Laurence Lauderdale turned slowly, awkwardly as if the motion pained him. White hair drifting around his thin scalp, he tilted his head at the group, bemused.
Rage tightened to a narrow tunnel of hatred so intense, it raked venomous claws through Shawn’s stomach. His chest.
This was what he’d waited for. Sixteen years, right here.
Silas pushed past him. “On it,” was all he said.
“We’ll take them,” Parker said, flanking Shawn. Her mouth was a thin, white line, her eyes chips of ice. “Handle Lauderdale.”
“With fucking pleasure.” Simon strode across the crimson carpet bisecting the aisle, his gaze on the old man, gun lowered at his side. “What are you up to, old man?”
“Simon.” The old man’s voice quavered.
“Get the location of that bomb,” Jonas ordered. “Is there anyone around?”
“Just him,” Shawn replied.
“Be careful, he’s a wily bastard.”
“Simon’s got him engaged,” Shawn said quietly, but his attention only half focused on the plan. On the order.
The man he’d come to murder, the monster, had changed. Stooped and gnarled, he was almost unrecognizable compared to the suited man who’d knocked on Shawn’s door that day. He’d been a distinguished man sixteen years ago, standing straight and polished and so untouchable. Confident as he’d spoken with Shawn’s father.
Pitiless as he’d watched his people gun Shawn’s family down.
“Hey.” Simon’s acknowledgment cut like glass. “Dad.”
Shawn’s gaze jerked to Simon. Dad? That made him . . .
Kayleigh’s brother?
And here Shawn thought his was a screwed-up family dynamic.
Why didn’t she tell him Simon was her brother? Why didn’t she trust him enough to confide?
Stupid questions. He never gave her the option. Never pretended he had any plans for the future.
Lauderdale smiled, wry and grim all at the same time. Hands tucked behind him, he let his chin droop. “So, that’s the way of it, then. I wondered if you were mine as much as hers.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t know,” Simon growled.
“I’m sorry to say I didn’t. Not that it changes anything.” Eyes the same color as Kayleigh’s, vivid even across the dimly lit cathedral, turned to Shawn. “I see you’ve made friends.”
Behind them, Silas ran across a pew, surprisingly light-footed for such a large body. Parker was already gone.
Kayleigh would be rescued. She wasn’t his problem. She wasn’t his plan.
Had never been part of it for longer than it took to get his hands around her father’s throat.
His fist clenched as the door closed behind Silas.
His guts churned, dread building into bile. He couldn’t abandon this, everything, now. Not for a woman. Not even for her. She’d have to understand
She never will.
So be it.
He strode around the central pedestal, gun lowering to his side as he glared at the wrecked old man watching them both with weary eyes. “You have nowhere to run,” he warned. “So you may as well tell us everything.”
Simon’s laugh was rough, gummy. “Start off with the location of that bomb.”
“Hm?” The man tilted his spotted head. “Which one?”
“Guys!” Jonas’s voice cracked through the mic in his ear. “That place is wired. I’m tracing the source, but it’s— Did he say ‘which one’?”
Another line clicked into place. “I’ll look,” Jessie announced, emphasis on the word.
“Jessie, don’t you—” Gunfire cut Silas off mid-order, and Shawn jerked his head as the sound left his ear pulsing. “Be careful, damn it!”
Simon glanced back at Shawn, a sidelong frown over his shoulder. Something red and viscous gleamed at his upper lip, smeared over his forearm as he dragged his sleeve across it. Blood, thin and watery, and tinged with too much yellow to be healthy. “There’s a shit ton of people fleeing the gunfire,” he warned. His eyes seemed cloudy, shoulders jerking as if he fought to stay upright. “We need to move fast.”
Could they move fast enough?
“Why the hell are you wiring this place up?” he demanded of the old man. “What’s your angle?”
“Because there is no room for it in the future,” Lauderdale replied as if he answered a simpler, more obvious question.
“That doesn’t answer anything.”
“Doesn’t it?” He smiled faintly. “It’s a symbol, this place. A beacon of hope and stability. That’s why it has to go.”
