by D. Laine
Jake was at my side when I reached the door to the compound, with Maria and Marcus not far behind. Two agents’ bodies lay in the entrance, and I darted right by them. Whether or not the Preppers followed wasn’t my concern.
Thea was.
Sadie was.
They were all that mattered at the moment.
The power to the compound had been cut. Flashing red emergency lights basked us in an eerie glow and lit our way. I took the stairs at a sprint. Maria’s warnings faded behind me, but Jake’s footsteps kept up with mine.
We vaulted over bodies. We cut down feasting tags in our path. We didn’t stop until we hit the bottom level of the compound. I only slowed when I saw that the door was already open.
I tossed a wary glance over my shoulder as I reached for the handle. Jake’s encouraging nod gave me the strength I needed to yank it open. Despite the steady grip he had on his gun, I saw his fear. It mirrored mine.
We may be too late. We might find them dead.
But he was with me. If we found the worst, we would face it together.
I heard the tags the moment I stepped into the corridor, and my chest tightened. So many of them. Their hollow screams surrounded me, but I couldn’t see them.
Our slow and cautious steps echoed off the floor as we drew closer to them. We passed two empty cells before I saw the first tags. Their skeletal arms slipped between narrow steel bars, and I lowered my gun when I realized they were locked up.
“Dylan?” I spun around to find Jake peering into another cell—this one with its door swung wide open. A dead agent lay sprawled on the floor. “They got out.”
Under other circumstances, that would have been a good thing. Not with the massacre we had witnessed on the way here. Had I jumped over Thea’s body without knowing? My own sister’s body? I didn’t even know what she looked like now. How would I find her in the chaos?
No. She was alive. I had to believe that. If only I had my connection to—
I spun toward Jake. “Can you sense Thea?”
His brows pinched together as if he were in pain, and the ache in my chest worsened as I waited for him to tell me that he couldn’t sense her. Because that would mean she was dead. Instead, he said, “She’s close. I think.”
“You think?”
“She’s safe.” He shook his head. “Somewhere dark.”
“Somewhere dark?” Apparently I was reduced to repeating words.
“I don’t think she’s in the compound.” Jake spun toward the door, then tossed a glance over his shoulder as I followed. “And I don’t think she’s alone.”
Sadie. Please, if there was a God, let her be with my sister.
The trip to the surface was quieter than it had been going down. Just as many tag bodies covered the floor as dead agents. This time, I took the time to look at faces. I recognized a few of the agents from passing. I felt bad that they had been duped by Spence, only to get caught in the crosshairs. Working with evil had cost them their lives, but I didn’t have time to mourn their untimely deaths.
None of them were Spence.
When we reached the landing to the third level, I called out to Jake. “Wait a minute.”
He froze with one foot on the next step. “We’ll get him later, Dylan.”
“No. We need to end him now.”
I barreled through the open door, and nearly tripped over a body in my path. I glanced down to find Tanner Ergot’s vacant eyes staring up at me. His neck had been slashed open, not by tag teeth but something cleaner.
My lips curled into a half smile. “Something tells me they’ve been this way.”
Maybe Thea and Sadie were hiding out nearby? Or, at the very least, someone who could tell us where they were. I took off, biting back the urge to call out their names. Not until I knew Spence was dead. Something told me that fucker was close.
I eased open the door to his office with the barrel of my gun. Behind me, Jake gave me the go-ahead with a nod. He was on my heels when I rushed into the room. Darkness enveloped us. The flashing red light from the hallway didn’t chase away the shadows that filled Spence’s office.
Steps inside the door, I froze.
Call it a sixth sense—or perhaps it was a gift from being descendent of a higher power—but I knew the traitor was in there. I felt his presence. A second later, I felt the rush of his blade as it swung toward me.
I threw my gun out to deflect his strike. The steel blade clanged off the barrel of my gun. My other hand thrust out, blindly reaching for where I suspected I would find his neck. With a satisfied grunt, my fingers curved around supple flesh.
