Caleb broke into a run. They had to get out of the building before security had an opportunity to organize. He and Gray might smash their way through just about anything, but given enough bullets and guards and only one exit, even they could be stopped. And Sean didn’t have their ability to heal.
And do I care? It would serve the asshole right to have somebody gun him down this time.
Except Sean was helping them now. And even if Caleb wouldn’t shed a tear to see him go down in a hail of bullets, they didn’t have enough allies to throw one aside.
The lobby guard who had let them in earlier stood in front of the elevator, looking nervous. He turned at the sound of running feet and took aim with his gun. “Stop!”
Caleb pushed with his TK, slamming the guy back against the elevator doors. Huh. I’m getting better at this. Unfortunately, the guard kept a hold on his gun, and even as Caleb closed with him, he fired.
The bullet almost missed, drawing a line of pain across Caleb’s thigh. Sean returned fire, and the guard let out a gurgle, slumping to one side.
Caleb knelt by the body and found the guard’s key card attached to his belt. Caleb shoved the body aside and hit the call button for the elevator.
Of course the damn thing wasn’t on their floor. Caleb wanted to scream with impatience. As for Sean, his face turned the color of old cheese, and he stared fixedly at the dead guard. Had Sean been friends with the guy? To hear John tell of it, most of the paranormally-abled in the office had known each other since high school. What would it be like to kill the person you’d sat beside in tenth-grade algebra?
Running footsteps echoed from the hall leading away from the lobby. “Fuck—someone heard the shots,” Caleb said.
To his credit, Sean immediately dropped into a crouch and brought up his gun again. A group of guards rounded the security barrier, their own weapons out and ready. “Stand down!” one of them shouted. “Drop it or we’ll shoot!”
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open.
Caleb lunged inside, key card at the ready. “Sean, get in here!”
Sean dove inside. Gunfire spattered the wall, and Sean leaned out to return fire. Caleb swiped the key card and punched the button for the ground floor. The doors began to slide closed; Sean waited until the last second before pulling his arm inside.
“Damn it.” Sean sagged against the wall. The stink of cordite now mingled with cigarettes and sweat. “This is bullshit.”
Caleb watched the numbers tick past. “Welcome to my world.”
Five floors to go. Four.
Would SPECTR have guards waiting for them in the parking garage? Probably. But how many?
Three. Two.
The elevator jolted to a halt.
* * *
Gray slides easily to the surface of their shared consciousness, Caleb gladly yielding. Behind them, the treacherous mortal Sean gasps.
“We will have to fight,” Gray explains, because they don’t need Sean shooting them from behind while other mortals shoot them from the front. “Caleb is better at some things. I am better at this.”
“Oh. Uh. Okay.”
Gray stretches up and pushes aside the access in the elevator roof. Fortunately no one is yet coming down from above. Perhaps the mortals mean to trap them here while they gather their forces. If so, they have made a mistake.
Gray climbs out, before reaching back in and hauling Sean up. Once the mortal is standing again, Gray turns his attention to the shaft. The exit is only a short distance overhead. “I will go first. You may retrieve your vehicle while they shoot at me.” He wishes they had their coat, to take some of the impact of the bullets.
Sean stares up at the doors. “I don’t think I can climb up there.”
Gray breathes out an impatient sigh, shaking his hair back. His scalp tingles as the hair grows instantly, falling in a long arc to...there. Sean seems taken aback, but he nods. “Good thinking. Might as well scare the piss out of them if you can.”
What does the mortal mean?
“All the hair flying around looks, you know. Impressive.”
Ah.
“You may hold onto me, and I will climb,” Gray says, although he would prefer not to touch this mortal at all. But John would likely not understand Gray abandoning this one at such a moment.
He kneels, and Sean hesitantly slips his arms around Gray’s shoulders. “Hold on tightly,” Gray advises. He rises to his feet, Sean pressing his knees to either side of Gray’s hips for extra grip.
Claws find traction in every crack and crevice, and Gray hauls them up, until they reach the door. Sean carefully grips the cable, bracing himself between it and the tracks to keep out of the line of fire.
