“Cal,” Cooper says with a half-joking, half-serious edge, “you look like you were nearly stoned to death by a vicious mob. You have bruises everywhere. Literally everywhere. And while I certainly find you attractive, extremely attractive, in the general sense, you’re not doing much for me tonight. Mottled blue is not a good color on you.”
I choke out a rough laugh. “Oh? And what is a good color on me?”
Cooper cups my cheek with his hand and presses his forehead against mine, looking directly into my eyes, his breath mingling with my own. “Any color that isn’t blood or bruising looks good on you,” he breathes against my lips. “But if you want a recommendation, then I’d say green.” His expression softens. “That pretty jade green I see every time I look at you, staring back at me.”
The tension in my muscles melts away, and I lean into his touch. “Aw,” I whisper back, “you think my eyes are pretty?”
“You think mine are. It’s only fair I repay the favor.”
He kisses me, nothing but a light peck, then backs away. “Now get in the damn shower and clean yourself up. You smell like you climbed down a chimney.”
I smack myself with my washcloth and burst out laughing. “Man, Cooper, you really know how to ruin a moment.”
“Yes,” he says, lingering in the bathroom doorway, “but I also know how to make one. Something you should keep in mind next time you want to get into my pants.”
With that, he slams the bathroom door in my face and leaves me standing there, mostly naked, covered in fresh bruises, smeared with all manner of acrid debris, and utterly confused about whether I’m supposed to feel turned on or chastised.
Knowing Cooper, the answer is both.
Which probably says some very interesting things about our relationship.
But since I’m not in the mood to dwell on that topic tonight, I strip my last article of clothing off, climb into the shower, let the spray wash clean all the evidence of another dismal failure, and decide to contemplate something simpler than the complex guerilla strategies of the Methuselah Group or the tangled ball of emotional yarn that makes up my current romantic and sexual relationship. Simpler, like the meaning of life and its infinite philosophical implications.
Sometimes my brain just needs a break from the hard stuff, you know?
THREE WEEKS LATER
Chapter One
A perfect scene of domesticity greets me as I drag myself out of the echoes of a dream I hope I don’t remember. My bedroom lit by the early morning sunshine peeking around the window shade, all the furniture cast in a soft yellow glow. Rumpled clothing strewn across the floor, left behind last night by two people who, at the time, couldn’t have cared less about laundry habits. Cooper Lee, in bed next to me, the comforter drawn up to his neck, his head on the pillow, dozing comfortably, hair tousled from sleep and other, less restful activities.
All is calm and quiet and peaceful in Calvin Kinsey’s apartment.
Which is what tips me off to the fact that something is horribly wrong.
I take quick stock of the room, searching for anything out of place, but find nothing until my gaze hits the bump in the road that is my smartphone on the nightstand. Reaching over, I swipe the phone and hit the home button—to reveal the big white clock proclaiming it a quarter past seven o’clock. For a second, I stare at those backlit numbers, my sleep-clogged brain struggling to figure out why that time doesn’t seem quite right.
And then it hits me: it’s Monday, and I’m supposed to get up at six thirty.
“Oh, damn.” I smack myself in the forehead. In the, uh, heat of the moment last night, both Cooper and I must’ve forgotten to set our alarms. Usually, Cooper would never forget such a thing—he’s a meticulous guy—but we made the mistake of renting an R-rated movie that featured some particularly salacious scenes, the kind that cause the blood to pool in certain areas below the belt. And in the natural aftermath of that scenario (that is, sex), we were too distracted to remember trivial things, like the fact we protect the world from supernatural monsters from eight to four on weekdays with occasional extensive overtime hours.
I calculate how much time we have left before we’re shamed for tardiness versus how much time it usually takes us to get ready when we have a sleepover. Ugh, we’ll have to skip breakfast if we want to beat the worst of the traffic, I think sourly. Cooper’s not going to like that.
See, Cooper doesn’t only love cooking. He loves making you eat what he cooks.
