The Librarians Fanfic: By Paths Coincident 13/?
Title: By Paths Coincident 13/?
Author: Honorat
Rating: T
Crossover: Leverage and The Librarians
Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damian Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.
Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot
Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.
Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren’t the only members of the two teams who’ve met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark. Lots of backstory in this chapter.
Previous chapters HERE.
* * * * *
By Paths Coincident
* * * * *
Cassandra closed the door of her apartment and leaned back against it.
When she had flown from Heathrow to PDX, she had left her life behind in New York. Nothing in her previous apartment had held meaning for her because that had been where she had done her best to forget who she was and who she could have been. She’d had her roommate send a suitcase with her clothes and told her to keep whatever else she wanted or give it away.
This little studio apartment was hers, in a way no other place had been. When she had told Jake that she had never had a kid’s bedroom, he had looked at her with pitying astonishment and, in spite of the awkward tension of those early days, immediately piled her and Ezekiel into his pickup and taken her shopping at every quaint or quirky interior design shop Ezekiel could find in Portland.
Instead of ignoring her synaesthesia, Jake had drawn her to talk about how the colors had sounded to her, what the shapes smelled like, what numbers she saw, what different textures made her feel. It had been such an astonishing experience for her. All her life people had treated her as though she were broken, as though speaking of her disability was painful for them, as though her very existence made them uncomfortable. But Jake had reacted as if her cross-wired brain had simply created a far greater depth and height and breadth to the ways she could perceive and appreciate art. For the first time she had tried to see herself through his eyes-as more rather than less, as a person uniquely gifted rather than horribly cursed. Like a blind man creating a masterpiece, Jake had coaxed her into describing sensations he could not feel or see or hear so that he could paint her room with them.
Cassandra found most places full of jarring and competing sensory bombardment, but this space she could now slip into like a comforting robe, her frayed nerves easing into peace, her fragmented sense of self coalescing into wholeness.
Now her room rioted with botanical murals blending into blackboard on which she could chalk math equations to her heart’s content. A light that looked like a glittering atom hung from the center of the room, and her walls were decorated with framed prints of scientific art from classical illustrations to images from scanning electron microscopes. Her bed was covered in plush versions of the weirdest animals the boys could find-an octopus, a wombat, and an iguana were her favorites. The three of them had spent a day at the Oregon Zoo before descending on the gift store like a hoard of locusts.
Jake had even used his landlady’s deceased husband’s workshop to put together a set of hexagonal shelves painted to match the mural with some of them plastered with pages from mathematical textbooks. Cassandra, who had no idea what had happened to her childhood collections, had purchased a fossil to sit on one shelf as the seed for a new collection.
She had once again a desk and table for her computer and lab work. Some days she would just hold up each beaker and retort and even the lowly test tubes to watch the light glow through them and take deep breaths of cinnamon and cardamom.
In one corner she had an overly enthusiastic Boston fern that was trying to take over the room, and in another, she had a fish tank, burbling away, that she was fairly certain Ezekiel had stolen for her, with guppies and neon tetras and sword tails and one snail that had somehow become one hundred. The multi-colored fish, swirling with such complex patterns, could mesmerize her with the equations they made, each minute a new secret. Along the counter of her small kitchen, she had a parade of chubby cacti, whose protective prickles created a design that always made Cassandra laugh when she ran their equations. Jake had looked at her wistfully and told her he wished he could hear the jokes that a cactus told.
Cassandra always felt surrounded by herself in this room in ways she never had before. Which was a good thing, because she wanted to curl up in the zebra-striped chair Jake had found for her at an antique store after the debacle of the Apple of Discord, and hug her pillow printed with the periodic table information for the element Carbon, and cry.
The evening had been a traumatic one, with the still unexplained tension between Colonel Baird and Jake’s cousin, the violent interruption of the Serpent Brotherhood, and Jake’s frightening head injury. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Her heart was breaking for Jake, and there was nothing she could do for him. That fact hurt. She had been so grateful to Eliot for taking care of his cousin, for letting her assist. But she knew Jake would never have asked for her help. He was such a caring person, but since that time she had betrayed the Library, there had always been a thin layer of ice between them. When she had spent time in Prince Charming’s skin, she had thought that, instead of the Huntsman, the Fairy Tale could as easily have made Jacob Stone into Snow White-trapped in a glass box with his heart poisoned. But she had lost the right to be the prince who could remove that barrier.
He had told her that family wasn’t ever easy, but tonight she had seen how much he cared for his cousin, how much fun they had had as boys together. And now, just when she had thought he might have found a family member he could be himself around, he had discovered that Eliot Spencer, like everyone else in his life, could not be trusted.
Even in the shadowed interior of the truck, with only the illumination of street lights, the look in Jake’s eyes as he had listened to Ezekiel’s litany of crimes that Eliot had committed had been wrenching, moving from angry disbelief to stunned shock to coldest rage and ending in a profound and anguished horror.
