by A A Woods
RENEGADES
Book 2 of
The Scottstown Heroes Series
By
A. A. Woods
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-951803-15-5
Copyright © 2020 A. A. Woods
All rights reserved.
Amonoux LLC
Cover Design by Rebecacovers
Books by the Author
The Scottstown Heroes Series
Vagabonds (Book 1)
Renegades (Book 2)
Runaways (Book 2.5)
Other Books
Hooded (Hooded Book 1)
Project Recollection (The Affinity Book 1)
The Star Siren
The Face of the Universe: A Short Story Collection
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Chapter One: Stormclouds
Daniel Keys knew he was walking a dangerous line. As he signed off his daily livestream with a jaunty “See ya tomorrow, suckers,” he felt the certainty, the thrill in his chest.
He lived for that thrill.
Layla turned off the camera with the sultry grin that always made him wild.
“That was pretty ballsy,” she said.
“My middle name.”
She set the tripod aside, trailing her fingers along the back of the couch as she drifted toward him. “And after Hans sent out specific instructions not to mention those self-proclaimed Vagabonds. Your video is certainly gonna ruffle some feathers.”
Daniel shrugged, his breath catching as she stepped around the couch, toward him. “My viewers deserve the truth, just like I promised them last week. Besides, people are talking about the latest sighting all over Reddit. Hans doesn’t have the control he thinks he has, not anymore.”
Layla only smiled, settling beside him with a lithe folding of her long limbs.
Daniel wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn Layla’s attention. She was eerily beautiful, strangely graceful, and utterly fascinating. She could sneak up on a cat if she wanted to. Sometimes, when she disappeared in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom or get a glass of water, he wondered. Now, with the appearance of real-live superheroes in that small Massachusetts town, he wondered even more.
But her fingernails on his arm was, as always, enough to distract him.
“I’m proud of you,” she said.
“You should be,” he joked. “It was your idea.”
“But your face on the platform,” she whispered, trailing kisses on his neck. “You’re the one taking a stand.”
“People deserve to know,” he said in a dazed voice.
“And Hans deserves a reckoning,” she answered, but he wasn’t listening anymore. He was thinking only of her, of the hip shifting to straddle him, of their shared bed only a few feet away.
Without warning, the door crashed open.
“What the—?”
“Hold them,” said a man backlit by the assaultingly bright lights of the apartment complex hallway.
Daniel surged to his feet, shoving Layla behind him. But new figures were swirling in like smoke, too fast, too strong. A small, thin young man grabbed Layla’s arm and pulled her away. A short, rounded figure stepped out of the shadows.
“Pan,” Daniel said as the young woman flicked a butterfly knife open, slicing her hand in the process. Blood sprayed on the carpet.
She cocked her head, unconcerned. “Nice to see you, Daniel.”
He curled his lip in a snarl, but the big man spoke next.
“I’m troubled, young Mr. Keys” Hans Schneider said, shaking his head and closing the apartment door behind him with a funerial click. “Very troubled. It seems my instructions weren’t clear enough, although I thought the order was quite simple. Don’t speak about the Vagabonds. Don’t post about them. Don’t acknowledge their existence, except to make it clear what a farce it is.” Those ice-blue eyes turned on Daniel and he felt a whole new set of chills shiver through his body. “Tell me, what about that was not specific enough for you?”
Daniel lifted his chin, fighting to subdue the wild terror crawling up his spine. He tried to look strong, secure. But he felt like the teenage kid Hans had pulled out of rural nowhere.
It had been Daniel’s personal dream-come-true when the big blonde man had knocked on his door, impressed by his little YouTube channel. He’d offered funding, fame, connections. Too good to be true, his mom had warned, shaking her head.
Turns out, she’d been right.
As Daniel’s channel blew up, he began to learn that certain restrictions came with Hans, rules he hadn’t signed up for. Things he was allowed to cover… and not.
Daniel lifted his chin, facing Hans with all the boldness that had attracted his attention in the first place. “This is the biggest news story of the century. I can’t just keep ignoring it.”
Hans’s eyes flashed. “You can’t? Or you won’t?”
“I have a duty to my subscribers. I’m not about this cover-up conspiracy shit!”
Hans didn’t respond to that, and Daniel felt like he was walking on ice, like the ground was about to fall out beneath him. Something was wrong here. He’d always wondered if Hans was dangerous, what kind of force lay behind the subtle threats and promises.
He had an ominous feeling he was about to find out.
Hans nodded, as if to himself. “Very well, it appears you have outlived your usefulness.” He reached into the inside pocket of his tailored jacket.
Layla surged against the small man holding her. “No!”
Daniel took a nervous step back, away from Pan, away from Hans. He wasn’t sure what was in that pocket, but he was suddenly very certain he didn’t want to know.
“I’ll deal with you later,” Hans said, not looking at her.
Layla snarled, an otherworldly sound. To Daniel’s surprise, she swung around and scratched her captor across the face, leaving four long bloody slices.
