Raising Hell

by Sharon Hannaford

  If it didn’t kill them first.

  There was a sedative that helped some wolves, but not all, get through it. Under better circumstances, he’d stay in case it didn’t work, but it would sap his strength, even with the added Alpha energy. Everything had just gone to Hell in a handbasket, and he couldn’t afford to be weak. He carried the wolf into the room off to the left of the med bay, the room with no windows and one-foot-thick, magically reinforced walls; it was more prison than emergency ward. He laid her on the bed just as a commotion erupted in the med bay. With a last regretful glance at the suffering wolf, he exited, closing and locking the door behind himself.

  “How far away is Jonathon?” Gabi’s words were quick and harsh. She and Alexander were bent over the still form of Sicarius on a gurney in the middle of the room. In the bright light of the medical suite, Kyle got his first good look at the man’s injuries. His face was bloodied and purple, his nose clearly broken, both eyes swollen shut. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth; his skin was developing a bluish tinge. Kyle could count at least three stab wounds to his chest and abdomen. If it wasn’t for the faint, occasional heartbeat that his Werewolf hearing detected, he’d have thought the man was already dead.

  “At least ten minutes.” Tabari answered Gabi’s question. An engine sounded outside, the vehicle coming to a screeching halt. Seconds later Butch rushed into the room, with Ben close on his heels.

  “Get to the house; take Lucy with you,” Kyle ordered Ben with a nod in the direction of the young Magus, who huddled in an out-of-the-way alcove, looking shaken. “Check on Breanna and Adriana, reassure them, tell them we’re just taking precautions. Then coordinate the team around the inside perimeter. Anything that gets past the Vampires dies. No questions.” If whoever this was knew about Flora, did they know about Breanna as well? The thought sent jagged icicles racing through his veins.

  “Stay clear of hellpup,” Gabi warned as Ben saluted and steered Lucy towards the opposite door.

  Alexander moved out of the way as Butch began dragging medical equipment closer, hooking Sicarius up to monitors and preparing an IV. He wasn’t a qualified doctor, but he had extensive medical training from his time in the military. He took a pair of scissors to the man’s clothing, peeling bloodied fabric away to reveal the gruesome extent of his injuries. By the grim set to the man’s mouth, Kyle knew what his Enforcer was going to say before he opened his mouth.

  “He’s too far gone,” Butch muttered, his voice gruff with genuine regret. “Even if Jonathon gets here, he won’t be able to work fast enough to repair the damage. It’s too late.”

  There was a second of loaded silence, and then Gabi spun, kicking an empty gurney, sending it careening into the far wall with a loud crash.

  “Fuck,” she spat, stalking away with her fists on her hips, her head tilted up to the ceiling. Kyle shared her sentiments. How had things gone to Hell so fucking fast? She spun back to them with a determined set to her jaw.

  “Infecting him with the Lycanthropy virus wouldn’t help him now,” she said, speaking directly to Alexander. “There’s only one way to save him.” Before Flora’s arrival, Gabi would’ve been the last one to try to save this man. As the assassin for the Decuria, he’d been an enormous pain in their ass. He’d kidnapped not only Gabi at one point but her mother as well, he’d shot at Gabi and assassinated a Vampire they were trying to interrogate before the Vampire could tell Julius what they wanted to know, and Kyle was pretty sure they didn’t know half of it. But in the intervening years things had changed, and they had all come to respect the man, if not his vocation.

  Alexander folded his arms, his eyes narrowing. “There’s no guarantee he’ll survive Turning either, Hellcat.”

  “It’s more chance than he has right now,” she shot back.

  “I…” The Vampire hesitated, glancing down to study his fingernails. “I’m not sure that we should.”

  “What?” Gabi folded her own arms, stalking closer to Julius’s second. Kyle knew that look and began to back out of her way. In his peripheral vision he noticed Butch, Mac and Tabari do the same. If Gabi lost her temper, nobody wanted to be in the kill zone. “Julius has an agreement with Eka. If the assassin died on duty, we would do everything we could to save him.” Her voice was low and dangerous.

