Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two

Copyright © 2015 by Loren Rhoads

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover illustration and design by Cody Tilson

Print ISBN: 978-1-59780-831-6

Ebook ISBN 978-1-59780-848-4

This book is dedicated to Brian Thomas, partner in crime and shining light.

CHAPTER 1

S
omething caught Raena Zacari’s attention. She glanced over at Ariel and Gavin, but they were engrossed in feeding each other pieces of some bright yellow alien fruit. Nothing strange there, except that they were being nice to each other.

Shoppers filled the souk today. Even though they ranged from humanoid to feathered to she didn’t know what, they were all acting like privileged rich people at a mall, haggling unnecessarily with the shopkeepers. Nothing seemed out of place, but adrenaline poured into Raena’s blood. She clenched her fists, ready for the fight to begin.

Something stung her thigh. Raena glanced down at her leg, bare in the slit of her parrot-blue dress. A tiny dart, fletched with silver foil, pierced her skin.

The drug hit her so fast she couldn’t call for help. Gavin saw her going down and lunged forward to catch her. She saw her terror reflected in his expression. Then his head came apart. She couldn’t even reach up to wipe his blood away.

Screaming people fled into the maze of the old Templar city. Kai was supposed to be a weapons-free world. Everyone paid enough to guarantee their safety here.

Ariel knelt beside Raena, staring at Gavin’s corpse, trying to figure out what had happened.

A second Gavin fought his way through the panicked crowd. He knocked Ariel aside and pulled Raena up over his shoulder. Then he dodged away through the souk.

This Gavin turned a corner to charge down a narrow street. He didn’t see the teenaged boy hiding there. Jain Thallian stepped out from a doorway to fling a shock net over Gavin and Raena both. Its initial jolt knocked Gavin from his feet. Raena fell to the dirt with him. With the drug in her system, she couldn’t raise her hands to break her fall.

Raena fought her way awake from the dream before the Thallians could take her prisoner. Then she lay on her back in her bunk, trying to slow her hammering heart. She breathed deeply, concentrating on the sounds of the
Veracity
around her. Its engines hummed with a steady, reassuring sound. She could hear the hiss of its air exchangers and the gurgle of water in its pipes. All appeared to be right in the galaxy.

Except for this dream. It felt wrong. Its weight—if that was the word she wanted for it—was too great for a soap bubble created from her subconscious. Rather than a mere nightmare, it felt more solid, almost like a memory: a memory of something that hadn’t really happened to her.

She scrubbed the tears from her eyes with her fists. There hadn’t been two Gavins. There had been only one. And on that day on Kai, he’d gotten knocked out as soon as Thallian’s soldiers attacked. Raena had killed as many of the attack team as she could, disabled the rest, and kidnapped Jain. Then she’d left Gavin and Ariel behind, stolen the
Veracity
, and assassinated the rest of the Thallian family. She was free now.

Suddenly Raena needed to get out of her cabin, into the company of people. It had been a month since she’d felt that way—and Jonan Thallian, the man who had been hunting her then, was dead. She’d watched his body burn.

Still jittery, Raena climbed off her bunk. She pulled a clean catsuit from the locker and shimmied into it. This one was poisonous magenta. She hoped the color would lift her mood.

She rubbed some static into her short black hair to make it ray out from her head. Then she strapped on her high-heeled boots like she was putting on her armor.

Ariel Shaad woke up herself by reaching for the gun that should have been holstered on her thigh—except that Ariel herself was worlds away from the events on Kai, safe in bed in her villa on Callixtos.

Shivering, Ariel examined the vestiges of the nightmare still fogging her head. There had been two Gavins. The new one murdered the Gavin she had been traveling with and ran off with Raena flung over his shoulder. One of Thallian’s sons had thrown a shock net over Gavin and her sister. Raena, paralyzed, was weeping in fear.

