Crossfire (Book 1) (The Omega Group) (7 page)

Mirissa rocked back with the impact of the bullet as it hit
her right bicep, but continued to thrust her arm forward to impale her
attacker. As he hit the ground, her blade found the space between his fourth
and fifth rib, and carried right through to his heart, ending his life
immediately.

Knowing that they had lost the element of surprise, Myrine
called out to the hostages in the room, “Follow me! We’re getting out of here.
Now!” and headed for the stairwell, trusting her daughter to cover their rear.
Speed was their only hope of escape, as a stampede of highly trained men would
surely be heading toward the sound of the gunshot.

As Myrine and Mirissa scooped up the rifles they had left at
the end of the hall earlier, the group burst through the door to the stairs,
and sprinted toward the lobby level. So far, so good, but their luck wouldn’t
hold forever. At the lowest level, Myrine paused briefly to quiet her
companions before cracking open the first floor door. The smoke in the lobby
area would be all but cleared by now, but the breeze created by the blown out
windows had only lessened it in the hallway slightly, and it would still
provide decent cover for their escape if they moved quickly.

Signaling to her group, they started down the long hallway
leading to the delivery door they had come in earlier. When they reached the
opening to the lobby, Myrine heard gasps from a few of her followers as the
horror of what had happened today truly set in, but like the professionals they
were, their speed didn’t falter.

With the delivery door only a few feet in front, Myrine
stopped dead in her tracks as two gunmen calmly walked out of one of the
offices on their right, with rifles aimed.

“Where’s your daughter?”

Myrine looked him in the eye and said, “She’s not here. She
went to get help.”

Without another word, the gunman raised his weapon and shot
the woman that was standing to Myrine’s right. She felt her anger boil over as
she watched Janice Campbell, an analyst that had been in her employ for almost
five years, fall dead to the floor.

“Where is she?” the same man asked again.

If looks could kill, the two men in front of her would have
suffered an agonizing death right then, but, unfortunately, that was a power
that Myrine did not possess. As she opened her mouth to tell another lie about
her daughter’s whereabouts, she heard Mirissa call out from a few feet behind
her.

“I’m here.”

A taunting grin crept over the man’s face as he waited for
Mirissa to join her mother. Once the two were side by side, each covered by one
of the men’s rifles, he spoke into his throat mic. “Team Leader this is Bravo
One. We have the targets secured”

Before he had a chance to listen to his leader’s response,
the air vent above their heads came crashing down, and with it, Ken and Jackie.
Ken took out one of the intruders by swinging his legs while still holding onto
the edge of the air vent, kicking him straight into Myrine’s blade. Jackie,
already standing on the floor, threw a straight punch at the back of the second
man’s neck, where his spine met the base of his skull. The nerve damage caused
by the sudden trauma to the spinal cord, though not fatal, succeeded in
disorienting the man long enough for her to grab his weapon, turn it on him,
and end his life the same way he had ended Janice Campbell’s only moments
before.

“Go, Barbie,” Mirissa said with an approving smirk.

With a last glance at Janice, Myrine once again filed her
feeling of loss away, and lead the group outside.

Sirens filled the air as police and fire emergency vehicles
poured into the street at the front of the building. Feeling the threat level
decline with the addition of local law enforcement, Myrine allowed herself a
moment to check on the wellbeing of her people.

“Is anyone injured?”

 As everyone shook their heads, Myrine turned her
attention to Mirissa. “Are you all right?” she asked. Her daughter was
frantically searching her right arm.

“I thought I’d been shot upstairs, but there’s nothing
there.”

“That was your protector. I’ll explain later. For now, we
need to lose these weapons and bring our rings back to standby mode.” Throwing
their weapons in a nearby dumpster, Myrine grabbed her daughter’s right hand,
closed her eyes, and brought both of their snakes back down to size, their
emerald encrusted heads once again perched on the crossed swords of each of
their rings.

Taking their time, so as to not attract any unwanted
attention, they made their way through the alleys between buildings, steering
clear of the main roads, until they had gotten several blocks away. From there,
it was easy enough for them to blend into the crowds of office workers roaming
the streets, the crowds that were blissfully unaware of the dangers that
surrounded them every day.

