Crossfire (Book 1) (The Omega Group) (19 page)

Myrine woke up feeling refreshed after the first good
night’s sleep she’d had in years. Her head was resting on her husband’s chest
as her fingers trailed lazy circles across his ribs. The early morning
Jacksonville sun was peeking through the sheers and lending a golden hue to the
room.

It just doesn’t get any better than this.

The last few days were some of the most difficult she’d
faced since starting the Omega Group, mainly because the safety of her family
had been at stake, but they’d made it. They’d come out on top.

Sort of. There were still a few loose ends that needed to be
taken care of. The most important one being the world’s oil supply.

Director Finley personally came to the house on Ortega
yesterday to supervise the transfer of Daedric’s preternaturals. They, along
with Beck and a medic, were loaded onto a chinook helicopter that was outfitted
with special restraint seating for transporting prisoners. The restraints were
the backup plan only. Beck was responsible for containment. The medic had
already tended to the wounds of the siren, but needed to wait for the Goura to
retract his dermal armor before he could examine and treat him. So, he went
along for the ride.

By now, Myrine figured, all seven of them would be securely
locked away in Finley’s basement. It wasn’t, of course, the Director’s actual
basement, but the nickname had stuck. It was an underground facility outside of
Atlanta that was built for the sole purpose of housing and interrogating
prisoners that no standard prison could ever hope to contain. The technology
behind it was a mix of state-of-the-art security systems designed and built by
humans that even Julian looked up to, and preternatural security measures put
together by the best nonhuman technicians in the world. It was impenetrable.

Once the helicopter took off and the cleanup crew was doing
their job, Director Finley took Myrine aside to update her. The news wasn’t
good.

Every oil facility that Daedric’s group had targeted was
almost completely destroyed. At best, they were looking at a year before any of
them could be back up and running. Even then, the volume of oil they could
produce would be only a fraction of what it was for many years to come.

The world was in for a rough time.

Receiving that news almost made Myrine forget about her
other loose end. Almost. When she told the Director why Daedric wasn’t among
the prisoners, she’d expected him to blow up, but he didn’t. He simply took it
in stride as he always did when faced with less than satisfactory reports.
Perhaps the introduction of actual gods into the scene made him more
understanding of their loss. Or, perhaps, he’d just seen so much over his long
tenure as Director that nothing surprised him anymore.

Either way, Myrine knew that he would be stewing over Ares’s
plans for Daedric. She would be doing the same thing.

For now, she intended to enjoy every second of her time with
her family. For one full day, maybe even more, the rest of the world could
wait. She’d earned this time—spent twelve years earning it—and she planned to
make the most of it.

“Mom?”

With a jerk, Myrine turned toward her daughter’s voice. “How
long have you been standing there?”

“I don’t know. I was down in the kitchen and then…” Mirissa
looked confused.

“Then what, sweetheart?” Myrine asked. She gently shook
Steve awake.

“I don’t know. I was in the kitchen, then I was here. How
did I get here? I don’t even remember leaving the kitchen.”

It took a moment, but realization soon dawned on Myrine. “I
think this might be the parting gift from Daedric that Artemis mentioned. When
Orano hit the succubus with an energy ball, it must have triggered more than
just a reversal of the transfer of your powers. It must have gone too far, at
least a little. I believe you may now have Daedric’s teleporting ability.”

Mirissa looked dumbfounded. “Are you serious?” She closed
her eyes and a moment later—disappeared. Before Myrine could climb out of bed
to go look for her, she reappeared, holding a shocked looking Henry in her hands
and wearing a big smile on her face. “This is going to be awesome!”

Myrine looked at her husband and in unison they said, “Yeah.
Awesome.”

“I am such an idiot!” Julian yelled to everyone in the room
as he slammed his fists on his desk. “How did I not see this before?”

Mumbling profanities to himself, the Omega Group’s computer
genius furiously typed at his keyboard. The three monitors that formed a
semicircle on his desk scrolled through news reports, financial records,
research papers, and a slew of other information available on the Internet. At
least it was available if you possessed the skills—some legal and some not—that
he did.

