“Sir, I’m fine. Look, I don’t even need the stupid sling.” He ripped the strap up over his head and dropped the sling to the floor. “It’s just a little stiff. I took pain meds—ibuprofen, nothing stronger,” he said when the general opened his mouth to protest.
“You will be a liability to your team and to the mission.”
“We’ve done more with far worse injuries! I ran to escape Hell while it was actually dislocated. I’m fine!”
Connor, still looking over the blueprints with no apparent interest in the conversation, said, “Sir, I don’t think we have a choice. I need him.”
“Why?” General Mace asked.
“Because he’s the only one who speaks the demons’ language. He knows their culture. He’s a scientist trained in multiple disciplines. He might be invaluable to recovering stolen files.” As General Mace raised his eyebrows, Connor continued, “Plus, he’s a hell of a good shot.”
Jordan gave Connor a surprised smile.
General Mace looked from Connor to Jordan. “All right, it’s your mission. Just take it easy on that arm.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want zero presence, folks. In and out. Recover any stolen research, neutralize the demons, and find the missing employees.”
“Piece of cake,” Trent said dubiously.
“Mmmm, cake.” Ben licked his lips. “Do you think—”
“No,” Liv, Trent, and Connor said at the same time.
“I’ll leave you to it.” General Mace strode out of the room.
Gin and Trent laid out the detailed blueprints of the building and an employee roster next to the sketchy security system details. The team studied everything and began to formulate a plan.
* * *
Two hours later, the SM hovered over the roof of Innerstellar Technologies. Connor figured this entrance gave them the best chance for surprise.
After all, the demons would assume they’d be able to see an aircraft.
One by one, the team dropped to the roof and ran for cover. The darkness swallowed them without a trace.
When Liv jumped out last, the SM silently sped off to land on a neighboring building’s roof. General Mace had appropriated the landing pad for the night so the SM could wait for them.
Liv arrived at Innerstellar’s roof entrance to find Gin already hacking the lock with her laptop while Connor and Trent covered the doorway.
After a minute of frantic typing and a couple of choice curses from Gin, Ben asked, “Can you get us in?”
Gin snarled, “Do I bother you when you’re doing whatever bullshit you do in the cockpit of a plane? If we just wanted to break down the door, we’d let you do it, Flyboy. We need stealth, and I need quiet.”
Ben pretended to zip his mouth shut and lock it.
Finally, Gin sat back. “I’m through. This system is amazing—I’m in the security center.”
“Where are they?” Connor asked.
Gin’s fingers raced over the keyboard and she frowned. “I can’t get into the visual system from here.” More clicking of keys, and her frown turned to a frustrated snarl.
Connor asked, “How many?”
“Didn’t I just say I can’t get in?”
More speed-typing, and she growled at her computer. “We need to get to the main control room. There’s a positional lock. I can’t hack it from here.”
“All right. You and Ben get there, then we’ll get rid of the demons and search for the missing employees.”
Ben snorted. “Easy.”
“Get us through the door,” Connor said to Gin.
“Already did.” She grinned as the door next to them thunked.
Connor pulled it open, and they went through by twos onto a deserted stair landing.
When Jordan shut the door behind them, Connor said, “Ben and Gin, get down to five. Get us the system. I want movements, numbers, attempts and successes or failures to access the computers, security setup, everything. I assume they won’t see us moving, Gin?”
“Nope. They’re blind, and they don’t even know it.”
“Good,” Connor said. “Liv and Jordan, start here and work down floor by floor. Look for evidence of stolen technology, tampering, broken locks, or workers. Trent and I will start in the lobby and work our way up to you. Do not alert them to our presence.”
Connor started down the stairs and motioned to the door at the bottom of the flight.
Gin was already pulling out her laptop’s connecting wires. “Give me a second.”
She plugged into the lock and commenced frantic screen tapping interspersed with typing. A minute later, she said, “I have this floor.”
