Tracker: A Rylee Adamson Novel (7 page)

“When?” Good, he was back to business.

I checked the clock. “Half hour to the mine shaft, half hour to the doorway. Hour at most.”

“Shit, it’ll be close. Wait for me, I’ll be there.” He hung up and so did I.

Everything was coming together better than I could have hoped when I’d left Giselle’s in the dead of night.

Which should have made me feel good, but the rolling in my gut made me question whether I was wrong about this whole trip. No, I needed that book, needed help. And if there was nothing else I’d learned in the last few months, it was I couldn’t do it alone. I needed those around me to help with the nastiness in the world.

Then again, the tingle of fear and subtle twist of premonition in my heart could be due to the fact I was driving a truck that had belonged to Faris and he’d been followed—oh yeah, he had a phone in it that worked around supernaturals.

I stared at the phone and then picked it up, flipping it open. The call log was easy to access and I re-dialed Faris.

He answered right away. “Technology is a beautiful thing when it works, isn’t it?”

“Where the fuck did you get this phone?”

“It was a gift. From a lovely lady with mocha skin and
delicious
lips, amongst her other delicious bits … would you like the details of how we met, and how she showed me her gun, so I showed her mine?”

I hung up on him with a snarl and threw the phone onto the dash. Pig. The phone may have been a gift, but no doubt strings were attached. Could Faris be working with those who had the deadly accurate guns? A shiver rippled down my spine at the thought. For now, there was nothing I could do, nothing to change this.

Half an hour later we were on the highway, cruising toward the mineshaft with no issues. Red and blue lights flickered behind us, and I checked the speedometer. Nope, all good there.

No doubt Faris had reported the missing truck and set them on me. Fuck a duck, Faris was an asshat. For a brief moment, I thought about making a run for it, knowing I could outrun the cop once we hit the badlands. No, I had time to deal with a cop. I took my foot off the gas pedal and let the truck slow, steering it to the side.

“Fucking hell,” I muttered and Alex nodded.

“Bad guys.”

I shook my head. “No, not bad guys. Just pain in the ass cops doing their job.”

When the first shot ricocheted off the back of the truck, I thought I was hearing things. The second and third shot, I knew we were in shit. Again.

“Motherfuckers!” I yelped when a bullet slammed through the back window and out the front. “Faris, I hate you, you bastard!”

I put tereify">I he pedal to the floor, taking us back onto the highway. Horns blared around us as I did a half-assed merge into traffic. At that moment, I didn’t care if Faris was using me, I was grateful he had the foresight to steal a truck and not some pansy-assed girly car.

The shots kept coming and again, I wondered how the fuck they were doing this, and with what technology—how they were able to overcome the vibrations supernaturals gave off. Our exit came up fast and I waited until the last second to yank the truck to the right and skidded sideways the off-ramp. Teeth gritted, I fought the wheel to stay in control, the slush and ice pulling at the tires.

“Weeeee!” Alex bounced in his seat, not understanding the severity of the situation. If it had been magic or monsters chasing us, he might have got it. But he didn’t understand guns; they had never been a factor in our lives.

“Alex, sit still.”

He slammed his butt onto the seat and gripped the dash, claws digging into the plastic. “Fun, Alex likes rides with Ryleeeeeee!”

He bounced into me, and the wheel slipped through my hands, spinning
the truck in a 180-degree circle so a brief second we were staring back at our pursuers. A black sedan was alongside the police car, like the last one. Just like all the cars the FBI drove. What the fuck was going on, had
Agent Valley
decided we were a liability—and if so, was Liam in trouble? But that didn’t make sense. The thoughts ran through my head faster than ever, slipping through before I could do anything about them.

The truck continued to spin until we faced the right way, though looking at the wrong side of traffic. Cars peeled off around us, fishtailing and sliding in fresh snow. A mess of metal and rubber collided around us.

“Son of a bitch.” I slammed the truck into four wheel drive, the extra grip giving me the power I needed to get our asses back on the right side of the road and avoid the collision of cars that sprung up around us.

