Desert Devil (Old School Book 5)

by Jenny Schwartz

  Darius’s mouth compressed.

  Austin snatched a piece of paper out of their former captain’s hand. “They left a note with Darius.”

  Rest kept his arm around her as he reached across and took the note from Austin. He read it aloud. “Rest Castillo. I apologize for the crude tactic. I had to get your attention. Phone me…and he gives a cellphone number.”

  Gabe leaned in the kitchen doorway. “Someone should have told this guy to be careful what he wishes for. He’s got our attention, now.”

  “Did he sign his name?” Donna craned her neck.

  Rest tilted the sheet of paper her way. “No. No way to trace him—or her, I guess.” He looked at Darius. “I’m sorry whoever it is involved you.”

  Darius flexed his fingers in a way Donna had seen wizards do. “They chose me because I’m crippled.”

  Gabe’s crack of laughter sounded from the kitchen. “They don’t know who they’re messing with, Captain.”

  “How did they get the jump on you?” Rest asked Darius.

  “I was at my cabin at the lake. The cabin itself is warded, but I should have set the perimeter wider. I’ll fix that when I return. They were able to sneak through the woods without triggering any alarms. They shot me with a tranquilizer gun.”

  “Dumped his unconscious body on my porch,” Austin said. “I got a message on my cellphone, the one I use for my real estate business. Told me a package had been delivered and that it was time sensitive. I have wards around my yard, but they got through them. The wards on the house held, hence dumping Darius on my porch. I nearly disregarded the message as spam or a wrong number, but the back of my neck crawled. I drove home, found Darius with the note pinned to him, and called you. He woke up as I phoned you.”

  Gabe returned with mugs of coffee. Without anyone saying anything, they took their coffees and headed outside.

  Darius sat on the old wooden chair that had a pair of Rest’s boots beside it.

  Austin hitched himself up to sit on the porch railing. If he cared about his expensive clothes getting dirty or torn, it didn’t show.

  Gabe stood in an easy slouch.

  The steps weren’t taken, so Donna sat on the top one and sipped the bitter coffee. The day was heating up already. She positioned herself with her back to a post and her bare arms and legs in the shade of the porch roof.

  Rest studied the top of Donna’s head as she raised the mug to her lips and blew on the hot coffee. She couldn’t be as relaxed as she appeared. She’d freaked when he’d handed her the gun. She’d regained control fast, though. He’d been proud of her when he’d opened the portal and she’d been waiting, as instructed, ready to shoot. She’d been his backup plan. If he’d been walking into a trap baited with Austin and Darius, he’d intended to haul them back through the portal and onto his territory, the ranch.

  The adrenaline was still cooling in his veins. A potential ambush on exiting a portal brought back the violent failure of his team’s last mission.

  This was the first time they’d been together in nearly two years. He could see the changes in his friends.

  Superficially, Gabe was the least changed, but two years ago he wouldn’t have thought to make coffee and include Donna in the group.

  Austin looked slick. There was no other word for it. He radiated success. He could give lessons on how to hide in plain sight, Rest thought wryly. Yet for all the trappings of success, there was a restlessness to Austin that spoke of dissatisfaction.

  Darius was real the worry. There was no wedding ring on his finger and he had an air of isolation and bitterness. Yes, it was summer, but why was he at the lake when the woman he’d been set to marry hated it? Lauren preferred Boston.

  “I never thought you’d end up in a desert,” Austin said. “Where are we, exactly?”

  “Arizona, north of Phoenix, just outside a town called Tedium.”

  No one commented on the town’s strange name. Its founders had been hippies in the 1960s. In the interests of dropping out, they’d wanted to keep everyone away, and so they’d named the town to be Dullsville. Whether the name worked some magic or not, the town remained small and overlooked.

  The team had a two year gap and a current crisis to manage, and yet, silence seemed easier. No one, not even Austin, followed up with questions of the ranch’s location or raised questions of what they faced. Maybe they were all dealing with memories, as he was.

