by Nell Stark
“Holy shit. He’s coming here.”
“Apparently. Do you still want our people on him, or are you going to call it in?”
My head pounded with possibilities. “Both. We need a full court press. We can’t lose him.”
“I’m on it.”
The first number I dialed was Leon Summers’s, and after I had him on the line, I added Devon Foster to the call.
“This had better be good, Val,” she said. “I’m up to my teeth, here.”
“You and me both,” said Summers.
They both sounded fatigued, and it wasn’t difficult to guess why; with no news about the status of the delegation, they were exhausting every avenue of inquiry. I cut to the chase.
“Balthasar Brenner will be landing at Linden Airport in about two hours.”
The conversation exploded, as I’d known it would. Once they’d had it out with their expressions of incredulity, I explained my orders to Caleb and what he had discovered.
“The ball’s in your court now,” I told them, “but I want to be a part of this. Start to finish.”
“Then get your ass over here,” Summers snapped. “We’ll be in the War Room.”
“And bring guns,” Foster added. “Lots of guns.”
Chapter Fifteen
I had a separate closet for my guns, the way other women had a closet for their shoes. My collection had come a long way in the year and a half since Penn, my father’s head of security, had given me my first revolver—a Colt M1911. Now, I debated between a wide variety of handguns, most of which had been custom-made by a small company in Arkansas. Finally, I selected three: the CQB Tactical Light Rail, which was excellent in low-light conditions; the M-4T Tactical Carbine, which could shoot thirty rounds before it needed reloading and was especially good at close-range; and the easily-concealed Combat Sentinel. And a knife, as backup.
Gray predawn light was filtering through my car’s windows by the time I reached Headquarters, and I ducked inside the doors with relief. Giselle’s replacement at the front desk was even more beautiful than her predecessor, with exquisite ebony skin and large, almond-shaped eyes. On any other day, I would have paused to introduce myself, but instead, I hurried for the elevator.
If Consortium Headquarters was a fortress, then the War Room was its keep. Giant plasma screens plastered almost every available wall, some displaying live video feeds from around the world, while others projected data arranged in charts and graphs. When I entered, I was directed to a conference room in the back where Summers and Foster were monitoring the team that had been deployed to track Brenner’s movements.
Like everyone else in the conference room, I was wearing a black sweater, black pants, and black boots. We had all come prepared for a raid. Caleb greeted me tersely, his attention clearly divided between the two screens in this room. One was a long-distance shot of the airfield, while the other camera was inside the hangar. Our hackers had made quick work of the airport’s security protocols.
I clapped Caleb on the shoulder. “Nice job picking up Brenner.”
He only grunted in reply. Foster hailed me from across the room and I went to join her and Summers where they were examining schematics of the airport and hangar.
“I’m not going to believe you actually found him until I see the fucker with my own eyes,” Summers said.
“Patience, Leon,” I replied, though truthfully, I was just as impatient as he was. “What’s the plan once he’s on the ground?”
“We’ve got people on the tarmac, in the hangar, and in the airport,” said Foster. “As well as two teams waiting in cars and a few extras on motorcycles. Anyone likely to get close to him is a human, to avoid suspicion. We’ll be on him like crazy glue.”
“As soon as we track him to his base, we’ll mount a raid.” Summers turned his full attention to me for the first time. “I take it you’ll be coming along?”
I hefted the small duffle that held the M-4T and spare rounds. The Light Rail was already strapped to my waist, and the Sentinel pressed comfortingly against my lower back, fully concealed by my shirt. “Locked and loaded. Try and stop me.”
“Plane’s coming in,” someone called, and all attention turned to the screen monitoring the runway. A few seconds later, a small silver airplane came into view and touched down smoothly before taxiing to the hangar. The minutes dragged by as we waited for its passengers to disembark.
Several armed men in dark suits walked down the stairway first and inspected the hangar and its personnel. One of them spoke into a wrist mic, and a few moments later, another figure appeared at the airlock. During the flight, Brenner had transformed from a business executive into a militia leader. Dressed in gray cable-knit sweater, camo pants, and military-issue boots, he looked ready for a fight.
