Chapter Fifteen
Breen plugged his legs into his black cargo pants, hitched them over his hips, then buttoned, zipped, and belted. Next his shirt went on.
The other Spec Ops Team members geared up for the mission ahead around him, clattering at their lockers.
“What’s the difference between a drug dealer and a hooker?” Dev asked, tugging his shirt down his torso.
Thomal planted a booted foot on the bench and started to lace up. “What?” he asked, already laughing.
“A drug dealer can’t resell his crack.”
A louder laugh burst out of Thomal.
Gábor cracked up too. “So we’re going with butt jokes this morning?” He rooted around inside his locker. “All right, I got one. What did the cannibal do after he dumped his girlfriend?”
Nobody said anything.
Gábor grinned. “Wiped his ass.”
Dev groaned. “Fuck, Pavenic.”
Thomal stomped his boot to the floor. “That’s not a dirty joke, douche-bucket.”
“Hell if it’s not,” Gábor defended. “It’s the ultimate in dirty.”
“Dirty gross,” Thomal countered, “not dirty sexy. You want gross? How about this: chick drops off a dress at the dry cleaners. Shop lady says, ‘Come again!’ Chick says, ‘No, just toothpaste this time.’”
Dev’s shoulders shook.
“Not bad,” Gábor approved, laughing harder. “Not bad at all. But, hell, I can be grosser.”
“Do not,” Dev ordered.
Gábor found a stick of deodorant in his locker and applied it. “You’re up, Dalakis.”
Breen lifted his eyebrows. “What?”
“Whenever we have a holy-shit-o’clock call,” Gábor explained, “we tell dirty jokes to wake up our sorry asses.”
“Dirty sexy,” Thomal clarified.
Breen shrugged. “I’m just stoked to finally be going on a real topside mission.”
For the past month he’d only been patrolling Videon’s regular hunting grounds with the team, looking for trouble and not finding any. He’d used the time to familiarize himself with being topside again. Last time he’d been in the city was four years ago, back when all the warriors went up to deal with an exchange Raymond Parthen arranged of Marissa—who he’d kidnapped—for Toni. A fake exchange, considering Jacken wouldn’t let Toni get within spitting distance of her messed-up father. But a month was plenty for re-familiarizing. Now it was time for action.
Dev pulled two extra ammo clips out of his locker and jammed them into the leg pocket of his cargo pants. “Little girl says to her dad, ‘How are babies made?’ The dad answers, ‘Daddy plants a seed in Mommy’s tummy.’ Girl asks, ‘Oh, does she swallow the seed?’ Dad says, ‘Only if she wants new shoes.’”
Thomal hooted. “Oh, that’s fucking bad, Nichita. I’m so telling your wife.”
“Ha!” Gábor raked a gesture at Dev. “See, Dalakis?”
Breen moved over to a table where a spread of guns and knives had been brought in from the armory. He snapped a Browning .32 automatic in a holster on the right side of his belt and a drop-point knife, specially crafted for the warriors, on the left.
Gábor narrowed his eyes. “You have to be able to talk bullshit to be a member of this team.”
Breen picked up a clip and started loading it with bullets, pushing them in one at a time with his thumb.
“Speaking of talking bullshit,” Dev said. “Did Chelsea ever make good on her promise to dominate you?”
Gábor gave Dev a blank stare. “What?”
“Two weeks ago,” Dev reminded, “after the tasting gig at Three Friends’ Place. Your wife marched you off to pull a domination move on you.”
Thomal chuckled. “Shit, I’d forgotten about that.”
Breen looked up from his clip. “What’s this?”
Thomal cut a never-mind gesture at him. “You were busy getting into deep sneakers with Toni for punching Amza.”
Gábor chortled. “Oh, yeah. Chelsea pulled a move on me, all right. And you guys definitely don’t want to know what it is.”
The spring came tight in the magazine, and Breen put the clip in his lower pants pocket. He started to load up another.
Thomal crossed his arms over his chest and gave Gábor a pointed glare. “Spill, Pavenic.”