  Rest gripped the porch railing and stared out at his land, able to see for miles. He needed its openness. The ambush that had ended the team had occurred in a jungle, and the claustrophobia of that crowded, alien environment still engulfed him in nightmares. The Arizona desert soothed him. It countered the memories.

  The memories rose around him: the heat of the Congolese jungle, the smell and sounds of it at night, and the magic that had coiled in the clearing in which they’d exited the portal he’d opened.

  His team hadn’t been sent to take out the warlord who’d been using child soldiers and strapping bombs to hostages. Instead, they’d been told to extract one of the hostages, a woman with high level connections in the French government; a woman who was also a geomage studying the potential riches to be mined in the area.

  Their enemies had used magic to hide themselves long enough for the team to emerge from the portal.

  The team hadn’t expected a double-cross. They’d operated according to the procedure they’d honed over multiple missions.

  Gabe had taken point. He had no magic of his own, but he was sensitive to it, and more than that, he was a superb tracker. Darius followed, with Austin and Wayne moving out just ahead of Rest. He always exited last, holding the portal open in case they needed to retreat; staying near it so that they could leave fast.

  The explosion of fire had caught Gabe first. Darius had run for him, casting a spell that flung the fire away from Gabe and back into the forest. There’d been screams sounding shrill over the sustained burst of machine gun fire that tore across the clearing.

  Wayne had dropped silently.

  Darius had fallen, trying to shield Gabe. Austin had run to them, his own magic flaring out in a pulsing shield. He was a minor wizard and Rest had known he wouldn’t be able to hold the shield beyond a count of ten. Rest had picked up Wayne’s butchered body. The weathermage had been nearly torn in half by the spray of gunfire. Rest had run on, closing the portal and opening another one at Darius’s shoulder.

  Austin hadn’t hesitated. In the Path, the others of Rest’s team would be completely disoriented and could get lost in the weird scrunching and warping of it, but Rest could find them. Austin had grabbed Darius and rolled their captain into the portal. Gabe had managed to rise to his hands and knees and crawl in. Rest barreled through with Wayne’s body over his shoulder, grabbing at Austin so that he kept at least one of the team safe.

  Even in extremis, the team had known the perils of the Path and the risk of losing time they didn’t have to being lost in it. They’d formed a human chain. Darius was unconscious, but Gabe gripped his ankle, Austin grabbed the tatters of Gabe’s burned shirt, and Rest held Austin’s shoulder as in a vice.

  He’d opened the portal inside the 13OPS medical center within the Washington DC military base. Without the healer mage on duty there, Darius would have died. It had been too late to save Wayne, but they’d brought him home.

  Rest’s injuries had been relatively minor. He’d refused healing magic—no need to waste it on him—and refused to clean up, too, till Darius had been stabilized. It had been a hours-long fight between the healer mage and death. Sometime during that vigil Tony Keats had arrived and Donna had been with him.

  How she’d gotten into the secure facility he hadn’t questioned. Likely she’d insisted on accompanying her dad, and Tony could be remarkably stubborn himself. If he’d decided Donna had a right to be there for her foster brother, he’d have gotten her in.

  That was the day Rest realized she’d grown into a strong woman, one who mattered to him. J
ust how deeply she mattered, he hadn’t dared to examine, not when he’d acted on the decision to cut her out of his life. For her sake.

  But now she was back and showing every sign of digging in. She wanted some kind of relationship with him. They were both dancing around it, calling it “family”, but it was more than that. So much more.

  Donna broke the silence. “Have you seen each other since the team disbanded?”

  “No.” Gabe stared at the horizon.

  Rest tipped up his mug, and found it empty. He froze for a moment with the mug at his lips. How long had he been lost in his memories? How long had the silence stretched?

  “You need privacy to talk.” Donna stood up, collecting his empty mug from him and holding out her hand for the others. She dangled them by their handles from her fingers. “I’ll pop these in the kitchen and go to the other house.”

  Austin’s eyebrows rose at the mention of a second house.

  Darius was more focused. “Tell us about yourself,” he invited, or ordered, Donna.

