by Alisha Rai
Three Shadows wasn’t bad. Three Jules could handle.
The sound of collective, raspy breathing filled the air as they came closer—theirs, not hers. Jules counted two males and a female. All but naked, claw marks covered their white skin, blending in with the red tracery of raised veins.
Now that she was back on familiar territory, Jules didn’t waste time. With a flip of her hand, her switchblade extended to a deadly length. Racing toward them, she strategized and launched herself at the male leading the pack. One quick slice and his neck gaped open. He fell to the ground in a heap.
Without missing a beat, she turned and slammed her foot into the other male who was creeping closer. The female was a step behind him. The Shadows stumbled together, but neither lost their balance. The female snarled, tossed the male aside and charged her.
Like all older Shadows, she was strong but clumsy. Jules feinted left, ducked out of the Shadow’s closing arms and slammed her knife into her flesh, just under her collarbone. She staggered back, grasping it as if she was stunned to find it there.
The male came at her with a growl. Since her knife was gone, Jules fell back on hand to hand, slamming her fist into his face. It barely fazed him as he reacted, throwing an uncoordinated but fast punch to her solar plexus. She fell backward with a groan, the air rushing out of her body.
Gun. Yes. Before the male could rush at her again, she pulled the gun from her holster, aimed and shot him straight in the head. At the close range, the high-powered bullet made his skull explode, showering blood and bone fragments over the female Shadow on her knees still tugging at the blade lodged in her chest. Jules ended the female’s futile struggle by firing a bullet into her brain.
Yeah, three were no problem. Sadly, the party was just getting started.
A scream rang through the night. Jules glanced over at her young charge in time to see a still-pigmented female Shadow lurching toward her, uncaring that her companions were getting slaughtered by Jules.
She jumped to her feet, but her race to the woman was interrupted by the sound of raspy breathing behind her. “Oh, come fucking on.”
She ducked, turned and raised her gun to take the newest arrival out. The new guy slapped it away before she could get her sweaty finger to pull the trigger.
Resorting to her fists again, she delivered a powerful right hook to the man’s jaw. While he was blessedly stunned, she scooped up the gun on the ground and shot him, grimacing at the fine mist of pink blood. The Shadow lurched backwards and fell on his back, still.
She didn’t waste time to check and see if the deed had been done. She pivoted and ran to the teenager. Even as she ran, she knew she was too late. The Shadow’s mouth was moving on the girl’s shoulder, sucking away at her blood, and the kid was even paler than before, her eyes vacant and officially checked out of reality.
No way. Jules refused to lose someone in front of her very eyes.
She grabbed the Shadow’s brown hair and threw all of her weight into a solid heave. The thing staggered back and fell to the ground, slow in her glutted state. She blinked as Jules straddled her.
The Shadow went limp, all fight gone. Her face relaxed in blissful acceptance. For a split second, Jules could swear coherence shone out of the female’s silver eyes, replacing the madness that had just been there.
But then it vanished, and she began to struggle like a wildcat, twisting and bucking underneath Jules.
Sending a quick prayer upward, Jules took care of the creature with a single, well-placed shot between the eyes.
The sound of the gun was extremely loud to Jules in the now-silent night. She stood on shaky legs and walked back over to the teen who lay on the ground, her pretty amber eyes staring up at the sky. Her dirty brown hair was wet with sweat and clung to cheeks barely beginning to lose the chubbiness of childhood. Bright red blood stained her shoulder.
Jules knelt next to the teen and easily ripped the neckline of her shirt until the bloody wound high up was visible.
Compromised.
The word was what they used for people who were bitten by the Shadows for blood. If the Shadows were ravenous, they feasted on the human’s flesh long enough to kill them, which Jules privately thought was the better option. Better to be eaten alive than be compromised. Because if a person was compromised, then whatever virus the Shadows carried in their blood and saliva was transmitted to the human. And the human, after the hellish three-to-four-day-long Illness, either turned…or died.
“What do I do?” she murmured, half to herself. She had never come across such a recently compromised individual, let alone one so young.
She had never had to watch anyone actually get bitten.
Basic puncture wounds, those she knew how to treat. Clumsily, she pulled her own shirt over her head, leaving her wearing only her tank top. She was amped up enough that the cold didn’t bother her.
She pressed the cloth to the teen’s wound. The shirt was hardly sterile, not with her sweat and dirt covering it, but it was better than nothing. And really, infection was the least of their concerns, not when the mother of all blood-borne diseases was coursing through the girl’s system.
So focused was she on the girl, she didn’t hear the footsteps. The displaced air behind her was her first sign they weren’t alone.
“Fuck,” she muttered in a whisper. Not more Shadows. She was wiped.
Her body turned fast enough that the blow meant for her temple glanced off the back of her head. She fell to her butt, stars temporarily bursting in front of her eyes. Despite her incapacitation, she fumbled for her gun, unsurprised when a boot slammed down on her hand, forcing her to drop her weapon. Tears sprang to her eyes. Not Shadows. Human.
