In the Ruins (Metahuman Files Book 2)

by Hailey Turner

  Kyle was halfway up the stairs to the hall when one of Oksana’s bodyguards rounded the corner, gun drawn, but Kyle was quicker on the trigger. He shot the man in the gut even as he threw himself to the side, getting out of the way of the bullets that peppered the spot he’d just been in. Running up the stairs, Kyle slammed the other man against the wall and rammed his knee into the bleeding wound in his midsection.

  The man didn’t scream so much as vomit blood all over himself before Kyle quickly let him go. He slid to the ground, body splayed on the stairs. Kyle ran, too focused on the targets getting away to care about the bodies he was leaving in his wake.

  He made it to the hall and could see Oksana’s bright blonde hair in the crowd near the street exit. Kyle shoved his way forward without apology, making desperately needed progress when the second of Oksana’s bodyguards came at him through the panicking crowd, a hulking figure with his own gun in hand. Kyle moved in without thinking, grabbing the man’s hand and yanking it downward to keep the gun pointing at the floor even as he rammed his forehead against the man’s face. He howled in pain as Kyle pivoted away, wrenching the man’s gun out of his hand. Kyle hit the release button, the mag popping out and onto the floor, and ejected the chambered round. He tossed the body of the gun into the rapidly dissipating crowd.

  “<>” the guy said in Russian as he closed in.

  “<>” Kyle retorted in the same language.

  The split-second surprise and hesitation the guy had at hearing Kyle respond in perfect Russian was all Kyle needed to get the upper hand.

  Weaving in close, he ducked a round house kick aimed for his right hand and slammed his foot into the guy’s opposite thigh. The blow disabled the leg he stood on, and he staggered in order to regain his balance. Kyle spun, ramming his forearm into the guy’s throat. He fell to the ground, choking hard. Kyle kicked him in the face hard enough to knock him out before stepping over the body and sprinting toward the exit.

  He was mere steps from it when an ear-piercing noise rent the night. The sirens rose in volume before fading out and coming back in a loop, just as loud as ever.

  A warning to shelter in place due to a Splice chemical bomb attack.

  If people weren’t screaming before, they were definitely screaming now. The crowd surged around him as everyone rushed back into the station. Kyle had to fight his way free of the crush, elbowing people out of the way as he finally made it to the street. The station was a shelter-in-place location, all Underground stations were, because all trains would be halted in the wake of the warning sirens.

  With everyone running into the station, Kyle only had to find people running away from it. He knew they wouldn’t go far, because if Oksana and Stanislav were only using the station as a distraction, their pickup had to be close.

  He couldn’t let them make it out of the quarantine zone.

  The MDF and other metahuman agencies needed to know what they were dealing with, and if that meant Kyle had to break his cover to a certain extent, then so be it.

  Extricating himself from the crowd, Kyle made it to the edge of the street, head whipping from side to side as he searched for any sign of Oksana and Stanislav. Squinting down the dark street to his left, Kyle thought he caught sight of a familiar blue evening dress. He couldn’t make out much through the people running to take shelter in the station, but he took a chance that what he’d seen was his target.

  Kyle ran, gun in hand, casing the street with a quick eye. It forked up ahead, and he opted for the road veering left instead of continuing straight. He’d almost reached the street in question when someone darted out from around the sharp corner.

  Kyle didn’t immediately shoot, because he wasn’t sure if the person was friendly or not. Oksana probably counted on him not wanting to risk an innocent bystander. It was the only explanation Kyle had for the bullet he took in his left thigh as he tried to twist aside. White hot pain tore through his leg as blood oozed out of the deep hole, stealing the breath from his lungs for a few seconds even as his body reacted to the threat.

  Kyle pushed aside the pain with long practice and got off his own shot with an accuracy drilled into him from years and years of fighting. His bullet caught Oksana in the shoulder of her right arm, her dominant arm, and she screamed, dropping to her knees. Her gun clattered to the ground as blood began to pour out of her shoulder. She slapped her left hand over the wound, blood seeping between her fingers, her blue evening gown quickly becoming stained.

