“Um. Yeah. It’s… a toxic substance. If it had stayed on your skin, that would have been trouble. It wasn’t on there for very long, was it?” he asked.
Maisie shook her head. “No. You took care of that. So I guess… thanks, then? Even though it was only there for a second, it did still give me a bit of a burn.” She paused. “So then, I guess it makes evenlesssense as to why you’re up and about so quickly. Shot, got… venomous goo on – and in – you, looked like you were at death’s door…” She looked over at him. “And what was that place I drove you to, anyway?”
Rhys bit his lip. “It was… my workplace. Sorry, I feel like everything’s a bit of a blank. DidItell you to take me there?”
“At first, yeah,” Maisie said. “But you were a bit too out of it to give me any directions. It seemed like you were making a call, but you dropped your phone – and when I picked it up, some guy on the other end told me where to come. So I just did what he told me to do.”
Rhys frowned, groping around in his pocket for his phone. He opened hisRecentslist, but the most recent phone call he’d made was yesterday, to Euan, his teammate, about something he couldn’t even remember now. But for today, there were no calls.
No texts after the ones Hector and I sent each other either,Rhys thought, as he switched to his messages.
Obviously, Maisie wouldn’t have any reason to lie to him – obviously, something else was going on here.
But then, that was why they were heading out to where they were heading.
Unease crawled through Rhys’s stomach. Everything else had been temporarily wiped from his mind after Maisie had appeared in front of him and he’d realized she was his mate, but now, he knew he had even more things to deal with than trying to find a way to tell her they were mates.
“Are yousureit was my phone?” he asked, though he knew it was a stupid question. But still, it was better to make sure this wasn’t some kind of misunderstanding.
“Well, it definitely wasn’t mine, and I have to say, I’m not known for my psychic intuition,” Maisie said. “I just lifted up your phone after you dropped it, and I got directions for where to go, since you were pretty insistent on not going to a hospital.”
Rhys nodded. “And the voice on the other end – can you remember what it sounded like?”
Frowning, Maisie thought for a moment. “Well… male. Kind of serious-sounding. I couldn’t really tell his age, but not that young. I thought it was the guy who greeted me when I brought you in, but I can’t be sure. Everything is… well, it’s kind of a blur, to be honest. So the details are a little hazy just now.” She shot him a quick look. “And anyway, why amIthe one getting twenty questions here? I feel like I havewaymore things I should be askingyou.”
“No, you’re probably right about that,” Rhys conceded – he just wished he knew what kind of answers he should give her. Right now, he wasn’t even sure he had many answers forhimself.
What I do know is, someone wiped that last phone call from my phone.And yeah,maybethe guys who attacked medidkill themselves. But maybe…
Rhys shook his head. He couldn’t get too caught up in speculations right now.
“Like… perhaps you could, for example, tell me where we’re going right now?” Maisie asked, her voice sharp.
That, at least, was a question Rhys knew hecouldanswer – ormostlyanswer, anyway.
“To see a friend of mine,” he said. “He’s a bit of a night owl – he’s a computer specialist. Of a sort. And right now, I feel like there’s a few things I need his expertise on.”
It was a completely truthful answer – it just left out the part where the computer expert was a quokka shifter named Michael who did hacking jobs for him sometimes, and was his own personal source – in other words, not affiliated with the Agency.
“O… kay,” Maisie said, glancing at him. “Well, I guess you said he’s a night owl, but is there any particular reason we have to go see himright now?”
Because there’s something fishy going on here, and I want to know what it is,Rhys thought, but what he said was, “I know it probably seems weird. But I just want to ask him to do some work for me. It’s kind of urgent, and it might take him a while.”
“Hmm. Sound like some James Bond shit,” Maisie said, her voice arch. She turned to him. “Isit some James Bond shit?”
She was closer than perhaps she realized, Rhys thought – and for a moment, he contemplated telling her everything right there and then. It wasn’t exactly like there was anything elsetotell her.
“Maisie,” he said, swallowing, and preparing to just blurt something out and hope for the best, since apparently he couldn’tthinkof the right way to phrase things. “What do you know about –”
“Your destination is on the left, in ten meters,” the electronic voice of the GPS Maisie had clipped to her dashboard smoothly interrupted him, sounding even more smug and insufferable tohis ears than these things usually did. “I hope you enjoyed your journey!”
“Um. Well, it seems like we’re here, then,” Maisie said, pulling up. The street wasn’t anything special – it just looked like any other street in Bondi Junction, lined with trees and filled with some pretty flash terrace houses – but then, being an expert hacker certainly made Michael more than enough money. “Does your friend know we’re coming?”
“Kind of?” Rhys said. Michael was used to him dropping in at odd hours. Though this time, Rhys realized, he had a reason to let him know he was coming by. “Just a sec.”
He pulled out his phone, his lip pulling tight at the mysterious missing phone call. Quickly, he texted –hey. sry. about to come up. please DO NOT be in quokka form when i get there. i have someone with me.
Hopefully that would be enough for Michael to understand that by ‘someone’ he meant ‘someone who doesn’t know about shifters, so please just look and act normal’.
