Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) (3 page)

But she could not have this. Not even a stolen taste of it. She could not let lust trash her good judgment. She had to stay murderously sharp. Constantly on the defensive. Without rest.

Sexual frustration wouldn’t kill her.

But there were other things out there that definitely could.

Chapter 2

She was gone. He told himself to stop running.
Stop, goddamnit.

Noah forced himself to stop sprinting and slow to a walk. He stood there in the street, panting. Vibrating with the near-uncontrollable urge to keep pursuing her.

Breathe. Breathe it down.

Cars swerved around him, horns blatting. He was making a spectacle of himself, standing out in the middle of city traffic. Like he gave a shit about the noise and shouted insults. He just kept staring, trying to follow her taxi with his gaze even after it turned the corner. But even his enhanced vision couldn’t bend light rays.

The dancer’s bulky disguise—it had to be a disguise—couldn’t fool him, not now that he’d seen her energy signature. Unique to her. Invisible to anyone but him. Unless, of course, that person used cutting-edge visual imaging, similar to the micro-tech implanted in his own eyes and brain to support his AVP combat programming.

Her energy sig was the most beautiful he’d ever seen. A vivid bloom of color, floating in the air and superimposed over her drab coat. It struck him as intensely feminine, though he’d never assigned any gender attributes to energy sigs before. His hands clenched as he tried to shut down his raging frustration.

At the speed that cab had been going, he could have outrun it without breaking a sweat. Like a panther taking down an antelope. He wouldn’t even need AVP to access his emergency fuel stores. He could have wrenched the door right off the vehicle, flung it away and claimed his prize, then and there. Nobody on earth could have stopped him.

He wanted to howl like a wild animal.

Just his luck that she’d gotten away. She’d saved him from police involvement, legal action, media buzz. Viral fucking videos circulating on the Internet, filmed with the phones of whoever was passing by. And somebody was always passing by.

The Obsidian Group was lurking out there, watching and listening for them even years after rebellion day. Ready to come down on him, above all, like a ton of bricks. Behaving the way Obsidian had programmed him to behave would put everything and everyone he cared about in danger.

He would . . . not . . . do it.
No.

Breathe, dick-for-brains. Grab a hook. Go sit in the freezer until you’re capable of at least pretending to be a normal human being.

A car horn blared long and loud, zapping his combat program into furious play again. He whipped his head around. Fixed the offending driver with a lethal stare.

The guy flinched, lifting his hands off the horn. He quickly swerved into the opposing lane of traffic to stay well clear of Noah’s highly effective Look of Death, tires squealing as he accelerated away. The other cars stopped well short of him and waited as he strode across the roadway and back onto the sidewalk.

The combat program was in full swing, measuring and analyzing everything his enhanced eyes perceived, pumping him full of corrosive stress hormones. Everyone he saw was was an enemy
, automatically assessed for threat level. The program churned out an instant
aneous bare-hands kill plan for each one, urging him to act, move, take them out fast, kill them, kill them now, now,
now . . .

No. Those people are not enemies. They’re ordinary citizens of Seattle going about their usual afternoon business. Step back.

He would not follow their program.
He was his own man. He was who he chose to be. Not Obsidian’s rabid hound lunging on a chain. Fuck that.
Fuck
them.

Grab the hook. Grab it!

He swiftly descended into his most efficient analog, an arctic glacier, a maze of ice caves, blue-tinted and deep. All senses engaged with the biting cold to chill him . . . the fuck . . .
out.

The red haze retreated. The constant scroll of data down his field of vision began to slow down, as did his thudding heartbeat. He was still generating kill plans, but the urge to violently follow through on them was ebbing. Slowly.

He’d trained himself over the years to function normally in the outside world while simultaneously analog diving. It created a double vision effect, but he was used to it, to the point where he could even conduct a coherent business conversation like that.

He chilled in his ice cave while he made his way back into the office building. Ignoring people’s puzzled stares in the same way that he ignored the combat program’s helpful, detailed suggestions as to how to most efficiently tear them all into small, bloody pieces.

