Phoenix (9 page)

Minute after minute passed, and he began to wonder when Gabriel and the others would return. Risking a glance to the driver’s side mirror, he checked the mine shaft, but no one was emerging from it yet.

The object had paused, though he could clearly see now it was a person in a green camouflage outfit.

Then, as if reading his mind, it began to retreat back the way it came.

“Oh no you don’t,” he said and exploded out from the truck as fast as he could, barreling down on the spy.

Although Uriel had the advantage of surprise on his side, the distance between the two was just too great, and he quickly lost his quarry in the forest as it grew thicker the farther they went from the cleared area.

“Fuck,” he swore, coming to a small stream. The prints disappeared into it and he knew the person could have escaped several ways.

Making time he ran back to the clearing, where the others were looking for him.

“Gabriel! In the forest, that way!” he shouted, pointing behind him.

The leader of the Stone Bears didn’t waste any time, and in seconds he and Raphael charged into the brush, leaping forward. Simultaneously their bears erupted, huge, angry beasts that hit the ground on all fours and rocketed past Uriel at full speed, quickly picking up the scent that wasn’t his and going after it. Like he should be.

He should be with them. The three of them should be out there. Hell, he should have been able to chase down his target initially. If only he was whole and his bear would talk to him.

Angrily he smashed his fist into a nearby tree, taking out his anger on an object that couldn’t fight back.

He strode past the assembled group of trainees, who were gawking into the forest and wondering what was going on. Uriel stopped behind them, then looked around. All three of them were not paying attention anywhere but where he had emerged from the forest.

“Jared!” he shouted, grabbing the nominal trainee leader’s attention. “What kind of circus are you running here? This isn’t a fucking candy shop!”

Jared spun, his face going red with embarrassment as he realized what he had done, but to his credit, the shifter immediately detailed his two men to fan out and begin searching the perimeter around the vehicles. Gabriel had already secured the stone within his truck before Uriel had returned, but that didn’t rule out an attack from a different direction. It was just entirely possible the person Uriel had spotted was a decoy.

They waited for ten minutes, until Gabriel and Raphael returned empty-handed.

“Any ideas what it was?” he asked as they approached.

The two of them shook their heads.

“Either human, or it didn’t shift. It reeked of cologne, covering any trace of animal scent.” Gabriel sniffed to accentuate his point of how pungent it must have been. “All the tracks were footprints. We lost it at the river.”

Uriel swore again. He should have been one of the ones to go after it. He was the best acknowledged tracker and his sense of smell was strongest. Yet again he had let them down.

“I lost it at the river too.” He explained how he had seen it approaching, then chased after it when it began to leave.

“Do you think it was here for us, or the Emeralds?” Raphael asked.

None of them had an answer to that.

“If it was us, that’s not good,” Uriel said. “That would mean they knew we were going to be here, which means they can read our communications.”

He shared a look with Gabriel. The message he had given Uriel to take the four Sentinels to the cabin had indeed been handwritten to avoid anyone intercepting it. They had had no proof at that point, but Gabriel had begun to suspect it. Now they knew for certain.

“No, it’s not good,” Gabriel agreed. “Right now there’s not much we can do. We may as well head back. I’m going to leave Jared and Thom here, have them explore the river for a mile or two in each direction, see if they pick up on anything. Right now though we need to get this stone secured.”

Uriel didn’t want to be holed up in the truck for another twenty minutes with Raphael, or anybody or that matter. He was highly disappointed in himself, and more than anything just wanted to be left alone. What had started out as such a burst of energy and excitement for his return to work was now spiraling into a rather depressing day.

Thankfully, he had seen a way out of it.

“Hey Gabe, I’m going to take the dump truck back, okay?”

He pointed over at the truck full of rock and other debris from the Emerald Crew’s mine. Normally the Mining Consortium sent out a driver for that sort of thing, but right now it provided him with an excuse to spend some time alone.

Gabriel, as if sensing what was going on in his head, didn’t put up a fight. “Just make sure you radio it in to HQ and let Ajax know it’ll be gone for a bit.”

Uriel nodded his understanding and moved out of the way while the two trucks roared to life and exited the cleared area, heading back down the road. The third remained parked until Jared and Thom returned.

Not the way I imagined it going.

Rolling his eyes he walked over to the Emerald trailer, he snatched up the landline that would connect him to Ajax down in the mine.

Sydney

She was frustrated.

“Why is there nothing here?” she asked aloud for what felt like the twentieth time.

Sydney was currently browsing the electronic records section of the LMC intranet, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for.

“He’s got to be there somewhere,” she said in frustration.

It had now been one whole week since she had first seen Uriel, and it was two days since the branch had fallen on her. Like Courtenay had said, her leg was healing nicely. Today was the first day she had begun to move around on it, though she was still doing so very gingerly, and for no more than a few steps at a time.

Uriel, she knew, had already healed from his. He had been perfectly fine the morning after he had stayed over despite all his, ah, exertions, that night. Lucky jerk.

