Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella (4 page)

Another one of those short, warm chuckles spiked Danny’s temperature up a degree. Despite his flippant retort, he sucked in a breath as his pounding heartbeat dropped into portions of his anatomy he should have been ignoring.

Two figures stepped out of that room, one struggling into a holster carrying some kind of wicked-looking machine gun pistol hybrid. “What the fuck was that?” demanded one. The woman. Danny squinted, but all he could make out was dark hair against that black get-up all the missionaries had started wearing recently.

Beside her, a man only an inch taller pulled the door closed behind them. Dressed in the same plasteel body armor, he jerked a hand through his much paler hair. “It didn’t feel like an explosion.”

Static crackled, causing Danny to jump and press himself tighter to the wall.

“Shh.” The warning filled his ear.

Danny didn’t ask how the man knew every alarm in his brain was screaming at him to run. Get away.
Move, damn it.

Maybe he could see Danny’s face through the cameras, see how wide his good eye had gotten as the two faced each other. As the woman reached for the comm clipped to her belt. Maybe he could hear the rampaging thud of Danny’s heart, suddenly thick and acrid and cold in his throat.

All one of them had to do was turn a head. Just look down the hall, and that’d be it. They’d be on him faster than he could run.

The beatings would start again.

His palms sweating, Danny realized it didn’t matter. He couldn’t move. Not to fade back into the corridor, not even to blink. Fear filled his skin, spread like ice and acid on his tongue.

“What is it?” the woman demanded into the comm.

Her partner hesitated, his head turning. Almost as if in slow motion, Danny’s spine locked with terror. Sheer, unadulterated panic.

“All squads stand down,” came the static-peppered order through the comm.

The man’s eyes snapped back to the woman. “Stand down? What was it?”

“Not me,” Jonas murmured.

The importance of that statement, Danny told himself, would have to wait until after he passed out. Or woke up from passing out. Back so tight against the wall that his shoulder blades pinched, he stared at the two operatives mere feet away and held his breath.
Go.

“Crap,” the lady said tersely. “I’m not paid enough for this.”

“Easy,” Jonas murmured. “You’re doing great.”

Danny’s lungs clamored for air. He jerked hard as his fists clenched.

“Stand-down order means it’s not big, right?” The man sighed as he followed his partner down the hall. In the opposite direction. “You’d think they’d send a memo.” His voice faded, until not even their footsteps echoed anymore.

“And . . .” A brief pause. Then soft relief as Jonas finished, “Clear.”

Danny’s knees gave out.

Collapsing heavily against the wall, his butt hit the floor with a dull thud he’d feel later. Or wouldn’t, given everything else already screaming in his body. He clung to the surface with sweat-dampened hands, supported himself at an angle that gave him no leverage if he had to move fast, and let out a shuddering breath.

“You’re good, Danny.” Did that so-calm voice crack?

No way.

“That was close, but you’re almost out. Follow that hall for four junctions, then turn right.”

“What was that?” Danny whispered.

“I—” Jonas’s voice tightened. “I don’t know, and it’s not important. We need to get you out, remember? Four junctions, take a right.”

“Right,” Danny murmured, raising a shaking hand to his eyes. He winced as his fingers found flesh too swollen to feel like his own. “I can do that.”

“I know you can. Hard part’s over.”

He couldn’t help himself. His mouth twitched. “Hard part’s half the fun, angel.”

“Only half?”

Holy shit.
Danny jerked as a bolt of raw adrenaline unlocked from his rapid-fire heartbeat to shoot into his crotch. “Most of the fun,” he allowed tightly. “You’re a real tease, aren’t you?”

A beat. Too long a silence to go unnoticed. Too short to fill as Jonas replied softly, “Just your nerves talking, kid.”

Was it?

He couldn’t push it. Not here, and not while his brain suffered a very real chance of leaking out through his ears. He felt like hell.

He probably looked like hell; like ground meat paste and sweat. Not sexy.

Danny didn’t say anything, forcing himself upright and jerking into a loping, staggered jog. It jarred every bruised bone in his body, but he could all but taste the promise of freedom. Hear it through the comm, his one fragile link to the outside world.

As he followed the directions, he tilted his head. Frowned. “What’s that clicking sound?”

