by Jena Leigh
Reckoning
The Variant Series, Book 4
Jena Leigh
Reckoning
Copyright © 2017 Jena Leigh. All rights reserved.
eBooks are not transferable. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the author’s permission.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
To Mimi, for the long talks, the constant support, and the endless love she’s shown me over the years.
Contents
1. One
2. Two
3. Three
4. Four
5. Five
6. Six
7. Seven
8. Eight
9. Nine
10. Ten
11. Eleven
12. Twelve
13. Thirteen
14. Fourteen
15. Fifteen
16. Sixteen
17. Seventeen
18. Eighteen
19. Nineteen
20. Twenty
21. Twenty-One
22. Twenty-Two
23. Twenty-Three
24. Twenty-Four
25. Twenty-Five
26. Twenty-Six
27. Twenty-Seven
28. Twenty-Eight
29. Twenty-Nine
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Jena Leigh
Acknowledgments
One
Alex Parker was not where she was supposed to be.
Technically speaking, she was supposed to be safe and sound back at the uprising’s Montana compound. Instead, she was silently threading her way through aisles of decaying office furniture and past metal shelves lined with boxes.
A damp, musty odor assaulted her senses as she clung to the inside wall in an effort to locate her objective.
“For the love of… Have you gone deaf, Declan? What did I just say? I told you to hold, so freaking hold!”
Nathaniel’s roar sent Alex’s hand flying to adjust her earpiece.
She stopped herself just short of telling him to keep it down. After all, as far as the others were concerned, she wasn’t there.
Alex worked her jaw in a useless attempt to silence the ringing in her ears.
For the third time in as many missions, she found herself longing for a wireless comms device equipped with volume controls. She really needed to ask Ozzie—their snarky, bespectacled tech genius in residence—about an upgrade.
Declan’s hearing might be the one in question right now, but if Nate didn’t take it down an octave, Alex would be the one facing permanent damage.
Sighing, she resumed her search.
The basement was cold, gray, and poorly lit, typical for a subfloor in an office building constructed before the advent of color television. Over the years, numerous renovations had left the exterior of the complex gleaming and transformed the upper floors into bright, welcoming spaces.
But the basement?
From the look of things, it had never once been altered. It certainly hadn’t been cleaned in years.
As her hearing returned, Alex listened to Nate draw a steadying breath, only to blow it out again in a huff.
“You’ve got almost a dozen agents between you and the stairwell you’re gunning for, Decks,” Nate said from his seat in the surveillance van roughly a block away.
His voice held a quiet, understated fury. Alex recognized the tone immediately. One that only crept to the surface when Nate struggled to remain calm during his arguments with Declan.
Arguments that had become far more frequent since Alex and Declan’s return from their disastrous journey to the past.
Near as Alex could tell, the underlying cause of the brothers’ bickering had little to do with the laundry list of petty topics they squabbled over on any given day, and everything to do with Nate’s unwanted role as a double agent. The others had been quick to understand and forgive, but Declan?
Not so much.
For nearly a year, Nate fed the Variant Protection Agency sensitive information regarding the entire Grayson clan.
From the beginning, Nate did his best to do as little as possible, giving the Agency bare minimum intel. Just enough to satisfy Director Carter’s curiosity, but nothing that could hurt Alex or the family.
And never anything that might put their lives in danger.
In that impossible situation, Nate walked a razor-fine line with amazing dexterity and no small amount of skill.
His efforts guaranteed that Alex and Declan’s actions in the past wouldn’t unravel their present. More importantly, he bought them time to find a cure for Declan after Samuel Masterson poisoned him with a modified version of the VX-2.
Nate’s deal with the Agency was the only reason they’d been able to save Declan’s life.
It didn’t seem to matter that even though Nate had been the one stuck carrying out the plan, the entire arrangement had been Alex’s idea—a fact she stressed every time the subject came up. As far as Alex was concerned, she held the lion’s share of the blame. If Declan was going to be angry with someone, it ought to be her. Not Nathaniel.
But Declan, bullheaded as ever, refused to forgive his brother for the way events played out.
“They’re freaking paper pushers, Nate,” Declan’s voice whispered in her earpiece. “What are they going to do? Chuck a stapler at me? I’m telling you, I got this.”
Paper pushers, sure, but Alex was willing to bet that a vast majority of the employees in this Agency-run facility were armed with a lot more than office supplies.
For all he knew, every employee on the third floor could be a top five Variant, possessing the most dangerous supernatural abilities in existence.
Two minutes earlier, Declan missed his window to slink toward the exit unnoticed when a group of agents returned early from a meeting. Judging from the increasingly heated discussion taking place on the comms line, he was now trapped in an empty cubicle.
