“You could say that, Desmond.” Riker snatches his phone and shoves it into his pocket. “Twelve minutes ago, three werewolves attacked two wizards. In the middle of a grocery store.”
Chapter Twenty
Fate has this funny way of mocking me through frustrating coincidences—like a flat tire, for instance.
On the way down to the garage, with eighteen people stuffed into an elevator meant for ten, Riker barks out orders left and right. Ramirez and his team, as well as two of the auxiliary teams from the task room, shout a chorus of Yes, sir once my captain finishes dishing out the attack plan. Or, I suppose, the relief plan. We have minutes left on the clock before the Aurora PD arrive at Stein’s Groceries and walk straight into a massacre, and even less time before some bystander records actual werewolves on their phone and uploads a video to YouTube. This is one of those infernos in the making you have to snuff out real quick. Or else.
Riker’s voice is rough in my ear when he leans close and says, “And you—you’re going home. Your truck is where you left it. I had someone stick your keys in the glove compartment earlier. Get in. Turn it on. Warm it up. Drive home. No exceptions. Understand?”
“You sound like you expect me to argue.” I wince when a frantic Harmony Burgess accidentally jabs me in the hip with her half-assembled sniper rifle. “Listen, Captain, I know when I’m beat. Or in this case, thoroughly tenderized to the point where I’d make a lovely steak on some big bad Wolf’s grill.”
Riker runs a hand through his hair, which I notice sports a touch of gray at the roots. “God, do you ever run out of sarcasm?”
“If my funny meter had an empty setting”—I drop my voice to a low tone only he can hear—“I wouldn’t still be here, Captain.”
It takes Riker a second to figure out what I’m implying. He pales. “Fuck, Cal.” His hand gently grazes my shoulder. “You…just don’t worry about this hiccup, okay? We’ll take care of it. It’s not our first exposure scare, and definitely won’t be the last. So don’t concern yourself with it. Please, go home and get some sleep.” He drops his hand to his coat, digs around, and tugs something out. A wad of cash. Which he presses into my open palm. “Your favorite delivery meal is on me.”
“Oh, sir, you don’t have to…”
“I insist.”
I hesitate, then stick the money in my pocket. “Thanks, Captain.”
A faint smile crosses his weary face.
The elevator doors finally creak open, and we all spill out into the lowest level of the office. Ramirez and his team speed down the hall in a group, like a well-oiled machine, and by the time the rest of us make it to the garage, they’re already in their SUV and halfway to the exit. The auxiliary teams aren’t far behind them. My team is the slowest, but only because Amy, Ella, and Desmond all stop to give me soft pats on the back and mutter “Night, Cal” and “Take care of yourself” before they hop into their designated vehicle, Ella at the wheel.
Riker is the last to the SUV, clambering into the front passenger seat. His cane almost falls out when he’s trying to prop it up against the glove compartment, but he reaches out in time to catch it.
It’s then that I notice he’s not wielding the same cane I’ve seen in his hand since the day I met him. His usual cane is a cheap, generic, pharmacy-bought number that his doctor probably told him to buy as the bare minimum requirement. But this cane—which he did not have, I’m sure, before my kidnapping—has a fancy black and gold design. It looks like a custom piece, something expensive.
I wonder what that means as I watch him slam the SUV door shut. Is he finally starting to accept he’ll probably be disabled for years…if not forever?
The SUV starts up, and, silently wishing my team luck, I hobble over to where I parked my truck the day of that fateful fight on Lombard. Per Riker’s word, the truck hasn’t moved from its spot next to the column for row H. But as I draw closer, I notice that something has moved. The left front tire. The hood of the truck is sitting at a slight angle because the tire in question has gone completely flat. Somehow, even though my truck didn’t travel with me to the torture shack, it too suffered an untimely injury.
“Oh, man,” I grumble. “Can’t anything go right for me this week?”
I glare at the tire, hang my head, and then turn to limp back to the office entrance. As I do, my team’s SUV quickly backs out of its parking space and starts to pull around to the exit. Ella, however, notices me standing there, looking like a kicked puppy, and stops the vehicle. She rolls down the window and sticks her head out. “You okay, Cal?”
