Still, he couldn’t keep himself from looking away, even as his back straightened. The radio crackled overhead, another feminine voice delivering emergency instructions.
He turned to the woman, instead. “The Naomi West.”
“That would be me.” Her overly lush mouth quirked, a silver ring in the center winking beneath the dull fluorescent lights. “You aren’t Satan and you haven’t tried to take me on for the bounty, so I’m going to assume you’re the Shawn they keep nagging about.”
Charming. “Yeah.” Take her on? Hell, no. Not even on a good day, and today was the farthest thing from it. Naomi West had once been one of the Church’s top assassins. A hell of a missionary, by all accounts.
Now she was the resistance’s second-closest guarded secret. Their very own witch healer. Shawn had never trusted her. He didn’t trust anyone coming down from on high to suddenly mingle with the civil soldiers.
Then again, he’d never met her, either.
But as he approached the bed, a wary eye on Danny, he didn’t stop to question why he wasn’t grilling her. Why he was okay with having the healer here for May.
It was obvious. And he was a selfish bastard.
“Can you fix her?” he demanded.
“Shut up, of course she can,” Danny muttered behind him. The kid had deflated, collapsed on the edge of a chair with his head in his hands.
“Hi, I’m Jonas,” the man beside him said, flashing a smile that wasn’t cheerful so much as oddly and determinedly reassuring.
Because Shawn looked like he needed it?
Fuck.
“In the flesh,” was all Shawn managed. How was it that two of the four people in the highly classified resistance leader’s room were ex-Church? When did that shift happen?
Naomi quirked a black eyebrow at him. “Is it true? Were you AWOL?”
The chair creaked behind him. Shawn didn’t have to look to know Danny had raised his head.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Come back for May?”
Shawn glanced at the radio. The serenely professional voice on it assured listeners that emergency services were functioning at prime efficiency, that everyone should remain calm.
His mouth twisted. “Mostly.”
“Asshole,” Danny muttered.
Shawn turned. “That was your freebie,” he replied evenly, a phrase they’d both heard May utter many times.
The kid’s dark eyes narrowed.
Jonas laid a scarred hand on his shoulder. “May was in Lucky Lou’s headquarters.” Unlike Danny, there was no blame in his voice. None in his gaze as it met Shawn’s direct. His crystal-clear tenor was pitched to soothe. “The earthquake lasted about thirty seconds. For about half that, nobody knew what the hell was going on.”
He knew that feeling.
“The whole building collapsed when Lou’s underneath gave,” Jonas continued. “She was just on her way out. Concussion, maybe some initial brain swelling.”
Shawn’s hackles settled slowly. He still wanted to drive his fist through something, but May would never forgive him if he chose Danny for the stress release.
He blew out a hard breath. “Will she be okay?”
Naomi shrugged. “I’ve already done most of the hard work. It’ll take some time for her body to work out the kinks, but she’ll be fine.”
“Nai’s damned good at what she does.” Jonas’s smile flickered. “Always.”
“Flirt.”
Shawn scraped both hands through his hair. “Do the other cells know yet?”
Danny raised his head. “Not yet. Most don’t even know how to reach her.”
“I’ve got people fielding requests,” Jonas supplied. Silently, Danny’s hand lifted. Interlaced tightly with his.
It was a gesture so intimate, so personal between the two men that embarrassment filled him. Shawn looked away, met Naomi’s amused stare across the narrow room. That eyebrow was still hiked high.
He refused to flinch. “What’s the breakdown, then?” Outside, voices were raised, a flurry of activity that warned him more injured had come in.
Naomi’s smile, a deeply sardonic curve, faded.
“The breakdown,” Jonas answered, his cadence easing into the now-familiar rhythm of his comm calls, “is that we have every cell accounted for save two. One is still working on stripping Lucky Lou’s and one below.”
“Below?”
“Sent after you,” Danny muttered, sullen.
Shawn winced. He should have expected that. May would never let things rest the way he’d shaped them. “When do you expect them back?”
