by Jenn Stark
Predictably, they’d turned up nothing.
Maria seemed less satisfied with this outcome than Warrick, though. “There’s always a stash—always,” she grumbled, peering around the room. “Even if it’s a legit stash by the counters, an overage to bring counts up to snuff in case of a systems snafu.”
“Well, a legitimate stash would have been emptied when they left.”
“Fair,” she said, but she didn’t look convinced. “I’m not saying that I know these people perfectly, but I’ve been around the Guardia long enough to know that wherever there’s an opportunity, there’s theft. Not on a grand scale, not that anyone would notice, but we’re talking millions of pills being pushed here. Accidents happen, shit hits the floor, and these people are addicts. There’s no way they ran a completely tight operation here. Other than the doors, there’s nothing state-of-the-art about this place.”
“Which begs the question, why here?” Warrick nodded. “Proximity to suppliers?”
“Or proximity to the target market. Whoever Takio was planning on selling the drugs to.”
Warrick grimaced, but now was not the time to explain to Maria how wrong she was. Now was also not a time to think about how many demons he’d just banished back beyond the veil. He’d lost count after about eighty.
“We can’t go back up the way we came,” she said, squinting at the basement door. “They’ve got to have cameras on us.”
“They did,” Warrick grunted, gesturing at the ones he’d picked out in the room—four of them, now all coated with thick, black blood. “I don’t think they’re very helpful right now, but you’re right, they’ll be coming down to assess the damage, and soon.”
Warrick had about hit his limit on dead bodies, even bodies that weren’t technically human. Besides, they had a bigger issue. They had to get out.
Still…it had been an epic battle. One that no one would believe he and Maria had survived as two ordinary humans.
He scanned the shadows of the room, noting the service elevators and doorways. “Have you ever been down here?”
“That would be negative,” Maria said. “I’ve been in A and B, that’s it. I don’t know that Jack ever got down this far either.”
“He did,” Warrick said, feeling the steel in Maria’s gaze as she turned it on him. “He was not as clean a player in all this as he wanted you to believe, Maria. That’s reasonable, of course. He liked you. He admired you.”
“And I was his ticket out,” Maria said wryly. “If I knew he’d truly been in the thick of things with the drug operation, that would’ve made it more difficult for me to cut the deal that I did that got him out and off to Florida to be with his sister.”
“Or to be with his money in some harbor town where no one recognized him after the surgery he plans,” Warrick corrected her.
Maria blinked, then smiled wearily. “Fine. At least tell me he wasn’t directly involved with the selling or trafficking of these hallucinogens, or whatever these are,” she muttered. “Or selling and trafficking anything else, for that matter.”
“He wasn’t,” Warrick said, glad to be able to confirm the truth on that point. “Jack was a product of his environment and his appetites, but he tried to maintain some code of honor even in the midst of all that.”
“Good. So, what was he doing down—”
“Wait.” Warrick straightened, their momentary foray into Jack’s better qualities triggering something in his fragmented memories that he’d originally overlooked. Glee. Something about this place had made Jack happy, and the man hadn’t been an idiot. Though he’d been in the assembly room only a few times, he’d seen the pharmaceutical gold that was being packaged there. If he’d known it was only a temporary setup, what would he have done?
Slowly, Warrick pivoted, scanning the room. “Anybody coming or going from the building was subject to a full body search and the digital scan. He couldn’t have secreted the pills out of the compound without ingesting them.”
Maria snorted. “That really wasn’t Jack’s style.”
“Agreed. When he was down here, it was strictly to get pills and make deliveries for Takio. Closely monitored deliveries. No way could he have taken anything out of here without being noticed.” Warrick went over to the service elevator.
“Don’t hit that,” Maria warned. “They’ll be down here in a flash if they think the fighting’s over.”
“There’s a stairwell back here,” Warrick said. Sure enough, over to the right was an exit door that led to a second flight of stone steps. It was unmanned, of course, since the operation had left the building.
That still amazed him. All those demons roaming the upper halls, and Holkeri had simply—left them there? Failed experiments to elevate the spawn or to return actual demons to their exalted former state? The creatures he’d banished had been mentally torn apart, crazed with pain and need. But they were not God’s favored children.
Did Holkeri think he could get away with his acts because of that?
“Warrick.” Maria was peering at the nook at the base of the stairs. “These are sign-in and sign-out cards. Seriously old school. We have them at Lucy’s. One of the things Jack always got a kick out of. If he’d noticed this here…”
Warrick jolted, another fragment of memory coming back to him. “He noticed,” he said. The hanging file was well out of the spray from the fight in the center of the room, and the cards still stuck out of the slots—but there was an opening at the top, big enough for a clipboard.
She stood on her tiptoes, trying to feel around the opening. “I can’t reach.”
Warrick moved to where she was standing, reached inside. It took only a moment for him to brush across the telltale shape of the capsule. Five of them. No one would think Jack was the one who’d tossed them here—they wouldn’t know who’d done that deed, would have shrugged and returned them to the main supply or, more likely, pocketed the stash for themselves. All Jack had needed to do was wait.
Warrick pulled the pills free and handed three of them to Maria. She stared at him as he glanced back to the card holder.