Or maybe he reserves that behavior for me, seeing as he thinks I can’t feed myself properly. (Honestly, I’m not that bad. I just skip a few meals here and there, and everywhere. And eat a lot of junk food. And drink too much soda. And reheat three-day-old takeout. And…yeah, okay, my diet’s a mess. Cooper has a point.)
Either way, he’s going to be ticked he can’t whip up his egg, bacon, and pancake combo this morning. But there is a saving grace. In the form of an excellent breakfast restaurant named Kelly’s that’s only a one-turn detour from the office. As long as I eat breakfast, and it’s not from a big-name fast food joint, Cooper should be pacified. Until lunchtime.
Gently, I shake Cooper’s shoulder to rouse him.
He mumbles nonsense at me, annoyed, until he finally cracks an eye open. “Eh? What’s going on now?” he slurs out.
“Time to get up. Past time actually. We forgot to set an alarm.”
Cooper stares at me, uncomprehending, and then it sinks in. “Shit! How late are we?”
“Not late yet. But we have to hurry.”
So we do.
In fifteen minutes, we bumble around in my cramped shower together—by the way, showering with somebody is by far the least sexy thing in the world when you’re rushing—dry off, get dressed, brush our teeth, comb our hair, and head out the door, all without tripping over our own feet. And if we didn’t look like complete fools jogging down the hall to the elevator and pounding on the down button, I’d be tempted to call us impressive.
We make it to my truck with no time to spare, and a minute later, we’re on the road, already dodging commuter vehicles that are starting to clog both lanes as rush hour consumes the streets. But the weather is fine, if not a little hot and muggy, that late August humidity that seems to linger on forever, so the traffic keeps moving at a decent speed, minus a few boneheaded moves from distracted drivers. By quarter to eight, we’re only five minutes from the DSI office, which gives us plenty of time to pull into Kelly’s and grab a hearty meal to go.
Kelly’s has no drive-thru, so the parking lot is a nightmarish clutter of cars this time of day, but I manage to squeeze my truck into a narrow corner spot after another patron backs out. Cooper and I exit the truck and power walk to the front entrance, mentally preparing for the onslaught that is Kelly’s at prime breakfast hour. Thankfully, there’s no line curling out onto the sidewalk today, but even before I tug the door open, I spy five customers ahead of us. Given how fast the Kelly’s staff normally hustles, I estimate it’ll be six minutes until we get our food.
Cutting it close, but the office is just down the street. We’ll make it.
We take our place in line, eyes on the menu posted above the cash registers to ensure they haven’t swapped meal numbers. I have a usual, and so does Cooper, and there’s no time to deviate from routine, so we settle into checking the news on our phones and sharing funny tidbits from gossip columns with each other for the short minutes it takes the employees to clear most of the customers in front of us.
After a handsome guy in a tan suit strolls out the door with a massive sausage and egg burrito, only a married couple remains between us and our delicious breakfast platters. The husband gives one more cursory glance at the menu, grumbles out his order, and plucks a few bills from his wallet. The wife glances at a special of the day poster on the wall, and decides to go with that instead of whatever she normally chooses, feeling a little adventurous today. The cashier taps their orders into the system, their total pops up, the husband mo
ves to hand the money over, and…
That’s where it all goes south.
The wife drops. Like a sack of bricks. One second she’s smiling at the thought of chowing down on French toast, and the next she’s on the floor. Her head smacks the tile and bounces off. Her arms flop limply across her torso. Her eyes roll back into her head, leaving nothing but ghostly whites. And a hushed gasp of pain wafts past her lips like an afterthought, the only sound that indicates she’s even remotely aware of what’s happening.
A hush falls over the restaurant for two seconds that pass like a long winter, a dozen people standing frozen, waiting for a sign that the world hasn’t fallen off its axis.
The sign doesn’t come, and time jerks back into its usual flow.
The husband tosses his money on the countertop and sinks to his knees, panicked. “Honey? Are you all right?” He shakes her shoulders, but she’s unresponsive.
