Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) (30 page)

She stared at the flat emptiness of his eyes. Her ears roared. That nightmare was coming due. She’d tried so hard to outrun it, but it was here.

She had no idea if she could open Lydia’s safe at all. Caro had urged the woman to change her training image sequence to something new and private. It was sloppy and dangerous to leave an interface coach with potential access to goods and secrets that others would kill to have. Changing the sequence protected everyone.

But Lydia had been reluctant. What a freaking idiot.

“They say you killed a colleague of mine,” the guy said. “With a boxcutter. Hard to believe that a dumb cow like you could pull that off. Did you wait until he was fucking you? That makes some men stupid, but not me.”

He bent down and kissed her, clamping his hand over her nose and thrusting his tongue into her mouth. It was muscular and slimy and huge. He slid it to the opening of her throat. No air.

She’d almost blacked out when he lifted his face.

“You know what? I can think when I fuck,” he confided. “When Olund’s done with you, I’ll show you.” His grin showed his eyeteeth before he attacked with another vile, smothering kiss. This time, he grabbed her crotch, groping and squeezing. Her muffled shriek was lost against his mouth as his long tongue thrust into her mouth.

She bit down on his tongue with frantic force and clawed wildly at his face.

He yelled and tried to pull away. She bit down harder. Hot, coppery blood flooded her mouth. He whacked the side of her head and freed himself, but she kept on moving. She slid off the slippery plastic and onto the floor. Sprang to her feet.

He dove after her with a shout. She bolted through the communicating rooms, bare feet pounding. Two men in the front room turned startled faces toward her as she ran at them, screaming. One of them stumbled back. The other tackled her.

She staggered at the contact. Hit the floor hard, the guy landing on top of her. Gasping for breath, screaming and clawing and squirming. The other guy piled on, too.

Too many of them. Too much rank, stinking dead weight. She was immobilized, but she was possessed. She could not stop shrieking and twisting.

Another blow to her head stunned her. Her vision swam back into focus to see the big, thick-faced guy who had kicked her down the driveway rubbing his jaw. Angry.

“What the fuck was that about?” he demanded. “Why’d you hit me? Asshole!”

“I told you, dipshit. She’s not supposed to be harmed. Olund’s orders.” The man with the goatee again. “That kick would have knocked out all her fucking teeth!”

“Don’t think she’ll need teeth where she’s going,” the third man observed.

“That’s not our call. Shut up, you asswipe moron. Olund wants her intact for whatever he has planned, and if she looks like hamburger when he gets here, he’ll kill us. Here, help me. Get her legs. And hang on tight. This bitch can kick.”

She started screaming and flailing again as the three of them hauled her back into the bedroom and flung her onto the bed. This time, they jerked her arms up and immediately fastened them to the iron bedframe with a zip tie, yanked brutally tight.

The three men stood there, panting. The goateed man had flecks of blood on his lips, his cheeks, his chin. Her fingernails had left angry stripes down his cheeks, and his eyelid was bloody and reddened. As their eyes met, his lips stretched in a horrifying smile, showing bloodied teeth. He moved forward, holding up his knife.

She couldn’t shrink back, just cringed away as he slid it into the fabric of her layered T-shirts and sliced through necklines with a twist and flick of the blade.

He then tore the shirts open all the way down, wrenching them wide.

All three men stared at her bared breasts. That fixed, hot, mindless stare.

The knife tip was cold, tracing and then piercing her skin at the collarbone. Then again, and again. She clenched her body, and made no sound as the knifetip dug in. A trickle of hot blood made its way slowly down her chest. Then another.

“You scratched me,” the guy said softly. “Now you have to bleed. Whore.”

The big one licked his heavy lips until they gleamed wetly. “Nice tits,” he said. “Can we, uh . . .”

“No,” the goateed man said. “Olund said no damage.”

“It wouldn’t damage her.” The big guy’s voice was sulky. “Not much, anyhow. Besides, you’re cutting her. Fucking hypocrite.”

“Maybe after, when Olund’s done. If there’s anything left.” He dipped his finger in the blood pooling in her navel. “I’ve seen that guy work people over,” he told Caro. “He knows all about pain. And he’s got something special planned just for you.” He wiped the blood off his mouth with his sleeve. “I just hope he lets me watch.”

