As Cold As Ice (19 page)

She didn’t move. She didn’t sneer at
him—which she really wanted to do—and she didn’t lean back when he
took a lock of her hair into his hand and twirled it around his
finger.

Yeah, just like every creepy, overachieving
villain hiding behind a self-confidence problem. That little smile
would totally vanish from his stupid mouth if she told him that.
Especially if she added in that he wasn’t that good-looking and
probably had a tiny penis.

“
Do you know what else is a
rare thing?”

“
What?” Jessica
asked.

“
Paranormals who can
control the elements. You have ice, the woman Jack Marilla vanished
with has fire—a very beautiful fire, by the way—and the man your
brother was chasing after could control electricity. Usually, the
people who come to this building have some small amount of psychic
abilities, or they’re vampires, werewolves, man-eating
wendigoes—the usual dangerous creatures the public doesn’t want to
deal with. Someone like you, however, could be a real
asset.”

“
What?” Jessica’s tone was
flat. She had a pretty good idea of where this was going, and she
didn’t like it.

Her eyes almost flicked over to Soren, who
had gone quiet, but she managed to refrain. Best not to give Markus
any more ammunition than he already had.

Markus continued. The eerie thing about all
of this was the fact that he sounded perfectly serious. There was
nothing in his voice that suggested he was messing with her, that
he was just playing around or making her some bullshit offer
because he thought she was stupid enough to take it. Despite all
the guards and handlers and recruits standing around, it was almost
as if he was talking to her like she was a real equal.

“
If I can get a team of
powerful paranormals—and not just vampires and werewolves, or even
the gargoyles and mermaids—what I mean is that I want creatures so
rare and so held up in high esteem to the community, to the world,
to show their support for this cause. If I can make that happen,
then all this talk about paranormals in politics, the protests,
peaceful and otherwise, will all come to a stop. Now, I want you to
think about that before you respond,” Markus said quickly, just as
Jessica opened her mouth.

“
All right, what would be
the upside to this? Is this why you have Soren working for you? Get
him to act all nice and friendly on camera like in your shitty
sitcoms?”

Markus didn’t appear to take any offense at
her insult. “Something like that, but one dragon isn’t enough, and
neither are the gargoyles and the psychics. No one takes them
seriously anyway. Mermaids and centaurs and fairies, well, they’re
helpful, people like them well enough thanks to Disney movies, but
I only have one man who can breathe under water, and he can’t make
a tail. He just has more webbing on his hands and feet, so that
doesn’t help me too much. I can’t get the vampires and the
werewolves to work with me to save my life. Not that the public
likes them too much anyway, and they certainly don’t like me.”

Good
. Jessica didn’t want anyone liking Markus, or working with
him.

“
But if I can get a good
group of paranormals to work with me, people of real power who can
gain the trust of the public, who are respected even by the people
of this great country, then just imagine that. I can see the way
the wheels are turning in your head, so just think about this
before you respond. There would be less violence on the street.
Fewer paranormals on the run who have to steal from convenience
stores and people walking down the street just to be able to eat or
have a place to sleep. Fewer paranormals dying because they feel
they need to run instead of coming into The Head Office for
Paranormal Containment and Study. Do you have any idea how many
paranormals, hunters and collectors are injured and sometimes pay
for their lives with this entire thing?”

“
I bet the number of
paranormals who get killed or injured is a lot more than the
hunters and collectors.”

Jessica didn’t need to bet,
though; she knew it firsthand. As a hunter—a
former
hunter—she’d seen exactly how
many other hunters and collectors were injured. In the years she’d
worked for Head Office, there had only been one hunter death, and a
handful of injuries to both hunters and collectors.

Markus glared at her, turned around, and
started to pace. “Stubborn, stubborn. Don’t know whether I like
that or not.”

Whatever
.

The death of that hunter had caused a media
shit-storm. Sympathizers all over the country had flooded their
support to Head Office, especially the family of the hunter who had
been killed.

That family was still a strong voice in
politics, wearing their buttons that asked people to remember the
brave injured and dead who worked to get the dangerous paranormals
off the street.

Anyone who tried to work toward equality and
fairness for paranormals in politics always had to answer to them,
as that family was the first to be brought on television by all the
stations. Everyone always wanted their opinion. They—the parents,
siblings, husband and children of the dead hunter—were always
solemn-faced and angry that anyone could ever spit on the memory of
their loved one by suggesting that paranormals—vampires,
werewolves, and everyone else fitting into that category—could ever
safely walk the streets like a normal person.

Markus wagged his finger at her. There was a
smile on his face, but it was strained. “I like you. I like your
spirit. I really do, but I just need to channel that.”

“
I thought you were going
to stick me on that Proxy Project, or whatever it was,” Jessica
said, the spot where she’d received her injection suddenly
itching.

She looked behind Markus to see Soren had
been put on his knees. He looked roughed-up, but not too bad. When
Charles quickly rushed over to him, dropped to one knee and
injected Soren’s arm with a big, thick-ass needle of his own,
Jessica winced in sympathy pain.

She also wanted to kill the lot of them.

“
I don’t think that will be
a good idea anymore, now that I know this one’s been trying to help
you get out. Tell me, what did he tell you about me? About how this
place works?”

“
He didn’t give away
anything incriminating,” Jessica said immediately. “He said I was
going to be put onto your new project, and that was when I was
going to try and make my escape, when you let me and several other
paranormals out of the building. That was it.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Jessica didn't exactly expect Markus to look
convinced, so she wasn't sure why her stomach quivered when he
didn't eat up her words.

