Unforgettable (Talented Saga #6) (20 page)

“
Yes, actually, it does,”
Victoria replied, golden eyes widening slightly.

If the visible reaction to my words
hadn’t been enough, the fact that Victoria neither chastised me for
failing to greet her properly nor called me “Agent Lyons” was
enough to know that she was shocked.

“
Okay…,” I prompted when
the councilwoman didn’t elaborate. “And?”

“
Pardon me,” Victoria
replied, shaking her head as if to clear a haze. “It’s just
that…never mind. You’re saying this is the location we’re looking
for?”

“
It is,” I said without
hesitation.

“
Very well,” Victoria
responded, regaining her composed façade. “Andrew’s Rock is not far
from your current location, a fifteen minute hover-flight, if that.
That will also make getting the strike teams into position much
easier on such notice. I will go ahead and finish making the
arrangements for tomorrow. Your cover identities will be forwarded
to all of your communicators shortly. Along with all the intel our
Cryptos have compiled thus far. Please be sure to frequently check
back for updates, though. They should be coming in through the
night. Oh, and please inform me when the other members of the
taskforce arrive.”

“
Understood,” I replied.
“Anything else?”

Glancing over my shoulder to where
Erik lay on the bed, I raised my eyebrows, silently asking him if
he had anything to add. He shook his head no.

“
Tell Erik I said good
job,” Victoria said, her tiny holographic smile genuine.

This drew a scoff from me, and I
glared down at her image.

“
Why would you just
assume
that it was Erik?
He—”

Too late. Victoria had disconnected
the call.

Erik chuckled. I scowled.

“
Would it kill her to give
me credit for
something,
besides screwing up?” I grumbled, tossing the
communicator onto the chaise lounge. “And stop laughing, it’s not
funny.”

“
Aww, come here.” Erik
gestured me over, holding one outstretched hand in my direction.
Pretending it was with great reluctance, I sat next to Erik on the
mattress and let him fold me into his arms. “She only gives you a
hard time because you give her a hard time. I think deep down, she
likes you. Maybe even admires you.”

With his cheek resting on top of my
head, Erik’s words were muffled by my hair.

“
Hardly,” I pouted. “It
wouldn’t be so bad if she didn’t worship the ground you walk on.
That’s just annoying.”

Erik stiffened and his mood shifted
from playful to serious. At first, I thought maybe he’d been pulled
back to Kenly. Or maybe Willa. Both scenarios were equally
sobering. But when I tested his mental barriers and found them
still down, I also found that his sharp turn had nothing to do with
Kenly or Willa. It was about my offhanded comment about Victoria’s
crush on him.

“
Hey, I’m just kidding,” I
said, twisting to look into Erik’s eyes. “I mean, she really does
like you a lot. But it doesn’t bother me. Everyone considers you my
better half, I’m used to bias.”

Erik laughed softly, but the worried
glint in his turquoise eyes never left.

“
It’s not that, Tals. Not
exactly. It’s just…forget it, it’s nothing. It’s not important
right now. Right now we need to rest, eat, and love each other like
tonight is our last together. Not necessarily in that
order.”

My glared lacked any real heat. I
wanted to tell Erik not to change the subject. I wanted to force
him to talk to me, to tell me what was wrong. But just as badly as
I wanted to know, Erik didn’t want me to. In a rare exercise of
restraint, I dropped the subject.

We did all of the things Erik
suggested, though not in the order he suggested them. We were
blissfully undisturbed until Frederick knocked, to let us know the
other members of the taskforce had arrived.

“
We have company, guys,”
Frederick called through the closed bedroom door.

“
Stay real still, maybe
he’ll go away,” Erik mumbled, warm breath caressing my
neck.

“
I’m not leaving until I
have both of you in tow. We have important intel to memorize,”
Frederick barked. “And dinner to eat.”

It was the last thing I wanted to do,
but I slipped into the role of the responsible half of our
pair.

“
It’s time to earn our
keep,” I teased, ignoring Erik’s advice and giving him a playful
shake.

“
I’m not going away,”
Frederick proclaimed, punctuating each word with a bang on the
door.

“
I hope he remembers this
the next time he and Henri are trying to squeeze in some quality
time,” Erik muttered, planting a quick kiss on my forehead before
dragging himself from our bed. To Frederick, he said, “Dude, we’re
coming.”

Five minutes later, dressed casually
in jeans and tee-shirts, Erik and I joined Frederick in the
hallway. On the walk downstairs, Frederick filled us in on the new
arrivals.

Victoria’s chosen agents weren’t my
favorites, but also not the worst of the lot. And at least I knew
them, since all five were stationed on Eden with the rest of
us.

Catherine Canary, a thirty-something
Telekinetic who’d been with UNITED since before her eighteenth
birthday, was a natural leader and someone I respected a great
deal. She’d been on a number of missions with my friends and me,
and was an all-around solid agent.

The same could not be said for Gina
Flores. Between her perpetually negative attitude and generally
unfriendly nature, she was not at the top of my list of new
friends. But, she was Janelle’s roommate on Eden, and the two got
along okay. If Janelle thought Gina wasn’t so bad, I supposed maybe
the other woman would warm up once I spent more time with
her.

Of the other three agents—Thom Phan,
Ronnie Bagrov, and Jay Matthews—I knew little beyond names and
Talents. Thom and Jay were Morphers, Ronnie a highly-skilled Light
Manipulator.

The dining room was crowded by the
time the three of us arrived. Henri and Penny had saved three seats
between them for Frederick, Erik, and me. We all said a quick,
cordial greeting before getting down to business.

