Codename: Nightshade (Deadly Seven Strike Force) (22 page)

“Bloody hell,” he says, rubbing his hand over his face. “This changes a lot. I can see why you’re sorry you shot him.”

“That’s not why I'm sorry I shot him,” I admit. “I'm sorry I shot him because I need…” I gauge whether or not I should share this and then just decide to say 'fuck it'. “After I kill, I need to release… cut loose. I need—”

“Marko.”

He says it matter of fact, like he gets it on the same level. Somehow, though, I doubt it. I’ve seen into his side of things now. Marko is more than an escape for him—he’s his home. For me, he’s just a balancing beam.

“If I hadn’t killed Pishkar, I wouldn’t have been here, and Marko wouldn’t have gotten hurt. Countess might even still be alive.”

Silence envelops us then. I used to wonder what the phrase 'deafening silence' meant. I like it quiet. When I line up a shot, my ears shut off. I rely on the absence of sound. I couldn’t understand how silence could overwhelm someone. Nikolai explained it to me once.

Deafening silence is the calm before a storm, Poppy. It’s a quiet when everything inside of you is screaming. A void that your mind is filing with sound you don’t want to hear.

It’s several minutes later when he says, “So, where are we going?”

“I don’t know where to even begin.”

“How bout with you telling me who you’re running from.”

It’s time, Poppy.

I hate the emotions that rush up inside me. My eyes sting, but I don’t cry. “I saw… Nikolai.”

I know where I should go. I should turn myself into the closest clinic, lock myself up for insanity. I’m a loose cannon with a gun and a God complex. Maybe Stevens and Justice are right about me, after all.

Claymore hears me, and taps his fingers on the table, but he doesn’t offer an opinion. He knows there’s more to it than that.

Sometimes I hate how well he knows me.

“The attacker, the assassin who ran us off the road and then showed up at the hospital, was Nikolai. Or at least I
thought
it was Nikolai.”

He can’t hide the surprise on his face as he realizes exactly what’s been bothering me. “
Prizrak
.”

“Yes… I don’t know… I hope not.”

His laugh is humorless and shock is still dominant in his stare. “That’s not possible, Shade. You know that, aye? You know he died.”

Do I? I know someone told me he died. I know I haven’t seen him in ten years. He might as well be an unopened crate in Hassan’s hallway.

“I know,” I say, “but still… it was him. His eyes. His lips. He threw me around the room with the same force that Nikolai used to have. He got the upper hand on me…
twice
. That’s something only he used to be able to do.”

Claymore wrings his hands together and glances away. I can tell he wants to pull out his knife, but this isn’t exactly the best place to do that. “That’s why you’re on the mind control kick.”

“What if whatever happened to Vixen and Countess is happening to me?”

“It won’t.”

“You don’t know that.
I
don’t know that. All we have to go off of is the fact that we’re all seeing ghosts and two of us are dead because of it. I should be dead. If Countess hadn’t shot him, I would be.”

“It’s not going to happen, Shade,” he says, looking back at me. The intensity in his eyes is unsettling. “It's not going to happen, because I won’t let it.”

“Did the file say anything about where she was shot?”

I shake my head. “Security cut me off before I could read the full report.”

We’re back on the road, this time in a dark blue Toyota with a stick shift. We circle the streets just to stay mobile. I clutch my backpack in my lap like a lifeline. My world is unraveling like a worn out sweatshirt. I don’t know when the first string was pulled, but I can’t tie them all back together anymore.

The only thing that makes sense is the bag in my arms.

“Well, I know she took a town car that night, because I saw her leave.”

“Yeah, but where did she go?”

“I said I saw her leave, not that I read her damn mind.”

I roll my window down. Frustration is becoming a fog in the cab of the truck, and I need it vented out. “She said she had a mission to get to, and the file said she was Veltriv’s bodyguard.”

“Aye. Maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way.”

“How so?”

“Well, Marko has no logical reason to be a target, but his father does. He was getting in deep with military contracts, nothing Marko paid much attention to, but what if whatever he was working on spooked him? If he was planning on defecting to America…”

“Then his country would want him eliminated.”

“Aye.”

I stare ahead, not seeing the road, but seeing the possible scenarios lined up instead. “That still doesn’t explain why we were attacked.”

“Of course it does. You know as well as I do that killing somebody does little more than send a message to the next guy. Hurting the target means giving them a permanent reminder by way of a scar.”

“Exploiting their weakness ensures they do what you want,” I finish. Another of Nikolai’s lessons.

“Aye. So they put the squeeze on Marko to send a message to his father. I’m guessing his father tried to back out yet still, and Countess paid the price.”

It’s a formed picture in my head now, but outlying questions still nag at me.

Why would any of us see ghosts?

“Ace’s face,” I say, recalling the conversation from earlier.

“Aye?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

He waves a hand between us. “I don’t know. I just thought it was weird. The council tells all of us that he’s hurt. You’re one step away from being put on psych eval leave because of it and the bastard is completely fine.”

The council tells all of us…

Those words stick out in my mind. The council told me Ace was shot. The council agreed immediately with the declaration that DMG was supplying guns to the Saudis.

“The council.”

He side-eyes me. “Aye?”

“If DMG had nothing to do with the weapons, why did the council go along with it? And if Ace wasn’t hurt, why was I being reprimanded for my actions?”

His hands tighten around the steering wheel. “Why was Countess burned instead of quietly buried?”

