Suffocate In Spirit - Shadows of the Night 4

Chapter 7

"Are you threatening us?" Brenna said slowly.

I shook my head. "We're not here to throw you or your friends to the sharks, Brenna. Not if you cooperate. Look, I don't care if you were okay with the Raven being Chris' ally." A lie, but I wasn't going to tell her that. "We just need to know what she told you about their liaison."

"You think you can just walk in here, threaten us with god-knows-what, and we're gonna spill just to save our skins?" Brenna laughed. "You don't know a single thing about the Bloody Warden or us."

I stared at her, meeting the challenge in her eyes. "You're wrong. I'm asking you because you owe me one. No matter what you think of me, I saved all your lives. If you are who I think you are, you're not going to do it because we're threatening you." I took a deep breath. "Look. This is important. Did you know that Chris and the Raven were collaborating?"

Brenna stared at me for a long moment before she shook her head. She looked away. "Chris only said she had powerful allies. That she still had contacts in the Force, and that there were others in the Circle that thought like her – witches who disagreed with the Circle's fake policy of peace."

"And that they were going to help us," Tony threw in.

Andy's eyes were still on Tony, watching his face closely. "Who were these contacts?"

Tony shot another nervous glance around the bar, as if he could have identified crooks and Circle members in disguise at a glance.

"She never told us," he finally said.

Andy absorbed their reactions with the precision of someone used to long, dragging interrogations. I didn't doubt for a second that he would be able to tell if they were lying.

He leaned back. It was a slow, deliberate action that made me wonder if it was part of his repertoire of interrogation techniques. "The Circle searched Chris' office thoroughly. Someone managed to clear all the data in her computer. Or, fried it, to be more precise. I got a pretty good idea just how that happened. We need all the information she had on the computer – e-mails, documents, documentation of business transactions etc. – excluding name lists of Bloody Warden members, of course. Give that to us, and we'll withhold your names and whereabouts from the Circle. That's the deal."

"You can't possibly think we'd hand that kind of information over. If we had it to begin with." Tony added the last part with a tad too much conviction for me to believe they really didn't have it.

"We'll give it to you," Brenna said with a steely voice.

I blinked at her, feeling the collective stares of Tony and Andy going to the female half-witch.

"In return you'll help us hide from the Circle and the vampires," she said. "No name lists of our members. And by that I mean all of them. You'll only get information about contacts Chris had in the Circle, or within the Inri Brotherhood. There's information on her business ventures – you can have that as well, I don't care. But in return you'll destroy any evidence that we were part of it. Even future evidence you or the Circle find."

So that's what she's after. She wants a clean slate for all the half-witches.

Andy crossed his arms in front of him, jaw hardening. I could see his mind working behind those brown eyes. He'd been in hostage situations, up to his ass in alligators – seconds and decisions that decided over the life of innocents. This was very different. And yet I detected that same determined, distant look he got when he scented danger.

For the barest of moments the thought crossed my mind that there was a part of him that liked it, in a sense that he lived for it. Another heartbeat, another spiked shot of adrenaline. Another decision that could mean life and death. Was that really who he was?