Noah opened his eyes to the dark of the small room under the house. The tunnels coming off four corners were just far enough out of the way so that no one would bump into the sleeping agents if they came running through in the night.
He'd been on strange assignments before—hell, he'd just gotten back from the strangest of them. But this was getting even weirder than that one.
He caught a movement in the open face of the tunnel and wondered if that was what woke him. Though he didn’t automatically react with fear to someone was in the tunnel near him, he did remember there was a mole in the family who had already slaughtered two people.
Wade stepped out into the lighter portion of the room, and Noah was grateful he’d had a moment for his eyes to adjust. The other man motioned for him to follow down the tunnel. For a moment, Noah looked around the room as though he needed to find the light. Instead, he was asking himself if Wade could possibly be the mole.
“Is no one else awake yet?” he asked.
“I don’t think so.”
Noah wanted to frown. Didn’t wolves have superior eyesight? He knew they had better hearing, then realized it didn’t matter in this case. He noticed the faint amount of light that existed, glinting off of the glasses Wade was wearing. He’d seemed to struggle a bit to focus when they’d been out in the field, too. Maybe this particular wolf’s eyesight wasn't superior.
Noah stood up wearing only what he’d slept in—a tank top, old sweat pants, and bare feet. He didn’t quite notice until his soles hit the dirt that the floor was cool to the touch, and he followed Wade along the tunnel completely unarmed, except for the ability he had. Maybe Wade didn't know about. That depended on what Christina had told him.
Everyone had been so excited to see Wade—the family, the agents, all of them—that Noah didn’t know how much the other agent and favored grandson had been told in the barely half a day he’d been here. Or what he’d known from before he arrived.
Still, there were moles in the family. Noah didn’t know anyone here, which would be an advantage if he could keep his eyes open and actually listen to what he was hearing with no bias. He had no clue right now if he was walking down the tunnel to his death or just meeting another agent for a chat.
He thought for a moment of what his brothers would say if he died here, if he never came back from the farm. They would only hear of his disappearance. There was also the possibility that Westerfield might call his family and tell them that Noah had joined an elite unit, and that he was just gone. They would all assume he was working… instead of dead.
His brother Bennett would assume that Noah was living the high life and had decided to stay with the special unit because Noah had told Bennett about the first assignment. But as of right now, his brother still thought he was in the relatively safe position of tracking another agent—not in the middle of a war that was getting bigger and more dangerous by the hour.
He trailed Wade down the tunnel, wondering if they were getting far enough away to not wake the others when they talked. Maybe he wants us far enough away so the other’s won’t hear me die. He wouldn't see Bennett’s children again, or any of his future nieces and nephews. He thought these things as he padded barefoot down the hallway. His brothers would have to explain once again to their Mormon family and community that, no, not everybody was the same, and they would have to continue doing it with the desire to both increase goodwill toward anyone different and without revealing what their own strange skills were.
Then again, Wade had thrown himself on top of Noah yesterday and taken the brunt of the shrapnel. He was a favored grandson of the leader and a NightShade agent. So he probably wasn’t getting murdered. That was just a leftover layer of paranoia from being pulled from sleep.
On the other hand, Wade was in a position to be the best mole ever.
Once the other man deemed they'd move far enough away, he turned around and started to lean a shoulder against the wall, then quickly thought better of it. He must have a cut or bruise or something that he pinged, Noah thought.
“Are you new at NightShade?” His first question was easy.
“Yes.”
Before Noah could fully respond, Wade added almost clumsily, “Christina sometimes calls you agent, but sometimes other titles, so that made me wonder.”
“That's fair. I’m stationed at the Miami branch of the Bureau. I was tapped to work with NightShade agents on a local case that wound up in the Caribbean, and then the SAC offered me a job,” Noah explained. He didn’t bother to detail how he’d turned it down before winding up with an investigation on file at his regular job. “Technically, he has me on as a consultant, because my Miami SAC retained my issued badge and gun.”
“That sucks,” Wade commiserated, and then promptly changed the subject. “What do you know about what’s going on here?”
Something in the way he tipped his head and narrowed his eyes made Noah curious. So he flat out asked, “Why are you asking me? I've never been here before. I don't know any of these people.”
“And that's exactly the point,” Wade replied. “You're fresh eyes. According to Christina, there's probably more than one mole in my family.”
Noah felt his eyebrows rise, even as he crossed his arms on his chest. Ugh, even that was painful. He tried to not show it. “How do you know it's not me?”
“Christina says she found you outside, well beyond the family compound, and everything checks out. Westerfield vouches for you. And I called Eleri and Donovan.”
