Night Unbound(95)

“You don’t need to defend me, love. Seth knows it had to be done and is secretly relieved he won’t have to do it himself.”
Lisette eyed Seth doubtfully.
Seth stared at Zach, his fingers clenched around the fork he held. “What did you find?”
“Not a damned thing,” Zach told him.
Seth’s brow furrowed. “I’m torn between feeling relieved that I didn’t miss anything and utterly confounded. How is that possible?”
“That would be the billion-dollar question.”
Seth poked at the pasta on his plate. “You found no evidence of guilt in any of their minds?”
“Nothing.”
“You read the shifters, too?”
“Yes.”
“And found nothing?”
“Nothing. Although . . .”
Seth looked up.
“There was one telepath,” Zach murmured, face troubled, “whose barriers were stronger than any of the others’.” Setting his fork down, he leaned forward and drew a folded sheet of paper out of his back pocket. He spread it on the table in front of Lisette.
A quick glimpse revealed it to be the list of immortals he had been given, both names and where to find them.
“This one,” he said, pointing to a name on the list. “The Celt.”
“Aidan,” Seth murmured.
Curious, Lisette leaned forward to view the name. “Aidan?” The only Aidan she knew spelled it with an e.
“Aiden O’Kearney?”
Seth shook his head as he studied the paper. “Different Aidan. This one’s been stationed in Denmark for some time. Keeps to himself.”
“He’s an elder?”
Seth nodded. “Born around seven or eight hundred B.C.” His eyes met Zach’s. “And he can read minds and teleport.”
Zach picked up his fork and resumed eating. “Among other things.”
“You say his barriers were stronger than the others’?”
Zach nodded.
“How much stronger?”
“Too much. Enough to tell me he’s been working on strengthening them. I couldn’t penetrate the strongest of them without giving him more than a nosebleed. With your permission,” he drawled, voice dripping with sarcasm, “I’ll return and find out what the hell he’s hiding.”
Seth immediately vetoed that one. “No, I’ll do it.”
“Bad call,” Zach said with a shake of his head.
“Not wanting you to kill him is a bad call?”
“I wouldn’t kill him. I’d just hurt him. And an Immortal Guardian as old as he is will recover quickly.”
“No.”
“Stop being such a hard-ass,” Zach said. “When you fucked up before, you could blame it on not having slept for two months.”
Lisette looked at Seth. “You told me weeks, not months!”
Seth glared at Zach.
Zach continued. “Fuck up now that you’re rested, and it’ll just be poor judgment.”
“I’m not going to let you—”
“There’s a reason surgeons aren’t supposed to operate on their own relatives,” Zach interrupted, voice mild. “Their emotions are too invested and may lead them to make mistakes, to not do something they should for fear they’ll cause their spouse or father or daughter pain.” He pointed his fork at Seth. “Try to do this yourself, and you’ll pull back the instant Aidan manifests discomfort.”
Lisette nibbled her lower lip and watched Seth. “He has a point.”
Something flickered in Seth’s eyes, there and gone in an instant. “You question my ability to carry out my duties?”
“Absolutely not,” she assured him, squeezing his arm before she withdrew her touch. “Unlike Zach, I think you’ll do whatever it takes to find out what Aidan is hiding because the lives of the rest of us depend upon it. But I also know that you aren’t as cold and ruthless as Zach can be.”#p#分页标题#e#
Zach frowned. “Ummm . . .”
Seth’s lips twitched.
“Being the instrument of pain that will extract the information you need from Aidan will torment you endlessly. Zach won’t give it a second thought.”
“Now, wait a minute,” Zach protested.
Lisette rolled her eyes. “Don’t even try to deny it. If I hadn’t stopped you, you would have erased Bastien’s and Ethan’s memories of you and given them brain damage.”
Seth scowled. “What?”
“To protect you,” Zach ground out. “I was going to do it to protect you.”
“And you’re willing to hurt Aidan why?”
A moment passed. Zach sighed in defeat. “To protect you. Fine. I’m ruthless.”
She smiled. “It’s one of the many things I love about you.”