Lark sat behind the wheel, rubbing his hands together to warm them. The heater was on, but it would take a few minutes for the van to warm up. Mai had claimed the front passenger seat and was wrapped in a blanket. Unlike Kris and me, Mai and Lark felt the chill, and according to the thermostat, it was below freezing outside today.
Kris climbed into the back of the van and took the seat opposite me with the table between us. His expression was grim.
I wanted to say something, but, hey, how did things go with the severed hand delivery didn’t quite feel right. The idling engine purred, and then we were on the move down the gravel drive.
I settled back in my seat. “Will Jay be okay without us?”
Kris shrugged. “It’s been quiet the last few weeks. He should be fine, and if he needs us, we’re only a phone call and an hour’s drive away.”
As we drove up to the closed wrought iron gates, Lark slowed down. A bare-chested Killion appeared. Smoke rose off his body in curls and melted into the air. Shit, he was hot. Literally, but then what could you expect from a hellhound?
He yanked open the gates, and I caught his ember gaze as we drove past. Yeah, Jay would be fine. He had Killion as backup if anything went wrong.
We drove in silence for several minutes, and then the lulling motion of the van had my eyes drifting closed.
Hell, no.
A tête-à-tête with the shimmer man was not on my agenda … ever.
I sat up bolt-straight. “Okay, we need to talk or something. I cannot fall asleep.”
Kris pulled a packet of playing cards from his pocket and placed it on the table. “We could play …” He smirked. “Or we could retire to the bedroom for some between-the-sheets activity. I’m sure Tris won’t mind if we move her.”
“Kat wants to stay awake,” Mai said lightly. “Not be bored to sleep.”
Kris tucked in his chin. “Oh, Mai, do we really want to go there?”
Mai snapped her mouth closed and fixed her gaze on the view out the windshield. Lark’s shoulders tensed.
Oh, shit. Mai and Kris doing the hokey cokey? Maybe it was time to defuse the situation. I picked up the pack of playing cards. “Get ready to have your ass kicked.”
Chapter Six
“Coordinates are on the outskirts of the town,” Lark said as we drove past the sign for Reverie.
A dirt track appeared up on the left, and Lark turned the van onto it. Trees and brush blocked out the sun. We continued up the track for a minute. The scrape of branches on the outside of the van filled the air, and snow kissed the windows as it was knocked free of the foliage.
We came to a shuddering halt, and Lark killed the engine.
“What’s happening?” Kris asked.
“The track is too narrow,” Lark replied. “There’s no way the van will make it. We’re gonna have to go the rest of the way on foot.”
I grabbed my daggers, the sedative dart gun, and my live-round pistol before following Kris out of the van.
Damn, the camper was an impressive ride. The residence part was compact on the outside but spacious in the inside, and no, there was no weaver magic involved, I’d asked. Just clever engineering. The van hitched to the back contained five cells, large enough to hold a large person or a couple of smaller ones.
Lark locked up and pocketed the keys in his fur-lined parka. He stamped his feet and rubbed his hands together.
The cold air bit at my skin. Yeah, if I could feel it, then it was fucking cold. Mai had dressed for the occasion in fur-lined black boots with a wedge heel and a calf-length padded coat. Her holster was strapped over the top of her coat, and a pack hugged her back. A black beanie covered her pixie haircut and kept her ears warm, but the tip of her nose was already tinged pink. I guess kitsunes felt the cold too. Kris was like me, dressed in jeans and a leather jacket—no gloves or hats required. The silver cuffs on his wrists winked when the sunlight caught them.
We’d gone over our plan a few hours ago, but there was no harm in going over it again.
I nodded at Lark. “You’re our lookout, so hang back.”
Lark nodded and pulled on a pair of gloves. “I’ll call for backup if needed.”
“Good. Kris, Mai, and I will scope out the place. The primary objective is to sedate and incapacitate the Custodians for transport back to Scorchwood. Once we’ve done that, we can get any human captives out.”
