Stefan had the gall to laugh. “It won’t work. My soldiers will be up here before the hour is out.” He gestured to the feed from the security cameras, which had been restored with the generator power. We could see Unbounded suiting up all over the building, and a crowd gathering on the floor below. “It’s going to make the bloodshed you’ve already experienced nothing more than an appetizer.”
Ava showed only confidence. “As long as we have you, they won’t dare come in with too much force.”
“My real successor is in London.” Stefan’s smirk deepened. “He won’t take this sitting down. Make no mistake. Even if you succeed today, tomorrow he’ll be here with an army.”
“Exactly,” Ropte said. “His heir has everything to gain if Stefan is dead. He won’t mind murdering everyone up here, including Stefan.”
Stefan scowled. “The only one of us he’ll be murdering is you.”
“There will be no reinforcements,” Ava said. “We did have to break our blockade when we shifted inside, but a group of Hunters took our place. Even if reinforcements come, they won’t get past them.”
“I’m going to drink your blood,” Stefan promised.
Ava sighed in exasperation. “Somebody gag him. Gag them both. Until we’re ready to record the video footage to send downstairs.”
As Jace and Mari jumped to do her bidding, Ava drew me aside, close to where Cort had been cut down. I avoided looking at the blood that soaked the carpet, but memories of him assailed me. Especially memories of a particular restaurant he’d taken me to when I’d first Changed, and how he’d told me about his château in Paris and promised to take me there.
“Stefan’s right,” Ava said, her back to our prisoners, her voice stretched to a breaking point. “We need to calm those people downstairs. We’re too vulnerable here. I’m thinking a succession announcement will have to wait a week—or more. We’ll get it all signed today and move Stefan and Ropte and all the wounded guards out of here, but for right now, it’s better to have Stefan announce that his son has been returned to him and with his help, they were able to overthrow a Renegade plot. Catrina says they have speakers and video screens about every twenty feet throughout the entire building, and in every work station and private residence. They should all hear his message.”
I chewed on my lip as I tentatively sent my mind downward to the gathering masses. Dimitri was right—now that things had calmed down, I was already regaining some control. “I don’t know that it’ll work—no matter what we tell them. The panic coming from below is strong.”
“One of the soldiers had a battery-powered radio, so they know a little of what was going on up here.”
“Then I’m guessing those soldiers will start coming up those stairs within twenty minutes. If they receive backup from the other headquarters, we’ll be in big trouble.”
Ava shook her head. “That shouldn’t happen. Reports are already coming in from the other headquarter locations. Someone here did manage to get out a call for reinforcements, but so far anyone leaving the other buildings has been turned back inside or taken prisoner by our people.”
“Chris?” I asked.
“Stella said he’s taken fifty-two already. The rest have stayed inside. But whoever has taken control below is bound to hatch a plan if we don’t send out instructions from the Triad.”
Across the room, Mari clapped her hands. “Wait! I know what to do. It’s Noah. We need Noah!” Everyone stared at her, but she vanished, appearing next to Ava. She lowered her voice so Stefan and Ropte couldn’t hear. “Or rather, we need Erin channeling Noah. Together they can calm them down. All those speakers they have should easily spread the emotion Erin can put into the words. It’s not like a recording or anything.”
Ava snapped her fingers. “It’s worth a try. Where’s Noah?”
“Helping Stella and Patrick with communications,” Jace said from behind me, moving so fast I hadn’t noticed his approach. “But the electric grid around the building is back on.”
“Can we disable it up here without shutting off all the electricity?” Mari asked. “And we’ll need to have Stella turn off our grid over there.”
“I’ll take care of this one.” Jace shifted the assault rifle he’d appropriated from somewhere and stalked up behind Stefan’s couch, grabbing him roughly by the neck. “Hey, old man, I need some codes from you.” He looked over to where Catrina was printing documents. “We’ll need computer access too.” She hurried over with her tablet.
