by D. Laine
“I don’t know.” I shifted to peer down at Thea as she slept. “It’s not . . .”
“You said she was clear,” he added with an audible edge of desperation. “Dylan, you told me you checked.”
“I did!” I jerked at my own outburst, then lowered my voice. “Jake, she was clear. I don’t know how she got tagged, but it doesn’t seem to be progressing like normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said I’ve been out for three days,” I started slowly, and he nodded. “She got sick five days ago, Jake. Remember that night I didn’t come back to the hotel? It was because she was sick. She should have matured by now, but the mark isn’t even complete yet. It’s taking longer for her. And if she was tagged when I think she was tagged, it’s taking a lot longer.”
“When was that?”
“Three weeks ago,” I answered promptly.
He stared down at his sister with calculating eyes. “Has an assassin ever been tagged?”
“I don’t think so. If anyone was, the agency never told us.” I shifted to peer down at Thea’s closed eyelids. “She’s one of us, whether she wants to admit it or not, so maybe . . .”
“They said we couldn’t be tagged,” Jake gritted between clenched teeth.
“Maybe that’s why it’s not progressing like normal. Maybe her genetic makeup is fighting it. Maybe . . .”
There were too many maybes in the equation. I didn’t have the answer, but I wanted to believe what I said. The alternative wasn’t fathomable.
“Do we tell her?” Jake asked after a moment.
“Would you want to know?” I peeled my gaze away from Thea to look up at Jake. “I don’t want to scare her if we don’t have to. If we can get back to the base and find out that she’s protected then all of this worry will be for nothing.”
Jake swallowed hard. “And if she matures before we get there?”
“Then we’ll do what we have to do.” Despite the flutter in my chest, I met my partner’s gaze unflinchingly. “And we’ll face it together.”
A FEW HOURS LATER, I was moving around well. Since I hadn’t been able to go back to sleep after my talk with Jake, I insisted that he get some rest. He’d been out cold before his head hit my pillow.
Now, I watched with amusement as Thea stretched awake, and waited for her to realize she was snuggling with her brother. She rolled, unknowingly nuzzling her face into Jake’s chest.
I chuckled softly, and she stiffened. A second later she bolted up, nearly smacking her head on the low ceiling. Her gaze swung around the bunker before coming to a stop on me where I sat at the base of the stairs with a can of ravioli in my hands and a grin on my face.
Buried deep beneath her irritation was a trace of relief—just enough to give me hope. “I guess this means you’re not going to die,” she muttered.
“I have more lives than a cat.” I shrugged as I scooped a heaping spoonful of cold mush from the can. “You hang around me long enough, you’ll see.”
“I guess I’ll never know then,” she murmured as she slipped out of the bed. She stalked past me to swipe a bottled water from the stocked pantry.
“I get it, Thea. You’re pissed.” I turned to look up at her. “You have every right to be mad at me, but whether you like it or not, we’re kind of stuck together.”
She took a sip of water before answering, “For now.”
“For a long time,” I countered. “You might as well talk to me. Let me—”
“There’s nothing to explain, Dylan. Jake told us everything.”
“Everything?”
She glanced down at me with a stiff nod. “Everything.”
“Not everything,” a muffled moan came from the other side of the bunker. I looked up as Jake tossed the sheet aside and swung his feet to the floor. To Thea, he added, “I told you most of it. I was waiting for him”—he nodded at me—“to tell you the rest.”
Behind Thea, David groaned. “I can’t believe there’s more.”
How long had he been awake? It didn’t matter. We were all awake, and healthy, and ready to walk out of here.
We had a hell of a day ahead of us, full of things I had been prepared for, but had never seen. I was able to check fully matured, activated tags off my list. Question remained as to whether or not the vessels had been claimed by their demon masters yet. The full extent of the damage caused by the eruption remained to be seen, but I imagined the worst.
Looking into Thea’s and David’s eyes, I suspected Jake had already prepared them for some of that. Both looked rightfully spooked.
“So what do they know?” I asked Jake.
“I think we confirmed that the apocalypse is real,” David volunteered warily as he sat up to recline against the metal lined wall behind him. “Apparently, so are zombies.”
“Tags,” Jake corrected.
David shrugged. “They looked like genetically mutated super-zombies with that speed and—”
“Can we not talk about them anymore?” Thea snapped.
“Sorry, Thea,” David muttered. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Glancing at me, she added, “Jake told us about vessels, and said the people you killed—”
“We killed,” Jake volunteered.
“—were behind all of this,” she finished without missing a beat. “If they’re not stopped, then we’ll have hell on Earth when the vessels are inhabited by . . .”
“Demons,” I offered when she struggled to say the word.
Her head shook. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”
“Oh, it’s happening.” I turned to Jake. “Sounds like you covered everything. What else is there to tell them?”
Jake nodded pointedly at Thea while she wasn’t looking. “There were questions about the roles you and I play in all of this. Why we work in the apocalypse prevention business, and what exactly it is we do.”
“Ah.”
