Evenfall (124 page)

"He's good people. We trained together." Jonathan's gaze, if anything, only seemed to intensify. "You know how he names his moves sometimes? There's one called the helicopter?"

The man was seriously strange. "I don't recall that move," he said after a moment.

"Oh." Jonathan looked disappointed and he leaned back in his seat. "Well. I named it."

"Oh." Boyd stared at him, not really knowing what to say. Silence grew between them before he added, "Maybe he hasn't had the chance to teach it to me yet."

"Maybe," Jonathan said, though he seemed mollified by the explanation. He suddenly gave Boyd a briefly pleased look then peered out the window. "Call me Blair, by the way. And he's Archer." He nodded toward Casey, whose raptor-like gaze was focused on the van and what he could see outside the windows. "Don't call him Casey; he hates that."

"Alright." After a moment Boyd looked out the window as well. In the reflection off the glass, he could see Harriet and Archer both looking incredibly unimpressed.

The scenery rolled past and in his mind Boyd found himself automatically placing them in context of the city and the secret passageways. The city was confusing as hell, with streets that started and ended abruptly, areas that had no rhyme or reason to the layout and other areas with sections that seemed logical but were intersected by diagonal streets that cut the blocks into strange shapes. Some streets wound back in on each other and disappeared and reappeared across the city like a serpent winding in and out of the water.
The street names were all over the place as well, after almost anything a person could think of: People, days of the year, heroes, Zodiac signs, countries, capitols, seemingly random words... It had taken Boyd awhile to even figure out how to navigate the city in the first place but all those months paid off as he watched their progress.

As they drove, he felt increasingly anxious about what they would find.

Their target area came upon them abruptly; it went from increasingly poor residential homes to large blocks of concrete and foreboding buildings rising around them. Kassian drove around the back on a service road until they reached a building that provided cover. He pulled the van up to the back, parking it next to an outcropped wall that would keep them out of view while they silently unloaded from the vehicle.

It was obvious that the team had worked together before. Kassian didn't even need to give a signal before they spread out and without a sound approached the neighboring building. Boyd started to go with them but Archer suddenly put his hand on his chest and shoved him back a step with a sharp look. Boyd slid his gaze over to him, meeting his eyes evenly, but stayed behind them by a few steps anyway.

Once he was around the corner, he could see the target building.
It was a squat clinic, looking long ago abandoned judging by the faded address spray-painted on the wall and the creaking, half-broken sign. The doors, on the other hand, looked curiously well taken care of.
Kassian's team moved in silently and quickly, securing the perimeter before they even attempted the building itself. Boyd could feel his heart thundering in his chest as he followed them, wanting to push them aside and run in to see what was happening. Instead he stayed back and tried not to imagine Sin's corpse, images that kept flashing through his mind growing more grotesque and vivid the closer he came to the building.

The entire area seemed completely deserted. No other sounds could be heard other than the faint drilling of a jackhammer several blocks away. The wind picked up slightly, whipping Boyd's choppy, uneven hair.

He stared at the door intently, wishing they would just go in already. Wishing they would stop being so fucking thorough when he sensed no one in the general area except them.

Finally Archer approached the door, .45 in his hand as he walked sideways along the wall and seemed to listen for any sounds on the inside. He glanced at Kassian, who looked at Boyd with a tense expression on his face. The look was strange and it was hard to tell what the man was thinking. Finally Kassian's eyes slid to Archer and he nodded once, shortly.

Archer abruptly spun towards the door and kicked it open, before ducking out of the way again and pinning himself against the side of the building once again. Nothing happened; no one called out in alarm and no one began firing out at them.
From Boyd's angle, all he could see was darkness beyond the doorway. He felt his muscles tense with the desire to run in there. Finally, Archer, Harriet, and Blair all moved in. Michael continued to watch the perimeter and Kassian, surprisingly, continued to watch Boyd.

"It's empty!" Harriet's voice called out eventually.

Kassian finally nodded at Boyd and strode toward the clinic himself.

The first thing Boyd noticed about the inside of the clinic was that it looked filthy; the walls were covered in a thick layer of grime and dust that didn't seem to have been disturbed in years. But as he looked closer, he realized that other things in the small lobby didn't look as dirty. Chairs weren't covered in the same layers of dust as the walls and there were obvious footprints tracking through areas of the room.

There were only three doors from the main lobby and the team checked them all one at a time. One room was completely covered in the sheen of dust and obviously hadn't been used in some time. The second appeared to be a small office. Although there were no stacks of paper sitting around, there were obvious places in the grime on the desk where objects had been sat down recently, one of which appeared to have been a large box or case.

Finally the team turned to the third door and Kassian hesitated, eyes once again finding Boyd's in the darkness as he slowly twisted the doorknob. Boyd's heart sped up, breath coming a little faster as his stomach twisted with anxiety. He shifted his intent gaze to the door.

Kassian pushed the door open and stared inside. Before Boyd could see anything, Michael immediately looked over Kassian's shoulder and his eyes widened slightly.

"Well, shit."

Hearing Michael's tone, Boyd moved so he could see in.

The room was eerily covered in blood.

Sin wasn't there.

The air was dank and abandoned. The smell of blood was thick and overwhelming. Splatters could be seen on the walls, mixing with the dust and grime. Dull metal shone from what appeared to be a surgeon's table, covered in long streaks of blood that twisted and stretched in patterns that told stories on their own. Small pools of coagulated blood had gathered on either side of the table as if something had been steadily bleeding and dripping in those particular spots.

