He wondered if anyone had told Riley and Zachariah that their father might be dead. Still contemplating his cell phone, he considered calling them. Someone needed to tell them, and it might as well be him. Besides which, he had the urge to check in on Scott, despite Damon’s orders not to. Scott was like a son to him, and he hadn’t seen or heard from him in nearly a month. He needed to know that he was okay, that he was still alive. In the face of Damon’s possible death, he needed the reassurance only speaking to Scott could provide.
Henry’s thumb had begun inching toward Scott’s name on his contacts list when Vanessa swept back into the room, her eyes wide, her dark, curly hair disheveled, strands wisping from their pins. He yanked his thumb away from the screen as she circled to his side of the desk and leaned so he could hear her.
“We have a problem,” she said. “On the phone just now? It was a representative for the Committee. They’re coming to meet with you about Director Hartley.”
“Me?” Henry exclaimed. “Why me?”
“I don’t know, but they’ll be here in less than five minutes.” Vanessa looked nothing short of terrified. Her reaction was completely understandable. Henry could think of exactly one instance in his entire time with the Agency that the Committee had made its way to the Agency’s headquarters, and it was back when Damon had been awarded the Directorship of the Agency.
Henry levered himself from his desk chair, grabbed the television remote, and aimed it at the screen with a quick jab of the power button. If anything changed in the search for Damon, he’d have to learn about it later. “Go open up the executive conference room,” he told her, “and get the EMP screen in there turned on. You know the drill. In the meantime, I’m going to get freshened up, and then I’ll meet you at the conference room. They didn’t say what they were coming here for, did they?”
“No, but I figure it’s probably about the obvious,” she said. “And we have a big problem.”
“What’s that?”
“Brandon isn’t here.”
“Shit,” Henry breathed. “I hadn’t thought of that. What the hell am I supposed to tell them if they ask about him?”
“The truth,” Vanessa said. “Tell them the truth. Brandon is gone, and he’s been gone for days. No one knows for sure where he is, but it’s strongly believed he’s engaging in extracurricular activities that his new position as Deputy Director forbids him to participate in. In addition, he’s abusing his power as Deputy Director, issuing unlawful rogue statuses on those who he has vendettas against, and he’s misusing Agency assets to accomplish personal goals. With Damon missing and presumed dead, the Agency is, in essence, leaderless. Ask for their guidance.”
“And what exactly will all that accomplish?” Henry asked, shrugging on his suit jacket.
“Well, Damon’s missing. Brandon is breaking the rules,” she said. “And you’re third in line. If Brandon’s deposed and Damon’s presumed dead, then that makes you Director of the Agency. And as Director, you can start dismantling that son of a bitch’s plans from the inside.”
Scott was appalled to find himself in the middle of the most ridiculous kidnapping scenario he’d been in outside of training. It was almost annoying, really. He’d have thought he deserved more than the stupid black-bag-over-the-head-and-zip-ties bullshit these people seemed to be fascinated with. It was like something out of a bad action movie. He was almost insulted.
Insulted or not, that didn’t change the fact he’d been kidnapped.
His right arm hurt like hell. So did his leg. It throbbed with every pulse of his heart, and he could only imagine the damage the werewolf had done when it had buried its teeth in his leg. In a desperate need to take his mind off it—he was too scared to think of what a bite from a werewolf could result in, and if the horror movies were right, it wasn’t anything good—he used his senses to assess his surroundings. He was in a moving vehicle; he felt the bumps and jostles through the entire length of his body. He lay on his side, stretched out on a cold floor, unrestrained by a seatbelt or anything similar, so he assumed it was a type of van that was meant more for cargo than passenger transport. There were a few people in there with him; he sensed them somewhere nearby. He wondered if one of the people present was the woman in red. He was dying to have words with her. But no, he couldn’t imagine such a well put-together woman hitching a ride in the back of a van that smelled like damp dog.
It didn’t take much for him to keep his wits together. This wasn’t any worse than the things he’d endured during training, both in the Agency and in the Navy SEALs. He’d laid around with a bag over his head more often than he cared to think about, but it made it easier to stay calm and figure out where they were taking him. He’d missed the first minute or so of driving, but since then, he’d silently counted carefully measured seconds until a turn was made, at which point he’d start over. The counting settled his nerves, but it didn’t do anything for the worries about Riley swirling in his brain.
There was no question that he was scared for her. He’d told her to run, and she had—shockingly, right into the Mississippi River—but he had no idea if she’d gotten away. He hoped she had. Because he had a feeling she’d be his only reliable hope of rescue.
The van he was in began slowing, and he waited with bated breath to see if it was slowing for a turn or a stop. A stop it was, and more importantly, it was one they wouldn’t move from: the engine cut off, and the van’s doors opened. Whoever was in the back of the van with him climbed out, and he lay there, feeling the still-chilly air breeze into the van and waiting for what would happen next.
“Clear!” a man called, his voice pitched at that perfect level that kept it from carrying too far.
