by D. Laine
“Pretty much,” Trent muttered.
I could tell he was getting tired of explaining this nonsense to me, but I didn’t give a damn. This was my life we were talking about. This was my brother and the man I loved at risk of being used by unwanted forces.
Everything and everyone I knew was at risk here.
Except these Preppers didn’t think Jake and Dylan were coming back, regardless of how many times I told them they would. They wouldn’t leave me here. They were practically immortal. They had more lives than a family of cats.
They would be back. Only Sadie believed me, but the others? They would find out soon enough that I was right.
“Dylan knew nothing about this?” I asked Sadie.
“No.” She shook her head somberly. “The agency got to him before the Preppers could. He has no idea what your leader has been planning all along.”
“Had no idea,” Trent muttered from the shadows. When Sadie and I glared at him, he shrugged. “I’m sorry, but he’s dead. They were led into an entire horde of tags, and the Preppers will off the ones who manage to escape.”
“Shut up, Trent,” Sadie snapped. “Matt won’t—”
“Matt’s stuck too far up Calvin’s ass,” Trent replied coolly. “He won’t go against the boss. He won’t risk letting the Watchers come, not even for your brother.”
She lunged to put a stiff finger in Trent’s face. “Just because your brother has apparently made a pact with Lucifer, doesn’t mean you get to take your frustration out on the rest of us. Matt will do the right thing.”
Trent snorted his disbelief. I opened my mouth to ask who exactly Matt was, when a loud thump sounded above me. A muffled shout followed. My spine stiffened, and I forgot all about my question.
No one moved. We eyed each other warily as we waited for another noise.
Nothing.
And then a thunderous boom.
One distant gun shot, and then dozens of them.
Behind me, the tags screeched and wailed. Metal clanged loudly. It sounded as if they were throwing themselves up against the bars like caged monkeys.
Sadie met my panicked gaze with wide eyes. “The compound is under attack.”
Dylan? Jake? The rest of the assassins? I knew they would make it. I started to smile, until I registered the concerned look on Sadie’s face.
“By who?”
I was fully prepared for bad news, but I never expected the answer Trent gave.
“The tags.”
“Tags? But—”
“Lucifer put them on standby weeks ago,” Sadie explained quickly. “We suspected he was assembling numbers to attack the surviving assassins, but we didn’t know when it would happen.”
“It’s happening now,” someone declared.
“They’re putting an end to it,” another added.
“But there aren’t any assassins here,” I reminded them. “They were all sent out. There’s no one here but Spence and the agents.”
“The agents are still descendents of the Watchers,” Trent explained hastily. “They’ve been fooled and manipulated by Spence, but they need to go.”
“We need to get out of here,” Sadie announced.
That was the only thing that made sense to me right now.
An agent sprinted past our cell, yelling over the radio in his hand. I couldn’t make anything out over the tags’ screams echoing off the walls.
“Hey!” Trent banged on the bars. “Let us out!”
The agent stopped and gave us a brusque once-over.
“We can help,” someone else pleaded, “but only if you let us out.”
The agent shook his head and lifted the radio to his mouth. A bloodcurdling scream ripped from the radio before he could say anything, and the sounds of death played out for all of us to hear. When it stopped, the echo of gunshots vibrated through the ceiling, closer. Even louder were the shrill screams of the tags.
They were coming.
Everyone in the cell lunged forward to bang on the bars, myself included.
“Let us out!”
The agent muttered a curse and withdrew a set of keys from his pocket. He tried two with trembling hands before one successfully slipped into the hole. The door swung open with a metallic clatter. Trent rushed out to grab the agent’s gun, and another guy took the keys.
“Come on.” Sadie yanked on my hand, forcing me to follow the others.
I glanced over my shoulder as Trent manhandled the agent into the cell. The other guy approached with the key, but Trent shook his head. Then he lifted his gun.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the same time he fired. The boom thundered through the narrow corridor, and everyone stopped. But not because they were disgusted by Trent’s actions, as I was.
We couldn’t get out.
“It’s locked!” someone shouted.
The guy with the keys shouldered by me on his way to the door. Trent took up position behind me with the gun, his hard eyes watching the dark corridor, where the tags screeched from their cells. As eager as I was to leave this level behind, apprehension danced across the back of my neck as I studied Trent.
Even if he didn’t remind me of Tanner, I would never trust this guy.
For now, we were on the same side. Once the door was opened, we took a collective step toward freedom. Above us, an unknown number of deadly, hungry obstacles stood in our way.
The number of gunshots and screams funneled to us had diminished significantly over the past several minutes. The growls, grumbles, and sounds of tearing flesh grew louder as we ascended the stairs.
Ahead of me, six Preppers led the way with Trent now at the front with the only weapon in our arsenal. Sadie walked with me, her hand gripping mine as tightly as I gripped hers.
I didn’t doubt she took as much comfort from me as I did from her. I couldn’t help but be reminded of her brother in her presence, and I suspected I provided her with a similar sense of familiarity.
We climbed four levels without incident, bypassing the shouts and screams we heard on the other side of the doors we passed. That changed when we reached the third level.