Cassandra herself found it hard to believe that Eliot Spencer with his charming smile and his healer’s hands could be the cold-blooded killer Ezekiel had described. And yet she had watched him fight The Serpent Brotherhood with a skill that went beyond terrifying. Although she had to admit that, at the time, since Eliot had been defending them, it had also been rather thrilling to watch the ease with which he had annihilated their enemies.
But Colonel Baird’s reaction to Eliot had new meaning in light of Ezekiel’s information. Cassandra had never seen Baird so thoroughly traumatized. Even when she’d been a princess, their dauntless Guardian had been no damsel in distress. She might have trilled songs and batted her eyes, but she kicked off her high heels and fought fearlessly even with her curtailed skills. What then could have happened to make her respond to Eliot Spencer with more fear than she had to a Minotaur?
Cassandra was fairly certain she did not want to know.
She wished she could have volunteered to spend the night with both Eve and Jake. She had wanted so much to be able to comfort Jake. But she was sure her presence tonight would only be a reminder that everyone always betrayed him. So she had seconded Colonel Baird’s plan to send her home. No need for math in patching up broken hearts.
Still clutching the element Carbon to her chest, Cassandra tried to breathe deeply, running the periodical table through her mind, all those beautiful numbers, neutrons and protons and ions, atomic weights, and valence levels, until she disappeared into the swirl of color and music, and they flickered about her like spinning universes.
* * * * *
Alec Hardison sat alone in the briefing room, his laptop screen the only light illuminating his face. Windows and tabs opened under his searching touch so rapidly they flickered like a movie.
Eliot had gone wherever Eliot went when he got thunderous and surly. And Parker was . . . ah, that was a very faint rustle, far up in the vaulted ceiling. Sure enough, with the zipping hiss of rope and harness, Parker floated down over the desk like a very large and entirely gorgeous spider. She hovered just off the surface, rotating slowly, a bowl of loudly colored cereal and milk in one hand. Balancing on the rope by hooking it with her elbow, she maneuvered her spoon with her other hand.
“Didn’t you get enough to eat tonight?” Hardison asked mildly, his hands slowing their dance over the keys, but not stopping.
“Yes,” said Parker with the total lack of comprehension that still could surprise him. Parker’s out-of-phase view of the world was a constant source of delight to Hardison.
“Then why the cereal?” Hardison gestured at the bowl.
“There is no ‘why’ about cereal,” Parker said, wrinkling her nose and reversing her spin. “‘Why’ is for vegetables. Eliot knows all the ‘why’s’. Because iron, or because beta carotene, or because fiber. I just like things that have no reason.”
Hardison shrugged. When she put it that way, it made perfect sense. Parker usually did, when she explained. Sometimes he thought maybe Parker was the only sane one, and all the rest of the world was crazy.
“What are you doing?” Parker asked, landing on the desk and scooting over without using her hands to peer at the computer screen.
Hardison took a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the wiggling that maneuver involved before answering, “Does anyone think some really weird shit went down with Eliot tonight?”
“Are you talking about the NATO Colonel, Eliot’s cousin, or that woman with the sword and her gang?” Parker asked, shovelling cereal into her mouth with rapt concentration.
“All of the above,” Hardison said. “I started with the people with knives and guns because I wanna know who’s comin’ after Eliot, and I ain’t got nothin’.”
Which was nothing but the truth, and that was baffling. “I mean they are nowhere in my world. Eliot called them The Serpent Brotherhood, but nobody’s talkin’ about ‘em, nobody’s tweetin’ about ‘em, they don’t have a webpage or anything. They got no accounts, no news articles. I’ve got searches runnin’ with facial recognition, but with Eliot’s enemies, that pretty much means coverin’ the entire planet, so I doubt I’ll get much for a few hours, unless they been operatin’ long in Portland. But if some of Eliot’s old buddies were runnin’ game here in town, you’d think he’d have said somethin’.”
Parker set down her empty bowl and launched herself into a slow swing around Hardison so that she could see what he was doing and flop her arms over his shoulders. Hardison readjusted her so that he wasn’t in danger of being strangled and continued to caress his keyboard. Things were getting a little tricky now.
“That’s the NATO person,” Parker pointed out, putting a sugar-dusted fingerprint on his screen.
“Woman!” Hardison exclaimed in exasperation. “Do not combine cereal dandruff with my laptop! Yes, that’s Colonel Eve Baird. I thought she was the next most important problem. Any time the law comes gunning for one of us, we end up burnin’ through aliases and blowin’ up offices. Now I need t’concentrate, because hackin’ NATO ain’t no walk in the park.”
Parker could be a monumental pest when she was in the mood, but she knew when to leave Hardison in peace. She patted his head, then zipped back up her rope, and for a while, he could hear the quiet clinks and swishes of her swinging about the rafters.
But then the systems put in place to prevent just such intrusions as his demanded his full attention and all background activity faded from his awareness. Several hours later, he was sweating and breathing as though he had been running, but he was in. He had all the files on one Eve Baird, Colonel. And damn. This was worse than he had feared.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when Parker’s voice breathed in his ear. “What’s wrong?”
“Jiminy Christmas, Parker! You tryin’ t’kill me, girl?”
