Rogue Alliance (27 page)

             
A slight creaking sound gave notice that the front door had been opened.
Waiting for the next telling sound she held her breath. It was silent for too long. Slowly she opened the bathroom door and peeked out. The apartment was empty and the front door stood wide open. Had Brennan gone out or
had someone come in?

             
She saw her gun on Brennan’s bedside table. Why in the hell hadn’t he held on to it?
Slipping out, she tip-toed toward the night stand.

             
“Shyla!
”

             
Shyla heard Brennan shout her name and turned just in time to see
the intruder launch through the front door. Instinct had her sprawl to the floor. The sound of a gun-shot rang through the air and echoed within the walls.

             
From somewhere in the dark corner of the room behind the door, Brennan leapt out and jumped the attacker from behind.
There were only three swift and violent movements before the man was on the floor and bleeding from his throat where Brennan had ripped out his jugular with his teeth.

             
Nothing about what Shyla had just seen
seemed real. It all happened impossibly fast and ended with a gruesome murder.

             
Shock quickly gave way to fear. She scrambled to her knees and crawled to the bedside table, grabbing her gun.

             
“Stay back, Brennan,” she shouted, p
ointing it straight a
t Brennan’s chest.

             
He stared at her, his bare chest heaving, blood dripping from his mouth.

             
She should have seen rage or ugliness in him. But his eyes were sad and haunted as he looked at her. It was confusing. All of it was so confusing. She ran to the body and felt for a pulse at the wrist, knowing there would be none.

             
Looking up,
Brennan was still standing above the body
watching.

             
“What
in
the hell just happened here?” she demanded
,
standing upright.

             
Brennan turned away.

             
She stepped over the body and grabbed his arm.

             
“No way, you aren’t going to get away with the silence anymore. No
t after this. You start talking
now or I’m calling the cops.”

             
Brennan jerked his arm away.

             
“There’s nothing to tell. This guy tried to kill us and I killed him in self-defense. You came in with a gun. You obviously intended to do the same.”

             
“Yeah, with a gun. Not with my teeth. I mean, how is that even possible? You
ripped his
goddamn throat out. Who
are you?”

             
“I should be asking you the same thing.”

             
“I’m not letting this go. Who or what are you, Brennan?”

             
His shoulders slumped
as if defeated. He wiped a hand across
his mouth.

             
“I don’t know,” he said,
“y
our guess is as good as mine.”

             
“What does that mean?”

             
“It means that I’
m an experiment. I escaped…
w
ell…
Victor helped me escape from a genetic research institute. I’d been there s
ince I was about sixteen. All
memories from my life before are gone. I know nothing about where I came from or who I was
before
. All I kno
w is what I’ve become
.”

             
Shyla shook her head.

             
“This sounds crazy,” she said, b
ut somewhere in the back of her mind she knew he was telling the truth.

             
“Crazy, pathological, amoral; those are all
good descriptions of Dr. Shinto. He’s the
doctor who made me this way. He could explain it perfectly:
a gene slice here, micro-chip there, injections of hormones and any other thing you could imagine. All to create a super-human, he said.

             
“I crave blood. In fact, I need it to survive. I will die without it. Daily blood transfusions are what keep my craving down, but
even then, years of training have
made the yearning for taking a live kill nearly unbearable at times.”

             
“Trai
ning,” Shyly asked breathlessly, “w
hat kind of training?”

             
It was morbid, but she had to know the details.

             
Brennan turned and shuffled
across the floor.

             
“Y
ou really don’t want to know.”

             
Shyla looked down at the dead body they both seemed oblivious to and thought that this had to be the weirdest night of her life. And coming from someone who had stabbed her own dad to death
:
that said a lot.

             
“But I do want to know. I…I have to know. We all have a past
,
Brennan. It’s not your fault that you were someone’s guinea pig.
I know what its like to be at the mercy of someone more powerful than you.”

             
She said it quietly, and her breathing was shallow as an old fear crept up.

             
“I know about your dad and mom.”

             
“The whole town does. It’s not a secret.”

             
The room was filled with deafening silence. They stared across the room over the dead body of their attacker.

             
“What now?” Shyla asked.

             
“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

             
“How did you know he was coming?”

             
Brennan grabbed a shirt out of the dresser.

