“Mistress,” shouted a voice from below, “we’ve got them pinned on the second floor! Teams in both stairwells, holding ground.”
Over the crackle of a walkie-talkie, Nadine’s voice echoed off the tight concrete walls.
“Good. That filthy-clawed peasant is following us, but I’m splitting the convoy. Whoever she doesn’t pursue is going to double back and bring reinforcements. Hold them until I get there. Oh, and throw them your radio.”
“Beg pardon?” the man said.
“Throw. Them. Your. Radio.”
Shuffling feet below. He called up, “Don’t shoot, okay? I’m throwing you my radio.”
“Totally going to shoot him,” Jessie murmured. I shook my head at her.
The slim black box flew up in the air, sailing like an easy pitch at a softball game. Jessie snatched it and jumped back, out of the line of fire. She pressed the “Send” button and put the radio to her ear.
“Piss off, Nadine. We know who you’re looking for—same as us—and he isn’t here. Cut your losses and leave before more of your men get hurt. We’ve already dropped two bodies, and I don’t mind making a few more before we go.”
“Bad dog,” Nadine snapped. “Dogs don’t talk. Give the radio to Harmony.”
Jessie stared at the radio, one incredulous eyebrow slowly lifting. I sighed and held out my hand.
“She isn’t lying,” I said into the radio. “He’s not here, Nadine. And it doesn’t sound like anybody else wants you around, either. Also, last I checked, that no-kill order was still in place. You could claim self-defense at the Bast Club. What’s your excuse going to be today?”
A long, slow chuckle slithered over the radio, dragging a finger of ice down my spine.
“Oh, there won’t be one, because you were never here. You’re just going to disappear off the face of the earth. You remember our friendly chat at the club? What I promised I was going to do to you? I keep my promises. And tell your partner to get the last of her amusing little quips out. First thing I’m going to do when I arrive is cut her impudent tongue out and make her eat it. Wait for me, little girl. I’m coming in. And I’m going to greet you with a nice . . . long . . . kiss.”
The memory of Nadine’s lips and the torrent of her psychic poison made my brain spark like a misfiring battery. Whatever she’d done to me, it had played havoc with my mind and my magic, almost shutting me down completely. I was able to fight through it in Nevada, digging deep to save my partner’s life. I’d gotten a little control back, but I could feel my grip starting to fail again.
“It’s my job to protect people,” I told Nadine. “To save them from monsters like you. I try to take the high road, I really do. I try to see the best in the world, to change things for the better—”
“There a point to this speech, Pollyanna?”
“Yes,” I said. “The point is, this isn’t the kind of thing I say very often, so listen up.”
I brought the radio close to my lips, dropping to a whisper.
“I’m going to kill you, Nadine. You, your daughter, and everyone who stands with you. I’m going to burn your little house to ashes, and then I’m going to salt the earth it stood on. That’s my promise.”
I held the radio over the railing, opened my hand, and let it drop. I heard it clatter and break on the concrete below. Then I tapped my earpiece.
“Brain trust, we’re pinned on two, and we need an evac route, us plus one civilian for extraction, now.”
THREE
“We’re going mobile,” Kevin’s voice said in my ear, buzzing with nervous anticipation. “Okay, okay, we’ve got a—yes! Fire escape. Go through the landing door on two, and make for the east side of the building.”
Jessie and I breached the door, pistols covering the hall in both directions, checking for threats. Her hand tapped my shoulder. Clear. We turned right and ran down the corridor with Luis trailing in our wake. Around another bend, past door after numbered door, we hit a dead end. A dead end with a window overlooking the street and the railing of an old fire escape just beyond. I pulled at the window. It wouldn’t budge. I cursed as my fingers traced the sill, feeling the seam where they’d painted it over.
“I got this,” Jessie said. “Watch your face.”
The window shattered under her elbow, chunks of glass falling and gleaming, reflecting the overcast sky. She used the butt of her gun to clear the rest, punching out the jagged remnants and clearing a hole. She was the first one through; I helped Luis up and over the sill, watching our backs, and followed.
