CHAPTER 13
Sherry kept her nerves in check as she casually walked along the corridor on the second floor of the Archangel building, Emelia at her side. The pretty brunette had met her at the roof access door and brought her down to this level shortly after Thorne had shown up to cause a ruckus in the cafeteria as planned.
By the sounds echoing through the building, and the occasional rush of armed hunters past her, Sable and Thorne were still fighting.
She looked down at her boots, trying to see beyond the wooden floor to the lowest level of the building.
Was Talon still down there?
Emelia had explained that she’d had to put him in a cell to make it look good after she had run into one of the scientists in charge of whatever went on down there, but that Bleu and Iolanthe had been given his location and were already on their way to rescue him and the others.
The huntress had been silent ever since, lost in her own thoughts as they headed towards the central archive.
Sherry offered a flirty smile to a hunter who glanced her way, distracting him as he frowned at her as if he was trying to place her. It worked. He grinned right back at her and went on his way, only pausing to look back at her before entering one of the offices that came off the corridor.
She tried to focus on Talon, needing to know he was safe and convinced she would be able to feel him in the way he said that he could feel her. A way he had implied ran deeper than simply him feeling her on his sharp senses. She felt stupid when she felt nothing, an idiot for even trying.
“Not far now,” Emelia said in a low voice.
Sherry’s nerves instantly rose, trying to get the better of her. She breathed slowly to calm her racing heart and tamped them down, telling herself on repeat that she would be fine and no one would suspect her. Apparently hunters visited the archive all the time, checking the files for information on their latest target.
The people in there would just think she was another hunter researching a mark.
She slipped her hand into her right pocket and felt the USB drive there, turning it in her fingers. It was one she had found in her apartment.
One she was going to use to download Talon’s file.
What secret was he trying to protect?
If she asked him, would he tell her?
Emelia slowed.
Sherry stopped and looked back at her, frowned as the woman stared straight through her, her eyes wide and lips parted. Spacing out?
“What’s wrong?” Sherry closed the distance between them and Emelia snapped back to her.
“Nothing.” Emelia hesitated in a way that screamed it was something. “I’m just a bit on edge.”
“Because of what we’re doing?” she whispered.
The brunette shook her head.
“No.” Emelia paused again, looked at her as if she was trying to pull her apart and see how she ticked, and then sighed and glanced off to her right, to a window there that opened onto a courtyard. “Someone I know… I think he’s done something stupid… something that might get him killed. I’m worried about him.”
That made two of them.
Sherry didn’t want to probe, because she hated it when people poked around in her private business, but Emelia looked as if she needed to talk to someone and get it off her chest.
“What do you think he’s done?”
Emelia’s green eyes slipped shut. “I think he went to Hell… to hunt a dragon for me.”
Wow. Whoever he was, he was definitely in love with Emelia. No doubt about that.
And suicidal.
Dragons were ridiculously strong from what she had heard, and the men working at Archangel didn’t exactly look capable of hunting one. She eyed one as he passed her—a regular human man. Not strong enough to take down a sixty-foot shifter with teeth that were probably almost as big as her.
Unless Emelia’s man wasn’t human.
“Is he a hunter here?” Sherry edged a little closer still, aware that people were looking at them as they passed and sure that if the man in question wasn’t one of them, Emelia would get into trouble if they heard about her mysterious and non-human lover.
The huntress shook her head again.
“Is he strong?” Sherry watched her face closely, but not as closely as she watched the people coming and going along the corridor.
Emelia was helping her. She was damned if she was going to expose her and whatever was happening between her and this man.
Emelia nodded.
“Capable of killing a dragon?
Another nod.
“So you’re just worried about him because you feel something for him?” She could relate to that. She was worried about Talon too, even though she was sure he could take care of himself and Bleu had probably teleported him out of the building by now.
“No.” Emelia’s eyes met hers. “You don’t understand… like dragons aren’t meant to come here… he isn’t supposed to go there.”
Sherry knew enough about dragons after meeting Loke to know what Emelia was getting at, and why she was worried.
Dragons were stripped of their powers and died if they dared to leave Hell. Loke had been in a bad shape when the elves had brought him to Underworld, close to dying, and he had only been away from Hell for a few days at most.
Emelia believed the man she loved was about to suffer the same painful fate, but in reverse. He was going to die because he had chosen to enter Hell, to fight a dragon for her.
“Is there nothing you can do?” Sherry’s chest ached for Emelia when her dark eyebrows furrowed and she shook her head.
A huge boom rocked the floor and Emelia’s green eyes shot down to her feet.
They widened and then narrowed.
“Maybe there is something I can do after all.”
Something that terrified her, but something she was going to do regardless if the steely look in her eyes was anything to go by.
Sherry had the feeling that Thorne was going to be taking more than one huntress back to Hell with him.
An alarm sounded and she almost jumped out of her skin. Damn it. She covered her ears, flinching at the high pitch wail, and squinted as red lights flashed, hurting her eyes.
“Is it that fucking demon again?” someone yelled.
Hunters streamed past her, heading for the stairs that led downwards, and Emelia grabbed her wrist, tugging her in the opposite direction.
“Now,” the huntress said and she hurried to keep up with her, a sense of urgency suddenly flooding her as they raced along the corridor.
They skidded around a bend, almost ploughing straight into two men. One shouted that they were going the wrong way.
Emelia didn’t slow, and Sherry could see why as she dragged her eyes away from the hunters and focused on running again.
Ahead of her, twin doors loomed at the end of the corridor, and the sign above them read ‘Central Archive’.
They were here.
The doors burst open as they reached them, a woman coming out of them with a blade at the ready. Sherry plastered herself against the wall to avoid being cut and then ducked into the room the moment she had passed.