Ava pulled out her phone. “I’ll let Stella know we need Noah ready.”
Mari tapped her foot impatiently until the grids were shut down in both locations. Then she disappeared and returned less than two minutes later with both Noah and Patrick. From the couches across the room, Stefan and Ropte stared in shocked surprise at Mari’s ability to shift others, but it didn’t matter what they saw now.
“I know just the song,” Noah said to me. “It was inspired from a speech by Mother Teresa. Not her words exactly, but the same sort of thing: brotherly love, living in peace, helping one another. You get the idea. I’ll teach it to you. I brought the music. But first you have to look the part.” She lifted a bag containing the same outfit I’d worn at Ropte’s. “Mari took us back to my place for this, and it’s why I brought Patrick and more nanites, so you can channel him first. It was in the paper that you were at Ropte’s, and some of them will recognize you—me—in this outfit.” She shook her head with a little laugh. “Whatever.”
“Let us know when you’re ready,” Ava said, her voice easier now. “I’ll have Stefan make a public statement on a recording. Ropte too. We’ll try to get a shot of them sitting on the same couch without killing each other. If they won’t behave, Patrick will have to fake being Stefan.”
“I haven’t been able to study his mannerisms,” Patrick said, “so I wouldn’t be able to do a thorough job at becoming him, but why don’t we do a pre-announcement first? I could do that much, and just seeing Stefan alive and letting his people know there will be a more lengthy announcement soon should buy us time to record one that will satisfy them.”
“Good idea. The camera is that way. Make it brief. Have Catrina actually make the announcement. Maybe you can pretend you’re on the phone in the background.” Her voice lowered. “Record it first. Catrina seems trustworthy, but we can’t risk anything at this point.”
Patrick nodded and moved off, pulling out a portable neural headset.
Ava raised her voice and signaled Jace. “I’ll need your help with Stefan to provide an incentive to say what we need him to say—exactly the words I choose.”
“My pleasure,” Jace said. “I’m sure Ritter will offer pointers, if I need them.”
From the couch, Ritter laughed. Our eyes met, and emotion rushed between us, briefly stirring our connection. This time it didn’t hold only grief. The tightness in my chest eased ever so slightly.
“Wait!” Jeane, who had apparently regained consciousness under Dimitri’s care, chose that moment to stagger to her feet. Her hair was knotted and bloody, her eyes wide with shock. For once, there was no sign of the playful sexiness she normally portrayed. Shaking off Dimitri’s hand, she stumbled inside the square of couches to stand in front of her brother, the coffee table rubbing at the back of her calves.
“Fix it,” she demanded. “I heard what everyone says you did to me, but my mind remembers it another way. I want back the truth.”
His response was muffled, and she leaned forward, yanking out his gag. “I said fix it!” She leaned over, extending one hand to where his hands were securely tied and resting in his lap.
He hit her hand away. “I can’t fix it, you nitwit. I just ask you to remember how it was and then I tell you how I want you to remember it. There is no undoing anything. You could have nulled me while I was speaking. Too bad you were too stupid.”
“Then I guess I don’t need you.” A light shot out from her other hand, arcing across Ropte’s neck. Ritter jumped to his feet
and over the huge coffee table, but wasn’t able to reach her before she’d waved it across Ropte again. Not twice, but three or four times. She appeared to have every intention of continuing her strikes until Ritter grabbed her from behind and wrenched Tihalt’s laser from her hand.
Ropte didn’t make a sound. And he never would again.
Ava swore under her breath, and in all the time I’d known her she’d never cursed. “Will you ever think of anyone but yourself? We need him!”
Jeane shook her head. “Not really. People here barely know him. Remember, I’m his successor, and they do know me.” Her contented, blood-streaked smile chilled me. “He said it would only be temporary until he chose someone better. I guess he was wrong. His legacy—and Delia’s—end with me.”
On his couch, the gag still in his mouth, Stefan was laughing.
