The Perfect Soldier

by B D Grant

  Half an hour later, Kelly and I leave the cubicle to find the waiting area has cleared up quite a bit. Mitchell is pacing between benches until he sees us. He pauses mid-step when he catches sight of us walking out. “It went okay?” he asks as he hurries over.

  Kelly grins, seeming to relax just by the sight of Mitchell. “I didn’t punch a single person.”

  As the two of them chitchat, I watch two men in grey suits exchange notes. They play a kind of waltz with their paperwork; one hands papers to the other, the one taking the paper scans over it, and then goes to his briefcase inserts papers and withdrawals another set of papers that he hands over to the other guy.

  Neither of them are Seraphim; I don’t get the familiar Seraphim pull. But their calm, collected dispositions as they quietly review page after page makes me wonder if they fully grasp what we are. The large oval clock on the wall behind them shows that it’s been almost an hour since Sandy walked us back.

  “Everyone is waiting upstairs for McBride’s thing to start,” Mitchell tells us. “Detectives want me to go through another round of photo lineups to see if I can identify anyone else first, though.” Then, to Kelly, “I told them I was waiting for you to get out before I’d head in there. You can wait out here if want. It shouldn’t take long.” Mitchell’s lying. It gets easier each time I push. Detectives want him to look at photos, but it isn’t for lineups, it’s to identify bodies. Ann, the girl who had been recruited by Lia Heincliff with Kelly and who was later killed during the raid, is who Mitchell is hoping to identify. It’s sweet really. He’s worried that if Kelly knows, he’ll demand to go back with him, and then he’ll have to really worry about Kelly losing it if her photo were to turn up in the lineup.

  His protectiveness over Kelly is heart warming. My eyes water and I pinch my nose trying not to cry. Kelly glances at me and I step away from him refusing to meet his gaze as if I were absented mindedly preoccupied by my own thoughts. One of the men in the grey suits catches sight of the time on the clock behind them. The two exchange a few words and then take off splitting off in opposite directions, one rounding the corner toward the main entrance and the other toward the side stairs. Mitchell notices me watching them.

  “If you want to be in there, you better get upstairs.”

  “I’ll see you two later then,” I tell them as I turn to follow the man headed toward the main entrance. I half-hope Kelly will decide to come instead of waiting for Mitchell.

  Kelly calls out after me, “Thanks, by the way.”

  I barely glance over my shoulder. “Yeah, don’t mention it.”

  Chapter 21

  Once Mitchell is called back to go over more photo lineups, I look around the waiting room for the longest bench. I had been too stressed out last night imagining what would happen having to talk to detectives again to get much sleep. Then, I started thinking about how Taylor could help just to spend the rest of the night worrying about what would happen if she refused.

  Now that I’m done with the interview, I can feel the fatigue setting in pretty quick. All of the benches look to be identical, so I just take the one closest to me, letting my legs hang over one side. I lay back on the bench, thankful that I wasn’t arrested for what I did while in my Elite stupor. I had expected that by now they’d be escorting me out of the Supreme Council building in shackles, not laying out on one of their benches.

  “Kelly,” Kemma calls out into the waiting area.

  I hadn’t heard any of the doors opening. I instantly tense. It isn’t too late to be arrested. “Yes ma’am,” I say, sitting up.

  She opens the door wider. “I have something for you, if you’ll come with me.”

  She takes me to the same tiny, insulated cubicle we had been in not fifteen minutes ago.

  I watch her carefully as she walks in after me. She isn’t carrying a laptop, nor is there one on the table, but she does have a pen in her hand. I sit down in the same chair as before, but I immediately regret it when Kemma maneuvers past my long legs to sit down in the seat Taylor had been in beside me. She shifts in the chair, angling it more toward me. I doubt she’s planning on arresting me sitting down, but my heart is still pounding.

  When she takes her time to speak carefully looking over my face instead I say the first thing that comes to mind, “Did something happen to my grandmother?”

