by Tracey Ward
“Shhh!”
“What are we hiding from?”
“Shhh!”
My shoulders slump in irritation. “Dude, your shushing is louder than my whispering.”
“I’m up here,” he whispers viciously.
I look up. It’s hard to see, this dream is so friggin’ dark, but there’s an outline of black against black about twenty feet up in a tree to my left. “How’d you get up there?”
“I climbed.”
“Good climber.”
“Shhh!”
I roll my eyes. “Oh my God. I’m done with this.”
I imagine myself some stairs. Ornate ones because I can. Marble and gold, looping around his tree in a spiral that I follow impatiently. I create a kind of landing next to him where he clings to a branch with big, shaking arms. His eyes are huge and wet, just like his underwear.
“How did you do that?” he gasps.
“It’s not hard. Not anymore.” I imagine a chair on the landing, taking a seat across from him on the soft, suede surface.
He stares at me in amazement. “What is this?”
“It’s a dream. Or a nightmare, really. Your nightmare.”
“You’re insane. How could you be in my dream?”
I open my arms, gesturing to the foyer of Buckingham Palace that I just magicked into the forest. “You think this happens in reality?” I look over the edge of my landing to the ground way below us. “What are we hiding from, by the way? What are you afraid of?”
He glares at me, his square jaw clenched tight. “I will never tell you.”
I hear footsteps on the ground underneath us. They’re big, and they’re closing in. “You don’t have to tell me. I’m pretty sure you’re about to show me.”
He hears it too. His hard demeanor softens, quivering in his arms. In his chin. “It’s coming.”
“I can’t wait to meet it.”
He only shakes his head, his eyes wide with panic.
I lean in my seat until I’m looking straight down at the ground. I can see the bushes rustling with movement, the air humming with the soft growl of the beast, like it’s purring. Like a cat. Is he afraid of cats? Maybe big cats, like jaguars or panthers. Pumas!
The bushes part, the face of the animal pushing through into the moonlight. My breath hiccups in my throat when I recognize it. It’s not a kitty cat.
It’s a bear.
No, not just a bear. A Kodiak brown bear. A big-ass brown bear with a huge head, snuffling snout, and dark, shining eyes that search the forest hungrily. It takes forever for its body to come into the clearing, its paws massive as a dinosaur’s with twice the claws. It’s a hulking, roving death wish. And it’s coming straight for us.
“That’s a good one,” I tell the guard quietly, my palms sweating at the sight of it. “I was ready to make fun of you if it was butterflies or something, but this is… this is a good one.”
“Stop talking,” he gasps tremulously.
I watch the bear circle the base of our tree. I immediately vanish the stairs before it can find them.
“Where are you from?” I ask the guard curiously, still watching the bear. Afraid to look away from it. Its back is long, covered in coarse hair that shines in the night. “Somewhere in the east, right? One of the countries with a V in it? Slovakia? Yugoslavia?” The bear sniffs the air, raising its head to look up at us. At me. Its black eyes are like cold marbles holding mine in a stare that stops my blood. “A lot of bears in your neck of the woods? Is that why you’re afraid of them?” The bear snorts. Thick steam rushes from its nose, rising like smoke up into the trees. “Or did you just have a bad experience at the zoo one time?”
The bear opens his mouth to roar up at us. Steam rolls around his white teeth that are sharp as knives and bigger than my brain can handle. His cry is deafening. It tears through the forest, through my ears, through my mind, rattling me to the bone.
The guard whimpers, clasping his hands over his ears as he cries quietly.
I’m not loving the bear, but I’m not nearly as afraid as this guy is. I know this is a dream. I know I can pull the ripcord any time I want and bail on the whole thing. Or I can imagine myself a table, a four-course dinner, and a movie to wait it out up here. I’ve got options. This guy doesn’t. His only option right now is living his nightmare.
Unless I give him another one.
“Hey,” I call to him.
He doesn’t answer.
I sit forward, trying again. “Hey!”
“What?!” he shouts back.