Gray takes a deep breath, anticipating pain. Gripping the closed doors, he shoves them open with a single heave.
A line of guards stands just outside, eyes wide, weapons held nervously at the ready. “Shit, it’s the drakul!” one of them shouts. Apparently word of what they face has not yet spread. Perhaps their superiors fear the guards will flee if they know ahead of time.
Gray surges out of the shaft and onto the concrete of the garage, just as they open fire. It hurts, the tear of silver-jacketed lead through his body, smashing bone and shredding organs. He ignores the pain, charging them with bared fangs, a roar of anger rolling up out of him like the crash of thunder.
He grabs the nearest one, claws sinking in, and hurls her into the line of parked SUVs. The others close on him, not daring to shoot now lest they hit one another. It is a mistake, and they realize it almost immediately, but it is too late.
He falls on them, ripping any flesh within reach. They try to overwhelm him with numbers, but they lack even the strength of the demons he hunts. Still, the slash of their knives and strike of their batons is painful. He would try to break through their line, but he must cover Sean’s retreat.
Tires squeal on concrete, painfully loud to his sensitive hearing. Sean’s sedan screeches to a halt by Gray, the door flying open. Most of the guards are injured or dying at this point, and Sean’s eyes are wide with horror. “Get in,” he says.
Gray tumbles into the car, slamming the door behind him. His suit is soaked with blood, fabric shredded by gunfire. He coughs and spits, body bringing up fragments of lead.
“God, I hate this part.”
Sean guns the engine, screaming through the tight turns of the garage. They emerge into the lot above, barely avoiding an armored vehicle moving to block the exit. A few seconds later, the car bursts through the flimsy wooden arm of the gate, tires shrieking as Sean pulls onto the road and leaves SPECTR-HQ behind.
Chapter 13
John peered out between the thin curtains on the hotel room window yet again. They’d waited for hours—where the hell were Sean and Caleb?
“Sit down, Starkweather,” Tiffany ordered. The Vigilant operative who had given them the thumb drive to use on Forsyth’s computer gave them a laptop as well, encrypted to hell and back and virtually untraceable. She sat in front of it, surfing news sites. “Wearing a hole in the carpet isn’t going to make them show up any faster.”
“Something must have gone wrong,” John said. He let the curtain fall closed, but didn’t sit down.
“Or it just took them a while to get the job done. It’s not the sort of thing to rush, not if they did it right. So sit your ass down.”
He crossed the room and sank onto the little couch to one side of the single king bed. If Sean betrayed them a second time...Goddess. Why had John ever gone along with this plan? In hindsight it seemed monumentally stupid, trusting Sean with all their lives. What had he been thinking?
A knock sounded on the door.
John all but leapt toward the door, barely remembering to check the peephole before throwing it open. Sean and Caleb stood there, Sean a bit rumpled, and Caleb—
“What happened?” John shut the door behind them, then hauled Caleb into his arms. “Are you okay, babe?”
Caleb looked like he’d been through a wa
r zone, his suit pocked with bullet holes and stiff with blood. Gray had already restored his hair to a long fall of shining black silk. Give it to Caleb to have his own set of priorities.
“I’m fine,” Caleb said, hugging him back. “Well, I will be after I get this damn tie off and take a shower. Sorry it took us so long to get back, but we had to ditch Sean’s car, find something old enough to hot wire, and steal it. After swapping a few sets of plates around.”
“And someone insisted on stopping for dinner,” Sean muttered. “Good thing Charleston is infested with ghouls.”
“A few less now.” Caleb shrugged at John’s concerned expression. “Gray spent a lot of energy healing us. Topping off seemed like the smart thing to do.”
“Did you get the data?” Tiffany asked. Cutting right to the chase, as usual.
Sean rummaged in his pocket for a minute and tossed her the drive. “Yep. Did you get a shipping address?”
While Tiffany plugged the drive into her laptop, John shifted his weight uneasily. “Yeah. And it’s...weird.”
