The Agency, Volume II

by Sylvan, Dianne

  Nearby, Elora slept in a heap on the floor, freed from the blanket they'd bundled her in but tied up as he was. There was a bench seat between him and the driver's seat.

  "Will this process be the same for Elora?"

  Kaeli looked alarmed. "We would never expect a child to go through that kind of initiation," she said. "The process is exactly the same, but she'll be kept under sedation until the final stage. The spiritual cleansing has to be done while conscious, so the Way can be implanted into the soul properly. She'll be sore and exhausted afterward, and possibly malnourished, but everyone receives careful healing attention. She'll thank us as soon as she's able to walk again. Everyone is always grateful to be shown the truth."

  "And if I refuse?"

  "You can't. We can't give you a choice—you've been led astray, your will twisted by those people. You don't know what's best for yourself right now. I do. Trust me, Father, I'll take care of you."

  Beneath him he could feel the van slowing down. His senses were still so fogged, he could barely tell anything about where they were; he couldn't even tell if they had him under any sort of psychic barrier. As soon as he got his strength back he could call for help—they couldn't be that far away yet. He could reach the base…no, he could reach Jason. Their minds were connected, all he needed was an opportunity, and the energy…god, he was so tired.

  He blinked, and when he looked again he saw Kaeli loading something into a syringe. "I'm going to put you under again for a little while so I can do what I have to without you fighting me."

  "No—"

  He struggled, trying to wrench his hands out of the ropes that held them tightly behind his back, but the van lurched to a halt and threw him toward her. A moment later the back door groaned open and one of the other Elves climbed in, seizing him by the shoulders to pin him down.

  "Hush," Kaeli admonished him gently. "Just hush." She leaned down and stroked his face with one hand while the other plunged the needle into his neck. He felt its contents shooting into his body, burning, his feet going numb…legs…he couldn't move…

  "Untie him," he heard Kaeli say as his vision faded. "Hold out his wrist."

  Part Twelve

  Somewhere far in the distance, Jason heard a scream.

  He jolted back into his body, sucking in a half-sobbed breath. His awareness slammed back into himself, and he flung his hands out trying to find something, anything, to grab onto.

  Someone took hold of each of his arms, and two bodies held him between them. "Easy," he heard a lilting, masculine voice say to his right. "Just breathe."

  Another voice, this one female: "That was stupid. That was so stupid. I can't believe he did that."

  "I can," the first replied. "I would have done the same for my love, once."

  Jason pried his eyes open—the light on the Floor was agonizingly bright. "Fuck."

  He heard plastic on plastic as Sage, at his left, took off her headset. "That was as far out as we could go. Range 10. Did you get anything at all?"

  "Screaming," he panted. "God, Rowan—they're hurting him. I have to try again."

  "I don't think—"

  "Damn it, Sage, you heard me. If I was close enough to hear that, I'm close enough to find him. Put your goddamned Ear back on and let's try again."

  Since Pentecost, she had lost much of her fire, and had become a quiet shell of the wild Irish rose she'd once been; he was well aware of how shattered she still was by what she'd been through. He had every intention of speaking to her about it, but he kept putting it off; they worked so well together that he tended to forget she had once been something else. As if to underscore the change in her personality, she didn't protest again, but sighed and reached for the headset once more.

  "Don't blame me if this kills you," she groused.

  "I won't." Jason sat back up, gripping the arms of the chair until his knuckles turned white, and pushed himself back into a state of calm awareness—it wasn't easy. That scream…it echoed, ricocheting off the inside of his mind, tearing holes as it went. But he had to focus. He couldn't think about what they were doing to the Elf. He had work to do.

  "All right," he murmured. "Start back at Range 1."

  To his frustration, his telepathic ability was growing shakier with each attempt; this was the fourth, and while last time he'd reached farther than he could recall any Agent ever reaching on the system, this time, his mind was already straining under Range 4.

  Rowan. This is for Rowan. Find him. It's all right if you don't make it. He's what matters.

  In all his years, Jason had devoted himself to many causes, but never once in his life had a thought like that entered his mind…that there was something, or someone, he was truly willing to die for…and it was true. He summoned as much strength as he could and reached, farther and farther, trying to bridge the distance between them.

  North…they were somewhere north of Austin. Georgetown? No, farther…Waco. They'd taken the interstate toward Dallas/Ft. Worth. But right now, they were stopped…where…where?

  "Range 9," he heard Sage say.

  He reached…listening…trying desperately to hear anything, even another scream, that would tell him the location. Just a little farther…

  "Losing it. Range 8. Range 7."

  Jason tried to ignore the weakness that was swiftly overcoming him, but it was no use—he was falling back into his body again, the distance simply too great to cross.

  His head was pounding and he knew it would get worse. He might, in fact, pass out if he tried again, and not wake up for days.

