Blood and Bone (Royal Blood #6)

by Amity Cross

  “I know,” X said. “It’s not going to be nice.”

  I ran through the maps I had available, but they were crap at best. Knocking up some code, I worked my way into the MI6 satellite array through a backdoor and searched for one that was currently over London. Even though I worked for them, accessing the data like this had forced me to break about a dozen anti-terrorism and cybercrime laws. Mercy was worth it.

  “What’s taking so long?” X asked, beginning to get agitated.

  “It takes time,” I said. “I’m fast, but it still takes a while. Give me a break.”

  A screen flashed up onto the laptop as my program hooked into a satellite, and I ran the execute, and locations began to pop up of possible sites where they could have taken her. There was one about a mile away from our current location that we could start with. It fit the profile, but before I could open my mouth to direct X there, my phone began to ring.

  The dramatic tones of Eye of The Tiger began to shrill through the car, and X raised his eyebrow. “What the fuck is that?”

  Mercy’s number was flashing on the screen, and I almost dropped the laptop on the floor at my feet.

  “My phone,” I said, answering it before X could take it from me. I figured the last thing she wanted to hear when she was buried alive in a box was her dead boyfriend.

  “Mercy?” I asked. “Mercy, can you hear me?”

  “Jackson…” She sounded groggy, the call dropping in and out.

  “Listen to me very carefully,” I said. “We need to conserve as much battery power on your phone as possible. Are you hearing me?”

  “I… I can hear you.” There was a pause. “Battery…”

  “Yes, Mercy. The battery. I need you to do something for me the moment I hang up, okay?”

  “Okay…”

  “You have an iPhone, right? I need you to turn on the Find My iPhone app.”

  “Seriously?” X asked beside me.

  I stuck my finger in my ear, blocking him out. “Did you get that, Mercy?”

  “Find my iPhone…” she mumbled.

  “We’re coming,” I said. “We’re going to get you out of there, okay?”

  “Find my iPhone…”

  The call dropped out, beeping coming down the line, and I glanced at the screen as it went dark.

  “Are you shitting me?” X practically roared. “You’re putting her life in the hands of a fucking mobile phone app?”

  “We’re time poor. It’s the best and easiest solution. It will give us a general location based on GPS, then I can narrow it down by rigging up a scanner that will detect the radio frequency given off by mobile devices…” I hammered on the keyboard and logged into Mercy’s Apple account, hoping to God that she had activated the app.

  “Mobile device? Every fucker and his dog in this city has a mobile device.”

  “Have you got any other ideas?” I yelled at him. “Have you, X? Because I’m the only one here with the above average IQ. All I’ve got is my brain and a laptop. I’m not a super hero fucking assassin! I want to get her back as much as you do!”

  X raised his eyebrow. “So you do have a pair of balls down there.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I shot back, bringing up the Find My iPhone app. A dot appeared on the map, and I declared, “There! She’s there!”

  X leaned over and checked the location. “I’ll get us there. Do you have what you need for your scanner?”

  “Give me your phone,” I demanded, holding out my hand.

  Thankfully, he didn’t hesitate. Getting to work, I ripped his phone to pieces and began assembling the components I needed to turn it into a device that scanned for radio waves. Opening the glove box in front of me, I pulled out a screwdriver I’d seen rolling around and began prying the radio from the console.

  By the time X pulled the car into a space at the location Mercy’s app had pinpointed, I was putting the finishing touches on the device. It looked like a pile of shit, but what was I meant to do while riding in a speeding car?

  “We’re here,” X said.

  Glancing up, I saw rows of headstones stretching out before us into the darkness.

  “They put her in a grave?” I asked. “Literally in a grave?”

  “Does that thing work?” X asked, ignoring my stupidly obvious question.

  “We’ll see in a moment,” I replied, placing the battery from his phone into the back of the scanner. The screen lit up, and I let out a whoop. “We’ve got ignition.”

  Jumping from the car, I darted forward through the rows of graves, following the signal. X was hot on my heels as the beeping got louder.

