Darkness Returns (32 page)

This line of thought almost changed her mind about pulling wolves off other parts of the op to try and ram the door open. But the flashing red light on the keypad next to the door stopped her. The pixie didn’t know the code to get into Jessie’s room, but someone besides the girl herself had to. She had seen Lockman run into the room with the girl as the smoke from the grenade cleared. So she couldn’t get the code out of him, and probably couldn’t have through any kind of torture or mojo, either. The bastard’s instinct to protect that thing made him too resistant.

Who else, then?

The pixie had laid out the Agency’s hierarchy. The famous actor, Romeo Kress, actually stood at the head of this beast. As CO, he probably would know the code, or at least some way to breach the room, and definitely what to expect if they did.

Using her newly learned language of smell, she ordered Trent and Aaron to split off with her. She gave the other six wolves to hold this position as if their lives depended on it.

They were so close. Just one damn wall between Teresa and her prey. She imagined she could smell the thing’s sickly skin, the blood on her breath, the sweat between the wrinkles in her folded wings.

She barked, jerked her head, and led Trent and Aaron out to find the Agency’s leader.

Finding him turned out easy. His scent had touched nearly every inch of the place at one point or another. Once they had it picked out, they followed the strongest trails. This led them up to the penthouse apartment the pixie had described and which Teresa had found hard to believe until she saw it herself. Mr. Kress liked to dance along the border of palatial and gaudy.

Trent pounced on the door to knock it loose—not nearly as secure as Jessie’s bedroom door, obviously—and landed on top of the door, skating across the slick checkered tiles as if riding a surfboard. He lowered his head and growled, not at all amused by his short ride.

When Teresa stepped inside, she understood Trent’s disfavor immediately. The slick tile did not accommodate a wolf’s paw very well. Not that she slipped around as if on ice like the door had, but she wouldn’t want to have to run on such a surface.

The three of them suffered through walking across the tiles, and when they didn’t find Kress in his living room, all of them snorted in relief to find carpeting along the hall leading back to the bedrooms.

“I’m in here,” a ragged voice said, a voice that sounded as if it had been shouting all day.

They exchanged looks, their scents changing to form the same question—

Trap?

Teresa crept forward, the others to either side and a little behind, forming a triangle as they traveled down the hall. They found him in the master bedroom. The room looked large enough to hold the floor plan for most single family homes. The ceiling vaulted. Polished pine rafters gave the room a country cabin feel. Despite the fancy silk sheets on the perfectly made bed, the shining mirror above the antique dresser, or the freshly vacuumed carpet, some trails from the vacuum still visible in the knap, the bedroom smelled of sweat and urine.

Kress stood on top of the dresser, fully clothed in a designer suit except for his feet, which were bare. Along with his political looking blue and white striped tie, Kress also had a noose around his neck. The opposite end of the rope was tied to the middle of one of the rafters with enough slack that it looked like he could play Tarzan and swing across the room—if he were holding the rope instead of dangling by his neck, that is.

Kress’s eyes were wet and pink around the edges as if he’d been crying for a long time.

He gazed at Teresa with those sad eyes and her gut clenched. She lowered her head and whimpered, unable to hide the sudden wave of empathy she had with this man. Had their infiltration drove him to this? Made sense. Kill himself before they could try to extract any intel. But it looked so forlorn, in so much psychic pain that Teresa felt in her bones there was more to it than the Cold War equivalent of a cyanide pill.

“I’ve been up here half the day,” Kress said, answering some of Teresa’s questions without her having to ask them. “I just can’t seem to make myself do it.”

Teresa felt her eyes water. She couldn’t stand seeing him like this, so pathetic, alone. She shifted into human form. Her companions whimpered, but from the smell, she knew those cries were meant for Kress, not her decision to approach him in human form.

When she reached the dresser he stood on, she reached out and touched his calf. A flock of emotions fluttered through Teresa, tickling her insides like bat wings—anger, sadness, hopelessness, all laced with a hint of joy.

Something isn’t right
, she thought as tears streamed down her hot face.

She sniffled and looked up at him. “Why are you doing this?”

He reached a hand down to her. “He took over. Everything that I worked so hard to build, and now
he
is in charge.”

Teresa took his hand, didn’t have to be told who
he
was. Lockman, of course.
Damn you, Craig. Can’t you see the pain this man is in? Don’t you care?

“Will you stand here with me?” Kress asked. “For just a moment.”

I’m forgetting something
.

But she couldn’t figure out what.

Aaron and Trent both shifted into human form. No one seemed to notice or care the three of them were naked. They cried like Teresa. Beads of tears caught in Trent’s disheveled mustache.

“Please?” Kress begged.

Teresa had never heard such desperation. How could she deny him a moment of comfort before he took his life. Maybe he would even share the security code they had come for.

That’s what you’re forgetting. You have to get—

The thought broke into pieces as Kress squeezed her hand and gently tugged. He helped her up onto the dresser with him, and once at his side, she put her arms around him. It felt so natural. All she wanted to do was take care of this poor, hurting man.

So it confused her when he slipped the noose off his neck, hooped it around hers, and gave her a hard shove off the dresser.

As the rope tightened around her neck and she swung across the room, her toes brushing the carpeting at the center of her pendulum arch, the spell on her emotions shattered. On the swing back toward the dresser, breath and blood cut off, she realized the trick. Kress was an empath of some kind who could share his emotions with others. A nasty trick.

A trick that worked perfectly.