“This was nearly a year ago,” he murmured, going over in his mind what Jack’s shattered memory had brought him. “He forgot he’d stashed the pills, maybe was high when he’d done it, which is why they’d left him alone in the first place.”
“They knew he wasn’t going to get out of here with anything.” Maria nodded. She looked down at her outfit and frowned. “There is nothing on me that’s not stuck together,” she said. “You good with carrying these?”
Wordlessly, he took the three pills, adding them to the two more that he’d palmed. Maria would get her three—plenty for her to analyze. The archangel could take them from her at any time, should he decide to do so. Meanwhile, Warrick would have two to deliver to Michael himself. If these pills represented some new drug that Holkeri was trying to use to turn back the curse of demonism…
It couldn’t be possible, could it?
A shout sounded deep in the building, then a clatter of feet on the staircase they’d first descended, at the far end of the room.
“Time to go,” Warrick said, pulling Maria with him. They pressed into the rear stairwell, and he was about to race up the stairs when Maria stopped him.
“Wait!” she said. “They’ll know that’s where we’re going—we don’t have any other choice. They’ll block off the exit with their radios. We should stay here.”
He skewered her with a look. “We stay here, and your life is in greater danger than before. You summoned me, and I came to protect you. The new threat will be one I cannot let stand. I will be forced to kill the rest of them.”
“Um…I summoned you?”
Warrick grimaced. That had been more than he’d wanted to say. “This really isn’t the time—” he began, his words cut off by the scatter of gunfire peppering the far stairwell. Clearly Nico and his team wanted to make sure Warrick and Maria weren’t trying to come up the way they’d come down.
Apparently, Maria agreed. “Okay!” She nodded vigorously. “We’ll try these stairs.”
Warrick grinned. “I thought you might agree.”
They piled up the back stairs even as the sound of shouting grew louder in the basement behind them. Eventually, they came to a door that was locked and padlocked—but only locked and padlocked, Warrick decided. There were no electrical wires attached to it. The elevator door he’d noted below was wired, yes, but not this access portal. Which meant it was usually heavily guarded.
But that wasn’t his problem today. Still riding high on the adrenaline spike of banishing so many demons at once, he reached out and ripped the door off its hinges.
“Jesus!”
Maria hesitated only a moment as Warrick tossed the door to the side, then gamely ran through as he gestured at her almost angrily to precede him. They raced into a large room that had once apparently served as the building’s attached garage—not for the residents, though, but for commercial equipment. The service elevator had a bay here, and there were three large garage doors for truck deliveries.
“You know those are going to be attached to some sort of alarm system,” she said.
Warrick didn’t seem to hear her. He passed her and kept on running, reaching the door a full five strides before she did. She thought for sure he was going to punch through that one too, but he pressed his hand flat against the door instead, his shoulders convulsing.
“What is it?” Maria demanded, looking back over her shoulder. “They’re coming up fast, exploring all the exits. They’re going to see the shattered door.”
“That might not have been us,” Warrick said, still exploring the door with his fingers—not even exploring it, but more like testing it for weakness, his hands splayed on the flat surface as if he had some sort of electronic stud finder embedded in his fingertips. “There’s a full contingent of demons that’s been let loose here. It will be easy to lay any damage at their feet. That’s exactly what Nico will do. It’s what I’d do.”
“Who?” And wait, demons?
“The doorman.” Warrick’s gaze shifted to Maria again, and he frowned, but he was clearly still distracted. Did he really just say demons?
Warrick reached out and put one hand on her shoulder, the other one against her face. He stared at her intently. “You’re still bleeding.”
“Head wound. They’re bleeders.” She shrugged, though in truth, she did feel light-headed—whether that had to do with the fight, the horror back in that lab room, their mad dash up the stairs…or the fact that Warrick had put a name to the creatures who’d attacked them. Not a hallucination, but…demons. Honest-to-God demons.
No…no, that couldn’t be possible.
She shoved the thought away. “You need to focus, Warrick. The moment they realize we’re not down there, they’re going to come running for us up these back stairs. We need to be gone.”
“No,” Warrick said. “We need to wait until they pass by us. Then we can follow them.”
“But—”
“Shh. Keep your hands on my skin—my arms. My waist. Don’t look at any of them as they pass us. You don’t have to shut your eyes, but keep your head down.” He pulled Maria close behind a stack of pallets, wrapping his arms around her as the footsteps hit the stairs they’d just climbed. There was a rush of outrage and confusion as the door that Warrick had ripped off its hinges was discovered, and then a knot of armed guards poured through the doorway onto the oversized loading dock.
“Search!” ordered the doorman—Nico, Warrick had called him—as two of the men ran forward and checked the garage doors.
“Locked, sir!” they cried.
Others fanned out in a wide arc, one of them passing within five feet of Maria and Warrick—he never glanced their way once, though their hiding place was hardly ideal. Still, with Warrick’s arms wrapped around her, it was as if she didn’t exist. As if neither of them existed—as if they were both invisible.
You summoned me, and I protected you.
The full contingent of demons.
What she’d seen in Bonnie…Cedo’s eyes…the creatures in the basement. Those were real, not hallucinations.
