“Give me your phone. I know you’re buddy-buddy with the vamps. They wouldn’t have taken it from you.”
“Rose,” Matt said, “we don’t have time for this.”
Melody held out a hand.
Slowly, Rose pulled her cell from her jeans pocket and opened the lock screen. “It doesn’t work here. The vampires have it jammed, probably the Army too.”
Melody typed away for a moment then handed the phone back. She had added a number to Rose’s contacts list. “You can reach me there. We’ll talk once you figure out these guys are using you.”
“I’m not leaving you here,” Rose said.
Melody strode to the door, not even bothering to look back. “No. This is where I leave you.”
Though she still wasn’t perfectly steady on her feet, certainly not the smooth killing machine she had been the night Leslie died, Melody slipped past Matt with draw-borne grace. Her footfalls echoed down the hall and up the stairs, gone in seconds.
Matt looked at Rose, his mouth a flat line, his eyes full of concern. “Should we try to stop her?”
“No. She’s made her decision. We both have.”
23
We All Fall Down
Tears stained Rose’s cheeks by the time she finished the call with Leslie’s mother. She slid her phone into the drink holder next to her seat and stared out at the scrub brush spooling past her window. The land between Lerado and San Antonio looked the same as that in Mexico: patchy green, empty, and forlorn in some way she couldn’t pinpoint.
“You okay?” Matt pulled out his earphones, which he had used to give her privacy for the call.
“I told her the military would handle the transport from Mexico.” Which meant the Order would foot the bill.
Matt nodded. He had offered to make the call himself, arguing that he was Leslie’s commanding officer, but Rose had demurred. It wouldn’t have felt right letting him take that burden.
“She’ll be back with her family in a couple of days. They’ll have the funeral this weekend.”
They drove alone, the rest of the Dog Ears scattered amongst the remaining van and four SUVs they had brought to Mexico. Rose got the feeling Matt had arranged things this way, but in their mad scramble to abandon the hacienda she hadn’t noticed.
They rode in silence for a time before Matt said quietly, “We need to talk about wrangling.”
Wrung out emotionally and physically, Rose wanted to say no. But one look at Matt’s face changed her mind. He needed this.
“Okay,” she said.
He bit his lip, something Rose had never seen him do, as if he might taste the words before he spoke them. “My parents divorced when I was three. My dad raised me. That’s a lie. A bevy of au pairs, babysitters, and butlers raised me until I was twelve. Till then, my father hardly noticed me. Robin,” Matt pursed his lips. “Mom, had lost me in the custody battle. Dad had money and political ties she lacked, so she got no visitation rights.”
“That’s horrible,” Rose said. “You didn’t know your mom?”
“Sometimes my dad was generous, especially when he was away on extended business, and he’d let her visit. But never when he was around. She was like some fabulous aunt who blew into town at whim between globetrotting and jet-setting to every amazing place on Earth. I didn’t know her. I didn’t know either of them.”
“What changed when you turned twelve?”
“I became a polydraw.”
“And suddenly your dad was interested.”
Matt tapped his nose. “Dad’s a sine. He has many gifts, but he can draw only one at a time. When he discovered I was not only a polydraw, but that I was a sime to boot, I suddenly became his pride and joy. Granted, he was still a senator, and head of the Indrawn Breath, but now he was taking me to work, showing me off to his friends.”
“And you loved it,” Rose said.
“And I loved it.” Matt gave her a self-deprecating smile. “He hired instructors. I worked with some of the most powerful succubi and incubi in American Society. I soaked it up, and my dad, the great Senator Jason Craft, was proud of me for the first time in my life.”
“When did David Lord come into the picture?” Rose could see the question weighed on Matt. He heaved a sigh before answering.
“I first shook hands with David Lord on my fifteenth birthday. Dad said he had a special surprise for me. Since I had expressed interest in maybe becoming an FBI agent—there’s an entire secret division of the Bureau devoted to succubi affairs—he had arranged to have me shadow one of their top operatives.
“I followed Lord on a pickup that very night. We captured three rogue incubi, men who were using charm to run a drug operation. Not only were they dealing cocaine and molly, but they were also building a vast votary base off all their marks.”
“And you liked it,” Rose said, no bitterness in her voice, no recriminations, just pure interest. She pictured a fifteen-year-old Matthew Snow following the charismatic David Lord like a hungry puppy.
“I had the time of my life.”
“Then what?” Rose asked. “Your mother found out?”
Matt shook his head. “Dad told me not to tell her. She wouldn’t understand. So, I didn’t. She’d visit, we’d hang out, and I’d say nothing about hunting rogue succubi. By the time I was eighteen, I was running my own team. We crisscrossed the nation, putting down what we considered enemies of the state. Whether that state was the U.S. or Society, I don’t know. Both, I guess.”
“You were arresting slinkers.”
“Yes. Mostly. Not that they were all innocent. There were bad actors, like those drug runners, who legitimately broke the law, both Society and U.S. But, over time, I noticed a lot of the so-called malefactors we arrested turned out to be people with families. Often, my orders didn’t specify crimes committed, just gave me an address, a name, a basic description. I started to wonder just who these people were.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Of course I did. Lord assured me they were homegrown militants bent on harming our way of life. I trusted that answer. It was the same one my father gave when I put the question to him.”
