Blood Victory

Because it’s been torn in half.

And that’s the only word to describe it. Torn. Like all the others in the crate, it’s a rat snake, about four feet long, dark. Cyrus’s first thought is maybe some of the rats ganged up and tore it to shreds, but that’s absurd. Even if all the rats somehow worked in concert, they’d have trouble doing damage like this in the minute or two it took him to round the back of the truck. And rat snakes eat rats. Not the other way around.

Torn. The word keeps pulsing in his brain, bringing with it a cold wash of fear in the pit of his stomach and tension all along his shoulders.

There is something in here that can tear a snake in half.

Suddenly afraid to push the divider back any farther, Cyrus raises the Taser at the narrow sliver of pale-blue light before him.

What happens next happens so quickly he can barely give it a chronology. His instincts assume some vehicle has struck the truck from behind and the entire thing is now sliding through the field. But when he slams face-first into one of the container’s hard metal walls, he realizes the truck’s not moving at all. But he sure as hell is. Then, as if on a delay, he hears the divider being violently pushed all the way open. That happened first, he realizes, but he was too shocked to process it at the time.

Now he’s on all fours, his head throbbing with pain so total it feels like a helmet. Then he’s yanked backward and up at the same time. Now he’s sure something really did happen to the truck because there’s no other explanation for the impossibly powerful force that’s taken control of his body.

His back slams down onto something hard. The metallic rattles are familiar sounding but louder than they’ve ever been before. The gurney. Something’s slamming him down onto the gurney. It’s been righted and he’s somehow landed on it and now he’s feeling something that seems startlingly normal and almost soothing given the jarring movements that brought him to this position. She’s binding his hands with the leather straps he left dangling from the sides of the gurney after he attached the cables to her wrists.

There she is, standing over him; his little seedling, Hailey Brinkmann. Not coughing. Seemingly unafraid, working with a focus and precision that says he hasn’t managed to send even the slightest of cracks through her mind.

A wail escapes him before he can stop it. She looks into his eyes with a coldness and determination he’s never seen in one of his seedlings, a look that suggests divine judgment and many other things he’s never believed in. But all she says as she holds his jaw in a firm grip is, “Shut the fuck up, Cyrus.”

13

After releasing his jaw, Charlotte checks Mattingly’s restraints. The light testing tugs she’d like to give each strap might snap them in two, so she settles for running her fingers over each one. He had a box of extra straps nearby, which tells her she’s not the first victim to get free. Or at least temporarily free. But now he’s bound just like she was when he first loaded her into the truck; there are thick leather straps around his wrists, ankles, and head and a big, fat one just above the waistline of his jeans. She returns her attention to his contorted, gasping grimace, his wide-eyed terror. But she’s not just enjoying his fear. She’s looking for evidence of something specific in his crazed eyes.

Has he sensed the unnatural extent of her strength? Or is he convincing himself she just caught him off guard and somehow gained the upper hand?

The dumb shock in his expression suggests it could be the former, but it’s anyone’s guess until he finds his voice.

It’s a gratifying sight, of course, seeing him strapped down like this, but the last time she paused to inflame a target’s terror, the bastard didn’t survive. Memories of Richard Davies, broken and bleeding to death on the snowy hunting range where he tried to confine her, have proved both stubborn and vivid in the six months since. They don’t inspire guilt. After all, the man fashioned wallets and belts from the skin of his victims. But if he were alive and in prison, she doubts she’d think about him so clearly every night before bed.

But Cole’s order that she blindfold her targets as soon as possible has nothing to do with her memories, good, bad, or otherwise, and everything to do with keeping her incredible strength secret. They’ve added business partners since last time, people who’ve helped finance everything from Luke’s magical SUV to every last physical and digital detail of Hailey Brinkmann’s fake life. She’s pretty sure this new rule comes from them. She’s also pretty sure they’re watching everything she does now, so she’s got no plans to defy them.

The headpiece with its grotesque throat attachment—she’s not sure what else to call the thing—rests on a pull-down utility shelf attached to the container’s wall, looking like a hellish beached jellyfish that floated up from the depths. Gently, she tears the fabric hood from the leather mask that covered most of her face while she was confined in the storm cellar, letting the mask fall to the floor. It’s taken her hours of practice in the lab to execute small, everyday moments while triggered without using mantras or deep breathing techniques to keep her from pulling doorknobs out of doors and cracking cell phone screens when she doesn’t mean to. She’s not perfect, but she’s getting better.

The leather tongue hits the metal with a loud, satisfying thwack; then she tugs the fabric down over Mattingly’s head, covering his eyes just as he did her own hours before.

“Sending Luke in.” Cole’s voice through the earpiece startles her so badly she almost jumps. His is the first voice other than Mattingly’s she’s heard in over a day.

“Afraid a woman can’t handle it on her own?”

“Can we minimize chitchat in front of our new captive?”

In a near whisper, she says, “Yeah, I forget. You’re a big fan of one-way conversations.”

“Letting off steam, I get it. It’s been a night. You’re allowed. I hate snakes, too.”

Charlotte turns her back on the now blindfolded Cyrus Mattingly, moves to the open divider. “I actually don’t mind them, but that one struck at me when I opened the crate, and I wasn’t in the mood.” She glances back, sees Mattingly jerking against his restraints to see who she’s talking to. Voice low, she says, “Just want to point out there’s not enough here.”

“You think if we notify the authorities there won’t be enough to implicate him?”

She almost laughs at the ease with which Cole used the term authorities, as if the man answers to any higher power at all.

“Not without me, no,” she answers.

“Well, you’re absolutely not talking to the cops.”

“Also, I shredded the headpiece to make the blindfold so that’s one piece of evidence that’s been tampered with.”

“Yeah, it was covered in your DNA, so that would have been out, too.”

“You reposition surveillance satellites at your will. I bet you can tamper with a little DNA evidence.”

“Perhaps. But I prefer to tamper with it before it’s discovered, not after. What are you really proposing here, Charlotte?”

He doesn’t sound annoyed, or even put off. More like he’s leading her to say something he’s afraid to say himself. She’s never been quite sure what value Cole Graydon places on the lives of these killers. He didn’t shed a tear when he broke the news to her that the target of their last operation didn’t survive it. But she knows this: after inserting himself in her very first hunt, he managed to talk her out of her rage before she broke her target’s neck. And by doing so, he gave the families of the man’s victims a level of closure she hadn’t thought to consider when she’d been poised to snap the fucker like kindling. Zypraxon doesn’t steal her common sense; the opportunity to exact revenge with her bare hands does.