She tried to gasp out an introduction. “I’m here to help. Don’t—”
A hard hand grasped her by the hair and arched her neck backwards before smacking her head into the tree. The sound of more footsteps had her lashing her arms out at the knowledge that she would have to fight two or more people shortly.
Who was crowing about being such a tough chick yesterday? Pride goeth before the fall.
No, no way was she going out like this. She’d fought Shadows. She could take a couple of humans.
Unless, of course, she thought as an all-too-familiar prick on her neck gave her a slight warning before she became dizzy, they came armed with tranqs. Chingado.
Jules woke up to the harsh glare of lights trained into her eyes. Her retinas winced from the abuse. There was a dull murmur of noise around her, hands touching her arms and legs, her clothes being shoved aside or unbuttoned and removed.
She couldn’t push her vocal cords, her arms or her legs into motion. Drugged, her sluggish mind told her.
Fingers were on her neck, on her collar. Her earpiece had already been taken from her ear. The murmurs grew louder. One face, a female with stringy brown hair and big black glasses, came into focus above her. Her lips formed words, but they sounded like that old vintage Peanuts cartoon to Jules’s ears. Wah wah wah.
The chick kept tugging at her collar. Good luck getting it off like that. The latch was fairly well hidden.
The woman tugged at it again. Bitch was cutting off Jules’s oxygen with her tugs. Sadly, she wasn’t hitting the button on the left which would ring James up.
Yeah, she should totally give her lover man the heads up. He should know that she’d been kidnapped, drugged and pummeled. That was probably important. But she was so damn tired. Later, later, she would ring him up later. Maybe she could engage in a little more of that verbal foreplay with him then too.
The roaring in her ears cleared long enough for her to hear the woman speak. “Stop yelling at me, you moron.”
A man responded. “You’ve had this woman drugged on this table all fucking day, and no one thought to question what this collar was?”
“I assumed it was an electro.”
“You assumed wrong. It’s clearly some sort of high-functioning technological device.”
“I’ve been alone here with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, while you’ve been off—”
“Taking care of the male.” The man’s voice was icy. “Not to mention trying to contain our adventure from this morning. Do you have any idea what would have happened if word got back to—?”
“Yes, yes. You’ve given me the lecture before.”
“If you care about our continued good health, you would listen.” A man came into her field of vision. His hands slipped over her throat, rough and uncaring. “Do we have anything to cut this thing off?”
“I don’t think so. We could send one of the guards out for a power tool.”
Wait, what? Cut off her collar? Fear made her heart beat faster. Forget the fact that they were going to try to cut off her collar when her neck was right freakin’ under it. If they cut off her collar, she couldn’t get a hold of James.
That was untenable. Her heart clenched. Over a year of partnership, friendship, camaraderie and, hell, yes, even caring…they were all tied to that simple, lightweight collar.
“She’s awake.”
Bug-eyed lady regarded her dispassionately. “So? I’ll shoot her up with some more of the sedative.” She turned away.
The man tugged on the collar, his tone of voice conversational. “That must have been you who took out those Shadows yesterday, eh? We wondered. Had we not been dealing with our own problems, we would have come looking for you then.”
Fuck you.
The woman came back into Jules’s field of vision. “Stop talking to her like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to make her into another one of your pets.”
“She will be another pet,” the man said comfortably. “She owes me, since she killed one of our other ones. Hell, two of our other ones, if the girl doesn’t survive the bite.”
“Our failures. Who wouldn’t have escaped had you not been so lenient with the hybrid.” The woman slammed the needle she held into Jules’s arm. That little whore.
She’d be no one’s pet, especially not these people.
“Don’t worry about sending for a saw. I found the latch here. Let’s get it off and hammer it.”
Jules made no effort to control her pulse. Panic and anger mingled until she was sure her heart would beat right out of her chest. James. James!
Time flew when an emergency was at hand.
James stretched and rubbed the small of his back as he entered his office. It ached from being hunched over a cot for the past few hours. A full dozen of the soldiers who had returned from the aborted Cheyenne mission that afternoon had become even more sick during their journey back. After a couple of the medical staff fell ill too, it had been all available hands on deck in the sickbay.
Thankfully, it was looking like a particularly virulent strain of flu, and not anything related to the Illness. James made a mental note to read up on medical care. There was nothing he hated more than caring for the sick—it brought back too many memories—but sometimes necessity trumped his desires.
He sank into his chair at the same moment his handheld uttered a warning beep alerting him to a change in one of his agent’s vitals. He docked the device, his own heartbeat stuttering when he recognized Jules’s icon pulsing.
A quick glance at the time showed him she should be close to, if not in California by now. Had he not been tied up, he probably would have checked in an hour or so ago.
He expanded her window. In the space of a second, the waves representing her vital signs were rocketing across the monitor, stronger and more frenzied than he’d ever seen them.
This is not caused by a rat.
Without waiting for his customary verbal check-in, he pulled up her visuals. The screen morphed from blue to a wavy pattern of greens and purples as he started to connect.
“Jules. What’s going on?” His tone was brisk, kisses and virtual reality forgotten in the heat of the moment and the fact that his woman was facing something that was bad enough to affect her unshakeable composure.
