by Unknown
When Eli made with point through tightly clenched teeth, Josie hadn’t even had the heart to point out to him that she didn’t actually know the words to that particular song. Nor was she certain she could stand on her head, considering that she hadn’t tried to do so since she was seven years old.
She figured he already knew about her lack of fluency in the languages and dialects of the African continent.
Once one of the teams located either of their primary targets, an arrest was to be made as quickly as possible and with the least amount of required force (that had been the only point at which any of the volunteers for the evening’s escapade had expressed their grumbling disapproval). The prisoners would then be escorted back the way the team had entered and returned to the Stone Creek jail for charging and processing. Unfortunately, given the assumed lateness of the hour at which this return would likely be accomplished, an judge would be unavailable to arraign the suspects until the following morning.
All evidence collected at the scene would be turned over to Sheriff Pace by the appropriate deputies immediately. The sheriff would provide this evidence in turn to the proper county, state, and federal district attorneys in order to substantiate the charges being leveled against the prisoners.
And once the trial dates were set, Josie vowed, she would sit in the gallery every day until the bastards paid for their crimes. She didn’t care if she had to perform spay/neuter surgeries on top of a folding card table.
Just before the group prepared to move out, Josie felt an arm snake around her waist and found herself being pulled back against a firm and familiar body. When Eli’s voice murmured almost soundlessly in her ear, she couldn’t prevent the shiver that ran through her.
“Just remember these three things,” he breathed, the current of air teasing her skin and sending a few short hairs at her temple wavering. “One, do exactly as I say. Two, do exactly as Steve says. And three, if you get hurt, I will beat you so hard you have to stand up at our wedding dinner.”
He slipped away before the sound of the last word reached her ear and took his position at the head of the line, leaving Josie blinking unsteadily after him. She had to hurry to catch up when he gave the gesture for the troop to move out. She slipped into place where she’d been instructed, sandwiched between Rick and Steve in front, behind Eli, and Lucas and Mike in back. The rest of the men followed in silent double file.
A short way down the logging trail, Eli guided the column to the right, off the road and into the dense woods. Around her, Josie could see little more than a couple of feet in front of her, just enough not to run into anything solid, and she heard even less. The only sounds came from the nightlife of the forest and her own boot-clad footfalls. The men around her moved like ghosts. She tried to make as little noise as possible, but she had no idea how they moved without even rustling the leaves underfoot. It should have been against the laws of physics.
In fact, she felt pretty sure it was.
The walk from the trucks to the rear of the fence surrounding the campground seemed to last for most of Josie’s thirties, though she remembered Lucas saying he estimated they would reach it in approximately twenty minutes. They had to loop around fairly far to the west before doubling back in order to avoid where a trail from one of the camp’s lesser-known exits wound back toward the logging road.
When they finally reached that first grand milestone, Josie felt a sense of disappointment. Somehow, while they had been discussing this whole adventure, her mind had supplied a picture of a barrier something like the Berlin Wall. Or maybe a prison fence, something at least twelve feet tall, made of stone and concrete with broken glass embedded in the top and lengths of razor wire coiled above it. Maybe even with a few strategically placed guard towers built in for good measure.
Instead, they stopped in front of an ordinary chain-link fence, maybe eight feet tall. It had begun to corrode after years in the outdoor environment of the Pacific Coastal mountain range, and vines and creeping plants had curled their tendrils over and through it until it looked in places like a planter trellis in someone’s back garden. Josie identified at least one of the climbers as honeysuckle and thought incongruously that if this were only a couple of months earlier, she could have plucked off a bloom and sucked the nectar from the bottom of the stamen.
None of the men seemed to share her peculiar reaction. In fact, only a couple of them actually bothered to look at the fence. The others watched the surrounding woods with wary, restless eyes, ensuring that no one stumbled upon them before they made their way inside and accomplished their mission.
Josie ran her gaze nervously over the shadows a single time, then turned her concentration back to the fence where Rick had begun to wield a set of sharp matte wire cutters on the weathered links. The whole group waited patiently, which struck Josie as significant, seeing that most of them could have jumped the fence with as little effort as if it were a small stone lying in their path. But since Steve, Josie, Will, and Mike didn’t have those sort of athletic gifts, they had decided to cut their way through.
It would also make for a faster getaway, as Steve had pointed out, if none of them had to swing up and over, but could instead move straight through.
This team of men and others was nothing if not thorough, she concluded as she studied the way in which Rick had dismantled the fence. He had cut through the wire in order to pull away a two-foot-wide section of metal, but at first he left it in place while he and Mike Driscoll quickly and carefully untangled the vegetation from its grid pattern. The flash of energy Josie saw from time to time told her that some of the stubborn plants gave in not to the men’s coaxing hands but from a flash of Fae magic that asked the vegetation to kindly get out of the way so that the men could finish their task and move on into the camp.