Ava nodded at Dimitri, who’d come up behind Jeane with a syringe of sedative. Jeane turned at Ava’s motion, and the fear returned to her eyes. “No,” she protested in a small, breathy voice. Her shoulders slumped as all the fight drained from her body.
I took the three steps separating me from Dimitri and placed a hand on his arm. “She’s suffered enough. Let her stay conscious—just tie her up in another room. Take Lew too.” The man’s sightless stare was unsettling, reminding me of Cort’s eyes in those seconds after his death.
Ava nodded at Dimitri. “That’s fine. We may need her anyway after we announce she’s Ropte’s successor.”
Twenty minutes later, Ava’s video was ready. Catrina and I had worked together to get Stefan to look natural, with Jace waving Tihalt’s laser occasionally near Stefan’s feet for encouragement. After a rapid cleaning and splicing by Patrick, the clip lasted only two and a half minutes but appeared genuine.
In the recording, Stefan appeared briefly with a cleaned-up Jace and assured everyone that the Renegade rebellion had been squashed despite the shifter the Renegades had employed to infiltrate the upper floors. “She is in custody now with the rest of her comrades,” Stefan said. “My son, who has recently Changed and joined us, was instrumental in capturing her.” He raised a fist. “We are invincible as always, and soon we’ll have many shifters of our own.”
Stefan paused before dropping the “terrible” news of a Triad member fatality, and here a hint of his gloating showed through despite our best efforts. “However, David’s official successor, Jeane Baker, is safe and will take his place as soon as the customary documents are examined by the department heads and DNA testing by doctors is complete. But you all know Jeane,” he added with an empty smile, “and we look forward to her future contributions to our organization.”
He finished by promising to bring Jace to the lower levels later to officially introduce him around. Of course, if we ended up doing that, it would really be Patrick looking like Stefan, but Ava felt that promising a physical appearance would ease more tension, even if we didn’t follow through for a few days.
Jace took over the rest of the video, introducing himself and spinning a yarn about how he’d come to train under his father’s tutelage. He wrapped up by announcing that he’d brought with him a special visitor who was famous on every continent. Then he introduced me as Noah.
At that point, we switched to a live feed. As I sang into the microphone, the words and music blasted over every speaker in the building, and my face—or Noah’s—appeared on every screen on every floor. I sang of peace and love. Of family and the human race. Keene enhanced my efforts, and I pulled on his proffered energy, imbuing his sadness into the notes.
My eyes strayed to Cort’s blood on the carpet. He’d be proud of what we’d accomplished here today. Proud that he’d saved his brother’s life when for five hundred years he’d been helpless to save any of his other siblings from the monster he called father.
“It’s working!” Mari whispered, pointing to the monitors. “They’re going back to their desks and jobs and whatever else they were doing before the call to arms went out. Look!”
“Three department heads have asked to meet personally with Stefan,” Catrina put in, tapping on her tablet. “I scheduled a meeting for tomorrow, and they seemed okay with that. So I hope Patrick will have studied Stefan enough by then to pass their examination.”
No doubt there would be more who questioned. We’d have to slowly weed out the troublemakers and place the former prisoners from Mexico in every department as new “managers.” That some of them were known in the Emporium from before their capture should make it easier for them to spot trouble brewing.
In the end, where fighting and negotiation had failed, Noah’s supposedly useless, beautiful ability, not meant for battle but for inspiration, convinced everyone and won the day. I hugged Noah tightly. Maybe if we’d bred in more abilities like hers, we could have finished this battle a century ago.
Catrina came up to me after I was myself again. “You do have multiple abilities,” she said, touching my arm. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
She must believe I was also a technopath because I’d changed my appearance using the nanites. “Something like that,” I told her. Now wasn’t the time to explain channeling, not until all the Emporium headquarters were secure and we were sure about where she planned to go from here.
She leaned closer. “Erin, there’s something wonderful inside you. Can’t you feel it?”
