Sacrifice the Wicked (5 page)

And to Laurence Lauderdale, director of Sector Three.

Parker had tried the usual channels. Now, with her missionaries’ lives on the line, she needed alternatives.

Straightening, she unhooked her comm, flipped it open with a thumb, and keyed in Jonas Stone’s comm frequency by rote. Attaching the speaker to the shell of her ear, she waited.

The line clicked over. “Uh . . . Great timing, Director.”

Parker had stopped being surprised by the clarity of her lead tech analyst’s warm tenor. A few years and a set of living parents, and he could have become a fine singer for the culture feeds.

Instead, he had to deal with her. “Operation Domino,” she said by way of greeting. She’d ease into the subject. “Talk to me.”

“Oh.” The word was a sigh on the speaker, beset by a faint line of crackling static. “This sucks, ma’am,” he continued, as serious as she’d ever heard him. “We’ve got samples from the scene, hope to find something there. Every scene has come back negative.”

“Of what?”

“Anything helpful,” he replied dryly. “No fingerprints, no DNA aside from the dead hunter’s.”

“What does Mr. Eckhart say?”

The clatter of keys—as much a part of every call she’d ever had with him as his voice—halted for a moment. “Basically, ma’am? We’ve got no leads, no evidence, and nothing but speculation. It’s as bad as Ghostwatch.”

“Timely lead in,” Parker said, frowning. “Where are we there?”

“About the same.” But irritation colored his voice. “Whoever this hacker is, they’re damn good.”

Parker shook her head as she rose. “All our leads are frozen. This is not efficient, Mr. Stone.”

“I know, I know.” A keyboard ruckus undercut his frustration. “Every time I put a tracer on this guy’s electronic footsteps, it leads to a dead end. It’s like he’s got something warning him every time I get close to his turf.”

“A program?”

“If so, he’d have to infect the entire city grid with markers. It’d be one fuck almighty of a program,” Jonas replied, then added quickly, “Er, sorry, ma’am.”

Language was the least of her concerns. “Impossible?”

“Impossible to hide,” he corrected. “It’s possible to make.”

“But actually
impossible
to hide?”

He hummed a thoughtful note. “Okay, really difficult. Even for me. To hide something like that, it’d be an extremely sophisticated piece of programming. It’d have to not just attach itself to city systems but disguise itself while it did it.”

“Explain.”

“Okay, say I’m a virus piggybacking on another system,” he said patiently. “The system is designed to sweep for anything out of the ordinary, like unapproved data or stagnant bits of code. So, I’d basically be sending out two parcels of data—a stream of encrypted communication, and a stream of junk data disguised as valid information to fool any seekers. The encrypted data would ride under that. Follow?”

Parker let out a deep breath, perching on the edge of her desk. “So possible.”

“Possible, and I’ll start looking for that,” he allowed, “but improbable.”

She stared at the covered window, eyes narrowed. “I had a thought, Mr. Stone.”

“Yeah?”

“Someone is hunting missionaries,” she said evenly. “Someone is learning not only who they are but where they live, where they like to operate, where they
are.
”

“Are you thinking the ghost is behind it?”

“The thought had occurred to me.” But no, that’s not where she was going. “Follow me here. Ms. Long was murdered in the restroom of a lower street club. Although she was on duty at the time, Mr. Carver was not. He was murdered in his own home. Someone with intimate knowledge of the Mission has to be—”

The frequency rattled, dissolving into static as Jonas’s sudden fit of coughing overwhelmed the mic.

Parker’s eyebrow raised, her glance shifting to the comm unit on the desk. “Mr. Stone?”

“Sorry!” He cleared his throat. Tried again when it rattled. “Sorry, I inhaled my energy booster. Man, that burns.”

She rubbed at the bridge of her nose with one finger, grasping for what calm she could wrap around a sudden surge of impatience. “If you’re finished.”

“Sorry,” he said again, a little rougher around the edges, but accompanied once more by clicking keys. “Ma’am, do you think Simon is
murdering
our people?”

Did she?

She looked down at her desk, stared through the clean surface. She didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t want to think that the man who’d tested the last dregs of her patience with a kiss that still sent flickers of aftershocks through her could be so . . .

So evil.

“Ma’am?”

But why else would he be here? Just spying didn’t seem enough.