Chapter 22

Noah peered through the trees, teeth gritted. He had an arsenal of guns and he practiced regularly. Even with extensive mods, marksmanship was a perishable skill. Not one he could let slide, considering Obsidian’s looming shadow over their lives.

All his effort and paranoia did him no goddamn good at all right now. He’d been too out of his head when he left his house to think to to bring a weapon.

He wanted to kick his own ass, he was so disgusted.

Ransacking the SUV for anything useful turned up only a tire iron and a coil of climbing rope. Sisko and Zade had raced to equip themselves after his frantic call, but they still hadn’t showed.

One single unarmed man. That was Caro’s whole cavalry.
Fuck.

The sig of the guy circling the house showed him to be the human equivalent of an attack dog. An inflamed red-orange glow in the area of the belly and groin pulsed like a lava lamp, and a dull yellow haze hung around his head. His chest area was blank. No energy at all, just a cold dark sinkhole.

He’d seen sigs like that before on some of the Obsidian researchers. Their colors were even worse. Like pus or gangrene. For some reason, that project had attracted brain-eating sociopaths.

Mark’s sig had gotten just as ugly by the time they’d parted company. Midlands had changed Mark. It had killed his humanity.

Men with sigs like that could do unspeakable things to Caro before Sisko and Zade caught up with him. The urgency that assailed him wouldn’t let him wait for back-up.

He slid the tire iron into the sleeve of his leather jacket and edged closer. He’d have to thin them out. Get his hands on a gun. There were two men in the front room. He read their thermals through the wall. Caro’s would be instantly recognizable if he saw it. He itched to identify how many of them there were, what room she was in.

But not yet. Better to get rid of some guys in the front. Improve his chances before he got anywhere near Caro.

He studied the man pacing not thirty feet from him. Tall, massive. His face was thick, his eyes dull. Not a take-charge type. He might hesitate before shooting Noah in the throat, for fear of fucking up.

He’d hold back, if only for an instant. All Noah needed.

Cut plastic cuffs lay on the ground behind one of their vehicles. They had pulled her out of the trunk of the car and cut off her bonds.

Seething rage got the better of him for a moment. He fought it down. He could not let rage run the show. His enhancements gave him an edge, but he was alone, unarmed, outnumbered. No margin for error.

Go.
He stumbled drunkenly out into the roadway, flapping a roadmap as he strode toward the guard, slurring his words.

“Ah, exshcuse me! Hey, sir? I, uh, crashed my car a few miles back, and walked here, can you believe it? No offense, but this place is the ass end of nowhere. I can’t get any bars on my cell and I was wondering if you—”

“Fuck off, dickwad,” the guy snarled.

Noah staggered closer. “Dude! Don’t get uptight! I’m not gonna rob you, I’m just—whoa! You don’t need . . . Holy shit, dude, put that fucking thing down!”

The guard pulled his gun. Noah shrank back, angling his body so that the other man wouldn’t see the tire iron slide out.

With a blow too fast to see, he whipped it down and shattered the man’s arm.

The gun dropped. The guy stared at his arm, startled. It dangled, floppy and useless. His eyes rolled to the whites as he sucked in air—

Noah whacked the tire iron across his throat, crushing his windpipe.

The man dropped, gasping. He made a choked, wet sound, lips turning blue.

Not his lucky day. Shouldn’t run with a pack that laid hands on Noah’s woman. Bad call. Die alone and gasping, shitbag.

He grabbed the guy by the ankles, dragged his twitching bulk behind the Jeep. Jerked up the man’s pant leg, took the knife in his boot sheath. Scooped up the guy’s Glock. Two more in that front room to deal with. One stationary, one moving.

He ran back, snatched up the coil of rope, checked the tree limbs over their parked Jeep. He clambered swiftly on top of it, the rope around his shoulder.

His leap from the Jeep’s roof had all the power of Braxton’s enhanced muscle gene cocktail behind it. He caught a branch several feet above the Jeep and nearer to the building. He swung there, fingers scraped by the rough bark, his body dangling over the overgrown path. The smell of pine pitch stung his nose. The branch bent dangerously under his weight as he crawled higher into the sticky boughs, seeking a clear drop onto the path. He uncoiled the rope.

The knot didn’t need any enhancement to remember. Just a hangman’s noose.

