by Leigh, Jena
“What’s the matter?” asked Brandt.
Grayson sighed. “They must have changed my clearance level. I no longer have access. And we’ve got maybe ten minutes to find a way in there before someone at the Agency figures out what we’re doing and comes to investigate.”
“Well, Miss Cross?” said Brandt. “It is still Miss, correct? Not Mrs.?”
Cil glared at him. “They’ve still got the EM shield up, Brandt. I can sense it from here. We can’t teleport inside.” She narrowed her eyes at the scanner. “But maybe we can try something else.”
Placing her hand on the side of the scanner, Cil began studying the inner-workings of the device, searching for the door control. Twenty seconds passed, then thirty.
“Not to trouble you, my dear,” said Brandt. “But we are operating under something of a time constraint here.”
Okay, so she was rusty.
The last time she’d attempted to use her powers to manipulate an electronic device had been two presidential administrations and a lifetime ago.
Another minute passed.
She couldn’t find the damn door control.
What she had found, however, was the component that would have been triggered had Grayson’s security clearance been high enough.
“Grayson,” she said. “Look into the scanner again.”
He did as she requested. Cil forced the approval and the door lock released with a hiss of air.
“Finally,” said Brandt, pulling the door wide.
“You’re welcome,” she shot back, following them through the entryway—and into a world she’d hoped never to see again.
The place was a tomb.
Cil stood frozen in place, just a foot inside the door. Fluorescent lights were coming on, panel by panel, gradually illuminating the long hallway as Grayson and Brandt forged ahead, making their way toward the silver elevator doors that glinted in the darkness at the end of the passageway.
The air was stale. Cil wondered how many years had passed since anyone had actually been down here. The entire complex was supposed to have been sealed up for good that snowy night, twelve years ago. The same night she’d helped Grayson and Brandt put an end to the horror that was Samuel Masterson.
As if reading her thoughts, the air filtration system in the ceiling above whirred to life, pumping in fresh air from above ground.
Glass partitions took the place of walls, demarcating the rooms on either side of the long hall. She supposed the glass had been selected in an attempt to curb the feeling of claustrophobia that came with working beneath countless tons of solid rock. Instead, it gave their former headquarters all the homeyness of a fishbowl, the contents of each room laid bare for all to see.
Desks, computers, file cabinets, a coffee pot on the counter in the break room… In its appearance, it was no different than any other office.
To look at it, you’d have no idea that their line of work had been anything but ordinary.
Her gaze lingered for a moment on a plain black picture frame that sat on a desk in an office to her right. James’s desk.
In the image, her sister knelt in the grass out front of their former home, arms wrapped tightly around a three-year-old Alex, as they both smiled up at James behind the camera.
“Coming, Cil?” called Grayson. He and Brandt were already at the end of the hall and stood waiting for her at the elevator.
She started walking, the sound of her heels clicking against the linoleum floors, echoing in the quiet space. Cil found herself remembering a time when these offices had been filled with noise and movement and—more often than not—the sound of laughter.
Before Masterson’s reign of terror incited the higher-ups at the Agency to change their methods (quickly making them the bane of Variants everywhere), Grayson’s team had been a real force for good in the world.
Cil had worked with them often enough to see just how close the group had become in the eight years since the unit had been formed. Grayson had hit the nail on the head when he’d described their bond to Alex earlier—they weren’t just co-workers. They were family.
The elevator opened.
It took every ounce of her resolve to step inside.
The doors slid closed. No going back now.
As they began their slow decent, Cil broke the silence. “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing here, Jonathan?”
Grayson’s choice to remain silent only served to confirm her fears.
“I should think the reason why we’re here ought to be fairly obvious by now, love,” said Brandt. “God knows we didn’t come back for the sheer nostalgia of it all.”
“It’s not possible,” she said quietly. “He’s dead, Brandt. Masterson is dead… We made sure he couldn’t come back.”
“You two are like broken bloody records, you are,” said Brandt. “You know, I never asked what measures you took to make sure he was truly dead… And honestly, I could have cared less how you did it, so long as the dog had finally been put down. But now that some bastard is out there masquerading with my face and sullying my good name—” Cil snorted at that. ‘Good name,’ indeed. “Well, personally, I’d like to know for certain that your measures were effective.”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open.
One final blast door stood between the trio and the resting place of nothing less than pure evil.
Cil stared up at the massive metal door, curling her hands into fists to fight the trembling in her fingers. It was a scene from her nightmares, made all too real.
Doors like this one weren’t meant to be opened.
Another retinal scanner. Cil and Grayson repeated the process and, far sooner than Cil would have liked, she found herself walking into a massive room, empty except for a row of cryogenic chambers, standing upright at the center of the room.
Masterson’s numerous gifts had made killing him nearly impossible. Accelerated healing and a myriad of other defensive abilities meant that, even if you could stop his heart, he wouldn’t stay dead long.
In the end, a chemical cocktail, a little subterfuge, and a loaded gun had put him under just long enough for Grayson and Cil to transport him back to the mountain and place him in cryo-stasis—leaving him forever frozen in his temporary state of death.
