The tang of copper hits my nose, and I lose it. I stumble back into the doorframe, double over, and vomit until I’m heaving up nothing but bile. My gun slips from my fingers and clatters across the floor, coming to rest beside the body of a young CDC doctor, her eyes stuck open in a look of utter horror. There’s a bullet hole in her forehead. The back of her head is gone. I recoil from her, crawling on my hands and knees into the hallway, until I collide with the wall opposite the door. My breathing hitches—I’m hyperventilating—and my vision blackens at the edges.
I squeeze my eyes shut and command myself to calm down. You’ve seen worse crime scenes, I try to convince myself, so regain your composure, get up, and figure out an alternate plan to deploy the counter-curse. You don’t have time to dwell on this…
What is this?
Why would someone murder the CDC team? None of them were practitioners, and the vast majority had no real knowledge of the supernatural world. They weren’t a threat to Delos’ plan. They couldn’t stop the curse. And not even Navarro—god, Navarro is dead—could build a counter-curse without Delos’ notes on the original spell’s construction. So, why, why would somebody do this? There’s no gain for Methuselah here. There’s no gain for anyone. This is senseless carnage.
Bastard, I silently curse to the cold-blooded killer. I’ll find you. I’ll find you, and I’ll make you pay.
I force myself to stand up, my trembling hand recovering the grimoire I dropped as I lurched out of the room. My mind sifts through a flurry of confusing thoughts, and I try desperately to grab hold of the most useful ones. Without Navarro, I’ll have to find another capable person to gather the minor practitioner team and lead the deployment of the counter-curse. I know a handful of the other practitioners who work in the infirmary, but most of them were sent home to isolate themselves from the curse’s effects, and the ones who weren’t already fell victim to the curse.
To make matters worse, in order to get to any of those homebound practitioners, I have to get out of the building in one piece. And with Delos and gang prowling around in the garage, battling Erica, and the mole undoubtedly lying in wait—the mole who probably just murdered twenty-odd people—I’m in a massive bind.
God, I really wish my teammates were here. There’s no way they’d follow orders to arrest me in this situation, even if threatened with job termination by the overly bureaucratic commissioner. And the rest of the usual suspects, Ramirez and Delarosa and Sing, and even Nakamura, would follow Riker’s example if he put his foot down and said no to Bollinger and Mayor Burbank’s demands.
But they aren’t here, because we tricked them into leaving the building to gain access to the task room, the…
The task room that must’ve been massacred only minutes after they left. If it had happened before they headed out to wrangle the Wolves, someone would’ve heard all the gunfire and come to investigate. And the window between their departure and my arrival was, at most, fifteen minutes.
My fear redoubles. Whoever killed those people must be close by.
I have to get out of this building, now. I’ll figure out the rest of this clusterfuck later.
Steadying myself, I compel my legs to move forward, back to the task room doorway. I bend over and reach as far as I can without actually entering the room to sweep my gun off the floor. I have the spare in my waistband, but I don’t want to risk running out of ammo if I end up in a firefight on my way out of the office. So I ignore the streaks of blood on the body of the gun and reassert my grip, finger hovering over the trigger.
I do my best not to look at the murdered CDC personnel again, and more so look at Navarro, the grumbly doctor who loved to snipe at me for taking up an infirmary bed too often, who healed so many DSI agents over the years, who was the best of the best. And he fell not in a valiant fight with the curse, with a medical dilemma, but at the hands of a psychotic, mass-murdering bastard.
Rage erodes my fear, and I grip my gun tightly.
I swing around to storm out of the room—and spot something I missed before. On the edges of the puddle of deep red blood soaked into the carpet are several obvious shoeprints, where the killer must’ve circled the table to double-check all the victims were dead. The shoeprints sport an eerily familiar tread: it matches the one I photographed in the barn the night we raided the farm, the night that Delos set me up to take the fall for the spread of the curse.
The man who slaughtered these people, he was there. He’s deep into this scheme, at the very core, standing next to Delos all the way. I have to identify him, the mole. Because he’s not just destroying evidence anymore, not just passing intel and wrecking our raids. He’s crushing everything he can get his hands on, at Delos’ beck and call. He’s not just dangerous. He’s catastrophic.
