Red Rooster (Sons of Rome Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  “Okay, here,” she said, and Rooster glanced away from the girl – she stared down into the cocoa and its bobbing raft of mini marshmallows like someone seeing the face of God – and turned back to his landlady. “I’m on the Ingraham Institute website, right? Well, once you get past all the shiny front page stuff, miracle drugs and all that, there’s a page dedicated to the weapons technology they’re developing for all the branches of the military.”

  “’Cept the Corps,” he said with a snort.

  She tipped her head in acknowledgement. “Y’all will get it in fifteen years, I’m sure. But listen to this. There’s a list of their projects. Project Royal. Project Kashnikov – I don’t know about you, but that sounds super Russian to me – and some others. Then, down at the bottom: The LC-W Initiative.” She looked up from her phone, face illuminated by the screen. “Didn’t she say she was called LC-5?”

  He swallowed. “Yeah.”

  Ashely sighed and slipped the phone into the pocket of her robe. “What the hell’s going on over at that place?”

  “I don’t–”

  The back door flew open with a shower of splinters and the muted thud of a police-issue battering ram busting the lock to pieces.

  Years of training honed to instinct compelled him to move, and for the first time in over a year, his body actually responded. He picked Ashely up around the waist, tucked her in tight to his chest, and launched into a tuck-and-roll that carried them up over the breakfast bar and down to the floor on the other side. Through it all, Ash didn’t make a sound, so he heard the thump of the door landing on the kitchen floor, the bark of angry male voices, the treads of a dozen pairs of boots crunching over debris, and the particular click of riot gear shifting on the human body as suited-up men poured into the house.

  He took a moment to get his bearings, kneeling on the tile with Ashley caged in by his arms. She’d dropped her phone, and had one hand clapped over her mouth, breath whistling through the gaps in her fingers.

  “I need a gun,” he whispered in her ear.

  She pulled her hand away enough to say, “Upstairs.”

  Shit.

  “You two behind the wall, get up,” one of the intruders commanded. “Nice and slow. Hands behind your heads.”

  Weaponless, and probably harboring a fugitive, there was nothing to do but comply.

  Rooster stood up first, slow as ordered, hands clenched together behind his head. He kept himself between the men and Ashley, a barrier they didn’t like.

  Facing off from them was a knot of guys in helmets and all-black tac gear, armed with a combination of rifles, handguns, clear riot shields, and batons. Facial details were lost behind the clear face shields of their helmets. Too many for the small kitchen to hold, they spilled out into the hallway and the attached living room – where the redheaded girl had been only moments before. She wasn’t there now, and Rooster was strangely glad.

  “Separate,” the closest guy, the leader, said, motioning to Rooster and Ashley with the end of his baton.

  Rooster didn’t move; he’d shielded Deshawn before, and he would shield his wife now.

  But Ash hedged away a few steps, palms facing the cops, and said, in her calmest, most commanding voice, “Problem, officers?”

  “Where’s the girl?” the leader asked. He motioned over his shoulder and three of his boys broke off and headed down the hall, toward the front of the house, floorboards popping under their boots.

  Rooster wasn’t a cop, so he would admit that he didn’t know the ins and outs of raid protocol, but several things stood out to him:

  For starters, the girl was just that: a girl. Young and slender as a reed, and so obviously not a threat, and these guys were tricked out like they were busting up Taliban spider holes. An unarmed teenager in white pajamas shouldn’t have brought out the big guns.

  Then there were the cops themselves: there was no lettering on their vests. Whether Homeland, or FBI, CIA, DEA, or even just NYPD, they should have had their agency printed in bright white across their backs.

  Then there was all that stuff Ash had found about the Ingraham Institute on her phone.

  Throw in the fact that Rooster’s internal alarms were going off like air raid sirens, and none of this sat right with him.

  “Are you people deaf?” the leader asked. “Where’s the girl?”