My brain digs through the dregs of my knowledge and tosses out the first-aid training I learned in the academy. I fall to one knee, grab the woman’s wrist, and take her pulse. At first, I find nothing, and a jolt of fear shoots through my body. But then I feel it, slow and erratic, as if her heart is struggling to pump blood through her veins. And another thing—her skin is hot. Not mild flu hot. But like raging infection hot. The kind of hot you can’t possibly ignore sweltering under your skin.
How the heck was this woman acting fine and dandy a minute ago?
I glance over my shoulder at Cooper, who’s caught between kneeling next to me and staying upright, knees slightly bent. “Call 911,” I say. “She’s extremely sick.”
“What?” says her husband. “How? She wasn’t sick when we got here.”
“Are you sure?” I throw up an air of professional skepticism, the kind a doctor uses to coax the truth out of difficult patients. “Think carefully. Did she have a headache this morning? Nausea? Did she feel warmer than usual when you touched her?” That’s about the extent of my medical knowledge, beyond basic anatomy and how to treat common injuries with stopgap measures when you’re working in the field, but as long as I can keep this guy talking, maybe he won’t freak out. And if he doesn’t freak out, maybe the rest of the patrons won’t freak out.
I’ve dealt with too many freak-outs lately, okay? Aurora has not been a peaceful place this past year.
The husband’s gaze darts all over as he frantically recalls every detail from his morning. “No,” he says at last, a firm answer. “No, she wasn’t sick at all. In fact, she was better than she’d been in weeks. She broke her ankle doing a marathon about two months ago, and just got back into training three days back. She was happy, and well. No colds. No sinus allergies. Nothing. When we left this morning, she was excited about her upcoming trip to the gym.”
Medical ignorance weighing down on me, I examine the woman again. Roughly forty. Athletic looking, with lean, well-defined muscles. No lingering scent of cigarette smoke or alcohol. No visible bruising on her extremities—I tug up the hem of her T-shirt—or her abdomen. No external bleeding either.
If it wasn’t for the fever, I would think one of life’s invisible terrors just struck her. A pulmonary embolism. A stroke. A heart attack. An aneurysm. One of those deathly shadows you can’t hide from forever, no matter how many veggies you eat or miles you run.
But the fever doesn’t fit. The fever says infection…right?
Christ, she needs a doctor, not my dumb ass.
“Cooper?”
He wheels around from where he walked off to the alcove beside the exit to block the background noise. “ETA on the ambulance is three minutes. Dispatcher wants to know if she’s relatively stable or actively…” Cooper bites his tongue to cut himself off before he says the word dying, as the husband, now grasping his wife’s limp hand, looks up with an expression on his face that indicates he’s on the verge of a total breakdown.
Leaning over the wife, I say, “Ma’am, can you hear me?”
No response.
I place my ear close to her chest, listening for her heartbeat and her breathing. The former is even more erratic than before, and slowing down, while the latter is ragged and quick. As subtly as I can, I shake my head at Cooper. The woman is fading, fast. Something is burning through her, and her body can’t handle it. If she doesn’t get to a hospital fast…
Cooper catches my signal and whirls around, muttering to the dispatcher too softly for the husband to hear.
I rest the back of my hand against the woman’s forehead. It’s even hotter than her wrist.
My stomach twists into a knot. What if she has something contagious? Everyone in the restaurant, including me and Cooper, could’ve been exposed.
Does that make any sense though? If some kind of deadly virus was prowling the streets of Aurora—or any major metropolitan area—then surely there’d have been a news story about it by now. What are the odds this woman is patient zero, the start of an epidemic? What are the odds she incubated some dormant disease until the moment she walked into a low-brow breakfast café? And what are the odds this disease, or any disease for that matter, could have taken her down in mere minutes?
No, it can’t be a contagion. Diseases don’t work like that. It takes time before the immune system ramps up a response of this magnitude.
But if it’s not a contagion—my attention dips to the woman’s twitching, milk-white eyes, an image straight out of a horror show—then what the hell is wrong with her?
