Shadow Falling (The Scorpius Syndrome #2) (5 page)

Two seconds inside the apartment and the room seemed warmer. The smell of calla lilies, her scent, already was seeping into the air. The woman wrung her hands together, so nervous she was making him uncomfortable. “Vinnie? You’re safe here.”

What a fucking lie. She wasn’t safe . . . because of him.

She nodded. “I just hope I can help out a little.” Her blue eyes darkened as she looked at the bare countertops. “You don’t have any pictures anywhere.”

“No.” He shrugged. “I was on a mission halfway around the world when Scorpius hit and haven’t been home since.”

“Home?” she asked.

He breathed out. “Wyoming. I grew up in the mountains before entering the service.”

She smiled. “You’re a cowboy?”

The smile shot through him like fine whiskey and put his muscles on alert. His groin hardened. “I’m no cowboy.” He chuckled. “We did own a small ranch, though. Also, our mom owned a small restaurant in an even smaller town. We served a lot of ranchers.” From ten years old, he’d known how to sling hash. Sometimes he missed those days.

“Do you still have family there?” she asked, her body finally relaxing.

He didn’t have time to share with her. The less she knew about him, the better. Yet the hope in her eyes did him in. “No. Our father died in the service when we were young, and my sister and I were raised by our mom. Great lady.” To
this day, his heart hurt at losing her. “Cervical cancer took her when I was twenty and Moe was sixteen.”

Poor Maureen. She’d gotten so lost.

“Moe is your sister?” Vinnie asked.

“She was,” Raze said, his pulse quickening. He had to get out of there and stop sharing with the shrink. While she might be vulnerable, pure intelligence shone in her stunning eyes. “I have to go meet Jax and will be back later for my stuff.” Almost running, he shot out the door and closed it behind him, taking several deep breaths. A mission. That’s all she was. Just another mission.

The second he turned her over to Grey, he’d forget all about her. Just like any mission.

Liar. Even now, as he stormed back down the hallway, he knew he was a damn liar. He’d never forget Vinnie Wellington. Taking the steps down two at a time, he launched into the vestibule just as Jax emerged from his offices, gun in hand.

Jax lifted a dark eyebrow. A scar cut under the left side of his rugged jaw, showing he’d beaten death more than once and would more than likely do it again. He’d changed into worn jeans and a black shirt, stretched tight over solid muscle. “You okay?”

“Fine.” Raze reached for the gun at the back of his waist and checked to make sure the safety was off. “Ready to roll.”

Jax studied him with deep brown eyes, as if trying to see inside his head.

Raze stared back, accustomed to the Vanguard leader’s scrutiny. Of course they didn’t trust each other. This deadly new world made for odd allies, and for the moment they could cover each other’s backs. If, or rather when, Jax discovered Raze’s true mission, they’d be instant enemies.

The thought charged into Raze’s gut like an ax handle he’d taken to the ribs one time years ago. It’d been so long
since he belonged anywhere, and Vanguard was a good place. As good as possible these days anyway.

Jax turned to look up the stairway, his movements quick and graceful. “She still having nightmares?”

“Yes.”

“She tell you why Atherton wanted her so badly?” Jax slid that hard gaze back onto Raze.

“Nope. We’re not girlfriends, Jax.” Raze pivoted to open the outside door.

Jax may have muttered
asshole
behind his back, but Raze didn’t give a shit. He was a helluvalot worse than an asshole.

“She was with President Atherton a long time, Raze,” Jax said.

“Yeah, but she’s not working with him. She wakes up screaming his name in terror,” Raze snapped. “You can trust her, Mercury.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Jax retorted easily. “Especially a former shrink who can read us all with a glance. If she does anything to harm Vanguard, I’m taking it out on both of you, and I hate the idea of harming a woman, so I’ll probably kill you instead.”

“You could try,” Raze said evenly.

