by Mark Henwick
I couldn’t hold back any longer.
I let her breast go, slid my hand between them, caressing her in slow circles, all down the swooping curve of her belly. Down.
She groaned again, her body moving, trembling, offering herself, eager for the pleasure.
But it was Alex I gripped. Felt the shock of it. The sheer, hard bulk of him. The heat. The pulse.
Shock rippled through him as well. Through Jen. Back to me.
A nudge. A press of my groin against her butt. Moved her until she was just right. Teasing her. Teasing both of them.
For a long minute, I didn’t let go of him. Felt the pressure building in both of them. I was lightheaded with desire, savoring every tiny sensation, every moment. My heart hammered against Jen’s back and my vision swam.
I let Alex go and pressed Jen down.
We all cried out and my heart felt like it would burst with joy.
Chapter 73
I swam up out of the sort of deep sleep that comes from exhaustion.
Fair enough.
I ached pleasantly all over. All over.
The night had been…unbelievable.
Making love with three of us was kinda difficult; we’d had to learn as we went along. If we played it with any one of us in the middle, being teased and touched by the other two, it was all over for that one too quickly. And if my eukori sneaked out, sharing every sensation each of us felt, it became uncontrollably intense, and it was all over for all of us too quickly.
We’d made that spicy beef dinner eventually, when hunger drove us out of the bedroom. Cooking had been slow and interrupted. And then Jen had insisted on rules for eating: One huge plate. In bed. Fingers only. No feeding yourself. No licking your own fingers clean.
It’d been the slowest meal ever. And I’d been right: chili sauce on fingers smarts when you touch tender places.
We couldn’t fit in the bathtub, so we’d showered. Like the meal, that had been a long drawn-out affair.
So why am I awake now?
A touch on my eukori. Nothing more than a feeling. Yelena.
I started to weave my way reluctantly out of the knot of my kin’s arms and legs.
“Mmmm?” Jen. The sort of hum that managed to say why am I awake at the same time as what should we try now.
“Yelena’s coming.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. “Julie? Or Keith? Or both?”
I snickered.
“No. As in walking in from outside.”
Alex grumbled and one strong arm made to pull me back into bed.
I twisted and slipped out. If I let myself be pulled back in, I might never get out.
Flipping a bathrobe over me, I made it halfway down the corridor. Yelena loomed in the darkness, bulky in her cold-weather camo. She’d taken time to pull her boots off. I guessed it wasn’t that urgent.
“You have time to get dressed, Boss,” she said before I could speak.
“What is it?”
“Call from Agent Ingram on a bad line. Inbound on a helicopter. Fifteen minutes.”
“The storm?”
“Died down. It’s clear now.”
Fifteen minutes. A voice on a bad line.
“Assessment?”
Yelena shrugged. “With the three of us outside, anyone getting out of a helicopter onto that landing pad is in our kill zone. That would be stupid. If they come in and land, then it probably is Ingram. If the call was just to check if you were here…”
So much for paranoia waiting till we got back to Denver.
If it wasn’t Ingram, then someone knew too much about us and they’d be here quicker than fifteen minutes and all we’d see of them would be rockets.
Alex was behind me, half dressed.
“You and Jen, in outdoor clothes and armed, with Yelena,” I said.
“You?”
“There to greet him if it is Ingram, but not in the ranch house.”
In ten minutes, we were all outside, hidden and wired up. The ranch’s lights were on.
I didn’t know exactly where anyone else was. I was hiding underneath the landing area.
In twelve minutes, I could hear the helicopter.
“Single helicopter,” I muttered into the commset.
I got no answer, but I wasn’t expecting one.
The helicopter came in slowly, lit up with landing lights. This was not an air assault.
Keith was at the front of the ranch. “No one here,” he said.
So not a distraction either.
Still, it was a relief when I recognized the figure that stepped down and began walking toward the ranch.
“Agent Ingram,” I said, coming out of the shadows. He jumped.
“Sorry,” I went on.
