Mercy Strange

by Alisa Woods

  “Service sidearms only and non-lethal Talents,” Grimes said as he strapped on his bulletproof vest. “We’re raiding a medical research company, not the Dziki cartel.” Swift had been brought on solely for the investigation into Raine Magitek, but he’d read the briefings—the Dziki cartel had been integral to distributing the experimental drugs as well as stealing “bodies” from the morgue and resurrecting them for further experimentation. Last he heard, the head of the cartel and some of his top lieutenants had been killed, but that only left the rest of the gang—which spanned the sprawling Chicago area—leaderless. Taking down Tobin Raine and the rest of the drug-making enterprise was key to keeping them that way, at least as far as the bioweapons were concerned. Regular magick enhancers would still be peddled by someone, but that was Magickal Crimes’ problem, not his.

  By the time they were done gearing up, a whole fleet of FBI-black vans had lined up in the garage. Another dozen agents in standard bureau-adept gear—leather pants and overcoats—were inside the vehicles, waiting. Raine Magitek was a large corporation, and the building was huge—it would take a lot of agents to conduct a search and seizure on the whole place. And once it was locked down, it would take hours to collect up all the relevant evidence.

  Swift rubbed his temple, very aware of the impending, crippling headache about to take him down. He didn’t have hours—but he wasn’t on this mission to scan hard drives, either.

  Grimes tapped the hood of the lead van. “All right, listen up,” he said to the assembled agents, half in and out of the vans, half in tactical gear, half standard suits. “B Team locks down the perimeter of the building—nobody leaves through a back door while we’re coming in the front. A Team goes in the main entrance with Agent Payne and myself. We’ve got a warrant for search and seizure only… but if we locate one Tobin Raine or Violet Thorn, we’re to respectfully ask them to come in for a visit at the field office.” A thrumming of dark humor beat the air, but no one cracked a smile. A few suspicious glances were directed Swift’s way. “Questions?” Grimes asked.

  No one had any. They piled in the vans and rode in tense silence the short ride to the concrete tower that was Raine Magitek’s headquarters. Once they rolled up, everything moved fast. There were only two entrances to the building—half the tactical agents swept around the back while Swift and Grimes led the rest quickly through the sliding glass doors at the front. The receptionist had a phone in his hand.

  “Put it down,” Grimes ordered, flashing his phone with the warrant on the screen. The older man froze, then slowly placed the phone on the desk. The rest of the team raised their weapons and ordered the security guard to disarm while they flooded through the scanning arch. Swift stayed with Grimes at the front, who was interrogating the receptionist. “We’re looking for Tobin Raine and Violet Thorn. Are they in the building?”

  “I… I don’t know,” the man bumbled out. But then his eyes betrayed him—he glanced down at the monitor bank on his desk. The surge of his panic masked his sudden concern for… something. It was too personal. Someone, then.

  Swift took a guess. “Where is she?” he demanded, leaning over the desk to ostensibly look at the screens, but he was really flooding the man’s mind with an urgent need to help them. Swift twisted that soft spot the man had for someone—Violet?—into a terror-filled fear that if he didn’t help them, horrible things would happen. Swift didn’t have to make any threats, just supply the overdose of fear—the man’s imagination would fill in the details.

  “No! Don’t hurt her! No, please, no!” the man babbled, cringing over his monitors like he could reach his hands through them to save her. “She’s just a lost little girl!”

  Grimes’ eyes went wide, and he flicked a slightly horrified look at Swift.

  “Tell us where she is, and we’ll save her,” Swift said quietly.

  “Please, please…” The man sobbed, and literal tears ran down his cheeks. He crumpled against the monitors, the desk barely keeping him upright.

  Fuck. Too much. Swift ground his knuckle into his temple to fight off the surging headache and pulled back on his assault. The man sniffled but stopped the uncontrollable sobbing.

  “Tell us now,” Swift prompted. “I’ll personally make sure she’s safe.”