“Told you I would come back for you,” I sneered as I tossed him against the wall. I expected more of a fight from him, considering he was Lucifer’s chosen vessel, but he flailed limply in my grasp. The blood pooling at our feet told me that he had been injured. Easily pinning him near the door, where the red light illuminated his battered face, I demanded, “Where are they?”
“Take a close look at all the bodies on the floor,” he suggested coldly. “I suspect you’ll find them eventually.”
My grip tightened. “You thought you would get away with this? You actually thought you would pull this off?”
“You have no idea what we—”
“I know enough!” With a roar, I smashed his head into the wall. “You’re a fucking traitor. You’re Lucifer’s vessel. You manipulated us—”
“I did what I had to do to survive!”
“Yeah? So where’s your master now?” I swept a gaze over his wounds—bite marks and deep scratches—that meant the tags had not spared him in the massacre. He’d merely gotten lucky.
Spence’s eyes dimmed and his lips thinned. I slammed his head against the wall to give him the encouragement he needed to talk.
Jake was much more controlled when he spoke from over my shoulder. “What’s happening, Spence?”
“I don’t know.” The man who had practically raised us sagged against the wall, the air of superiority that always hovered around him gone. “I no longer feel his presence with me.”
“He turned his back on you, didn’t he?” I jeered. “He got what he needed from you, so he sent his little soldiers to get rid of you.”
Spence glared at me, but offered no response.
“Who is his new puppet?” I demanded.
Still nothing. I tried to encourage him to answer with another slam into the wall.
“He wouldn’t give up now, Spence,” Jake reasoned. “He must have another vessel somewhere. Your brother claims it can’t be him—”
“Or is he full of shit?” I interrupted.
“Is there another that it can be?” Jake pressed.
Spence’s eyes bounced back and forth between Jake and me. Finally, a cunning smirk settled on his lips. “There is one other.” His voice rattled from the blood collecting in his throat. “One who has the resources I no longer have.”
“The tagged vessels? The ones with both demon and Watcher blood? Is that what you mean by resources?” Jake questioned.
“He’s smart enough to know he needs them. All of them,” Spence replied. “The Watchers will stand no chance in defeating him with them on his side.”
“I suppose kidnapping them didn’t work out for you,” I jeered.
“Tell us who his vessel is,” Jake ordered. “You still have time to do the right thing.”
Spence’s head shook fractionally. “That will go with me to my grave.”
“You’ll be there soon enough.” I gripped my blade with my free hand, deciding Spence deserved a slower and more agonizing death than a shot to the head would give him.
Spence cackled madly and wheezed, “Lucifer will win. The Watchers will come, and you will be at their mercy.”
“Well, they can try. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that I don’t like to follow orders.” I pressed the blade to his throat, prepared to end him and his madness now.
“Killing me will change nothing. I’m no longe
r his slave. I—”
“I’d rather not take the chance.” The sharp metal bit into his skin, drawing a sliver of fresh blood.
I knew he needed to die. We couldn’t take the chance of Lucifer coming back to claim him later. All potential vessels of Lucifer needed to be eliminated, but right now? Offing a man already half-dead felt like cold-blooded murder. I hesitated.
Spence shifted. The arm at his side moved fractionally. The gleam of shiny metal reflected in the light as he withdrew a gun from behind his back. He swung it up, targeting Jake in his sights.
The gun fired as I swatted his arm down with one hand. I flicked the knife across his throat with the other. Blood spurted from the narrow wound, misting the front of my coat and forcing me to take a step back.
“Jake?” I yelled over my shoulder.
“He missed,” Jake assured me, rushing to my side as Spence fell to the floor. Together, we stared down at our traitorous commander and the puddle of blood collecting on the floor around him. We watched in silence as the last raspy breath left him.
Jake grabbed me by the arm. “We need to go.”
