Sacrifice (10 page)

“Will, come on.” James grabbed his arm and pulled him down the hall.

His feet moved like they were stuck in molasses. He knew he was mixed up in some crazy shit, but this proved it even more.

“Will!” James gave him a jerk.

He stumbled and recovered, glancing back at Alex, but he was gone.

James stopped next to a guard and pulled a gun out of his holster.

Swiping his hand over his mouth, Will surveyed the hall. “What the hell happened here?”

“This was your world, Will. Not mine.” James leaned over another guard and grabbed another gun, then put it in Will’s hand. He rummaged around the bodies, pulling out ammunition and stuffing it in his pockets. “You’re white as a sheet. You need to get your shit together. We may have to fight our way out of here.”

The question was, who would they have to fight? He could fight just about anything with guns. But this? Will shook his head, taking several deep breaths. It was one thing to hear a voice in his head and fantasize about a woman he’d seen for ten minutes. But this…

James searched several more bodies, finding a high-powered rifle on one. He looped it over his shoulder. “Okay, I say we take the staircase and try to find a car to get away.”

Will nodded, still struggling to get up to speed. “Yeah.” He nodded, sucking in a deep breath. “Sounds like a plan.”

They entered the stairwell and moved up the stairs in silence, Will having to rest a couple of times to catch his breath. When they reached the first floor, they stopped at the door. Will peered out the small window into the lobby.

“There’re bodies here too.”

“I suspect there’re bodies everywhere,” James whispered.

Will suspected James was right but refused to admit it, swallowing his rising anxiety. The fact that he was so unnerved only fueled the undercurrent of panic.

“There’s a parking lot in the back,” James said, sliding back the rack on his gun. “I say we steal the keys off a guard out there and borrow his car.”

“How do you know there’s a parking lot in back?” Will narrowed his eyes.

James straightened his shoulders. “What exactly are you accusing me of? I’m in this ass-deep shit because of you and your girlfriend, and you’re now pinning some kind of blame on me? What the fuck, Will?”

Will heaved a breath. “I’m sorry.” Rubbing his forehead, he tried to pull himself together. He was paranoid. James’s life was in danger too, and he was helping Will escape. Given Will’s current mental state, he wasn’t so sure how well he would have fared on his own.

James relaxed. “I happen to know about the parking lot from when we broke in here a week ago.”

“So that really happened? I hear I stole a plane.”

James snorted. “You were always such a drama queen.”

“I’m gonna need a bigger tiara.” Joking soothed his apprehension.

Glancing out the window again, James grabbed for the doorknob. “We’ll enter the lobby and if the coast is clear, we’ll turn left and head out the back door. The compound has a circular drive. The buildings are all at one end of an oval. The guard house at the exit is at the other end.”

Will nodded and focused on James’s words. “I remember the security checkpoint. It seemed pretty inadequate.”

“I suspect they hadn’t seen much action until you hit ’em.” James smirked. “Over and over again. You ready?”

Will nodded.

James studied him, the worry in his eyes telling Will that he didn’t believe him. James pressed his lips together. “Okay, let’s do it.”

Will opened the door and James slipped out first, his gun raised as he looked out the front doors and down the hallway. He turned to Will and motioned him out.

Exiting the stairwell, Will’s instincts kicked in. James reached into the pocket of a dead guard. Five bodies added to the twelve downstairs, no marks or sign of trauma. They all looked like they had fainted and fallen to the ground.

James had said this was Will’s world, yet James seemed more unaffected than Will. James had to have been part of it to accept everything going on around them. With a glance, James motioned down the hall before he took off.

Will followed behind, covering the front door. They burst outside.

The sun had begun to rise, casting a red glow on the horizon that threw an eerie pall over the half-full parking lot.

A car chirped and James ran for the driver’s door. Will twisted around, surveying the area for guards before he climbed into the car. The compound was quiet, with no signs of life.

Because everyone was dead.

