ShiftingHeat by Lynne Connolly Page A

against his chair with a soft thud.
“As a cripple?”
    “As a disabled student. We couldn’t ask for better cover,
because you’re going in as yourself. They never knew about your conversion.
That will give you a huge advantage.” Ann frowned at Faye. “I want your word
that you’ll do as you’re told. If you feel out of your depth or in danger, you
broadcast and we’ll send help. Andros will be going in as himself, Serena has a
post as a temporary lecturer in the professor’s department and Nick will back
you up. If you need him to come in, he’ll act as Serena’s boyfriend. I want
this man stopped and I want it done discreetly.”
    “Can you strip his mind once you have Nordheim?” Faye didn’t
care what happened to him anymore. Not after finding out what he’d done to
others. If it had merely been manipulation, selfish use of people for his own
ends, then she wouldn’t have been so concerned. After all, it was her own
stupid fault that she’d believed him. But he’d caused suffering and death—for
money.
    “It’s a last resort,” Serena said. She’d hardly moved at
all, just observed with that uncanny stillness virgin Sorcerers sometimes had.
“In any case, he probably has a self-destruct bomb set. We’re finding more and
more of them these days.” At Faye’s raised brow, she explained. “It’s like a
suicide bomb. If a Sorcerer trips a mental trigger, it will detonate. Like an
atom bomb, but of the mind. It wipes the mind of the person concerned and the
Sorcerer who is questioning. And if it’s done outside an iso room, anyone in
the vicinity, also.”
    “For now,” Ann said, “I want Nordheim stopped, and anyone in
transit recovered. I want extreme discretion used, so that I can put an agent
into the operation in deep cover. Clear?”
    In this place, Faye was learning, Ann’s decisions were final.
She swallowed. “I’m so sorry. I wish I’d realized sooner.”
    “Make amends,” Ann told her. “Make a difference.”
    * * * * *
    Back in the privacy of his apartment, Andros could finally
give Faye the comfort he’d yearned to all the time he’d listened and learned
about the professor’s activities. He put his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll
get out of this. We’ll do okay.”
    She shuddered and turned into the shelter of his body. “I
shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have gotten him out. I really thought—how
stupid am I?”
    He hated her this vulnerable. Her fine mind was collapsing
in the wake of the revelations and the pictures she’d forced herself to look
at.
    His boss would do anything to get the justice she believed
Talents were entitled to. She only ever thought about the big picture. She’d
dragged Sandro Gianetti out of blissful retirement on his honeymoon to stand
for a vacant senatorship. She’d used couples ruthlessly in pursuit of the
greater good, and Andros had no doubt that if she had to sacrifice him, she’d
do it without compunction if she thought she’d save more lives than she’d lose.
    He couldn’t live like that, couldn’t think like that. Coming
in to STORM from the outside, from the viewpoint of a previously anti-Talent
stand, he could see what she didn’t. As far as he’d been concerned, they’d
refused to help him with his muscular dystrophy when they had the means to do
so. The Talents he’d connected with had lied to him, told him they could cure
him or convert him with little cost to themselves, and so he could understand
what Faye was going through now.
    Before, he’d believed that Talents were refusing to help
him. To learn that shape-shifters could only convert once and vampires had to
give up their lives in order to convert someone had come as a revelation to
him. He still thought they should reveal that fact. It would stop the begging
letters STORM received by the sacksful, or the inbox-full. But Ann wanted
information filtered out and vampires, secretive by nature, refused to reveal
anything about themselves that