Julian had spent almost every minute since the attack on
their headquarters glued to Little Duck, the name he’d given his computer at
Safe House Alpha. Big Duck, his pride and joy, was the Cray system he used at
the office. He chose that particular moniker because of the way ducks always
seemed so calm on the surface, even when their little feet were working frantically
beneath. It had always seemed to him that computers were much the same. On the
outside they were simplistic plastic boxes with a few keys and a screen, but on
the inside they could make millions of calculations in the blink of an eye.

His long dirty blond hair was tied in a ponytail that had
all but fallen out. He was wearing his standard work attire: a graphic tee and
torn blue jeans that were worn out from wear, not by design. They were the same
clothes he’d put on two days earlier before heading in for his shift at
headquarters. His lack of personal hygiene hadn’t gone unnoticed by his
temporary roommates, but they knew better than to suggest he take the time for
a shower.

The litter basket at his feet was overflowing with empty
coffee cups and energy drink cans, and his desk held the remains of take-out
Chinese food and chocolate bars. He was living on caffeine, sugar, and MSG.

Yesterday, Myrine and her field agents took out Daedric’s
team and, even though Daedric was taken away, they’d stopped him. Julian
should’ve been celebrating with everyone else, or at the very least sleeping,
but something was still nagging at him. It was like a voice in the back of his
brain whispering to him that he’d missed something.

And he had.

It was so clear now, but it had taken almost twenty-four
hours for him to put all the pieces of the puzzle together. He would have liked
to blame his lack of sleep or the smaller computer for not seeing it sooner,
but he knew that wasn’t the truth. Daedric had simply done an amazing job of
hiding it. If he’d kept his ego in check, he might have kept it hidden, but
that wasn’t something that Daedric could do. That one slip started Julian on
the path that led him to the answer. And what an answer it was.

He grabbed his phone and punched in Myrine’s number.

“Do you have any idea what time it is, Julian?” Myrine
sounded more than a little perturbed.

“Yes, but you need to hear this. I figured it out.”

“Figured what out?”

“Everything!” Julian’s caffeine intake over the last couple
of days had him bordering on hyper, so he tried to pull his thoughts together
before continuing. “It was an anagram. Sera Maison. It’s an anagram, not a
person. If you rearrange the letters it says ‘I am Ares son.’ It was all a
cover.”

Myrine took a breath and commanded, “Start at the beginning
and tell me everything.”

Today, the world let out a collective sigh of relief as a
shining light suddenly appeared at the end of what experts thought would be a
very long, very dark tunnel.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attack that destroyed
most of the world’s oil production capabilities only three weeks ago, we
haven’t had much good news to report. The world economy has been thrown into
turmoil. Martial law is in place in most of the large cities across America and
around the globe. As our oil reserves depleted, citizens of all socioeconomic
backgrounds found themselves thrust into what many called “The dark ages.”

But that may all be coming to an end now.

SeraTech, a company responsible for making many headlines
over the last six years with their development of oil drilling and processing
equipment, has just made their biggest headline yet.

Sera Maison, the founder of SeraTech, made her first ever
public appearance this morning at a scheduled press conference. Let’s take a
look.

“Thank you, everyone, for coming. I know this has been a
terribly difficult time for all of you. It is my hope that the worst is behind
us. For the last six years, SeraTech has been developing a new way of
extracting oil from the vast shale deposits that we have right here in America.
It has been well known for many years that the Green River Formation in
Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah has 17,000 square miles of oil shale deposits
containing about two trillion barrels of oil. The Piceance Creek Basin in
Colorado holds another one trillion barrels. We don’t suffer from a lack of
oil, we never have. We have simply not had the technology to safely and
efficiently extract it. Until now, that is.

“I am proud to introduce to you, and to all the world,
SeraTech’s newest development. A safe, efficient, and low cost system to
extract all the oil we need, from within our own borders, without damaging the
environment in any way. And the best part? It’s already up and running,
extracting oil ready for processing.”

Critics came forward immediately following Ms. Maison’s
press conference, citing the impossibility of her claims. There are many
problems with shale oil extraction that, they said, simply can’t be overcome.
They listed the vast amounts of energy and water required, the harmful
greenhouse gases produced, the surface impact and the overall costs as the
insurmountable problems faced when trying to extract shale oil. But, their
arguments were quickly put to rest.