“You found something,” Parker said. “I want to know what.”
Taking a few deep breaths to settle his pulse, Hardison transferred the view on his screen to the large bank of screens on the wall as if this were only another case.
“Colonel Eve Baird,” he said in his briefing-the-team voice. “Born Decemeber 24, 1972.”
“Ooooh! Christmas Eve!” Parker exclaimed.
“Yeah, wonder if she ever forgave her parents for that name. Anyway, she grew up on a variety of army bases. Went to West Point-transcripts are all 4.0.”
“Hot and smart,” Parker said.
Hardison rolled his eyes. Part of the problem with the pre-human Parker imprinting on him and Eliot was that she had a tendency to talk like she was one of them. Not that he minded if Parker actually did find girls hot, too.
“She’s too old for us, Parker,” Hardison pointed out.
“But not for Eliot,” Parker said.
“Yeah, she’s not too much older than him, and he always likes girls that can kick his ass a little, but wait’ll you see where they intersect. Now let me finish.”
Parker subsided.
“She went on to complete her Military Intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Then she was recruited for Delta Force counter-terrorism. From there, she joined NATO counter-terrorism. And here’s where it gets interesting. You see, eleven years ago, Captain Eve Baird was given a mission to break up a shipment of nuclear materials through Spain being orchestrated by none other than Damien Moreau.”
Parker made her disgust face. “Blech.”
“Eleven years ago.” Hardison paused significantly but Parker looked blank, so he explained. “Back when we realized goin’ up against Moreau meant goin’ up against Eliot’s past, I did a bit of diggin’, and that would have been right in the middle of the time he was doin’ all kinds of crazy bad shit for Moreau.”
“Uh oh.”
“Uh oh, is right. Baird’s whole team was killed, the shipment was lost, and Baird herself ended up hospitalized. And get this. That team was armored and armed to the teeth, but they were taken out by one man with knives. Sound like anyone we know?”
Parker’s eyes were wide with comprehension. She nodded soberly.
“They didn’t have enough evidence to convict, but I’m guessing they must have had a pretty good idea, because Baird sure reacted to Eliot’s name.”
“What did he do to her?” Parker asked quietly.
They’d always known Eliot had a dark and violent past, but they had never met any of his victims except for General Flores and Toby, both of whom Eliot had spared. Colonel Eve Baird was a reminder that Eliot hadn’t just killed and hurt other bad guys.
“She was medically discharged after that, and didn’t re-enlist for three years. I hacked the hospital’s records, which was a damn sight easier than NATO’s, let me tell you. And Eliot left her with a coma, a fractured skull, a crushed larynx, a perforated abdomen with resulting peritonitis, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a couple of cases of death. She flat-lined twice before they got her stabilized. Also, her therapist bills look like the national debt, so I’m guessing a raging case of PTSD, too.”
“Poor Eliot,” Parker said even more quietly.
Hardison knew she wasn’t dismissing what Eliot had done to Baird but imagining what having that on his conscience was doing to Eliot.
“Is that why she’s just working as a security guard for an archive now?” Parker asked.
That was actually a good question, because Baird was merely on transfer from NATO. Hardison looked up the Metropolitan Library. And drew a blank. As far as he could tell, there was no such organization in Portland. And the New York library seemed to have no actual connection to Portland. Payroll taxes were being withheld, but no information was available for her place of employment. He quickly looked up the other members of the archive.
“They were all hired around the same time, in New York. But they’ve apparently only worked from here. And who the hell pays their taxes in Roman denarii?”
“And who hires a thief to work in an archive containing rare art?” Parker asked.
“Ah, yes. Ezekiel Jones. Maybe they don’t know he’s a thief?” Hardison had come across Jones’ work a few times in the last several years. The kid had game, that was for sure. “Well, if he’s on the heist, should we let them know?”
Parker shrugged. “Anyone with that crappy of background checks deserves to get robbed.”
She had a point.
“Does this mean we’re going to have to leave?” Parker asked. “If Baird knows who Eliot was?”
“I doubt she can bring a case against him now, any more than they could back then,” Hardison said. “I’m more worried about him.”
“Because he feels guilty.” Parker nodded. As always, she and Eliot seemed to understand each other.
“Yeah. And because, if she wants some kind of revenge, I’m afraid he’ll just let her. I don’t even know where he’s disappeared to right now.”
“He’s on the roof,” Parker said.
“In the rain?” Hardison asked. “Never mind. He’d probably prefer it was hail. The man missed his century-he should have lived in the Middle Ages with self-flagellation and hair shirts.”
“He let his cousin get hurt,” Parker said. “You know how he gets when one of us gets hurt.”
* * * * *
Eliot Spencer sat in Parker’s favorite spot on the roof of the building which housed the Brew Pub looking out on the jeweled loveliness that was Portland on a rainy night. It was 52 degrees out and he was beginning to feel chilled as the water dripping from his unruly curls seeped down his neck. He tipped his head back, letting the rain beat against his face, welcoming the physical discomfort because it took the edge off his mental discomfort.