“But eventually you stopped wrangling and joined the Order,” Rose said. “How’d that happen?”
“It was three months before my nineteenth birthday when Robin came to visit. I was feeling disillusioned, confused. I was questioning everything about our way of life—my way of protecting our people.”
“So, you told her.”
“She cried. It wasn’t what I expected. I thought maybe she would just blow it off. She had always seemed so flighty to me, so devil-may-care. I didn’t even know if she realized Dad was effectively running Society.”
“What about the fear factory? Had Lord told you about it?”
“Not precisely, but he had made—I don’t know what you would call them—overtures maybe? Hints? He had alluded to someplace that held the people we arrested, and that some were now votaries for him and a few others. I got the feeling he wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Like maybe my dad had ordered against it. I don’t know.”
“So, is this when Robin decided to fight? Did she come up with the idea of Camp Den after you told her what was happening to you?”
Matt shook his head. “Nope. She had that idea years and years before this. She had been building and planning a way to counteract the Indrawn Breath, to counteract Dad, most of my life.”
Rose tilted her head. “Does that mean she knew about the fear factory for years?”
“I don’t know. She’s never told me how long she knew about it. She’s a much more secretive woman than you’d guess on first meeting her. Back then, all she told me about was the Order.”
“And she made you a part of it,” Rose said.
“I didn’t join her right away. I should have, but I was a teenager, and I had heard all my life that what I was doing was right. I was important. I was powerful. I was better than any human and most succubi. Nothing Robin said could conv
ince me otherwise.”
“Did you tell your father what she was up to?”
“No. I was torn between them. I couldn’t be disloyal to either one.”
Rose stared at Matt. He watched the road, but she could tell he noticed. All his life he had believed he was elite, a man evolved to be greater than ninety-nine percent of humankind. It was the counter to her own story, believing her powers a curse, one she must hide in shame and fear. Both stories were fraught with lies and half-truths. Both were equally insidious and toxic to a young mind. “What made you finally change?”
“Walter Green Middlebrook,” Matt said the name with reverence. “He was a slinker. A man with almost no identity. He had been arrested a few times for vagrancy in North Carolina and Virginia. From what I’ve ferreted out, I don’t think he ever hurt anyone in his life. He certainly wasn’t an incubus bent on becoming the next Mussolini.”
Matt fell silent, and Rose gave him time to gather his thoughts. His jaw tightened before he spoke again. “Lord primed him.”
“For the fear factory?”
“He tortured Walter in an abandoned mill where no one would hear him scream. But I heard. I was obliged to watch. To—” Matt broke off.
“To participate?”
“It wasn’t like my hands were clean even then. I had roughed up my share of men and women. It was how we instilled fear.”
Rose covered her mouth. “You were drawing courage by then? But I thought you said you had never been to the fear factory.”
“No. But Lord taught me the fear draw early on. We used it like pepper spray or a Taser. It’s the one draw a succubus can focus on an individual, which makes it powerful in its own way. How can someone run or fight when fear overwhelms them?”
“Like the night you took me.”
Matt glanced her way and nodded.
“And you drew fear from this Walter guy?”
“Until the moment he died.” Matt trembled, his muscles standing out in his forearms. “Lord acted like it was nothing. Like Walter’s death was as meaningless as roadkill. We left his body strapped to an old office chair where animals could get at it, where time would take its toll.
“Afterward, Lord saw how that affected me. He tried to talk it away. He explained that terrorists weren’t worth mourning. But it was too late. My eyes were open. I had finally realized that I was the monster I was supposed to be fighting.”
Rose put a hand on Matt’s taut arm. “You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Yes, I do. I’m not looking for absolution, Rose. No one can give me that. But I’m falling in love with you. And that means I must tell. I should have done it before, but I was afraid.”
“Afraid I wouldn’t be able to handle it?” Rose’s heart was racing.
He nodded.
“Stop underestimating me, Snow.”
A ghost of his half grin curved his lips. “Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s it like?” Rose asked, tentatively. “The fear draw.”
“It’s like winning the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Indianapolis 500 all rolled into one. It drowns out everything else.”
“How?”
“It snuffs your other emotions, especially compassion. You cease caring about anything besides getting more of the fear draw. And you can steal it from pretty much anyone, even the weakest human.”
“That sounds horrible.” Rose tried to picture Matt priming votaries to fear him but couldn’t. How could anyone with a conscience do that? It defied human, and succubus, decency.
“It doesn’t feel horrible. It feels…perfect. I guess it’s like any drug. You get addicted, and you want more. Pretty soon, it doesn’t matter what you have to do to get it. You’ll do things you never imagined just to feel that elation.”
“You had a hard time giving it up.” Now that she had them, Rose couldn’t imagine denying herself access to her votaries. But Matt had done just that, and with the added enticement of insatiable craving.
“That night I took your courage—” Matt hesitated, his gaze fixed on the road ahead as if he couldn’t look at her.
“It was the first time you had done it since kicking the habit?”