But the most alarming part was the drag marks.
The layer of dust on the floor was not only interrupted by footprints there; a solid chunk was entirely rubbed away as if something had been dragged from the table and toward the back door. A disturbing amount of bloodstains streaked across that section of the floor and a smeared, bloody handprint was vaguely visible on one side of it.

Boyd's eyes widened and he stared in shock, gaze darting around to take in every splatter. He couldn't seem to concentrate on any one area until he saw the pools.
He looked back up at the surgeon's table and his imagination gave him a ghostly flash of Sin strapped down, screaming, or maybe he'd just been lying still like when he'd been drugged in the box and he'd been incapable of even defending himself.
Boyd felt nauseated and almost swayed, placing a hand against the wall to steady himself. His heart was resoundingly loud to him, like an echo it seemed everyone else would be able to hear around him. When he saw the drag marks he grit his teeth and slid his eyes closed to give himself a chance to gather any sense of control.

It took much of his willpower not to just shove between Michael and Kassian, to run across the room and follow those drag marks. The door was shut but it didn't matter. He'd already been out back. He knew nothing was there.

But somehow, standing by that room, he felt like maybe if he just opened the door Sin would be there. It would turn out that all the blood wasn't his, it was his attackers', and there were no bodies because he'd already disposed of them. If he just opened that door, Sin would be slouched against the wall and would look at him mildly, saying he'd been waiting for them to come pick him up already.

Boyd let his breath out in a slow, quiet release, then managed to say, only slightly shaken, "They took him. Do you know how to find him?"

No one seemed to listen to him. Harriet walked around the room as Michael and Blair opened the door and began looking around the back more thoroughly, flashlights on as they examined the floors.

"It looks like they did him here," Harriet said flatly, gesturing to the surgeon table. "Dragged the body out back."

Michael reappeared in the doorway, nodding as if he were confirming the theory. "There's some blood and tire marks in the back. They probably took it elsewhere to discard."

Boyd looked immediately at Kassian, his gaze intense. "Do you know how to find him?" he repeated more firmly because they either hadn't heard him the first time or were ignoring him. "Because I do."

But Kassian didn't seem to be paying him any mind. He glanced at his watch and then surveyed the room again. He walked over to a corner of the room where what looked to be a pile of garbage was situated. Harriet took out a small digital camera and began snapping pictures of the scene.

"Obviously they're not here," Kassian said. "Since we have no data on their actual base of operations, let's spread out and find any information, if there is any, before heading out." He crouched down and picked at the pile of discarded sheets and cloth before extracting what appeared to be a torn white shirt, stained with blood.

Boyd immediately recognized Sin's shirt. His eyes narrowed and although it was upsetting to see, more than anything it angered him. The people who took Sin had hurt him so much that they'd actually managed to overpower him. They had, he assumed, kept him strapped to a surgeon's table and dragged him around like he was garbage.

And now, the rescue team was ignoring the one person who had been in that city for months, who was telling them he had a solution. The longer they waited in that room, the longer those five screwed around poking at blood pools and trying to reconstruct the scene, the less chance they had of finding Sin in time before something worse happened.

Even with all that blood, he refused to believe Sin was dead. Even if he had flat-lined, it was possible he'd somehow been revived. And even if that wasn't the case, Boyd was still going to find his fucking body.

Making a noise of disgust, Boyd turned his back on the room and strode further into the main part of the clinic. He wasn't going to be able to help Sin by staring at that scene; there was no point in focusing on the past when what was important was the future.

Within a few seconds he had removed his watch and flipped it over to the GPS tracking system, waiting with his heart pounding and breath held as the screen went briefly blank. For a moment, he thought Tayla and Liani had failed him, that the GPS wasn't working after all even though he and Sin had tested them when they'd first put them on. Then green lines spread across the screen and a small dot languidly blinked up at him.
He felt such a sense of relief that he slouched and slid his eyes closed, his head tilted down for a moment.

He didn't get the chance to do anything more before Kassian strode into the lobby and abruptly yanked him backwards. "I told you not to go anywhere unless I said so," he said in an irritated tone, although the unidentifiable expression remained on his face.

"You weren't listening to me," Boyd snapped, unable to keep the annoyance out of his voice. He held the watch up so Kassian could see. "Look, he's only fifteen minutes away if we take the right streets. There's no point in staying here anymore."

Kassian stared at him for a moment before snatching the watch away and looking down at it. Harriet and Archer had come partially into the room to observe the exchange and they stared down at the watch in confusion.

"It's a GPS receiver," Kassian said out loud, although he spoke to no one in particular. He looked up at Boyd with slightly narrowed eyes. "How is it tracking him? Not through the chip."

"That chip only tracks to the Agency and wouldn't be any help in this type of situation," Boyd said dismissively although he was trying to keep a tight rein on his irritation. He didn't want to be explaining this, he just wanted to go. "So I got us each a receiver and transmitter. And before you ask, yes, it's encrypted, yes, we took the proper precautions, yes, I trust the technology, and no, it won't pinpoint him directly but it will give us a hell of a lot better idea than just wandering around looking at bloodstains and hoping the bad guys were nice enough to give us tire tracks all the way to their home base."

Kassian stared at him blankly. "Does that answer my question? No. I asked how it is tracking him. What is the device that was used. I am aware of what the chip does and I could personally care less about your feelings on the current situation. If you don't like how things are done you can be easily detained and kept out of the operation until we return to the States. I am only allowing you to be here out of the kindness of my heart." He held up the watch. "Now answer the fucking question."

"An earring," Boyd said after a moment, trying to stay calm. Frustration and impatience burned within him. He pushed his short hair out of the way and pointed to an innocuous silver post in his upper ear. "Like this one."