“Weird?” Caleb asked. “What do you mean?”
“Forsyth cleared out the Atlanta storage facility. There isn’t a single bottle left, out of space for thousands.”
Sean let out a low whistle. “Christ. Where did he send them?”
“All of them went to the same address. Which a quick search on the internet turned up. It’s the mailing address for the Fort Sumter National Monument.”
Caleb frowned. “That’s the civil war place, right? On an island in the bay.”
“Yeah,” Sean said. “Big tourist attraction. But the park service closed it for repairs a couple of months back.”
“I don’t think there are really any repairs.” John sank down on the edge of the bed. Caleb sat by him. “It’s the perfect place to carry out something you don’t want anyone else to know about. Not only was it built to be a fortress, but there’s no way on or off except by boat. It’s government property. No one is going to think twice if guards run off any sightseers who try to get a closer peek while it’s closed to the public. And yet it’s conveniently located just a half-hour’s boat ride from Charleston.”
“Okay,” Tiffany called. “I’ve got the files up. And I already see something I don’t like.”
They joined her at the small desk. “What?” Sean asked.
The drive held three folders: Drakul, Baikal, and Email. Tiffany pointed at the screen. “Look here at the creation dates. See the one for Drakul?”
John’s gut twisted. “Three years ago. He’s been interested in the drakul for longer than we realized.”
“Fuck. I thought it was just stuff on Gray.” Caleb leaned against John, as if unconsciously seeking comfort. John slid an arm around Caleb’s waist, ignoring the tang of dried blood rising from his clothes and skin.
Tiffany opened the folder and scanned the contents quickly. “Forsyth is the orderly type—no surprise there. He collected a lot of the vampire lore. Possible sightings...nothing certain. Of course the Vigilant erased any sightings we could, to keep people like him away from the drakul. Forsyth must have creamed his jeans when he realized the very thing he was looking for had shown up in Charleston.”
“Ew, not a mental image I wanted,” Sean said.
“Life is full of hardship.” She scanned a couple of files, clicking to the top level. “Baikal?”
“It sounded familiar,” Caleb said.
“It ought to. I mentioned it to you. Lake Baikal is where the Soviets supposedly imprisoned the drakul they summoned.”
John blinked. “What?”
Tiffany nodded, not taking her eyes of the screen as she opened the folder. “Rumor has it...oh shit. According to this, it’s more than rumor.”
Scans of old documents, interspersed with grainy photos stamped Top Secret, filled the folder. Tiffany glanced through them quickly. “Okay, here’s a summary. The Soviets summoned a drakul into a living host in 1953. They did it at a gulag and used the prisoners for sacrifices to raise the etheric energy. Something went wrong, but they managed to trap the drakul before it was too late. Imprisoned it in tons of steel and concrete, and dropped it to the bottom of Lake Baikal, a solid mile down.”
Caleb shuddered. “It’s...it’s still down there, isn’t it?”
John’s chest ached at the thought. Goddess have mercy; to be down there, alone in the crushing black, trapped for decades...and he’d thought the bottles were bad.
“Yes,” Tiffany said. “And someday it will break out, either because it manages to claw its way through, or because the concrete and steel will eventually crumble around it. Let’s just pray it doesn’t get loose anytime in the next thousand years.”
Caleb turned away, his regrown hair falling to hide his face. John put a silent hand to his shoulder.
“Hell,” Tiffany said.
“What now?” Sean asked. “Christ, tell me there’s some good news in these files somewhere.”
“Not here.” She shook her head, braids sighing over her shoulders. “See this?”
The screen showed what looked like a bad scan of a page in a book. “Oh hell. It’s a summoning ritual for drakul.”
“Not the sort of thing we want someone like Forsyth to have his hands on,” she agreed grimly. “But hopefully nothing we have to worry about right now. Let’s take a peek at his email.”
John leaned over her other shoulder while she opened the final folder. A long list of subject headers and recipients scrolled past. “There,” he said, pointing. “Those are to the director.”
Tiffany opened one and hissed. “Look at the subject. ‘Project Baikal.’”
