Ready For All (The Warrior Book 9), page 9
For a moment, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Nothing about this mission had gone the way it was supposed to, and now her team leader had turned into a completely different person. Or maybe it was a side of him she hadn’t seen yet. Swallowing thickly, Idina lifted her chin and calmly asked, “Is that what you believe personally, Sergeant, or is Command still talking through you right now?”
Grossman whipped his head toward her and stared.
Briggs’ only reaction was to pull out another stick of gum. He took forever to unwrap it and stick it in his mouth, staring Idina down the whole time until he finally replied—kind of. “If you can’t get the target to cooperate willingly, there’s a contingency. So when you head back out there tomorrow and follow Thwinton to his next therapy appointment with…”
He looked down at the printout again, and Idina didn’t bother to help him with the information she’d memorized over the last three days because she’d had nothing else to do. “Dr. Reynolds, the two of you won’t be heading out alone.”
The living room fell silent, then Idina put the last few pieces of information together. “That’s why they’re getting the van. That’s your contingency.”
“It’s not mine, Moorfield. It’s Bravo’s.”
Idina couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
We don’t take civilians. We don’t do anything with civilians but keep them out of danger. Now we’re being ordered to do this? I knew Richard had already lost his mind, but this is beyond what I expected.
“Sergeant, this isn’t what we do—”
“We do what we’re told. All of us. Which is why I strongly recommend getting him to cooperate.”
Her team leader’s tightly pressed lips and wide eyes conveyed an unspoken corollary to his last sentence. Idina wasn’t sure she understood it, though. “Any other questions?”
Neither Idina nor Grossman had anything to say, which was apparently all that Briggs wanted. He flipped the printed papers over again to place them facedown on the table, then nodded. “None of us want to be here any longer than we have to. Eat some real food and sleep in a real bed. We’ll keep going in the morning.”
Grossman stood stiffly from his chair with his fists clenched and his jaw muscles working. He didn’t so much as acknowledge the sergeant before taking off for the kitchen.
He’s being used for what he can do and doesn’t want his magic working a certain way for someone else’s purpose. Yeah, I know exactly how that feels.
Idina had never had to use her abilities to pry into someone’s mind—willingly, unwillingly, civilian, or otherwise. That was the other problem here. It wasn’t only about Hellion changing their tactics against a mob that none of them fully understood.
It was about changing how the squadron’s operators felt about themselves afterward.
She stood slowly from the table, waiting for Briggs to say anything else that might help her feel like this wasn’t the worst idea Command could come up with for them. All he gave her was a glance and half a nod before dropping his gaze to the papers he wasn’t reading.
Of course, he doesn’t want to dismiss me officially. He doesn’t like this either. And there’s nothing we can do.
When she turned stiffly to walk across the Mini Brain and the kitchen on her way to the stairs, though, Idina didn’t believe that was the whole truth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sergeant Briggs had briefed the rest of Bravo Team on the new objective with their civilian target. Nobody else seemed particularly enthused about the idea either, even though nobody would come right out and say it, including Idina.
They all knew it was only a matter of time before their primary target showed itself again. If they couldn’t glean every piece of information possible from the mind of the one person in the world so far who’d had their new human-possessing mob inside him for longer than thirty seconds, they’d still have to face that monster completely unprepared. Again.
They needed Thwinton to cooperate, even if involving him was the last thing anybody on Bravo Team wanted.
This time, when Idina and Grossman got into the Volvo and followed Charles Thwinton around after he spent the first half of his day doing nothing at home, it was with the knowledge of exactly where and when they’d step into his life one more time. And they were the ones who needed his help.
At thirteen fifty-two, Idina looked at the clock on the dashboard for what must have been the hundredth time in the last hour. Then she let out a heavy sigh and dropped her head back against the headrest of the driver’s seat. “This isn’t anywhere close to what I thought I’d be doing on my first field mission.”
Grossman snorted. “Bored already, huh?”
“You know what I mean.”
“He’s still got another eight minutes in there with his shrink, Moorfield. That’s eight more minutes for you to chill.”
She looked at him with a deadpan expression, then shook her head. “Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we went in there and talked to Dr. Reynolds instead?”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. Thwinton’s already been in there talking to the guy, and I seriously doubt he hasn’t mentioned losing his family and his entire life in one night.”
“So that’s what you wanna do, huh? You wanna go off-script.”
Idina drew a deep breath and returned her attention to the front door of the therapist’s private office. “What I want is to finish this mission without making the survivor’s life any more of a living hell than it already is.”
He let out a heavy sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose before shifting in the passenger seat to face her more head-on. “Listen. This is part of the job. Not what we usually do or how we usually do it, but we’re still the only ones out there who can. Because the bottom line is we’re trying to avoid even more casualties, right?”
“Grossman, I know that.”