Myrine had a private word with Ken as they were heading down
Forsyth Street before gathering her group around her. “I’m going to take
Mirissa to Safe House Beta. You each know what you have to do. Stay on your
toes.”

After their group disbanded in the streets of Jacksonville,
Myrine needed to get her daughter out of town. She made a call on her cell
phone to secure a vehicle, a nondescript Ford Taurus, which they picked up in a
parking garage on Forsyth Street, then started on the road toward the safe
house.

They made one stop at a storage unit that Myrine had rented
years ago for just such an occasion as this. She grabbed a large duffel bag
from the back seat and opened the storage unit door.

Mirissa let out a low whistle at the sight of what lay
inside. There were racks covering two of the walls from floor to ceiling that
held an extensive collection of firearms.

The rack on the short back wall held rows of pistols and the
longer wall on the right held rifles. Quickly making their choices, they loaded
the weapons in the duffel bag, along with extra magazines and several boxes of
ammunition for each.

After taking one last look around, satisfied that she and
her daughter had what they needed, Myrine led Mirissa out of the storage unit
and hit the road for Jacksonville Beach, where Safe House Beta was located.

It was about a twenty-five mile drive, so Myrine wasn’t
surprised when Mirissa took the opportunity to try and get a few answers. “So,
you want to tell me what’s going on?”

“We’re under attack,” Myrine said absently as she smoothly
weaved in and out of traffic, staying within a few miles of the speed limit.

“I got that much. What I’d like to know is by whom and why?”

Myrine took a deep breath, unsure of how to begin.
“Kakodaemons aren’t the only threat out there, Mirissa. They are just the tip
of the iceberg.”

Mirissa sat in the passenger seat of the Ford Taurus waiting
for her mother to continue. Announcing that the Kakodaemons were only the tip
of the iceberg was quite a bombshell, yet she hadn’t made any attempt to expand
on the statement.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mirissa watched her mother
drive them to Jacksonville Beach. In the twelve years since she’d last seen
her, she hadn’t changed that much. Yes, she had a little gray hair in a few
spots, and there were minor wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, but for the
most part, she looked for all outward appearance like Mirissa remembered
her—beautiful. She was tall, about the same height as Mirissa had grown to,
slender and muscular but not masculine, and with the same long brown hair. Her
eyes appeared to be the only part of her that looked different. They were the
same dark hazel, encased in long dark lashes, but they had lost the sparkle
that Mirissa remembered seeing in them. Now they were the eyes of someone who’d
seen too much. Someone who had the weight of the world on her shoulders.

In all of the daydreams Mirissa had over the years about
being reunited with her mother, never had she imagined it would be like this.

“Is that really all you’re going to say?” Mirissa said as
she stared out the window.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart. It’s just…”

“Don’t call me that! You left us. You left
me!
”

Mirissa sat there, quietly fighting back the tears that
threatened to overrun her.
Sweetheart? Really?
She hadn’t seen or heard
from her mother in all these years and she wasn’t about to let loving pet names
be used. Not yet, anyway.

“There is so much that I want to tell you. So much that you
need to know. I just don’t know where to begin,” Myrine said in such a low
voice Mirissa had difficulty hearing her.

“Why not start at the beginning. Where did you go twelve
years ago, and why?”

Myrine got a faraway look in her eyes as though she was
remembering something she hadn’t thought of for a long time. “The night before
your piano recital I did what I normally did. I know you weren’t aware of it at
the time, but I’d been fighting Kakos for many years. I would patrol the hot
spots in and around Jacksonville and take them out, much like you’ve been doing
this last year.”

Mirissa wanted to ask how her mother knew anything about
what she’d been doing, but she stayed quiet. This information was too important
to her to risk interrupting.