  “Gabrielle.” Alexander’s eyes were hard as flint as they flicked back to meet hers. Kyle wasn’t sure he’d ever heard the Vampire call her by her given name before. “We don’t know this man very well. He was, and possibly still is, the official assassin for the Decuria. That should make him our sworn enemy. You know how dangerous he is as a human; he’s only one very short step away from being an uncontrollable psychopath. Don’t forget that Julius’s bloodline has a habit of making Master Vampires. We have no way of knowing where his loyalties lie.”

  Gabi took another step closer to Alexander; one more step and they’d be toe to toe. She jabbed a finger in the direction of the dying man. “He gave his life trying to save someone under our protection. What more proof of loyalty do you want?”

  Alexander stared at her, his eyes searching hers, seeking chinks in her resolve.

  “You know that Julius would stand by his word if he were here. It’s the right thing to do, Alexander.”

  Kyle half expected a phone to ring with Julius on the other side, that was the strength of the connection between him and Gabi. But there was no ringing phone, just Alexander, his face a closed mask, his mouth a thin line, and a wall of tension thick enough to see between the two of them.

  And then abruptly Alexander’s stance changed; he relaxed, clearly some kind of decision made.

  “He still might not make it. You know that, right?” he said to Gabi.

  “Yes, I know,” she answered in an almost whisper, her eyes finding Mac. Gabi had begged Julius to save Mac when he’d been mortally wounded fighting to protect the Source, the magical font of power that lay hidden beneath the City. Gabi hadn’t known if he would want to come back as a Vampire, she’d made the choice for him, and she’d agonised over it. With Sicarius it was easier; at least they knew he wanted this. “And if he survives and he turns on us, I’ll hunt him down myself,” she told Alexander in a tone that left no one in the room doubting it.

  ********************

  Touching the red disconnect icon, Trish looked down at the phone, not seeing it. Not seeing the flashing computer screens, the TV monitors, the banks of electronic equipment, the sunless but familiar space she worked in on a daily basis. She felt numb.

  Her wolf had been right, there had been a threat to her pup, just not the pup she’d immediately thought of.

  Flora. Her wolf considered Flora one of hers. Hers to worry about, hers to protect.

  They’d failed her.

  Where was she? Had they hurt her? She would be so frightened.

  “Trish?”

  She realised that someone was speaking to her, had called her name more than once.

  Murphy.

  His face came into view, crouched down in front of her, concern etching lines across his forehead, contorting the tattoos down the sides of his face.

  She cleared her throat, striving to control the wolf angrily battering at her mind, demanding to be set free, to wreak havoc, to track down those who dared to take what was hers.

  Breaking down or releasing the wolf now wouldn’t help, she told herself sternly. Gritting her teeth and straightening her spine, she focused on her friend.

  “It’s Flora,” she told him, trying to keep her voice from cracking. “Someone attacked them on the road. Jade and Sicarius almost gave their lives trying to protect her, but they took her. Someone evil has her.” Tears burned the back of her eyes as the numbness began to fade. A painful darkness flooded in to fill the void.

  “I don’t understand,” Riley said, from her seat in the corner. After her meeting with Kyle and Derek earlier, she’d agreed to spend more time with them and had arrived at CenOps with dinner for everyone a few hours ago.
She’d been quiet for the most part during the night, making coffee and doing small tasks they gave her without comment. “Why would someone want to take your foster daughter?”

  “Flora is Vodun,” Murphy told her. His hand squeezed Trish’s knee in comfort and solidarity. He had no idea how much she needed the touch of someone familiar; it was just his natural way. “She will be very powerful one day, possibly quite soon. She has always been in danger from those who know what she is. We were supposed to keep her safe.” His voice echoed the yawning abyss of guilt and fear threatening to swallow Trish.

  She focused on the facts, on the things that she’d just learned. She needed to make sense of them all because somehow it all fitted together. Through gritted teeth, she shared what Kyle had told her about the Zonbi and how they would’ve been created.