“Soon,” Jonas replied. If he was aware that his thumb swept over Danny’s knuckles, back and forth, he didn’t acknowledge it. His other hand shoved his glasses back up on his nose. “But since you’re here, let’s get to the real issue.”
The real issue? Aside from May’s unannounced nap, there was only one major problem Shawn knew of that would warrant this level of seriousness.
“If this is about Kayleigh,” Shawn began, only to stop, mentally cursing as Jonas’s eyes went round and wide behind his lenses.
“Wait, hold on—Kayleigh?”
“May didn’t tell you?” When Jonas only stared, Shawn palmed his forehead with a rough hand. “Shit. Yeah, I have Lauderdale’s daughter.”
The bed creaked as Naomi looked up from whatever she studied in May’s still features. “Wait, Lauderdale?”
“You’re kidding.” It was almost a laugh. Jonas shook his head. “The old man’s throwing a shit fit right about now, I bet. No wonder May wanted you found. You know we need her, right?”
Shawn gritted his teeth, ignoring the pang of guilt. “What’s the real issue, then?”
Jonas sobered immediately. “The issue is that I’ve been tracking encrypted chatter from the various hubs in the Church mainframe.”
“You have access?”
Danny took a deep breath. “No,” he said on the hard exhale. Strained, but at least he’d found middle ground between sulking and anger.
“The whole topside quad is on its own closed system,” Jonas explained, gaze touching on Danny for a moment, then lifting back to Shawn. His brow furrowed. “I can crack the mid-low offices, but they don’t have anything important there. Haven’t for about a month, now.”
“Less since breaking me out,” Danny said, a mild snort.
Jonas returned his smile. “That didn’t help.”
Shawn watched their byplay, but his mind forged on. “Point being?”
“Point being,” Jonas repeated, “anything coming out is encrypted like . . .” His free hand splayed, and for the first time, Shawn noticed his smallest two fingers bent crookedly. Broken, maybe, and never set right.
“Like hell,” Naomi offered, “if May and Jonas had a security specialist for a love-child and named it the Devil.”
“Nice,” Danny drawled.
Shawn swiped one arm across his eyes, squeezing them shut as exhaustion plucked at his flagging nerves. “So we don’t know what they’re talking about or sending.”
“No,” Jonas agreed. His eyebrows rose over his glasses. “But I can tell you this. There have been three separate earthquakes, and none of them were reported in the local media.”
“Which, by the way,” Danny interjected, “is freaking weird. New Seattle’s got a complex about things that make the earth shake, what with that whole witch-fueled Armageddon a few years back.”
Naomi’s smile returned. “Smartass.”
“No offense,” the kid added, leaning back in his chair and resting his head against the wall behind it.
“Eat me, kid,” she snorted, as Jonas spoke over them both with a serious, “That’s the part that worries me.”
Shawn watched her lay a steady hand over May’s forehead. The woman was made of edges and spikes; he could see her attitude on her face like a brand. Dangerous as hell.
Yet May trusted her. That meant something, right now. Hell, the old woman probably saw s
omething of herself in the witch’s defiance.
But if he cut her some slack, then wouldn’t he have to give all of them a fair chance? Jonas. The dying ex-missionary Simon. The ex-Mission director the resistance had been protecting, Parker Adams.
Kayleigh.
Could he trust Laurence Lauderdale’s daughter? No, of course not.
Did he want to?
Didn’t he already?
“Shawn?”
He blinked hard, frowned as Jonas waved a scarred hand at him. “What?”
“Are you all right?”
“Tired,” he said, as close to the truth as they needed. Tired, angry, frustrated.
Confused.
Where was Kayleigh now?
And why had his first response been to protect her? Here, in this room, and down below when Jessie had grabbed her arm. The way his chest had twisted when she’d asked him, all but begged him to kiss her still sent shocks of sluggish, simmering arousal through his body.
The way she’d screamed when that operative had pushed her over the ledge haunted his thoughts like a ghost he didn’t fucking want.
“Okay.” The man’s tenor forced Shawn’s attention back to the cramped room, the two sets of dark eyes watching him. Measuring him. “I was saying that a mega shit-ton of data scraped through my nets.”
