A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1)

by Cassy Campbell

  That was doable, she supposed.

  Then, the major problem: how to make the cells respond. The machine would have to integrate higher brain centers too, so the suggestion of the gun-wielder could be accepted.

  But the real problem was that burst of energy, the extremely brief but enormous charge that would basically wipe the cells, letting her manipulate them. It was why her tests kept failing. She couldn’t use electricity, because that passed through all the cells. Radio waves were too diffuse, and not powerful enough. She needed to set off a nuclear charge in only those cells…

  She sat up, her mind lit up as if struck by lightning. She pulled up her simulation and started typing. However, she wasn’t a computer programmer nor a weapons engineer. She picked up the phone. “Hey, Gin? Sorry to bother you. I need your help here.”

  Gin sounded bright and perky, like always. “I’m on my way.”

  She made the same call to Trent, who answered as quickly, “Be right there.”

  It was already almost end of shift, and they probably had things to do, but her team was always there for her. Thoughts of Jordan tried to intrude, but she didn’t have time now. Still, she wished there was a reason to call him in on this. She wanted to see him.

  Even though you were going to dump him tonight?

  She squirmed a little at that. It had been her original plan, but the day had drained her of her resolve. She wanted to see him, feel the particular calm that only his presence brought.

  Gin walked through the door, having beaten Trent since her office was only four floors away on twenty-three, while he had to come down all the way from eight. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “I’d rather wait to tell you both at the same time.”

  “Both? Trent?”

  “Yeah.”

  Within seconds, he arrived.

  “Hey. Sorry to keep y’all after shift.”

  Gin grinned. “What else do we have to do?”

  “I was just going to go home and watch the UFC championship,” Trent said with a shrug. “It’s DVR-ing. No big.”

  Liv smiled. “You guys are awesome. Okay, here’s what we need.”

  * * *

  Jordan walked into the DEPOT Friday morning and went looking for Liv. She’d been busy on her brain modification research all day yesterday and he’d barely seen her. He’d tried calling her house last night, but she hadn’t picked up. She’d worked Wednesday night through, and now he was pretty sure she hadn’t gone home last night either.

  There were really only two places she could be.

  He started at her office and found her typing frantically at the keyboard. When he knocked on the door jamb, she didn’t even look up, so he just walked in.

  “This sort of behavior is only decent in Gin,” he said.

  She literally jumped in her chair. “Oh, Jordan! You scared me. I was buried in this.”

  “In what?” He took a seat on the edge of her desk where he could see the monitor, which displayed the schematic for her brain gun.

  “Gin and Trent helped me make some modifications. I’m just testing the last recalibration to see if it will work…” With that, she hit a key and sat back to let the simulation run.

  She stared at the screen, holding her breath in anticipation. Her intensity sucked Jordan in too, and he watched the screen raptly.

  The computer gave a fussy little beep and a message flashed up: Simulation fire success.

  Liv leapt out of her chair with a whoop. She grabbed him and hugged him hard. He grinned and held her, but she pulled away almost immediately and did a little hopping dance next to her desk, punctuated by a looping wandering song that went something like, “It works! It wo-orks! I-it works! It works!”

  Either she was drunk or extremely overtired. “Liv, when did you last take a break?”

  She stopped dancing to look at him. “I haven’t yet.”

  “You were here all night again?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” She beamed at him. “But it works!” She clapped her hands.

  “Wow. Now I know why you don’t drink.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. Are you going to bring it to General Mace?”

  “Yeah. Soon’s I get this down to R & D.”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “Sure! Gin said it was too big for a disc. Y’all wanna hook up the laptop while I save all this to the backup server?” The words were almost bake-up suvuh.

  “Boy, your accent gets strong when you’re tired.”

  “Thanks, home skillet. Y’all gonna help me or what?”

  He laughed and mimicked her accent. “Yes ma’am.”

  She appraised him with a smile. “That was pretty good. Apparently you speak Southern Georgia too.”

  “I’ll add it to my thirty-two other languages.”

  Jordan grabbed the laptop from the counter she’d indicated, and looked at the mess of wires sitting next to it. “You didn’t use all of these, did you?”

  She looked over at them. “No clue. Gin did that part for me last time.”

  “Great idea.” He headed over to the desk and dialed Gin’s office. It rang seven times before he hung up. He tried her cell and reached her on the first ring. “Speak.”

  “Hey Gin, good morning to you too.”

  “Hey Jordan, what’s up?”

  “Liv needs your help in her office.”

  “I’m almost there now.”

  She hung up on him and walked through the door. Liv clapped her hands. “It works!” She started a little shuffling version of her previous bouncing dance.

  “Finally!” Gin’s expression said she knew Liv was punch drunk and exhausted, but clearly Gin was simply amused by it.

  “We need to get the information to R & D,” Jordan explained.

  “Ah. Then you do not want to use that,” she said, indicating the laptop Jordan still held.

  “We don’t?” Liv asked.

  “I’ll just go get my laptop, shall I?”

  “Why not the laptop?” Jordan asked.