The whir of propellers caught my ear. A quadcopter about the size of a bowling ball hovered a few feet away, the drone bobbing on a cold gust of wind as the black lens of a camera focused on me.
“Here I am,” Kevin said in my ear. “Told you I was working on something new. After that dustup with the Xerxes drones during the Red Knight mission, I got inspired. I’ve been tinkering with this puppy in my spare time.”
“Nice toy.” Jessie thundered down the narrow iron steps, the scaffolding rocking under our shoes. “You know you can buy those off Amazon, right?”
“Not like mine. She’s got a boosted transmitter for improved range, duplex ultralight battery setup for flight time, I’m patched into area navigation and traffic sys—on your left!”
I turned as a pair of gunmen burst out of the alley, left of the fire escape, guns raised and fingers on the triggers. I opened fire. Two slugs blossomed crimson in one shooter’s chest and sent him to the concrete in a tangled heap. The drone swooped in, rotors screaming as it swarmed around the other man’s face like a mosquito on steroids. Then it spun, graceful as a ballerina, and fired two tiny harpoons on a wire leash. The barbs dug into the shooter’s neck. Then he went rigid, twitching, falling, his gun hitting the pavement a half second before he did.
“Also,” Kevin said, “I added a Taser. You’re welcome.”
I was the last to touch down, jumping off the last three rungs of the fire escape’s ladder and landing in a crouch. The drone whistled high to get a bird’s-eye view of the tangled backstreets. Kevin called out our escape route over the earpieces.
“Okay, up this alley, then make a—wait, no, that’s one of Nadine’s cars about a block up; they’re patrolling the neighborhood. Go the other way. I’ve gotta drive the van, so I’m passing the controls to April. Doc, please don’t crash my drone?”
“If you’ll recall,” April said, “I’ve flown one of these before.”
“I do recall. You crashed it.”
April took over navigation, the drone zipping ahead and bobbing wildly. She sent us on a long and winding run through alleys and across side streets.
“Wait there,” April said. “Right where you are. Stay out of sight.”
I was grateful for the chance to rest. I crouched down behind a dumpster with my hands on my knees. Out of breath, with a painful stitch in my side that pinched every time I inhaled. Luis looked like he was about to throw up. Jessie wasn’t even winded.
A car rumbled past on the street ahead. Nadine was in the backseat, and she didn’t look happy. We stayed down, waiting until April gave us the all clear, then sprinted across the road. Two more turns and our race ended at the victory line: a white panel van advertising a local housecleaning service. The side door swooped open, revealing the electronic console and flickering screens of an FBI-grade surveillance suite. And Dr. April Cassidy, sitting regally in her wheelchair, her eyes cold behind steel bifocals.
“Quickly, please,” she said. “We have a thirty-second window.”
I shoved Luis on board and pulled the rattling door shut behind me. Sitting at the wheel, Kevin glanced back over his shoulder. The lanky nineteen-year-old gave us an expectant look.
“So? Yeah? Am I awesome?”
“You’re awesome,” Jessie said. “Now get us the fuck out of here.”
He threw the van into gear. Luis bit down on his knuckles. “I don’t understand any of this. Who were those people? Why were they chasi
ng me?”
“They weren’t after you,” I told him. “They were looking for your roomie.”
They would have gladly taken Luis and tortured him until they were sure he didn’t know where Houston was—and then kept torturing him, just for fun—but he didn’t need to hear that right now.
“He’s not . . . he’s not just my roommate,” Luis said. His voice trailed off.
April tilted her head, looking close. I watched her eyes narrow as she studied him.
“You know, don’t you, Mr. Perez?” she said. “You know there’s more to your partner than he wanted you to see. More than just a skilled cardsharp.”
His shoulders slumped.
“He never talked about his past. A year after we started dating, we got jumped by a mugger. Houston took his gun away, like snatching a rattle from a baby. Then he . . . took him apart—broke half the bones in the guy’s body. It was like something from an action movie. Houston knew every move the guy was going to make; he blocked punches the mugger hadn’t thrown yet. After, he just laughed it off, said he’d taken self-defense classes in college. Right. It was just little things, over the years. Things like that. I never confronted him—I didn’t have anything concrete I could really confront him with, you know? And I just didn’t want to rock the boat, I guess.”