  She gives me a small smile. “No, no, it’s nothing like that,” she says, looking down at her lap. “It’s news from your blood work. The lab finally sent us results from the first batch that McBride’s team sent off.”

  “I didn’t know that I was waiting on any blood work to come back.”

  Kemma’s small, awkward smile wavers as her eyes meet mine. “Did Mr. Lanton not tell you that he requested DNA tests for the both of you?”

  I try to think back. It’s surprisingly hard to recall the days and weeks leading up to my training. If Mitchell had told me anything about this, it would have been during my time in the hospital. Really, my only lasting impression was the pain from having my burns treated. “I don’t remember.”

  She looks at the carpet, speaking carefully. “He did tell you that there was a possibility of your having some…familial relation?”

  “He told me that he dated my mom before she moved away from Aurora to have me.” I know where she’s going before she continues.

  It is one of the things I do remember fairly clearly besides what happened to Boston in Baton Rouge.

  “Kian Sipe showed me my DNA test when I was in the city when he was asking me to work for him. It listed my father as Donovan Andler,” I say.

  She slumps back in her chair, although I don’t know whether it’s from relief or added stress. “You worked for him,” she says as she sets down her pen. She works her hand into her pants pocket and pulls out an envelope folded tightly into quarters and smoothes out its creases. When she places it on her lap, I see my name handwritten in dark black ink on the front.

  She stares off across the small cubicle. “Did you enjoy what you did while you were going through Kian’s training?” she asks dreamily. She turns to look at my right arm, the one that was burned from the basement explosion.

  “No,” I say decisively, my voice low.

  “Did you enjoy what you did after your training with them was complete?”

  “No.”

  She looks up from my arm. She almost sounds sad when she asks, “Did you like feeling powerful?”

  I shake my head, remembering what little I felt as an Elite. By the end of my training they had me killing without any explanation as to why. It was a cold, inhuman feeling to take a life. “It wasn’t power,” I tell her.

  “If you didn’t enjoy the pain you inflicted—” Sidney’s face flashes in front of me; the look after I pulled the trigger, “—and you didn’t enjoy being one of their Elites, than you were never a Rogue. You just worked for them.”

  “I enjoyed taking Mase down, and I really enjoyed hurting Lia after the raid.” My fists pounding away on Lia is the only thing I like to revisit from the day Anne died. If I ever get another chance to lay hands on her I won’t waste time throwing punches, I would wrap my hands around her skinny throat, and wouldn’t let go until she was cold.

  Kemma leans closer to me, creasing the envelope as she places her forearm across her knees. “But would you enjoy killing them?”

  I’m silent for second, looking down at the envelope beneath her arm. She wouldn’t have me arrested based off of how I answer, would she? I don’t think so, at least not after she went out of her way to bring me my DNA results. “Maybe not Mase,” I answer truthfully.

  One side of her mouth curls. “I’d bet you wouldn’t enjoy killing Lia either.” She looks me in the eye again, but I don’t return her conspiratorial grin. “But, you are only human.” She stands, holding out the envelope. “You can have this. Mr. Lanton may still want to see the results for himself. And, like you said, it really doesn’t matter who your parents were.”

  I look a
t the envelope. It’s sealed, no signs of tampering. “Do you know what it says?”

  “I do not,” she answers as she steps for the door. “Do you want me to find out if Mr. Lanton is still with our detectives?”

  “You said ‘were.’”

  “Pardon?” she asks, holding the door for me.

  I don’t move. “You said, ‘who my parents were.’” Past tense would mean that she would have to know who my parents are.

  She gives a small smile. “We don’t concern ourselves with those things, Kelly,” she says. “The council is just interested in serving justice.” She keeps the door open, waiting. I walk past, and hear the door swing shut behind her.

  I know that Mitchell Lanton is not my father. For half a second, as I sit on a bench in the nearly empty waiting area, I think about not opening the envelope at all. But I know there’s no chance I’ll be able to ignore it—I guess now’s as good a time as any.

  I rip open the envelope and pull out the single page. It takes less than two minutes to go through everything, but I go back to the start as soon as I finish scanning the page.

