Night Whispers: ShadowLands, Book 1 (2 page)

“You should have notified me immediately.”

“Knew you’d say that.”

“This isn’t a joke.”

“I was fine. There were only a few.”

“Few-against-one odds do not equal fine. Your mission is search and rescue and intelligence gathering, not—”

“Combat,” she finished for him. “Yeah, yeah. I never initially engage. I finish the bastards off when they find me. You want me to run away?”

“No, I want you to avoid.” He clipped off the words. “Fighting is for soldiers, not you.”

Okay, so Compound, the combined crew of Raven on the East Coast and Sanctuary on the West, had a military force. Theoretically, it was supposed to take care of official ass-kicking. But it suffered from the same problem plaguing all of them—too much need and not enough numbers. More importantly, there wasn’t a single soldier anywhere near her right now. If something attacked her, the scrappy hood rat in her wouldn’t let her sit on her hands and look pretty.

She had to be able to handle all of the aspects of her job that kept her on the front lines. “I’m a better fighter than a lot of those soldiers.”

“Damn it, Jules.”

“I had it under control.”

“You do it on purpose, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Keep your heartbeat steady when you’re fighting, so I won’t know until later.”

Nah, she’d always been pretty calm while fighting. She’d seen too many street fights end badly when someone lost their head. “You know I like to save my energy for more important things.”

When he spoke again, his voice was low and husky and sent all sorts of shivers down her spine. “Is that right?”

Blushing wasn’t something she experienced a ton, but one rough whisper from James could heat her cheeks.

She tried to tell herself their suggestive exchanges were no different from how she’d treat anyone who was in his place.

Liar.

Flirting with James was such a bad idea.
Let me count the ways.
One, he was her boss. Kind of. The shadowy head of the organization, Gabriel, was everyone’s boss, but she took his orders through James. Two, she’d never met him in person. Three, he lived clear across the country from her, and traveling that distance was a huge undertaking. Hell, there had only been about two envoys to date between the bases since they’d established communication over a year and a half ago, and they’d been fraught with danger for the travelers. Four, number three made number two highly improbable to achieve…

Never mind, she didn’t want to count the ways. They were far too depressing.

“Let me see,” he insisted.

“I’m not hiding anything from you,” she yelped, and jogged up the stairs, careful to keep her still-bloody and therefore potentially infectious blade away from her body.

“If you’re not hiding something, then why won’t you let me see?”

“Maybe I’m not decent.”

“If you’re fighting Shadows naked, I’m going to keep my video plugged in all the time. And hope for mirrors.”

“Empty threats.” He never intruded on her, even though it probably only took a flip of a switch to see her surroundings through the camera she wore in her collar.

“I’ll keep it plugged in,
and
I’ll sell tickets.”

“Hopefully you’ll make enough to pay for surgery on all the men whose eyes I’ll have to gouge out,” she said cheerfully.

“I’m loading video in three. One…”

She scurried into the big room upstairs.

“Two…”

She played the light over the foyer area. Cobwebs were the main decoration, along with rat droppings and the musty smell of mold and mildew. A long desk, covered in dust and probably abandoned for at least a decade, sat in the middle of the room. During her search earlier, she’d noted the skeleton that lay partially exposed behind it. She averted the light and quickly walked to the right of the desk so James wouldn’t get too good of a look. The poor bastard had either taken shelter here and died naturally long ago, or he was recently deceased and the Shadows had picked his bones clean after sucking his blood dry. Either way, he was beyond help.

“Two and a half…”

She smiled. Tickets, her ass. He was so damn predictably noble. “Okay, open your eyes.”

She imagined she could feel the choker she wore around her neck warm slightly. From experience, she knew it would shift in color from black to a dull blue as he obtained a 360-degree view of the room. It was part of the reason she had to hack off her hair every few weeks. The few times she let it go, James made puffing noises as if he were trying to blow strands out of his eyes.

Tough intelligence/militiamen/search-and-rescue agents weren’t supposed to be giggling when a monster could be lurking nearby.

“It’s an administrative building?”

“Kind of.” It did look like an administrative building with the rows of outdated computers and Xerox machines, which dated back over a decade and a half ago. A smidgen of the anticipation she’d felt when she’d seen the sign and pulled off the road to this campus resurfaced.

She directed the light to the entrance of the smaller room closest to her and walked through it, keeping her free hand on the hilt of her knife and her senses open, despite her excitement. She hadn’t lived to the ripe old age of twenty-two by being stupid.

James’s breath hitched in her ear as she played the light over the far east side of the large room. She played dumb. “What?”

“Walk closer,” he said slowly.

She obeyed, the thought of James’s pleasure making her grin like a fool. When she’d been a kid, before the virus had, you know, destroyed the planet and all, this was how she’d felt on Christmas morning, presenting her troubled mama with some macaroni necklace she’d spent hours slaving over. The walls were lined with bookshelves which housed…

“Books,” he said, his tone reverent. Jules didn’t know if he spoke to her or himself.

“An
I’m sorry
present. And happy early birthday too. Next week, right? Thirty’s a big number.”

He was silent for a second. “Jules.”

The one word was so laden with emotion she tripped over her own tongue to launch into speech.

“I know it isn’t much, but after you told me how your dad used to take you to the library when you were a kid and you haven’t seen a real book since you went underground, I thought you would like to maybe…and then I saw the sign for the university—”

“Jules, shut up.” The caressing tone muted her way more effectively than the actual words of the command. “You remembered my birthday?”