The bear snorts angrily below us.
The guard closes his eyes tightly.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“W-what?”
“What is your name? Mine is Alex. What’s yours?”
“Ruther.”
“Ruther?”
“Yes.”
“As in, one who Ruths?”
He opens his eyes to look at me with deep distrust and confusion. “What?”
“Never mind. Ruther, listen to me. I have a plan.”
“For what?”
“To get away from the bear.”
His face eases, hope brightening his eyes. “How?”
“You tell me who you’re working for, and I get us out of here. Easy.”
The softness in his eyes fades. “You’re an idiot.”
“Am I?”
“Yes. You are. Your whole team is full of idiots.”
“Are you saying that because you don’t know who you’re working for or because you’ll never tell me?”
“I’ll never tell you,” he replies haughtily.
I smile at him thinly. “Never say never.”
The tree sinks a foot into the ground.
We drop a foot closer to the bear.
Ruther shouts in surprise, a word in a foreign language that’s probably a curse. The bear below us lunges at the tree, its claws ripping effortlessly through the rough bark.
“What did you…” Ruther begins breathlessly. “How did you do that?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’m an idiot, remember?”
I drop the tree down another foot.
“Stop!” he cries.
“Who are you working for?”
“I can’t tell you.”
Another foot. Another step closer to the bear.
“Stop!”
“Who are you working for?” I repeat patiently.
He’s hyperventilating. I hope he doesn’t pass out before he answers me. “I can’t… I can’t tell you… They’ll kill me.”
“So will that bear.”
Ruther shakes his head.
I drop us down another foot.
He shouts more words I can’t understand. Not linguistically, but contextually I totally understand his meaning, and I’m pretty sure my mom would be offended by the things he’s suggesting she does.
“How far from the bear do you think we are now?” I ask him, glancing down. “Sixteen feet? Maybe fifteen? I bet that bear is at least ten feet long, butt to snout. About four feet tall. If he stood up on his back legs, how tall do you think he’d be compared to how high up we are? We’d come out about even, don’t you think?”
“Stop,” he pleads desperately, his face buried in his arms, hiding like a child under the covers.
To be real, this is hard for me. This hurts. I’m not a violent person. I see someone suffering, and the first thing I want to do is help them. I’m not the person for this job. I’m wavering even now, wondering if I’m doing this right and kind of hoping I’m not.
But nothing about this life has been easy and none of us are walking away from it without scars. Without doubts. And if I ever want to live in a world where I don’t have to constantly look over my shoulder, I have to dole out a little pain of my own. I have to push back against those who are constantly pushing against me.
I drop us down two feet.
The bear rises up on its hind legs, swatting eagerly at Ruth’s foot. One long, bla
ck claw scrapes against the rubber on the bottom of his shoe. Ruth yells, pulling his legs up higher. As high as he can. He looks up at the tree for another branch to climb, an exit from this fate, but I’m ruthless.
I vanish the top of the tree.
He moans miserably in the back of his throat.
“Are you ready to talk to me?” I ask calmly, my stomach rolling drunkenly inside me. I can’t bear it if he says no again. This is going to get bloody if he does, and I don’t know if I can handle that. In fact, I’m almost a hundred percent sure I can’t. This is a breaking point for both of us. One of us is about to give in.
I swallow a sigh of relief when it’s him.
“Yes. Anything,” he weeps openly. He looks up at me with pained, wet eyes. “Just, please, for the love of God, don’t let him eat me.”
“That’s up to you,” I tell him sternly, crossing my legs as I lean back in my chair, acting about a million degrees cooler than I feel. “Now, talk.”
CHAPTER NINE
NICK
“Gustav Jokinen,” Alex pronounces carefully, the ‘J’ coming off like a ‘Y’. “J-O-K-I-N-E-N. I made him spell it because seriously.”
