Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (7 page)

“No.” Jessie tried to run back, but Ree had her arm again, like her arm was a fucking leash to him. She jerked and twisted to break free. Another agent took her other arm. Together, he and Ree dragged her back on her heels.

A walkie-talkie squawked from somewhere. A disconnected voice responded. “Roger that.” Background noise while Jessie stared at the smoke, wondering if any of it belonged to Wertz.

Her guardian.

A person she had let down.

The one who had saved her life and died after an argument she would never get to apologize for.

Tears blurred her vision, turning the billowing smoke into an impressionistic nightmare. A collaboration between Monet and Dali.

Tires squealed behind her. A door rolled open. The agents pulled her into a van and buckled her into a backseat.

The Agency always had an escape plan.

The door slammed shut. Jessie’s stomach rolled when the van took off, again squealing its tires on the concrete street. One that looked like all the others in this place. Perfect camouflage for a safe house—unless you go out to a club and expose yourself to the enemy because you wanted to rebel without considering the consequences.

The van turned, putting the looming black cloud out of Jessie’s line of sight. Jessie put her hands over her face and wept.

Ree sat next to her and she felt his hand on her shoulder.

She shook it away. She didn’t deserve comfort.

I did this. I killed Wertz.

Chapter Thirteen

B
ACK IN HUMAN FORM,
E
LKA
washed the last of Kenny’s blood off of herself in his shower. His body and head remained in the living room where they had fallen. The carpet had soaked up his blood in little time. Short of tearing it up, there was no way to hide the stains.

With the water beating down on her, Elka leaned her head against the shower tiles. Damn it, why had he forced her to kill him?

He didn’t. He dropped the knife after you changed. You could have scared him off and left without harming him.

She pounded the tiles with the heel of her fist.

She had wanted to kill him. Needed to. From the moment she woke up to the rage, someone’s death had been inevitable. But she was better than this. More careful. Kenny and his twisted, impatient lust had ruined everything.

She no longer felt pity toward him. She was glad he was dead. That didn’t, however, change the fact that she had a job ahead of her. In broad daylight, disposing of his body would prove difficult. Scrubbing the evidence, impossible. This left her with one option. The one she had wanted to avoid, but that she had known she would have to choose eventually.

It always came to this.

Her tears blended with the water pouring over her. She wiped her face. Double-checked for any remaining blood, then turned off the spray. She dried herself with one of Kenny’s towels stored in a cupboard under the bathroom sink, then dropped the towel on the floor. She wasn’t worried about leaving DNA evidence. A mortal forensics technician wouldn’t know what to make of what she left behind.

There were other hunters besides mortal law enforcement, though. Hunters who knew how to look for signs she could not erase. The only way to keep them off her trail was to avoid bringing attention to her acts. She would fail any attempt at that here.

Elka dressed back in her Chuggers uniform, the feel of the synthetic fabric especially abrasive after she had spent time in her natural form, in her natural skin, the touch of her mane along the back of her neck, the warmth of her white hair across her flanks.

She returned to the living room to survey the gore to make certain she couldn’t sufficiently eliminate any trace. The artery in Kenny’s neck had stopped pumping blood, but the pool left under his headless body had soaked the carpet so thoroughly the nap had flattened like the hair on a wet dog. Probably had soaked through clear to the floorboards by now.

His head had wedged between the floor and wall not far from the entrance to the kitchen. One eyelid had stuck open, making it look like he was winking at her. Ragged flaps of flesh hung from his throat with the look of torn leather helped along by the browning blood.

The air stank with the blood’s signature metallic scent.

Elka saw little hope of salvaging the scene. Even if she waited till nighttime to remove the body, the blood would never come out no matter how hard she scrubbed. And waiting until night would increase her chances of discovery as every minute passed.

“Pisser.”

She had no choice.

Once again she would have to disappear, create a whole new life, start from scratch.

Run, as her people had for as long as their history.

Like prey.

Chapter Fourteen

W
HAT’S HAPPENED WITH US
?

Jessie sat in the backseat of the small jet, contemplating this question. She would never get a chance to answer it for Wertz. And never mind all the questions she had about what had happened back there.