“I’ll be damned,” Leon muttered.
Brenner bypassed the entrance to the small building that housed the airport’s offices, walking toward the hangar doors and then out of the camera’s field of view.
“Report,” Foster ordered, sounding much more calm than I would have under the circumstances.
The speaker on the table crackled into life. “He’s getting into a black Suburban parked around the corner. We’ll pick him up.”
For the next fifteen minutes, we listened to the operatives report in as they followed Brenner in a dizzying series of coordinated maneuvers designed not to arouse the suspicions of his driver or guards. Finally, the car turned into a derelict storage lot that, one of Leon’s agents informed us, used to be an offshoot of the New York/New Jersey Port Authority before business had waned. Unfortunately, its security cameras had been disabled, so we had no way of seeing inside short of physically entering the yard.
“Watch the perimeter,” Foster was instructing her team. “Every square inch, including the waterfront. Commandeer a boat if we can’t scramble one fast enough. Nobody comes or goes without your knowledge. We’ll be there as soon as it’s dark again.”
Once the operatives’ affirmative replies had come through the speaker, Summers ended the transmission and whistled shrilly to call the room to attention.
“We have eleven hours to come up with an ironclad plan, people,” he barked. “Failure is not an option. Let’s get to work.”
*
As the van exited the Holland Tunnel, Foster called her team leader at the lot. “Status?”
“No change.” If the man was getting tired of Foster’s frequent requests for reports, his voice didn’t reveal it. Before we left Headquarters, we had all been outfitted with earbuds and mics, and I could hear Foster’s lieutenant as clearly as if he were sitting next to me.
“ETA twenty minutes,” she said.
I stretched my legs into the space between the van’s benches and mentally prepared myself for the skirmish to come. We had the element of surprise along with three different attack plans based on what we found when we arrived at the yard. Satellite photographs had helped us identify a cluster of three warehouses near the center of the complex where movement had been seen earlier in the day, and each plan focused on surrounding and securing the area with minimal chaos. The last thing we needed was to alert any human authorities.
We had fed before leaving Headquarters, and my senses were so amplified that I could hear every minor imperfection in the car; its front tires needed rotation and its back axle was a tiny bit crooked. When I closed my eyes, the sounds and scents jumped into even sharper relief: the low buzz of our electronic equipment, the acrid odor of gunpowder, the persistent grinding of Caleb’s teeth as he guided the van in and out of traffic.
Summers studied the GPS closely. “Let’s ditch the car up here,” he said, indicating the parking lot of an abandoned grocery superstore. Caleb pulled over and maneuvered the van behind a large pile of dirty snow, concealing it from the casual view of passersby. I unzipped my duffle and pulled out a ski mask, then slung the M-4T across my shoulders and clipped the spare rounds to my belt.
“How far are we from
this place?” I asked as I followed Foster out the sliding door.
“Just over half a mile.” After radioing the team leader that we were approaching on foot, she led the way down the road at a jog.
The chill air sluiced down my lungs and my breath steamed into the night. It felt good to be on the move, and I allowed myself a brief moment simply to appreciate the crisp starlit evening before shifting my attention to the mission ahead. As the storage lot came into view around a bend in the road, Summers held up a hand to slow our pace.
I peered into the shadows ahead, straining with my other senses as well. There were humans not too far away—at least two of them. Weres had been here recently, but their scent was dull, like the stale smell of beer in an abandoned fraternity basement.
“Dobson, Harris,” Foster murmured. “Show yourselves.”
Two humans materialized out of the darkness. “Their perimeter is a hundred yards away,” whispered the taller of the two. “Sentries still positioned at twenty-yard intervals.”
“Stick to the plan, then,” said Summers.