He nodded, a pained grin turning up one corner of his mouth. “You gave me no choice. I couldn’t keep up with you.”
“I’m sorry I made you do that.” Lovely. Just what Rose needed, more guilt, more regret. She had nearly sent her lover back into the throes of addiction psychopathy.
“Hey.” Matt put a reassuring hand on her knee. “I’m okay. No harm done. If my time as a taker for the Breathers taught me anything, it was control. Speaking of which, there’s something else we should discuss about drawing.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s called spillover.” Matt sounded like an actor in one of those cheesy STD commercials. Talk to your doctor about herpes today.
Rose lifted an eyebrow at him.
“I don’t suppose the Pruett twins ever mentioned it?”
“No.”
“And we don’t cover it at Camp Den because it doesn’t affect most trainees. It’s a side effect of having a huge votary count. Most succubi never experience it, only stars and athletes, maybe some politicians. It’s like a feedback loop of emotions you get when your votaries all think a certain way. Like I said, it’s rare, but you might feel what they feel, especially when they’re mostly all of one mind like yours are.”
Rose frowned, trying to suss out his meaning. “But how are my votaries all thinking the same way? That makes no sense. Are you saying I’m somehow controlling their thoughts? Like I’m charming them from afar?”
“No. It’s not a matter of them thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It’s about expectation. You’re a superhero to them, so they expect you to act a certain way. I think maybe that’s why you got so upset with Clemente even before you found him with that poor girl he killed. You hated the vampires almost from the start because your fans would expect Rose Carver—Superhero!—to hate them.”
Rose thought about that. She didn’t feel her dislike of the vampires had come from outside herself. Catching Clemente in the act of murdering a helpless girl had ignited her blistering anger, no one else’s. But maybe she had gained something of a heroic cast from her votaries—a sort of craving to save others rather than slink away from trouble. She hadn’t felt like running in a long time.
She started to ask another question, but Matt’s phone chirped. He slipped his left earphone into place.
“Hello?”
Rose couldn’t hear the voice piped into Matt’s ear, but she saw his brow furrow, his lips crease at the corners.
“Mont Stivens is Kosher,” Matt said. It was a key phrase indicating that all was clear on Matt’s end. He listened for a long time, his expression going from grave to shocked.
“What channel?” Matt asked after a moment, his face pale. “Okay. What about rendezvous? Yeah, that’s good.” He remained silent a long time, then said, “And about the other, you’re certain?” He winced at the answer.
Matt ended the call. “That was Gunny Lipe. Camp Den’s gone.”
“What?” Rose bolted upright, her heart in her throat.
“FBI raid. Grab your laptop. He said it’s on all the newscasts. There was a fire. Some folks escaped, Lipe among them.” Matt looked at Rose, expression sober. “Most didn’t.”
The top headline on CNN.com read, “Suspected Terrorist Cell Raided, Burned.” She clicked the live video link.
The screen filled with an aerial view of Camp Den. Links burned merrily, smoke billowing from its many windows, its bricks black with soot. Both the training barracks and teams housing were also ablaze.
Men and women dressed in body armor with the letters FBI emblazoned in yellow on their backs stood conferring or talking into radios while firefighters doused the buildings. It was obvious whatever had happened was over. No one seemed overly concerned with getting shot.
“According to sources within the FBI, a
gents this morning raided a terrorist compound disguised as a fitness boot camp,” said a bland male reporter as the images played. “Sources say that Camp Den, Total Body Takeover, was a front for a domestic terror group known as the Order. The Order’s stated intentions were to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a new one in its place. Although the FBI attempted to surprise the group, members resisted arrest, opting to launch an offensive using small arms fire and explosives. A three-hour standoff ensued, after which FBI agents, bolstered by local S.W.A.T. forces, infiltrated the compound. A fire broke out in the camp’s main building shortly after they entered. It’s unclear whether the terrorists intentionally set the fire or it was the result of an ammunition explosion.
“Though sources with the FBI report arresting eighty-five Order members during the raid, David Lord, the agent in charge on the scene, stated this morning that as many as thirty to fifty members might have escaped during the firefight.”
Rose clicked the pause button. Her stomach felt sour, her throat tight. “Oh, God.”
“Robin’s dead,” Matt said.
“What?” Rose jerked as if slapped. “Lipe told you?”
“Said they were fleeing, trying to get as many people into as many cars as they could. A bullet got her as they were driving away. She died instantly.”
“Oh, Matt, I’m so sorry.”
Matt’s eyes glistened, but no tears fell. Some of the color came back into his cheeks, his ears reddening. “It’s not going to end here. Not like this.”
“Do you think…” Rose searched for the right words. “Do you think the Breathers found Den by reading Drawn?”
Matt first shook his head, sighed, then shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t want what we did to be the reason this happened.”
“It’s not your fault,” Matt said. “It’s not anyone’s fault, except my father’s and David Lord’s.”
Rose nodded, little mollified, but unwilling to belabor the point. “What now?”
Matt ground his teeth. “I have to tell the team. Lipe only managed to get eighteen people out with him. That gives us a total of thirty-one ops.”
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