ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  “So, this tank has a cannon somewhere I missed, I take it?” Stone asked from the seat behind David.

  “After the night we’ve had, I’m not arguing with an inch of steel plating between me and whoever cares to shoot at me,” the Commander replied. “GPS says we’re twenty minutes out if either of you wants to take a nap.”

  “Some of us are neither regenerators or under thirty,” Hellet said. “You’ll learn to take your sleep where you can get it.”

  Stone chuckled behind them.

  “She’s not wrong, boss,” he told David. “I’m her under-thirty, and I’m feeling this last day.”

  “One arrest, then we can find a hotel and pass out,” David promised. “We’re down three days of seven, people.”

  “Yeah, but we know who it was now,” Stone complained. “Talon Security, working for the Familias. How much further can we trace it?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. “But I have the feeling that unless we dump out a bag of heads on the Conclave floor or deliver a specific name, we won’t gain ground.”

  “No offense, boss, but I’m so glad that’s your problem.”

  #

  The address that van der Watt had given them took them across a long bridge onto Mercer Island, and then down through a series of neighborhoods, each with larger and more separated houses than the one before it, until they were following the road around the southern tip of the island lined with homes that likely cost more money than even the United States government’s elite supernatural soldiers would see in a decade.

  Finally, they pulled up to the address, a large not-quite-mansion set a good fifty feet back from the road. Trees swathed the property, providing a degree of quiet and privacy no home David had ever lived in had shared.

  “See that lump on the back of the grounds?” Stone said quietly from behind him. “Bunker. Probably a gun range, from how long it is. Would be a good place to do just about anything you didn’t want the neighbors to know about, with the sound dampening and all.”

  “If he’s not in the house, we’ll check that out,” David replied, bringing the SUV to a halt blocking the garage. Triple garage or not, nothing was getting out past the immense armored car.

  “Let’s go,” he continued. He reached over to wake Hellet up, but the Mage had started moving when the car stopped.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked.

  “I want you to move around and cover the back,” he ordered. “Stone, stay with the car; cover the front with Becky. I’ll give you ninety seconds, then I’m going to go knock.

  “We need Adams alive if at all possible, so try not to kill him—but I need you two alive more than I need him. Clear?”

  “Clear,” both chorused. Hellet was already moving, checking the line of sight from the windows as she circled around the outside of the house.

  They didn’t have their full gear, but he’d borrowed proper tactical helmets at least, allowing him to show the ninety-second timer on all three of their helmets. He let it tick down to zero, then left the SUV and strode toward the front door, pistol in hand.

  Stepping up to the side of the door, he rapped on it hard. Announcing his presence as police was probably a recipe for a bullet through the door if Adams had any idea what was going on at this point.

  There was no answer, and he knocked again, harder.

  When the silence continued, David inhaled, focusing hard on his prescience. Was he going to get shot the moment he opened the door? It was hard for him to assess possibilities. Anything more than a second out barely registered at all.

  The door appeared to be safe. A vague sense of foreboding hung over the entire house to his precognition, but it wasn’t giving him any more details.

  “No response,” he reported softly over the radio. “I’m moving in.”

  The door was locked. That held him up for the full second it took him to punch the lock assembly through the frame. He didn’t realize the door had been reinforced with steel plating until he shoved it open, the welds holding the lock to the armor having sheared under his blow.

  Pushing forward into the house, he saw the entire main floor was open, wrapping around a wide set of stairs that led up to the second floor. It was floored in dark hardwood with expensive-looking chrome-and-black-leather furniture.

  The house was also empty as far as he could see. The main floor was unoccupied as he scanned across, no sign of life except…

  “Hellet, did he go out the back?” he demanded.

  “No. Nothing’s moving back here,” she replied.

  “Someone opened the main floor window,” David noted aloud. Stepping closer, he could see that it had been forced open, the interior latch snapped clean off. “Forced open,” he corrected. “And it looks like that was reinforced too.”

  “Do you need backup?” Stone asked.

  “Negative, maintain the perimeter,” David ordered. “I’m heading upstairs.”

  He couldn’t hear anything. The house creaked a bit, like all houses did to his hearing, but there was no movement, nothing. Breathing…maybe. He wasn’t sure.

  It was coming from upstairs, if someone actually was breathing. He took the big staircase slowly, sweeping for threats as he stretched his senses for anything.

  Someone was definitely breathing. Muffled. Strained. But breathing. David turned toward the sound and swept the second floor. A single broad hallway linked to half a dozen rooms, all of the doors closed. Sweeping each door as he passed by, he approached the breathing—the middle door on the left.

  Something was not right. He could hear someone breathing now and they were awake—but they hadn’t responded to him breaking into the house. Their breathing was sharp, panicked.

  David broke the door down, hitting it with every ounce of his muscled mass and smashing into Karl Adams’ office. The room was all dark wood and chrome again, with a wall of oiled weapons and a black desk with two monitors linked to a laptop.

  His attention, however, was immediately drawn to the man tied to the office chair with tautly drawn cables—and the blocks of C-4 bolted to the floor.

