Darkening Dawn (The Lockman Chronicles Book 5) (13 page)

The whole time he spoke his mouth stayed straight and his eyes grew more intense. His voice was filled with the kind of wonder a kid has at the first sight of the presents under the Christmas tree.

Elka’s sweaty hands trembled more. She flattened them against her thighs and rubbed the sweat into her denim skirt. The light blouse she wore might as well have been a wool sweater. The café’s air-conditioning did nothing to break the sweat running down her back and between her breasts. Her bra felt like a metal vice.

“Anyway,” Earl continued, “I woke up this morning, went straight to the paper, turned the page to the one I dreamt about, and saw your ad. I knew it was you. So I came here—”

He pointed at her.

“—and here you are.”

A dream? Was this man a sensitive? She still hadn’t figured out for sure if he was mortal or not. No reason to beat around the bush. “What are you?”

“From what to who, huh? I guess you’re asking if I’m human or some kind of beastie like yourself.”

That caught her like a gutshot by a cannonball. The breath huffed out of her as if physically struck. All that sweat turned to ice on her skin. The wild switch in her body temperature made her feel like she could come down with pneumonia at any second.

How do you know what I am?

She thought she had asked the question out loud.

Earl stared at her, waiting as if she hadn’t yet spoken.

She realized she hadn’t. And couldn’t. The fear had her by the throat.

Earl’s smile returned. All the serious intensity slipped off his face like a mask. Sweet old Andy Griffith had come back after a commercial break.

“Don’t fret a thing, sweetheart. Your secret’s safe with me.”

She still couldn’t talk. Years of careful lessons passed down from her family told her to run. A people hunted for a hundred generations had evolved until the urge to flee when cornered had become a part of their blood.

This was a mistake.

It didn’t matter how this guy knew what he knew.

What mattered was escape.

She grabbed what remained of her latte, peeled off the lid and splashed it in Earl’s face.

He cried out and covered his face with his hands.

Elka shot to her feet. Her chair clattered to the floor behind her. Without a backward glance, she sprinted for the exit, weaving around tables, bumping into chairs, ignoring the shouts from those sitting in the chairs. Her heart raced. The instinct to flee took over her body. She had to fight to keep from shifting into her true form like her instincts insisted.

On the mortal plane, that part of her natural self would get her killed.

In this place, you have to learn to control who you are, no matter what your blood demands.

Her father’s lesson, not part of what her people had evolved to for survival’s sake.

She reached the door and shoved against the glass, pushing her way out into the stifling humidity. On a whim, she turned to her right and ran along the sidewalk, dodging the people taking their time as they strolled along, unhunted, safe in their own world.

She almost made it to the end of the block when a massive black man stepped into her path. Her momentum drove her right into him before she could stop running. She hit him like hitting a wall. Only this wall had arms as thick as the lilith trees from her home world her mother used to tell her about.

They’re the most beautiful things. I wish you could see them. Maybe someday.

He wrapped those lilith arms around her and dragged her into the doorway of an empty storefront with a
For Lease
sign in the window.

“Chill,” he whispered in her ear as he squeezed her against him. “I don’t want to have to put you out with a choke hold. Earl wouldn’t like it.”

There was no way she could break out of his hold.

She could scream. But that could draw the attention of law enforcement, and with Kenny’s sloppy murder in her recent past, she didn’t dare chance it.

Besides, she had a feeling he could wring the breath right out of her before she could make the meekest noise.

She stopped struggling. Tears stung her eyes. Her heart felt ready to burst.

Another unicorn trapped in a long history of her people’s constant struggle against the hunters who prize them.

I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m a shame to our kind. But maybe I’ll finally see you again in the Great Beyond.

Her captor let go with one arm, but easily kept her pinned against him with the other, her face smashed against his chest. She couldn’t see what he was doing with his other hand. But she soon felt the needle sink into the side of her neck.

Two seconds later, all turned black.

