The Reckoning (15 page)

“Fiend!” came a scream from behind me as the old Hunter recovered enough to launch himself at my back, a knife in hand. Just to show me gratitude for saving his life.

The blade sank deep into my right arm and my fingers lost hold of the gun. I turned toward him. Ordinarily, a mortal wouldn’t be much of a challenge, but this Hunter surprised me by slamming into me and wrapping his arm around my neck. The knife penetrated my skin as he dug it into my flesh.

I’d been in worse situations, though not with a snake in my head devouring my energy. I reached out to him mentally. It felt like slogging through mud. At last I found his shield—weak, yet strong enough to keep me out in my condition. I summoned the mental image of my machete. I’d have energy for one stab, and then no more.
Get in. Fry his brain,
I thought. I hoped I had enough strength. Desperately I began absorbing, pulling in nutrients from the air. Still, the Hunter’s shield held.

He cursed vehemently, telling me exactly what he was going to do to me and the others I’d incapacitated. Slow carving with a chain saw was the entire gist. That was one thing you could always trust about Hunters: they took joy from doing their duty to dispatch Unbounded. I’d been to one of their meetings when they’d planned a killing—a righteous and necessary killing as they saw it—and first they made the man suffer in order to atone for the sin of being Unbounded. Knives were their preferred method of exacting this penance.

Maybe the Emporium wasn’t all that wrong to want them dead.

If I failed, Ritter would never forgive me for leaving him like this.

JEANE CASUALLY EMERGED FROM BETWEEN
two cars, pausing five feet away. “Drop it.” Her voice was icy cold, without its usual breathiness. She was pointing an assault rifle at us, one that looked very similar to the rifle the male soldier had been carrying.

“No way,” the Hunter said. “I’ll be dead the minute I let her go.”

Jeane shrugged delicately, her mouth opening in a smile. “Oh, darling, I’ll just shoot you both if you don’t let her go. She’ll recover. What about you?”

His chest heaved against my back and the stench of sour sweat filled my nose. “You wouldn’t.”

“Actually, I’d love to—shoot you both. I owe her one.” She flicked her gaze at me, her expression cruel. “Though I had something else in mind. Look, you let her go, and I’ll let you go. But you have only ten seconds. One, two, three, four, five . . .”

With a hoarse sob, the Hunter pushed me at her and ran. Jeane stepped out of the way as I struggled for balance. She let him reach almost to the end of the alley before shooting him. The sound of the bullet was deafening, but he collapsed without a sound. I couldn’t even hear the quiet
thump
of his body as it hit the pavement.

Jeane’s satisfied smile as she turned to me would probably haunt me for a very long time. I snatched the gun from her, fire licking across the deep cut in my arm. “You didn’t need to do that. You should have just let him go.”

“Hunters are vermin. I agree with the Emporium on that.”

I couldn’t refute her, having had similar thoughts only moments before, and somehow I couldn’t find too much pity for the man in my heart. I wouldn’t have killed him, though.

“He was inferior,” she added, more as an afterthought rather than an explanation.

The comment concerned me. “Because he’s mortal?” That would be Emporium rhetoric.

She gave a low laugh. “Because of his morals.”

“What about the other one?” Had she also killed him?

“Over by the car.” She jerked her head in the direction of the car where the Emporium agents had confronted the men.

Dare I hope Walker was still cowering under the vehicle? Because I wanted to question him. I couldn’t see much by the dim light of the single streetlight at the end of the alley, but I looked for his life force and found him more or less where Jeane had indicated, alive and close to the body of the male Unbounded, whose life force was glowing brighter as he healed, but not bright enough to be a concern. Yet.

Using my knife, I ripped my shirt and wrapped it around the wound in my arm, tying it with difficulty. My neck was also slick with blood, but I could feel that it had already stopped bleeding, so the cut hadn’t been deep. The bullet in my thigh was the most serious problem, each movement sending a ripple of misery throughout my entire leg, but I would have to deal with that later.

Though the headset had been lost during the scuffle, my phone was still intact, and I called Stella. “Erin,” she said, sounding relieved. “What happened? You sound terrible.”

“Little complication, but I have two Emporium agents down. You want me to bring them in?” Now that Jeane was close and I wasn’t exerting sensing effort, the snake was no longer emitting light. I continued my higher absorption rate, which gave me the impression of breathing or drinking more deeply, and energy trickled into my body. It was easier without a knife to my throat.

“Did they see you?” She was all business again. “Because bringing them in could endanger the plutonium recovery.”

I considered it. “One can’t identify me. The other I can fix. They’ll think they were attacked by buddies of the Hunter.” Just the idea of removing another memory made me feel exhausted, but I was confident I could do it if needed.

“Bring the one who saw you,” Stella said after a pause. “Leave the other to finger the Hunters for his companion’s capture. We don’t want to pass up an opportunity to question an Emporium agent, and it’s not like it’ll make things worse. Besides, you shouldn’t use your ability anymore.” I was glad she didn’t berate me for using it in the first place because it wasn’t as if there had been a choice.

I picked up the woman and carried her to Walker’s rental car. Hopefully he had the keys because I really didn’t want to search the Hunter’s dead body for them. I found Walker not only close to the sprawled Emporium agent but cuffed to him. His eyes were crazed with fear.

I scowled at Jeane. “What?” she said with a casual lift of her shoulders. “He was trying to run.”

Unceremoniously, I dropped the Emporium woman by the car and approached Walker slowly. “It’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you.”

A sob burst from his throat. “You killed him. You killed them all.”

“For starters, these two aren’t dead. If you know enough to be here, you know that. And your friend tried to kill me.”

“Not my friend.” He convulsed with another sob. “I’m on a story. He’s a contact, that’s all.”