  Kyle ignored his own wound, having mentally evaluated it as not life-threatening since she hadn’t nicked his femoral artery, and sighted down his gun again. He aimed not for her head, but for her chest.

  “Guess you’re not just a pretty fuck,” she spat out furiously.

  “Guess I’m the one with the better aim,” Kyle said right before he pulled the trigger.

  Blood erupted from her chest as his bullet found its mark, dead center, right in her heart. Oksana was dead before she hit the ground, but Kyle didn’t have time to be grateful for that. A car pulled around the corner, coming to a hard halt mere feet away from where Oksana’s body lay in the street. Kyle kept his gun trained on the vehicle’s driver before readjusting his aim to the man who got out, waving for his people to stay put. He stepped over Oksana’s body on the way toward Kyle, the casual disregard shown to her corpse telling Kyle without words how little the man cared about her.

  “I honestly didn’t see tonight ending like this, though I can’t be angry about the results,” Stanislav Pavluhkin said as he approached with an unhurried stride. “Thank you for killing her.”

  Kyle stared at Stanislav incredulously over his gun, hand steady despite the blood sliding down his leg. “What? You couldn’t stab her in the back yourself?”

  “She wasn’t one of mine. Getting rid of her now instead of last week required some finesse.”

  Kyle could only think about the bomb in Los Angeles and the implications of it made him go cold. He shifted, forcing back a wince as his left leg protested taking his weight. Kyle knew he needed to dig out the bullet soon before he healed around it. Digging it out later was never fun.

  “You knew the Reborn IRA would crash the gala. Were you hoping they would get rid of her for you?” Kyle asked.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

  Kyle kept his gun trained on Stanislav. “Of course you don’t. Deniability.”

  “Is very important,” Stanislav agreed easily. “But tonight was just business.”

  “I take offense to your business almost getting my friends killed.”

  Stanislav didn’t stop moving forward until Kyle’s gun was pressed right up against his chest. The Russian had a few inches on him, but that didn’t stop Kyle from glaring murderously at the bastard.

  “Almost. You truly believe they are alive?”

  “They’re Marines. Of course they fucking are.”

  “Jamie Callahan is a man who inspires a shocking amount of loyalty. Most people don’t send their pet to track me down out of revenge. You are…unpredictable, to say the least.”

  The flicker of irritation in his voice had Kyle filing away the cause of anger to unpack it later, when he wasn’t bleeding all over a London street.

  “I’m a lot of things,” Kyle said flatly. “Just not anything Oksana accused me of being.”

  “And what is that?”

  “I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

  “Considering I’m interested in dealing with the man whose bed you warm, I would say it is.” At Kyle’s faint, angry twitch of his mouth, Stanislav chuckled. “I always vet my business deals. Which means I know you are everything Oksana said you were, but what she didn’t understand is that men like me? Like Jamie Callahan? We can do whatever we want with the people under our command. But no one else has the right to touch them.”

  Kyle wasn’t surprised to feel strong fingers grip his chin and jerk his head up. Stanisla
v stared at him even as Kyle dug the muzzle into the other man’s chest.

  “Hands off,” Kyle growled.

  “Or what? You will shoot me and ruin a business deal before it even begins?”

  The smirk on Stanislav’s face said he didn’t believe Kyle would pull the trigger—and he would be right, but not for the reason he so obviously believed. Kyle didn’t have the green light to kill the bastard. They still needed to know where the Splice labs were, and the only way to get that information was to play along.

  There was a reason Kyle hated spy work. The long game was never as satisfying as a bullet finding its target with brutal immediacy.

  “No,” Kyle said, thumbing the safety on his gun and aiming it at the sky. “I’m not going to shoot you.”

  Stanislav’s smirk widened into a smile that Kyle wiped off his face with a satisfying punch to the mouth.

  “That’s for fucking with my family,” Kyle snarled, ignoring the pain from his bad leg.