From the hijacked security feeds, Nate counted six men and three women blocking the path to the stairwell. Even sporting multiple abilities, there was little chance Declan would be strong enough to overpower the entire group.
“If you move now, Decks, you’re toast,” Nate said. “Just give us a minute and we’ll find you another way out.”
Ahead of her in the basement, the rows of shelving ended abruptly, opening into an empty stretch of wall that dead-ended at the building’s north face.
There it was.
Or, to be a bit more accurate, there they were.
Instead of the single breaker box Alex expected, she confronted six different wall-mounted panels.
She chewed anxiously at her bottom lip.
Ozzie hadn’t said anything about multiple boxes.
Uncertainly, Alex turned her attention to the largest panel: a floor-to-ceiling monstrosity that seemed to be the closest thing to an electrical nerve center the basement had to offer.
She could only pray that it was the one she needed. There wasn’t time to go back and ask Ozzie for clarification.
An electromagnetic shield still shrouded the Agency facility, rendering her jumping ability practically useless and making telepor
tation impossible. But it couldn’t stop Alex from manipulating the building’s electrical currents to a certain extent.
A slight crackle of interference carried over the comms line. Alex reigned in the electrical charge she was infusing into the baseball-sized machine in her hands.
According to Ozzie, a small charge should be all she needed to activate the feedback loop in the device she was holding.
In the earpiece Alex heard Declan murmur a reply to Nate.
“I’m outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, Nate. And according to my watch I’ve got less than two minutes before our window closes and someone realizes we’ve hijacked the surveillance feeds. Eventually security’s going to sound the alarm and put this entire facility on lockdown. So unless you’ve got a miracle waiting on standby, my only choice right now is to move.”
Alex quirked a smile.
“A miracle, huh?” she said aloud, keeping her voice low. “I’ve been called worse things.”
“Dammit, Lex!” Declan hissed.
Things like “dammit, Lex,” for instance.
Nathaniel’s curse was at least four decibels louder. “You were supposed to take the flash drive back to the safe house and stay there until the mission ended, Alex,” he said. “Those were your orders.”
“And leave Declan stuck inside an Agency facility without backup?” Alex asked. “In what universe was that ever going to happen, Nate? Of course I planned to go back in.”
“Like hell you will,” Declan whispered. “Don’t even think about it, Lex.”
“Too late,” she replied. “Already inside.”
An amused snort accompanied Nate’s groan of resignation.
“Attagirl,” Kenzie said.
Alex smiled, recognizing the note of approval in her friend’s voice.
Like Nate, Kenzie had also been sidelined to the surveillance van for the duration of the mission. Nate was there because he’d been charged with overseeing the op. Red was there on account of her latest demotion. She’d gone off script during both of their last two operations, simultaneously pissing off the boss and ensuring the success of both ventures.
Unfortunately for Kenzie, “winging it” was decidedly not one of John Grayson’s preferred operational tactics.
And oh, was Grayson ever going to hate what Alex currently had in mind to assist Declan.
“I’m going to create a distraction,” she said. “Ozzie was a little vague about what this machine actually does, but he swears it will—and I quote—‘play merry hell with the building’s electronics.’ So when that happens, Decks, make a run for it. Not a second before. Got it?”
Declan was having none of it. “Get free of the EM shield and jump back to the safe house now, Alex,” he said. “That’s an order.”
She rolled her eyes. “An order, you say? Well then, mon capitaine, I guess you’re just gonna have to court martial me later,” she whispered. “I’m roughly forty seconds away from saving your ungrateful butt. So how about you table the objections, take your brother’s advice, and stay exactly where you are?”
“Don’t even think about it, Alex,” Declan warned.
“What part of ‘too late’ are you not getting, Decks?” she asked. “Thirty seconds!”
Declan and Nate swore in unison.
The sound of a van door sliding open carried over the comms line, and a faint but familiar Manchester accent bellowed, “Your window of darkness is half a minute from closing and Declan’s still not here. What the hell is going on in there?”
Grayson? Where had he come from? He hadn’t left the safe house in weeks.
“In a nutshell?” asked Kenzie. “Mom and Dad are fighting again.”
A pause.
“Oh, you meant with the mission?” she asked sweetly.
Alex could easily picture the irritated scowl with which the Grayson family patriarch fixed his adopted daughter.
Another long suffering sigh.
Poor Nate.
Calling the shots on this mission wasn’t the cakewalk he’d been promised—more like wrangling cats.
Surly, insubordinate cats with a penchant for improvisation and incessant bickering.
She might have felt bad for him if she hadn’t been focused on not dropping the jerry-rigged bomb in her hands.
