34.
Reed
The plane touched down on the tarmac in York with a little bump. I tried to smooth things as much as I could, canceling out the crosswinds that had threatened to buffet the plane on the approach, but our pilot apparently lacked the expert-level skill most of the private plane pilots tended to have, and he bounced us good one time, eliciting not a sound from his meta passengers, who were used to their fair share of bumps in the course of our duties.
Sliding across the tarmac, the Gulfstream hit another bump, this one in the pavement. I cringed, and glanced at Augustus, who shrugged. “Didn’t know I was supposed to smooth everything out too,” he said. He closed his eyes and concentrated. “There,” he said when they opened again, “pavement fixed. That ought to make it a little easier on us the rest of the way.”
“Where are we going?” Jamal asked. “Up to a jetway?”
“You know that’s not how this private service thing works,” Veronika said with a smirk, a whiskey she’d poured during the flight still in hand. “They roll you up to a hangar and bring your car right up to you.” She threw a glance at me. “Limo, I hope?”
“We’re not staying,” I said tightly, because now we were in the dicey part of this op. We’d had no contact with Sienna since the last time I’d slept, which was almost twenty-four hours ago. Or something. The change in time zones and all the waiting we’d done between Texas and Minneapolis and here was throwing me off. “Most of us will stay on the plane.”
“I like the way you say ‘us,’” Scott said, leaning forward in his seat, “like you’re going to be one of the ones who stays.”
I swallowed heavily, because he’d heard me right, and I hated that I’d even said it. “I am staying on the plane,” I said quietly. “I’m known here. If I go outside and get seen, hell is gonna be descending on us from the UK authorities about ten seconds later. We need to send out people who aren’t known here, who aren’t known associates of Sienna Nealon.” I glanced around the cabin. “Veronika, Colin, Chase…you’re up.”
“Lucky us,” Veronika said, draining the last of her whiskey and getting to her feet. “I’ll lead this soiree, ladies.” She looked at Colin, who had cocked an eyebrow at her. “You’re an honorary lady, Colin. Take that as the compliment it is.” She waved them forward and ducked the bulkhead as she headed down the aisle toward the door. “Come on.”
“And we just sit here?” Augustus asked, raising an eyebrow at me.
“Not all of us are just sitting,” Jamal said, head down on his tablet.
“Copy that,” Abby said, her laptop on, well, her lap. “Some of us are working.”
“I’ve got the traffic cams around York and I’m scanning facial recognition,” Jamal said. “No sign of Sienna yet.”
“He’s so good at this,” J.J. whispered to Abby. “Why do we even bother to show up?”
“So we can keep tech geeking when he switches from a support class to a mage,” Abby said.
“Right,” J.J. said. “You’re smart and beautiful, did you know that?”
“I’m really more of a druid than a mage, which covers both,” Jamal mumbled, but they didn’t hear him. I did, and am embarrassed to say that I thought he was pretty dead on with that assessment.
“Anything we need to know before we make like a fetus and head out?” Veronika asked, opening a luggage compartment and pulling out a bag. She knew what she was after, and she’d slid a case out of it seconds later, popping an earphone into her ear and then handing one each to Chase and Colin. When she looked at Colin she said, “Might want to hold that in if you go for a run.”
“This is not my first time using one of these,” Colin said, getting a little irritable at her constant condescension.
Veronika just smiled back and beckoned him forward as she waited for the flight attendant to open the door now that we were at a stop. “You get off first, before anyone sees you, okay? You’re recon. Chase and I are going to hit the ladies’ room.”
“That’s good cover,” J.J. said. “Very realistic.”
Veronika just smirked. “Of course it is, genius. I actually have to go. You?” She looked at Chase and got a nod. “Yeah, I figured.”
“You know we have a bathroom on the plane?” I asked.
Veronika just shrugged. “I got a thing about preferring to have my feet on solid ground if I can. It’s a thing.” The flight attendant lowered the ramp, and Veronika headed off, a second after Colin whooshed out past them all.
“What…what was that?” the co-pilot asked, his hair blowing over his forehead. Apparently he hadn’t been paying attention to our entire conversation, which I realized a little belatedly had been held entirely in the open.
“A strong wind,” Veronika deadpanned, and headed out. “We’ll be back in a little bit, once the plane’s refueled.” I’d already talked with the pilot about this, and he was clear on how we were working this: we were parked here until I said otherwise.
“Hm. I’m getting something,” Jamal said, staring intently at his screen.
“The mage is a power player,” J.J. said. “He has a serious INT bonus, and that gives him a minus five to all hacking attempts.”
“I think it’s more like minus twenty, honestly,” Abby said.
Kat snorted, sighed, and rolled over in her sleep a couple rows back. I had kinda forgotten she was even on the plane, honestly, because she was apparently still on California time.
“What have you got?” I asked, taking up the mantle of the leader by asking the question that Jamal had just begged. I stood up and moved to look at his screen, laying hands on the stitched leather seats as I levered my way over.
“I’ve got Sienna at the train station,” Jamal said, and he blew up the screen to show me footage of Sienna with another guy—a little older chap, very British-looking—walking side by side out the front doors. “Who’s that?”
“Don’t know,” I said, staring intently at him. “She had some contacts over here. Maybe he’s one of them.”
“Who’s the threat?” Scott asked, leaning over the seat to peek at Jamal’s screen. “We should probably be on the lookout for trouble since I’m guessing we can see farther than her right now.”
“All I know is that it’s a succubus named Rose,” I said, staring at my sister’s digitized face on the display. She was severely pixilated, the camera not doing the best job of rendering her. She was still recognizable, but it wasn’t exactly HD.
