“Mason, here.”
“Get up to Morrell’s main compound ASAP. Dimitriou and Castillo have been killed. Hits, both.”
One thing Gregg liked about Mason—he could think on his feet and didn’t waste time or let obstacles stop him.
“Yessir. I’ll leave Naples in charge here. We’ve breached and are clearing now. Should be mostly mop-up.”
“I’ll meet you there.” Gregg hung up.
Kinsey blocked his path. “I’m coming with you.”
“I need someone to coordinate here.”
“Petra can handle it. I’ve already sent for her.” Kinsey’s craggy face brooked no arguments.
“Fine. Wear body armor—including a helmet. I don’t want to lose you, too.”
“You, too. Half-travel mode won’t save you from a traitor getting you when you think you’re safe.”
The idea that someone might be a traitor burned through Gregg. “It damned well better not have been an inside job,” he snarled. “If I find out it was, the culprits will wish they’d never been born. I’ll make them suffer in ways they can’t even begin to imagine.”
Everybody in the room stared at him, the tension thick. His gaze scraped over each of them. Most paled, and a few turned green like they were going to be sick.
Kinsey was not so easily cowed. One of the reasons Gregg trusted him. He told the truth as he saw it and didn’t sugarcoat it. “If someone wanted to make a big play, taking you down and grabbing up Morrell’s holdings would be the way,” he said, drawing Gregg’s attention. “Chances are their intent is to lure you out from cover, but they could easily have a plant inside, or it’s possible one of us decided they want to be the one giving orders.”
Gregg couldn’t imagine who. He made a point of doing right by his people. He wanted to get their loyalty willingly, not scare it out of them. He’d always thought it made for a stronger organization. Maybe he’d been too soft. Maybe he could learn a thing from Savannah.
The thought surprised him. A question to ponder later. Now he had to get up to Savannah’s compound and salvage the operation.
“I’ve got Crockett and Tubbs out there,” Gregg said, referring to Bruno and Randall. “They’ve got a stake in keeping me alive. They’ll make sure no one stabs me in the back.”
Kinsey scowled but didn’t object. Not that Gregg would listen. He had work to do. He was about to take on Clay, Riley, and her family. He only hoped he didn’t have to kill them all.
CITY TRAFFIC MOVED like sludge. Gregg fought the urge to travel to the compound and leave his entourage to catch up. It took a good hour to even get close. They stopped and parked and hotfooted it the last mile. Gregg was accompanied by Randall and Bruno, Kinsey, and a dozen soldiers. Each was well-shielded against magic and wearing body armor. Gregg slipped halfway into dreamspace, where bullets couldn’t touch him.
The neighborhood surrounding Savannah’s estate was all too familiar. Was it only days ago Savannah had let him loose from her prison with the null around his wrist? It seemed like a year. Taylor and that bastard Dalton had rescued him that night as he’d run from his waiting enemies. Now he was their enemy. That seemed wrong, too.
A blinding pain knifed through his head. Gregg staggered and caught himself against a tree trunk, his body solidifying as he jerked out of dreamspace.
“Boss?” Kinsey asked. “Something wrong?”
Gregg dropped to his knees, grabbing his head in both hands. An animal sound erupted from him. Hands hooked under his arms and lifted him.
“Let’s get him out of here,” Kinsey said.
“No,” Gregg rasped. “On to Savannah’s.” The pain in his head receded slightly, allowing him to think. “I’ll be fine.”
Kinsey gave him a doubtful look but just nodded, redeploying half their soldiers to take point, with the other half watching their flanks. He fell in beside Gregg with Randall and Bruno just behind.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Don’t know.”
“You should get checked out.”
He should. By Cass. The moment the thought flickered into his mind, pain speared through his skull again. His sight went black. He continued to walk blindly forward, even as his gorge rose and his balls shriveled up inside his body. The hurt should have dropped him into unconsciousness. Somewhere he knew that. But it didn’t, and so he was forced to feel it. Forced to endure.