The jet’s engine sounded like a low hum, almost soothing like white noise. A half-empty bottle of water sat on the table in front of her, ripples quivering on the water’s surface as the jet hit some minor turbulence. Across the table sat Ree. He kept glancing at her. He would open his mouth as if to say something, then clam up and pretend he hadn’t looked at her at all.

Eight pairs of seats with tables between them lined either side of the jet’s interior. The four agents who had escaped from the safe house with her, and the one who had picked them up in the van, occupied some of these seats. Two sat together, while the remaining three sat alone, their expressions solemn, eyes glazed over while they looked inside themselves. Jessie knew what they were doing because she was doing the same.

What’s happened with us?

That question would haunt her forever.

What
had
happened?

They used to be so close. He had treated her like his own daughter, did his best to step in for Mom and Dad—leaning more toward Dad with his overprotective ways. Hell, only six months ago everything had seemed fine. But as Jessie had come closer and closer to her eighteenth birthday, something inside her had changed. A bit of her old rebellious streak snaked its way back into her. The pressure of fulfilling a prophecy that looked impossible after three years of steady work and so little to show for it became crushing, suffocating.

There was no way she could eliminate all the supernaturals on the mortal plane. She would have to live to a thousand—and maybe not even then.

She sighed and looked out the circular window to her right. The night sky acted as a black backdrop to her translucent reflection. Black circles under her eyes. Hair with split ends. Black lipstick smudged so that her mouth looked like a bruise smack in the middle of her face. What a wreck.

Her stomach lurching, she turned away so she didn’t have to look at that frightening girl looking back at her.

Not a girl anymore.

A woman.

And what difference did that make?

“Jessie.” Ree was looking at her, finally with the courage to speak up. Not that he could say anything that could make Jessie feel better. He shouldn’t have bothered trying, but Jessie knew he probably thought it was his responsibility or some stupid shit like that.

Jessie waved a hand. “Don’t.”

“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Seriously?” She huffed and crossed her arms, leaned back in her seat.

“Yes, seriously. Our whole mission revolves around you. It’s my duty to protect you.”

Jessie closed her eyes. If she had to listen to any more of this, she’d puke. She could already taste the bile. “I don’t want to hear about your
duty
.” She spat the last word like a curse word.

Ree rubbed his toffee colored face with his hands. When he dropped his hands, he leaned forward, an intense look in his eyes. “I’m not using the right words. I ain’t got kids, and the most I’ve dealt with you is on the field. I’m not sure how to talk to you. Sue me.”

“First off,” Jessie said, “I’m not a kid. Second, I don’t want a pep talk or a ‘things happen for a reason’ speech. I don’t have the stomach for bullshit at the moment.”

“I’m not trying to bullshit you. I’m trying to…”

His gaze dropped to the bottle of water on the table between them. The tense look in his eyes turned to soft contemplation.

An extra punch of turbulence shook the plane, startling Jessie as if someone had snuck up behind her and shouted
Boo
. Her heartbeat kicked up a notch.

She laughed to herself. Once upon a time, she had giant vamp wings. She flew through the sky with nothing between her and the wind except her clothing. She had never thought to be scared then. Now, inside an airplane, a little turbulence put a fright in her.

She chalked it up to the aftershock of adrenaline from the attack at the safe house.

“Thanks,” Ree said, lip curled.

“What?”

“For laughing at me when I’m trying to make an honest effort here.”

His face was pinched. He really did look hurt. Jessie flushed. She didn’t have to be such a bitch. It wasn’t Ree’s fault Wertz had been killed. No, that weight sat squarely on her shoulders.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t laughing at you.”

He hitched a shoulder. “We’re all upset. Those fuckers killed one of the best damn commanders I ever worked for. I don’t care that he was a gnome.”

Sometimes Jessie forgot Wertz was a supernatural. His presence always dwarfed his physical size. As it turned out, he was even bigger than she had realized. Which raised one of the questions that had bothered her since the attack.

“How…back at the house…what the hell was that?”

