As the secretary turned her back, Riley dropped into a chair and set her bag on the floor beside it, pulling a leg up to rest her foot on the edge of the seat to alleviate the pain in her back. She rested her arm against her knee and stared at the glass wall as the secretary departed, watching the hall beyond and waiting for who-knew-what as she tried to quell her nervousness.
The hallway was a veritable beehive of activity, men and women walking rapidly down halls, barely speaking to each other, save for the occasional nod that acknowledged another’s existence. Secretaries spoke on Bluetooth headsets as they skirted around hustling agents, running errands for their assigned bosses. And standing at the far end of the hallway, almost at the edge of Riley’s sight, was the ringmaster of this ongoing circus. Damon Hartley, current Director of the Agency, stood an astonishing six and a half feet tall. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and sporting a healthy tan, he had a commanding presence and could be considered imposing on a good day. Riley had certainly found him to be so on the one occasion she’d had the displeasure of being called to his office—at the tender age of seventeen—to answer for certain lies she’d been stupid enough to tell at the time. After staring at her with his almost-black eyes for long moments, looking her up and down as if assessing her, he’d said, “I don’t see the problem here.” She hadn’t known it then, but that was his standard dismissal, his usual way of refusing to punish a transgressor. Those words had likely saved her life. But she had a feeling she wouldn’t be able to count herself so lucky the next time she was summoned to his office.
As Riley stared at him, Hartley suddenly turned and seemed to look right at her. She swallowed and averted her gaze, resisting the urge to duck under the table. Not that that would do her any good, as it was glass. Thankfully, at that moment, Brandon entered, two other men right behind him, and Riley couldn’t suppress the relief that flooded her as her attention was diverted from Hartley to Brandon instead. She gave the tall, blond man a smile and unfolded her legs to rise from her chair, but he put up a hand to stop her.
“No need to get up, Riley,” he assured her. “You look comfortable enough already.”
“Excellent,” Riley responded, giving him her best cheeky grin. Brandon didn’t reply, much to her surprise. He gave her a once-over and then settled into the office chair across from her. The two unknown men who’d entered with him found their own seats, one near the end of the table and the other in the far corner where it was darkest. Riley raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment. She didn’t know either of the men, and it would have been her luck to say something smart-assed only to find out they were from higher on the food chain than her—and in a position to do something about her mouth.
The man at the end of the table had just claimed his seat when he moved toward her. He was a tall, thin man she placed in his late twenties, maybe a few years older than her. His hair was long, brushing his shoulders, and a shiny, intense black. His eyes were equally intense, a bluish-green tint framed by thick, almost feminine lashes. His cheekbones were high and sharp, and his skin was pale and unblemished, save for a thin, faint scar decorating his jaw. Despite his thinness, he looked fit and strong. Riley had never seen him before, and she was overcome with curiosity as she examined him. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met,” the man said as Riley accepted his offer of a handshake. “I’m Zachariah Lawrence.”
“Awful big mouthful of a name,” Riley commented. “Got something else I can call you, or is it just Zachariah?”
“Just Zachariah,” he said. He glanced at the man in the corner, as if expecting him to offer his own introduction, and Riley followed his gaze. She couldn’t make out his features—he’d unfolded a newspaper and had his head bowed, reading it intently—and he didn’t seem eager to move into the light or lower the paper. When he didn’t offer an introduction, Zachariah shifted his eyes back to Brandon, returning to his seat. Riley mimicked his actions.
“So what’s going on, Brandon?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he promised. He set a file folder onto the table, and Riley smoothed both hands over the thighs of her jeans, her fingertips tingling with the desire to grab it and dig through it. It was a red folder, and that meant only one thing: a new assignment.
“So what’s the hold up, then?” Riley asked. She held both hands out in a gesture halfway between a shrug and a flail. “I’m right here, in case you didn’t notice.”
“We’re waiting for one more person,” Brandon said. He glanced past Riley to the glass wall behind her, and his eyes lit up. “And here he is now.”
Riley knew better than to turn in her seat. Gawking at the newcomer like a tourist wouldn’t do much for the confident demeanor she’d spent ages cultivating to combat the youthfulness of her looks—a youthfulness that while handy in certain circumstances worked against her in others. So rather than twirl around in her seat to check out the new guy, she waited for him to settle into the chair beside hers before turning her head to him. She wasn’t surprised to discover it was the man from the waiting room. He appraised her with warm, chocolate brown eyes and gave her a polite nod before focusing on the man across the table from them.
“Okay, so he’s here,” she said without addressing the newcomer. “Now do you want to tell me what’s going on?”
Brandon didn’t acknowledge her question. He opened the folder and smoothed both hands over the contents, and when he spoke, his words were directed to the papers in front of him. “The Agency has run into a little bit of a situation,” he said, “and we could use your help with it.”
