Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella (5 page)

Colors that now painted Danny Granger in shades of red and purple and black.

Unfair.

“Nai?”

“I got an address for you,” she said immediately. She rattled it off, and Jonas committed it to memory as he limped through the garage. The cadence of his passing didn’t bother him anymore. The rhythm came as easily as breathing, now. One step, one crutch. Next step, and the other crutch went with it. His shoulders rolled, causing the bag to chafe, but he ignored it.

In the scheme of things, it didn’t matter much.

“Danny’s been there for about a week,” he said.

“Yeah. Parker said.” Every iota of amusement leached from her voice, and Jonas fought back a sigh. This was what had made Naomi such a fine missionary. The ability to turn it off. Go ice cold, do the job, get on with it. “If they stick with basic training, they won’t have broken anything absolutely necessary, but there’s lots of shit that isn’t necessary.”

Only she hadn’t done that great of getting on with it back in the day. And even while Jonas had been her shoulder, almost a year ago, he’d never shared how much he got it.

How much he lived it.

“I’ll meet you there, do what I can. He’s going to need rest, and a friendly face. You okay, Jonas?”

She’d had enough on her plate then, and she still did now. So he lied. “I’m good. Better than good, baby cakes, I’m the king of the wave. You know that.”

“Uh huh. How much damage did you cause?”

“Minimal. I don’t think it’ll mess with your plans. Listen, something happened about five minutes ago.” When she only returned a questioning sound, Jonas continued quickly. “The whole place rattled, at least as far as the mid-low cells. I didn’t feel it here, but I saw it in the Mission feed.”

“Rattled? Did something blow?”

Jonas pushed out of the garage door, letting it swing shut and automatically lock behind him. All at once, he was assailed by neon and fluorescent signs, lights flashing in purples and oranges and reds. The smell hit him a second later, sharp as acid and sour as the moldy, dank stench of abandoned refuse drifting out from the alley beside him.

New Seattle was built a lot like a layer cake. New on top of the old, each tier getting more and more posh until the very top. Down here in the lower streets, where the populace stopped giving a damn about anything but the next big thrill,
posh
was something that happened to the fictional people on fantasy feeds.

He hadn’t seen whatever happened to the Mission offices. Hadn’t noticed anything strange here at the garage, and the street now didn’t reflect anything but the usual activity. Whatever sent the Mission into a tizzy, it had been localized.

Maybe something he could use later. Information, after all, was his thing. “Maybe that’s it,” he mused. “Testing something new? I’ll check it out.”

“Let us know.”

He pressed the back of his hand to a corner of his glasses, righting them.

“I’ll pack some gear,” Naomi continued. “Stay out of trouble ‘til I get there.”

“I’ll see you there. Thanks, pretty girl.”

The line clicked off, and he drew the earpiece off the shell of his ear.

Touchstone. He’d always been one. Always been the guy to go to when a missionary needed a steady hand and a smile. Jonas had practically grown up in the Mission proper. Even after the accident that ruined his body, even when Silas—who held himself responsible—left the city all those years ago, left Jonas broken behind him, Jonas didn’t give up.

Maybe it would have been easier.

But Jonas didn’t like
easy
anywhere else but in his bed.

The world expected him to give up. Just like everyone expected Danny to be a traumatized wreck after the Mission’s week-long hospitality.

Filled with bubbles and a green-eyed pool boy.

Adrenaline did a lot of things to a body. Including forcing the need for a touchstone.

Jonas provided. That’s what he did.

He rounded his shoulders, weight braced solidly in his locked arms, and waited for the vehicle that would bring Danny Granger to safety. Pedestrians streamed around him, some with purpose. Those were the men and women who were lucky enough to have a job down in the lower streets. Shit work mostly, the kind of industrial labor nobody else even considered as they lived happily in the fresher air above.

Most ambled in the neon corona. Idle, nowhere to go, nowhere to be. The mechanic’s shop was nestled between a warehouse—usually exploited for its ability to smash as many desperate people in a single party as possible—and a darkened, boarded-up warehouse on the other side. Nothing to see here. Just a guy, waiting on a ride.

Trying like hell to keep the inferno of his anxiety under wraps.

