Night Whispers: ShadowLands, Book 1 (10 page)

He expanded her window. In the space of a second, the waves representing her vital signs were rocketing across the monitor, stronger and more frenzied than he’d ever seen them.

This is not caused by a rat.

Without waiting for his customary verbal check-in, he pulled up her visuals. The screen morphed from blue to a wavy pattern of greens and purples as he started to connect.

“Jules. What’s going on?” His tone was brisk, kisses and virtual reality forgotten in the heat of the moment and the fact that his woman was facing something that was bad enough to affect her unshakeable composure.

She didn’t respond.

For a split second the screen was filled with a mixture of white and steel. A loud static filled his audio, a far cry from Jules’s brisk tone. “Jules?”

The visual dissolved. The audio cut.

Her vital signs flatlined.

James breathed in deep.
Don’t panic
. It was a glitch. A glitch on his end, or maybe hers. Technology was temperamental sometime.

He reestablished the connection. Nothing.

He shut down his end and rebooted. Nothing.

He slammed his hand down on the control panel. Nothing.

Now. Now was the time to panic. “Jules!” he bellowed, knowing it was useless but unable to help himself.

He grabbed his handheld and tried to pull up her location. The tracker on her van showed that it was in the same general vicinity she’d been in last night, give or take a few miles. Her collar gave him no GPS signal.

Her collar was giving him nothing.

James realized he was breathing in pants, and he attempted to bring it under control.
Cool it. Think.

Everything could be fine. Her collar could have malfunctioned, and she simply hadn’t left yet.

Why would she not have left today? Unless something had gone wrong and she needed help.

He knew it. He couldn’t explain how he knew it, but he was suddenly, completely certain that something catastrophic had happened. It was the same queasy, uneasy feeling he’d had all day before the explosion that had killed so many.

Christ, she needed help.
He
needed help, since he was absolutely and totally ill-equipped to assist her. Why the fuck had he been put in charge of her life, of anyone’s life?

He should think about this rationally and calmly and come up with a good plan. He was awesome at plans.

Fuck a plan. He charged out of the office, his handheld gripped firmly in his hand. As he sprinted up to Gabriel’s, he continued to refresh the trackers, her signal, to no avail.

Come on, come on, come on…
The chant continued in his brain until it became a never-ending loop, until he became unable to deny the reality anymore.

Flinging open the door of Gabriel’s office, he charged inside. “I think Jules is in trouble,” he blurted out.

Gabriel rose from his chair with some difficulty, a frown crossing his face. “What kind of trouble?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What happened to her?”

“I don’t know.”

“So how do you know she’s in trouble?” The prosaic question came from the armchair in front of the desk. Marc. A late-night meeting, perhaps.

He focused back on Gabriel. “Her heart rate shot up so I tapped into her A/V. It functioned for a second, and then they both went dead. I can’t read her vitals either. Her van’s in the same town it was last night.”

“She never left to head back home?”

“No.”

“Could she be dead?”

He swallowed. He knew that eventually one of his agents would die. They were on their own when they traveled, unlike the soldiers who usually worked in pairs. But not Jules, please, no. “Even if she was…dead…I’d be able to tap into her collar.” He would see the ground, maybe hear her rattling last breaths. Speak to her. Tell her she wasn’t alone.

“Maybe your equipment is malfunctioning,” Marc suggested.

He rounded on the other man. “My equipment does not malfunction. My equipment is fucking amazing. Don’t give me…”

“Let’s calm down here,” Gabriel said soothingly. “James, where exactly was she?”

He inhaled. “Eaton, Colorado.”

“Very well. What do you want to do, send one of your other agents after her? You’d feel comfortable sending one or two of them in blind?”

Yes. Yes. Find her at any cost.
But could he justify another life by sending them in without knowing what had happened to her? Jules was, by far, the best trained in fighting of any of his agents. Some of the males might be physically stronger, but as far as headcount went, Jules was heads and tails above the rest. The rest of his dozen or so agents were primarily glorified scouts who did a bit of search and rescue and no combat.

“Give me some soldiers,” he said hoarsely. “Give me a few for backup, and let them all go in after her.”

Gabriel looked at Marc.

James had always counted the other man as a friend. A flash of rage coursed through him when Marc raised his hands, a helpless look on his face. “My best group of guys are all sick. I can’t send the couple I have back in alone.”

A dull roar filled James’s ears. It wasn’t until he felt Gabriel’s hard arm encircle his waist that he realized he’d lunged at Marc, that his hands were wrapped around the other man’s neck, squeezing, crushing.

“Calm down, James.” Gabriel’s carefully moderated voice cut through the haze of rage surrounding him.

He struggled to catch his breath. His fingers slowly let go of the other man’s neck. “
She
went in alone.”

Marc gasped for air. “Because you said she could handle it.”

“I said she could handle
one night
on her own in an area on which we had radio silence, because she’s the smartest person we have on the front lines. One night. We were supposed to give her backup. She should have left that town before sun-up to head home. It’s almost eight p.m. where she is now.” They’d failed her. No, he’d failed her.

“I’m well aware of that, James, but you can’t possibly blame me for this. Even if our troops had shown up today, this could have still happened. Why didn’t you realize at dawn that she’d never left Colorado?”

Because he’d been fucking busy since the moment he’d woken up, and he’d only kept himself tapped into her vitals, not her GPS. Still, he should have checked in to make sure she’d left. Christ, so fucking stupid. “You have to give me those troops,” he said, no, pleaded, to Gabriel.