“He’s the only link we have to the data from Wayward Rose,” she said crisply. “With Nelson dead, we have no way of knowing who else may be working for Lauderdale.”

Jonas sucked in a breath, the air hissing between his teeth. “You’re talking full-scale conspiracy.”

“At this point in time, I’m willing to track down any leads. No matter how—”
Terrifying. Infuriating.
“—disheartening.”

“Aw, man.” She could hear the worry as thick as paste on the line; a worry she echoed. “All right. Where should I look?”

Parker frowned, pushing the heel of her hand against the needling threat of a headache centered behind her forehead. Where should Jonas look? Simon was the only stamped agent she knew of.

She needed an inspection. But all inspections were done by qualified medical personnel, and she couldn’t just order her missionaries to strip for her. Well, she could, as she’d done when Simon and his partner had first been placed with her, but that had been to inspect the seal specifically.

And she’d skirted a few regulations in doing so.

All medical personnel came from the labs, which meant Sector Three influence there, too.

Damn it.
And that was even supposing all of Sector Three’s spies wore the bar code.

She needed Simon’s help.

Wouldn’t get it.

“Start with everyone Simon’s age, give or take a year or two,” Parker said, calculating quickly. “Disqualify anyone assigned before—” She hesitated.

“I’d start with sixteen months,” Jonas cut in quietly.

Her mind made the connection immediately. “Peterson’s exposure?”

“I don’t know,” Jonas said, “but if I wanted to slip a mickey into a drink, I’d wait for a little confusion to serve as distraction, right?”

“Good point.” And that would mean Sector Three had launched its campaign almost immediately upon her appointment. It was, she had to admit, what she would have done. If she were a backbiting political snake. “Do that.”

The sign on the line echoed the one she wanted to give. “Okay, I’ll start running background checks on any agents acquired in the last sixteen months. I’ll bring up medical records, too. This’ll take a bit.”

“I want you to go over the murdered agents with a fine-toothed comb, too,” she ordered. “We weren’t looking at them very closely. See if there’s a link between them.”

“Aside from a tendency to hunt down witches?”

A flicker of a smile tugged at her lips. “Aside from that.”

“I’m on it.”

“Good.” That was one thing covered. “Be in—”

“There’s something else.”

She raised an eyebrow as she studied the unit on the desk, raising a finger to the bridge of her nose. “What is it?”

Jonas cleared his throat. “Are you, um, somewhere safe?”

The other eyebrow joined the first. “Safe?”

“I mean private,” he amended quickly. His voice, normally fairly casual even when talking to her, now strained. “Somewhere, you know, without ears.”

“Yes,” she said slowly, glance flicking around her empty office. Bookshelves, coatrack, chairs. Lamps. “What’s going on?”

He took a deep, audible breath. “While we’re on the subject, I have some information about that . . . thing. With the bar-code tattoos and stuff.”

Her chest tightened with anticipation. “GeneCorp.”

“Yeah.” He drew the word out slowly, and for the first time, Parker realized he’d stopped typing. As if he needed to focus intently on what he said.

Or what she said.

She worked to keep her eagerness out of her voice. “Well? What about it?”

“So, you know that I . . . know people,” Jonas hedged. “I mean, you sort of have to, in this line, right?”

“Get to the point, Mr. Stone.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She could practically hear the wince in the acknowledgement. “I have a lead in to something that sounds big, and it’s from a source that really needs to not, uh . . . have questions aimed at him. If you know what I mean.”

Following that took effort. “He . . . is willing to give us information in exchange for a certain amount of immunity?”

“Yes,” Jonas said in relief. “That.”

“About GeneCorp?” About the witches GeneCorp was cultivating. The human subjects churned out in lists longer than her arm. Anticipation gripped her.

“Er . . . yes.”

Parker slid off the edge of her desk, straightening from her perch, and carefully tucked stray tendrils of her hair back into place. “So meet with him.”

“Um . . .” He sighed. “Ma’am, he wants to meet with
you
.”

Her eyebrows knitted. Her? Unheard of. “This sounds like a trap, Mr. Stone.”

“I promise you, it’s not,” he said hurriedly. “Really. It’s just that it’s really complicated.”

She studied the surface of her desk, neat to the point of obsession, and traced two fingers along the ledge in absent thought. Complicated.