I charge away from the task room, back down the hall toward the stairwell. I have no clue what to do about Erica—who I can’t help in any capacity with so many enemy practitioners in one place—and I don’t know how I’m going to reach another of the infirmary doctors without being seen skulking through town by the dozens of police, DSI, and Guard patrols who’ve been briefed on my appearance, ordered to arrest me on sight. All I do know is that I’m pissed off beyond belief, devastated beyond sanity, and so bitter at the shit that’s been done to me and everyone else by these Methuselah motherfuckers…
I pause mid-step, ten paces from the stairwell.
The elevator doors are open.
My gun hand flies up of its own accord, pointed at an angle through the doors. No one immediately emerges from the box, and no voices carry out into the hall, which makes me think someone is hiding in the corner of the elevator, just out of my line of sight. The elevator is about fifteen feet from the stairwell, so I’m not standing in the right position to cover the entire box without moving, but if I take the chance to draw closer to the elevator and more easily dispatch my potential assailant, I’ll lose the easy escape route directly in front of me. Think fast, Cal. Think!
The most important thing for me to do right now is get the hell out of this building. I don’t have time for a hallway gunfight. So I angle myself to the left, gun firmly pointed at the elevator that hasn’t moved in thirty seconds—someone must’ve hit the emergency stop button—and do a sideways shuffle toward the stairwell door. As I cross fully into the intersecting hallway, leaving me with nowhere to run for cover except the stairwell itself, I rest my finger on the trigger of my pistol. Lightly. If anything moves, anything at all, I’ll fire a warning shot and then dive for the stairwell—
“I have to say I’m disappointed, Kinsey,” says a familiar voice behind me. “I thought you’d be a smarter strategist by now.”
I stand there, frozen in terror, for half a second of utter disbelief.
Then I wheel around, desperately try to align my gun with the goddamned traitor who just silently emerged from the room where he was lying in wait for me to make the critical mistake, for me to take his bait, the obvious, so obvious elevator trap. But I’m too slow. And it’s too late. And I never had a chance in hell to leave this floor in one piece the second I stepped into the task room and witnessed the bloodbath within.
Commissioner Bollinger, wielding the gun he used to kill two dozen people, pulls the trigger three times.
One bullet clips me in the shoulder, spraying blood across the hall.
One bullet eats into my thigh, cracking the bone in half.
One bullet strikes me in the chest, obliterating my kidney.
I collapse onto the cold tile floor, stunned beyond pain, nothing but static in my brain, my own gun bouncing away, useless. I lie in a growing pool of blood, my blood, dribbling out of me, warm and wet, though I feel so cold. So fucking cold.
How did we miss this? How did we not notice? We’ve been telling him everything. He knew everything. That’s how…All this time…Oh, god…
Bollinger strolls closer like he’s taking a walk in the park and says, “Well, that was a pitiful fight, now wasn’t it?”
Chapter N
ineteen
They never saw it coming, those poor people in the task room. Bollinger walked in, closed the door, locked it, greeted them in a friendly manner, and then pulled out a gun and started shooting. He shot at Navarro first, taking out everyone around the infirmary doctor in the process, because of all the people there, only Navarro had the power to fight back. Once Navarro was down, bleeding to death atop a pile of other bodies, too weak to conjure any spells to help anyone, himself included, Bollinger then took his time systematically executing everyone else in the room. When he was done, he walked out, passed right underneath the cameras he’d ordered the security office to disable for some believable reason, and then went to hide, waiting for me to show up.
I never saw it coming either.
Tim Bollinger has worked for DSI for the better part of three decades. He started as a low-level administrator and worked his way up to the top desk. He’s been Riker’s good friend and respected colleague for most of that time, and though he’s known to be a hard-ass and a stickler for the rules, no agent can claim he’s a bad man, a poor leader, or a corrupt official. Or at least, that was the case, until sometime over the past three or four years. When everything changed. When the Methuselah Group’s roots began growing in Aurora.