“Maybe later,” he said vaguely in answer to Kinsey’s comment. “After we get this business settled.” He waved ahead of him, hoping he was gesturing in the right direction.
“I’ll remind you.”
“You do that.”
When he focused back on their mission, the pain receded. If he tried to think about why, it came back, so he didn’t. Not now.
Getting to their frontline command center was relatively easy. Before they’d been killed, Dimitriou and Castillo had set up a phalanx to make sure they had a clear path to safely come and go and bring in supplies. Gregg’s soldiers made sure that interlopers didn’t trespass into the territory they’d staked out. Not alive, anyhow. Gunshots perforated the day, echoing off the mountains. All the same, they walked right in without incident.
The command post had been established across the street from Savannah’s estate on the parklike backyard of another big estate. The redbrick wall had been knocked over and some of the debris piled to create a makeshift bunker. Nulls and binders didn’t stop conventional attacks.
Behind it sat a semi, its trailer serving as a mobile command unit. Several tables with a scatter of notepads, cell phones, weapons, and an assortment of magical items. Several people spoke on phones and others on radios. A substantial arsenal had been organized inside an area fenced in by vans stuffed with supplies and gear. A wall tent had been erected just beyond to hold bodies.
Parked behind the still-standing section of wall were an array of vehicles, including a dozen four-wheelers and snowmobiles.
Gregg glanced over the setup and then eyed the open expanse behind. A hundred yards away behind a screen of trees, he could see the gray tile roof of the mansion that belonged to the wall and grounds.
“Sir!” A dark-skinned, iron-jawed woman with a short high-and-tight jarhead haircut trotted down the stairs of the semitrailer.
Gregg had to search his memory for her name. Strange. He was usually much better with details and prided himself on remembering names. He finally dug it up out of the depths of his brain. Angel Curtis from San Diego. She was smart and disciplined and loyal. Former Marine. Dimitriou had relied on her a lot.
“What’s the situation, Curtis?”
She’d caught his look at the empty snowfield behind them. Dozens of tracks crisscrossed it.
“We cleared the house and set sentries and UPMs. Shouldn’t have any problems with that back door.”
UPM stood for Urban Perimeter Mine. There were any number of varieties. Generally they would send up warning signals when the perimeter was broken by mundane or magic means, plus either temporarily freeze intruders in place, or otherwise disable them. They had to be set in overlapping patterns and spread over a band of at least twenty feet in order to be effective, since the magic they expended wore out within a few minutes. A handful of sentries could take out any intruders before they made it through the band, protecting vulnerable flanks while freeing up man power for forward action. They were useful in a lot of urban situations when you didn’t want a lot of carnage.
“Mason get here?”
Curtis shook her head. “Not yet, sir.”
“What’s our status?”
“Magic’s up and working, but that null they used crippled us. And then there’s that.”
She gestured back to Savannah’s. It took a moment for Gregg to see what she was talking about. A wire net rose just on the out
side of the wall. It shot up a good thirty feet and then curved outward. The filaments were so fine they looked like fishing line. The work of Riley’s half brothers, no doubt.
“It’s sharp. Put a hand on it and it slices you to the bone,” Curtis said. “It’s covered in razor barbs as well. Looks like Savannah’s people joined forces and are making a united stand. They didn’t suffer from the null blast. They were expecting it.”
“We get anybody inside?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded, considering. Time was getting far too short for comfort. His deadline was looming. It was time to bring in the big guns. Literally.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, and laid out his plan. His goal was to breach the metal net in so many places that the brothers couldn’t rebuild it before Gregg’s team could deploy enough binders, which they’d start putting into place immediately. After that, he’d send in an army of people with mundane weapons to overwhelm the defenders. He had an entire army already staging just outside of the city limits, not far from Savannah’s, all courtesy of Jackson Tyrell.
