by Jenna Ryan
Low blow, she thought, and tangled her hands in his hair. “Flattery doesn’t work on me, Nolan.” She dragged his mouth back down onto hers. “Very often.”
A thousand fiery arrows raced through her. She wanted to absorb him, to jump in and savor all the sensations he stirred up inside.
He ran his fingers through her hair, over her shoulders and along her arms. She used her teeth on the corners of his mouth and watched his eyes glitter when she drew back. “This is nothing more than lust, right? We know that.”
His thumb grazed her cheek. “Lust’s all there is, Kate. It’s all there can ever be.”
It took a moment for his words to penetrate. When they did, she brought her brows together. “You believe that? You think everything between a man and a woman comes down to lust?”
“And sex.”
More bemused than upset, she studied his expression. “And after that?”
“More sex.” He touched her lower lip. “You do safe and solid. I do lust and sex.”
“So a woman’s brain, her feelings—” She made a dismissing hand motion. “Not important?”
“Not a factor,” he corrected. “I think in moments, not blocks of time. Last night, I wanted to get drunk. Tonight, not so much.”
“Right. Good.” Now she pushed. “Clean and sober is definitely the way to go, especially when there’s a phantom in the shadows who wants you dead. No, don’t,” she said when he inclined his head.
His lips twitched. “Too late.” He kissed her again, but lightly this time and with none of the fire from before. “I think I prefer it when we fight.”
“Do you?” Her eyes flashed a warning. “Kiss me like I’m your sister again and I promise you, a hit man will be the least of your worries.”
“Don’t get bitchy, Kate. You started this. I just came along for the ride.”
She ground her teeth. “Three, two, one…”
“Message received.” Standing, he blanked his features and in doing so put the two of them back where they needed to be.
She pointed. “Door—behind you. Use it.” Then she noticed a pile of folded clothes on the dresser. “Whose are those?”
“Yours, I imagine.” He set a hand on the doorknob. “Look on the bright side, Kate. We’re going to get some time off work. Crucible’s already arranged it. Apparently.”
“I don’t want time off work,” she grumbled to his back. However, since she appeared to have no choice, she hiked up the oversized nightgown and went to the dresser to retrieve the clothes.
A tray of food appeared while she was showering in a stall the size of a coffin. Fifteen minutes later, her elbows were bruised and her left hip felt as though someone had taken a swing at it with a bat. Back in the bedroom, she heard Nolan and possibly three or four other people talking in the other room, but no voice she recognized as Crucible’s.
The clothing consisted of fresh jeans, plain black underwear and a charcoal gray shirt that almost fit. Leaving her hair damp, she pulled on her boots. Although she wished for a few basic cosmetics, she had to make do with the brow pencil and bronze lip gloss she habitually kept in the pocket of her leather coat.
She tried not to think about what she’d lost the night before. Her car, obviously, her medical kit, her iPad, her shoulder bag and wallet—the list went on.
Since feeling overwhelmed would be all too easy, she focused on the plus points. She was alive, Nolan was alive and no one had been injured.
The voices, mostly male, came from the front of the apartment. She made do with Cheerios and a cranberry muffin, then picked up a fresh bottle of juice and ventured into the kitchen.
Nolan wore an open denim shirt now over his jeans. His hair, like hers, was damp. Unlike her, his feet were bare. He held out a steaming mug of coffee when she entered.
Two of the males—hippie agents, she assumed—melted away, leaving her, Nolan, a man and a woman in the cramped space.
Nolan nodded at the newcomers while he poured more coffee. “Miranda Montgomery and Killian. Miranda is Crucible’s personal assistant. Killian’s a liaison.”
“Between Crucible and the directors,” Killian elaborated. He extended his hand. “I’d say I was pleased to meet you, but under the circumstances, not. Also, doctors terrify me.”
Miranda, a gorgeous brunette with eyes a shade darker than Nolan’s, smiled. “Anyone, doctor or otherwise, whose profession involves the wielding of scissor-like objects terrifies him. Killian sees himself as Samson. Cut the hair, destroy the man.”