“They didn’t just burn her identity, they implicated her in a crime,” I say, piecing more of it together. “A crime they linked to—”

“DMG,” he says. His jaw ticks. I can tell he’s trying to hold his rage in check.

I feel it, too. The council is the only force we answer to, the one organization in the world we’re supposed to trust to be on the level. I don’t lie to myself and say they're completely noble. You have to have a decent dose of greed in you to be able to control anything in the world. But I believe they fight for what they believe is best, and they pay the seven of us to do their dirty work.

I never realized how dirty some of it could be.

“You ever wonder why we can’t find any real trace of DMG?” I ask.

He makes a left at the light. I don’t know if he has a destination in mind or if we’re still just traveling in circles. “Aye. I’ve never been sent on a mission to find a nest, either, but you know who has?”

We’re not supposed to have knowledge of each other’s missions. We’re breaking every rule we’ve worked our asses off to maintain for the past ten years.

“Who?”

“Ace.”

I feel sick. Bile hits the back of my tongue, and I choke it back down. “So what are we saying here, MacNeal?”

“That the council knows more than they’re telling us, and Ace might be in on it.”

I was afraid that was what we were saying.

“Why do I get the feeling we’re about to drive into the middle of Oz and demand to see the wizard?”

“Shade, please,” he says with a dramatic eye roll. “
I’m
the gay one. Stop stealing my good lines.”

I punch his arm as he laughs.

We both need the humor to distract us from what’s ahead.

I don’t know what we’re about to uncover. I hope it’s nothing. My gut tells me it’s bad.

Either way, the past twelve years of my life are starting to feel like they might be a lie.

“Fuck you,” I say, flopping into the green plastic chair next to Deputy Miller’s desk.

“I’m not bothering with giving you the riot act, Penelope,” Deputy Miller says, looking at my arrest record on his computer screen, noting yet another misdemeanor. “But you know what you did was wrong.”

“You’re right,” I say, spinning a pen on his desk. “I should have accessed the files through the remote server so they couldn’t trace the router.”

He gives me the frown that I suspect kids with good dads get from their fathers when they’re disappointed in them. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

I know it. I’m seventeen. I should know better.

“What did I actually harm?” I ask in all honesty. “I don’t see the problem with me just practicing my computer skills.”

“You hacked into the FBI’s Most Wanted database,” he says like I wasn’t in the room with myself when I did it.

“But I didn’t do anything except flip through files.”

“You broke the law. It’s illegal to see those files without authorization.”

“If they didn’t want people to see them, they shouldn’t make it so easy to access the files.”

“They don’t,” he says, his voice growing louder with frustration. “Those files were on a protected server and encrypted by programs only other computers can unlock.”

I shrug, flopping back in the chair. “It took me ten minutes.”

Deputy Miller sighs. It’s that what-I’m-about-to-say-next-won’t-stick-but-I’m-going-say-it-anyway sigh that he uses every time I’m sitting in this seat. “I understand that you’re smarter than most everyone around you.” I snort. That’s a drastic understatement. “But rules are rules, Penelope. You
have
to learn that. Just because you can do something, even if it’s something no one else can do, doesn’t mean you should do it.”

“Is the morality play over, or are Oscar and Kermit going to come out and teach me about sharing next?” I don’t mask the contempt in my voice. The thing I hate more than being treated like a child is being told I’m a smart child, but still… a
child
.

I get it. What I did was wrong. Let’s move along.

“Can I call my mother before you book me?”

Deputy Miller shakes his head. “Nope, your mother has already been contacted.”

That’s weird. Usually they just book me, processing me into a night of juvie, and I call my mother to tell her not to wait up for me. “What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Deputy Miller echoes with a mild case of humor that makes me want to rearrange his face. “What's up, Penelope, is you broke the law. Big laws, with federal consequences.”

Someone calls his name, and he excuses himself. I’m not handcuffed or locked to the seat in any way. I could make a break for it. But where would that land me? Resisting arrest would only make matters worse.

Federal consequences
. What does that even mean? I didn’t do anything except pick an electronic lock. It’s basically breaking and entering.

Deputy Miller is gone so long I start to get antsy. I peek around. Everyone is so caught up in their own shit. No one is paying any attention to me. I slide over into his chair, punching his spacebar to get rid of the ridiculous flying toasters on his screen saver. He’s left my arrest record up. I scroll through the crimes, smiling at a few of them.

I forgot about breaking into the arcade last summer. I outran those cops for a good ten blocks, even scaling a six-foot wall to get away. Unfortunately, I was caught on the security camera footage, so they still brought me in later that night.

Reaching my current dilemma, I consider erasing it from the record. My fingers are poised over the keys, ready to type, when a voice makes me jump in my seat.

“That won’t change anything.”

I expect to see Deputy Miller or one of his colleagues, but the dude standing there is a complete mystery to me. He’s big—like, Andre the Giant kind of tall. His forehead is short, though. Sharp features, hard lines, and angles make up his face. And his eyes are black, like something you’d see on a demon and not a human. I don’t know that I would call him handsome, but he’s not ugly. He’s got the kind of face I can’t help but stare at, like a gravitational pull exists between his skin and my eyes. He’s not old like Deputy Miller, but he’s not as young as me. I’d place him in his early to mid-twenties. He’s not wearing a badge, or a uniform, instead dressed in a black suit and matching black shirt with a blood red tie.