“So it’s a she named Rose and that’s all we know,” Augustus said. “Scottish, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We’re looking for a white girl with fair skin in a country largely of white people with fair skin,” Augustus deadpanned. “That’ll be easy to find.”
“From what little Sienna told me, I get the feeling she’ll find us before we find her,” I said quietly. “She’s drained countless metas. We have no idea what her power profile is, but I think we can safely assume it’s obscenely strong.” I heard the murmur of discontent. “Hopefully we won’t run across her at all; we can just extract and bail before she even knows we’re in country, since no one likes to go into a fight overmatched.”
“I love it when I’m facing enemies that can totally annihilate me without much thought,” Augustus said. “I mean, I look back on how we fought Sienna in South Dakota last year, and I think—why don’t I go courting more ass-whoopings like that? Because now we’ve got a succubus with all those powers she used to lay the beatdown on us, plus more still. Good times.” His face was pure snarky amusement.
“I get the feeling we’re going to be using those beefed-up abilities of ours if we cross this Rose’s path,” Scott said, a little ominously for him. He was usually sunnier than that these days.
“Seems likely,” I said, stepping up and grabbing the box of earphones that Veronika had left behind. I snugged one in my ear and held it out, offering them to the rest. Augustus took one immediately, and so did Jamal and Scott. J.J. and Abby followed, while Kat let out a gentle snore and turned over in her seat. She was wearing a black sleep mask and I wondered if she even knew where she was right now. I doubted it. “This is Reed,” I announced, “online.”
“Geez, champ, you coulda waited to say anything until I was done emptying my bladder,” Veronika said. “I think you just settled the issue for me, thanks. That was some splashing.”
“Uhm, how do I mute this thing?” Chase asked, her voice echoey.
“Let’s focus on something other than the ladies in the bathroom,” Augustus said, voice a little thick with embarrassment. “Yo, Colin, how’s the view from York?”
“I’m a little out of town,” Colin said, and I could hear the wind rushing past him. “Nice scenery. You know, I always figured I should try running across the ocean, but I can never quite get manage to get across Puget Sound without eventually falling in, so…probably not a great idea, huh?”
“You can still swim fast though, right?” Augustus asked.
“Pretty well, yeah,” Colin said. “Water offers a lot of resistance. Hey, I’m in York proper now.”
“Where were you before?” I asked, sliding open a window shade. This wasn’t a proper airport. Not that it mattered. Sienna would figure out what was going on and find her way to us.
I hoped.
“It’s kind of a run,” Colin said. “We’re a ways outside of town. Where did you say Sienna was?”
“She was at the train station,” Jamal said, and I could hear his frown without even looking at him. “She’s not there anymore, and I’m hard pressed to figure out why.”
“Hey guys,” Colin said, and he sounded a little breathless. “Did we ever figure out what this enemy of Sienna’s looks like?”
“We don’t have a description, no,” I said, a frown of my own puckering my brow. “Why? You see something?”
“I’m not slowing down enough to see much,” Colin said. “I’m running around this wall that circles the old city. Kinda cool.”
“Are you…doing touristy stuff?” Scott asked. “While the rest of us are stuck on the plane?”
“Why, do you need me to get you a York hat? Coffee mug? Tea mug?” Colin cracked. “Commemorative panties that say, ‘Mind the Gap’?”
“Ooh, I want some of those,” Veronika chimed in.
“Done,” Colin said. “Knew you would.”
“Colin, she’s somewhere near the train station,” Jamal said, still intent on his screen. “She ducked into a blind spot of the cameras or something, I don’t know—this is weird.”
“On my way—I think,” Colin said.
I settled my hand on the back of Jamal’s seat and gave it a squeeze. “How would Sienna have known where the blind spots are in the camera system?”
“She shouldn’t have,” Jamal said, still focused on his screen. “I mean, some cameras are obvious, but others are really well hidden, and sometimes you can get a look from blocks away. I don’t see how she did it, because the coverage here is pretty good, but…she damned sure found the blind spot. Almost like she—or that guy she’s with, more likely—knew exactly they were doing.”
“Lends credence to the idea it’s one of her UK sources,” I said, coming up again and nearly braining myself on the low-hanging bulkhead. “Colin, if you find her, can you extract her here?”
“In less than two minutes,” Colin said cheerily. “You find her, I’ll…uh…unwind her?”
“Unbind her,” Abby said. “It almost fits.”
“Lined her,” J.J. said, thinking out loud, “kind her, mind her, pined her—”
“Rind her,” Scott said with a smirk. “Like a watermelon.”
“Tined her?” Jamal asked. “Tinder. No! Wait, definitely not Tinder.”
“If you find her, get her the hell out so we can pop smoke, okay?” I offered, trying to steer past the rhyming police.
“Rogerwilco,” Colin said.
“Veronika?” I asked. “I know there’s not much going on here since Sienna’s in town, but do you see any activity?”
I waited a moment, got distracted staring at Jamal’s screen. He was still playing with the cameras around the train station, zooming out and trying to catch Sienna. His face was all screwed up in concentration, but he had a whole lot of nothing going on, that I could see, in the results department.
I paused, listening. “Veronika?”
“Yeah, boss,” Veronika said, the tension ratcheted up in her voice. It was obvious as the nose on my face when I actually concentrated on it.
“How are you doing out there?” I asked, experimentally.
“Oh, we’re doing just fine,” she said stiffly, and I almost swore. Instead, I motioned to Jamal, trying to get his attention. I caught it, and he looked at me quizzically as I pointed to his tablet, then brought my finger around to encompass the world around us, forcefully.
He got it, and touched the base of the tablet. The screen flickered, and then switched to something else.
A view of a plane on a tarmac.
Surrounded by men with guns, creeping closer and closer to the Gulfstream with the open door sitting in the middle of the runway.
Our plane.
We were surrounded.