  Gin smirked. “Trust me. You want something with the capabilities to transfer a giant program with all of its attendant files and support programs intact from one machine to another. That machine is not it. Let’s just say I’ve made a few…modifications to mine.”

  Jordan set the laptop down as Gin breezed out of the room. They heard her say, “It works!” in the hallway, and then Trent walked in. “Nice job!”

  From Trent, that was lavish praise. Liv flashed her smile again, but with less exuberance. Apparently, she was running out of that fast. Jordan vowed to himself he’d get her home as quickly as possible.

  Liv called General Mace’s office, and when she hung up, reported, “He wants to see us as soon as we’re done with R & D.”

  Gin returned in minutes with her laptop and connected several cables to the back of Liv’s machine. She set it down and typed rapidly.

  Within minutes, she snapped the machine closed and disconnected the wires. “Did you alert General Mace yet?”

  “Yeah, he wants us in the briefing room ASAP.”

  “R & D first,” Trent said.

  “Then let’s go.”

  Jordan followed the others to R & D. He didn’t come here much, given that his areas of expertise were more theoretical. They dropped off the information for a bunch of excited weapons techs, Gin again connecting her pad and apparently downloading the whole program into a new machine.

  “We’ll get right on this,” one of the techs promised.

  Trent said, “I’ll be back after the briefing to help out, if I can.”

  The tech nodded absently, already crowding in with the others to watch the simulation run.

  They trooped back to the briefing room and found Connor and Ben already there with General Mace.

  Liv reported her findings, which took a very short time, even considering the fact that she kept looping back to things she’d already said, and then forgot several key points which Gin
and Trent reminded her of.

  When she’d finished, General Mace asked, “Did they say how long until they have a working prototype?”

  “No, sir,” Trent answered, “but I’d expect it to take only a few days. They’ve had all the parts and materials on order for several weeks now, anticipating the final configuration.”

  “Commander Bryant, Lieutenant Farthing, and Dr. Jameson, you get working on testing plans. We have to know that it works on people, but we also have to test it on demons. The rest of you can get back down to R & D and help them with it.”

  “Sir,” Jordan said, “Liv’s been awake for more than two days straight now. And she hardly slept the night before.”

  Liv frowned at him. “How do you know that?”

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, but still.”

  He turned back to the general. “She needs to sleep.”

  “Granted. Go home, Dr. Greenwood. They can call you if they need anything.”

  “But sir—”

  “Do I have to make it an order?”

  Liv slumped. “No.”

  “I don’t think you should be driving, Liv. I’ll take you.” Jordan looked at the general for permission, which he silently gave. Jordan nodded back his thanks.

  “Dismissed.”

  Chapter 19

  Liv woke up the next morning, and bleary numbers swam into view. 6:03 am. The alarm wasn’t set. That must mean she didn’t have to get up. The events of yesterday drifted to the surface of her mind, and she decided today was Saturday. She’d slept about twenty hours straight, and they hadn’t called her about the brain modification device.

  She suspected Jordan might have had something to do with that.

  A clunk sounded from the living room, as of somebody setting a glass on her end table. Somebody’s in my house! She grabbed her Rogue from its place in the drawer of her bedside table and held it on the door. There was a clatter in the kitchen and then a definite but indefinable sense of someone moving down her hallway. The door opened and she put her finger on the trigger.

  Jordan stepped through, and immediately put up his free hand. “Whoa!”

  She lowered the gun and safed it. “Sorry.” She registered that he was holding a cup of coffee in his other hand, and said, “Is that for me?”

  “If you don’t shoot me first.”

  “Sorry. What are you doing here?”

  He walked over and handed her the coffee. “I brought you home yesterday, remember?”

  “Yeah. Actually, no.” She took a sip—lots of cream and sugar, just the way she liked it—and sighed. Heaven in a cup.

  “That’s because you fell asleep in the car, and you didn’t wake up when you got home. I carried you in here.”

  Which explained why she had slept in the bra and undershirt she’d been wearing yesterday. “Oh. You haven’t been here this whole time, have you?”

  “No. I spent most of yesterday working on test scenarios. I’ve got a couple demon testing sites lined up.”

  Liv tried to focus. She wasn’t all that awake yet, and her brain didn’t want to absorb information. Jordan sat on the bed next to her, distracting her further. He was wearing jeans and a plain blue t-shirt, but he looked like a god in them. She took another sip of coffee.

  “Why don’t you sit back and enjoy your coffee?”

  “I’m enjoying, thanks.”

  He bit his lip, something clearly bothering him.

  “What’s up?”

  When he didn’t answer, she nudged him with her knee. He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. “Who’s Nathan?”

  She nearly spilled her coffee. “How do you know that name?”

  He looked apologetic. “You talk in your sleep.”

  She didn’t remember dreaming at all, but apparently she had. “What did I say?”

  “Mostly, leave you alone, and never ever speak to you again.”

  “Ah. Then you must have inferred he’s an ex.”

  “Just an ex?”

  It was too early in the morning for this. She took another drink of coffee, concentrating on making it absorb into her system faster. Jordan was still staring expectantly. She decided to try a noncommittal head jerk.