“How many did Lex say there were?” Mai asked Lark.
This base was shared by three teams, including Lex’s unit, and each team was made up of three Custodians. Considering we’d taken out two and had Lex in custody, there should be six Custodians at base.
“Six,” Lark confirmed my calculation.
“Everyone, check your weapons, make sure they’re loaded.” I’d checked mine but checked again. Nothing worse than firing off a shot to discover you’d neglected to load the damn gun.
Kris hauled a pack onto his back. “I have cuffs and rope.”
Looked like we were ready. Time to kick some Custodian ass. We took the track at a steady pace, eyes on the brush, ears scanning for any sounds that were out of the ordinary.
“The coordinates are up ahead.” Lark studied his tablet with the green lines and the blinking dot, which denoted the location Lex had handed over under duress. “Another minute and we’ll be there. Wherever there is.”
My gaze snagged on something high up in the trees. If not for a ray of errant sunlight glancing off the lens, I’d have missed it.
A camera. “Eyes on us at two o’clock.”
Kris looked up. “Shit.” He left the path and clambered up the tree easily. “Wires are cut. This camera isn’t providing a feed to anywhere.”
Then what was the point of it being there? A deterrent? No. It made no sense.
Strange.
Still, we needed to be careful. “Lark, hang back.”
Lark cursed but slowed his pace. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “If you don’t radio me in twenty minutes, I’ll head back to the van and into town.” His attention traveled to Mai, and his throat bobbed. “Be careful.”
Something passed between them, bittersweet and aching with longing. My heart hurt for them. Fucking race laws, fucking bloodline snobbery. It was unfair they couldn’t be together.
Mai lifted her chin and grinned. “We got this. You stay sharp.”
“The coordinates are four meters up then ten meters to your left,” Lark said.
I led the way up the track. Four meters … This was about right. Oh, lookie here, another track, barely visible. How the fuck had the Custodians gotten anything in or out of their hideout? Maybe there was another route we’d missed?
Kris went ahead this time. We kept close together on the barely-there track until it spilled onto a dusty, bracken-littered clearing that housed a broken-down cabin. The door was off its hinges, the windows shattered, and the roof was caving in.
“Shit,” Kris said. “Fucking Lex lied.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.” I smiled as I walked past him. “He didn’t lie. This is perfect.”
“Perfect?” Kris looked skeptical.
“No one’s going to bother coming here, let alone investigating a battered place like this. So …” I stepped over the threshold of the cabin. “It stands to reason that the entrance to the Custodian base is hidden somewhere in plain sight.”
“Hidden in plain sight.” Mai chuckled. “I like it.”
I scanned the interior of the rotting cabin. Damn, what a mess. A table with one leg missing was flung on its side, a filthy, soot-clogged fireplace covered one crumbling wall, and a mold-spattered fabric sofa sat lonesome in the center of the room. Battered books and pots and pans littered the floor. Had someone really lived here at some point? Stairs reached up to the open sky, but the entrance to the hideout wouldn’t be up there. It would be down here somewhere, and then my gaze snagged on the perfect spot—the only undisturbed part of this sad little hovel.
A patterned rug that looked almost
new.
My boots creaked on the rotting floorboards as I made my way over, but then the creak turned to a sturdy clomp. Yes, this was the spot. The floorboards here were solid, supported from a structure hidden beneath.
“Did you hear that?” Mai asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.” I grabbed a corner of the rug and lifted. “Voilà, a trap door.”
“Kinda cliché, don’t you think?” Mai wrinkled her nose.
“You can take that up with the Custodians when we nab them,” Kris drawled.
Mai shot him a serious look. “And you need to keep your mouth shut about stuff.”
“Stuff?” Kris’s brows shot up.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about.” She looked seriously miffed.
But now was not the time to give Kris a berating. “We’re losing daylight, people. “Let’s get this done, and then you two can duke it out after.”