  “The fact that I’m a seer is a secret.” She led with what was most important to her. “I’m also a minor witch, although I seldom use magic. I work in an exclusive gallery that specializes in rare, often magical objects, and I also do fieldwork as a treasure hunter. I enjoy it. I have a gift for languages. I read, write and speak Cantonese, German, French and Spanish, plus Arabic with an Egyptian accent.”

  “Whoa,” Austin exclaimed, impressed.

  Darius and Gabe were listening just as intently.

  It might have been two years, but Rest knew his friends. They hadn’t so much accepted Donna, not yet, as that they’d accepted his statement that she stayed. So they were trying to get more information. She’d become a risk factor they had to add to their mission plan. The mission itself was obvious. Whoever had kidnapped Darius was a threat that had to be identified and neutralized. It was one thing for Rest to choose to hide, but Darius, Austin and Gabe couldn’t be expected to do the same. Nor could Donna.

  It was also obvious that she recognized that his friends were interviewing her. Despite the old porch, her casual clothes, and the mugs dangling from her fingers, she exuded quiet professionalism. It was exactly the right approach to gain his team’s approval. Any attempt to win their friendship would have triggered their suspicions. But stating her skills and experience and letting them talk for her, that worked with his team.

  “No combat experience,” Darius summed up Donna’s potential contribution. “You have muscle tone, but you don’t hold yourself as if you’re ready to fight.”

  “You’re not my enemy,” she said quietly.

  “And she did point a gun at you,” Austin contributed.

  Gabe shook his head, grinning faintly.

  Darius’s mouth compressed.

  Rest straightened from his slouch. “Donna, put the mugs in the kitchen and rejoin us.” He held the screen door open for her. Whatever he said, she’d hear, even in the kitchen, unless he spoke under his breath. The house was too small for it to be otherwise. He watched her cross the living room and enter the kitchen. Then he met Darius’s gaze. “What happened with Lauren?”

  His old captain’s jaw tightened. “We broke up during my rehab. She wanted a hero, not a cripple.”

  Austin swore.

  Rest had guessed it was something like that. He’d never liked Lauren. Never liked the way she’d eyed up the others on the team, Gabe especially, when Darius wasn’t around. “Donna is not like Lauren,” he said bluntly. “And I will not have her put in danger because you can’t tell the difference.”

  From the edge of his vision, Rest saw Gabe nod once in approval and agreement with the blunt statement. However, Rest kept his attention on Darius.

  “There can be other kinds of betrayal.” The objection came from Austin. He negated it in the same breath. “But I remember her now from the hospital. The blood on us scared her nearly to death, and she held onto you anyway.”

  “Like a limpet,” Donna said from the doorway. She walked onto the porch. “And it wasn’t the blood that scared me. You all were terrifying. You were furious. You’d lost one of your own and feared you were going to lose Darius, as well. The medical staff tiptoed around you.”

  “But you stayed.” Rest looked down at her. “Did I say thank you?”

  “Nope. You ran, instead.”

  His head jerked back at her verbal punch.

  “To avoid the situation we’re in, now,” Gabe said gently. But his hand gripped the porch support too tightly. He was angry, though not with Donna. Probably with the situation.

  “Is there anyone else I need to extract?” Rest asked. “Anyone who can be held as a hostage and used against you?”

  “No,” the three men said in chorus.

  “I think my parents are safe,” Donna said. “With Dad couriering for the government…”

  “They’ll look after him, and Ellen,” Rest agreed. “All right. We need to work out why Darius was kidnapped at this time and left with a message for me. I’ll state it bluntly. I have no idea.” He looked at Darius. “I can give you a list of clients I’ve worked with in the last two years, as well as those Bo has rejected. Bo is my agent,” he added for Donna’s benefit. Before they split, Rest had told the team he intended to freelance as a courier, keeping his location secret by using an agent who was himself impossible to pin down.

  “Bo is also my uncle,” Gabe added.

  It was a relationship kept under wraps. The man was Gabe’s father’s half-brother. Gabe’s parents and grandparents were dead, and no one knew of the two men’s relationship. They both lived in Louisiana, on the bayou, and navigated the swamp to speak privately.