“Wondered where you were, Ms. Farrell. And I knew it was a good idea to call ahead,” he said. “I don’t doubt I am lit up on someone’s IR scopes right now.”
“You might be,” I admitted, and glanced over at the pilot still sitting at his controls. “You coming in?”
“No. Can’t stay,” he said.
He’d come a long way to say hello.
“Okay. Let’s sit over there.” The shed I pointed at gave us seats and a windbreak. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was better than standing in the wind.
“Yup.”
He was stiff from sitting in the helicopter and it wouldn’t get any better here, but it was his choice.
“You seem better rested than our last meeting, Ms. Farrell.”
“I am.”
“A good rest, then.” Agent Ingram’s voice was very quiet.
“Yeah. Better than that. Much, much better. Unbelievable. I’m sorry, I guess you had a crap time of it.”
“You could say. Good job on Forsythe. Good job on…everything.”
He sighed and reached into his pocket.
My nose twitched. Bourbon. He wasn’t drunk or anything, but Agent Ingram had been keeping himself warm on his flight.
He took a swig from a battered old hip flask and passed it over.
I sipped and coughed.
“Single barrel, Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit,” he said.
“Ah! The one they call the Kickin’ Chick’n.”
“The same.”
A special occasion?
He didn’t seem to know where to start whatever it was he wanted to start on, so I prompted him.
“So tell me about your lousy time in Vegas and LA,” I said.
“We’ve cleared all the properties in both cities. Everything. Bagged it all. Ranked some of it. Sorted some of it. All disappeared into Project Anthracite. LA wasn’t much, but you wouldn’t believe what we got from Vegas. Still sorting it. Got more of that…sickness to look forward to.”
I frowned in the darkness. I could imagine what he was talking about.
“You got people to do that, haven’t you? Crime scene specialists, like little Agent-lets?” I tried to lighten it up. “You know, like fairy dust. You sprinkle ’em on the scene and they do it all while you go nap. Keeps everything more at arm’s length.”
“Yeah.” He sighed.
“So?”
“Politics.” There was a world of pissed-off in that word.
“You mean someone—” I snapped my mouth closed. If there was someone powerful or famous involved, perpetrator or victim, he couldn’t tell me. “Sorry.”
He grunted something noncommittal and leaned forward, hands on knees.
“Y’know, I have been known to bend the rules here and there.”
I made polite, disbelieving noises while crossing my toes.
He didn’t seem to notice. He took another swig and passed the flask again.
“But I ain’t ever tampered with evidence.”
I was starting to worry. Agent Ingram wasn’t the kind of guy to get introspective about things.
We passed the flask a couple more times. He was taking small swigs.
I was starting to worry what the bourbon was for. The obvious thing, the thing
I was meant to believe, was to ease him into sleeping that night. Letting him forget the sickness he’d had to wade through.
But what if it wasn’t?
What if it was for me?
If it was for me, why did he want me loosened up? Or anesthetized before he told me whatever it was he was going to eventually tell me?
He clapped his hands on his knees, rubbed them together.
“So,” he said, abruptly. “I pulled your evidence. Your tapes do not officially exist.”
“Shit!” Ingram did that? For me? “I mean, thank you, Agent Ingram. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
“Don’t thank me.”
“But you compromised yourself for me.”
He didn’t answer directly. Instead, he stood and we walked slowly back toward the helicopter.
That was it? He came all the way to tell me that?
“Spoke to Mr. Altau earlier,” he said finally. “Long talk.”
Skylur asked him to pull my tapes?
“You did it because he asked? Or do you mean you did it for Emergence?”
“I didn’t exactly do it for you, Ms. Farrell. Or for our plan, which I warn you will be our plan and may not be exactly your plan anymore.”
He gave a grunt as if he was physically wrestling with the thoughts he was trying to explain.
