Assassin: Book Four in the Enhanced Series

by T. C. Edge

  With my pulse racing, and my breath heaving, and my eyes burning with hazel-coloured flames, I step on shaking legs towards the Savant.

  She sees me coming, her efforts to escape futile. She sits up and looks at me, and I see her trying to enter my mind.

  I turn my eyes to the ground, no energy in me to repel her, and ball my fist as tight as it will go. And when I reach her, and her oozing words come at me again, I pay them no mind at all.

  My balled fist lifts. And with a final burst of anger, I slash it as hard as I can across her jaw, sending her eyes rolling about in their sockets, and her brain doing summersaults in her skull.

  And dropping to the sofa, her frame goes still.

  “Sweet dreams, Romelia,” I whisper.

  21

  Standing in the room with two unconscious Savants, I have no time to waste, no time to rest, as much as I’d like to.

  My throat still feels like it’s on fire, my neck stiff as I set about binding Adryan’s arms and legs in just the same manner as Agent Woolf.

  Unfortunately, I have no option. Until I can remove the order from his mind, he’s just going to keep trying to kill me.

  I use up almost the entire set of tape just to make sure, binding his arms and legs and then wrapping up Agent Woolf’s mouth and eyes as well. If she can’t speak, and she can’t see, then her powers are muted. For now at least.

  Once I’m done with her, I begin work on clearing Adryan’s mind of the order. Sitting him on the sofa, I open his eyelids and enter his unconscious mind, searching for the command Woolf gave him.

  It takes a while, my own head aching desperately and in serious need of rest, but eventually I manage to find and extract it, setting his mind back in order.

  Once I’ve done that, I tend to his wound, my hands still shaking as I clean up the blood and apply some healing lotion. My inspection of the cut suggests that it should heal fairly quickly, the gash long but not particularly deep.

  I work fast and efficiently, making sure to keep my composure as I do so. It’s hard, given how my husband came so close to murdering me, but I need to steady my emotions and keep them in check. There is no time for tears now.

  I need to be strong.

  And so, with everything back in order, I grab the same flask that I used to knock him out, fill it to the brim with ice-cold water, and send its entire contents across his face.

  Slowly but surely, his eyelids flicker, and a shiver runs through his frame, and I see those silver eyes reappear, groggy and clouded. I stare into them, and see no hatred anymore, no anger, his compulsion to kill me extinguished.

  “Adryan,” I whisper tentatively. “Adryan, can you hear me?”

  His mind continues to wake, and his vision continues to return. And then, with a weak and confused frown falling, he nods.

  “What…what happened?”

  As he asks the question, he looks straight past me to the opposite sofa, and the figure of Agent Woolf comes into view, wrapped up like a mummy.

  “How much do you remember?” I ask.

  He stares at her for a second, and then nods.

  “She knows…she knows, doesn’t she?”

  His eyes lift up to mine, and then suddenly fall to my neck.

  “Your neck…are you OK? You’re all bruised…”

  He tries to reach out, but finds that his hands are heavily tied. Then he looks to his feet, and sees that they, too, are out of action.

  That swamp of confusion hits him again. He doesn’t remember what he did.

  Then, the realisation dawns.

  “Did I…was that me?”

  His eyes are clouded, troubled by the thought. I immediately set about quenching his guilt. Right now, we have other things to worry about.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I assure him. “You had no control.”

  He shakes his head and scrunches up his eyes. Shutting them hard, I see a grimace flow through him. When they open again and find me, their corners have grown damp, his contrition so intense his eyes have watered.

  “I’m so sorry, Brie…I can’t believe I…”

  “Adryan, stop,” I say firmly, grabbing his cheeks and steadying his gaze on me. “You had no control, do you hear me! No control! That woman could make anyone do anything. And now we have to figure out what to do with her.”

  My stern words force him to refocus. He stares past me again, nodding slowly. And as he does, I begin removing his binds, satisfied that all remnants of the order have been expunged.

  “OK…you’re right. I remember hearing a commotion, and coming in here. We…we tied her up, but there’s nothing else. My memory…it’s…”

  “Faded,” I finish for him. “I know. You won’t remember the order she gave. But that doesn’t matter now. I managed to knock you off…”

  I gesture to his head, and his now unbound hands reach up and feel the sensitive cut with a grimace.

  “I put some lotion on it. It’s not deep, and should heal up fast. Please, Adryan, don’t try to remember what happened. It’s best you don’t.”

  He nods in muted fashion and takes a breath. Still, there’s an apology in his eyes that won’t go away.

  I need it to go away.

  I need him to think of a way out of this mess!

  Slowly, however, he turns his mind back to the task, doing just what he was doing before Woolf set him on me. He begins pacing again, more groggily this time, scratching his chin and letting his brain work its way to some conclusion.

  As he does so, my own mind begins working on full steam once more, searching for its own way out.

  And yet, in the end, nothing sticks, nothing makes sense, except one single thought.

  We have to kill her.

  As Adryan continues to pace across the room, I vocalise the thought. He turns to me with a look that suggests he’s thinking along similar lines, but would rather not resort to such a thing.