“I’ll get you free, but I want you to tell me everything you know.”

He nodded, still looking as if he was going to puke from fear. I rummaged over the sprawled body, trying to find the keys to the cuffs. I found them and opened the lock. Walker scooted backward until he hit his rental car, rubbing his hands. His eyes darted frantically up the street, as if calculating his chance for escape.

“Give me the keys,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here, and we’re taking her with us.” I thumbed at the apparently lifeless woman. “Someone could have heard those last shots.”

He snorted. “If they did, they probably ran away. This is Venezuela. There’s more civil unrest here than just about anywhere. People shoot it out on the streets all the time.” His voice rose to a painful squeak. “Should have known better than to come here.”

I had no idea about civil unrest, but then I hadn’t actually listened to the news lately. Little busy trying to stay alive. I held out my hand for the keys, and he practically threw them at me. I passed them to Jeane, who seemed to be examining her fingernails. “Get her in the car.” When she stared at me, I felt compelled to add, “Please.”

When I was sure she would comply, I turned back to Walker. “Who is Habid Salemi?”

Walker shook his head. “Some Iranian guy is all I know.”

“Why did you come to meet him?”

“Just to see if he knew”—he cast a look at Jeane who’d opened the trunk and now grabbed the unconscious Emporium female’s arm and began dragging her unceremoniously to the back—“what the Unbounded here were planning.”

“And what was that?”

“Something big is all I know. He wouldn’t tell me over the phone.”

“How’d you get a line on him?”

He heaved a breath. “Look, I was doing research for a story on the president’s son. Well, that was several months ago when he was still the vice president. You see, my sister went to school with his girlfriend, and she claimed that something odd happened to him. That he suddenly couldn’t remember things they had done together. They broke up because of it, and she was devastated. Asked me to look into him. She was sure someone was drugging him or something.”

I knew what he was talking about. The president’s son had been abducted and an Emporium agent put in his place, but we’d managed to rescue him at the same time we’d freed Jeane, putting a stop to their plan to gain more political control. Both the White House and the Renegades had taken stringent efforts to see that not a hint of the event was mentioned in the press.

I nodded for Walker to continue. “What happened then?”

“About Mann? Nothing, but while I was researching him, I stumbled over some mention of people who don’t die, and that led me to Strout—the guy I was with tonight. He gave me enough information to track down one of the Unbounded, and I got a job as a security guard for a rich guy in Texas to keep an eye on him to see if it was all true.”

The rich guy had to be Desoto, but I wasn’t letting on that I knew. “And?”

“And it didn’t take me long poking around in their computer system to realize something unusual was going on down here in Venezuela. Not with the Unbounded, but with the rich guy. So I put out a few feelers and found the Iranian, Salemi, who told me he had some information, but that I needed to come here for it.” Walker’s voice became more confident, slightly tinged with pride. “I talked to Strout and we decided to come here. He has more of an expense budget than I do.”

“So you abandoned your job with the rich guy and came down here.”

He shrugged. “Strout and his friends ruined it for me anyway. When I told them there was definitely something going on, they came to the house, tried to grab the Unbounded I was tracking. Didn’t end up well then.” He paused before adding, “Or now.”

At least that explained why he’d kept Stella’s device instead of reporting it to the other guard at Desoto’s. He’d probably thought he could get information from it.

“And Salemi?” I asked.

“He didn’t show up tonight. But I talked to him several times during the last week, and even sent him some material he asked for. There’s no way he would cut out on me.” The fear was back in Walker’s eyes, and he curled in on himself. “Those two who attacked us knew we were coming. They might have killed him.”

What his story meant was that those stupid Hunters had probably ruined everything for us. If the Emporium knew someone had information about the plutonium, it would be that much harder to steal.

“Get in the car,” I said. “Front seat.”

Walker’s breathing came faster. “Please, just let me go. I won’t tell anyone about you. I promise.”

“Look,” I said, tilting my head at the unconscious Unbounded, “this guy here is about to wake up, and if you’re anywhere nearby, you’ll be dead. He’s going to think you did something to his partner, and I believe you know what that something is. I’m sure your Hunter friend over there told you exactly how his ilk rid the world of Unbounded.” I motioned again at the male agent. “He won’t be as nice to you as I am, but I’ll leave you here if you want.” Judging by the strength of the agent’s life force that was increasing as his body healed, we had maybe ten minutes before he awoke.

My statement was enough to get Walker into the car. I heaved myself painfully in after him, sliding behind the steering wheel, wondering what I was going to do with him. The woman in the trunk would be sent to our prison compound in Mexico after we questioned her, but Walker was essentially an innocent, his only offense being an unhealthy curiosity and a desire to break a story that would make his career. Being driven wasn’t all that bad, and maybe he’d learned his lesson.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked him.

He thought a moment. “My hotel?”

“Might be watched.”

“Airport.”

“Much better. I’ll get you to a taxi.”

“We’re really going to take him somewhere and let him go?” Jeane said from the backseat. “He can identify us.”

She had a point, which meant I would have to do something about that, regardless of what that snake did in my head. It was either that or lug him around until after we got the plutonium, and I already had one millstone around my neck in the form of Jeane.

“It’s easier to kill him.” Jeane spoke carelessly into the darkness, her face only partially lit by the street lamps and the headlights of the passing cars. “If we did that sort of thing, I mean.”

Walker gazed at her in horror. “You’re really going to kill me, aren’t you?”

I pulled the car over to the curb. “You have something to write on?”

“Yeah.” Terror filled the word.

“Get it.”

From his pocket, he drew out a small cell phone.

“Write this. Strout is dead. You barely got away. They gave you something to erase your memory. Go back to the States. Forget the story.”