  “So…everything that’s been going on tonight and the past few days, it’s all connected?” Riley asked. “The Ghouls that are actually zombies, the missing corpses. It’s all connected by Voodoo, and it’s all been about kidnapping Flora?”

  “Yes, it would seem that way,” Murphy agreed. He was rubbing his chin, deep in thought.

  “But why?” Riley was persistent.

  Trish just wanted her to shut up while she tried to figure out what to do. Kyle had told her not to drive home alone; he would send an escort as soon as they could spare one. He wanted her safe, and CenOps was practically a fortress, not that Trish thought she was in any danger, but she knew she was too distraught to drive anyway.

  “Why would they go to all the trouble with the zombies? They could’ve just taken her without all the drama. Surely it isn’t easy to make and control a small army of the undead?”

  “They were keeping us distracted.” Murphy pushed up from his crouch with a frustrated growl. “All our eyes, all our resources were concentrated on the zombies. They weren’t just toying with us, they were moving us around like pieces on a gameboard to exactly where they wanted us. It’s given them time to leave the City with her. If we hadn’t been stretched so thin by the zombies, we would’ve been alerted much sooner and been able to track her.” He sighed, rubbing his hands over his clean-shaven head. “They planned this meticulously.”

  “Wow,” Riley breathed. “What do you think they’ll do with…”

  The dark pit called to Trish, offering respite from the dreadful pain of reality. And then a vision of Flora—bound, gagged and scared—coalesced in her mind. The black abyss turned red.

  Red with fury.

  How dare they? How dare they take what was hers? How dare they threaten someone she loved.

  “We’ll find them,” she said, and her voice came out in a low growl. A bone-deep resolve hardened inside her. She stood and faced Murphy and Riley. “We will hack data from every goddamn computer and database in this country and a hundred others if we have to. We will track them down.” Her fingernails dug into her palms, just a micron away from being claws. “And then Kyle and Gabrielle will rip every one of them to shreds and bring Flora home to us. No one will ever dare to try to take her again.” Her wolf snarled in vicious agreement.

  “Trish.” Steve’s voice in the sudden silence of the control room jerked her around. The large man bustled out of the grunt room. As usual, Steve was patently oblivious to the emotional tension in the control room and didn’t bother to apologise for interrupting. “You know that deep search you asked me to do?”

  It took a second for Trish’s brain to click into gear and remember that she had assigned him the task of background checking Deshane. It seemed so long ago and somewhat redundant now.

  He was holding out a handful of printed pages. “Well, I think you wanna see this.” He dropped the papers onto the desk beside her.

  She turned to look down at them.

  “What is it?” Murphy asked, coming up behind her to read over her shoulder.

  “It’s a very carefully concocted history,” Steve told him. “Professional job, if you ask me. Everything’s there. Birth certificate, parents’ details, addresses, education—hell, there’s even primary school photos. This guy would pass just about every police and security check out there.”

  Riley approached from the other side, her eyes also drawn to the printed sheets.

  “But you’ve found something.” Trish wasn’t sure whether to be excited or concerned.

  “Yup.” Steve grinned. “I ran him through the dark web and several international websites. I got a hit on facial rec. This guy definitely is not what he seems. He’s not even the age he seems.” He riffled through the papers to find a photo. It was a passport-type photo of Deshane; Flora had shown Trish several pictures on her phone a couple of weeks ago. He was a good-looking man, his African heritage obvious in the richness of his skin colour, the deep brown of his eyes and the fullness of his lips and nose. “This is the photo on official record. They regularly update photos of those with refugee status, which is how he’s legally in the country. It was time-stamped late last year.”

  Trish nodded.

  Steve sorted through the sheets again, pulling out another with a photograph, the quality of the print grainier than the previous one, but still clear. It was a close-up of Deshane again at around the same age, this time in a more casual stance, his expression less serious as though it was a private moment. The bell-bottomed pants and frilled shirt he wore were more suited to the seventies than today. “This photo is from 1978.”

