She followed the line of his finger. “We’re going to land behind the Holy Cathedral,” he said, a surreal time lapse between the shape of his mustache-framed mouth and the words filtering through the frequency. “There’s a landing pad just there.”
The courtyard, framed by the four rectangular buildings comprising the quad, teemed with people as the helicopter skated overhead; employees in business dress, some in the all-black of the Church’s operatives, scurrying like ants from one side to the other. Most moved from the blackened frame of the Mission building, a section swathed by dark blue tarp, to the Magdalene Asylum, while some split to and from the civics building.
The cathedral rose tall and imposing over it all, a beautifully ornate frame from the courtyard side. The real display faced out, where the topsiders would come in for Sunday Mass up gorgeously carved white steps and move inside beneath the highest cross decorating the steeple.
As the helicopter crested the sloping roof, she found the circular landing pad, wide enough for two vehicles and already hosting one.
Her guts clenched, a sudden jolt of fear. Of nerves.
Officer Wilkinson touched her arm. “Is there anyone we should call for you, Dr. Lauderdale?”
His eyes, a very clear green, were compassionate.
She summoned a smile as the bird dropped gently. “No, thank you. I know where to go.”
“Are you sure?” The landing skids hovered, just a few feet separating the landing pad and the helicopter. Kayleigh grabbed the edge of the seat as the machine tilted under the pilot’s skillful handling, touched down.
“Absolutely,” she assured him, unbuckling her harness. “Thank you, sir, I’m grateful for the ride home.” And for the jacket, which bore the NSRF tag across the back.
The officer nodded, unlatching the door. “Keep your head down and clear the landing pad before you straighten,” he ordered. “You just got home, let’s keep your head attached.”
This time, her smile felt a little more real. “I’ll do that. Thanks again.”
“No problem, miss. Be safe.”
Given everything that had happened in the past few days? The things that needed to happen now? Kayleigh just couldn’t promise.
At least her vision wasn’t going double on her anymore.
She slid out of the passenger bay, offering a quick wave to the pilot, who nodded solemnly back, his gaze hidden by the helmet he wore. Keeping her head down as directed, she hurried to the edge of the landing pad, buffeted by the wind from the rotary blades as the helicopter lifted back into the air.
Home. Once, anyway.
Kayleigh wasted no time. She crossed the quad, ignoring the sideways stares she received from people not otherwise occupied on an errand. In her synth-leather pants and NSRF jacket, probably looking every bit as worn down as she felt, Kayleigh wasn’t surprised when a murmur rose in her wake. Some spun to watch her go.
She ignored them.
Her father would be in his office. God only knew, he never left it anymore. She entered the Magdalene from the front, waved to the desk clerk, whose eyes rounded. “Doctor!”
“I’m going up, buzz me in,” she ordered, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“Yes, ma’am.” She hit the panel, unlocking the far door that led to the internal corridors of the hospital.
Normally, Kayleigh would have used the side door, or come up the elevator direct from the parking garage. All of her keys, her pass cards, everything had been left in her car, wherever Shawn had abandoned it.
She wouldn’t be here long enough to get them changed.
The ride up the elevator was interminably long. The silvered panels gave her too much time to study herself. To avoid her own shadowed eyes in the mirror.
She looked like a common street girl, like she’d spent all night long grinding on a dance floor, around a pole, hell, even underneath a man; she looked as if she’d come home too late, too worn, too used.
She raked both hands through her hair, still struggling to push it into some semblance of order as the doors opened.
The director’s office, a three-piece suite with a reception area, a conference room, and her father’s own well-appointed space, opened right off the elevator.
A harried, dark-haired head rose from the desk beyond the initial foyer.
Eyes widened behind thick-framed glasses. “Dr. Lauderdale!”
“Evening, Patrick.” She strove for calm, she really did. But as she walked out of the elevator and into the familiar comfort of her father’s office, as Patrick Ross rounded the desk, shock clear on his usually so-polite expression, her façade crumbled. “Is . . .” Her voice shuddered. “Is my dad in?”