Connor nodded, motioned Liv and Jordan through the door, turned the corner to the next flight and continued down the staircase.
“Sir, we’re on twenty.”
Connor stopped two steps down and turned. “Yes, Ben, I know.”
“It’s been a long day. I’d really rather take the elevator.”
Connor turned to Gin. “Won’t they see it moving?”
Gin rolled her eyes. “Have you not repeatedly witnessed my highly astounding talent? I’ll get you an invisible elevator.”
Connor frowned at Ben but came back up to the door. At his signal, Trent opened it and they went through fast. “Clear.”
Liv stepped into a shadowy hallway lined with glass doors. Most of the offices had windows on the hall, through which Liv saw lake-sized desks and plush antique chairs.
Ben stepped up to a window and peered inside just as a demon stepped out of a doorway halfway down the hall. Connor instantly motioned the team back to the stairwell, but the demon didn’t look their way. It stopped in the hallway and swirled into nothing.
Ben stepped back as the rest of the team gaped.
Gin closed her mouth with a snap. “They’re Traveling?”
“From a twenty-story building?” Liv asked.
“How?” Trent asked.
“To where?” Gin asked.
“There must be a matching building in another world,” Jordan said. “It’s the only explanation.”
“They built a twenty-story building in Hell?” Trent asked.
“I assume it was Hell,” Jordan agreed.
“They’ve been planning this for a while,” Ben said.
Connor grinned. “Kinda makes me want to take a look over there.”
Trent grinned back.
“Change of plan,” Connor said. “Trent and I are going to Hell. Everyone else, same instructions. Watch your backs. You can’t clear rooms if they can Travel in behind you.”
“What if the other building’s not in Hell?” Jordan asked.
Connor looked at him for a second and said, “Right. We’ll head down a few levels, give ourselves a chance to break a fall.”
Gin said, “I can disable the security surrounding the elevators, but I can’t get the floor cameras without physically going to each floor. Stay on this floor or they’ll see you,” she said to Liv and Jordan. “We’ll get the cameras down from main control and then radio you.”
“When that’s done,” Connor said, “you’d better get back up here and help in the labs. There’s no point in trying to trap them between you if they can Travel from any floor.” He headed for the elevator, and Trent, Ben, and Gin followed.
* * *
Gin and Ben stood alone in the elevator. Connor and Trent had already gotten off on level seven.
Ben pulled his sidearm and Gin did the same. They stood at either side of the door with their backs to the elevator wall. A ding announced their arrival on five, and when the doors opened, they turned as one and leapt out into the hallway.
Two surprised demons stood guarding the elevator doors. Both took shots to the head and chest as Ben and Gin opened fire.
“Now what?” Gin shouted.
Ben already had a wildfyre grenade ready. He hit the release button and lobbed it at the nearest demon, who batted it with a hand. The grenade exploded into flame as the demon swiped it, setting
its hand instantly ablaze.
The demon stumbled back into its comrade, turning them both to living torches. The first demon ran straight at Ben and Gin, who dived out of the way. It leapt into the elevator behind them and the doors closed.
The other demon dissolved out of existence, taking the wildfyre with it.
Crashes and bangs came from the elevator, along with squealing-pig screams, then a thud, and silence.
Gin got to her feet, still eyeing the silent elevator with suspicion. “I can’t believe you didn’t set the whole building on fire.”
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”
“Because you are the luckiest son of a bitch alive. What if they had run into us?”
Ben shrugged. “We’d have Traveled to ditch the fyre and popped right back. And don’t talk about my mama like that.”
Gin snorted. “How are we supposed to find stolen info-discs on a blazing corpse?”
“Not gonna happen. Also not our problem. If there were disks, they’re destroyed. If they can’t use it, they didn’t steal it.”
Gin conceded his point. “I hope the other one doesn’t run right into Trent and Connor.”
Ben’s smile vanished. “Yeah, me too. I didn’t think it would be so fast to duck and run.”
