A Sense of Danger

by Jennifer Estep

  Chapter Seven

  Desmond

  Charlotte Locke hated me.

  I couldn’t really blame her, given the bad blood between her father and mine, which was mostly my father’s fault, due to the General’s ruthless tendency to use people for his own personal and political gain. Still, I had been hoping for mild dislike, at worst. What I’d gotten was a look of pure, utter disgust the second she’d realized who my father was.

  I had been hoping to keep my family name out of things, but Trevor had slipped up and let the cat out of the bag, which wasn’t like him. Maybe it was for the best. Charlotte would have found out I was a Percy sooner or later. It was probably better to get all the hate out in the open right off the bat.

  Now, Charlotte was marching along behind me. Thanks to my galvanism, I could feel the waves of emotional energy surging off her, and the heat of her anger blasted against my back like a fiery furnace. Again, I couldn’t really blame her, but I had been hoping she would take into account the fact that I had saved her life.

  Apparently not.

  We left the bullpen, walked down a corridor, and headed toward the elevators. I stepped into one of the cars and stuck out my hand, politely holding the door open. Charlotte eyed me, but she also stepped inside. The door slid shut, and we rode in tense silence down to the fifth floor.

  The elevator door dinged open, and Charlotte stormed out into the gray corridor beyond. I followed her and started to head toward the bullpen for the mission briefing, but she latched onto my wrist and yanked me to the left. She was quite a bit stronger than I’d expected, probably from the energy I had fed into her body. Either way, I let her pull me over into a shadowy alcove close to the door that led into the locker room.

  Charlotte stopped and released my arm. She glanced around, staring at the gray carpeted floor, the thick concrete columns, and finally up at the ceiling. After a few seconds, she nodded in silent satisfaction.

  I glanced around as well, but I didn’t see any telltale black domes or blinking red lights or hear any faint hums that would indicate there were any cameras or listening devices nearby. Of course, this was Section 47, so most of the cameras and bugs would be hidden anyway.

  I also reached out with my galvanism, scanning the area for sparks, flickers, crackles, and pulses of electricity, but I didn’t sense anything in this space, not so much as a voice-activated bug designed to pick up whispered secrets. This was a rare surveillance dead zone inside Section, a place where people could have a private, non-recorded conversation, something Charlotte seemed to know. Clever of her to bring me here.

  Then again, Charlotte Locke was most definitely clever.

  She crossed her arms over her chest, still clutching the pen and notepad she’d had in Trevor’s office. I wondered what she saw when she looked at me. Probably a younger, fitter, deadlier version of General Jethro Percy, the man who’d gotten her father captured and then killed during a Section mission gone horribly wrong.

  As for what I saw when I looked at her, well, the headshot in her Section file hadn’t done her justice. The photo hadn’t revealed the red highlights in her shoulder-length auburn hair, or what a deep, dark blue her eyes were, or how she smelled sharp, clean, and sweet all at once, like limes mixed with sugar. The picture hadn’t given me a sense of her soft Southern drawl, and it especially hadn’t indicated how bright, steady, and strong her aura was.

  People constantly give off energy, just like phones, computers, and spy cameras do, and I could see that power as easily as I could spot the physical glow from a bare bulb. Sometimes, people’s auras appeared to me as colorful lights, a flare of green or a spark of gold centered on their hearts. Other times, it was more of a feeling, of hot anger or sweeping passion or slimy envy, emanating from their bodies. Whether it was a color, a feeling, or something else, as a galvanist I could manipulate that human energy, adding to it as I’d done by healing Charlotte, or turning it off completely and killing a person the same way I could snap off a light switch on the wall.

  Charlotte’s aura was the same deep, dark blue as her eyes, and it gleamed around her heart as though she had a sapphire brooch pinned to her chest. Even though she was angry, Charlotte’s aura also radiated a crisp coolness, like the air on a brisk fall morning. The soothing sensation took me by surprise, as did how much I enjoyed it. Maybe this was just another one of my flights of fancy, as my father would snidely, brusquely say. Or perhaps I was just tired, after everything that had happened with Graham, and looking for any comfort I could find, even in this woman who so obviously hated me.

  That must have been it. I was tired—so damn tired—but I couldn’t rest until I’d found and killed Adrian Anatoly. I owed it to Graham and everyone else who had died on the Blacksea mission, and nothing was going to stop me from achieving my goal. Not my father, not Section rules and regulations, and especially not the angry woman standing in front of me.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Charlotte hissed.

  Once she’d gotten over her initial shock at seeing me again and realizing exactly who I was, she had been all ice in Trevor’s office. I’d been impressed by how quickly she had switched gears. Most people probably would have started blubbering about how four cleaners had tried to kill them, but not Charlotte Locke. Instead, she’d matched me move for move and hadn’t revealed anything to Trevor about our two previous encounters. But now that initial ice had cracked away, revealing the fire underneath—far more fire than I had expected.

  Then again, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that I should always expect the unexpected when it came to Charlotte Locke.

  She kept glaring at me, clearly wanting an answer. I shrugged. She wasn’t the only one who could be cool and inscrutable.

