by D. Laine
I sprang awake, fetching my clothes from the floor—where just hours ago, Dylan had stripped them from my body with soft diligence. He had been different.
The same in many ways . . . but different. He had touched me like he was memorizing my every detail. He had kissed me slowly like he knew it would be the last. When his hips sank into mine, he had reminded me that he loved me.
I had refused to accept the feeling that it was his way of saying goodbye. But this morning, I was assured of that.
Jake’s suite was silent. Empty. My brother was also gone.
I slowly pushed open the door to Dylan’s suite. The sensation of emptiness slammed into me, tripping up my heart. I tiptoed into his bedroom anyway. Just in case.
His bag was gone. As were his weapons.
A small white paper lay on the top of the bed, and I lifted it with trembling fingers. Through blurry eyes, I read his last words.
Thea –
I’m sorry I didn’t wake you to say goodbye, but I couldn’t risk you putting yourself in harm’s way. We need to do this without you. I’m going to do everything in my power to come back to you. If we fail, stay low. Ride it out. I don’t know what will happen, but you should be safe in the compound. These last few days with you have been the best days of my life, and I meant everything I’ve said to you.
I’ll see you soon –
Dylan
I folded the paper and placed it in my pocket. As I palmed away the tears, a shiver ran up the length of my spine. Partially from disappointment and fear for Dylan and Jake, but also from something else. Something unexpected. Something closing in.
Awareness tickled the back of my neck and the air grew thick around me.
I wasn’t alone.
They moved first, capturing me by the waist before I could run. The strength of my attacker momentarily paralyzed me as a damp cloth was placed over my nose and mouth. I had no choice but to breathe in the sour substance that saturated it.
As my legs grew weak beneath me, a pointy chin pressed into my shoulder and a familiar voice growled in my ear.
“Stupid bitch.”
Tanner?
I tried to struggle, but the drug had already taken effect. My body failed me, and seconds before my mind followed, my faceless attacker ensured that my spirit broke as well.
“Your boyfriend won’t be back to fight for you this time.”
21
DYLAN
Thirteen agency-issued vehicles parked alongside the cars left abandoned on the highway. Ahead of us loomed a dark tunnel. Towering above us, the Rocky Mountains. Snow and ash coated the ground, combining to form a wet cement-like layer of goo to hike through in order to reach our destination.
I had only been to western Colorado once before, and it had been cold as fuck then. Now, the heavy coat I pulled around me offered little protection from the bitter temperature. I tugged the beanie down over my ears before checking my weapons. The agency’s eyepiece communications device went on last.
“I still don’t see the point of wearing these,” I muttered to the Ringer twins, who had assembled beside Jake, Marcus, Maria, and myself. Of the fifty-two assassins on this mission, they were the five I felt most confident going into battle with.
“Let’s keep the chatter to a minimum,” a voice barked through the earpiece. Spence. Of course, he was commanding this mission himself—from the safety of the compound. “The tunnel is a mile and a half long, but sound will travel. Communicate with hand signals, eliminate any small enemy presence quietly and efficiently. Today is the day you will fulfill your destinies. Go get some.”
Maria covered a snort with her hand in response to the boss’s poor attempt at rallying the troops. I had to give him some credit for trying, but we didn’t really need it. We had this. We’d had ten years to prepare for this.
No communication was needed. We automatically fell into formation as we marched into the tunnel. Jake and I took point as the number one team, with the rest of the assassins stacked shoulder to shoulder around us. With Jake to my left and Marcus to my right, I felt indestructible.
There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that Lucifer’s vessel was going down tonight. Ideally, by my hand.
It was exceptionally dark inside the tunnel. I finally found a use for the agency’s eyewear when I switched on the night vision. The tunnel walls and the two-lane road lit up in bright green. My arms, holding my gun in front of me, reflected back in red from the built-in thermal detection.
I supposed the gadget Spence insisted on us wearing wasn’t entirely useless.
Too bad it didn’t pick up low volume sounds, or even fine tremors in the ground. Then we might have detected the stampede of tags before it was too late. We were nearly to the halfway point by the time we realized we had company. A big welcoming party, from the sound of it.
“Command,” Jake whispered into his device. “Can we get a satellite confirmation on the incoming threat?”
Our group slowed as the crescendo of screams, growls, and mumbles funneling to us multiplied.
“I don’t need the satellite to tell me it’s a lot,” Marcus predicted quietly.
“Command,” Jake tried again. “Come in. We need visual assistance—”
A piercing hiss of static rang in my ear, forcing me to yank the communications device clear. The eyepiece stayed on, and I glimpsed the first red dot in the distance, growing bigger and closer by the second.
All around me, assassins protested the same sharp hissing noise. A few ground their audio device with the heel of their boots to make the noise stop. Others tried calling out to the agency, but it was obvious we had been disconnected.
“Command?” Jake barked over the static. “Are you there?”
A gnawing sense of dread settled in my gut. “They’re not going to answer, Jake,” I concluded.
“We need to retreat,” another assassin suggested. “Reestablish satellite connection near the entrance.”
