NightShade Forensic FBI Files, page 62
Strange, strange days.
As she walked farther, the tug in her belly got stronger and stronger. It kept her moving forward at a fast clip until she saw the light in the distance.
It was the blue fire from the bowl she had lit. The urge was strong, and she picked up her pace, even as time passed sloppily.
Suddenly, she was there, standing over herself, lying on the ground. Donovan hovered, checking her pulse, turning her head side to side, leaning his ear down next to her chest—though what specifically he was listening for, she didn't know. Maybe breathing.
He seemed worried, but not frantic.
Good.
The tug in her gut became overwhelming.
The flames in the blue bowl flared, catching Donovan's attention. He turned and stared at the change. He should have seen her here in the field but, somehow, he didn't.
Eleri wondered why the flames continued to burn when she was no longer stoking them. She watched as individual spikes of fire reached out and pulled her closer and closer with an urge she couldn't fight.
Her feet remained on the towel she’d laid out. The makeshift stage for the spell from her great-great-grandmother's book was still set, even though she had apparently passed out.
Suddenly, everything around her warped, the tug in her belly taking over. The decision was no longer her own.
In a moment that felt almost as if she’d fallen asleep and jerked her head back awake, she opened her eyes. The air rushed into her lungs. When she jerked, she felt the ground materialize behind her, almost as if she’d fallen into her own body. Her eyes flew open.
“Eleri!” Donovan turned toward her, his eyes pulled from the now-dancing flames.
She smiled.
“Oh, thank God. You're back.”
71
“I'm fine,” Christina announced, angrily waving Noah away as she stood up.
“No, Christina, you're not. You were out cold for about three minutes.”
She nodded, understanding what he meant. For what he’d seen, he was right—but he hadn't seen everything.
Feeling steady on her feet now, she searched the field, trying to parse the melee still going on around them. Something about the way she had passed out and come to had left her laser-focused.
A short distance away, she saw GJ standing with her feet planted apart, her gun pulled, and aimed at the man on the ground.
Christina's heart broke for the youngest agent. Even as she acknowledged that GJ was doing what must be done, she saw Walter flying toward her partner, her feet eating distance, her own weapon pulled. She aimed a gun she’d probably stolen from one of his soldiers and pelted bullets into the man on the ground, an assault he would not survive.
Walter hadn't changed the outcome, but Christina realized Walter had made it possible to claim her own bullets had killed Murray Marks, hopefully taking the burden from her partner, the old scientist’s granddaughter.
Christina spun around at a soft noise behind her and leveled her own weapon at a soldier who thought he could take her back. The man fell quickly with the shot, though Christina wasn't certain he was dead.
The training to aim for center mass was strong, and she might have just popped him backward with a bullet to his Kevlar. But she’d take the win.
“Eleri?” she asked into the air, even though she had a pretty darn good idea now what had happened. Eleri’s absence confirmed what Christina had figured out.
The number of soldiers was lower now, much lower. Many were on the ground. GJ and Walter, having completed one of the major tasks of this mission, looked until they spotted Christina.
With one finger in the air, she made a circular motion, indicating they were to wrap up and get out. Wade was the first to her side and he placed a hand on her shoulder, as if to steady her. She brushed him off, too.
If there had been time and there hadn’t been bullets flying—both real ones and those invented by Noah—she would have rolled her eyes.
“I’m fine,” she protested again as the three of them dropped to the ground. Looking to the blond man on her left, she asked, “You got this?”
He nodded easily. He almost seemed surprised that he did, in fact, have this.
She signaled next to Walter and GJ, who exited the area from a different direction.
As they all cleared the space taken up by the soldiers, Noah sent another round of fake bullets flying. The soldiers who were left behind wisely scattered.
It took a few minutes for the agents to reconvene as a group.
A reasonable distance from the scene and the dead bodies, Christina’s group huddled together at the base of a tree, hoping they were covered by the tall grasses.
All five of them were now breathing heavily as their adrenaline began to wane.
“You got hit,” Walter told her casually, pointing at her chest.
Stunned, Christina looked down to see the tear in the front of her shirt and she poked a curious finger into it. She felt the flattened piece of metal against her protective vest. It had done its job. That had once been a bullet. Did it still feel warm to the touch? Maybe it was just because she knew it should. There was no time to pry it out of the Kevlar, so she left it in place.
Despite not having felt the hit, she knew she was probably going to pay with bruises and broken ribs that she couldn't yet distinguish.
They had no time to think about tomorrow.
“Now what?” Wade asked, his head back to look up at the sky or check for soldiers in the tree above them, perhaps.
“Go back,” Noah replied, but Christina shook her head.
Despite everything, they were not yet done.
“Eat.” She gave the command even though it would be hard to do as they were breathing heavily. But the soldiers who had captured them had searched them only briefly and hadn’t stolen their food. The agents began pulling energy bars and snacks from pockets and taking forced bites.