She sits at the head of the dining table in the bleak white kitchen back on the island. Beck, Brody, Liam, Campbell, Justin, and I flank her on each side. It’s late, the day done, the rest of Liam’s crew in the common room or in bed. Alex’s body is slouched with exhaustion, but she insisted on doing this briefing when we got back. Right after we dropped the guard in the middle of Stonehenge. No money. No wallet. No weapon. I’m sure he’ll be fine.
I also don’t really care.
“What kind of name is that?” I wonder aloud.
“Finnish,” Alex answers immediately, surprising me. Her interrogation was more thorough than I thought. “Ruther, our guard, is from the Czech Republic. He joined the military when he was eighteen. He was dishonorably discharged six years later when he was caught selling stolen weapons on the Black Market. He should have done jail time but he snuck out of the country with the help of one of his buyers. They hooked him up with their boss, an entrepreneur looking for trained men to add to a small army of mercenaries he was hiring out.”
Beck nods slowly, his hand scribbling notes as Alex speaks. “Gustav Jokinen.”
“Yep. He’s been with Jokinen for three years basically being a Viking. He and his buddies roll up on villages and raid, rape, murder, and burn the place out of existence. Every now and then they’ll kidnap someone to hold for ransom or… whatever.”
Alex clears her throat, avoiding our eyes. She’s shaken. She’s been trying to hide it since she came out of the dream, but it’s in the sharp edge of her voice. The slash of her hand through the air as she speaks. She’s too rigid, too controlled, trying to overcompensate for the unhinged feeling inside her. I wish I didn’t let her go into Ruther’s mind alone like that, but her ability to get into a person’s head is one I don’t have. She can’t take me with her and I couldn’t do it for her, so the dirty work was on her today. And it hurt her heart to do it. It hurts mine to see it.
“Sandrine mentioned both Gustav and an Andre when you saw her. Did you ask Ruther if he knows who Andre is?” Liam asks.
Alex nods wearily. “Andre Naidu is a South African war lord. Ruther said he works with Jokinen, but it sounded more like Naidu works for him. Naidu has the influence in Africa, but Jokinen has the money and most of the power. He calls all the shots.”
“What does an African war lord and a Finnish mercenary want with us?” Justin asks innocently.
I nearly laugh at the question, it’s so insane. The answer so obvious.
“What do most of us in this room have in common?” I ask him patiently.
Justin looks at the faces around him. When he gets back to me, he’s nervous. Unsure at how simple his answer sounds. “We’re all supers?”
“Not all of us,” Campbell reminds him.
“We were all part of the super soldier trials,” I answer.
Beck raises his hand. “Super strength.”
“Heightened hearing and sight,” Brody adds.
“Ideal assassin,” Alex agrees.
I put my hand to my chest. “Reflexes and agility, among other things. And you with your regeneration ability would be an ideal soldier in the field. Even if they put a bullet in you, you’d get back up. You’d keep on fighting.”
Justin winces. “Yeah, but it’d still hurt. Getting shot over and over again would be torture.”
“They don’t care.”
“Not even a little,” Alex says softly. Sadly.
I turn to her, getting us back on track. Pushing us through this so she’ll go to bed and rest. “When Sandrine talked about ‘The Organization’, is this what she meant? Jokinen and Naidu? Or is there someone higher we need to be looking for?”
“No, Jokinen is the top. He’s it. Naidu has the muscle but not the money to keep hopping the globe looking for supers. If Jokinen was out of the picture, Naidu would be just another war lord.”
“Then that’s where we start. At the top, with Jokinen.”
“But Naidu is just as bad. Shouldn’t we go after both of them?”
“Trust me, we will. But Jokinen is the first target. You cut the funding, you kill just about any operation. Mercenaries work for money. Without it, Naidu will lose his influence, men will jump ship, and he’ll be crippled. It’ll make it easier to come at him.”
“Do we know where to find Jokinen?” Liam asks.
“Vaguely,” Alex answers regrettably. “Ruther knows he owns a resort on the outskirts of Marrakech, but he didn’t know the name or exactly where it is.”
“Ha,” Campbell laughs loudly to himself.
