Oblivious, page 1
Contents
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Author's Note
Thanks for Reading
Acknowledgements
Other Works by Krista Walsh
About the Author
OBLIVIOUS
Ghostmaker Book 2
By
Krista Walsh
All Rights Reserved
This edition published in 2022 by Raven’s Quill Press
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this work are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity is purely coincidental.
Cover: John Wenzel/Chris Reddie
Model: Thomas James
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher. The rights of the authors of this work has been asserted by him/ her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
To the City of Ottawa
If it weren't for your sinkholes, your storms, your public transportation, your construction, your walking paths, your geese, and your increasing number of high-rises, I might never have been inspired to write this series.
Chapter 1
Jet
I eased my foot off the gas pedal before I blew too far over the speed limit. We needed to get to my apartment building, pack, and get out as quickly as possible, and being pulled over for speeding would not only slow us down but also attract attention from people we didn’t want asking questions. If the blood on my hands didn’t get us hauled in for questioning, the injured man in my passenger seat would, and there went our secrecy. We had to keep our heads down, avoid notice. Anything to buy us a bit of extra time to disappear.
But as soon as the engine slowed, I caught myself paying more attention to the rear-view mirror than the road ahead, every moment expecting a black SUV to pull up behind us.
They won’t be that quick. They can’t have tracked us down yet.
I figured we had about half an hour before the security officers pulled my name from the records. Thirty minutes before it became known that Captain Bridget Dawson had used her registered security key to free an American spy from custody. Eighteen-hundred seconds until Supernatural, Magical and Occult Affairs Canada declared me a rogue agent.
Possibly a murderer.
Maybe even a traitor.
Thirty minutes was a small window, but I’d never been more motivated to perform a miracle.
My stomach twisted with uncontrolled nerves, and bile burned the back of my throat at the reek of blood trapped in my nose—not all of it from the man sitting beside me.
My gaze strayed to the passenger seat, to the half-naked Gideon Leigh bleeding on the upholstery of my Mustang. Bruises and dark stubble shadowed his pale face, his expression pinched with pain. Every few seconds, part of his body dissolved into mist, his cellular makeup pulling apart only to come back together in slightly better condition than before.
He’d been working on healing himself ever since I’d removed the metal collar blocking his supernatural ability. His dislocated shoulder now sat properly in its socket, and the thousand cuts he’d received, the dozens of lashes on his mangled back, looked a few days old instead of the ravaged, weeping mess they’d been twenty minutes ago.
I didn’t know how he was still conscious.
“How are you holding up?” I asked. “You going to stay with us?”
“For a while yet,” he said through clenched teeth. His back arched and he groaned as another surge of pain passed through him. His left arm dissolved from shoulder to elbow, and when it took shape again, the gash along the back of his bicep had thinned, though fresh blood soon welled to the surface.
I returned my attention to the road and ground my teeth as I sped through a yellow light. Only three more minutes and we’d reach my apartment, but those three minutes stretched ahead of me like a decade after a week that felt like it had already lasted seven years.
Two days ago, the minister had ordered that Gideon, a foreign agent working unauthorized on Canadian soil, be taken into custody. From what Gideon had managed to tell me between grunts of discomfort and wavering consciousness, he’d spent the first day undergoing a gentle interrogation at the hands of my lieutenant, Eric Sampson, and the second trapped in the dark, naked and collared, while a man recently recruited to my task force—to my team—tortured him to the brink of insanity. All under my nose in my own goddamned detainment centre.
For fourteen years, I had been a loyal SMOAC agent, a proud member of the department that took care of Canada’s vast supernatural population. For fourteen years, I had dutifully followed orders, putting my faith in the people sworn to keep us safe, hidden, and supported. I loved my job, I loved my hand-picked team, and I loved the sense that I was serving my country in a hands-on, ass-kicking way.
Within the past week, all my pride and deepest-held beliefs had been blown apart. What should have been a routine raid to wipe out the country’s biggest supernatural crime organization had resulted in the massacre of half my team. Instead of the drug deal we’d expected to interrupt, only the drugs had waited for us—strapped to a time bomb that had detonated, releasing a roomful of ghost, the latest trend in street drugs that gave mundanes a glimpse through the perception filter at the true face of the world and gave supernaturals a boost to their abilities. A fantastic party drug. Except that the tiniest amount over the safe limit—somewhere less than three milligrams—could send your brain into overdrive and kill you within minutes.