  Karl Adams’s panicked gaze met David’s and he tried to shake his head. Even his head was tied down. There was no way the mercenary could escape his restraints, and David had no clue how long the man had been like that.

  Tied up, surrounded by explosives and waiting to die.

  Now David’s precognition flared, warning him that his timing was atrocious. The explosives were seconds at most away from detonating. He charged forward, hoping to throw Adams out of the window before the bomb went off.

  His precognition was so focused on the timer he missed the tripwire. There was a flash of thunder and white fire…then darkness.

  Chapter 24

  “Convalescent leave” did not mean as much to Michael O’Brien as his doctors wished it did. His body had flushed over ninety percent of the silver solution out inside the first few days, but there was still enough in his system to impede his normal full function.

  Since even his impeded function was still well beyond normal human maximums, Michael found the attempt by his doctors to keep him out of action reasonable but ill advised in the circumstances. He’d conceded enough to keep ONSET Nine the flying reserve, which meant he was suited up but in the shared common room of Nine’s dormitory building when his phone rang.

  “O’Brien.”

  “It’s Warner. You suited?”

  “Do you sleep?” he asked ONSET’s second-in-command. “And yes, I’m suited up. Ix is suited up. Dilsner is suited up, if asleep on the couch. Teller is still in transit back from Florida.”

  Stacy Teller was his team’s new Mage. When he’d told her to take a break, she’d listened. Now, like David a week before, she’d been recalled from the beach and surf to get back to work.

  “You’ll have to go without her,” the Major ordered. “And yes, I sleep. Fucked if I know when I last did so anywhere except my office, but I sleep.

  “White is down, hu
rt bad. He survived, so he’ll live, but I want a full team on the ground to back him up.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone blew him the hell up—along with what might have been our last link forward in this file,” Warner said grimly. “The vampire thrall we’re pretty sure organized the attack was used as bait and then somebody blew up his house around him.

  “I want you to drag every detail, every thought, you can out of Hellet and Johnston,” she ordered. “De Bergen as well. I can guess where everything came apart, but if there’s a loose thread somewhere that hasn’t been yanked on, I want it found.”

  “Am I in charge, then?”

  “White is in command once he wakes up,” she replied. “Still his file. You’re backup.” She paused. “If you feel it necessary to take over, even White won’t complain, I suspect, but he’s the man on the ground and I don’t want to yank the rug from under him unless he’s screwed up.”

  “He got blown up,” Michael observed. He doubted that the younger cop had screwed up, but getting blown up didn’t look good.

  “I’m still thinking we ran three layers deep into someone else’s contingency plan, O’Brien,” she reminded him. “If there’s a gap in it—a flaw, something we can follow to the sons of bitches who’ve been killing our people—I want it found and I don’t care about niceties of inter-team or inter-office authority; you follow?”

  “I understand. I’ll get it done,” Michael said grimly.

  He might share White’s rank, but he’d been the very first ONSET team commander—and he’d once commanded the entire High Threat Response force when it had been part of OSPI. Some Commanders were more equal than others.

  “Good. I want you in the air in ten.”

  Michael hung up and stepped over to poke Morgen Dilsner with a foot.

  “Wake up,” he ordered. “We’re moving out.”

  “Wha?” the half-awake Mage replied.

  “We’re moving out,” Michael repeated. “Seattle-wards. Ix!”

  The demon, whose name was much longer than Ix and not really pronounceable to humans, emerged from the second floor. His skin was a red so dark as to appear black at a distance, and a double row of tiny horns circled his head above his ears in lieu of hair.

  “Yes?”

  “You heard?”

  The demon’s senses were amongst the best Michael had encountered.

  “The entire conversation, yes. Seattle should be cold enough for a hat, which should help me blend in.”

  “Cover up and play it smart, but I need you for backup,” Michael confirmed. “These bastards took David out, however temporarily. They are not playing stupid.”

  “The Familias never has,” Ix pointed out.

  “No,” Michael agreed. “Which is why I’m not sure why they even got involved in this shit. They may have covered their tracks, but why take the risk at all?”

  “They were offered something,” the demon suggested, his voice slow and precise.

  “Yeah.” Michael nodded. “I agree. But what?”

  #

  The Pendragon arrived silently in the way only the enchanted black helicopters could, sweeping in over Mercer Island like a stooping bird of prey to land next to the shattered wreckage of what appeared to have been a nice house. Before it exploded.

  A fire truck was parked across the entrance to the property, suited firefighters rolling their hoses back in. The grounds and trees surrounding the house glistened with moisture, both the fire and everything remotely near it soaked to prevent the fire from spreading.

  As Michael dropped out of the Pendragon, he saw five of the black SUVs the Omicron offices had never stopped using despite the stereotypes tucked away from the fire truck, forming a semicircle around a white tent.

  A sixth SUV was next to the house, still somehow intact despite all of the paint on one side having been stripped away by the explosion.

  “That wasn’t a small bomb,” Dilsner said behind him. “Are we sure David’s okay?”

  “If he survived at all, he’s okay,” Michael pointed out. White was, after all, just as powerful a regenerator as the werewolf himself. “But there’s a reason I brought a box of protein bars. Let’s go see how we’re doing.”

