Wicked Edge (Realm Enforcers, #2)(7)
Garrett swallowed. “Um, were there a bunch of them? The ones who took you out?”
“No. One woman with a syringe knocked me on my ass.” One woman.
Garrett’s eyebrows rose in his hard-cut face. “A woman?”
Daire growled. “Yes. Very pretty.”
Garrett pressed his lips together, and his gray eyes lightened to a sparkling silver.
“If you laugh, I’m going to throw you out the window,” Daire snapped. A ten-story fall would teach the young vampire a lesson.
Garrett’s mouth twitched, and he cleared his throat.
Logan shoved his way back inside the door. “The surveillance system was knocked out all night. No videos.”
“Smart woman,” Garrett coughed.
Logan glanced down at his buddy, who was still crouched beside Daire. “Woman?”
Garrett stood and took a step away from Daire. “Yes. A woman with a mighty syringe.”
Logan stood straighter, a frown drawing down his dark eyebrows. “Shifter or witch?”
“No.” Daire planted a hand on the wall and shoved himself to his feet. He would’ve recognized a witch, and he hadn’t gotten any hint of shifter from her. Vampires were male only, and demons gave out stronger vibes than any other species. Plus, ninety percent of the demon nation was male, and a female would never be out on her own like that. “Enhanced human.”
Logan’s mouth dropped open.
“Shut up,” Daire growled. “She was beautiful, and it has been a while.” Could he sound any more like a dumbass? “If you two tell anybody, and I mean anybody, I’ll cut off your heads myself.”
The kids shuffled their feet. Garrett was no doubt under orders to report anything and everything to his uncle Dage, the king of vampires. Logan was probably similarly under orders to report all progress to his brother, Zane Kyllwood, the leader of the demon nation.
Daire sighed. “The woman and the mine holdings don’t concern the vampire or demon nations, so I’m asking you, at least for now, keep this between us.” Considering they’d done nothing but create chaos in his perfectly ordered life while also eating him out of house and home, they could grant him a solid.
The soldiers nodded.
Good. Now he owed them, but he’d worry about that later. Right now, he had to figure out the Apollo drug and Cee Cee’s connection to it and the mines. Besides killing humans, the drug had been injected into darts and fired at witches, thus killing them. They’d learned that Seattle was just a test-drive for the drug, and soon it would be unleashed on his homeland. That simply couldn’t happen. “So no progress on Apollo tonight?”
“No.” Logan leaned back against the closed door. “It was a shitty night.”
A shitty night? Yeah, that about summed it up. But it was nothing compared to the night little Cee Cee was going to have when Daire caught up to her.
Chapter 3
Wind pierced Cee Cee’s thick clothing, digging with sharp blades right to her skin. She shivered, her gaze on the frozen landscape of Fryser Island in the Arctic Sea. The sun shone weakly down, glittering along the ice, failing to provide an ounce of warmth. The chill banished any hint of fog, leaving the arctic tundra in crisp focus.
She had taken three different private planes to arrive in the Arctic, and her eyes stung with the need to sleep. First she had a job to do, and at least the cold was keeping her awake.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but this is a very bad idea,” said her pilot, a local from the mainland and a barrel of a man with the thickest beard she’d ever seen. “Ms. Jones. Please come back to the plane with me, and I’ll return you to the mainland.” Concern, and an unwelcome note of duty, echoed in his tone.
She smiled. “I asked you to call me Cee Cee.” They’d spent hours together in the small plane to reach the island few people knew even existed in the Norwegian Sea. “Mr. Agard, I assure you, I have a guide meeting me any minute.”
They stood on an ice-covered wooden dock? facing away from the quiet sea and toward a series of abandoned buildings staring back at them. Barren and rugged, the fierce desolation of the area appealed to her on a primal level. Even the massive mountains piled so high and sharp held a beauty that stole her breath.
He cleared his throat. “We have another abandoned city called Pyramiden on Spitsbergen Island. It’s cold and desolate like this, but sometimes tourists go there, and graduate students study the environment. There are hotels not too far away, and more importantly, there are people. Please let me take you there.”
Pyramiden hadn’t been mined in years and was of little interest to her. This place? Yeah. It looked abandoned, but mines often went far into the mountains, and there were a hell of a lot of mountains behind the tiny entrance. More danger chased her than the man could imagine, but his instincts, like those of most humans, were spot-on. “I like abandoned,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “There’s nothin’ here but old buildings, cold, polar bears, rabbits, and arctic foxes.” Almost on cue, a white shaggy beast with horns loped across the landscape. “And Svalbard reindeer.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, her eyes tearing from the chill, even from behind protective contacts. Since the mine in her sight was obviously dead, she only needed to check on two other mines, because she’d already discovered the secrets of the third, and they would end tomorrow. The wind slapped her face, and she made a mental note to slather on face cream at first chance.