“I— Dr. Lauderdale, we heard you’d been kidnapped.” He reached out as if he’d take her arm, paused, and adjusted his plain black tie instead. “Your dad—Director Lauderdale is on a press conference right now. I don’t know if you heard, but there was an earthquake. Bishop Applegate had a terrible accident, it’s been a nightmare.” As he spoke, her father’s assistant seemed to pull his usual polished veneer back into place, brick by efficient brick.
Kayleigh’s only crumpled. “I heard,” she whispered. Her shoulders rounded, but she couldn’t stop. Couldn’t keep herself from shaking as hours and hours of stress, fear, anxiety—so much guilt—boiled over. “I . . . I lost my comm down there, I don’t have clothes . . . I need to talk to him, Patrick.”
To his obvious horror, tears filled her eyes. She knuckled them away impatiently, but they wouldn’t stop. Not even when Patrick plucked tissues from a box, shoved them into her hands.
“Okay.” It was barely a breath of sound from the well-dressed man. Grimacing, he checked the watch on his wrist, looked up to the blank screen mounted on the wall as if it would give him some kind of clue. When she sniffled into a tissue, he winced. “Stay here, Doctor. There’s water in the bar and some of the director’s usual snacks. I’ll . . .” He practically wrung his hands as he backpedaled to the elevator. “I’ll get him. It might be a little while. Just . . . stay.” Patrick retreated into the elevator, nodding at her as the doors closed.
What a mess. She couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t keep her usual façade of calm and efficiency up any longer. She tried; damn it, she scraped what dignity she had left around her, and it only fractured further.
Her stomach burned, badly enough to remind her of everything she’d done. Everything she had left to do.
Kayleigh lasted all of three seconds in the silence of the office.
It would take them some time to extricate her father from a press conference of this magnitude. If the bishop really was dead—
Tell me you didn’t know.
She grabbed at her head as Shawn’s voice filled it.
Of course she hadn’t known. How could she? She wasn’t omniscient, she’d told him that before. Kayleigh had been so busy helping the victims of the quake, how could she know?
Desperate to clear her mind, to focus on something besides the intensity of dark brown eyes tearing through her, going blank with forced sedation, she reached for the remote. The widescreen lit soundlessly.
Her father liked to keep it on the news. Kayleigh often did, too, when she wasn’t preoccupied with her own project goals.
“—somewhat unbelievable reports of unlikely rescuers,” said a solemn, black-haired man in the frame. His eyes, unnaturally blue in his pleasant features, stared out with grave yet carefully modulated charm. “Sources from below the sec-lines are telling us that victims of the previous quake and subsequent tremors have been rescued by witches.”
Kayleigh’s smile, wan and strained, edged into a muffled snort as she rubbed her face with both hands.
The Salem agents must be out in force.
“One, a girl described as ‘no more than sixteen, with short hair and freckles,’ allegedly used nothing but her voice to lift a ton of rubble out of the way of stalled emergency vehicles.”
Impossible. Sixteen? Ther
e was no one in the Salem Project listings that young.
Kayleigh’s hands clasped together, pressed tight enough to mute their trembling to a dull vibration.
The man smiled briefly. “Reports are uncertain as to where this girl is now, but civilians and medical personnel in the area are calling her the Good Witch in gratitude.”
She didn’t laugh. She could barely breathe.
Witches helping people? Witches outside Sector Three?
More like Jessie and Naomi?
Unbidden, her thoughts circled back around. To Shawn. To the blank rage distorting his features as the sedative put him down.
Did he know about this so-called Good Witch? Was she one of theirs?
Did her father know?
Abruptly, the news feed cut, blipped once, and shifted to a new location. Kayleigh shook her head, squinting as the picture in front of her blurred.