Wasn’t it always?

“I won’t ask you what you know,” she finally said, her lips turning up into a humorless smile as Jonas’s sigh of relief filtered through the speaker. “Yet.”

“Right.”

“But I need to know how credible this is.”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Absolutely, one hundred percent credible, ma’am. Whatever he’s got, it’s going to be worth it.”

And if whatever it was could help her in her Mission, then it would be exactly that.

She nodded, once. “When and where?”

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

K
ayleigh strode down the hall, her head buried in her digital reader. Like Simon knew it would be.

He didn’t bother with greetings. “Where’s the docket?”

She jerked in surprise. “Simon! What are you doing?” Her question ended on a surprised note as he grabbed her arm, pulled her out of sight around the corner. She stumbled, but she didn’t fold.

She was too much her mother’s daughter to fold.

Simon let her go as she pulled at his grip, her pretty blue-gray eyes narrowed in anger. Color rode her cheeks. “You have no right—”

“Shut up,” he said over her, cornering her into the alcove wall.

The shock in her eyes made the act worth it.

The Magdalene Asylum had damn good security. Practically unbreakable. Compared to the other three sides of the Holy Order quadplex, the place was a veritable fortress.

Fortunately for him, his security clearance allowed for a certain amount of free reign in the building. Not as much free reign as she got, but being the Sector Three director’s daughter had its perks.

It was only a matter of time before she’d come back to her office. So he’d waited.

With some really bad vending machine coffee to keep him company. After the morning he’d had, it’d do.

“No one knew about that folder but me,” he said, ignoring her wide-eyed surprise. He kept his voice low, but the intensity of his anger didn’t need volume to translate. “I broke every reg in the book, but I got it and got out, no mess. Only to lose it to some jackass shadowing me. How did you learn about it, Kayleigh?”

Although she had no room to sidle in, less room beyond Simon where the alcove ended abruptly into the instant coffee machine, she didn’t give in. He let her shake off his grip from her arm.

Her mouth thinned, practically white with anger. “Don’t you
ever
jump me like this again,” she hissed. “Ever. I don’t know where your goddamned folder is!
My
operative never got inside.”

Simon frowned at her. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Exactly that.” When she pushed at his chest, he stepped back, giving her the space she needed to peel herself off the wall and straighten her red suit jacket. “Are you telling me someone took that file from you?”

“Motherfucker.” As an answer, it said enough.

Kayleigh bent to pick up her dropped digital reader, light brown eyebrows furrowed. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

“That’s all I’ve got,” Simon growled. He turned, glared at the coffee machine. It had no answers for him. “How did you learn about it?”

“You aren’t the only eyes and ears in the Mission.” She sighed behind him. “I assume you’ll track that folder down?”

“Yeah.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Speaking of, what were you doing in Adams’s office?”

Kayleigh dropped her gaze to the reader braced on her forearm. Her fingers moved quickly, keying in a sequence for something he couldn’t see. “That’s classified.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Simon raked a hand through his short hair. He didn’t have to check the halls to know they were still alone. People—impressions—pinged across the back of his mind, all tucked in offices along the corridor or in the floors above and beyond.

When he wasn’t catastrophically bleeding through the nose, his ability worked just fine.

“Simon—”

“Look,” he said, cutting her off. “I’ve got a job to do. Give me the tools so I can. Who else is reporting to you?”

She didn’t bat an eyelash. “Try again.”

His back teeth ground. “Fine. What did you and Director Adams talk about?”

She stared at him. Weighed it. He watched the struggle in her face, forced himself not to smile in victory as it gave way. With a small shake of her head, she said, “Operation Domino.”

Of course. “You’re afraid the Mission might get too close.”

“Exactly so. The evidence they’re sending our labs is liberally laced with Salem markers, but they’re ours. For obvious reasons. We can’t risk them learning any more of the truth than what Carpenter’s case revealed.”

Jesus Christ. Kayleigh Lauderdale had no conception of the truth. Simon shook his head. “They won’t.” Not without some help, anyway. He turned back to the hall, his jaw set. “If that’s all, I need—”

“Why haven’t you checked in, Simon?”

He hesitated.

“Your last report was two weeks ago.” The reader chirped in her hands. “And last you reported, you were, let’s see, ‘back to one hundred percent.’ That’s it.”

