“Wow, you really are a speed demon, aren’t you? I remember you couldn’t wait to get your license,” I commented, watching his face—and the speedometer—as he drove. “Do you remember the first time we were in a car together?”
“You mean when I stole Father’s car and took you out for ice cream?” Some of the intense concentration left his face as he added, “The punishment was worth it, you know.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” I said, looking out the window, remembering what a douchebag his father was. While my parents mostly ignored me, Gabriel’s took a heavy-handed approach to child rearing. “It was a good day until you got caught.”
Gabriel’s father had beaten him so badly he’d barely been able to walk the next day. I snuck him stale potato chips and root beer and told him I was going to kill his father for what he’d done. Gabriel kept saying he was glad he’d done it, and if I did kill his father, he’d visit me in prison.
“Well, you have a nicer car than he ever did,” I finally told him, which was the truth, but not even close to what I wanted to say right now. We rode along in companionable silence until it got weird, and I nervously broke the silence.
“Do you ever see them?” I asked, and wasn’t at all surprised when he shook his head. “It’s just as well, they’re hideous.”
“What about you?” He shot me a side-eye. “How are you going to deal with your family?”
“My plan is to stay as far away from them as I can.” I wasn’t clear on how to do that, given the Sheltons were everywhere I turned, but I was going to do my darndest. “They did try to kill me, you know. No reason to give them a second shot.”
“I agree,” he said, reaching out and laying his hand over mine. The contact felt good. As if we are aligned not only in purpose, but other ways, as well.
“That first day we met… again… Was what you said true? The part about leaving your parent’s money behind and starting the business by yourself?” I’d always wondered how Gabriel had done it and, to my shame, had assumed he’d started with a bazillion dollars. While it hadn’t stopped me from admiring him on magazine covers, knowing he’d built Vanguard Enterprises from the ground up… well, I was impressed.
But that, too, was Gabriel. Failure wasn’t in his vocabulary.
“Yes.” His hand left mine and gripped the wheel tightly as he chose his words. “I never wanted their money. I didn’t want any part of that life—it was pure poison. But you have to spend money to make money, so…”
“You started working for Dawson.”
“Actually…” His questioning gaze slid over to me, and the back of my neck prickled. “Lincoln gave me my first job forging certificates of authenticity for him. At first, I did COAs for minor jobs, then bigger ones followed. My teenage life of crime earned enough capital to establish a reputable business.” He shook his head. “Don’t you think it’s odd…”
“That we share Lincoln between us,” I answered, suddenly aware of the inconceivable coincidence of that fact. I shoved my doubts and questions away. We had bigger things to worry about right now.
“We should compare notes,” Gabriel said casually, though he firmed his grip on the wheel, “when this is over. Because I find it hard to believe our meeting is random.”
“Lincoln was the largest forged art dealer in the country. It’d make sense he’d hire the best.” I squirmed beneath my heavy coat, suddenly feeling clammy.
“How do you know I’m the best?” he asked, the touch of playful arrogance back in his voice. I was glad to hear it because thinking about Lincoln and Gabriel and me… I didn’t like the ideas it put in my head.
“Because you usually are,” I admitted. I could have told him he wasn’t, but we both knew it would be a lie.
“He hired me two years after you left. I was fifteen.”
So much for putting that on the back burner. I began to sweat in earnest. “Lincoln just needed someone in New York, and he already had Dawson. Maybe Dawson gave him your name?” This had to be fluke. I mean, there’s no way Lincoln knew of my connection to Gabriel. Because if he did, the ramifications were too terrible for me to consider.
“The work could have been done remotely by anyone, anywhere.”
“He…” My words trailed off, the absurd number of coincidences it took for both of us to cross paths with Lincoln. Me by accident, Gabriel by design. “He couldn’t have known, D,” I insisted, feeling untethered as I weighed the consequences. If Lincoln knew I was a Shelton, then he’d pieced together everything, including all the secrets I’d worked so hard to keep.
“He had to have, Andy. He had to have,” he repeated firmly. “This only makes sense if Lincoln knew exactly who you were, and then hired me… afterwards. I don’t know why, but I’m not the detective, you are. Figure it out.”
We were closing in on the prison, and now my mind was whirling with nefarious plots. Lincoln was a clever old shit. I couldn’t count the times I’d seen him con his way right into someone’s life and walk right back out with everything in their safe, them none the wiser for it.
But would he have lied to me?
Of course, he could, when I’d been lying to him all along.
During the tense silence, I knew Gabriel was running possible scenarios through his head as well, and from his tightly clamped lips, I knew he was coming to many of the same conclusions. But we had a facility to blow up, hopefully not literally, and to do that, we had to get our heads in the game.
“How about we focus on the capacitor right now? Then we talk this through,” I bargained, only capable of dealing with one impending disaster at a time. “You’ll see, there’s got to be a reasonable explanation, and then we’ll have a good laugh over our shared paranoia.”
Gabriel gave me the barest nod he’d heard me, which wasn’t a good sign when today’s mission relied solely on his technical skills and his focus.