“All stations should now be aware of current events. The Church is here,” her father said, his voice strong and clear despite the hunched shoulders and gnarled fingers curled into either side of the podium. Kayleigh stared up into the monitor, her mouth parting on a soundless note of surprise as her vision sparkled. As the light of the screen fuzzed, building a pale halo around it. “We know this is a difficult time, but all citizens of New Seattle must remain calm.”
Her guts turned, churning as camera bulbs flashed, lights popping like sparklers and sending a fresh splatter over her suddenly deteriorating vision.
She rubbed her eyes, stepped back, and bumped into Patrick’s curved desk.
“We have deployed agents to every law enforcement office in the city,” Director Lauderdale continued, his faded blue-gray eyes staring not at the crowd, but at her. Through her. Directly into the camera. His lined, weathered features—always so familiar—now looked alien. Strange.
When he tilted his head as he moved, his eyes left icy trails. An afterburn of pale blue. “Magdalene Asylum staff have been relocated with priority to the most harshly affected areas, then spread out among the other hospitals, clinics and triage centers for unavoidable diversion.”
Diversion. He expected catastrophic injuries.
Kayleigh squinted, and when that failed to clear the haze, scrunched her eyes closed.
Hundreds of thousands dead.
She swayed. The desk hit the small of her back, and she gripped the edge without being fully aware that she’d done so. Not until her elbow swept the stacked in-box to the ground.
Papers fluttered. Pens scattered across the floor.
It could be less, whispered that confident, knowing part of her brain she didn’t know what to make of. It could be so much less.
The pain struck hard and sudden, mirror of the first migraine that had ever put her in the hospital. The office turned sideways as her father’s voice echoed through her head.
“Stand firm,” he said. “This disaster will not end . . .”
Her vision went black.
“ . . . together, in the name of our late . . . We will—” We will. . .
Her fingernails snagged in the plush carpet.
Make a better world.
Chapter Eighteen
Hard hands closed around Shawn’s shoulders. His back collided with the twisted portion of the chain-link fence still standing guard around the ruined husk of the GeneCorp facility, knocking the wind out of him.
Shawn didn’t fight back.
The man pinning him to the swaying metal looked like hell slapped into a human shape. His features were sallow, cheeks gaunt and sharp bone structure stark and nearly white beneath his thin skin. His eyes, snapping hazel and glassy enough to explain the heat saturating through the man’s palms to Shawn’s shoulders, bored into his, lips peeled back from bared teeth.
Simon Wells, the ex-missionary, was falling apart.
“You had her?”
The snarled demand fisted Shawn’s hands against the fence behind him. “I had her,” he confirmed tightly. More than had her.
He’d held her. Tasted her.
Fucked her.
For what? Nothing. It’d meant nothing to her. Or to him.
Yeah, right.
His shoulder blades scraped against rusted metal as Simon shoved him hard, let him go to stalk a few feet away. The chain link fence clanged wildly.
Simon was tall, taller than Shawn, but whatever compact muscle had once defined him as a dangerous agent of the Church had weakened, gone ropy with the disease claiming him day by day.
The jeans he wore didn’t quite fit, his shirt baggy. But there was no mistaking the lethality of every trained movement as he turned, flicking away the rainwater as it drizzled over them both. “What happened?”
Behind him, three figures made their way across the shattered lot, one limping between arm crutches. Jonas. His voice, pitch-perfect, drifted across the lot, punctuated by the muted thunk of his crutches colliding with pitted asphalt. Naomi, her magenta-streaked hair and piercings catching what little light filtered from above, nodded and quickened her pace.
Shawn’s jaw locked. “She got the jump on me.” The words curled in his gut like acid.
Simon’s incredulous snort was a sucker punch to the solar plexus. “Please,” he scoffed, “she couldn’t jump a legless dog.”
“Shut the hell up.”
He hadn’t meant to say the words. Definitely hadn’t intended to give the ex-missionary any more ammunition to throw in his venomous attack, but Simon’s eyes widened, then narrowed just as fast.
“You stupid son of a bitch.” The man’s fists clenched, a muscle jumping in his cheek as he squared up, nose to nose, and pure scorn dripping from every word. “You let Lauderdale have the cure for a piece of ass?”
