Ready For All (The Warrior Book 9), page 2
Then Idina noticed something very, very wrong-looking about the shape of Sergeant Briggs’ head.
It was growing narrower, inch by inch and bit by bit. So was the rest of him—his shoulders and back, his hips, arms, and legs. Every part of the man’s body was shrinking, growing thinner and thinner until it was no wider than the seam between the closed doors. The golden-brown light of his magic flashed again, definitely from inside this time instead of outside. Then it winked out and left the rest of Bravo outside in the dark.
Sergeant Briggs had left every inch of his clothing in a crumpled pile at the base of the double doors.
What the fuck was that?
Idina leaned forward for a better look at her team leader’s clothes as if that would change anything about what she’d seen.
Wilson threw his arms up and shook his head. Edgars’ body shook in silent laughter. Trigger turned and scanned the expanse of the back yard behind them—maybe to keep a visual on any potential threat they hadn’t yet detected, possibly to avoid seeing an ass-naked Sergeant Briggs once they were all on the same side of those double doors again.
Blinking at the millimeter-width of the seam between the doors, Idina fought back a laugh and readjusted her grip on the Sleeper. It was much lighter than the other Army standard rifles she’d trained with, but the Hellion rifle was still a solid weight in her hands. Feeling it there was an effective physical reminder that she hadn’t been sucked out of reality and into some kind of crazy hallucination.
He can restructure his own body. Yeah, no shit.
A very soft series of beeps came from the other side of the doors, then one of the handles slowly turned. Briggs didn’t immediately reveal himself on the other side. Still, he’d disarmed the security system, and that was what they’d needed.
“Go give him his shit,” Grossman said in all their minds.
Chandler looked stunned when he slowly turned to stare at the telepathic operator. “How ‘bout you fucking do it?”
“So he can send us all unsolicited mental snapshots of the sergeant?” Trigger added, although she still hadn’t turned from facing the back yard. “No way in hell. Get your ass in there, Chandler.”
The rest of the team was fairly successful at holding back their laughter while breaking into a civilian’s home to engage a supernatural monster they knew nothing about. Chandler finally had to give in and snatched up the pile of Briggs’ discarded clothes. Then he ducked through the slightly ajar door with an angry scowl and his arms full of their sergeant’s gear.
For fun, Grossman amplified the thoughts of their giant, inhumanly strong operator and their team leader who’d squeezed himself through a set of closed doors.
“Jesus Christ. This should’ve been Plan C.”
“Chill the fuck out, Chandler. Nothing you haven’t seen before. Unless you’re jealous…”
The rest of the team held back their snickers and any other mental chatter they could share as a unit while Briggs slipped into his clothes. As soon as he had, Chandler opened the door a little wider to allow the other operators to slip inside. They only had to wait another fifteen seconds for Briggs to strap on his holsters, body armor, and helmet. Then the sergeant turned toward Idina and signaled with two fingers toward the entirety of the Thwinton mansion.
“You’re up, Moorfield.”
Nodding, she stepped away from the rest of her team toward the stairs leading up from the main living room of the mansion’s basement. Then she stopped and looked up to study the ceiling.
Two months ago, before she and Richard had destroyed the Olc—with the help of Bravo—Idina wouldn’t have been able to say with any real certainty whether or not she could control every different facet of her magic. There were a lot. Still, two months had been long enough for her to accept her promotion to corporal and fully qualify with field experience as a U.S. Army paratrooper. It sure as hell had been long enough to get over a few little “lack of control” hurdles.
It made her optimistic about this mission being her first with Hellion’s Bravo Team—or at least the first that Hellion Squadron Command had sanctioned.
All she had to do now was focus on the layers of building materials and levels of space between them. Her magic would search for and pull up the glowing green outlines for her.
The western third of the mansion was empty on both floors above them. So was the center of the house, all the main living spaces, the dining room, and the kitchen. The main floor was empty on the east side as well. When she squinted and pushed her magic to search a little farther, it pulled up a flicker of green light on the southeastern corner of the second story.
It was only a faint glimmer of a man’s silhouette outlined in glowing green, like every other time Idina had been able to see through walls and solid obstacles to get a visual of her targets. Only this time, something didn’t look quite right.
The green flicker around the human-shaped silhouette wasn’t all green. Not in the way she’d come to recognize it from her magic. It had a muddy brown tint like it was tainted or stained somehow.
She didn’t have to formulate a coherent thought about how wrong it felt because Grossman picked up on everything she saw and instantly relayed it to the rest of the team.
“Not your usual X-ray vision, huh, Moorfield?” Briggs asked.
That ripped her out of her thoughtless staring, and she shook her head as the green lights faded from her vision.
“Then that’s our guy. Let’s move.”
The sergeant signaled for them to move out—more out of operational habit than because they needed it to communicate. Together, Bravo followed their team leader up the stairs and through Charles Thwinton’s home.
Idina didn’t immediately know why it felt so wrong until she realized what Sergeant Briggs had assumed—that “not her usual X-ray vision” meant she’d seen the monster up there on the second floor and not an actual human. That wasn’t the case.