  "Tell…send a message to Ness. Tell her they're in Waco. I don't know where exactly, somewhere just off IH35 probably, but they're parked for now. Hurry, Sage."

  She obeyed, hitting the number to Ness's office and then to her cell phone, and relayed the information.

  "All right, will you stop now? They're sending every available Agent to Waco and they've got the local cowboys searching the entire interstate corridor between there and DFW."

  "No…I have to try again."

  "You're out of your fucking mind!"

  "If I may," Ardeth said before the argument could escalate, "I have an idea that might help."

  Jason managed to turn his head toward the Elf. "What?"

  "This Rowan—what is his strongest gift?"

  "He's a level 9 empath," Jason answered. "He was a rethla, back in Clan Oak."

  Ardeth just looked at him, waiting, and after a second Jason sat up straight. "Son of a bitch," the vampire said. "I've been going about this all wrong. Sage, I need you to do something a little unorthodox."

  "So what else is new?" She snorted. "What this time?"

  "Recalibrate the Ear to work off of empathy, not telepathy."

  She sat back hard in her chair, gaping at him. "We can do that?"

  He nodded. "Just do as I say, and I'll walk you through it step by step. First code us temporarily off the network, then take the primary relay offline. A window will pop up on your screen asking if you want to load the secondary relay; tell it yes, and the calibration menu will appear."

  "Right, right, hang on…"

  Jason closed his eyes a moment, trying to still the whirling ache in his head, but kept talking, rattling off instructions. Most people at the Agency didn't know he'd been one of the initial test subjects for the Ears, so he was a lot more familiar with their inner workings than the average Agent; they had, in fact, been designed based on his limits, assuming he couldn't exceed Range 8, with Range 10 built in as an absolute maximum.

  But any good engineer, he knew, added a little padding, just in case.

  "Okay. It's recalibrating. It wants to know your empathy level."

  In truth he had no idea; strictly speaking he wasn't really an empath. His secondary gift, the musical one, was all he had to go on. "Six."

  "Range?"

  "Push it up to 12."

  Sage made a noise like someone had punched her in the stomach. "Um…this thing only goes up to 10."
/>
  "Just tell it 12 and see what it says."

  She shook her head in disbelief but punched in the number. "It wants authorization."

  He reached up and tapped his Ear. "Shadow Agent 7. Adams, Jason. Authorization 47075-9."

  There was a whirring noise and a series of beeps, and he felt the Ear inside his head, its energy shifting, realigning. Empathy worked through the brain too, of course, but from different locations and along different pathways.

  His consciousness spun around itself, then settled into the familiar back-of-the-mind buzzing he was used to.

  "All right," he said. "Let's do this."

  *****

  Rowan heard himself screaming a second before searing agony ripped him from sleep and back into the world. He knew he was writhing, but couldn't stop; he knew he was going to beg for release, starting any minute now, as he always had. He heard himself, heard the screams, but inside he was remembering what happened next, what always happened next: cold air on his back as the rags he wore were pulled down or up, and the sickening, thick wet sounds of being fucked, thighs slapping against his, white hot pain clawing through his middle.

  Instead, there was sudden relief, and he lay still, gulping in lungfuls of freezing-cold air.

  "Good. It's working. Be ready to get back on the road in twenty minutes."

  As if from miles away, he heard someone crying, and eventually his mind supplied a name: Elora.

  The first voice spoke up again. "Be quiet, child. If you misbehave I'll push this button—do you see this button?—and it will happen again. It will be your fault if I have to hurt him again. Do you want that?"

  Rowan fought his way awake. His entire body ached from the muscles clenching so tightly, and his arm was burning and itching and felt hot. He got his other hand to move, and reached over to touch where it hurt. His fingers encountered a ridge of skin, something hard, and the rough outline of clumsy stitches.

  Oh god. No…no.

  He opened his eyes.

  A dull red light shone from beneath the skin of his wrist, surrounded by a rectangular shape sewn up on one side with black thread. The stitches were red and puffy, the skin hot with the first blush of infection.

  He heard a door slam, and looked up, trying to make sense of what was happening. He was on a carpeted floor, the room nondescript, with a king-sized bed in a hideous polyester spread. A motel. They were in a motel.

  When the door closed, something moved across the room, and Elora's terrified pale face appeared over him. "Tiomi Rowan? Are you all right?" She was crying, and she patted his face, his neck, his shoulders with her little hands. "Please be all right."

  They had made her watch. Rowan was sure, briefly, that he was going to be sick, but clamped down on the urge. "It's…I'm all right, Elora. Where are the others?"

  "Outside. They're going to take us to where they live, it's in…Colorado." She pronounced the name slowly, unaccustomed to the strange syllables. "They're going to hurt you more, a lot more. The woman with the long hair tried to make them let you go, but they hit her and put her back in the van."