“I wish we had some concrete answers to give you,” I said. “That said, I think that’s a conversation you need to have with him, one-on-one.”
Even through his exhaustion and fear, his face lit up.
“Can you save him? Can you bring him back to me?”
“We’re going to try,” I said. “I promise.”
Jessie leaned against the console as the van swayed, taking a hard left.
“Right now,” she told him, “you’ve gotta worry about you. You have any savings you can draw on? Fast?”
His head bobbed. “We’re . . . we’re pretty frugal. We were saving up, you know, thinking about . . . thinking about adopting a kid. That’s expensive.”
“We’ll take you to your bank. You need to withdraw every dime you’ve got. Cash money. Then you need to get lost for a while. Stay off the radar and keep moving. A lot of people are going to be looking for Houston, and you don’t want to be anywhere near when they come sniffing, got me?”
He got her. We took him to a strip-mall bank and waited while he withdrew every last dime. Our next stop was a no-tell motel on the edge of town, the kind of place that didn’t demand photo ID and gladly accepted payment in cash. We checked him in under a false name and paid the clerk extra to develop sudden memory problems. I gave Luis the standard witness-protection spiel: Don’t use the phone, don’t reach out to friends or family, don’t set foot outside if you absolutely don’t have to.
If he followed the rules, he’d be safe, for a while. As safe as anyone could be after they’d dipped their toes into our world, willingly or not. We left him there, stranded, at the edge of an uncertain future. He was a civilian casualty, fallout from the war in the shadows. From there, he’d have to find his own way home.
“Right,” Jessie said, “so we’re going to New Jersey. Words I never wanted to speak. Kevin, get us to the airport. April, can you line up plane tickets? I want to stay under the radar. How’s the Oceanic Polymer AmEx holding up?”
April reached for Kevin’s laptop, resting it across her knees. “Uncomfortably close to the spending limit. If you plan on doing much more traveling, we’re either going to have to tap FBI resources or find another source of funding.”
Oceanic Polymer was a shell company, originally created for a long-abandoned DEA sting operation. Jessie snapped it up, dusted it off, and turned it into a civilian front for the team with a little help from Kevin’s keyboard magic. We were reasonably sure not even Linder could trace Oceanic’s finances, which made it the perfect cover for traveling right under his nose.
“We’ll just have to rob the casino.” Jessie smirked, catching something in my look. “Maybe not. Okay, probably not. We’ll see.”
“We’re still FBI agents,” I told her, crossing my arms.
“You are for the moment,” April said. “There’s a bit of a wrinkle. While you were off rescuing that civilian from Nadine’s tender embrace—”
Kevin held up a finger. “On that note, is anyone else a little concerned that a psychotic succubus with her own hit squad has access to somebody inside the NSA? And Harmony, what was with the other one—Caitlin? She wanted you to get out safe?”
“While you were busy,” April continued, “Linder called me this time.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this,” Jessie said.
April took out her phone, set it to speaker, and tapped the voice mail icon. Linder’s voice—hushed, low, fast, and tinged with worry—flooded the van.
“Dr. Cassidy, I’m reaching out to you because . . . well, let’s not mince words. Agent Temple is disregarding my orders, and I haven’t been able to reach Agent Black. Considering the events of your last mission, what little I know of it, I’m starting to think Jessie is becoming a bad influence on her.”
“Damn right,” Jessie said. She held her fist out. Then she wriggled it at me until I halfheartedly bumped it.
“I know that you uncovered information about Glass Predator,” Linder said. “I won’t apologize for my part in that program. It was another time, and I did what I felt was best for the nation’s safety. If that’s what’s keeping you from reporting in for debriefing, please disregard your feelings and listen to reason. We need to talk. Call me. Go behind their backs if you have to.”
“I declined,” April murmured, her voice dry.
