She told the last, “Don’t say a fucking word. And if you and your two goons want to live, I would suggest not walking far from where I send you. Because, I might not be able to find your useless asses.”
“Send me whe…,” was all Klaus was able to get out before the back of his head exploded in pain and he disappeared from view.
Ashur chuffed behind her, “Yeah, good point.” She turned to John, “Pod?”
“Up above us.”
“Leave it.” She turned to look at Ashur, “Let’s go boy wonder,” Ashur chuffed, “No, I’m not your damned sidekick you four-footed walking rug.” She reached out and grabbed John, “Now come here, or I won’t get you a date.”
Ashur trotted up and chuffed to her again, “I don’t care,” she replied, “I won’t help you with any female and we won’t go on the Internet to search, either. So take that and chew on it, my dear opposable thumb lacking pain-in-the-ass.”
ADAM, find and destroy their surveillance equipment if you can.
>>If I can?<<
What if it isn’t connected to the Internet?
>>I was surfing the radio waves…<<
TOM, take care of the Pod and the car, please.
Yes, oh careful Wife of Trophies.
TOM.
Yes?
Doghouse for you, Alien for brains.
She could hear TOM’s snickering in her mind.
Grabbing Ashur, the three of them disappeared. The Ferrari took off into the sky, leaving behind a mess, a lot of questions, and not many answers.
CHAPTER TWO
Chapter 2
QBS ArchAngel Over Japan – 16.5 hours before meeting in Japan
John shook his head as he walked into the Pod Bay, Gabrielle striding behind him, was continuing her tirade, “Why are you going instead of me or why not you and me? At least answer that question you poor excuse for a walking mime,” she huffed in exasperation.
John grinned. The last four hundred feet, all the way from the Bitch’s quarters, he had been listening to Gabrielle’s constant complaining about John not taking her along. He allowed his go bag to slide off of his shoulder, and he put it into his Pod before turning around and looking down at the vampire, “Because, I’ve got one beautiful female to deal while out in public. I don’t need two, especially since you just got nominated to be here to represent Bethany Anne.”
“Who the hell told you I was the best solution for that role?” Gabrielle retorted.
“ArchAngel. She said Bethany Anne would most likely nominate you, as you had the role when we all went to China.” John continued his staring contest.
Gabrielle stared up at John for ten seconds, “Shit,” she finally spat. Gabrielle turned around and started walking back out of the bay, “Don’t think I’ll forget this, John!” she called over her shoulder
John turned around, “No, that would make life too easy,” he agreed.
John heard Gabrielle yell right before stepping through the doors, “I heard that!”
John looked back to make sure the doors had closed, “Of course you did, that’s because you can hear an ant fart in a hurricane.” John sat in the Pod and started locking in, the Pod doors closed and sealed, “ArchAngel, how is Gabrielle?”
“She is telling me that I need to discuss ‘girls sticking together’ with her some time.”
John chuckled, “Does she not realize you could just as easily look like a guy?”
“Probably, but since my avatar is Bethany Anne, I doubt it comes to mind.”
“No, probably not.” John finished clicking his straps, “Take me out.” He paused before asking, “Why did you want her staying behind?”
“Because I’ve analyzed the data, John. You will go and support Bethany Anne. You won’t judge her, and you won’t condemn her. In all things, you are her rock, and she leans on you. You are the best choice.”
The Pod slipped through the gravitic shield into space. In moments, it was streaking through space eighty miles above Earth.
“You might as well take me to the address, ArchAngel.”
“Understood, John. You will arrive in eighteen minutes.”
One-half day’s march from Shennongjia Peak, Hubei
Bai leaned back against a tree, pushing his pack into a small area between the branches, allowing him to take some of the weight off of his back. Zhu nodded to his friend as he came up.
Bai said, “Any idea if our trackers have any clue where we are going?”
Zhu nodded, “Yes, we were chosen to take the second group who left. I listened in on the conversations, and it seems that our group met with another group. The new group stopped for a little while and then left.”
“That’s good, right? That means our group slowed down, and we won’t have to follow them too far?” Bai asked.
Zhu shook his head, “Bai, they stopped and had a meeting with something that joined them. That something walked with cat’s tracks our tracker claims. He wasn’t happy about it at all.”