  He crossed to the collection of SUVs around the tent, recognizing Catherine de Bergen and Agent Kate Hellet as he did.

  “Chief Inspector, Agent,” he greeted them. “I see we’re all having a brilliant day.”

  “Brigadier,” de Bergen greeted him as Hellet saluted.

  “I haven’t been Brigadier in years,” Michael reminded her. “What happened?”

  “Hard to be sure with the whole place blown to pieces,” de Bergen said bluntly.

  “David said a window had been busted open and went upstairs looking for someone,” Hellet said quietly. “There was…organic debris in the explosion that wasn’t David.”

  “How badly messed up was Commander White?”

  “The explosives blew him through three walls and inflicted third- and fourth-degree burns over roughly two thirds of his body,” the Mage said crisply. “At least one lung was collapsed and several ribs shattered. If he wasn’t tougher than a regular human as well as a regenerator, he would be dead.”

  “How is he?”

  “Sedated and hidden from view,” de Bergen confirmed. “I…do not have the stomach to watch the process.”

  “I’ve been blown up myself,” Michael pointed out. “Trust me, he wants to be sedated right now. It’ll be…” he considered, “…eighteen to twenty hours before he’s fully back together. Morning, basically.”

  De Bergen shook her head.

  “He was blown up,” she said wonderingly.

  “He’s a Class One Empowered, Chief Inspector. There’s a reason he runs an ONSET Team.” Michael turned to Hellet. “I need to pin you and Stone down,” he told her. “I’ve got a pretty good idea of just what happened, but I need all of the details.”

  “No one could have seen this coming,” she objected.

  “I don’t disagree. The problem, though, is that someone pretty clearly saw us coming.”

  #

  Michael slipped inside the tent set up on Karl Adams’s lawn and studied the two gurneys there in silence. The doctor was outside, checking over Stone. The SUV had shielded him from most of the blast, but he hadn’t had time to turn to granite to protect himself, and he had some scrapes and burns.

  One of the gurneys didn’t hold a person so much as pieces of one. They’d scraped together enough bits of what was presumably Karl Adams that it looked like they’d be able to do a dental identification. They certainly weren’t going to be able to compare fingerprints or try and ID him by face.

  The other gurney held David White. After three or four hours, he still probably looked just as bad to the uneducated eye, a mostly burnt almost-corpse only barely twitching with each breath.

  Michael knew what to look for. The flesh was already beginning to fill in at the lowest layers. The other man’s lung, pierced by debris according to Hellet, had already healed.

  This was the second time he’d seen White this injured and he felt more than a little guilty over dragging the younger man—and who wasn’t younger than Michael at this point—into this life.

  The sword resting on the folding table next to the gurney was a reminder of why he’d had no choice. Michael was one of the few people who’d tried to wield Memoria since it had fallen into White’s hands. None of its supernatural powers woke for him. When he wielded it, it was an unusually tough, sharp blade.

  When White wielded it, it cut anything and shut down supernaturals’ regeneration.

  “You’ll be fine,” he told White’s unconscious form. “I’ve been worse. I told you we used a nuke to kill the last high court demon before Ekhmez. I didn’t tell you how close I was when the damn thing went off.”

  He shivered at the memory. It wasn’t the only reason he was no longer the Brigadier commanding the supernatural high threat response, b
ut it was high on the list.

  “Adams was your last lead, though,” he said quietly. “I’ll keep digging. May have something by morning, but I don’t have much hope. You did everything you could, David, but this whole thing is looking like a bust.”

  Chapter 25

  David woke up slowly, his head pounding and everything feeling wrapped in three layers of cotton. It was easily twenty seconds before he remembered what had happened, and then his eyes snapped open and he tried to bolt upright.

  A massive hand descended on his chest with firm but gentle speed.

  “Easy there, White,” he heard O’Brien rumble. “Take it easy.”

  “Well, you’re here, so I’m not in Hell unless you died and no one told me,” David said slowly. “How bad?”

  “Bad enough,” the werewolf told, smiling down at him as he released David’s chest and helped the Commander to slowly rise to a sitting position.

  He was naked, covered by a white sheet.

  “My clothes?”

  “Destroyed,” his old boss said calmly. “So, to all intents and purposes, were you. Hungry?”

  As soon as the other man asked the question, David realized he was ravenous and nodded. O’Brien handed him a box of what appeared to be protein bars, but he ripped the first one open without inspecting it.

  He was halfway through the third protein bar before the taste caught up with him he almost choked—only to find O’Brien laughing at him.

  “All right, now you can taste them, have these ones.” He handed over a second box of protein bars. These ones were chocolate and proved much more palatable. “I’ve been through this myself,” O’Brien continued. “That which does not kill you instantly, well, does not kill you. But you are very hungry afterwards. Your body rebuilt probably twenty kilos of mass out of thaumic energy, and the universe is going to want that back. Your appetite is going to be even worse for a while.”

  His appetite was already ridiculous. David shivered and realized he’d gone through three chocolate protein bars while the werewolf was talking.