26.
Reed
I landed outside the office, wishing I’d just used my powers to fly back from Texas rather than trying to feign calm on the jet ride with Angel. She’d been a decent traveling companion, staying gracefully quiet the entire way, unlike any of the other options I might have been presented with. She hadn’t even protested when I had flown off toward the office without her when we landed. Miranda would have groused that I was breaking the law, since the governor had yanked my free flight status over Minnesota airspace.
I was so beyond giving a shit.
Opening the door, I found Casey sitting behind the receptionist desk. “Hi, Reed,” she said, all chipper.
“Morning,” I said, more wood chipper, a little below a snarl. I had things on my mind. Also, it was more like evening at this point in the day.
I didn’t even make it through the hallway into the bullpen before Miranda seemed to spring out of a nearby wall, making me wonder if she’d been waiting in ambush, a paper in hand. “What the hell is this charge for a charter plane for an international flight?” She wasn’t angry, exactly, but she was clearly of a mind to work out the financial detail on this one.
“I have business overseas,” I said coolly, making my way up the aisle through the middle of the bullpen rather than skirting the edge. Heads were popping up—Augustus, Scott, Friday, even Veronika, Colin, and Kat. I guess the B team had made it back from their latest sojourn to California.
Also, I wouldn’t have called them the B team to their faces, because Colin was scary fast, Veronika was just scary, and Kat could pull tears out—guilty, terrible, pretty tears—at a moment’s notice.
“Hey, Reed,” J.J. called from his cubicle. He was peeping out of it like a groundhog on February 2nd when winter was about to go away. “You got a second?”
“No,” I said, clipped, and turned my attention back to Miranda. “Don’t worry about it, okay? It’s not credit card fraud; I chartered it myself. I’ll be back in a couple days.”
She gave me the raised eyebrow. “Where are you going?”
“Tahiti,” I lied, only a few steps from my office.
“That doesn’t sound like a business expense,” she said.
“Find a way to justify it,” I said, not turning back to answer her, “and if not, I’ll just pay the company back out of my own pocket.” I really didn’t care, but I didn’t have a credit card that could be charged for the hundred grand or better it had taken to get the plane. I doubted they were going to accept a personal check either, and I didn’t feel I had the time to explore other payment methods.
“I don’t think you realize—” Miranda started to say, but I slammed the door to my office and shut the shades.
That done, I stood there in the pale dark, twilight peeking through the slits in the closed blinds. I took a long, slow breath. I was about to violate a whole heaping ton of laws. Not exactly a first for me, but definitely the first time in a while. I clenched my phone in my hand.
How the hell was I supposed to explain this to Isabella?
There was a knock at the door, a brief and done thing that ended as someone opened said door and slipped in. I turned to find J.J. standing there, closing the door behind him. His hair was puffy, his look serious, and he said, without preamble, “I know where you’re going.”
“J.J…” I started.
“Dude,” he said, brushing my objection aside. “Really?”
“I’m not going to—”
“I know where you’re going,” J.J. said. “Do you have any idea how big a flag you raised around here by doing this?”
I hadn’t considered that. My crew was tight, and if they knew I booked a charter to the UK…well, then they knew almost everything. “Dammit.”
“I covered it up,” he said. “When the pilot files the flight plan with ATC, I’m going to change it in the system so it looks like you’re going somewhere innocuous, like Sacramento. But you need to be careful on these sorts of things.” He lowered his voice. “You don’t know who’s listening, even in here.” He wasn’t speaking meta low, but I realized he’d never said my destination out loud, even though he surely knew it.
Damn. In the heat of the moment, I’d forgotten that in addition to the Scottish authorities watching the hell out of things on that end, the FBI was probably still surveilling us on this end. We had the office swept for bugs regularly, but that was hardly a thing you wanted to hang your life on. “When was the last sweep?” I asked.
“Checked a few minutes ago myself,” he said. “It’s easy once you have the gear. But dude—I still wouldn’t go speaking it aloud anywhere you can avoid it. Remember Ca—uh, that really smart lady who could use targeted words to hear our conversations about her?”
“Got it,” I said, nodding. He meant Cassidy Ellis. “Listen…I need you to tell Isabella for me.”
He made a face. “Dude…you think I’m not coming with you?”
“J.J…” I said, exasperation popping out. “This is serious, man. I have to do this alone.”
“Are you nuts?” J.J. asked, waving a hand behind him to encompass the bullpen and all the people waiting within it, probably straining hard to hear our conversation through the door. “You gotta be joking right now. You’re gonna take the team and leave me behind?”
I froze. “I’m not taking the team.”
He squinched his face up further. “Whut?”
“I’m going alone,” I said. “The team is staying here.”
J.J. adjusted his glasses, giving me an “oh no you didn’t” sort of look. “You’re going to ditch everybody? You’re going to go—extract our friend—and you think you can just go solo, no one rolling with you?”
“No one is coming with me,” I said, hesitating.
“You heading into trouble?” J.J. asked, like I was dumb, and it was obvious.
“Hopefully not.”
He cocked his head. Again, I got the feeling I was dumb. “You’re going to her. She’s wanted. She’s—I assume—in some kind of trouble—”
“She got disempowered,” I said, not sure why I said that. It just sort of popped out. “She ran into another succubus,” I went on, when his eyes blew up wide, “a stronger one. This other girl…she ripped the souls right out of her, left her…weak. Turned the cops against her. She’s…” I ran a hand through my long hair. “It’s bad.”
J.J. just stared at me. “All the shit we’ve been through, and you think that the crew is going to stay behind on this one?”
“This is off books, J.J.,” I said. “This is not the mission, it’s not their job. I don’t have the authority to ask this of them, even if I wanted to. They shouldn’t have me dragging them into this—”
“It’s Sienna, man,” J.J. said. “We’re all in this.”