Chapter Twenty-One

I
F SHE STILL HAD HER
wings, this could have gone a lot easier. But instead of flying off the roof of the few stories of headquarters that rose above ground, Jessie had to take an alternative route.

One of the school bus-sized trash bins stored in the lowest floor of the building.

The trash room resembled a warehouse with the aisleways running between garbage bins instead of storage boxes. It sort of reminded her of the warehouse at the end of
Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
, where they tuck away the ark in a crate among thousands of similar crates carrying who knew what.

This was also one of the only places outside Jessie’s suite not lit by fluorescent bulbs. Several shaded lights hanging from the metal rafters lined the aisles, each casting a yellowish light from incandescent bulbs.

The trash had softer lighting than even Wertz’s office.

Only it wasn’t Wertz’s anymore, was it?

The stink was worse than what Jessie had prepared for. Despite the vapor rub she had slathered under her nose, she could still smell the mixed rot of garbage filling the room. Not all of the bins were full. Most of them, in fact, weren’t. But even the empties stank as Jessie passed them on her way to the far end of the trash room.

She carried a backpack stuffed with as many clothes that would fit, as well as her wallet with her Agency-issued bankcard that she would probably get one use out of before they cut her off. They wouldn’t do that, though, until she used it that once, even if they discovered her gone before she could reach a bank. They would anticipate her using the card. They would use it to pin her location.

She also had to consider the possibility that they had somehow put a homing device on her. They had done it to her dad, planted one in the bottom of his foot. Her mom had cut it out for him.

Jessie seriously hoped she wouldn’t have to do the same.

Either way, the Agency had access to magic. They could put together a tracking spell. Use blood from their bank made up of “donations” from Agency employees. She had tried to clear any trace of herself from her suite, but they had forensic specialists who would eventually find something.

They would find her.

She just had to stay one step ahead of them long enough to get out of range of any spell and stay off their radar for the rest of her life.

Because they would never stop looking.

At the room’s far end was the huge freight elevator that could fit two of these bins at a time. The elevator carried the bins to ground level, were put onto a trailer, and hauled off to the Agency’s own private landfill some fifty miles south.

She knew all this from a casual conversation with the head of waste management where she feigned interest in his day-to-day work. Obviously, not many people showed such an interest, because the poor guy blabbed for close to an hour about all the systems in place to deal with all the garbage generated by the Agency’s daily functioning.

Jessie had learned from her dad—always have a way out.

So she had made sure she had a way out of the Agency.

Dad would be proud.

In anticipation of the totally gross method of transportation off this fucked up reservation, Jessie had dressed in her least favorite clothes. A pair of jeans that didn’t fit her anymore, the waistband cutting into her belly, giving her a freaking muffin top even though she was in perfect shape. An old sweatshirt with holes in the pits and a faded University of Michigan logo on the chest, given to her by her werewolf stepdad at a Wolverine’s game in Ann Arbor.

She also had her hair tucked up into a knit cap to keep as much stink out of her hair as possible. For shoes, she hadn’t many options. While her boots were her favorite of the three pairs she owned, the Chuck Taylors or the Vans would let any wetness in the bin soak right through her socks.

Tucked in her pocket she had a bandana to tie over her face like a western outlaw. Probably wouldn’t help much.

Anyway, the mismatched outfit was the best she could do. A little gross suffering would be worth getting the hell away from the likes of Borscht and his cunt lackey, Kinga Kowalski.

Damn. I’m whipping out the “C” word on her. And I’d probably say it to her face if I had to see her again.

Teeth clenched and face warm from just the thought of Kinga, Jessie used her anger as fuel to push her to go through with her plan.

She approached the bin nearest the freight elevator. Each bin had a metal ladder at one corner. According to Jay, the garbage dude, they used those to get in and hose out the bins, and occasionally to retrieve something not meant to go to the landfill.

She didn’t ask him how that would go.

She didn’t want to know.

Of course, she was about to find out for herself.

She climbed up the ladder and peered into the bin.

