Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05]

by One for the Wicked

  “She’s an adult,” Shawn countered evenly.

  “Sort of.”

  Yeah, and wasn’t that the sticking point? He withdrew his hands, tugging his gloves up on his wrist. “Look, whatever you’re getting at, I don’t really care.” Another lie. He was pretty good at those.

  He’d have to be. This was the way it needed to be.

  “Parker,” Silas rumbled. “Next.”

  “You’re all so damned tough, aren’t you?” The whole observation came on a sigh. Shaking her head, she passed Shawn, tightening her own gloves. “Take it from me, Mr. Lowe. Life is short.” As Silas recoiled the cable around his wrist, pulling it taut, she grabbed the line in one hand, glanced over her shoulder.

  Something bleak and haunted filled her eyes. Shaped her shadowed features, carving black lines in the dark.

  “Too short to play games,” she added.

  Shawn looked away.

  “Got it?” Silas asked, offering a hand as a step-up. Parker placed her booted foot in them, caught the cable as he boosted her up with one powerful lift of one arm.

  “Come up nice and slow, sweetheart.” Simon’s encouragement.

  Parker’s huff, almost a laugh, as she shimmied up the rope. “I aced . . . climbing . . . in training, Agent Wells. Save your . . . pity.”

  Despite his worries, his lies—the sinking sensation deep in his gut that he’d fucked up everything without even knowing quite how—a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  Silas only shook his head, a gesture he watched the big man do often.

  Resignation? Or, as Shawn was beginning to suspect, a strange sense of balance with the world and his place in it.

  It took Parker less time than it had taken Simon to scale the distance. Another sign of Simon’s failing health.

  Shit.

  “You’re up,” Silas told him, a deep note in the dark. “Ready?”

  No. Maybe not as ready as he thought.

  “It’s none of my business,” Silas continued slowly when Shawn didn’t move. “But I’ve seen things that some would call evil. Seen some good people make damned poor choices.” The man shifted his weight, awkward. Suddenly uncertain. “Don’t know Kayleigh. Don’t much like the situation. But she seems like someone stuck.”

  “Stuck?”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged, the outline of his hand slashing through the air. “Make the best of what you’ve got, right? Seems like she’s done just that.”

  Two men standing in the dark, this close to a heart-to-heart. About Kayleigh fucking Lauderdale. Jesus Christ.

  Setting his jaw, Shawn sidled around Silas’s broad shoulders, flexed his fingers around the cable. “If she’s so stuck,” he found himself saying, “then why the hell didn’t she get out while she could?”

  Silas’s answering sound, a wordless reverberation, turned into a matter-of-fact “Maybe she didn’t know it was an option.”

  Maybe Shawn hadn’t made it clear enough.

  “Or,” Silas added, “maybe by the time it came around, she was already trapped.”

  Hell.

  Too late now. Way too late. A team of resistance fighters infiltrating topside to murder her father?

  Yeah. That boat had sailed.

  He rolled his shoulders. “Let’s get this done.”

  Silas said nothing.

  Of all four sides of the Holy Order’s quad, the cathedral was the quietest. At its max capacity, Kayleigh suspected it could hold the entire topside population in all its wings, foyers, and pews, and as a landmark, it stood as the highest, brightest beacon of New Seattle.

  Aside from Sunday Mass, it rarely held more than a few clergy at any given time. Although press conferences were often held on the Holy Cathedral’s steps for the backdrop, the press were forbidden to operate within its walls. At the bishop’s orders, the interior was to provide a sanctuary of peace and safety.

  Or so it was reputed.

  To Kayleigh, the vaulted ceilings and ornate interiors echoed hollowly with her footsteps, magnified every whisper. Angels, cherubs, and Jesus Christ looked down from a vaunted place on high, beautiful glass windows set into the ceiling, but it wasn’t the Son of God’s likeness that held the most prominent positions.

  St. Dominic watched all from every corner, every pedestal and window and icon. Where cherubs clustered, there he waited. Where angels heralded, he stood and listened. He watched everything, heard everything. Gold and marble and polished wood—prohibitively expensive since the fall.