Yeah. Thanks. Not today.

He hadn’t had a stress event this severe in over ten years. And right in the middle of an important meeting. Seconds away from signing key documents.

Hannah’s timing was a balls-on disaster. Everyone in that room, including his fianceé and her stepfather, had seen him chasing a party entertainer out of the building in much the way that a big predator chased down its lunch.

That was going to be tough to explain. He couldn’t even explain it to himself. He faked normal pretty well these days, for the most part. He did all the normal things. He’d even gotten engaged to Simone Brightman, the perfect woman.

He had his shit together, or so he thought. He was on top of the bad stuff in his past. He’d left it behind, had not allowed it to define him. Heading down the straight and narrow path to marriage, kids, a house in the suburbs. What could be more normal than that?

So his reasoning had gone. But he’d obviously been fooling himself.
If a pretty dancing girl could knock him right off his rails
and get him running AVP hot, right out of fucking nowhere . . . that was bad.

He was still deep in the shit. Deeper than he’d thought. He groped for the shades in his jacket pocket. Put them on. The extra light shield helped a little.

He should have talked to Simone about this, but what could he say? He couldn’t tell her the truth about Midlands and what happened there. He couldn’t come clean about his modifications.

His phone buzzed in his pocket as he waited for the elevator. He pulled it out. An encrypted message on his private line.

Heads up. yr future father-in-law Batello has dealings with Mayburg Group, a subsidiary of Obsidian. Don’t sign. Asa

The text message was followed by a series of links.

He realized some time later that he was blocking the entrance to the elevator. People were sidling awkwardly around him, shooting him nervous glances. They sensed the buzzing bad energy he was giving off. There was once again a personalized kill plan glowing on his inner screen for every single person in his line of vision.

Batello? How could Noah and his team have missed a connection between Batello and Obsidian, with all their due diligence? And how the
fuck
did his brother Asa know about it?

How did Asa know anything about them at all, after thirteen years without contact?

His mind reeled. His focus was blasted all to shit.
Asa?

As soon as he could move at all, he followed the first directive in his own damage control checklist.
Isolate yourself ASAP.

Stairwell. He went for it.

Twenty-four flights of stairs at a dead sprint would drain off some excess energy.

So would randomly killing someone. Whatever happened first.

* * *

It was hard to sit still. The bus lumbered through the University District. Not her first choice for a getaway vehicle, but it had been stopped near the taxi when Caro jumped out. She perched on the plastic seat, vibrating with urgency. She wanted to jump up, run, yell, do something, anything. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Noah Gallagher staring after her cab as he sprinted down the middle of a busy street, as if the honking cars swerving around him were not even a relevant consideration.

She almost wished he’d caught up with her. So strange and sexy, to be seen like that. So deeply. Delicious and toe-curling, that a man like him wanted her attention so much he’d run out into traffic to try and catch her.

It was more fun to think about her fantasy lover than to dwell on the terrifying real issues of her life. But please. She had to stay focused. A psycho killer was after her ass. No one was going to save that ass but her. She was almost certainly being followed, which meant Mark probably knew where she was. She couldn’t swoon off into romantic daydreams. Much less full-on sexual fantasies.

The suspicion that she was being tailed began yesterday after she’d seen Bea. By now it was as big and heavy as a rock in her throat. There was no one in the bus to inspire mortal dread, just a Goth girl rocking out to headphones and an old lady opposite her. A plaid purse on her lap held a yappy little dog. The dog stuck its head out and eyed Caro balefully, as if it knew something that Caro didn’t.

She’d seen the guy twice yesterday. Big, tall. Black ponytail, hawk nose, strolling casually about a block or so behind her. He hadn’t looked directly at her, but that meant nothing. The competent ones never seemed to be looking.

Then she’d spotted him again at the Stray Cat after that stupid bachelor party gig. That clinched it. More than once was once too often. He’d filmed her on his phone. There were no coincidences. If something seemed sinister, it
was
sinister. Count on it.

