Greene's Calling: Seventeen Book Three (A Supernatural Action Adventure Thriller Series 3) (27 page)

Alarmed cries resonated close by as he rolled past the opening. He leapt to his feet and looked around. The woman was racing down a passage on the left, the briefcase and gun in her hands. Heads appeared in the doorways lining the corridor. Conrad clenched his teeth and bolted after her. He glimpsed rows of shocked faces as he sprinted past the startled office workers.

The hallway ended in a panoramic glass wall overlooking a vista of glimmering towers. The Arc de Triomphe rose along Charles de Gaulle Avenue in the far distance. The woman reached a fire door adjacent to the large window. Her fingers stilled on the handle and her head whipped around when she sensed his looming presence.

Conrad slammed into her with a harsh cry. His momentum carried them inexorably forward. They smashed sideways into the glass wall, hoarse grunts escaping their lips. The glazing shattered under the force of their combined impact.

Conrad froze. The woman’s eyes rounded. Wind whistled in his ears as they tipped through the expanding breach in the facade of the building. They fell outside in a rain of sparkling shards. Sunlight struck Conrad’s face. A kaleidoscope of white clouds, blue sky, and glittering walls flashed across his vision during the moment of weightlessness that followed.

He hit the roof of the atrium on his right side. Air fled his body in a guttural wheeze. Numbness enveloped him as his senses shut down from the pain of the impact.

He lay winded for long seconds, his throat and chest locked in a spasm of shock. He opened his mouth and heard a labored rasp whistle past his lips. Blood thundered in his ears, drowning all other sounds. A choked cough finally tore up his windpipe.

Conrad shuddered and gasped as oxygen flooded his lungs. The roar in his head faded. The panicked shouts rising from below finally registered.

He rolled onto his stomach and started to push himself up on his elbows. His right arm throbbed. He winced and looked down. His forearm was broken. He pressed his lips together and sent a burst of healing energy to the injured limb as he staggered to his feet. By the time he stood up, the angled bone had snapped back into place and repaired itself, along with the damaged flesh around it.

He looked for the woman.

Chapter Twenty

N
adica spat out crimson drops and crawled to her knees. Pain stabbed through her left flank from a pair of broken ribs. The ringing in her head subsided to a dull thrum. She inhaled shallowly and looked up.

They had plummeted two floors onto the roof of the glass-covered courtyard that connected the complex of towers. Distant figures milled about more than a hundred feet below, their fingers pointed agitatedly in her direction. The metal briefcase and the gun had escaped her grip during the fall and lay some fifteen feet away.

Movement caught Nadica’s eyes. She swung her head, her instincts on high alert. Conrad Greene was rising a short distance from where she stooped on all fours, his broken arm hanging limply at his side.

Nadica stiffened at what she witnessed next. Greene’s limb straightened itself with a low crack. The red swelling deforming his skin vanished before her eyes. He lurched upright and glared at her.

‘Give yourself up!’ he shouted. ‘There’s nowhere for you to go!’

Nadica stared into the gray-blue irises and felt a shiver run down her spine. A cold conviction flooded her consciousness.

Conrad Greene was no ordinary man.

An unexpected thrill followed that thought; here was someone who could be her brother’s equal. She wiped blood from her mouth, rose in a low crouch, and reached for the short kilij saber tucked in a scabbard under her jacket. Her amulet fell out of the neckline of her shirt.

Greene’s stare focused briefly on the pendant before shifting to the Turkish sword in her grip. He removed a gilded staff from his back and twisted a ring in the middle of the shaft. Twin blades sprung out from the ends of the weapon.

Nadica observed the spear and its holder appraisingly, a quiver of lust shooting through her. Her lips parted in a savage smile. She darted toward Greene, slipped to the side, and thrust the curved blade toward his gut. He deflected the strike.

She whirled around him and came in for another stab. He spun the staff expertly between his fingers, the weapon hitting her arm and wrist in rapid succession. The edge of the spear sliced across her skin.

Nadica sprang back and stared incredulously at the crimson beads blooming on the shallow gash on the back of her hand. No one had ever wounded her in battle. She stroked a thumb across the cut and licked the end of her bloody finger; her gaze hooded as her temper flared.