When Delos started building his informant network.
It’s easy to put it together, in retrospect. Not all those people Lucian butchered during his killing spree were willing MG collaborators. Some of them, maybe most of them, were brainwashed. (Mac was almost certainly among that number.) I bet if I looked into Delos’ travel history over the past few years, I’d find several curious “business trips” to Aurora, during which he utilized his mind magic to the fullest extent, crafting a vast network of informants that would later be put to use when the MG ramped up their attacks against the vampires.
How obvious it seems, in hindsight, that Commissioner Bollinger would be among them.
All it would’ve taken was one “chance” encounter, at a restaurant, or a movie theater, or some other average venue people visit on weekends. Bollinger walked in his normal self, a good man, a proud, esteemed government official, and walked out Delos’ inside man for the troublesome group of Crows he knew would try their best to dismantle Methuselah, he knew would need to be taken care of, discredited at least, dismantled at best. Who better to use for that task than their own trusted commissioner? Who better than the man that all the intel passes to? Who better than the man who would be the last person suspected of being a traitor?
The only thing that Bollinger did not know is that Erica helps Team Riker from time to time. And what a fantastic piece of luck that was. Because if we had told him, Erica would’ve been mind-wiped or murdered long ago.
Not that saving her then will do much now. She’s going to die in that fight in the garage.
Bollinger bends down and yanks Delos’ grimoire from under my arm, then trudges off back to the office he was hiding in before he shot me. I’m in such mind-numbing pain, I can barely lift my head, much less roll over, grab my gun, and try to stop him. So I’m forced to watch as he slips the counter-curse notes out of the book, tosses them in a trashcan, lights a match, and burns all of Erica’s hard work. He doesn’t burn the grimoire though; no, he’s planning to return that to his good friend Iron Delos.
Once he’s sure the papers are fully destroyed, he joins me in the hall again, and sighs at the pathetic sight of my slowly dying body. He removes a handkerchief from the pocket of his sleek suit jacket and uses it to wipe down his gun. I notice that he’s wearing leather gloves, so as to not leave any obvious prints. Assured the gun is clean, he crouches next to me again, lifts my limp hand, and wraps my trembling fingers around the grip and trigger.
Oh, I think wearily, I see how it is.
Bollinger must read my face, because he says, “We have to have some malicious explanation for your presence in the building, Kinsey. Else this whole story of you being a naughty traitor would be too thin. So, yes, we’re going to pin the CDC murders—and the death of Dr. Navarro—on you. Say that you and your rogue witch companion, on orders from your vampire superior, Lucian Ardelean, broke in to butcher the hardworking men and women who were doing their best to stop the spread of the deadly ‘infection’ strangling our fair city.”
“No one’s going to believe that,” I reply, my voice slurring. The pain is getting to me.
Bollinger chuckles. “They’ll believe what I tell them to believe, or at least they’ll pretend to for the sake of their livelihoods. It doesn’t matter what anyone whispers into their pillows at night, or how guilty they feel about throwing you under the bus, the outcome will remain the same. Delos, representing the ICM, will link DSI to a plot by the vampires to launch a diabolical attack against human practitioners, and so will begin the war of the supernaturals, exactly as planned.”
He ejects the magazine from the frame gun to reveal it’s out of bullets—he used the last three on me—then he nods in satisfaction, clips the magazine back in, and tucks the gun into his waistband. My gun, I belatedly realize. One of the two Delos stripped from me after Barnett brought me in. Bollinger shot all those people with my gun.
Hot rage kindles inside my chest, and I use every ounce of strength I have left to drag myself to the right and reach for the weapon I dropped. But when my fingers are an inch from the grip, another gun fires first, and it blows a hole directly through the center of my palm, shredding every tendon and shattering every bone.
I scream. It echoes down the hall.