Ozzie had been clear. Jostling the device after she activated the charge would be a Very Bad Idea.
She just hoped the trembling in her hands didn’t count as “jostling.”
“Declan’s still trapped on the third floor,” Nate said. “Too many agents blocking his way to the exit. Alex went back in to extract him.”
“She did what?!”
Alex winced. Judging from the boss’s reaction, Red wouldn’t be the only one exiled to the van during their next mission.
That was assuming, of course, that Alex eventually made it out of this building alive, which was not exactly a given at this point.
Ozzie had also suggested that once the pulse went off, the breaker box could explode instead of just sending a concentrated electrical charge into the system.
So Alex had that to look forward to as well.
As she pressed the device against the metal panel, it emitted a low whine that began cycling upward.
“Ten seconds,” Alex whispered.
The comms finally fell silent as she finished securing the device to the panel in the way Ozzie had instructed—and then she ran like hell.
Four… three… two…
Alex dove behind a nearby support column, the only solid shelter she could find in the relatively cluttered room.
Nothing happened.
When another ten seconds passed, Alex cautiously stepped around the side of the pillar to inspect the device.
Declan’s voice was wry as it drifted across the comms line. “Exactly what sort of distraction am I waiting on here, Lex? ´Cause I’ve got jack all happening right n—”
A piercing howl truncated Declan’s sentence in the same instant a blinding white light enveloped the device and the breaker box. A wave of heat knocked Alex off her feet and flung her backward.
Her right shoulder slammed into the steel column and bounced off, sending a wrenching pain from her neck to her fingers when she hit the ground.
Alex cried out, trying in vain to blink away the afterimage of the flash. She’d been staring right at the device when it blew.
For a moment she could only lay there dazed, sprawled on the cold concrete floor.
As the ringing in her ears subsided, shrieking feedback over the comms line took its place. Alex clawed at her ear with her good hand and removed the device.
As silence descended, she pushed herself gingerly up onto her knees, gradually coming to realize two very important things.
First, the air around her no longer felt like a suffocating shroud. Add that to the malfunctioning comms and it seemed obvious that Ozzie’s bomb had done the trick. The building’s EM shield was down for the count.
And second?
The ache behind her eyes was absolutely unparalleled. Face twisted in pain, Alex groped blindly for the column with her good arm, attempting to steady herself as she climbed the rest of the way to her feet.
The good news was that, since her return from the past, Alex had been able to teleport without any prolonged side trips into that horrific dimension they now casually referred to as “limbo.”
Any trace of the time jumping ability appeared to have vanished the moment she returned to the present. Alex might never again be able to travel into the past, but she no longer needed to worry about getting trapped in limbo for all eternity every time she attempted a jump.
At least, that was Ozzie’s working theory.
Alex, on the other hand, couldn’t help but have her doubts. Even the dimmest prospect of becoming trapped in an interdimensional hellscape generally made a girl want to err on the side of caution.
Now that the shield was down and her borrowed jumping ability was at full strength, all Alex had
to do was teleport to safety.
Before she could manage that, however, she first needed to derail the freight train of anxiety that hit her every time she even thought about teleporting.
Who was to say that her next jump wouldn’t be the one that proved Ozzie’s theory wrong?
Alex took a slow, steadying breath. The pain behind her eyes was fast becoming unbearable. She couldn’t hang around in this basement forever.
She needed to get out of there, limbo or no limbo.
Calling up the memory of the empty side street where they’d parked the surveillance van, Alex rallied her courage and jumped.
Two
A force slammed into her, shifting Alex away from her intended destination. She materialized a few feet from her target. Apparently, someone else was already standing there.
The ground beneath her was uneven. One foot materialized, resting on solid ground. The other found nothing but open air.
Alex, still blinded by the afterimage of the blast, listed to one side and let out a yelp as she started to fall.
A firm pair of hands gripped her shoulders, held her steady, and guided her back onto the sidewalk. She bit back a whimper as a spike of pain travelled the length of her right arm. Whoever was holding her must have been able to read the agony in her expression because their grip on her shoulders immediately weakened.
“Oh, Lee-Lee! What happened?!”
“Aunt Cil?” asked Alex.
Realization dawned an instant later. Grayson would have needed a lift to join them in Chicago. Who better to hitch a ride with than a jumper like her Aunt Cecilia?
Alex turned her head toward the source of her aunt’s voice. The world around her was nearly blinding in its intensity. She could make out little more than two shadowy, human-sized figures standing beside her, along with the murky outline of the white utility van Nate and Kenzie had been using to oversee the mission. From the hint of a shadow at the van’s center, its sliding door stood open.