“He’s a vampire now, which means he’s signed his death warrant,” Angelique said. She tilted her head and added, “But you knew that already too, didn’t you?”
Ashton turned away from her, slamming the notepad onto his desk in frustrated anger. “Yes, I knew,” he bit out. “He came to see me last night.”
“And you didn’t kill him?”
“No,” Ashton muttered. “Not yet, anyway. He said there’s a lot more going on than we thought, so we’re going to try to flip this, see if we can’t work something out.”
There was a scrape of boot against carpet, and then Angelique appeared at his elbow. She stood beside him for several long minutes, silent, letting him dwell on the thoughts that had been rattling in his head all night. When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “You know you’re going to have to, eventually.”
“I know.”
Another hush fell between them. Ashton focused on the security monitors behind his desk. They were all black; he’d yet to power them on for the day, though he knew the cameras were recording regardless. He gripped the edge of his desk as if it were a lifeline, trying to not think on what the future held for him and Zachariah. When the silence was broken, it was by Angelique clearing her throat.
“When the vampires left the coven last night, I infiltrated it,” she said, continuing her report as if she’d never stopped. “I went inside to see what I could learn. The place was empty, but it was obvious there were vampires living there. That’s when I found Zachariah’s machete. I thought I’d take it with me since…well, I thought you’d want it back.”
Ashton nodded and looked at his desk, staring at the list of books he’d copied off of The Unnaturals’ computer database. Angelique continued to stand beside him, staring. He felt like he would come unhinged if she didn’t stop.
“I got back over this way, but I was followed,” Angelique added. “I left my car before I got to Buzzard Point and went the rest of the way on foot. I think I shook off whoever was following me. I’m not positive, though.”
Ashton barely paid attention to the woman’s words. A sudden, burning desire to be alone, utterly alone, had boiled up inside him, even as a heavy emotion burbled up in his chest. His eye flickered over the desk, searching for something to send Angelique off on so he could be alone. He snatched up the list of books and shoved it at her. “Go get yourself cleaned up and get these books for me out of the library,” he ordered, feeling like he was choking on the words. “And if anyone else is looking to meet with me, I’m not available for any meetings.”
Angelique took the paper from him, but she didn’t leave right away like he’d expected her to—like he’d hoped she would. Instead, she stared at the paper, reading it over, before speaking up to say, “All of these books are about vampires. You’re looking to find a way to save him, aren’t you?”
“And why shouldn’t I?” Ashton demanded. “Why shouldn’t I try to help him? Why is it that I’m expected to throw in the towel and put a bullet in his head without at least trying to find a way to reverse what’s happened to him?”
“Because every other agent in this organization that has been suspected of having been bitten by a vampire—or a werewolf, or a demon, or any of the other creatures we deal with on a daily basis—has been immediately put to death,” Angelique pointed out. “You were the exception to the rule, because Zachariah lobbied for The Agency to wait a few days before carrying out an execution, and in that time they determined you weren’t bitten. But why should Zachariah be given that same exception when it’s obvious he’s been bitten?”
“Because it’s Zach, damn it,” Ashton ground out from between clenched teeth. He gripped the edge of his mahogany desk tighter, his knuckles blanching with the force of his grip. “He saved my life two years ago. I owe him. I owe it to him to try to find a way to reverse what’s happened to him. There are stories—”
“And that’s all they are,” Angelique said. “Stories. Legends. Lore. Whatever. There’s not a single documented case of a person who was turned into a vampire finding a way to reverse it.”
“All legends have some basis in fact,” Ashton argued. “Somewhere, there’s a grain of truth to the stories. And that means that somewhere, there has to be documentation of a way to turn this around. We just haven’t found it yet.”
“Ashton…”
Ashton slammed his fist against the desktop. Angelique jumped. “Don’t you dare start that placating bullshit with me, Angelique,” he snarled. “Now get the fuck out of my office before I throw you out myself.”