“That night I came across a couple of what I thought were
Kakos. They were out in the open in a crowded area but didn’t make any attempt
to get a human secluded enough to drain their soul. I followed them for over an
hour before I realized that they were up to something else. Now, you have to
understand, sweet—Mirissa.” Myrine corrected herself before she caused another
outburst. “For over two thousand years, Kakos have had only one purpose. Kill
humans, and Amazons when possible, and steal their souls. So these two were
acting way out of the ordinary. It was like they were looking for something—or
someone. After watching them for almost two hours I finally decided to just
take them out and worry about their unusual behavior later. That’s when things
got weird. It took a while for them to put themselves in a place that had the
privacy I needed, but as soon as they did I went after them. The first one went
down easily, but I’d lost the element of surprise. When I looked at the other
one he just stood there, smiling at me, like he wasn’t worried at all. The next
thing I knew, he was gone.”

“You just let him go?” Mirissa asked.

“No. You don’t understand. He disappeared, right in front of
me. One minute he was there, the next he wasn’t. I’d never seen anything like
it. I didn’t even think it was possible.”

“So, you’re saying that Kakodaemons can vanish into thin
air?”

“No,” Myrine said, “I’m saying that he wasn’t a Kakodaemon.
He was something else.”

Mirissa didn’t know what to say. She’d only been at this for
a year so she was well aware that there was still a lot she didn’t know, but
surely Greco would have told her about other threats hanging out with the
Kakos. It didn’t make any sense. It also didn’t explain why her mother had left.

“Okay,” Mirissa started, “so, I get that you came up against
some unknown big bad guy, but you still haven’t told me why you left.”

“When I left you and your dad the next morning, the day of
your recital, I went to the office I used to rent. I never really needed an
office, but I wanted to keep that part of my life separate from you for as long
as I could. I called some of my Amazon sisters to see if any of them knew
anything about this new player, but none of them had ever come across anything
other than Kakos. So, I went to Tritonia to talk to Artemis. That’s when I
learned about your destiny.”

“What about my destiny?”

“Mirissa, you aren’t like the rest of us. You’re special.
You have powers that are going to make you a force to be reckoned with.” Myrine
smiled at her daughter for the first time since they’d gotten in the car.

“You’re wrong, Mom. I don’t have any powers.”

“Yes, my girl, you do. I don’t know how much your Guardian
has told you, obviously not much considering you still don’t know how to use your
ring properly, but you are most definitely special.”

Mirissa tried to digest all of this new information, but
once again, every new revelation led to more questions. “So, you left us
because I was different?”

“No, Mirissa. I left you because it was the only way to keep
you safe.” Myrine’s short-lived smile disappeared from her face. She looked at
her daughter and for the first time that day Mirissa saw the pain and
loneliness in her eyes. “The big bad guy, as you called him, is bigger and
badder than you can imagine—and he knows you’re out there. When I came across
him that night, he only knew that you would be born to the current Amazon
queen, but he didn’t know I was that queen, or that you had already been born,
when we met that night. I got lucky, but that luck wouldn’t hold forever. It
wouldn’t take him long to learn who I was, and then it would be a simple matter
of watching me until I led him straight to you. I couldn’t let that happen,
Mirissa, so I made the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make. I left
you and your dad so that no matter who was watching me, they’d never find out
about you.”

Mirissa’s head was spinning. For all these years she’d
thought her mother had abandoned her because she didn’t love her. Her father
had spent years trying, unsuccessfully, to convince her that it wasn’t her
fault. That she hadn’t done anything wrong. Now, her whole world was turned
upside down. Nothing was what she thought.

“Why bring me in now?” Mirissa asked.

“Because he knows who you are now.” Myrine kept her voice
even, but Mirissa could see real fear in her eyes
. This guy must be really
bad news.

“What does he want with me? Why am I so special?”

“He needs to get rid of you before you can fulfill your
destiny. You see, you are going to be the most powerful Amazon to ever walk the
earth. You’re going to lead us, all of us, into the battle that will decide the
fate of all mankind.”

Okay
, she thought.
No pressure there at all.

Suddenly, Mirissa had an even scarier thought.

“What about Dad? If this guy knows who I am then he must
know about Dad. I need to call him and warn him!” Mirissa was almost screaming
now.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. Ken has already gone to pick him
up. They should be on their way to the safe house now.