“My superiors want a full report, and they want it yesterday,” the recording continued. “There was an . . . an incident, involving Agent Temple’s mother, in custody. Something she needs to know about—something you all need to know about. So come in, let me debrief you, and I’ll have a full update for the team waiting and ready. Otherwise . . . look, things are being taken out of my hands. For your safety, for your team’s safety, you need to call me immediately.”
The recording beeped. April put her phone away, stashing it in the canvas tote bag that dangled from one arm of her wheelchair. I looked to Jessie. Her smile had vanished, replaced with a thousand-yard stare. Her turquoise eyes gone winter cold.
Facing Althea Temple-Sinclair and her pack of killers had pushed us all to the breaking point, but nobody more than Jessie. She’d fought the otherworldly infection in her veins, her own deepest instincts—and then fought Althea herself, taking a brutal beatdown that would have crippled or killed a woman without Jessie’s supernatural resilience. As it was, I knew she’d earned some new scars from that battle. Some on her skin, some deeper down.
“He’s full of shit,” Jessie snapped.
“Jessie—” April started to say.
She shook her head. “No. He’s got super-important information, but he won’t just come out and say it? That’s bait. He’s trying to lure us in. My decision stands: we go for debriefing after we get to the bottom of this mess and find the truth. Linder’s face was in Douglas Bredford’s photo collection, circled with a bright-red bull’s-eye. Whatever Cold Spectrum was, and whoever gave the order to kill Bredford’s team, he was elbows-deep in it.”
“Airport?” Kevin asked.
“Airport. So far we pulled off one rescue today. Let’s break our record and go for two.”
FOUR
Flying to Atlantic City was harder than it sounded. There weren’t any direct flights from Portland International, and the best we could do was a red-eye to Philadelphia, then a SEPTA rail ride downtown, and finally another hour and a half crammed into a New Jersey Transit train.
“Gee,” Jessie said, “it’s almost like they don’t want people to go here. We should take that as a hint.”
The morning found us sleepless, aching, and looking for a fight. Cold rain drizzled down from a slate-gray sky over the Atlantic City boardwalk. A bankrupt casino on one side, its mar
quee rotting in the October wind, a span of empty beach on the other. Ice-cold waves rolled up on the dirty sand. We’d rented an SUV under civilian cover, and I cruised through sparse morning traffic on Pacific Avenue while April argued with an American Express rep on the phone, cajoling him into increasing our daily spending limit. Some covert agents had luxury jets and unlimited bank accounts; we just got by with what we had, improvised in the field, and somehow made it work.
The Diamondback was a quarter mile down, as lean and mean as its namesake. A diamond pattern glittered on the curving walls and curling metal canopy, tinted green and red like a harlequin’s tights. A low-slung casino in front, a hotel tower rising behind it like a serpent’s tail, twelve stories tall. The sign out front promised loose slots, single-zero roulette, and a happy hour that ran from 5:00 p.m. to midnight. A few veteran gamblers were already shuffling through the glass doors out front, clutching plastic cups for the slot machines in their grizzled hands, and none of them looked happy.
“Heading in to get their fix,” Jessie said lightly, watching as we cruised for the parking garage ramp. “I know a junkie when I see one.”
I wasn’t sure she did. I was sitting right next to her.
She’d been there for me after Nadine’s attack at the Bast Club. Sat beside me on a hotel roof while I screamed my frustration and my hunger into a bucket. Took the plastic room key—Nadine’s room key—from my trembling fingers and pitched it over the side of the roof, banishing my temptation for one night and keeping me on the right path.
For one night.
But the hunger didn’t go away. Neither did the incessant ache in my veins, or the way my connection to the currents of magic slipped and slid and sparked under my fingertips. I was a malfunctioning battery, a broken machine. And I knew what it would take to make me feel all right again.
April told me this wasn’t my fault. That what Nadine had done, the occult drug-infused kiss she’d forced on me, was no different from forcing someone to smoke crack at gunpoint. Intellectually, I knew she was right. Emotionally, I felt . . . filthy. Used. And the only thing worse than the pain of withdrawal, the only thing more humiliating than what Nadine had done to me, was the fact that part of me wanted more.
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