“Why is that funny?” Justin asks, glancing around the table to see if he’s the only one who doesn’t get the joke.
He’s not. No one else is laughing but Campbell.
Campbell grins smugly at Alex. “Ask her why it’s funny. I want to see if she knows.”
Alex’s head falls back, her eyes on the ceiling. “Not this again,” she groans.
“Where’s Marrakech, SB?”
“I know where it is.”
“Do you?”
She lowers her face to glare at him across the table. “Morocco. Marrakech is in Morocco. And so is Tangier.”
“Ah, my grasshopper! I’m proud of you.”
“You are such a pain.”
Liam frowns at them. “What are you two on about?”
“Don’t get involved,” I advise him. “Trust me, it’ll only make it worse. Let’s focus on finding this resort. If we find the resort, we can find Jokinen.”
“He owns it, but he doesn’t live there,” Alex clarifies.
“So where does he live?”
She shrugs. “Not a clue. Ruther didn’t know. He said he spent most of his time at a military base under Naidu’s control. That’s where he always saw Jokinen. He said Jokinen stayed there a lot. He felt safe behind the walls with Naidu’s army on guard.”
“Okay, so where’s the military base?”
“On the border of Mauritania and Morocco. Ruther said it’s in the middle of the desert.”
“The Sahara,” Campbell clarifies just because he can.
“Whatever. It’s hot and miserable. Ruther hated it.” She looks hopefully at Liam. “Any chance you’ve been there before?”
Liam grins ruefully. “Never had the pleasure.”
“Crap.”
“You can get us there,” I tell her encouragingly. “You’re getting more accurate with every Slip.”
“Yeah, but this is the middle of nowhere. They’ll be able to see us coming for miles. If I don’t get us inside the walls on the first try, we’re done for. Slipping to a place I’ve never been to or seen, I don’t have that kind of precision.”
“Besides,” Campbell reasons, “we need to do a recon mission before we go dropping inside their gates. We have no idea how many people are in that base. How strapp
ed are they? Is Jokinen even there?”
“Which is why we should look for the resort and wait for Jokinen there,” I argue. “There won’t be a military presence and we can blend in with the tourists while we wait.”
“For how long? Ruther said he owns the place, not that he lives there. How often do you think Richard Hilton stays at his hotels? And what are the odds you’re going to catch him at one? To pull off this above-the-law crap he’s been doing, Jokinen has to be a billionaire at least. Do you think some resort in Marrakech is his only property?”
“It’s going to be his closest one to the military base.”
“And he feels safer inside those walls. If he’s in the area, he’s going to the base, not the local Best Western.”
“Campbell is right,” Brody admits unhappily.
Alex snorts. “Bite your tongue.”
“It’s not somethin’ any of us wants to admit, ever, but it’s true. The military base is our best bet for catchin’ him.”
I sigh, running my hand over my mouth. “It’ll be highly fortified. Probably small but powerful. They’ll have regular rotations watching the fences. Jokinen will have his own personal guard with him, like Secret Service with the President.”
“And Naidu’s army.”
I nod reluctantly. “And Naidu’s army. Alex, did Ruther give you a headcount on the inside of the base?”
“No,” she admits glumly. “He said it’s always changing. People are constantly coming and going on ‘runs’ so it’s nearly impossible to know how many are there at any given moment. The most he said he’d seen was probably ninety, maybe a hundred, with more outside on a run.”
Campbell looks at me seriously, his eyes intense. “Forty we can handle. A hundred or more is suicide.”
“Not necessarily. Not if we keep our distance when we attack.”
He shakes his head severely. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m down, but they’ll never go for it.” He juts his chin toward the head of the table. At Alex. “She definitely won’t.”
Alex’s eyes bounce between Campbell and I. “I won’t go for what? What are you thinking?”
“He’s thinking we wait for Jokinen to get on base and we blow the whole thing.”
Alex’s mouth drops open. “We’d kill every person on that base,” she whispers in horror.
