Darkness Returns (30 page)

As the new Agency head, Lockman should have had access to those codes and even the ability to operate them remotely, locking Wertz out of the room. But his transition to CO had hardly come smoothly or with any kind of training. He didn’t know the codes, didn’t know where to get them, probably wouldn’t know how to use them even if he had.

And trying to take the stairs to the next floor and use the elevator would give Wertz more than enough time to answer Mica’s call, if it
was
Mica—

It’s not,
Lockman thought.
In fact, I’m betting it’s an old Agency friend recently gone furry.

—before Lockman could ever reach him.

In other words, they were screwed.

If he couldn’t stop the situation, he could prepare for it. Which, in this case, meant getting protection to Jessie.

Lockman raced down the stairs to the next floor below and found that door locked as well. Through it he could hear an undulating hum that sounded both human and machine, like a robotic chorus. Whatever mojo supported and operated the doorway room must have sat on this floor, which meant it was probably always locked. He mentally marked the floor number for later reference, then continued onto the next floor.

The door opened easily. Lockman stepped out into one of the complex’s famous long hallways with mysteriously unmarked doors. Industrial gray walls and matching carpet, with cheap Picasso and Monet reprints framed and hung on the walls, it looked like a cross between a corporate office space and a seedy hotel.

The paintings and their failing mission to cheer the hall had Lockman wondering if these weren’t living quarters for Kress’s menagerie of supernatural buddies.

Even in this hall, the repetitive ting-tong of Mica’s emergency ring tone blared from unseen speakers. Of course, if it was a mojo thing, they wouldn’t need speakers.

During the course of any mission, plans had to change.

Lockman wanted nothing more than to race back to Jessie and check on her safety. But if what he thought was coming really
was
coming, he’d need more than himself and a pair of Glocks loaded with silver to save her this time. He needed help.

Door-to-door, banging like a cop with a warrant, he went, not bothering to wait for an answer, only making sure he hit every door—all fifteen of them—in the hall, first down one side, then the next. By the time he reached the last door and looked back down the hall, about ten different faces all leaned out of their rooms and stared at him as if he was a door-to-door salesman trying to do his work in batches. Out of the fifteen faces, all but two looked supernatural. The blue-faced woman with the scales and the dark auburn hair. The fella living next door to her, with carrot colored curls, a mouth wide enough to reach his ears, and purple freckles dotting his cheeks. Son of a bitch, they even had a werewolf who had shifted half way, and looked a little like the Lon Chaney wolf man that Lockman knew about only because Jess had forced him to watch the movie at least a half-dozen times.

Though, I have a feeling she’ll want to skip that flick from now on.

Only one of the doors remained closed. The ghost merely passed the upper half of his body through the door, leaning out as if from a train window, watching the station receded behind him.

Lockman had met the ghost before. And Kate had explained plenty about the specter to make Lockman hate him. He didn’t see the point keeping one around. Non-corporeal beings could do serious damage to a person’s psyche—he and Jessie had seen it firsthand more than once. But it was a slow and wicked way to fight. And their only way, since you couldn’t put a gun in a ghost’s hands.

They did make excellent interrogators if you had the stomach to let them practice their art. In the end, though, even friendly ghosts had to resort to not-so-friendly tactics. A ghost proved more liability than asset. Kress, however, appeared never to have met a supernatural he didn’t like.

“Shit’s going down,” Lockman said.

The half-shifted wolf looked up as if he meant to bay at the moon. Lockman realized he was focusing on the chimes, though. “That’s Mica’s song.”

Some of the others muttered agreement.

“But Mica is dead,” Lockman said flatly. “I saw her die.”

“If tha’ths true,” said the blue woman with a lisp. “How do they have the code?”

Good question. They’d never interrogated her. Never had the chance. Was it possible he was mistaken? That she’d remained alive long enough to divulge her code song to Teresa? But the pixie’s blood had set Teresa on fire. Teresa might have since healed, but the timeline felt wrong. Too many things happening all at once.

“I don’t know,” Lockman said.

“Easy,” the ghost said. “Reanimation.”

