The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (23 page)

At first, she couldn’t remember what happened. But then it all came flooding back: the assault on the office, the creature that had attacked her at the end. She’d passed out, probably from shock.

“How many?” she asked.

Wallace shook his head.

“Four dead, seven wounded, the rest terrified,” he said. “Some of the survivors may not come back to work. It’s one thing to study the supernatural; it’s another to have it threaten your life.”

Sara closed her eyes. Four dead. “Who?” she asked.

Wallace rattled off names, but they were ones Sara didn’t know well. She’d only been there two months, and she’d spent much of her time holed up in her office, researching pretenders. She wished now she’d gotten to know her colleagues better.

“It would have been worse if Olson hadn’t sent out an email this afternoon, detailing ways to fight shirkens and stoneskins,” Wallace said. “McDermott managed to kill the stoneskin in my office. Olson and a few on her team took down another one. And somebody killed the shirken, thank God.”

“That was me,” Sara said. “I stabbed it in the eye.”

“You read the email,” Wallace said.

Sara let out a short, unhappy laugh.

“I never saw the email,” she said.

“Then how did you know what to do?”

“I heard Alex’s voice in my mind, Wallace. He’s the one who told me to do that.”

She wasn’t sure if she expected an expression of disbelief, an insistence that she must have imagined it. But Wallace was the wrong man for that. Instead, he nodded his head as if he wasn’t surprised.

“If he’s as powerful as Rakev believes him to be, that makes sense. He could tell you were in danger and reached out.”

Sara breathed a sigh of relief.

“So he’s still alive,” she said.

She reached out with her mind then, silently asking the question that was burned into her brain:
Where are you, Alex? Where is he keeping you?
But there was no response.

“The other . . .
thing
in there,” she said. “What was that?”

“Nobody saw it, though I’m guessing you had something to do with its departure. The police found a sizable hole in the window, but no body or objects down below.”

Sara described what she’d seen, shuddering at the memory. Wallace’s eyes grew wide.

“Never heard of something like that,” he said. “I’ll have Olson start researching it right away.”

“I think whatever it was made the fog.”

“Probably right. We think there was something psychoactive in the mist, mind-altering. Or maybe it altered the physical plane on which we existed. It warped our perceptions, made it difficult to see and hear. The whole place seemed a lot bigger as well.”

“I used your silver letter opener on it,” she said. “It worked remarkably well. Almost too well.”

Wallace arched an eyebrow.

“Then the creature is related to the Fae,” he said. “Some of their kind hate iron, others hate silver. Guess we should feel fortunate this one was in the latter camp.”

“What happened to me?” she asked. “I was hurt, but I’m not sure why I passed out.”

“The doc says it was exhaustion, combined with acute stress and the injury to your leg,” Wallace said. “You banged it up pretty well. How’s it feel, by the way?”

She looked down at her leg, relieved to find it wasn’t in a splint. She flexed her foot and felt a little soreness, but it didn’t appear to be badly hurt.

“Better.”

Wallace nodded his head.

“What about the police?” she asked. “What do they think?”

“They think the same people that kidnapped Alex returned to kill you,” Wallace said. “Your Detective Sharpe—who has been near your side nearly every minute since you passed out, but had to go in to the station a little while ago—helped to convince them, but it wasn’t very hard.”

“What about the stoneskins and the shirken? What did the police say about that?”

“Remarkably little,” Wallace said. “Which makes me believe the police are not nearly as dumb as I assumed. Some of them, at least, must know what’s going on.”

“Ken has hinted at that,” Sara said. “But he doesn’t know how widely it’s known.”

“Wide enough, I suspect,” Wallace said. “The police have ordered a guard on you at all times in case Rakev’s monsters come back.”

Sara shook his head.

“Why did he attack?” she asked. “They have what they want.”

Wallace leaned back in his hospital chair and shifted uncomfortably as he ran his hands over his bald head.

“The knife,” he said after a moment.

“We don’t have it. And we think Rakev does.”

“Yes, but somehow they must have found out we were looking into it,” Wallace said. “They found out you and Ken had been out to the Hillwood museum, and came looking for you. I called the museum director and told her she might want to take an emergency vacation just in case Rakev’s creatures go after her next.”