‘You’re mine!’ she hissed.

Sunlight gleamed on the sharpened edge of the kilij as she attacked, the crescent blade flowing seamlessly through the air in a rain of deadly stabs and thrusts. Greene parried her blows just as skillfully with his spear staff, his jaw set in a forbidding line.

Sparks erupted where their weapons collided. Seconds later, the kilij slipped past his guard and carved a deep line along his cheek. Nadica gasped.

The wound healed immediately, the damaged skin and muscle knitting seamlessly together in front of her eyes, not a single drop of blood spilled.

A sliver of fear skittered through her veins, dampening her rage. She straightened and took a step back. ‘Who are you?’ she whispered.

A dark smile dawned on Greene’s lips. His eyes glittered with the light of an arctic storm. ‘I’m the son of a bitch who’s going to stop you,’ he said coldly.

Automatic gunfire suddenly erupted behind them. Bullets peppered the roof of the atrium with sharp pops. A shot thudded into Greene’s leg. Terrified cries replaced the shocked silence from the crowd in the courtyard below.

Nadica looked up and saw the Strabo Corp. security head standing at the broken glass wall two floors above them. She turned and ran, her heart thundering inside her breast. Greene started after her. He skidded to a stop a split second later as more bullets riddled the transparent floor around him.

Nadica swooped down, grabbed the metal briefcase and her pistol, and raced for the tower wall. She glanced over her shoulder. Greene had exchanged the staff weapon for a gun and was running in a zigzag to avoid the hailstorm of shots from above. She smiled grimly and accelerated, the pain in her chest drowned by the murderous fury pouring inside her.

A crowd of horrified faces loomed behind the window of the office in front of her. Nadica raised her weapon and fired rapidly, hoping her bullets would maim, blind, kill. The only thing that could satisfy her wrath in that moment was a bloodbath of death.

The figures scattered as her shots smashed into the glass. The glazing collapsed in shimmering fragments. She dove through the opening, rolled when she hit the floor of the room beyond, and rose to her feet.

Conrad weaved a random path across the roof of the atrium, his heart in his throat. He had already ejected the bullet from the gunshot wound on his thigh and repaired the injury. A further burst from the automatic rifle whistled past his ears. He lifted the HK P8 in the direction of the Strabo Corp. security chief, hesitated, and cursed. He jammed the pistol viciously in his waistband; he could not shoot at the tower without the risk of one of his bullets striking an innocent bystander.

The gunfire ended abruptly. Conrad looked up and saw Anatole struggling with the security head. He clenched his teeth and changed direction, boots pounding the glass roof as he sprinted toward the broken window where the woman had disappeared.

He launched himself through the gaping hole, landed hard on a bed of shards, and slid some twenty feet across a polished floor. Blood blossomed from dozens of cuts on his body as he spun to a stop. He leapt to his feet and looked around wildly.

‘Where did she go?’ Conrad bellowed at the people cowering on the ground.

A man pointed shakily to a door on the other side of a row of cubicles. Conrad turned and ran toward it. A wide corridor lay beyond. He spotted drops of blood on the marble floor and followed the scarlet trail to a foyer with a service lift. His eyes darted to the operating panel. It showed the elevator opening on an underground car park.

Conrad swore and slammed his fist against the steel door. He scanned the lobby and saw a fire exit in the corner. He barged through it and started down the stairs beyond, the tower’s rear facade a solid wall of glass to his left.

‘They’re in the garage under the main building!’ he barked into his Bluetooth transmitter as he glanced out to the back of the complex.

‘Gotcha!’ responded the Bastian Hunter through the earpiece.

Conrad gripped the steel handrails and bounded swiftly from landing to landing, his chest heaving with his rapid breaths. Motion outside drew his gaze. A line of trucks with dark canvas roofs emerged from beneath the high-rise several floors down and headed rapidly for the road behind the building.

‘No,’ he breathed.

A screech of tires brought his eyes up. The Bastian Hunters’ sedan came into view some two hundred feet up the thoroughfare. The vehicle shot through the contraflow, juddered onto the curb, and slewed sideways across the garage exit.