             
“One of the big financial contributors to the institute hired a hi
t man to take me and Victor out,” he explained,
“and t
his is him. I’m not sure if they’ll give up or send in another to finish the job.”

             
“You have to turn yourself in, Brennan.”

             
He gave a soft chuckle.

             
“I can’t ever go back
to living that way;
behind bars. I’ll die first.”

             
A pang struck her to the core.
She’d never heard anything so raw, so brutal. There was no way that she would be able to do anything which would lead to his incarceration. It went against all of her training and ethical codes, but she just couldn’t do it.
Rules were made to be broken.

             
She sighed and tucked her gun into the back of her jeans.

             
“
I have more questions
,” she said,
“
as I’m sure you have a few for me. But for now, I’m going to leave and go home. You handle this as you see fit. I was never here, you hear me? Not to anyone, especially Victor.”

             
She could see by the look on his face that he was doubtful.
He would have no idea how suddenly fierce
her
urge to protect him was.

             
“Why?”

             
“Because it won’t make sense to anyone; how his throat got ripped out, why I showed up, why I have a gun…”

             
“Why do you have a gun, Shyla?
And why are you out here?
”

             
She wanted to tell the truth. It knocked on the forefront of her mind.

             
“
I can’t sleep at night w
ithout one. I still have dreams,
”
she said, knowing
he would
remember their talk at the park, “a
nd I was hoping to see Victor. I haven’t seen him since the arrest and didn’t want to wait until our date tomorrow.”

             
“Yeah, I understand dreams. But as you can see, Victor’s not here. He went into town. But I won’t tell him you were here.”

             
She nodded and
,
when there was nothing left to say, she turned to leave.

             
“Shy?”

             
It
was odd to hear a nickname roll off his lips in such odd circumstances.

             
“Yes?”

             
“Be careful.”

             
She knew he was referring to her relationship with Victor. A shiver ran up her spine.

             
“Okay. Will you be around tomorrow?
Victor and I are supposed to get together.
”

             
“No. I’ll be out of town on business.”

             
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you around.”

             
She walked out the door
and down the steps feeling like she was walking through a dream. Nothing about what had just occurred could have been real. She was hallucinating or dreaming. But she knew she wasn’t
.

             
Why was she protecting Brennan? Why was he protecting her?
It was obvious he wasn’t buying her game anymore. Showing up in the middle of the night with a gun had sealed that deal.

             
She should stay away and forget about the case, about Victor, about Brennan.

             
There was no way she could do any of those things.

TWENTY-EIGHT

             
Brennan
was numb as he walked into the clearing and looked up at the dark, vast sky.
The stars were mostly hidden behind a thin layer of clouds which had ro
lled in.
He had already buried the body in the fi
eld behind the house just past
the tree-line.

             
As he neared the house, Victor pulled into the drive. Brennan guessed it must have been after two in the morning.
Turning on the hose, Brennan
rinsed off the shovel. It was cool out, but his body was heated from exertion.
The night’s activities and peaks of adrenaline were
wearing off. A fatigue like no
other he’d ever experienced was beginning to set in. This was not the life he’d imagined for himself.
He felt like screaming.

             
Shyla had seen. She’d witnessed his cruelty, his wrongness. Then she’d
walked out the door, asking him to keep her presence that night
a
secret. If she was willing to keep the horror of what she’d seen between them in order to keep his silence, then she obviously had something much more substantial to hide. At least that’s how he saw it.

             
That thought gave him no comfort. They were now tied to one another in bonded silence. It felt dangerous and vulnerable. He didn’t want to go to Los Angeles in the morning and uncover the reality.

             
The crunch of footsteps across the gravel lane told him that Victor had spotted him and was heading his way.

             
“What
are you doing out here in the middle of the night, Brennan?”

             
He could hear the drink in his voice but Victor appeared to still be fairly lucid.

             
“
Burying the guy
wh
o tried to kill me tonight,” he said, tone
bland and lifeless.

             
“No shit?
The hit man.
Well…where’d you bury him?”

             
Brennan stood up straight
. Every muscle in his body was stiff. He pointed toward the mountain.

             
“Just beyond the tree-line. The spot doesn’t even look disturbed. No one will ever notice it.”