I glanced in the rearview mirror to see the sedan stuck behind the pile up of cars, unable to cut through the snow and grass median as we had. A figure stepped out, tall and slender, feminine with a distinct
mocha
hue to her skin highlighting her jet black hair. At this distance, I couldn’t tell anything else. She lifted a hand and saluted us as we sped away.

I rolled down the window, stuck my hand out and saluted her back. Though not with the respect she’d shown us. How the fuck had they found me? Had Faris actually called in the stolen truck? No, that wasn’t his style.

But how else … my eyes landed on the phone. If it was null to the supernatural, they could easily put a tracking device in it.

“FUCK!” I grabbed the phone from the dash and tossed it out the window.

Whoever had the guns, also had a desire to deal with vampires. Not good, not good at all. I hoped Liam would be able to handle this shit for a few hours until I was back.

The road twisted to the right, the wreck disappearing behind us, and then it curved to the left. With the speed we were going, and the kickback from the last curve, I was pretty sure we were about to eat it. “Hang on, Alex!”

Sweat slid down the back of my neck as I did my best to keep the truck on the road. As the tires slid off the pavement and onto the gravel, the truck finally gained traction and I was able to give it some actual direction.

One more fishtail as the truck settled onto the road, and we were good. I glanced in the rearview mirf trearvieror, expecting the black sedan to be on our asses. But the road was blessedly empty.

Less than a half hour later, we were bouncing and sliding across the badlands, and I was doing my best not to get us stuck. Even with the four-wheel drive, I knew there were holes and slush that would suck us down with ease. Ahead, I could see the edge of the mineshaft peeking out of the fresh blanket of snow. Almost a foot in fewer than twenty-four hours. It didn’t seem that long since we’d crawled out the mineshaft with the ogres in tow.

I put the truck in park, and Alex and I jumped out. I sank to my knees in the snow and had to slog my way through to the top of the mineshaft. I had a sudden vision of coming back through the mineshaft, the tall FBI woman with mocha skin at the top with a gun waiting for us.

Shit, that would not be good. There was a chance the phone wasn’t a tracking device, and it was not a chance I was willing to take. Not with my life, or Alex’s.

I swallowed hard and sent out a silent call to Blaz, knowing even though he was at the barn, he could hear me being this close.

Tracker, where are you?

I licked my lips and concentrated on forming the words clearly in my mind, finally gave up and just looked at the mineshaft.

There was a pause before he answered.
Yes, I see it. But what is that in your mind about Faris?

Oh, fuck a duck, that was the last thing I needed, Blaz on a rampage after the vampire for being, well, Faris. I blocked everything to do with Faris and concentrated on the mineshaft and a desire for Blaz to keep an eye on the place while I was on the other side to keep it clear of anything nasty.

I waited, hoping he didn’t pursue the Faris thread. The downside of Blaz was he could be inside my brain and there wasn’t much I could do about it. All part of the bonding between him and me.

Yes, I will check. But I’d rather not leave the farm unless I’m needed.

“What the hell?” I grumbled and apparently that went through loud and clear.

We can discuss it later; it is not urgent. But I am … somewhat in hiding.

My eyebrows shot up and I leaned my hands on the mineshaft edge. Hiding? What the hell could a dragon be hiding from?

An image of a large, red dragon flashed inside my head, then was gone before I could be certain of what I saw.

“Fine. Hide. We can ‘discuss’ this when I get back.”

Eve is not back yet; that is another reason to stay where I am.
There was a slight overlay of worry in his thoughts, amusing since he ate Harpies on a regular basis.

I Tracked her and felt her not too far from us actually, out with the Tamoskin Crush. The unicorn group wouldn’t hurt her, of that I was certain. Not after their future leader Calypso had brought the Harpy back to life. Eve’s emotions were smooth, and while not necessarily happy, she was at least calm and not afraid.

I let him see her, feel her emotions and that she was not far. Through me, he could in a sense “Track” as well. This was so damn frustrating, not being able to speak like he did. Seemed some things didn’t go both ways. As it was, I did my best to soothe him.