Looking to the small group first, Christina assessed that they were okay. No serious injury. No twisted ankles, no blood soaked sleeves. So she turned to Noah.
“I passed out, you said.”
“Yes,” he replied, with a tone that indicated she should have already figured this out.
“I saw Eleri.”
“Where?” Wade now looked at her like she was nuts. But she brushed it off.
“I saw Eleri, and she said we need to get Aegis’ bones. That Aegis himself isn't real. It's all spells.”
The others nodded at that, at least.
“ Well that explains the bombs,” Wade stated, though they'd already had their musings about that.
“How do we steal the bones?” Walter jumped in, ever practical.
But Christina had heard one last phrase from Eleri, the words hanging in the air even as the woman had disappeared. Her voice lingered now. And Christina turned to GJ.
“Eleri told me that you would know.”
72
“They haven't left,” Noah told the group.
They all looked back at him as though he were crazy. Luckily, Wade caught on and picked up the thread. “He's right. Marks is dead… What about Menon?”
Walter offered a short nod to let them know that she confirmed that Marks’ assistant had also been taken out.
GJ swallowed hard, as though the news wasn’t going down easily. From what Noah had gathered, getting rid of those two targets was supposed to mark the end of an era. Instead, they were still up to their necks in the fight and not much better off than before.
GJ sucked in a deep breath through her nose and steeled her gaze. She could grieve later. Noah had to respect that.
“Well if those two are gone,” Wade continued, looking at the group for answers, just as Noah had, “then who's in charge?”
They all looked to each other, finally understanding finally what Noah had been trying to ask.
If the leader is dead, why hasn’t the group disbanded?
“Because the leader isn't dead,” Christina said with the irritation of realization.
“So who is the leader now?” Noah asked the group, figuring he was the only one who didn't know.
But everybody shrugged.
“Then how do we find the bones?”
Another round of shrugs in reply.
Well this sucks, he thought. They were out here like sitting ducks partially hidden by the foliage. They were not safe. They had only the weapons they'd stolen. No water, only a little food. And no real plan.
“Are we going back?”
He’d asked this before, but he was now wondering if maybe this was the final straw. They could regroup, get backup….
But Christina shook her head no. “First, we need to go back to the site and steal more weapons and ammo off of the bodies. We have to be prepared.”
As Noah looked at the other four faces, he saw that everyone else in the group seemed to agree. It wasn't his place to say that it was a crazy idea, or that it was equally nuts to search for missing, ancient bones in the middle of an armed insurgence. They didn't even know where the bones were! And their current course of action was only the belief that “GJ could do it.”
He decided to quell at least one of his fears, even if he was asking about a vision one of his fellow agents had had. “Why did Eleri say you could do it, GJ?”
GJ smiled before she replied. “When I first met Eleri and Donovan, they were on a case. I was on the same case, but for different reasons. We were all looking for a set of bones. They got to it first. But I stole the skeleton from them.”
Noah felt his gaze narrow. “So Eleri thinks you can steal bones from a well-oiled machine of heavily armed soldiers, because you’ve stolen them from NightShade agents in the past?”
“No,” GJ said, still smiling. “She probably believes I can steal the bones, because after she and Donovan got them back from me, they put them into evidence. Then I stole them from an FBI facility.”
Holy shit. Noah couldn't imagine stealing something from a secured Bureau evidence lockup. Hell, it was hard enough checking out his own evidence when he was the arresting agent. Maybe Eleri was right. Maybe GJ could pull this off.
“Is everybody fed?” Christina asked.
As he nodded in answer, Noah noticed that his heart had slowed from a gallop to a trot. Though he didn’t like any of this, he was ready to go.
“Come along.” Christina stood slowly, checking the area around her. When she deemed it clear, she motioned everyone else to their feet. Still, they all stayed low as they made their way back toward the soldiers who had died or fallen in their small battle.
None of the invaders had arrived to clean up or check on the wounded yet. Despite all the noise they’d created, the scene was empty. Only a few of the fallen moaned where they lay. A path here or there showed evidence that someone well-damaged had limped or been dragged away. But everything else—everyone else—had been left where they fell.
Someone must have been close enough to hear the bullets and the screams. How could they have missed that? Or did they just not care that their own soldiers had fallen?
In fact, Noah looked around and said, “I haven't even heard anyone come to check on this—but we can't be so far from other groups that they didn’t hear the massacre…”
Christina held one finger up for him to be quiet. Then she motioned as she pulled the comm system off one of the soldiers.
Ew, he thought, but he followed suit, wiping down the earpiece and dialing the system to a frequency that Christina had chosen before he spoke again. “No one has been here. Someone had to have been close enough to know what happened…”
His implied question was overshadowed by his fellow agents pulling guns and clips from the bodies. He did the same, checking the number of rounds in each magazine, before setting the safety and sliding the gun into a pocket on his pants or into his emptied ankle holster. He took both the holster and its knife from one of the dead and strapped it to his own thigh. This monster blade might come in useful. He ignored the fact that he was raiding a body—one he might have killed himself.
