Darkness Returns (31 page)

Could it be so easy?

The pixie had described the facility as heavily secure and ready for anything. The impression she was getting is that they were ready for nothing. Something else must have had their attention. Combine that with her brilliant ruse to get in through the interdimensional door, and this whole op could go as smooth as Bombay had back in the eighties.

She wondered if Craig remembered Bombay, the easy slaughter at the nest of the lizard-like things simply because they had picked a rare cool day for the op, and the lizards could hardly get their cold-blooded asses moving before the first flashbang was thrown.

“Ma’am.” Trent cleared his throat.

Teresa pulled herself from the reverie. She nodded. “Time to move in.”

In her old life, she would have checked her rifle, pulled the bolt, and took up a defensive firing position. But her hands were empty. She held them out before her and watched her fingertips turn to claws.

More and more pressure against her as the wolves continued to push their way in through the doorways. The room smelled like an abandoned kennel. Some of the fully shifted had marked their new territory.

Aaron zipped out of his track suit. Naked, he gingery folded the suit, looked around him, realized he had no place to set the outfit without it getting trample, and tossed it aside with a shrug. He shifted.

Trent shifted.

Finally, Teresa fully shifted.

She took the lead, running out into the hallway, an army of giant wolves following her with blind obedience. Not for the first time, she thought to herself…

I should have gone wolf a long time ago.

A small voice at the back of her mind dared one contradiction before falling silent as obediently as her pack.

Then it would have been you who killed your sister.

Chapter Forty

Lockman led the remaining supernaturals straight to his apartment. Teresa had come with a takeover in mind, but part of that involved killing Lockman’s daughter, the Chosen One, and he’d be damned if he didn’t lead a team to cover her.

On the way, they passed several groups of mortals dressed and armed with military grade gear, all headed for the door room, each squad leader asking the same question as they passed in opposite directions.

“Are they in?”

Lockman would answer each with the same clipped tone. “Breach achieved.” Two words, but enough to get every squad running double-time to the appropriate stairwell, elevator, or guard post depending on their assignments.

Kress probably had all that information memorized. Lockman didn’t have a clue what the protocol for such an eventuality was. The response felt especially slow to him, though. Kress had taken the impregnable nature of his castle for granted, refused a basic tenant of any secure facility—there is
always
a way in.

His hubris could get them all killed.

They arrived at the apartment and found the door ripped off its hinges. Lockman drew is pistol and led the way inside. Gun arm up, he swung the barrel around like a flashlight, scanning every inch of the apartment.

The place was trashed.

The massive plasma TV had a hole in the screen that continued through the wall. Lockman could peer through the cracked screen and ragged drywall to his bedroom. The furniture made of wood lay in splinters across the floor. Any piece with cushions had been slashed, the stuffing torn out and scattered about like sheep shearings. In the kitchenette, Jessie’s special fridge lay tipped face down with lines of blood rolling away from it as if the machine itself were a murder victim.

The others spread out behind him, quiet and quick. They had the rest of the apartment searched in thirty seconds, voices calling out, “Clear,” like an evolving echo.

Lockman lowered his weapon and turned to take in his impromptu team. Every face, even the most warped, insect-like one, wore a mask of somber professionalism.

Kress might have been a dick, but he knew how to recruit talent.

“No sign of her,” a pasty-faced thing with an androgynous voice and who smelled like raw dough said. He or she carried a rifle, but otherwise had no clothing. Its body looked made of what it smelled like, dough.

The thing nodded at Lockman’s scrutiny. “They call me Doughboy around here, sir. Took me a while to get it, but this ain’t my world. To you it’s pretty obvious, huh?”

Lockman nodded absently. “Thanks. Any thoughts on what happened?”

“The Chosen One, according to observation and study, can tend toward erratic.”

That won a grunt from Lockman. “She’s a teenager.”

Doughboy carried on. “I believe this is her work.”

