Tracker: A Rylee Adamson Novel (Book 6)

by Shannon Mayer

  I tested the ropes. “Alex, can you …” I trailed off as he expertly wrapped the rope into a harness, holding it out for me to finish off the knots.

  “Alex watches Boss.”

  Well, I’ll be damned. After I tied the knots, Alex climbed carefully over the edge and lowered himself down. Like he’d done it a hundred times. Shit, that was a hell of a lot easier than I had planned. The werewolf could still surprise me. Then again, he was growing up in a way, losing his submissiveness, and as it went, he became more mature. Day by day, he seemed to be gaining back his humanity, and with it I was losing the goofy werewolf who’d shown up on my doorstep two years ago.

  Again, I set my thoughts aside to pay attention to what was in front of us.

  The cave was no different than any day before, but it felt different. More than likely it was the backwards footprints we followed. Every now and then I saw the outline of an ogre’s foot, and I found myself wondering which of the boys it was; my heart aching for their loss, and had to push it away. One day I would honor all those who had fallen, all those I’d loved and lost.

  One day. Just not today.

  Alex and I crossed the veil with no difficulty, sliding through without anything pushing us to cross. Of course, that didn’t mean what was waiting for us on the other side wasn’t difficult.

  Worse, it wasn’t Doran.

  Chapter 7

  The castle was quiet—eerily so—and the stiff hair on the back of my neck told me it wasn’t a good thing. For the moment, I ignored my gut. On our side, the doorway from North Dakota opened onto the first floor of the castle. Nothing fancy. But we needed New Mexico and that meant descending the stairs into the dungeon. A walk I’d taken more than a few times lately. Again, I was surprised at the quiet. Not that the castle tended to be noisy.

  “Alex, you smell anything?” I paused at the juncture of three hallways, the torch in my hand burning the pitch with a spitting hiss releasing the scent of pine into the air.

  Alex sat back on his haunches and sniffed the air several times, tipping his face toward one hallway after the other. “Funny air.”

  “Yeah. I got that much.” We were in a hurry, but I had a feeling something was off. Which meant I had to look into it, I couldn’t just leave it alone. I set the torch into a wall sconce and pulled a sword free. With one finger to my lips, I signaled Alex to follow me with a head jerk. He tiptoed, taking in long breaths as we went. I didn’t think about where I was headed, just followed my instincts.

  We stood at another intersection, this time with a flight of ascending stairs. My gut tightened as I stared the steps.

  “Here we go.” I crept up, feeling the tension rise as I went, the tingling sensation of imminent danger I knew all too well working its way along the edge of my nerve endings.

  At the top of the stairs, Alex bumped gently against my legs, stopping me.

  “What?”

  “Bad smells. Rotten smells.” He shook his head as if to clear the scent. We could have turned around, pretended whatever was going on had nothing to do with us, but past experience told me that was stupid. Lately, everything seemed to happen to me, or was about the stupid fucking prophecies. I gritted my teeth and started down the dimmed hallway. Ahead, a glimmer of steel caught my eye. I yanked my second sword clear of its sheath and pressed my back against the wall.

  Alex mimicked me, his claws scraping against the cold stone. We waited, two heartbeats, three, ten, twenty. Nothing happened.

  I inched along the wall while I searched the shadows for a figure, or something.

  Nope. False alarm, apparently.

  But then why was my heart still pounding with adrenaline? Good fucking question.

  At the end of the hallway was a window, sealed shut, but light peering from the moon through the cracks. I strode to it, sure we were alone and flung the window open.

  “Wowsers. Big door,” Alex breathed out behind me.

  I turned and stared at a door recessed deep into the wall. In front of it was a black veil, like something you’d put over the pictures of someone deceased. Not really thinking, I pulled the veil down. It fluttered to my feet with a soft hush.