“Don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine,” I said out loud.

I almost felt him snort.
I wasn’t worried about the Harpy. I knew you would worry about her.

“Whatever,” I muttered, then called Alex to my side. There were still ropes leading down into the shaft from the last time. Probably not the safest practice, but hell, not many people wandered the badlands this time of year.

I tested the ropes. “Alex, can you …” I trailed off as he expertly wrapped the rope into a harness, holding it out for me to finish off the knots.

“Alex watches Boss.”

Well, I’ll be damned. After I tied the knots, Alex climbed carefully over the edge and lowered himself down. Like he’d done it a hundred times. Shit, that was a hell of a lot easier than I had planned. The werewolf could still surprise me. Then again, he was growing up in a way, losing his submissiveness, and as it went, he became more mature. Day by day, he seemed to be gaining back his humanity, and with it I was losing the goofy werewolf who’d shown up on my doorstep two years ago.

Again, I set my thoughts aside to pay attention to what was in front of us.

The cave was no different than any day before, but it
felt
different. More than likely it was the backwards footprints we followed. Every now and then I saw the outline of an ogre’s foot, and I found myself wondering which of the boys it was; my heart aching for their loss, and had to push it away. One day I would honor all those who had fallen, all those I’d loved and lost.

One day. Just not today.

Alex and I crossed the veil with no difficulty, sliding through without anything pushing us to cross. Of course, that didn’t mean what was waiting for us on the other side wasn’t diff
icult.

Worse, it wasn’t Doran.

Chapter 7

T
he castle was
quiet—eerily so—and the stiff hair on the back of my neck told me it wasn’t a good thing. For the moment, I ignored my gut. On our side, the doorway from North Dakota opened onto the first floor of the castle. Nothing fancy. But we needed New Mexico and that meant descending the stairs into the dungeon. A walk I’d taken more than a few times lately. Again, I was surprised at the quiet. Not that the castle tended to be noisy.

“Alex, you smell anything?” I paused at the juncture of three hallways, the torch in my hand burning the pitch with a spitting hiss releasing the scent of pine into the air.

Alex sat back on his haunches and sniffed the air several times, tipping his face toward one hallway after the other. “Funny air.”

“Yeah. I got that much.” We were in a hurry, but I had a feeling something was off. Which meant I had to look into it, I couldn’t just leave it alone. I set the torch into a wall sconce and pulled a sword free. With one finger to my lips, I signaled Alex to follow me with a head jerk. He tiptoed, taking in long breaths as we went. I didn’t think about where I was headed, just followed my instincts.

We stood at another intersection, this time with a flight of ascending stairs. My gut tightened as I stared the steps.

“Here we go.” I crept up, feeling the, _e tension rise as I went, the tingling sensation of imminent danger I knew all too well working its way along the edge of my nerve endings.

At the top of the stairs, Alex bumped gently against my legs, stopping me.

“What?”

“Bad smells. Rotten smells.” He shook his head as if to clear the scent. We could have turned around, pretended whatever was going on had nothing to do with us, but past experience told me that was stupid. Lately, everything seemed to happen to me, or was about the stupid fucking prophecies. I gritted my teeth and started down the dimmed hallway. Ahead, a glimmer of steel caught my eye. I yanked my second sword clear of its sheath and pressed my back against the wall.

Alex mimicked me, his claws scraping against the cold stone. We waited, two heartbeats, three, ten, twenty. Nothing happened.

I inched along the wall while I searched the shadows for a figure, or something.

Nope. False alarm, apparently.

But then why was my heart still pounding with adrenaline? Good fucking question.

At the end of the hallway was a window, sealed shut, but light peering from the moon through the cracks. I strode to it, sure we were alone and flung the window open.

“Wowsers. Big door,” Alex breathed out behind me.

I turned and stared at a door recessed deep into the wall. In front of it was a black veil, like something you’d put over the pictures of someone deceased. Not really thinking, I pulled the veil down. It fluttered to my feet with a soft hush.