That made no sense. “You’re going to blow up your own—”
Lauderdale shifted, one hand coming up in a sudden arc.
Every alarm in his brain clanged at once. Shawn’s head jerked to the side, eyes widening. “Simon, get—”
The warning died as a gunshot tore through the cathedral air, slammed wall to wall, built on a sea of echoes. They drilled through his eardrums, left them ringing.
Simon, caught half turning, staggered.
“What happened?” Jonas’s demand, peppered by a terse, strained echo from Parker.
The smell of gunpowder wafted across the cathedral. Sweat bloomed across Shawn’s forehead, his shoulders, dampened his palms as he watched Simon topple to the ground. The pungent metallic odor of blood followed.
Lauderdale stepped back onto the altar steps, holding up a narrow black box in one hand as the other dropped his weapon. It thunked as it hit the carpeted stairs, a hollow sound mirroring the dull thud of Shawn’s heartbeat.
Rage seized his throat. “You never had problems pulling the trigger, did you?”
“Shawn?” Parker’s voice, cracking faintly under the strain he imagined she must be feeling. “Simon!”
The old man stood silently for a moment, his gaze fixed on Simon’s still body. Then, thoughtfully, “You could have shot me, boy. What’s stopping you?”
The taunt, matter-of-fact as it was, plinked something dark and ugly in his brain.
The line crackled faintly, as if interference hovered just on the edge of the channel. “What happened?” Jonas demanded.
Fingers shaking, he reached up, depressed the tiny button on the mic. The line went dead. “That was your son!” he snarled.
There was no answering emotion in the old man’s wizened regard. “Will you shoot me for it, Shawn Lowe?” At his name on the bastard’s lips, Shawn jerked, guts twisting. Nausea filled his belly, bile in his throat. “Oh, yes,” he added, almost a sigh as he held that switch between them. “I remember you now.”
The observation burned like acid.
“Why shoot him?” Shawn demanded. “What was the point?”
“Failures come around.” Lauderdale glanced at the still, sallow figure at Shawn’s feet, and his eyebrows twitched. “He would have died anyway, you know. There’s no stopping degeneration. Not yet, anyway. I did him a service.”
“Is that your excuse?” Shawn gritted out between his teeth, “Is that why you killed my parents? A service?”
Lauderdale waved the switch in front of him in denial. “I pulled no triggers. Your parents overreacted. I am not responsible for that!”
“Overreacted,” Shawn spat. “You killed them! And it ends here. Now.”
Lauderdale’s face tipped to the ceiling, but if he studied the art painted there or saw something else in his old brain, Shawn couldn’t tell. Didn’t care.
This man had murdered his family, and he would pay.
And so would Kayleigh.
His finger jerked against the trigger. Stilled. His teeth gritted so hard, the joints in his jaw popped loudly.
It’s not about her. It never was. Not for one second did he think—
“What about Kayleigh?”
His heart hit the back of his throat and lodged there. “She has nothing to do with this!”
Lauderdale watched him, a shrewd half smile on his thin lips. “Ah. You can always tell when a man goes soft.” He
raised his free hand, rubbed it over his balding head. Awkward. Impatient. “Knowing what you know of my daughter,” he continued, rational to the bone, “will you shoot me, son?”
“Don’t call me that.”
Again, that gaze settled on Simon. Blood darkened the carpet, turned red fibers nearly black under Shawn’s boots.
When the man shrugged, stooped shoulders rolling with it, he said, “Shoot me, then. I will be beyond caring.” He flipped the cap off the box he held, thumb nestling on the trigger. “What you young people don’t and have never understood is that it isn’t about me. It’s never been about me. This city will fall, and when the dust is settled, they’ll come together again. The way they used to. The way they should.”
“You’re crazy!”
The man shrugged again. The motion jerked, as if being upright pained him. “I have been called worse by better men.”
Shawn wanted to kneel and check Simon’s throat for a pulse. He wanted to pull the trigger, damn the switch and the bomb and Kayleigh . . .
He couldn’t damn Kayleigh.
Shawn eased one step closer to Simon. His skin was pale, clammy, everything too still. No breath that he could see at a glance. No sound.