  The cathedral had always been opulent. Normally, it didn’t bother her. She barely noticed when she came for Mass.

  Tonight, as she made her way through the nave and passed under the watchful eyes of St. Dominic’s marble likeness, she felt exposed. Raw.

  A heretic on hallowed ground.

  She clutched her digital reader to her chest. “Dad?”

  “In here!” The cathedral took her voice, his, threw them around until they whispered eerily in a loop. Repressing a shudder, Kayleigh hurried across the nave, rounded the marble statue.

  The cathedral proper unfolded in front of her. No light shone through the large window arrayed into the wall, but it didn’t need it. Even without the unearthly glow the stained glass picked up, it was a stern piece. Violent crimsons and regal blues, an expensive, detailed accounting of St. Dominic at the height of his life.

  The inquisitor.

  When full, the cathedral was impressive. Empty, and it became intimidating. The lights were kept low, lamps affixed to the corners and arrayed at key points to offer visibility without glare.

  A soft, muted corona hovered around each.

  Her father stood in front of the massive altar where the bishop had often stood, his hands clasped behind him as he studied the choir balcony overhead. He looked so frail on the carpeted steps, a tiny, stooped figure only a breath away from collapse.

  Kayleigh’s heart lurched. The edges of the lights brightened as the nimbus increased.

  She waited for the pain to hit, the headache that would accompany her ocular warnings. So far, only her vision flared. She had time.

  He didn’t turn as she approached, though her footfalls—stifled by the lush crimson carpet—announced her arrival. “Why are we meeting here?” she asked.

  “Ah, Kayleigh.” Her father’s mottled head gleamed beneath the cobweb-fine fringe of white hair clinging to his scalp. “Right on time, as always.”

  Faint praise. She climbed the stairs, but hesitated before clearing the altar landing. “Dad, what happened to Bishop Applegate?”

  His thin shoulders stiffened. “Why?” When he turned, his expression was sad, thin mouth set in a resigned slant. “Will you repeat the things the media has spun?”

  “What things?” She frowned. “What are they saying? I’ve only been hearing news about the earthquake.”

  “News,” he muttered. “Like that will help them.”

  “Dad?”

  His pale eyes focused on her again. Exhaustion telegraphed through every brittle line of his body as he sagged. “Don’t mind me, sweetheart. It’s been a trying few days.” He didn’t reach for her—but then, Laurence Lauderdale had never been one for casual affection. Instead, he stepped off the landing. Wobbled enough that she offered a hand, which he took in obvious gratitude. “Bishop Applegate had an accident. Investigators are still trying to put it together.”

  Carefully, step by step, she steadied her father as he made his way to the cathedral floor. “That’s terrible.”

  And . . . and very hard to swallow.

  A sudden accident? Sudden? Just in time for everything else?

  “Unfortunately, we’re all too busy with the earthquakes,” he continued once he straightened his suit jacket. The smile he gave her, perfunctory but not unkind, sobered as his gaze landed on the reader in the crook of her arm. “Is that the Eve data?”

  She looked down at it. Her arm tightened across the frame. “Yes.”

  “Good, we’ll need it.”


  Yes. She knew that much. “Dad, I need to ask you something.”

  His bushy white eyebrows rose. “Speak plainly, Kayleigh, we need to leave quickly.”

  “Then you need to be straight with me.” Plain was the only way she could frame it. It came out on a rush. “Did my mother really die when I was eight?”

  Those eyebrows fell. Knotted. For a moment, Kayleigh wondered if she saw impatience under his wrinkled, so familiar features, but when he sighed, shoulders rounding, all she read was dismay. “I knew you’d ask me this one day.”

  He will lie.

  She raised her fingers to her temple, wincing as that haze reached out. Enfolded her father. Her own skin. Conflicting thoughts sparked.

  He has no choice but to tell the truth.

  Two paths. Choices laid out before someone.

  Was this what her mother had seen?