Eliot did not often find himself forced to admit that he had no idea what to do, but he seemed to have arrived at that point now. He felt like a planet with three continents that had just collided-shaken to his very foundation. When the plates of the earth’s crust ground against each other, mountain ranges rose up, and he could feel their razored peaks slicing through his heart. He had sacrificed to keep his worlds separate-had given up his family, his identity-but apparently that had not been enough to appease the vengeful Furies.
How had he managed so thoroughly to fuck up everything he had ever cared about? He remembered the moment he had first known that he could never go home again, never contact anyone he had loved. For a long time he hadn’t gone home because of the fight with his father, but he had spent a couple of Christmases with Jake’s family when he got leave from the Service. Then there had been Aimee. He’d gone home to her in between jobs, until the one when he hadn’t made it out for three months, and then he’d been recovering for another three, and she’d finally tired of waiting and moved on. Eventually the work he was doing was so far over the line he hadn’t wanted to carry that shit home on his boots. But that moment when he had first accepted a contract to kill a man’s family as a warning from Damien Moreau, and he had realized what his family risked by being connected to someone in his line of work, that was when he had known that he not only would not go home, he could not.
His family. They were only safe so long as no one knew they were in any way connected to him. Jake had always been a problem, because his relationship with Eliot was undeniable, and he could be mistaken for his cousin. But Jake had been safely stuck at home in a town with one traffic light and no video surveillance, and he had seemed likely to stay there, even if he’d never married and settled down like most of his siblings and cousins, thanks to his father’s drunken unthriftiness and the resultant responsibility of supporting his family.
Eliot had had a bad six months when Jake had hied himself off to Alaska to work on some stupid pipeline, but at least that had been a remote location of no value to international criminals, and when the job had ended, Jake had returned, like a ball on an elastic string, to his home town, and he hadn’t left since. So what the hell was he doing working as an archivist in Portland, having obviously filed off the shackle that was his father’s business? And how in hell was Eliot going to keep him safe now? He’d already done a piss poor job of that. Not two hours from the moment Jake had reunited with his errant cousin, he had already been caught in the crossfire between Eliot and some very old enemies.
Eliot rubbed his fingers together still feeling the phantom stains of Jake’s blood on his hands. This-this was his worst nightmare. He did not mind suffering the consequences of his own folly, but that his family should feel one minute’s worth of the pain that Eliot alone deserved? That, he could not endure.
He had known he risked such a consequence with the Leverage team, too. But the one time he had tried to leave them, for their own good, he had realized it was already too late. Somehow, that broken bunch of misfit fellow criminals had become his family, and he could find no way to take back the love that had somehow escaped and attached itself to them. He didn’t have any trouble calling it love these days, although it had taken him a few years to admit that was what it had been. So Eliot had done the next best thing to leaving. He had stayed with them. If he were always there to protect them, surely they would be safe.
It had worked. But only because Nate was a devious, manipulative bastard, Sophie was a chameleon with hypnotic powers, Parker was a bloody menace with the gift of invisibility, or so it seemed, and Hardison . . . well Hardison had at least finally learned how to punch somebody, and he had to admit that the man could destroy anyone whose life in any way depended upon a computer. They trusted Eliot to take care of them, but this family could hold its own against Eliot’s enemies as they had proven when they’d gone up against the most formidable of them-Damien Moreau. God, he still couldn’t believe that they’d taken that bastard down. Although Eliot continued to check once a month to see that he was staying down.
But Jake, who had always fought with more enthusiasm than science, Jake, who had not the least clue about the kind of evil Eliot’s enemies were capable of, Jake who was likely even now being informed by his colleague of what an untrustworthy and unworthy piece of human refuse his cousin was-how in the name of God was he going to protect Jake?
He was going to have to tell Jake the truth. The only thing worse than Jake knowing what his cousin had become was for him to walk the same world as Eliot ignorant of all the vengeance hovering in wait for the perfect moment to swoop down and exact payment for his sins from Eliot Spencer or any reasonable facsimile. Even Eliot’s good deeds were now a threat to Jake, because Leverage had created an even more powerful set of enemies.
And he was going to have to talk to Colonel Eve Baird. If she was security where Jake worked, perhaps she could protect him in Eliot’s stead. At least, if she knew the likely directions from which an attack might arrive, she might stand a chance. She had the training to be a formidable opponent. But would she even listen to a man like him?
Eliot buried his head in his hands, the rain driving against his back like a scourge. He had scarcely been damaged by the fight with The Serpent Brotherhood, but his gut radiated pain as though he had been taking direct hits for hours. What could he even say to Eve Baird? He could offer her no compensation for what he had taken from her. He could not beg her to spare him whatever vengeance she felt was due. His only hope was that if she demanded his death-a life for so many other lives-she would allow him to make it as public and splashy and worthy of headlines on new services around the world as possible, so that all his enemies would call off their dogs and leave Jacob Stone in peace.
* * * * *
TBC
Author: Honorat
Rating: T
Crossover: Leverage and The Librarians
Characters: Jenkins, Eve Baird, Jacob Stone, Cassandra Cillian, Ezekiel Jones, Parker, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Damian Moreau, Chapman, Lamia, Others TBA as needed.