Jax kept moving forward. “It’d be a helluva fight, Shadow. But you gotta know, in this time and this place, I apparently have more to lose than you do.”

“Right.” Yet that wasn’t exactly true. “You have trust issues. Maybe Vinnie can help you work on those.”

“Asshole.” Jax didn’t bother to mutter this time.

The Vanguard headquarters opened up to a former parking lot, now empty, that reached the long chain-link fence and a large gate. Downed vehicles protected them on the other side, while across the deserted road, a three-story brick building still stood.

“You figure out how to get rid of that damn building
yet?” Raze asked as Jax followed him into the early dawn light.

“Yeah. C-4 or a bunch of dynamite. If you find any, hand it over,” Jax all but growled as they made it across the parking lot.

Right. If he found C-4, he’d save it to defend himself from Jax’s attack when it came. Vinnie was under Jax’s protection, and once Raze took her, Jax would fight hard and without mercy to get her back—whether he trusted her or not. “I would assume all the C-4 and dynamite has been looted or secured.” But who knew? They’d found weirder stuff in innocent-looking suburban homes.

“Nah. There’s more out there somewhere. We just need to find it tomorrow when we go scouting.” Jax whistled and the gate rolled open. “We have a briefing with Vinnie after lunch today to discuss President Atherton and what she knows about his organization, motives, and next moves. She had better be of value or she’s out of headquarters. For now, I need you to walk the perimeter with me to look for holes in the fence and weak points. I have an itch between my shoulder blades—I think an attack is coming.”

Raze nodded. “Copy that.” Oh, an attack was coming, but it was from the inside. From him.

Vinnie tried
to remember what lecturing felt like. Before Scorpius, she’d given lectures all over the country to law enforcement organizations when she wasn’t hunting serial killers. She could talk to these people. A scratched whiteboard waited at her back, while some of the most dangerous people still alive sat in front of her on folded chairs.

Jax Mercury looked just as deadly in the soft afternoon light as he had in the morning. Shaggy black hair, hard brown eyes, and sharp Latino features. Lynne Harmony sat next to him, cultured and educated, her gaze intense and curious. Blue from her famous heart showed through her T-shirt in an electric glow. The second she’d entered the room, Jax had put her safely between him and the door.

What would it be like to have somebody so intent on protecting her? So damn determined? Vinnie felt a small spurt of jealousy that she quickly quashed.

Tace, the medic, sat next to her, while Sami, a pretty
brunette with sparkling eyes, kicked back on his right. Raze leaned against the side wall as if preparing for an attack.

Did he ever sit?

Of course, he was right between Vinnie and any threat, whether he’d intended to place himself there or not.

“You ready?” Jax asked quietly. His gaze was shuttered, his body on alert.

One of her gifts, one she’d honed with training, was reading body language as well as digging into subtext. Jax didn’t know her, didn’t like her, and wasn’t going to trust her.

If he had any clue how crazy she was, he’d throw her right out.

“I’m ready.” She nodded and tried to ignore the sight of her stepmother sitting behind Jax. Lucinda had married Vinnie’s father when Vinnie was thirteen, and they’d had a fairly decent relationship until Lucinda had succumbed completely to schizophrenia a few years after Vinnie’s dad had died. Regardless, Lucinda had died years ago and wasn’t present in Vanguard territory. Nope. Not at all. And ghosts didn’t exist. So Vinnie needed to get a grip on her hallucinating brain somehow.

They were on the first floor of Vanguard headquarters, in Jax’s offices, where a large conference room was surrounded by lockers holding weapons.

“Okay.” Jax scrubbed a hand down his face. “Lynne has educated us about Scorpius and the bacterium’s effect on the brain and body, so we can skip any more information there. I understand that sociopaths and serial killers might have different brains than normal people. For now, I need you to give us a brief lesson on the way sociopaths and serial killers think before we move on to discussing President Atherton.”