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “Other than following me, killing people, and not telling your buddy Trevor about either one.”

  “I think you mean watching out for and saving your life. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  Her thumb curled over the pen still clutched in her hand, and I got the distinct impression she wanted to stab me in the eye with it. She could probably do it. She had almost cut down that female cleaner with a broken beer bottle. I’d have to be careful to stay out of range if she ever had a real weapon in her hand.

  “I’ll ask you again, Dundee—why are you here, and what do you want?”

  “You heard what Trevor said—you’re to be my liaison for an upcoming mission.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What mission? Who’s the target?”

  This was the tricky part. There actually was a mission, and I really did need Charlotte’s help with the target. But I also had my own private agenda that Section didn’t—couldn’t—know anything about.

  Charlotte would learn the details at the briefing, but I decided to tell her a few pertinent facts right now. Perhaps sharing some information would get her to trust me, just a little bit.

  “Henrika Hyde,” I replied. “She’s the target, and you seem to know more about her than anyone else here. That’s why I asked for you as my liaison.”

  “Henrika Hyde is a monster,” Charlotte muttered, a note of reluctant agreement in her voice. “She needs to be stopped before she creates some new biomagical weapon that’s even more horrible than her current inventions.”

  “At last, something we both agree on.”

  Charlotte ignored my sarcasm. “I’ve been telling Jensen that for weeks now.” She grimaced. “At least, I told Jensen that before his accident. He agreed with me enough to pass off my work as his own, but I doubt anyone else ever read my original reports.”

  Ah, but that was the problem and the reason I was here. Someone else had read her reports—Graham Walker, my cleaner partner and best friend.

  Graham had always been a total geek for anything analytical, and he read reports from Section stations just for fun and to decompress after missions. When the two of us had first been tasked with finding and killing Adrian Anatoly, Graham had sta
rted reading even more reports, cross-referencing them and looking for every scrap of information on Anatoly he could dig up, anything that would help us hunt down and kill the terrorist.

  And he’d finally found something.

  A few days before the Blacksea mission, Graham had told me about a report from a D.C. analyst linking the United Corporation, one of Anatoly’s known shell companies, to a biomagical weapons maker named Henrika Hyde. Before Graham could follow up on the report, we’d gotten intel that Anatoly was hiding on an island off the Australian coast, and Section had sent us after him.

  Among his many, many crimes, Adrian Anatoly had bombed a tourist market in Sydney six months ago, killing more than twenty people and injuring dozens of others. After that incident, Section had dispatched Norris and Stinson, two other cleaners, to eliminate the terrorist, although Anatoly and his men had turned the tables and managed to kill the cleaners instead.

  That should have been our first clue there was a mole inside Section, although my respect for and friendship with Norris and Stinson had blinded me to that fact. I’d just wanted Anatoly dead, but Graham had been a little more curious and far more cautious, the way he always was, and he had started investigating Norris’s and Stinson’s deaths, although he hadn’t gotten far. Still, we’d both been happy when Anatoly was finally located, and our mission had been equal parts righteousness and revenge.

  Until it had all gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  Just thinking about the mission took me back to that day. In an instant, everything around me vanished, and I felt like I was wandering through the macabre museum of my own mind, staring at the garishly colored paintings on the walls, the gruesome images that were forever burned into my brain.

  The pristine white sand melted into crunchy black glass from the force, fire, and fury of the IED explosions. The lower part of Graham’s leg separated from the rest of his body and sticking up at an impossible angle. The whites of Graham’s eyes standing out in stark contrast against the rest of his red, ruined face. My hands digging into Graham’s shoulders, dragging him away from the worst of the flames, my fingers covered with bright, fat, red, raw blisters and burns that made them looked like stewed sausages.

  There was sound too, as though I were wearing headphones and listening to a tour guide talk me through that museum of horrors. Only it was Graham, urgently whispering to me in between choked coughs and wheezing breaths.

  It’s okay, Dez. You’ll get the bastard… Read the reports. Talk to Charlotte Locke… Work it from the other end. Anatoly can’t hide forever, and neither can whoever sold us out to him…

  More sounds filled my ears. The lingering buzz from the explosions. The faint slap-slap-slap of the ocean waves against the scorched shore. My own hoarse, raspy voice, telling Graham it was going to be okay, over and over again, even though we both knew it was a lie. That the support staff was dead and no one was coming to help us anytime soon.

  But perhaps the thing I remembered most vividly was the absolute lack of energy. No electrical currents, no phones, not even the faint auras of the fish in the ocean. Everything close to shore had been decimated and blown away by the IEDs, and I had never experienced such utter stillness before. I felt like my magic had been blown off just as Graham’s leg had been, and the cold, sickening knowledge filled me that I wouldn’t be able to use my power to save us, not this time…

  “Are you okay?” Charlotte’s voice cut through my miserable tour of memories and snapped me back to the here and now.

  I found myself focusing on the jeweled aura pulsing around her heart, and I swayed a little closer, just breathing in the cool blue of her.

  Charlotte stared at me, clearly wondering what I was doing, but she held her ground. I got the feeling she didn’t back down from anyone, not even a cleaner like me.