In other words, Jake chickened out when it came time to tell Thea that she was born into the same career path as Jake and I. Looking at the scowl on her face now, I understood why he hadn’t done it yet. She wasn’t exactly receptive to the information we had been dumping on her.
“You could have just given them the same speech we got when we were twelve,” I told Jake.
“I thought it best to wait for you,” he defended. “In case I forgot something.”
I smirked at my friend. We both knew he wouldn’t have forgotten. He wanted me to be the one to tell Thea the rest so that I was the bad guy—not him. Sneaky son of a bitch.
“So what is it?” she pressed impatiently.
I turned to her with a wary sigh. “What Jake and I were told when we were kids, and what you would have been told if you hadn’t been abducted, was that the day would come when the world as we know it would cease to exist.”
“The apocalypse. Right.” She nodded along and glanced at Jake. “But how did the two of you know this was going to happen?”
“We were chosen,” I answered. “It’s our so-called birth right.”
“I don’t understand,” she murmured.
I suspected she understood a lot more than she wanted to. She just didn’t want to admit it.
“There’s a secret agency, hidden in the deserts of Nevada, that has known this day was coming for a long time,” I explained.
“Centuries,” Jake added.
“In the beginning, a certain group of people were selected as a first line of defense,” I continued. “They were trained and prepared to do everything in their power to prevent the apocalypse from coming. There was something in their genetic makeup that made them the ultimate warriors. But they never got to use what they learned. The apocalypse never came.
“What made them special has been passed down for generations. Each new crop of warriors is trained and prepared, but our generation”—I turned to nod at Jake—“is the one that finally gets to use the gift we were given.”
A snort-like sound came from Thea’
s direction. I looked to find her head shaking softly. I understood her doubt. I’d had a hard time swallowing this pill when I was twelve—when the line between reality and make-believe was still blurry. Thea had her entire life to know stuff like this wasn’t real.
But it was real, and she played a bigger role than she realized yet.
“You’re one of us, Thea,” I told her softly—dropping the bomb Jake had been too afraid to drop on her earlier.
She glared at me. “I am not—”
“You are,” Jake jumped in. “You might not have been brought up and trained by the agency like Dylan and I were, but you were born with the gift. Same as him. Same as me.”
“No, I can’t.” She backed as far as she could into the corner of the bunker. Her head shook violently. “I’m a college student. I—”
“Not anymore,” Jake grumbled.
“Everything you knew is gone now, Thea,” I reminded her gently.
Several steps remained between us, and I itched to close that distance. I longed to wrap my arms around her, to provide her with the support she needed right now. My eyes darted behind her, where David sat, watching me, waiting for me to do something.
I shook my head at him. As hard as she was taking this, she wouldn’t want me to comfort her. That much was clear when I took a tentative step toward her . . . because I felt like I had to do something. She pulled away from me faster than a bolt of greased lightning.
“We can still fight this, Thea,” I offered. “There’s still a chance of getting back some of what we lost.”
Her eyes slowly lifted to mine, and I knew she’d deciphered the double meaning behind my words. Yes, we could still fight back with the help of the agency and the other assassins. All was not lost yet . . . not until the vessels were inhabited. But Thea wasn’t thinking about that right now.
She’d drawn the parallels to me . . . to us, and what we’d started. Her head shook softly. “How?”
“We go to the agency,” Jake volunteered, unaware of the moment passing between Thea and me. “We regroup and we fight back. If we get Lucifer’s vessel . . .”
“We don’t give up,” I told Thea, getting back to the double meanings. “Not when we have something worth fighting for.”
She sucked in a shaky breath before turning away from me. It wasn’t a total shut down. The glint of unshed tears in her eyes confirmed that she got my message, and possibly still had hope, even if she wasn’t ready to act on it.
She had once told me some things were worth waiting for. I hadn’t understood the point she was trying to make then, but now I got it. Now I had something worth waiting for.
“So we’re leaving here?” She directed her question to Jake.
“We have to,” he replied.
“Is it safe?”
Jake and I shared a look. With the tags snacking on the humans that had survived the eruption, it wouldn’t be safe for a very long time. I didn’t know if she was asking about that, or the fallout from the eruption. I knew the answer to one of those. For the other, I directed the question to David.
“What do you think, genius?”
“The initial danger is gone,” David answered slowly. “Ash that was pushed into the atmosphere will continue to fall for weeks, possibly months. As far as that goes, we’d probably only need to worry about lingering fires that are still burning and the negative effects on the air we will be breathing. It will be worse closer to the vent, and improve as we get farther from it.”
“Did your parents stock any gas masks in here?” Jake asked Thea. All of us heard the tone he used to hiss the word “parents.” He made it no secret what he thought of the people that had taken his sister from him—even before they tried to eat me.
I doubted he’d hidden his feelings about them from Thea while I was out cold the past few days. Already, I glimpsed the signs of sibling annoyance that ran rampant amongst the teams of assassins.
Thea rolled her eyes before turning to search the wall of supplies and food behind her. She produced three military-grade gas masks.
“We can rotate them between the four of us,” she suggested. Turning to David, she asked, “Will that work?”