“My truck’s got a flat tire,” I say in a tone that sounds suspiciously like a moody teenager’s whining.
Ella blinks a couple times. “Seriously?”
I shrug my shoulders just enough to get across my frustration without putting pressure on my broken ribs. “Welcome to my life.”
“For god’s sake.” She taps on the steering wheel, thinking fast. “All right. Get in the SUV. We’ll drop you off at your apartment as soon as we’re done wrapping up this grocery store nonsense.”
“Ella,” Riker says from the passenger seat, “I don’t want him—”
“He’s our responsibility,” she snaps. “One of McKinney’s men is still out there. I don’t want him taking public transportation home, where he has to wait out in the cold, alone and vulnerable.”
Riker holds up his hands, exasperated. “He can bum a ride off somebody at the office.”
Amy pipes up from the back seat. “Just what we need—Cooper Lee getting kidnapped again.”
I’m surprised Riker’s eyes don’t pop out of his skull. “Why are you all conspiring against me?”
“Well, boss,” Desmond replies from some shadowy corner I can’t see through the tinted windows, “last time we left a teammate alone during a mission, it didn’t end so well.”
Riker chokes.
Holy hell, I can’t believe Desmond brought up Norman Bishop.
Ella can’t either. She whips her head around so hard her neck cracks and shoots daggers into the back seat. “That was uncalled for.”
“It was true,” Desmond responds, as calm as ever. “We were all thinking it.”
Ella deflates. “Well, that’s…yeah.”
The silhouette of Amy through the back window kicks Ella’s seat. “Well, now that our paranoia has been established, can we get on the fucking ball?” She opens her door, unclips her seatbelt, slides out, and points at the empty space between her place and Desmond’s. “Get in, Kinsey.” Without waiting for my response, she marches over to my truck, pops the passenger door, and hauls out the duffel bag full of gifts, carrying it back over to the SUV.
Desmond pats the seat next to him. “Hurry up now, Calvin. Or Ramirez and his team won’t have any backup.”
I glance to Ella, but her forehead is pressed against the steering wheel, and she’s muttering swears under her breath. Riker peers over the top of her head at me, a heavy, worn look in his hooded eyes. He’s my captain, not Amy or Desmond, and I respect that enough to wait for his final judgment on the issue.
Six seconds tick by, and he delivers it: “Get in, Cal. We’ll take you home. On one condition: You do not, under any circumstances, get out of this vehicle. You stay in the SUV, with your seatbelt on, for the duration of our mission. You will not fight. You will not involve yourself, at all, in this grocery store pissing contest. Clear?”
“As crystal, Captain.” I scamper by Amy, who’s smirking, and scoot up next to Desmond, who’s wearing an eerily similar expression. “Now let’s get going. I look forward to watching you all kick some werewolf and wizard butt. From a safe distance. Behind bulletproof glass and armored doors.”
“That’s the spirit, Kinsey.” Amy tosses the duffel bag in the back of the SUV and slips into the vehicle, slamming the door. She kicks Ella’s seat again. “Hit the gas, sister. Let’s roll.”
Ella sighs deeply and taps the accelerator, as instructed.
Way faster than
the speed limit allows, we zip through the icy streets and arrive at Stein’s in what must be a record five minutes and forty-three seconds. Ella skids the SUV to a less-than-graceful stop behind the other three black DSI vehicles parked half a block away from the grocery store under fire. Even from a distance, the signs of a violent disturbance are noticeable: a broken show window, the edges stained red, several overturned carts in front of the main entrance, scared people huddling behind a few civilian cars parked in the street-side spots next to the sidewalk.
The DSI auxiliary teams have a perimeter set, twenty feet or so around the building. One team has taken up a strategic battle formation near the front doors, guns drawn. The other team I don’t see, which means they must have headed around back to guard the loading bay doors, in case one of the fighters decides to flee that direction.