The door leading to the command center was propped open by a body sprawled on the floor. The agent’s mangled corpse forced the Preppers to climb single file past the doorway, each darting a wary glance into the corridor before scampering up the next level of stairs.
The gun that lay under the dead agent was swiped by the man behind Trent. Both had nearly reached the next landing before it was my turn to pass. My foot barely hit the first step when a bloody hand darted through the doorway to snatch me. Big arms folded around me, hauling me into the corridor, as another hand covered my mouth.
I recognized the arms of the man who had me, and bucked against him in spite of knowing I had never succeeded in escaping this particular hold in all the time we had trained together. With little effort on his part, Tanner threw me against the wall. In his hand was a long-bladed knife smeared with blood. My eyes bulged when I saw it approaching my neck.
“He’s turned on us all. I need your blood,” he muttered in a poor attempt to explain why he was about to kill me.
I drove a knee up into his groin. His hand slipped from my mouth, but I thought better of screaming for help. I heard tags somewhere in the corridor behind him. Screaming would only guarantee a worse death.
I clawed at Tanner’s arms and face with my nails. Blood bubbled up from the wounds I inflicted, but his knife-holding arm never wavered. My arms shook from the effort of trying to keep the blade from cutting into my skin.
His focus on getting what he wanted from me blinded him to the knife intended for his own neck. Sadie’s stab came swiftly from behind him. He dropped his weapon, both hands moving to cover his slashed carotid. Blood pumped between his fingers as he stared at me. His mouth opened and closed like a fish trying to breath on land. A gurgling noise spurted from his mouth before he fell to the floor at my feet.
He didn’t move.
“You
okay?” Sadie asked me.
I nodded, unable to muster the words to answer her. Unable to take my eyes off of Tanner.
“Grab his knife,” Sadie told me. “We have to go. The others are gone.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. We need to find them.”
She flew out the door. I pried the knife from Tanner’s lifeless fingers, and followed. We both skidded to stop at the sight of the three tags assembled on the stairs above us. Their mouths dropped open to emit a hair-raising chorus of screeches at the sight of us.
I turned to run, but froze when Sadie grabbed my arm.
“Stay still,” she instructed me under her breath.
Fear paralyzed me when the tags advanced on us. I backed against the wall, knife held at my side, when one tag leaned into me. Another sniffed Sadie’s hair, and I couldn’t help but think of some show I had seen on National Geographic, where a lion licked and played with its prey moments before devouring it. The weapon in her hand rattled, but she remained perfectly still—as she had encouraged me to do.
My gaze dropped to stare at the shoes of the tag examining me, and fixated on the splashes of red dotting the shoelaces. Its tattered jeans were stained crimson from its ankles to its knees, and I wondered how many people it had killed.
Did it eat them all? Or did it merely enjoy the thrill of the kill?
Would it hurt when it killed me?
Its face nuzzled my neck and it sniffed. Pressed close to my ear, it shrieked. I bit my tongue to keep from screaming.
Then it was gone.
The tags raced down the stairs in search of other prey, leaving Sadie and me to sag against the wall. I watched until they were out of sight.
“How—how did you know?” I breathed.
“I didn’t,” she admitted. “But I hoped.”
“What?” I whirled around on her.
“If we would have fought them, they would have killed us,” she explained quickly. “I hoped if we let them smell us, they would recognize us.”
“Recognize us?”
“As one of them,” she answered. “We’re tagged, like they are. They can smell it in our blood. Now, come on. I don’t want to chance a repeat. We might not get lucky again.”
I followed her up the stairs in a half daze, her words tumbling around in my head as I struggled to make sense of them.
They could sense that I was tagged like them? Is that why Tanner said he needed my blood? Had he intended to cover himself with my scent to get out of the compound alive? As troublesome as those thoughts were, an even more devastating realization slammed into me.
This one nearly cut my legs out from under me, and I gripped the railing for support.
The tag that killed David? I understood now. It bypassed me and went after him because it had smelled the tainted blood flowing in my veins. It had considered me one of them.
How much was I like them? I didn’t feel anything . . . different. I certainly didn’t have cannibalistic tendencies. How much of the blood flowing through me controlled who I was?
My concerned thoughts—and my growing list of questions—were momentarily forgotten when we reached the top level of the compound. The heavy door that was supposed to protect us from the outside had been left swung wide open. Dead agents and Air Force soldiers littered the ground.
Sadie stopped to swipe two guns. She confirmed they were loaded before handing one to me. “Come on,” she urged. “We need to find the others.”
The sky was especially dark. Without the aid of the moon or stars to guide us, we were searching blindly. We had no way of knowing where the others had gone.
“Do you have a meeting place?” I whispered to Sadie as we darted between two buildings.
“We have a hideout,” she answered. “But it’s too far to travel on foot. Especially at night.”
Shouts and heinous screeches rose behind us. Too close for comfort.
“We need somewhere to hide until morning,” I suggested.
Sadie stopped and turned to me. “Where?”