  The man peered up at him with watery eyes. “In the labs in the basement. She likes to go there to be alone and… and… sometimes I watch.” His lip trembled.

  Holy shit, the guy was a complete stalker. Swift shoved away from the reception desk in disgust and pulled out of the man’s mind, leaving him dazed and soggy. “I know where that is,” he said to Grimes, then hurried through the arch and toward the elevator. SWAT agents were stationed at security so no one could slip out. Meanwhile, the rest of the field agents were flooding in and fanning out, taking elevators and stairs to lock the place down and start the search and seizure portion of the party. Swift and Grimes took the first elevator down, quickly hustling through the warren of labs. Swift caught sight of Violet’s slender form in the back office, where she’d brought him just yesterday. She was standing up at the desk, madly typing away.

  Grimes raised his gun. “Freeze! Back away from the computer!”

  She ignored him and typed faster.

  Swift held his hand up to Grimes and darted closer. He was almost within range…

  Violet suddenly straightened and flicked her hands, conjuring something blue and crackling—it blasted in Swift’s direction. He barely danced out of the way, and the ball of magickal energy crashed into one of the lab machines, making it smoke and sputter, but by then he was close enough… he slammed into Violet’s mind with a crippling sense of failure.

  She shrieked and crumpled to the floor, curling up into a ball.

  Swift rushed forward and knelt down. She was conjuring something again—another ball of energy—but then she just slammed it into her own stomach, screaming as the magick burned.

  Fuck. Swift grabbed her wrists and pinned them over her head. Self-harm? What the hell? He was fucking this up. He pulled back on the failure, flooding her with cooperation instead. His head throbbed, the headache crashing in on him.

  “Where is he?” Swift shouted in her face. “Where’s your Master?”

  She nodded like she wanted to answer, wanted to help, but her lips were pressed so tight they were white.

  “Holy fuck,” Grimes said behind him. “Agent Payne…” It was a warning.

  But Swift wasn’t in danger of hurting her—or letting her hurt herself—anymore. He leaned in, practically in her face. “Tell me where he is.”

  She nodded harder. Blood seeped from her lips where she was biting them. Fuck. He almost pulled back again, but then she let loose and with bloody lips screamed, “He has gone! He is beautifully flown, and you will never find him! Never! He is mine forever mine no you cannot have him!” And then she dissolved into a puddle of hysterical laughter and crying mixed together.

  Swift leaned back on his heels, easing up on both his physical and mental hold on her. She rolled over and curled into a ball, still muttering, but nothing he could discern. Or that mattered.

  Swift peered up at Grimes. His horrified expression said everything Swift felt about his work, his Talent, and the fucked-up way he made a living. “Tobin’s not here.”

  Then the headache exploded, and Swift slumped against the door, head buried in his hands, and he was lost to the pain of it for a long, long time…

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mercy was hip-deep in data with a tough problem to solve that involved magickal gene editing, sophisticated genomic analysis, and breakthrough scientific theories.

  In other words, heaven.

  Except for the fact that lives hung in the balance. And the annoyance of Special Agent Swift Payne hanging around her office, lurking by the window, watching her. He relentlessly sparked agitation all over her body—not from his Talent, just because he was hot and there was a vast gap between possibility and not-yet-reality in their “relationshi
p.” Which was, in actuality, just a few furtive kisses under duress. Then, after yesterday’s relentless drama, he’d disappeared without a word for twenty-four hours. Somehow, true to his promise, he’d gotten the police to stop calling her a “suspect” on all the news channels—and so far, no one had come for her. Then, just an hour ago, Swift had shown up at her office, blaming his absence on “migraines” that had waylaid him again.

  Mercy didn’t know what to make of that. Were migraines code for some PsyOps Top Secret Mission? Was he ducking out of the Resurrectionist case for brief periods of undercover work somewhere else, emotionally manipulating someone else into something else?

  There was so little she knew about him—and could she really believe the things she “knew”? Things he told her between kisses and apparently heartfelt confessions. She had second-guessed everything in the twenty-four hours he’d been just… gone. His Talent was as illegal as hers, but he obviously had license to use it—and had done so extensively.