“She’s just jealous,” Killian countered, “because my hair is two inches longer than hers. Did you sleep well, Dr. Marshall?”
“Kate. Well enough, thanks.” She sipped her coffee. It tasted as vile as it smelled. “Where’s Crucible?”
Reading her expression, Miranda passed her a carton of milk. “Stuff’s pure Mississippi mud. Trust me, I was born in New Orleans. There’s been another calling-card death, Kate. In Chicago this time. Crucible left San Francisco early this morning, which is why Killian and I are here. You’re lucky. Cutter, one of the directors, wanted to come. He’s a little intimidating.”
“As opposed to Crucible, who’s a veritable Mr. Rogers.” Nolan downed his own mud-black coffee without a shudder. “Go ahead, whoever’s feeling brave. Tell her the plan.”
“Crucible’s plan.” Miranda turned to Kate. “It involves you and Nolan, a team of specially trained agents and Alcatraz.”
Kate’s eyes moved from her to Killian. “You want to put us in prison?”
“Only temporarily,” Miranda explained. “I know it sounds extreme, but we need to control your environment in order to protect you.”
“You want to put us on Alcatraz Island?” she said. “Together? Me and Nolan?”
“With a team of agents,” Killian qualified. “We, uh… It was Crucible’s idea.”
“Imagine how wimpy that would have sounded if he had less hair.” Miranda’s quick grin faded. “I’m sorry, Kate, I really am. I hate being confined myself. The only thing I can think of that’s worse than imprisonment is death.”
“You want to put Nolan and me together on Alcatraz.” Amused now, Kate moved a finger between them. “I hope you realize there’s more than one way for people to die.”
Miranda laughed, Killian sighed and Nolan calmly finished his coffee. “Don’t sweat it, Marshall. Fog’s back, it’s dark. I put our odds of making it to the island alive at about one in fifty.”
“Oh, well, in that case, I’m there. Do we get to pack, call family, talk to anyone at the hospital?”
“Arrange our funerals?” Nolan moved a shoulder. “Just saying.”
Kate set her mug on the counter. “This night is feeling extremely surreal all of a sudden. I need a moment to let it sink in.”
Fussing with a shirt that was as snug as her jeans, she snagged a piece of toast and returned to the living room. With pictures of friends and relatives running through her head, she twitched aside the curtain on the big window and looked out.
Nolan was right about the fog. At any given moment, it completely obliterated the building across the alley. Even when it thinned, the opposing wall had a grainy, B movie quality to it.
Voices droned in the background. Mostly Killian’s and Miranda’s. For no particular reason, Kate closed her eyes and thought about her last relationship two years ago, with Bob, the orthodontist.
Smiling a little, she bit into her toast. Bob, the unadventurous was closer to the mark. He wouldn’t be caught dead or alive in a cemetery at 3:00 a.m.
No one had bothered to turn on lights anywhere except in the kitchen. The pull out behind her remained out, with sheets and blankets rumpled…. And no way was she going there.
Below her in the alley, someone darted through her line of vision. A man, she thought, but couldn’t be sure.
She watched and waited and finally spotted the movement again. It was probably a man, but really more of an outline, slipping diagonally from this apartment buildi
ng to the one across the alley.
A ghost agent out for a smoke? Maybe. Or not.
Thoughtful now, she finished her toast. She started to tug on the hem of her shirt but stilled the motion and brought her eyes up when a chill, cold as the grave, prickled the skin of her neck. With both the prickle and an icy chill sliding down her spine, she breathed in and whirled to confront—nothing.
“Well, God.” Pressing a fist to her stomach, she exhaled. “Talk about jumping at shadows.”
“It is not safe here, Kate Marshall.”
Another heart-pounding quarter-turn brought her face to veiled face with the woman from the road and the cemetery.
Kate took an automatic step back. Her knees threatened to tremble, but she firmed them up. “You’re not real.” She said it out loud. “Whoever you are, you can’t possibly be here. There’s security…” She trailed off, felt her cheeks go pale. “Are you dead?” An even more horrible thought occurred. “Am I?”