The smell blasted her. No single scent came through on its own. It all mixed to make a uniform stench that coiled in through her nose and hit the back of her throat, making her gag. She hung onto the ladder’s top rung and slapped her free hand over her mouth, trying to hold back from upchucking. The garbage didn’t need her help making it anymore gross.

This is a stupid idea. It’s a movie cliché too. Like I’m Princess Leia blasting a hole in the grate to the trash compactor to escape the storm troopers. Who am I kidding?

Then she weighed her options on a mental scale—Kinga Kowalski on one side, nasty trip in the trash on the other.

Fuck it.

She climbed higher, swung a leg over the lip of the bin, hesitated a second, then swung the other leg over and dropped into the garbage.

Thankfully she didn’t sink all the way to her neck like she imagined. Just up to her knees. Debris of all kinds surrounded her. Take-out boxes with petrified leftovers inside. Old printers and fax machines. Wads and wads of paper. (
Guess the Agency doesn’t believe in recycling.
) Coffee filters crusted with wet grounds. Orange peels. Banana peels. All sorts of rotted things that might once have been vegetables.

While there were a few stuffed trash bags—many split open—most of the trash was loose in the bin. Jay had explained how many departments used shoots that fed directly to the bins instead of trash cans since there were so many departments and offices and personnel all making their own trash. Because of the top secret nature of the building, they couldn’t risk hiring a full janitorial staff to collect all those wastebaskets.

Support staff like Jay and the few people running the cafeteria was kept to a minimum and housed in headquarters like the rest of the agents—and Jessie, but not for long.

Weird way to run a place. But a good way if the place wasn’t supposed to exist.

Jessie pulled off her backpack and dropped it beside her. She tied the bandana over her mouth. The worst part came next.

Since she hadn’t sunk past her knees, she would have to burrow into the junk to get low enough to stay out of sight. She even anticipated the possibility of burying herself if needed.

Vamp wings were gross too, but at the moment, man did they sound a shit ton better than this.

Digging into the trash like a gopher, Jessie managed to make a hole deep enough to take her in to her shoulders and wide enough for her to pull her backpack down with her. Before she settled in for the long haul—a literal haul—she checked her watch. She had thirty minutes before they loaded her bin into the elevator. Fifteen before Jay and his small crew came into the trash room to get the bins ready.

“Good times,” she said under her breath and eased herself into her gopher hole.

Some of the trash caved in around her. Something cold and wet and about the size of a dog pressed up against her back. She could feel her sweatshirt absorbing the wetness. The bandana didn’t do a thing to hold back the rankness surrounding her.

She was really doing this.

She wondered if it would end up worth the trouble. If she could really keep out of the Agency’s grasp. They had a far reach and a lot of resources. Even her special-ops trained dad had had a hard time keeping them off his back.

To keep her mind off her disgusting situation, Jessie closed her eyes and played scenes from
Chinatown
on her mind’s movie screen while listening for the sound of Jay coming in to unwittingly help her bust out of this joint.

Chapter Twenty-Two

E
LKA’S HEAD THROBBED.
H
ER
eyes felt pasted shut. Her tongue was a desert rock in her mouth.

Everything spun.

Where am I?

Digging through her memory, pieces came together. The man in the plaid shirt with the fatherly smile. The cold bolt in her gut as he revealed he knew what she really was. The sound of her chair clacking against the floor. The feel of her heart pounding. And the black man with the hard chest and lilith tree arms.

The needle.

A bit of bile climbed up Elka’s throat. She tried to swallow it back, but her head was bent forward with her chin on her chest, making it difficult with her neck kinked like that. When she tried to lift her head, she only managed to loll it to one side. Then gravity fought back and her head swung back to center.

Wherever she was, something whined like an animal stuck in a steel trap. Something hunted.

She realized the sound came from her.

She was the something hunted.

Judging from the aching in her body, at least she had kept her human form. They couldn’t get to her horn yet. And if she had any say, they would have to kill her to get her to shift back.