Retrieval (37 page)

“Skylar.” Raina could be heard over Bleak’s earpiece.

“Take him to safety Raina, or I’ll put you all out,” Skylar told her never once looking back at Sebastian.

More and more of those unbelievable creatures continued to pour out of the vestibule of the large building.

“You’re going to lose him if you keep doing this—let him help you, don’t make him stand down,” Raina urged, and though she was being somewhat cryptic even Sebastian understood what she was trying to convey to Skylar.

“I’ll get him killed if he stays. I will not tell you all again—leave.” And this time her voice was eerie in its quietness.

“We’ll pull back, but if I feel you’re too close or something is about to go wrong, I’ll be in here so fast, not even you will be able to stop me,” Sebastian warned because he was afraid she would make good on her threat to knock them out, and then he’d be no use for her at all.

She dropped her hold on Sebastian and cursed as she did so.

“You will not ever threaten Skylar.” The ominous words rang out from the shadows.

Sebastian immediately took a protective step toward Sky, placing her at his back and leveling a wicked looking Kimber Tactical Custom II .45 ACP in the direction of the one who’d spoken.

“Who the fuck are you?” Sebastian did not like the almost possessive tone of the individual in the shadows.

And was that a Russian accent?

“Stand down, Bastian. Aleksei, where are your people?” Sky asked the as-yet-to-be-seen mystery man as she continued to decimate the animals coming at them.

Finally, no more of the abominations poured out, and yet she’d not released Sebastian’s men. He was beginning to feel the stirrings of a unique rage. How dare she leave them impotent to this danger?

“Safe. Goolsby and the others are coming. This was just the first wave. Skylar this is no place for your people,” Aleksei said and finally stepped into the light.

He was as tall, taller than Sebastian, with long blond hair and wide-as-the-Grand-Canyon shoulders. Sebastian threw Skylar a confused look before turned to gaze at the man who’d stepped out. Bastian didn’t like that she knew the man, and he didn’t.

“Again, I’ll ask, who are you?” Sebastian demanded.

“No time, you need to get her sisters to safety and your men out of harm’s way. This is no place for you, and this is not your fight. I will do what I can to save her,” he threw Skylar a look, “but you have to be prepared on the outside to pick off what flees.” And with that Aleksei turned around and loped into the building.

“No way are you going in there with him. I’m coming with you, or you don’t leave at all,” Sebastian said hotly.

She looked at him with eyes blazing red against a backdrop of black in her sudden fury.

“You will not ever tell me what I can and cannot do. This isn’t about you or me, Sebastian, this is about destroying something so evil it defies definition. You will leave, or you will compromise this entire thing, and that is something I will not allow.”

“Don’t tell me what you will and won’t allow, Skylar. I’ve watched helplessly as you destroyed my house and left me with no way of knowing if you were alive or not. I’ll be damned if I’ll let you go into danger again without me there to deflect it.” Sebastian was in her face now, towering over her but still not touching her.

“They are heading your way, Skylar. I would suggest you make haste if you want to give them a target other than your people,”
Aleksei warned on their mental pathway.

“Raina?” Sky asked not looking away from Sebastian. “Prepare yourself. Kinsey, Piper? You’d be wise to do the same.”

Then Skylar touched Sebastian’s forehead with her index finger, and the lights went out completely.

* * * *

“Her sisters are out there. They seem to think that Graham’s spec-ops men will be able to protect them,” Goolsby said derisively.

“They are well aware, Warren, of their own strengths. My daughters hide behind no one. You must remember though, the ones out there are expendable. It is the one coming up the stairs now that we need to disable and get to safety. She is the key to my past failures, and my future success. Milania produced remarkable children.” Smythe-Ward responded. Pride tingled through him, made him light-headed with giddiness.

“Are you sure it wasn’t the thing we moved in secret yesterday that created them?” Goolsby asked slyly.

Before could the man could take another breath, Smythe-Ward moved and plunged a knife into his throat. Left gasping around the blade, his mouth moved, but his voice had been cut off. Smythe-Ward shook his head.

