Etched in Bone (25 page)

Yes, thank you. Have him tell the bitch that Stephen sends his regards.

Teodoro finished his fruit platter—a plump strawberry—while he thoughtfully regarded Underwood, his mental fingers still deep within her psyche. Her mind was on standby, her face blank, like that of a sleepwalking child.

He had to admit, he admired Underwood’s plan for her murderous daughter-in-law. It’d be next to impossible to tie Underwood to Valerie’s sure-to-be-bloody and terrifying death at the hands—or fangs, actually—of Dante Baptiste. If anything, law enforcement officials might suspect that Valerie Underwood had reneged in the payment for Stephen’s murder and that she’d ended up paying in blood.

Admirable or not, Underwood’s plans interfered with his own. Teodoro had thought—erroneously, it turned out—that Underwood had sent Purcell to New Orleans to snuff Baptiste. Teodoro could’ve worked with that scenario. Could’ve tweaked Underwood’s memories into believing she’d turned the mission over to Teodoro to keep herself safely distanced from any fallout.

But since Underwood was actually avenging her murdered son, Teodoro wouldn’t be able to sway the SOD’s deep-seated desire for payback, to reap a little revenge in her murdered son’s name. Couldn’t tweak it in a way that wouldn’t leave doubt buried in her subconscious like a worm wriggling beneath rain-wet soil.

Her hunger to avenge her son was the driving force rolling her out of bed in the morning and pressing her foot against the gas pedal of her Lexus on her drives in to HQ.

A shame really. He understood that hunger for justice, that fire, well. It was what drove him even now.

Teodoro wanted the young Maker to remember everything that was about to happen to him with exquisite, diamond-cut clarity. But whenever Baptiste’s programming was engaged, he remembered nothing, not even his own actions.

That wouldn’t do.

Teodoro sipped at his coffee and mulled over his options. And realized he only had one. Setting down his coffee cup, he drew in a deep breath of the bacon-greased air and went to work.

A moment later, Underwood blinked, then opened and closed her mouth, confusion twisting a frown across her lips. “What . . . what was I saying?”

Teodoro arranged the proper amount of concern on his face, furrowed his brow. “Are you feeling all right? You seemed to lose focus for a moment.”

Underwood blinked again. She rubbed one temple with her fingers, pain tight at the corners of her mouth. “A bit of a headache. I’ve got some Excedrin at the office.”

“You look a little pale,” Teodoro agreed. “Maybe you’re coming down with something.”

Shaking her head, Underwood picked up her glass of water and drained it. Setting the glass down, she said, “I don’t have time to be sick, so that’s simply not an option.” She gathered up the folder, Teodoro’s questions about Purcell gone from her memory. “Thanks for this, Díon. I’ll make sure the Committee knows that the director has been compromised and that Britto is called on the carpet for it.”

“Glad I could help, ma’am,” Teodoro said, sliding out of the booth and scooping up the meal check at the same time. “I’ll get this. You can get the next one.”

Underwood snorted. “Thank you, but I’m hoping there won’t be a reason for another clandestine meeting.”

Teodoro chuckled. “Me too, ma’am. Me too.”

Teodoro was stepping outside the door when he heard the clatter of dishes against carpet and a panicked cry from the chubby waitress clearing dishes from the last booth on the right.

“Someone call 911!”

Teodoro slipped out the door and strode across the parking lot to his shining cranberry Prius. He didn’t need to look to know that the stroke had left SOD Celeste Underwood facedown on her emptied plate, maple syrup gluing her dark cheek to the stoneware.

Climbing into the Prius, Teodoro belted himself in behind the steering wheel. Through the café’s main window, he watched frantic activity taking place beside the booth he’d just left. He started the car’s engine.

He’d liked Underwood, despite her prickly manner, had enjoyed working with her for the last decade, and he regretted what he’d been forced to do. But in the grand scheme of things, her life meant little. After all these centuries, he finally had an opportunity to take from the Fallen the thing they most wanted—just as they’d once done to him.

Soon the Princes of Gehenna would have no choice but to slay their precious, long-awaited
creawdwr
as madness reshaped him into the Great Destroyer.