“Why not? We know they can turn into some sort of werecat, what is their problem? We all have some silver on us.”
“Bai, what do cats do more than most animals,” Zhu looked into the forest, looking up into the limbs of the trees above them.
Bai followed his friend's glance and thought about it. “They hunt.”
Zhu nodded, “They hunt. And now, they are hunting us with the intellect of a human and a cat.”
“That’s not good,” Bai agreed, trying to peer harder into the foliage above them. “You think they are setting up a trap?”
Zhu looked at his friend, “Jian told Shun and me to count on it.”
Bai nodded and checked his rifle, making sure his silver rounds were loaded for the fourth time this morning.
CHAPTER THREE
Chapter 3
Etheric
“I’m saying,” Gunter ground out, “How do we know she wasn’t lying to us?”
“Do you know where the fuck we are?” Klaus asked, looking into the grayness tracking in every direction, “I can’t see shit. Neither can either of you. So, she says she would find us unless we moved.”
“Like I trust that woman with anything! Have you finally figured out who she is?”
“Yes, I know where I saw her face,” Klaus admitted.
“And?” Gunter pushed.
“She is the head of TQB,” Klaus looked into the distance, but nothing changed for him. He still couldn’t see anything, like looking through the fog on a cold morning.
“What kind of shit does she have if she can send us to some other part of the Earth,” Dieter snapped his fingers, “like that?”
“What makes you think,” Klaus asked, turning to Dieter, “that we are on Earth?”
QBS Base, Colorado USA
Mason accepted a cup of coffee from Jasmin. She had taken him and his daughter from the room where they had appeared after the gray … place.
Now, he was sitting at a meeting table, with Anne asleep in the chair next to him, her head on his shoulder. Her arms were wrapped around his, making sure he didn’t move while she slept.
He knew his job was incredibly secret but honestly hadn’t thought it would ever affect his wife or his children. Now, the reality of how casually he had played with their safety shamed him. The last week and a half had been a nightmare.
With some of the secret technology he worked on, he had never expected to be so easily awed by the abilities of someone outside the group with whom he worked.
Mason wished he had some paper or something to write his thoughts down. He kept going through the events, trying to sear them into his long-term memory. Maybe one day he would understand the technology she must have used to accomplish the act.
He had let her in the house when the dog had taken off upstairs. He couldn’t let Anne off of her bed, or the bombs would go off. He had run after the dog and stumbled on the steps. Like he had been pushed aside.
Pushed…aside.
His face tightened up. Did she run by him
that fast?
He made it up the stairs to see the woman already in the room, speaking in a quick, clipped voice to the dog. She hadn’t moved Anne yet, but she noticed him running into the room. She popped him on his forehead, and he remembered gray. Then, she was there with Anne and the dog, “We have to go,” she told him and gave him Anne. When he took Anne, she grabbed his arm and the dog.
And then the four of them were in a rock room. “Wait here,” she said in a commanding voice, “someone will come to get you.”
Then, she was gone again.
Where the hell was he supposed to go? He was still holding Anne tight to his chest, just holding her as she cried when there was a knock on the door hard enough to get his attention. He opened the door, and a woman asked him to follow her to this meeting room and then brought the two of them some breakfast.
Anne fell asleep, and here he was, wondering what would happen to Sheila, now.
—
The three men could hear the voices before they could discern the vague outlines of two people walking towards them.
They heard a woman’s voice, “I’m saying that killing them here is easier to clean up. As in, there isn’t any clean up.”
A third figure became a little distinct trailing the first two. They heard a dog’s chuff emerge from the mist.
The gargantuan figure beside her, his voice deeper, seemed to be trying to argue for the three of them.
“I understand you didn’t like returning and getting singed in the fire.”
Another chuff.
“You either, Ashur.”
“I might have been unlucky enough to come back into a broken piece of wall, that would have been a real downer.”
The two were getting closer.
“How come you guys didn’t?”
“I can peek out, now. I’ve figured out how to barely look and make sure. The fucking fire was still damned hot. That shit burns like a motherfucker.” She was close enough for the three men to discern her features. “Ah, here are my three camel tea-baggers now.”
The dog stopped and laid down on the ground.
“So, where is the wife?” She asked the three of them. All of them kept their mouths shut.