  “What girl?” Ashely asked, smooth as silk. “It’s just us, and my daughter. You’re the ones who broke down my door, so maybe you’d like to show me a warrant, or the next time we speak, we’ll be in court.”

  Desiree! Rooster remembered with a jolt. Shit, those three guys were at the foot of the stairs. Surely they wouldn’t…

  The leader took an exaggerated, aggressive step forward, baton just a handspan from Ashley’s face. “Shut up,” he said, calm, expecting to be obeyed, and all the more threatening for it.

  More of his men branched off. In the living room, Rooster heard a chair overturn.

  He said, “Which agency are you with?”

  The baton came to his face, and hung there, a silent warning.

  This wasn’t right.

  “Found her!” someone called, and a moment later two men came back down the hall into the kitchen, dragging the girl between them. She resisted like a little wild cat, thrashing and struggling, kicking at them with her socked feet. They overpowered her easily.

  She lifted her face and looked right at Rooster through a screen of tousled red hair, her green eyes huge and terrified. Help me.

  “Be careful with her,” the leader said, turning to look over his shoulder at his men. “She burned Simmons back at the lab.”

  Rooster felt Ashley step on his foot.

  This wasn’t right.

  He was going to do something about it.

  He nodded his head, one slow, careful movement, and the girl’s brows lifted: she understood.

  “Get down,” Rooster whispered to Ashley, and grabbed the baton that still wavered in front of his face. He snatched it loose, flipped it around, and the man who’d been holding it didn’t turn around fast enough.

  Rooster caught him with it at the vulnerable place where the corner of his jaw met his throat, and the leader fell sideways into his own men, sending four of them down in a tangle.

  The redheaded girl went up in a blaze of fire.

  Fire.

  Shouts. Flailing arms. Clap of riot gear crashing together.

  If she was on fire, Rooster would get the extinguisher from under the kitchen counter. After he dealt with these idiots.

  He slid into the old dance of hand-to-hand with the ease of long practice, and a freshly painless body. He cracked another in the shoulder with the baton, hard enough to send him staggering, and ripped the man’s gun from its holster in the process.

  Another took a swing that he ducked, and he heard the crack of a gunshot that he prayed didn’t find a mark. He didn’t know where Ash was, but didn’t have time to check. He grabbed a man by the wrist, tugged him close, and pressed the muzzle of his stolen gun under his arm, fired off a shot that sent a jolt up his own arm. The man screamed and went down.

  Rooster couldn’t risk a wild shot. He moved in close, and tight, baton in one hand, gun in the other. Muzzle to skin, to fabric, close shots that burned.

  There were more screams than he could account for, and always fire, leaping and dancing at his periphery. Was the house burning? Why weren’t the smoke alarms going off?

  Rooster dropped a body to the floor and suddenly, they were all bodies. No one was left standing but him…

  And the girl, fire rippling around her like a shroud.

  Slowly, she turned to face him, and the fire winked out. He expected her to be a blackened and ruined version of herself, but not even her clothes or hair were singed. Her skin glowed a faint pink, almost like a sunburn, but she appeared otherwise whole.

  Rooster cast a glance around the room, the bodies slumped on the floor, and, in one case, across the breakfast bar. They all b
ore that particular limpness that comes with death. Some of them were burned, skin red, and black, and blistered.

  “Holy shit,” Ashley said behind him, creeping back in on tiptoes.

  Rooster shot a look to the girl that he couldn’t manage to make stern.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Her eyes rolled up in her head and she fainted for the second time that night.

  ~*~

  They had to call someone. Mike Cartwright, Ashley suggested, an old service buddy long-since retired and now working as a vice detective.

  “You can’t stay,” Ashley told him, voice heavy with sadness, and he knew she was right. The house was full of his fingerprints and DNA, and there would be no choice for her but to tell the cops what had happened. It was the only way to keep her and Desiree safe.

  “I can’t leave you,” he protested, though, gesturing to the bodies.

  “What about her?” They stood over the redheaded girl, again laid out on the couch. “I can look after myself, but what about her?”

