by Paige Tyler
One arm still around Sage, Alina guided her over to the first row of pews and sat down with her, rocking the girl back and forth and making soothing sounds in her ear as she caressed her dark hair. Trevor had to admit that trusting Alina enough to bring her with him had been one of his better ideas.
Releasing his grip on the dart gun, Trevor gestured for the priest to follow him out of the church. Tanner joined them while Jaxson stayed inside to keep an eye on Alina and Sage. Considering the man had seen everything, Trevor was going to have to do some serious damage control.
“I’ve never seen a shifter lose control like that,” the old man said once they were outside. “Is she ill?”
Trevor gaped. Beside him, Tanner looked just as surprised.
“You know about shifters?” Trevor asked cautiously.
The priest nodded. “Yes. The church has been aware of the existence of these very special people for a long time. Our histories say they were poorly treated at first, but once the clergy finally realized they’re no more evil than any of God’s other creatures, the church took on the role of protecting them and their identities.”
Trevor exchanged looks with Tanner. Okay, he hadn’t expected that. “So you’re not going to tell anyone about this?”
The priest smiled. “The girl came into my church seeking solace and peace. She was so scared that it was difficult to understand what she was saying, but I did glean from her words that churches have always represented safety and sanctuary to her. The girl’s secret is safe with me…and the church.” He regarded Trevor thoughtfully for a moment. “You never answered my question about whether or not the girl is ill.”
“No, she’s not ill,” Trevor said honestly. He couldn’t exactly lie to a priest. “Sage wasn’t born a shifter. Someone gave her a drug to turn her into one against her will. The out-of-control behavior you saw is a result of those drugs. We’re trying to help her, but she’s having a hard time of it.”
The priest’s mouth tightened. “Besides helping her, I trust you’re doing whatever is necessary to make sure the person who did this horrible thing isn’t allowed to do it again?”
Trevor nodded. “We’re trying very hard.”
The priest looked like he would have said more, but just then, Alina and Jaxson came out with Sage. The girl was practically glued to Alina’s side, and while she’d stopped crying, she still seemed emotionally and physically drained.
“We can take her back to the complex in my vehicle,” Jaxson said. “I should be able to get us through the gate without anyone paying too much attention.”
Alina hesitated, looking in Trevor’s direction. He was about to tell Jaxson that he’d take them in his vehicle and let the other man run interference at the gate, but then his frigging phone rang. He pulled it out to see who it was, intending on letting it go to voice mail. Then he saw who it was.
Holding up his finger to tell Alina to wait, he moved to the side to take the call. “What’s up, Evan? This isn’t exactly the best time to talk. I’m kind of busy.”
“Well, you’re about to get even busier,” Evan said. “Vivian just called. Thorn is heading to the DC office right now for that classified briefing. If you want to hear what he says, you need to be there in an hour.”
Shit.
Trevor glanced at his watch, trying to calculate how long it would take him to get into the middle of DC at this time in the morning. With traffic, it was going to be close. “Did you talk to IT and figure out a way to get a set of ears into the conference room?”
“Yeah, I have a way to do it. I just don’t know how we’re going to make it work,” Evan said. “You never explained how the hell we’re going to get the bug in the room with them.”
That was because he hadn’t given it one second of thought. “Like I said, let me worry about that. I’m leaving now, but it’s going to be tight. Any chance you can rig up a way to slow things down if I’m late?”
There was a long sigh on the other end of the line. “Dammit, Trevor. I’m an analyst, not a field agent. I sit around a soft, cushy cubicle all day and play with a computer. I don’t know how to rig anything.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Trevor said, trying to be as encouraging as he could. “Keep it simple, and you’ll be fine. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
He hung up and gave Tanner a nod, knowing the hybrid had heard the entire phone conversation.
“What was that about?” Alina asked.
While he’d been on the phone, she’d gotten Sage into the back of Jaxson’s SUV and somehow convinced her to stay put. Through the open back window, Trevor could see the girl looking anxiously at Alina.
“Did Dick go after Seth and Cody again?” Alina prompted when he didn’t answer.
He shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I just need to be someplace.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
Trevor’s first instinct was to say yes, but the word got stuck in his throat as his head spoke up and urged caution. Letting her help with Sage was one thing; bringing her to a meeting where Thorn might finally reveal something damaging was a completely different world. He hated himself for doing it, but that didn’t keep him from shaking his head.
“No. I’d rather you help Jaxson get Sage back to the complex and settled. You and she seem to have a connection, and what I’m doing isn’t a big deal. I’ll take Tanner with me and catch up with you later.”
Disappointment flashed across Alina’s face for a brief second before she nodded and climbed in the backseat of Jaxson’s vehicle with Sage.
Trevor had no doubt his partner knew he’d fed her a line of crap, and he could tell it bothered the hell out of her. It bothered the hell out of him, too, especially considering what she’d just done for Sage. But until he knew for sure that she wasn’t playing him, he couldn’t take the risk of telling her what he was doing.