  Kyle hopped a little to regain his balance, trying not to keep so much weight on his injured leg. Stanislav looked absolutely furious for several seconds, spitting blood out on the asphalt, before he threw back his head and laughed.

  “You are loyal. That is a trait I favor above all others.” Stanislav gripped Kyle by the lapel of his tuxedo jacket and dragged him closer. Kyle kept the gun between them as a warning, but Stanislav didn’t seem to mind. He leaned down, talking directly into Kyle’s ear. “Tell your Jamie I will be in touch, da? We will see where his loyalty to me will take him.”

  Stanislav patted Kyle on the cheek hard enough to sting before walking back to the car. He got in the front passenger seat and the driver revved the engine. The car didn’t wait for him to get out of the way, and Kyle ended up throwing himself to the side, landing hard enough to jar his leg and lose all the air in his lungs. It took him a few seconds or so to remember how to breathe, gritting his teeth against the sharp pain of the gunshot wound as he struggled to sit up.

  Staring down at Stanislav’s blood on his knuckles, Kyle raised his hand and carefully rubbed the blood onto his white dress shirt.

  “Got something for your lab rats, Knight,” Kyle said over the comms.

  “About fucking time you checked in, Reaper. Where are you?” Liam replied.

  “Outside South Kensington Station.”

  “That commotion was you?”

  “Yeah.” Kyle glanced at where Oksana lay, blood pooling around her body. “I’m gonna need a medic and a body bag.”

  “Medic we can spare. Body bags are spoken for.”

  Kyle closed his eyes, doing his best to ignore the fiery pain in his leg. “That bad?”

  Liam didn’t immediately reply. When he did, his voice was tired, subdued—how they all sounded when the worst days weren’t over yet.

  “Yeah. That bad.”

  15

  The Messes of Men

  It took less than twelve hours for everyone affected by Splice to die.

  By Saturday night, men and women in PPPS suits were working to clear the bodies while the survivors of the gala attack were funneled, one by one, into the decontamination tents set up outside on Exhibition Road. The quarantine zone was still in effect in and around the Victoria and Albert Museum; cleanup inside was going to take months, at a minimum. Cataloging the damage done was going to be a slow, time-consuming process, and the museum would be closed for the foreseeable future.

  Alpha Team, along with the Royal Legion and other UMG metahumans, were some of the first to be escorted out of the museum. They stripped out of their clothes and were scrubbed down by biohazard specialists in hazmat suits before given clean clothes and a ride to UMG headquarters across the Thames for a very long debrief that had stretched through the night and into the morning. It was nearing 1100 and there wasn’t enough synthcaf in the world that would make Jamie less tired.

  Out of Alpha Team, Jamie and Kyle were the last ones remaining for the classified debrief. Jamie had accounted for every one of his teammates during the aftermath, though the only one who hadn’t been physically present was Kyle. Jamie had heard his voice intermittently over the comms, aware that Kyle had encountered Stanislav at South Kensington Station and survived the encounter. Oksana, apparently, had not.

  Looking at a holopic of the Russian woman’s body laid out on a table in the cold morgue of the UMG’s headquarters, Jamie wasn’t at all surprised to discover she wasn’t who she’d introduced herself to be.

  “Alyona Mikhailov,” Chapman said, flicking through the layers of holoscreens arrayed around him. “Her fingerprints and retinas come up as two different aliases in the biometrics readouts, but DNA doesn’t lie and those results are finally in. You said Stanislav Pavluhkin thanked you for killing her, is that correct, Brannigan?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kyle said from his spot beside Jamie at the conference table. “He also said he didn’t see the night of the gala ending like it did.”

  “And you’re certain Alyona is who you saw in Los Angeles last week?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’d ask what Russia’s GRU would want with Stanislav Pavluhkin, but considering what he’s bankrolling with his father’s money, I think it would be a moot question,” Liam said.

  Jamie nodded silent agreement. The GRU was the English translation for the Cyrillic acronym standing for the Russian military’s Main Intelligence Directorate. The fact that Stanislav seemed to have played two factions of the Reborn IRA against each other solely to get Alyona killed said he didn’t want the GRU to know what he was up to. That she was most likely a Russian undercover agent assigned to monitor one of their own citizens wasn’t a difficult theory to believe.