  When the team had formed, they’d all shared that background of isolation, and they’d come to rely on each other. It had looked as if Darius might change that when he’d gotten engaged to Lauren. But look how well that had turned out?

  Rest rolled his shoulders. “It’ll take time, though, to check who among them would be able to learn about us. Our missions were classified.”

  “Which brings us back to the most likely possibility,” Darius said evenly. “That the people who kidnapped me did so under orders. We always knew the military would want you back, Rest. Your talent is rare and your skillset as a combat courier is unique. The only way for you to be independent was to vanish.”

  “We could ask Dad if he’s heard anything,” Donna said. “I could ask him.”

  “And reveal that you’re in contact with Rest?” Darius challenged.

  Rest intervened. “It wouldn’t help, Donna. Tony would lie if he was ordered to. His loyalty isn’t to me.”

  She shrank back. “Or to me.”

  Ouch. Rest hadn’t meant to hurt her.

  Austin raised his eyebrows, silently querying if it was true.

  Rest nodded. He hadn’t meant to disclose it, but Donna had never been a priority for either of her parents. “The obvious way to get answers is for me to phone the number in the note.”

  “Why would 13OPS or whoever commanded your unit wait two years to get in contact with you?” Donna asked.

  “I’ll ask them.”

  “Hold up,” Darius ordered. “The timing has me interested, too. Donna, you claim a vision impelled you to find and warn Rest that he could die. Are you sure it referred to the temple guardian?”

  “Yes. It fits what Rest described he faced and…the pressure on me to warn him vanished. I don’t think my seer vision applies to your kidnapping, which isn’t to say that Rest isn’t in danger again.” She leaned a shoulder against a porch post, thrusting her hands into her back pockets. “I…there is one other thing I know, or that I overheard. It’s probably irrelevant.”

  She took her hands out of her pockets. She was fidgeting and uncomfortable. “I was at my parents’ house the day before yesterday and overheard Dad talking to Mom. He mentioned a name I’d heard in another context, which is why I paid attention. It didn’t seem immediately important to menti
on to you, Rest.”

  “We had other things to deal with.”

  “Yeah.” Her mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Dad said, ‘…they tried to lend me out to that lobbyist Svenson. He shouldn’t even be aware of what I do.’ I didn’t hear who ‘they’ were, but I assume he meant his handlers in government.”

  “Or 13OPS,” Rest said.

  “13OPS wouldn’t let a lobbyist into their discussions,” Darius said. “They’re paranoid freaks.”

  Donna folded her arms. The self-protective gesture wasn’t lost on any of the men watching.

  Rest had focused on how his friends were still to trust her. He hadn’t considered that she had no reason to trust them.

  She frowned at Darius. “I have a good friend in 13OPS.” She paused. “I also have friends who’ve encountered Gerald Svenson’s name in a couple of difficult situations recently. If he’s tried to get my dad to work for him and failed, he could be interested in employing Rest. It might be that Svenson isn’t too particular about how he achieves that.”

  She unfolded her arms, rubbing her right thumb over her left knuckles. “My friends haven’t encountered Svenson directly. But their situations involved some degree of magic. A woman who knew him decades ago reported that he has a small talent for magic. She called him a street wizard. We don’t know what he intends to do, but among other things, Svenson seems to be collecting fantastical creatures.”

  “What kind?” Gabe asked. He was the hunter of the group, and had learned his skills in the bayou which had unique monsters.

  “Anything, although he’s interested in the more powerful creatures. He also employed the Stag Agency to get an amulet for him. They won’t take any further contracts from him.”

  Darius frowned. “Stag agents are wizard mercenaries. What could a lobbyist have done to get himself blacklisted?”

  Donna chose her words with obvious care. She definitely didn’t trust the team.

  By Austin’s frown, he’d noticed.

  Gabe gave a small nod of approval.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t that Donna didn’t trust Rest’s team as much as she had secrets of her own to guard, ones that went beyond her seer talent?