Riley leaned forward in her chair, resting an elbow against the edge of the table. If Brandon and his men couldn’t solve a problem affecting the Agency—if Damon Hartley couldn’t—then it must have been a serious problem indeed. “What sort of situation?” she prompted when he didn’t continue right away.
He steepled his fingers and pressed them against his lips in a familiar gesture, considering his next words. “We believe there’s someone out there who is targeting agents,” he began. “Setting them up and then taking them out. Effortlessly.” He reached into the papers before him and began pulling out photographs, dropping them one by one onto the table. “All told, twenty-seven of some of our best agents have been targeted. None have survived.”
“That’s a pretty damn high attrition rate,” the man beside Riley commented. He leaned forward to look at the photos, sliding one aside to see the one below it.
“You’re telling me,” Brandon agreed. “We can’t afford to lose that many agents, not in such a short time. The skills alone that have been lost are mind-boggling.”
Riley examined the photos for faces she knew. There was a photo of a female agent with a notation saying her throat had been ripped out; another of a male agent that she recognized who’d had his chest torn out; another who’d been eviscerated; yet another who’d had his throat torn out; another—
She jerked back from the last photo, rolling her chair back even as she shoved the photo across the slick glass surface, trying to get away from it and it away from her. Her hands trembled as she stared at the pile of photos displaying the mutilated bodies of her fellow agents. She shook her head. “I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t. I don’t want to be involved. This is something you guys are going to have to figure out on your own.”
Kevin Anderson’s face stared at Riley from the photo. She could still see it in her head: his dark hair lank with sweat and blood, his eyes empty and sightless, his skin splattered with blood and viscera. The photo merged together in her mind’s eye with the last time she’d seen him alive. She blinked as she tried to banish the image from her sight.
“Why is his picture there?” Riley demanded. Her voice trembled, and she fought off a snarl of disgust. “Why do you have him in there?”
“Because we believe he was the first,” Brandon said. “Riley, tell us what happened in Paris. Six months ago, you and Kevin Anderson were on an assignment in Paris. Tell us what happened.�
��
“I’ve told you this before. The mission failed,” she bit out. “We failed. That’s what happened. And Kevin ended up dead because we apparently had bad intel I didn’t follow up on like I was supposed to, and I was tired and hadn’t had any sleep the night before and got careless and trusted the source too much.”
She could feel all eyes on her, waiting for her explanation. The sensation of being a sideshow for an audience was unnerving and annoying. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fingers around the arms of her chair, her knuckles blanching. “Riley, tell us what you wrote in your incident report,” Brandon ordered, his voice low.
“Which one? The official one or the first one I filed that made you accuse me of being insane?” she asked.
“The first one.”
Riley blew out a breath and shook her head again, as if she could rearrange her thoughts with the movement. She didn’t want to talk about this. It was too painful, both the actual event and the investigation that followed. But she was being ordered to relate the events, and no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t tell Brandon no. She averted her eyes to the tabletop, staring at the carpet through its clear surface. When she spoke, her voice was a borderline monotone, almost emotionless.
“The Agency received intel that pointed to the kidnapping of Senator Douglas Whitehall’s daughter when she went to France with a few of her friends as a graduation gift from her father. As there are lucrative sex trafficking rings in that area of France, we had to act fast to get her back. We received intel that Ivan Antonov, a known organizer of sex trafficking in the area whose M.O. matched that of Miss Whitehall’s disappearance, may have been involved in her kidnapping. Kevin Anderson and I were sent in to track him down, extract the information we needed regarding Miss Whitehall, and then get rid of him. This did not go as planned. I set up a sniper’s nest on the rooftop across the street from the apartment building, and Kevin went in like we’d agreed on. But Antonov wasn’t alone like he was supposed to be. A woman was with him, and I believe she took Antonov down before we could get to him.
“It was a set up. It had to have been a set up. There was a sniper other than me operating in the area that was likely partnered with the woman in the apartment. Kevin was shot twice in the back by the sniper, and then the woman…it looked like she ripped his throat out with her fingers, but she had to have had a knife that I couldn’t see. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t aim fast enough. Then she seemed like she…like she bit him. Like she was trying to chew her way right through his neck. I don’t know what I saw, but I froze, and she got away. And I know that Kevin died, and we never found out Miss Whitehall’s location. She’s still missing to this day.”
Riley fell silent and tore her eyes away from the tabletop to the clear wall behind Brandon, letting out a pained breath. Silence reigned for several heartbeats as she tried to collect herself, and then Brandon spoke.
“That was the last time the Agency worked with teams,” he said. “We disbanded all partnerships and relied on agents working solo after that. Things ran more…efficiently and safely that way. Except now we’ve detected a pattern of agents being targeted, and we can’t trust that if we put a sole agent on the task that he or she won’t also be killed. So we’ve decided to fall back on old methods and assign you a new partner.”
“What?” Riley gasped. She shook her head and rose half out of her chair. “You can’t do that. I work alone!”
