Black Gate: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 4 (15 page)

Did she trust these men with everything? Mari was one of her people, one of the Timewalkers and descendants that Katherine had tried so hard to protect. She was fierce in her determination to keep their identities secret, and there were many others whose names he did not know, their identities locked in an impenetrable vault inside her mind.

“No, Frank.” Katherine’s eyes filled with tears as she looked at each of the men in turn. Teagh held in his sigh of relief. She did not trust them enough to expose Mari. Thank the gods for small favors. He would have been forced to kill them all to protect the healer and Raiden from their clutches. “No. It’s time for me to go.”

“Shit.” Ryan pushed away from the back door. “I’ll get Robbie. We can figure out the rest of this mess when we get back. Come on, Andrew. You, too. You can break up with us later.”

“Damn it, Kitty-Kat. I’m going to be upset with you if you get yourself killed.” Matteo shook his head and stalked toward the kitchen. He must know her exit was inevitable. They’d all been in the dark with her, been saved by her unique brand of power. They’d survived. Every one of them would be changed. Their world had changed with their knowledge of what she was. Teagh almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

Frank rose, looked Teagh in the eye. “Keep her safe.”

“With my life.”

Katherine grunted, her doubt obvious, but Frank searched his gaze for a moment, man to man, and nodded his acceptance of the truth. Teagh would die to keep her safe. It was a sacrifice that these men were familiar with, that they had each chosen to make for their own reasons. Life and death was the only level of commitment soldiers like Frank and his team truly respected or understood.

Sebastian said nothing, simply walked over to touch Katherine’s cheek before retreating toward Teagh’s bedroom, where the Rear Admiral remained unconscious. “I’ll get the Weasel.”

Katherine gasped and Frank grinned at her. “We all have our secrets, Katherine.” Frank climbed to his feet and reached over to squeeze her hand. “Find us when you’re able, my dear. We’ll be together, and we’ll be ready.”

Frank walked away and Teagh found himself facing the last man. Andrew. There was no soft emotion or regret in the man’s eyes. “Going to give me the big brother lecture now?”

Andrew grinned, but not with humor. “Hell, no. You hurt her and she’ll take care of you herself.” Still grinning, he winked at Katherine before raising laser-like eyes to Teagh. “But if you get her killed, there won’t be a dark corner in hell where we can’t hunt you down.” Katherine tensed beneath him at the man’s words and Teagh placed his palm to her neck to try to sooth her. If there were any humans who could pose a legitimate threat to him, Andrew and this team of men would now make the short list. They would still die, but at the very least, the hunt would be interesting.

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Katherine held back tears as Drew left the room and the reality of the situation hit her hard. Her team, her family, was leaving. Andrew was threatening to go A.W.O.L. The Rear Admiral and the rest of the Casper Project would hunt him if he did, him and anyone who went with him.. They’d be fugitives worldwide. There would be nowhere safe for them to go, no country wild enough, no island remote enough, to protect them. They were good, but they were a handful against an army of equally well-trained professionals. Eventually, the odds would catch up to them. Even if she risked exposing her mother’s people, asked them to help hide her boys, given enough time, the sheer number of assassins hunting for them would prevail. They all knew the score.

She
knew. Walking away was a death sentence for the entire team, including her.

Through it all, Teagh’s hands kept her sane. His hand on her back helped her combat the pain of the poison in her lacerations, and the hand roaming through over hair, caressing the skin on the side of her neck, made her feel protected. Cherished. Even if it was a lie.

No one could save her from the Gate. And no one could know her new purpose. She had to heal, and escape the man stroking her as if she were a pet, as quickly as possible.

Ajax believed that Teagh was his betrayer, the traitor who’d captured him and held him prisoner all these years. Teagh. Someone the King had trusted with his life.

Two names, both men that Ajax loved as brothers. Ajax considered them family, and had warned her not to trust either one of them.