Emelia released her and headed straight for one of the computers on the long double rows of desks that filled the middle of the room. All around the edges, huge black cases lined the white walls, the servers stacked in them flashing with green, orange and red lights.
Sherry grabbed the computer opposite Emelia so the huntress couldn’t see what she was doing. Her hands shook as she took out the two USB drives, one from each pocket. She pushed the first into the slot in the black tower beside the flat screen, and woke the display with the mouse.
A pale blue screen came up with a column of links down the left side and Archangel’s winged logo in the centre of the space on the right, just above a search box.
She typed in the names Talon had given her one by one and moved those files onto the USB drive. All of the files contained a link to a page that documented the raid on the fae town. She quickly skimmed it, frowning as she realised it was just one raid in many, something Archangel were doing with increasing regularity to track down different species for their research.
Thankfully, the file contained links to all the profiles of the captives, so she was able to track down the demon they had taken with Talon. Her frown increased as she read the demon’s notes and saw everything they had put him through, gruelling tests that had lasted hours, and invasive procedures designed to not only uncover how his biology worked, but how quickly he could heal major wounds.
The bastards had left him open on the table, had forced him to deal with his own wounds when he had come around, all so they could document his regenerative abilities.
An urge to head out into the corridor and punch the hell out of the hunters in retaliation blasted through her.
“I don’t like what I’m reading here,” Emelia said, stealing her focus. The brunette lifted her gaze to her over the top of the monitors that separated them, her emerald eyes cold and hard, but lit with fire. “What the fuck are they up to?”
Sherry wanted the answer to that question herself. Archangel were meant to protect innocent non-humans, but they were experimenting on them in secret, learning everything about them, including their weaknesses.
Were Archangel about to do a one-eighty back to the days when they had hunted and killed any non-humans?
What had prompted them to do such a thing?
She scrolled through the list of raids and stopped when she hit a date where they went from one every few weeks to almost one every other day. Why the sudden spike? Her eyes widened as she looked at the date when the increase had started.
It was only six months ago.
A shiver tripped down her spine.
She clicked on the first raid and her blood ran cold as her worst fears were confirmed in the very first sentence.
It is proposed in the aftermath of discovering the existence of another plane that Archangel must broaden its knowledge of all non-human species through any means necessary and forge forwards towards ensuring the safety of mankind.
Archangel had learned of Hell.
Someone in the organisation had seen it as an opportunity to steer Archangel towards a more violent future under the banner of protecting mankind.
Sons of bitches.
The non-humans rarely bothered her kind, had co-existed peacefully with them for centuries now according to her friends, and she seriously doubted everyone in Hell was a threat to mankind. They were just living their lives, in their own world, far away from this one.
Hell, the elves had moved their entire species there thousands of years ago because her world had become too violent for them.
She needed more information.
Some of the profiles of those captured with Talon contained links to projects, so she clicked all of those too and saved all the related documents, following the trail deeper into Archangel’s heart.
She kept hitting an encrypted file at the end of each path, one that required high level clearance and several passwords.
Project Abaddon.
Sherry tried to move the files for it over without decrypting them but the system refused, stating that without access she couldn’t retrieve the documents.
She could move some related files though, ones that mentioned it. Hopefully that would be enough for them to piece together what Archangel were up to.
Another rumbling roar echoed through the building.
She hurried to find the next file, aware that Sable and Thorne wouldn’t be able to keep fighting much longer and would have to get out. The plan had been for a fifteen minute argument in the cafeteria and then Thorne would win and steal Sable away.
It had to be close to time now.
Sherry tracked back to the search page and typed in Talon’s name. She did her best to grab the file and put it on the second USB drive without looking at it, but the first line below his name caught her eye. It stated he was a tiger shifter, which was nothing new to her. The estimated age based on his appearance and other factors including a blood test was though.
Three to four hundred.
Here she was pushing thirty-six, and he was potentially pushing four hundred.
She closed the file and deleted it off the servers, and did the same with the other ones.
Just one more to go.
She typed in another name and opened the file. A picture of a beautiful woman filled the rectangular panel on the left of the screen, next to her name.
Jayna.
They listed her as only two to three hundred, and her height and weight. She read down the page, her stomach slowly twisting as she found she had been subjected to experiment after experiment for over twenty different projects, far more than the others. One stood out, a project name unfamiliar to her, and she clicked on it to download it.
Froze with her eyes locked on the first line.
They had tried to force her to breed with Talon, drugging her to rouse a need to mate. Sickness brewed in Sherry’s stomach and she told herself not to read on, but she couldn’t stop her eyes from devouring each line, even when she feared what she would find.
Talon had been brought to her several times over the period they had been in captivity.
On the last occasion, they had drugged him too.
The result.
She couldn’t look, didn’t want to know if he had slept with another woman, wasn’t sure she could bear it if he had, even though they hadn’t known each other then.
She moved the mouse to the close button on the file and paused with her finger hovering over it.
No.
She needed to know, because if she didn’t look, it would eat away at her, and she didn’t want anything coming between them. She didn’t want to end up driving him away because she was unsure of this one thing about him, and unable to control her emotions, believing he had gone through with it.
She steeled herself, lowered her eyes from the corner of the page and read the last line.
It was two words.
Experiment failed.
She let out her breath and deleted the file without downloading it, sure Talon wouldn’t want to be reminded of what they had put him and Jayna through, and wouldn’t want the others knowing about it.
She clicked back to Jayna’s file and reached the notes at the bottom.
Her heart dropped through her feet.
It was a location followed by the word ‘authorised’ and today’s date.
A shiver ran down her spine and thighs.
Jayna had given them the location of a pride.
Talon’s pride.
Archangel had dispatched a team there.