“I’m securing your passage.”

He knew that sound. Knew it the same way he knew a lullaby, or the sound of his grandmother’s voice. Knew it because the background accompaniment—the steady click of fingers on keys—had been a facet of every part of his life for as long as he could remember.

“So Grams found a protégé, huh?” he asked, his breath tight in his throat. His body struggled to keep going. Muscles cramped, his balance wavered, but Danny forced himself to go. Foot after foot. Step by step.

He turned right.

“I don’t know about that,” Jonas replied, somehow managing to sound as if his full attention remained on that fine, ephemeral frequency straining between them. And not, like Danny was sure it was, on whatever string of gobbledygook he typed into his computer. “But I found you, and that’s all that matters.”

Danny couldn’t help himself. “I love a man with tunnel vision.”

The muffled sound in his ear could have been a snort. Or a gasp.

Then, “You’re leaving my view, Danny. Be careful. According to my plans, you’ve got about thirteen feet before you reach a door.”

“Is it clear?”

“Everyone’s in briefing. Whatever happened, it surprised the hell out of them.”

“It surprised the hell out of me,” Danny retorted.

“We’ll take what we can get. There should be a door.”

There was. “Door,” Danny confirmed as he came up against a dark panel the same gray as everything else. After this, he was going to go on a crusade against the godforsaken color.

“On it.” More clicking. More digital magic, he figured.

Danny waited, because he knew what kind of miracles people like his grandmother could pull. He studied the panel set into the wall beside the door, the sensor that would probably shriek a warning if he tampered with it.

Reaching behind him, he rubbed the back of his head at the same time as he stretched the aching muscles along his side. They cramped, twanging a warning along every nerve in his side and sending his breath hissing from between his teeth.

The focused clatter of keys hitched. “Are you okay, Danny?”

“Ask me that in about an hour.” He shook his head. “No, wait. Get me a bath, then ask me that.”

“Yes, sir,” came the light—
too light
—response. The echo of his keyboard subtly shifted in speed. Faster. “How would you like that water?”

“Scalding.” Danny let his eye close. Let the darkness fill his head. Just for a moment. “Filled with bubbles and a green-eyed pool boy. You busy?”

A snort, this time. Definitely a snort. “Not on your life, kid. And—there,” he added before Danny could pin anything or even
try
. “Go through.”

The door clicked once more as if the mysterious Jonas with the sexy tenor stood behind some curtain and directed the composition of Danny’s escape. Tumblers rolled back, hinges sprang into motion. The automated door swung wide.

Danny barely made it half a step before a gun knocked neatly between his eyebrows.

His heart plummeted into his toes.

Chapter Three

“D
ANNY?”

Gripping the edge of the desk, Jonas didn’t notice that his knuckles popped. Threatened to tear through the fragile skin gone white from the pressure.

No visual. Not there. That was half the reason he’d chosen the side door as part of his exit strategy. Alan Eckhart had known about the weakness in the Mission’s surveillance, so he made damn sure to patch it up with manpower until he could get the building budgeted for a rewire.

Not once in Jonas’s fifteen-year career did they ever have to handle a break-in.

But the Church’s secret operatives killed Eckhart in their bloody coup, and as far as Jonas could tell, they hadn’t considered the implications of the weakness.

A weakness that may have just gotten Danny killed.

Nothing filtered through the suddenly quiet comm. Nothing but a muffled rasp.

“Danny?” He leaned toward the useless monitor, each segment showing footage he didn’t need anymore. His heart thudded in his throat, too tight. Too heavy. “Danny!”

“Yo.”

Jonas’s breath rocked out before he could stop it. That wasn’t Danny’s voice, but it’d come in a fine second. “Hey, Gordon.” Light and even. “How’s it swinging?”

Adam Gordon was one of theirs. A missionary caught in the coup, who’d seen the Church’s mysterious Sector Three operatives take over everything he’d worked hard to build and decided
fuck that
with the rest of the sleeper agents. Like the surveillance patch, Gordon was a weakness.

But the Church’s weaknesses would be Jonas’s strength.

“Got your boy,” he drawled in a deep, dry voice reminiscent of the way Jonas’s voice got after a nasty cold. “Scared him bad, though. He’s out.”