I grabbed the ring on the door and pulled it up to reveal a set of stone steps. There was light coming from somewhere down there.
“This is it, guys.”
I drew my dart gun and stepped into the gloom.
My boots made no sound on the steps as I shifted into stealth mode. My senses heightened, searching for any sounds of life. A heartbeat or body heat.
Even as we hit the bottom of the steps, it was clear to me that the place was empty of life.
We stopped at the base of a short corridor that opened out into a larger room with two more corridors coming off it. This was a neat underground bunker, probably built as an elaborate bomb shelter or an apocalypse hideout. There had to be a generator still running, which accounted for the lights.
I holstered my gun. “There’s no one here.”
“How do you know that?” Mai whispered.
“I just do. We should sweep the place regardless, see what we can find.”
Kris and Mai were looking at me strangely.
“Trust me. I have an ear and nose for these things. No heartbeats and no smell of life.”
Mai sniffed the air and walked closer to one of the tunnels. She sniffed again. “You’re right. It smells empty.”
Kris ran a hand over his face. “Fuck, we’re too late. They probably upped and moved base as soon as Lex and his team failed to return. They would have guessed they’d been compromised.”
“I’ll radio Lark and check in,” Mai said.
“Then we scope the place out,” Kris said. “We do it together, though, no splitting up.”
Sounded like a plan.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, and so far, we’d come up empty. The bunker wasn’t huge, and the rooms at the end of the tunnels had been stripped, so it didn’t take long to do a sweep. One room had been set up as a dorm with beds, free of bedding now. Sticky gum still clung to the walls where posters or pictures must have hung. Kris found a playing card that Mai plucked from his fingers and popped into a Ziplock bag.
The bedframes were bolted to the floor, and there was very little gap between the floor and the frame. It was pitch black under the beds. This was where Nightblood vision kicked ass, because without it, there was no way I’d have spotted the folder shoved against the wall under the bed.
“There’s something here.” I lay flat on the ground and wriggled partially under the bed to reach for the folder. “Got it.”
Kris and Mai joined me to examine the find. I flipped open the folder to reveal several sheets of paper with a headshot pinned to the left top corner of each one. The sheets were photocopies, and the photographs were black and white and grainy, but the details were clear. Height, weight, supernatural species, and a short bio for each. They were all different but had one thing in common—a stamp across the page saying terminated.
“Shit,” Kris said. “Looked like someone was squirreling away information.”
I closed the file. “An insurance policy, maybe? We can check the supe missing persons database for these people.”
“It’s obvious the Custodians left in a hurry,” Mai said. “Or he would have taken this information with him.” She hauled her pack off her shoulders and retrieved a leather pouch. “Let’s gather samples for Lark. Anything that might help us ID the Custodians or the humans who may have been held here.”
We donned latex gloves and headed for the final tunnel. The room at the end was a prison, a chamber lit by tube lights that flickered eerily.
Barred cells lined the wall, and the smell of death and blood lingered faintly on the air. It didn’t take long to figure out why. A huge bloodstain painted the ground, and the remnants of chalk still clung to the concrete. Some kind of blood ritual?
The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, and an icy finger tickled my spine. I turned my head slowly and peered into the shadows. There was something there. The man stepped into the chamber slowly, dragging his feet. His eyes were glazed. He walked right past me and then lay down on the blood-stained floor. His body began to convulse. Tears streamed down his face as his mouth opened in a soundless scream.
“Kat?” Mai touched my arm lightly.
I gripped her hand, pushing my sight into her.
“Fuck!” She pulled away, staring at the figure lying on the floor.
Wounds opened on his naked body, and blood seeped into the ground. And then he winked out.
“What the fuck was that? A ghost?” She looked about. “Where did he go?”
“You saw a ghost?” Kris asked.
I rubbed my arms to dispel the goosebumps. “No. That wasn’t a ghost, that was a psychic imprint. An echo of what happened here.” I crouched by the bloodstain. “The Custodians did something to the prisoners. They bled them right here. It had to be a ritualistic thing.”