  “What you got there?” Mitchell asks. I look up, unsure how long he’s been standing there.

  I hand it over to him. “It’s the test results you asked for.” I ball up the empty envelope and throw it in the nearest trashcan.

  I don’t watch him as he reads it. The DNA test compares our allele sizes with numbers and letters that mean nothing to me. This test looks more legit than the one Kian Sipe had shown me giving us the name and address of the lab that tested our DNA, but the results aren’t any different. The statement at the bottom is straight to the point. His DNA lacks the genetic markers that must be contributed to said child, me, by a biological father—there is zero probability of paternity.

  Mitchell folds the paper up before offering it back to me. I refuse it with a silent shake of my head. “This proves that your mom knew what she was doing,” he says, tapping the paper against the side of his leg.

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “She got you far away from Donovan before he could sink his hooks into you.”

  “He was that bad of a guy?” I ask, feeling more nonchalant about what he could say next than I probably should.

  “From what Diane told me he had gone off the deep end once he got involved in The Movement.” He pauses a moment. “The day she broke things off with him, she called him a Rogue. At that time the term was still pretty new term for Seraphim in The Movement. I know he slapped her.” Mitchell’s jaw muscles tighten. Gran told me that it was my father who ended things with my mom, but I don’t interrupt him. “She came to me afterwards. We hadn’t actually started dating yet, but I wanted to beat the crap out of him for it. She made me promise not to. She said it would only make things worse for her.”

  I had never heard any stories about my father growing up, and now I know why. “Do you know what happened to him? Kian told me he died.”

  Mitch shrugs. “It makes sense. I had thought that he somehow got out of The Movement after he and Diane split, because I never saw him again after he hit Dianne. But, I did leave shortly after your mother disappeared.”

  Mitch holds out the letter again, but I don’t take it, so he folds it into a small square and slips it into his pants pocket. “When Kian was telling me about Donovan he also said that my mom was in The Movement.” Mitch looks at me a second, his mouth barely open. He looks past me closing his mouth as if he’s thinking. “If she was,” he says finally, “it was because Donovan talked her into joining. By the time she and I got together she had no interest in The Movement or what it stood for.” His eyes meet mine. “You hungry?”

  I smile at him. “I could eat.”

  I think of the photo Kian had shown me of Donovan Andler with his arm around my mom. Mitch takes the folded paper from his pocket and tosses it into the trashcan by the metal detectors on our way out. She may have looked happy in that picture, but I’m happier that she met Mitch, the man who would happily have fought anyone who would have hurt her and who raided an entire campus full of Rogues to get me out.

  Chapter 22

  Ash lays the faxes down on Susan’s desk. He had clipped all of them together after he’d read through them all one last time. She’s taken it pretty hard losing Detective Lane, but who hasn’t. He can’t ignore the fresh box of tissues on her desk beside the small bottle of hand sanitizer nor the trashcan next to her desk stuffed with tissues from the last box. Susan is still the best person to share what he’s found. For one, she owes him for keeping tabs on Lane when she couldn’t and giving him backup. For two, Daphne has relocated to an office upstairs where only the council and their entourage conducts business. It’s the best time to get this out in the air without having to immediately alert the council.

  “What’s this?” she asks as he lays the faxes out neatly on her desk. He knows that if he doesn’t come at her with this the right way than she’ll melt down again before he has had the chance to show her what he’s got.

  “I got the top ones off the council’s fax machine not five minutes ago. The ones clipped below those are from less than a week ago.”

  She uses a single fingernail to lift up the corners of the faxes, scanning through them quickly. “Why are you bringing them to me?”

  He looks down at his feet. One of her snot rags missed its mark and is sitting by his shoe. He kicks it closer to the nearly full trashcan rubbing the tip of his shoe across the carpet as he returns it beneath him. “I, uh, thought you would appreciate the growing number of bodies pilling up on our front door.”

  Susan extracts a fresh tissue, tossing the used one she’s had concealed in her left hand in the trash. She uses the left hand to better go through the faxes. Ash forces himself not to point out her hand sanitizer to her.