Others murmured their agreement while I shook my head. I always thought I had pretty good intuition, but I should have seen this coming sooner. The signs had been there. Right under my fucking nose, and I hadn’t seen them.
Assassins not returning from supposedly easy missions. The agency’s piss-poor intel. The line drawn between assassins and agents. Spence’s indifference.
The satellite wasn’t the reason we lost communications. Something I didn’t want to believe, but couldn’t deny, was the problem. Catching the scowl on Maria’s face, I knew I wasn’t the only one who had come to the conclusion that we had been led into a trap.
An excellent one, I might add.
“Fucking Spence,” Maria spat. “I never did like that asshole.”
“But why?” Marcus wondered. “What’s the point of getting us all killed?”
“We’ll ask him when we get out of this mess,” Jake replied quickly. To the other assassins, he ordered, “Fall back.”
The red blob rolled closer—close enough now to discern dozens of man-sized shapes. Row upon row of them.
“We can’t fall back,” someone called from the rear.
“Defensive positions,” another ordered. “Incoming from the west!”
“We’re surrounded,” Maria growled.
I ripped the gadget from my head and peered directly into the small green light that confirmed the agency could still see me. “You watching this, Spence? I hope you enjoy the show, because when I get out of here, I’m coming for you.”
“Form a line,” Jake barked over the roar of the first wave of tags to reach us.
I put the gadget over my eyes just in time to see a blur of red surround me.
They hit us from both sides. Hard. The agency had done a hell of a job ensuring we had little chance of getting out of this tunnel alive.
Sounds of death echoed all around me, giving me the impression that Spence’s plan was working. I heard every fatal bite, every scream, and every last breath of my comrades. The guys and girls I had trained with,
lived with, and grown up with were dying by his hand. Not directly, but he was responsible.
And I had left Thea with him. I wondered if he had killed her yet, or if he was waiting to make sure Jake and I were eliminated first. I didn’t really have the time to be as impacted by that revelation as I should have been. I never would have the time, because I would be joining her in death soon enough.
I realized that, with a sharp sense of awareness, but accepting my fate didn’t mean I would lay my weapons down. Hell, no. I was a fucking assassin. I would fight until the last breath.
A few yards away, Keith and Kent climbed onto the elevated walkway that ran the length of the tunnel. They fired arrows into the swarm of tags in rapid succession like a couple of modern day Robin Hoods.
Beside me, Jake sliced his long blade through a tag’s neck. A few steps behind him, Maria planted a foot into the stomach of one that got a little too close. She fired a shot over her shoulder while Marcus finished off the tag Maria had spilled on the ground.
Other assassins were out there—I heard them fighting to the very end—but the six of us created an impenetrable wall. The pile of bodies around us served as our moat. When our castle fell, we would go down together.
Our destruction sounded inevitable from the deafening roar that rolled toward us in the tunnel. I couldn’t even tell which direction it came from. It was that loud.
“More tags coming,” Maria grunted in between swings with her blade.
No one responded. We recognized our fate. There was no way out of this.
The agency would win and whatever they were orchestrating would be seen through.
And Thea . . .
“You think there’s an afterlife?” I yelled to Jake, around the two gnashing tags between us.
He sunk a short dagger into one of the tag’s eyes before glancing up at me. “What?”
“You know, an afterlife,” I repeated with a grunt, narrowly avoiding some pointy teeth. “A place where we’ll all be together again.”
“I don’t know.” He swung, decapitating two tags with one swing. “I’m trying not to leave this life.”
I peered the length of the tunnel. The approaching tags were nothing but a moving red blur—a never-ending stream of them. My gaze met Jake’s briefly.
“There has to be an afterlife,” I muttered. “We’re fighting against hell. Theoretically, there should be another side. I’m not saying I believe in heaven. I’m not saying I don’t—”
I grunted when my blade got stuck in the skull of a particularly beefy tag. Another barreled toward me, so I sacrificed my favorite close quarters weapon in favor of something equally sharp and deadly. This one sliced through the tag’s neck like warm butter.
It was now my new favorite weapon.
“I just think, with all this evidence in front of us, that there has to be something after this ends.” I jabbed at an advancing tag, sending him straight to hell with a flick of my wrist.
As I watched him convulse on the ground at my feet, I realized it was suddenly too quiet. Not completely quiet—not with the horde of tags racing closer—but quieter.
Glancing up, I saw only one Ringer brother still standing. I had no idea if I was looking at Keith or Kent, but a mob of hungry mouths had him surrounded. Beyond him, there was no one left.
Only a sea of tags.
I spun to look for Jake, but he was gone. So was Maria.
“Jake!” I yelled. Catching Marcus’s panicked gaze, I asked, “Where are they? What happened?”
“Up,” he grunted between slashes at the mob of tags surrounding him.
I glanced in the direction Marcus hinted, and saw two red dots zipping toward the heavens I had just been blabbering about. A second later, a ruddy streak dropped in front of me. A blonde with a ninja mask covering half of her face yanked the eyepiece off my head and tossed it to the ground. A faint light appeared above us, illuminating us in an eerie glow as she looped a cord around my waist and tugged it tight.