He tried again. “You’d think with all the noise, someone would have heard, and come to check on their own people.” Noah waved a hand at the at the destruction as if to say, Clearly, this should have been checked on.
Wade shrugged again and Noah began to very much dislike getting shrugged at as an answer. He thought he'd seen everything in the Caribbean. It turned out, all he'd done was peek behind the curtain. Still, there was something exciting about this work—something about being asked to do what he could do, rather than being punished for it—that made him want to stay.
Despite the shrugs, he realized he trusted these four agents. So he gathered everything he could fit into his pockets, including a still-sealed water bottle he found as they were finishing up.
Wade placed a finger to his lips then quickly motioned the others to get down.
Noah followed suit, having no idea what was going on—although at least this time, it looked like someone did.
Wade next motioned to his ear, and then made a second motion about walking.
Were they supposed to walk? But then he heard it: the cadence of footsteps. By the sound, a large company was marching right toward their group. In fact, a voice called out.
“This looks like it, and it doesn't look good.”
Christina waved to get her agents’ attention and motion them to stay low. She whispered into the comms, “Stay still. I've got you.”
73
For a few heart-pounding moments, Christina watched as the soldiers made their way around them.
She breathed carefully in through her nose and out through her mouth, feeding constantly into the mental push required to hold the illusion. There were so many soldiers to push and five people to remove from their vision.
She kept her focus as pure as she could and tried to let the others observe what was happening. None of the soldiers seemed to notice that there were five spots they just didn’t step in.
If they walked into one of the spots where her agents crouched, they’d feel that they hit someone, so the trick was to make them not notice that they avoided those places.
She just wished she’d had enough warning to get her team close together, because at any given time, there were several soldiers standing between her and each of her fellow agents. Christina didn't like it.
There was nothing she could do to change their positions now, so she held the illusion until well after the soldiers’ footsteps had receded into the distance.
Once she motioned that it was safe to get up, she waited while everybody else slowly began to look around.
Eleri had gotten hunches. She knew things. There were other agents in NightShade who could sense things before they happened. Christina had worked with Dana so long that she took those visions as just a matter of course. But she’d been privy to very few since Dana had died, and no one here had that ability or even anything close. It left Christina feeling horribly exposed.
Walter turned to the group, looking confident, and said, “Follow them. That's where the bones are. That's where the leader is.”
The team began walking slowly along, staying low and quiet. The bent-over posture seemed to be getting to all of them and made it difficult to keep up with the soldiers.
When Noah stopped them, Christina's irritation flared. They were getting even further behind. But his eyes zeroed in on hers. “Can you make us blend in? What if we look like them? Then we can walk straight into the compound with them.”
He said it so calmly, but holy shit. Why hadn't she thought of that?
Christina rapidly nodded and pushed the mental image of the five agents outfitted as Marks’ soldiers outward to anyone within sight. They all stood up, looking at each other. It took a moment before it occurred to her that, though she was working to make everyone else see them, she hadn’t made them see them. They had to know what people saw when they looked. So she took another deep breath, nodded, and held up one finger.
For the first time, she pushed her friends.
It felt awful—a cranking sensation twisting at her emotions and sitting like a rock in the bottom of her chest. Even though she knew it was the right thing to do, she was still breaking an oath she’d made to herself. And she’d broken it so easily.
She didn’t even tell them she was doing this for the first time in years. Christina had worked so hard to avoid exactly this. But here she was.
She opened her eyes to see that Noah was perhaps the most surprised, even though it was his own idea. He looked between the other agents, assessing them each as soldiers.
Though Christina had left their faces intact, she'd outfitted them to look exactly like Marks’ people. To a certain extent, though Walter tried to hide it, they all examined their new looks in awe. They ran their fingers down the arm of their clothing, or along the seam of the slick, black camo pants, probably to see if it felt the same as it looked. Their actual Kevlar was FBI issued, but now it looked like a basic, black layer version that could be purchased in any military-style outfitter. They had knee pads—the same as she'd seen some of the upper- level soldiers wearing.
Noah reached around his back, feeling for the rifle she'd visually draped there. His hand knocked it a little bit, but she shook her head at him. If he pulled it and fired the weapon, he’d give her too much work to do to maintain the illusion. The less she had to alter, the better.
He nodded, seeming to understand.
Then Walter got them back in the groove. With two fingers, she motioned to all of them to move forward. This time, they stood up straight and walked quickly, as though they were just catching up with their unit.
Christina’s thighs thanked her for the newer, straighter position, and she wondered if all the younger agents had handled this any better than she had. She was in very good shape, but she was beginning to wonder if it was good enough.
Luckily, the path ahead to catch up with the other soldiers was clear. Walter appeared to have been correct about everything leading to the center, for only a little while later, yet another unit joined up.