“No, we’re not,” I said. “She’s my family. I’m in this. But the rest of you? This is your private lives, man, and what we’re talking about here is the opposite of what we do here for work. This is lawbreaking, doing wrong—this team doesn’t do that. They aren’t a group of bank robbers or mercenaries. And when it comes to this kind of illegality, these kinds of life-changing, ruinous consequences, they don’t answer to me—”
“THEY WILL ANSWER TO THE KING OF GONDOR!” J.J. shouted, almost rattling the door. His eyes were on fire, wild as I’d ever seen them. “Dude. The beacons are lit AF, okay? Sienna calls for aid—”
“You guys aren’t Rohan,” I said, trying to keep an even keel. J.J. was plainly worked up, speaking in geek metaphor that—yeah, I got it, but…I wasn’t exactly proud of the fact. “This isn’t your fight. This is the reason Sienna has kept us all at arm’s length for the last several months. Everyone who goes on this trip is asking for a prison sentence if things go wrong, if we end up getting into a fight. Let me handle this—”
“Hell no!” a voice cracked through the door.
“Nuh uh,” came another.
“What the—” I went for the handle and J.J. moved aside. I opened it to find the crew out there, not even making a pretense of working. Augustus, Scott, Kat and Jamal were standing right out there, Veronika, Colin, Abigail and Friday about a half-step behind them. Not one of them looked shame-faced, though Chase was lingering back a ways, as was Miranda.
“Man, Sienna put this team together,” Augustus said, and before I could say anything to that: “You ain’t got grounds to deny it. We all know she’s been behind the scenes on this from day one.” He looked at Miranda significantly. She didn’t admit anything, of course. She was a lawyer who’d been taking orders from a wanted fugitive; she’d be dumb to open her mouth, even here. Augustus looked back at me, all sincerity. “She’s saved my life more times than I can count. If she’s in trouble, if she’s powerless I don’t care whose damned law is standing in the way. I’m going. Because if I got my ass in it up to the neck, you know she’d be there to help, even if the law was still after her.”
“Here, here,” Jamal said, doing a little abrupt clap. When no one else joined in, he stopped.
“Guys—” I started to say, and then Abby shot me a hard look. “And gals,” I amended. “There could be serious consequences for this. Life in the cube, and for some of us…it might be a long life.”
“Puh-lease,” Veronika said, feigning a yawn. “I’m insulted you didn’t ask me to come. I mean, I do illegal things all the time.”
Augustus rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, we get it. You have a wild sex life.”
Veronika froze for a second, then threw her head back and let out a laugh. “Oh, I like you, pretty boy. I was talking about how I used to be an assassin, sweetie, and you go full into the gutter without even a nudge from me.” She wore a wide grin. “I’m wearing you down, baby.”
Augustus made a face. “Did you just Urkel me?”
“Sienna and I have had our differences,” Scott said, “but you know…I’m there for her, no matter what. She’s saved the world…so many times. And the world turned its back on her? Well, I won’t. I’m coming.” He clenched a fist in front of him. “If I have to ride the waves behind you all the way, I am coming.”
“Like you could leave me behind on this,” Kat said, arms folded in front of her, usual smile evaporated.
“I will hack your plane and send you into the ocean if you try and leave me behind,” Abby said, completely inscrutable. She had a good poker face. Scary good. “So unless you want to go for a nice swim in the north Atlantic…”
“You’d be okay,” Scott promised.
“And then I’d bring down a rain of satellites on you, just to liven things up,” Abby said, still inscrutable.
“Or we could just save ourselves the headache and bring the whole clown car along,” Jamal said under his breath.
“I’m fighting for Sienna,” Guy Friday said, boldly, declaratively, a little sappily, like he was crying under his mask. “For truth, and freedom, and justice and decency and stuff! Because she’s my niece! And because I kinda want to drink some Belgian beer right at the source.”
“I’m not going to Belgium,” I said crossly.
“Oh, well,” Friday said, “then for all those other reasons—I AM COMING!” And he struck a pose, massive arms strapped across his inflated chest.
I looked at Colin, then Chase, because neither of them had said anything. Colin looked around, adjusted his beanie slowly (for him) and said, “Yeah…no prison can really hold me, and the cops can’t really catch me, so…” He shrugged. “I’m in.”
Looking past him, Chase had a hard look on her face. She had her arms crossed, and there was a mountain of discomfort, her brown hair coming over one of her eyes in a pouty wave. “So…Sienna’s how I got this job, huh?” She bowed her head. “I shoulda known. Saved my life in Montana, got me the best-paying gig I’ve had in years.” She let out a long breath. “Yeah, okay. I guess I kinda owe her. Plus, uh, y’know, if she’s been saving the world…” She shrugged again. “I suppose I’ve been living on borrowed time or something, so…”
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said. “This is voluntary.”
“Yeah, and I’m kind of volunteering,” she said. “You guys have been really decent to me, and she’s one of your clan, so…” She nodded. “I’m in.”
I nodded, once, feeling a little…not astounded, exactly, but maybe a little amazed. “I have to admit…I’ve worked with most of you for kind of a while now, and…you did surprise me today.”
“That’s right, baby,” J.J. said. “Winger speech and bring it on home.”
I ignored him and went on. “My sister is…a complicated person. We all know that. But most us know that the hell that’s come her way lately is stuff she doesn’t deserve, that she didn’t earn. And now this Scottish succubus, whoever she is…she thinks she’s got Sienna rocked back on her heels, on the run. That she’s isolated, hunted and alone. Well…
“Sienna has saved the world, and she’s saved us all, at one time or another,” I said, feeling my chest puff a little with pride. “It’s our turn now. Let’s go save her.”