Temptation in Shadows (2 page)

“There’s no time.”

“Please.”

He faced her, expression hard as granite. “You a hacker?”

“Something like that,” she said, and licked her lips nervously.

He tangled a hand through his hair. “How long do you need?”

“No more than a few minutes.”

His brows furrowed together. “That quickly? How is that—”

A pained moan sounded from another room. Sean whipped around—but not before she glimpsed the murderous light in his eyes. Though she couldn’t see an intruder, she prepared to attack as well. Then the shadows painted over the hallway walls seemed to suck inward, surrounding them, keeping them hidden, and she frowned. Something similar had happened a few times before. She didn’t know how—unless her abilities were changing?

“This way,” he whispered, and hooked her finger around his belt loop so that both of his hands could remain free. “And be quiet.”

Forever they seemed to walk but she couldn’t see where they were going or even what surrounded them. Odd. Still, Gabby knew how to take care of herself but couldn’t deny she liked being guarded like this.

Over the years she’d taken hundreds of self-defense lessons and learned to fight as dirty as possible. She’d had to. She’d grown up on the streets, a target for every pimp in need of a fresh-faced little girl and every junkie desperate enough to steal from a starving kid.

“Bill?” Sean said, and there was a mix of confusion, anger, and upset in his voice. He crouched down.

As the shadows cleared, Gabby pulled herself from her musings and gasped. A man lay on the floor, blood pooling around him.

Sean worked frantically at the man’s clothes,
revealing a gunshot wound to the stomach. “What the hell happened?” Sean demanded, pressing the heel of his hand against the hole to staunch the crimson flow.

The man—Bill—grimaced. He was average height, probably late forties, with mocha skin and dark eyes that were glazed with pain.

Intending to help, Gabby rushed to the duffel bag resting on the other side of him. If medical supplies were inside . . .
please be inside.
Her fingers shook as she unzipped it, the blood splattered across the handles smearing on her palms. This man couldn’t be their abductor—could he? Sean knew him, was concerned for him. But how else would the man have known they were here?

Damn it.
Only clothes rested inside the bag.

“Be . . . trayed,” she heard him rasp. “Came here . . . free you . . . run.” The man’s head lolled to the side. His chest ceased its shallow movements as breath escaped his cut and parted lips on a final gasp.

“Motherfucker!” Sean growled.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she faced him, and she meant it. Losing a friend was tough. Losing a friend to violence was tougher. “You can mourn him. Later.” Forget the computer. “Right now, we have to get out of here.”

The anger drained from Sean’s expression, leaving something hard and unreadable. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Bill wasn’t supposed to die.”

She opened her mouth to respond. None of this was supposed to have happened. Before she could utter a single word, however, a loud crash reverberated from around the corner.

Sean jumped to his feet. Blood coated his hands and shirt as he gazed around wildly.

“Bill’s tracks end here,” a new voice said from another room. Male, harsh. Determined. “Check every room. If you find the other two, you know what to do.”

Footsteps pounded.

Sean muttered another curse under his breath and grabbed hold of her. Shadows once again seemed to suck inward, surrounding them, as he jerked her forward, to the back door.

She couldn’t see anything but Sean and gloom. But she could hear hinges squeaking, feet pounding. Gabby bit her lip to keep her cry of surprise and fear inside, when Sean suddenly yanked her against his chest and stopped. More footsteps pounded, blending with the rasp of breath. From multiple people. Still, she couldn’t see them. What the hell was going on?

Without a word, Sean started forward again. He kept a tight hold on her hand, and she was glad. She was still reeling. That had to be it. She’d just watched a man die, and now her mind wouldn’t let her see the men hunting her.

Outside, she thought a few seconds later. She had to be outside now. Cool, crisp air caressed her. Why couldn’t she at least see sunlight? Moonlight? Something? And how was Sean navigating through this?

Gabby managed to maintain his quick pace for several miles, rocks and twigs cutting into her shoes. But by then she was sweating, fighting for every burning breath, trembling. “I . . . can’t . . .”

“Just a little further.” Sean didn’t even seem winded, the bastard. “You can do it.”

An eternity later, he stopped and the shadows disappeared completely, revealing amber moonlight, a forest bursting with thick, lush trees and a—a car? Sure enough, he removed a leafy canopy from the frame of a two-door sedan.