Without stopping to concoct a specific battle plan, my team empties out of the SUV and rushes toward the store, leaving me behind, doors locked. Through the tinted windows, I watch as the auxiliary agents allow Riker’s elites through the perimeter. The captain himself stops just inside the doorway, cane planted firmly on the worn tiles. Like a sentry intending to block anyone who dares to try and pass him. (He’s not fast enough to lead a charge with his injured leg—and he knows it.) He nods for Ella to continue onward, and she guides Desmond and Amy beyond the cash registers, back toward Stein’s locally famous bakery. They turn down the cereal aisle, and I lose sight of them.
For two or three minutes, nothing happens. The night is still.
Then—a gunshot.
Riker jerks, whips his head around, and calls for two of the auxiliary agents to head inside. The instant the agents move toward the door, three entire aisles of groceries come crashing down. Cereal boxes explode, throwing Wheaties and Cheerios into the air like confetti. The entire selection of Campbell’s soup blasts off its racks, each can bursting like a live grenade, painting the floor tomato red and the concentrated yellow of chicken noodle. Flimsy plastic bags tear wide open, slinging dry beans and rice thirty feet across the store. And finally, in the middle of all the carnage, half-buried beneath a mountain of ruined food—a werewolf lies panting.
The wizard who decked him with a spell, some older Latino man I’ve never seen, darts over the toppled metal shelving with an actual wand clutched in his hand. His light brown face is streaked with crimson red where the Wolf’s claws raked across his head and cheek, deep, a wound that would scar him for life without magical healing. Fury steaming out of his every breath, he points his wand at the downed Wolf and opens his mouth to shout what must be a deadly spell.
Only for Ella Dean to charge up behind him and tackle him to the floor.
That poor bastard doesn’t know what hit him.
Ella snaps his wrist mid-fall, the wand spiraling away, and then bashes his face right into an overturned crate of sardine tins. The wizard’s nose explodes on impact. Blood spurts out and rains across his wrinkled white button-up. He crumples to the floor and tries to curl up in the fetal position, but Ella’s not having that. She flips him over onto his stomach, pins his hands, and cuffs him in one swift move I definitely need her to teach me.
The wizard could probably get out of the cuffs with a well-placed spell, but Desmond and Amy are now loitering behind Ella, guns and beggar rings at the ready. The man would be a fool to try anything, lest he earn himself a bullet to the ass, courtesy of Major Sugawara. And even though most ICM practitioners loathe DSI, they know better than to test the battle-worn elite detectives in the middle of a combat situation. The wizard shakes his head and spits out some words I can’t hear but imagine as a string of nasty swears.
Ella tips her head back, unamused, and drags the guy to his feet, before passing him off to one of the auxiliary agents lying in wait near the registers. The man reluctantly allows the agents to lead him to the exit, where Riker looms with a venomous glare that promises a verbal beat-down of epic proportions. A wizard the Latino man might be, but even he cowers in the presence of a genuinely pissed-off Nicholas Riker.
Meanwhile, at the overturned shelving, Ella, Desmond, and Amy are approaching the injured Wolf. He’s not unconscious—else he’d revert back to human form—but he clearly took a beating from the wizard. Both his hind legs are bent in awkward directions, and his breathing is erratic. There are several patches of charred fur, burnt flesh beneath, mostly along the left side of his belly and chest, where he must have taken the brunt of a fire spell of some kind.
His injuries are nothing a Wolf can’t shrug off with accelerated healing. But he doesn’t have quite enough time to heal fully before Riker’s elites surround him. Ella gestures to him and says something, to which the Wolf doesn’t immediately respond. Then Amy steps past Ella, bends close to the Wolf, and obviously threatens him with much worse injuries than he already has. Because the Wolf tenses in terror, and a few seconds later, there is no Wolf. Just a pale, naked man, lying on the dirty tiles, covered in spilled cereal and soup.
Amy makes quick work of him with her cuffs. Ella peers over her shoulder at Desmond and points to the Wolf man. Desmond nods, maneuvers around her, and takes up a guard position next to the Wolf, intending to keep him in one place until, presumably, the rest of the fighting in the store, hidden from view, has been dealt with. Ella and Amy then retreat back toward the bakery area, out of sight. Ramirez’s team must be there somewhere, dealing with the other two Wolves and the remaining wizard.
