“Very much.”
“Was she well-trained? Smart? Loyal?”
“Yes, all of those things.”
“Well. Michael and Daniel are all of those things too. And I love them, dearly, but don’t tell them that.”
Payne grinned and sipped his coffee. “Are you three physical?”
Rayna smirked and decided to play dumb until he embarrassed himself. “Sure. We train together every day.”
“I mean, you know…”
“I know? Why don’t you tell me what I know?”
He scratched his head. “You know what I’m asking. I know you do.”
She shrugged. “No. You’re being quite obtuse. Why don’t you just come out and ask me whatever it is you want to know?”
“Argh! Are you sleeping together?”
“Well... If we’re exhausted and wind up taking a nap in the grass.”
Major Payne threw his hands in the air. “Are you fucking one or both of them?”
She burst out laughing. “Did you fuck your dog?”
The major picked up his coffee mug, looked like he was going to pour it over her head, then his professionalism took over, and he set it in the sink and walked out.
6
Payne let Jasper go in Brooklyn, knowing that Lioness, the artist with remote viewing skills, could track him from the mansion, hopefully right to his boss.
Lioness was already in her trance when Jasper’s beat-up Honda Civic creaked out of the alley behind an occult shop. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the L.A.W. living room, surrounded by candles and a haze of eucalyptus smoke. Her charcoal pencil moved like it had somewhere to be, sketching furiously across a pad the size of a pizza box.
Joell hovered nearby, arms folded, watching the lines take shape with a mix of admiration and barely-concealed anxiety.
“Is she okay?” Brianna whispered. “She looks like she’s mid-possession.”
“She’s fine,” Joell said, though her tone suggested she’d feel better if someone was standing by with holy water and maybe a tranquilizer dart. “She always looks like that when she’s tracking someone. It’s her process.”
Rayna uncurled from a nearby loveseat and squinted at the sketch. “Is that a Denny’s?”
“No way,” Brianna said. “I think it’s a Waffle House.”
“Maybe he’s just hungry. We didn’t feed him.”
“Focus,” Joell snapped. Lioness’s hand dragged out the rough lines of a man. It was Jasper, hunched and glancing over his shoulder, skulking past a neon sign.
“Guess he didn’t take that whole ‘we’re letting you go because we’re benevolent witches’ speech seriously,” Rayna muttered.
“He took it seriously enough to haul ass straight to his boss,” Joell said, kneeling next to Lioness. “Come on, girl, show me where.”
Lioness obliged. Her fingers blurred, pulling a black SUV from the paper like it’d been hiding there all along. Big. Tactical. Government issue.
“Well, that’s subtle,” Brianna said. “I thought the goal of shadowy puppet masters was tonotlook like they’re in an FBI TV show.”
The SUV had tinted windows and a faint symbol on the passenger door, like a triangle stuffed inside a square, half-burned off. Lioness darkened the detail until it stood out like a bruise.