The front doors burst open with a bang, startling everyone in the restaurant, and two paramedics wheel a gurney across the floor to the counter. I push off the tile and step back toward Cooper, quickly relaying everything I observed about the woman’s condition up until this point. The young female paramedic thanks me, and with her partner, they transfer the woman to the gurney, cover her with a blanket, and recheck her vitals. As they lift the gurney to its full height, the male paramedic urges the shell-shocked husband to stand and follow them out to the ambulance now waiting in the parking lot, lights flashing.
Everyone at Kelly’s watches in stunned silence as the poor wife is hoisted into the vehicle, her husband is dragged in behind her, the doors are slammed shut, and the ambulance races away to the nearest hospital.
It’s only when the flashing lights disappear around a street corner that Cooper nudges me with his elbow and murmurs, “Uh, Cal, we’re late for work.”
Chapter Two
“You’re late,” is the first thing Riker says when I walk through the office door.
“I know,” is what I reply as I slam the door behind me.
My team is scattered throughout Riker’s office, Amy in a chair by the window, feet on a side table, Desmond on the opposite end of the room, a book in his hand, Riker seated at his desk, and Ella standing beside him, poring over a series of papers spread across the desktop in front of his computer. Riker furrows his brow at my blatant disrespect and tracks me as I cross the room and drop into a chair with an audible thump.
“Something wrong, Cal?” he asks.
My fingers twitch at the phantom sensation of the heat rolling off that woman’s skin. “Bad commute.”
“Oh? Something worth mentioning on your monthly performance review, other than ‘arrives late during times of crisis’?”
I shrug. “I don’t really care what you write.”
Ella looks up from the papers, concerned. “What happened? You didn’t have an accident, did you?”
Leaning forward, I drag my hands down my face and groan softly. “Cooper and I were running late, so we stopped at Kelly’s to grab breakfast instead of fixing it ourselves, and…I don’t know what the hell happened. This lady in front of us collapsed. We had to call an ambulance. Paramedics rushed her off to the hospital.” A dry laugh escapes. “It threw me off so much I lost my appetite and didn’t even end up getting the damn breakfast.”
“Jeez,” Amy mutters, slipping her feet off the table. “That’s one way to start a morning.”
Ella rou
nds the desk and drops her hand onto my shoulder. “That’s terrible, Cal. Was the woman okay, you think?”
“No, she was not.” I sit up straight and slap my palms against my knees. “But I don’t guess we have time to check in on random sick citizens, so I’ll try to put it out of my head.”
“And while you’re at it, go get something to eat,” Riker says.
“I’m not—”
“Calvin,” chimes in Desmond, closing his book, “you can’t fight if you have no energy.”
Riker makes a shoo gesture and points at the door. “Our task meeting with Naomi’s team doesn’t start for another fifteen minutes. Lucky for you, they got delayed too. So grab something to eat from the cafeteria and meet us in the task room when you’re finished.”
I open my mouth to argue, but Ella shoots me a look that says, There will be repercussions if you don’t obey. So I click my jaw shut, rise from the chair, and shuffle back out the room the way I came.
Exactly fifteen minutes later, with the taste of dry cafeteria eggs lingering in my mouth and a subtle queasy rumble in my stomach, I march into the task room we’ve pretty much commandeered for the foreseeable future. There are four whiteboards lined up against the back wall, each one covered with printed pictures of known MG conspirators and persons of interest. Several of the pictures have a large X drawn over the face, an indicator that the person is no longer with us. A few are marked with orange circles instead, the next people on our list of potential rogues to shake down for information.
I take my usual seat just as Naomi is lighting up the projector, the wireless keyboard positioned in front of her, a stack of wrinkled papers beside it. Since the farmhouse bombing, Team Sing has been fiercely hunting the people we identified in the weeks leading up to the raid, to no avail. Their last-ditch effort, a raid on an abandoned duplex in a small town an hour outside Aurora, that took place two days back, didn’t turn up any additional leads. So now they’re rejoining us to focus on a shift in tactics.
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