“How did you know—”

“Just get in,” he commanded.

She obeyed as if her feet were on fire. Now wasn’t the time to chat. No one had followed them—to her knowledge—but it was better to be safe than sorry. Except when she and Sean were inside the car, he pulled a key from his pocket and used it. And it worked, the engine roaring to life. A thousand questions seemed to rush through her mind. Only one continued to echo, though.
What. The. Hell?

As he maneuvered out of the forest and onto a gravel road, she decided chatting couldn’t wait. “How did you know where the car was? How did you have a key for it?”

“Lucky, I guess.”

Ha!
Bad was the only kind of luck the two of them had had tonight. But fine. She’d tackle this another way. “How did you know that man? Bill?”

“He was my boss.”

“I thought Rowan Patrick was your boss.”

Silence.

Gabby refused to let this go. “Did Bill abduct us?”

“No. He was a good man.”

“Then how did he know—”

“I don’t know! Okay? I don’t know. You and I were supposed to be taken, but Bill wasn’t supposed to be there and he sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be killed.”

Gabby shook her head, trying to make sense
of Sean’s words. “Are you psychic?” A possibility, she supposed. After all, she was proof that people with extraordinary abilities existed. “ ’Cause there’s no other way for you to have known what was and wasn’t supposed to happen back there. There’s no other way you would have known to hide a car in some random forest.”

Silence slithered between them, and she thought he meant to ignore her. Then, he sighed, stopped the car at the side of the road, and pierced her with the darkest stare she’d ever seen.

“I know because I’m the one who abducted you.”

Three weeks earlier

“This, gentlemen, is your target. Gabrielle Huit. Gabby to her friends. Twenty-seven years old, five eight, and approximately one hundred and thirty pounds.”

Sean Walker studied the female’s photo on the wall in front of him. Thick brown hair, straight as a pin. Big brown eyes, olive skin, no freckles that he could see. She was utterly nondescript. Totally dismissible. Unless you concentrated on those eyes.

The brown was a mix of honey and cinnamon—
I must be hungry, because damn
—and were filled with haunting pain. As a twelve-year agent for Rose Briar, an independent firm that offered a safe haven for anyone exhibiting extraordinary abilities, as well as destruction for anyone who abused those powers, Sean had seen that look enough times to know her life had not been all sunshine and candy. But she’d survived, which meant she was strong. He admired strength.

The photo disappeared, replaced by one of Gabby walking out of a redbrick apartment building. That
was quickly followed by one of her strolling down a sidewalk, people and taxis meandering around her as she sipped a cup of coffee. Next she was handing a kid a few dollars. Money Gabby couldn’t spare, if the report on her bank account balance—an account she kept under a false identity—could be believed. Finally, Sean saw her in a dimmed club, a tray clutched in her hands as a man reached out to pinch her ass.

“She’s a technopath,” Bill, his boss and the man now in charge of Rose Briar, continued.

“A what?” Sean and fellow Rose Briar agent Rowan Patrick asked at the same time. They shared an amused glance. Though they looked nothing alike, people often accused them of being twins.

“A technopath. She’s a human computer.” Bill’s head tilted to the side. “Well, kind of.” He scrubbed a hand down his face. Though his skin was the color of coffee, he somehow appeared ashen. “I’ll start from the beginning. I just hope you’re ready for this.” He paused. “About twenty years ago, I was among a group of Rose Briar agents who raided a lab belonging to Dr. Karlis Fasset. It was my first mission, but one I’ll never forget.”

Bill raised a small black remote, pressed a button, and Gabrielle’s face disappeared, a new one taking its place. Sean hated the loss—and that pissed him off. She was a job, not a possible date. The new mark was a studious man, probably early thirties, who was thin, almost gaunt, with pale skin and thick glasses.

“Kids were disappearing off the streets in broad daylight, yet there were no witnesses,” Bill said. “We suspected we were dealing with someone who could teleport.
Then
we found one of the kids. His head had been shaved, was scabbed and scarred,
and he was mentally and emotionally traumatized, but he managed to lead us to Dr. Fasset’s lab. After going through the doctor’s notes, we realized he had abducted ten kids in all. Kids who were homeless, parentless, and wouldn’t be missed. He had implanted all kinds of shit into their brains, basically making them remote receivers.”