She had to warn Celestina, too. And then there was Sarah. Her cousin trusted Bran, said that he was the Archiver who’d saved her life. Which didn’t make any sense. None of this made sense.

The heat of Teagh’s touch made her want to crawl into his arms and curl up next to his heat. He felt so safe to her weak body, so very, very strong. The very real possibility that his honor, his promises to keep her safe, were a giant lie, made her heart hurt. Why couldn’t just one damn thing be easy?

“Take me to her. Now!” The Rear Admiral’s voice boomed through the small beach house and Katherine rolled away from Teagh, pushed against her thighs with shaking arms. She stiffened her spine, ignored the branding iron of pain that seared through her, determined to sit while facing the man who had ruled her life for the last few years.

Ryan and Frank stepped around the corner with the Rear Admiral hobbling between them, his arms around their shoulders as they half carried him to her.

“The chair.” Once seated, the Rear Admiral yelled over his shoulder. “Bring Robert in here, please.”

“He’s outside.”

“Bring him in.”

A few minutes later, a young man, a teenager, rounded the corner with the silent Andrew following behind. Katherine gasped and tried to stand, but agony sliced her feet out from under her and she sank back down onto the couch. Teagh’s arm magically appeared at her back, helping her sit up when she would have fallen backward. Her voice cracked with sorrow when she saw the boy. “What is he doing here?”

“I brought him into the Project after Chicago.”

The young man grinned at her and her heart broke, just a little. He looked like a little boy playing dress up in his soldier’s uniform, his stance achingly recognizable. She’d watched him grow from the day he was born. “Hey, Katie.”

“Hi, Robbie. You really shouldn’t be here.” Every man in the room froze at their familiarity.

She turned to the Rear Admiral, anger swelling to dangerous levels inside her. The Gate’s dark power shifted in her bones, eager to answer her call. “Why is he here?”

The Rear Admiral answered her question with another. “You two know each other?”

Robbie grinned, and lied. “She used to date my big brother.”

The Rear Admiral looked thoughtful, calculating. Katherine wanted to kill him before he saw through Robbie’s lies, or could use her cousin to track the rest of her family down. So, Robbie was the guard she’d seen in the room, the one she hadn’t been able to place. No wonder he’d looked familiar.

“Why is he here? He’s a baby. What the hell have you done?”

“I was following orders, Katherine. Just like the rest of you.”

It was no excuse, and they both knew it. “Whose orders? Robbie is seventeen years old. I’ll kill the bastard myself.”

“I’m sorry, Katherine. If I’d known the truth, I wouldn’t have done what I did to either one of you.” There was no true regret in his tone, just fact. He was a man who made life and death decisions every day and had learned to live with the consequences, good and bad..

“What, exactly, did you do?” God help her, she was afraid of the answer. She’d suffered months of nightmares, a steady loss of sanity and loss of control over her power the last few months. She’d assumed it was because of the battle she’d been part of, Sarah’s battle with the Triscani. Now, seeing the shifting gaze of her commander, she wasn’t so sure.

“There is a man, an Immortal, who is responsible for the entire Project. He came to us several years ago, gave us intel, money and new tech to start. We couldn’t say no.” The Rear Admiral looked at Frank, an apology in his eyes for the men whose lives he’d risked, and the friends they’d lost over the years. “We didn’t
want
to say no.”

“Who is he? Give me his name.” Teagh demanded an answer to the question she’d struggled to shove past the disgust in her throat.

“I don’t know his name. My clearance isn’t high enough. He promised the Joint Chiefs much, but especially he promised control of a ‘
Gate between worlds’
, the ultimate weapon against an army of invading aliens and advanced beings from other planets, or other dimensions.”

Teagh tensed beside her, but she ignored him for now. “And what does this have to do with me? With Robbie?” Her cousin, so young, so fresh-faced and innocent the last time she’d seen him. He had circles under his eyes, exhaustion and a world-weary soul stared out at her from behind his gray-green gaze. She wanted to kill the Rear Admiral for putting that look on a seventeen-year-old kid’s face.