“Why bother to attack us at all?” Sara asked.

Wallace shook his head.

“Whatever Rakev is up to, my guess is he’s going to act soon,” Wallace said. “They don’t want anybody interfering with that, and I suspect having someone poking around asking questions about that knife tripped a few alarm bells.”

“Which means the knife is key to what’s happening,” Sara said. “Alex is pointing us in the right direction.”

Wallace nodded.

“He is, but we still haven’t put it all together,” he said. “Glen and Alice are at one of our backup locations doing more research. They think they may have a lead on something. We can’t risk going back to our headquarters until we can make sure an attack like that can never happen again.”

“And Soren? Has anybody heard from him?” Sara asked.

She tried not to let the bitterness seep into her voice, but it did anyway. “No,” Wallace said. “I know what you’re thinking—”

“Shouldn’t you be thinking it too?” Sara asked. “If he’s on our side, where the fuck is he? We could have used a monster of our own back there. If we had one, four people might still be alive.”

“I’m a paranoid man, but I just don’t see the point,” Wallace said. “If he’d wanted to take Alex, he could have done so any time in the past eight years. You didn’t know what he was. Why wait until now?”

“He could be working with Rakev.”

“He could be, but I have trouble believing that.”

“You don’t believe it because he saved your son. You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment.”

“Pot, kettle,” Wallace replied. “And what are your emotions? I know you want revenge. You’d like Soren to be the bad guy.”

“Because he
is
the bad guy,” Sara insisted. “Maybe Glen really is just another pawn, but it’s all a game to Soren. Trust me. You keep fooling yourself into thinking he’s not a monster, but you didn’t see him in the forest. He ripped through those acolytes like they were tissue paper. He’s a killer, Wallace.”

Wallace leaned forward and met her gaze.

“Have it your way. Either way, I don’t know where Chase is, and neither does his assistant. He’s been trying to reach him. I do have one piece of good news. I don’t want to get your hopes up, but even though we paid a heavy price tonight, we did get something out of it.”

“What?” Sara asked, hoping it was something tangible. They were running out of time.

“The police caught a man in the parking garage of our building,” Wallace said. “They identified him already. His name is Gregory Ivanovich. They suspect he was the one who brought the monsters to our door. They think he works for Rakev.”

Sara could scarcely believe it. For the first time since her son had been taken, she felt some measure of hope.

“And if he works for Rakev—” she said.

“He might know where Alex is,” Wallace said.

Ron watched as Carla broke into a nearby car, a beat-up Pontiac Firebird.

She did it with such ease, for a moment he wondered if she was secretly a car thief instead of a first grade teacher. But no, he’d been to her class.

When the door popped open, Carla slid behind the wheel and leaned out the window to look at him.

“You coming, honey?”

He felt a thrill and got into the passenger seat. He almost couldn’t believe what was happening. This was just supposed to be a normal date night, and now they’d made a major scene in a restaurant and were engaging in grand theft auto.

Carla did something to get the car started—he couldn’t even see what—and they roared down the road. He kept thinking of what he should say to her. Should he apologize? Now that his anger had cooled, he wasn’t so sure she had set him up. It was Sam’s fault. Sam had been trying to turn her against him, run away with her. His hands turned into fists at the thought.

“What’s your name?” Carla asked.

Ron gave her a confused look. Something seemed ever-so-slightly off about her tonight. She wasn’t normally so tolerant of his “anger issues,” as she called them, and he didn’t even know she could break into cars.

“You know my name,” he said. “You okay, honey?”

She flashed him a smile, and his heart melted a bit. That’s all he wanted. She was his girl.

“Just humor me, sugar,” she said.

She said it in her sweetest tone, leaning on the delightful twang that was pure southwestern Virginia.

His name. He was Ron Chase. No, that wasn’t right. His name was Soren Davis. That, too, felt off. He shook his head. Once again, there was this nagging feeling that he’d forgotten something important. Finally, he landed on a name that felt right.

“Soren Chase,” Ron said. “That’s my name.”

Carla looked over briefly in surprise.

“Well, now,” she said. “That is very interesting. I figured you would have said your real name—your true name—but maybe that’ll come.”