  Rowan turned onto his stomach and tried to get up, but he was simply too weak, which was probably a good thing. He had no inhibitor, and if they were near any sort of crowd, or in a city, he wouldn't be able to shield himself.

  "Elora, listen to me. When they come to take us out to the van, I'm going to attack one of them, and I want you to use the distraction to run—out the door and whichever way you can. Don't stop running until you know they're not following anymore. Then find a telephone and dial 911. You know what a telephone looks like? Good. Tell the operator you need to be patched through to the Shadow Agency and give them this number: 47071-7. Can you remember that?"

  She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "What's going to happen to you?"

  "I don't know. But don't worry about me, just run. Promise me you'll run."

  "I promise…"

  "Good girl. Now, can you help me get up?"

  It took a minute, but eventually he got to his feet, wavering only slightly. He took a deep breath, then another, grounding himself, and gathered what strength he had. There would only be one chance. If he tried to escape, they could kill him with the implant, but Elora could still get away, and if he lived…the Agency would track the van from their current location, and maybe, just maybe, they would find him before it was too late. He tried not to dwell in that hope, though.

  If he could have had one wish it would have been to tell Jason goodbye; he felt tears welling up at the thought that they would most likely never see each other again. He was facing a lingering, tormented death sentence at the hands of his own daughter—if the rest of their purification involved the implant, there was no way he could survive. His nerves were already too damaged to bear much more; the only saving grace was that his body would probably give out long before they finished with him.

  Beloved…I'm sorry. It was so beautiful…I never thought it would end like this. Please don't blame yourself like I know you will.

  He was hurting again, and worse with each passing second, his knees attempting to buckle, but he kept himself upright by sheer force of will and staggered over to the motel room door. If he was very lucky he could get the drop on whoever came to collect them. His hands weren't tied—they were depending on his weakness to keep him in check.

  Leaning sideways on the wall, he waited, passing the minutes by thinking of Jason, remembering all the nights they'd spent tangled in each other, or watching TV on the couch. He thought of Jason's hands, his muscles, that incredible mouth roaming over the landscape of his body, and finally of music, music that betrayed the depth and power of the vampire's heart. He imagined he could still hear it…the rise and fall…no two pieces ever alike, but every one kissed with healing energy and love…Rowan drew the music into himself, remembering.

  Wait…

  He could hear it.

  For less than the space between two breaths, he heard it, and moreover he felt it. A flood of emotion washed over him, and he tasted dark wine, felt a heart reaching for his.

  And just before the door opened, he heard a single thought that sent renewed strength and determination singing through his every cell: [I'm coming.]

  The Elf who entered the room never knew what hit him. Rowan waited until he was fully inside, then seized him by the shoulders and slammed him hard into the wall, simultaneously doubling him over and kneeing him in the chest. The Elf cried out and fell, and Rowan kicked him in the stomach before reaching over and taking his gun.

  "Elora," Rowan said calmly, "cover your eyes."

  He heard the click of a gun being cocked and spun around, reflexes taking over, firing twice at the second guard who appeared—she had time to bark out a warning to whoever was behind her before he shot her, both times in the heart.

  At his feet the first Elf started to try and get up. He looked up at Rowan, fear in his eyes, but Rowan didn't even feel a twinge of compassion or remorse as a single bullet wiped the fear away.

  The rest stayed outside. He heard them yelling at each other, heard Kaeli ordering the third guard to stand back. He knew what she was doing—going for the transmitter—

  Another wave of agony hit him full force, and he dropped to his knees, hand still gripping the gun. He could feel himself blacking out; he shouted at Elora to run for it, and surprisingly she obeyed, tearing out of the room as fast as her legs could carry her. He used all his remaining energy to raise the gun again and send a volley of cover shots over her head. He heard a scream. Third guard.

  Now it was just him and Kaeli.

  He hit the ground hard, and didn't move again. The gun slid out of his hand to the floor, and he saw heavy boots level with his face, kicking the weapon away.

  "What have those people done to you?" he heard Kaeli ask sadly. "I'm so sorry, Father. I don't think I can let you join the Clan if you're able to kill your own kind. You're a murderer now."

  He started to laugh, a harsh and hu
morless sound. He could taste blood in his mouth. "You…should change your name," he snarled. "Whoever you are…you have no right to call yourself my kin. We're both dead, you and I."

  She smiled, and it was a smile of regret. "You're right."

  She pressed the barrel of her pistol to his head.

  He heard the shot, and saw her body stiffen, just as he flinched at the patter of something wet across his face.

  With a gurgling cry, Kaeli fell over sideways, blood pooling beneath her from a hole in her chest. Behind her, Rowan saw Sedna standing in the doorway, armed with one of the guards' semiautomatics.