Conrad’s heart stuttered against his ribs. The lead truck had accelerated. It plowed mercilessly into the Merc, the force of the collision loud enough to penetrate through the glazing of the tower wall. The car spun across the lanes.

Fury filled the immortal. He raced down the stairs, his blood a thunderous roar in his ears.

By the time he located an external door and reached the access road to the underground parking, the trucks had disappeared. Traffic had piled to a stop behind the heavily mangled wreckage of the sedan. Both sides of the vehicle had been smashed in repeatedly. Steam curled up from under the hood. The figures inside were ominously still.

Conrad bolted toward the car. Sirens sounded dimly in the distance. He skidded to a stop by the driver’s door and looked through the cracked window. Bile flooded the back of his throat.

He grabbed the handle and pulled. A whiff of diesel reached his nostrils. Metal shrieked in the distorted frame under his grip; the panel was jammed. He ignored the shouts of alarm from the growing crowd on the sidewalks, braced one foot against the center pillar, and tugged with all his might.

Veins and muscles bulged in his neck, and a harsh cry left his lips as the door finally gave way with a tortuous creak. Conrad reached inside the sedan and heaved the heavily bleeding driver and front passenger to the safety of the opposite sidewalk. He returned to the vehicle, air leaving his lips in tortured gasps. He ducked inside the car in time to see one of the Hunters in the back stir.

‘Open the door!’ he shouted. The immortal blinked at him.

Conrad raced around to the other side and saw the Hunter push weakly against the damaged rear door. Sparks flashed under the vehicle’s carriage. Icy fear danced down Conrad’s spine as he tugged on the door handle in vain. The stench of diesel grew stronger. A dark trail of fuel flamed up.

His eyes flared. ‘Shit!’

About the only two things immortals could not survive were decapitation and being pulverized into tiny pieces by an explosion.

The crowd scattered amid panicked screams as the blaze took hold of the rear of the sedan. Conrad finally managed to wrench the back door open and helped the dazed Hunter grab the last two men under their shoulders. The roar of the flames drowned the sound of their wheezing breaths as they hauled the inert figures out of the sedan and staggered backward across the asphalt.

They got twenty feet away from the vehicle before the fuel tank exploded.

Heat scorched Conrad’s face and chest. He caught the smell of singed hair.

The pressure wave from the blast wrapped around their bodies and hurled them a dozen feet through the air. They landed hard on the road and rolled over several times before finally rocking to a stop.

Further detonations erupted from the direction of the burning sedan. Conrad blinked at the smoke trails blurring the patch of blue sky above him, the explosions echoing dully in his ears. He lifted his head and stared at the blazing remains of the car.

On the other side of the flames, the two Bastians who had been in the front of the vehicle were rising to their feet.

Conrad pushed himself up slowly, his chest heaving with painful pants. He looked down at his trembling, bloodied hands, stunned that he had somehow managed to rescue the five men.

‘You okay?’ gasped someone beside him. It was the Hunter he had pulled out from the rear of the car.

‘Yeah,’ muttered Conrad. He climbed unsteadily to his knees. ‘You?’

The Hunter groaned. ‘I’ve been better.’

The two men they had pulled out of the sedan started to come around. The Bastian driver and passenger stumbled across the road to join them. Conrad ignored the simmering anger still plaguing him and quickly assessed the Hunters’ injuries. He healed one man’s lacerated liver and spleen, another’s shattered pelvis and torn gut, and a third man’s contused lung. The rest he deemed their immortal bodies able to repair.

He ignored the flashing lights and sirens of the police vehicles and ambulances hurtling down the road, and headed back inside the complex of towers. Streams of people surged past him when he reached the glass atrium; the buildings were being cleared. Conrad marched against the living tide and negotiated a path to the bank of lifts in the main tower. His bloodied clothes earned him a few fearful glances. He turned a blind eye and took the elevator to the twentieth floor.

The frosted entrance to Strabo Corp. lay wide open as he jogged toward it a moment later, his gun held low in his hands. The security panel on the wall had acquired several spiderweb fractures from a spray of bullets.