by Laura Taylor
Steven smiled and nodded. “I’m sure I’ll find the right one soon,” he said, hoping that agreeing with her would avoid a protracted discussion on the topic. “Now, you said he was down in the alley. What time of day was this?”
“Eight o’clock in the evening,” Nancy told him firmly. “They were having an argument. That’s why I noticed. It started off as just a conversation, but then they started yelling.”
“And what were they yelling about?”
“There was a big man there. He had a beard. He was telling the other one off about having broken the rules. He said there would be consequences. He didn’t threaten him with anything specific, but by gum, he was angry. He said the one on the news... what did you say his name was? James?”
“Jack Miller,” Steven supplied.
“Jack. Right. Well, the one with the beard was telling Jack that he’d put their entire operation at risk, and he would have to toe the line, or he’d be out.”
“Uh huh. Excellent, excellent. Did he happen to mention anything about what this ‘operation’ was?”
Nancy shrugged and went to pull the window closed. She couldn’t quite manage, so Steven did it for her. “No. Just a lot of swearing and telling him he’d done his job wrong. In my day, you didn’t need to swear like that to make a point. Youths these days are getting less and less respect for their elders. I think it’s quite sad, really.”
“For what it’s worth, I totally agree,” Steven told her. “We could all be a lot more civil to each other. I do have just one concern, though. You said it was eight o’clock at night. So it would have been dark, correct?”
“Well, naturally.”
“And you were looking through a small gap in your window, into a dim alley three storeys below. I don’t mean any offence, but how certain are you that it was really Miller you saw and not another man who looked a bit like him?”
Nancy pursed her lips, reminding Steven of a school principal he’d once had, a fierce woman who hadn’t taken any nonsense from anyone. “My legs don’t work so well anymore,” Nancy told him sharply, “but there’s nothing wrong with my eyes. Here, take this,” she said, picking up a newspaper that was sitting on a low table beside her armchair. “Go and stand over by the wall and open it to any page you like. Then hold it up for me to see.”
Feeling slightly baffled, Steven went and did just that. “Member of Parliament in Expenses Rort,” she read, picking the headline off the top of the page. “Winner of the Evensly Art Awards Announced,” she continued, picking the next one down, and then at the bottom of the page, “Local Library to Cancel Story Hour. You see? Nothing wrong with my eyesight. I saw Jack Miller, standing in my alleyway. Wasn’t sure at first, but then the other man gave him a shove at one point, and he ended up standing right beneath the street light. Didn’t stay there long, but that was enough. I know who I saw, young man, and if you want to catch this criminal, you’d best take heed of it.”
Steven felt a rush of excitement that was hard to contain. “You’re right, ma’am,” he said, genuinely impressed as he folded the newspaper and set it down. “There’s nothing wrong with your eyesight. And you’ve done us a great service by calling and telling us about this. I only wish there were more people in the world as diligent as you.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lee stormed into her rented room, slamming her bag of equipment down on the bed. She threw the lock on the door, then kicked it for good measure. She looked around for something to throw, but reason prevailed, and she stopped short of hurling knives at the wall or turning the entire bed upside down. Her landlords would not be happy with her destroying her room, and for all her anger, deeply ingrained lessons about maintaining anonymity and discretion forced her to stop before she actually did any damage. But the bed was an easy target for her surging anger, and she slammed her fist down on it, imagining there was a knife in her hand, stabbing, stabbing, ripping the fucking guts out of some lowly maggot who deserved to die!
Mind whirling, she collapsed back on the bed, breathing hard, and grabbed a pillow. She stuffed her face into it and screamed, needing to do something to let the chaos in her mind out.
Drew was... Drew was a shape shifter.
Did he know she was a Khuli? No, she dismissed the idea almost immediately. He hadn't pushed to know more about her work or her family, hadn't asked detailed questions about where she was from, hadn't asked to see her room, and though he'd suggested they share a bed, when she'd been reluctant, he'd let the idea go. He'd done absolutely nothing that would gain him either information, or the opportunity to harm her while she was vulnerable. And so the only rational conclusion was that he didn't know what she really was.
The realisation didn't make her feel any better. She'd thought he was honest! But he'd been lying to her the whole time, lies about his job, his family, his housemates. Was he really even a journalist, she wondered? Had he actually travelled to those wonderful places he'd spoken of? How could she really believe anything he'd said?
She hated him, she decided in an instant. She hated him for lying to her, tricking her into relaxing her guard and making such a fool of her. No one made a fool of a Satva Khuli. She sat up abruptly and slammed her fist into the bed again. She would go back to the estate and kill Drew, and kill Miller and the alpha, and the puppies. This whole assignment had taken too long already, and it was high time she came up with a decent plan and killed some damn wolves. And then life could go back to normal. To being sure of her actions, and knowing her place, and...
And being constantly on the move, hunting things, killing things, always sleeping with one eye open, checking over her shoulder. It was a miserable life.
But she was a predator, she reminded herself, trying hard to recapture the sense of pride she'd so often felt at the title. She was a huntress. She would slaughter her enemies and present their heads to her master.