Gábor continued to chortle. “The only thing I’m saying is that it had to do with my ass, and it was awesome.”
Dev, who’d just grabbed a set of car keys out of his locker, froze in the act of putting them in his pocket.
Breen likewise stopped loading the second clip.
“See?” Gábor gestured at their faces. “Told ya you didn’t want to know.”
Thomal’s mouth slanted. “Oh, I think it’s just the opposite, Pavenic. I believe you have everyone’s undivided attention.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking.” Dev slipped the keys into his pocket with a rattle. “Pavenic has been dominated by a pregnant woman. Maybe he needs to resign from the team.”
Closing his locker door, Gábor kept his hand pressed to the front and gave Dev a bored stare.
“Now, see,” Dev continued, “Costache here is married to a half-demon who’s strong as fuck. We all understand it when his wife dominates him.”
“She does?” Thomal stroked a thumb over one of his fangs.
Eyes bright with amusement, Dev started for the door. “Pavenic still has to pony up details about what Chelsea did to him, but he can give those in the car. It’s launch time.”
The rest of them followed.
As they exited into the hall, Breen asked, “What’s the difference between peanut butter and jam?”
They all stopped and looked at him.
“What?” Dev obliged.
“I can’t peanut butter my dick up your ass.”
Dev’s goatee split into a wide grin, and Thomal guffawed.
Gábor snorted. “Fuck if I want your dick anywhere near my ass, Dalakis.”
Breen hitched a shoulder. “Based on the story you just told about Chelsea and what you like going on down there…maybe not.”
Gábor gave him a narrow stare.
Dev exhaled a laugh from his nose. “Hey, you’re the one who said Dalakis has to talk bullshit.”
Topside
8:45 p.m.
The house where the handoff was supposed to take place was in the boonies of Lakeside, separated from any neighbors by an acre of forested landscape. The large A-frame structure was built of dark-paneled wood in an alpine rustic style, rising two stories high. It should have been an upper-middle-class home, but unkemptness added a layer of cheap. Open window shutters sagged, the lawn out front was dotted with a scattershot of crabgrass, and bird-of-paradise plants had been left to grow to the size of pelican heads.
Breen crouched behind a bush, a shadow among shadows. The night was still and nippy, with a dark blue sky, stars like glowing buttons, and an almost-full moon. He steadily watched his side of the house—the east—while the other warriors observed the north, south, and west sides.
Gábor’s voice crackled through Breen’s earpiece. “Anybody else not feeling all bunnies and rainbows about this place?”
Breen certainly didn’t like what he was seeing. No lights on. No smoke wafting from the chimney. No signs or scents of human occupation. No movement. Nothing. Only a reflection of the pale fist of the moon hanging suspended in the glass of the upper window pane.
Breen pushed the speak button on the throat-mic he wore like a choker necklace. “I agree. Something’s off. Nice place, but feels deserted.”
Thomal weighed in. “I’m beginning to get a distinct wild-goose chase vibe here.”
Dev’s snort came through as a short burst of static. “Who the fuck would send us on a wild-goose chase?”
Valid point. “Any texts from Toni?” Breen asked. Maybe she’d heard from the Underground Om Rău.
“Zero,” Dev answered.
They waited some more.
“Anyone picking up signs of life?” Dev asked.
“Negative,” Breen said.
Thomal and Gábor responded the same.
They’d been “observing only” for close to an hour now.
Dev exhaled over comms. “Not sure I feel comfortable leaving the scene without confirming absolutely that no one’s here. We need to recon inside.”
The flesh on Breen’s nape crawled, although why, he didn’t know. Strong likelihood was this place was as abandoned as it appeared.
“Pavenic and Dalakis,” Dev directed, “take the upstairs windows and meet in the middle. Costache, you head for the front door. I’ll go in the back. Be the night, gentlemen.”
Breen left the cover of his shrub at an easy lope and did exactly what Dev said—he sucked in the power of the moon, turning his body into organic blackness, and putting wings on his feet.
