41
As far as plans went, this one seemed pretty shitty.
“Do you have a better one?” John – Little John – asked and sounded somehow kind in his mocking. He was a mountain of a man. Werewolf. Whatever. With a smile to match.
“No,” Rooster hated to admit, sighing.
“Alright, then. This’ll work. We do this sort of thing all the time.”
Rooster glanced over at Deshawn, who nodded.
John peeled off a strip of duct tape and said, “Hold it steady. Like that.” He taped the small little flip-phone to the inside of Rooster’s arm and then tugged the baggy sweatshirt sleeve down over it.
“Tuck,” John prompted, and when nothing happened, turned around with a sigh. “Tuck.”
The friar came awake with a snort. “Wha…? Oh, yes, right.”
John sighed.
Rooster silently berated the old man for ruining the Disneyfied idea he’d had of Friar Tuck for most of his life.
They stood in an armory roughly the size of the house Rooster grew up in, surrounded by enough weapons and tech to storm the beaches at Normandy. Their plan, though, was much simpler than that.
Tuck fumbled a pair of narrow reading glasses from his pocket and slipped them on his nose; they sat crooked; the lenses were smudged. “What am I doing now?”
Deshawn sighed.
John patiently said, “A glamour. For the phone.” He tapped the concealed cellphone taped to Rooster’s arm.
“Oh, yes! Just a moment.” He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. Wiggled the fingers of his right hand, afterward, and then passed his palm slowly down Rooster’s arm, not touching, just hovering.
Rooster felt goosebumps spring up in the wake of his non-touch, and suppressed a shudder.
They’d told him that Tuck was like Red. A mage, they called it. But Tuck, according to Rob, was much weaker. He had a rudimentary grasp of power, but nothing like the fire-wielding and wound-healing that Red could manipulate without thought.
But it wasn’t Tuck they were sending in to find Red. Nor any of the wolves.
Just Rooster. With a glamoured phone.
Knuckles rapped the doorjamb. “Ready?” Rob called.
Rooster took a deep breath. “Yeah.”
~*~
Nikita had bragged once, to a young vamp maneater just before he’d put him down, that he’d never fed from a human.
He couldn’t say that anymore.
Cut off from Val’s help, unable to contact him, it had taken nearly two days to pin down the exact location of Blackmere Manor in the deceptively deep forest outside of Richmond, but they’d finally found it. Even a half mile away, in a rental cabin, Nikita feel the hum of the place. Power – both electrical, and supernatural.
His breath came in stutters, but his hands were steady as he unzipped his duffel bag and pulled out the secondary garment bag within. He laid it out on the lumpy, quilt-covered bed, alone for the moment in the cabin’s one bedroom. Hesitated a moment.
Most would have chalked this bag – the way he’d kept it in the back of every closet of every apartment he’d lived in for the past seventy-five years – up to nostalgia. But it wasn’t that at all. It was fear. A fear that one day he’d stop kidding himself that he was somehow morally superior to all the other monsters. He didn’t kill anymore…except he had. Except he did. And he would kill today.
With a sound like a gasp lodged in his throat, he unzipped the bag. As it gapped down the middle, revealing what lay inside, the last of his nerves bled out, replaced by a calm so unshakable it felt almost like bliss.
Yes. This was him. The real him.
“Hello, old friend.”
~*~
It was unremarkable from the street. A beat-up galvanized mailbox with flaking numbers, and a dirt track that led off the road and plunged down through the trees. It was a long driveway. Rooster walked down it for a half hour, until sweat had gathered along his skin, under his hoodie. Fall was approaching – he could see it in the first brown edges of the leaves that crowded overhead, shading his path – but mid-afternoon temperatures remained warm. Muggy. He swatted a mosquito away from his face as he followed a sharp curve. On the right, a hill reared up, faced with granite, shaded by clumps of thin tress. On the left, a ravine opened, deep and jagged as a knife wound, the slope plunging down into a stream.
Not for the first time, he decided this plan was stupid. His only means of communicating with the others – his team – was with the phone taped to his arm, and he wasn’t supposed to touch it until he was out of other options. They needed a man on the inside, a human man, one the Institute people would be forced to apprehend.