The doorway itself had my attention. It stole my thoughts as I stared at it. Thick, I could tell without even touching it, the whole thing was solid steel, shining as if polished. That must have been the glint I’d seen. Three solid, shining steel bands lay across the door, each with a lock the size of a melon hanging off it. Etched into the door were symbols I was unfamiliar with, swirls and designs that drew my eye and made me think I almost understood what they said.

What they meant.

“Big door, no kidding.” I reached up and was unable to touch the top of the frame, not that I really expected to be able to. It had to be at least ten feet high and almost the same width. More of a square than a rectangle. Set deep into the stone as it was, I wondered if the purpose was an attempt to hide the doorway. Where did it lead? I put my hand on the metal, lightly, tracing one of the designs with my finger.

From the other side, something rammed into the steel door, making the doorframe shudder and flex, the solid bands groaning under the impact. But they held.

Barely.

I stepped back, swallowing hard. Alex let out a whimper.

“Not good.”

No, this wasn’t good. But there really wasn’t anything I could do about this, nor was there time. I needed to get to Doran, get what I needed and get my ass back to Liam.

The thing on the other side of the door rammed it again, harder this time. I took a few steps back, and the ramming eased. More steps back and it stopped altogether.

Whatever it was knew when we were close. Which left us with only one option.

“Time to go.”

The thing on the other side of the steel door could stay there. Even I knew when it was time to leave well enough alone.

Liam would be proud. I couldn’t stop the smile that slipped across my lips as I headed back down the stairwell.

We had learned there was a door we would never open, and what lay on the other side of it was awake and less than pleasant. No doubt that was the tension I’d picked up on.

I was glad we could walk away from the door. Because I had a bad feeling one day we would have to find out what was waiting for us on the other side of it.

Yippy fucking skippy.

Once more, we were back in the dungeons, facing the doorway that would take us into New Mexico. Or more accurately, a cave on the outskirts of Roswell. Doran would be waiting for us there. He’d better be. I wasn’t walking all the way into Roswell to find his fanged ass. We stepped through the doorway.

My torch flickered as a gust of wind ripped through cave, blowing it out. A single figure waited at the mouth of the cave. A woman I recognized from the tunnels below Venice. She was one of Berget’s slaves, a human who had taken blood from a vampire but hadn’t been turned. Might not ever be, according to what I understood.

“Hello, Rylee.” Her voice carried well in the cave. I dropped the torch at my feet so I could pull my two blades free.

“Hey, bitch. On a suicide mission?” I stepped toward her and she smartly stepped back.

“No, I am here to give a simple message. The Empress hopes the death of your Harpy was enough to convince you to help her now. She would hate to take the life of any more of your ‘wards.’”

I couldn’t help the laughter that poured out of me. So similar to Faris’s tactics it was unbelievable, yet with Faris it had been a ruse. With Berget, she’d been serious about killing Eve, though Berget couldn’t know Eve had survived. It took me a good ten seconds to pull myself back together. “Oh my, you see that’s how I know it isn’t my little sister in charge of things, but her two psychotic parents. My sister would know better than to try and
kill
a member of my pack to gain my loyalty.”

She gave a startled twist to her head. “We did not
try
and kill her. We
did
kill her.”

I grinned at her as I walked the slight incline that would lead us out. “And my friend brought her back to life. Lucky for you, because now your death will be quick.”

I lunged forward and she stumbled back, surprise flitting across her features before she was snatched out of reach of my blade.

“What the fuck?” I yelled. Doran came out of nowhere. He spared me a glance as he wrestled the woman into submission.

“Rylee, don’t you know it isn’t polite to just kill someone when you haven’t wrung all the information you can out of them?” He stared down at the woman and smiled as he ran a finger along her cheek.

She screamed and tried to pull back from him, her cheek blistering where he’d touched her.

Shit, he was stronger than I thought, in ways I hadn’t imagined. Doran had been holding back on me.

