CHAPTER 26
Aric took the wheel, and Kaya directed him to the place Mackie’s friend at the garage had surrendered to her unwillingly through his thoughts. The abandoned house sat on a weed-choked empty lot near the city dump.
“A fitting refuge for excrement like Big Mack,” Aric muttered as they parked the vehicle behind a rusted old water tower and prepared to execute the rough plan they’d discussed on the way. “You may not see me, but I promise I’ll be close.”
She nodded, reassured by his presence even if the conflict between them felt as wide as a cavern.
As soon as they were out of the car, Aric dissolved into shadows.
Kaya walked to the front porch of the sagging one-story eyesore and knocked on the door. A tall, scrawny man answered several moments later. Stringy hair covered his mottled skull, and beneath the scraggly brows that climbed high on his forehead at the sight of her, his bleary eyes blinked rapidly in confusion.
“What the fuck?” He blinked, then rubbed his eyes and blinked again. “You ain’t Raven.”
“No, I’m not.” Kaya smiled pleasantly, her hand resting at the small of her back where the pistol she’d brought with her from the command center was tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “Step aside. I’m here to talk to my sister.”
No sense pretending, she and Aric had decided. They were going to take Leah out of there and they were prepared to do so with guns blazing.
The aged junkie at the door gave a vigorous shake of his head. “Big Mack won’t like this. Raven ain’t takin’ visitors right now.”
“I say she is.” Aric’s deep voice and bared fangs as he emerged out of the shadows near the open door sent the man scrambling back into the house.
Mackie’s poor excuse for a guard frantically reached for the gun holstered at his hip. Mistake. Aric shot him dead in an instant.
He glanced over at Kaya, his eyes ablaze with battle rage. “Ready, partner?”
She nodded. “Let’s go get her.”
At the same moment, the house erupted in chaos following the sound of gunfire. Two men charged from the back. Kaya took out one with a bullet to the head. Aric got the other. Indistinct shouts joined the panicked sounds of half a dozen men caught unaware by the invasion.
“Leah!” Kaya shouted. She didn’t know where to look for her, only that the man at the garage knew Mackie had her sister with him at his hideout following the failed raid. She could be anywhere. Kaya only hoped her twin wouldn’t be coming at them as an enemy. “Leah, where are you?”
A blast of bullets from a semiautomatic ripped into the bowed wood paneling near Kaya’s head as she and Aric pushed farther inside the small house. They ducked out of range but only barely. Splinters rained down into Kaya’s hair.
“Leah!” Aric called now, his low bellow vibrating the floorboards beneath Kaya’s feet.
Then she heard it.
The smallest cry coming from somewhere down the far end of the hall. Female. It was Leah. And she sounded to be in pain.
Aric shot a big man who barreled out of a bedroom ahead of them. The body sprawled across the floor, blocking their clean path. The woman’s cry came again, more distinct now.
They hurried toward a closed bathroom door at the end of the narrow passage. Aric kicked it in with his boot. The thin door shattered off its hinges. And there, huddled in the filth of the avocado-tiled prison was Kaya’s twin.
“Oh, my God. Leah.”
She was handcuffed to the sink pipes like an animal, a gag tied around her mouth. Her clothing was torn and dirty. Bruises rode her left cheekbone. A scab covered an ugly split in her swollen lip.
Kaya’s heart lurched at the sight of her sister’s abuse. She hurried to her side along with Aric, who made quick work of the cuffs with a mental command that broke the locks open while Kaya unfastened the tight knots of the gag.
Leah’s sob as the punishing restraints fell away shredded all of the misgivings she’d ever had for her estranged sibling.
“I’m going to look for Mackie,” Aric said.
“Be careful.” It was Leah’s voice that spoke the words that were also on Kaya’s tongue. Leah glanced at both of them, remorse in her dark brown eyes. “Angus has weapons hidden everywhere.”
Aric nodded curtly, then vanished.
# # #
As furious as he had been for the fact that Kaya hadn’t trusted him enough to share the truth about her sister and her past with him, Aric’s rage had gone nuclear at the sight of her pregnant twin shackled like a dog inside Mackie’s newest hideout.
It was too easy to see Kaya in the pretty, battered face that stared up at them so helplessly and broken. Too easy to think of Kaya being subjected to the punishing hands and lecherous cravings of men like Angus Mackie and his ilk.
For that, every man in this place would die.
