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Gabriel stood on a street corner, lit up by the glow of his phone.
The young mortician might have nearly wet himself upon their meeting, but he did good work. Already, he’d completed his tests on the mysterious capsule and sent over the results. It was a toxin, as they’d expected. Strychnos, derived from a plant found native in the Amazon.
He looked up slowly, staring with a troubled expression across the street.
It wasn’t the accident itself that was so concerning, even though he’d be flinching through intersections for the foreseeable future. It was the timeline itself. A group of separatists flee the supernatural community, only to steal a vial of uranium in the council’s backyard. They manage to smuggle it safely out of the country, only to leave it in a roadside storage locker. Then they disappear entirely—wearing round-the-clock inhibitors—only to attack two of the PC’s most prized agents.
And now this? A toxin from the heart of the Brazilian river basin?
What am I missing here? What’s the connecting thread?
“Are you coming inside?” a voice called from somewhere above him. “Or are you charging by the hour? We could reserve you that street corner, you know. The mayor owes me a favor.”
Gabriel slipped the phone back into his pocket, raising a finger above his head.
This is why the neighbors don’t like us.
“Call the mayor,” he shouted in reply, before jogging up the stairs.
The lobby of the Fodder’s housing complex looked exactly as it had the last time he was there, like some Yuletide snowglobe had exploded—raining down festive shrapnel on everything in sight. The countertops had been transformed into miniature ice-rinks, no less than seven twinkle-lit trees had been crammed into the hall. The sitting area had been removed to make room for a dry-ice replica of Santa’s workshop that conjured up distressing memories of the place he’d just left.
There was a man standing in the center of it all. He was dressed like an elf.
He was also sobbing.
“Gabriel, is it true?”
The assassin froze in surprise as Rafael careened towards him—a hundred little tears flying off his cheeks. He did nothing to slow his speed and they collided with the force of a small comet, staggering dangerously close to a gilded reindeer, antlers polished to a shine.
Gabriel opened his mouth, but couldn’t find the breath. “Is what true?” he rasped.
“I just heard about Mr. Decker,” the man sobbed, burying his face in the assassin’s coat. “I never meant to eavesdrop, but the others were talking about it when they came up. I can’t believe it, just can’t believe it! Such horrible things are always happening to the nicest of people!”
He probably would have said more—he probably would have said a lot more—but he was overcome once again and slumped forward, racking with muffled sobs.
Gabriel froze in surprise, hands hovering over his back. Of all the things that might have been troubling him, that was nowhere on the assassin’s list. It took him a moment to recover.
“Oh, that’s all right.” He embraced the man lightly, rubbing circles on his back. It was made just slightly stranger because he was dressed as an elf. “Jules is already awake, he’s going to be fine. He’s making up conspiracy theories about the nurses.” He added, as if to settle it, “Rae’s on her way.”
Rafael nodded with a little shudder, then pulled back with a frown. “Mrs. Kerrigan? Why would that be so important?”
The assassin froze again, unable to believe his mistake.
It had been a needless addition, a reflexive comfort that would have made sense to literally any other person in his life. He’d meant, she could heal him. He could just as easily have said Alicia.
For the first time in his life, he understood his previous employer’s insistence upon making his lair in the very bedrock of the earth. It had always seemed out of character. The man was a frightening sort of purist, but there was great vanity inside him and never once in his life did he not believe he deserved the very best. Why not buy and island for himself somewhere? Why not build his kingdom from a castle in the clouds? But Cromfield had always been smarter than that. Or perhaps he’d been alive for so long, he’d learned to see farther. The day you got too familiar, was the day you started making mistakes. Isolation was a part of the profession.
This is why he made us sleep in the cave.
“Oh...” he stammered, unable to form a single reply. In a moment of sheer mindlessness, he forgot how he’d been trained, and leaned into his instincts instead. “She just—matters to Julian.”
...his instincts were a little bit naughty.
Rafael blinked with an utter lack of comprehension.
Then his instincts kicked in as well.
“She just...matters to Julian?”
Gabriel nodded slowly. “She does.”
Plausible deniability. She does, a great deal.
The man lifted a hand to his mouth, delicate as a flower, then something lit in the backs of his eyes—bright as a fever. He nodded slowly in return, raising a single finger to his lips.
The assassin gave him a wink, then swept away to the elevator. He couldn’t help but smile as he did so, hands dug into his pockets, staring at the man’s reflection in the glass.
Nice to stir up a little intrigue, every now and again.
* * *
WHEN ELEVATOR DOORS opened, Gabriel was expecting a full house. His little trip to the morgue had taken longer than expected. His wife was supposed to be there as well. But the rooms and halls were nearly empty. Nothing but the animatronic butler Natasha had bestowed as a gift.
A flicker of panic stirred in his chest.
“Narissa?” he asked nervously.
She turned with a pair of unblinking eyes.
“Gabriel, is that you?” Luke called, from somewhere down the hall. “I’m in here.”
The assassin turned his head in surprise, then followed the sound to the home office. The door was cracked open, and Luke was in the process of firing up his computers. He glanced up quickly when Gabriel stepped into the doorway—waving the screen of his phone.
There was a video on pause, dimly-lit and assuredly sound-tracked.
“Has Jules been sending you these? I think they’re in code.”
Gabriel flashed an unlikely grin.