“Oh, Warren. You’ve turned into such a disappointment. I should’ve realized from the very first job all those years ago that you were too messy and unstable to handle my business. Tell me: How did it feel to kill my Milania? Can’t speak? Oh that’s right. You have a knife buried in your throat. It’s too bad really. You were efficient but not finessed enough to handle the more sensitive issues. Then again, I have new information that tells me even your efficiency is questionable. More’s the pity that you have to die now.” Smythe-Ward’s voice was quiet as he spoke to the man who writhed in pain on the floor.

“But die you must.” Smythe-Ward removed the knife from Goolsby’s throat, and with a swiftness that belied his advanced age, he stuck the object directly into Goolsby’s left eye.

Death was instantaneous, though somewhat messy. Calmly, as if he hadn’t just wiped another being off the face of the earth, Smythe-Ward removed the blade from the other man’s brain and wiped it across the dead man’s shirt.

“You were a waste of my resources,” he said and spat, turning when he heard heavy footsteps outside the boardroom.

Skylar pointed to Goolsby’s body as she stepped into the room behind the mammoth man who had been Smythe-Ward’s second project. “Looks like you beat me to it.”

He must’ve had some kind of muse riding his shoulder when he’d created his children and the beast standing beside his first daughter, because he’d yet to break either of them, and they were the most powerful of all he’d attempted.

“He was always expendable.” He shrugged his shoulders before looking directly at his daughter.

*

The look in his eyes made her shudder. Greed and malice made them appear slick and greasy.

“You disgust me,” she said in a near whisper as she stepped fully around Aleksei.

“Careful,” Aleksei cautioned out of the corner of his mouth.

“Yes, child, be very careful what you say to me as I have the power to eliminate your sisters and your lover Mr. Graham with ease.” Smythe-Ward’s jowls jiggled as he huffed in an outraged breath.

The sight of the old, decrepit-looking man standing over the dead Warren Goolsby was so incongruous it caused her chills. How had an eighty-year-old man had the strength to drive a knife through the bone of Goolsby’s skull?

“Genetics daughter. Pure and simple genetics. As I’ve done with you, your sisters and your new friend. What did you call him? Aleksei? Yes well, as with you all, I simply attached new and improved links into my DNA chain thus genetically enhancing myself. It took me quite a while to perfect it, but I have the strength of someone sixty years my junior. Unfortunately, I have yet to perfect the aging-prevention gene, and I’m going downhill fast. That’s why I needed you here, darling. You see your blood holds the framework, the literal blueprint, to anti-aging. Not only are you more powerful than anything ever known, since you’ve hit puberty you only age at half the rate of the rest of the human race. Amazing isn’t it?”

“Oh, so you didn’t want me here for my power?” she asked, not even touching the whole “anti-aging” thing.

“Well, that too. You hold so many keys. You are the Eve of my creativity, and within you is housed the genetic blueprint for future generations of superhumans. And they will all be subject to me, Skylar. Imagine a world where I have created everyone, and they owe their very existence to me.” He sounded orgasmic at the prospect.

“Sounds fab-u-lous. There’s just one little bitty thing: You won’t live to make any more mini-Skys, so that whole homage thing? Never gonna happen.”

“Stop drawing energy. Look, Aleksei’s hair is all staticky. I can tell you’re drawing, now stop it,” he demanded in a voice full of fury.

“No, I’m going to finish what I started in New York a few years ago. I should’ve killed you then, but I just didn’t quite know how to get around your end stop.”

He shrugged lightly. “Are you telling me you do now?” he asked.

“Maybe I just don’t care what the results would be,” she told him coldly.

“But there are others I think who would care if you ceased to exist, hmmm?” He smugly informed her before pressing a button on what looked like an intercom system on the long boardroom table.

“Dempsey? Bring them in please.”

Peter Dempsey was here? I might be able to wipe all their asses out after all.

“Yes, he’s here,” Smythe-Ward answered her unvoiced question.

“Here they are, sir.” A small, wiry man entered first followed by one of the abominations she’d fought earlier.

Sebastian, his men, and her sisters, followed them. None of them had ties on their wrists. In fact, none of them were bound in any way. But they did not have their weapons, and it was the massive creatures surrounding them that kept them from making a move.

“Skylar? Save yourself. Don’t do this,”
Sebastian whispered in her mind.

“I told you to leave,” she snarled at him out loud, avoiding the link.