Pulling from the parking lot onto the highway, he aimed the Prius for the Shadow Branch’s underground facilities. He had a gift for Violet—a new box of crayons.

20
HARD NEWS

N
EW
O
RLEANS
C
AFÉ DU
M
ONDE
March 28

T
AKING A SIP OF
his café au lait, Field Agent Richard Purcell folded back the front page of the
Times-Picayune
and scanned the headlines. A smile stretched his lips when he spotted a paragraph on
page 4
detailing the blazing conflagration that had destroyed the home of local rock musician Dante Prejean the night before. One life was lost—that of Simone Martinique.

Purcell remembered how the scene had looked when he’d arrived about an hour after the fire had been doused and the fire trucks had finally left.

The plantation house has burned down to its foundation. A couple of fire-blackened walls poke up into the night like fingers scorched to the bone. Several huge old oaks look like torched skeletons—leaves gone, gnarled and twisted branches crisped black. Smoke hangs in the air, a lung-coating reek of incinerated wood, molten metal, and irretrievable loss. The wet street gleams in the moonlight.

The newspaper stated that witnesses had mentioned hearing shattering glass and explosions, suggestive of Molotov cocktails. The survivors denied hearing anything.

Of course the bloodsuckers denied hearing anything, Purcell mused. They would take care of the problem on their own, leaving blood and ruin in their wake.

And Prejean—the little fucking psycho codenamed S—would bathe in the shit, a knowing smile curving his lips, his pale, pale face incandescent with a devastating beauty.

A beauty Purcell’s heart had hardened against years before. S’s sexy spell wouldn’t work on him. Never had.

The chug-chug-chug of powerful ship engines echoed from the Mississippi, and the cool morning air smelled of river water and mud and sweet pastries as Purcell sat back in his chair, eating his beignet with its liberal dusting of powdered sugar, and watched the pigeons hopping around the café’s covered terrace, heads cocked to one side as if they hoped to force crumbs to the pavement with a hungry pigeon’s version of the Force. Pigeon Jedi mind tricks.

Breaking off a couple of pieces from the beignet, he tossed them in front of the optimistic pigeons.
Well, look at that. It worked.

Chuckling, he polished off his beignet and brushed sugar from his hands. He scooted back his chair, scraping it across the pavement and causing a few pigeons to hop away madly. Just as he stood, his cell phone vibrated in his trouser pocket. He pulled it free and looked at the caller ID. Unknown. Frowning, he answered the call.

“Purcell. And who is this?”

“It’s Díon, Purcell. Are you sitting down? I have some hard news.”

The fact that a field interrogator was calling him with hard news instead of SOD Underwood shuffled unpleasant possibilities through Purcell’s mind with all the faster-than-the-eye speed of a deck of cards in the hands of a Vegas blackjack dealer. But the ace of spades in that deck was the most likely possibility: Underwood’s little plot had been discovered and she was in deep, deep trouble.

And, maybe, just maybe, so was he. The beignet in his belly turned to stone. He planted his butt back in his chair.

“I’m sitting,” he said roughly.

“SOD Underwood died of a stroke this morning.”

Purcell stared at the splay-toed pigeon prints in the powdered sugar scattered on the pavement. His pulse pounded in his temples. That card hadn’t even been tucked into his deck of possibilities. Underwood,
dead
?

“A stroke?” he repeated like an idiot, not sure of what to say.

“Yeah,” Díon sighed. “A massive one. The attending doc said she went quick, if that’s any consolation.”

“Fuck.” Purcell trailed a hand through his hair. Now what? Should he continue with the mission, for Underwood’s sake? See her daughter-in-law into her well-deserved grave?

But even as those thoughts were zipping through Purcell’s mind, Díon said, in a low, European-flavored voice, “Underwood told me about the gift for her daughter-in-law that you were going to deliver for her.”

Fear curled a cold hand around Purcell’s guts. He went still. “She did, did she?”

A low, rueful laugh. “I didn’t pluck it from her mind. Christ, Purcell. Why would I even be looking?”

Good question. A damned fine question, and one Purcell was going to examine in minute detail and in every kind of light later. Once he’d figured out what Díon wanted.

“That I don’t know,” he admitted. “So how come
you’re
breaking the news?”

