“I don’t have one,” he says and I don’t believe him, but before I can hurt him, I hear someone cry out. I have a terrible moment of indecision as to whether I should kill Jeremiah or not. He doesn’t give me a chance. I glance at the house for one second and when I look back, he’s disappeared.
“Damn it,” I mumble and run toward the house.
I’ve made it all the way back, climbing the steps when I realize it wasn’t a real scream. Someone was just fumbling with a body. Just inside the door I look up and see the kid, her mismatched shoes clearing the top landing as she creeps up the stairs. I don’t know why, but I hesitate to follow her.
Jackson puts a hand on my arm.
“Jeremiah has NRD,” I say and pull her away from the staircase into the hallway. I see Lane pass with a body, but if he has seen us, he doesn’t show any sign.
“What do you mean?” she asks, keeping her voice low.
I repeat what I heard.
“You think he’s like Rachel and Jesse. Like Sullivan,” she says because she never really did get the hang of calling him Caldwell.
“It would explain his interest in all of this,” I say. I’m about to say more when I feel that familiar buzz in my brain.
“Shit. He’s here.” I whirl around and Jackson does the same, but we don’t see him.
We both glance at the staircase toward Jesse, and at the same moment, dart forward. We don’t make it up the stairs before an explosion rocks the house. A great boom rattles its frame and I hear the crack of splintering wood.
Lane unceremoniously drops the body he’s carrying and Jackson and I pick up the slack, all of us filing out of the house away from the blast. As we come into the yard, I see Alice, running up to us, blond hair flying like a banner behind her.
“Where is Jesse?” she asks.
“Upstairs,” I say as Jackson and I lower the body down.
“Upstairs?” she repeats as if it is unbelievable. And maybe it is. Thick black fumes funnel into the sky, and the entire upper level is on fire.
Somehow, I know the kid did it. She blew up the whole fucking room. She’s more than enough for him now, that’s what Jeremiah had said. A rush of relief and pride washes over me. God, I hope it’s true.
Alice is screaming Jesse’s name and it is all I can do to hold her in place and keep her from running head-first into the fire.
The pressure between my ears builds to an uncomfortable degree. Jackson too turns toward the darkness just outside of the fire’s dancing shadows and looks at the cornfield expectantly.
I hear his voice before I see him. I wonder if that is why he waited until full dark, simply for the sake of his entrance.
Brinkley, he whispers in my head like we are the oldest of friends. I’m so glad you came.
Chapter 70
7:15 P.M.
Jesse emerges from the smoldering house. I move to grab ahold of her and keep her close but I’m not quick enough. Jesse passes me, walking out into the yard toward the corn swaying in the firelight.
She just stares at it, as if waiting for something to happen. Then I realize she must be able to hear Caldwell in her head as well as I can—if not better.
Caldwell slips between the stalks into full view, meeting her in the yard. He’s the perfect polished politician, with one exception. He’s dragging a burned body.
She did this, he tells me, squeezing himself into the small space between my temples. Even twenty feet away, I can see his lips aren’t moving.
She’s becoming quite the little monster, Brinkley. I’m so sad you won’t live to see her in her full glory. Or maybe you don’t want to see it. Isn’t that why you’ve been so hard on her all these years? Aren’t you afraid of what will happen the moment you loosen that collar? Don’t want her to be like me, do you?
Alice sees Caldwell and charges forward, no doubt with the intention of putting herself between him and Jesse. I grab her arm with my left hand.
“No, no, wait,” I say when she starts to struggle. “Look.”
Caldwell’s men emerge from the darkness, guns drawn. How did he get them all here? I’d heard no helicopters or engines. If he’d carried them, the way he’d carried Maisie back to Georgia, his gift must’ve grown in the last ten years.
He speaks aloud, for whose benefit I’m not sure. “He was supposed to guard this house.” He drops the charred body without ceremony. “But he was too afraid to confront you. He hid upstairs, cowering like a dog. I only gave him two jobs: sedate and annihilate any unwanted guests. It was hardly too much to ask for, now was it?”