Taking a second look at the mess, Lockman thought Doughboy just might be right. It did look a bit like the aftermath of a temper tantrum—on a vamp level. “She’s having a hard time adjusting,” Lockman said, which was an understatement. “We’re sure the wolves couldn’t have made it here before us?”

Doughboy shook his fat, doughy head. “Not from the door room. We would have run into them on the way down. Or they would be…shit.”

Doughboy had time enough to turn toward the apartment door when the wolf hit him. Doughboy went down, the wolf landed on top, pinning the rifle between them, and then the wolf turned Doughboy’s face into crumbs.

Lockman raised his pistol as three more wolves charged through the door. Big wolves. Which forced them to come in single-file. Lockman blew the snout off the first one, teeth and blood exploding from its face as momentum carried it a few more steps before it dropped and rolled onto its side, writhing and making a high-pitched keen through what remained of its mouth.

The rest of Lockman’s team reacted as quickly. They opened fire on the remaining pair of charging dogs, their rifles on full-auto and turning the wolves into furry ground beef.

Then all weapons aimed for the doorway, expecting more.

Four and a half heartbeats went by in silence except for the sounds of gunfire and screams echoing throughout the facility. The silence broke when the hand grenade thumped to the floor and rolled.

“Grenade,” Lockman shouted and sprinted for the couch. A headfirst leap took him over the top of the couch. He slammed to the floor on the other side, letting go of his pistol so he could cover the back of his head with both hands. He had no idea how the others were reacting. Some probably not acting at all, but stunned in that brief moment between the realization and the reality of death.

The force of the explosion kicked the couch in the air and over Lockman, fiery tassels fluttering from where the fabric burned. The air pressure expanded for an instant, pumping deafness into Lockman’s ears. His old training had taken over, though. In a battle, you never pause, even for a second to wonder how the hell you’re still alive.

The couch hit the floor and Lockman shot to his feet. He scooped up his pistol and fired blindly toward the doorway while he ran in a zigzag, making his way to the other side of the apartment suite and finally into Jessie’s room.

He glimpsed some of the carnage during his retreat. Spattered guts, blown-off limbs, and faces perforated with debris shards. He couldn’t be sure if the entire team was down, had no time to make a body count, so could only hope someone on his side could still fight.

Meanwhile, he slammed Jessie’s door shut, the sound like thunder. An iron door, with reinforced steel strapping was no light thing. A keypad beside the door had a light that shined solid green. After Lockman tapped in a code, the light flashed red. The massive lock inside the door
thunked
while a few smaller bolts clicked into place. The walls in here were constructed with the same metal combination.

Lockman’s own bedroom had no such protection. But when you’re the Chosen One, you get special treatment.

Lockman leaned his back against the door and wiped away the sweat burning his eyes with the back of his wrist. He panted. His heartbeat pulsed hard enough for him to hear the blood whooshing in his ears underneath the ringing the sound of the explosion left behind.

He listened.

The reinforced door and walls made for good sound-proofing as well as protection, but couldn’t stop him from hearing more chattering gunfire that abruptly stopped before a long and terrible scream that turned wet and garbled another second later.

Lockman recognized the pattern of sounds, especially that last, the sound a scream makes while the throat gets torn open.

He dropped his head back against the door and pressed the side of his gun against his forehead like an icepack for a headache.

He’d done it again. Led more supernaturals to their death.

“You better drop the guilt shit,” a familiar voice said. “Or we’ll never get out of here alive.”

He turned his eyes toward the sound. The open closet, filled with nothing but clothes and shadows.

Shadows.

His realization came a second before Jessie materialized from those shadows—which didn’t look so dark now that she stepped out of them.

“I can see it in your eyes,” she said. “
Woe, is me, I’ve led everyone into doom.
“ She flapped her wings once, the sound like a wind-snapped flag. “We aren’t playing that role anymore. Neither of us. Got it?”

Lockman lowered his gun hand to his side and, couldn’t help it, laughed. “Sure thing.”