“What if things go south?” he’d asked back at Lionheart.
Rob had sent him a smile that he probably thought was reassuring. “We’ll get you out, don’t worry. One way or another.”
But Rooster had the feeling the “other” included him being dead, and that wasn’t something he wanted to happen before he made sure Red was safe and free.
After that.
Well, it didn’t much matter.
The elevation around him leveled, and after the next bend, he passed through a set of heavy wrought-iron gates with cameras poised on its stone pillars.
He took a deep breath, and kept walking.
Then, there was the house.
Lionheart’s façade was impressive and battle-ready, but nothing like the palatial, opulent stone face of Blackmere Manor. Two sweeping wings that he could see, sun glinting off thousands of mullioned windows and the shape of a conservatory, far off to the left, so far it might be in another zip code. From the gargoyles on the pitched roofline to the iron-banded double front doors, every exquisitely-wrought detail had been designed to terrify and impress.
But the most terrifying aspect of all was the group of helmeted, armed men in tac gear flooding down the front steps and running at him, shouting for him to put his hands up and get down on his knees.
Rooster curled his hand around the butt of a gun that wasn’t there and knew a crushing, momentary panic. This would never work. This plan was shit.
But then they were circling him and all he could do was press his hands to the back of his skull and sink slowly to his knees in the dirt.
~*~
Trina turned all the walkies on and tuned them to the same channel. Lined them up on the table in front of her and let out another breath that was doing nothing to regulate her pounding heart.
Behind her, Jamie paced. Alexei sipped vodka straight from the bottle, passing it every now and then to Lanny who took a slug and passed it back.
Trina lined up the walkies again. Again. Fiddled with the straps on her Kevlar.
“Nik,” she called toward the closed bedroom door. “You ready?”
She heard the latch click, and the tread of boots, and turned…
And felt her mouth drop open in shock.
Expressionless, Nikita stepped into the room in black skinnies and t-shirt…under an ankle-length black leather coat. Boots. Gaiters. Fingerless gloves. And perched on his head: the black fur cap with the hammer and sickle. She’d seen him like this before, in the vision Val had shown her.
Gone was Nikita the grungy millennial, and in his place was Captain Nikita Baskin, Chekist.
“For real?” Lanny asked.
Nikita didn’t react. He gazed steadily at Trina. “Ready.”
42
Under different circumstances, Red thought Sasha might have been delightful company. He had pale eyes that somehow managed warmth; a pretty smile, two of his teeth just a touch crooked. She liked his hair, the platinum shagginess of it, and the vulnerable curve of his neck when he bowed his head.
But, circumstances what they were, Red didn’t trust anyone.
And Sasha seemed to be going through some sort of drug withdrawal.
He pressed the soles of his slipper-socks to the floor and tipped his head back against the wall, breathing in shallow shudders through an open mouth. His lips and eyelashes trembled; an unconscious vibration she swore she could feel from a foot away. Sweat stood out on his brow, temples, upper lip, and throat, a greasy sheen that glued tendrils of hair to his cheeks. His shirt clung to his chest.
A twinge of sympathy found its way through her suspicion. “What did they do to you?” she asked.
His eyes opened a crack and slid over. An aborted smile quirked one corner of his mouth. “Kidnapped me. Drugged me. They keep drugging me.”
She blinked, surprised despite herself. He wore the same kind of cuffs that she did, but if he was…what Fulk had said he was. What they were. Then maybe it wasn’t so simple as cutting off a flow of power like he was an electrical box. Not like with her.
“Is it because you’re a – a wolf?” she asked, stumbling over the word a little.
“No.” His smile stretched, his chapped lips cracking. “It’s because they made me. Seventy-five years ago. And they know I hate them.” His Russian accent lent the words gravity. Hinted at a threat.
“Seventy-five…” She lifted her brows. “But you look–”
“I was nineteen when I was turned.” When she only stared: “You look surprised. And you can make fire.”
“Yeah. Very true.”
He shut his eyes again with another unsteady sigh. “Did they leave him alive?”
The skin on the back of her neck prickled. “Who?”
“The human you smell like. The one they took you from. Is he alive?”
“They won’t tell me. I hope.” It hurt too viscerally to think otherwise. “What about you?”