  “Her DNA scan concluded she wasn’t a metahuman,” Nazari said through an uplink on the screen embedded in the wall, gaze askance as he read something off-screen. “Do we have the results back yet on Stanislav Pavluhkin?”

  Chapman tapped a command into the computer and a report popped up at everyone’s personal terminal. “Positive across all baseline markers. He carries more gene markers for a psionic power than any other.”

  Jamie studied the report with a grimace. Across the table, Liam looked just as unhappy about that detail.

  “Do we have an idea of his power, sir?” Liam asked.

  Chapman leaned back in his chair, a troubled look in his eyes. “Considering what happened at the gala Friday night, taking into account the brief conversation Brannigan had with him, we’re leaning towards precognition. Theoretical at the moment, but his actions fit with that power.”

  Jamie couldn’t stop himself from tensing at that announcement. “When was the last time a precog showed up?”

  “In Italy, about fifty years ago. The way records describe the power, she could focus it on targeted people and receive multiple flashes of a possible future. The flashes weren’t concrete, because the future was always changing, and her reach was about twenty-four hours in advance. But she could pinpoint with great accuracy the most logical path to a future that would happen and build off the flashes to achieve her goal,” Nazari said.

  Liam sighed tiredly. “Does this mean we’re finished before we even get started? Does he know if we’re metahumans or not? If he can see us coming, how do we fight that?”

  “Stanislav seemed annoyed when he talked about Jamie sending me after him. Something about us being unpredictable and how it wasn’t appreciated,” Kyle said slowly. “I guess, with our covers, he thought I should’ve stayed with Jamie, but I didn’t.”

  “Being unpredictable gets tiring.”

  “It may be the only weapon we have,” Chapman said.

  “You took over for Delta Team at the last minute last week,” Jamie said, looking at Kyle. “If Stanislav saw the threat, he may have only seen Delta Team and not you. It may be how he knew where to plant the bomb. Their sniper said she’d have picked the same location as you did to take the shot.”

  “Still a fifty-fifty chance he’s playing us,” Kyle replied
.

  “If Stanislav is a precog, I don’t know why he’s not leveraging his power with the Kremlin then. It would be enough to entrench his family’s power for years. You’d think a man like him would want that,” Liam said.

  “Maybe because he hasn’t is why the GRU is looking into him. Whether or not they know he’s a metahuman is still unknown, but they’re monitoring him. I wouldn’t be surprised if Stanislav has been keeping one step ahead of them for years,” Jamie said.

  “And we bloody well helped him.” Liam rubbed a hand over his face. “He manipulated us.”

  “It seems that way to a certain extent. Which means we have our work cut out for us, because we can’t lose this opening with the Pavluhkins and the Presnenskaya Bratva. They seem to be in control of the criminal alliance right now and are the ones dictating the next steps. If the cover we put in place holds and they contact us again, we may very well get a lead,” Nazari agreed.

  “If they contact us. From where I’m sitting, that’s a very big if, sir,” Jamie said.

  “You’re the perfect bait, Callahan. I believe he will think long and hard about giving you up.”

  “Even after the story The New York Times is planning to release hits the news streams?”

  The article in question, written by Adam Dixon, would be going live midday, Eastern Standard Time, sans any quote from the Callahan family. Even without reading it, Jamie knew it was going to cause a lot of problems. The mere hint that Richard Callahan’s son was lying about his deployment and being seen with a known criminal, the same criminal who had dealings with the Reborn IRA group that attacked the Victoria and Albert Museum, would throw the Republican nomination fight into chaos.

  “We have people working on a fix for that. You’ll be informed of your role when you and Alpha Team return later on today,” Nazari said.

  Jamie could only nod in the face of that order. Liam gave him a faintly commiserating look from across the table. The other man knew, better than most, just how difficult it was to be part of a prominent family while trying to serve your country.