  “Do we have any other choice?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he breathes, shaking his head. “But if we kill her, someone’s sure to come looking. And it won’t take them long to track her here.”

  “Then what? What else is there?”

  He looks to the windows, arching his eyes towards the northern quarter way into the distance.

  “We need to get her down there somehow. Somehow…we have to get her to your brother.”

  “But what good will that do? They’ll still come looking for her if she’s missing…”

  “But not here, Brie. I’m thinking, still thinking. Give me a few minutes, OK.”

  He seems to be onto something, a plan of sorts formulating in his mind. My own thoughts, meanwhile, are running wild.

  Could we somehow get Titus involved? He helped me once before, and maybe he could again. Maybe Magnus too, seeing as they’re brothers. They could smuggle her out, couldn’t they?

  The thought rushes through my head and out of my mouth. Adryan listens but immediately shuts it down as he always does. And he’s right to. It was a stupid idea.

  He returns to his own thinking. Thinking and pacing, up and down. Then he stops, and looks out of the window for a moment, and I wait for him to speak in hope that he’s figured something out. And then, off he goes again, pacing and thinking. Back and forward, spinning on his heels, the motion driving me mad.

  I turn away, burying my head in my hands, and rack my brain for something else.

  Could I manipulate the people downstairs? Could I somehow fashion some path for us to sneak Woolf through?

  No, surely not. Not with all the tension around the place, the heightened security.

  I dismiss that idea without verbalising it, and return to my thoughts as Adryan continues his endless march.

  And then, just when I’m reaching the far reaches of my creativity, he stops. The sudden change in motion draws my eyes, and I lift my head to look at him. He swivels on the spot, his visage now set with a firm plan.

  “Can you manipulate her?” he asks.

>   I’m disappointed. I’d thought of something similar but decided it wasn’t even worth discussing. I really hoped he’d come up with something better.

  I shake my head.

  “She’s too strong. Even if I could set an order into her mind, it would never stick for long. She’d break free, and then…game over.”

  I see no disappointment across his face. It’s as though he expected the answer.

  “And…if she wasn’t so strong?” he asks. “What about then?”

  “I…I guess so. But how would that happen?”

  Now his face does change, and a smile begins to rise on his lips.

  “Drugs, Brie,” he says. “I can get drugs that will relax her mind and weaken her for a short time. It should allow you to manipulate her as if she was just a regular woman.”

  I begin nodding quickly, standing up.

  “OK…that might work. But what order would I set?”

  “One that gets her over to Outer Haven. If people see her leaving the High Tower, then there will be no suspicion that she’s gone missing, at least not here. You have to make her go over to somewhere in Outer Haven where your brother can have her taken in. No one will suspect you, or us, then. And…it will give Zander a chance to extract information from her too. Two birds, one stone, Brie.”

  He smiles, although it’s more of a wince, and lifts his hand to the gash on his head once more. I step forward and inspect it again to see that it’s trickling blood.

  “I’m sorry…if it hurts,” I say. “Do you have any plasters or bandages for it? I couldn’t find anything to use.”

  “It’s OK,” he says, shaking his head. “The lotion should close it up soon. Any dressings will just raise questions.”

  He takes my hands softly, and removes the wince of pain from his face.

  “And don’t you ever apologise,” he whispers. “It should be me…”

  I reach forward and place my fingers to his lips, stopping his words from flowing. “Don’t, Adryan. Let’s just forget it, OK?”

  We turn our attention back to his plan, which sounds like it might just work. Naturally, however, I’ll need to get in touch with Zander first, drawing him back into this mess when he’s probably got a whole load of things to be worrying about.

  Yet, in my head the question of our parents remains.

  Does Woolf know them? At least one if not the other.

  And if she does, then Zander may well be able to find that information in her head…

  With the hour now growing late, Adryan leaves me to work in silence. Shutting my eyes, I try to contact my brother, praying that he answers. Yet there’s no reply, something that could well be due to a problem on my end, and not his.

  Because with my neck still throbbing, and my head aching, I find it difficult to project the words, to maintain any constant connection with him.

  All I get is his faded voice, shouting from the depths.

  Brie…are…you…there…

  He sounds tense and anxious, and yet it still gives me at least some solace that he’s OK, and that Sophie and Rycard, therefore, will have been deposited safely into the underlands.

  My failure to connect properly, however, isn’t the end of it. Moving to his room, Adryan tries as well, withdrawing his private communicator and attempting to make contact with Lady Orlando. That, too, proves to be a failure, leaving us with little to do but wait.

  And as we do, something draws my eyes over at the window. I move towards the transparent walls and spread my gaze down towards the far reaches of the northern quarter. Zooming in as far as my Hawk-eyes will go, my irises dilate, sucking in all the available light as they search through the lingering storm, the rain still falling and the sky occasionally cracking with lightning.

  As I stand there like a statue, Adryan hovers over to me.

  “What is it? What do you see?” he whispers.

  Light. That’s what I see. Little flashes of yellow and blue and red. But it’s not the lightning that I speak of. It’s something else.

  “Brie…” says Adryan softly.

  I blink and retract my eyes, and turn them to his.