He made a small huffing sound and smiled again, eyes still closed. “Mine is very stubborn.” The smile slipped. “And he feels very guilty. All the time. He will come for me, even though he shouldn’t.”
Red shifted to a more comfortable position, one that mirrored Sasha’s: feet on the floor, back to the wall. “That sounds like Rooster.”
He snorted. “His name is Rooster?”
“Well,” she said, defensive, “what’s your guy’s?”
“Nikita.” The name full of longing and worry and hopeless affection. She wondered if her own voice had sounded that way to him.
“Another Russian, huh?”
“What’s wrong with Russian?”
“What’s wrong with Rooster?” she shot back. Then softened: “His name is Roger. Rooster’s just a nickname.”
“I figured.”
They lapsed into silence.
It wasn’t uncomfortable, so Red couldn’t explain the way the confession built and built in her gut until she had to bring it up and let it out. Maybe it was the unlikely comfort of knowing the person beside her was a prisoner, too, brought here against his will.
“I was born here,” she said, quietly. Fulk had said wolves could hear like dogs – like real wolves. That she could speak softly enough to keep the cameras from picking up the words.
Sasha lifted his head away from the wall and looked at her.
“Not here, exactly, in this place. But at the Institute. The one in New York. I was raised there. In a lab.”
“Shit. Really?”
“Fulk says he can smell who my parents were, but I never met them. I’m just…an experiment.” A weapon, she added silently, because she understood, finally. She guessed Sasha was a weapon, too.
“I…” he started, and then cocked his head, eyes going to the ceiling.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I think something’s happening.”
~*~
Of all the ways in which this job was worse than deployment, Jake had to give it to the bastards that the accommodations were decent. Well, lavish, actually.
Jake left his own sumptuous suite, with its four-poster and giant gilt mirror and real Oriental rugs, and walked down the hall to rap on the door of Ramirez’s room. When he didn’t get an answer, he looked first one way down the hall, and then the other. This was one of the windowless passages on the second floor, and though the hall was wide, the dark paneling and flickering sconces gave the impression that the walls were slowly closing in on him. Despite its richness, the manor had the air of a haunted house about it, and he suppressed a shudder.
“Ramirez,” he called, and knocked again. “Adela. You alright?”
“Fine,” she barked from the other side. Which wasn’t like her. She was coy, infuriating, and superior. But she wasn’t snappish.
“Can I come in?”
“Asshole.” But that wasn’t a no, and he was starting to worry.
He cracked the door and peeked in, then eased it open the rest of the way when he saw that she was sitting on the side of the bed in workout gear, her head in her hands.
“Hey,” he said, taking an uncertain step forward. “Is it your leg?” She wore shorts, and he could see the heavy bandage on her thigh. “Do you need to go back to medical?”
She sat up, pushed herself up, hands on her knees. Her hair, tied back in a loose knot, looked damp, like she’d just had a shower. She was very obviously not wearing a bra under her Nike tank top. And she was glaring at him. “Boundaries, dude.”
But what snared his attention was her foot. The right one. Because it…wasn’t quite the same as the left. And then he jaw the faint pink line of a scar around her calf.
“Hey. Eyes up here, asshole.”
He jerked and lifted his gaze to meet her furious stare. Not just angry, but desperate, spooked. Self-conscious. “Sorry–”
“What do you want?”
“You got hurt. I wanted to check on you.”
She sneered and dragged the folded blanket over from the end of the bed, up into her lap; it shook out over her knees, hiding her bandage…and her mismatched feet. “Right. ‘Cause you’re such a nice guy.” When she angrily tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear, he saw that her hand was shaking.
“Because you’re part of my team, and I was concerned,” he said. “What happened with Vlad?”
She made a face, but not fast enough. He saw a ripple of shock, even fear, before she shuttered her expression and just looked sour. “Nothing.”
Jake waited.
“He’s creepy as shit.”
“Yeah.”
She glanced up at him, finally, some of the fear peeking through her façade. “Do you know what’s in the injections they give us?” she asked.
He shrugged. They’d told him it was an experimental drug, and he hadn’t cared what was in it or what the side-effects might be. There were people capable of living without sight – capable of thriving, even – but he didn’t have the grace or the temerity to be one of them. He’d signed – as best he could without being able to see the pen or paper – and never asked twice about the shit they were pumping into his veins.