Shawn jerked. “Fuck your cure,” he snarled.
The man grabbed his collar. “You fucked my cure,” he threw back, vicious. Shaking with it. “You fucked the only woman who’s got the goddamned cure, and then you let her run back topside like some kind of slumming whor—”
He moved, fast. Explosive. Suddenly, Shawn’s fist drove into Simon’s face, sent the man reeling, fingers ripping from Shawn’s collar. Threads snapped, fabric tearing free.
Simon reeled, spat out a mouthful of blood. Murder in his sunken eyes, he spun back, took one step.
Shawn met it.
Arms wrapped in bright red vinyl snaked under his, jerked his elbows together, and brought him up short. “Knock it off!” a woman said behind him.
“Guys.” Jonas’s voice. Strained.
Simon drew up, fists clenched at his sides, nostrils flaring with every breath as Shawn wrenched at Naomi’s grip. Blood trickled from Simon’s nose.
A foot slammed into the back of his knee, dropping him to the gravel so efficiently, it took him a second to realize the jagged edge of gravel digging into his kneecap hurt like a bitch. “You’re both fuckheads,” Naomi declared.
“Guys, please,” Jonas said as he and the sandy-haired man who walked with him finally cleared the lot. “There’s bigger things at stake, here.” But apology laced the words. “No offense, Simon.”
Simon shook his head, back of his hand lifted to blot at the thin line of red trailing over his lip and chin.
The scarred man beside him only folded his arms over his zipped-up black jacket and stared at Shawn. The light picked out raw creases of corrugated skin on the left side of his throat, trailing ridged fingers up along his jaw to twist one side of his mouth into a permanent smirk.
There was nothing funny about the serious, overpoweringly blue eyes leveled on Shawn.
He met that gaze, held it even kneeling. His jaw firmed. “What?”
“I’m Caleb Leigh.”
“Good for you.”
Naomi’s fingers closed on the back of his neck. “Hey, asshole,” she said in his ear, her husky voice growing more amused by the second. “You’re surrounded by people who all like each other a screwton more than you, so be nice.”
Jonas winced. “Nai . . .”
“Thank you.” Shifting, shoulders hunched over the braces that allowed him to walk, Jonas jerked a head back to the facility. “We found the remains of a digital reader under some wreckage. It’ll take more time than we have to get the data off it, if anything is left, but maybe we can find Simon’s information with enough effort and a whole bucket of luck.”
Shawn rose to his feet as Naomi’s grip eased, shaking off the lingering sting in his fist. Simon glared at him, but he rubbed at his head as if it hurt and said nothing.
Caleb looked up at the twinkling neon. A narrow band of shadow cut through the usual blanket, a void where the destruction had wiped out a swath of buildings, electricity. Lives. “Cure or not, this isn’t over. If what I saw was right, it’s only just beginning.”
“What you saw?” Shawn frowned. “What do you mean?”
“A vision.” This new voice came on soundless feet, and Shawn shifted to see a tall, elegantly featured redhead in denim and too-big flannel step out of the shadows beyond the lot. Her copper hair was pulled into a tight braid, severely drawn back from her face, and her blue eyes, cool as winter, met his without hesitance or reservation.
His eyebrows rose. “Parker fucking Adams.”
Simon shifted. Just enough that nobody could mistake his point. “Curb it,” he ordered, quiet but far from gentle.
The new woman—her face plastered on every feed and every bulletin from the lower city slums on up—circled the group. The hand she placed on Simon’s arm did nothing to ease the man’s tension, but he covered her fingers with his own. “You know as well as I do what May says,” she said, her gaze on Shawn. “I know you don’t trust me or Simon, but I’m telling you that we’ve got no more love for the Holy Order than you do.”
“Maybe less,” Simon muttered.
Shawn doubted that. Still, she was right. He didn’t apologize, but he inclined his head to the ex-Mission director to show he was willing to listen.
Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Page 19