Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella
Read Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella Online
Authors: Karina Cooper
Tags: #Paranormal romance, #Fiction
Wicked Lies
A D
ark
M
ission
N
ovella
KARINA COOPER
For my Uncle Stephen. You were the first man in my life who bravely came out to me, and who paved the way for me to be myself. I loved you so much before, and I love you just as much now. You are my inspiration.
And for every gay, lesbian, bi-, trans-, queer, and questioning youth out there. Life can be hard, sometimes it can get mean. There will be days when you feel like it’s impossible, but I want you to know that there are people like me out here who support you. I promise: it gets better.
Contents
An Excerpt from
Before the Witches
An Excerpt from
The Earl in My Bed
by Sophie Jordan
An Excerpt from
Kiss Me
by Codi Gary, Cheryl Harper, and Jaclyn Hatcher
An Excerpt from
Adventures with Max and Louise
by Ellyn Oaksmith
An Excerpt from
Get There
by Megan Hart
An Excerpt from
Vampires Gone Wild
by Kerrelyn Sparks, Pamela Palmer, Amanda Arista, and Kim Falconer
An Excerpt from
Saved by the Rancher
by Jennifer Ryan
A
BLUE-WHITE LIGHT
flickered in the dark. Sparks glinted off the tool racks bolted to the wall across the shadowed room, reflected from the metal braces left leaning against the desk. As silence—mind-numbingly loud, thick as water, and twice as hard to breathe—filled the narrow room, that blue-white light caught in the circular lenses of a pair of glasses and threw a glare across the screen.
Jonas Stone stirred. “It has to be now,” he said, his voice too loud in the oppressive weight of the shadows behind him. He couldn’t look away from the feed spilling its incandescent glow over his desk, his keyboard.
His conscience.
Because the man framed in that digital feed—the
kid
strapped to the chair dead center of the surveillance footage—wasn’t the first suspected heretic to sit there. To sweat there.
To bleed.
“Be sure, Jonas. We get one shot at this.”
His brain wanted to look at the comm unit beside his left hand. His body refused to obey, every cell focused on the prisoner’s dark, drooping head. Scarred fingers twitched, knuckles whitening, and Jonas frowned as he realized his right hand had closed into a painful fist.
It had to be now. The kid wouldn’t last much longer.
“There’s no alternative,” he replied. “We’re not going to get another opening soon enough to . . .” He hesitated.
The voice over the comm link didn’t waver. Not even a fracture. “Soon enough to save him.”
Only through recent experience did Jonas know that the raspy, lifetime-pack-a-day voice coming out of the secure line belonged to a woman named May. Leader of a rebellion that had saved Jonas’s life, and the perpetrator behind a string of hacking jobs that left Jonas seriously reconsidering a career shift before the Church had made that choice for him.
The fact that she was very,
very
good was all that kept him from throwing in the towel now.
But he’d never met her in person. Hell, he’d never met the prisoner now struggling to raise his head in Jonas’s feed, either. Instead, all he had was a picture in a box, a hacked security feed, and too many hours spent staring at the incandescent screen until his eyeballs throbbed and the vicious curl of helplessness inside him turned to a spiraling ache.
That boy didn’t belong in that kind of interrogation room.
A single light, faded blue, gleamed over shoulders broader than Jonas’s, but not by much. The prisoner was athletically lean where Jonas was simply skinny. The narrowly defined muscles of his chest were outlined by the stained remains of a thin, long-sleeve shirt. Blood and sweat had turned it nearly brown. His slumped shoulders strained against the restraints confining him to the hard metal chair, a position not just awkward but painful as hell. Jonas hadn’t seen his face for over an hour.
He didn’t have to. He knew what he’d see when—if—the kid raised his chin again.
Blood caked into a ridged scab across the fine slash of his upper lip, under his broad nose and over a determinedly sculpted chin. He’d see the blackened stains of it dried into the man’s ears, blending into his dark brown hair. Even now, that greasy fringe flopped over his forehead, long since sweating off the gel that had held it into its fashionable spikes. The longest of the textured strands would slide into one swollen eye, if it ever opened again.
The prisoner had eyes the color of the computer-lit confines of the places Jonas preferred to inhabit. Almost black, even without pain stripping them to an endless void. When open, those eyes all but crackled with an intensity that could take a lesser man’s objectivity away in a single glance. Like a hungry kid or a kicked puppy.
Or a man on the edge of desperation.
Jonas’s chest kicked.
“Let me know when your people are ready.” He didn’t bother hiding the raw regret in his voice. He’d felt a lot of it, lately. After all, he used to be the man who helped put people into rooms just like that.
“Fine.” May’s voice cracked. Flattened. “I’m trusting you, Jonas.”
“I know.” They always did. “Let me try. I’m positive I can get him out. They won’t expect it this soon.”
“What about your friends?”
He frowned at the screen. Naomi and Silas were making plans, working every angle they could with the other refugees from the Church’s city-wide manhunt. His fellow ex-missionaries were good, but not good enough to get to that cell in time. They weren’t ready.
Jonas was. Right now. “They’ll adapt. I’ll let them know.”
“It’s a risk.” She didn’t have to say what Jonas already knew. He could all but feel the thready pulse of fear through the frequency he’d been so far unable to trace. She was hurting.