“Why, do you?” he asked.
“I think–”
The walkie on his belt crackled to life. “Major Treadwell,” one of the guards said. “We have a situation.”
~*~
Rooster wasn’t proud of the way his stomach turned over when one of the guards cinched a blindfold tight around his eyes. Rob had warned him that something like this might happen, and he’d been mentally preparing himself, but he was already without weapons; take away his vision, and he felt breathlessly vulnerable in the worst way.
At least no one noticed the phone, though. He was patted down roughly, the guard’s hand clapping right over the bulge taped to his arm, but the glamour must have worked, because he was cuffed and marched forward, the phone still there.
He tried to keep his breathing slow and regular. Strained his other senses. He was marched up the big stone front steps – he tripped on the first one and was caught by rough hands, shoved forward so that he was forced to find his balance – and then across hard-surface floors that sent all their footfalls echoing through what sounded like a wide-open space.
And then a voice said, “Wait,” and he knew who it was.
That motherfucker Jake.
Rooster ground to a halt, and clenched his jaw to keep from saying what he wanted to, which was some variation on I’m gonna fucking kill you, asshole. He tested his cuffs, but they held.
“Where did he come from?” Jake demanded, and Rooster took a small bit of satisfaction in the fact that he sounded unmoored. “Nevermind, just…”
Low murmurs of conference, and then Rooster was pushed forward again. Hard. He tripped on the edge of a rug and was hauled upright. Shoved on.
They walked for a long way, a time during which Rooster heard distant voices, strange echoes, and the chirp and crackle of walkie-talkies. A sense of bustling activity, and of worry. And of soaring ceilings that trapped and projected sound in unexpected ways. He’d walked through countless bases and buildings, and this place sounded like none of them.
Finally, he was put in an elevator and rode a short distance down, his stomach dropping unpleasantly. A hand settled on the back of his neck, and squeezed, once, almost gently. He knew that was Jake, somehow, and he longed to be able to drive his elbow back through the guy’s nose.
When they stepped off the elevator, Rooster was hit with a strong smell of dust. Dampness and disuse. Their footfalls echoed differently here, and the air was cold, and stale.
Another walk. And then a staircase leading down, and around. And down, and around.
A low grating sound, and a hiss, like an airlock. Clang of metal.
A vault, maybe. At the very least a cell.
Rooster’s pulse pounded like parade drums in his ears; his heart felt like it might crack a rib.
Finally, he was pulled up short, and turned around.
The blindfold was removed.
Two guards flanked him, holding his arms though he was cuffed, and Jake stood in front of him. His expression, truly pained, slowed the burst of hate that rushed to fill Rooster’s chest. Slowed, but didn’t stop.
Rooster said, “Where is she?”
Jake sighed. “How did you find this place?”
“I wasn’t in the Army. I can actually get shit done.”
Jake’s lips pressed together a moment. “Whatever you’re trying to do here, Rooster, you didn’t succeed. Now’s not the time to be a smartass. The people here are gonna want answers, and it’ll go easier on you if you talk to me.”
“Okay, let’s talk. Where is she?”
Jake shook his head. I tried, his expression said. He stepped back out of the cell; the two guards at his arms removed his cuffs. Locked him in. The barred door slid shut with an ominous clang.
And then Rooster realized that he understood something. That he’d overlooked all the signs: the outward reluctance, the apology. The fact that he was still alive.
“The drug trial,” he said, and though the other two guards walked on, Jake lingered, half-turned away. “The one for wounded vets. You were one of the ones they let in, weren’t you?”
Jake stiffened, a quick, reflexive movement, and Rooster knew he was right.
“I tried to get into the trial,” Rooster said, and was surprised to find there was no bitterness in his tone. Look at what these people had done to Jake; he didn’t wish himself in that position, the gun hand of some shadow organization. “But they rejected me. Said I wasn’t ‘stable’ enough. What about you, huh? You plenty stable?”
Jake looked at him a long moment; a muscle in his cheek spasmed like he was about to say something. But in the end, he walked off, silent, and the two heavy doors shut with the finality of coffins closing.