We fanned out at the fifty-yard point, a steel trap poised to close on Brenner’s guards. In an effort to infiltrate the lot without alerting him, Summers and Foster had assigned two team members to each of his sentries. We were to avoid shooting our guns unless absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, using silencers wouldn’t help; with their keen hearing, the shifters would still be able to hear a silenced shot.
Foster and I paired off, Caleb and Summers to our right. We moved like ghosts, sprinting silently between patches of shadow. As we crested a small rise in the terrain, we dropped to our stomachs. The chain link fence surrounding the yard was topped with rolls of barbed wire. A large gate bisected the road, flanked by two human-shaped figures. I was fairly confident they hadn’t seen our approach, but the twenty yards between us and them was completely devoid of cover. We would have to make a dash for it. I hoped our team’s human pairs were luckier in terms of their geography. Having fed so recently, I could cover the distance in only a few seconds, but they would be much slower.
“Ready?” Foster said under her breath. While the other pairs reported in, I disengaged my gun safeties and loosened the strap of the M-4T. When she glanced at me, I nodded.
“Go go go!”
I pushed hard off the frozen ground and raced across the intervening space, milking every ounce of superhuman speed from my legs. With no time to shift, the sentries snarled and reached for their weapons, but I pistol-whipped the first before he could fire. Distracted by me, the second guard fell to Foster who put him in a chokehold.
“Not bad,” I said, my breaths still coming steadily. And then machine gun fire erupted off to our left like popcorn in a kettle drum.
Foster cursed but didn’t take her focus off the gate. As we broke the chain and yanked it open, Caleb and Summers rejoined us. A moment later, Harris reported that one of his fellow operatives had been wounded but the others would join us shortly.
“Let’s get in there while Brenner’s troops are mustering,” said Summers.
“We’re going in,” Foster said into her mic. “Assemble the rest of the team and then come and back us up.”
We ran into the yard and immediately took cover behind the nearest shipping container. With our backs to the fence, we made our way toward the center of the compound. All my senses were on high alert, but the prevailing scent was a composite of salt water and rotting fish from the nearby bay, and the only sounds I heard were the ones our small party made as we traversed the broken asphalt.
“Where the hell are his goons?” Summers growled as we approached the cluster of warehouses that had appeared—from the sky, anyway—to be Brenner’s base camp. Each of us in turn peered around the corner of the container we were currently using for cover. The warehouse buildings formed three legs of a square with a large empty space in the middle.
“Trap.” Caleb sounded like he had no doubt, and neither did I.
“We need to spring it somehow,” I said. “We’re just giving them more time to get ready, otherwise.”
Foster knelt and began to scratch patterns in the gravel. “Why don’t we—”
From the bay, a nearby barge sounded its horn in a long, booming note, almost drowning out the scrape of a boot on metal above us. As the sound reached my hypersensitive ears, I dove into the corridor between our container and the next, rolled onto my back, and fired almost straight up into the air. Moments later, a twitching canine body dropped to my feet. I’d missed a killing blow and now had a fully shifted wolf on my hands.
“Ambush from above!” I hissed just before all hell broke loose.
The massive wolf lunged for my throat, but Foster shot it in the head before it touched me. Bullets pinged the metal walls all around us, ricocheting dangerously. One thudded into the earth just past my feet, and I scrambled up to find new cover. I sprinted around the back of the container and vaulted onto its ladder, sticking my head up above the walls just long enough to pick off one of Brenner’s thugs. Bullets sprayed above my head as I dropped back to the ground.
“I’ll cherry pick,” I said into the mic. “You guys find a defensible spot.”
I darted from container to container, shooting off as many rounds as I could and then zigzagging unpredictably so Brenner’s mercenaries couldn’t be certain of where I would pop up next. Meanwhile, Foster, Summers, and Caleb deployed most of the team to flanking positions near the central warehouses and instructed the rest to keep our path of retreat open.