  That thought both horrified and intrigued her.

  And now he was just hanging out in her office, looking sexy and mostly staying out of her way while she worked. Only a superhuman focus on that work brought a semblance of sanity to her thoughts. That, and her dad was working side-by-side with her now.

  “I’m still having trouble with the switch as a concept.” Her father stroked his chin, staring into the space above her head as he puzzled it out. “I mean, yes, the gene drives are clearly designed to activate certain genetic sequences, presumably those involved in a Talent. I’ll even grant that an appropriate spell could act as “seeker magick”—as you’ve theorized—to find precisely the sequences required. But if the drives only install a switch, that means you need some fast-acting external control that would affect every related cell in the body at once. Or something close to that.”

  “Microwave emissions?” Mercy offered. “UV light? Magnetic fields? There are plenty of studies where genetic changes are triggered by an external force.”

  “Maybe it’s a sound,” Swift said from his lurking spot by the window.

  Her father’s eyebrows lifted, and his gaze dropped to Mercy. “Like your whisper magick?”

  She threw Swift a quick glare. “I did not trigger their switches.”

  “No, no.” Her father wagged a finger. “I don’t believe Agent Payne meant that. But an auditory signal or some other sound wave…” Then he went back to peering at nothing as he thought. His easy acceptance of her illegal magick once again warmed her heart. And spiked some guilt through it as well. How could she have ever doubted him? Her father was the best man—the most purely good man—she’d ever known. That he accepted her without question was further proof of that. He even granted Swift the benefit of the doubt, although he didn’t know Agent Payne was PsyOps. And, as far as she could tell, he suspected nothing about her and Swift being… what? Together? It wasn’t like there was any real relationship to suspect.

  Still, she gave Swift a more pointed glare for bringing up her Talent.

  He just shrugged and swept a look over her. It heated her even as she wanted to be angry with him. Holy Mother of Magick, the man frustrated her to no end.

  Her father snapped his fingers. “Radio frequency!”

  “Radio waves?” Mercy said skeptically. “You’d need something bioactive that was sensitive to those. I don’t know what that would be.”

  “Me, either.” Her father pressed his lips tight again.

  Mercy craned her neck, stretching it. They’d been at this for hours. Last night, she’d gone home, gotten some sleep, and this morning, she’d finally done a full refresh of clothes and makeup. She’d come in early—on a Sunday, but time mattered little when you were hunting a killer—then spent half the day sifting through the reports Swift originally gleaned from Raine Magitek, and the constant trickle of documents from their raid yesterday. The FBI’s Magickal Crimes Division was good about sending her everything once they’d decrypted it, but she was swamped in data. Even with the AI chugging away, it was just a vast mountain of information, and they weren’t even sure what they were trying to find.

  Her muscles protested sitting too long, so she stood and stretched her arms overhead, letting her mind go loose a little, hoping the pieces would just fall into place. Her stretching had lifted her black silk corset, exposing her bare belly above her leather pants—something she only noticed under the heat of Swift’s stare. She quickly fixed it, adjusting the skimpy lace shawl draped across her shoulders as well and wishing she’d gone for the Victorian death couture, rather than this more conventional and revealing attire. But it had seemed wrong to telegraph her dangerous Talent with her morbid clothing, now that everyone—well, everyone who was important to her—knew all about what she could do. She’d even toned down the makeup, opting for a softer purple-blue-white framing around her eyes and an almost pastel blue lip shade. More pretty than terrifying. Even as she’d applied it, she couldn’t decide if this was the New Her or some horrifying devolution where she suddenly was trying to prettify herself for the insanely attractive Special Agent Swift Payne.

  Her father sighed. “Let’s assume for the moment that we figure out exactly how the switch was triggered. Let’s assume we even know how to stop it.”

  “I honestly think that will be the easy part.” Mercy took a seat again, leaning back, lacing her fingers, and avoiding Swift’s attentive gaze.