Jonas waited under the battered awning, hands in his pockets, and tried not to breathe too deeply of the chill-touched scent of mold and rot and worse infecting the acrid air. Early autumn had landed without finesse, sweeping away any hint of the muggy summer.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The van drew up through a knot of indifferent people, a battered old vehicle the color of soot-smeared brick. Gordon beckoned from behind the wheel. Jonas didn’t bother with niceties. He seized the back handle as the vehicle idled, blowing exhaust around his knees. It opened easily.

The crackle of orange neon scattered across the interior of the van, merging with the faint light from the overhead dome in the front cab. The rest remained draped in shadow. Just dark enough to hide everything but the outline of a man’s sneakered foot in the far corner, a huddled shape tucked behind the driver seat.

His heart picked up speed. Anger.
Nerves.

A pair of blue eyes watched him from the rearview mirror, but Jonas didn’t let that stop him. He wasn’t graceful; hell, he barely qualified as
balanced
, but he knew how to get around. On days like this, he missed the hell out of the surveillance van he’d babied for over a decade. She’d been loaded with everything he needed to get by. Hydraulic lifts for days he needed a boost and easy-grip rails for the rest of the time. Shelves to house his veritable black hole of electronics, surveillance mounted to the outside, a refrigerator to hoard his energy boosters, and whatever bribery the agents used to hand his way for extra work.

It’d been . . . .

He frowned as he stared at the worn, stained matting bolted to the van floor.

It hadn’t been a great life, but he’d had what he wanted. Then.

“Need a hand?” Gordon’s voice stripped the memory from Jonas’s eyes. His gaze cleared on that even regard reflected back at him.

He shook his head, hard, and firmed his grip on the edge of the open door. “Nope,” he replied lightly, flashing a smile. “Just hold her steady.” As choking exhaust swirled around him, he tossed his crutches inside one after the other—
clank, clank
—shrugged out of the bag, and perched a hip on the back edge of the interior. Though he could force his legs to lift, score through aching muscles and tendon and deformed bone, he couldn’t force them far. Matter-of-factly, he grabbed his pants legs in one practiced hand, leaned back, and rotated fully inside.

Once his feet hit the mat beside his crutches, it was the work of moments to lean out, grab the doors and swing them shut behind him.

“Good?”

“Good,” Jonas affirmed.

And then froze as the huddled silhouette three feet away stirred. The mutter didn’t make any sense to him, but he recognized the rasped, muted cadence of Danny’s voice as one hand fell limply to the rough carpet.

“He’s been in and out.” Gordon guided the rusted van out into the muddled blend of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. “Where to?”

Jonas repeated the address Naomi gave him, waiting until the van rocked into motion before scooting across the narrow interior. “Hey, kid.”

“Angel?” The word scraped over his nerves, already raw with fear and fury. As the city lights bloomed through the windshield, Jonas’s fingers clamped against the floor as stark rage replaced a nervousness he didn’t want to deal with now.

Everything looked worse up close.

Danny curled into the far side, his shirt colored blue by the shadows, splattered with the filth of his confinement. He smelled like something dropped off in a sewer, but that was the least of Jonas’s problems. Balanced on his arms, palms flattened before he did something stupid, he stared into a face battered nearly beyond recognition.

A single eye remained slitted open. Black as pitch in the van, fever bright.

Pinned on him.

The swollen edge of his mouth quirked; a near-smile that had to hurt. “Hey,” he croaked.

Jonas jerked into motion, somehow forcing the words beyond the lump in his throat. Closing the distance, ignoring the cramping warning of his legs and hips, he shifted until he could brace Danny’s limp weight with his own. A wrong spill now could break him. “You look like you’ve seen better days.”

A grimace, cut with a wince. “That great, huh?”

Without stopping to think, without even realizing he did it, Jonas caught the hand lifted to him. Held it between his, tight enough to make it damn clear that he wasn’t going anywhere. “I’ve seen worse,” he assured him, guilt thick in his chest. Sticky on his tongue.
I’m sorry.

He should have been faster. Gotten Danny out sooner.

The city lights painted neon swaths over the lurid bruises across his cheek, dipped into the ravaged edges of his split lip. His whole face looked like he’d gone toe to toe with a battering ram. Blood, filthy streaks of dried sweat, and the collected dirt from his week-long prison sentence coated his skin. A week’s worth of dark whiskers only helped to make him look like a street bum on a bad, bad day.