Over her head, I watched another masked ninja lasso Marcus. Beyond them, the shadowy wave of tags had nearly reached us. Both ninjas rose their hands, giving the universal sign for “okay,” and I suddenly realized what was happening.
They weren’t angels escorting us through the pearly gates.
“Wait!” I shouted. I turned to look for the Ringers, but I couldn’t find either of them in the chaos. The platform they had been standing on had been completely overrun by tags. And most of them were preoccupied with something I couldn’t see on the ground. Several had blood on their chins.
The girl spun me around. “It’s too late for anyone else,” she told me.
Then I flew.
22
THEA
The sounds—those high-pitched, alien shrieks that had dominated my nightmares for weeks—reached me long before the darkness lifted. I couldn’t see a damn thing, but I heard them. The synapses to my legs fired, but nothing below the waist worked. My mouth apparently worked fine though, and I let out a scream.
“Shh.” A hand materialized out of the darkness and landed on my shoulder. “You’re okay. You’re just coming out of it. You’re okay.”
My eyelids peeled open—or so I thought, but I still couldn’t see. I sucked in a breath, building another scream in my throat, when I glimpsed a blur of movement above me. An unfamiliar face drifted out of the shadows and into my line of sight.
“They can’t get you,” the voice assured me softly. “You’re okay.”
I blinked a few times to focus my eyes on the face hovering over me. It belonged to a girl. One with dark hair and light eyes—or that was how they appeared in the tiny bit of light that filtered in from somewhere behind me.
She leaned above me where I lay on the cold, hard floor. As my vision adjusted, I noticed several more faces lurking in the shadows behind her. None of them were snarling or salivating at the sight of the easy meal I offered, so I swallowed my next scream.
“We’re separated from them,” the girl explained slowly, “but the sound echoes down here. They sound closer than they are.” Her hand moved over my shoulder soothingly. “You’re okay.”
As many times as she had told me that, I didn’t feel okay. Something had gone terribly wrong—I just didn’t know what. Or how. Or why.
“Can you sit up?” She prompted me with a gentle tug on my arm.
“I—I—” My teeth chattered, either from fear or the cold. Maybe a combination of both.
Where in the hell was I?
I pushed upright shakily, but the new, improved view didn’t offer me any answers. Half a dozen sets of eyes stared at me from over the girl’s head.
“What’s your name?” she asked me.
“Th—Thea.”
She offered a comforting smile, and I realized that I liked her. The others I wasn’t so sure about yet.
“I’m Sadie,” she offered.
I jerked my head up and down. I would say it was nice to meet her, but I wasn’t so sure nice was the appropriate word to use.
“Where am I?” I asked, attempting to look for the answer over my shoulder.
Steel bars and three walls enclosed us. I couldn’t see the tags, only hear them. Bars or not, they sounded too close. And it sounded like a lot of them. Maybe not as many as I had seen before, but enough to keep me in a constant state of unease.
“We’re on the seventh level of the agency,” Sadie explained, as if I understood where that was.
I didn’t. Nothing in that sentence made sense. Except . . . well, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that had been Tanner’s voice in my ear earlier, but it sure had sounded like him. Had he brought me down here?
“What’s going on? Why—”
“The agency is corrupt,” a deep voice answered from the shadows.
I blinked to find the source, but only found a bunch of eyes staring at me. Any one of them could have been the one behind the voice.
I questioned no one in particular. “What does that mean?�
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“You’re lucky is what that means,” another voice grumbled.
“We’ll explain everything to you. I promise. But first . . .” Sadie’s brow furrowed as she studied me. “Who is your twin?”
“Um . . .” I shook my head to clear all the clustered thoughts in my head. This was an easy question to answer. “Jake.”
“Jake Walker?” someone wondered.
Had I imagined his shock? Looking into Sadie’s wide eyes, I didn’t think so.
I swallowed hard. “Yes. Jake Walker.”
A number of voices murmured. I picked out a few phrases like “that sucks,” “too bad,” and “we’re fucked.” One stood out from the others.
“So you’re her?”
My eyes narrowed on the shapes hovering in the shadows. I really hated not being able to see them. “What?”
“You’re the last one. The one they were looking for.” A young man stepped forward, into the light. One I recognized.
I choked on a strangled scream. My feet kicked out to scoot me across the floor. It didn’t even dawn on me that I was moving closer to the bars, toward the tags. Not with Tanner’s face peering down at me.
I clambered to my feet and my hands fisted at my sides. Sadie jumped up between us and placed a comforting hand on my shoulder.
“His name is Trent,” she supplied quickly. “He’s not who you think he is. He’s one of us.”
I stared at the Tanner/Trent face with familiar piercing blue eyes squinting at me. Only now could I detect the slight differences. This one had longer hair, a slimmer frame, and harder eyes—as impossible as that was to believe.
“I take it you’ve met my brother,” he muttered.
I really hated that this whole organization was made up of people who all looked alike.
“I’m pretty sure he was the one who put me in here,” I supplied.
Trent nodded glumly and his eyes shifted to the floor. His lips pursed, and I suspected I wasn’t going to get an explanation. No one offered one, and silence descended over the small cell.