Angelique hesitated before folding the list in half and turning on her heel, striding across the floor toward the office’s lone exit. Ashton had an irrational stab of fear dart through his chest—what if she went to his bosses and reported him for having illegal contact with a vampire? Or what if, God forbid, she went after Zachariah herself?—and almost called after her to stop. But she was out the door and slamming it behind her before he could choke the words out past the lump in his throat. The pane of glass set in the door rattled in its frame.
With the slamming of the door, the fear shifted into white-hot fires of pure anger. Before he could stop himself, he swiped his hand sideways along the top of his desk, striking his coffee mug. It sailed halfway across the office to bang against the wall and drop to the carpet with a splash of cold coffee and a crunch of breaking ceramic. He closed his eye and fought to control himself, to get a handle on his anger. It was when he got angry that he lost control and made stupid decisions, and he couldn’t afford that. Zachariah’s life was on the line. He didn’t have room for mistakes, not this time.
Ashton abandoned his post by his desk and headed for his attached bedroom, sparing the spilled coffee and the mug it had come from only a momentary glance. The handle had been broken off by his furious swipe, but otherwise, the mug was still whole. Broken but serviceable. Kind of like him.
Ashton paused in the doorway to his bedroom, gripping the doorframe and frowning. Since when had he begun to think of himself as broken?
He shook the feeling off and stepped into his bedroom, shutting and locking the door before crossing to the attached bathroom. Once there, he stared at himself in the mirror, studying his face, looking past the scars for once to the person beyond them. Two years before, he’d thought he’d known who he was: a field agent, loyal to his country and to the Agency, researching and learning everything he could about the newest enemies he’d been tasked with facing, one half of what was considered the best partnership to have ever come from the Agency and The Unnaturals combined. He’d loved what he did, and it was the only life he knew; when Damon Hartley had discovered him when he was about nineteen, suffering from a severe case of amnesia and with no idea who he was, where he’d come from, or how he’d come to be in Washington, D.C., the man had given him a new life and a new purpose. After that, he’d woken up every day with a renewed sense of enjoyment at the challenges he’d faced regularly. He’d been utterly defined by his job.
And then, as he and Zachariah had been celebrating another assignment gone right, everything had gone wrong, and he’d been left scrambling to find himself again.
Ashton wasn’t sure he had succeeded. Especially now, as he gazed at himself in the bathroom mirror, trying to figure out when he’d become the type to consort with the things he had spent years of his life studying and tracking and killing.
His neck was sore where Zachariah had bitten it. He unbuttoned his wrinkled dress shirt, shucking it off and dropping the dark blue article of clothing into the laundry hamper by the sink. Then he hooked his fingers into the collar of his white undershirt, but he hesitated before he pulled the collar aside. There was a small stain of blood on the edge of the fabric, and the sight of it forced Ashton to acknowledge the cold, hard reality of what had happened to Zachariah. He pressed his lips together and tugged the fabric aside to look at his shoulder.
It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected—though, truth be told, he wasn’t sure w
hat he had expected when he’d pulled the shirt collar aside. The wounds from Zachariah’s teeth were still there, raw and red around the edges, but they no longer oozed blood like they had when Zachariah had first bitten him. The area was bruised and discolored from the pressure of the man’s teeth. Ashton prodded the bruise with a fingertip and grimaced at the ache in his shoulder as his mind spun with plans and ideas.
He wondered what it said about him and his oh-so-pristine loyalties that his first thought was that it’d be perfectly okay for him to walk away from the Agency and take Zachariah somewhere where The Unnaturals couldn’t get their hands on him.
Chapter Seventeen
It had been six long hours since Scott had suggested that her long-time friend and mentor and ex-boyfriend Brandon Hall was a murderer, and Riley couldn’t wrap her mind around the possibility. Oh, she wasn’t an idiot. Their jobs as covert operatives entailed the occasional government-sponsored assassinations of less-than-savory characters, and none of their hands were clean. But Brandon murdering agents? There had to have been another explanation. The suggestion didn’t come close to matching what Riley knew of the man, who had always treated her and other agents like her with the respect and dignity they deserved.