“You mean Wertz blocking that weapon’s fire?”

Jessie nodded.

One corner of Ree’s mouth quirked up. “He’s a gnome.”

“No fucking duh. But how could he stand there and not get hurt?”

His eyes narrowed. “You really don’t know?”

She held up her hands and gave him her best
duh
face. Ree seemed to need a lot of
duhs
.

“Right.” He seemed to mull over his next words. “Where did you normally find gnomes before you knew they were real beings?”

Jessie scrunched up her face. “I don’t know.”

“Gardens, right?”

Jessie instantly thought of an animated movie she’d seen about a whole bunch of garden gnomes at war with each other. A cute little film, but not really her thing. “Okay. Gardens. So what?”

“What are those gnomes made of?”

“They’re statues. Their made of…stone?” She had a sense of where this was going, but couldn’t believe it enough to form a conclusion.

Ree pointed at her and nodded. “Stone.”

“What are you saying? That—” Despite herself, she ended up drawing a conclusion anyway. “—Wertz was made of stone?”

Ree leaned back with a satisfied smile. “Not stone, exactly. Something a whole lot stronger. Certainly not something found on the mortal plane.”

“I don’t get the connection,” Jessie said. “With the garden statues, I mean.”

“You know how it is. Real details about supernaturals make it into mortal mythology and get exaggerated or reinterpreted.” He shrugged. “Who knows how it really started?”

A thought smacked Jessie so hard she felt stunned for a moment, wanting to speak and unable to for a few seconds. When she found her voice, it came out in a rush, all jittery and full of breath. “Does that mean he could have survived that explosion?”

Ree ducked his head. His shoulders drooped. “No. Not something that huge. If I had to guess, he’s the one that caused the explosion in a way. The attackers probably cranked up their weapon to the max and overloaded Wertz until he…” Ree looked up to meet Jessie’s eyes. “Until he burst.”

Jessie’s vision wavered. She realized it was from tears in her eyes. She wiped them away. No crying. Not now.

“This is the worst fucking day ever,” she said. Then felt a twinge of guilt because saying that seemed like a betrayal to the day her dad was killed—or the day Mom died for that matter. Or Marty. Jessie had a number of Worst Days Ever. All marked by the death of someone she cared for.

And Wertz had been the last. There was no one left Jessie could claim as close to her.

What’s happened with us?

The answer was simple. She had taken for granted her relationship with Wertz.

And now she was totally alone because of it.

Chapter Fifteen

E
ARL
F
ARMER SAT BEFORE THE
altar of bones, his AR-15 resting across his folded legs, eyes closed, smelling the candle wax melting. He took a deep breath in, held it, released.

Focus on the breath.

Another inhale, filling his lungs, his diaphragm expanding outward. He felt the cold of the concrete floor. Ignored it.

Images of their failure rattled across his inner vision like chewed up footage from an old war documentary. He let the images pass. He exhaled.

Focus on clearing the mind.

A pinpoint of light opened in the darkness behind his closed eyelids. He felt heat from the light like a laser beam to his brain. The light dilated into a glaring disc of whiteness. It burned into his soul like a brand. His breathing faltered.

Focus.

Back to the breath. In. Hold. Out. Hold. In. Hold. Out. Hold.

Despite the light’s overwhelming brightness, Earl returned his mind to the quiet. He still felt the light’s singeing blare, yet every time he became aware of it, he gently pushed the sensation aside.

The light grew larger and larger until it replaced all of the darkness.

Then came the feeling of falling, as if he’d jumped from Willis Tower in Chicago, the second tallest building in the world. Yet Earl never hit ground. He kept falling and falling. His stomach dropped. Vertigo swirled in his head.

His meditation came to an end, his mind moving on to the next stage of the ritual.

A whistle touched the cup of his ear like a strong wind. All part of the falling sensation.

He was falling all right—right into the pits of hell.

The burning grew more imposing, engulfing his whole body now, not just his mind. His sense of his body outside of this internal world, sitting at the altar, left him. For a moment, he could feel his soul cling to his physical form right before it tore loose like a pulled tooth from its socket.