Cil came up short. She wasn’t sure what was more surprising. That one of the formerly empty units was now active—containing the body of a man she couldn’t identify, because his face lay in shadow—or that Masterson’s unit wasn’t empty.
Samuel Masterson was still locked in his icy prison.
Grayson came to a stop in front of the unit, eye-to-eye with Masterson’s sleeping form.
“Well, now,” said Brandt. “There’s a twist.”
A pair of strong arms grabbed Cil from behind. One arm around her waist, the other reaching up to grip her by the throat. The arms were nearly translucent in the dim light, slowly shimmering into form. Another heartbeat, and the figure’s materialization was complete.
Cil craned her neck to peer up at her now visible captor.
Samuel Masterson’s face smiled down at her. “Hello, lovely,” he said in a quiet voice. “Been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Samuel!” Grayson said with a start. His gaze traveled quickly from the man holding Cil, to the unit, and back again. “But how…?”
“I suppose I ought to start out by thanking you,” he said. “Been trying for ages to get in here. Couldn’t have done it without those magnificent eyes of yours, Jonathan. Much obliged.”
“You followed us in here,” said Brandt.
“Invisibility sure is a neat trick, isn’t it?” he laughed.
“How are you here and in there at the same time?” asked Brandt.
“Christ, you three got old,” said Masterson, giving Cil a once-over as she struggled in his arms. “Especially you, John. I suppose raising four kids on your own will do that to a man. Oh, but then you weren’t alone the entire time, were you? There was that beautiful second wi
fe of yours… The one you found to replace Mary. Now, what was her name? Lillian, wasn’t it? Pretty name for a pretty lady. You always did have a weakness for the pretty ones, didn’t you, John?”
“Shut up,” Grayson forced out through clenched teeth.
“Such a shame what happened to her,” he continued. “Nasty bit of business, that. Tell me, John. Did they ever find all the pieces?”
Masterson’s smile could have chilled the noontime desert.
Grayson gaped at him, the color draining from his face.
“No,” he continued. “No, I don’t suppose they could have. I scattered bits of her in places even you wouldn’t have thought to look. What can I say? I pride myself on my creativity.”
“God damn you,” whispered Cil. Masterson tightened his grip on her throat.
An alarm echoed through the large room. The blast door slammed closed and a locking mechanism clicked into place, sealing them inside.
The Agency had arrived.
“That would be our cue to hurry things along,” said Masterson. “Jonathan, if you would please assist me by opening up my cryo-unit? There’s a good chap…. And if you want Cil to live to see the dawn, you won’t get too creative with the reanimation sequence. It doesn’t need to go all the way through the cycle. You know as well as I do the body will start healing, no matter what state it’s in when you pull it out of there.”
Grayson walked slowly to the cylindrical towers. He punched something into the computer attached to Masterson’s unit and the glass case of the container slid open.
“Excellent, Jonathan. Thank you,” said Masterson. “Now, undo the restraints, lay the body on the floor, and step away.”
Grayson did as he was told.
Masterson released Cil, shoving her toward Brandt. Carson held out a hand to steady her.
As Masterson knelt to examine the body, Grayson pulled a gun from the inside of his coat.
“Please,” said Masterson, sounding bored. He raised a hand and, without bothering to look up, yanked the gun from Grayson’s grasp using telekinesis, turned it in mid-air and aimed it at Cil.
The gun fired, the report echoing through the empty space.
Cil fell to the ground as the bullet tore through her right thigh.
“Cil!” cried Grayson, moving toward her.
“Not another step,” said Masterson, finally glancing up. The gun floated through the air until it came to rest in his right hand. “That was very stupid, Jonathan.”
Grayson addressed Masterson, but his eyes never left Cil’s. “Are you going to kill us now, Samuel?”
“I told you, John… What fate has in store for you is far worse than anything I could whip up. Not that I don’t intend to give destiny a helping hand every once in a while. Lillian found that out the hard way, I suppose. Anyhow,” Masterson pulled his half-frozen duplicate into his arms. “We’ll have plenty of time to catch up in the months to come. I have something quite special in store for all of you. If you’d be so kind, please tell my pet I’m looking forward to her next lesson.”
With that, the two Masterson’s disappeared, vanishing not in a flash of light, but instead fading like a mirage, until the space they’d once occupied stood empty.
Brandt was the first one to pull himself together. He strode quickly to Cecilia, putting an arm around her waist and hauling her to her feet. She cried out in pain.
“I’m afraid, love, that you’re our one and only ticket out of this place,” said Brandt, by way of an apology. He guided her, limping, to a control panel set into the wall beside the blast door. “Can you disable the EM shield from here?”
She put a hand to the panel. The exterior controls hadn’t offered her access to the security measures… But the computers inside the complex were a different story.
Cil found the shield’s controls and powered them down.
Easy as flicking a switch.
“Done,” she said, still leaning against Brandt for support. The pain in her leg was excruciating, but the bullet had only grazed her. She’d definitely seen worse.
“Grayson,” said Brandt.
