The Uninvited (The Julianna Rae Chronicles Book 1) (3 page)

They both turned their attention to the black security panel attached to the door.

‘We need a proximity card,’ she said.

‘Maybe not,’ he said. ‘Allow me this time.’

He concentrated his fingers over the square panel until a tidy click sounded as the lock slipped open. The door moved, and they peered through its narrow break at the compound shift changes taking place.

‘It won’t be long before the control room notices us missing. We need to make our move.’

‘Not that I’m disagreeing, but you do have a plan in that watcher mind of yours?’

The troops massed, exchanging shift reports and other information before dayshift departed for their quarters. Caden put his fingers between his lips and whistled.

‘You want us killed?’ she whispered as she pressed against the wall.

His eyes moved in her direction. His head did not. He pursed his lips again, silencing the nearby guards with his second whistle. The blood thumped into her ears and her heart pounded. When she moved from the door, he pushed her in front of it again.

‘Get ready,’ he said quietly. ‘Be quick.’

Her eyes widened. Ready for what? Her thoughts were loud enough that he heard her yelling from within her mind. His head turned and the door closed. He heard her all right, loud and clear, with no intentions of telling her anything more.

What an asshole, she thought. He raised his eyebrows. He’d heard everything.

He playfully smiled. The preternatural class clown – their reputation for an entirely dark humor very rarely caught a liberated laugh, and she was on the receiving end of this one.

Rifles pushed through the doors. Two officers followed, steadying their sights against Julianna as the doors swung closed. They scanned her while she waited for his betrayal behind them.

The female officer yelled. ‘Prisoner! Drop your weapon and get down on the ground! Now!’

Her fingers opened and the knife clunked onto the hard floor. The bulkier Sergeant kicked it away and into Caden’s reach, ordered her to her knees and watched as she complied with her hands behind her head.

Caden’s finger rose to his lips for silence. His other curled around the knife, readying for his attack.

‘Where’s the other pris—’

A thin, red line carved ruthlessly into the heavy-set jugular of the Sergeant, poured his warm blood over the flap of open skin onto the blonde’s clean boots. She fumbled for her radio, holding it to her lips and stumbling with her words, not seeing Julianna’s fist in time to duck as it smashed into her face. The radio dropped into the spreading blood.  Her body followed heavily into a heap between Julianna’s feet.

Join the Rebellion now, Julianna thought. Her stomach churned at his victim heaped in the red puddle rolling out. Why not, and add murder to the list while I’m at it. The puddle stretched more as Caden pulled at the dead man’s uniform. The blood soaked T-shirt from the half-naked soldier slapped against the corner wall. Everything else he took.

‘Kill or be killed,’ he said. ‘Get undressed. We just found our way out.’

Julianna crouched over the girl’s boots, unlacing them easily. Dancing scantily-clad at the club with women was entirely different from undressing them, she thought, and she looked down at the pants that she tugged over the officer’s ankles.

Caden buttoned his new shirt over his distinctly marked chest. Ancient black symbols, encased in their own thick circles and lines, stretched around to his back and down his arms. Some she recognized from the time spent with Taris, as status markings of a watcher possessing the highest of abilities.

‘Any slower, sweetheart, and I’ll lock you in the cells myself,’ he said.

A force to be reckoned with, she contemplated. She undressed in the speedy pace he urged, pushing her pants down past her knees and almost losing her knickers as she did. He laughed quietly. 

The markings reached his wrists and she watched the last symbol disappear beneath the shirt sleeve he pulled down.

‘Nice ink,’ she stated as she finished dressing herself. The uniform felt warm against her skin. ‘Local shop or something a little more up-market?’

She knew they were from levels of initiation and the rites of passage he would have endured.

‘Nice rack,’ he retorted. ‘Plastic surgeon?’ He had two buttons to go, which he worked on as he peered outside the door. ‘We need to move.’

He bent down and took the sidearm for himself, strapping it to his thigh and leaving the rifle where it rested in the mess still flooding out. 

‘What about her?’ she asked. They looked at the girl sprawled across the floor. The pretty blonde, with high cheek bones and pouty lips, lay deathly still as blood pooled around her nose. It drizzled down her cheek into the edge of her hair.

‘Good Militia are dead Militia,’ he replied. He knelt beside the girl and checked for her pulse. ‘And she’s good.’ Caden threw the girl’s cap at Julianna’s chest and she caught it. ‘Great hit.’

‘She’s dead?’ She stared at the body as Caden straightened his posture. ‘I killed her?’

He took the cap from her frozen hands and pulled it over her head to hide her features. ‘Look down, follow me, don’t speak.’

She studied the girl...and her fist didn’t even hurt.

I really do have to stop meeting you like this, trouble. We’re becoming too familiar...

His pull against her arm broke the macabre concentration, surprising her, for his appearance change. He shifted himself into a younger body. His already dark hair deepened in color and hung past his brow. His face became clean-shaven and free from the lines cornering his eyes. She admired it as much as she did the one in the cell. He held the door open; freedom was close enough that the spells Taris had cast, were ineffective against his power. He was free – and if I hadn’t already been beside him, he’d already have escaped.

He frowned down at her. ‘You helped me. We go together, okay?’

She nodded. He’d read her again. Intruding where he wasn’t welcome, reading and manipulating her, using trickery. Shape-shifting. He could hold his own in a crowd of a thousand watchers. This one could do it all.

She stared at him.

Yet, here I am with an unfamiliar watcher in a bad situation. Very bad, Julianna, there’s that trouble again. Capital T.

She felt the world she knew slipping away. She’d killed a person and he hadn’t even flinched. It wasn’t a world that she wanted.