But now she had to update his records with his physiotherapy progress, treatment, and other information, but she couldn’t find anything.

Perhaps they weren’t kept digitally due to his status as a Stone Bear? She wasn’t sure if that made any sense, but going through the storage room couldn’t be any more frustrating than what she was doing now. With a sigh she grabbed her crutches and left the room, heading into the administration section. It wasn’t the first time she’d had to go looking for files that weren’t stored electronically, and she found her way there easily.

“Hey Brenda,” she said to the clerk that managed the room, among other duties.

“Afternoon Sydney. Go on in,” she said with a wave of her hand.

“Thanks,” she said gratefully, sliding her frame sideways while she held the door with the butt end of one of her crutches. She had really learned to hate doors.

She moved into the section labelled
Personnel Records
and began looking in the section labelled “U.”

Nothing.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” she said, swearing in frustration at the ridiculousness of the search. Like the other Stone Bears, Uriel didn’t have a last name, or so he told her.

What else might it be filed under?

Playing a hunch, she looked under “S.”

There, three quarters of the way to the end, was a particularly thick folder with the printed label of “Stone Bears.” The inside was divided up into three sections. She grabbed the one with Uriel’s name on it and pulled it and began looking through it.

Pre-LMC History.

Training Period.

Assignment.

Psychological Evaluation.

Sydney knew she shouldn’t look, but she hadn’t realized the Stone Bears underwent any sort of psychological treatment. Why would they need to, she wondered? Her mind brimming with uncertainty, she thumbed open the folder and began to read the words contained within.

“Oh my God,” she said, eyes widening in horror as she learned more about what the Stone Bears truly did. “So much death,” she whispered, reading file after file. A part of her rational brain told her that they spanned the course of several years, but in each one, there was a constant.

Uriel had killed the person. The documents in front of her termed it as “ending,” but there was no mistaking what the term meant.

But that couldn’t be right. Uriel wasn’t a killer. Why would he be killing other shifters? Sydney didn’t understand it. He was just a security guard…wasn’t he? With trembling fingers she put the file back, not wanting to read any more. The image she had assembled of Uriel in her head was already crumbling to pieces. She wasn’t sure she could stand reading any more of what he had done.

The next section was labeled “medical,” and she pulled his file from there. It was empty besides one piece of paper that had no heading and only one line of text. It read “Subject is a bear shifter and possesses all the advanced healing functions common to the race. No further need for medical information.”

Rolling her eyes she grabbed the piece of paper and shoved the rest of the thick file back into its place in the drawer. She would just have to do up a proper set of medical records herself and put them in the file. Sometimes the disregard for shifters irritated her. Just because they weren’t human didn’t mean people should be lazy about maintaining these things! Sydney preferred to do things properly, and that included filing records.

“Thanks Brenda,” she said, gliding by on her crutches.

As she made her way down the hallway, another thought struck her. What was she going to say to Uriel? How was she going to react when they were together next?

Worry seeped into her mind, along with regret and self-loathing. She should never have read that damn file. It wasn’t her business! If he had wanted to share those things with her, then he would have.

The anger at the intrusion into his privacy warred with the fact that he
was
a killer and he
hadn’t
said a word of it to her. They had slept together several times now. That was the sort of information a woman would want when making the decision to have sex with someone.

Sydney was torn; she didn’t know what to do now. She opened the door into her office.

“I need your help.”

Grabbing at her crutches in surprise, Sydney fought to remain balanced as Uriel turned to face her. He hadn’t been sitting—instead it appeared he had either been pacing or waiting behind the chair for her to come back.

“Don’t you normally knock?” she asked somewhat acidly.

“I did. You didn’t answer, so I came in,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I need your help.”

“You said that already. Need my help for what?” She felt bad, but she couldn’t contain her disdain for him. Uriel only made it worse by appearing blind to her attitude.

“I need to be better. I need to fix what’s wrong with me. I can’t shift. I need to be able to shift,” he said, the words tumbling out of him almost faster than he could speak.

“Uriel,” she said slowly. “Listen to me very carefully. I. Am not. A psychologist.” She shook her head in exasperation. “I can’t help you with whatever’s going on in your head, and with your bear.”

“Doc, please, I need it. I’ll do whatever it takes!”

She was pained, because he was clearly bothered by whatever was going on, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had told him that before and he had seemed to understand. Why was he so adamant now? What had happened to make him so urgently need to be able to shift?

“I can’t help you with your head Uriel! Why don’t you go see the shrink you talk to every time you kill someone?” she snapped.

Oh shit.
She hadn’t meant to say that. Not at all. Now he would know she’d been snooping around in his private life. Fuck.

“What did you just say?” he asked, his voice suddenly calm and firm in the silence that followed.

“Nothing,” she said, trying to brush it off. The glare of his eyes told her that there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to let this pass. She sighed, knowing it was hopeless to evade the question. “I read your file,” she said at last. “You’ve killed over a dozen people! When were you planning on telling me all this?” she said, trying to keep her voice down despite her desire to shriek at him.

“They were shifters. I ended them because I had to,” he said angrily.