“Bastard,” Rowan said.

Rowan was a good man and an even better agent. He and Sean had done countless missions together and usually met their objective with low collateral damage. With his blond hair, green eyes, and you-can-trust-me smile, people tended to welcome Rowan into their midst, few questions asked. They couldn’t help but want to befriend him. Even emulate him. Only later, when that angel face revealed a devil’s intentions, did they regret their decision.

“Those kids, not that they’re kids anymore, can now download files from other people’s computers into their brains,” Bill said, his dark eyes grim. “They don’t even need to touch the damn things. If the computer is on, they can access what’s inside.”

Wow.
“What about codes and encryptions?”

“We’re not sure about that.”

Still. Stomach tightening, Sean leaned back in his seat. As far as unnatural abilities went, that was a big one. The ramifications were devastating. Government secrets—theirs for the taking.
Any
secrets—theirs for the taking. If someone like that fell into the wrong hands . . .

“It gets worse,” Bill said. “Dr. Fasset had already released all the kids back into the wild, so to speak, before we discovered what he’d been doing. He’d renamed them, actually numbered them in French.
Only good thing he did was put their fingerprints into both police and government databases so that they’d be traceable. Over the years, we’ve been hunting them and managed to find Quatre, who was the one to lead us to the doctor, as well as Six and Neuf. Four, six, and nine. And let me tell you, despite the names and the fingerprints, finding those last two wasn’t easy. Some of the kids were adopted, their names again changed, and their files sealed. Some were never picked up. Gabrielle Huit, number eight, was of the never-picked-up variety.”

“So how’d you finally find her?” Sean asked.

“She’d gone off the grid, but was arrested a few weeks ago for assaulting some guy at a coffee shop. Broke his nose, busted three of his teeth.”

Rowan laughed. “We’re talking about the mouse you just showed us, right?”

She’s not a mouse. Those eyes,
Sean thought again.

“Why’d she do it? Beat the coffee guy up, I mean.” For the most part, people abhorred physical violence. Women especially. They went out of their way to avoid it and didn’t tend to rush headlong into it.

“When questioned,” Bill said, “she told cops that the man had kiddie porn on his laptop. And she was right.”

Good for her, then. Sean only wished she’d removed
all
the bastard’s teeth.

“Anyway, we’d already flagged the ten sets of prints, so we were notified immediately when hers were scanned. She’s here in New York, a waitress at some nightclub. Eye Candy, it’s called.”

“You want us to kill her?” Sean asked with a tinge of . . . regret. Yes, regret. That didn’t mean
he’d hesitate. He might admire the woman’s spirit, but he always did his job.

“No. No, no, no.” Bill held up his hands, that little black remote anchored between his fingers. “We want to study her, question her, so we’re sending you in to gain her trust. And if you hear nothing else I say, hear this. Gaining her trust is imperative. When we questioned Quatre, the stuff in his brain self-destructed, killing him. Six didn’t want to work with us, but she didn’t want her ability any longer, either, so we operated on her, hoping to deactivate what had been done. But again, the chips and wires caused some sort of self-destructive reaction and killed not only the girl but the people operating on her.”

Rowan leaned forward and propped his elbows on the square tabletop in front of him. “What happened to the last? Neuf?”

Bill’s shoulders slouched ever so slightly. “We made him comfortable but kept him locked up. We didn’t know what to do with him, but didn’t want him free, others able to use him. The continued anxiety caused a meltdown. After only fifteen days, we found him dead in his cell.”

Sean and Rowan shared another look, this one pure
Oh, shit.
Sean thought,
No pressure.
Gain the girl’s trust and be careful not to incite her nerves for a prolonged period of time.

He rubbed the tattoos at his temples. They were swirling Celtic designs he both loved and hated. Usually the action calmed him. Not this time. “How do you want us to do this?”

“Remember I told you she works at a nightclub?” Bill waited for their nods. “Well, the owner, Thomas
Wayland, was dealing on the side and was happy to give us the club and a smooth transition from his rule to ours in exchange for his freedom and a one-way ticket out of the country.”