“Shit, why didn’t we bring a camera?” Kris muttered.
This was a powerful psychic spot in the bunker. But the blood staining the ground was old, too old for me to sniff out if it belonged to a human or supernatural. Shit.
Mai crouched beside me and zipped open her leather bag. “I’ll grab samples. I can scrape the dried blood into test tubes for Lark to take back and analyze at the lab.”
“Good idea,” Kris agreed.
There was nothing else to find, and ten minutes later, we made our way to the exit.
“No wonder Lex gave up the location so easily this time around,” Mai said. “He held out long enough to ensure the other Custodians got away.”
We climbed the steps.
“But eight weeks?” I shook my head. “Surely, he could have saved himself a shit load of pain if he’d spilled the coordinates four or five weeks ago?”
“Who knows what kind of protocols they have in place?” Mai replied. “Plus, he was going through withdrawal. Lark said Lex was in and out of consciousness for over a week when the demon blood started leaving his system.”
Cool air kissed my cheeks as I climbed out of the hatch.
“Or maybe he was just buying himself time,” Kris said as he followed me out. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, they’re gone, and we have nothing.”
“But the humans …” Mai frowned. “When did they start going missing? They could still be connected to the Custodians.” She tapped the pouch. “We could have proof in the blood samples that the missing humans were here.”
Flakes of snow began to swirl in through the broken windows. “I suggest we get to Reverie and ask some questions. Maybe there’s a lab we can use?”
We headed out of the cabin and toward the frozen dirt track.
“Good call.” Mai smiled. “The sooner we wrap up this case, the sooner we can get back and decorate the mansion.”
“Ah, Kris told you about our epic shopping trip.”
Mai’s eyes twinkled. “I think it’s a fabulous idea.”
So, the Custodians had gotten away, so what? We’d find them, and we’d figure out what was up with the humans, because that was what we did, and then we’d kick back and enjoy Yuletide because we fucking deserved it.
We made our way d
own the dirt track then took a right onto the main track.
A bellow broke the crisp winter silence.
“Lark!” Mai broke into a run.
Kris and I followed, boots crunching on the frozen ground. Figures came into view up ahead.
Lark stood with his hands up, and another figure, dressed in gray and white so he blended into the blizzard, stood behind him. But the thing that caught my eye was the black nose of a gun.
The gun the stranger had trained on Lark’s head.
Chapter Seven
I had my pistol out and pointed at the stranger’s head in a heartbeat.
“Shoot me, and your friend dies.” His tone was smooth and cultured, but his face was obscured by a gray ski mask. His stormy eyes were chips of ice as they locked on mine. “Do not test me.”
“I don’t test.” My smile was cold. “I’m an excellent shot.”
His jaw flexed. “Your friend here tried to use weaver shit on me. I can’t have that.”
“Then don’t fucking sneak up on a guy,” Lark snapped.
Okay, this was getting us nowhere. “Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
Fucking hell. “Kat Justice with the Nightwatch.”
His shoulders relaxed a fraction, the motion so slight anyone else may have missed it. Not the enemy, then.
“Logan Remington,” he said. “Hunter, Golden Eagle Chapter.”
A bounty hunter. I could believe that. But what kind of supe was he? Impossible to tell without getting up close and taking a whiff. But Golden Eagle only recruited the best.
There were three chapters of bounty hunters that worked independently of the council. There’d been a time when there’d been talk of shutting them down—I mean who needed bounty hunters when you had Nightwatch agents? But the motion had never been passed. I guess there weren’t enough Nightwatch agents to go around, and having the hunters in operation reduced our overall workload. After all, Nightwatch dealt with issues in order of priority, and the hunters were a great way to skip the queue. All you had to do was pay the hefty price.
Ghost at the Feast: The Nightwatch Book 3 Page 4