“Grossman, you still got this thing turned on?” She had to think it at the back of the telepathic operator’s head, but he raised his hand over his shoulder and gave her a thumbs-up without turning as they climbed the stairs. So she went with her gut and shared her thoughts while the entire team reached the top landing of the staircase and spread out through the mansion’s main level, weapons ready.
“Sergeant, I don’t think that’s our target. Not completely.”
“Dammit, Moorfield. Are you picking right now to tell me this shit?”
If anyone else had been watching Bravo Team move through the house, they wouldn’t have had the slightest clue that the magical operators were conversing in complete silence. The Hellion operators moved swiftly and efficiently, clearing every doorway, room, closet, and hall before moving on toward the southeast corner of the mansion.
That didn’t mean Idina felt any better about what they were about to walk into.
“I didn’t put it together until right now, Sergeant. It’s not only the target mob up there.”
“What the fuck else could it be? Unless you’re telling me your fun party trick stopped working the way it’s supposed to.”
“No, it works.” Idina paused beside Bam to clear another open doorway. It led into a greenhouse at the back of the main floor. “I haven’t seen this before. The mob’s up there. With a civilian.”
Briggs stopped at the base of the staircase to the second story and crisply signaled for the rest of the team to do the same. Then he turned to look at Idina and tilted his head. For a moment, he looked like he might have forgotten about the mission and would start screaming out loud at her right there. However, he was better trained than that and had become Bravo’s team leader for a reason.
“What the fuck does that mean, Corporal?”
She wanted to kick herself for not recognizing the unforeseen problem immediately. At least she’d figured it out before they all stormed up to the top floor of this ridiculously large single-family home and started spraying magical bullets at the wrong target.
“I think the mob’s…inside him.”
CHAPTER THREE
Briggs stared at Idina in the semi-darkness. Now that the team’s vision had adjusted, the soft light spilling from the single room down the hall was enough to light up the sergeant’s incredulous expression. Bravo’s other operators exchanged wary glances because they were all still in on Grossman’s team-wide telepathic comms.
Then their team leader drew a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “What you said makes no fucking sense. How sure are you?”
“I have no idea how it happened or what we’re up against right now, but if you’re asking how sure I am that it’s a civilian up there—”
“Give me a fucking percentage, Moorfield.”
“One hundred percent, Sergeant.”
“Fuck.” Despite the new information and Hellion’s complete lack of protocol for engaging with a mob that was inside a human, Briggs didn’t miss a beat. He signaled for the team to keep moving up the stairs as he took off in the lead. The others had no choice but to follow him because this was still their mission, and they still had a mob to go after. “If the poor bastard has a mob inside him, we do what we can to get it out. If we can’t do that, we complete this mission anyway.”
A hot flush of anger and indignation washed through Idina from head to toe when her team leader’s words filtered into her mind. She waited for the rest of the team to head up the stairs ahead of her before she forced herself to move one step at a time.
We’re supposed to be taking down these mobs to save civilians, not the other way around.
When most of Bravo had made it to the second-story landing, Grossman hung back for a few seconds for a quick, questioning look at Idina. Whatever he did to make it work, when she heard his voice in her head, she knew he’d stopped broadcasting to the team so they could have a private conversation.
“You good?”
Gritting her teeth, Idina nodded and moved swiftly up the last two steps with Grossman at her side.
Up ahead, Briggs slowed at the first doorway off the stairs. “Moorfield. I need confirmation.”
She gazed at the closed door and focused on pulling up her magic to see the figure she knew she’d see through the wood and the plaster walls. The glowing green outline of a man’s figure rimmed in flickering muddy brown that she’d previously seen pacing back and forth wasn’t there.
“Do we have confirmation or not?”
“Negative, Sergeant.” Idina turned to scan all the other doors lining this particular hallway, but her green lights wouldn’t pull up anything anymore. “He must have changed his location while we were moving—”
“Well, where the hell is he now?”
With her heart pounding in her chest, Idina pushed herself as hard as she could to pull up her green lights and a final visual of the mob and the civilian. There was nothing.
“I don’t know, Sergeant. I lost him.”
“It fucking works, huh?” Scowling, Briggs split the team into pairs, signaling for each of them to head in a different direction on the second story and clear every single room.
Idina paired up with Edgars, and as each two-person unit took off in the direction Briggs ordered, the knot in her gut grew tighter and tighter.
We have no idea what kind of mob we’re up against right now. I lost visual on it and the civilian, and how the hell are we supposed to get that thing out of him? First real mission’s a nightmare, huh? That’s a fucking understatement.
Edgars moved in complete silence three paces ahead of her as they turned right off the top of the stairs and headed down a much narrower branching hallway toward the north-facing front of the mansion. When he reached the first closed door, his magic enabled him to silence even the act of turning the doorknob and opening the door. The second he did, Idina was in the doorway, sweeping the space beyond with the Sleeper’s barrel.
As soon as she stepped aside, Edgars moved down the hall again toward the next door.
“Hey, doesn’t this guy have a family?” Trigger asked. “Wife and kids or something?”
“One of each,” Grossman replied.