“So?”
“So,” he repeated, a habit that was beginning to grate, “every packet corresponded with every quake by about an hour or so.”
“Wait,” Shawn interrupted. He raised both hands, as if to pause the train of ideas, of incredulity, that Jonas was throwing out between them. “Are you telling me the Church can predict the earthquakes?”
Naomi lifted her head. “That’s impossible.” When Jonas only raised his eyebrows at her, her mouth went lopsided. “Well, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
She shrugged. “We know a witch who does the prediction thing, but I can’t say he saw this coming. Exactly.”
“Look, all I know,” Jonas said, shifting his weight awkwardly, “is that the data waves didn’t just come from the quad.” Danny reached up, slid an arm around his waist, tugged him closer. Jonas leaned against his shoulder with obvious relief. The lines at his mouth eased, but the intensity behind his forthright stare didn’t. “They were earmarked on Lauderdale’s top clearance channels.”
“So whatever is going on,” Shawn said slowly, “Laurence Lauderdale knows.”
And if he knew, did Kayleigh?
“I’m a witch.” Jessie smiled at Kayleigh, a warm curve that matched the easy amicability in her light brown eyes. “Just so we’re clear.”
“Noted,” Kayleigh replied warily. The handcuffs Jessie had replaced once her injuries were bandaged clinked in front of her as she tucked tendrils of her freshly braided hair back behind one ear. Two painkillers without kick later, a change of borrowed clothes that made her feel like a slummer all over again, a snack to take the edge off, and she was feeling human again.
Mostly human. The cuffs still caught her by surprise when she tried to gesture, and the synth-leather pants and black tank top looked like something she’d have found on a low-street dance floor. She shifted, pulling down the edge of the shirt as it exposed more of her back than she was comfortable with.
“Sorry about the clothes,” Jessie added, watching her with both sympathy and amusement. “You’re about Naomi’s size, and she has a weird sense of humor.”
“That explains the bracelet,” Kayleigh admitted, looking down at the black strap with silver spikes decorating her un-bandaged wrist. She’d almost left it in the bag Jessie had pressed into her hands, sure the bracelet wasn’t meant for her. At the last moment, she’d picked it up.
It was a surreal symbol of how much she didn’t fit in to this world. How much this world wasn’t hers. It clinked against the cuffs in musical reminder.
If she got out of here with her skin intact, she’d keep it. A spiky souvenir.
“Pretty much,” Jessie agreed, a quick smile crossing her wide mouth. It touched her eyes, lit them to warm honey, and faded again. “Naomi’s a witch, too. Different circumstances.”
“I remember her circumstances,” Kayleigh said slowly, her attention narrowing on the witch beside her, “but they didn’t include witchcraft.”
“Things change.”
“Not like that.” Kayleigh was very sure. After all, she knew the genome better than almost anyone alive.
Jessie’s smile, something much more mysterious, unnerved her. “Lots of things change,” she said quietly. “Things that shouldn’t exist, do. Things that aren’t supposed to happen, happen. What is it they say? Life finds a way?”
“Not that fast.” It made no sense. As far as Kayleigh knew, she still had Naomi West’s original data on file. There had never been any sign of the Salem genome in her genetic workups.
Only witches carried the genome. Marked from birth.
“Is there a reason I should know that you’re witches?” she added when Jessie only watched her expectantly.
“My mom came out of your Salem lab.”
Kayleigh hesitated, her gaze trapped in Jessie’s. Her smile hadn’t faded, but Kayleigh wasn’t stupid. Despite the fact that they both sat on the floor in what little space they could grab in the clinic hallway, she had little illusion about her safety.
Whatever kind of witch Jessie was, she’d seen powers that could conflagrate a body in seconds. Tear it apart.
Even bend it to another’s will.
A pit opened in her stomach.
“You look worried,” Jessie said, tilting her head. Her hair, a sandy shade darker than Kayleigh’s, pulled back into a high ponytail, swung around her shoulders as she gestured. “Don’t be.”