  He nodded as if that had answered his question. “So, he broke your heart?”

  She scowled. “No.” He hadn’t. Bastard.

  “But you haven’t dated anyone since.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Jordan’s eyes flashed, but his voice remained mild. “Actually, it is.”

  “How?”

  “Because you’re with me now. Right?”

  Liv remembered what she had been going to do—two nights ago? Three? Get out before it was too late. Was it too late now? Jordan was sitting here talking with her after getting her home, taking care of her, bringing her coffee in bed. She felt safe. Logically, she should end it before it turned as messy as the thing with Nathan had—except that she was so incredibly reluctant.

  “Right?” Jordan prodded.

  It was definitely too early for this. “I don’t know, Jordan. We slept together once. We work together lots. What do you call that?”

  She immediately regretted her words, expecting an outburst, but he didn’t get mad. “I would call that ‘you’re mine.’”

  That melted her heart a bit. Jesus, how did he do that? “You always turn me around.”

  His smile was puzzled. “What does that mean?”

  She looked fully at him, trying to x-ray the inside of his mind the way he always seemed to do hers. She got an eyeful of gorgeous male, but not a hint of his thoughts. “I try to say something, I start to feel something, and you just turn me a different way. Without even trying.”

  “Oh, believe me, I try. So what did I make you feel this time?”

  That I love you.

  But she’d thought she’d loved Nathan too, had ignored the signs that he wasn’t the man she’d given him credit for being. The worst part was, when he’d shown her his true self, she hadn’t been surprised. Since it had ended, she’d never once missed him. So it hadn’t been love.

  She was obviously a bad judge of character. Nor did she know much about her own feelings, apparently. She couldn’t stand to make the same mistake with Jordan.

  What if he wasn’t the caring, intuitive, brave, intelligent, honorable, and moral man she thought he was? What if she didn’t understand love at all, and this wasn’t it?

  She tried another noncommittal jerk, but he nodded as if she’d spoken aloud. Damn the man and his mind-reading intuition.

  Then he smiled, and her insides melted. All at once.

  Jordan took the cup of coffee out of her hands, put it on the bedside table, and leaned in. He kissed her, and she took him in her arms as he pushed her back against the pillows. She ran her hands over the firm muscles of his back under his shirt. He nipped at her lip, and heat flashed through her, a far more effective wake-up than the coffee.

  Except now, her mind was awake enough to remember that she needed to get to work. She managed to get a hand between them and pushed him away. “Jordan! Get off. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “No. They sent me home last night because Trent and the R & D team have it under control.”

  “But I still need to go in, finish up on some other things, and I’ll be there in case they need me…”

  He was smiling now. “It’s Saturday. Why don’t we sleep in?”

  He kissed her again, setting off flash fires along her nerve endings. She had to admit, he had a point.

  When he finally released her mouth to trail kisses down her neck, she said, a little breathlessly. “Oh all right, if you insist.”

  He nipped her neck and she gasped, arching up to him. His laugh rumbled through his chest and into hers. “I do.”

  She gasped again as his hand slipped under her waistband, and surrendered herself to the heat, and to him.

  * * *

  Jordan managed to keep her
away all day Saturday, but Sunday, Liv insisted on going in to the DEPOT to see what she’d missed.

  Turned out, nothing.

  R & D, along with Gin and Trent, had everything well in hand, and practically pushed her out of the room when she wanted to look over their shoulders at the emerging weapon. She went back to her office in case they needed her, catching up on paperwork. Her heart jumped when the phone rang once, and she hoped they would call her over to R & D, but they just had a question which she easily answered.

  Disappointed, she sat back to wait some more, double checking her results and finishing her research notes.

  By Monday, she was sick of waiting. By Tuesday, she could barely contain her impatience and took Ben up on an offer to help him test fly a jet at the Ranch. On the third loop-the-loop, she wished she had remembered her Dramamine and vowed never again to let him talk her into something against her better judgment.

  When she told him as much, he said, “But I took it easy on you, Liv! We didn’t roll or spin or anything!”

  “And I only vomited after we were back on the ground. We’re even.”

  Wednesday morning when she got to her office she finally found a memo blinking on her computer: Briefing at 0800 hours. T36 and R & D team.

  It was finished!

  Her heart leapt. She hurried down to the briefing room to find the rest of her team already there. “It’s done?” she asked Trent as soon as she got to the conference table.

  He nodded gravely, or maybe just tiredly. He looked as exhausted as she’d felt after her research marathon just before R & D had taken over.

  Before she could ask more, General Mace arrived, followed by two of the R & D team, wheeling a cart that held the world’s only prototype of Liv’s brain modification device.

  The R & D guys immediately launched into a spiel about how they had developed the weapon and what the specs were. It was all as she and Gin and Trent had designed it.

  “Will it work?” Connor asked.

  The taller R & D guy—was his name Pete?—froze. The other, whose name might be Sam or Stan, frowned. “It appears to send out an energy charge when activated. The same energy each time at each setting.”

  “How was it tested?”

  Pete recovered enough to answer, “Remotely, in an empty, shielded room.”