Surely not even Forsyth was that crazy. “They aren’t trying to retrieve the drakul from the lake, are they? The Russians wouldn’t stand for it.”
Tiffany just shook her head. “I think it’s just a code name. The emails are threaded...looks like a series of reports...here Forsyth is confirming Gray is really a drakul in a living host. Ha, you’ll like this one, Caleb. ‘The host displays antagonism toward figures of authority and is unsuitable for recruitment.’”
Caleb snorted. “Damn right.”
“‘Tests can still be done...host will be terminated and a suitable dead body provided to attract the drakul...I believe it will prove somewhat more manageable in a corpse.’”
“Sekhmet preserve us,” John breathed. His stomach turned over, and bile stung the back of his throat. He’d known Forsyth didn’t have Gray or Caleb’s best interests at heart, but to see it spelled out this cold-bloodedly made him ill. The man must be a sociopath to pretend he meant to exorcise Gray, while the whole time intending murder and imprisonment.
Etheric energy lapped against John’s skin. “We want him dead,” Caleb said, but his voice fell into a register somewhere in between his ordinary tones and Gray’s bass rumble.
“Agreed,” John said. He turned back to Tiffany, only to see her skin had taken on a grayish hue, and her hand stilled on the track pad. “What’s wrong?”
She swallowed thickly before answering. “The last email. It’s from yesterday. Forsyth says with Caleb on the loose, the timetable needs to step up. ‘The summoning will take place Saturday night.’”
John’s lips felt numb. “The summoning?”
She nodded. “Yes. I think...I think I get it now. Why Forsyth has been kidnapping victims. Taking demons. He’s not going to create an army—he’s going to become one.”
“What do you mean?” Sean asked.
Tiffany closed her eyes. “Judging by these emails, he’s going to summon a drakul into himself. And once he does, we have no hope of stopping him.”
* * *
“Are...are you sure?” Caleb asked into the ensuing silence. But even though he stood directly beside John, his voice sounded impossibly distant. Someone speaking from a world that still contained hope.
“Project Baikal.” John’s hands had gone cold, and he folded his arms over his chest, tucking his fingers into his armpits
in a futile attempt at warmth. “He retrieved the summoning ritual from the Russian files. He has victims to sacrifice. And demons to feed on afterward.”
“But it didn’t work for the Russians. Why would he think it would be any different this time around?” Caleb’s brown eyes had gone wide, begging for John to agree with him.
John shook his head. “It didn’t work for them. But it worked with you.”
“But Gray’s situation was different.”
“Everyone thinks they’re different,” Sean said. “Remember Leland? He thought he could control a lycanthrope because he had pure intentions. Senator Olney thought his kid could handle an incubus because God wouldn’t have let him get possessed otherwise.” Sean shook his head in disgust. “If Forsyth had any doubts to start with, once he saw a skinny civilian like you handling a drakul, he assumed he’d do even better. Probably told himself the Soviets brought it on themselves somehow, used a disloyal soldier, a prisoner from the gulag, who knows. Not a real man, a real patriot, like him.”
“Okay,” Caleb said, glancing from Sean to John to Tiffany. “What do we do now?”
Tiffany shook her head slowly, still staring at the damning words. “Now? Now we kiss our asses good-bye. Forsyth is going to kill—” Her breath caught sharply, and John remembered members of her own family numbered among the kidnapped. “Going to sacrifice those he’s taken. Maybe more—God only knows, he’s probably been collecting undesirables for weeks now. The Vigilant, homeless, ICE detainees. Then he’ll slurp down all those tasty bottled NHEs.”
She swallowed convulsively. “Even if, by some freak of luck he doesn’t lose control, he’ll hunt down everyone who stood against him. And if we’re right, if the lack of the sort of cushion Gray had will doom the drakul to madness...the entirety of the low country is in danger. Maybe the whole state. The whole southeast.”
Silence. Sean took out his pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it in defiance of the no indoor smoking policy. John turned away from them all and wandered to the window.
Summoner of Storms Page 12