“Get him out of the van,” a woman said. If Scott wasn’t mistaken, it was the woman in red—the only woman he’d seen—who must have been the leader of his gaggle of kidnappers. He went limp, intending to make it as difficult as possible for his captors, but it didn’t matter; a hand closed around his uninjured ankle, dragged him to the back of the van, and picked him up as effortlessly as one would a sack of flour. He stayed limp, feigning unconsciousness, as he was carried from the cooler outdoor air into a warmer, indoor environment. Footsteps echoed off wooden floorboards, and then they went down stairs into a much colder room, so much drastically so that Scott started shivering. He was flipped off his captor’s shoulder seconds later, which made his head spin, and dumped into a metal folding chair. More zip ties fastened him securely to the chair, and once he couldn’t move, the hood was yanked off his head.
The first person he laid eyes on once his vision adjusted to the dim light in the room was Brandon Hall.
“Deputy Director Hall,” Scott greeted, glaring at him. He jerked against his restraints reflexively, like he could launch himself off the chair to throttle the man in front of him. “You son of a bitch.”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Brandon asked mockingly.
“My mother’s the one who taught me to talk like this,” he replied. “Why are you here?”
“Why do you think I’m here? Isn’t it obvious? I’m still trying to deal with this nasty thorn in my side. Four thorns, really.” Brandon leaned against a wooden workbench, bracing the heels of his hands against the edge of it, and smiled. Scott gritted his teeth, trying not to look at what was laid out in neat rows on the workbench in question. “I had a fifth thorn dealt with rather efficiently already.”
“Which fifth thorn would that be?” Scott asked, his mind racing to fill in the blanks. The four that Brandon referenced could only be Riley, Zachariah, Ashton, and himself. Who was the fifth?
“Who else?” Brandon said. “Your boss. Your recruiter. The one who dug you out of the SEALs and dropped you right into the chair you’re sitting in today.”
He clenched his teeth. Henry, he thought. Brandon could only be talking about his handler, Henry Cage. He started shaking with cold fury, but he pushed it down from a boil to a slow, steady simmer as Brandon wal
ked toward him, tablet computer in hand, and cued up a video. He flipped the device around, and Scott gritted his teeth. What, is he going to make me watch how Henry died? he thought, realizing the video on the screen was shaky cellphone footage.
But no, it wasn’t Henry on the screen. It was Damon, walking in what appeared to be a tasteful, two-story house in an equally tasteful neighborhood, unlocking his front door and pushing it open. Scott had a horrible suspicion that he was about to watch Damon get shot to death.
That didn’t happen. Damon shut the front door, and long, agonizing moments ticked by as Scott waited for something to happen.
Then, without warning, the first floor of the house exploded. He jumped in his chair as the explosion rang out through the tablet’s speakers, and he watched in horror as debris blasted in a large, outward radius from the building and the second floor collapsed onto the rest of the house.
The dust had barely settled before Brandon yanked the tablet from view. “As you can see, Damon has been…relieved of his duties,” he said euphemistically. “And as such, like a vice president who is faced with the task of burying the leader of a country, I step into his place.” He grinned wickedly. “So you can call me Director Hall from now on. Now that that business is taken care of…” He set the tablet on the workbench and motioned to several of the men who ringed the basement, gesturing for them to approach, even as he began rolling his own sleeves up. “Allow me to show you what my regime will look like, up close and personal.”
Ten
Ashton and Zachariah were almost to the French Quarter of New Orleans when Zachariah’s cell phone rang. Ashton startled, whipping his head around from the view outside the window to stare at the device vibrating across the SUV’s dashboard, and it took him a second to reach for it. When he glanced at the screen, he frowned at the number on the caller ID.
“You recognize this number?” he asked, angling the phone so Zachariah could see it.
“Not in the slightest,” Zachariah answered.
“Should I answer it, you think?”
“Yeah, let’s see who it is.”
Ashton swiped to accept the call then put the phone to his ear. “Hello?”
“Oh, thank God, you answered. Ashton, is that you?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Who is th—?” Ashton cut himself off as the voice registered. “Shit. Riley?”
“The one and only. Where are you?”
“We’re coming into the French Quarter,” he told her. “Where should we meet you?”
“Just a sec.” There was a rustling noise on the other end, like she was making an effort to cover the phone’s mouthpiece, and her muffled voice asked, “What’s a good place I can meet with my boss?” A man’s voice said something indistinct, and then Riley said, “No, that won’t work at all.” She came back on the line and said, “Meet me at this address. It’s a store. It’ll be closed, but knock on the door and ask for Marie.” She rattled off an address on Bourbon Street then hung up before he could ask anything further.
“What the hell was that about?” Ashton asked, looking at the phone like it had suddenly sprouted something strange and unnatural out of its screen.
“What’s going on?”
Ashton repeated the address Riley had given him then said, “We’re supposed to ask for Marie. Zach…” He paused, mulling over what he’d heard, then said, “There’s something wrong.”
“Wrong?” Zachariah said. “What do you mean? How can you tell?”
“She didn’t say ‘we.’ She said ‘me,’” he explained. “She said, ‘Meet me at this address.’ And someone was with her, but I don’t think it was Scott. It didn’t sound like anyone I knew.”
