case.” She leaned back on the couch and placed the folded rag over her forehead and tear-swollen eyes.
I took a deep breath, but was careful to keep it silent. I didn’t want her to know how important it was for me to get out of the assassin part of the favor she was asking. “I don’t have a problem with your husband’s murderer dying for his crimes.” The state would give him