Shit. Shit.
“Where are the bombs?” he demanded grimly.
“Out of your reach,” Lauderdale assured him. “Even if I told you, you’d never make it in time.”
“This cathedral isn’t that big.”
The old man’s laughter was dry as brittle bone. “It doesn’t stop there, my boy. It has never stopped at the Church. You’re too young to understand what I saw back then. How the people came together, how they helped one another.”
Shawn squeezed his eyes shut. “At least tell me why you went after my father. Why the warrant?”
“I don’t really recall,” Lauderdale said promptly, and Shawn snarled a word that earned a brief frown. “All of you street people are the same, aren’t you?”
He ignored that. “You’re lying.”
“My dear boy,” Lauderdale said as he cradled the switch between gnarled hands, thumb firmly in place. “Why would I bother lying? To be honest, there were a lot of reasons I could think of off the top of my head—employment opportunities, medical necessity, even simple interrogation. But I think the likeliest is . . .” He hummed a wavering note. “This was fifteen years ago?”
“Sixteen.”
“Ah.” As if it all made sense, he nodded. “The chances are good that his was one of the records selected from the medical files.”
Shawn’s gun lowered a fraction. “Selected? Selected for what?”
“Back then, I had all medical records sent through filters,” Lauderdale explained, pleasant for all he stood on a church altar with a bomb switch in his hands. “Your father’s genetic sequence was ideal for the Salem purposes.”
He knew it. He’d known it then—suspected something to do with that fucking witch factory—and now, confirmed, he stepped forward. “Is there anything in this city you haven’t corrupted?”
“Me?” He raised the switch, brandished it. “I’ve corrupted nothing! I’ve watched this city crumble bit by bit, cowed under Church rule and drowning in its own poison.”
Gun firm again, Shawn bared his teeth. “Bullshit,” he snarled. “Your family is no more than a collection of butchers.” Unfair, his heart argued.
The demon in him didn’t care. It hungered for blood, demanded justice. Vengeance.
“My family? You mean Kayleigh.” Her name earned another punch in Shawn’s chest, a reminder of everything he stood to lose.
Had lost already.
Lauderdale shook his head, smile slipping. “No. Kayleigh is brilliant, but she lacks the . . . stomach. The will, you understand. I couldn’t tell her my plans.”
Kayleigh? Lacking will? Shawn scoffed, rage banking enough to recognize that bullshit for what it was.
“We did things differently back then,” Lauderdale admitted. “Still would, if I had the right help. Mattie understood, at first. Saw the light at the end of the tunnel.” He winced. “Before the tunnel grew too long and the ground too . . . cluttered. No, Kayleigh doesn’t know where the lab came from. How we operated. Maybe I shouldn’t have coddled her.”
“Coddled?” Shawn flung his free hand at the cathedral around them. “You call this coddling? You planted a bomb!”
“No.” Surprise laced the reply. And regret. “This is . . . necessary.” The man gestured with the box, and the sweat on Shawn’s shoulders turned to ice. “This . . . this cathedral is an afterthought. A stain. We won’t need mementos of the Church when this is over, don’t you see? It’s not about you or me or religion anymore! It never was. It’s for them. For the people! The same people you claim to fight for.”
Shawn closed his eyes. Took a slow, deep breath, and raised the gun.
This is the way it has to be.
“This is the end of the road,” he announced, his voice rebounding back at him from every direction. “Tell us where all the bombs are, and—”
“And what? You shall have me tried?” Lauderdale studied him for a long moment. Ignored the weapon, the threat. “There is no force that can try me now. Everything I have done, I’ve done for the betterment of this city.”
Such bullshit.
“I regret nothing.” When his eyes flicked aside, focused on something behind Shawn—ghosts or God only knew—he nodded. “Good genes,” he finally said, as if to himself. “I always knew it. My Mattie had a flair for the dramatic, but nobody could see it like she could.” He turned his back, head tilting up as he studied the face of the red-robed figure set into stained glass.
“Hit that switch,” Shawn warned, “and you’re a dead man.”