  Trish’s eyes flew to Steve’s face; he was gleeful.

  “See?” he asked, brimming with excitement now. “Facial rec confirms this is him, and the name is in no way associated with his official family. It’s not a father or brother or uncle. Either this guy can time travel, or he’s much older than the twenty-two years it states on his official information.”

  “Where did you get this older picture?” she demanded, picking it up to study it closer.

  “It was archived in a Ghanaian newspaper’s files,” he answered. “It was published in an attempt by local police to try to find him. He was wanted in connection with several murders and a host of other charges. All of the charges related to the practice of Voodoo.”

  The breath left Trish’s lungs in a whoosh. Any thoughts she’d harboured of doppelgangers or pure facial coincidence vanished.

  “So that’s how they knew her routine and found out how well-protected she was,” Murphy growled, beginning to pace the small area. “This guy cosied up to her at university and used her attraction to him to glean information.”

  Trish wanted to punch something. If she had only checked up on this guy—

  “And he did it quickly.” Murphy interrupted her self-flagellation. “He kept it at casual friend for weeks, assuming we wouldn’t bother checking on him. But once things seemed to be getting more serious, he figured we’d investigate. That’s why they ramped up the zombies. He knew if we dug hard enough, we’d find something.”

  “Flora and this guy were in some kind of relationship?” Riley asked. She was reading through the information on one of the printouts.

  “It wasn’t serious,” Trish told her. “They’d only just gone on their first date.” Now wasn’t the time to entertain the guilt that was gnawing at her insides; that wouldn’t get Flora home. Trish shoved it firmly aside.

  “Keep digging,” she told Steve. “I want his friends, his family, his connections, where he’s lived, his bank accounts. I want to know what countries he’s been to in the last three years. I want to know everything about this son of a bitch.”

  Steve’s eyes widened, and he took an involuntary step backwards. Trish wasn’t sure if it was her use of swear words, which rarely left her mouth, or the rage that felt as though it was seeping out of her pores. He nodded and spun away.

  “Murphy, you keep working to find the vehicle they took her in,” she ordered. “I’ll check all flight plans, see if they left the City by air.”

  “I’d like to help,” Riley said in a quiet but determined voice. “I don’t know much about c
omputers, but I’m a quick study.”

  “Pick an empty workstation through there,” Trish told her, pointing to the grunt room. “I have to call Kyle, and then I’ll get you up to speed.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The inactivity clawed at Kyle’s control. He needed to be doing something, fighting something, going somewhere. Anywhere. He held tight to the ethereal thread of hope that the discovery of Deshane’s deception would put them on the trail of Flora’s kidnappers soon.

  “You need to chill,” Gabi said in a low voice filled with meaning.

  He glanced over at her. She was on the sofa, with Breanna curled on her lap, looking utterly forlorn. The wolf pup, Bear, snuggled up as close to the little girl as he could get, licking the tiny tears that trickled silently down her face. Razor was on the back of the sofa beside Gabi’s head, pretending to sleep, but Kyle could tell by the tension in his body that he was alert and uneasy. Gabi made an almost imperceptible motion downward at the little girl. Her message was clear; Kyle needed to keep it together for Breanna’s sake. It had been impossible to keep Breanna in the dark despite the panic room being furnished to look like an extra playroom in the house, complete with games, beds, snacks and movies. She’d known something was wrong. By Adriana’s accounts she’d known there was something wrong even before Adriana had tried to contact Flora. Her agitation had been what made Adriana call in the first place.

  The one piece of good news for the entire night was Jade’s reaction to the sedative. The white wolf had calmed and settled into a deep sleep moments after Jonathon administered it to her. Alexander himself had opened a vein to feed Sicarius enough blood to start the Turning process and, with dawn less than an hour way, the Vampires had taken the assassin back to the estate. Gabi had been ready to leave with them to watch over Sicarius, but then Ben had arrived to say that Breanna was working herself into a state. Gabi didn’t hesitate to rush to the house with Kyle.