Chapter 10

"You wanna run that one by us again, Derek?" Nick asked, crossing his arms across his chest.

"It would appear that while you were gone looking for Deirdre, our security was breached." Derek Rayne replied. "Someone hijacked the Quomlink system."

"For the San Francisco House?" Luke asked.

Derek exchanged a look with Nick, who nodded. Derek turned to Luke. "Unfortunately, no. They hacked the system that links all the Legacy Houses to each other."

"What's the extent of the damage?" Nick asked.

Vivian held up a hand. "Can we please take this discussion down to the parlor? The children are tired. Sophia especially. And my daughter still needs her rest."

Nick nodded to the others and the group headed toward the door.

"Mrs. Cates?" Rachel Corrigan interjected. "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to sit with Deirdre and observe her. I'm a medical doctor, and Deirdre has been under my care for a number of years."

Vivian looked about ready to object, but Matt put a hand on her shoulder.

"I'll take this shift with Dr. Corrigan, Vee." Matt soothed. "Would you mind if Sophia took a nap in the guest room?"

"Dad, I'm-"

"Dead on your feet," Matt replied in a tone that brooked no argument. "We still don't know what effect these new abilities have on you. I had to wake you from this last time because you were screaming bloody murder. So you are taking a nap! By. Your. Self. Am I understood?"

Sophia's cheeks flared red, but she nodded all the same.

Downstairs in Vivian Cates's parlor, the Cates family, and the members of the San Francisco Legacy House joined Adam Pierson and Duncan Macleod, who were huddled around Adam's laptop computer.

Without looking up, Adam gave a derisive snort as they walked in. "Derek Rayne. I wondered when you would deign to grace us with your presence."

"You two know each other?" Luke asked.

"Oh yes," Adam continued jovially. "Dr. Rayne here dated your Aunt Gloria on and off for several years after she and I divorced. Didn't you Derek?"

"Behave," Duncan groaned at Adam.

Derek, for his part, took the exchange in stride. "You're looking well, Adam. You haven't changed a bit. But then, you wouldn't, would you."

Adam gave Derek a dangerous grin in response. Duncan placed a hand on Adam's shoulder to cut off his reply.

"Well this is all very charming," Vivian interjected, setting down a self serve tea tray on top of the bar. "Now can we cut the crap, and discuss why you are all here in my house? And what the hell happened to my daughter while she was under your tutelage?"

Alex pushed off of the wall she'd been leaning against. "I guess I'll start, if that's agreeable to everyone?"

"Be my guest." Vivian smiled icily.

"How much do they already know?" Alex asked Nick.

"Everything that I do," Nick made a gesture with his hands that encompassed the room. "Up to and including the fire at the Bucharest House, the newscast, the manhunt courtesy of Stanton and Quentin Travers, and Adam and I pulling a fastball to get out of Romania."

Alex nodded thoughtfully. "And we know that Deirdre has been back stateside for how long?"

"Two weeks, give or take a few days." Adam replied.

"Richie called them." Luke piped in.

Alex kept nodding. "Okay, after Nick called in to tell Derek that Dee was found alive, I started digging into the Quomlink's recordings of outside calls going into the Bucharest house. According to Stanton's report, Deirdre took a hike through Romania after missing her meet up with Nick in Hungary."

"She was heading east." Nick nodded to show he was following.

"Yes," Alex agreed, "But why Romania? Up until then, Deirdre had actively been avoiding passing through regions with a known population of supernatural beings."

"Because you told her to!" Luke growled in anger. "Nick already told us… Stanton offered up the house in Romania as a safe haven, and you gave her the instructions to go there when she called San Francisco to talk to him."

"Except I never took that call." Alex explained. "It was intercepted. According to the Quomlink computer, there was a call from Deirdre's cell phone number a few hours after the mixup at Budapest Keleti Train Station. But it looks like it never rang through. Instead, there was a matching incoming call to the Legacy House in Romania at the exact same time."

"You're saying they stole the call?" Vivian raised an eyebrow. "How? And better yet, why?"

Derek piped up. "We're not entirely sure how. Though the timing of the call would suggest that whoever tapped into the Quomlink did so with the intention of taking control of our communications. It's an automated system. The systems that are internal to the house seem unaffected."

"Could they have installed a wire tap manually?" Nick asked.