A sickness wormed through Lockman’s gut. “Are you saying they turned her into a zombie?”

The ghost made a face that made it look like Lockman’s question smelled like rotten trash to him. “Give me a break. There’s no such thing as a zombie.” His arm came through the door and he waved a dismissive, translucent hand. “Temporary reanimation of a corpse as long as the brain is still intact makes for an interesting interrogation candidate.”

“You would know.”

“I would.”

The ghost didn’t seem the least bit insulted or ashamed by Lockman’s dig.

“That’s bullshit.” This guy looked mortal, muscled like a soldier, and tats up and down his arms and covering every inch of his bare chest. “Even as a corpse, Mica wouldn’t give us up.”

The ghost’s spectral eyes remained on Lockman. “You’d be surprised the ways you can find to get someone as hard as Mica to talk.”

Lockman sliced a hand through the air. “It doesn’t matter. Wertz has already gone to the door room to let whoever is waiting on the other side in.”

The guy with the tats shrugged, and one of his tattoos of a snake slithered across his six pack abs like an animated cartoon. “Not a tragedy. Wertz might get trapped in there with whoever. But no one can get out of the door room without codes.”

“Codes,” the ghost said with a raspy, whispering voice, “that Mica knew.”

Tats exchanged a look with the ghost, then dropped his gaze to the floor. He whispered something under his breath that could have been either a curse or a prayer.

The ghost coasted all the way through his door and stood in the hall. Entirely made of shades of green light, he looked like a glowing Heineken bottle shaped like a man. “What are we looking at?” he asked Lockman.

Lockman shrugged. “Pack of wolves, probably.”

“What are they after?”

The pinch in his chest made Lockman hesitate. “Jessie.”

“The Chosen One?” Tats asked.

The blue woman chewed on her lower lip, eyes focused on the space in front of her. “No.”

“No what?” Lockman took a tentative step forward.

“There’s more than a single pack. And they’re here for more than just the Chosen.” She blinked her eyes and scanned the hall from face to face until she stopped at Lockman. “Seven full wolf packs are at our door, all being led by a female alpha named Teresa.”

Alpha? What? Lockman gaped at the blue woman too long for Tat’s taste. He marched out of his room and snapped his fingers in front of Lockman’s eyes. “Wake up, hombre. Della is a CV, and she’s got a ninety-five percent correct average.”

CV. Lockman sifted through his old Agency jargon and came up with the meaning. Clairvoyant Visionary. Basically, someone who could literally visualize future events.

But Teresa as Alpha dog made the whole idea seem too ludicrous. He was about to tell them this must be the other five percent when Mica’s tune fell dead. In its place, the heavy breathing of everyone in the hall.

The undulating hum Lockman had heard outside the door to the floor under the door room pulsed through the ceiling like a techno bass beat, picking up speed until the undulation became a steady whirr.

“Doors’ are powered up,” Tat said.

Della went back to staring into space. Whatever the space showed her, she didn’t like. Her jaw dropped. She gasped. “They’re in.”

“Fucking Wertz,” Lockman growled.

Tat got up in Lockman’s face. “He did what any of us would.”

“Not me. I know a trap when I see one.”

Tat made a face, but turned to Della instead of arguing. “What about Wertz?”

“I can’t see him.”

“The fuck you mean?” A tattoo of a vicious-looking spider about the side of a dinner plate crawled up Tat’s back and settled on his shoulder. “If he opened the door, he’s got to be there.”

“Unless the wolves ate him already,” the ghost offered without the slightest hint of sarcasm.

Tat shook his head as if trying to screw it tighter on his neck. “That’s loco, bro. Della would see…something.”

Della narrowed her eyes, pressed her lips together. A second later her eyes bloomed wide and she smiled. “I think he slipped through another door, but I can’t see to where.”

“Just as well,” Tat said. “If you can’t see where he went, neither can the wolves. But we gotta get our asses down there and shut that door.”

As if on cue, an alarm sounded—something a lot more straightforward than tinkering bells. The wail of the alarm hit Lockman’s eardrums like a pair of ball peen hammers.