A chill crept up his spine and he shook it off. He’d seen plenty of dead men before. It wasn’t something he wanted a Boy Scout badge for, but it was a fact of life for a Marine in the middle of action. The bodies in war were often bloodied and ripped to shreds. At least these bodies were clean. In theory, the neater crime scene should be easier to stomach, but it only reinforced to Will the reality that he was out of his element.

James started the car and drove around the back of the buildings.

“You have a plan for once we get out of here?” Will asked.

“Nope.”

They drove up the circular drive to the guardhouse, finding two bodies lying on the sidewalk next to the small building. The gate was up.

“What the hell did Alex do to them?”

James shrugged and pulled onto the highway. “Who knows? Although if Emma had done it, they’d be piles of ash.”

Will sucked in his breath as a fresh wave of anxiety hit him. “So she does have powers?”

James hesitated. “Yeah.”

“What is she?”

Gripping the steering wheel with both hands, James tensed. “That’s an interesting question, and even more interesting is that I never once heard you ask that question before you lost your memory. Before, it was all about protecting and defending her and…yeah.” He cast a glance at Will. “You were trying to get answers, which was the whole reason you broke into the compound in the first place, but I never heard you put it that way.”

Will latched on to every word, trying to piece his life together. “You still didn’t answer my question. What is she?”

“I don’t know. You were trying to find out, part of the reason you stole the book. But as far as I know, you never found the answer.”

“She wouldn’t tell me?”

“She didn’t know herself. She’d never shown any type of powers until she met you.”

Will took another breath. “How did I meet her?”

James gave him a hard stare. “You were never totally forthcoming with all the details, but I know that she was your big job. The Vinco Potentia hired you to bring her to them.”

“Wait. Who?”

“Kramer works for the Vinco Potentia, a secret political group that Senator Philip Warren is the head of.”

“Why would they want her?”

“She was part of a prophecy. She was supposed to have a baby that had powers they planned to exploit.”

“But you said she had powers. Wouldn’t they want her for those?”

“They did after they found out she had them. Of course, they were scared shitless of her after they realized what she could do. But your purpose was to deliver her to them so they could make one of their members the Chosen One. They figured one of their guys would get the mark and have the power. Double the power, double the fun.”

“So did one of them become this Chosen One?”

“No, you did.”

Will’s heart skipped a beat.

“The Chosen One got a mark, like a tattoo or a brand.”

“On my arm. It was on my arm.”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Kramer.” Will sighed, rubbing his eyes. “So did I have powers too?”

“No. You said you could talk to her in your head when she was really scared, but other than that it was just an obsessive desire to protect her. That was the Chosen One’s purpose—to protect the queen.”

“She’s a queen?”

“That’s what the prophecy calls her, although you were never sure if that was literal or not.”

A queen. This was insane. But if she had supernatural powers and he really could hear her in his dreams, that meant that the voice in his head could have been real. But who was it? “Who’s Jake?”

“Her son.”

“So where is he now?”

“Last I knew, Alex Warren had him. Right before Kramer showed up to capture Emma, we’d tracked Alex to Montana. Not only were you trying to get more information about what Emma might be, you were also trying to recover her five-year-old son.”

“Why would Alex want him?”

“Because he has powers of his own. He can see the future.”

“Shit.” If he hadn’t already been exposed to everything else, he wasn’t sure he could believe all of this. “Wait,”—he braced his hand on the dashboard—“we have to go back. If Alex has Jake, we need to get him back.”

James shook his head. “No fucking way. We are
not
going back there. Besides, I’m fairly certain that Alex doesn’t have him anymore. They kept asking me if I knew where Jake was. Before this, Kramer knew that Alex had him.”

“Then Alex lost him or gave him to someone else.”

“So it appears.”

“Then who has him now?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe Emma has him back.”

Will knew that wasn’t true, judging from her cries for Jake in his dreams. “So now what?”

“Now?” James raised his eyebrows. “Now, we try to put our lives back together.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We have to find Emma.”