Why? a small, quiet voice asked, but beneath the chaotic noise swirling in her mind, the question went unheeded. Li Khuli had things to kill. People, and wolves, and puppies...
Puppies. She would kill the... Lee stopped, actually feeling sick at the thought. She squashed the feeling, knowing it had no place in her life.
But then she hesitated, coming back around to it, recalling the horror she'd felt killing animals as a child. She'd learned to suppress it, to push it down and ignore it. But she hadn't always been a killer. Once, when she was very young, she remembered seeing a beautiful blue butterfly resting on a white flower. It had been so delicate, the first one for the spring after a long, cold winter, its wings perfectly formed, bright in the sunlight and seeming so much brighter with the white of the petals behind it. One tiny, fragile foot took a step that was only a fraction of an inch, its antennae waving gently... And then another Khuli child had come along and crushed it, and called her a half-wit for wasting time looking at useless bugs. Lee had learned how to not cry that day. The girl who had crushed the insect had been bigger, older, and as mean as they came. So Lee had shrugged, told the girl there was no need to make such a damned fuss about it, and walked away. And she had taken the part of herself that wanted to weep for the loss of that tiny, fragile life and locked it away in a box, and never looked at it again.
Now, though, she deliberately stopped to imagine it; the puppies, soft and weak and innocent. She imagined picking one of them up, a small bundle of fluff and fur, hearing it whimper, slowly crushing its throat, feeling those tiny legs struggling...
STOP IT, she wanted to scream at her imaginary self. There was no reason for the pups to die...
Killing innocent creatures for no reason was evil. Regardless of the Noturatii's insistence that their children become weapons, soldiers, warriors in a war that could dictate the fate of all humanity, basic common wisdom said that killing innocent creatures was wrong.
But soldiers went to war, she reasoned, and killed people, and when they came home, people called them heroes. The government gave them medals and people held parades for t
hem. And the Noturatii were most certainly fighting a war against the shifters.
So, was she a murderer, or a hero?
The shifters were her enemies. That much was clear.
Why? came that small voice again, the soft but insistent question finally registering. Why did she need to hate the wolves? What had they ever done to her?
Drew had lied to her, Li Khuli answered the voice immediately. He'd told her that...
What had he told her, actually?
He hadn't told her he was a shifter.
But of course he wouldn't. Even if she was just a regular human, the shifters kept the secret of their existence just as securely as the Noturatii did.
He'd told her he was a journalist.
But she had no reason not to believe that part of his story. He'd spoken of the people he'd met, the places he'd been in such detail that it seemed unlikely he had just made the whole thing up. He'd told her of the food he'd eaten in Italy, spoken to her in some of the language. It was one of the ones Lee knew as well, and while Drew's grasp of it was rusty and not particularly eloquent, he'd known enough to convince her he had actually studied the language.
So what exactly had he lied about?
He'd made a fool of her, Li Khuli insisted to herself. Made her fawn over a man who was her enemy, made her let her guard down, and made her begin to like him.
How dare he? the voice in her mind said, but she couldn't tell if it was sympathising with her or mocking her.
Needing desperately to clear her head, she stowed her bag of equipment hastily underneath the bed, changed her clothes, and with a quick glance around to make sure everything was in order, she let herself out of the room and into the cold night air. A brisk walk would make everything clearer.
Thando waited quietly on the roof of the supermarket, hidden in deep shadows as he watched Kathy Simms return to her car with her bags of groceries. Twenty-five years old and a junior lab assistant in the Noturatii’s main British base, Kathy was first on Dr Evans’ list of people to rescue from the twisted organisation, and while there wasn’t much in the world that surprised Thando anymore, her choice had not been the most obvious one. This woman had clearly been selected for emotional reasons rather than strategic ones, and if Thando had had his way, he would currently be stalking someone in middle management; someone with password access to sensitive information and a good working knowledge of the internal structure of the Noturatii’s departments. Kathy worked in a low-level position and likely knew little about the organisation outside her own team.
But a deal was a deal, and he’d told Evans they’d rescue her first choice in return for what she knew about the British science labs. Further rescues would require additional payment – along with clearance from the Council – but there was no point thrashing out any further details until they had a reasonable idea of whether this whole scheme was going to be even remotely workable.
So far, his forays into planning how to abduct Kathy had not been encouraging. She was clearly safety-conscious, and when she wasn’t either inside the Noturatii base or inside her apartment complex, she stayed diligently in public places, avoided deserted parking lots, didn’t take strolls to the corner store after dark, and generally made life difficult for someone who might be planning to kidnap her.
Thando had visited her apartment complex, of course, and there was potential there, but also risk. While senior staff members tended to live in high security compounds, the more junior members were allocated apartments in normal apartment blocks, although every one of them had reasonable security measures, codes required to open doors and gates and a security pass to use the lift. Such mediocre measures provided no barrier whatsoever for a shifter assassin, but there was a big difference between Thando getting in without being seen, and managing to get out again without anyone noticing him carrying an unconscious woman. While it wasn’t the most challenging assignment he’d ever had by a wide margin, if there was an easier way, he was all for taking it.