She craned her neck until it ached, squinting through the rainspotted window at headlights and taillights. She didn’t dare draw any more unhealthy attention to Bea, who had problems of her own. It was wrong to pull anyone into the toxic mess of
her life.

Like she’d done to Tim.

She shoved that thought away fast, before it could swallow her.

She’d been on the bus since that bizarre belly dancing gig, just riding the loop and hoping to keep Ponytail off her trail until she pinned Bea down one last time.

Sexual fantasies were a huge improvement over her usual thought patterns, at least. Noah Gallagher was going to haunt her dreams, and her dreams were already haunted. His smoldering gaze was
a mindblowing distraction.

One she didn’t need. Not when she had to fight for her very existence.

Her eyes stung from lack of sleep. Lashes were gummy from old mascara. She rubbed them, and when she opened them, her stomach dropped into a bottomless hole.

Her hands were wet, crimson. Slippery with blood. She held a boxcutter in her shaking hand. It dripped with hot gore.

She looked up, in dread. The big guy who had been with Mark Olund on the night of the attack at Dex’s office stood before her. The one who had held her down on the worktable while Mark murdered Dex.

She’d killed him. Almost by accident. She’d grabbed the boxcutter at random with her scrabbling hand, and gotten in a wild lucky jab right to his neck. He’d cut her too, in the brief struggle that took place afterwards. She’d barely noticed at the time.

The ghost man stared at her with pale, accusing eyes. His bloody fingers pressed against the hole she’d punched into his throat. Slowly, tauntingly, he lifted his hand—and hot pulsing spurts of blood pumped out, drenching her.

He grinned, with bloody teeth, and toppled slowly toward her.

She jumped up to evade his falling body with a cry—

He was gone. So was the blood, the boxcutter. Of course. It was just the old lady on the plastic bench, peering up with a suspicious frown. Her tiny dog stuck its head out of the purse and bared its sharp yellow teeth, growling low in its throat.

The bus was dead silent. Everyone was giving her the Look. Shrinking away as far as they could get from a crazy passenger who yelled at things no one else could see.

It made her cringe to be that girl again. With her overdeveloped capacity to visualize, combined with extreme stress, hallucinations could happen out of nowhere. The first time was when she was little, after Mom died. Since then . . . she’d had others.

She knew the difference between fantasy and reality. And it wasn’t all bad. Her freakish visual ability had given her art, masks, costume design. It had brought her to the attention of Dex Boyd of GodsEye Biometrics. Which had transformed her life.

Her body clenched instinctively when she thought about Dex. His murder had happened only eight months ago. Still a raw wound in her mind.

The bus lurched to a standstill. It was one stop too soon, but she had to get away from the sidelong glances. She grabbed the bag that held her dancing costume and headed for the exit as the door opened.

The vehicle hissed and groaned and lumbered away, leaving her in near darkness with raw wind gusting around her. Her knees still wobbled from the shock of the ugly hallucination. And now she had twelve extra blocks to walk. Great.

She was chilled to the bone when she found Bea’s boyfriend’s house. She tucked her glasses into her bag, spat out the jaw prosthesis, peeled off the wig, raking a hand through her flattened hair. She felt horribly exposed without her disguise.

She spun around. No one seemed to be lurking. So far, so good.

The house was a weatherbeaten green, the sparse lawn fenced with chain-link. She went up onto the sagging porch and pressed the doorbell.

The curtains twitched to the side. A man peered out. Her heart sank. She’d been hoping desperately to talk to Bea alone. The door opened, stopped short by a clanking security chain. A stocky, bearded guy peered out. She knew who he was. Todd Blount, originally from Chelan, Washington, a
special ed teacher in elementary school.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I hope so. I want to speak to Marika.” The name Bea used in her new life.

He looked at her suspiciously, but not like he was afraid of her. Caro concluded that he knew diddly about his girlfriend’s secrets.

“What’s it about?” Todd demanded.

“I knew her back in college,” Caro improvised.