Derek shook his head. "Not unless they dug into the lines underneath the Bay. We examined every connection on Angel Island that runs to the house."

"Computer virus." Adam suggested.

"Most likely," Alex confirmed. "They could have delivered it through an email or during a data dump."

"Again, this is all very fascinating," said Vee, "but what does it have to do with my daughter?"

The Legacy team exchanged uneasy looks and Derek continued. "Unfortunately, more than I'd like. We may not have tracked down the source of the information interruption, but we have well founded suspicions that they began either just before or just after The Key of Uruz started making its rounds in the Bay Area."

"That crazy guy with the lust curse?" Luke's brows furrowed. "But I thought you caught that son of a bitch."

Derek nodded. "In London. We did. But not before the curse claimed its fair share of victims. And the perpetrator, Rothschild, was from Montreal, one of the rogue houses."

Realization shown on Nick's face. "Their Prefect, Evangeline, had a beef with Derek. They kidnapped Derek's sister, Ingrid, and tried to offer her up as a sacrifice to the Dark Side. But we took them down."

Alex nodded. "Exactly, but what if they weren't alone? We've been operating on the assumption that what happened with the Key of Uruz, and what happened to you and Deirdre in London was just a run of bad luck. A series of unrelated circumstances. But what if they weren't unrelated?"

"You're saying we were set up." Nick concluded.

Alex nodded with finality.

Vivian went to speak again, but Adam pre-empted her. "The San Francisco House has sustained all kinds of attacks over the years. You've proven to be pretty resilient to agents of the Dark Side. It would be a feather in the cap of any rogue Prefect to take you down. So they needed a weak link."

Alex tilted her hands in an approving gesture to Adam. "Deirdre has been an attaché member for many years, but she's only been active as a Slayer for the last few. What if, whatever game Rothschild was trying to draw us into required Deirdre's involvement?"

"That doesn't make any sense." Nick countered. "Dee doesn't deal with the inner workings of the Legacy Houses. San Francisco or any other. She wouldn't have any control over who catches what case, or which Houses became involved in the investigation. The only reason she jumped back into the fight in London is that she…."

Nick trailed off.

"She happened to be there at the time." Adam finished.

"It's a bait and switch." Duncan offered, for the first time entering the conversation. "Your perpetrator created so much havoc that you had to call in backup. Adam and Deirdre were already in London after Gloria's death. They have connections to the London House as well. So it made sense to call them in. Then all Rothschild would have to do is get you all into the same vicinity and set off a bomb. Dozens of birds, one little stone."

"There's a fault in your logic." Vivian offered. "As you said, Deirdre is not a full Legacy member. Why would this Rothschild want to kill her? Were they enemies?"

"No." Adam added. "No, Deirdre isn't one of the birds in this equation. She's the stone."

"They wanted me to catch the Key." Nick choked. He collapsed back into a nearby chair, dumbstruck.

"But to what end?" Alex asked. "That's what I haven't been able to figure out. I mean you're a valued member of our team.

Nick rubbed his temples, squeezing his eyes shut. "Rothschild didn't throw the Key at me. I was just the one that caught it. He threw it at Derek."

There was silence in the room for a moment while all eyes fell on Derek Rayne. Vivian finally broke the silence. Her voice was frozen iron.

"Do you mean to tell me that all of this," Vivian gestured toward the stairs with one hand. "Every thing that my daughter has been through over the last year. All of that was fallout of a plot to kill you, Dr. Rayne?"

Before Derek could respond, Adam piped up. "That's one possibility."

"There's another?" Vivian asked through gritted teeth.

"You won't like it." Adam warned.

"My daughter is comatose upstairs, my Pack is in disarray, and I have two secret societies potentially on their way to my town to kill everyone...For the second time this week." Vivian offered. "Try me."

Adam gave a long suffering sigh. "It's possible, even likely, that the idea of this rogue sleeper cell of Legacy agents was for Derek to be infected by the Key's powers, go on a lustful rampage and die by Deirdre's hand. But whoever we are dealing with is smart enough to think that up, it's also possible that Derek's death wasn't their endgame."

Vivian stood staring at Adam, waiting for him to continue. "Well? Go on! What's their endgame?"

"The baby."

The small voice came from behind Vivian. Sophia looked more ragged than ever. "They wanted her baby."