“Hey, look at me,” I ordered him, using my very serious, no-time-for-games tone. “Lincoln’s dead. Whatever he knew probably died with him, so today… right now… we do this. We do this, and tonight, when we’re home and safe, we hash out the possibility we were both played by a master, okay?”
A little of the tension went out of his face, but we made the rest of the trip in silence, both of us churning through these past fifteen years, replaying every small detail to see if it offered up any clues.
“There’s an unmarked delivery entrance just past the facility. We’ll park there.” As we neared the turnoff for the highway that led to Devilton, he blacked out the windows. “Not a perfect solution, but they won’t be able to ID us. Cameras”—he pointed to the concrete divider separating the lanes—“every quarter mile. I changed the license on the car as well, so it’ll be impossible to trace.”
“Good thinking.”
As we drove down the Devil’s Highway, everyone else was trying to get out. Fully loaded busses raced eastward, toward Gabriel’s empty warehouse, and I hoped Henry was on one of them. By the time we passed Devilton’s landscaped entrance, there were only a handful of cars left in the parking lot.
The delivery drive was nothing but a gravel drive with two parking spots at the end, and it hadn’t been used since the building was constructed, given the number of overgrown weeds. Gabriel handed me a pair of thin leather gloves, then put on a pair himself. We shoved through brambles and sapling until we arrived at the fence, covered in Virginia creeper. “Please tell me you have some bolt cutters in your pocket,” I said, working my gloved fingers between the chain link topped with razor wire and nervously eyeing the cameras.
“Don’t worry about them, nobody’s paying any attention, and they’ll be toast as soon as we open the valves on the machine.”
“What about the video feed?”
“Prison has closed-loop circuitry. Nothing gets in or out.”
“Except for Henry,” I observed drily. “No system is foolproof, and you shouldn’t rely on maybe. That’s how you get caught. If the doctor had a private line out of
the complex, others might too.”
“Well,” Gabriel said, pulling what looked like the world’s smallest flashlight out of his pocket. “There were. Before I closed them off. Nothing gets in or out of the prison, there’s no access to video, no alarms, nothing.”
“What’s that?”
“Laser cutter.”
I scoffed. “That won’t cut through this fence. It’s reinforced steel with a titanium core. You need something stronger.” I stepped up to the fence and pulled the glove off my right hand and wiggled my fingers dramatically. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
Magic flowed out of my hand—the white-hot plasma version of it—and I quickly drew a lopsided circle on the fence, the ivy catching fire as I did. The combination, organic material and metallic oxides topped off with magically produced ozone, was pungent enough we both coughed.
“Like that’s not a dead giveaway, someone’s melting through the fence,” Gabriel observed, his eyes sparkling as he pushed against the section, and it gave way.
“We would have been here for an hour, had you used… that.” I nodded to the tool he was trying to slip into his pocket before I noticed how inadequate it was. “Next time, bring the right tool for the job.”
“I brought you, didn’t I?” he asked, right before he stepped through.
31
The building was quiet.
Too quiet.
Just kidding. I wanted this place quiet. Devoid of guards and personnel of any kind. Since I was following Gabriel’s lead on this—I had to, given the high level of nerdy science involved—I figured the smoother the breaking and entering part went, the more energy we’d have to dedicate to deactivating a piece of complex machinery that neither of us knew anything about.
There was only one entrance, guarded by a digital keypad and a speaker, presumably where the duty guard asked, “Who’s there?”
Gabriel took out a handheld device and touched it to the key pad. Numbers raced across the screen, interspersed with some sort of code. Within seconds the screen blinked, then the readout display changed to KEYCODE ACCEPTED, followed by the low, unmistakable click of a lock being disengaged.
“We’re in,” Gabriel unnecessarily informed me, as I wondered how often he did this sort of thing. “There’s a short hallway, then the capacitor will be in the vault at the end.”
“Vault?” I asked curiously, watching him push the door slowly open and waiting for the inevitable squadron of armed guards to emerge. “You mean… room, right?”
“Vault,” Gabriel reiterated as I followed him inside, darkness engulfing us when he closed the door. “This structure is a containment building to prevent radiation and magical… leakage. The walls are twenty feet thick and reinforced with a lead-based sheath. I suppose because the researchers had only nuclear plant construction to base their designs on. I couldn’t find the specs for the access points, but it’s safe to assume the inner vault is sealed off from the outside atmosphere.”
He kept explaining as we felt our way down the dark hall, his voice magnified, even though he was whispering.
“You know how I feel about tight places,” I quietly reminded him. “You’re making it sound like a tomb.”
A tiny pin light broke through the darkness like a star, outlining Gabriel like a halo as he stopped and reached out, touching my arm. “I know you do, Andy, but this won’t take long. I didn’t tell you before because…”
“I still would have come, Gabriel,” I lied as my knees started quivering. “I’m not as bad as I used to be.”
Where my phobia came from, I didn’t know. All I knew was tight, airless places tended to make me panic, the irrational fear worse than having a gun pointed in my face. Which is why I made it my life’s mission to never, ever go into small, enclosed places.
“We plant the timer, and then we leave,” Gabriel said, watching me worriedly. “A couple minutes, okay? Then we’ll be on our way.”
All I could do was nod, my panic getting the better of me.