“You and Robbie were chosen by him personally. He said you’d be the most compatible.”

“For what?” Katherine’s blood pounded in her skull and she swayed forward, eager to unleash the darkness in her soul and kill him on the spot. “What have you done?”

“We needed to find the Gate. We needed a way to, not just summon the dark, but control it.”

Teagh snorted. “Reckless and stupid.”

The Rear Admiral nodded agreement. “Yes, I know that now. And I’m sorry, Katherine, but it can’t be undone.”

The dark welled up within her in answer to her fear for herself and her beloved cousin. But it didn’t stay nicely contained, it seemed to grow inside her like a balloon of power filled to the point of bursting by her emotions. “God damn it, if you don’t tell me exactly what you did to us, right now, I am going to rip your heart from your chest and shove it down your lying throat.” Katherine rose from the couch, but not to stand on her own two feet, instead she floated in the air, her feet level with the couch cushions as the dark crackled with power all around her like a demon’s halo.

“Damn, Kitty-Kat.” Matteo whistled. “Girl turned into a super freak.”

“I like it.” Andrew smiled at her and she bit back a slew of curses as she pulled the power back inside and resumed her seat next to the only man in the room whose energy was calm, inside and out.

Teagh must already know the answer to her question. And he wasn’t freaking out. That fact alone helped her keep it together as she faced the Weasel and waited.

“Tell me.” She locked her gaze to the Rear Admiral’s and willed him to speak. “Now.”

“He supplied us with D.N.A., gene therapy, for you and Robert. I don’t know where he got the D.N.A., or who it belonged to. I did what I was told. So did Doc Hansen. And it worked, at first. Your power was off the charts and you hunted like a bloodhound. We recovered more pieces in the last three months than in the prior two years. And you led us to every single one.” The Rear Admiral scooted forward in his seat, renewed zeal and commitment to the cause in his voice. “I thought we had the answer when you found the Gate, Katherine. I believed. I truly did. I thought you would be able to control the Gate, to recon other worlds, other dimensions and report back, as he’d promised us.”

Why would this mystery man want her travelling around in the dark? Katherine thought of Ajax and tensed. “But?”

The Rear Admiral leaned back, defeated. “The darkness spoke to me, Katherine. When I was over there, it got inside my head.”

Teagh rubbed small circles over her hip as she waited for the rest of it. She shouldn’t have allowed the intimate touch, but she couldn’t find the will to scoot away when her entire existence, the very essence of who and what she was, was crumbling into dust with each word the Rear Admiral spoke. “And? What did it say?”

“It’s alive, intelligent.”

Yes. So what? She knew that already. But why would it tell the Rear Admiral anything? She didn’t understand. Neither did Sebastian, who repeated the important question. “So, what did it say?”

“The Gate has tasted Katherine, and it wants to keep her. Our travels here will have alerted it to Robert’s abilities, and I can only assume it will be after Robert as well. It wants you, Katherine. Badly. The darkness offered me a trade.”

Bile rose in her throat and she clenched her teeth in an effort to keep it sealed safely in the lower decks. Teagh’s hand froze on her hip and his relaxed demeanor vanished as he spoke. “What, exactly, did it offer?”

“A permanent lock on the Gates between worlds.”

Teagh’s hand bit painfully into her hip and Katherine wondered what the hell that would mean. His reaction made her twice as nervous. “How many of these Gates are there?”

The Rear Admiral shook his head before responding. “We didn’t know how many there were. Hell, we had a hard enough time finding even one, and the Immortal who supplied the D.N.A. didn’t know either. But the dark knows everything, and it told me there were three.”

“Three of them?” How was she going to deal with that? Could she find them? Close them all?

“There are only two Gates.” Teagh’s hand resumed moving, but his restless energy buzzed up and down her spine.

“No. There are three,” the Rear Admiral insisted. “The dark showed them to me, so I’d know it spoke the truth.”