Were we unwanted? I think. I thought you’d been counting down to this day.
Caldwell turns his gaze to me and grins.
“You look well, Alice,” Caldwell says. I feel her tense in my grip and I let go of her, but stay close.
“He can read your mind,” Jesse says. So she does know. Good. She isn’t as in the dark about this part of him as I feared.
She’s going to tear you apart, I think at him.
You really think so? I would love a challenge.
“You are a smart, smart girl,” he says to Alice.
I’ve missed something. Perhaps because he is having conversations with everyone. Alice, Jesse, me and maybe even his men. “If only you hadn’t caused me so much grief, I’d have liked to get to know you better.”
What is it about Alice? I ask him. She’s got you on your toes.
Why would I tell you that? He laughs.
I don’t give up that easily. What can she do to you?
Jesse makes the smallest of movements and then I see the pale purple shimmer envelope her.
Caldwell must see it too because he lifts his hands. Alice moves forward to stop him from touching Jesse, and I have to grab her again and hold her back. She’s safer here near the porch with me. Lane seems to understand this already. He stands quiet and ready on my right.
“Look,” Lane whispers.
Caldwell touches the pale purple light. Like water, it ripples and glides around Jesse.
His grin widens as he presses harder, his fingers flattening against a hard surface that wasn’t there before. He can’t get through it. It’s some kind of force field.
“You do not disappoint,” Caldwell says to Jesse. “Oh what I could do with your gifts.”
He slides his hand admiringly over the barrier, and I see Jackson slip away and disappear around the side of the house. If only one of us can survive tonight, let it be Jackson.
Micah is waiting for her.
I put my hand on the Python, thinking for one panicked moment I should rush after her. I don’t get the chance.
Caldwell appears in front of us, and I feel like a fool for not expecting it. I jerk forward to put myself between Caldwell and Alice, but the purple shimmer returns. This time it isn’t around Jesse, who stands behind Caldwell. The field is enveloping Alice.
Caldwell can’t touch her.
“Get away from her,” Jesse says. Her warm breath rolls like smoke from between her lips into the cold night. The house is still burning, and I can feel the heat through the leather on my back.
You’ll never use Jesse the way you want, I warn him.
Ah, but you aren’t sure are you? Caldwell says, eyes meeting mine. He turns to Lane, standing unprotected beside me. You’ve always wondered just when she might turn.
She’ll beat you, I bluff, but his words have shaken me. Every muscle in my body twitches for what will come next. And Jackson will kill your AMP. After tonight, you’ll have nothing.
Let’s find out, shall we?
Shots fire and I jump.
Chapter 71
7:31 P.M.
I tuck and roll but it is far from graceful. I’m sore from carrying Jackson and the sleeping victims. I think I may have even sprained something while running around in the trees. When I look up, Caldwell has Alice by the back of her coat. I lift my gun to shoot him, but Jeremiah and Nicole burst around the side of the house blasting their own fir
earms. Caldwell disappears.
Jeremiah speaks to Alice for the briefest of moments before she takes off into the corn.
Then he sees me and this time doesn’t act like a deer caught in headlights. He covers me from the gunfire erupting all around us. Jeremiah’s men, I realize, are in a full blown gunfight with Caldwell’s men. All I care about is Jesse, who kneels nearby, pressing her hands over Lane’s bleeding throat. Not a headshot. Good. Lane will live—well, after he dies.
Tucked safely into a corner of the porch I see Jeremiah look at Jesse as well. I shove my gun under his chin.
“When you’re gone, who is going to give Jesse the support she needs to defeat him?” he asks, trying to meet my gaze but unable to, given the tilt of his chin.
“Jackson.”
“Alone?” Jeremiah says. When I don’t answer he adds, “She is going to need me. They all are.”
Jesse leaps up from Lane’s dying body and takes off into the corn after Alice. An intense desire to go after her seizes me. I shove the barrel harder into Jeremiah’s jaw before shoving him away and taking chase.