Too late now. Gin jerked her head to the right, indicating the hallway that turned a corner to the left about thirty feet down. There was no posh carpeting on this floor. The walls were sickly yellow cinderblock, and although they stalked in a half-crouch, each footstep sounded tiny echoes off the gold-flecked linoleum that had probably been new in the nineteen-seventies. The windows into the various rooms were reinforced with diamond mesh and steel-girder frames.
They turned the corner to see waffle-shaped light escaping through a gridded window at the end of the hall. A pure beam slipped through a narrow crack in the unlatched door. As they crept closer, Ben and Gin could hear demons’ voices rumbling from within.
Ben looked at her, and she raised her eyebrows in question. Now what?
He held up a finger, indicating he had an idea, and rummaged in his vest pocket. When he pulled out another wildfyre grenade, she shook her head frantically. Bad idea!
He raised his eyebrows expectantly. You got a better one?
Reluctantly, she shook her head. She had no clue how else to kill the demons.
They duck-walked under the window and stood shoulder-to-shoulder next to the door. Usually, they’d enter from either side, but they couldn’t risk the demons seeing one of them cross the opening. Ben, closest to the door, held up one hand and counted down from three. He held the wildfyre grenade in the other hand.
When he reached zero, they leapt through the door. This room was state-of-the-art, gleaming with glass, steel, and a rainbow of lights blinking from computers and control banks. Gin had no time to admire the equipment as Ben pitched the grenade at the nearest demon’s chest. It sat in a wheeled office chair about halfway down the narrow room. The demon started to rise from its chair to leap at the intruders, but roared and abruptly reversed direction to escape the flames. It succeeded only in spreading the wildfyre to its nearest comrade.
Both demons flailed around the room in a panic while the third scrambled to avoid their blundering movements. Their wings thrashed, knocking equipment to the floor. Gin shot from the doorway, trying to herd them away from the equipment, with no success.
Between the din of gunfire and the cacophonous pig-screams, she wondered if her ears would ever be the same.
Wildfyre jumped from demon to computer, and suddenly the electronics were burning, melting, and sparking at the far end of the narrow room, where the third demon had taken refuge. Gin almost gagged on the smell of roasting demon and frying plastic. Then the wildfyre leapt from the electronics to the third demon.
However, it didn’t flail aimlessly, but ran straight at Ben and Gin who still stood by the door.
“Oh, shit!” Gin swore as she dived out of the way. The demon fled through the open doorway, its wings nearly lodging it in the opening, and ran down the hall.
The other two demons collapsed onto the floor, setting it ablaze. One of the rolling chairs began to sag as the plastic castors and then the plastic legs melted. Its fabric caught as the seat drooped toward the floor, and acrid fumes burned Gin’s nose. From the hall came the sound of the running demon’s retreating footsteps, a huge tinkling-splintering crash, and then silence except for the quiet roar of flames.
“Well, I think our work here is done,” Ben said brightly as he got to his feet.
Gin cuffed him on the back of the head with an open hand. “Idiot.”
“What was that for?”
Gin gestured to the blazing electronics. “How am I supposed to get the cameras down and find the missing workers when you’ve torched the system?”
“Did y’all forget to mention your better plan to clear the room of three otherwise indestructible demons?”
Gin sighed. “No.”
“The fyre will probably fry the camera circuits. They won’t be able to see us anyway.”
He had a point. She turned to the door. They’d better find out where the third demon had ended up.
Ben followed her out and closed the door behind them in a probably futile attempt to contain the fyre.
Gin crept quietly back down the hallway. But when she peered around the corner, she dropped all attempts at stealth and continued down the hall.
There was a window at the end of the hallway, with the bank of elevators on the left and the yellow cinderblock wall on the right. Glass hung in broken shards in the window frame, and the diamond security grid bent outward in tortured wire spirals around the demon-sized hole in the center. Gin felt cool air on her face.