As the name crossed his consciousness, a spasm ran through his brain, shaking him to his fingertips, almost like a mini seizure. He shied from thinking about it. He couldn’t afford the distraction of the pain.
“Kinsey—start moving the rest of our forces up here.” He glanced at the field behind him. “This place should work for staging. Let the sentries know you’re coming and have them dismantle the UPMs. Curtis—when Mason gets here, you two get a deployment plan and move everything into place. I want to strike in no more than two hours, so hustle. There’ll be bonuses all around when we get this done. In the meantime, I want you to gather a strike squad and bring four of the big binders.”
“What are you going to do, Boss?” Kinsey asked with a worried frown.
The corner of Gregg’s mouth lifted in an unpleasant half smile. “I’m going to do a little reconnaissance.” The perks of being a traveller. He could slide partway into dreamspace and walk through Savannah’s compound like a ghost. All he had to do was make a hole in the perimeter. With luck, he could find Riley’s brothers. Taking them out of the picture would definitely better the odds in Gregg’s favor.
Having their marching orders, Curtis and Kinsey swung into high gear, galvanizing their people to action. Mason arrived on a snowmobile as Curtis and the six-member strike squad joined Gregg. Bruno and Randall tagged along.
He knew exactly where he wanted to hit. A scenic corner in the back of Savannah’s compound made the perfect entry point for him. A wide creek ran under the wall on one side, and back out on the other. A footbridge led across to a private gazebo where Savannah sometimes entertained, or more likely, her staff fucked their clients.
The corner was about as far from the main house as it was possible to be, and Gregg was willing to bet it wasn’t well guarded.
He was right.
Running water eroded magic. This part of the security wall should have been getting recharged a couple times a week. He was willing to bet it hadn’t been charged since before Savannah’s death, which made it a weak link. He couldn’t make a full-on assault here, but he could get himself through.
Curtis ordered the four big binders put into place, then waited for Gregg’s signal. He nodded to her and turned to Bruno and Randall. “Have a cup of coffee, boys. I’ll be back.”
Before they could protest, he slid halfway into dreamspace and strode through the wall. As he’d expected, the binders worked like a charm. They wouldn’t last more than fifteen or twenty seconds, but it didn’t matter. He’d breached the security wall. Now he could travel with impunity.
He stepped fully into dreamspace, porting himself into the room where Savannah had held him prisoner. It was empty, the door open. Not that a locked door would have mattered to him now. He returned to ghost mode. Nobody would see him, and he’d see and hear everything.
Before he could move, he flickered and solidified. Maybe there were binder fields at play somewhere in the mansion. He summoned more magic and stabilized himself.
Drifting purposefully through walls, he began his search of the mansion. The upper floors with the bedrooms were largely empty. The main two floors bustled. The squatters had established their command center in the small ballroom. People hunched over banks of computers, some watching security footage, others scanning the web and social media for helpful information. Others messaged informants, while a bank of four wore headphones, typing and talking at the same time as they coordinated outside the compound.
At a long table in the middle of the room sat Savannah’s lieutenants. Taylor stood at the head of the table. She spoke with firmness and control. She looked comfortable leading them, and while she treated them with respect, she made it clear she was running the show.
Gregg couldn’t deny he was impressed, not to mention incredibly turned on. Was there anything more sexy than a beautiful woman with strength and smarts? Not to mention eyes that could drive a man to his knees.
Down, boy, he told himself. Even if being Riley’s sister didn’t put her way off-limits, she was the enemy.
A sly voice whispered back in his mind: She’s a grown woman—why should she be off-limits? Why not take her prisoner and work out a mutually delicious deal for parole?
The idea whirled in his mind, overwhelming his senses. He tried to push it away, but it netted him, sending pulsing waves of desire rushing through him. His cock hardened and strained at his pants. Even halfway into dreamspace, he could feel the aching need for release.
Take her. Snatch her right now. Haul her upstairs and bed her. Ride her hard. Drive her wild until she’s begging. You know you want to. You’ve always wanted to. The sly voice urged, stroking his primitive desire higher.