  The doorway itself had my attention. It stole my thoughts as I stared at it. Thick, I could tell without even touching it, the whole thing was solid steel, shining as if polished. That must have been the glint I’d seen. Three solid, shining steel bands lay across the door, each with a lock the size of a melon hanging off it. Etched into the door were symbols I was unfamiliar with, swirls and designs that drew my eye and made me think I almost understood what they said.

  What they meant.

  “Big door, no kidding.” I reached up and was unable to touch the top of the frame, not that I really expected to be able to. It had to be at least ten feet high and almost the same width. More of a square than a rectangle. Set deep into the stone as it was, I wondered if the purpose was an attempt to hide the doorway. Where did it lead? I put my hand on the metal, lightly, tracing one of the designs with my finger.

  From the other side, something rammed into the steel door, making the doorframe shudder and flex, the solid bands groaning under the impact. But they held.

  Barely.

  I stepped back, swallowing hard. Alex let out a whimper.

  “Not good.”

  No, this wasn’t good. But there really wasn’t anything I could do about this, nor was there time. I needed to get to Doran, get what I needed and get my ass back to Liam.

  The thing on the other side of the door rammed it again, harder this time. I took a few steps back, and the ramming eased. More steps back and it stopped altogether.

  Whatever it was knew when we were close. Which left us with only one option.

  “Time to go.”

  The thing on the other side of the steel door could stay there. Even I knew when it was time to leave well enough alone.

  Liam would be proud. I couldn’t stop the smile that slipped across my lips as I headed back down the stairwell.

  We had learned there was a door we would never open, and what lay on the other side of it was awake and less than pleasant. No doubt that was the tension I’d picked up on.

  I was glad we could walk away from the door. Because I had a bad feeling one day we would have to find out what was waiting for us on the other side of it.

  Yippy fucking skippy.

  Once more, we were back in the dungeons, facing the doorway that would take us into New Mexico. Or more accurately, a cave on the outskirts of Roswell. Doran would be waiting for us there. He’d better be. I wasn’t walking all the way into Roswell to find his fanged ass. We stepped through the doorway.

  My torch flickered as a gust of wind ripped through cave, blowing it out. A single figure waited at the mouth of the cave. A woman I recognized from the tunnels below Venice. She was one of Berget’s slaves, a human who had taken blood from a vampire but hadn’t been turned. Might not ever be, according to what I understood.

  “Hello, Rylee.” Her voice carried well in the cave. I dropped the torch at my feet so I could pull my two blades free.

  “Hey, bitch. On a suicide mission?” I stepped toward her and she smartly stepped back.

  “No, I am here to give a simple message. The Empress hopes the death of your Harpy was enough to convince you to help her now. She would hate to take the life of any more of your ‘wards.’”

  I couldn’t help the laughter that poured out of me. So similar to Faris’s tactics it was unbelievable, yet with Faris it had been a ruse. With Berget, she’d been serious about killing Eve, though Berget couldn’t know Eve had survived. It took me a good ten seconds to pull myself back together. “Oh my, you see that’s how I know it isn’t my little sister in charge of things, but her two psychotic parents. My sister would know better than to try and kill a member of my pack to gain my loyalty.”

  She gave a startled twist to her head. “We did not try and kill her. We did kill her.”

  I grinned at her as I walked th
e slight incline that would lead us out. “And my friend brought her back to life. Lucky for you, because now your death will be quick.”

  I lunged forward and she stumbled back, surprise flitting across her features before she was snatched out of reach of my blade.

  “What the fuck?” I yelled. Doran came out of nowhere. He spared me a glance as he wrestled the woman into submission.

  “Rylee, don’t you know it isn’t polite to just kill someone when you haven’t wrung all the information you can out of them?” He stared down at the woman and smiled as he ran a finger along her cheek.

  She screamed and tried to pull back from him, her cheek blistering where he’d touched her.

  Shit, he was stronger than I thought, in ways I hadn’t imagined. Doran had been holding back on me.