Grayson was still staring dumbly at the place where Masterson and his doppelgänger had disappeared. “He played us,” he said. “From the beginning... He planned for all of this.”
“Grayson!” Brandt barked. “For god’s sake, Jonathan, snap out of it and get your boney arse over here, before we leave you behind.”
Breaking from his reverie with a determined look on his face, Grayson moved to join them.
Cil grabbed hold of his arm and jumped, leaving the scene of her nightmares behind. She was fairly certain she’d just collected enough new material to fuel new nightmares every night for the rest of her life.
— 21 —
“I was wondering where you’d disappeared to.”
Aiden O’Connell sat on the stone edge of a large rock waterfall, positioned at the very center of the atrium. It was rare that he found his way to the cabin these days. Rarer still that he found himself a welcome guest.
He returned the mass of water he’d been toying with to the fountain beside him. “Alex still asleep?” he asked.
“Fourteen hours and counting,” Nate answered, his shoes crunching on the gravel path as he approached.
“Yeah, well,” said Aiden. “We both know that’s nothing, for her.”
Nate smiled, handing him a mug filled to the brim with steaming black liquid.
“Coffee,” said Aiden after taking an appreciative sniff. “Thanks. I needed this.”
“Careful,” Nate replied. “Kenzie made it.”
Aiden frowned warily at the mug. He’d had Kenzie’s coffee before. It gave new meaning to the phrase “high octane.”
“So what happened to the roof?” asked Aiden, nodding toward a ten-foot stretch of blue tarp that covered the glass ceiling above them. It crinkled loudly as it whipped about in the wind outside of the enclosure.
“Declan happened,” said Nate. “Although I suppose I helped a bit.”
“Uh-huh,” said Aiden, taking a sip of coffee.
Nate settled onto the fountain’s edge beside Aiden, rested his elbows on his knees and hung his head low, staring at the ground. Aiden recognized the look—he was losing himself in the memories of days gone by.
The last rays of the evening sun filtered through the trees that surrounded the enclosure, creating an army of shadows that danced upon the gravel pathway as the leaves above them trembled in the breeze.
This had been his home, once.
It hadn’t lasted long, but it had been the most peaceful six months that Aiden had ever known. Nate wasn’t the only one guilty of wishing he could go back in time and relive the past.
“I thought it’d be different, man,” said Nate, looking up.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know. Just… different. Easier.”
“You told her anything yet?”
“How could I?” he asked, a bitter edge to his voice. “I say the wrong thing, and he dies.”
“Yeah,” said Aiden. “Or you say nothing, and she does.”
“We don’t know that,” said Nate. “Not for certain. Besides, how do we know what the wrong thing to say even is?”
Silence settled over them. They’d had this argument before. Aiden wasn’t sure if they’d ever agree on what action to take. One thing was certain, though—now that Alex had finally arrived, they were running out of time to make a decision.
“She saw something in my head last night,” said Nate. “Kenzie had her digging around for a location for Declan. Somehow she managed to glimpse an image from Seattle.”
“What did she see?”
“Probably the worst thing she could have.” He heaved a sigh. “She saw herself on the deck of the Misty Rose.”
“What? What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t tell her anything… I just refused to answer her and then I changed the subject as fast as I could.”
“Well,
shit.” Aiden raked a hand through his hair. He was all-for telling Alex what he thought she needed to know, but that particular piece of information he’d planned on leaving out.
The door to the house opened and Kenzie stepped through. “Yo, Nate!” she called over to them. “The boss is back. Family meeting in five.”
Aiden and Nate got to their feet.
His cousin walked on for a short ways, then turned when he realized Aiden hadn’t followed.
“What is it?” he asked.
Aiden smiled. “Think now would be a bad time to ask Grayson how he plans on paying for my apartment?”
* * *
“Alex, wake up.”
“Mmpff.”
Alex recognized the familiar tug and click of a ceiling fan cord being pulled. Light flooded the room and Alex burrowed deeper beneath the pillows in protest.
“Alex,” said an insistent, distinctly feminine voice from somewhere above her. “So help me, Lex, if you don’t get your butt up right now, I’m coming back with the ice water. It will be Rebecca Anderson’s third-grade slumber party all over again. Do you really want that?”
“That sounds like a fun story. Let’s hear about that,” said a second voice.
Declan.
“If she tells you anything, I’ll have to kill her,” Alex mumbled into a pillow. “Then I’ll have to kill you. So if she knows what’s good for her, she won’t say anything.”
When Alex finally pushed aside the pillow she was greeted by the sight of Cassie, hands on her hips, glaring down at her. Declan stood across the room, leaning against one of the dressers with his arms crossed.
He looked bored.
How long had he been standing there?
“Look at that,” he said. “Issuing death threats and she’s not even fully awake yet. Impressive.”
“Finally,” said Cassie. “You’ve been dead to the world for ages.”
“How long was I asleep?” It felt like she’d only laid down a few minutes ago. Surely she couldn’t have been out for that long…
“Well, seeing as how it’s nearly six in the evening here in the lovely state of New York… If I were to guess? I’d say, roughly fifteen hours.”