His true name was Falk. Ron remembered that, but it seemed important not to say it to this woman. He couldn’t remember why.

But Ron now remembered what he was. He was a pretender, a copy of Ron Davis, rather than the real thing. Somehow Carla knew that—and wasn’t freaking out.

“How do you know what I am?” he asked.

But as soon as he asked the question, a surge of memories came back. He remembered his training at Great Falls Park, and then sitting in the restaurant with Friday. He knew what must have happened. This wasn’t the real Carla with him. “Friday?” he asked.

“That’s me.”

Ron felt a thrill at the way she looked at him. He knew he wasn’t the actual Ron, but it was hard to untie the knot of his identity and separate himself from it. He had only a vague sense of Soren Chase, and knew even less about Falk, but Ron Davis was straightforward.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Nowhere,” she said. “Away. I don’t know.”

They came to a town that Ron remembered as Middleburg, and Carla turned off the main road. She drove until she found a graveyard near a church, and edged the car through the narrow stone gate. She stopped the car and turned it off.

“There now,” she said, turning toward him. “We should be out of the way of the police. I’d hate to have to become a cop tonight.”

She paused and licked her lips. “Now do you know why I said controlling aussenseiter emotions is so hard?”

He did. He felt a lingering fury at Sam.

“Sam is trying to take you away from me,” Ron said. “And you wanted him to. You wanted him.”

Friday shook her head.

“No, sugar, you got it all wrong,” she said. “Carla thinks Sam is a pompous asshole. She’s just being nice to him because she likes Phoebe, and wants to be better friends with her.”

Ron was shocked. Carla seemed to genuinely like Sam. She’d talked about how smart he was, and she laughed at all of his jokes.

Ron surprised himself by suddenly bursting into tears. Friday slid over the seat and took him into her arms as he sobbed against her shoulder.

“I thought you were going to leave me,” he said.

He felt embarrassed and ashamed. The last time he’d cried like this was when his mother died. But he didn’t seem able to stop the flood of tears.

“I will never leave you,” Friday said.

Ron knew this wasn’t real. He wasn’t Ron and she wasn’t Carla. But he felt grateful all the same. He put his arms around her and squeezed her tightly.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I overreacted in the restaurant.”

“Honey, please,” she said. “You did great for your first time out. Of all the emotions we deal with, jealousy is one of the hardest to control. I know I make it seem easy to do this, but it’s not. Every target is a risk. Every one is a chance to lose yourself. That’s the point, really. It’s the thrill of taking a new identity. But sometimes losing yourself makes you go a little cuckoo.”

She twirled her finger around in the universal sign for craziness and laughed. Ron laughed with her. Friday smiled at him again.

“That’s right,” she said. “You should be celebrating. This is a big moment for you. I know you said your name is Soren Chase, but he’s gone. You’re free of him—finally. Free to be Ron Davis or whomever else you want.”

Ron thought about that. That nagging feeling still pulled on him. There was a job he had to do, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He did feel more relaxed, as if a weight had been lifted from him.

And holding Friday in his arms made him feel better. He looked up and met her eyes. It was dark, but he could still see how lovely they were. He reached up to take off her glasses. As he did so, they seemed to melt away back into her face. He’d forgotten about that.

She leaned in and kissed him hard. Normally, Carla was reserved, cautious, letting Ron make the first move. But she had fire in her tonight. She opened her mouth, caressing his tongue with hers. Her kiss tasted like raspberries and wine.

She pulled away and moved so that she straddled him. He slid his hand under her skirt, sliding up her thigh. Ron knew she wasn’t the real Carla, but he didn’t give a damn. The sadness and anger had faded away, giving rise to a more powerful emotion—lust.

He slid his hand up to grip her ass, pulling her down into the seat so she could feel how much he wanted her. She kissed him again, and his blood raced. He kissed her neck, biting it softly.

“There are so many things I want to tell you,” she breathed in his ear. “I had to wait until you didn’t hate us anymore. I could see it in how you looked at me. You were repulsed. But that’s all gone now, isn’t it? You’re free; you’re free. Oh sugar, it’s good times ahead.”