Pairing: Parker/Hardison, Cassandra/Jake, Cassandra/Eliot
Disclaimer: Dean Devlin, John Rogers, TNT own these characters.
Description: The Librarians discover Leverage International. Jacob Stone and Eliot Spencer have a family past, but they aren’t the only members of the two teams who’ve met before. Expect whiplash between light and dark. Lots of backstory in this chapter.
Previous chapters HERE.
* * * * *
By Paths Coincident
* * * * *
Cassandra closed the door of her apartment and leaned back against it.
When she had flown from Heathrow to PDX, she had left her life behind in New York. Nothing in her previous apartment had held meaning for her because that had been where she had done her best to forget who she was and who she could have been. She’d had her roommate send a suitcase with her clothes and told her to keep whatever else she wanted or give it away.
This little studio apartment was hers, in a way no other place had been. When she had told Jake that she had never had a kid’s bedroom, he had looked at her with pitying astonishment and, in spite of the awkward tension of those early days, immediately piled her and Ezekiel into his pickup and taken her shopping at every quaint or quirky interior design shop Ezekiel could find in Portland.
Instead of ignoring her synaesthesia, Jake had drawn her to talk about how the colors had sounded to her, what the shapes smelled like, what numbers she saw, what different textures made her feel. It had been such an astonishing experience for her. All her life people had treated her as though she were broken, as though speaking of her disability was painful for them, as though her very existence made them uncomfortable. But Jake had reacted as if her cross-wired brain had simply created a far greater depth and height and breadth to the ways she could perceive and appreciate art. For the first time she had tried to see herself through his eyes-as more rather than less, as a person uniquely gifted rather than horribly cursed. Like a blind man creating a masterpiece, Jake had coaxed her into describing sensations he could not feel or see or hear so that he could paint her room with them.
Cassandra found most places full of jarring and competing sensory bombardment, but this space she could now slip into like a comforting robe, her frayed nerves easing into peace, her fragmented sense of self coalescing into wholeness.
Now her room rioted with botanical murals blending into blackboard on which she could chalk math equations to her heart’s content. A light that looked like a glittering atom hung from the center of the room, and her walls were decorated with framed prints of scientific art from classical illustrations to images from scanning electron microscopes. Her bed was covered in plush versions of the weirdest animals the boys could find-an octopus, a wombat, and an iguana were her favorites. The three of them had spent a day at the Oregon Zoo before descending on the gift store like a hoard of locusts.
Jake had even used his landlady’s deceased husband’s workshop to put together a set of hexagonal shelves painted to match the mural with some of them plastered with pages from mathematical textbooks. Cassandra, who had no idea what had happened to her childhood collections, had purchased a fossil to sit on one shelf as the seed for a new collection.
She had once again a desk and table for her computer and lab work. Some days she would just hold up each beaker and retort and even the lowly test tubes to watch the light glow through them and take deep breaths of cinnamon and cardamom.
In one corner she had an overly enthusiastic Boston fern that was trying to take over the room, and in another, she had a fish tank, burbling away, that she was fairly certain Ezekiel had stolen for her, with guppies and neon tetras and sword tails and one snail that had somehow become one hundred. The multi-colored fish, swirling with such complex patterns, could mesmerize her with the equations they made, each minute a new secret. Along the counter of her small kitchen, she had a parade of chubby cacti, whose protective prickles created a design that always made Cassandra laugh when she ran their equations. Jake had looked at her wistfully and told her he wished he could hear the jokes that a cactus told.
Cassandra always felt surrounded by herself in this room in ways she never had before. Which was a good thing, because she wanted to curl up in the zebra-striped chair Jake had found for her at an antique store after the debacle of the Apple of Discord, and hug her pillow printed with the periodic table information for the element Carbon, and cry.
The evening had been a traumatic one, with the still unexplained tension between Colonel Baird and Jake’s cousin, the violent interruption of the Serpent Brotherhood, and Jake’s frightening head injury. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
Her heart was breaking for Jake, and there was nothing she could do for him. That fact hurt. She had been so grateful to Eliot for taking care of his cousin, for letting her assist. But she knew Jake would never have asked for her help. He was such a caring person, but since that time she had betrayed the Library, there had always been a thin layer of ice between them. When she had spent time in Prince Charming’s skin, she had thought that, instead of the Huntsman, the Fairy Tale could as easily have made Jacob Stone into Snow White-trapped in a glass box with his heart poisoned. But she had lost the right to be the prince who could remove that barrier.
He had told her that family wasn’t ever easy, but tonight she had seen how much he cared for his cousin, how much fun they had had as boys together. And now, just when she had thought he might have found a family member he could be himself around, he had discovered that Eliot Spencer, like everyone else in his life, could not be trusted.
Even in the shadowed interior of the truck, with only the illumination of street lights, the look in Jake’s eyes as he had listened to Ezekiel’s litany of crimes that Eliot had committed had been wrenching, moving from angry disbelief to stunned shock to coldest rage and ending in a profound and anguished horror.