“Good.” He faced forward and set his jaw before gesturing at the therapist’s building with a quick, irritated wave. “What he’s going through is shit. But I doubt this guy’s gonna tell his fucking shrink that a monster possessed him, hypnotized his wife into a murder-suicide, and left a bunch of information in his head before it bounced. Which is what we’d have to find in Dr. Reynolds’s office to make that more worth our time than what we’re about to do.”
Idina closed her eyes and readjusted her two-handed grip on the steering wheel. She’d been holding onto it for at least twenty minutes to avoid letting her frustration lead to the kind of larger magical outburst Bravo couldn’t afford to deal with right now. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s a good point. So yeah. Doesn’t mean I like this.”
With a bitter smile, Grossman scoffed. “Doesn’t mean you have to. Hey. Shit. There he is.”
It would have been extremely hard to miss the haggard, morose-looking Charles Thwinton walking slowly out of the therapist’s office with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his wrinkled slacks. He didn’t look up when he stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street in the strip mall to get to the parking lot.
“Okay, here we go.” Idina watched the man intently. “He’s walking out to his car. Then he’ll get in and—wait. Shit. What is he doing?”
“Changing things up on us.”
“There’s nothing down this way but coffee and frozen yogurt.”
Grossman snickered and opened the passenger-side door. “Maybe he feels like a little pick-me-up.”
“Great. So we have to go do this out in public now.”
They both got out at the same time and lightly shut their doors.
“Nah, there’s an alley first. We can get him in there.”
Idina shot her partner for this mission a scathing look. “Snatching him up is Plan B. The legal shitstorm we don’t want to invoke.”
“Relax, Moorfield. We’re gonna talk to him first.” Grossman shrugged and looked both ways before crossing the street between the parking lot and the shops. “It’s a hell of a lot easier to get him to talk if he can’t get away.”
With a heavy sigh, Idina looked around at the mostly empty parking lot for fourteen hundred hours on a Thursday. Nobody was watching. Most likely, nobody even cared. Shopping malls still had cameras, and if they didn’t get to Thwinton before he realized what was happening, they probably wouldn’t have another chance like this.
An opportunity to make sure Thwinton walked down the alley all on his own presented itself, and she couldn’t pass it up. Her green lights lit up in her vision—the pile of rocks in the median, a large stick that had snapped off a nearby tree branch, a wayward piece of a cardboard box that had probably been stuck on top of a full dumpster and blown off down the sidewalk with nothing to hold it in place.
After one more glance around, she nudged Grossman’s arm and muttered, “Hold on a sec.”
“Not a good time to have second thoughts—”
“Just face me and look super interested in whatever the fuck we’re talking about right now.”
With a crooked smile of surprise and curiosity, Grossman did exactly that. “What are we talking about right now, Moorfield?”
“Getting him alone without freaking him out to the point of no return. Probably.”
“What are you—”
“Shh.” She plastered an incredibly fake grin on her face and nodded enthusiastically. Then she glanced again at Thwinton walking their way without paying attention to where he was going. Her green lights flashed in her vision, all the points lining up perfectly in bright, glowing green trajectory lines. Idina flicked her finger toward the pile of rocks in the median that filled the space around the young trees growing there.
A burst of green light flew from her fingertip and struck one of the topmost rocks at the perfect angle. It launched the rock straight out of the median and sent it soaring over the road toward the sidewalk. The stone struck the thick tree branch that had broken off one of the trees and been swept up by the wind into the perfect position.
It rolled right under the slightly bent piece of cardboard from a broken-down box that hadn’t stayed where it was supposed to on top of a dumpster.
It all happened in the blink of an eye.
Right before Charles Thwinton stepped onto the thick stick covered by a piece of cardboard because he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings.
The cardboard rolled over the stick, Charles’ shoe rolled with it, and Idina was already tugging Grossman across the rest of the street and onto the sidewalk.
Their target cried out in surprise—and probably a little pain at so awkwardly rolling his ankle—and flailed his arms. The mouth of the alley happened to be right there where he’d made a single wrong step, and instead of catching himself on the wall of the closest strip mall shop, he stumbled into the alley and eventually struck out to steady himself against the wall.
“That was fucking awesome,” Grossman muttered.
Idina didn’t take her eyes off the mouth of the alley. “Yeah, we’ll see…”
“Oh come on,” Thwinton muttered, still completely unaware of the operators coming up behind him. Then he sucked in a sharp, hissing breath through his teeth as he looked down at his ankle to check the damage. He hadn’t put his full weight down on it again, which helped to keep him distracted as Idina and Grossman walked quickly into the alley behind him.
“Mr. Thwinton,” Idina said calmly.
Their target froze.
“There’s nothing to worry about here, Mr. Thwinton,” she continued. “We only need to have a little talk.”
The man spun wide-eyed, forgetting his sensitive ankle. He cried out again when his foot couldn’t hold him up and he stumbled sideways instead. Thwinton caught himself against the alley wall one more time with a quick slap and stared at his unexpected visitors.