Bollinger stands over me, an irate scowl on his face. He holds his own smoking gun in his hand, a small-caliber pistol he must’ve had hidden in his jacket. He points it at my face as he marches around the large, spreading puddle of blood on the floor, swoops down, and snags the weapon I borrowed from Wallace. I have the spare tucked into the back of my waistband still, but I can’t contort my torso enough to reach it. My arm, leg, and chest are shredded. I can barely breathe. And now my hand…Jesus, it’s ruined. My dominant hand.
I go limp on the floor, defeated.
Something akin to respect flashes through Bollinger’s eyes, but it’s gone in a second. “Nice try, but the jig is up. We’re going downstairs. Delos is going to rewrite you, like he planned. You’re going to give a lovely confession about your role in the dastardly attack on the city, and then you’re going to die. Simple as that. Accept it and stop struggling. You’re already in enough pain. Don’t make yourself suffer needlessly.”
He grabs me by the collar and hoists me up, my feet dragging along the floor as he hauls me into the elevator. Then he unceremoniously drops me against the wall, and intense quakes of pain resonate outward from the four bloody, bullet-ravaged epicenters. He pushes the release on the emergency stop, unlocking the doors, and hits the button for the ground floor, to take us back to the hallway right next to the garage entrance. As the elevator begins to descend, he taps the flat side of his gun against his leg and hums a tune. All I can do is gurgle quietly, bile and blood rising up my throat.
The damage to my chest is going to kill me in short order, if Delos doesn’t kill me first.
I slump sideways, no muscle tension at all, in a vain attempt to conserve what fragments remain of my energy, so I can think. But all I see in my mind’s eye is a series of question marks and blanks, no answers to be found. This isn’t a situation I can escape from without serious help, and I don’t have the strength to even use the phone in my pocket to make a call, much less sneak such an action behind the attentive commissioner’s back. Every DSI agent who might help me is out rounding up Wallace’s cohorts, and Wallace is back at the warehouse…
The warehouse.
Something about that. An important detail I’ve forgotten. What is it?
I scour my mind for what is probably an obvious solution, but I come up short. My brain is fraying as my blood leeches out of me with each inhale and exhale. Soon, I’ll be unconscious, and there’ll be nothing more I can do to fix this mess, nothing
more I can do to save Aurora, nothing more I can do to stop Delos from successfully spearheading his war that will tear the world apart. I’ve failed. So miserably.
The elevator dings, and the doors open to reveal a hallway strewn with glass, two dozing DSI agents, and the remains of what used to be four metal turnstiles. As Bollinger steps forward hesitantly and peeks out at the garage, a deafening boom rattles the entire ground floor so hard you can see the walls moving, and the elevator groans in a disconcerting manner. “Goodness,” Bollinger mutters, straightening his tie, “that witch is putting up one hell of a fight.”
“You expected less,” I say, wearing a bitter smile stained red, “after what she did to the practitioners on Primrose?”
Bollinger stiffens. “So that was her handiwork? I always wondered. The reports from that battle seemed quite smudged compared to Team Riker’s generally meticulous summaries.” He eyes me warily. “How long have you been keeping that little secret exactly? Milburn’s involvement.”
I spit a glob of bloody saliva on his expensive shoes. “Go fuck yourself. If you want answers from me, you’ll have to get your buddy Delos to rip them out.”
He frowns. “That can be arranged.”
“Then arrange it and shut up.”
Irritated at my behavior, he swings his leg back like he wants to kick me, but he doesn’t follow through. If he hits me too hard, I might die instantly, and he can’t have that. He needs my patsy ass to stay alive just long enough to frame me for all the crimes he and Delos have committed over the past few days. I bore my gaze into his own, hoping my internal mantra of bastard, bastard, bastard comes across loud and clear. Because this man, this imitation of the real Tim Bollinger, is exactly that. A heartless, soulless bastard.
My chest tightens at the thought of what happened to the real Bollinger—erased in seconds and replaced with a doppelganger—and I hope that somehow, someway, his original mind can be restored. But I know that’s a doomed hope. Delos tripped up with me because he didn’t know about the extra memories Vanth implanted in my mind. Bollinger had no such defense. He was a sitting duck, and he paid for that lack of security with his very essence.
Doom Sayer (City of Crows Book 4) Page 19