He stared down the hall at the menagerie of odd faces staring back at him, realized they were waiting on his order. Every instinct wanted to have them fall back with him to Jessie’s position, lock her up in the apartment, and fight off anything that got near.

A bad plan.

He pointed at the ghost. “What can you do?”

The ghost’s gentlemanly green smile gave him a hungry look. “Haunt them.”

“Do whatever you can to bottleneck them in the doorway room itself.”

Without a word, the ghost floated up through the ceiling, out of sight.

“Wish I knew that trick,” Tat muttered.

“What is your trick?” Lockman asked.

Tat offered a half smile, half sneer. The spider tat on his shoulder wriggled. For a second, Lockman thought his vision had gone blurry. Then the spider stood on Tat’s shoulder in full 3-D with a lot more detail than any ink drawing.

“I have friends,” Tat said, and all over his arms and torso his tattoos writhed to life—bats, snakes, alien creatures, even the barbed wire around one bicep curled around and down his arm like a living thing. All of them, unlike the spider, remained as moving pictures on his body, but Lockman guessed Tat could call anyone of them into the corporeal world as its real-life counterpart.

“Take your friends and a team of six you trust with your life upstairs to the engine room and see if you can’t shut down all the doors.”

“And if we can’t?”

“Destroy the damn thing. We have the advantage of a bottleneck right now, no matter how many they got. But they’ll keep coming and eventually pour through the whole damn facility if we can’t cut them off before they even get started.”

Della’s spacey eyes stared in Lockman general direction. “We cannot destroy the doorways. Romeo had them built as part of our Return.”

Of course he fucking did.

“I don’t give a damn. There won’t be a soul alive in this place to Return if we don’t stop the invasion.”

“Is that what this is?” the carrot-topped guy said with the worry of a child, even though Lockman glimpsed the wicked needle teeth in his over-sized mouth that looked like they could help him bite through a steel pipe.

It fit Teresa’s style in an exaggerated sense.
Take ‘em down in their own home
, she used to say when they were assigned with clearing a vamp nest. And if Teresa really had command of that many wolves…

“Yes,” Lockman said. “This is a full on invasion, and if we don’t divert it before it’s in full swing, we are all dead.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Teresa discovered the packs outside of Vegas had a number of brilliant core members. Their Alphas had Betas with brains. It was from one of the northern packs that the suggestion to push through multiple doors came. They had doorways throughout the state and its neighbors. According to their gathered intel from the pixie, the Agency’s “doorway room” as the pixie had called it had enough interdimensional portals to accommodate at least one per each of the seven packs.

Plan was simple.

Spread out to the other doorways, each pack taking one. Synchronize watches. Program a chain of phones all with speed dial to the others. Pack one would make the initial breech with the emergency ruse. Once inside, they could program and open the other doors, and all seven packs could file into the facility to begin the attack.

Worked perfectly.

Turned out they had doors to spare. But most of her pack was in and working the codes to get out of the door room and into the facility proper when the others began filing through after Aaron’s call sending the all clear. Aaron had traded his white track suit for a blue one with green stripes. He looked ready for a game of B-ball, rather than an invasion. But after his quick shift to put down Cage and his ability to slip right back into his clothes when he shifted back made Teresa wonder if she shouldn’t find more practical dress for herself. Most the wolves wore hand-me-downs and thrift-store finds, knowing they wouldn’t last long. But Teresa had never been much of a bargain hunter.

They received no resistance coming through. Not even a sign of whoever activated the doorway on this end. Apparently, this Agency carried a level of hubris the old one never suffered from. They had thought themselves impervious.

“Got it,” Trent said, his mustache twitching as he smiled at her over his shoulder. He stood at the heavy metallic door that led out of the room, fingers of one hand still a couple inches from the keypad on the wall beside the door. A loud
clank
followed by a short hiss sounded.

Aaron stepped forward and swung the door open, quickly standing aside in case of a counter attack.

Behind Teresa, the other wolves continued to pour in. Some of them had already shifted. The room quickly grew crowded. Bodies in various stages of shift pressed against her as she stood before the open door, trying to decide her next move.