Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1) (38 page)

“It’s a family trait,” Asa said. “When we fuck up, we go all out.”

He turned and walked out without looking back.

Chapter 28

One of two things was certain, Mark had determined. One: that incompetent shithead Carrerra was already dead. Two: he was about to die, for not answering Mark’s calls. It had been over twenty-four hours since Carrerra’s triumphant phone call announcing that he’d picked up Bishop and was heading to the meet-up.

Nothing since then.
Carrerra knew better than to be incommunicado.

It was not quite dawn, but for him and the five prototypes, equipped with visual implants and new, improved AVP, light levels were no issue. Mark drove through the canyon of dark pines, noting the glaring lack of guards.

Sloppy. Or ominous. He was betting on the latter. His tension mounted.

New kill plans generated on his inner eye screen every time he happened to look at one of the prototypes. He was accustomed to the constantly changing display. Multiple kill plans were useful when he needed to kill large numbers of people in a short amount of time, but at the moment, they only served to remind him how much he would enjoy annihilating the slave soldiers.

Who continued to annoy the living shit out of him.

Besides the palpable hostility they displayed, there were serious glitches. Brenner kept blurting out the name of his kid at random intervals, and Raquel was a river of tears, which swelled her eyes and dripped from her her nose. In addition to making him want to smack her puffy, reddened face, the snot and the gurgling and the constant sniffling obliterated her sexual appeal.

He’d been keeping Brenner and Raquel in the freight container, just to prevent himself from acting on the temptation to hurt them. Life had been simpler when he was alone. The other three in the cab up front had the sense to keep their mouths shut.

When he saw the building, he knew instantly that Carrerra’s entire team was dead. There were no live thermals within a hundred meters of the place, aside from some small forest animals. An unmistakable stench wafted through the window. Not terribly strong yet, but his sense of smell was acute, and he had extensive experience with that particular odor.

He stopped the truck, ordered the protos out, and let the other two out of the freight container before starting the damage assessment. The smell indicated that he was going to need the whole crew for the cleanup.

One corpse lay in the gravel driveway, throat crushed. Dead of asphyxiation, judging by the bulging, sightless eyes.

Wind whipped the treetops. A rhythmic creaking led him to the hanged man, swaying over the narrow path that led to the house. The third corpse lay facedown in front of the aluminum steps, his livid face turned at an improbable angle on his neck. He’d soiled himself in death. The reek of terror-shit blended with the developing taint of human decomp made Mark circle the corpse as widely as possible.

He mounted the stairs that led into the small building. The door hung open, banging against the aluminum siding in the wind, letting out a stench of of blood and death that was stronger still.

Brenner tried to follow him through the front door, but Mark spun around. “Stay out, until I call for you!” he snarled.

Brenner faded quietly back outside.

Mark found Carrerra pinned to the floor by the knife stuck through his hand. His face was unrecognizable, swollen and dark, crusted with blood. His eyes were hidden in pockets of swollen, purplish flesh.

Mark catalogued every detail. The bloodsmears, the bullet holes, the broken plastic restraints. Whoever did this had been looking specifically for Caroline Bishop, but she had no friends or allies capable of rescuing her. She’d been all alone, living off crumbs, huddling in dark corners. The closest she’d come to a bodyguard had been that dickwad Tim Wheaton. Easy enough to crack.

Whoever had pulled this off was in another class altogether. Considerably smarter than Wheaton. Someone who knew the potential of the info she held in her head. Probably the same man who took down Carrerra’s last team. Acting alone, by Mark’s guess. Stealthy, highly skilled, and possessing formidable strength.

An extremely gifted professional . . . or else he was modified.

Carrerra looked like he’d fought hard. Mark had hired him for that, and he’d proved to be ferocious. He’d met his match this time.

He walked around Carrerra’s body, peering at it from the other side, and saw the yellow paper poking out of the stiff, purplish lips and fragments of broken teeth. He pried the dead man’s mouth open, and extracted the crumpled, bloody paper, smoothing it out.

Even with AVP, it was a challenge to read. When he did, his combat program surged and seethed. Terms? Arrogant shithead.