Rooster let out a deep, unsteady breath and glanced at his surroundings. There was a stone wall at his back, and on his right; bars ahead, at the door, and to his left, between this and another cell. A metal cot frame with no mattress and a stainless-steel prison toilet were the only furnishings.
At least he wasn’t cuffed anymore.
He sat down on the edge of the cot and plucked at the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Might as well make the call; he was stuck and there was nothing he could learn here, down in the bowels of this fucking place.
A low scraping sound launched him to his feet. His pulse leapt, and he spun a tight circle in his cell, arms outstretched, wishing like hell it was a knife strapped to his arm instead.
“Somebody there?” he barked, putting every ounce of Marine Corps bravado he possessed into the words.
Sound like an inhale. An exhale. A chuckle, dry and rusty. He heard the first sound again, the metallic scrape, and he saw movement. Not in the cell beside his, but in the one beyond it. It was dimly lit, and his view was of shadows sliding over one another, down low against the floor.
Then another shift, and a face slid into the dim light of a caged bulb.
A lightly-accented man’s voice said, “Oh, don’t worry, I can assure you I’m chained up – how is it you Americans say? To hell and back? I don’t know.” A pale hand lifted and pushed snarled, pale hair back from the face, revealing blue eyes. “I am like you: a prisoner.”
Rooster eased back down to the cot. “Yeah? What are you in for?”
“Killing my brother,” the man said. “Or, attempting to, I suppose. Only I wasn’t actually attempting. I just needed the great lout to sleep for a little while.”
“O…kay.”
“It’s all very tedious.”
Great, Rooster thought. They locked me up with a fucking lunatic.
“It’s very boring down here,” the man said, and Rooster noticed two things when he shifted again:
One: he wore a heavy silver collar and matching cuffs, all of it hooked together with a mass of chains.
And two: there was a little orange cat curled up on one of his thighs.
“I’m Val,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Rooster.”
A pause.
“Oh,” the man said, finally, smile forming on his gaunt, shadowed face. “Rooster. Oh, really?”
~*~
Val had been thinking quite a lot about the end of days. Ragnarok, his mother’s people had called it. When the heroes were summoned and Loki’s children broke the world.
Melodramatic ponderings, perhaps, but he supposed it was only natural that he should sulk and dwell on worst-case scenarios when he couldn’t dreamwalk.
Hobble him, his brother had said, and he’d rattled the cuffs on his wrists and laughed. Laughed right in Vlad’s face like the insolent little shit anyone who’d ever known the two of them had always claimed he was.
But then the techs had come in, and they’d pushed up his clothes and stuck little electrodes all down the back of his neck, and along his collarbones, and hooked their trailing wires into the collar that locked around his throat tight enough to choke him.
It was a shock collar, Vlad had explained. When he dreamwalked, he went down into a sort of trance, and his heartrate slowed, even slower than a normal resting rate, as if he truly did leave his body. When that happened, Vlad said, dispassionately, the collar would be triggered, and it would flood his body with electricity. Three short, sharp pulses designed to pull him back to his body. New technology, he said, the likes of which wasn’t anywhere near ready for human use.
He’d tried it, once, when Vlad and the lackeys had left, just to see what it was like.
He was still shaking, fingers spasming of their own accord, nerves still jangling with tiny aftershocks.
So, naturally, his thoughts turned to the apocalypse.
For the Vikings, Ragnarok had not been a true final reckoning. Life – a new life – would begin after. It was merely an end to the gods. The old way dying to make room for the new.
And if the old way was stirring…out where Vlad had buried it…if Romulus truly was waking…
Then he supposed all the things he kept threatening just to get a rise out of the doctors were indeed unfolding.
If he was searching for a sign, it had just been dropped two cells over.
“Rooster,” he said again, and his blood sang in his veins. A dread so acute it felt like joy. “A nickname, hm?”
A beat. “Yeah,” his new companion – Rooster – said slowly.
No doubt Val sounded crazy, but that was out of his control, now. His pulse beat like bird wings inside the cage of his chest. “Tell me, Rooster, are you at all familiar with any of the old religions? Let’s just say, oh, hypothetically…the Norse gods, perhaps?”