Cassandra herself found it hard to believe that Eliot Spencer with his charming smile and his healer’s hands could be the cold-blooded killer Ezekiel had described. And yet she had watched him fight The Serpent Brotherhood with a skill that went beyond terrifying. Although she had to admit that, at the time, since Eliot had been defending them, it had also been rather thrilling to watch the ease with which he had annihilated their enemies.
But Colonel Baird’s reaction to Eliot had new meaning in light of Ezekiel’s information. Cassandra had never seen Baird so thoroughly traumatized. Even when she’d been a princess, their dauntless Guardian had been no damsel in distress. She might have trilled songs and batted her eyes, but she kicked off her high heels and fought fearlessly even with her curtailed skills. What then could have happened to make her respond to Eliot Spencer with more fear than she had to a Minotaur?
Cassandra was fairly certain she did not want to know.
She wished she could have volunteered to spend the night with both Eve and Jake. She had wanted so much to be able to comfort Jake. But she was sure her presence tonight would only be a reminder that everyone always betrayed him. So she had seconded Colonel Baird’s plan to send her home. No need for math in patching up broken hearts.
Still clutching the element Carbon to her chest, Cassandra tried to breathe deeply, running the periodical table through her mind, all those beautiful numbers, neutrons and protons and ions, atomic weights, and valence levels, until she disappeared into the swirl of color and music, and they flickered about her like spinning universes.
* * * * *
Alec Hardison sat alone in the briefing room, his laptop screen the only light illuminating his face. Windows and tabs opened under his searching touch so rapidly they flickered like a movie.
Eliot had gone wherever Eliot went when he got thunderous and surly. And Parker was . . . ah, that was a very faint rustle, far up in the vaulted ceiling. Sure enough, with the zipping hiss of rope and harness, Parker floated down over the desk like a very large and entirely gorgeous spider. She hovered just off the surface, rotating slowly, a bowl of loudly colored cereal and milk in one hand. Balancing on the rope by hooking it with her elbow, she maneuvered her spoon with her other hand.
“Didn’t you get enough to eat tonight?” Hardison asked mildly, his hands slowing their dance over the keys, but not stopping.
“Yes,” said Parker with the total lack of comprehension that still could surprise him. Parker’s out-of-phase view of the world was a constant source of delight to Hardison.
“Then why the cereal?” Hardison gestured at the bowl.
“There is no ‘why’ about cereal,” Parker said, wrinkling her nose and reversing her spin. “‘Why’ is for vegetables. Eliot knows all the ‘why’s’. Because iron, or because beta carotene, or because fiber. I just like things that have no reason.”
Hardison shrugged. When she put it that way, it made perfect sense. Parker usually did, when she explained. Sometimes he thought maybe Parker was the only sane one, and all the rest of the world was crazy.
“What are you doing?” Parker asked, landing on the desk and scooting over without using her hands to peer at the computer screen.
Hardison took a moment to appreciate the aesthetics of the wiggling that maneuver involved before answering, “Does anyone think some really weird shit went down with Eliot tonight?”
“Are you talking about the NATO Colonel, Eliot’s cousin, or that woman with the sword and her gang?” Parker asked, shovelling cereal into her mouth with rapt concentration.
“All of the above,” Hardison said. “I started with the people with knives and guns because I wanna know who’s comin’ after Eliot, and I ain’t got nothin’.”
Which was nothing but the truth, and that was baffling. “I mean they are nowhere in my world. Eliot called them The Serpent Brotherhood, but nobody’s talkin’ about ‘em, nobody’s tweetin’ about ‘em, they don’t have a webpage or anything. They got no accounts, no news articles. I’ve got searches runnin’ with facial recognition, but with Eliot’s enemies, that pretty much means coverin’ the entire planet, so I doubt I’ll get much for a few hours, unless they been operatin’ long in Portland. But if some of Eliot’s old buddies were runnin’ game here in town, you’d think he’d have said somethin’.”
Parker set down her empty bowl and launched herself into a slow swing around Hardison so that she could see what he was doing and flop her arms over his shoulders. Hardison readjusted her so that he wasn’t in danger of being strangled and continued to caress his keyboard. Things were getting a little tricky now.
“That’s the NATO person,” Parker pointed out, putting a sugar-dusted fingerprint on his screen.
“Woman!” Hardison exclaimed in exasperation. “Do not combine cereal dandruff with my laptop! Yes, that’s Colonel Eve Baird. I thought she was the next most important problem. Any time the law comes gunning for one of us, we end up burnin’ through aliases and blowin’ up offices. Now I need t’concentrate, because hackin’ NATO ain’t no walk in the park.”
Parker could be a monumental pest when she was in the mood, but she knew when to leave Hardison in peace. She patted his head, then zipped back up her rope, and for a while, he could hear the quiet clinks and swishes of her swinging about the rafters.
But then the systems put in place to prevent just such intrusions as his demanded his full attention and all background activity faded from his awareness. Several hours later, he was sweating and breathing as though he had been running, but he was in. He had all the files on one Eve Baird, Colonel. And damn. This was worse than he had feared.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when Parker’s voice breathed in his ear. “What’s wrong?”