He forced himself to study the note more closely. Looked like a woman’s handwriting. Caroline. Had to be. So she was alive, conscious, functional, and under the other man’s control.

She’s mine
, the note said. The bastard was probably fucking her in the ass right now.

He pocketed the note and left the building, looking down at his crew of hollow-eyed, staring supersoldiers. Still glaring at him, in spite of their frequent punishments. They looked like zombies who hadn’t gotten around to rotting yet. Soon, though.

“Take the bodies into the woods,” he told them. “Bury them deep. You get to burn the house before we go. Special treat. Say thank you.”

They stood there, mute and glaring, until he raised the freq wand and gave them all a pain zap. That shocked them into action. Except for Brenner, who didn’t move.

“Callie,” Brenner blurted hoarsely.

Moaning about his goddamn kid again. It was too much. He punched Brenner, sending the big man flying right off his feet. When Brenner crashed heavily to the ground, Mark extended the wand and gave the stupid fuck an excruciating buzz of neural punishment.

Brenner writhed and screamed for long, satisfying minutes.

Mark pocketed the wand, walked over and kicked the whimpering man in the crotch, hard. The cerebral inhibitor blocked Brenner from defending himself against his controller. He just curled up, panting heavily with rasping, sobbing breaths.

“Say that name one more time, and I’ll take you back to where she lives and make you kill her with an axe,” Mark told him. “And when you’re done, you can set yourself on fire. Got me? Do we understand each other?”

Brenner choked out the name one last time.

Mark sighed in frustration, switched the wand’s setting to knock-out, and zapped him unconscious. Best to power him down. Let them both chill. It was impractical to flush a thirty million dollar investment down the toilet for nothing. There were cheaper necks to squeeze if he felt the urge.

Talk terms, his ass. He’d teach the Keyholder all about terms before he was done. That arrogant shithead was going to get a special, intensive private lesson.

While Mark gouged his eyes out with his thumbs.

* * *

The ride back to the Kirkland house was weirdly silent. Sisko slid behind the wheel and took over the driving, as if by prior arrangement. Noah sat in the back with her, but would not respond to anything she said. After a few frustrating minutes, he put out his hand and pressed his finger gently against her lips, without meeting her eyes.

“Not now,” he said. “Sorry. I can’t.”

“Caro. Let him be,” Sisko said.

“Do I have a choice?” she asked bitterly.

“He’s doing an ASP management thing,” Sisko explained, keeping his eyes on the road. “Self-imposed sensory deprivation. You isolate yourself and blank out all sensory input. It’s problematic, because you have to lower your guard, but when analog diving isn’t working, it’s an emergency time-out, so you don’t blow something up. Or hurt somebody.”

“I see,” she whispered, even though she didn’t.

“He’ll be back soon,” Sisko assured her. “Just be patient.”

Patient, hell. She wanted to blow something up herself. It was not freaking fair.

Sisko parked outside the Kirkland house, and held up his hand when she opened her mouth to speak. They sat in utter silence for a couple of minutes, just waiting.

Finally, Noah opened his eyes and looked at Caro. “Sorry,” he said.

The raw pain in his eyes made something clutch in her throat. She knew how that felt. Painful memories were hard to control. Seeing his brother Asa after so long must have triggered a torrent of them.

Once inside the house, Sisko looked Noah over keenly. “You OK?”

“I’m good.” Noah’s voice was flat.

“Call if you need me. I’ll be down in the basement tech room.” Sisko nodded at Caro, and headed for staircase.

Caro took Noah’s hand and tugged it. “Let’s go up and rest.”

“No,” he said. “I’m going out for a while.”

She was bewildered, and alarmed. “Out where?”

“Just outside. I need space.”

Ouch.
Her whole body contracted. “Well. That’s a classic.”

“Caro, please,” he said wearily. “Don’t get your feelings hurt. It’s not you.”

“Oh, just shut up,” she snapped. “If you need to blow off steam, I know just how that might be accomplished. Without isolating yourself.”

The room charged instantly with sex. His eyes flashed, right through the lenses. She could feel the hot magical light on some level other than just sight, and her body answered, softening and melting. Preparing for him.