  Since we’d used the existing ropes to rappel into the tunnel, Doran used the rope Alex and I brought to tie up the woman. He tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of screaming potatoes for the walk to Doran’s classic ’67 Mustang. He dumped her into the trunk, her head hitting something with a thud and she finally shut up.

  Sleek, silver, and chromed to the gills, the Mustang glittered in the weak winter sunlight. Though it was cold as a witch’s third tit, very little snow was on the ground. Which was a good thing with the girly car. Alex piled into the backseat and lay down, his eyes taking in everything, yet remaining remarkably quiet—but that didn’t last long.

  He let out a long trumpeting fart as if to deliberately contradict my thoughts. He even had the audacity to throw me a big wink. As if he knew what I was thinking. I rolled the window down and said nothing.

  Doran glanced at me, his green eyes curious. “Why did you come back so quickly?”

  “I left the black-skinned demon book in Dox’s safe.”

  “And where the hell is the big ox? I’d planned on heading to his place for a drink tonight.”

  “Dead. Him and a bunch of his friends.” I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, the words like chunks of glass in my throat. Doran’s hand slid over mine.

  “I’m sorry. I know he was your friend.”

  “And he wasn’t yours?” I jerked my hand away.

  Doran’s lips tightened. “No. I drank his liquor, and we lived in the same territory, but we were not ‘friends.’ Daywalkers do not have friends any more than shamans do.” His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, he stared straight ahead, the teasing Doran I knew gone as his voice hardened. “Shamans bargain for their services. Daywalkers bargain for the pleasure they can bring. I get hit up on both counts. But not as a friend.”

  I stared hard at him wondering if he liked not having friends. For years, I’d thought I could do it on my own, thought I was strong enough to face the world one on one. It had taken friends and love to show me I was stronger with them than without.

  I couldn’t help challenging him. “You think pretty highly of yourself to think everyone wants you.”

  His eyes darted to mine, then back to the road. “That’s why I like you, Rylee. No games with you. You say what you mean, no filters involved. I don’t get that with anyone else.”

  Something in his tone told me it was time to change the subject. “Aside from that shit, we have a rather large problem.”

  I quickly went over the guns and the phone I’d found, though I didn’t say who it belonged to.

  “You think the humans are manufacturing technology that works around us?” Doran didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the road.

  “Yes. They know about us, or at least a portion of the FBI does, and it would make sense they are trying to find a way to protect themselves from us. It’s the same old shit with them—whatever they don’t understand, whatever frightens them, they want to annihilate.”

  Doran blew out a soft whistle and shook his head. “All right, I assume there is more to this visit than all that.”

  I took a deep breath and a chance, voicing the thoughts that had been spinning through my head since I had the dream about Berget. “I think we can still save my sister.”

  He hit the brakes, the car skidding sideways to a stop in the middle of the road. My seatbelt jerked tightly and the thump from the trunk told me our passenger got the short end of the stick.

  “What did you say?” Doran’s cool demeanor was gone; instead he sounded almost panicked. “I thought you were going to kill her. In fact, I would agree with Faris that killing her would be the smartest choice. She’s been inside my head, Rylee. She’s controlled me. I know her better than anyone else.”

  I undid my seatbelt and faced him. I had been thinking long and hard on this, and there was a chance I had found a loophole in Faris’s stupid oath. Or at least, part of it.

  “You know her when she is controlled by her dead parents, who happen to be fucking loony tunes. We were able to stop Giselle’s madness for a little while and the same stone worked on the necromancer I fought in London. You said it yourself, Berget is mad with the power that comes from her parents. Berget is not the one who has been doing these fucking awful things. I know I swore to kill her, but I swore to kill the Child Empress. If I can bring Berget back from the brink, she isn’t the empress anymore, is she? She won’t want to be the empress.” I could only hope I was right.

  The words hovered between us and he opened his mouth, blinked a couple of times, and then snapped it shut. “Shit, you might be right.”