Riley shook her head and looked at Scott. The man paced restlessly across the room, back and forth, from the windows to just short of the bathroom door and back. From her perch on the end of the bed, Riley followed him with her eyes, feeling like she was watching a particularly slow tennis match. She wanted popcorn. She also wanted to tell the man to sit down because he was making her dizzy, but he had his cell phone pressed to his ear and was talking to someone on the other end in a low, almost angry tone.
“Look, this is running far deeper than we initially thought,” Scott said into the phone. He paced past Riley to the window and paused, brushing the curtains aside to look at the street below. Then he let it fall and moved away from it, shaking his head at whatever was being said on the other end of the line. “I can’t give you more details than that, okay? It’s all I’ve got.” He paused again and ran a hand through his dark hair before adding, “Call it a gut instinct.”
Riley chewed on her bottom lip pensively as she watched Scott blow out a frustrated breath, and she leaned against her hands to watch him from a position of increased comfort. He was on the phone with Henry Cage, attempting to get the man to give them a hand with some information they required. Scott had developed a renewed determination to play connect-the-dots with the information that was available to them, because he was certain there was some sort of connection between the twenty-seven agents, something that tied them all together. He’d spoken of puzzles and missing pieces until she’d nearly leaned forward and slapped him just to get him to shut up with the metaphors.
“Well, who does have access to them?” Scott snapped. He looked like he was ready to tear his hair out in frustration as he listened to Henry. If Riley strained her ears, she could catch the faint strands of Henry’s voice, though she couldn’t make out anything of what he was saying. But then Scott stopped in mid-stride and turned, his eyes narrowing as he looked across the room. Riley followed his gaze and realized that he was staring at the closed bathroom door. There was silence for long moments as Scott listened intently, and then he said, “Thanks, Henry. I think that will be enough for now.” He hung up, closing the clamshell phone with a snap and stuffing it into his pocket.
Riley straightened and smoothed her hands over the thighs of her jeans. The expression on Scott’s face wasn’t pleasant, and she was hesitant to voice her question. “What did you find out?”
Scott flopped onto the ergonomic desk chair and propped his feet onto the ottoman that was still beside it. “A whole hell of a lot of bullshit,” he said. “I don’t even know where to start.” He ran his hands through his hair and started to massage his temples with his fingertips. Then he spilled the beans, and Riley found herself reeling from the bombshell he’d just dropped about what Henry had found: modified files and Brandon’s apparent attempt to cover up his involvement in it. The shock of it was like being suddenly doused with a bucket of cold water, and it took her long heartbeats to come up for air. When she found that she could breathe again, an odd calmness had settled over her, like all emotion had drained out of her once her internal mini-meltdown was over.
“What else?” she prompted.
“Well, after a little wheedling and a bit more threatening, Henry tried to access the personnel files that he not only should have had access to but was also browsing in just yesterday.”
“Let me take a wild guess and say he couldn’t get in,” Riley said.
“You guessed right,” Scott confirmed. “The files have all been locked down overnight. There’s no way to access them without a specific code. Apparently, they’re only now accessible by one person.”
“Brandon,” Riley murmured.
Scott nodded. “Exactly. For some reason, he’s locked down access credentials to all twenty-seven files. Twenty-eight if we count yours.”
“Mine?” Riley repeated. A sinking feeling flooded her limbs, and she swallowed. “Why would he lock down my files?”
“I don’t know, but we can find out,” Scott said. He moved to the bedside table to retrieve his weapons, returning them to their holsters as he spoke. “We should head out and see if we can track down Brandon,” he said. “Maybe we can manage to find him and dig some information out of him regarding what the hell he’s doing.”
“What makes you think he’s going to tell us the truth though?” Riley asked. “I mean, this is Brandon Hall we’re talking about. There’s a reason that the Agency promoted him to handler and, apparently, Deputy Director. He wouldn’t know what the truth was if it slapped him in the face.”