Gregg felt himself starting to flicker again. He summoned more magic to steady himself. Fire consumed his body. Nothing else seemed to matter. All he could think of were the things he wanted to do to her. With her. He couldn’t tear his gaze from Taylor’s delicious curves and intoxicating lips. God, to have those around his cock. . . . He nearly exploded.
A spark of sanity ignited in his brain. He flung himself fully into dreamspace and back into his prison cell. He staggered as he landed, panting as if he’d run a marathon. Sweat dampened his back and sides, and his cock was a bar of iron. He hadn’t felt this hungry for a woman since his first time. Maybe not even then.
He frowned. Why the sudden overwhelming urges? Taylor was beautiful, but so were plenty of other women. He’d never—
Pain.
Gregg dropped to his knees, gripping the sides of his head, his vision blurring. A whine escaped him, and his body convulsed as the pain drilled deeper into his skull.
His desire for Taylor should have melted, but it didn’t. The pain from his head stoked the blistering ache of unfulfilled hunger. Dizzying sparks raked through him.
Abruptly the agony in his head withdrew, pricking him lightly with needles as if to remind him it remained ready. Gregg pushed himself up until he sat on his heels, his breath coming hard between his lips. He tried to think about what had happened, but a dagger cut into his mind, and he recoiled. Instead, his thoughts turned to Taylor. Warm delight answered, soothing the pain away. He thought of Mason and Curtis and fell backward as a shotgun blasted inside his skull. Taylor again. The pain receded and pleasure swirled around his balls and over the head of his cock, making him shudder.
What was happening to him?
Laughter. Call it behavior modification.
A maelstrom of horror, terror, and fury crashed into Gregg. He had a brain jockey. A dreamer had taken hold of his mind and had control of him. Instinctively, he summoned up his training to fight the dreamer’s hold. A smothering blanket settled over his mind in instant response.
Now, now. None of that.
�
��Who are you?”
A dry chuckle. All you need to know is that I’m your master. I give you orders, and you obey and reap the reward, or you fight me and pay the consequences. Either way, you will do as I tell you.
Was it Vernon? Gregg could think of no one else. But why?
Ah, Vernon. Or should I call him Sam? Whatever he chooses to go by these days, rest assured, I am not him.
“What do you want from me?”
Right now? Take Taylor—rape her if she refuses you. Revel in her until they hunt you down and throw you back in a cell. Your brother will be very angry with you, as will Riley. They will not soon forgive you.
“Why?” Gregg gasped, barely able to form the words. Disgust balled in his gut. Rape Taylor? He couldn’t.
But you can, and you will, if that’s what it takes. Another dry chuckle. As for why—the wrench doesn’t need to know why it turns the bolt. Do as required and you will feel pleasure like you’ve never experienced in your life. Do not, and . . .
A flash of agony so savage his body seized. The pain intensified, and he thought he would pass out or die. But that wasn’t permitted. He must remain conscious and suffer. Learn his lessons like a good boy.
For the first time in his life, Gregg prayed for death.
Oh, no, my friend. You are far too valuable for that. Now go do as you’re told. Fuck the woman. Enjoy her. Then get yourself caught.
“Who are you?” Gregg asked again, desperate to know who his enemy was.
I knew you were a persistent bastard. I like that in an employee. All you need to know is that I give you orders and you obey.
The bastard didn’t want Gregg to know his or her identity, didn’t want someone like Cass picking it out of his brain.
A laugh. Indeed. But we won’t have to worry about her much longer now, will we?
“What have you done?”
It’s not what I’ve done. It’s what you’ve done.
Bile rose in Gregg’s throat, and he spat on the floor before lunging to his feet, his muscles cording with the violence of his emotions. “What did you make me do?” He rasped, his vocal cords scraped bloody by the hard edges of the words.
Shades of Memory Page 36