Zachariah tapped his fingers against the steering wheel, and a look of impatience mixed with worry crossed his face. Ashton couldn’t imagine what was going through his head, though undoubtedly the worry was there because of his sister. “Do you think it’s a trap?” he asked. “Do you think we’re about to walk into something that’s going to get us killed?”
“I don’t know,” Ashton admitted. “But considering the arsenal we’ve got in the trunk, I like to think we’re well prepared if it is.”
“Even so.” He stayed quiet for a minute, navigating the streets of downtown New Orleans, and when he spoke again, it was to ask, “Do you think Scott’s dead?”
“I don’t know, but Riley not mentioning him certainly doesn’t bode well.”
Miraculously, despite the mess that Bourbon Street was at night and how difficult it could be to find anywhere to put a car at any time of the day or night, Zachariah found a place to park their SUV right in front of the shop in question. It probably helped that the shop was away from the street’s main action.
Ashton stared at the store; its front was dark, though there was the faintest sliver of light in the back of the store, and if he craned his head back, he could see lights on the second floor. “You sure this is it?” he asked.
“The numbers above the door match,” Zachariah said, “so I’m assuming it is.”
Ashton blew out a breath. “Okay then. You stay here. I’ll go check things out, ring the metaphorical doorbell.”
“I’m not letting you go alone,” Zachariah protested.
“Yes, you are,” he replied. “You’re far and away more valuable than I am. If your father is right, you’re one half of what the world needs to stop it from ending, so we can’t put you at unnecessary risk.”
Zachariah flopped back in his seat. “One of these days, you’ll quit treating me like I’m not a fully trained government agent.”
“Well, today is not that day.” He opened his door and slid out, closing it quietly before approaching the store’s wooden door. He hesitated then gently rapped his knuckles against the glass panel set in it. He waited, tamping down impatience that tried to well up in him, and was about to tap on the door again when the silhouette of a tall woman that reminded him of Angelique Rousseau came to the door. She stared at him through the window for a moment, which made him want to squirm under her scrutiny—he desperately hated it when people stared at him—before she unlocked the door and cracked it open. “Are you Marie?” he asked.
“You must be Ashton,” the woman said. “Where is Zachariah?”
“In the car,” he answered. Without looking back, he motioned to Zachariah, and seconds later, the other man joined him, a pensive expression on his face.
“Come in,” Marie said. “Don’t be slow about it. We don’t need someone seeing you.”
Ashton slipped into the building, Zachariah right behind him, and waited while Marie locked back up. “Which way are we going?”
“Upstairs,” she said. “Riley’s waiting.”
“And Scott?” Zachariah asked.
Marie didn’t answer, which made Ashton feel queasy. He let the two of them ascend the stairs ahead of him, since he knew he’d slow them down, and as he limped along behind them in silence, struggling up each step with his leg giving him hell, he listened carefully for any sign of what was going on above. He could hear voices, one of them distinctly Riley, the other that unfamiliar man. Marie and Zachariah stopped at the top of the stairs to wait for him, and he silently cursed himself and tried to speed up his climb.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Zachariah confessed when he joined them. “A very bad feeling.”
Marie beckoned them forward, and she opened a door at the end of the hall to reveal a small, sparsely furnished studio apartment. Ashton stepped inside and stopped short when he saw Riley sitting on the edge of a queen-sized bed, looking like she’d been dunked into the world’s filthiest swimming pool. A rather handsome African American man paced in front of her, but Ashton didn’t take in much about him, because his brain ground to a halt when he realized the man wore a police officer’s uniform.
Riley looked up, and her eyes lit up like she’d seen her best friend walk through the door. She leaped off the bed and raced to him and Zachariah, somehow managing to throw h
er arms around both of them at the same time. Her clothes were wet, but Ashton didn’t care, he was so relieved to see her alive and well.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice muffled against Zachariah’s chest. His hand was buried in her wet, tangled hair, practically cradling her head. “I should never have run off. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Zachariah said. “It’s okay. I understand. I’d have probably taken off too if I hadn’t had other concerns that prevented it.” He glanced at Ashton, a strained look in his eyes, and Ashton squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.
“What’s going on, Riley?” Ashton asked, releasing her and taking a step back from the tiny cluster of embracing limbs. “Where is Scott? And who is this?”
Riley let go of Zachariah and looked back at the police officer, who’d stopped pacing and was staring at them with obvious suspicion. Ashton didn’t like dealing with local law enforcement; it always proved difficult trying to figure out how to explain his and his partner’s presences to them, which was why the Agency had instituted the usage of false identification. He wondered what Riley had already told the man and how he was going to negotiate around any of it.
“This is Officer Greg Tate,” Riley introduced. “Scott and I have already had a run in with him, and he’s gotten sucked into this by way of a dead body in our hotel room.”
“The one you, ah, called us about?” Zachariah asked delicately, like he was trying to dance around the topic without saying it outright. Ashton was tempted to just say it: werewolf. Maybe if the good Officer Greg Tate thought they were a bunch of crazies, he’d leave them alone and stay out of their business.
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