  “So you’ve been assigned to go after Henrika Hyde,” she said. “Why?”

  “Because she’s a menace, a biomagical weapons maker who delights in inventing new and gruesome ways to murder innocent people.”

  “No, that’s why Section wants to go after her. Why do you want her so badly?”

  I shrugged. “No other reason. It’s a mission, pure and simple, the same as any other.”

  “Lie,” Charlotte snapped.

  I had always prided myself on being an excellent liar, especially when it came to Section business. As a cleaner, I spent a lot of time undercover, getting close to my targets, so lying was part of my job, a necessary skill that helped keep me alive. Even if I hadn’t been a cleaner, I still would have been good at lying. The General had been giving me a master class in the arts of treachery and deception my whole life.

  “Let’s try something simpler. Why did you come over to me in the cafeteria yesterday?” Charlotte asked. “Why not just tell me what you wanted instead of hitting on me?”

  I had no intention of revealing the fact that I had been fishing for information on Henrika Hyde. “It seemed better to ease you into the idea of working with me, especially given the history between our fathers.”

  “Lie,” she snapped again.

  I resisted the urge to grind my teeth together. How was she doing that?

  Her eyes narrowed. “Is this some weird sex thing? Do you get your rocks off having women under your thumb? Some liaisons might offer a full range of services to their cleaners, but I’m not going to fuck you, if that’s what this is about.”

  Anger shot through me, and I stepped forward. Charlotte held her ground again, glaring right back at me.

  “First of all, I would never touch a woman like that without her express permission,” I said in a cold voice.

  Something flickered in her eyes, and she jerked her head in a short, sharp nod, as though she suddenly believed me, just like that.

  “And second, don’t flatter yourself. You’re not my type, Numbers.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “Numbers? Why not? I think it fits you beautifully.”

  And it truly did. Graham might have read Section reports for fun, but he had his favorite analysts the way that regular folks had fiction authors. He had raved about how detailed and thorough Charlotte’s reports always were, along with being absolutely free of typos. I thought he even had a bit of an intellectual crush on her, even though the two of them had never met.

  After Graham’s death, I had read her reports too. Every single one from the past year. I didn’t understand half of what was in them, especially not the pages and pages of spreadsheets and numbers, but it was obvious Charlotte Locke knew her stuff. And now, being face to face with her, I could feel the energy pulsing off that big brain of hers, and I could see the calculations going on behind her eyes as she analyzed, measured, and weighed everyone and everything around her.

  “Listen to me, Dundee,” she snapped. “You might fool your buddy Trevor Donnelly and everyone else at Section, but you will never, ever fool me. So either come clean and tell me why you’re really here and exactly what you want, or I walk.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Why? Because you’re a cleaner? A Percy? Or because you mistakenly think you have some kind of power over me?”

  “Because you’ve been assigned to be my liaison. It’s a plum job. You turn that down, and we both know that you’re done at Section. They’ll boot you out on your ass before you even have time to pack up your desk. And given your empty apartment and that charming man you met with at the diner last night, I’m guessing you desperately need your Section job and the steady paycheck that comes along with it to get yourself out of whatever trouble you’re in.”

  Something that looked like weary agreement flickered across her face, although her anger quickly drowned it out. “Fuck off, Dundee.”

  Her aura blazed an even brighter blue, and the hot energy blasting off her told me that she meant every word she said. Despite her troubles, Charlotte Locke was pissed enough to walk away, no matter what the consequences might be to her Section career
or her own personal self. I admired her for that, even if she was mucking up my plans.

  She whirled around to storm away, but I reached out and caught the edge of her gray cardigan sleeve. Not touching her, just the fabric. She might be angry and stubborn, but I wasn’t giving up. I would never give up until I had avenged Graham.

  Charlotte jerked away, but she faced me again.

  “You can’t walk away,” I repeated.

  “Why not?”

  “Because, in case you’ve forgotten, someone sent four cleaners to kill you.”

  A muscle ticked in her jaw at the unpleasant reminder, and she couldn’t quite hide the worry that filled her face. She shook her head, as if pushing away the emotion. “And how do I know it wasn’t you? That you saving me wasn’t just some elaborate plot to lure me over to your dark side?”

  I barked out a laugh. “Wow, you are really paranoid, aren’t you? Even I’m not that devious and diabolical.”

  “Anyone can be that devious and diabolical, if they put their mind to it.”

  I didn’t—couldn’t—contradict her. Thanks to the General, I knew exactly how deceptive and dangerous people could be, especially your supposed loved ones. “Devious or not, the fact remains that someone sent four cleaners to kill you, so they’ll probably try again.”

  More agreement filled her face. “Do you know who wants me dead? Or why?”

  I chose my words carefully. “It probably has something to do with your reports on Henrika Hyde. That’s the main thing you’ve been working on lately, right?”

  It most likely had everything to do with her reports, and that tenuous connection she’d found between Henrika and Anatoly, but I didn’t tell her that. Not yet. I didn’t want to bias her with my own opinions, especially when I needed her to look for more connections between the two of them. I shouldn’t have said as much as I did, but Charlotte nodded, and some of the anger and suspicion leaked out of her face.