As Jaxson pulled the Suburban out of the church parking lot and drove away, Alina threw Trevor an angry look. It occurred to him then that he might have burned down the already shaky bridge that had started forming between them.
* * *
Vivian met Trevor and Tanner in the lobby of the DC office. With its big reception desk and black-and-white photos of well-known landmarks like the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building on the walls, it wasn’t all that remarkable. It certainly didn’t scream covert organization.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said softly. “Thorn and the people he’s meeting with have been here for a while, and poor Evan is about to blow a gasket.”
Trevor could believe it. While Evan might be on the verge of passing out, Vivian seemed cool as a cucumber as she led them down a deserted hallway. Considering the leggy blond had never done anything other than receptionist work for the DCO, that was a little surprising. Then again, maybe she was a ninja receptionist? He could see John hiring someone like that to work the desk of the organization’s clandestine headquarters.
“Who’s in there with him?” Tanner asked.
“I don’t recognize them,” she said over her shoulder. “No one from the Committee or the DCO, that’s for sure.”
“Not even Dick?” Trevor asked.
The DCO’s new director was rarely far from Thorn when anything important was going down.
She shook her head. “No. They’re all scientist types.”
“How do you know that?” Tanner asked.
“Trust me,” Vivian said. “I know a nerd herd when I see one.”
Trevor frowned. If Vivian was right about them being scientists, this meeting could very well be about another hybrid project—or whatever Thorn had decided was the next step in hybrid evolution.
“Man, am I glad to see you guys,” Evan said when they walked into the office where the analyst was waiting for them. “I was able to delay the start of the meeting for a few minutes by pop
ping the circuit breakers, which made all the computers in the conference room have to reboot, but I couldn’t get away with that more than once.”
“Sorry about that. Traffic was a bitch, as usual,” Trevor said. “Did you get the wire I asked for?”
Evan nodded and held out a small plastic and metal device that looked kind of like a miniature flash drive, except the USB adapter on the end of it didn’t look quite right.
“Who’d you get it from?” Trevor asked.
“Karl in IT tech support.” Evan handed it to him. “He said all you have to do is press the base in and hold it for a few seconds to turn it on. Then just get it somewhere in the room, and it will do the rest. It’ll pick up anyone talking as well as capture the video feed going into the overhead projector. And before you ask, I didn’t tell him what we needed it for, and he didn’t want to know.”
“Which conference room are they in?” Trevor asked.
Evan’s eyes widened. “You’re not going to be able to just walk in there.”
“Why not?” Trevor shrugged. “I’ll act like I walked into the wrong room, drop the device under a table, then be out of there before they even realize I slipped a bug in the room.”
Evan exchanged looks with Vivian. “It’s not that,” he said. “Thorn put two guards on the door, and one of them is Frasier.”
Trevor cursed. His plan would be infinitely more difficult with someone guarding the door, but Douglas Frasier’s presence made it damn near impossible. Frasier flat-out hated his guts. Then again, it seemed like Frasier hated everyone’s guts, but especially shifters’.
In addition to being Thorn’s head of security, Frasier also ran certain special projects for the former senator. Which was a nice way of saying the man killed people his boss wanted dead. Trevor didn’t know a lot about the guy, but he knew Frasier had worked for the DCO years ago and that he’d been paired up with the first shifter the organization had ever discovered—Adam. Trevor wasn’t sure what happened between the two of them, but considering what Adam had said about his partner shooting him in the back, Trevor had a pretty good idea. Whatever it was, it forced Adam to go off the grid while Frasier had landed a cushy job working for Thorn. The man was never going to let him get within ten feet of the conference room his boss was in.
Trevor glanced at Tanner. The hybrid had even less chance of getting past Frasier than he did. That left only one option.
He stared at Evan, trying to come up with something to say to convince the analyst he had it in him to bluff his way past Frasier and the other guard and figure out how to slip the device into the room.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Evan asked suspiciously. Then his eyes widened as it dawned on him. “No way! I can’t go in there. Frasier would know I’m lying. He’d shoot me.”
Shit. Evan looked like he was about to start hyperventilating at the mere thought of going in the conference room. Trevor opened his mouth to point out it was highly unlikely Frasier would kill him, but Vivian cut him off.
“I’ll do it.”
Well, damn. He hadn’t even considered suggesting she do it. Which was rather sexist, he realized. “You sure about this?”
“Will this help catch the people who killed John and Olivia?” she asked.
Trevor nodded.
“Then I’ll do it. Olivia was my friend long before I started working here. She even got me the job interview. As for John, he was the best boss I’ve ever worked for and an even better person. If putting a bug in that room will get me a little revenge, I’m in. I want those bastards to pay for what they’ve done.”
“How are you going to get it in there?” Trevor asked as he handed the device to her.
“Carefully” was all she said, then she left the room.
Evan let out a breath. “What do we do if they catch her?”
“We go rescue her,” Trevor said.
Evan seemed a little nervous at that idea but nodded. “I’ll get the computer set up. That way, we’ll know what’s happening in there.”