“You never
have
to kill someone,” she snapped.

“How long have you lived here in Genesis Valley, Sydney?” he said, catching her off guard with the sudden topic change.

“A year, what the hell does it matter to you?” she asked. “Don’t think you can change the subject.”

He snorted, sitting down in the chair, waving her over to sit behind the desk.

“Have you not noticed in that year that Genesis Valley is a little different than any other shifter community?”

She blinked, trying to understand where he was going with the topic, and how he could remain so calm.

“A little,” she said. “You shifters seem to fight a lot more from what I’ve heard.”

“There’s the understatement of the century,” he said softly. “Okay Sydney, here’s the basics. Genesis Valley is owned by the Kedyns via Lionshead. They own everything in the Valley except for the human population.”

She frowned. “You’re saying they own the shifters too?”

He nodded. “I’ve always admired how smart you are. That’s it exactly. Any shifter that comes here does so because they can’t hack it out there.” He pointed vaguely outside the room, but she understood he meant in the rest of the world. “Genesis Valley gets the screwups, the crazies, the criminals. We take in the worst of the worst, and try to make them into something better by giving them strict rules and hardworking jobs. Most of them accept that.” He paused.

“Some of them don’t,” she said for him.

Uriel grimaced. “Exactly. Some of them do not. We”—she heard the reference to his kind, the shifters, in that ‘we’—“have several rules that are unbreakable. First and foremost, is not using any of the advantages we have over humans to hurt them. That includes hitting them in any way.”

There was cold hard anger contained in his voice as he spoke, but Uriel never hesitated, never paused to try and make the words he was saying warmer. She saw for the first time what those he confronted must see, and what he was trained to do. There
was
a killer in him. That much suddenly became clear to her.

“If a shifter harms or kills a human, there is only one punishment, and it is non-negotiable. That shifter is to be ended. There is no argument, no plea, nothing. Many times it is carried out summarily at the site of the crime, if a LMC liaison is nearby.” He grimaced. “Part of my job is to carry out those sentences.”

She gasped. “That’s horrible!” she exclaimed, then clamped a hand over her mouth as she realized how loud she had said it. She hated what she was hearing, but she was still willing to respect his privacy. Obviously what he was telling her wasn’t something normally shared outside the shifter community. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

“I’m telling you because I don’t want you to think I’m some cold-blooded executioner,” he said. “I hate it. We all hate it. Our kind’s numbers are already so limited that the last thing any of us want to do is have a hand in decreasing that even more. But we have to. Shifters who come here know they can’t be rehabilitated any further than working in the mines. The rules are harsh, but if the miners follow them, they won’t be bothered either. Anyone who comes into the Valley knows what they’re getting themselves into. Nobody is forced to come here.”

Sydney sat back, trying to come to terms with what he had just told her. It sounded so foreign, so alien to her sense of morals and justice. It wasn’t right to treat someone that way she thought. No human being should have to face the constant threat of death like that.

Except they aren’t human. They’re shifters.

“We may look like humans,” he told her, as if guessing her thoughts, “but we aren’t. We have our own society, our own rules.” His voice was like steel, but she could hear the regret buried behind it. He tried hard to hide it, and if she hadn’t been so close to him, Sydney doubted she would have heard it either. But she was, and she did, and it made her feel much better because of it, knowing that he didn’t relish being called upon to fulfill that portion of his duty.

“Why do you stay here then? Can’t you go elsewhere, live a more normal life?” She didn’t understand why someone would volunteer for something like this.

“Didn’t you see that in my file?” he asked.

Her jaw dropped open at the pointed jab about her violation of his privacy. “I’m sorry Uriel. I shouldn’t have done that. There’s still so much I don’t know about you, but that’s no reason for me to go snooping around in your personal life. I should have respected your wanting to keep that to yourself and waited for you to tell me in your own time.”

He gave her a pained smile. “I’m sorry too. I don’t need to make you feel worse about it.” He ran his hand through his hair, letting his breath out slowly. “To answer your question, the reason I can’t go anywhere is because I don’t have anywhere to go.”

She frowned, shaking her head slightly to indicate she didn’t understand.

“We’re orphans, Sydney. Me, Gabriel, Raph. The LMC picked us up off the streets where we were getting in to trouble, brought us here, gave us an education and trained us. The Stone Bears who came before us were the same way, and the ones that come after us will be the same too I would imagine. I have no family that I know of, and never made any friends. The only ones I have now are those I’ve met here in Origin and the valley.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said quietly, feeling even more terrible. “I didn’t know.”

“I know you didn’t. It’s okay. I can forgive you, if you can assure me that in the future, you’ll come and ask me any questions you have, instead of going and searching for them on your own.”

“Just like that?” she asked, astonished. “I mean, of course I promise, but you can forgive me that easily?”

“I care for you deeply Sydney, and we all make mistakes. Keep that in mind when I make my first one, will you?” he said, a genuine smile playing across his face this time.

“I suppose that’s only fair, isn’t it?” she said, laughing along with him.