“It’s better than nothing,” he shrugged. Shifting his gaze toward me, he sighed. “But what I’m more worried about is . . .”
“The things that snacked on me?” I guessed when I saw that he was struggling.
He darted a glance in Thea’s direction before nodding.
“We’re going to encounter a lot of those things once we leave here,” Jake announced. “You better get used to seeing them.”
“Jesus, Jake,” I groaned.
“They need to know,” he argued. To Thea and David, he added, “Either of you know how to shoot a gun?”
Of all the surprising events lately, nothing shocked me more than the sight of Thea nodding her head. David looked ready to puke.
To me, Jake suggested, “Quick crash course for him before we move out?”
“I’ll do it,” I volunteered.
“I’ll pack our stuff.” Jake grabbed one of the two backpacks that carried our supplies.
“Whoa, wait a minute.” David jumped from the cot. “We’re just going to leave? No plan? No strategy? No way of knowing what’s out there?”
“We know what’s out there, David.”
I snatched one of the guns from the floor and quickly checked the chamber for bullets. Two missing. Jake already had replacements fished out of the bag, and tossed them to me. I slid them into place, snapped the chamber shut, and held it out to David.
“Trust me when I say you’re going to need this.”
He accepted it with unsteady hands—exactly why I hadn’t disengaged the safety. “I . . . I can’t believe I’m going to have to shoot a gun for survival.”
Despite the gravity of the situation, I flashed him a grin. “Welcome to the apocalypse.”
TAGGED
APOCALYPSE ASSASSINS BOOK TWO
PROLOGUE
Thea
My home was gone; the town I grew up in, unrecognizable. The trees I once found solace in had been uprooted and laid over like dominos. Most had been scorched. Some still smoldered, adding to the already putrid air we breathed.
I trudged through the thick layer of volcanic ash that carpeted the ground. My eyes never drifted from the broad shoulders in front of me, even if I didn’t particularly like their owner right now. I feared getting lost in the cloud of soot that rained down on us if I were to lose sight of him.
For now, survival trumped pride. In the aftermath of the eruption, our small group had only two goals: Get to safety. Stay alive.
When alien shrieks arose in the distance, lifting the hairs on the back of my neck, I feared we would fail at both. I couldn’t see the source of the eerie noises—not through the thick ash that fell from the sky—but I felt the danger creeping closer. Led by razor sharp teeth and a taste for flesh, the threat had been constant since the moment we emerged from the shelter. I sensed them around me. Everywhere.
Two sturdy bodies lined up on each side of me to create an impenetrable barricade. A third bumped into my back. The three of them were all I had left.
One of them slid a bullet into their gun’s chamber, prompting me to do the same. The hollow clicks pierced the brief silence.
“We do this together,” a deep voice rumbled from beside me.
I breathed in and out once. Twice.
Then all of hell descended on us.
1
THEA
2 weeks later
It was the little things I missed the most. Don’t get me wrong. The big things like hot food, fresh water, and a comfortable place to sleep were on my mind constantly—like an overplayed song permanently on repeat in my head—but it was the little things I carried an unhealthy obsession for. Soap to wash my ash-covered hair, a toothbrush to get rid of the taste of cold ravioli in my mouth, and coffee . . .
Oh, God, did I ever miss coffee. Not only for the
caffeine boost I desperately needed on these long and grueling days, but for the warmth it provided.
I never realized how much I had taken sunlight for granted until I didn’t have it anymore. The sky was perpetually black now. Sun-blocking ash drifted slowly toward the earth as if it had nothing else better to do than complicate our lives. My hair was thick with it, my clothes and backpack covered. The sturdy straps already bit into my shoulders, weighed down by several days’ worth of food and water and a spare change of clothes. Every ten minutes I stopped to shake like a wet dog to get rid of the extra ash piled on top.
More than I wished for a cup of coffee, I wished I could take a proper bath. With extra bubbles.
The last we had seen fresh, clean water not sealed away in a plastic bottle was two weeks ago. I tried not to think about that wonderful final morning before everything went to hell, but there were times I couldn’t help but immerse myself in those pleasant memories—if only to escape my new, sobering reality.
My trips down memory lane always started with my waking up beside the sexy and mysterious Dylan Romero. I had taken my last shower, eaten my last hot meal, and feasted on the deliciousness of a great last kiss. At the time I hadn’t known that those would be the final moments of my life as a normal college student caught in a whirlwind romance.
The apocalypse had changed everything.
Now my thoughts centered around how many times I could pull the trigger before I needed to reload, how much water I had left, and when I would be able to rest my aching feet again. This had been the case since we fled my parents’ underground shelter in Montana two weeks ago.
We had trekked nearly four hundred miles since then—but who was counting?
One advantage of walking through the vast wilderness of eastern Idaho was the lack of blood-and-flesh-craving monsters released in the aftermath of the volcano’s eruption. The tags seemed to prefer heavily populated areas—with an abundance of people to feast on. We hadn’t seen many of the demon-DNA-infused creatures since we’d left Montana behind.