No rushing to the hospital to deal with the overdose, just death. A horrible, bloody, painful death.
For ten out of my twenty-member squad.
So many days later, I still hadn’t wrapped my head fully around my loss.
And that had only been the start of my week. In the past twenty-four hours, I’d uncovered a possible connection between the Death’s Head Syndicate and our department, learned that six of our best informants were dead or missing, found our minister murdered in his office, and saved my best friend, Madison Prince, from a mad chemist looking to send some kind of message over the unseen wall.
Now I was on the run because, in choosing to save Gideon from the new-recruit-slash-syndicate mole who’d taken great joy in tormenting him, I’d painted a target on my back. The only thing the members of the department not involved in the conspiracy would know was that I’d helped a detained private security officer escape on the same night Minister Bastien had been killed, while the actual guilty parties would no doubt guess I’d put together at least part of the truth and have an easy time pinning the crime on me.
Everything was fine.
I could handle this.
I took the next turn too fast and nearly struck a pedestrian crossing the street against the light. She flipped me off, and I hit the gas as soon as her foot touched the sidewalk.
Two minutes away from home now. Once there, the real strain would begin as we waited for Madison, now my literal partner in crime, to call me and tell us where to meet her. She was arranging a safe house for us, somewhere we could recover and figure out how the hell to deal with this disaster, and the sooner we vanished, the better. Although we’d left the office building less than five minutes ago, I had my cellphone in my lap, checking the screen every other second to make sure I didn’t miss her.
A little more than an hour ago, she’d been strapped to a ghostbomb, staring into the eyes of the Ghostmaker himself, Peter Dougall, and already she’d put it behind her to focus on keeping us safe. There weren’t a dozen women in the world like her.
I just hoped she was quick about sorting out the details, because the last thing I wanted to do was feel trapped in my home watching the clock, knowing every tick of the second hand brought us closer to discovery.
Another grunt from Gideon pulled my thoughts away from the mayhem I’d found myself
I slammed my palms against the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
Shouting didn’t make me feel any better, but at least it vented some of the energy threatening to tear me apart.
My frustration wasn’t only over the state of him. The sight of anyone in his condition—inflicted in my detainment centre—would get to me. But he couldn’t be some stranger I’d rescued from SMOAC’s creeping corruption, could he? It had to be more complicated than that. Because of course.
Two years ago, I’d booted him out of my life. A week ago, he’d wheedled his way back in. When we’d first met, he and I had been all thriller novel—sex and spies—and although I’d sworn that part of our relationship was over, I’d had more than enough reason to doubt myself over the past couple days. The arrogant son of a bitch was a charming, intelligent private security officer. He was also a lying, manipulative skeezebag.
I hated him, I wanted him, I hated that I wanted him, and now I was stuck saving his life so I could figure out whether I hated or wanted him more.
Bastard.
I hung a final left and pulled around the back of my apartment building, a squeezed-in alley that hid my car from view and provided three exit points, one of which only the people who lived here knew about. It was a tight fit, but I was willing to risk a few scratches on my baby if it meant reaching a main road quickly and without anyone seeing.
Once the engine was off, I rested my hand on a healed patch of Gideon’s arm and gently shook him awake, careful not to jar him too much. I was afraid one more shock to his system would undo all his work.
His eyelids fluttered open, his chest heaved, and he bolted upright, eyes wide and nostrils flared with panic. When he turned and saw me, his shoulders relaxed, and I pretended I hadn’t noticed his terror, knowing he’d hate for me to see his weakness.
Which was bullshit, of course. Twenty-four hours stuck in the dark, cold and bleeding—I would have been concerned if he weren’t haunted by nightmares.
“We need to get moving,” I said, keeping him focused on the here and now. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
He jerked his head in a nod and groaned as he attempted to pull his stained white T-shirt over his head. His movements were slow and stiff, and I held back a wince with every stretch and tug on the wounds he hadn’t yet stitched back together. I wanted to help—not only to speed things along but also to save him some of the agony of brushing crusted cotton over his open gashes—but didn’t want to insult his pride.
A voice in the back of my head scoffed. Pride. That was why he’d wound up in SMOAC’s hands to begin with, because he’d taken too many stupid risks, confident he wouldn’t get caught.