A few minutes. I could do a few minutes. Not more than that, but a few.
As I continued repeating this to myself, Gabriel worked his magic with the digital panel outside the double doors marked Storage Chamber. This time, it seemed like it took forever before I heard the metallic click, the sounds of metal sliding against metal. Before Gabriel opened the door, his hand closed around my arm.
“The room’s pressurized, Andy. It’s negative pressure, which means when I open this door, all the air will suck inwards. Hold on tight.”
Between my growing panic and this new, unforeseen information—could this get any worse?—I wrapped both hands around Gabriel’s arm, my fingers digging in. Despite my fears, the ratcheting panic, and the unknown, I felt his muscles contract as he pushed the door inwards, and there was something comforting about knowing we were, at least, together in this.
Air sucking inwards was an understatement.
Try—all the air in the universe will be sucked through this one, tiny opening. The opening, coincidently, we were standing in.
Instantly, Gabriel was ripped from my grasp, and even though there was dim light from overhead, my world turned into a topsy turvy merry-go-round of sounds and smells as we were both pulled into the room, then tossed against the only solid thing in our way—the capacitor itself.
Hitting metal at the speed of about a thousand miles an hour hurt like a bitch, and when I was able to roll over onto my back, it appeared Gabriel didn’t fare any better, his eyes closed as he cradled one arm.
The room was filled with a high-pitched keening, like the sounds of metal against metal, that made me clap my hands over my ears. Then all I felt was Gabriel’s arms go around me as he lifted me to my feet. He blocked most of the wind, and I got my bearings, crushed against his chest as I held on for dear life.
“Andy?” Gabriel shouted over the din. “We have to get to the control room.” He pointed to the nearest end of the machine, easily the size of a football field. Walking was hard, as the air was still finding its natural balance, and we ended up pushing against a stiff wind with every step. Gabriel finally grabbed my shoulders and pulled me along until we reached the next security panel. It seemed like a year before he bypassed it, and we finally stepped through into the control room. There were more buttons and screens and digital whatevers in this room than in the entire world.
He hit a button, and the door closed automatically with a metallic hiss of air. My ears hollowed out for a second before I could hear again, and if there wasn’t blood coming out of them, it felt like there should be.
“Okay, almost there. How are you doing?”
I shook my head. I was definitely not doing good, but I was also not about to admit it. Not when Gabriel’s coat sleeve was torn, and I saw a smear of blood on his arm. “Just hurry up,” I muttered. “Then let’s get out of here.”
“I need to find the main… ah, here it is.” He pulled one of the devices out of his pocket and attached it to the complicated control panel, which had so many different switches and lightboards it made my head spin. “Another minute, Andy, stick with me.” He looked worried enough that I reached up and touched my nose, and my finger came away bloody.
“Aren’t you worried about leaving a digital footprint?” I asked, positively sure he’d already thought this through, but also… just in case he hadn’t.
“Bootleg parts, some of which I scavenged off the nanotech that asshole used on you. With any luck, this will come back to bite the Sheltons in the ass. No fingerprints because…” He waggled his gloved hand at me, and I couldn’t suppress my smile. “I’ve got this covered, Andy, stop worrying so much.”
“Yeah, okay.” But I couldn’t. This was where things usually went wrong, right about the time you were so sure you’d covered all your bases. Kind of like me turning Frank into a human torch, I had this bad feeling there was an eventuality here that not even Gabriel had planned for.
Gabriel leaned forward as the little slim device, not muc
h bigger than a credit card, beeped softly, the control panel lighting up like Christmas. Parts of the panel began humming, while others clicked on and off, following some unseen sequence.
“Looks like the shutdown protocol has begun.” We watched as the process continued, separate workstations following suite. “This complex has been programed for remote shutdown, most likely in case of a system failure. The process will take five minutes, then my coding will upload, telling the system to open the release valves.” He offered his hand to me. “We should get a move on.”
Taking Gabriel’s hand felt so natural, it scared me.
Our kiss scared me, too, but I was looking forward to doing it again. Soon.
But I held on tight, allowed him to lead me through the still-turbulent air spilling into the vault, then down the hallway back out into the sunlight of the parking lot.
“In five minutes, the motor operated release valves of the capacitor will open, releasing magic into the air. We don’t want to be around for that.”
“No. You don’t.”
Detective Bennett’s quietly menacing voice came from our left, and Gabriel turned instinctually, blocking my body with his. When the shot rang out, the sound deafening against the eerie quiet, I was staring straight into Gabriel’s eyes as the bullet hit him. Those baby blues flew open in surprise, his hand still clasped in mine while he collapsed to the ground.
32
“I knew you’d come back. I knew this whole charade”—Bennett waved the gun around like it was a laser pointer—“was your doing. But I have to wonder… how is it you have friends in such high places, McHale?”
It took my brain a second to catch up, as I went to my knees beside Gabriel, stripped off my gloves and ran my hands frantically over him, searching for the entrance wound. Even with the vest on, he’d been hit, and my hand came away bloody. His breathing was labored, his eyes closed tightly in pain.
Betrayed by Blood: The Shelton Family Legacy : 1 Page 22