James snorted. “We most certainly do
not
have to find Emma. We need to stay the fuck away from Emma. You claimed you loved her, but she was a manipulative bitch who tricked you into becoming part of all of this mess. She almost got you killed several times and she definitely gifted you with some powerful enemies. The best thing that happened to you was losing your memories of her. I have no idea how that happened—more supernatural mumbo-jumbo shit, I’m sure—but we’ll take it as a sign that your job is done and you’re free of her.”

Giving Emma up was the last thing he could do. “Why do you say she manipulated me?”

“Think about it. When have you ever fallen in love with a woman? Messed around? Sure. You even had some steady girlfriends in the past. But head-over-heels in love? Never. So what are the chances you’re going to fall hopelessly in love in less than a few weeks with someone you’re hired to transport?”

Will wasn’t sure he wanted to know where this was headed.

“You’re branded with a fucking magical mark by a woman with magical powers and you just happen to fall in love with her? She’s cast a spell on you, Will.”

Will shook his head. “There’s no such thing as magical spells. That’s insane.”

“No. It’s not. She possesses power you can’t even dream of. She can use mind control. She can create massive explosions. She’s killed countless people, Will. Countless.”

“That doesn’t mean that she made me fall in love with her.”

“She freely admitted that the mark made you feel compelled to protect her. If she branded you with that, what’s to stop her from making you love her? Wouldn’t that be in her best interest? Wouldn’t you want to protect her even more if you thought you loved her?”

Will’s stomach twisted. What he felt wasn’t real. Or was it? “I dreamed of her.”

“What?”

“Not only did I hear her crying when I slept, calling out for me and Jake, but when you woke me up because of the alarms, I was dreaming of her. It was real, like she was really there.” He turned his head to James. “She was surprised to see me alive. She was happy to see me.”

“What did she want?”

He gave his head a shake. “Nothing. She just wanted to be with me.”

James remained silent for several seconds. “That might have been real.”

Will nearly collapsed with relief.

“But you said she cried for you in the other dreams? You think she’s being held captive?”

His defenses went up. “Yeah.”

“What if she needs you to save her? What if she visited you so you would search for her?”

“She didn’t ask me to save her, James. She said she thought I was dead and was happy to see me.”

“Yeah, of course she was. Because she needs you to save her.”

Will shook his head. “No. I don’t think—”

James tapped the steering wheel with his thumb then pulled the car to the side of the road. “We need the book.”

“What book?”

“The book you stole from the compound. The book you thought had answers. We need to find the book and figure out how to free you.”

Will wasn’t so sure he wanted to be freed. But he wanted answers and he also wanted to find her, James be damned. “So where’s the book?”

“Last time I saw it was in Montana.”

Leaning back into the seat, Will’s eyes sunk closed. “And where are we now?”

“South Dakota.”

“Do you have any money on you, Daddy Warbucks? How are we going to pay for this little field trip?”

James shoved Will’s shoulder and laughed. “Oh, ye of little faith.” His hand slipped into his pocket and pulled out a wallet. “Those guards back at that compound don’t need these anymore.”

***

When Emma opened her eyes, she found Raphael sitting in a chair next to the window. Her heart skipped a beat as she sat up.

His elbows rested on the chair arms, his fingers laced and under his chin. Dark circles underscored his eyes. He sighed when he saw her move and lowered his hands to grip the chair arms.

Emma’s first reaction was to jump out of bed and make him leave. But his glazed expression made it obvious he was hung over. After last night, provoking him seemed a bad idea. Instead, she froze, waiting to see what he wanted.

His eyes bore into hers. “I’m sorry for my behavior last night. I was drunk and obviously out of control.”

While his apology was surprising, it also angered her. “It couldn’t wait until breakfast? I sit down to eat a bagel and you sip your coffee murmuring ‘sorry about terrorizing you last night.’ Why are you in my room watching me sleep?”

He rubbed his face with his hands. “After I calmed down, I realized I’d made you take several sleeping pills. I wanted to make sure you didn’t stop breathing.”

“Wow. Am I supposed to thank you for that?”