  “Seraphim die every day. It doesn’t mean that they are all connected,” she says, setting the fax back down.

  “I actually looked into the stats on that when I received the first batch of faxes from a retired agent who used to work with Doherty. There’s no way Doherty would have told him about our case, and yet this guy thought his team should look into this. Deaths in our…” Ash pauses. He sometimes nearly forgets that Susan isn’t one of them. “Deaths in the Seraphim community have increased threefold.”

  Her eyes narrow on him. “Since when?”

  Ash pushes the faxes closer to her. “Since the raid.”

  Susan absentmindedly picks up her pen and begins clicking it rhythmically as she goes on to the next fax, and then the next. Without setting down the pen, she wipes her red, blotchy nose with a tissue. She returns to the top sheet of paper, then lays the faxes down in front of Ash, tossing the tissue in the trashcan.

  She looks up at Ash unimpressed as she grabs the worn notebook from beside her keyboard and stands.

  “One of ours is dead,” she says. “My primary initiative—no, my only initiative—is catching those responsible.”

  “Susan—”

  “I’m the one who had to give the news to Lane’s wife, and I’ll be damned if I’m not the one who tells her that these people have been put away.” Susan abruptly turns, leaving him staring as she struts off toward Doherty’s office.

  “Wait. Where are you going?” Ash grabs the faxes and then pushes her chair out of his way to follow after her. She heads straight to Doherty’s office. He hadn’t wanted to bring any of this Doherty yet, not until he’d gotten a second opinion on whether or not it was worth showing him when they’re already working a case load three times what they’re use to.

  Doherty has been working harder than Ash has ever seen since getting back from Baton Rouge. He’s been questioning captured Rogues nonstop except for the occasional break to go over notes in his office. “What can I do for you two?” Doherty asks as Ash enters the room on Susan’s heels. Ash looks to the couch where a rumbled pillow sits. Ash looks to his boss wondering if he’s sleeping here too. With the Supreme Council working under the sa
me roof, Doherty has hung his various degrees and training awards in place of the sticky notes wall that they all enjoy. Ash hadn’t even bothered to give him a hard about it, because he understood. Since the council started working in the same building all of the detectives seemed to be acting more professional.

  “I wanted to check on how the warrants are coming along?” Susan asks. Ash steps up next to her trying to get a read on if she’s going to bring up what he just showed her, but she refuses look at him.

  “Those guys aren’t coming out of that building any time soon,” he says, frowning as hard as Susan does hearing it. “But we have eyes on the roof and all the exits, so if they do we’ll get them,” he assures her, collecting the stack of ten or so photos of men and women coming and going from the Baton Rouge buildings he was examining when they walked in. Doherty’s examining Susan’s face as she frowns down at Doherty’s desk. “They aren’t going anywhere.” He hands Susan the photos. Ash watches as she flips through them. “Those are the newest of the surveillance footage from the Rogue complex,” he says, leaning back in his chair to cross his arms over his chest.

  “None of these are of Kian or Cassidy,” she says after looking at the last photo.

  Doherty takes a drink of his lukewarm coffee. “Do you blame them? Everyone in that building knows we’re watching them. A helicopter came in to pick up some lab equipment—”

  “And someone in a lab coat,” Susan snaps, holding up the snapshot of the helicopter and a person who’s white lab coat is flapping in the wind as he or she climbs in the back.

  Ash perks up. “You think they’re cooking up something new?”

  “It looked like basic lab equipment being loaded up. Nothing requiring refrigeration,” Doherty says. Susan pulls out another photo of the helicopter where two people are loading what Ash has learned is a Next Generation Sequencing instrument used for reading DNA sequences. It’s multimillion-dollar machine that has the investigators working the Baton Rouge complex incident that resulted in Lane’s death searching for the backers funding the operations. Behind the people loading the machine is the somewhat blurry profile of the person in the white lab coat holding a small cardboard box. They know enough from the students who were being injected at the school that the serum they were using needs to be refrigerated.