Made him look far older than his whatever-twenties.

But the hand caught between Jonas’s was warm. Vitally alive. Even strong enough to curl around his. Calluses slid over his knuckles, surprising him.

Intriguing him.

Stop it.

Jonas tried to let go. That hand tightened. “S’okay, angel,” Danny whispered, even as his single good eye slid shut. As if he knew. Knew what kind of shit danced around in Jonas’s thoughts, his conscience. Knew, and absolved him.

Impossible.

“Don’t call me that,” he told the battered kid holding his hand.

But Danny said nothing.

Chapter Four

T
HE VAN SLOWED
twenty minutes later.

“We’re here,” Gordon announced. “I’ll come around back.”

He stepped out of the cab, leaving Jonas to stare at Danny’s quiet, sleeping form. He hadn’t stirred much, save to mutter now and again when the vehicle rocked him one way or the other. Jonas had let him go as soon as the kid drifted to sleep, but he didn’t go far.

He told himself it was to keep Danny from hurting himself with the van’s turning radius.

Now, easing away from the warmth of Danny’s side, Jonas collected his bag and crutches and pushed open the back doors. Worry gnawed at him. “He’s been out for about ten minutes,” he said as Gordon caught the swinging door.

“I got him.”

No argument, no questions asked. The missionary waited for Jonas to slide out of the vehicle—easier to get out than in—and ducked inside. Jonas jammed his arms into the crutches, gritting his teeth.

A quiet little voice in his head told him
he
should have been the one collecting Danny. Pulling him into his arms, cradling his fragile, broken body like—

No way.
Absolutely no way in hell. Jonas didn’t have that kind of strength, and even if his legs could hold the weight for two, Danny was taller than he was. Even a little wider. Against the missionary’s solid muscle, Jonas didn’t even stand a chance in comparison. He knew missionaries built like brick walls, knew others built more like lean, lethal machines.

Jonas was built like a nerdy school kid.

Gritting his teeth, he stepped back as Gordon jumped from the van, Danny held in his arms like his limp, curled figure didn’t weigh a thing. Wordlessly, Jonas turned in an awkward semicircle and led the way into the open-air apartment complex.

He had strengths that didn’t involve, well,
strength
. King of the wave. Second only—and he could admit it—to a rebellion leader with a vendetta against the Church. He didn’t mind keeping that kind of hallowed company.

And Danny Granger was that leader’s grandson.

No matter what kind of hints the kid had been dropping throughout that entire rescue, even if it turned out—God help him—that Danny had been serious as a bullet, it didn’t matter. He owed May a hell of a lot more than screwing around with a member of her family.

Besides, what were the odds?

“Which one?”

Jonas jerked his head—which managed to yank the too-long edges of his light brown hair from his eyes, but skewed his glasses—and took a second to orient himself. The tenements were nestled into an open square, bordering a courtyard abandoned to disuse and disrepair. Lights affixed to the outside of each door flickered uncertainly; more busted out than still working. It outlined the remains of some kind of garden now given way to broken bits of mortar and brick, discarded tires, fragments of glass, appliances piled in heaps, and the remains of a fire. The air was cooler this far down in New Seattle’s hierarchy of streets. Part of it was the depth. No sun came this far. Even summer’s rare cloudless days didn’t matter much in the scheme of things.

At nearly midnight, most of the chill forced below between thunderstorms and a biting wind settled in for the duration. He shivered, only now remembering the coat he’d left behind in his hurry to get Danny to safety.

“Apartment fifteen,” he finally said, pointing with the end of one crutch. “There. First floor.”

It took effort not to turn around. To check on the unconscious body in Gordon’s arms. Reassure himself that the kid still breathed.

Instead, firming his grip on his crutches, he headed for the safe house Naomi assured him would be, well, safe.

It took only a few more moments to input the security code into the neatly concealed panel, open the door and let Gordon carry Danny inside. There wasn’t much to it: one room, a half-kitchen along the far eastern wall, beige carpet, beige hide-a-bed couch, and green blinds over the two windows. Across from the sofa, a single door probably led to the bathroom. A back door in the kitchen had been boarded up, which meant if they had to make a quick escape, it would have to be through a window.