“Oh? You are so out of your league, penis tips, that life as you know it doesn’t exist. You aren’t even school-grade sports against a pro. This is like a pro team against a tank full of goldfish.”
She looked the three of them over and then amended, “dead goldfish.”
She looked to her left, then her right and reached under her jacket and pulled out a scabbarded short sword, “You know, for some reason, there is this misunderstanding that good people should be nice to Schweinehunden such as yourself. Personally, I don’t agree and since my overly large friend here,” she thumbed the man next to her, “really isn’t my conscience and this isn’t a good-cop-bad-cop routine like you are thinking, you can all kiss my ass.” There was a chuff behind her, “I know, stay back, you hate getting blood out of your coat.”
She took the scabbard off, “Eenie meanie miney moe, Dieter, my friend, you can go.” She was ten feet away and then Gunter and Klaus jumped back because she had stabbed Dieter through the gut with her sword. Her left hand was choking him, as she easily held him off the ground, while he struggled. She looked over her shoulder and spoke to the man behind her, “I told you, much cleaner here.”
The big man shrugged, “All I said is it would be easier to get the wife’s location from people that were alive, even if you had to leave them alive.”
When she turned around, Gunter and Klaus took another involuntary step back. The figure in front of them was from a nightmare. Her face had red glowing eyes, her teeth had grown, and she smiled at them like they were snacks. “I never said I had to have live people to get my answers, John. I can always ask them when I kill them the second time.”
“She’s in a warehouse!” Gunter screamed, “On the East side out by Green Valley in Vegas, I swear!”
“Shut up, Gunter.” Klaus hissed, “That is our only negotiation card.” Scared or not, Klaus knew that the woman was one thing that might get them out of this predicament.
Dieter had stopped struggling in her grip. His lifeless body was still above the ground, his blood puddling at her feet. She seemed to finally notice he had expired. “That was uneventful,” she muttered, acting annoyed and tossing the body aside. Both men were shocked. Dieter’s lifeless body had been thrown twenty feet away into the mist. She never noticed his weight.
The frightening woman took a step towards the two men, “Who paid you to do this?”
Klaus spoke up, “Will you let us go if we tell you what we know?” His voice, usually assured, was cracking.
“Klaus Weber,” her voice changed, softer but unyielding, “stand still and tell me what you know. Who paid you to do this?”
Klaus bit down hard, trying to keep the information to himself. He kept hearing her command resonating in his mind, he played what he would say to her over and over and finally stopped thinking about it when she said, “That is enough, you don’t need to tell me multiple times.”
Her man spoke, “Bethany Anne, we don’t have time to track all of this down right now. We need to get back to the ArchAngel. We have a meeting with the Japanese pretty soon.”
She looked disgusted, “Ok ... fine. I don’t think this prick knows anything, sounds like a typical dark web merc job. I know someone bored who needs something to do.”
Why? What do trophy wives do except check on truant children and blow up houses?
Shut. Up. TOM.
Klaus, aghast that he had been talking the whole time he thought he was keeping the secrets to himself never saw the flick of the blade that cut his head off.
Gunter, his mouth open as Klaus’s body dropped to the ground, finally recognized she was cleaning her sword on Klaus’s shirt. Her face, eyes normal, looked up to him, “and now, we come to miney moe.”
—
Mason Jayden woke up, his arm numb from Anne’s tight grip. He heard people coming down the hall outside his room. His mind foggy, he was trying to remember how he and his daughter had ended up in here and realized he must have nodded off for a few minutes.
Then he heard it, he heard her voice, “Sheila?” he whispered. He couldn’t quite make out the words the voice was speaking, it was still too far away, but Mason thought it was his wife. He looked down to figure out how to extricate himself from his daughter, but she was already waking up.
“Mom?” she called out, eyes half-closed, “MOM?”
She pushed her chair back when they both heard a ‘baby?’ come from down the hallway and another, louder, “Mason?”
Mason’s chair shot back to the wall, he grabbed Anne’s hand as they reached the door and came around to see Sheila running down the hall, crying. The family reunion was intense as the three hugged, all crying pretty loudly.
“Ma’am?”
Bethany Anne turned around. She and John had left some personal space for the three to reunite. “Yes?”
My Ride is a Bitch (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 13) Page 3