Gliding soundlessly and invisibly up to a bougainvillea straggling along the east wall of the house, he grabbed hold of the trellis underneath and started to climb up through the gnarly tentacles, hand over hand. The bougainvillea’s sharp thorns scratched his cheeks and arms. He arrived at the second-story window and, keeping his head low, reached up to test it. He gave the frame a prod. It nudged up.
The window was unlocked.
Cold sweat drizzled down the channel of his spine. He wasn’t bunnies and rainbows over that, either.
Shifting to the right, he eased higher and peered through the window from the corner of the pane. Sheet-covered furniture. Dust and grime. No people. No strong Dragon scent, either, although that could be the result of him having a “bonded male” nose now.
He waited. There was an unearthly quiet to everything. No wind, even. He swept the room once more. Everything remained the same.
With one thumb, he raised the window all the way open. The air inside met the air outside and didn’t change temperature. It smelled like the interior of an unplugged refrigerator, sour Chablis and old, tart baby food, like mashed mangoes, and…something familiar.
He waited again.
No gutter punk gangsta jumped out at him.
He edged over to a center position, chin-upped through the window, his belly passing the frame, and landed lightly on outstretched palms. Somersaulting, he came smoothly to his feet, his hand on the butt of his pistol, adrenaline swelling in his bloodstream.
He panned the room.
No one.
He waited for a “clear” call through his earpiece. None came.
Outside, the trees murmured.
He moved a single step forward, and—
Then there was someone.
A man floated down from the rafters and landed without a single breath of sound several feet in front of him.
Breen froze.
The guy wore black pants, black boots, and no shirt, leaving exposed the interlinked circles of a strange tattoo. Almost supernaturally black in color, the geometric shapes marked his left arm and the left side of his chest. He had strange eyes, too. The irises were thunder-gray and surrounded by what looked like a string of tiny black pearls.
The familiar scent was stronger now—the man had brought it with him. Blood filled Breen’s muscles as his body prepared to strike.
The guy hard-stared Breen, and the dots around his irises began to spin like well-oiled miniature ball bearings in a roulette wheel.
What the hell?
Breen unholstered his Browning just as shouts erupted from the first floor. Next came the basso sound of gunfire rolling up the stairs—only a quick, one-two punch of shots before the noise was cut off. Then more shouts, different voices, and Breen was pulling his own trigger.
The guy’s tats spun, and the bullets from Breen’s gun veered around him.
Wood pulp chunked out of the wall behind the guy.
Breen’s heart thumped a couple of extra-violent beats.
The shirtless guy grinned nastily—clearly enjoying Breen’s shock—and what Breen saw in that smile rooted him in place.
He could only stand there stupidly, staring at the man’s mouth, not doing a single damned thing to prevent it when the guy whaled a vicious uppercut at him.
The inhumanly strong fist met the underside of Breen’s chin and threw his head back. He saw the ceiling through a splintered matrix of pain right before the shutters on both eyes slammed shut.
When Breen woke up he was lying with his nose pressed to a dirty wooden floor, smelling a mixture of brambly woodsmoke, trampled bougainvillea, and Red Man or maybe Copenhagen chewing tobacco. Each of his eyelids weighed an even ton. His bruised jaw thumped. His brain was an inert blob.
He managed to scan around a little with just his eyes. He was in the house’s living room, next to a pile of smashed cell phones and comm equipment, and maybe he was seeing double, because it seemed like there were a hundred bad guys around. Every one of them had hair as black as tar and were wearing dark pants and boots, many of them shirtless, like Breen’s attacker had been, most with geometric tattoos on their bodies, but on different parts of the anatomy. They carried knives, some had swords—freaky—and Breen couldn’t understand a word they were saying. Maybe his hearing was off.
Maybe he’d woken up inside Assassin’s Creed.
A couple bad guys bent over him and roughly bound his wrists with duct tape. They hauled him to his feet, a trip he made woozily, then dragged him outside.
A fleet of rental cars had magically appeared in front of the house.