  Because turning her over to someone, after what had just happened, wasn’t an option, not for either of them. So Rooster stuffed his meager belongings in his duffle bag, crammed a hat down on top of his head, and told Ashley how sorry he was.

  She shook her head, firm. “What woulda happened if you hadn’t been here?”

  “They wouldn’t have shown up at all.”

  She tilted her head to a stubborn angle. “That poor girl needs someone looking out for her.”

  So.

  Here he sat, the sunrise molted beyond the fogged-up glass of a diner window on the way to Connecticut. He sipped his coffee slowly, enjoying the warmth of the mug against both his hands, watching the girl seated across from him.

  Ashley had tucked her bright hair beneath one of Deshawn’s old winter stocking caps, but little pieces kept working their way free, bold as flame down her neck and shoulders. She wore dark smudges beneath both eyes, signs of exhaustion, but she shoveled pancakes into her mouth with almost frantic energy, hand unsteady on the fork.

  “Not too fast, kid, or you’ll be sick,” he cautioned.

  She grunted a response, but did slow the movement of her fork, actually swallowing before she brought the next bite to her lips.

  Rooster let her eat – he knew well the look of someone who’d gone hungry for a long time – and planned a route in his head. They needed to get out of the state and lay low, probably for a long time. Ashley could work miracles, but Rooster knew it would take nothing short to clear him of multiple murder charges. He had no idea which branch of law enforcement those guys had answered to, but someone would want retribution.

  Worse, someone would want the girl back. Their pursuit proved that she was valuable. Her little fire routine proved she was dangerous.

  Rooster entertained ideas of dropping her off at a hospital, or a children’s home. Even a school. Putting some cash in her palm, spinning her around in the parking lot, and telling her to go find someone else to look after her until she was old enough to go be homeless on her own.

  But she acted like she’d never tasted pancakes before.

  And she was just a little thing.

  And she’d touched him, and suddenly he was sitting in a booth and his hip wasn’t caught in a bind; blinding pain wasn’t shooting down his leg, and arm, and spine.

  The waitress stopped by and topped up his coffee, asked if they needed anything else.

  “Two breakfast plates to go,” he requested, because he didn’t know when they’d have another chance to stop for food.

  When she was gone, the girl finally pushed her plate away, wiped her sticky mouth with the too-long sleeve of her borrowed sweatshirt, and met his gaze with a level one of her own.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, solemnly.

  “That’s alright.” He set his coffee down. Kept his voice low, so the old man two booths over couldn’t hear them. “Who were those guys?”

  She took a big, shuddery breath. “They’re from the Institute, they…I’m sorry.” She blinked hard.

  “What were they gonna do if they took you back there?”

  “They…Dr. Fowler said…” Her narrow shoulders jerked up and down as she breathed. Color bloomed in her pale cheeks, and not in a good way. “It was time…I was ready…for breeding.”

  Rooster’s breakfast turned to lead in his stomach. “Breeding?”

  “I started bleeding, which means I’m a woman now, and they need more of us, and the best way is to…” She babbled, twisting her napkin between her hands until her knuckles turned white.

  “Hey,” Rooster said, and she looked at him gratefully. “That’s not gonna happen, okay?” Inwardly, his heart pounded. Breeding? What in the ever-loving shit were those people doing over there? “We’ll figure something else out.”

  “Thank you.” She blinked some more, but the tears were determined, and a few slipped down her cheeks. She brushed them away with her sleeve. “I know it’s my – my responsibility.” They sounded like repeated words, something an adult had told her that had never set right; a little line appeared between her brows as she frowned. “I was made for this, and I should be grateful for the chance to help, and–”

  “Hey,” he said again, and this time, reached across the table to cover her little hand with his own.

  She jumped at first, and then settled, her expression a miserable blend of guilt and exhaustion.

  He decided on a different line of questioning. “Do you know how old you are?”

  “Fifteen.”

  Older than he’d thought. “Okay, so, you’re fifteen. And I think it’s fair to say you like pancakes.”