“Jiminy Christmas, Parker! You tryin’ t’kill me, girl?”
“You found something,” Parker said. “I want to know what.”
Taking a few deep breaths to settle his pulse, Hardison transferred the view on his screen to the large bank of screens on the wall as if this were only another case.
“Colonel Eve Baird,” he said in his briefing-the-team voice. “Born Decemeber 24, 1972.”
“Ooooh! Christmas Eve!” Parker exclaimed.
“Yeah, wonder if she ever forgave her parents for that name. Anyway, she grew up on a variety of army bases. Went to West Point-transcripts are all 4.0.”
“Hot and smart,” Parker said.
Hardison rolled his eyes. Part of the problem with the pre-human Parker imprinting on him and Eliot was that she had a tendency to talk like she was one of them. Not that he minded if Parker actually did find girls hot, too.
“She’s too old for us, Parker,” Hardison pointed out.
“But not for Eliot,” Parker said.
“Yeah, she’s not too much older than him, and he always likes girls that can kick his ass a little, but wait’ll you see where they intersect. Now let me finish.”
Parker subsided.
“She went on to complete her Military Intelligence training at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Then she was recruited for Delta Force counter-terrorism. From there, she joined NATO counter-terrorism. And here’s where it gets interesting. You see, eleven years ago, Captain Eve Baird was given a mission to break up a shipment of nuclear materials through Spain being orchestrated by none other than Damien Moreau.”
Parker made her disgust face. “Blech.”
“Eleven years ago.” Hardison paused significantly but Parker looked blank, so he explained. “Back when we realized goin’ up against Moreau meant goin’ up against Eliot’s past, I did a bit of diggin’, and that would have been right in the middle of the time he was doin’ all kinds of crazy bad shit for Moreau.”
“Uh oh.”
“Uh oh, is right. Baird’s whole team was killed, the shipment was lost, and Baird herself ended up hospitalized. And get this. That team was armored and armed to the teeth, but they were taken out by one man with knives. Sound like anyone we know?”
Parker’s eyes were wide with comprehension. She nodded soberly.
“They didn’t have enough evidence to convict, but I’m guessing they must have had a pretty good idea, because Baird sure reacted to Eliot’s name.”
“What did he do to her?” Parker asked quietly.
They’d always known Eliot had a dark and violent past, but they had never met any of his victims except for General Flores and Toby, both of whom Eliot had spared. Colonel Eve Baird was a reminder that Eliot hadn’t just killed and hurt other bad guys.
“She was medically discharged after that, and didn’t re-enlist for three years. I hacked the hospital’s records, which was a damn sight easier than NATO’s, let me tell you. And Eliot left her with a coma, a fractured skull, a crushed larynx, a perforated abdomen with resulting peritonitis, and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a couple of cases of death. She flat-lined twice before they got her stabilized. Also, her therapist bills look like the national debt, so I’m guessing a raging case of PTSD, too.”
“Poor Eliot,” Parker said even more quietly.
Hardison knew she wasn’t dismissing what Eliot had done to Baird but imagining what having that on his conscience was doing to Eliot.
“Is that why she’s just working as a security guard for an archive now?” Parker asked.
That was actually a good question, because Baird was merely on transfer from NATO. Hardison looked up the Metropolitan Library. And drew a blank. As far as he could tell, there was no such organization in Portland. And the New York library seemed to have no actual connection to Portland. Payroll taxes were being withheld, but no information was available for her place of employment. He quickly looked up the other members of the archive.
“They were all hired around the same time, in New York. But they’ve apparently only worked from here. And who the hell pays their taxes in Roman denarii?”
“And who hires a thief to work in an archive containing rare art?” Parker asked.
“Ah, yes. Ezekiel Jones. Maybe they don’t know he’s a thief?” Hardison had come across Jones’ work a few times in the last several years. The kid had game, that was for sure. “Well, if he’s on the heist, should we let them know?”
Parker shrugged. “Anyone with that crappy of background checks deserves to get robbed.”
She had a point.
“Does this mean we’re going to have to leave?” Parker asked. “If Baird knows who Eliot was?”
“I doubt she can bring a case against him now, any more than they could back then,” Hardison said. “I’m more worried about him.”
“Because he feels guilty.” Parker nodded. As always, she and Eliot seemed to understand each other.
“Yeah. And because, if she wants some kind of revenge, I’m afraid he’ll just let her. I don’t even know where he’s disappeared to right now.”
“He’s on the roof,” Parker said.
“In the rain?” Hardison asked. “Never mind. He’d probably prefer it was hail. The man missed his century-he should have lived in the Middle Ages with self-flagellation and hair shirts.”
“He let his cousin get hurt,” Parker said. “You know how he gets when one of us gets hurt.”
* * * * *
Eliot Spencer sat in Parker’s favorite spot on the roof of the building which housed the Brew Pub looking out on the jeweled loveliness that was Portland on a rainy night. It was 52 degrees out and he was beginning to feel chilled as the water dripping from his unruly curls seeped down his neck. He tipped his head back, letting the rain beat against his face, welcoming the physical discomfort because it took the edge off his mental discomfort.