Taking a laptop out of his backpack, Evan placed it on the table, then slipped something that looked like some kind of wireless mouse adapter into one of the computer’s USB ports and began poking keys.
“You want to pick up the pace a little?” Trevor said. “At this rate, Frasier could knock Vivian out and drag her out to the trunk of his car before you get any sound on that thing.”
“Hold on.” Evan’s fingers flew over the keys. “I’m praying she remembered to push the adapter to turn it on, or this will all be a waste of time.”
A few moments later, muffled noise came out of the computer’s speakers along with the sound of something heavy thudding together.
Evan threw Trevor a nervous look. “What the hell was that?”
Trevor held up his hand for silence, trying to figure out what the hell they were listening to.
“I thought everyone would like some coffee and Danish,” Vivian said over the speaker. “Nothing like a little caffeine and sugar to get you through a morning meeting.”
“Thank you, Vivian.”
Thorn’s deceptively sweet voice made Trevor’s teeth ache.
“Of course, Mr. Thorn. If you need anything else, just let me know.”
“Damn, she’s smooth,” Tanner said as Vivian left the room. “John should have put her in the field.”
Trevor chuckled. “No kidding. Maybe he intended to. John was always ten steps ahead of everyone else when it came to knowing who’d be a good field agent.”
“He was good when it came to seeing other people’s futures,” Evan said softly. “I wish he had spent a little more time worrying about his own. Then maybe he would’ve foreseen somebody planting that bomb.”
The mood in the small office immediately changed as the humor that had been there a moment ago disappeared. They stared at the blank screen of the laptop, listening to the men in the conference room drink their coffee and talk about whether they preferred cheese or apple Danish.
“I’m surprised you didn’t bring Alina with you,” Evan said. “Zarina told me she helped get Sage back, so I figured she was a newly accepted member of our little rebel alliance.”
“She wanted to stay behind to take care of Sage,” Trevor said, the lie sliding wet and slimy off his tongue. Great, now he was lying to Evan like he’d lied to Alina. At this rate, he was going to end up no better than Thorn and his a-hole friends.
“But everything is good with her, right?” Evan probed. “She’s on our side, isn’t she?”
Trevor didn’t know how to answer that. His head was still advising him to proceed with caution, while his instincts shouted at him to trust her. That disconnect had him tied up in knots, not sure what to do. Why the hell did this have to be so difficult?
He shrugged. “I’m leaning that way, but in truth, I’m not sure.”
Evan frowned in confusion, while Tanner gave him a look that said he thought Trevor was full of crap. He knew the feeling. He was confused, too, and pretty sure he was full of shit.
Thankfully, the door opened, and Vivian stuck her head in, saving him from fielding any more questions about Alina.
“We good?” Vivian asked.
Trevor motioned at the laptop. “We have audio, but it remains to be seen if we’re going to grab any video from the projector. Regardless, you did good.”
Before she could say anything, the screen on Evan’s laptop flickered to life.
“We’ve got video,” the analyst announced excitedly.
Vivian nodded. “I need to go out and man the desk in case anyone else walks in late for the meeting. Hope you get what you need.”
“Me, too,” Trevor said. “Thanks again.”
As she closed the door behind her, an image of some kind of chart appeared on the laptop screen. The timeline along the bottom stretched back at leas
t four years, while the rest of the slide was filled with a bewildering array of stars, numbers, and various horizontal lines. It didn’t look like some kind of diabolical scheme concocted by Thorn to take over the world—or whatever the hell he was up to. In fact, it looked like something involving a weapons development schedule.
Trevor cursed. This was probably going to end up being a huge waste of time. He’d screwed the partnership he’d been building with Alina for nothing.
A man’s voice came through the speaker. Even with the guy explaining the chart, Trevor was still lost. All the scientific terms might as well have been Greek as far as he was concerned.
“The program has grown in leaps and bounds since the minor setback we experienced at the end of May when our test subject was unable to sustain a full transition,” another man said.
The picture on the screen changed to a man lying twisted and motionless on an exam table.
Trevor did a double take. Shit, that was Aaron Moore. He’d been an agent at the DCO right up until the moment he’d volunteered to take the hybrid serum Thorn’s doctors whipped up in their test tubes and died in horrible, screaming pain as a result.
Now the chart made a whole hell of a lot more sense. It outlined how long they’d been working on the hybrid serum.
“We still don’t know why Agent Moore responded so poorly to the serum,” the man continued. “While it was a reduced dosage, Agent Harmon displayed absolutely zero side effects when given the same treatment. In fact, it appears the serum failed completely in Harmon’s case. I admit, having a test subject die from such a small tweak in the formulation continues to confound our failure review team.”
Trevor ground his jaw at the total disregard for human life apparent in the man’s voice as he talked about Moore’s death. Former Special Forces lieutenant turned DCO agent Jayson Harmon should have died, too. What Thorn’s doctors didn’t know was that Zarina had injected Jayson with her own experimental drug minutes before they’d administered the hybrid serum. Only her drug hadn’t been meant to turn him into a snarling beast with a mouth full of fangs. It’d been meant to counteract the serum.