“It is not your time to die.”
“What about you?”
“I’m alive. For the moment.”
Whatever the hell that meant. “Look, I need Nolan and the others to see—”
The woman cut her off. “There’s no time.” She swung a frail hand toward the window. Kate saw the tattoo again, some kind of red orchid. “You must leave this building, Kate Marshall. Get yourself and everyone out. Now!”
The last word emerged on a blast of cold air that shot through Kate’s head and blew her five feet away from the curtain. Startled, she whispered, “Nolan?”
“Now!” The frigid blast repeated.
Spinning, she shouted, “Nolan, Miranda, Killian!”
Nolan appeared first. He caught her by the arms and halted her before she mowed him down. “What is it? What’s going on? Did you see something?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” She looked back. Of course the woman was gone.
“You must leave now….”
But apparently only in body.
She turned back. “Is the massage parlor open? Do you know? Does anyone?”
“It’s open.” Nolan watched her closely as Miranda and Killian joined them. “What happened, Kate?”
Tell him or don’t tell him? Let everyone in the building die on the off chance she wasn’t losing her mind?
She drew a calming breath. “I saw the old woman again. Here, in this room. She told me to get out, to get everyone out.”
“Why?”
“She said it wasn’t safe.”
“Did she say why? Did you ask her?”
“There wasn’t time. She came out of nowhere and shocked me into a near coronary. But I know urgent when I hear it, and that’s what she was. She told me it wasn’t my time to die. I’m hoping that applies to all of us.” When he continued to stare, she twisted free. “Maybe my mind has snapped, Nolan, but you didn’t hear her—it—whatever. We need to get out of this building. All of us.”
Miranda, who’d been listening, glanced around. “My great-grandmother was born in Haiti. I grew up in Baton Rouge. I say we go. Killian?”
“Maybe we should call… Yeah, okay,” he agreed. “I’m on it. I’ll round up the team. You call May downstairs.”
“I’ll get my gun.” Nolan’s eyes remained on Kate’s.
Not wasting time, she grabbed her coat and found a bag for last night’s clothes. “I’m not going crazy,” she told herself. Hallucinating, though, she could be doing that. Pot smoke in the air, something baked into the muffin, cemetery hangover. People under extreme stress often experienced weird episodes.
She wished she believed this was one of them.
It took less than five minutes to evacuate the building. The sour-faced woman called May shivered in a cardigan hastily thrown over her muumuu. “Damn hoax, that’s what it is. You’ll see. Kid probably snuck in wearing a costume.”
Kate swivelled to stare. “People can sneak into a government-controlled building? I thought it was safe here.”
“Having a front, in this case a permanent massage parlor, creates gaps,” Miranda told her. “That’s why we could only let you stay for one night.”
“A fact they never mention until it’s too late,” Nolan remarked dryly.
Killian jogged to the head of the alley. “Inside’s clear. Not that I think there’s any real threat, but Crucible wants the place swept.” He whipped his hair into a quick ponytail. “Looks like you folks will be heading to your new digs ahead of schedule. Transportation’s—”
A sudden blast blew out every window on the second floor and more than half of the alley-side wall. Killian jerked around in shock, then began batting at the ends of his hair as flying embers rained down on all of them.
“Son of a—”
He was cut off a second time by three additional blasts. While Kate watched, too stunned to speak or move, flames shot, bystanders screamed and in less time than it took to blink, pandemonium reigned.
* * *
Hunched over a small table in a coffee shop that contained only two other customers, Hazzard listened to the distant explosions. A big bang, a pause then three smaller bangs.
“Another one bites the dust,” he said into his cup. “You live through that, Doc, you must have some kind of powerful guardian angel. The boss man’s gonna be very pleased with me.”
His gaze rose—and froze—on the menu board. For a fractured second, he thought, could have sworn in fact, that a face superimposed itself over the dessert selection. An ugly little doll’s face that seemed to glower down at him.
It vanished before it took full form, and with a nervous laugh Hazzard pressed his thumb and middle finger on the bridge of his nose. San Francisco fog was getting to him, that’s all. Give him the cloying heat and humidity of New Orleans any day of the week.