“So we could discuss mutual concerns.”

“Those being . . . ?”

“Terminating Prejean and fulfilling Underwood’s last request.”

Laughter from tourists strolling along Decatur street headed for the French Market carried like music on the still air. “Keep talking,” Purcell said.

A grin stretched across Purcell’s lips and excitement crackled like crazed lightning through his veins as he listened to Díon’s urbane voice lay out his plan for S and his traitorous FBI squeeze, Heather Wallace.

21
TRUE BLUE AMERICAN

O
UTSIDE
D
AMASCUS
, OR
T
HE
W
ELLS
/L
YONS
C
OMPOUND
March 28

T
IM
S
HAUNN WAS LYING
on his belly in the dirt and scrub beneath rain-dripping pines atop a small rise near what remained of the Wells place. He adjusted the gas mask strapped on over his head, making sure it was snug as a bug in a effing rug.

He had zero desire to die from a stray whiff of the toxic fumes the federal government talking heads claimed was wafting from the mysterious sinkhole that had opened up and swallowed an entire house. Not to mention the poor, doomed souls living inside it—an FBI agent and his family, so the
Oregonian
said.

And, not only that, the so-called toxic fumes had stolen the lives of several of the nearest neighbors in the sparsely populated hillside community.

A handful of agents wearing tan windbreakers with red letters on the back reading
TASK FORCE
—and, effing interesting that no particular agency was named, not the FBI or HSA or CDC, just a generic, all-encompassing
TASK FORCE
—strolled the grounds alongside techs in yellow jumpsuits. A small guest cottage with broken-out windows seemed to be functioning as a command post.

Tim noted that no one was wearing a gas mask or any other kind of air filtration device. Not even the techs standing at the lip of what looked like an enormous mist-blanketed pit, various gadgets and instruments in their gloved hands.

Toxic fumes, my ass.

Tim snorted, and the tinny sound bounced off the mask’s confines and into his ears. Okay, then. No more noise while wearing this effing thing. But the thought of pulling the gas mask off and putting the harmlessness of the air to the test left him cold.

Better safe than too effing dead to be sorry.

Maybe the toxic fumes had been controlled or had ended. Maybe. But on Tim’s fave late-night radio talk show,
Mike and Jill Carr Digging for the Truth!
, he’d heard a darker, more chilling theory.

The government was killing witnesses to whatever had happened at the Wells/Lyons compound. Too many people near the site had suddenly gone on vacation—without bothering to tell anyone. Or had inexplicably moved, leaving a forwarding address to some faraway vacant lot.

The feds rolled their eyes and explained that some people had been contaminated by the fumes and had been shuttled to a secure location to be scrubbed clean, monitored, then released.

Like quail in front of a pump action shotgun.

Tim’s gut tied itself into hard knots. He finger-wiped rain from the gas mask’s goggles as he reminded himself why he was here risking life and liberty. Mike and Jill Carr’s slogan circled through his mind like a torch held aloft by an Olympic runner:
Keep Digging for the Truth!

Americans had the right to know what was going on in their very own country and on their own Grade A USA soil, had the right to know what dirty-assed deeds their duly elected government officials were busy committing and why.

Plus . . . maybe, just maybe, Mike Carr would ask Tim to the studio and have him recount his gritty, dangerous adventure live over the airwaves to a rapt audience. Jill Carr would then declare Tim a hero and a true-blue American and plant a pink-lipped kiss of gratitude on his manly, whisker-stubbled cheek.

A dreamy sigh escaped Tim’s lips, and he caught a pungent whiff of onion and green peppers from his breakfast burrito. His stomach rumbled, wishing for another.

Later
, he promised it. First a little sleuthing, a bit of James Bonding, maybe a few photos, a smooth and unseen getaway, then a tasty and well-deserved lunch. Taco Bell was the
shit
.

Pulling his binoculars from his olive-green knapsack, Tim raised them to his eyes. They smacked against his goggles with a dull
thok
. His cheeks heated even though no one had witnessed his decidedly not double-oh moment. Sweat prickling against his scalp—
damned mask was effing hot!
—Tim carefully rested the binoculars against the goggles and peered at the scene below. Or tried to.