According to Sera Maison, these problems are not
insurmountable. In fact, with her geothermic fuel cell technology, she’s
already solved them, and then some. There is no combustion, so virtually no
greenhouse gas. It requires very little water as the steam created by the fuel
cell’s exhaust is simply recirculated, and the entire process takes place in a
sealed environment underground, so there is no surface impact. SeraTech also
stated that her technology uses its own waste products as fuel. The costs are
also diminished by the excess electricity and natural gas that is formed as a
by-product of her process.

In short, Sera Maison has solved the age-old problem of
not having enough oil, and her timing couldn’t have been better.

Stay with us here at CNN as we bring you all of the
details about this amazing development. I’m Julia Saxon and we’ll be right
back.

Mirissa stifled a laugh after seeing her mother on the news
posing as Sera Maison. “Nice job, Ms. Maison. You just saved the world.”

Mirissa stretched out on the couch of her mother’s office in
their brand new headquarters. It was decorated with the same warm colors as her
old office and had half-full bookshelves lining most walls. The one difference
was the two new additions to the picture wall. Janice Campbell, shot by the
attackers of their old headquarters, and Lincoln, killed on Ortega. Their
official causes of death were a mugging and training accident.

The new location, deemed necessary by Director Finley and
Myrine, was a welcome change for everyone involved. The Omega Group now
occupied a seven-thousand-square-foot building on six wooded acres just north
of the city. The building was originally someone’s very large home, but was now
remodeled and retrofitted to comfortably house the offices and equipment
required by Myrine’s team. Julian and his team of computer nerds had a wing all
to themselves with Big Duck, and Myrick, perhaps the most pleased with the new
location, could swim to work as the property was on Nassau Sound.

In the days following the Ortega Incident, as Finley now
called it, Mirissa, her father, and Greco were officially appointed to the
Omega Group team. Everyone’s first priority had been to locate Daedric, but
after weeks of finding no trace of him, things started to get back to normal—at
least what passed for normal in Mirissa’s life these days. She started
patrolling the streets at night again, looking for Kakos and whatever else
might be out there. Getting a paycheck for hunting bad guys was a new, and very
welcome, experience for Mirissa. She could now afford to get her own apartment,
although she kept that bit of information to herself. Her parents weren’t quite
ready to let her go just yet.

Greco, on the other hand, didn’t seem as excited as Mirissa
was. They’d spent most every day together training and learning the ropes of
the Omega Group. Through it all, he was quiet and withdrawn. Even more so than
usual. Though Mirissa had tried several times to get him to open up about what
was going on with him, he’d refused.

Mirissa’s father and mother sat across from her now, sharing
a large recliner and acting like teenagers in love. Since being reunited they’d
spent every possible moment together, always holding hands or kissing each
other.

Gross!
Mirissa thought.
But kind of adorable, too.

It was almost time for Mirissa to go out on patrol, so she
gathered her things to leave.

“Let me give you a key to the building, sweetheart. That way
you can come and go as you please.” Myrine walked to her desk and grabbed a key
ring from her drawer, handing one over to Mirissa.

“Thanks.” Mirissa was about to walk out when a thought
struck her. “Hey, Mom. I’ve been meaning to ask you. The key you left in the
wood chest with the Amazon book. What’s it for?”

Myrine sat back down, this time on Steve’s lap, and smiled.
“I wish I knew. My mother gave it to me, as her mother gave it to her. She told
me I needed to give it to you when you reached the age of maturity.”

“So, I’m just supposed to hold onto it and pass it down to
my daughter one day?”

“No,” Myrine began. “The key is yours. It has always been
yours. My mother said it’s been passed down through the generations with
instructions that
you
finally receive it. She also said that, when the
time comes, you will know what to do with it.”

Mirissa stopped herself before she asked all of the
questions that popped into her mind. It was obvious that she had gotten all of
the information about this key that she was going to get. “I guess I’ll just
wait and see then.”

With that, Mirissa headed out to patrol the streets of
Jacksonville. To keep the masses safe and blissfully unaware of the
unbelievable dangers that lurked everywhere around them.

The End