Aric moved through the house as a stealth assassin, keeping to the shadows except to fill each of Mackie’s men with lead. And now he had only to find the king of the rats.
Aric swept through the place, leaving no corner unturned.
And then he spotted the bastard.
Unshaven, dressed in only a pair of saggy yellowed cotton briefs, his hairy belly drooped in front of him and jiggling as he ran, the purportedly fearsome Big Mack made a hurried dash for the basement door. It banged behind him, followed by the hasty thudding of Mackie’s bare feet on old wooden steps.
Aric snarled and leapt across the distance. He was just about to throw the door open with his mind when a shotgun blast exploded the panel in front of him. He dodged the spray and of wood and shrapnel in time to avoid the worst of it, then he dove through the opening and body slammed Mackie to the bottom of the stairs.
The fat coward screamed as Aric seized hold of him by the throat. His fangs felt as immense as daggers in his mouth, his eyes lighting up Mackie’s face like an amber spotlight. “Not so brave now, are you?”
“What the fuck!” His eyes went wide, full of shock and terror. “Daywalker?”
“That’s right,” Aric snarled. “Your worst nightmare.”
Not far from where he had Mackie pinned, crates that looked disturbingly similar to the ones the Order had recovered from the van at Scrully’s estate were lined up on the concrete floor of the basement. Easily a dozen of them.
He growled a curse and tightened his chokehold on the gang leader. “Now, before I eviscerate you, you’re going to tell me where you got this UV. I’m guessing from that black bug you’ve got tattooed on your right tit that your buddy Fineas Riordan hooked you up before the Order wasted him.”
“I’m not telling you shit.” Mackie gritted his teeth, struggling against Aric’s unyielding hold. “You’ll have to kill me. If I squeal, Opus will make sure I’m dead.”
Behind him on the stairs, Aric heard Kaya’s soft footsteps. “The house is clear.”
Aric nodded tightly, dragging Mackie up off the floor by his throat. “You and Leah all right?” he asked, looking at her because he needed to see for himself.
Kaya had come to the bottom step. Leah stood behind her halfway down, looking like a ghost version of her vibrant sister. “We’re okay.”
“Good. As soon as this sack of pus tells me what I want to know, we can be out of here.”
“Fuck. You.” Mackie sputtered.
Kaya walked up next to Aric. “There’s another way to get the information we need.”
She touched the human’s flailing arm and asked him the same questions Aric had. But now Mackie’s mind was open, his thoughts spilling loose at just a suggestion from Kaya. “Riordan supplied the ultraviolet weapons and rounds. Mackie has had contact from Opus, but never in person. He doesn’t know any of the members.”
“In other words, he’s useless,” Aric said, hardly disappointed to have the license to end the bastard. But there was still one very important question that he suspected Mackie could answer. “Where is Opus getting all of their intel on Order movements?”
Kaya sucked in a breath. “They have someone on the inside. Mackie knows it.”
“Who?” Aric demanded, squeezing his throat nearly to the point of crushing it.
The human attempted a chuckle. “I love seeing you bloodsuckers chase your tails. Almost as much as I like seeing you smoked in a pile of ash under my boots.”
Aric roared his fury. “Tell us, goddamn you.”
“There is a mole,” Kaya confirmed, her voice wooden. “They’ve got someone embedded. Someone who’s feeding them high-value intel on a regular basis now. Data files too.”
“What the fuck?” Aric scowled, beyond enraged. “Who is it? Say the name or say goodbye to your larynx.”
“Some Irish bitch,” Mackie finally relented. “Iona something.”
Aric reeled back. He caught Kaya’s confused gaze too. “If you’re talking about Reginald Crowe’s mistress, Iona Lynch, she’s dead. I saw her savaged body with my own eyes last week.”
“Yeah?” Mackie taunted despite the strangling hold on him. “Then she must be sending messages from hell because she’s the one who got a warning passed on to me that the Order was after my ass a few nights ago.”
“What?” Kaya swiveled a questioning look at her sister. “I thought you warned him after I came to see you.”
Leah shook her head. “This son of a bitch has been holding me against my will for six months, threatening to kill me and my baby if I try to leave. I would never tell him anything.”
Aric’s blood ran ice cold. When he glanced at Kaya, her face showed the same astonished dread that was currently coiled around him.
“Oh, my God,” Kaya murmured. “Rafe.”