He swallowed, hard. Hands flexing, clenching. “Not now,” he said thickly. “My AVP is bugfuck. Happens, after half a lifetime of getting fucked over and pissed off. You do not want me naked on top of you while I’m metabolizing it.”

“Stop carrying on,” she said. “I trust you completely. AVP or no AVP. You just need to trust yourself.”

He shook his head, and walked out the door.

She forced herself to breathe down the hurt.
Suck it up.
This issue was bigger than her tender feelings, and nobody could criticize the man for not trying hard enough on her behalf. She had to grow up. Go upstairs. Wait patiently for him to work through his crap. He was entitled to his weird strategies. Whatever worked for him was fine.

Her mind raced too frantically for sleep, so she sat down in the living room for a while, and leafed through a stack of files Sisko had left there.

One caught her attention. A list Sisko had compiled of the people who had been reported missing the past week in Utah and Wyoming, the states Mark had mentioned in the video they had found in Luke Ryan’s lake house.

It wasn’t hard to winnow the list. The supersoldiers had to be young, physically powerful, and without
family connections to fit the supersoldier profile. In the past few days,
ten had met the criteria. Seven men. Three women.

Caro studied them for a while, staring at the photographs. She opened one of Noah’s laptops, which lay on the coffee table, and did internet searches on each one. Not much to be found. No missing-person alerts either, statewide or national.

She lingered over Sierra Horst, a waitress who’d disappeared from a restaurant during her shift. Blood found in the parking lot. Active investigation.

While searching one of the names, she found a video clip from a local news channel covering the disappearance of Brenner Jameson from Cheyenne, Wyoming. The attractive blonde reporter gazed earnestly into the camera, her lips not quite in sync with the audio. Caro listened closely.

“Brenner Jameson left his two-year-old daughter Callie with his mother-in-law at seven AM, just like he always did, for his daily ten mile run. Every other day, he’d come back, have breakfast with his daughter, and take her to day care on his way to work. But the day he disappeared was not like every other day
. . .”

The blonde babbled on, speaking over a shifting display of photos. Brenner, muscle-bound and proud of it. Callie, a laughing toddler with dark hair. Callie’s mother, a pretty, slender woman who, the reporter said, had died of leukemia only a few months earlier.

Caro stared into the big, liquid eyes of the motherless toddler gazing back at her from the screen. Big, brown, owl-like eyes. So innocent. They hurt her heart.

It was a pain in the ass to have all these inconvenient goddamn feelings waking up again. Blindsiding her.

She’d bet good money that Callie’s dad Brenner was one of the unlucky ones.

She’d be so fucking happy to lose that bet.

Chapter 29

Caro started up out of an ugly dream. It took a moment to orient herself.

Oh. Yeah. She was in Mansion Two. She’d dozed off on the couch, laptop still on her lap. But where was Noah? There wasn’t a sound from any direction.

Looked like she’d be sleeping alone. She closed down the laptop, gathered the files together and set them in a neat pile on the coffee table. She went upstairs and stripped off her clothes, sliding naked between the cool sheets.

A half hour of ceiling-staring later, she felt the air currents shift as the bedroom door opened. And there he was. She wasn’t surprised. She was so acutely aware of him now. She wondered if hanging out with enhanced people sharpened her own senses somehow.

She reached for the bedside lamp. Stopped herself just in time. He’d had enough drama today. Getting jabbed with light would not help his mood. Or her own agenda.

She gazed at his tall, broad form, a deeper darkness silhouetted against the dark framed by the bedroom door. A breath of the outdoors came in with him, a whiff of the forest: dampness and leaves, needles and resin. Sweet wild earthy smells.

He’d taken off his lenses, and his eyes had that uncanny reflective gleam even in the dark, catching all the available light and flashing it back at her. It was a glimpse straight into the heart of the unfathomable energy of nature. The flash in a wolf’s eyes, the deadly grace in a mountain lion’s spring, the infinity of the night sky. Pure, distilled masculine power, armoring the secret tenderness inside him.

He was so beautiful, he stopped her breath. She held the sheet to her chest, warmed by delicious, toe-curling, very female desire as he tossed his jacket on the chair and stripped off his sweatshirt. What light there was gleamed on the wide, powerful contours of his shoulders as he bent to kick off his shoes.