How had she done that?
Daniel watched, helpless, as she leapt sideways, twisting around with feline grace to face the invading trio. She crouched in front of him.
“Babe, stay—”
“Head for the window,” Layla growled, arms thrown out. “Get out of here, I’ll follow.”
“But—”
“Now.”
What the hell was happening? he thought as he cast around, looking for an exit. The door was blocked. The window was six stories up.
What was he supposed to do?
Hans interrupted his frantic search with a longsuffering sigh. “Don’t make this worse for yourself, Ghost.”
Layla only growled.
Ghost?
Daniel blinked.
Ghost…
Vagabonds.
“You’re… one of them,” he whispered.
No one responded, but they didn’t need to. Daniel looked at Pan, whose hand had already healed. Then at the slender man who had kicked open his door. Then at Layla, who suddenly made too much sense.
“Tut tut, look what you’ve done now,” Pan said in a singsong voice, flipping the knife again and streaking more blood on the carpet
“Remember, you’ll have to clean that up,” Hans said sharply.
Pan’s smile didn’t shift.
Daniel felt like he’d suddenly fallen down a rabbit hole. Not only were superheroes real, they were in his life, in his fucking apartment. He’d been surrounded by them all along. Dating one of them.
No wonder Hans wanted to cover up those Vagabonds.
They were everywhere!
“This is insane…” he said, looking from Layla to Pan to Hans. “People will find out about this. You can’t keep this quiet.”
“We’ll see about that,” Hans said, withdrawing a small canister. It looked like a perfume bottle, with a locking cap. The liquid inside shimmered like the sun on fresh snow. “Such a pity.”
Daniel took another step back, but his knees hit the couch. He swayed, fighting to stay on his feet. “What’s that?”
“Don’t you dare,” spat Layla in a desperate voice.
Hans shook his head again. “It appears your training was far from sufficient. We’ll have to work on that.” From another pocket, he withdrew a black face covering with twin fittings on either side.
A gas mask.
Layla’s voice was frantic now. “You can’t!”
Daniel cut in on top of her. “Hey, stop it!”
But Hans ignored them both, holding the mask in place with one hand and spraying the bottle with the other.
For a moment, nothing happened. Daniel stood, staring at Layla, wondering why her expression was contorted in rage and horror. He held his breath on instinct, not even sure why he was doing it.
But when the slender boy stepped forward to grab Layla again, he burst out, “Don’t you—”
And then he felt it.
A tightness in his chest.
A sudden flooding of his senses, everything electric, everything on fire.
He staggered back and fell onto the couch, struggling for air, fighting a haze of pain and panic.
“Daniel!” Layla screamed as she was pulled away, but all Daniel saw was Hans’s cold, blue eyes. The eyes of the devil, he thought frantically. The devil he’d sold his soul to.
As Daniel’s body began to fail, between the spasms of suffocating pain, all he felt was regret.
~~~
Layla was crying, but Hans ignored her. These teenage hormones were so terribly troublesome. It was an odious downside of working with live specimens, but he supposed it was just the cost of his business. Pan, at least, watched the scene with the dispassionate detachment he’d trained into her.
She was one of his greatest successes.
“Take her away, Tiny,” Hans said through the mask, gesturing at the small man. Boy, really. At twenty-two, Tiny was one of the first generation, loyal and obedient to a fault. His attributes were a triumph, although Hans wished he had more personal directive.
Layla—or Ghost as she was called in Hans’s inner circle—shrieked and clawed as Tiny dragged her away. It was no use, of course. With a proper grip and undistracted focus, he overpowered her easily. The hall would be empty, courtesy of a generous bribe to the building manager. No one would see Layla bundled into the unmarked van waiting for them in the parking lot, or notice the clean-up team that Pan would lead over the next few hours.
Everything according to plan.
Well, almost everything.
“The video already went out, sir,” Pan said, checking the laptop on the kitchen table, still unlocked. “It’s been watched almost a thousand times already.”
“Delete it,” Hans said, voice still muffled by the gas mask. “Delete the whole channel.”
“People will notice.”
“They will, for a day. But by tomorrow morning there will be something new to talk about. I’ll make sure of it.”
Pan nodded, her fingers clacking on the keyboard.
Standing over the jerking, dying body of the young man, Hans gave himself a moment to feel the loss of yet another valuable resource. Daniel had showed tremendous promise; poor, hungry, desperate for glory. And Hans could have given it to him. He could have made something out of the boy, beyond his wildest dreams.
But those truthful, seditious instincts were a stubborn disease, one so common among the young.
Such a pity.
Hans sighed, careful to keep the mask in place. It wouldn’t hurt his team, but he wasn’t like them. He was quite ordinary, or at least as ordinary as any billionaire ever was. The agent he was now sliding back into his jacket would kill him too if he wasn’t careful.
Of course, Hans was very, very careful.
“Clean this place up,” he said to Pan. “And meet us back at the heliport. The plane is already prepping, so don’t take too long.”
