Taliesin Ascendant (The Children and the Blood) Read Online Free Page B

bankrupt halt.
    Even if it’s what they wanted anyway. Even if it made the most sense. But this was a deeply personal issue to Jamison, for all that he acted like a paragon of impassivity, and Harris didn’t want to bet on the man’s understanding if he just left without an explanation. Not where Cole was concerned.
    His mouth tightening, Jamison nodded and then glanced to Simeon. From his pocket, the ponytailed man took out a pen and business card, and scribbled something down before handing the latter to Harris.
    “Her last known location,” Jamison said. “And Simeon’s phone number, in case you find anything. Not much is left, but one of her wizard associates inadvertently alerted us to the location by using their magic to travel there as we were passing by, so she may still be hiding in the vicinity.”
    Though it felt annoyingly submissive, Harris nodded. “Thank you, Mr. Jamison.”
    With a distracted gesture of acknowledgement, Jamison disappeared through the door, leaving Simeon to tend to the others still in the room.
    Ignoring them all, Harris made a beeline for the exit. At the desk, the clerk glanced up and then gave him an odd look, as though questioning why he’d been in the conference room. Crossing the lobby quickly, he slipped past the door before she could speak.
    The drive home flew by and he barely noticed when the front door slammed behind him as he headed for the bedroom. Yanking open the closet, he scanned the shelves and then tugged down his suitcase, coughing as a wave of dust descended with the luggage. Grimacing, he swung the bag onto the bed, and then tossed a few shirts over to join it.
    With shirts and pants shoved haphazardly into the suitcase, he hauled the bag out to the living room and dropped it by the door while he surveyed the apartment to see if he was forgetting anything.
    His eyes came to rest on the box from Brogan, left sitting on the table for the past month. Between the cardboard flaps, he could see the duplicate badge – a replacement for the one taken by the department – lying half-covered by packing peanuts, same as it had been since he first tossed the thing back after opening the box. Being paid as a private investigator was one thing. Overtly faking credentials he no longer possessed fell into a whole other category.
    Absently, his hand moved to check his gun.
    That was different. The gun meant protection for the innocent. It was a weapon, but he was trained and he had a permit. And as for everything else, he’d never explicitly told anyone he was still on active duty. But if he took the badge…
    He grimaced. He was splitting hairs, possibly microscopically. Each was as bad as the other in its own right, and all the rationalization in the world wouldn’t make that change.
    But then, maybe that wasn’t the point. Like it or not, he’d need all the help he could get.
    A few weeks ago, there’d been a time when he could still see the lines, and still believed that he could do this without irrevocably crossing them. And then a bunch of wizards turned an abandoned gas station into World War Three and a teenage girl brought a building down on a man twice her size. People with far more advantages than he could ever claim were fighting an invisible war in which he’d scarcely be noticed as a casualty, and not a single person in what he’d call the ‘real world’ would ever believe him enough to help him bring that war to an end.
    He crossed the room. His hand wrapped around the badge.
    It was illegal. Immoral too. He’d taken an oath to uphold the law, and this certainly wasn’t it.
    His life had never been black and white, but it’d also never been this gray.
    And he’d need every bit of help he could get.
    Shoving the badge into his pocket, he headed for the door. He snatched the suitcase from the ground, hefted it into the hall, and then pulled the door closed. Across the corridor, the door to the neighboring apartment swung back, and the old woman from