“Well, then, with that out of the way… What’s the plan, Stan?”

He glanced around at his surroundings. Despite the clutter and the illusion that a normal teen lived there, they occupied one of the safest locations in the facility. Under the bed, out of his sight for the moment, a trap door, also code-locked, led into a smaller room with provisions. Food, medical supplies, weapons. As far as emergency threats to the Chosen One, they stood exactly where they belonged.

“Mica didn’t have the code for your room,” he said, mostly to himself. “Just me and you.”

“And Kress.”

Lockman squeezed his eyes shut and sighed. Kress had
all
the fucking codes. After all, this was his “house.” The government merely rented a few rooms. And Kress was in no condition to suffer extreme interrogation. If they could get to him, they could conceivably get him to give up the codes, rendering the safe room not so safe, and more along the lines of death trap.

How much time they had to figure out an escape depended on how fast the wolves could find Kress, figure out what he knew, then force him to share it all.

“Are we in another one of our
Totally Screwed
moments?” Jessie asked.

“This time might be the real deal.”

Jessie pouted with her hands on her hips. “Well that sucks.”

Lockman shook his head. He was still a little out of breath. He waved a hand at her. “As a vamp, you are no longer allowed to use that expression.”

Her phony pout turned into a real frown. “Nice. That’s…that’s real sensitive.”

“Quit yer crying and move the bed. Let’s find out what we’ve got down below.”

Hopefully something that could kill a lot of wolves.

Chapter Forty-One

It was hard being an alpha wolf without fully understanding what it meant to be a wolf in the first place. But Teresa was quickly learning.

Like the way she could communicate with the others while in wolf form through scent. The variations in smells became the new language when she was on all fours. The different smells translated themselves to words once they hit her brain, the whole process quick, a little like telepathy.

“Listening” came easily once she got the hang of it.

“Talking” by consciously tweaking her own body odor, on the other hand, took some work. Instinct helped a lot, as it did for most things werewolf.

However, by the time they had breached the facility and moved forward with the plans they had sketched out ahead of time based on the pixie’s intel, she had wolf-talk nailed, and used the smell of her body to give orders as easily as her voice.

Now she paced on all fours in the apartment suite’s living room, making sure to stay clear of the gore scattered across the floor. Trent, as wolf, his muzzle hair curled in a wolfish imitation of his mortal mustache, plodded over to her. He wore the equivalent of a saddle bag over his shoulders. The belted pocket on either side bulged with weapons. It’s where Aaron got the grenade he tossed while briefly taking human form.

The three expendable wolves and the grenade were all part of the breach plan into this apartment suite—although the wolves themselves, strategically picked one each from packs outside Teresa’s, didn’t know going in they were mere cannon fodder.

The pixie had explained the security strength of Jessie’s bedroom. The hope had been to distract her long enough to keep her from locking herself inside her room. If the grenade toss went lucky and killed her first, so much the better.

Luck didn’t want to play on their team, though.

We should order more wolves in
, Trent “said” to her.
Enough of us hit that door, it’ll come off the hinges.

Taking time and resources away from other parts of the operation wouldn’t work. Trent had no training. He didn’t understand how the cogs in an operation worked, as in most cases they did not. They were less like cogs than wheels. Once you hit the battle field, you could fuck the plan, but you
had
to keep the wheels spinning. The most important part of this op, much as Teresa hated to admit it, wasn’t about getting to Jessie, it was about taking control of the facility. Once that happened, they could take all the time they needed to cut Jessie out of her box.

She snuffed and shook her head.

Then what? We’re wasting ourselves just standing here.

Good point. Besides Teresa, they had eight wolves with them, all from the Vegas pack—now that their distracters were dead—which included Trent and Aaron. They couldn’t waste time hoping the others in the facility could bring the operation to a close. Because if they couldn’t overtake the building, they could not leave until that vamp demon hiding in her bedroom was finally dead.