She didn’t respond.
For a split second the screen was filled with a mixture of white and steel. A loud static filled his audio, a far cry from Jules’s brisk tone. “Jules?”
The visual dissolved. The audio cut.
Her vital signs flatlined.
James breathed in deep. Don’t panic. It was a glitch. A glitch on his end, or maybe hers. Technology was temperamental sometime.
He reestablished the connection. Nothing.
He shut down his end and rebooted. Nothing.
He slammed his hand down on the control panel. Nothing.
Now. Now was the time to panic. “Jules!” he bellowed, knowing it was useless but unable to help himself.
He grabbed his handheld and tried to pull up her location. The tracker on her van showed that it was in the same general vicinity she’d been in last night, give or take a few miles. Her collar gave him no GPS signal.
Her collar was giving him nothing.
James realized he was breathing in pants, and he attempted to bring it under control. Cool it. Think.
Everything could be fine. Her collar could have malfunctioned, and she simply hadn’t left yet.
Why would she not have left today? Unless something had gone wrong and she needed help.
He knew it. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but he was suddenly, completely certain that something catastrophic had happened. It was the same queasy, uneasy feeling he’d had all day before the explosion that had killed so many.
Christ, she needed help. He needed help, since he was absolutely and totally ill-equipped to assist her. Why the fuck had he been put in charge of her life, of anyone’s life?
He should think about this rationally and calmly and come up with a good plan. He was awesome at plans.
Fuck a plan. He charged out of the office, his handheld gripped firmly in his hand. As he sprinted up to Gabriel’s, he continued to refresh the trackers, her signal, to no avail.
Come on, come on, come on… The chant continued in his brain until it became a never-ending loop, until he became unable to deny the reality anymore.
Flinging open the door of Gabriel’s office, he charged inside. “I think Jules is in trouble,” he blurted out.
Gabriel rose from his chair with some difficulty, a frown crossing his face. “What kind of trouble?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know.”
“So how do you know she’s in trouble?” The prosaic question came from the armchair in front of the desk. Marc. A late-night meeting, perhaps.
He focused back on Gabriel. “Her heart rate shot up so I tapped into her A/V. It functioned for a second, and then they both went dead. I can’t read her vitals either. Her van’s in the same town it was last night.”
“She never left to head back home?”
“No.”
“Could she be dead?”
He swallowed. He knew that eventually one of his agents would die. They were on their own when they traveled, unlike the soldiers who usually worked in pairs. But not Jules, please, no. “Even if she was…dead…I’d be able to tap into her collar.” He would see the ground, maybe hear her rattling last breaths. Speak to her. Tell her she wasn’t alone.
“Maybe your equipment is malfunctioning,” Marc suggested.
He rounded on the other man. “My equipment does not malfunction. My equipment is fucking amazing. Don’t give me…”
“Let’s calm down here,” Gabriel said soothingly. “James, where exactly was she?”
He inhaled. “Eaton, Colorado.”
“Very well. What do you want to do, send one of your other agents after her? You’d feel comfortable sending one or two of them in blind?”
Yes. Yes. Find her at any cost. But could he justify another life by sending them in without knowing what had happened to her? Jules was, by far, the best trained in fighting of any of his agent
s. Some of the males might be physically stronger, but as far as headcount went, Jules was heads and tails above the rest. The rest of his dozen or so agents were primarily glorified scouts who did a bit of search and rescue and no combat.
“Give me some soldiers,” he said hoarsely. “Give me a few for backup, and let them all go in after her.”
Gabriel looked at Marc.
James had always counted the other man as a friend. A flash of rage coursed through him when Marc raised his hands, a helpless look on his face. “My best group of guys are all sick. I can’t send the couple I have back in alone.”
A dull roar filled James’s ears. It wasn’t until he felt Gabriel’s hard arm encircle his waist that he realized he’d lunged at Marc, that his hands were wrapped around the other man’s neck, squeezing, crushing.
“Calm down, James.” Gabriel’s carefully moderated voice cut through the haze of rage surrounding him.
He struggled to catch his breath. His fingers slowly let go of the other man’s neck. “She went in alone.”
Marc gasped for air. “Because you said she could handle it.”
“I said she could handle one night on her own in an area on which we had radio silence, because she’s the smartest person we have on the front lines. One night. We were supposed to give her backup. She should have left that town before sun-up to head home. It’s almost eight p.m. where she is now.” They’d failed her. No, he’d failed her.
“I’m well aware of that, James, but you can’t possibly blame me for this. Even if our troops had shown up today, this could have still happened. Why didn’t you realize at dawn that she’d never left Colorado?”
Because he’d been fucking busy since the moment he’d woken up, and he’d only kept himself tapped into her vitals, not her GPS. Still, he should have checked in to make sure she’d left. Christ, so fucking stupid. “You have to give me those troops,” he said, no, pleaded, to Gabriel.
Pity and compassion reflected in his boss’s eyes. “Marc, give us a minute, please.”
“Yes. James, I’m so sorry—”