  “Your mother . . .” His nostrils, large in his aquiline nose, flared. “Your mother left us, Kayleigh.” When her mouth fell open, he added quickly, “It wasn’t anything you did, never think that. She had so much talent, she was so brilliant. You’re like her in so many ways, but she couldn’t . . .”

  Kayleigh looked down at her reader. The data she’d stored there, the backups she’d made, made it feel as if it weighed a thousand pounds. “Mom found the Eve sequence, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.” Honesty, there. She’d stake her life on it. “I do know that she engineered the fracture.”

  “But why?”

  He sighed deeply. “I ask myself that every day, sweetheart. Our vision was so closely aligned for decades. And then I caught her . . . dabbling.” Pain filled his eyes. Bent his old, fragile body until he seemed breakable as glass. “I should have known when she took active interest. She’d always loved me, I know it, but we were older already. And then she . . .”

  She watched him struggle with the words, for the first time in her memory watched her father fail to find them.

  Her throat dry, tongue thick with fear, she whispered, “Was mom a witch?”

  He went still. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I saw my charts, Dad.”

  “Ah.” Another pained sound, almost a sigh. “I’d hoped to spare you that knowledge, too.”

  Kayleigh took a step backward, anger welling. Fighting for purchase beside hope. Terrible, painful hope. “So you didn’t mean to lie to me?”

  “Not a lie,” he corrected, stern reprimand creeping into his features. His shoulders straightened as much as they could, finger thrust at her. “You had the allele, like your mother, but you displayed no talents beyond your intelligence.”

  “All witches have the allele,” she pointed out, struggling for calm. Rational. “Abilities are inevitable.”

  “All witches have the allele,” her father said, a smile pulling at his mouth, creasing his eyes, “yet not all those who have the allele are witches.”

  “That . . .” Kayleigh looked down at her reader. “Dad, that flies in the face of everything we ever taught people.”

  “It needed to be taught.”

  “At what cost?” She looked up, stricken. “How many innocent people were sent to the fires for having the gene?”

  “They aren’t important!” He turned, faced her directly. “Please understand, sweetheart,” he pleaded, “I wanted to spare you the humiliation of a witch’s stigma. I didn’t dare let the Church get its hand on you. Your mother . . . Hiding her abilities was easy. She saw people, saw what they were capable of. God only knew how it’d manifest in you.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  His thin, wrinkled lips vanished beneath a grim frown. “Until now. I know, sweetheart. I suspected it with your first collapse.”

  “You knew?” Kayleigh flinched. “And you didn’t tell me! You let me wonder what was wrong?” Her father said nothing. She took a deep breath. Facts. She needed the answers. “What changed? Why now?”

  “Your mother died several months ago,” he admitted, simply. As if it were only a detail. “Simon made sure of that.”

  “Simon?” Kayleigh sucked in a hard breath, choked on it as too many words surged to her throat. “Simon killed her? But he—”

  Her father’s eyes, mirror to hers, turned flinty.

  She paused, stared. Then, slowly, so slowly as her lips shaped every word with unraveling care, she whispered, “Simon . . . worked for you. Dad?” She couldn’t avoid the question. Couldn’t not ask. “Did you . . . ? Did you find her without telling me? Did you kill her? Did you send her own blood to kill her?”

  A lie will destroy everything.

  “Dad? Did you kill Mom?”

  It welled up in her. Something heavy, thick like cobwebs clinging to her skin, weighing her thoughts. As she watched, the shape of her father split into two, superimposed on top of one another.

  One crumpled, apology wrenched from his lips, sobs in his thin chest.

  The other let out a hard breath, a long-fingered, frail hand curving over his eyes. “I had wondered if your mother’s death might have caused a subsequent reaction.”

  She shook her head, uncomprehending even as that first image reached out a frail, trembling hand. “I don’t . . . What’s going on, Dad?”

  He lowered his hand, eyes flinty, now. Cold. “Science finds a way.” Life finds a way, Jessie had said. So simply. “With Matilda’s death, her powers somehow transferred to you. I intend to study how. Patrick.”

  “Sir.” The voice came from behind her.

  “Escort my daughter to safety.” The sobbing man faded, leaving only one version of her father behind. He turned his back.