Another pause. “Uh. No.”
“Okay, not so hypothetically, then. Do you know anything about the Norse gods?”
“No.” The light was dim, but Val could see him, sitting on the very edge of his cot, big-shouldered, and strong, his too-long straw-colored hair the stuff of longship captains.
Val could have choked on delight. Could have vomited from the fear. “Well, allow me to elucidate.”
He was vibrating, and it wasn’t just aftershocks, now. Poppy sat upright on his leg and meowed a little protest. He stroked the back of her neck with shaking fingertips. “I’m only half Norse, you see,” he said. “My mother was Norse. I have her hair. But, that’s not important. Anyway – she talked often, when I was a child, about the old legends. Humans call them myths nowadays, but to her it was religion. Like Jesus on the cross. Father tried to bring her over to Eastern Orthodoxy, as he had done, but she only did it as a token, to please him. Deep down, she still made offerings to her gods.
“She didn’t like to talk about Ragnarok. A gentle soul, my mother; she could rip a man’s head from his body with one movement.” He mimed doing so, as his chains would allow, and they rattled. Poppy hissed in displeasure and retreated to the shadows. “But talking about the end of the world – of the gods – depressed her. So she didn’t talk about Heimdall slaying Loki, or Balder being the only one to return, but she would talk about the beginning. About the way three cocks crowed to herald the start of it.”
Rooster stared at him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“There was Fjalar in the wood, and there was the soot-red rooster at the gates of Hel. And there was Gullinkambi. Golden Comb. The glorious red rooster that lived in Valhalla, whose crow woke the gods and heroes so that they might ready for the coming battle.” His smile was starting to hurt his face. “Which one are you, Rooster?”
~*~
This guy was batshit crazy.
Maybe that was the point, he thought, briefly: lock him up with a psycho who drove him so nuts he eventually hanged himself with his own boot laces.
“Look, man, I have no idea what you’re going on about, but it’s got nothing to do with me.” He shifted back on the cot so he could rest his head against the cool stone wall, and pointedly didn’t glance back over at his fellow prisoner: Val, he’d said his name was.
“Hmm, maybe not,” Val said. “A coincidence perhaps. But I wonder.”
Rooster bit back a sigh and pushed up the sleeve of his hoodie. Started picking at the edges of the duct tape.
“Do you believe in coincidences? Because I don’t. They happen, to be sure, but in general, pessimist that I am, I don’t think chance comes much into play…What do you have there?” The chains clicked together as he pushed up onto his knees.
“A phone,” Rooster said with a grunt as he pulled the tape loose, and took a good chunk of his arm hair with it.
“Ooh.” Val gave another creaky chuckle. “How did you sneak that in, I wonder?”
“Magic.” Which was apparently what was giving him three bars of coverage this deep underground. Huh.
There was more chain-rattling as Val perked up another notch. “Who are you going to call?”
“The Ghostbusters,” Rooster deadpanned. When he didn’t get a response, he turned to glance over at his fellow prisoner, thumb hovering over the Call icon. Val was frowning at him. “You know. The Ghostbusters?”
Val’s expression turned sad. “I’ve been locked up for five-hundred years. I’ve learned quite a lot about your world, considering, but not all of it.”
“Five hundred…” Jesus. “Are you. Um.” He wet his lips. “One of those…those wolf things?”
A fresh smile stole across Val’s face, knife-sharp, and there was just enough light for Rooster to make out the sharp points of his canines. “Oh no. I’m much worse.”
Rooster turned back to his phone.
“You didn’t answer me. Who will you call? The person who magicked your phone?”
“Friends.”
“Ah. An escape plan.”
Rooster hesitated another moment. The guy was just staring at him, with his too-sharp teeth, like something out of one of those terrible movies Red loved. “What?”
“Do you really think these friends of yours will be able to get you out of this cell? That they’ll fight their way down three levels to find you?”
“I…” Deshawn would try, and probably get himself killed in the process. As for Rob and the others, he only had legend to go on, and no firsthand knowledge.
“Here’s a thought.” There was something suggestive, almost obscene, in Val’s smile now. “How about you set me loose, and let me help you?”
Rooster looked at the bars. At the phone. At his lack of weapons. And back at the blond in shackles. “You’re serious.”
