Intimidator (20 page)

Ally appeared in the smoking, fire-wreathed doorway then turned to run but they caught her too. Of all the days for her to escape her minders… Willow watched, trapped in the enemy’s grasp. These men had killed so effortlessly. The tears in her eyes never shed. She was past crying, past devastation, gone into the land of the anesthetized and silent.

She didn’t know how it was that she could walk through such a fire and live, and she didn’t care. Evil had found her again. Perhaps it always did when she was happy.

The alert came as Brask shot down the last of the Bak-lal. He holstered the HK at his back, ignoring the urgent beep in his ear comm for a few seconds as he scanned for life. The countdown ticker said they’d got all the suspects – difficult to find these until they showed up by doing something out of character for normal humans. These were no soldiers, not modified for war – simply people with some Bak-lal mind alterations. Mean motherfuckers in Earth lingo.

But the lack of armaments and hard-wired nerves meant the Preyfinder AI couldn’t find them easily in the data stream.

These had emerged from hiding and killed along with the Bak-lal at two other locations. He’d had to commit almost every man on this island continent to maintain control. Why? There must be a reason.

They’d fought desperately, intending to kill by any means possible, but with only human guns and knives in their hands. The underground car park stank of smoke and blood and cordite from the guns. His men were hauling bodies, some in fragments.

Perhaps this was best. A full guts and glory battle with Bak-lal with no god available to back up the Preyfinders’ actions might mean irretrievable exposure to humans.

The message was from the operations coordinator at the ship.

“Guard me,” he signaled to his second in command, Jadd.

Prompted by the message title, he flicked on the holo, and was confronted by a house consumed by fire. The flames leapt thirty feet in the air and the building was surrounded by units from the fire brigade, police, and ambulance.

That house, he knew it. His stomach wrenched.

“Where is this?” he barked.

“The house owned by Willow,” said the coordinator. “Both Stom and her were known to be there. We’ve only just restored drone coverage, sir. Our orbiting drone was incapacitated by a Bak-lal strike. Where it came from, we don’t know as yet.”

All this information said that this, where he stood, was a diversion. Had the Bak-lal wanted Stom?

“Did you retrieve Stom? Or anyone?” That inferno looked survivable, if he’d been wearing his coat. If not… He clamped down on his emotional response.

“The humans have him. I’m tracking the ambulance. Seven minutes to arrival at the hospital. From drone images, he’s dying.” A picture flashed up: a black man-shaped thing on a stretcher being covered by a silvery cloth. “No one else was brought out. We had no units, no men except the core defense manning the ship, sir. Permission to use those to retrieve Stom?”

Even the operator sounded stressed. Stom’s chances of surviving were tiny, but they had to retrieve him. Brask pressed his knuckles into his forehead. Risk exposure by mounting an operation on a moving ambulance? Risk depriving the ship of its core personnel?

One of the other strike teams was closer than his.

“Accor? How fast can he get there compared to a team from the ship?”

“They can make it. Estimated one-minute difference. His team is returning here already.”

“Good.” He drew in a long breath and committed. “I authorize a non-lethal strike on the ambulance by Accor’s team. I also authorize the use of a ship’s shuttle to return him to the ship. Make sure everything is standing by. Alert medical personnel.”

“Sir.”

He snapped off the holo and swiveled on one heel. “Jadd. You’re in charge.”

At a jog, he headed for the nearest transport. With no god, their ability to manipulate all the many human means of recording and exchanging information was small. This was out in the open, on a street, in daylight. All it would take when the team hit the ambulance was one man they didn’t spot recording a video and uploading it to YouTube.

His career might be heading down the toilet but for once he didn’t care. He’d thrown away enough potential friends over the years. Stom was a man he’d grown to like.

When he reached the ship, Stom was already assessed, hooked up to resuscitators and regenerators, and from the tubes and humming gadgets, the docs had plugged him into everything the ship possessed. Possibly including even the games machine from level three.