Since we’d used the existing ropes to rappel into the tunnel, Doran used the rope Alex and I brought to tie up the woman. He tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of screaming potatoes for the walk to Doran’s classic ’67 Mustang. He dumped her into the trunk, her head hitting something with a thud and she finally shut up.

Sleek, silver, and chromed to the gills, the Mustang glittered in the weak winter sunlight. Though it was cold as a witch’s third tit, very little snow was on the ground. Whi Ce glls, the ch was a good thing with the girly car. Alex piled into the backseat and lay down, his eyes taking in everything, yet remaining remarkably quiet—but that didn’t last long.

He let out a long trumpeting fart as if to deliberately contradict my thoughts. He even had the audacity to throw me a big wink. As if he knew what I was thinking. I rolled the window down and said nothing.

Doran glanced at me, his green eyes curious. “Why did you come back so quickly?”

“I left the black-skinned demon book in Dox’s safe.”

“And where the hell is the big ox? I’d planned on heading to his place for a drink tonight.”

“Dead. Him and a bunch of his friends.” I closed my eyes, swallowed hard, the words like chunks of glass in my throat. Doran’s hand slid over mine.

“I’m sorry. I know he was your friend.”

“And he wasn’t yours?” I jerked my hand away.

Doran’s lips tightened. “No. I drank his liquor, and we lived in the same territory, but we were not ‘friends.’ Daywalkers do not have friends any more than shamans do.” His eyes wouldn’t meet mine, he stared straight ahead, the teasing Doran I knew gone as his voice hardened. “Shamans bargain for their services. Daywalkers bargain for the pleasure they can bring. I get hit up on both counts. But not as a friend.”

I stared hard at him wondering if he liked not having friends. For years, I’d thought I could do it on my own, thought I was strong enough to face the world one on one. It had taken friends and love to show me I was stronger with them than without.

I couldn’t help challenging him. “You think pretty highly of yourself to think everyone wants you.”

His eyes darted to mine, then back to the road. “That’s why I like you, Rylee. No games with you. You say what you mean, no filters involved. I don’t get that with anyone else.”

Something in his tone told me it was time to change the subject. “Aside from that shit, we have a rather large problem.”

I quickly went over the guns and the phone I’d found, though I didn’t say who it belonged to.

“You think the humans are manufacturing technology that works around us?” Doran didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the road.

“Yes. They know about us, or at least a portion of the FBI does, and it would make sense they are trying to find a way to protect themselves from us. It’s the same old shit with them—whatever they don’t understand, whatever frightens them, they want to annihilate.”

Doran blew out a soft whistle and shook his head. “All right, I assume there is more to this visit than all that.”

I took a deep breath and a chance, voicing the thoughts that had been spinning through my head since I had the dream about Berget. “I think we can still save my sister.”

He hit the brakes, the car skidding sideways to a stop in the middle of the road. My seatbelt jerked tightly and the thump from the trunk told me our passenger got the short end of the stick.

“What did you say?” Doran’s cool demeanor was gone; instead he sounded almost panicked. “I thought you were going to kill her. In fact, I would agree with Faris that killing her would be the smartest choice. She’s been inside my head, Rylee. She’s controlled me. I know her better than anyone else.”

I undid my seatbelt and faced him. I had been thinking long and hard on this, and there was a chance I had found a loophole in Fari Cphotify"s’s stupid oath. Or at least, part of it.

“You know her when she is controlled by her dead parents, who happen to be fucking loony tunes. We were able to stop Giselle’s madness for a little while and the same stone worked on the necromancer I fought in London. You said it yourself, Berget is
mad
with the power that comes from her parents. Berget is not the one who has been doing these fucking awful things. I know I swore to kill her, but I swore to kill the
Child Empress.
If I can bring Berget back from the brink, she isn’t the empress anymore, is she? She won’t want to be the empress.” I could only hope I was right.

The words hovered between us and he opened his mouth, blinked a couple of times, and then snapped it shut. “Shit, you might be right.”

Hope, bright and pure, flared in me. He thought I might be right.

And that meant that maybe, just maybe, we had a chance at saving Berget.