The compound changed shifts in front of them as they stood at the posts of the fallen officers. The moonlight and the floodlights made it easy to survey their environment. Those around were still handing over the day’s events to nightshift, oblivious to the new sentry on duty.

Caden saluted soldiers who acknowledged his two stars on his uniform epaulet, surprising her with his comfort.  

Council members...she tried to recall. Are they Militia or neutral? Do they work within the Militia as officers or do they watch everything from the sidelines…he knows my father!

Caden tracked the yellow stretch of light from the tower to the corner of a brick building shrouded in darkness. They made their way, ducking from view before they were seen. The change-over of shift was complete. New security sat in the checkpoint, finding comfort in fresh coffee and The Bulletin newspaper. The monitoring between radio calls paused, waiting for the new relief to continue transmissions. The tower guards checked their ammunition before settling into position for the night. Another round of spot lighting from the overhead towers lit the compound, and Caden peered around the edge of the building.

Sirens rang.

Soldiers ran to their posts and the sentry guard armed himself as his newspaper scattered to the ground. Loose, slippery papers fell and a coffee cup spilt.

Caden snapped back, pressing against the wall. Julianna felt his embrace draw her into his chest. She let his grasp drape around her shoulders, but the smell of blood lingered on his shirt, urging her to vomit on his boots.

Caden’s hand lowered to her stomach; her gaze followed his touch rather than the insanity of the soldiers on high alert in the compound. The nausea disappeared, and with it the pain from the assault Taris had delivered. He’d restored her health in seconds. She looked back at his dark eyes staring over her shoulder, and she gave him a nod, which he returned. A let’s get moving nod.

His shoulders pushed back confidently in his stride through the open quadrangle and into the roughly painted white booth. The frantic guard dismissed him with a frenzied hand cutting angrily through the air and Julianna noticed the monitor under the glass screen displaying images of herself and Caden. Prisoner identification numbers and a huge red BREACH flashed angrily above the digital photos.

Caden’s photo had him looking ten years younger and the guard was too slow to make the connection. The man dropped, lifeless, with his neck bent at right angles against the waste bin under the desk. Caden slammed the emergency over-ride button to open the gates and grabbed her hand to run. The gate’s wheels crunched across the gravel, slowly opening for their escape. Caden slipped through first, narrowly making it sideways with her dragging behind, and they ran into the vast woodland for cover, the Jeeps having to wait.

*    *    *    *

They ran hand-in-hand through the trees and rocks, weaving in and out with the scenery blurring around them. Footsteps gained on them before disappearing; flashlights shone, bouncing off the tree trunks and damp grass. Jeeps roared in the distance. Hover drones hummed, their laser eyes flashing behind them, angrily scanning the ground for traces of body heat or any other readings they could find. Their breath hung as mist on the cold air and their thumping hearts struggled to catch up.

Julianna felt as though her lungs would burst. Her legs followed Caden in leaps and bounds, and when Caden slipped, they went together, plummeting down a steep ledge, sliding down smooth rock, and landing into a pool of soft, thick mud. He sat up, holding her close as they pushed against a ledge, waiting for the footsteps and voices to pass above them. She stayed in his arms. She let him stay close. This time she felt scared.

She glanced from his chest to his face. The smell of blood was gone, replaced with the stench of mud and sweat. Caden watched over her shoulder, their lips almost touched with the rise of her chin.

He looked down at them. ‘You hurt at all?’ he whispered.

Julianna shook her head and stared back in terror at the ledge above them. The footsteps returned.

His arms tightened around her chest, suffocating her breathing. They pressed against the sheer rock again, looking toward the sounds above and waiting for the hum of a nearby drone to come closer. A laser pointed down in their direction, scanning its red beam through the misty rain.

Be still
, he whispered. His voice stretched inside her mind.
Be very, very still.

The hover drone dropped down to stare at them. His arms released her embrace, thoughtfully and slowly, inch by inch, and then she felt the sting of a close blade fly over her shoulder. The drone fell to their feet with the knife she had taken from Taris sticking out from its viewfinder. The electrical board sizzled in the mud and sparks flew up. He wedged out the knife, taking a chunk of the computer circuitry with it to study.

The footsteps passed again, a soldier called out, ‘The drone’s gone east!’

Caden freed the knife and folded it into his pocket. Her breath let go for short, sharp ones instead. When she looked at him, he squeezed her arm and raised a pointed finger in the direction ahead.

She nodded.

They moved along the rocks, putting more space between them and the camp. The Jeep engines faded into the night and the flashlights were no longer visible. The lasers in the sky were gone. They rested, listening to the river rapids drown out their heavy breathing.

She slid against the steep rock sheltering them. Her side ached where she held it tightly, not daring to look under the freshly torn uniform.

Caden rested his hands on his knees to catch his breath. ‘Home free,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘If this is your standard day, Julianna Rae…’he drew in another deep breath. 

Laughing hurt her.

He watched, as watchers did. ‘Hey,’ he said. She looked up. ‘You holding up over there?’ he said, stepping over to her.

She nodded, forcing a smile. The shirt felt damp under her hands.

‘Let me see,’ he said quietly, as he lifted her shirt.

‘We should move,’ his hand fell, as she moved away, to step over the slate and rock to the thickness of the trees meeting with the river.

‘You can walk, then?’

She nodded. ‘I can run if I have to.’

‘Don’t need to run. We’ve lost them,’ he said and reached for his holster.

She looked over her shoulder, searching for their predators. An eerie silence hung in the air. No manufactured noise, no hover drones, no dogs, no Jeeps, no shots being fired; just the river flowing, the wind, and the rain. When she turned back, he held a sliver of broken glass in one hand; while balancing the knife on his thigh, he scratched two lines into its blade.

‘What’s your last name?’ she asked.