Breen was tossed into the trunk of one, trussed up—his ankles now duct-taped too—but not gagged.
The drive to wherever they went took about twenty minutes, long enough for Breen to Humpty-Dumpty his brain back together. When the trunk lid finally opened, he was clear-headed.
A bad guy slashed the duct tape free of Breen’s ankles, yanked him out of the trunk, and set him on his feet. Breen was steered through nondescript woodland, and his mind shifted into overdrive, thinking of escape options, but almost immediately discarding them. Because, hell, he hadn’t been seeing double before—there were a hundred bad guys. And all the training in the world couldn’t overcome the kind of problems four warriors against a C-note of inhumanly strong shitbaggers would bring on.
He saw his teammates, their bodies vague, shadowy figures interspersed among tall trees that were sparse at first, but growing thicker. Breen tried to meet their eyes to silently come up with a plan of action, maybe a coordinated assault, but even though he could see in the dark well enough with his Pure-bred eyes, the bad guys were keeping the four of them too far apart to communicate.
The crunch of multiple pairs of boots through dead leaves was the only sound. Meager darts of moonlight penetrated the snarl of bare branches overhead, and the dimness turned the landscape threatening.
If this was foreshadowing, Breen wasn’t a fan.
They walked for a good ten or fifteen minutes, then finally came to a clearing where the sky opened up to a canopy of icy stars. The glade was about fifty yards across and was lorded over by a giant oak tree, its long-shafted, knobby limbs spidering across the pale moon. Two strong branches grew at right angles about twelve feet up the trunk, and several bad guys began securing chains to them: three sets on the left-side branch, one set on the right.
Dev was muscled over to the right-side branch, and Breen’s mouth went dry when the bad guys ripped Dev’s shirt off. Dev quick-shifted, managing to step back and land a few kicks. But there were just too many to fight. Dev was overpowered. His wrists were bound in chains, then he was hoisted up, booted feet dangling, his bare back aimed toward the clearing.
Thomal, Gábor, and Breen were likewise stripped of their shirts and bound in chains. Breen exchanged a glance with his teammates, and silently they all agreed to stay cool. Fighting this many men was pointless, and Breen’s head had already taken enough abuse tonight. It’d be stupid to risk getting his wits rattled again. He needed them.
The three of them were strung up, side by side, on the left-side branch, but facing the clearing.
A bonfire was lit in a center pit, illuminating a collection of half a dozen log cabins about seventy-five hundred feet beyond, embedded in the woods. The cabins appeared to be simple, saggy, one-room structures, all with boarded-up windows.
As the bonfire roared to full inferno, flames whipping at the darkness, a group of men whooped and hollered and danced around, their undulating bodies casting tormented shadows across the backdrop of trees.
This was bad.
“So, Dalakis,” Gábor drawled, “how do you like your first real topside mission so far?”
Breen shifted on his chain with a clink-clank and looked at Gábor and Thomal.
Thomal had a fulminating glare trained on the bonfire. “That whole be-careful thing?” he gritted. “We should’ve done that.”
“We were careful,” Dev argued. “These men cloaked themselves, and they’re strong as fuck. And there’s a shitpile of them.”
Gábor sneered at the savage, cannibalistic display by the pit. “You think these assholes plan to put us in a cauldron?”
There wasn’t time to figure it out.
A man strode forward importantly, and the others murmured in excitement, speaking in a foreign language.
Maybe Breen had woken up inside of Halo.
The important man was older than the rest, with a white skunk streak at the front of his black hair. He wore more clothing than everyone else, including a long trench coat. He had an aura of power about him, and when he aimed for the oak tree, a hush fell. The other bad guys leaned forward intently, attention pinned on him.
The leader came to a stop right next to Dev, and, with cool haughtiness, looked up at the warrior.
Dev looked back down at him, his gaze flat and dangerously calm.
“Son of Grigore Nichita?” the leader asked in accented English.
The name made the entire length of Breen’s spine lock straight, his chain clanking louder. Holy shit, this man knew who Dev was.