“Funny how it comes around every year like that.” He’d abruptly announced it last year. That in and of itself had been unusual enough for her to make a note of it. Until then, though they’d been connected to each other for a solid month, he hadn’t volunteered any personal information about himself during their cool, no-nonsense exchanges.

She’d reciprocated, for some reason, and told him hers. And then, a few months ago, he’d surprised her with a birthday present. Not with cake or balloons, or even a stripper dressed like—well, him, or whatever she imagined he looked like. Nope, he’d given her something even more valuable.

When she got to the outpost he’d directed her to outside of San Diego, she’d been expected. She didn’t know what James had told them, but instead of handing her the usual supply of rations and some intel, the soldiers had shown her to a small room with a hard, narrow cot and a leaking roof.

Three heavily armed and trained soldiers had patrolled the perimeter of the outpost that night, while another two sat inside the building. It had been the first decent night’s sleep she’d received since she’d started patrolling, a solid twelve hours of bliss.

So she’d been mulling over what she could do for her boss/partner/fantasy lover for the past couple days. The broken-down sign for the university had been like a godsend. Libraries had gone mostly digital pre-virus, but not the ones inside of schools. She wasn’t the most empathetic of people, but even she’d picked up on the nostalgia in his voice when they’d been chatting during a particularly long, lonely day of exploring.
I can get almost any book I want electronically through our archives, but what I wouldn’t give to walk through stacks of books again.

Plus, she owed him for what she’d put him through today.

“I love it. It’s the nicest present I’ve ever received.”

The flutter of her heart had her pressing her hand to her chest. “Great. Good. I’m happy to hear that. And we’re cool?”

“We’re always cool, Jules. I was—” He cut himself off. He did that a lot, stopped, thought and then spoke with deliberation. He was a thinker, her guy. “I was worried about you. I don’t want to think of you all alone out there.”

But she was always alone. Except for James. Which was fine with her. She did better on her own.

Sure, she supposed Sanctuary and the outposts scattered around California were some safety net, but the state was huge. She wasn’t always in shouting distance of someone.

She could have told him that, but somehow she knew it would only upset him to have his illusion of her security shattered.

“I guess you should get going. I want you to make Denver before nightfall.”

“You don’t want to see them up close?”

“Oh, no, it’ll take too much time…”

James wasn’t the only one who could tell when someone was fibbing. She walked over to a shelf. Some of the books had not fared well. “Can you see okay?”

“Yeah.” It didn’t seem as though he had noticed the less-than-perfect condition of the books. “When I was a child, my favorite smell was a new book. Better than a new car.”

The smell of mildew was pretty strong here, but she wouldn’t be telling him that.

“Touch them for me.” James’s whisper started a tingle in her abdomen that was as worrisome as heart flutters.

She wore combat boots and carried a big knife, for fuck’s sake. She had no time for flutters and tingles.
You should remember that before you go giving sappy presents.

She propped her blade against the bookshelf and wiped her hands on her pants before running her finger along the spines of the closest leather-bound volumes. They appeared elegant with the gold embossed writing. In contrast, her hand looked stubby and mannish with its bitten-off nails and scars.

“Pick one up. Please.”

She licked her suddenly dry lips and pulled a book off the shelf. His breathing stuttered before accelerating. It took a rare man to have an orgasm over books.

Granted, maybe normal people did react like this. In her old life, pre Illness—it seemed a lifetime ago, and not just three years—she’d been more concerned about petty fights and getting her next fix than reading. Hell, she hadn’t even graduated high school.

Since coming to Sanctuary, she’d tried to make up for her lack of education by devouring knowledge from whoever she came across, but she was pretty sure book smarts would never be her strong suit. Meanwhile, all James had to do was open his mouth for a person to know how brainy he was. Sometimes she marveled that they could carry on the conversations they did.

She hefted the sturdy weight of the book. It felt both familiar and foreign—her hands were more used to balancing a blade than books. She turned it over in her hands. “Robert Frost.”

“I love old American poetry. Can you open it?” He sounded like a kid catching sight of real sugar. His excitement sent another pang of warmth through her. She opened the book, letting her fingers slide over the title page and binding. It was tattered but in remarkably good condition, having resisted the mold and mildew and decay that hung in the air. It wasn’t a first edition or anything so fancy as that, but even she could appreciate the crisp and foreign feel of paper under her fingers.

“I wish I could feel it,” her handler murmured. “It’s lovely, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” This wasn’t the first physical book she’d seen in her travels since the Illness, but it was the first she’d seen through James’s reverent, starved eyes.

Steadfast rocks didn’t roam. They stayed in one place. Safe, but missing out on some fun.

“Can you flip through the pages?”

The words slid in front of her too fast to identify and read. She stopped when she came to a small, hard, cardboard piece stuck between the pages. She fleetingly wondered over the last person who had held this book. Had it been a woman? A man? A student?

Curious on her own part now, she shone the light on the words, her mouth moving as she silently read.

His voice was rough when he finally spoke.
“I have outwalked the furthest city light…”

“I have been one acquainted with the night,”
she whispered the final line along with him.

“God, it’s so beautiful.”

She inhaled. “Mmm. Yeah. It’s a pretty poem.” Maybe that wasn’t the most insightful comment, but it had been pretty. She didn’t have enough pretty in her life that she could afford not to appreciate the few pieces that trickled through.

“Truly, this was the best present ever.” His voice dropped, became husky. “You have no idea what you’ve given me.”

Funny. It was like she’d been given the gift. She studied the bookshelves in front of her and wondered what each of those books held.