I inched away from Spence’s body with an eager nod. We needed to find Thea and Sadie, then figure out what to do about the Preppers. I had no doubt that they would turn on us once the abducted members of their group were found.
I was reassured of that suspicion the moment Jake and I reached the top level of the agency. We found Maria and Marcus near the main door, watching the Preppers warily as they moved around the many outbuildings. Dead tags littered the ground. No prisoners. No Thea. No Sadie. But a lot of Preppers dressed in ninja gear.
I spotted two cresting the hill that lay between us and the highway, each carrying steel and black leather bindings that resembled something taken from the basement of a twisted sociopath with a serious BDSM fetish. I didn’t doubt the restraints were for us.
“They’re showing up in carloads,” Maria grumbled. “I knew this was a bad idea. I knew we shouldn’t have trusted them.”
“So let’s get who we came here for and get out of here,” Jake suggested.
“Any idea where they could have gone?” I asked no one in particular, and got no answer.
After a moment, Maria murmured, “If you escaped in the middle of a tag attack . . .”
Where would I go?
Not out in the open where tags could spot me. Not in the compound where Spence or any of the double-crossing agents could find me. That left . . .
“Maybe they tried to make it back to their camp,” Marcus offered, disrupting the idea slowly forming in my head.
“No.” Jake’s brows furrowed when he glanced at me. “It’s too far. They would hunker down somewhere close until daylight.”
The rising sun was visible over the horizon now. A soft beam of light filtered through the ash and reflected off the metallic roof of the hangar directly across from us. A cluster of Preppers walked the perimeter of the building, eyeing the ground for footprints. They must have lost the tracks amongst all the tags’ footprints.
The desert was too open to seek shelter in the middle of a tag attack. The hangars would have been three-sided death traps. Unless . . .
Jake spun to me with wide eyes when the idea hit him at the same time it hit me.
“The tunnel,” he whispered.
“Come on,” I ordered Maria and Marcus.
Avoiding the searching Preppers, we quickly slipped through the gate and took cover between two outbuildings. From there, we could see hangar six. I put a hand up to stop the others behind me when I spotted a heavily armed Prepper wander out of the building. He shook his head at another Prepper, but that didn’t discourage me. They didn’t know there was a hidden tunnel in there.
But Thea knew. She was smart enough to lead the abducted Preppers to it.
Once the guys wandered out of sight, we moved. Slipping into the shadows inside the hangar, we raced toward the back wall where we knew the hatch would be found. The smell hit me several yards away, and my steps faltered. I trudged forward on unsteady legs, refusing to give in to the wave of despair that familiar smell induced, until the first tag body came into view. Then another. And another.
A mound of them lay among the mangled and twisted metal that had once been the hatch.
“This is how they got in,” Marcus concluded.
Jake toed bodies to the side to clear a path before dropping to his knees at the opening. “Thea?”
“Can you sense her?” I hoped.
“She’s close,” he confirmed. Then he jumped through the opening.
I lunged toward the edge, choking back the bile. “Jake, what—”
Jake’s strained voice echoed from inside the tunnel. “They’re everywhere down here.”
“No shit. I don’t think she would go in there, man. You should probably—”
“Dylan?”
I spun toward the soft voice calling my name and squinted into the shadows as Thea stepped out of hiding. I treaded through the maze of tag bodies as she broke into a run. Her small body packed a hell of a punch when she slammed into me. I nearly toppled us both over as she climbed me like a spider monkey, wrapping her arms and legs around me. Then my hands cupped her ass and her mouth smashed against mine, and all was right in the world again.
She was alive. She was here. And I had her back in my arms.
Her lips slid from mine long enough to mutter, “I thought you . . .”
I squeezed her tighter. “I told you I would come back.”
She buried her face into my neck with a nod. “I still worried when—” Her head snapped back, and she directed her terrified eyes at me. “Where’s Jake?”
