More than Truth (Arcane Crossbreeds) (33 page)

“I’ve been working with the security feeds from the night we took down the labs, trying to figure out how Dr. Mahoney’s sister disappeared moments before the attack.” She hit a series of keys, and the video footage from the room played out on one of the screens.

They’d all seen it before. Hell, Tag had watched the fucking thing a hundred times, wishing he could give the doc something to work with.

“She’s been obsessed with the damn thing,” Raife grumbled.

“I don’t really understand what happened with my DNA and all that, or how she does what she does. I do understand this.” Katya motioned to the computers. “I just wanted to fight for her as hard as she’s been fighting for us.”

Tag smiled and felt his brother’s overwhelming emotions rush in to join his. He almost choked on the damn feelings. He wanted to share this with his mate so she would know she was appreciated, but he could feel her superpowered brain sparking, and he wasn’t getting close to that. He knew she had some fucked-up sense of not belonging here, but no one else in the entire tower felt the same. The doc was an integral part of Incog. It wouldn’t function without her. And neither could he.

Vin gripped his shoulder, and for once Tag didn’t feel the need to shrug him off. They may have a long way to go, but they were united in their feelings for their doctor.

Tag coughed to dislodge whatever had risen up from his chest to hang out in his throat. “We appreciate that, little sis.”

Katya smiled wanly at him and began to type again. “Anyway, obviously the angle of the camera doesn’t cover that corner of the room, but the camera itself is made to zoom in to show the smallest detail. That gave me good resolutions to work with. I never thought I would ever be grateful for all that shiny metal and concrete. I managed to compile enough image fragments from the reflections.”

Tag felt the big-ass smile start to spread over his face as her fingers flew over the keys, and tiny cropped stills from frame after frame of the video footage were assembled together until a full distorted image of the other side of the room appeared.

Vin moved in closer from his position behind the chair to squint at the image. “There’s nothing useful there. I can barely make out the shape of a body.”

Raife propped himself against the edge of the adjacent couch and folded his arms over his chest with a frown. “She’s not done yet.”

“I put together some imaging software to try to smooth out the image and fill in the missing parts.” As she typed, the image came into focus, one grouping of pixels at a time. Damn she was lethal with her programming skills. He was glad as hell they’d recruited her for their team.

As the picture became clearer, Tag felt his humor begin to drain away. “Isn’t that…”

Katya hit a final series of keys, and she zoomed into the face of the man that appeared to be holding open some kind of irregular hole in the wall. He could just make out the back of a woman ducking through. It was the man with the familiar black hair and eyes that kept his attention.

Dropping back against the chair, she reached up and gripped the hand Raife laid on her shoulder. “Yeah. It’s Gideon.”

Forestor paced silently away to look out the window.

“Gideon is the leak,” Vin mused. “He’s Elemental, right? He’s got the ability to walk through walls?”

“Yeah, it’s fucking eerie as hell. He touches something, and it just disappears. Hell, he can disappear.” Tag shivered at the memory of seeing the man in action. “I trusted that bastard.” And very few people could pull one over on a Drachon.

“I trusted him too,” Raife rumbled darkly as he stroked his hand over Katya’s hair. “Kat trusted him.”

“That explains how he was able to follow me. He could have been in the same room.” Vin turned to move from the room. “I need to contact my resource. Warn him.”

“Vin, wait.” Kahn finally spoke up. He’d been unusually quiet. “We have a bigger problem. Your mother says Britony left with a man named Gideon several minutes ago.”

Tag immediately reached for Brit, feeling his brother following a similar path, but there was only emptiness. She was just—gone.

“Fuck!” Tag didn’t think, couldn’t think. He sped from the room and into the hall, using short bursts of speed to get back to his office. He didn’t pause to use his bio-codes; he just crushed the steel door in and rushed to the system that housed his security feeds. He drew up her lab, going back thirty minutes. He rushed through the feeds until she stepped into the hall with that fucking dead man walking. Keying in the code for the security feed outside her lab, he backed it up and watched it twice. Nothing.

“Where is she?”

Tag ignored his brother and pulled up feed after feed until the multitude of screens were sectioned off into nearly a hundred images displaying those few minutes after she left her lab. None of which showed Gideon or his doc. They just disappeared.