Grossman looked him up and down and tilted his head. “What happened to your foot?”
Idina wanted so badly to punch him for asking it. Don’t jinx it now. If he thinks we have it out for him, he’ll run.
“What?” The man looked confused as he blustered and tried to answer their question. “I’m fine. Nothing happened. I’m just—I’m fine.” Thwinton narrowed his eyes at them and took a step back on his good foot. “Who are you?”
“People who can help.” Idina gestured non-threateningly. “We want to help. For that to happen, we need a little help from you too.”
“From me?” He looked back and forth between them with wide eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We need to talk to you about your family,” Grossman added gently. “And what happened that night.”
When the blankness of terror replaced the surprise and confusion on Thwinton’s face, Idina knew this wouldn’t turn out the way they wanted.
The man took another step back and shook his head. “No. I already spoke to the police. The detectives said it—” He swallowed thickly, and his lips started trembling when he pressed them together. “My family’s gone. I’m not talking about them with you. Or that night. I’m… I can’t.”
Idina nodded slowly. “We understand this is hard for you—”
“Hard for me.” Thwinton scoffed. “Hard? You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not having this conversation with a child and some…giant.” He looked Grossman up and down, then nodded at the sidewalk outside the alley. “I have to be somewhere right now, so I’m leaving.”
The man tried to skirt around them, but Grossman stepped in front of him and held up a hand for Thwinton to stop. “Not right now, you don’t.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know you want to put all this behind you, Charles,” Idina added. “Really. So do we. None of us can do that if you don’t tell us what we need to know.”
“Ask the police!”
“The police can’t answer our questions about what you saw that night. We’ve seen the reports. We know exactly what isn’t on there, and we understand why you haven’t told anyone about it.”
“What?” Thwinton’s gaze flickered back and forth between them.
“Your wife was a victim too. It wasn’t her, Charles. You know that. It was—”
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped and tried to brush past them again.
Grossman blocked the man one more time and nodded. “Yeah, you do.”
“You saw something else that night.” Idina held the man’s terrified gaze and slowly lifted both hands in front of her, hoping that would help their target feel a little less cornered even though they were blocking him in an alley. “Something you probably think you can’t explain to anyone because it sounds crazy.
"We deal with this kind of thing every day, Charles. We can help you find peace with this. And just as importantly, you can help us stop the creature that did this to you and your family from doing the same thing to anyone else.”
It wasn’t exactly the most subtle way to tell him they knew what had happened, more or less, but subtlety hadn’t been working.
At Idina’s mention of the monster, all the color drained from Charles Thwinton’s face. He staggered backward down the alley, limping on his sore ankle and looking desperately back and forth between the Hellion operators telling him in person what he’d been trying to convince himself had never happened. “Get away from me.”
“Charles, we’re here to help you—”
“No!” His voice shook as he shoved his hand into the pocket of his light jacket, still stumbling backward. He fumbled desperately with the fabric, then finally jerked out a pistol and swung it toward Idina and Grossman. The weapon trembled violently in his hand, but even when he instantly brought his other hand up to stabilize his grip, both arms shook. The pistol’s barrel wobbled wildly.
Even if he gets off a shot, he’ll never hit anything like that.
Grossman slowly shook his head. “That’s not how you want things to go, man.”
“I said get away from me!”
A soft pinch wormed its way behind Idina’s eyes a split second before she heard Grossman’s voice in her mind. So did the rest of Bravo.
“Target pulled a weapon. He’s not coming willingly.”
Idina forced herself not to grimace and took a calm step forward, her hands still raised in front of her. “Charles, please. There’s an easier way to do this. If you come with us—”
“No! You leave me alone!”
“Charles, listen to me—”
“Take one more step, and I’ll shoot! I mean it!”
Footsteps echoed toward the alley seconds before Chandler’s voice reached them. “I don’t think this guy’s ever fired a weapon in his life.” Then the massive operator stepped into the alley and nodded at Thwinton. “You should put that thing away before you hurt yourself.”
Thwinton’s eyes grew incredibly wide, and the pistol trembled even more violently in his hands. “Wh-wh-what is this?”
“We can explain everything,” Idina replied with another step forward. “If you put down the gun and come with—”
Charles Thwinton was so terrified right now that he was willing to use the loaded pistol he’d been carrying since the attack on his family. It wouldn’t have done a thing to the monster that had destroyed his life, but he didn’t know it. He also didn’t know that a regular firearm like the one in his hands wouldn’t have done a thing to the Hellion operators trying to reason with him.
If he had, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference.
He clenched his eyes shut, spittle flying from his mouth as he cried out in terror, and pulled the trigger.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Too fast for anyone to see, Trigger darted past her team members down the alley and knocked aside Thwinton’s weak, two-handed grip on his pistol. When the shot fired with a loud echo in the enclosed space, the round cracked against the asphalt at the base of the alley wall and ricocheted before tearing off a chunk of brick behind the man.