A dozen different excuses all filtered through his mind, even as a shape detached itself from the others in his sensory awareness. A body on the move.

A smile tugged on the corner of his mouth. “It’s true.”

“You’re not in the Mission for your health,” she snapped, lowering the reader to her side. “The only reason I know you’re doing your job is because of the Domino reports. Simon, you have to keep me apprised.”

No. No, he didn’t. He shrugged. “You need lab rats killed.” His teeth flashed, a smile he knew wasn’t kind. She flinched. “I kill lab rats.”

Her knuckles whitened over the reader. “We’ll see how smug you are when—” As his smile widened, as he folded his arms over his chest, she bit off the angry words he knew she couldn’t possibly mean and amended them to, “At least check in with me now. No pain or headaches?”

No one deserved death by degeneration.

“None.” He told the lie without so much as a twinge of conscience. She made it so easy.

“Nausea? Vertigo?”

“Nope.”

She hummed the tone that doctors everywhere cultivated. The one that hid her thoughts beneath a mask of intellectual study. “What about your abilities? Are they starting to fluctuate?”

His smile hardened. “Like Carver?”

He didn’t have to look at her to know she winced. “David was a unique case. He wasn’t showing any signs of degeneration, molecular or otherwise.”

Or maybe the witch just didn’t want to report it. Didn’t want to end up lying on some slab while they cataloged every step of the process.

Yeah. Simon knew the feeling.

“Domino’s going to be a problem for us if this keeps up,” she continued quietly. “They can’t possibly think witches are taking out their soldiers.”

“That’s exactly what they think,” Simon countered dryly, turning back. And they weren’t exactly wrong. He counted as a witch. So did the other few cleaners in Director Lauderdale’s camp. “Give me time.”

“Time isn’t on your side. You need to report in for weekly examinations,” Kayleigh said. “The others are already starting to degenerate. You’ll need to be somewhere safe when it happens to you.”

“I’ll cope.”

“Simon, every chance I have to study this thing is a greater chance for me to break it,” she pressed. “Don’t you want to help the others?”

No. He really didn’t. Simon raised an eyebrow, studying her with barely leashed scorn. “You sound like your father.”

Color flooded her cheeks. “My father is right to be concerned.”

“Your father is the reason you’re in corpses up to your pretty smile,” he replied evenly. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“Screw you.”

His tone lightened as he once more gave her his back. “I’ll check in when I’m done.”

“Simon—”

“Someone’s coming,” he told her, shooting her a grin over his shoulder. An easy, no-worries kind of smile. With teeth. “Better not get caught in a corner with a missionary, Doctor. What would Daddy say?”

Setting her jaw, Kayleigh pushed past him, clutching the digital reader to her chest as if it’d provide a shield between her and his mockery.

“You’re an ass,” she muttered.

“You said it yourself, Kayleigh. Enough time, and I’ll be out of your hair.” Venom coated his tongue as he added, “Unless I explode. Like Carver.”

“Damn it, Simon.” She stopped, didn’t turn around. He studied the back of her head, her wavy blond hair that wasn’t anything like her mother’s. But the obstinate set of her shoulders, well, he recognized that one.

Reminded him of her mother. And of himself.

But Kayleigh was one hundred percent natural. He wondered what she’d say if he ever sent her the DNA data he’d destroyed. What she’d do.

Confront her father, maybe. It wouldn’t get her anywhere.

“I didn’t
choose
this, you know.” The corridor sucked out her words, sent them bouncing along the plain, unassuming hall.

He was too tired for this shit. “That makes both of us. Guess your family should have thought of you before they started making me.”

Her indrawn breath wasn’t as silent as she probably hoped. But when she spoke again, she’d leashed whatever emotion she entertained into a thin, even line. “Just do your job, Simon. And check in on time.”

Simon didn’t say anything. Whistling softly, a breezy little tune, he slid his hands into his jeans pockets and sauntered back toward the elevators.

He was two floors down when his comm vibrated against his hip.

Simon unhooked the device from his belt. As he dropped his gaze to the small case, pain licked across his temple—
eighty people in the fifteenth floor of the Magdalene, mice in a maze
—and lanced through his forehead.

Did he get headaches? Oh, yeah.

