by James Moore
Billy Ray looked at Hank, then looked at the waitress, then back at Tina, who was smiling toothily at him, then back again at Hank.
Finally he decided to sit down. Hank patted his back cheerily and slipped past him in the booth, sitting next to Kyrie, who looked even smaller in comparison to his hulking figure.
Hunter felt himself relax. He’d sort of expected Hank to break the man’s back, or maybe just flat-out kill him. He hadn’t actually, technically met this Other. Tina had. Gene had. Kyrie had. Joe Bronx had. But not Hunter. He’d been too busy being a monster himself when Hank showed up. He only recognized the brute as Cody’s Other because of the pictures the Others had taken of themselves so that the Failures would know who they were dealing with.
The waitress who had witnessed the entire thing nodded and started taking orders while Hunter looked over Hank and the two truckers behind him. Hank didn’t seem worried at all about turning his back on the two apes. Cody would have been sweating all over himself and maybe trying to find a way to squirm between Tina and Hunter on their side of the booth, but Hank was calm and cool and in control. Weird. He’d half expected someone with all the manners of the Tasmanian devil.
Hank looked him over, a small smile playing on his face. He only stopped staring to order his food. The clothes he was wearing were beginning to rip at the seams—which wasn’t surprising, really, since they’d been on Cody only a few minutes earlier. Cody was like the runt of the litter, but Hank? Hank was a brute any way you looked at it.
When Hank was done ordering, he leaned forward on the table and planted his elbows. He didn’t look at Hunter but directed his gaze toward Tina. “Anyone ever tell you to back up on the ’tude?”
Tina eyed him right back. “Like I’d listen.”
Hank let out a bark of laughter and leaned back. Then his eyes flickered over to Hunter again, taking his measure. He didn’t seem overly impressed with what he was seeing. On the other hand, at least he wasn’t getting angry. That seemed like a big plus.
“Where are we?” Hank’s question seemed casual. Maybe having Joe Bronx dictating his life had made Hunter paranoid, but he didn’t trust the relaxed demeanor. There had to be another agenda, didn’t there?
“Almost to Illinois,” Hunter replied.
“Cool.” Hank smiled and leaned forward again. The bruiser seemed to have too much energy to sit still. “So we can maybe say hello to Evelyn today? Or you think tomorrow?”
Evelyn Hope was the reason they were driving from Boston to Chicago. The woman in question was, if they were right in what they’d learned, the reason that they existed in the first place. They were the genetic experiments that had gone wrong in the efforts to make perfect spies, assassins, or soldiers. He wasn’t really sure exactly which. They were the Failures. The ones that didn’t quite work out. They were supposed to be dead and instead they were, well, they were here, and they shared the same problem. There were two people in each body. It wasn’t working out very well. Evelyn Hope was just that, really: their last hope to fix the problem.
Hunter stared hard. It was difficult to deal with this. He’d never spoken to “Hank,” but the guy had information that almost nobody had. He was in on what Joe and the other counterparts were up to, and it was unsettling. More importantly, the Other had already spent private time with Joe Bronx a couple of days before, shortly after Joe, Hunter’s Other half, revealed to them that they were all connected. That was something most of them hadn’t done. The thought made Hunter nervous. Joe was his Other, true, but they’d never met face-to-face and he knew that his Hyde had been planning things on his own for a long time.
And yet, the massive figure sitting across from him was also Cody, who was short and skinny and bordered on mousy. Thinking about it made his head ache.
Tina rolled her eyes and elbowed Hunter in the rib cage. “You go to sleep over there? It’s rude not answering a question.” She looked at Hank and answered for him before he could respond. “Hunter thinks we can get there today. We just need to eat and then we’re on the way again.”
Hank looked at her again, smile lines around his eyes. “You’re cute when you’re growling.”
Tina did the absolutely unexpected and blushed. Last thing he would have ever thought the girl even capable of. Hunter thought she basically ate nails, and here she was getting shy around the looming figure of Cody’s Other.
“I don’t know what to say to that.” Tina looked away, and Hank chuckled.
Gene came from the direction of the showers, which meant that all of them had finally gotten cleaned up and they could be on the road that much sooner. Gene was tall and lean and normally very reserved. All of this, of course, was really just first impressions—because they’d barely had a chance to get to know each other yet. Hunter got a good feeling off the kid, even if he thought Gene was a little on the fussy side. The guy looked at dirt like it was a personal insult to all he believed in. He doubted Gene had ever so much as made a mud pie.
Gene looked at Hank like he might be a sleeping pit bull; like there was a very strong chance the Other might suddenly leap at him.
Tina’s hip smacked against Hunter’s side. “Scoot. We gotta make room for Gene. No way he’s fitting in next to Godzilla over there.”
Hank slowly smiled. “I always preferred King Kong.”
Tina looked Hank over. “Yeah, well, King Kong had more hair than you.”
Hunter shook his head even as he slid over. She really was fearless.
Gene sat next to Tina and crowded Hunter into the corner of the booth. Hunter felt his knee brush Kyrie’s and had to suppress a blush of his own. Damn, she was gorgeous.