One hand, the hand with the black box, edged out from his side. “My dear boy, I have been dying for years.” His thumb moved.
Shawn’s heart stalled.
As the world tunneled to a single moment, he pulled the trigger. Two gunshots cracked in the silence.
Chapter Twenty-Two
A third operative hit the ground, wheezing through his cracked faceplate. Parker lowered her gun, her face pale in the quad lights as she raked a stern eye over the huddled mass of bystanders hovering at the fringe.
Kayleigh stared at the carnage. Three agents down, one—a petite figure going hand to hand with the much larger Silas—showing signs of wear.
She took a step forward.
Parker’s arm came up, blocking her. “Stay out of sight,” she ordered, in the same cool tones Kayleigh had always earned from the Mission director.
She raised one hand, wrapped her fingers around Parker’s wrist. They shook. “I didn’t know,” she said intently, staring at the scattered, cowering crowd. Some were on comms. Calling for help, maybe. “Parker.” A beat. “Director Ad—”
The woman’s shoulders didn’t relax under the synth-leather jacket she wore—the same style she’d seen on Silas, on Shawn. But her eyes, always so cold, softened. Gently, she disengaged her wrist. “It’s Parker,” she said, and if it wasn’t the warmest thing, it didn’t freeze, either. “And I believe you. Mostly.”
Silas shifted as a boot cracked against his knee. He grimaced, caught the agent by the throat, and lifted her.
Kayleigh winced as he slammed her against the cathedral wall, once. Twice. Plastic fractured.
The crowd gasped.
Parker glowered at them. “Go home,” she ordered, every word an arctic command.
Some turned. Others stared.
One, a woman in crisp business attire, frowned. “Weren’t those Church agents—”
Kayleigh caught Parker’s shoulder as the ex-missionary’s grip shifted on her gun. The pale quality of her cheeks turned sallow.
The director had never liked blood. That she was willing to spill it now told Kayleigh everything she needed to know about the importance of their mission.
“Everyone, leave the area,” Kayleigh ordered, less chilly, but she knew ho
w to wield her reputation. Parker may have been the famed ice bitch of the Mission, but she was a Lauderdale.
Some nearly sprinted. Others took their time, but some people just wanted a show. She had no time for it.
“Some of them called for the riot force,” Kayleigh warned, turning back to the red-haired woman. Soldier, really. The difference was astounding after only three weeks.
Parker nodded once. “Silas, wrap it up!”
He grunted. When the agent’s hand came up, a trick Kayleigh had seen her do already in this fight, he wrapped his fingers around it. Kept her from using the magic that had stopped Kayleigh in her tracks with sheer kinetic strength. Silas squeezed until the witch cried out, sharp even through the spiderwebbed faceplate covering her features.
“Give up,” he growled.
Suddenly, Parker stiffened. She raised her fingers to her ear, tendrils of red sliding over them as she turned swiftly. “What do you mean? Where’s Simon?”
At the same time, Silas spun, giving his back to the crumpled agent. “Get away from the wall!” he roared.
Parker was already grabbing Kayleigh’s arm, wrenched her off the paved walkway and into the scrub bushes planted beside it.
Her heart surged into her throat. “What . . . Where’s—”
She had no chance to finish.
A clap of thunder echoed from somewhere nearby. Within a nanosecond, a shudder vibrated the quad ground. Kayleigh hit the dirt, Parker half sprawled on top of her.
The next instant hit like a shock wave.
It tore through the air, ripped apart everything in its path. Parker’s body rocked, lifted half off Kayleigh’s shoulder, and she cringed as a sheet of red whipped over her face. The world spun, heat licked over her exposed skin, seared everything it could reach. The ground shook and rocked, screams punctuated a terrible rumble, cracking stone and shattered glass.
Kayleigh covered her head, squeezing her eyes closed, and prayed.
It couldn’t end like this. Nothing was resolved.
All the things she’d meant to say, all the truths she needed to know, hadn’t seen daylight yet. She needed them to see daylight.
An arm curled around her shoulders, flattened over her as the rumbling faded, as abruptly as it came.
Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Page 23