Brask stopped and stared at the organized chaos. Medical personnel were rattling about, extracting fluids, doing a kakload of stuff to Stom, who was entirely hidden under a half-cylindrical white machine. He sneaked in to question the least busy one, who was playing with data on a screen.

He jerked his chin toward Stom. “How’s he going? I can see you’ve got a lot to do –”

The man glanced up and grimaced. “Sir, honestly, he’s going to die. Most of him is cooked so deep I don’t know how he’s still alive. He’s in no pain. We have him anesthetized, but he is going to die. You can’t regen charcoal.”

Stunned was the best word. He couldn’t move, couldn’t mouth a single syllable for several seconds.

Do your job.
The man looked white. They hadn’t had a death here for months.

He reached out and patted the man’s shoulder. “You did good, Terek. Thank you.”

His reply sounded as if it came from a tunnel a thousand yards long and Brask barely processed the meaning.

A message beep. He answered it.

“Sir. From cobbled together, retrieved human footage, we’ve found at least one vehicle leaving the area of the house with Willow inside. She doesn’t appear injured though she was naked. AI analysis says at least one of her captors is Bak-lal. The other woman, Ally, has gone missing also. She’s probably been captured by whoever has Willow.”

“Good.” He nodded. Getting somewhere. “Where is this vehicle? Where are the women?”

“We don’t know, Sir. They were headed north but that’s no guarantee as to destination.”

“Fuck.” She wasn’t injured. In that blaze? Stom would not have sat still to be burned. It had to be a surprise attack and that meant she would have been there too, surely. Not injured? What was going on here? Another woman of power? That conclusion was a stretch of logic.

He wished Dassenze was here.

“Put every priority on finding those women.” The Bak-lal queen, wherever she was, had come out of hiding for them. She’d thrown away resources, revealed her hand. What had seemed a curious ability must have far more significance. If Stom had to die, at least let him get revenge for this. They would find this queen. They would kill it.

Though she’d figured her situation could get no worse, when they dragged Ally past her door, Willow felt something crumble inside, and she wept.

Wherever this place was, it was near a town. The distant roar of traffic reached her now and then. They’d tied her up with steel handcuffs, left her on the bed, and used the collar Stom had given her to attach her to the headboard. That corruption of something he’d gifted to her had hurt. Yet another fresh, heart-deep wound to add to the general mutilation.

He was gone. Nothing could survive that fire. Except her, it seemed. The stench of the smoke permeated her hair and soot covered her skin, coated the insides of her mouth. She’d breathed fire, walked in it, and she lived, unscathed.

The ache within was enough to keep her head going round and round, reliving the agony of seeing him burn. But she’d held herself together. She’d held in the tears, she had, until Ally appeared.

Now sweet, innocent Ally was here too. She expected herself to be raped and killed at any moment. That she could stand. People who could do what she’d seen and not flinch, who had laughed in the car as they drove away, those people might do anything.

But Ally was here.
Fuck.

She cried despairing tears for the girl in another room who knew so little of what horrors the world could visit upon her. She’d always stopped harm from reaching her. Was she going to fail at that too?

This terrible fact stirred a need in her. It drove past the sorrow and the horror, kicked away the crutch of self-destruction. It made her start to think again.

I have to get out, somehow. Have to take her with me.

She sat up, wiped away the tears with her handcuffed wrist, and she thought. Forget the men in the next room, the dead place in her chest.

The fire.

Forget.

Methodical, she should be methodical. She went through a list. What was in the room? Could she use anything to escape? Who had she seen? How many? What could she hear them say? Her list went on forever.

Things happened around her. Strange thuds and clanks. Voices.

The screams from some anonymous woman in a nearby room were chilling, especially when men laughed again, not Ally though, thank god, but this time the sounds didn’t shut her down or stop her thinking. She wouldn’t give in anymore. Now she had a goal.

She listened to the screams grow quieter as perhaps the woman weakened then she fell silent.

In what sort of neighborhood would a woman’s screams go unnoticed?

A very bad one, said her logical self.

The half-open cupboard across the room held shoes, both men’s and women’s and there were dresses and shirts. A couple had lived here. Were they dead? Was that her in the next room? This house might have been hers.