She continued to swing back and forth. She tried digging her fingers in past the noose, but her body weight had cinched it tight. While she struggled, her vision going red around the edges, she saw Kress draw a pair of Glocks from under his suit. Tears in his eyes, still with Trent and Aaron still shocked frozen by Kress’s emotional spell, Kress double-tapped each of them in the forehead, one Glock per wolf, and Teresa’s newest allies dropped to the floor dead.

Meanwhile, Teresa had managed to slow her swinging by stretched her legs as far as she could and scraping her toes against the carpet mid-swing. The tips of her toes burned. Her calves and arches of her feet cramped. Precious oxygen refused to leak enough into the straw her throat had become.

Shift, you idiot.

That could go one of two ways. Either the rope would rip open when her neck expanded, or it would hold and all but sever her wolf head.

Kress jumped down from the dresser. He tucked away one of his two guns and used his freehand to grab Teresa’s arm to stop her swinging.

Now she could stretch her legs just enough to stand on the tips of her rug-burned toes. If she reached up and held onto the rope, she could get a scant whistle of air in through her throat and to her lungs.

Kress looked her up and down, not as if admiring her naked figure, but more like she were a specimen he meant to study. He pressed the barrel of his gun into the side of her face, right where her teeth met. His eyes still glistened with tears. In fact, when he spoke, he sounded choked up and fresh tears ran down his cheeks.

“You think you can come into my home and undo over two decades of work? You think you can take the Chosen One away from me?”

This, Teresa quickly realized, wasn’t an act. She felt nothing of the emotion he now expressed. No. This guy walked a line between sanity and sense, and looked close to tripping over his own feet.

And her life was now in his hands.

“I have a dossier on you,” Kress said.

All Teresa could focus on was keeping the air streaming in and out of her lungs. The cramps in her calves grew more painful, and more cramps started up her arms as she clung to the rope. Still, she kept a vague awareness of what Kress said, like background music you were forced to listen to at a department store.

“We meant to recruit you,” Kress continued. “Can you believe that?” He laughed through his tears, high-pitched and girlish. “Then you had to waltz off the rez and go crazy.”

Look who’s talking
? Teresa thought in lieu of her forced silence.

“This vendetta you have with Jessie…” Kress shook his head as if trying to clear his thoughts. “What’s the purpose?”

He waited for an answer he must have known she couldn’t give.

When he again shook his head, it was like a disapproving parent. He backed off a step and aimed his Glock in the center of her face.

So this is how it ends.

She would soon join the ranks of Marty, Adam, Rodriguez, Creed, and all the others who had died protecting what they should have destroyed.

She started to close her eyes, but decided to face her death as best she could.

“Did you come to me because you thought I’d give you the code to her room?” Kress asked.

Teresa stared at him, her hands slipping on the rope, the noose tightening, the world turning into a spinning, hazy red.

Panic had made her forget again.

Shift. Now it doesn’t matter if the rope takes off your head. He’s going to kill you anyway.

“I never would have given them up.”

Teresa shifted.

For a second, it felt as though her face might blow apart, explode outward from the sudden pressure like a squeezed balloon.

Then the rope came apart at her neck with a rip that, to Teresa, echoed through the entire facility. She did not bother with a first deep breath. She leapt at Kress, who began frantically firing his weapon.

Chapter Forty-Two

Every ten seconds or so came another echoing
bang
against the door. To Jessie’s eyes it looked like the wolves had started a dent. She swore the center of the door showed a slight bulge on their side.

“If they keep hitting it like that, it’ll come down,” she said, sitting on the edge of her bed. She had her Kress-issued smart phone in one hand and used her thumb on the touch screen to play the world’s worst round of Angry Birds. Not that she cared. She just needed to give her hands something to do. Slinging birds at pigs seemed as good a choice as any.

Bang.

Craig sat on the chair by her desk. He straddled it backward with his forearms resting on the chair back and his chin resting on his arms. “I’ve been counting the strikes. There’s about seven of them out there taking turns. You can tell by the variation in intervals. They’re using a lot of strength, which means having to rest more and more.”

Bang.

Jessie scrunched her face. “Is that, like, a math lesson. It kind of sounded like a story problem.” Somehow she clung to her sense of humor while her nerves snapped and crackled like wet wires. She had also gone into her movie title listing trance earlier until Craig had threatened to throw her to the wolves himself if she didn’t stop.

“Basic logic,” her dad said, ignoring her sarcasm as usual. “If there were more wolves, they’d be hitting that door more often. Then we might have to worry.”

Bang.

They had slid the bed all the way to the wall. The trap door in the middle of the floor hung open. It reminded Jessie of the scene from
Star Wars
when the rebels all hide in Han Solo’s secret cargo holds he used for smuggling. Because that, according to Dad, was Plan B—if the wolves made it through the first door, she and Craig would hide in the compartment down there that was about a quarter the size of her room. But it had its own toilet, ventilation, and fully loaded gun rack. So there was the silver lining around that cloudy idea.

Bang.

“Maybe I should do something,” she said.

Craig lifted his chin off his arms. “Like what?”

She shrugged. “I tapped into my mojo at the hospital. Why not do it here?”

“But what would you do? Turn the wolves into bunnies?”

Jessie shivered with some drama. “Ew. I hate bunnies. Their red eyes freak me out.”

Bang.

Craig shook his head. “You can’t be serious for a second.”

“Will letting go of my sense of humor make a bit of a dif’ in surviving this?”

He rolled his eyes.

Nice.
She
was supposed to be the apathetic teen in this relationship. “Lighten up, Dad. If we’re going to die, at least we go down fighting together, right?”