“Hard not to.” Kayleigh didn’t know how to ask, but she tried anyway. “Was your mother . . . Did she—”
“Die horribly?” The witch looked away. “Yeah. But not because of that broken thing that makes your subjects—” She sneered the word, but not at Kayleigh. As if she couldn’t avoid the edged emphasis. “—break down, I guess. She was murdered.”
“Oh.” Kayleigh held very still. This wasn’t the kind of conversation she expected to find herself having, not with the pretty blond girl who’d saved her from the ruins.
Of course, what did she expect? Tea and cookies?
She blew out a hard breath. “Jessie, I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t murder her. You were just a kid when it happened,” the woman added, glancing back at her with a quick smile. “You’re what, twenty-eight?”
“Thirty.”
“I’m twenty-nine. We were both teenagers then.” Jessie drew her feet in, making room for a gurney as two tired-looking men in scrubs pushed it down the hall. “My mom’s name was Lydia Leigh.”
Oh. “Leigh.”
The witch’s smile tightened. “Yeah. Recognize it?” Kayleigh hesitated, long enough that Jessie tilted her head back and stared up at the flickering ceiling instead. “Let me guess,” she said dryly. “You recognize it because of my brother.”
“Caleb Leigh was kind of a big deal in the Mission. It was hard not to hear about it.”
She chuckled, a husky sound. “Don’t let him hear you say that. His ego’s already impossible.”
Present tense. Her eyes widened. “Reports said he was dead.”
“Mm.” A noncommittal sound. “How long have you been part of the Salem thing?”
The question slid in under a note of amusement; Kayleigh stiffened as the answer sprang to her lips. She flattened them together before anything spilled out.
She was tired, but she wasn’t stupid. And she wasn’t among friends.
Jessie’s smile faded. Her gaze dropped from the ceiling. “My mom escaped that lab in the old industrial district. She set it on fire.”
Was she serious? She looked it; as if the things coming out of her mouth weren’t as wild as they sounded.
But then, Kayleigh knew how wild the truth really got.<
br />
When she learned about the abandoned lab’s location, she had wondered what caused her father to move it, leave the GeneCorp building behind, but the data had been sealed first, and then vanished. By the time she took over Mrs. Parrish’s duties, it didn’t seem important.
Her focus had been on the Eve sequence, not on the past.
“Your mom sounds very strong,” she offered cautiously.
Jessie nodded. “She was. So am I. I guess you’d have to be, too,” she added. She laced her hands in her cross-legged lap, smiled reassuringly at a young boy who passed, a teddy bear clutched in his arms. “I can’t imagine having the guts to maintain something like that hellhole. All those people dying. All those kids.”
Kayleigh winced. Guts was exactly her problem. “It’s not . . . like that. Not really. New generations haven’t been cultivated since—”
“Twenty-five years ago.”
Almost exactly. “How do you know?”
Jessie smiled sadly and shook her head.
No excuses. It was like that, wasn’t it? Subjects falling apart when they hit a certain age. Breaking down. New generations hadn’t been created for years, but her dad was pushing. He wanted progress.
She’d been dealing with the sequence for mere months, but she’d already signed off on a list as long as her arm. Executions of degenerating subjects—people—whose witchcraft tore them apart.
Clean them up, her father had said. No evidence for the Mission to collect.
Missionaries hunted witches.
Sector Three had made them.
Progress demanded she do her part. Her father demanded . . .
She did, too. “I’m sorry,” Kayleigh said, looking down. “I’ve only been working on it for a few months. That’s no excuse, but . . .”
“I thought as much.” A warm hand covered Kayleigh’s, clenched against her own thigh. “I just wanted to tell you, so that you knew where I come from.”
Slow. She was too slow. “Wait, twenty-five years . . .” Kayleigh very cautiously searched the witch’s expression. “You?”
“Mm.”
“A Salem subject?”
The witch shrugged, squeezing Kayleigh’s hand as if she were the strange one, the out-of-place one. “Case subject one-three-zero-nine-eight-four.” She rattled off the numbers like she expected them to mean something. Something specific, something important.
Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Page 16