“Not this time, Riley,” Brandon said. He motioned to the dark-haired man in the chair beside hers. “Ms. Walker, may I introduce you to your new partner, Agent Scott Hunter.” His tone indicated that it wasn’t a question or an offer.
Riley didn’t bother to look at the man. She clenched her fingers around the arms of her chair again, her jaw set in determined anger as she glared at Brandon and tried her damnedest to not look at the photo of Kevin Anderson’s broken body on the table between them. Throwing all caution and mental warnings to the wind and fighting to not grit her teeth, she snarled, “I don’t work with others.”
“Well, you used to,” Brandon said, unfazed in the face of her anger. “And now you do again. Or am I to assume that you are refusing to work with Mr. Hunter in yet another act of blatant insubordination? We put up with a lot from you that’s quite close to borderline because of how talented you are, but I wouldn’t be able to overlook this.”
Riley’s anger dissipated rapidly when he used the word “insubordination,” and she fought the urge to roll her chair further back from the table. Stiffening, she squared her shoulders and shook her head. “No, sir. I’m not being insubordinate,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I just don’t—”
A hand closed around her wrist and squeezed. She glanced over to see her presumed new partner looking at her, eyes wide with concern and almost fear. She could understand his fear. “Insubordination” was one of the most feared words in the Agency’s vocabulary, usually preceding a horrible, violent end to whatever agent was found guilty of it. As such, no agent ever wanted to end up in a situation where a charge of insubordination could be considered a possibility. Scott gave her a warning shake of his head and leaned close.
“For the love of Christ, please stop talking,” he murmured, loud enough for her to hear. His fingers tightened on her wrist.
Riley glared at him. Who was he to tell her what to do? He didn’t know her. She wrenched her arm free from his grasp and leaned back in her chair, focusing on Brandon. “What’s so damned complex that you feel the need to reinstate the Agency’s partnership program?”
Brandon looked pleased with Riley’s change of behavior. He weeded through the papers again, searching first one stack and then another. “Because it’s just too much and too damned difficult for one agent to handle,” he said. He settled on a stack and set it beside the folder then twisted his hands together and looked at both of them. “This is going to be a very specialized assignment.” He pushed the stack of papers toward her. “What are your thoughts about…vampires?”
Acknowledgments
Books take a lot of work to write, and I would be an idiot if I didn’t take the time to thank all the people who have been involved with helping me put all this together.
I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t take a moment to thank my parents and my sisters. As always, they’ve been a huge help and inspiration. Through good times and bad times, we’ve always stuck together, and I couldn’t ask for anything more.
In that vein, a special thanks to my mother for helping me come up with the title for The Unnaturals and the series it turned into when I was floundering around trying to come up with something to call not only this novel but the entire series.
A big thank you to my friends for putting up with my absenteeism and my general reclusiveness during the writing of this and my other books. I’d be a hermit if it weren’t for you guys forcibly dragging me out of my house periodically to reintroduce me to sunlight.
A huge thank-you to Rhiannon Frater and Kody Boye for their advice and guidance as I began my career reset and started (re)navigating the admittedly confusing world of publishing.
A massive thank you to my former agent Hannah Brown Gordon. You took me on at a very pivotal point in my career, and you helped me form The Unnaturals into something that wasn’t only readable but also actually pretty damn good, and I’m so grateful for all the work you’ve done for me.
And lastly, but most certainly not least, thank you to all my fans, both past, current, and future! I wouldn’t be sitting where I am today if it weren’t for all you kind folks taking the time to buy my books, read them, and recommend them to your friends and family. You are an integral part of this whole process, and I couldn’t do it without your support.
About the Author
Jessica Meigs is the author of The Becoming, a post-apocalyptic thriller series that follows a group of people trying to survive a massive viral outbreak in the southeastern United States. After gaining notoriety for writing the serie
s on a variety of BlackBerry smartphones, she self-published two novellas that now make up part of the first book in the series. In April 2011, she accepted a deal with Permuted Press to publish The Becoming and its sequels. The first of the series, entitled The Becoming, was released in November 2011 and was named one of Barnes & Noble’s Best Zombie Fiction Releases of the Decade by reviewer Paul Goat Allen. Five more novels and an assortment of novellas followed.
Jessica lives in semi-obscurity in Demopolis, Alabama. When she’s not writing, she works full time as an editor, copyeditor, and proofreader. She can be found on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
If you are an author who is interested in exploring Jessica’s editorial services, you can check out her editing business at Edits by Jessica.
Also by Jessica Meigs
The Becoming Series
The Becoming
The Becoming: Ground Zero
The Becoming: Revelations
The Becoming: Under Siege
The Becoming: Redemption
The Becoming: Origins
The Becoming: Bloodlines *
* * *
The Unnaturals Series
Nightfall
The Unnaturals
Hellforged
Wicked Creatures
Reapers *
* * *
* coming soon
Nightfall Page 27