But that was the way a Salem Project witch went out. With a goddamned bang.

Rubbing at his forehead, Simon flicked open his comm.

The list was growing. Fully a quarter of the names were marked as completed, some he’d done himself, but it didn’t end.

More names he knew. More faces he recognized.

More bodies he’d have to hide.

Splat.

Simon blinked. The comm screen blurred red.

Splat, splat.

God damn it, not again. Lifting his hand to his nose, he swore thickly as a metallic tang filled the back of his throat. Blood splattered his hand.

Tilting his head back sent waves of pain through his skull.

Two headaches in twenty-four hours? That couldn’t be a good sign.

P
arker strode into her office. The door was already swinging shut behind her when the rest of her attention caught up. “For the love of Christ, Mr. Wells!”

Simon didn’t get up. Sprawled in her office chair like some kind of decadent god on a throne, his long legs stretched across the gap between chair and desk, ankles crossed on the polished surface. Hazel eyes narrowed, he studied her over the raised hem of his blood-soaked T-shirt.

It bared the lean muscles carved into his abs, revealed one flat nipple.

Nausea warred with heat.

Won.

Parker clenched her teeth. “Why aren’t you at the infirmary?” More importantly, why did he keep showing up to
bleed
in
her
office?

His teeth flashed in a grin, as lazy as she’d ever seen him despite the blood saturating the fabric of his T-shirt. He lowered the hem. “Stopped bleeding. You said you wanted to talk. Is now a bad time,
Director
Adams?”

The way he stressed her title made her teeth ache.

The way he seemed to think he could bleed all over her things was worse.

She reached for the doorknob, mouth tight with the effort not to throw up the bile clinging to the back of her throat. She was an executive missionary, not a fighter. She didn’t do blood.

Hadn’t ever.

As they went, it was a hell of a phobia.

“I can leave, of course,” Simon added, his tone wickedly knowing. Mocking. He straightened, dropping his feet to the floor. It only served to pull him upright, to send every muscle in his torso flexing. Moving.

Like a well-oiled machine.

He had a body most women drooled over. Parker was trying very hard not to be one.

Lust and nausea, these things shouldn’t cohabitate.

Parker glanced at the doorknob, an inch from her outstretched fingers. Her skin crawled.

And tingled.

Oh, God, this was bad.

“You owe me an explanation, Mr. Wells,” she said quietly, appalled at herself for even forcing herself to endure that much. She turned, drawing her professional demeanor around her like a shroud. Cool, collected. “I’m eager to hear what you have to say.”

“Yeah. I’ll just bet.” Simon stood, a powerful surge of his lean body, and stripped his T-shirt off.

Parker tried not to swallow her own tongue. “What are you doing?”

He pitched the bloody shirt into the small trash can behind him, every move flexing the muscles stacked under his swarthy skin. The man was shirtless in her office. Shirtless, and no sign of any fresh wounds. The puckered scar decorating the front of his left side shone healthy and pink, starkly pale against his tanned skin tone.

She frowned. “What happened to you?”

“Nosebleed.” He rubbed at his nose, which showed no trace of any lingering blood. “Sucker punch in the training room. It happens.”

She swallowed as his gaze settled on her.

Less than four hours ago, she’d met that gaze wearing nothing but thin silk pajamas and the cloak of darkness. Now, in her suit and severely pinned hair, dismay filled her as her body responded in the same, pulse-knocking way.

“You often wear your street clothes in the training room?” she asked pointedly. Part of her knew he lied. The rest of her remained torn between visceral memory and the reality. Which was that he broke into her home. Bled on her desk.

Disobeyed every order.

His smile flashed.

Parker’s shoulders straightened as she strode across her office. “Get out from behind my desk.”

He stepped into her path.

She stopped just shy of running into him, jerking her gaze to his, mouth set in a cold line. Enough games. Enough flex of social muscle, physical muscle.

Enough with the sudden awareness of his body heat, of the warmth emanating from his bare chest. Flashing in his eyes.

“You’re walking a thin line.” She ignored his quirked smile. “Make no mistake, Wells, you’re here on my tolerance. Regardless of who put you here,” she added as he raised one condescending eyebrow, “all of my agents answer to
me
. That includes you.”

He raised a hand, fingers reaching for the side of her face.