When I look back, Jeremiah is just watching me go, his expression unreadable.
I don’t see the kid. I go in the direction I thought she went, but she isn’t there. I hear the guttural moans of fighting, the thuds of flesh colliding with flesh.
I break through the side of the corn and find myself on the edge of the woods, just in time to see Jackson deliver a strong front kick to Micah’s gut. Micah hits the dirt on his hands and knees, winded.
I point the Python at Micah’s head and pull back the trigger.
“No,” Jackson screams. “No.”
She knocks my hand down. “He’s my brother. He’s my baby brother, Jim.”
I look at the man kneeling in the dirt. The sack of shit is responsible for delivering Jesse to Caldwell not once, but twice, and he didn’t give a damn if it got the girl killed. And that was just Jesse. How many other sketches had he rendered for Caldwell that cost someone their life?
“I’ll do it,” she begs, pulling on my arm. “I’ll do it, I swear to god.”
“If he lives, Jesse—”
“I know,” she says, her face crumpling. “I know. I’ll do it.”
I hear a child crying and turn toward the sound.
“Go,” Jackson says, terror taking ahold of her face. “Hurry.”
I look at Jackson one last time and run.
Chapter 72
7:47 P.M.
Everything slows down. I can’t seem to move through the cornrows fast enough, or escape the sounds of Jackson struggling. Hearing cries slightly to my left, I adjust my position, cutting across several rows as cornsilk brushes my face.
I squeeze between two tall stalks and see them.
Caldwell is choking Alice. He strikes her twice across the face with his free hand and it occurs to me he isn’t using tricks on her. Why?
Why not use your tricks on Alice?
I see the three of them there, and in a moment of brilliant clarity, I know why he can’t just kill her. If he kills Alice, it will forever turn Jesse against him, giving her the conviction she needs to destroy him once and for all. And yet, he can’t let Alice live either. To let her live means Jesse can never be corrupted. She will always work against him, to protect the one she loves. Alice, too, will protect her in turn.
So here he sits, in a precarious balance, searching for a way to master her, subdue her, and take what he needs from his oldest daughter.
A child, the one Alice held onto earlier, clings to the back of her legs, screaming her head off.
The swell of fire to my left makes me glance at the blazing house, the smoke funneling into the sky. This is it. This is the place and moment I die.
This is my last chance to save myself.
No, I think. It could never have ended any other way.
It occurs to me now, I started my journal in the wrong place. I began with the moment Memphis walked into the office and sat down in front of me. But we began before that, the moment a boy in a bomber vest stumbled through my rifle’s scope.
If I hadn’t shot Aziz, I wouldn’t have come back to America and joined the FBRD. Raising my gun that once had caused me to raise my gun a thousand times. Out of guilt, out of necessity—it didn’t matter.
So here I am.
Jesse bursts into view and slams her fist into his jaw. She gets in two more hits, and I can tell by the wild, angry expression on her father’s face, he is both surprised and furious. He hits her back, and the world speeds up, pulling itself into sharp focus.
I dart forward, drawing the Python as I move.
Jesse hits the dirt, her knees giving underneath her while Alice staggers at her side, protected by Jesse’s own force field.
Protect yourself. Why won’t you protect yourself?
Because I don’t deserve to be saved.
Hadn’t I said this? But I see the kid in the dirt, giving all she’s got for the sake of someone she loves.
She does deserve to be saved. I regret that I never told her so. I regret that I’ll never have a chance to explain why I was so hard on her, why I was so scared that if I didn’t ride her ass she’d become like him, that she would let her power twist her into something darker. I’d called her kid, his kid, never seeing her for herself.
I was no better than Caldwell.
I lift my gun and shoot.
Only I do not see the bullet hit him. In the darkness stretching out endlessly in front of me, I see Charlie.
He comes forward, places a hand on each side of my neck and smiles.
Jim. Am I glad to see you—
Keep reading for a special preview of Dying Light, the next novel in the Dying for a Living series.
Jesse
“Come on,” I wail. “Jumping out of a burning building is not the craziest thing we’ve ever done!”