"Hmmm," Markus bit his lips together,
shaking his head before pointing a finger at her. "Close, but
that's not quite right, either. Soren was going to try to get you
out of here before it got down to that. Before I could put a
tracker inside you, right?"

"No," Jessica replied immediately. An
instant denial didn't help anything, of course. Weirdly enough, at
least to her own ears, it made her sound all the more guilty.

"Yes, I'm pretty sure that was the plan,"
Markus said. He walked over to the large square piece of concrete,
where the door leading outside was hidden, and put his thumb onto
the small, almost-hidden black glass panel.

He also leaned down and let the thing scan
his eye. Maybe something had come out of the glass and nicked his
thumb to get the blood sample it needed, because then the little
piece of square glass opened up, revealing a tiny hidden
compartment.

It was too bad that the concrete door didn't
slide out of the way. Jessica would've probably taken her chances
and started fighting right then and there, no matter what the odds
were.

Of course, then she would likely get shot
and dragged to a cell.

Yeah, it was probably better that she didn't
see the giant cement door open.

Jessica wasn't sure if there was something
more Markus needed to do in order to open that door. Was there a
keypad for a password hidden in there, as well? On top of
everything else? It was kind of annoying to think that he had so
many things standing in the way between her and freedom, but he
didn't punch in a code. He reached into the tiny space and pulled
out what looked like a USB key stick.

Markus turned back to her, the black glass
closing back over the hidden compartment, and he wiggled the key
stick at her.

Jessica groaned inside of her head, having a
pretty good idea of what he was about to say.

"Do you know what this is?"

"A USB stick?"

"Don't be cute. Tell me what you think is on
it," Markus said.

From the corner of her eye, Jessica could
see the way Soren's eyes widened, how his face drained of all
color.

Yeah, they were a little bit screwed.

"I'm guessing that, despite
what you told some of your other employees, you actually
do
have surveillance
down here," she said. "And you were watching Soren and me
fucking."

There were a couple of chuckles from the
many men standing behind her, mostly from the recruits, in all
probability. She ignored them. She didn't care about them.

Markus shrugged. "You would be amazed at
what you can learn about people when they think no one's watching
them. I'm not just talking about your average off-color sexist or
racist jokes, either, but about loyalty.

"Do you have any idea how many business
deals I've managed to close because of this little thing? It's not
even new, or that good. There's almost no picture, and I can't
watch anything happening from my computer on the top floor. The
part about how nothing wireless down here will work is actually
true. No cell phone will ever receive reception down here, and I
don't have anything wired up to my computer, or any hard drive
upstairs. That's just inviting trouble, what with hackers and what
have you. The last thing I need is for some idiot politician, or
former employee, to go making claims that I'm doing something
that's not quite on the right side of the law, and then have the
police come into my building to do a search of all the
computers."

"Right, that's inconvenient," Jessica
said.

She was fairly sure Markus caught the
sarcasm, but again, he pointed at her and smiled, like she
understood him in ways no one else did.

"You're exactly right. That's just right.
It's also inconvenient to have to come down here myself from time
to time to pick this up and have a look at what might be on it, but
it's worth it. The information I can get off some shitty picture
quality that doesn't even span the entire room, and some good
audio, is fucking priceless. More than worth the trouble of taking
the elevator all the way down here."

Jessica wanted to be sick. That basically
meant Markus had heard everything Soren had ever told her when they
were down there. He'd also seen a good chunk of what they'd been
doing, as well.

She looked to the metal table, how it lined
up with the square of black glass. Any camera hidden behind there
was in full sight of that. Even if Markus couldn't exactly see her
with her legs spread being fucked against a wall, that didn't make
it any less embarrassing that he'd heard her, or that he'd seen
some of what Soren had been doing to her.

That fact that he knew she'd destroyed his
leather chairs on purpose was kind of a nice thought, however. She
had to admit she liked that.

"So, what now?" Jessica asked, doing her
best to not make it completely obvious how she was looking around
the room, trying to gather a proper scale of how many men were down
there. How many people she needed to fight to get away.

She was so completely outnumbered that there
was no way she was getting out of this. No way Soren was getting
out, either.

Markus put his hands behind his back,
walking casually around the room, not a care in the world, nothing
sinister going on. Normal, normal, normal. "Now, I would like to
know how Soren was planning on getting you out of here. I can't
figure that out. He wasn't going to put a tracker inside of you. I
found a couple of broken trackers upstairs. My men have told me the
lights will switch on, but they won't reveal a signal on any
computer. I'm positive he was going to inject you and maybe a few
others with the tracker. Perhaps the hunter who was going to be
sent undercover with you, to prevent her from leading anyone back
to any safe houses she happened to find.

"Or, maybe he wasn't going to put a tracker
in you at all. Maybe the broken ones were only for the people to be
released, so the ones unaware of the project wouldn't inadvertently
lead my team back to their hidey holes. I do recall that Soren said
you wouldn't be here long enough to be sent out with them. I want
to know how he was planning on smuggling you out."

“
How?” Jessica asked. Her
voice shook a little.

Markus smiled. “Yes. Tell me how.”

She had no idea how. That was the biggest
problem she faced. She had no fucking clue how Soren was planning
on getting her out if he wasn’t going to just wait for her to leave
when the other paranormals were let go. Because of that, she
couldn’t even lie about it, couldn’t make something up about any
other way to leave the building.

“
I don’t know,” she said
quietly.

Quietly, but still loud enough that her
voice had carried.

Several fast clicks and a snap sounded.
Jessica looked to the side just in time to see Charles, who had
whipped out a nightstick from his pocket. He pulled his hand back,
and with all the force in his body, he slammed the end of the
weapon into Soren’s stomach.