She and Ben walked to the window and looked down to the street five stories below. The blazing demon was lying on the sidewalk.
Ben said, “I did not see that coming.”
“Oh, shit! Look at this idiot.” Gin watched helplessly as a civilian approached the flaming body. From the person’s posture, it was obvious that he or she was talking on a cell phone, almost certainly to the police or 911.
As the good Samaritan stepped closer to the body, it suddenly jerked, and then lurched to its feet.
“Oh fuck, it’s not dead!” Ben said.
Gin pulled her sidearm. She knew it wasn’t going to be much use from five stories up, but she had to try to protect the civilian. Before she could fire, the demon fled down the street, a beacon limned in wildfyre that swirled into nothingness and vanished in the dark. “It Traveled out,” Gin said. “Shit.”
Ben scowled after it. “Nothing we can do about it now.”
Gin spotted a fire extinguisher on the wall. She grabbed it and headed back for the security room. “Let’s see if we can salvage anything.”
Ben held the door handle as she took a deep breath. He opened the door at her signal. She squinted against the blast of heat and smoke and turned the fire extinguisher on the nearest pile of burning equipment. The cloud of fire-dousing chemical burst out, but it was about as useful as spit. She kept spraying, determined that the blaze would die. Her eyebrows felt like they were on fire, the skin of her forehead and cheeks was crack-glazed, and she was seriously afraid that her eyeballs might melt.
Then the fire extinguisher hissed as it ran empty.
She backed out of the room and Ben slammed the door behind her. “Apparently, fyre is immune to extinguishing. Fuck.”
“Yeah.” She glanced at him. “Let’s get to the lobby. They know we’re coming now, but we might be able to take them out before they can do anything about it. Maybe I can use the security booth there to locate our missing workers.” She clicked her radio twice to let Liv and Jordan know she needed to talk. She continued, “I sure hope there aren’t any more Travelers on the other side, because we’ve let two get back to them now. We could be looking at an army coming down on our heads.”
“So we should probably move,” Ben said.
Chapter 25
Jordan picked lock after lock as they silently searched offices, but he and Liv found nothing on the twentieth floor. By the time they’d finished their search, they still hadn’t heard from Gin. Liv raised her eyebrows at him, and he pointed to the corner office. She nodded and they silently slipped inside.
“We might as well make ourselves comfortable while we wait,” Jordan said as he slid down to sit along one wall.
“Okay.” Liv followed his example, sliding down to sit next to him.
Jordan reached for her hand, but she pulled it out of his grasp.
He turned his head to look at her. “So, Nathan. The two of you dated.”
She glanced at him. “Yes.”
“Was it serious?”
“It was a lifetime ago. I was in college.”
“So you aren’t still harboring a secret love for him.”
Her stomach fluttered as she gave him a withering stare.
He smiled. “Just checking. So what’s going on?”
“This is not the time to discuss this.”
“Then when?”
“Why doesn’t Gin call already?”
Jordan didn’t break his unwavering stare. “Liv, talk to me. What’s going on? You’ve been…secretive about something. I thought, when I saw you’ve still got some hang-up over Blank, that maybe you’re still in love with him.”
When he saw she was about to launch a protest, he interrupted, “I was relieved! At least it was an answer. Just tell me.”
“I don’t have a hang-up over him.”
“No, but when his name comes up, you flinch and change the subject. What happened?”
She glanced at him. “We work together.”
“You and I?”
She nodded.
He waited for more, and finally said, “What a news flash. And, so, but, therefore?”
“So we can’t do this.”
“Do what?” His voice had become as cold as Connor’s when he was angry.
She pushed gamely ahead. “Us. We can’t be together. It would be a disaster. Eventually, it’ll fall apart, and I’ll have to see you, and work with you in these extreme situations, and I couldn’t do it.”
“Why do you assume it would fall apart?”
A Despair of Demons (Travelers, Book 1) Page 24