And damn it, Jonas wanted out of the business of making people hurt.
“It’s a risk to leave him,” he countered. “Any more of this, and he’ll crack.”
“The things he knows aren’t worth his life.”
The things he knew, Jonas thought as he forced himself to look away from the screen, could very well be worth a hundred lives. But because he couldn’t help himself, because she had to know the stakes, he turned back to the flickering image and said flatly, “If you don’t let me try, I’ll do it on my own.”
She said nothing.
He sat back in the chair that didn’t belong with the rest of the decor. Unlike the four square feet of cleanliness around his station, dust and canvas and discarded tools glittered where they’d been left. The broken-down husks of battered junker cars rose like squat ghosts from the interior of the old garage, and the windows had long since been painted black to keep prying eyes and the always present crackle of neon lighting away.
Aside from the narrow corridor that served as his current base of operations, the garage was just that—a place to store things.
To store him. At least until he figured out what he wanted out of a life he’d only barely chosen.
“Fine,” came the word he’d both hoped for and dreaded. “Use whatever is at your disposal.” There a shuddering note as she took a breath. “Save my grandson.” Grit over steel.
Steel over glass.
She disconnected before she could extract the promise neither of them was positive he could keep. Jonas didn’t let himself consider why. Didn’t want to think about the fact that the Mission had transferred this dark-haired, dark-eyed kid to a cell below the security line, where there’d be less paperwork to consider. Fewer questions asked.
The same offices Jonas himself had once called home.
That was no witch strapped to the metal chair. At the most—a
huge
most, given the state of the once-proud Mission—they claimed an insurgent. A man who’d stopped believing what the Church was handing down. No worse, and a thousand times better, than Jonas himself. But that didn’t matter so much to the Mission anymore. Witches, heretics, political rivals, dissidents. Somewhere along the way, they’d all become the same thing.
It wasn’t recent. Couldn’t be. But if he had to put a definite timeline on it, the point where he’d made the decision to leave the Mission that had raised him, he’d nail it with emphasis to a week ago. When his whole world, already teetering on the brink of something he’d thought was his festering conscience, imploded.
Pain licked a path up his spine, and he shifted gingerly. In answer, a line of fire uncurled to his right knee. Moving, altering his body weight from one hip to the other, didn’t help. His legs spasmed in pain both remembered and new; they always did, more and more since he’d lost his custom chair. Of course, he’d nearly lost his life. What was comfortable posture to a living, beating—
breaking
—heart?
Motion on the screen narrowed his eyes. A clang as metal tumblers drew back.
Showtime. Jonas shoved his glasses farther up on his nose.
“You should be awake, now,” came that voice. That fucking pleasant voice. So reasonable. So
sure
.
So unfamiliar.
Jonas’s fingernails bit into his palms as he abruptly shifted forward. He shot one fist against the edge of the metal desk as he teetered in his chair sent one crutch clattering to the concrete floor, but he didn’t care.
Because Danny, that stupidly brave kid, raised his head.
Jonas stared into a single dark eye so filled with pain, with resignation, that his heart thudded against his ribs.
“Don’t,” he whispered, knowing it wouldn’t help.
The interrogator—one of the Church’s new operatives, a man Jonas didn’t recognize—crouched. The light didn’t reflect off his plain black suit jacket so much as sink into it. “You’re lucid,” he observed. “Good. What’s your name?”
“Bite me.”
“Damn it,” Jonas hissed.
“That spirit’ll keep you going,” the interrogator commented, as easily as if blood didn’t decorate Danny’s shirt and face. As if he offered him a goddamned drink. “Ready to talk?” As he cupped a hand under the prisoner’s stubble-dark chin, something vicious uncurled in Jonas’s stomach. Snarled.
Jonas didn’t bother to question why. He
knew
why.
Nobody deserved to be tortured by these traitors. Not before Jonas’s defection, when he provided the intel that would send suspects to his very room, and not now that Jonas was out.
And not, please God,
him
. Danny Granger was barely into his twenties. He wasn’t a soldier. Wasn’t built for this kind of warfare. He deserved better—nights spent partying with friends; worrying about where he’d get the money to fund his latest girlfriend’s interests; what to do on a Friday night. Normal things.
Whatever it was that kids raised outside the Mission orphanages considered normal.
“I think . . .” Danny managed, in a husky rasp that wrapped around Jonas’s head and pressed in like a studded vise. “I think . . . I’d like . . . ice cream.”
Stupid.
Jonas tamped down a fiercely protective surge, fought back something that kicked him hard in the darkest part of his mind. Interest.
Of course he was interested. That kid was his responsibility.
“Funny.” As the interrogator withdrew a small black baton from his belt, as his black-gloved thumb flicked on a subtle switch, Jonas flinched.
He didn’t even give the kid time to brace. The baton arced through the air. Whistled, nearly indefinable through the transmission.
A grunt strangled in Danny’s throat.
“Scream,” Jonas urged hoarsely. That’s what they wanted. That’s why they came, again and again, and touched that baton with its live voltage to a bound prisoner. They wanted his voice. “Scream, you idiot. Tell them something, make it up.” They wanted answers, his accomplices, his knowledge, too, but not as badly as they wanted prisoners to pay for every witch who’d ever killed one of their own.