For her part Kyrie kept looking at Hank, half dwarfed by the size of him as he sat next to her on the other side of the booth.
Hank leaned back and draped his arm over the back of the seat. He seemed oblivious to the look that the trucker behind him cast his way. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t need to care.
There were too many maybes. Hunter didn’t have the answers, not any more than the other people at the table did.
He observed while the whole group settled in and talked. Trying to think through the answers they’d gotten to the questions that had haunted him ever since he woke up five months earlier with amnesia.
He struggled with it. There were memories in his head that he could barely access, faces that should have meant something to him but had no connection to his world. He closed his eyes and saw a woman’s face and thought she might be his mother, saw a man’s and guessed that perhaps he was seeing his father; there was a boy in his memories—younger than him—perhaps a little brother or a cousin. Or all of them could have been faces from a magazine ad for all he knew. There were no connections, only the feeling that they were somehow important.
Around him the others at the table started eating, chowing down on the food that the waitress brought for them, mostly massive burgers and heaping piles of fries, but Kyrie ordered a tomato stuffed with tuna salad and already looked like she was regretting not getting the larger meal. Both Hank and Tina had also ordered large bowls of chili that looked like they were at least half grease. Hunter had already eaten, and his head ached from driving down the road and staring so hard. He knew how to drive but had no idea how he’d learned. Maybe it was something that Joe Bronx had mastered and he was just getting the benefits without the training. He wasn’t sure how it worked. What he did know was that they were all going to be wearing baggy clothes from now on. He’d done some shopping while they were all showering, and before they left, he’d suggest they go back and change again. Instead of clothes like they’d all been traveling in, he’d picked up several sets of running pants and sweats. It was that or stretch the stuff they were wearing. Why Bronx had never made the switch was one of those things he’d never know. That was the one of the problems with their situation: they were still new to all of this, and they were learning as they went along.
According to what Joe Bronx had said
, he and the others were supposed to be soldiers, sleepers who could be trained in military combat and tactics so that their bigger, far stronger selves could go into battle with the full knowledge of how to fight. Did that work both ways? Or had somebody actually shown him how to drive on his own? The amnesia thing was getting old. He had no way to know, not yet. Not without finding answers from Evelyn Hope or someone else connected to his past.
But maybe Evelyn Hope would have answers. He had to believe it. His hand moved to his hip, touching the sheet of paper in his back pocket. There was an address on that paper. The address was where Evelyn Hope was supposed to be waiting. All they had to do was find her, and if it went the way they wanted, she would be able to answer their questions, to give them back their lives somehow.
He understood that he would never be free of Joe Bronx, not if what his Other had said was true. But maybe he could find out about his family, about the life he used to have. And maybe, somehow, he could get back to that life again.
Evelyn Hope was his last chance, he supposed. He dug the envelope out of his pocket and looked at it again. There was a return address. He read it silently and then read it again aloud. “Josh Warburton.”
“Who?” Tina looked up from the bowl of chili she was attacking.
“Josh Warburton. He’s the one who wrote the letter to Evelyn Hope. He’s in Chicago too. If they work together, maybe he can help us get answers.”
Tina shrugged her response.
Gene nodded. “It’s a possibility. He might work in the same offices now, or maybe he at least knows about Janus and can tell us where we can find information if Evelyn Hope proves useless.”
“So how do we know they’ll help us, anyway?” Kyrie’s voice was small, but she looked directly at Hunter as she spoke.
Before he could answer, Hank spoke up. “We don’t know. It’s just all we have to work with right now.” He angled his body toward Kyrie. “When you don’t have anything to work with, you have to start sniffing for clues. Joe said this was all he had after years of looking, so we sort of have to try for this.”
Hunter tuned out the conversation, trying to remember anything at all from his past that might help them. He shook his head. He couldn’t go on this way. He had to escape from the endless transformations—and soon.
Evelyn Hope had to have the answers; that was all there was to it.
Around him the others were laughing at something Hank had said. Hunter hadn’t been listening closely enough to hear what it was, but he was glad the others were having fun. They all needed a little more laughter in their lives.
Chapter Three
Evelyn Hope
EVELYN SAT IN HER office and tried to tell herself she wasn’t worried. The team was on the hunt and they were well trained. They had every advantage in weapons and equipment and they would surely have the element of surprise. That had to count too, didn’t it?
George was off doing whatever it was he did when he wasn’t in her office, and that left her with only her thoughts for company.
Subject Seven was alive. She was still having trouble accepting that. Her hand reached for the necklace around her neck, once again playing with the wedding ring and bronzed tooth that rested against her skin. Her dead husband’s wedding ring. Her first son’s tooth. Bobby’s tooth.
When Bobby first disappeared, he’d called her several times, and she’d always reacted the same way, sending out a group to locate him and bring him back. He’d never been there to meet with those teams. She’d long since accepted that he was dead—but now, after all this time, maybe he was alive after all.
Her hand clenched the necklace tightly, and she squeezed her tokens until she could feel the sharp sting of the tooth trying to break her skin.
Her free hand rested next to her phone.