  “This isn’t an exact science,” I said. “It’ll bring us within range. We’ve gotta find her by looking for disturbed earth… Here!” The signal had reached a plateau, which meant we were close. “She’s around here someplace.”

  X grabbed my arm and gestured for me to look around. “Where?”

  Hesitating, I saw the freshly filled graves and counted five. Five. We couldn’t dig them all up in time.

  “You’ve got the brain, Jackson,” X said. “Which one is the most likely?”

  I didn’t have time to think about it. I rushed forward and stuck my hand into the earth of the closest grave. “Not this one.” I rushed to the second as X disappeared—probably looking for a couple of shovels. The next grave was the same as the first. The earth had been packed in hard. “Nope.” Falling to my knees at the third, I had a good feeling when my fingers pushed through the dirt easily. When they buried Mercy, they would have been hasty, filling the hole in quickly.

  Rising to my feet, I saw X running toward me with a pair of shovels in his hands. “This one! It has to be this one.”

  He didn’t answer. He just threw me a shovel and began digging like a madman. Since the earth hadn’t been packed into the hole, it’d just been backfilled and left to settle on its own, it wasn’t that hard to move. For a puny weakling like me, it was easy going…until I cracked a sweat.

  We’d gotten to four feet when X grimaced, his hand coming to rest over his shoulder. When he pulled it away, it was damp with blood.

  “You’ve been shot,” I declared, putting two and two together.

  “Give him a gun, and he thinks he’s Sherlock fucking Holmes,” he drawled, leaning back against the wall of earth.

  “Let me dig. You’re no good to her really dead, you know,” I said, ignoring his smartass comment and shoveling twice as fast. My chest felt like it was going to explode, but the thought of Mercy suffocating right underneath our feet had me pushing through it.

  X climbed out of the hole and fell onto his back as I continued digging. Gotta get her out, I thought. Mercy Reid was one of the few people at work who seemed to understand a fool like me. I rambled, suffered anxiety attacks, spoke in riddles no one seemed to understand even though it made complete sense to me… She got that I was different but didn’t compensate. She treated me just like she treated everyone else. It was weird, but it was what I wanted. I had to save Mercy Reid.

  My shovel hit something hard, and I glanced up at X. “This has to be it.”

  I scraped away at the dirt, exposing what was below…pine. If it were a proper coffin, a nice one that people were usually put inside of, it’d be a nice polished rosewood or whatever funeral homes used or up-selled to grieving families.

  “This is it!” I exclaimed as X jumped down into the hole beside me.

  We scraped the last part of earth away, enough so we could pry up a plank of wood. It snapped as we wrenched it away, X wincing as the effort tore through his shoulder.

  Peering into the darkened hole, I made out the shape of a body inside. Pulling out my phone, I turned on the flashlight, and my heart leapt as it revealed an unconscious Mercy.

  “Holy fuck!” I exclaimed.

  Wrestling with another plank of wood, we opened up the hole so it was large enough to get her out. I dragged Mercy from the hole, X taking her from my arms as I collapsed in a heap on the gr
ass. He leaned over her, checking for a pulse, his expression full of emotions I’d never seen him wear before. I knew he loved her, but I’d never seen it. I sure as hell saw it now.

  “Is she…?” I asked, heaving in breath after breath.

  “She’s alive,” he said, clutching her limp body against his chest like she was the most precious thing in the world. “She’s alive.”

  Chapter 22

  Mercy

  When you’re encased in total and complete darkness, any light is blinding.

  When my prison shattered above me, at first I thought angels of death had come to take me away. Two men stood haloed by the light, their hands grabbing my limbs and hauling me from my tomb. They were coming to take me to hell.

  The angels wore the faces of Jackson and X, which was weird as fuck. X was dead. If he was anything in the afterlife, it was a demon made of fire. Lucifer’s right-hand man.

  “Mercy! Thank fucking God,” X exclaimed, his arms closing around me.

  Shit, the oxygen deprivation had gone to my head, and I was hallucinating. It was the only explanation.