Pan offered a respectful nod as he left. But Hans was already planning his next move, already lost in a sea of schemes and plots. He still had to figure out how he was going to deal with those Vagabonds, not to mention reassert his dominance during the week of media dinners coming up. The industry had to be reminded, or else Daniel might not be the last young star to lose his life in the coming weeks. There was so much at stake, with him in the middle carefully juggling the balls.
Lots to think about, but he had time. Things weren’t dire yet.
Closing the door behind him, Hans drifted down the hall, the YouTuber and his folly already forgotten.
Chapter Two: City Girl
Eliza clutched the steering wheel with a white-knuckle grip, fighting the urge to scream. She wasn’t sure if it was rage, frustration, or terror pounding through her. Maybe some combination of the three. All she knew was that she hated, hated New York City.
“Look out!” Aquila called from behind her, pointing at the biker who had seemingly materialized out of thin air.
Eliza yanked the steering wheel, almost colliding with a grocery supply truck. The driver honked at her.
“Fuck you too!” Eliza shouted, shaking all over.
“I think we’re almost there,” Aquila said with forced calm, consulting his phone.
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
Eliza saw him wince in the rear-view mirror. “That was before the wrong turn.”
“What?”
“Just keep driving.”
Eliza grumbled to herself, trying desperately to keep her temper under control. It had been a long, brutal day in rental van, battling traffic and tolls and her rusty driving skills. But she’d had to remind herself over and over that no matter how stressed she felt, Aquila had it worse. He’d spent the whole six-hour trip crouched in the back, huge, iridescent wings tucked around him, nothing but his own grip to keep him safe (a thought that hadn’t made driving any less stressful). Turns out that there were few cars big enough to accommodate Aquila’s bulk, not to mention his height, so they were stuck with what Moose would have called a pedo-van, if Moose had been home.
Which was the whole reason they were there.
Thinking of that wayward brother, Eliza grit her teeth and focused on the road.
“Why the hell does Joe have to live here?” she muttered. “Why would anyone live here?”
“Art and culture?” Aquila offered.
“Or rampant sadomasochism.”
He snorted, which calmed her a bit.
As a chorus of honks and shouts followed them up fifth avenue, Eliza wondered what had happened to her. She’d grown up in urban areas, an Atlanta native through and through. By the time she was twelve she’d been biking crowded downtown streets, had learned to drive on a twelve-lane highway. She shouldn’t be quivering like she’d just climbed out of icy waters, shouldn’t be using half her energy just to keep herself together.
Focus, she told herself. Focus on the task at hand. Get to Joe’s house. Find Moose. Go home.
Or rather, the Eckelson mansion, which had become her home these past few months.
“Alright,” Aquila said in a nervous voice, as if worried that the wrong word might be the spark that lit Eliza’s fuse. “Take the next left.”
“Left?” Eliza squeaked, glancing over her shoulder. She was in the right lane. There were no openings.
“Sorry, Apple Maps is dumb.”
“Yeah, blame the computer program…”
“I always blame computer programs,” Aquila said, his voice straining to be light. “They’re conniving mofos.
”
Eliza tried once, twice to change lanes. On the third time, she growled “Fuck it” and accelerated in front of a BMW that was much more expensive than the junky van Ian Eckelson had rented for them.
“That’s right,” Eliza snarled as the BMW driver laid on their horn. “Don’t wanna risk your fancy car, do you?”
The petty standoff made her feel better. She’d won something, no matter how small.
It worried her how much that mattered.
“Ok, that should be Joe’s building… there,” Aquila said, pointing in front of them.
“Jesus,” Eliza breathed.
“No kidding.”
The apartment complex was huge and sleek, with wall-to-ceiling windows and tasteful balconies. Eliza almost rear-ended the taxi in front of her as she tried to trace the straight architectural lines all the way to the top.
She couldn’t.
“Bet they have a nice view,” Aquila said, his hand disappearing.
She choked out a laugh. “Understatement of the month right there.” Forcing herself to take a deep, calming breath, she asked, “You ready for this?”
“Yeah,” Aquila said softly, his fingers squeezing her shoulder. “Are you?”
“I’m fine,” she said, convincing neither of them.
She wasn’t fine, hadn’t been fine since the events on Fitzgerald base last October. But at least she could pretend in Scottstown. She knew how to disappear, knew the quiet, private corners of the mansion where she could hyperventilate in peace. Aquila suspected, sure. But Eliza had learned to hide things when Katie died. She’d learned to cope without help. And dammit, she could have kept up the act if Moose hadn’t up and run away to be some big-city hero.
Jerk.
“I think it’s valet parking,” Aquila said.
“Will they even park this thing?”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw him grin. “Let’s test their delicate sensibilities, shall we?”
Breath bursting out in a laugh, Eliza finagled her way into the impossibly tiny parking spot in front of the portico. Reaching over, she hand-cranked the window open, almost laughing at the pinched aversion on the doorman’s face.