  Fingers wrapped around her upper arm, jarring her out of her reverie. “Dad!”

  Another arm, clad in designer business wear, reached past her face. Kayleigh’s eyes widened as a rectangular box, colored wire twisted into place from every corner and merged beneath a simple plastic cap, skated past her vision. “The device is ready to go at any time.”

  A figure in Mission black armor beckoned from the far door.

  “What is that?” When he took the device from Patrick, ignored her, Kayleigh took a step forward. The hand at her arm tightened. “Dad, is that a bomb?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s merely a switch.”

  A switch. She cringed. “Dad, what are you doing?”

  He smiled without looking at her. “What we’ve always done, sweetheart. We’re making a better world.”

  Patrick pulled her back down the aisle.

  “Dad!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Getting up to the Holy Order quadplex turned out to be easier when Jonas could control the outside security. Inside was a whole other matter. Everything the quad pulled from was on a closed circuit, which meant Jonas needed juice.

  Shawn followed Parker, admiration for her growing as she made her way through the blackened portion of the Mission building. Most of the debris had been cleared, and aside from the occasional mutter as she worked out the altered floor plan, she led confidently and without excuses.

  When they found a panel covered in thick plastic, it was the work of moments to pull it off, power up the machine, and follow Jonas’s explicit instructions.

  It took ten minutes, but as Parker signed off the cracked account, Jonas’s breathed “Yes” reeked of success. “Give me five minutes to tap into the cameras.”

  “Think this will work?”

  Shawn shrugged at Simon. “If he’s half as good as May believes, he’ll make it work.”

  Parker kept her gaze on her watch, coolly marking the time.

  At three minutes, the line crackled. “You want the cathedral,” Jonas said, urgency thick in the feed. “Go!”

  “There’s a connected corridor,” Parker said without missing a beat, and Simon added, “I know where it is.”

  They sprinted through halls that showed little wear, each pulling a gun in case they ran into trouble.

  When they ran into trouble.

  The
weight of Shawn’s borrowed Beretta was much lighter than his usual weapon of choice, but it fired bullets and he couldn’t complain. Without taking a five-man excavation team back into the ruins, he’d have to make do.

  They ducked into open, cubicle-staggered offices where the signs of fire damage and violence colored the walls. Bullet holes riddled plaster stained brown. Parker’s features frosted over.

  “The quad is full of people,” Jonas said, keys rattling and clicking behind his report. “Most are employees, they don’t seem to be focused on anything else but their errands.”

  “Good,” Shawn said. Fewer people around, the better.

  “No one’s idling, anyway,” Simon added.

  “You all right, Simon?”

  “Fuck off,” the man muttered, and Jonas shut up.

  Within a few minutes, Parker pushed open a double-wide door, eased into a narrow hall, and vanished around the corner.

  Shawn followed, blinking as the Holy Cathedral of St. Dominic unfolded in front of him.

  The place was massive. Larger than anyplace he’d ever seen.

  “One to the left,” Simon muttered, “two across the way. Four waiting in the quad.” The words slurred, as if he had trouble remembering to enunciate. “About twenty beyond.”

  “Simon,” Parker murmured.

  “Go.”

  The mission was more important.

  They fanned into the cathedral proper.

  Color splashed from every direction, crimson and blue and mellow gold, but Shawn didn’t have the luxury to care about art. All he saw was Kayleigh, fighting as a thin man in designer clothing dragged her through a far door.

  Every muscle tensed; violence turned every nerve into a throbbing well of fury.

  “Easy,” Silas rumbled quietly.

  “Fuck easy,” Shawn snarled, and stalked out into the open. He leveled his weapon on the old man at the base of the altar steps, finger tight to the trigger. “Call them off her!”

  Kayleigh gasped, her eyes widening as she saw Shawn first, then the group behind him. She thrashed in earnest, grabbed the door frame to scream, “A bomb!” It echoed, lashed back in the vast emptiness of the cathedral. “There’s a bomb— Let me go.” She vanished through the door, a man’s curse following.