He held himself still until the branches stop swishing. Patience was a bitch, with Caro inside, suffering and afraid. He shut that thought down when it threatened to unseat his mind. After several agonizingly slow minutes, the screen door squeaked as it rasped wide. A tall, skinny guy in black leather with buzz-cut black hair peered out.

“Matt!” he bawled. “Where the fuck are you? You’re supposed to check in!”

Matt made no sound, being too busy dying behind the Jeep. The man in the doorway cursed. Someone behind him spoke in a sharp questioning voice.

“How the fuck do I know? He’s not answering,” Buzz-cut complained, gesturing with a gun as he emerged from the house and peered through the early morning gloom from the top of the. “Matt! Where the fuck are you?”

He got no answer. Noah, peering down through the pine needles, holding the end of the rope he’d draped over a strong branch, saw the man’s sig shift colors. It shrank, went from greenish to snot gray. The guy was unnerved.

He clattered down the steps and onto the path, no longer calling out, the gun kept close to his body in case he had to shoot fast. Preoccupied and antsy, he didn’t look up—until the noose thudded down onto his shoulders, around his neck.

Noah dropped himself down as a counterweight, yanking the guy up off his feet.

The man dangled and danced as Noah’s weight pulled him higher. They swung together. Holding the rope with one hand, Noah stared into the guy’s purpling face as he swayed there helplessly, clawing at his throat.

“I hate this shit, man,” Noah said to him softly. “But your number’s up.”

The guy twisted, groping desperately for a hidden knife. Noah saw it flash, seized the man’s wrist and torqued it until bones splintered.

The knife thudded to the ground.

It would take too long for the guy to suffocate on his own. Noah didn’t have the time to wait. He hoisted himself up, let the guy drop a couple of feet further down, wrapped his legs around Buzzcut’s neck, and finished him off with a lethal squeeze.

The man’s neck snapped with a sickening crunch. Noah let him hang for a moment just to be sure. The wind sighed. The rope that Buzz-cut dangled upon creaked.

Noah secured the end with a strong knot and dropped to the ground. He snatched up the knife. Sharp. Notched. Good.

The thermal splotch of the last guy in the front room was approaching the closed door. Noah dove for the open space under the building and scrambled behind the temporary stairs.

The door rasped open again.

Noah peered out through the space below the top step. Black leather boots appeared in Noah’s field of vision. They stopped a few steps down. Noah could see the back of the man’s thighs.

Creak . . . creak . . .
the hanged man swayed in the morning breeze.

Noah felt the moment that horrified realization exploded in the guy’s mind as he dragged in breath to yell for help.

Just before Noah stabbed through the open space under the stair and sank the notched blade deep into the guy’s hamstring. The man lurched forward with a gurgling cry.

Noah slithered out and jumped him, knocking him to the ground. The leg wound had crippled him, spurting blood and sapping his strength. Noah snapped his bull neck after less than a minute of pitched wrestling.

He left the guy where he lay, dropped the knife into the thigh pocket on his cargo pants, and slid noiselessly into the house, gun in hand.

Light filtered from a corridor that led from the open door off the front room. A male voice droned from it. He crept closer, bracing himself for whatever hit his eyes.

Caro lay on a plastic-wrapped bed, her shirt sliced open, arms stretched up, ziptied. The man he’d heard talking was leaning over her.

Caro saw him. Her sudden eye movement betrayed him.

Noah jerked back as the guy dropped down behind the bed into a crouch and opened fire, right over Caro’s naked torso. Noah dropped to the floor and aimed beneath the bed, for his feet.

Two shots. A hoarse yell. He’d scored a hit. Caro screamed.

“Get out, hands up, or she dies,” the guy said. “On three. One . . . two . . .”

“Don’t hurt her,” Noah broke in. “Olund needs her alive to open that safe. He’ll kill you if you hurt her. Count on it.” He held his breath, waiting.

The silence was broken only by sobbing gasps from Caro.

“Get out with your hands up, motherfucker,” her captor said. “I don’t give a shit what Olund wants right now. I swear, I will kill her, if you fuck with me.”

“Don’t do it,” Noah said. “Don’t shoot me, either.”

He crawled forward. There was rustling and grunting from the direction of the bed, which made his heart thud. But Caro was alive. So far. That much he knew.

The guy was cursing, hissing through his teeth. Caro made a sharp sound. A cut-off cry of pain.