Whoa, damn, Noah thought. He’d slept through being fully vetted, and he didn't even know it.
Wade pushed again. “So what do you think? Any ideas about who the mole is?”
It was the first Noah had outright been asked about it. No, he hadn't consciously sat down and tried to figure it out, but he had been forming ideas. They probably all had.
“It might be Jen. According to Christina, Jen has been in and out of the family for more than ten years. Will claims he knows where she went each time, but I think Will’s assessment is based on the belief that Jen has been telling him the truth. There may be a weak link there.”
“I know Jen,” Wade said casually. “I'm the one who brought her into the family.
That was a huge strike against her being the mole… or at least, against anyone in the family believing it was her.
Noah didn’t think she was it, but he pointed out the possibility that she could be an issue when everyone else was running on trust. Noah dropped it, but Wade didn’t.
“You make a good point, though. She didn't seem very radical when I met her. She just wanted a home that matched who and what she was. But if you want to infiltrate an organization, the best option … is to get someone who's already inside. Someone already trusted. Then you radicalize them. Jen would be a good target for that.”
Interesting, Noah hadn’t considered the idea that someone hadn’t wormed their way into the family, but maybe they were already in before they’d been converted. He needed to look at the options through that lens, too.
But Noah wasn't so sure that was how their mole had gotten in. “Well, via that option, the mole could be you, or Will.”
Wade laughed. “It's not my grandfather.”
Noah didn't say anything, but the expression on his face must have given him away.
“It's not me and it’s not my grandfather,” Wade repeated.
Everyone knew so much more than he did, but Noah didn’t know what he didn’t know. Jen made sense because she was so happy in the organization and because she hadn't been born to this direct line of the family. Noah threw out what he’d been told. “Christina said a lot of wolves have come into the group over the past six months, looking for shelter. Will takes them in.”
Wade nodded. “It's part of what he does. It's part of what his grandfather did before him, and why this compound is so big. It's a safe haven.”
Though Noah understood—it was a moral imperative to the family to provide shelter and home to others like themselves, but that also created a path for anyone to infiltrate them.
Despite the strangeness of the cases and the danger he'd continually been put into, there was something about NightShade that fascinated Noah and made him consider the job as a more permanent option, even though the others weren't quite like him.
With this group of agents, his skills were on display and he was requested to use them rather than being investigated for being “too good” at the job. It felt welcoming in a way he’d never experienced before. And the way he was trusted by a senior agent he’d just met also felt good. Then again, he partly considered staying with the division because he just might not have a job to go back to in Miami.
“Do me a favor?” Wade asked. “Keep your eyes open? I think you see this—us—without the blinders and preconceived ideas the rest of us have.”
“Will do,” Noah agreed, wondering if Wade was wrapping up the conversation. The day had been planned to relax and heal. Other wolves who'd previously stayed close to the base were being sent out on patrol, guarding the edges of the property and making sure that nothing went down. The compound was already heavily fortified and guarded in the west where the blast had come from.
“If we go out later, I’ll see if I notice anything strange.”
Christina had even asked a few of the wolves to go out today and search, to see if they could find any direct evidence of Aegis. She told Will that she wanted to look for anything that might look strange, ancient, or evil.
Though Noah could attest that those instructions seemed quite vague, he didn’t question them. But there was no timetable, and no specifics in the instructions, just a bit of “See what you can find.”
The wolves on patrol had been given pictures of Dr. Murray Marks and asked if they could spot him. Noah didn’t expect anything to come of that. He knew now that identifying an individual meant you had to get directly up into their faces, because of the helmets and gear and goggles they almost always wore.
But he agreed to Wade’s suggestion to keep his eyes open. He’d do what he could.
“I trust that you have a clear eye,” Wade said.
Noah almost laughed. “How can you tell?”
“I can smell it.” Wade grinned which only made Noah chuckle, until he wondered if maybe it wasn’t funny. Maybe there was a way to smell bias, and he simply didn't have the required or refined senses to sniff it out.
But even as he opened his mouth to ask about it, a blast shook the building.
He was knocked off his feet, unsure if he heard the rumbling sound or felt the shaking of the ground first.
As he failed to catch himself with his hands, Noah realized that he was going down and attempted to roll with the fall. But the ground was moving and he felt the side of his head smack the hard-packed dirt.
A garbled sound came from Wade's mouth, and as Noah’s eyes rolled and the world went black, he felt the rumble of the earth beneath him once again, and thought, This was no ordinary bomb.