Sebastian went stock-still, his eyes went dark, and for a second she mourned the warmth she knew she’d never feel again. His anger was palpable, and she was given comfort only by the fact that perhaps that would help him get through the coming years when he thought of her betrayal.

“Skylar,”
Aleksei said quietly. It was admonishment.

“Keep your mouth shut. You should have stayed with your people also. You could have sent energy my way without being here. Now you’re all at risk.”

“I will shield myself, and the ones you hold dear. I can do nothing to help you destroy him, but I can protect the ones you love.”

“You’re strong enough to withstand my fury?”

“With your sisters’ help, yes.”

“Stop talking to one another in your minds,” Smythe-Ward screamed.

“Is that rude? I apologize.” Skylar began to advance toward the conference table.

“Tell me father, is this the Peter Dempsey who harmed Sasha Bennoit in Afghanistan? Is this the scum who perpetrated years of torture on an innocent woman, Talia Moore, I believe is her name? Did you know he also hurt two of your daughters? He would have raped and sold one into slavery had she not been stronger than him. The other he would have simply broken and left for dead.” As she spoke, she’d walked to stand directly in front of Dempsey, who now stood beside her father smiling benignly.

“You’ve heard of me? That’s wonderful,” Dempsey said and seemed genuinely happy that his heinous reputation had preceded him.

“As one hears of shit on the bottom of another’s shoes, I’ve heard of you.”

She was almost nose to chest with the bastard, and the room was in chaos. Windows were bursting, and chairs flew around. She didn’t worry about anything touching her family. Aleksei would shield them. Bits of glass began to pelt her face and caused several trails of blood to flow down it.

“You need to learn your place,” Dempsey whispered savagely.

“Tell me, are you the man to teach me?” she asked in a dead voice as she pushed reflections of his doom like spikes into his brain.

“More than man enough for the likes of a harlot such as you,” he nearly screamed.

He hadn’t liked the thoughts she had placed in his head, had he?

“That’s not what I’ve heard.”

His hand moved to strike her face.

“Skylar.” Sebastian’s voice was a terrible echo throughout the room even in the midst of the wind and debris pelting the walls and floors.

She felt the brush of Dempsey’s hand across her face and felt the sting as her lip split open from his blow. She even felt the blood trickling down her chin but remained in front of him. Her head snapped back, and when he glanced at her eyes and noticed her smile he stiffened in alarm. It was gratifying to see his fear as she watched him realize that she’d
allowed
the blow.

“Is that all you have? I must say for such a connoisseur of torture you aren’t very original are you?” Skylar rebuffed him and then stepped back an even pace before turning all of her fury on the man who’d hurt her sisters and almost destroyed Bleak’s sister.

She stopped the wind; chairs fell from midair. Her father stepped back several steps, as if aware that Dempsey was about to catch hell, and he wanted no part of it. She glanced at him. Her father gasped.

You’re next Daddy
, she thought, but first the offal.

Raising her hands she brought them together and with a scything motion cut downward through the air. Red moisture began to pool quickly from behind Dempsey’s trouser front.

“Red suits you, Mr. Dempsey,” she said in a voice as dead as her eyes.

“Noooo,” Dempsey screamed, “You bitch!”

“Tell me? However will you finish yourself now Dempsey? With no dick to get hard as you watch the torture of innocents, how will you reach completion?” Skylar murmured.

“Bitch! No. No. No. Dolan stop her,” Dempsey screamed.

“He won’t help you. Your first mistake was in trusting his progeny or him. Poor little Peter Dempsey. You know I’ve seen in your mind the horrible things you’ve done. I would almost prefer to let you live in a state of dickless wonder but again, I’ve been inside your head. You hurt my sisters in so many more ways than just the physical, and for that alone you die.”

Skylar made another motion, and Dempsey’s hands both lay severed on the floor. He was squealing like a pig now but made immobile by the hold she had on his mind.

“It won’t be long now, and you’ll bleed out. Unless the dogs in the room with us decide to feast first?” Sky taunted him.

She stepped closer to him and leaned over the chair he’d fallen into. Standing over him, she had but a moment’s remorse for the taking of his life. He was less than nothing, and his crimes were more than deserving of his punishment. Still it was a life, and she’d never murdered anyone in cold blood before. It would be good practice for her dad, she supposed.