  Hope, bright and pure, flared in me. He thought I might be right.

  And that meant that maybe, just maybe, we had a chance at saving Berget.

  The Jeep, much to his surprise and dismay, started with barely a cough. Worse, it had started when Milly sat in the driver’s seat and him in the back.

  “Head to the old library on 10th Street.” He leaned back, tried not to breathe too deeply. To him, Milly stank. Her rose perfume and use of magic created a heavy fog that irritated his nose, even with the holes in the windows from the bullets bringing in fresh air. Yet Pamela didn’t smell like that, and it made him wonder if the smell had more to do with the nature of the person, or the kind of magic they used, rather than what perfume they wore.

  “What’s at the library?” Of course, the question came from Pam; when did she not have a question?

  “That’s the Arcane Arts division of the FBI for the central region. Best place to start asking questions.”

  “And you think they can really help us?” The young witch twisted in her seat, one hand gripping her seatbelt so she could look at him.

  He thought for a moment before answering. “They should have some idea of what’s going on, and if they don’t then they need to know. This is the sort of problem they are trained to deal with.”

  Telling Agent Valley he would periodically give the AA division information had been a hard choice. Now, though, that co-operation should serve them well. Didn’t matter he hadn’t brought any information to Valley yet; he was now.

  Milly slowed the Jeep for a stop sign. “And if they want more from you, from us, in exchange for their help?”

  Liam narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, more?”

  “They already have you on their list of informants, do they not?”

  If she knew that, what else did she know? “Witch, you are already so far down the shit list you may never see the light of day again. So make sure you consider that when I ask you this—how do you know?”

  She took the corner, checking several times for traffic. “Agent Valley has reached out to anyone who has a connection with the supernatural. That includes me. He doesn’t understand I am your least favorite person.”

  That didn’t make sense. “What about the fiasco in London?”

  She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “A misunderstanding. He is desperate for help, which makes him very dangerous. He will take help from anyone, even those he should be avoiding. There are rumors that he was reaching out to a certain vampire.”

  Liam thought back to when he’d seen Valley in London, before they’d left. There had been a distin
ct smell of rot about him, but at the time he brushed it off.

  “He’s working with a necromancer.” The words slipped out of his mouth as his brain put it all together.

  Milly started in her seat. “I don’t know about that. Why do you think he’s working with a necromancer?”

  “He smells like death.”

  Pamela’s heart rate kicked up several notches and the smell of fear rolled off her. The last time she dealt with a necromancer had been ugly, at best. She peered back at him, obviously trying to control her fear.

  “Are we going to be dealing with zombies again, do you think?”

  Before he answered, they were pulling into the parking lot of the “library.”

  “We’re going to find out,” he muttered, stepping out of the Jeep, the two witches following closely.

  He looked down at his clothes, loose t-shirt, ripped jeans, scuffed sneakers. Not exactly the Gucci suits he’d been used to for so long. The other Fed’s might be more bothered by his clothes than he was. To be fair, it was likely his old coworkers would be more bothered by the fact he was no longer human. He couldn’t help the grin that slipped over his lips.

  This could be fun. He paused for a split second.

  Good lord, Rylee was turning him into a delinquent in no time flat.

  “What are you smiling about?” Pamela moved up beside him.

  “Just thinking that Rylee has changed us all.”

  Milly snorted. “She is the catalyst. She’s going to change the world whether she wants to or not, and with that, she with that will of course alter all those around her. I have seen it in myself, seen her change me even when I wasn’t sure I could. She has changed us all. You included, Agent.”

  He ignored her and took the lead, pushing his way through the heavy, bulletproof glass doors. The secretary, Diana, if he remembered correctly, looked up from her desk as they stepped in. She’d been working here when he’d been in the department.

  She adjusted her glasses. “I’m sorry, the library is closed for renovations.”

  Liam saw her hand slide under her desk, no doubt for a gun. He said nothing, waited for her to recognize him. It took another few seconds.