“How is that possible?” Vin growled.

Tag stepped back from the screen and rubbed his hands over his buzzed head. This wasn’t possible. He couldn’t lose her now. Why would that fucker want her anyway? Did he work for the Triumvirate? That would give Tag time. The Triumvirate didn’t want her dead. He would fucking find her no matter what it took.

His breath sawed through him, and it felt like he couldn’t get enough air. Darkness ate at the edges of his vision. A hole opened up in his chest, and it felt like it was sucking him into it, hollowing him out. Losing his brother was nothing like this. This would kill him, and he’d gladly go.

“Tag.”
His brother’s voice cut through the blackness and tethered him, pulling him back. He blinked, and Vin’s face swam in front of his.

“We can’t lose her.”

Vin bracketed Tag’s face with his hands, his eyes searching.
“We won’t, but you’ve got to stay with me.”

Tag swallowed and nodded.
“Okay.”
Grateful for the solid feel of his brother standing with him, inside him. They were each half of a whole. Where he was weak, Vin was strong. Together they could do this. His brother dropped a hand to his neck and pulled him in until their foreheads touched.

“Okay,” Vin echoed on a shaky breath. Then he drew back and stilled, his gaze searching Tag’s face. “The tracking bracelet. Is it still on?”

Tag turned back to his computer to see he had a room full of people who had gotten to see his fucking breakdown. Standing next to them, his dad was holding his mom against his chest, and she was crying. Brim looked geared for battle. Raife and Katya were off to one side, and Kel stood in her uniform, her shirt hanging out. She looked like hell, and her mate hovered behind her with a distinct look of disapproval.

“I came soon as Raife told me. What can I do?” She angled her chin up. “The doc’s one of us, no matter that she sometimes creeps me out.”

Tag leaned over his keyboard and activated the doc’s tracking bracelet. He’d been trying to figure out how to get one permanently attached to her without her knowing. So far he’d come up with nothing. Maybe he’d get her to agree if he put diamonds or some such shit on it. A sense of relief assailed him as the blinking dot lit up on the screen. It was green.

“She’s alive.” It was programmed to display a different color if there was no pulse. He tried to reach for her again and growled when he found only emptiness. It left his dragon edgy and wanting to rip into something.

“She’s probably unconscious,” Vin said from beside him.

Kel frowned at the map and stepped forward. “That’s Hunter’s Point. Down by the old shipyard. I’ve been down there on a couple of blood-ring raids. I can take you there.”

Tag turned to meet his brother’s gaze.
“Let’s go get our mate.”

* * * *

“Goddamn it, Meghann, how many times do we have to tell you we’re not going to hurt you?” The muffled voices drew Brit from the dim recesses of her consciousness. She opened her eyes and blinked the ceiling into view. Where was she? Pushing up from the mattress, she focused on the look of boredom on her sister’s face. Meghann was leaning with her back against the wall by the door. One hand hovered over the knob flickering with a blue light.

“Baby, please tell me you’re okay.”
Before Brit could even process that her sister was actually in the room with her, Tag’s worried voice blasted through her mind.

Looking at her sister’s pursed lips as she heated up the knob of the door while she hummed, Brit felt a sense of the surreal.
“I’m fine. I’m with Meghann.”

“Good. I’m glad your sister is with you.”
Vin’s voice rumbled through her.
“Try to find out where you are in the building, love. We’re just outside, but we need to know where you are.”

“Hurt me?” Meghann laughed. “As if.” Her red hair was cropped around her head to barely reach her pointy chin, and her brown eyes glowed with satisfaction. She lifted her hand, and the blue glow hissed into flame. “I just like to fuck with the assholes.”

Meghann pushed away from the wall and strode over to drop down on the bed next to Brit. She looked older, but she had that same rebellious attitude. Her eyes softened, darkened, and she put a hand on Brit’s arm. “It’s good to see you, sis.”

Brit sat up, her head still aching. What had Gideon done to her? “I’ve been looking for you, Meggie. I thought you were dead.”