Relief filled in the bits fear had hollowed out. “Okay, good. Your tail clear?”

“I’m on street duty,” Gordon replied. “No one’s going to look twice. I’ll haul him your way.”

Not many people had Jonas’s current location on their radar. A select few, a trusted few. He didn’t even bat an eyelash. “I’ll be ready,” he promised. “Take good care of that package.”

“He’s no witch.” The firm, precise statement echoed, hollowed out on the frequency. “Doesn’t belong here. I’ll see you in a few.”

“You got it. You have a plan?”

“Already handled,” Gordon said, and the line went dark.

Jonas stared at the monitor, his fingers so tight around the edge of the work table that it took effort to unclench them.

No, Danny wasn’t a witch. But Jonas knew a few. People who were mired up to their eyebrows in this whole Sector Three business, who were witches
and
friends. And lab rats, thanks to the Church.

Thanks, in fact, to a classified lab experiment called the Salem Project. The same lab most of the current so-called missionaries came out of.

That wasn’t common info. The strictly classified sector of the Church had made damn sure anyone who knew about the project had been run down. Among them, himself. The old Mission Director. The Holy Library’s head librarian. Good men and women murdered without warning or reason.

His jaw clenched.

Quickly, he typed out a string of commands on his keyboard. One by one, the red lights over his computer blinked out. If all went according to plan, the bypass May’s insiders had triggered in the Mission’s closed circuit would eat itself in three minutes, leaving no trace of either Jonas’s interference or the prisoner they’d detained.

The prisoner they’d tortured.

Mouth settling into a thin, grim line, Jonas reached for his comm. The number his long fingers input by rote wasn’t one he dared program.

The unit hummed quietly as it sought the connection.

She didn’t disappoint. “What’s up, Jonas?”

“I need a favor.”

Naomi West had been a missionary once. One of the best. But the job had taken away everything Jonas had loved about her, until she wasn’t much more than a mean streak with lethal focus. A year after her defection, and she’d found a purpose that went beyond killing anyone the Church pointed out.

And she’d found a man who loved her.

It’d been a hard year, but she’d come out all right. She and her team weren’t quite part of May’s gathering rebellion, but parallel enough that Jonas didn’t even think twice about roping her in.

She was the only woman who could help.

“Name it,” she said, her voice a husky promise on the line.

Relief knocked another anchor off his shoulders. He struggled to get up, arms shaking as he pulled his weight out of the uncomfortable seat. “I need to use one of your safe houses.”

“Done and done.”

“And I need you to meet me there.”

That got her. As Jonas bent, awkwardly flattening his forearm against the table to reach for the crutch he knocked aside earlier, she asked flatly, “Shit, fuck and a half, Jonas, what’s going on? Are you hurt?” A beat. “Your legs?”

“Still working, babe,” he returned. “As is my brain, and all the parts in between.” A little too well, given the insanity that gripped him long enough to say half the stuff he’d said to that kid. “But I have May’s grandson.”

“Jesus fuck!”

“You’re so delicate,” Jonas said between clenched teeth as he angled himself upright once more. Years of practice made it a snap to settle both crutches to the ground, slide his arms into the braces built into the tops of each, and pocket his comm. He could even ignore the ache. “I know you were all planning some wide sweep, but—”

“Hey, Silas!” The call split through his earpiece, and he winced. “It’s Jonas, he’s got that kid.”

Jonas took the opportunity to struggle one strap of a bag over his shoulder. The weight wasn’t negligible—a delivery from May,
just in case
, said the innocuous delivery boy—but he’d cope for the short amount of time he’d need to get it to Danny.

A rich, resonant baritone filled the comm line under Naomi’s laugh, too far out of range to catch the gist.

Silas Smith. The man had once been a missionary, but the Church files marked him as killed in action. A file Jonas himself had made sure stayed nice and closed. No longer working for the Holy Order, Silas instead ran with a group that included the ex-Mission Director, three ex-missionaries, three witches, one fugitive socialite, and some cross-over between. They’d all banded, one by one, as the Church turned on them. Betrayed them.

Showed them the real colors Jonas had tried so hard not to cope with.