  “Agreed.” Her father straightened up from his spot against the wall. “We could know everything about the gen-magick and still not be able to stop whatever this madman has planned.”

  Mercy scowled. “Because we don’t know where the final test will be.”

  “Or what the greater plan is.” Swift was talking to them but looking out her window.

  “What do you mean?” her father asked, and Mercy wanted to know too. She was certain Swift had access to more information than he’d shared.

  He gazed at the city sparkling in the noontime sun. “The world runs on magick.” He turned back to them. “What would you do if you could turn it off?”

  “Well, that’s exactly the horror we’re trying to prevent,” her father said like that was obvious.

  But it wasn’t, not really. Mercy rose out of her chair. Swift was trying to telegraph something with those sexy, expressive eyes. “Maybe you wouldn’t turn it off—just threaten to. Then you could control everything.”

  Swift nodded.

  Her father looked aghast. Which, honestly, was the only appropriate reaction.

  Mercy stepped past him, around the piles of medical journals still precariously balanced on the floor, and up to Swift at the far end of her office. His eyes were alive with interest, watching her approach, but he said nothing.

  “It’s a weapon,” Mercy said to him, “but not one you’d actually want to deploy. What would be the use? Unless you were trying to enslave everyone by turning them into simples. That’s… a lot easier said than done. But if you could simply threaten to deploy it…” She pursed her lips and looked past Swift to the city outside. “You’d have to make the threat… convincing… and then…” She met Swift’s intense gaze. “What? Blackmail? Money? Political power?”

  Swift’s eyes had never left her face, and now that she was close, he seemed to scan her, seeing things that were making him smile, only he was holding it back. He had to be reading her emotions, but what had he said? That they were sounds to him. Her own personal emotional music playing for him alongside all the body language that everyone had but no one consciously thought about. Forget the bare shoulders under her lacy shawl or the brief flash of belly button—her entire being was splayed open to him. Everyone was naked before him, but only she knew.

  Swift gave a small, one-shoulder shrug. “Whatever they want, they’ll need to show beyond any doubt that they have the power to make it happen.”

  Mercy’s eyes went wide. “Of course. The next test. They don’t want to just see if the gen-tech works. It has to be a demonstration
. With an audience. Something that will prove they have the capacity to turn off people’s magick. Big. Public. Showy.”

  “But there’s nothing in the reports about it,” her father said. “Beyond the existence of another test.”

  Mercy tore herself away from Swift’s probing stare. “I still haven’t read all the reports, just run them through various AI. It’ll take me a week to get through all of them. And that’s not including the mountain of data from the raid. Even with the MCD helping, there’s just too much.”

  Just then, Nia appeared at the threshold to her office and knocked on the door frame. “Hey.” She’d been nominally guarding the lab, still not convinced the police weren’t coming for Mercy. “Someone from MCD is here with samples. You know, from the bus full of victims.”

  Mercy’s shoulders bowed. Even more data to process. Normally, she lived for this—it was literally her life’s work—but it was overwhelming with the stakes that came with it.

  “I’ll take it,” her father said to Mercy. “I want to look over the genomic data again anyway.”

  “Thanks.” Mercy shuffled over to her chair as her dad and Nia hustled out, then slumped into it and stared at her screen. Should she just manually read through all the reports and hope to get lucky, like she had been in stumbling upon the free jumpers? Maybe she should get Quill to change some of the AI programming again, looking for different connections in the text… or even in the reams of emails, data files, and reports they’d pulled from the raid. Or maybe she should focus on this “seeker magick” after all. Maybe that held the key to—

  “So I was right.” Swift’s voice was soft and close, right behind her.

  She jerked with surprise and nearly slid out of her chair. His firm hand around her arm kept her in place, then he knelt beside her chair, bringing his face dangerously close to hers.

  “Right about what?” Holy magick, she was breathless. And he wasn’t letting go of her, just leaning in with a touch of smile.