The devil men, her cousin Cara had called them. Los Diablos.
“Open it,” the doorman barked, startling Maria back to the present. She watched through slitted eyes as, obligingly, one of his men pounded something on the keypad, and the clanking assembly of the garage door moved up, revealing the dingy gray sky beyond. Maria caught sight of a parking lot, a few cars that had seen better days, and the street beyond. Still clutching her to him, Warrick moved then, and she didn’t need to be told to stay close. Moving soundlessly, they followed the others out the door and into the open air.
“No sign of them, sir.”
“There should be bodies,” Nico said. “Takio said there would be bodies. At least the woman’s.”
Maria’s eyes narrowed, but she didn’t resist when Warrick lifted her into a fireman’s hold, settling her onto his shoulder. She grabbed his shirt and pulled it free of his camo pants, then laid her hands along his back. If she needed skin-to-skin contact to keep this charade going, she was more than happy to do it.
A phone trilled, and Nico cursed, gesturing to the man to answer.
The man still hesitated. “What should we report?”
“We report what we saw. Nobody made it out of there alive. If Takio wants to see the bodies, tell him we’ll bring them to Morpheus once we clean them up. If he tells us not to bother, we’re good. If he wants them, we keep looking.”
The man nodded, clearly better trained than Maria was, since she was already poking the doorman’s plan full of holes. Nobody put two people through a crucible like that and didn’t want to see the results.
Nico’s direct report seemed to be making the same realization, wincing as a strident voice came over the line—a female voice, Maria realized. So not Takio, but someone close to him. Someone apparently pissed off.
The man hung up. “He wants the bodies, and he wants them yesterday. He also wants samples of the residue brought for analysis.”
“Fuck,” Nico said. “We find the bodies, then.”
The man fidgeted. “And if we don’t?”
“Then we get two bodies that are close. Surely we have enough people in this complex that finding a man and a woman who fit the description won’t be that hard. Kill them, cut them up, and serve them up in pieces.”
Despite herself, Maria nearly choked. What?
Her mind raced through the possibilities. If she were responsible, even indirectly, for the death of a man and a woman from the Citadel’s poverty-stricken slums, she would never forgive herself. And the couple would have to be hacked to pieces convincingly enough that it could be proven that was the way they’d died—cut up while they were alive. She definitely couldn’t live with that.
Warrick clamped his hand on her thighs, but his body heat had kicked up another five notches. He’d heard Nico as well. Good.
Another scream howled from inside the building, and the men turned, rifles up.
“Goddammit.” Nico growled. “We can’t fucking deal with them and get the bodies. You two—go round up likely candidates. You saw them, tall woman, taller man, shouldn’t be hard to find. As long as the fucking animals are loose in the zoo, we’re not going to find anything. And we don’t have enough tranqs in the world to keep them quiet for long.”
Another scream, and several more men ran—or more like fled from the building, the last one waving wildly as the garage door crashed shut—and suddenly, Maria got it. The high-tech doors, the barricaded staircases. Takio wasn’t trying to keep people out…he was trying to keep his lab rats in. Lab rats that even now had been driven to the point of hysteria with so many of their brethren dead beneath them. Their minds might have been fractured, but their vital urge toward self-preservation had to be clicking in…whatever the hell they were.
Demons.
They couldn’t let those t
hings escape any more than they could let Nico kill two innocent victims. Surely Warrick had to see that. Surely there was something that could be done.
Beneath her, Warrick breathed two quiet words she could barely make out. “Stefan,” he whispered. “Raum.”
Chapter Thirteen
After mentally communicating what was needed at the Citadel, Warrick didn’t wait for the other members of the Syx to show up. They would triangulate on the coordinates of the call, drop into the loading parking lot of the Citadel building, and figure out from the screams where best to go. When he’d sent the summons out to them, his directives were clear enough: make a big noise.
As to the human sacrifices…
He grimaced. Humans could do what they wanted to humans. That was the game. But this one wouldn’t play out exactly as planned, given the C-4 he’d suggested Stefan and Raum bring with them. They wouldn’t blow up the building—but they would blow off its doors. Then they’d take care of the rest of the demons as they poured through the opening. Child’s play, considering how deranged the demons inside Building D were at this point. After that, they could keep Nico and whoever else was on his team from doing any damage to anyone until more humans landed on the scene.
Warrick moved around the corner with Maria, dropping her lightly to the ground. As she stepped back from him, her eyes were wild, panicked.
“Warrick, we can’t let Nico kill those people,” she hissed.
“He won’t. But we have to move.”
“No! I’m serious!” Maria growled in frustration as he took off, tugging her along inexorably with him. He’d done this often enough, he knew the clearance protocols. The faster they got away, the—
Boom!
The explosion was so intense, the surge of heat so great that he and Maria went flying, the two of them breaking contact as their bodies were flung across the parking lot and hard up against the chain-link fence. Warrick immediately rolled to his feet, but Maria lay in a crumpled heap, out cold. He crouched and checked her vitals, grimacing in relief as he picked her up again. She was his to care for, and she’d nearly been killed twice so far on his watch.