Part of me, I was ashamed to admit, was still pissed off he’d lied to me about why he’d come to Ottawa. Not a risk assessment as he’d said but an attempt to work his own case, using my resources, without my knowledge. How long would it have been before he’d taken everything back to his firm, interrupted my operation of shutting down the ghost trade, and stolen credit for the work we’d done together? If Minister Bastien hadn’t outed him, I would probably still be in the dark, helping him propel his career forward while he ran my reputation through the mud.
If you hadn’t called him to meet you at Dougall’s place, he wouldn’t have been imprisoned and tortured, my infuriating brain reminded me, and I worked to smother my resentment. The man had suffered enough for his lies.
Gideon sagged against the seat, the effort of getting dressed apparently having exhausted him. He glanced at his wrist, and his fingers travelled over an inch-wide space of untanned skin. He tensed and reached for his jeans pockets, patting them down.
“I have it,” I said, and leaned into the backseat for his black vest and the leather bracelet he rarely took off.
“Thanks.” As soon as the bracelet was in place, he appeared more at ease, as though it weren’t so much a sentimental accessory as a talisman against further harm.
“Are you okay to walk?” I asked.
It had taken both Madison and me to get him into my car, but he looked far more alive now than he had when we’d found him on the cell floor.
“I’ll be fine.” His words were terse, and he didn’t spare me a glance as he opened his door.
I left the car unlocked to save time later and came around to the passenger side to help him if he needed it. His gaze darted from one end of the alley to the other, and he jumped when an obnoxious laugh echoed from the building behind us. It wasn’t quite four o’clock in the morning, and shadows filled with threats seemed to surround us.
I couldn’t drag my feet to coddle him. Trusting he would keep up, I strode to the back door and let us in. The elevator ride to the fourth floor was slow and awkward, but eventually we made it, and I let us into my apartment with a few extra glances over my shoulder.
“What’s the plan?” he asked as he headed to the kitchen. He turned on the water and ducked his head to drink straight from the faucet, a low moan escaping his throat as he chugged.
“A vanishing act,” I said. “Clean place to stay, clean car, and from there we decide how to move forward. We have no idea how high in the department this goes. We found Bastien dead, but was he the one working with the syndicate and they double-crossed him, or is someone else in the department behind this and they needed to get him out of the way? One of the first priorities is to get you out of sight. I doubt you’d make it over the border in your current state, but we can keep you safe until we find a way to return you to SilverGuard.”
As if it would be as easy as snapping our fingers. An entire department on our asses, a conspiracy to defraud the supernatural community, murder, torture, bombings, an injured American.
Easy as pie.
Gideon turned off the water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You work for a secret government agency, and you’re telling me you don’t have access to super jets or teleportation devices?”
A snarky reply tickled the tip of my tongue, ready to match his, but when I turned around, I saw his attempt to lighten the mood was offset by a hardness around his eyes and a tight, mirthless smirk.
“And just how would we explain that to the taxpayers?” I asked, preferring to respond to the joke instead of the anger I sensed radiating off him.
He ran his hand through his hair, the styled locks dark and thick with yet more blood. From the look in his eyes, he had something else to say, and I held my breath. I was exhausted, drained from my own mental and physical exertions over the past week, and didn’t know if I was up for whatever rage he wanted to throw my way. Not that he didn’t have every right to be furious at his situation, but other than getting him to safety and overturning every last rock to beat the shit out of the guy who’d hurt him, there wasn’t much I could do.
After a moment, he turned away, splashed some water on his face, and returned to what had to be the excruciating process of stitching himself back together, fading into mist and rematerializing without pause.
I watched in fascinated silence. Gideon’s ability had blown me away the first time I’d witnessed it back in New York. The way his limbs dissolved, clothes and all, and came back with everything in its proper place. I had full control over the air molecules around me, giving me what looked like a blend of super strength and telekinesis, but Gideon was able to break himself down to an atomic level, changing out of his solid state into little more than a cloud. He could drift through the air unseen or as an opaque fog, as he chose.
I’d asked him once how he carried his clothes and weapons with him, and he’d told me he could affect anything he understood well enough to change. The more he brought with him, the more effort it took, but he’d been practicing his skills since he was a kid.
I’d asked if he’d ever taken another person with him.
He’d said he never got close enough to anyone to know them as well as he’d need to.
At the time, I’d thought he was being coy. Then I’d learned it was the most honest he’d ever been with me. Gideon Leigh did not do partners, he did not do relationships, and he most certainly did not do intimacy.