  A shy little smile touched one corner of her mouth.

  “And you don’t have a name.”

  She shook her head, and another ribbon of red hair slid from beneath the cap, unraveling down the length of her throat.

  “How about Red? At least until we figure out something better.” He’d never been good at naming things, and really, Red was stupid. Red was what kids named dogs.

  But her smile stretched, wide and sweet. He heard the heels of her borrowed sneakers thump the booth as she swung her legs in a little circle. “I like that.”

  “Okay. Red it is.” He held his hand out to her across the table. A formal introduction. “Hi, Red. I’m Roger, but all my friends call me Rooster.”

  She slid her little hand against his, her skin warmer than it should have been. “Hi.”

  “So,” he said, reaching for his coffee again. “You can set stuff on fire, huh? What’s that like?”

  2

  Manhattan, New York

  Present Day

  A phone was ringing. The gentle chiming of the iPhone’s alert was far preferable to the shrill call of the landline it had replaced, but it was still an unwanted disturbance at – Nikita cracked his eyes open a crusty millimeter and read the dial on the bedside clock – four-thirty in the morning. As Sasha would say: ugh.

  Speaking of Sasha.

  Nikita could feel his warmth and weight down near the foot of the bed, curled up like a puppy on top of the covers. That happened often; he had his own bed – his own room, even, small though it was – but he didn’t like to sleep by himself. He snored soundly now, comforted by proximity and the safety of pack.

  The phone stopped, and was silent a moment. Then started up again.

  Nikita nudged Sasha with his toes. “Sashka.”

  He got an unhappy whine in protest.

  “I know you can hear that. It’s yours.”

  Sasha huffed, and snorted, but sat up and fished his phone from his hoodie pocket. “Yes, hello?” he mumbled sleepily without checking the screen. And then his eyes popped open and he straightened his spine.

  Nikita felt a thrill of nerves go down his back and sat up too, swiping the sleep from his eyes. “What?”

  “It’s Trina,” Sasha said. “You better talk to her.” He passed the phone over like it was a bomb about to go off
.

  Nikita took the phone with no small amount of trepidation. “Hello?” he asked when he put it to his ear.

  Trina breathed raggedly through her mouth, suppressed panic clear in her voice. “I can’t find Lanny.”

  ~*~

  Trina wasn’t an alarmist – she was Russian, for God’s sakes – so when she woke and found that Lanny was no longer in bed beside her, she didn’t panic. When she didn’t find him in the bathroom, or in the kitchen, though, and he didn’t come back after an hour and didn’t return any of her calls…then she started to fret. When she’d showered, nibbled on some toast, and checked in at the precinct, and there was still no sign of him? Then she panicked. A little.

  And she called Nikita. Well, Sasha, really.

  Her great-grandfather, it appeared, was not a morning person. (Though if myth and legend was to be believed, no vampire was.) He stood with one shoulder propped against the façade of his building, in rumpled clothes and unlaced combat boots, sporting bedhead and mirror-lensed shades, a Starbucks cup in one hand.

  By contrast, Sasha looked bright-eyed, his own sunglasses nestled in his shiny, freshly-washed hair, his boots laced tight and his iced coffee down to the dregs.

  “He came to you?” Trina asked, and felt her brows scale her forehead. “He asked you to” – a woman laden with shopping bags and two yelling children passed them on the sidewalk and she dropped her voice to a whisper – “turn him?”

  Nikita shrugged, and the gesture struck her as so completely Russian – and so completely familiar. It was the same one-shoulder shrug her grandfather used when he wanted to be evasive. Not just her grandfather, she reminded herself – Kolya Baskin was Nikita’s son. Maybe one day that would stop sounding strange.

  “He asked,” he said, voice gravelly as it had been on the phone a half hour ago. “I said ‘no.’”

  “You said no?”

  “Don’t shout.”

  She took an aggressive step forward, figurative hackles lifting. “He’s dying, Nik. Why the hell would you tell him no?”