But almost immediately, the first group ran into trouble. Brenner’s men atop the shipping containers were joined by shooters on the second level of the nearest warehouses. The group was pinned in a no man’s land. Instead of picking off one shooter at a time, I climbed out onto the container’s roof and ran toward the warehouse. The M-4T felt alive in my hands, and I used it to nail both of the gunmen who were out in the open. As soon as the ones in the warehouse realized what was happening, they turned their rifles toward me, but I shot one of them as I continued to run toward Foster’s beleaguered team.
I didn’t slow as I reached the far edge of the container, and instead propelled myself into the air even as I continued to fire into the warehouse windows. When I hit the ground, I rolled right into the remnants of the team. One was dead and another wounded, and the metallic aroma of fresh blood filled my mouth with moisture.
Before I could speak, a deep voice rang out into the night.
“Cease and desist, or I will start killing your precious Sunrunners, one by one.”
“Brenner!” Foster’s whisper echoed through my ears.
I beckoned for the two remaining humans to join me and we edged forward until we had a clear line of sight into the courtyard. Balthasar Brenner stood near the entrance to the warehouse that sat along the waterline. He was flanked by two large black wolves, and Bai knelt before him, face bloodied and hands tied behind his back.
“This has gone on long enough,” Brenner said, his voice echoing throughout the lot. “Leave at once, or you will have to explain this one’s death to your bloodsucking bitch mistress.” He tangled his fingers in Bai’s hair and tugged, exposing his throat. “When I am feeling disposed to negotiate terms for her surrender, she will be the first to know.”
I raised the M-4T to my shoulder and sighted along the barrel, not wanting to risk tipping off Brenner by using the laser sight. Even so, he seemed to know exactly what I was doing.
“And if you kill me now,” he continued, “my soldiers have orders to end the pathetic lives of every single vampire in my custody.”
Swearing quietly, I lowered the gun to my side. Foster and Summers were talking over each other, but their lines of reasoning seemed to be in agreement: under no circumstances could we risk Brenner killing his hostages. We needed to get out, inform Helen of the situation, and regroup.
“You’ve made your point,” Summers shouted from their hiding place. “We will retreat.”
I co
uld only imagine how bitter those words tasted in his mouth. “Watch your backs,” I murmured, even as I gestured for the humans to follow me back to the gate. “He didn’t guarantee safe passage.”
That became all too clear when the stillness of the night gave way to menacing snarls. Brenner had let his dogs out. We raced for the gate, and as it came into view, I heard Foster announce that her small group was through. But the growling behind us was growing louder. The wolves were going to overtake us.
I stopped and pulled the gun from my belt. I yelled at the humans to keep going, then planted my feet and faced back the way we had come. The two black wolves were covering the distance between us in ground-eating strides, their fearsome teeth bared beneath crimson gums. They would reach me in seconds, but I was still strong, still fast. Letting instinct guide my movements, I raised my gun and squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession.
The first wolf fell like a stone, a bloodstain blooming across its barrel chest. But my second shot went wide, and I had only a heartbeat before those jaws would close around my throat. In one smooth movement, I dropped into a crouch, pulled my knife from its ankle sheath, and flung it into the chest of the beast just as it leapt for me. Its momentum knocked me to the ground, but the spasmodic twitching of its muscles signaled that my blade had found its mark.
I rolled out from under its weight and hurried to rejoin the others. Since we couldn’t lock the gate, we raced back to the van, lest Brenner deploy more of his wolves. Caleb pealed out of the parking lot like a man possessed, and only then did I dare to take a deep breath.
“What a clusterfuck,” I said, finally allowing myself to feel the full measure of disgust at our impotence. Perhaps I should have disobeyed orders and pulled the trigger when I had the chance. Those wolves would have instantly turned on Bai, but we might have been able to get rid of them before—
When I realized where my thoughts had gone, I almost laughed. Before what? Before they crushed his jugular? Before they ripped open his guts? Bai was second in command to one of the most powerful vampires in the world. Brenner had all the chips, and he knew it. I glanced at Summers’s stony expression and wondered what he would advise Helen to do once we returned to Headquarters.