“Absolutely.”
“I dunno if you noticed this or not…but you’re chained up as fuck, man.”
“An inconvenience, yes.”
“Dude–”
“But now that you’re here–”
“Look at me.” Rooster gestured around him. “You’re not the only Rapunzel in this tower, okay? I have to sit on my ass and wait to be rescued, too.”
Val snorted. “So unimaginative. Listen to me.” He rocked forward and pressed his thin face to the bars. “If you get a gun away from one of the guards, will you know how to use it?”
For the first time in days, Rooster felt himself crack a smile. “Yeah. You could say that.”
~*~
Jake didn’t knock, just let himself into Dr. Talbot’s office, and was rewarded, momentarily, by the affronted look the doctor lifted toward the door. It was smoothed over quickly to a look of surprise, because Talbot was nothing if not committed to his kindly doctor façade, but for a heartbeat, Jake had seen what lay beneath: something oily, desperate, and angry.
“Major Treadwell,” he began. On his computer screen, angled so that Jake could see, a man’s face stared out: a live Facetime session. Jake noticed, absurdly, that the man on the other end of the line had startlingly red hair; the same color as Ruby Russell’s.
But speaking of Russell…
“Sir,” he said before the doctor could say anything else. “It’s Roger Palmer. He walked up the driveway about ten minutes ago.”
Dr. Talbot’s face blanked over with shock. “He what?”
“He was unarmed. Walked all the way from the road; several cameras picked him up.”
“He’s alive?” A spark of anger glimmered to life behind the lenses of his glasses. “I thought you neutralized him?”
Jake thought of the trees bending toward the girl, the unholy light in her eyes. The unemotional tone of her voice as she’d bargained with him…and he’d known he would go along, because she was a girl wrapped in fire.
He heaved a sigh. “I left him unconscious and bleeding out in a forest in Wyoming. There’s no conceivable way he could have found his way here.”
“And yet,” Dr. Talbot’s voice was deadly calm, “he did.”
“I’m going to interrogate him. Personally. I was just headed back to the cells now, but I wanted to let you–”
“The cells?” The doctor braced his hands on the desk and shoved himself to his feet, the color bleeding out of his face. “You put him down there with Valerian?”
“Well, yes, those are our only cells…” But the fine hairs on his arms lifted. What had he done?
Dr. Talbot said, “Go and get him.”
~*~
Trina tipped her head back, all the way back, and looked up at the hammered-pewter sky through the interlacing branches of the tree she was supposed to climb. A stout oak with wonderful thick branches, perfect for hooking her legs around and maintaining her balance while she took her shots.
She let out a wobbly breath. “I’m not a sniper.”
Beside her, Lanny snorted. “Yeah, I knew that.”
“Smartass,” she said without any heat, and turned to look at him. He wore jeans, and a black shirt under a Kevlar vest. Very dressed-down detective on a bust. He carried a shotgun propped on one shoulder, and a .45 at his waist. “You look hot.”
“That’s what I was going for.”
Trina crashed against him; threw her arms around his waist and he caught her hard with his free arm, squeezing her so tight she felt her ribs shift. She pressed her face into the collar of his shirt, tucked her nose over it so she felt warm skin, and took a deep breath of him.
“Don’t get killed,” she said.
“Don’t decide you like sniping so much that you run off and join the Army.”
“I am so serious right now, Roland.”
“I know.” He dropped his face into her hair, breath warm down the back of her neck.
She held him a long moment – as long as she dared; not long enough – and finally pulled back, dashed at her eyes with the back of one gloved hand. “You better go.” It hurt to look at his face, its familiar, comforting array of planes and lines.
“You wanna boost?”
“Yeah, that’d be good.”
He did it wrong, grabbing her by the waist and lifting her, sure to get a double handhold on her ass when he pushed her up to the lowest branch. But it made her chuckle, and she figured that was the point, especially when she looked down and saw his wistful, tight-edged smile.
“Be safe,” he said.
“You too.”
I love you.
With one last glance, he melted off into the underbrush, much quieter and smoother than he’d ever been as a mortal man.
Trina took a deep breath and started climbing, the Mosin-Nagant heavy against her back.