Pity and compassion reflected in his boss’s eyes. “Marc, give us a minute, please.”

“Yes. James, I’m so sorry—”

“Give me some soldiers then.”

Marc shook his head, regret stamped in the lines of his face, and left, closing the door softly behind him.

Gabriel pointed to the chair he’d vacated. “Sit.”

James sat, his foot tapping hard enough to set his entire leg wagging. “Gabriel—”

Gabriel sighed. “James, we truly know nothing of what’s going on here. How can you ask me to second-guess Marc, tear away soldiers who may or may not be ill or who are engaged in life-or-death work here and at Sanctuary, and send them on a wild-goose chase? For all we know, the equipment did malfunction, and Jules is on her way right now to her original destination. We could be getting notification in a day from an outpost that she’s made it. She isn’t stupid.”

“My equipment doesn’t malfunction.”

“But what if it did? Maybe her collar fell off. Maybe her car went dead, and she had to borrow a new one. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything.”

Like maybe after she thought about it she decided she’d rather go off and investigate Cheyenne than listen to you.

James shoved the treacherous—if there was still a country in place, he would even call it treasonous—suspicion out of his mind. No way. Jules didn’t always obey, but she was pretty up front about her insubordination. Plus, she wasn’t stupid. “The only way that collar could fall off is if someone took it off. Her heart accelerated…”

Gabriel shrugged. “She could have been jogging.”

Goddamn it, no.
He knew her habits better than he knew his own. Jules preferred to walk instead of run, and if she did work out, she did it through the combat program in the specs. Her exercise was all practical. “You don’t think it’s highly unlikely that she went off grid in an unknown area? That her van hasn’t moved and her collar malfunctioned right after her vitals went haywire? Surely you don’t believe in coincidences like this, Gabriel.”

Gabriel studied the ground for a long moment. “No. I don’t. However, I can’t justify sending people into a potentially dangerous situation without confirmation that something actually has happened. I’m sorry, James. I promise, if a couple of days go by and she doesn’t turn up at a Sanctuary outpost safe and sound, maybe then we can send a team out there to investigate.”

A couple of days? There were so many horrible things that could happen to a person in a couple of days. There were so many horrible things that could happen to a person in a couple of minutes.

Flesh ripped away from bone. Fire. Screams.

He screwed his eyes shut. Gabriel’s heavy hand came to rest on his shoulder. “James,” he said quietly. “I get where you’re coming from. You care about this girl, I can tell. But you must understand where I’m coming from. I have to think about all our people. If it was just my life I was risking, I would go after her in a heartbeat. But I’m incapable of doing that. I can’t ask others to do the same.”

“If you don’t hear from her,” he asked hoarsely, “in forty-eight hours exactly, will you promise to send someone?”

Gabriel’s hand slid from his shoulder. “If we have the manpower and they are willing after hearing the situation,” he said firmly, each caveat making James physically ill. “I won’t send anyone blind or against their will.”

Those qualifiers made Gabriel’s response practically a no. Their best soldiers were ill. What were the odds that in a couple of days they’d be hale and hearty and ready to move out again?

But that was that. There was no arguing with that note of finality in Gabriel’s voice. At any other time, he wouldn’t dare. Nice James would get up quietly, defer to the man and take his leave.

And that was exactly what he did now.

If it was just my life I was risking…

An unnatural calm descended over him as he walked down four flights of stairs, back to his office.

If it was just
my
life…

The germ of the plan in his head was ridiculous. It would have been ridiculous for anyone, but particularly for him.

He hadn’t left this bunker in two years. Not for a peek, for nothing. To contemplate not only leaving but driving across country into possibly even more danger was absurd.

My life. My risk.

He stood in the middle of his office and swallowed, feeling as though he was poised on the brink of some gaping hole.

The scarred, damaged baby in him bleated.
What if you’re sending yourself into certain danger? What if she’s already dead, or on her way back home and it’s all for naught? What if you die two hours into this multiple day and night journey?

His response was immediate. Better to die out there within the next day or so than to live with himself for another fifty years in here never knowing what happened to Jules. At least then he would have tried.

And hell, if she turned out to be safe and sound, then it was even more cause for celebration.

He glanced at his watch and cursed. If he really was going to leave—

You can’t be serious about going into the big, bad outdoors
, the baby whined.

—
because
he was really going to leave, he needed to see to some matters first. He grabbed the spare handheld off his desk, checked it for the charged battery and then pivoted and went in search of someone, anyone, who could help him.

He completely ignored the handful of people he encountered on the way to the lab, except to size them up and evaluate if they’d be fit for his purposes. No. No. No.

The doors to the lab opened soundlessly to admit him. This room was the largest in the entire compound and, similar to their war room, retained some of its earlier glory in the remnants of equipment that had once been state of the art and functional. Back then, the place had probably bustled with activity, with an engineer or technology guru at every console. Tonight, it was empty, save for a curvy, red-haired female sitting at a desk in front of a computer monitor. Numbers flashed by on the screen, too fast for him to even comprehend them.

He’d been hoping to find Kevin, but she would do.

A frown pleated her usually smooth forehead as she studied the series of digits.

“Hey, Alice.”

No response. This was standard for any of the techies. Once they got started working on a project, more oblivious people were never born, and he included himself in that description. Normally he would ease his way into the conversation, but he had no time for that. “Alice. Alice.
Alice.
”

She glanced up, blinking at him. The vague expression in her eyes was replaced with welcome. “James. How’s tricks?”