Now, see, this is the kind of mission I—
Déjà vu.
I go rigid in my seat, instinctively pulling away from the sensation, only for my old friend nausea to greet me again. Gagging, I force myself to relax, muscles slack, back and head resting against the leathery seat.
I seek out Navarro’s touted balance point. No rejection. No acceptance. No response at all, except to let the déjà vu happen as it will.
If I found the balance point at Slate’s house, I can find it a second time.
I calm my breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
The feeling of déjà vu sharpens, and for a brief flicker of time, it’s all encompassing, pumping through my every vein, infecting every cell. And then, like I walk through a wall of slow-moving air, a sense of relief passes over me, followed by the same phantom tug in my brain that led me to Slate’s secret basement room. I open eyes I didn’t realize I’d closed, guided by that tug, and turn my head to the right.
At the end of a dark alley between a Hallmark store and a nail salon—is a Wolf.
Donahue.
My déjà vu dissolves into the ether, and reality crashes down around me in a flurry of sight and sound, like my senses were muted during the episode. My brain suddenly kicks into high gear. Thoughts rush by:
I’m in the SUV all by myself, with no weapons on my person. Every other DSI agent in the vicinity is half a block away. Wolves can move faster than people. So if I roll down the window and call out for help, Donahue will get to the SUV and dismember me before anyone can come to my rescue. If I say nothing at all, Donahue might not notice I’m still in the SUV, given the tinted windows. But then, he could already know I’m here, and defenseless, if he’s been trailing the SUV for some time. And…
Wait.
That doesn’t make any sense. Donahue couldn’t be after me. He had no way of knowing I’d be released from the DSI infirmary today. Or that I’d be at the task meeting this afternoon. Or that I’d tag along with my team when they came to stop the fight at Stein’s. And, beyond those points, if Donahue wanted to hunt me down and rip me limb from limb, he simply could have followed me home, waited until I was alone, walked right up to the front door, knocked politely, and attacked when I came to greet my visitor.
So, no. I’m not his target.
But he must have a target. Or else he wouldn’t have shown up here.
Who…?
I tear my eyes from the werewolf in the alley, who’s prowling ever closer to the sidewalk, and scan the crowd of bystanders again. None of the people co
wering behind the vehicles outside the grocery store look familiar, and besides a small group of people loitering around the entrance to a bar a block away, peering curiously at the ruckus in and around Stein’s, there’s no one else nearby.
So unless Donahue is going after one of the DSI agents at Stein’s…but no, that doesn’t work either. He couldn’t have predicted exactly who’d arrive on scene; Riker could have sent another team in our stead. And Donahue wouldn’t have pulled this stunt on a whim because it’ll inevitably paint a very large, very red target on his back until the day he dies.
No member of the supernatural super-community risks public exposure without drawing the wrath of every violent creature in the world. As soon as word gets around that he did this—well, the last fool who tried to expose the supernatural world, a vampire, I believe, ended up nailed to a cross in a children’s play park with his entrails spilled out on the ground around him.
(Yeah, certain members of the supernatural world are indeed that vindictive. Ugh.)
Anyway, my point is:
Donahue would only have decided on this stunt at Stein’s if his plan involves going out in a blaze of glory.
Which means there must be someone here worth dying to attack. (And it’s not a DSI agent.)
A wriggling maggot of a thought worms its way into my head.
Could it be?
I check Donahue’s approach—he’s a few steps from the lip of the alley now—and try my hardest to follow his line of sight. Those dark Wolf eyes are staring at something (that is, someone) in particular. My gaze, however, finds only a light pole at the end of Donahue’s glare, its soft yellow bulb flickering on and off, unable to decide whether the overcast day qualifies as dark or light. There’s no one in the vicinity of this light pole, the nearest bystander a good twenty feet off.
But as I peel my eyes and survey the square of sidewalk beneath the light, I find something out of the ordinary. A person-shaped shadow, waffling in and out of existence in time with the light pole’s cycling.
Shade Chaser (City of Crows 2) Page 17