Ariel rolled over in bed, seeking coolness in sheets that were soft as water, but her thoughts were still entangled in the dream. That hadn’t been how things really happened. True, Thallian’s soldiers had attacked the three of them in the souk, but Gavin hadn’t died there. He’d merely gone down after his hard head met someone else’s even harder fist. One of Thallian’s men had grabbed Ariel’s arm. She’d lost precious time reaching after her nonexistent gun on the weapons-free pleasure planet. Raena stepped up, going on the attack, barehanded and in heels, taking down the kidnappers with a fluid poetry of motion that neutralized the threat until only one teenaged boy and his uncle were left. Then remorseless as an angel, Raena killed the uncle, squashing him like a bug. The boy fled, the only sensible course of action left to him. And Raena ran after him, legs flashing in the parrot-blue sheath dress. She’d been laughing.

That was real. It was over. Raena was safe and all the Thallians were dead.

A shudder crawled over Ariel’s flesh and impelled her to get up. She would get no more sleep today.

She switched on the screen by her bed and checked messages, but saw nothing from Raena. Ariel told herself that the silence signified nothing. It had been only a nightmare.

Two Gavins
, Ariel’s thoughts repeated, circling back to the weirdest part of the dream. The second Gavin had seemed—what? Older? More focused? He reminded Ariel of the era when Gavin had been using the Dart, a Templar drug that focused his personality into something so hateful that Ariel had broken off with him and hidden. In those days, she’d slept with a Stinger under her pillow, just in case.

Somehow, in the dream, Ariel felt that the second Gavin had been the one to drug Raena, just so he could steal her away. It didn’t make sense. In real life, in those final days on Kai, Ariel and Gavin had tried to hide Raena, to keep her safe from the Thallians. Luckily, the outcome had been the best anyone could hope for. Anyone who wasn’t a Thallian, of course.

Or, Ariel supposed with a wry twist of her mouth, anyone who wasn’t Gavin Sloane.

She sighed, glad to be rid of her ex at last. She scrolled through her messages again, but saw no more word from him. It had been a couple of weeks since Gavin left his last haranguing message. Did that mean he’d found a new obsession? Not bloody likely. Maybe he had checked himself in somewhere, gotten the help he so desperately needed. Taken some time out to rebuild his life without Ariel or her sister in it.

Probably he had been arrested again. Ariel tried to decide if she cared enough to check the news. In the end, she signed off the computer and went in search of breakfast. Business wasn’t going to do itself today.

Raena came out of her cabin into the
Veracity
’s passageway. She paused, as always, listening to establish the locations of the rest of the crew.

Something smelled good. Mykah, the human captain, must be busy in the galley. Raena had never eaten as well as she did in Mykah Chen’s crew. Before her imprisonment, when she’d served in the diplomatic service of humanity’s Empire, military rations had always been provided by the lowest bidder. Mykah, who’d worked in food service on Kai before Raena tempted him to become a pirate, insisted on fresh ingredients when he could get them—and knew how to combine them to best effect to please the spectrum of palates on the
Veracity
. Raena counted herself lucky to be serving with him.

She’d asked Mykah once why the others let him become the
Veracity
’s captain. At the time, Mykah laughed. “I’m an excellent cook and an apprentice journalist. Everyone else has useful skills.” Besides, captaining the
Veracity
wasn’t time-consuming. Mostly, Mykah’s job was a matter of entertaining himself with minor media hacks.

At this moment, Haoun, the pilot, and Coni, the resident hacker, were on duty in the cockpit, chatting about a solar wind race, critiquing the media coverage. Neither of them seemed to have placed any bets.

A faint tang of solder burned Raena’s nose. Somewhere toward the back end of the
Veracity
, Vezali must be tinkering. Upgrading the antique diplomatic transport ship—registered as the
Raptor
, before Raena stole it—seemed to fascinate Vezali endlessly. Raena supposed that had to do with the sheer amount of cobbling together Vezali was called on to do.

Galley first, Raena decided. She started in that direction, moving down the passageway silently, just to keep in practice.

When Mykah saw her reflection in the coffee pot he was filling, he smiled. He’d reshaped his beard again. Today he’d twisted it into two coils under his chin.

“Morning,” he wished amicably, even though it wasn’t morning any longer. Mykah didn’t seem to mind whatever hours Raena kept. He grasped that sleep was elusive for her, that she only captured it after hours of stalking it. He always wished her good morning the first time he saw her for the day, no matter the Galactic Standard hour.