Eliot did not often find himself forced to admit that he had no idea what to do, but he seemed to have arrived at that point now. He felt like a planet with three continents that had just collided-shaken to his very foundation. When the plates of the earth’s crust ground against each other, mountain ranges rose up, and he could feel their razored peaks slicing through his heart. He had sacrificed to keep his worlds separate-had given up his family, his identity-but apparently that had not been enough to appease the vengeful Furies.
How had he managed so thoroughly to fuck up everything he had ever cared about? He remembered the moment he had first known that he could never go home again, never contact anyone he had loved. For a long time he hadn’t gone home because of the fight with his father, but he had spent a couple of Christmases with Jake’s family when he got leave from the Service. Then there had been Aimee. He’d gone home to her in between jobs, until the one when he hadn’t made it out for three months, and then he’d been recovering for another three, and she’d finally tired of waiting and moved on. Eventually the work he was doing was so far over the line he hadn’t wanted to carry that shit home on his boots. But that moment when he had first accepted a contract to kill a man’s family as a warning from Damien Moreau, and he had realized what his family risked by being connected to someone in his line of work, that was when he had known that he not only would not go home, he could not.
His family. They were only safe so long as no one knew they were in any way connected to him. Jake had always been a problem, because his relationship with Eliot was undeniable, and he could be mistaken for his cousin. But Jake had been safely stuck at home in a town with one traffic light and no video surveillance, and he had seemed likely to stay there, even if he’d never married and settled down like most of his siblings and cousins, thanks to his father’s drunken unthriftiness and the resultant responsibility of supporting his family.
Eliot had had a bad six months when Jake had hied himself off to Alaska to work on some stupid pipeline, but at least that had been a remote location of no value to international criminals, and when the job had ended, Jake had returned, like a ball on an elastic string, to his home town, and he hadn’t left since. So what the hell was he doing working as an archivist in Portland, having obviously filed off the shackle that was his father’s business? And how in hell was Eliot going to keep him safe now? He’d already done a piss poor job of that. Not two hours from the moment Jake had reunited with his errant cousin, he had already been caught in the crossfire between Eliot and some very old enemies.
Eliot rubbed his fingers together still feeling the phantom stains of Jake’s blood on his hands. This-this was his worst nightmare. He did not mind suffering the consequences of his own folly, but that his family should feel one minute’s worth of the pain that Eliot alone deserved? That, he could not endure.
He had known he risked such a consequence with the Leverage team, too. But the one time he had tried to leave them, for their own good, he had realized it was already too late. Somehow, that broken bunch of misfit fellow criminals had become his family, and he could find no way to take back the love that had somehow escaped and attached itself to them. He didn’t have any trouble calling it love these days, although it had taken him a few years to admit that was what it had been. So Eliot had done the next best thing to leaving. He had stayed with them. If he were always there to protect them, surely they would be safe.
It had worked. But only because Nate was a devious, manipulative bastard, Sophie was a chameleon with hypnotic powers, Parker was a bloody menace with the gift of invisibility, or so it seemed, and Hardison . . . well Hardison had at least finally learned how to punch somebody, and he had to admit that the man could destroy anyone whose life in any way depended upon a computer. They trusted Eliot to take care of them, but this family could hold its own against Eliot’s enemies as they had proven when they’d gone up against the most formidable of them-Damien Moreau. God, he still couldn’t believe that they’d taken that bastard down. Although Eliot continued to check once a month to see that he was staying down.
But Jake, who had always fought with more enthusiasm than science, Jake, who had not the least clue about the kind of evil Eliot’s enemies were capable of, Jake who was likely even now being informed by his colleague of what an untrustworthy and unworthy piece of human refuse his cousin was-how in the name of God was he going to protect Jake?
He was going to have to tell Jake the truth. The only thing worse than Jake knowing what his cousin had become was for him to walk the same world as Eliot ignorant of all the vengeance hovering in wait for the perfect moment to swoop down and exact payment for his sins from Eliot Spencer or any reasonable facsimile. Even Eliot’s good deeds were now a threat to Jake, because Leverage had created an even more powerful set of enemies.
And he was going to have to talk to Colonel Eve Baird. If she was security where Jake worked, perhaps she could protect him in Eliot’s stead. At least, if she knew the likely directions from which an attack might arrive, she might stand a chance. She had the training to be a formidable opponent. But would she even listen to a man like him?
Eliot buried his head in his hands, the rain driving against his back like a scourge. He had scarcely been damaged by the fight with The Serpent Brotherhood, but his gut radiated pain as though he had been taking direct hits for hours. What could he even say to Eve Baird? He could offer her no compensation for what he had taken from her. He could not beg her to spare him whatever vengeance she felt was due. His only hope was that if she demanded his death-a life for so many other lives-she would allow him to make it as public and splashy and worthy of headlines on new services around the world as possible, so that all his enemies would call off their dogs and leave Jacob Stone in peace.
* * * * *
TBC