Our respective false identities had
arrived ahead of schedule, as well as information about Andrew’s
Rock. Skipping over the boring stuff, like how the area got its
name and why that mattered, I studied the blueprint images of the
compound instead. The place was huge. Like a small city. And that
was just what we had on record. UNITED was trying to get some more
specs with infrared imaging since the blueprints were a half
century old.

My identity was that of a twenty-two
year-old woman named Reya Rivers It sounded like a weather lady’s
name, but she was apparently an entirely fictitious aspiring
actress. Reya was the alleged girlfriend of some young, extremely
wealthy software tycoon from the States named Gregory Bolt. Unlike
Reya, Gregory Bolt was very real and very reclusive. He’d been
invited to several of these auctions in the last five years, ever
since cementing his place in the power-players-of-the-world club by
netting a cool ten million in his first year as President and CEO
of Bolt Software.

Despite the numerous invites, Gregory
Bolt had never attended a single auction. His relationship status
was actually unknown, but Bolt was purported to have a thing for
tiny brunettes—a fact our Cryptos had learned by trolling the
gossip sites. Images of a tall, thin man with light hair, his face
obscured by everything from umbrellas to bizarre masks, always
accompanied by a woman who looked vaguely like me, were provided
along with the dossier of my fake life.

I just assumed that Erik would be
impersonating Gregory Bolt, but when I flipped to the last
electronic page, I found Frederick’s picture instead.

Weird.

“
Who are you
playing?”
I sent to Erik, even though he
was sitting right next to me. Our mental line of communication was
still open and I wanted to take full advantage.

“
Victoria assigned me to
one of the strike teams. So I guess I’m playing myself,”
he sent back, offering me his communicator so
that I could read the message Victoria sent him.

The council felt it best that Erik
stay in the shadows. If this farce went off without a hitch, then
nobody would recognize his face when UNITED paraded him before the
world as their poster boy for well-behaved Created.

As strategies went, it was a good one.
However, the odds that this mission wasn’t going to end in disaster
were slim. The Poachers were careful enough to code their
invitations, and only give them to certain people. All it would
take was for one of the real invitees whose identities UNITED was
borrowing to show up at the auction and we’d be blown. Not to
mention the concern that all of us had but no one was willing to
say out loud: our reactions to seeing Talented, our kind, being
sold into slavery. More accurately, my reaction, as head of the
mission.

Just the thought of such an
unspeakable act made my blood boil. I was doing a decent job of
holding my temper in check now, while removed from the situation.
But once I saw with my own eyes people I likely knew—one I
definitely knew—up for auction…loss of control was almost
certain.

I wondered if that was part of the
reason Victoria wanted Erik to remain outside. In general, he was
much better at controlling his emotions and reining in his temper
than I was. But even she had to notice that it was taking him a
great deal of effort lately. In an environment like the upcoming
auction, Erik might not be able to keep the cap on the rage he had
bottled up inside. And once he let the beast out, it would be
impossible to put him back in his cage.

“
I feel like I should buy
you an expensive necklace or something,” Frederick said from his
chair on the other side of Erik. “Don’t mistresses get expensive
jewelry?”

“
Where are we getting
costumes from?” Penny asked around a mouthful of pasta from my
right.

The food was fantastic, the sauce had
real meat and held none of the fishy aftertaste that the stuff on
the islands did. Still, most of us were just picking at our meal.
Penny and Brand were the only two actually eating.

I smiled at my best friend as she
speared a sausage meatball. Seeing her eat, and enjoy her food,
made me happy. It was a small thing, but it gave me hope. Maybe,
just maybe, Penny was starting to put the past behind her. To put
the torture she’d endured at Mac’s hands behind her.

“
The costumes, as you say,
are already here,” Chaz or Viktor said, appearing out of nowhere
like a ghost.

The two UNITED agents looked nothing
alike, but for some reason, I just couldn’t keep them straight in
my head. The one who’d crept up behind us was the one who hadn’t
spoken at all earlier. They were both freaky.

“
There are tuxedos and
gowns in storage for your use. I believe Councilwoman Walburton
also has jewelry you all may wear,” the UNITED guy replied. He
grabbed a dinner plate from the side serving table and began
loading noodles and meat sauce onto the china until I wondered if
his arm was getting tired from the effort of holding the weighty
plate.

“
Thanks, Viktor,” Brand
said.

I made a mental note that the shorter
of the two men, the one with a shaved head and startlingly clear
blue eyes, was Viktor.

My communicator beeped, signaling an
incoming message—an update from UNITED with the infrared images of
Andrew’s Rock.

“
Are you seeing this,
Tals?”
Erik sent.

“
I sure am,”
I replied.

The new images revealed something that
was not part of the original blueprints: an amphitheater. It was
huge, stretching five or six stories high. Since the footage was
infrared, the detail was lacking. I could make out shapes and was
able to understand the general layout, but the finer points were
too obscure.

“
What about us, mate?”
Riley asked, drawing everyone’s attention to the trio of non-UNITED
agents.

They were huddled together at one end
of the table, Willa folded into herself both literally and
figuratively. I didn’t need to read her mind to know she was still
channeling Kenly’s emotions. As badly as I wanted a peek, I also
knew nothing good would come of looking. There was nothing more to
do for Kenly tonight, and feeling her pain would only mean both of
us spent the night suffering. Though there was certainly a part of
me that felt like it would almost be like keeping her company,
Kenly needed me to be on point tomorrow more than she needed
companionship. Especially since she’d have no sense of comfort from
it.

“
What do you mean?” Brand
asked, confused.

“
I want to help. I thought
that’s why we were brought here.” Riley gestured to his two
companions. “So who am I playing?”

In a rare show of deference, Brand
looked to me for the answer. Victoria had said we could use the
civilians, but hadn’t specified how.