When the section of fence came free, Rick moved it several feet away, laid it on the ground, and covered it with leaves, mulch, and soil until it blended completely with the forest floor. Then when Josie looked back at where the fence had once been, she realized that it took a moment before her eyes could relocate the area. By leaving the vegetation in place, Rick and Mike had created the illusion that the barrier remained intact, thus decreasing the chances that a sweep of the perimeter by guards or anyone else would lead to the sounding of an alarm. It was something Josie would never have thought of, but it was brilliant, which was probably why Josie didn’t play chess. A strategist she was not.
Mike held the vegetation apart with a Fae touch while the others ducked through and into the shadows of the compound, slipping inside himself just before he let the vines settle back into place leaving little to no trace of their passing.
Josie stuck close to her two watchdogs and waited while Eli gave a series of hand signals to disperse the others in their teams. The men ghosted off in silence, leaving Eli, Steve, and Josie to head for the main house and, hopefully, George A. Huddlesford.
The three of them fell into the predetermined formation with Eli leading the way through the darkness with his superior night vision, Josie in the middle where she was least likely to get into any trouble, and Steve bringing up the rear to protect their flank. According to the maps they had consulted earlier, the main house of the old campground was situated in the southeastern quadrant some distance from the nearest other building. When the camp had been built, the owner and manager of the facility had wanted to live on site to make his job easier, but had desired not to live surrounded by pubescent boys, so he’d deliberately set himself up with a perimeter of privacy.
Convenient at the time, Josie was sure, but now she could appreciate that the remote location would make slipping in undetected a great deal easier. Undetected was her favorite word today, she decided. Undetected meant un-shot-at, un-maimed, and un-killed, and that was how she preferred to keep things.
They crept through the woods in a way Josie couldn’t remember doing since her last year at summer camp when she’d been nine. The following year she’d begged to be allowed
to stay home and help her father and his employees at the clinic for the whopping rate of a dollar a day, which she intended to put toward the vet school savings account she’d started on her previous birthday. But at nine, she had enjoyed her last summer of total freedom despite herself and even indulged in several spirited games of Hunt the Hunter. As she recalled, that game had consisted mainly of skulking through the forest by the light of flashlights pretending to be deer intent on revenge against the humans who had killed so many of their relatives. The campers she and her friends hadn’t liked, of course, had been the hunters. Really, though, that was the last time Josie could recall skulking playing a part in her life. Wasn’t it just amazing the way one’s childhood began to repeat itself as one grew older?
Josie estimated that it took approximately another ten or fifteen minutes to walk around the outskirts of the compound to the rear of the three-story white house that sat atop a small hill about a hundred yards and several hundred trees away from the camp’s main entrance. They avoided the fence line, of course, as well as any noticeable trails to minimize their chance of detection, but when the darkened house came into view, it remained one screened by several rows of trees and assorted underbrush. Eli halted them behind a particularly thick clump, and gave the signal for them to stay quiet and remain in place.
Not particularly pleased by this turn of events, Josie watched unhappily as her lover dropped into a crouch and began to pick his way closer to the building. She did appreciate that he at least refrained from shifting into his Feline form, something they had discussed that evening. Now that the LV-7 virus had become effective against Felines, Josie insisted that it was much too dangerous to risk Eli being caught in his lion form.
“I don’t care if you turn furry occasionally,” she had informed him, “but I would care if you stayed that way permanently.”
He had tried to argue that because his senses were keener and his presence much more easily explained in animal form, it could prove useful for reconnaissance, but Josie had put her foot down. On his toes, since they’d been standing face-to-face at the time. It was just not worth the risk.
As he neared the house, Josie rose on her toes and strained to keep him in sight. She felt Steve lay a comforting had at her back, and while it was a lovely gesture, she really wanted to let him know that it didn’t help. She would feel comfortable when she, Eli, and all the others were safe back at home where they belonged, and probably not a moment before that.
No windows burned in or around the structure, so although her eyes had long since adjusted to the darkness, Josie began to lose track of Eli every time he ducked into the shadow of a tree or an overhang. When that happened, she would momentarily stop breathing until she saw him dart from one spot of cover to the next as he peered in windows and around corners looking for any signs of life.
Finally, after what seemed like days, he stopped near a low window at the back of the first floor and made a complex series of gestures with his hands that Josie understood not a flicker of. Steve, though, nodded and gestured back.
They had gone over hand signals earlier, back at the clinic, but Josie had concentrated only on the most critical ones: stop, halt, forward, wait, quiet, look, hide, and—her personal favorite—retreat. Or as she liked to call it, “run, run away!” Steve had explained that the signals were a standard code used by all branches of the US military and could convey large amounts of information when necessary. Apparently, it had just become necessary.
Steve gripped her arm, gave her an apologetic look, and then pressed his mouth against her ear. “Eli’s going in through the window. Once he gives the all-clear, we follow. We stay low, and we move fast. If you’re not close enough that I feel you on my tail, I’ll sic the werewarden on you. Ready?”
Josie swallowed, clutched her med kit closer, and nodded. Then she practically pressed herself up against Steve’s back and waited with vibrating tension for the next signal. It wasn’t long in coming.