There was only one place I could think of to hide. I remembered where it was. I only hoped I could find it in the dark.
I took her hand in mine. “Come with me.”
26
DYLAN
I didn’t trust these Preppers. If what they told us was true, we were flirting with our own fates by joining them. Calvin promised to help us, but I had my reservations about his sincerity. For now, we agreed on a common goal: get Thea and their people, including my sister, out of the agency. For that reason alone, I agreed on a temporary alliance.
“You do realize they’re going to kill us,” Maria snarled in my ear from the back seat of the car.
“They can try,” Jake muttered from the driver’s seat. His gaze flicked to the rearview mirror, where the headlights of the car behind us reflected in his hard eyes.
I turned around and glimpsed the three vehicles that followed us—all filled with Preppers and a whole hell of a lot of weapons. “We’ll figure something out once we get Thea and my sister back.”
“We’ll figure something out?” Maria mocked. “They’re not going to give us the chance to—they’re using us! You do realize that, don’t you?”
I thumped back into my seat. “Yeah, I’m well aware of that.”
“Once they get what they want—once they get into the agency and get their little tagged weapons back in their control—they won’t need us. We’re basically on a suicide mission because your little girlfriend—”
I flew around, half launching myself into the back seat, and growled, “Carefully choose your next words, Maria.”
“Easy. We’re all on the same side here.” Marcus grabbed me by the shoulders and somewhat eased me back into my seat. Then he turned to his sister and muttered, “Your mouth is going to get you killed one of these days.”
“Are we?” Ignoring Marcus, I glared at Maria. “Are we on the same side?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
“You’ve had it out for Thea since day one,” I reminded her. “Now that you know what we are and what the mark behind her ear really means . . .”
“I’m still the same as you.” She jabbed a finger in my face. “And Jake. And my brother. It’s us I’m worried about. We’re the ones the Preppers won’t need once we rescue her. We’re the ones who will be a danger to them.”
“Well, Thea technically falls under that label of them now, doesn’t she?” I paused to narrow my eyes. “That kind of makes her your enemy, doesn’t it?”
Maria folded her arms over her chest. “What is it you think I’m going to do, Dylan?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But I want to know I can count on you to have our backs.”
“I have your back,” she told me. “I’ve had your back for ten goddamn years!”
I studied her face, twisted with a mixture of annoyance, sincerity, and something else that I couldn’t quite place. I wanted to believe she wouldn’t do something stupid, but I had to be sure. “And Thea?” I pressed.
Maria’s eyes flicked to the back of Jake’s head, and she nodded reluctantly. “She is your partner. For now.”
That was the closest to acceptance I was going to get from Maria. Too exhausted to push her for more, I nodded and settled back into my seat. Maria may not like Thea, but she would do the right thing. She would participate in this rescue mission, even if it left her exposed and vulnerable in the end.
Shit, Maria was right. There were twelve of those fucking ninjas piled into the cars behind us. Though I hadn’t really seen them in action yet, I suspected they were well trained. Taking them on wasn’t going to be easy.
But first, we had to get Thea and my sister out of the agency.
My sister. I still couldn’t believe it. My skin prickled with nervous excitement as we approached the base, knowing she was close. She had been there for the past week, right under my feet, and I’d had no idea.
Fucking
Spence—aka Lucifer. I checked my gun, confirming that it was fully loaded. One of those bullets had his name on it.
“You ready for this?”
I turned to find Jake’s eyes on me and gave him a terse nod. He eased his foot off the gas and pulled to the side of the road. The other vehicles followed.
The agency lay just on the other side of the hill in front of us. Behind us, the sun barely touched the horizon. We approached quietly under the cover of near-darkness, the twelve Preppers flanking the four of us. Then we crested the hill to spy the agency in the basin below and I forgot all about the guns aimed at my back.
Orange flames flicked from the building that marked the entrance to the agency’s underground compound. Black smoke rose through the ash, making it appear as thick as the shit we had walked through in Montana. The glow from the fire illuminated dozens of bodies that littered the ground inside the gate. Several more darted between the outbuildings. Shouts and the occasional echo of gunfire drifted toward us. But the familiar eerie screeches dominated it all.
“Jesus,” Marcus muttered from behind me. “How many of them are there?”
Hundreds. Or there had been that many. The sheer number of bodies on the ground suggested that the flyboys had gunned a lot of them down, but the tags had still taken the base.
“This is Lucifer’s work,” Robbie declared from her position beside me. “He sent them to eliminate the rest of the Watchers’ vessels.”
“We still have people in there,” Calvin reminded us. “This doesn’t change anything.”
My stomach jumped into my throat as I stepped around two dead tags that lay at my feet. “Let’s go get them.”
“Dylan—”
“I said, let’s go, Maria!” I didn’t bother to look over my shoulder as I hustled down the embankment. The gunfire that erupted behind me assured me that the Preppers had followed.
Tags dropped like bowling pins as we rolled over them. Through the chaos, I heard Calvin barking out orders to his team. Sure it made more sense to secure the area, but I had only one goal in mind and that wasn’t it.