Scott ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “You’ve known Brandon longer and better than I have,” he said. Riley grimaced at the reminder; her brain didn’t need a refresher on why thoughts of Brandon’s possible betrayal hurt so much. “What do you think we should do if you’re convinced that he wouldn’t tell the truth if we confronted him?”
Riley licked her lips, thinking over their options. There was only one way to find out everything Brandon knew—assuming the knowledge was in physical format—but it wasn’t going to be easy. Taking on Brandon was something she wasn’t prepared to do. The man had done so much for her. He’d found her on the street when she’d had no other place to go and no one else to turn to. He’d given her a new life and a new hope, food and clothing and shelter, and all she’d ever had to do was complete the tasks he set before her. They weren’t difficult tasks, merely tasks that she was oddly suited to. After all of the kindness Brandon had shown her—in his own fashion, of course—Riley was horrified to discover that she was thinking of the man in terms she’d only ever applied to the targets she was set up against.
“Riley?” Scott questioned, and she startled. She’d been quiet too long, and she blinked as she tried to shake herself loose from her quiet contemplation. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, though she didn’t sound so even to her own ears. She cleared her throat and rubbed a hand over her eyes. “One of the best ways to find out anything Brandon knows is to get access to his files,” Riley explained. “I know that seems obvious, because it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
“What makes you say that?” Scott prompted.
“The man’s offices are like a fortress,” Riley explained. “Security features that you would never guess even existed. It’s kind of frightening just thinking about all of the shit I’m going to need to get past.” Even as she said that, she hoped Scott couldn’t read the lie in her eyes.
“You mean ‘we.’”
“No, I mean I,” Riley argued. “I don’t think more than one person could make it through the figurative gauntlet Brandon has established around his offices out of sheer paranoia. One person will be hard enough. Two people? Nearly impossible.”
“You’ll need he
lp,” Scott started.
Riley rolled his eyes. “Scott, I’ll be fine. I was born for this kind of shit. Nothing’s going to touch me.” She cut her eyes toward the bathroom. “Besides, someone needs to stay here with Zachariah. We can’t risk leaving him here alone.”
“So you propose that you should be the one to go after Brandon.” The way Scott said it indicated that it wasn’t a question, merely a statement of fact. He crossed his arms and stared at her, waiting for her answer. She scowled and rose from her spot on the bed.
“You bet your ass I do,” she said. “Between the two of us, I’ve got the best chance of getting in there. And anyway, I already have a plan.”
“I call bullshit,” Scott said. “You’ve said numerous times that you never plan shit.”
“Maybe I did this time,” Riley countered.
“I don’t think you have. I think you’ve got something up your sleeve and you’re going to do something that I won’t approve of.”
Riley glared. “Who the hell said I needed your approval?” she demanded, her voice rising in a high, shrill tone.
Several loud thumps rattled the bathroom door in its frame, and Zachariah’s voice rang out from inside. “Would you two shut the fuck up out there?”
Scott and Riley stared at each other for a minute, and then a bubble of laughter tried to push to the surface. She snorted and clapped a hand over her mouth to suppress it and shook her head. “Look, Scott, I understand you haven’t known me very long,” she started.
Scott let out a snort of his own. “You’re telling me.”
“And you have no reason to trust me,” she continued once she’d given him a dirty look. “But despite that, I’m asking you to trust me on this. This kind of thing is what I’m good at. Let me handle this, and you can stay here and keep tabs on Zachariah.”
Scott stared at her for a moment, studying her face as if he were trying to read something that she wasn’t aware of. She tried to not fidget under his intense gaze, but she couldn’t resist shoving her hands into her pockets and looking away to stare at the bathroom door. Once the silence and his staring had reached uncomfortable levels, he said, “Okay, fine. We’ll do this your way. I’ll trust you on this one and hope you know what the hell you’re doing.”
The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1) Page 26