“If you hadn’t panicked, the building wouldn’t be on fire,” Ally snaps back. She tucks the bundled laptop under her arm and starts yanking open desk drawers. Post-it notes of every color fly through the air, followed by pens, a stapler, paperclips and a Kleenex box.
I search the open office space for another door. Nada. Only one way in and out.
“I had to do something.” I thought firebombing the bad guy was my one good idea on this mission to retrieve a laptop for Jeremiah. “If I hadn’t, we’d still be stuck with him.”
We both turn our gaze to the locked door twenty feet away. A row of unoccupied desks rests between us and where we entered. The office is spacious, with rows of silver tabletops running the length of the room. Spacious—but not spacious enough with a homicidal maniac just on the other side of the door.
Something large slams into the locked office door, rattling the walls. Ominous black smoke seeps through the cracks and the smell of campfire wafts in. That smell is surely going to cling to my hair until I wash it.
“Just because we’ve been reckless before doesn’t excuse it now.” Ally slams a desk drawer shut and yanks another open. Her disheveled blonde hair hides most of her face, revealing only terrified eyes. She gives up trying to find a weapon in the desk drawer and hurries to the window. Her gaze falls on the street below. “God, Jesse. No. We’ll never survive a fall from this height.”
I shrug and pucker my lips. “It’s fine. I’ve fallen from higher. We’ll be fine.”
She blinks at me.
“You’re forgetting about my shield thingy.” I’m talking out of my ass here, but there is no way I’m letting him come in here and hurt her. He can trade punches with me all day if he wants, but not with Ally. I’ll have to find a way to break the window, jump out, and shield her on the way down.
The door shakes for the fourth time and a thick crack appears to the left of the jamb. A thicker plume of black smoke rolls through the crack and floats to the ceiling. The white popcorn tiles disappear beneath the black fog.
I go to the window and look through the glass beside her. The
glass is cold under my palms and my breath fogs on the surface despite the growing heat of the room. Down below, tiny cars cut corners around buildings. One could easily be mistaken for a child’s toy.
Shit, it really is far down.
I meet Ally’s eyes and shrug. “We don’t have a lot of options.”
Sweat forms at my hairline and in the folds where my coat sits snug against my body. Chicago shines brightly around us, each pinpoint of light from the buildings and streets illuminating the dark sky.
My gaze flits from building to building, from illuminated window to illuminated window, but I don’t see salvation. We aren’t close enough to another skyscraper to signal for help. No scaffolding or window-washer platform is available to carry us to the safety of solid ground or to the roof above, where we were supposed to meet Jeremiah.
The coms in our ears buzz incoherently for the billionth time. Ally sighs in irritation. As the coms stop crackling she mashes the speak button flat with her thumb. “For the thousandth time, we can’t understand you. Something is wrong with our signal. If you can hear us, we are on the 34th floor of the Jensen building and we’re trapped. Send help.” A look of resolution solidifies on Ally’s face. “Jason’s going to kill us.”
“No.” I squeeze her arm. “So what if he’s like a hell-bent terminator with unlimited healing ability.” I snort, trying to hide my panic. “I’ve got this.”
She cocks her head. “It’s great you have firebombs and shields but we have to be careful. We don’t know the repercussions of your powers yet.”
“And getting ourselves locked in burning buildings with raging madmen is playing it so safe.”
“You know what I mean.” She steps away from the window and shifts the laptop in her arms. She yanks open more office drawers.
I arch an eyebrow. “A paper cut isn’t going to hurt him.”
“Paper cuts hurt.” She forces a smile. “But we need something to slow him down. And you’re not helping.”
I throw my hands up and pick an aisle of desks. After uselessly searching two drawers, I lift one of the office chairs and immediately know this flimsy, ergonomic piece of crap won’t be able to break a window. I throw it anyway. It bounces off the glass and comes back at me with a vengeance, clipping my knee.
Dying for Her: A Companion Novel (Dying for a Living Book 3) Page 23