Dev said nothing. The name of Dev’s father, Grigore Nichita, was loathed.
The skin on Breen’s nape began to crawl again.
This was very bad.
The leader chuckled darkly. “No need to answer. You are practically the man’s replica, especially your eyes.” His chin rose another notch. “Are you prepared, Son of Grigore Nichita?”
Dev still didn’t answer.
Because who the hell knew what Skunk Streak was asking? Prepared for what?
The leader tut-tutted. “Must I elucidate?” He asked the question as if Dev was an especially stupid child. “You carry the foul blood of Grigore Nichita in your veins, and thus we have brought you here to answer for your father’s wrongdoing. Grigore Nichita betrayed his own people in the most despicable manner possible, and for nothing more than selfish greed. His heinous actions resulted in many deaths. Everyone here”—the leader made a massive sweep of his arm—“lost loved ones because of your father. So, I ask again: are you prepared, Son of Grigore Nichita”—his glare flared brighter—“to pay for you father’s sins?”
Dev matched Skunk Streak’s glare with one of his own.
The fire crackled. Embers spat and sizzled.
“Very well.” Imperiously, the leader held out a hand toward his men.
One of the bad guys hurried forward and placed a coiled bullwhip across his palm.
A rush of adrenalin nearly blinded Breen. Oh, shit.
Skunk Streak let the bullwhip uncoil.
It slapped the ground, and muscles along the wide breadth of Dev’s back twitched.
Thomal released a low growl, a sound so ferocious that even the hairs on Breen’s nape prickled.
Dev stared at Skunk Streak for a long moment, the sweat on his body glistening in the firelight. “Why the hell not?” he said through tight teeth. “Go for it.”
“What the fuck?” Gábor barked.
One of Skunk Streak’s brows lifted a fraction of an inch—in surprise?—then he gestured someone forward, still all righteous and royal.
A thin man stepped out of the crowd, his black hair rising at odd angles from his scalp. He accepted the whip and positioned himself behind Dev.
Breen’s temples pounded with the rushed throbs of his heart.
The skinny guy’s eyes darted over to his superior.
Skunk Streak nodded. “Începe.”
The thin man flipped the working end of the whip behind him, then struck out, yelling the name, “Cezar!” as the stinging tip lashed Dev’s back.
Dev hissed and jerked. A red welt rose along his flesh.
“Dammit to fuck!” Gábor yelled. “What the hell is this!? Back off, you cockburgers, or I’ll shove my boot so far up your asses, you’ll choke on your own shit!”
Another name yelled. “Stefan!” Another lash.
Another welt. Dev’s hands clenched into fists at the top of his chain.
The thin man scurried back over to Skunk Streak and returned the whip to him.
The leader slowly wound the long length of leather around his fist. He moved closer to Dev. He peered up. “Uncomfortable?” he inquired blandly.
Dev stared straight ahead, his breath coming hard, his jaw rigid.
“I would think so,” the leader said in a musing tone. “But uncomfortable isn’t really payment for a betrayal of the kind your father committed, is it?” He did the annoying tut-tut again. “No. I would say it isn’t.” He gestured another man forward.
This guy was shirtless, with geometric tattoos covering thickset shoulders. Long-haired, sharp-eyed, with a grim block of a mouth, he looked tough, mean even. He took the whip from Skunk Streak and lined up on Dev in an angled-body position. He let the whip dangle in readiness, the tip dancing near the earth.
This fucker knew what he was doing.
“Dorina!” he bawled and slashed out.
The whip crack-snapped against Dev like super-charged lightning. A long strip of flesh tore off Dev’s back, the ribbon of meat flailing out then flopping down past his belt.
Dev arched and yelled.
Thomal, strung up closest to Dev, flinched aside as blood hurled across his face.
Roaring, Gábor kicked and thrashed and thumped on his chain, his cheeks gorging bright red.
Breen sagged motionless as a corpse on his cable, his armpits stretched painfully taut from bearing his entire body weight. His heart dropped like a stone sinking deeply into still water.