She needed to be able to answer at a moment’s notice. The Strike Team could call in and she wanted—needed—to know if they’d succeeded. The Strikers were good—fast and better trained than most standard-issue soldiers—but they were up against Subject Seven, and he had a history of violence that was unsettling.
She needed to know when they found Seven. Needed to know that the monster had been captured so that he could be brought back to her. She had given him clues, but there had been no contact as of yet. The Strikers were simply following the best route possible at this point.
He had so much to answer for.
The phone rang shrilly in her silent office, and she remained where she was, unflinching, until the third ring. There was no reason to be in a hurry and certainly no reason to let anyone know she was impatient for answers.
“Hello?”
It was Rafael. “We have them in sight.”
Evelyn took a deep, slow breath and forced herself to stay calm.
“Bring them to me. Preferably alive. Call me when it’s done.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
That was all he had to say. She knew he would obey.
It was what he was made to do, after all. Unlike Seven and the others with him, Rafael was a success.
Chapter Four
Kyrie Merriwether
THE FOOD SAT LIKE a lump in her stomach. She’d eaten because she had to, but it was hard to enjoy it with Hank sitting next to her. If she’d met him on the street and never known what he was, she would have had an easier time of it, she supposed. But knowing that he was the thing that hid inside of Cody—little, skinny Cody, who was so shy and sweet—made it harder to accept him. Hank seemed nice enough, but she knew better. If what they’d been told was true, and she had to assume it was, he was designed to be a killing machine. Maybe he had a nice attitude and maybe he was just trying to be nice until he decided it was time to start breaking necks.
Either way, he’d been staring her square in the chest for long enough to irritate her, and she had a headache from not telling him to put his eyes back in his head. Tina might have the chops to square off with him, but not her. Kyrie wasn’t anywhere near as bold as the other girl in the group.
They climbed back into the car—Hank was too damned big to fit easily in the backseat so he was in the front passenger’s seat instead, which left Kyrie feeling at least a little better. Kyrie sat with Tina on her left and Gene on her right. Hunter was driving, which was good. This way she could study him without him realizing it.
Hunter was good looking, no two ways about it. He was also quiet and very, very angry. She could feel his frustration like it was heat coming from an oven, low and simmering and ready to flare up at any time. And damned if she didn’t find that edge of danger sexy as all get out. Hank scared the crap out of her and he was behaving himself, while Hunter was stiff and almost knotted with anger and she thought he was hot. Where was the logic in that? Not that it mattered. She couldn’t let herself start falling for a guy she’d just met, especially since she didn’t know how long she’d know any of them. She had a life to get back to, just as soon as they could find a way to stop their darker selves from emerging. Joe Bronx had summed it up pretty well when he’d pointed out that their Hydes had no concern about their families and Kyrie couldn’t risk Not-Kyrie waking up and deciding she didn’t like one of Kyrie’s loved ones.
A shiver ran through her. She didn’t know for certain that her Other had killed anyone, but there was a very real chance. Kyrie didn’t much like that idea. Not at all, actually. She was raised to believe in mercy and the values her family held as sacred. Killing was a sin. She was a good girl. If she died—if she managed to screw everything up and get herself killed before this was all resolved—what did that say about where she was going if her Other was a murderer? Kyrie believed in heaven and dreaded the thought of hell.
She shook her head, exasperated with herself and the mess her world had become, as the car pulled onto the interstate and started accelerating. When they left Boston, Joe Bronx had cruised down the road at seventy miles an hour. In comparison, his Other, Hunter, drove slower, more cautiously. He barely nudged the car up to sixty.
The road was almost empty except for their car. It was the timing, she supposed. They were in the middle of nowhere and the worst traffic would start later, when work began for the people who worked in the nine-to-five world.
She looked around, uncomfortable. When she woke up in the middle of Nebraska, she’d tried hitchhiking back to her home in Seattle, and that had ended poorly. Sometimes people expect a certain kind of payment for a ride and sometimes they’d get insistent.
Kyrie didn’t like to think about what might have happened if her Other hadn’t come to her rescue. It made her feel a little better about not knowing where the trucker (who’d been trying to get frisky) had vanished to. The radio talked again about the missing truckload of firearms. She tried not to dwell on the fact that the driver was missing too.
The truck? She knew where that was. It was in Boston, where she’d met up with the rest of the group. Somewhere along the way, it had been emptied of handguns and rifles and whatever else had been inside of it, courtesy of Joe Bronx, who also let Kyrie know that her Other had brought it along to the rendezvous.
She crossed her arms over her chest and shivered again. How was any of this possible? She was just a kid. She wasn’t in a hurry to grow up; but here she was driving across the stupid country to find a woman who was supposed to make everything all better. Driving with a group of strangers who had more in common with her, physically, than she had with her family. She wanted it all to go away. She wanted to be home again. Was that even possible? Could she ever go back to her old life?
Kyrie had been raised in a Christian family. She went to church every Sunday and she took care of her brothers and sisters and she was a cheerleader and a dancer and a high school sophomore. She wasn’t a gunrunner or a killer or a trained spy. Yet here she was, dealing with all of the insanity that had been dropped in her lap when Joe Bronx woke up the Other that was hiding inside of her.