Only seconds after pushing the window sash silently open and wiggling through the gap, Eli’s hand reemerged with a beckoning motion. Steve didn’t even glance back, just shot forward like an arrow with Josie at his back in a poor, ragged imitation of fletching. He halted under the window, turned smoothly, boosted Josie up and through before she even knew what was happening. Thankfully, she caught on in midair and was able to collect herself so that she slithered quietly to the floor and didn’t land on her face with an echoing thump. Immediately she scuttled to the side next to Eli and waited for Steve to follow. When all three of them were once again crouched together in the darkness, Eli uncoiled himself in a smooth flow of muscle and made his indirect way to the door.
At first, Josie stepped where he stepped because she remembered that’s what he’d ordered her to do when they left the clinic, but after only a few heartbeats she realized what he was doing. This house was an old one, built in the 1920s, with original hardwood floors throughout. Even if the men who’d constructed it, now long dead, had been master craftsmen, after decades of habitation the center of the floors—the most heavily used areas—would undoubtedly be the mostly likely to creak or groan when stepped on. By moving along the periphery, they might travel a few extra feet, but they would give far fewer unwitting signals of their presence.
A quick look around told Josie that they had entered the house in an old-fashioned study, sparsely furnished with worn antiques, faded upholstery, and walls lined with glass-fronted bookshelves. The only things that looked new were a few items scattered across the surface of an old-fashioned drop-leaf desk and the large flag of the Nazi party that had been hung above the stone fireplace. The sight of it made her grimace with distaste, but it served as a potent reminder of why she was here, skulking around someone else’s house like a criminal.
She wasn’t the criminal; George A. Huddlesford and his band of merry maniacs were the criminals, and Josie and Eli and the others had come here to stop them. The thought gave her strength and determination as they ghosted through the room toward the hall. As she neared the desk, she glanced down curiously and saw a pile of loose papers, an uncapped fountain pen, and a thread-bound theme book with a stiff black-and-white cover. In the dim light, she could just barely make out the heavy printing on the cover. It looked to be some sort of date code.
Josie had just reached out to flip open the cover when Steve nudged her sharply in the back. Jumping a little, she glanced over her shoulder and saw him jerk his head toward the hall door where Eli was already poised to slip through. Nodding, she grabbed the notebook and stuffed it in her medical bag. She’d told Eli she was coming for papers and information on the virus, and while she guessed she’d find them in a lab, it made a good excuse for snooping through what was probably someone’s diary.
Stepping carefully forward, she and Steve made their way to the hall and halted while Eli scanned it for signs of their host’s presence. As far as Josie could tell, the house was abandoned, which wasn’t quite what she had expected.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth, she thought, if they had come up with this elaborate plan and gone to all this trouble only to find out that Huddlesford was away on a pilgrimage to Berlin or something?
Apparently, she needn’t have worried. No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than a huge thud echoed at the front of the house.
Eli shoved Josie, and she responded immediately, ducking back around to the inside of the parlor door, dropping to the floor, and pressing herself against the wall. Eli was flattened against the side of the center staircase that descended from the level above to end opposite the house’s front door, and Steve stood over Josie, flattened into the shadows. Both men’s hands had been free only an instant before, but even in the darkness she could see that each one now gripped the big black handle of a sleek and dangerous-looking semiautomatic pistol.
Suddenly Josie wished very hard that she’d been able to talk Eli into giving her a gun of her own. She would have no reason to use one, he had assured
her, but right now she decided she would have felt very much better if she’d had something solid and reassuring in her hand. As it was, her fingers automatically dipped into her med kit in search of comfort.
For seven hundred years, none of the three intruders so much as breathed. At least, that’s what it felt like to Josie. They were waiting to see if the source of the loud noise revealed itself as friend or foe.
In a scrabble of sound and air, the front door swung open. Josie hadn’t been expecting the revelation that the source of the commotion was a Beatles fan.
“I ahm th’ walrush! Iyum t’ wahr’sh! Coogoog’shu,” came the drunkest rendition of a classic rock tune that Josie had ever heard.
Turning her head, she realized that if she peered between the doorjamb and Steve’s left kneecap, she had a decent vantage point from which to view the now wide-open front door and the swaying figure who stood on the threshold.
George A. Huddlesford, it turned out, stood only about five-foot-nine, and that was taking into account the thick-heeled cowboy boots he wore with his crisp white shirt and smartly ironed pin-striped trousers. He had a thick mustache that drooped along either side of his mouth, and shaggy gray-and-white hair that looked as if he spent most of his day dragging his fingers through it in agitation. His belly protruded in front of him like a six-month pregnancy, but he encompassed it with a thick belt of good Italian leather surmounted by a large silver buckle with the initials and logo of the NAH engraved in the front.
His right hand gestured to the supposedly empty hall with hazy grandiloquence, and in his left he carried the explanation for his off-key, off-tempo, off-lyric rendition of one of the Beatles’ immortal tunes: a fifth bottle of Kentucky bourbon with less than an inch of amber liquor left to its credit.
Lord, if he’d started on that new anytime today, it was a wonder he could still stand, let alone sing, albeit badly.