  “Gunfire,” I say. “I see gunfire.”

  22

  Standing side by side, just as we did when we first arrived here, I look out towards the city with my husband, the world dark and the skies heavy with a black swamp of stormy clouds.

  And in my heart, the same black clouds gather.

  Behind us, still unconscious on the sofa, Agent Woolf lies bound and gagged. In some ways, I’m glad this all happened. I’m glad she came here this evening and found out the truth. I’m glad I was forced to act and take her down, even if it’s just another problem we have to solve.

  Because really, I’ve had enough of her shadow. I’ve had enough of her black eyes, always watching, always creeping around and following my step. Eventually, this was always going to happen.

  But now, it’s all on my terms.

  Yet everything is in more of a rush as well. Every time I think we might be getting somewhere, that I might just have dodged some deadly bullet, another problem arises that I have to figure out.

  And by the looks of the firefight currently happening down in the northern quarter, time is certainly running short.

  “It’s a retaliation,” says Adryan, looking down as a loud boom of thunder rumbles through the sky. “For Commander Fenby. They’re stepping up their efforts to hunt down the assassins.”

  He’s right, and that’s probably why Zander can’t talk at the moment. He’s probably down there right now, engaging in the fight, protecting his people from the Con-Cops and Stalkers who relentlessly hunt them down.

  My mind swirls with thoughts of the great caverns below the ground, of the people there huddled around their fires, hoping that they remain hidden away. I think of Drum, and pray that he’s still there and hasn’t seen through his ambition to become a soldier. Pray that he’s not up there now as well, trying to atone for the life he took, trying to shed that guilt that now weighs heavily on his shoulders.

  I think of Sophie, too, down in the dirt with Maddox crying in her arms. Her first night in this strange world, the war beginning to rage up above. She must be wondering just why she went there, if this is the life she’s going to lead.

  And I, too, feel guilty for sending her to the city beneath the streets. To the very place where the servants of the High Tower are continually searching.

  Did I make the right choice? Did they?

  In the end, perhaps no one had a choice at all. It was either they’d be shipped off to live in Outer Haven without their son, or they’d have to flee and take him with them. Really, that was no choice at all.

  Rycard, though, will be keeping them safe, and keeping them strong. A half-Hawk he may now be, but he’s keen of mind too, and will be an asset to the Nameless when they need him. But for now, all I want is for him to be comforting his wife, protecting his son. That’s his duty now.

  Looking upon the world, I know this is just the start of it. And as the rumbling sounds of thunder come, reverberating through the High Tower and streets below, I hear a different sound enter my ears. Another loud boom, though this time carrying a different tone.

  A tone I recognise.

  Adryan looks at me with hooded eyes. He heard it too.

  An explosion. Somewhere behind us, not visible from our apartment. Over in the eastern quarter on the other side of the building, so powerful it sends a shockwave through the calm air, setting my insides on fire and my teeth on edge.

  “Another attack,” whispers Adryan. “Another attack by the Fanatics.”

  I don’t say a word. Things are escalating fast.

  And standing there, I know that we can’t wait around. We can’t wait to get in contact with Zander, or Lady Orlando, and form a plan to get Agent Woolf the hell out of this apartment.

  No, not with so much else to do. Because the mission is still on, clinging on by its fingertips. And I can’t delay.

/>   I look to my watch and see that it’s growing late, the hour creeping up on 3AM. I step away from the window, and glance again at Agent Woolf, still held fast by her restraints and lying silently on the sofa, her breathing steady.

  I move towards my bedroom, and open up the wardrobe, searching through my items for something suitable. Adryan follows me, watching as I scramble around.

  “What are you doing, Brie?” he asks.

  Without looking at him, I answer.

  “I need to get into Rebecca’s mind. I can’t wait, Adryan. I’ll just have to go down in my normal Unenhanced clothes…but I need a collar to hide my neck.”

  I’m still wearing the same clothes that I had on out in the storm. They’ve had plenty of time to dry, but my sweater has a splash of blood on it from Adryan’s head, and is a little frayed from the fight.

  I pull it off and toss it onto the bed, wearing a t-shirt underneath. I set about removing that too, but feel Adryan’s hand stopping me. I don’t think it’s to spare my blushes of undressing in front of him. He has other concerns.

  “You should rest, Brie. We need to get Agent Woolf out of here before we do anything else…”

  “No, Adryan! There is no time to just rest! Rebecca will be finishing work soon, and we need to find out what she knows. If she has no knowledge of Cromwell’s schedule, then we need to figure something else out. Look at what’s happening out there. We have no choice. I have no choice…”

  I pull his arm away, and begin dragging my t-shirt over my body, leaving me in only a bra. I toss the t-shirt to the bed, and continue my search for a shirt with a collar large enough to hide the bruising on my neck.

  Adryan stands there for a moment in silence, and as I reach forward, he takes my arm once more.

  I turn to him.

  “Adryan, I have to…”

  “I know,” he says, nodding. “You’re right. But if you’re going to go down there, you’d best do it in disguise as we discussed.”

  “But I don’t have any grey clothes. It’s all blue.”

  He turns to the door.