Shaking it off, he considered ordering the blue plate special. But damn it, now there was a niggle in his gut. Even as he sat there, it crawled from his belly up into his head and began to throb there like some kind of creepy ritual drum. Maybe he should check out the apartment building before he got too carried away.
And if those fucking drums didn’t stop, have his hearing checked as well.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heat intense enough to melt brick washed over her. Kate’s skin felt seared, her lungs scorched. Following Killian’s example, she checked her hair. Then she looked down and was stunned to realize she’d been blown into the wall of the neighboring building.
Through the fog and smoke, her gritty eyes picked out a floral blob that had to be May, lying in a pile of trash bags. She saw Killian as well and possibly Miranda, but she couldn’t find Nolan anywhere.
Struggling to her feet, she tried to call his name. Nothing but a croak came out.
“Run.” The wispy voice had her swinging around to scour the shadows. But not merely for the old woman. Hadn’t Nolan been standing behind her when the first blast occurred?
“Kate.” A hand clamped onto her arm.
She snapped her head sideways and breathed out in relief. “Oh, thank God. I thought you’d been vaporized.”
“Thought or hoped?” He drew her with him as he scouted the area. “We need to lose this place and these people.”
Pictures of Alcatraz ran through Kate’s head. Stark, cold and uninhabitable. Impregnable? Crucible and his team seemed to think so, but if the good guys could be taken there, then she had to figure the bad guys could follow.
“Come on.” Nolan pulled her deeper into the fog, away from the devastation and around the corner onto a quiet side street.
Behind swirling layers of mist, Kate glimpsed snatches of graffiti and rude posters, barred windows and an eerie sign that flashed the words Tattoos Available. She saw a shop that sold evil zombie parts and blood-smeared skull masks and a larger store next to it whose signboard boasted that every lewd sex toy on the planet could be purchased inside.
The sex toy window had a distortion in the center. It reflected the fog and Kate’s own elong
ated image. For a moment, no more than a finger-snap of time, she thought it also reflected a man—a bearded man who limped on his left leg in the handful of running steps she saw him take. But the fog had swallowed him up by the time she turned to look. Why not? she thought and sighed.
Nolan, who’d gone ahead to check out the corner, reappeared. “We’re good.” He followed her gaze across the street. “What?”
Kate looked again. You never knew. Unfortunately… “Nothing, I guess. I saw a man for a moment, but he’s gone now.”
“Like the old woman.”
She held her patience at his doubtful tone. “No, not like her. This guy had a limp, and you can give me all the uh-huh looks you want, Nolan. The apartment building blew up, so whoever the woman was, she got it right.”
“Whoever or whatever.”
“Oh great. First you don’t believe me at all, and now you’re suggesting I saw a ghost. Which I don’t believe in, by the way.” Kate regarded her right hand, frowning. “I should be shaking, shouldn’t I?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe I was right to ask the old woman if I was dead. She said I wasn’t, but what if I am? Or maybe I’m dying, and being in a transition state, I’m inventing all of this. The old woman, Crucible, everything. Anna Perradine’s car could have hit me last night. I could be lying in St. Mark’s as we speak.” Shoving her not-shaking hands in her pockets, she huddled deeper into her coat. “We both could.”
Nolan sent her a distracted grin. “Be a pretty big coincidence if we were. Unless toy boy shot both of us at Shanghai Lily’s.”
“Or the guy in Chinatown managed…” She halted and held herself perfectly still. “Uh, Nolan?”
“This thread’s getting old, Kate. We’re not dead, okay? And I never said I didn’t believe you about the woman with the flower-power tattoo.”
He skimmed his gaze over what he could see of the street as he responded. Kate got his attention by setting a hand on his arm and forcing him to look at her.
“I don’t know what’s real, or what I might be dreaming, but I’m sure of one thing. There were upward of twenty people in that apartment building when it blew.” From deep in her pocket, she produced a small white card and showed him the shadowy silhouette on its face. “I’d say whoever wants me dead, wants it very, very badly.”