  As oxygen filled my lungs, I began coughing and rolled onto my side. Jackson was there, and it was the Jackson I remembered. No wings, just perspiration and a dirty face. Did Jackson dig me up? Well, I’ll be damned.

  “Moltke’s going to murder everyone in MI6,” I muttered. “He said he saw Vesper die. Lorelei…” I swallowed. “What he did to her was the same as Vesper. He wants revenge on us all…”

  “We know,” the apparition that looked like X said. “We know. He’s got the hard drive and the Veltium-34. It’s only a matter of time before he strikes.”

  “He’s moved up his timetable…” I said. “We have to warn them… In three days, he’ll have what he needs to complete…to complete the weaponization of the Veltium-34… Then… I don’t know how, but he’ll use it.”

  “Leave it to me,” Jackson said. “I’ll make sure they get the intel.”

  I pushed my shaking body into a seated position and peered at the hallucination. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen X when I shouldn’t have. When I’d been tortured by The Watchman, I’d projected him into a familiar scene. The field outside the cottage, the stars stretching over our heads into infinity. X loved the stars.

  “Do you see that?” I asked Jackson.

  “See what?” He glanced around the graveyard.

  “Him.” I jabbed a finger at X…or the figment of my imagination. I wasn’t sure which to refer to him as.

  “Mr. Blood?” Jackson asked, cocking his head to the side.

  “Mr. Blood?” I asked, turning on my ass so I faced X. “Mr. Blood?”

  “She thinks I’m a hallucination,” he drawled. “Give her a minute.”

  “How do you know when the minute is up?” Jackson asked in his own unique and clueless way.

  My mind was like a raging whirlpool of emotions and pain as I took deep breaths. X was dead, and then X was alive. Jackson could see the apparition just as clearly as I was seeing it now. Slowly, oxygen began fueling my brain, and reality became tangible.

  Putting two and two together, I raised my hand and slapped X in the face as hard as I could. My palm cracked against his skin, forcing his head to the side.

  He raised his hand and started rubbing his jaw. “That’s how you know.”

  “I thought you were dead!” I shrieked at him. “I thought you were gone!”

  “Calm yourself,” X soothed. “You’re in shock.”

  There was no way in hell I was listening to anything he had to say. I lunged, throwing myself on him, and he fall backward onto the grass with me on top. He winced as I battered my fists against him, but I hardly noticed the change in his expression.

  “You left me, you left me, you left me!”

  Sitting, he wrapped his arms around me, forcing my body against his in an attempt to calm the raging storm I’d whipped myself into. Hurricane Mercy.

  “Shh,” he soothed. “I’m here, Mercy. I’m here.” His lips brushed against my forehead as I sank against his chest, the fight bleeding from my limbs. “I’ll explain everything, but we need to get you out of here, okay?”

  “You’re not dead?”

  “I’m not dead.”

  Tears began to spill down my cheeks as he lifted me into his arms, and I was vaguely aware of being carried through the darkness and placed in a car. Grasping X’s arm, I prodded at the blood that soaked his T-shirt and ran down his bare arm.

  “A scratch,” he whispered.

  Letting my arm drop, he fastened my seat belt and climbed into the driver’s seat. Whatever happened next, I didn’t know. Knowing I was safe with Jackson and X, I allowed the darkness to take me again.

  When I finally surfaced again, I was lying on the bed in the hotel room Jackson had found for us. The same bed I’d lain in and let my anguish at X’s death try to take me.

  Blinking, I focused on the body that lay next to me.

  “Where’s Jackson?” I asked X. He was beside me, his back against the headboard, his fingers probing his shoulder.

  “He’s gone to report your intel to MI6,” he replied, reaching for one of those square sticky bandage things doctors stuck on wounds at the hospital. Whatever they were called.

  I pushed myself up, ignoring the fatigue that still clung inside my head, stuffing it up with cotton wool. “You’re hurt…”

  “Moltke shot me,” he said like it was akin to getting a scratch. “What I want to know is how you overpowered that assassin.”