“I’m compromised. As soon as I spoke to you on the phone and gave you enough information to kidnap me in Denver, I was compromised. When I didn’t call my boss the moment I walked out of Haven, I was compromised. As soon as my boss doesn’t call his boss when he finds out what I did, he’ll be compromised. And we’ll all be compromised unless and until we reach the president and the president says we’re not compromised.” He snorted. “We can all hope.”
The snow crunched under our feet.
“Ain’t it the truth, you’re compromised one way and the next seems easier? Why shouldn’t I take that tape out of evidence? The whole case is hardly gonna hinge on one tape out of hundreds. But even that’s not the whole story.”
We stopped and stood just outside the circle of the helicopter blades.
“Interesting man, Mr. Altau. We talked about justice, which is what I aim to deliver. Damn cold comfort to all the women and children in that pile of evidence. Y’know, when I get to thinking like that, sometimes I have to ignore the big picture and make it about one person. A representative for the whole. A place holder to take the place of all the others I can’t really help with my justice.”
Ingram made a whirling gesture with his hand. The pilot got the engine turning again, and bent his head to concentrate on his checks.
“Can’t say I fully understand it,” Ingram said. “Mr. Altau said we were alike in many ways. He seemed to think you’d want these. That you’d be looking for a place holder, too.”
Turning his back so the pilot couldn’t see, Ingram dipped his hand into his coat pocket and came out with a bulky packet, which he held out to me.
What? Why hadn’t he just destroyed it?
“There’s…” he started to say something and paused, as if he was waiting for inspiration. He looked old and tired. Eventually he shook his head and, without another word, bent over and walked quickly back to the helicopter.
I got well back as the thud of the blades changed pitch and the helicopter lifted.
Stranger and stranger.
Why did Skylur think that I’d want the tapes? A place holder? Had Diana spoken to him about my wanting redemption somehow?
A trickle of worry began to take hold. I turned my back on the snowstorm kicked up by the helicopter and looked in the packet.
Two tapes.
Old VCR tapes lasted for three hours or more, if I recalled. Forsythe couldn’t have needed more than one for me. However it felt at the time.
I took the first out. In the light from the ranch, I could make out the writing. Printed on the top was the brand name and the maximum duration of 180 minutes. Then written in marker pen the date, which I’d never forget. My stomach twisted with nausea. Beneath the date, my initials AF. The pen was broad, Forsythe’s writing just as I remembered it, square and neat, like a stencil.
In this light, the color of the ink came out as black, making me think of blood under UV.
I pulled the second tape from the package. I frowned. The date was more than a month later. I was gone from Denver by that time. I was at boot camp.
And beneath the date, in the same careful, blocky writing, were the initials KF.
POST SCRIPT
I enjoy writing Urban Fantasy, but the strong themes I have used in this book and series are completely real. Human trafficking and rape happen.
As I say, I enjoy writing and I hope you enjoy reading, but:
“It doesn’t escape me for one moment
that so much joy in my life
is thanks to so much pain in someone else’s.”
Lupita Nyong’o
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to all who worked with me and support me:
My beta readers, without whom this book would not have been written: Gail, Jessica, Daniel, Leiah, Jon, Richard, Scottie, Renee, Stephane, Bernd, John, Brett, Dee, Beau, Perry, Joy, Jason, Ken, Leveke, Elizabeth, Sarah, Henry, Sally, TK, Michelle, Chuck, Robert, Tara, Natalie, Winnie and Jan.
Everyone who posts on the web site and Facebook pages, all those reviewers and bloggers. Thank you.
Reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are lifeblood to writers.
Thanks also to all those patient readers out there!
And the cover image team: Chris Mann, Maria Askew, Gideon, Jessica and Joshua Henwick.
My sub-editor: Jessica.
My development and proofreading editor: Lauren Sweet.
And, without which nothing, my wife and family.
Chris Mann : www.chrismannphotography.co.uk/ – photographer, actor
Gideon Henwick : www.GideonHenwick.com – digital artist
Lauren Sweet : www.LaurenSweet.com – author, editor
Maria Askew : www.MariaAskew.co.uk – actor, model
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