A strange darkness hovered just beyond her sister’s brown eyes, shimmering; it parted enough for Brit to get a sense of terrible pain and fury that had her mentally jerking back from the intensity. Meghann stood and paced back to open the door. “Close enough.”

A man stomped into the room, holding his blistered hand aloft. He cast Meghann a murderous look. She ignored him and leaned a shoulder against the wall. “So the meat puppet over here tells me you’re mated to a couple of dragons. Seriously, B? One wasn’t enough?” A smile teased the corner of her lips. “That must be all kinds of fun.”

“Where are we?” Brit looked around. The room was white with a bare slit of a window high over the bed. There was a desk built into the wall on one side, and next to the steel door was a toilet and sink. Out in the open.

“My best guess? Some kind of abandoned military prison near Hunter’s Point.” The man at the sink spun around in shock. Meghann only rolled her eyes. “Please. As if your little freak show’s magic trick could keep me under for long. I was awake five minutes after we left the lab.”

“
I’m in some kind of confinement cell. Main floor or higher.
” Brit eased her legs over the edge of the bed as she conveyed the information to Vin and Tag. She was still wearing her lab coat, and she smoothed her hands down wrinkled edges. “Why am I here?”

“We need your help, Dr. Mahoney.” The man flexed his hand and winced. Brit could see his blisters were bursting and recessing as he healed. A Guardian? She couldn’t pick up any ill intent from him, just determination and weariness. She glanced back at her sister thoughtfully as she realized where she likely was.

“Let me guess, you’re Rebels? You removed several women from the Triumvirate facility in Death Valley, my sister included.”

The man sighed. “Follow me, if you will.”

Just outside the door there was some kind of locker room with a bench and rows of lockers. There were more rooms like Brit’s, the doors ajar. Obviously empty.

“A holding unit, so to speak,” he said when he noticed her looking. “We process any new people we acquire here before moving them to more permanent quarters.”

Brit communicated what she saw to Tag and Vin as the man led her through a control room. She could just make out a person behind the tinted glass. A door buzzed, and the man pulled it open and ushered them down a long hall. “We’ve got people in every Triumvirate lab in the US. Most of the testing is ineffective, and when the genetic manipulation is successful, the gene is inactive. However, about two months ago, one of our plants in a lab in New England noticed something strange about those who were successfully manipulated. In the same strand there also existed a strange genetic anomaly, an unknown gene. We haven’t been able to tell what it controls, but we fear it may be the key to successfully activating the blood magic.”

Brit’s heart was pounding. He stopped outside a heavy steel door and turned to face her. “We can’t allow that to happen, so we started a full-scale evacuation of every person bearing that genetic marker.” He motioned to a camera on the ceiling, and the locks on the door buzzed. He shouldered the heavy door open and motioned her ahead. “Thus far we have collected one hundred and six people. All female.”

Brit gasped as she walked onto some kind of catwalk high above a commons area. There were several women sitting at tables and in random groupings of mismatched furniture. It was a cellblock, two rows of cells, all the barred doors opened flat against the walls.

“Baby, what’s going on? Talk to me, doc.”

“Are these women being imprisoned here?” Brit snapped, fury burning in the pit of her stomach.

“They are not mistreated, but it’s safer if they remain here. We cannot allow them to fall into the hands of the Triumvirate.”

“Goddamn it, Brit. What the fuck is going on? You feel like you’re about to blow a gasket.”

Brit eyed the catwalk around the top of the cellblock. A man was stationed every twenty feet or so, carefully watching the women below. Each had a large weapon strapped across his back and a handgun on his hip. “So you felt that because you didn’t want the Triumvirate to get to them first, you were justified in incarcerating them here?”

“They have people like me and Katya held inside,”
Brit told them, anger making her quiver.
“Over a hundred of them. They’re heavily guarded.”

“You and Katya?”
Vin’s voice broke in.
“What have you discovered that you haven’t shared, love?”

Brit rolled her eyes as she transferred the information from her mind into his. He retreated from her for a long moment. She could feel him carefully analyzing her findings.

“You have to understand the ramification of the Triumvirate figuring this out before we do,” the man began.

Brit cut across his words. “I understand the risks; however, that still does not give you the right to treat these women like criminals.”