  I took a deep breath. The assassin… “Jackson shot him,” I said and shook my head. “He… He had a photo of you…”

  “Jackson mentioned something like that,” X mused. “I’m sorry you believed…” He hesitated and glanced at me, his expression dark.

  “It was a message,” I said. “He knew about your compulsion, and he used it to send me a message… That’s how I knew…”

  “Moltke believes I’m dead,” he said dryly. “And I would have been if it wasn’t for Hawkes.”

  I paused. “Hawkes?”

  “The old fucker dove into the Thames and fished me out,” he said, leaning against the headboard. “He took me back to his safe house and dug out the bullet.” Glancing at his shoulder, he prodded the wound that now looked ugly and red. “I messed up his stitches.”

  “Hawkes…” I’d all but forgotten that I’d enlisted his help to get a message to X. Had I led him into a trap without knowing? “The meet for the stolen hard drive was another trap, wasn’t it?”

  X nodded. “Couldn’t be helped. I knew what I was risking, and I went anyway.”

  “Fuck.” I rubbed my eyes. “And Hawkes followed you.”

  “As far as Hawkes is concerned, we’re even as it gets.” He glanced at me. “Lorelei got out of the UK safe.”

  A little of the pressure weighing on my heart lifted. “Good.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment and rolled away from him. He moved with me like I was a gravitational force pulling him in. I lay for a moment, feeling the pressure of X’s legs against my back.

  “X…” I hesitated, not knowing how to explain the pain that had split me in two when I believed he was gone.

  “I know,” he replied.

  Of all the emotions swirling through me at that moment, the one I chose to grab onto was anger. X left me. X could have died. Moltke buried me alive. Moltke almost killed X. X left me. He’d promised he would never leave again, and what did he do? He left.

  “You left me,” I said, beginning to grind my teeth.

  “I had to leave to protect you,” he said. “It was the only thing I could do.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I spat, turning so I could see him. “You made me a promise after we escaped The Watchman. Always and forever. You and me until the end. You left and almost got yourself killed. Then I almost got taken out by a fucking assassin.” My voice began to rise, my anger getting dangerously close to overwhelming me. “I felt like dying. When I tho
ught you’d died, I wanted to die with you.” I pushed myself to my knees, the mattress rocking. “I can’t fucking believe you let me think you were dead!” Straddling him, I jammed my palm against his gunshot wound.

  His expression contorted in pain, and he grasped my wrist, flipping me back onto the bed. Pinning me down with his weight, he lowered his lips to mine.

  “Always and forever, Mercy,” he murmured.

  I seethed, my gaze burning into his. I wanted to tell him that he’d broken my heart and the unfaltering trust I’d placed in him. I wanted to hurt him like he’d hurt me…and he knew it.

  How did I know he wouldn’t do something like this again in the name of love? I didn’t. I didn’t, but that was the risk I had taken when I’d pledged my soul to him.

  “I fucking hate you for leaving me,” I hissed.

  “No, you don’t,” he murmured, his lips brushing against mine. “You’re angry. That’s a very different emotion to hate.”

  “So you’re the emotion king now?” I scoffed. “That’s rich.”

  His mouth closed over mine, his tongue wrapping greedily around mine. Despite how pissed off I was with him, my body exploded underneath his touch, and I found myself fumbling with the button on his jeans.

  “I hate you,” I mumbled between kisses. “Absolutely fucking loathe you.”

  “If it feels like this, then loathe as much as you like,” he replied, ridding me of my top.

  He pulled my arms above my head, forcing my breasts to jut upward, and as he latched onto one, then the other, I wriggled underneath him.

  “You know you were the only thing that went through my mind when I was falling…” he murmured, letting my wrists go and moving down my body.

  When he fell? Oh, the river…

  “I don’t remember hitting the water,” he went on, unzipping my jeans. Kissing the spot just above my underwear, he added, “I fell, I saw the water, then…” He yanked my jeans off, exposing my pussy and forcing my legs apart. “Then all I saw was you. Mercy Reid…”