And an easier way had just presented itself. The supermarket Kathy had just stopped at was roughly halfway between the Noturatii base and her home, and Thando and Liam, a second assassin the Council had sent to assist him, had spent the past few days tailing her car, assessing likely spots where they might be able to create an opportunity for themselves. Analisa, a third assassin, was currently at their safe-house keeping an eye on Dr Evans, and it hadn’t escaped Thando’s notice that the Council must be taking this situation rather seriously if they were willing to tie up three assassins for an unspecified amount of time in order to explore it further. And potentially even more than three assassins, if they started having more rescued Noturatii to watch.
From his position on the roof, Thando watched as Liam walked away from Kathy’s car, not too fast, not too slow, until he disappeared into the bushes on the far side of the parking lot. Thando waited until Kathy was almost at her car, then made his way hastily down off the building, jumping into the SUV they were using. Liam arrived back at the car just as Thando started the motor.
Thando’s expert driving was put to good use, manoeuvring swiftly through traffic and taking advantage of a few shortcuts, until they arrived at a point on a long stretch of deserted road. According to the GPS tracker Liam had secured to the underside of the vehicle, they’d arrived about thirty seconds ahead of Kathy.
Thando pulled over into a secluded driveway and killed the motor. He and Liam got out of the car, disappearing into the hedgerow and putting a short distance between themselves and their vehicle.
Up the road, headlights appeared, and Liam waited, keeping a close eye on the tracker in his hand. The car came closer, three hundred metres away... two hundred... one hundred... and then Liam hit a switch, and they heard a muffled bang. The car swerved, then straightened, and then slowed to a halt, coming to rest about twenty metres from them; twenty metres that they crossed quickly and silently, both of them invisible against the darkness.
It wasn’t hard to work out what was going on inside the car. Kathy would have realised she’d just blown a tyre and would be contemplating what to do next. If she was the helpless type, she might call either an emergency mechanic or a colleague to come and change it for her. If she was the cautious type, she would phone the Noturatii and have them send a security detail to make sure she made it home safely.
Or, if she was the independent type, she would...
Yup. The car door opened, and Kathy got out, using a torch app on her phone to see where she was going. Thando and Liam kept out of its beam as she came around the side of the car and took a look at the tyre. The tiny explosive charge Liam had set had ruptured the rubber, but caused no other damage. Kathy swore under her breath. She glanced up and down the road...
Silent as a ghost, Thando took three steps up behind her and jammed a needle into her arm, simultaneously clamping a hand over her mouth. She struggled immediately, dropping her phone and putting both elbows and feet to good use. But though she clearly had some skill, she had little chance against a fully-fledged assassin. Moments later, the drugs kicked in, and her body went limp in Thando’s grasp.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Alistair let himself out of the solicitor’s office, pausing to button up his coat while he scanned the street for potential problems. His meeting had started late, then run overtime, and now the streets were all but deserted, everyone safely ensconced in their homes, cooking dinner, watching television, arguing over whose turn it was to wash the dishes. He checked his watch as he headed back to his car, then sighed. By the time he made it back to the estate, he’d have missed dinner, and he considered stopping at a pub to grab a bite to eat... but then reconsidered. He’d heard a rumour that George was making his famous roast chicken tonight, and even reheated, that sort of temptation was not to be ignored.
He’d parked his car about five-minutes’ walk from the solicitor’s office, as an empty spot was hard to find when he’d arrived. Although he loved the night – the faint glitter of st
ars through high, wispy clouds, the scent of wood smoke from quietly puffing chimneys – he also kept an eye and an ear open for whoever else might be out and about. While Alistair’s very public persona ironically kept him out of the spotlight, as far as the Noturatii were concerned, he couldn’t afford to get careless.
But it seemed not everyone shared his sense of self-preservation. Across the road and down an alley, he spotted a woman strolling along in the dark, and he did a rapid assessment of who she was and what she was likely to be doing out alone at night. Noturatii was the first thought in his mind, but she hadn’t noticed him, didn’t seem to be watching him and certainly wasn’t following him. A thug, thief or some other sort of criminal was next on his list. But as she came to the end of the alley, she paused, staring at the sky, seemingly lost in her own world. Someone bent on nefarious purposes would be paying more attention to their surroundings.
A drug addict was the next obvious possibility, given her distracted air and aimless wandering, and Alistair realised he’d begun walking towards the woman, concerned that she was going to do herself some harm. Or equally concerned that someone else would harm her. If she didn’t have a firm handle on how to defend herself, she would be an easy target for a mugger or rapist, and Alistair’s conscience would never let him rest if he found out in the morning news that the woman had been found dead in that alley.
As he got closer, she drifted off down into the gloom again, and Alistair paused. He knew a trap when he saw one... but then she passed under a street lamp, and for a split second, he caught a glimpse of her face.