Vinnie swallowed. The Vanguard leader wanted her to distill seven years of higher education and five years in the field into an hour briefing? “No problem.” She reached for
a blue marker to twirl in her hands. “Simply put, sociopaths don’t feel anything, especially empathy. They can fake emotions, and well, but they don’t really
feel
them.”

Her stepmother nodded vigorously. Today her blond hair was streaked with purple and dangling elephant tusk earrings hung from her ears.

Vinnie kept her gaze on the real people and not her new hallucination. “Serial killers range from the disorganized kind who just want to harm or kill to the brilliant, calculating kind who live for the game of hunting people.”

Raze crossed his arms and settled his back against the wall. “It’s impossible to tell one until they act, right?”

“Correct. Before Scorpius we looked at nature and nurture. What was their nature, genetic makeup, and so on, in addition to how they were raised. Were they abused?” She settled into knowledge she still held. “Even though Scorpius changes the brain and has created killers out of people who might never have killed, we still need to look at background and behavior in order to figure out predators.”

Lynne nodded. “We have to wait until people snap.”

“No.” Vinnie shook her head. “People actually very rarely just snap. There are always warning signs. Behaviors to watch. Anger, acting out, careful planning, and so on. The problem is, often those things are muted or hidden until something bad happens, and then we see the signs.”

“But some Rippers are obviously nuts,” Jax said.

“Yes. The bacterium changed not only the physical aspects of the human brain, but the way neurons fire and so on. Heck, we don’t really know how the infection changed parts of the brain we’ve never understood. Not all sociopaths are serial killers, though.”

“But Rippers are serial killers, right?” Jax asked.

Man, she hated that nickname for the killers. Jack the Ripper shouldn’t live on in infamy. Yet it was too late to
change. “Yes. The common name for serial killers these days is ‘Ripper.’”

“Go on,” Jax ordered.

She breathed in and then out to calm her heart. “Serial killers can be organized, disorganized, or a mixture. The disorganized ones are the people running naked in the street and biting their victims or shooting guns wildly.” She sighed. “Keep in mind that Scorpius strips the brain and helps to create sociopaths. Again, not all sociopaths turn into killers.”

“For now I’m just worried about the ones who do,” Jax said slowly.

“Okay,” Lynne said. “Why do they kill? I mean, are they all hearing voices in their heads?”

Vinnie coughed. “No. There are many reasons. Some killers have visions or hear voices from God, some are hedonistic, some are on a mission to rid the earth of certain people, often prostitutes, and some killers just need the power of controlling others. These reasons often overlap.”

“Can they be cured?” Raze asked.

Vinnie shrugged. “The prevailing thought is that they cannot be cured. But we’ve never dealt with the situation of a bacteria stripping brains and helping to create these killers. Who knows?”

Lucinda nodded wildly.

She wasn’t there. The woman did not exist. Vinnie kept herself from looking at her very dead stepmother.

Jax ground his fist into his eye. “The headaches from Scorpius probably don’t help.”

“No,” Vinnie said.

He dropped his hand to the table. “Let’s move on to the president. Bret Atherton is a brilliant and organized killer.”

“Absolutely.” Vinnie nodded.

Lynne Harmony blanched. “He’s convinced he’s doing the right thing by hunting me. And you,” she said, eyeing Vinnie. “Thus he’s on a mission?”

Vinnie nodded. “A mission combined with the need for
power and control. You and I both escaped him, and he can’t let that happen. Even though he has no empathy, he has a hell of an ego. He’ll come for us both.” Lynne had dated Bret Atherton before he’d turned into a Ripper; Vinnie, on the other hand, hadn’t known him until she’d been taken by him after he’d already succumbed.

“Can he be manipulated or controlled?” Jax asked quietly.

Lynne cut him a shocked look.

Jax kept his gaze on Vinnie. “He’s evil and he’s the enemy now, but somebody has to lead the country, and he’s good at it. He’s working to bring the branches of the military under one umbrella, and we need that. The devil you know . . .”