“He’s here.” I set her on her feet. “He thought it was a good idea to—”
Another person drifted out of the shadows behind Thea, and I froze. Though we had no bond—not anymore—I would know my sister anywhere. There were some things no length of separation could change. Like the slightly lopsided twist of her lips when she smiled, and the adoring glint in her eyes when she looked at me—her big brother by two whole minutes.
Thea shifted to follow the direction of my gaze, and her arms constricted around my waist. “I found someone I think you’d like to meet,” she told me softly.
I could do nothing but nod. Distantly, I heard Marcus helping Jake out of the tunnel. I vaguely felt Thea’s arms slip away. I was pretty sure I took a few steps, because I was getting closer to Sadie. Or she was drawing closer to me, and I was rooted to the ground. Honestly, I didn’t know what was happening while the Earth tipped on its axis beneath me.
I had no idea who moved first, or if I even moved at all, but it didn’t matter the moment I pulled my sobbing sister into my arms. And fuck if I didn’t tear up like a big pussy. I squeezed her tight to make sure she was real. Then I squeezed tighter, burying my face in her hair as if that could conceal the flood of emotions that washed over me.
Not all of it was mine. It didn’t take me long to recognize the faint hum of a connection between us, and that was the excuse I would use if anyone thought it would be funny to point out the drop of moisture currently sliding down my cheek. I would blame it on Sadie and her fragile emotional state—which she had no problem expressing.
“Dad’s not here, you know?” she murmured against my shirt.
I pressed my cheek to the top of her head. “Dad’s dead.”
The words were out of my mouth before I realized my error. Perhaps I shouldn’t have assumed she knew that, considering she had been taken from the car before our parents were murdered. She didn’t react to my words, so I assumed she had discovered the truth at some point. Or already suspected it.
“I don’t care what Dad always said,” she told me. “It’s okay to be emotional.”
“You’re cheating.”
“I’m not trying to.” She finally pulled back far enough for me to see her face. Red, puffy eyes, identical to mine, peered up at me. “You’re pretty obvious. You always have been e
asy for me to read.”
A few snort-laugh-cough noises came from behind me. I shifted to peer over my shoulder, and found Jake, Thea, Marcus, and Maria watching us with a combination of bewildered and amused faces.
“I think there’re a few people who would disagree with you,” I informed Sadie.
Seeing the rest of the group, Sadie reluctantly slid out of my arms. But she stayed glued to my hip. Wiping at her wet eyes, she nodded. “So I’ve heard.”
I didn’t miss the look that passed between Thea and Sadie, and pinned Thea with a curious look of my own. “Heard what exactly?”
I glanced back at Sadie to find her frowning at me in that way only sisters can get away with. “Apparently, you grew up prone to some grade-A dickery in my absence.”
“Grade A?” I knew what Sadie meant, but I couldn’t help myself. Giving Thea a wink, I added, “I certainly do give a hundred percent. Thanks for noticing.”
While Thea shook her head, Sadie jabbed a finger into my stomach. “And you fell for him?”
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Thea returned drily.
“You know I am, baby.”
“You also seem to have forgotten the predicament we’re in,” Maria snapped. I followed her worried gaze to the open end of the hangar as two man-shaped shadows approached us. “What are we going to do about these Preppers who obviously want us dead?”
Sadie flinched.
“I think they plan on taking us alive,” Jake quickly offered.
“Maybe, but they’re not taking me away in chains,” I informed my partner before nudging Sadie behind me.
Jake’s brisk nod confirmed we were on the same page—cuffed and chained was not an acceptable option. Maria and Marcus reached for their weapons at the same time as Jake and I. The click-click-click of half a dozen weapons being readied at the same time echoed through the hangar.
The Preppers stopped several yards away, guns drawn. Only the panicked shrieks of my sister kept either side from firing first.
“No! Wait!” She darted into the space between the two groups, causing a physical pain to shoot through me at the danger she willingly put herself in. To me, she said, “It won’t be like that.”
“Like what? Dead? Or imprisoned?” Maria demanded.