Because she couldn’t hear a single sound from her temporary partner, even Idina’s careful footsteps sounded incredibly loud to her ears. Then Edgars stopped at the next door and reached out for the doorknob.
“So where are they?”
“Moorfield didn’t confirm any other bodies on site,” Briggs added. “Wherever they are, the wife and kid aren’t our fucking problem.”
Under the incredibly faint glow of Edgar’s magic, the doorknob turned soundlessly, followed by complete silence as he shoved it open.
Idina stepped in to sweep the open doorway with her weapon, fully intending to move on again down the hallway with Edgars once they’d marked the room as cleared.
There was no way she could have predicted what they’d find in there because her magic didn’t work like that.
The first thing she saw was the thick, still-wet splatters of blood on the wooden floor in front of her feet. Some of it had smeared in a streaking arc, caught by the bottom of the door when it swung open.
For a moment, she couldn’t stop staring at the blood splatter on the hardwood. There was so much of it. Then her gaze automatically trailed the rest of the evidence across the room to the source, and she stopped breathing.
Even in the darkness, there was no mistaking that this was a little girl’s bedroom. And there were two bodies on the floor.
Idina froze for long enough to make Edgars suspicious. He stepped up beside her with his weapon ready, and she heard him suck in a sharp, barely audible breath.
“Fucking shit.”
“Share with the class, Edgars,” Briggs prompted.
“We found the wife and kid, Sergeant. They’re still not our problem, but now we know why Moorfield didn’t have a visual before.”
“Fuck. Casualties already?”
“Looks like before we got here.”
“Moorfield, I want another body count on this floor now!”
She heard the entire conversation in her mind, which was impossible to tune out no matter how badly she wanted to. For the life of her, she couldn’t tear herself away from the gruesome sight of the bodies on the floor and all the blood streaking across the wood, frilly bedsheets, lace curtains, and a pile of stuffed animals at the foot of the bed.
She might not have ever snapped out of it if Edgars hadn’t nudged her arm with the back of his hand.
With a sharp inhale, Idina whipped her head toward him. He raised his eyebrows, then nodded at the hallway behind him, reminding her that their team leader had given her an order and they all still had a job to do.
Swallowing thickly, she backed out of the open doorway and forced herself to ignore the carnage they’d walked in on.
Body count. Focus.
She concentrated on her magic and the specific ability she’d honed so she could give Briggs exactly what he’d asked for. The first two bodies lined in different-colored light illuminated in her vision from the hallway beside the staircase—Trigger and Bam. She didn’t get a chance to look for the rest of her team or other bodies on the second story because the quick, deafening staccato of automatic weapons fire broke the silence.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Wilson shouted farther down the hall.
“I’m not!” Grossman shouted. He sounded terrified. “I’m not fucking doing it—”
More weapons fire filled the mansion.
“Jesus Christ! Are you—”
“It’s not me! I can’t stop it. I—shit!”
With their telepathic operator distracted by whatever was happening down the hall, the entire Bravo Team had lost their silent communication. They didn’t need to talk in each other’s minds to all have the same idea.
Something was wrong.
Idina and Edgars took off running down the hall, abandoning their objective of clearing every room they passed. Fortunately, all the doors were closed, but nothing else mattered at the moment when two of their team members were on the verge of fucking up the entire mission—or each other.
When the hallway opened again toward the center of the house into a wide room, Idina skirted around the corner and found Grossman training his weapon on Wilson. The short, bald, extremely muscular operator had stopped cold, both hands lifted in surrender. “You’re insane.”
“This isn’t me, man.” Grossman clenched his teeth in a grimace of concentration and effort. Both hands had closed tightly around his firearm, and his arms shook. Sweat poured down his face. “It’s something else. Fuck, I can’t—”
Idina launched a stream of green light at the center of Grossman’s weapon a split second before he could no longer keep his finger from squeezing the trigger. By the time he fired again, Idina’s magic had already done what she’d wanted it to do.
Crackling green light burst out from the center of his weapon like an electrical charge, only this one powered down the entire system and kept it from firing. Grossman’s weapon went completely dark as the click of him pulling the trigger and the lack of live rounds—even magical ones—filled the open room.
He looked down at his weapon with wide eyes, then jerked his head toward Idina and stared at her. It was the first time she’d seen him look truly scared.
“Holy fuck,” Wilson whispered.
Then the rest of their team barreled into the room from the entrances to various other hallways, all of them with their weapons raised and ready to engage the threat none of them understood or could even see.
“What the fuck just happened?” Briggs hissed.
Wilson gestured at Grossman, who still had his weapon trained on his partner and didn’t seem physically capable of lowering it. “He fucking fired on me. Moorfield had to fry his whole setup so he didn’t—”
“Sergeant, there’s something…” Grossman let out a low growl of frustration. “It’s not me!”
“Lower your fucking weapon, Grossman. Moorfield, where’s that count?”
Idina opened her mouth to tell him she still hadn’t found the civilian she’d originally seen up here on the second floor, but as soon as she did, Grossman let out a sound that was a mix between a bellowing growl and a scream.