Why had
her
house failed after all those years? Had Stom being there somehow interfered? Had he annoyed the ghost or whatever did the guarding? Or had something else changed?

They fed her that day and two men took her out to a toilet. Though one of them sneered, neither sexually assaulted her. When all was quiet that night, she listened closely and recognized the name Kasper in the conversations. Again with the chills. The fear. The shaking. She watched her hands shaking and they no longer seemed her hands. There was a dark terrible fear that made it impossible to sleep until she was so exhausted that her eyes refused to stay open.

In the morning, she asked herself the logical question.
What could he do to me that is worse than watching Stom die?

Answer: nothing.

That worked.

She had a wall, a concept to use. Except she had to stay alive long enough to get Ally out.

At around noon, they dragged her into a new room where she saw Ally, tied down on a table, but at least they’d let her keep her dress. It was as if most of these men no longer cared about sex. Their eyes were blank. A dead woman occupied another table, her arms and legs taped into a spread-eagled position. Trails of clotted blood led from wounds in her wrists and ankles.

Her steadfast, cast-iron, I-will-not-fear rule shattered into a thousand pieces.

Kasper sat in a single lounge chair watching it all like a king. Only his eyes were wrong. Even for a cold blooded, ice-in-his-veins criminal, his eyes were so wrong. He blinked too slowly and reminded her of a great lizard sunning itself in the heat of the day. Deep inside there, she knew, this was no longer Kasper. Something else moved behind the façade.

“What are you?” He sat forward, his gaze piercing, as if he could question her mind to mind.

“I’m nothing. No one,” she whispered, while trying to check out Ally.

Had they dosed her up with something? She drooled from slack lips and focused on the bare wall. An intravenous infusion tube ran from her arm to a bag of fluids.

Swear words rambled through her head. What could she do? Her fingernails dug into her palms.

Being naked in a room of men daunted her. Disturbed her. But not as much as seeing most of them look past her with cold, emotionless eyes. Stom had been human in his way. These people were more alien than a man from a thousand suns away.

“You’re not
nothing
.” Even his voice was distorted, as if his throat had been damaged. “We know. We can tell. My queen can tell and has taught us to see. She –” He pointed at the corpse. “Was one of you. A different human. As is this one who kept your house safe. We know.” He leaned back. “And when we learn how to change you, we will have your powers.”

“Powers? Me?” She laughed, mocking him even as her mind was telling her to shut up.

“You are the one who lives in fire. She was one who controlled insects. This one here, the alive one, is the protector, the one who gives us headaches.”

Ally? He meant her? She looked from her frail cousin to the men. They had drugged her because of headaches? Or they thought she gave them headaches. But, why?

Everything fell into place. Of course. Ally had been the one who had kept her safe all those years.

That morning, she had sent her away. She’d sent away the person who made the house safe. Willow bowed her head. She had therefore killed Stom. Vomit threatened to spill into her mouth. She swallowed it down as she felt the terrible blow. The room shuddered.

She hadn’t
known
, couldn’t have. Couldn’t have. But she’d killed him.

What have I done?

This was helping neither of them. She took a ragged breath.

“What do you want from me?” Slowly she straightened, uncurled her fingers.

“Tell us how you do this. Perhaps we will be kind to you or to her. Tell us.”

“Us?” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“The data thinks you know. How can you not know? Tell. Your books speak of rituals, of magic words and objects. You are witches. You have books. Rule books. How do you do it?”

“Books? I… Witches? Us? No. No, you have it wrong. I’m no witch.”

He tapped his fingers together then turned to the men. “I think we need to show her. The girl won’t die from a finger or two missing. Show her.” As the men moved in on Ally, he turned back to Willow and smiled. “We have to wait for our soldier to return with the altered nerve chewers. We hope those will succeed. The last ones failed and killed this woman. In the time we wait, you will talk to us. Proceed.” He nodded to his men.

What were they doing? Sweat beaded cold on her skin. They meant to take her finger?