The comment was strange, but no stranger than others she’d surprised me with today. I decided she was still talking about my channeling. Maybe soon I’d see if she could learn how. With the way Jace’s eyes lingered on her face, I had a feeling we were going to be seeing a lot more of each other.
WARM SAND STRETCHED FOR MILES on end with no one in sight. Ritter and I were completely alone. We’d had a busy month with Cort’s funeral, Chris and Stella’s wedding, and, yeah, that little matter of taking over the Emporium. We were still working out issues on that.
With Stella and Patrick sifting through the Emporium databases, uncovering centuries of plots and government interference, we were making headway with our changes. Slow changes that we’d accomplish hand in hand with the mortals to find a peaceful co-existence.
Stefan hadn’t officially retired, but he’d been transferred to Mexico, where he was under constant sedation after an escape attempt. He was alive only because we might need him, but I suspected that wouldn’t be for long. I was glad he was far away from Jace, who was quickly filling Stefan’s public role with the Emporium. That everyone liked Jace and few had liked Stefan made his job easier.
Ironically, our biggest problem, besides extending new directives to all the Emporium headquarters and deciding when to announce Stefan’s retirement, had been Jeane dying her hair blond again, painting her beauty mark, and trying to seduce every male in sight. She was no one’s idea of a leader, and her antics caused more than a little trouble among the guards. She offered to step down so she could spend the rest of her days shopping and tending a near comatose Lew, but as she had no posterity, and never would, we had no immediate way of replacing her. Triad succession rules would have to change—and soon. Our experts were still decoding her brain, but Catrina and I thought we might eventually extract her false memories. In the meantime, it was a full-time job keeping her out of trouble.
Someone else’s job right now. A week ago, Ritter and I had finally escaped to the tropical island Cort had left us in his will. “He always teased me that he would honeymoon here,” Ritter told me. “But he was married several times, and it never worked out.”
We could talk about him now, and it was a relief to share memories. Ritter had far more than I did, of course, but I had a few he didn’t know about.
The sun sat low enough in the sky that the heat was pleasant and the humidity bearable. The occasional wispy cloud and seagulls winging through the air provided the only variety in the endless blue sky. We’d been swimming, not in the ocean this time but in a small pool formed by a waterfall and surrounded by luscious palm trees. We’d left the pool to
dry in the sun and soak up some rays.
“It’s tomorrow the others are coming, right?” Ritter lifted himself up partway on the blanket and put an arm over me. His head blocked out the sun.
“Yeah. Mari’s bringing everyone after lunch.”
He heaved a sigh. “With Chris and his kids here, we’ll have to put on clothes.”
I laughed. “I miss them.”
“Clothes or the kids?”
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up and kiss me, Your Deathliness. Tonight’s our last night alone.”
“No, it’s only one of the first.” But he obliged me, lowering his mouth to mine and covering my bare legs with his.
He was wrong. Because I’d discovered the something wonderful Catrina had seen inside me—the tiny spark that meant life. Ritter would soon have a new op to plan, which was in some ways more frightening and exciting than anything we’d been through together. I wanted to tell him more than almost anything, but I wanted one thing even more: a few more hours as the center of his world. Because in a few months, we’d never really be alone again.
Tomorrow we would celebrate. Ritter would pick me up and spin me around and laugh like a madman. He’d put his mouth to my stomach and talk to our child. In another month or two, he’d start asking me to relay messages and begin designing workouts for children. I couldn’t wait.
Instead of deepening the kiss, Ritter drew away, his face growing serious and his black eyes searching mine. “Where do we go from here? I’ve fought them so long. I never really thought about what came after.”
“We make sure nothing like the Emporium ever happens again.”
Something akin to relief chased across his face. “The only way is for Unbounded to continue monitoring. We have to protect all our people.”
I liked how he said “our people.” From here on out, there were no more Renegades or Emporium, or even Unbounded and mortals. They were all our people.
Together, we would go into the future and discover what it held.
The Takeover Page 30