It had been easier to find those moments, since the tremors of the impact had settled, and it became clear all the necessary components of his odd little family were alive. It had become easier still, the more the psychic had come back to himself. Or perhaps he’d just succumb to the drugs.
“He’s convinced he’s in some kind of play. Where are the kids?” he added swiftly, glancing down the hallway like they might suddenly emerge. “I thought they were coming here.”
“Molly took them to the abbey,” Luke replied, typing swiftly and leaning towards the screen with a little frown. “Said she felt more comfortable somewhere with tanks. It’s surprising how often she says that,” he added under his breath.
Gabriel leaned against the wall, watching as he pulled up the right screens.
While the intercept about Harington Boulevard had obviously been a decoy to draw a team into the open, there still might be a way they could track the signal to pinpoint the place where that decoy had derived. It was a long shot, to be fair. But for now, it was all they had to go on.
The image flickered ever so slightly, as a thousand blinking coordinates flashed across the monitors. A tiny red dot roved endlessly over them, searching for a match.
It was a needle in a haystack. But they’d been up against worse.
“You know, Rafa’s pretty shaken up down there,” he murmured as a means of distracting himself, letting his eyes drift over the screen. “The guy wouldn’t stop crying.”
Maybe he’s allergic to the swans.
“Are you serious—still?” Luke asked, with a hint of distress. “He heard me yelling at the hospital board, started jumping to conclusions. I’ve tried to calm him down once already, but the guy just had a major switch-up in his meds—”
“Why were you yelling at the hospital board?” Gabriel interrupted.
There was the slightest hesitation.
“No reason.” Luke turned back to his computers, typing at the speed of light.
He pretended not to notice when the assassin walked up behind him. He pretended not to feel the burn of those piercing eyes. Then it came to a point when he could pretend no longer.
“I was trying to get him transferred to the abbey,” he confessed with a weary sigh. “I was able to make the request without providing an exact location,” he added quickly, seeing the look on Gabriel’s face. “I said we were a private facility in Brussels. Yet despite having proven, several thousand times over, that we were more than capable of providing adequate medical care, they were unwilling to release him. Not without going through some legal and rather public channels. One of them actually questioned the legitimacy of the hospital itself, if you can believe that. With my forgeries. Apparently, he’d actually lived outside Düsseldorf, and he never heard of us.” He flashed quick a look over his shoulder, cheeks burning. “That’s when I said I’d dialed a wrong number, and hung up the phone.”
Gabriel pursed his lips, staring at the back of his head.
Living each day in the electric glow of his wife, it was often easy to forget the man wasn’t quite sane himself. He looked so mild and level-headed by comparison. But only a few weeks earlier, he’d back-flipped off the roof of a nearby laundromat, just to satisfy the terms of a drunken bet.
The bet had been with Julian.
“You convened a meeting of the board?” the assassin repeated fondly.
Jokes aside...how?
“They’re going to keep him there forever, Gabriel.” Luke spun around in his chair, earnest and entreating. And demanding. It was an expression he’d adopted entirely from his wife. “I looked up the average recovery time for his injuries—it’s bloomin’ months. And then with the organ damage, the physical therapy? I understand it was the only place Devon could take him, but he’s in their system now. Endless records, endless eye-witnesses. And now with the royal taskforce guarding the floor?”
Gabriel nodded with a wince, glancing back at the map. “I heard about that. Jules has got to be livid.”
“The sooner we can find him a way out of there, the sooner we can have one of our healers fix him. I can’t imagine just having to sit there—casts and broken bones.” Luke shook his head with a shudder. “Even if he needs to convalesce for a while—which isn’t that unlikely, given the extent of the damage—it would be nice to do it elsewhere. I figured he’d be more comfortable at the abbey.”
There was a brief pause.
“Lucas, no one is ever more comfortable at the abbey.”
He turned with a glare. “Stop calling me Lucas.”
“I shall not.”
They held each other’s gaze a moment, then looked away.
It was becoming depressingly clear, their hail Mary wasn’t going to yield any results. The signal had been routed through too many intermediaries, bounced across too many satellites. It was excellent work, though Gabriel was reluctant to admit it. The kind of evasion that outclassed the level of criminal they were used to dealing with, elevating the spy craft into something else.
Because these aren’t just criminals. They used to be knights.
For the first time, he wondered if Luke had known them. He must have—the guy had been raised at the abbey, it’s where he’d learned to walk. The people there were a family, he must have known exactly who they were dealing with. Yet there he sat, tracking them all over the city.
Gabriel hesitated a moment, then cleared his throat quietly.
“The truck that hit them came through a portal. Not like one of Mase’s, like some kind of rip in the sky. I went back with Natasha and saw it in Devon’s memories.”
It’s the reason I left an inhibitor in the room.
There was a slight tensing in Luke’s shoulders, like they’d stepped into a wind.
“That’s Roger Brennen,” he answered curtly. “He’s a type of conjurer that my father got out of juvenile holding in Dublin. He’d been arrested for something stupid, kept boasting that in a few years, he was going to wake up with magical ink on his arm. That was about four decades ago.”
The assassin nodded slowly, familiar with the type.
“The driver died,” he answered softly. “He was some kind of snake. An adder, maybe?”
There was a break in typing, as Luke’s fingers went still.
“That’s Donny Mathers.” He paused a lengthy moment, then turned his eyes back to the screen. “He snuck me into a bar on my fifteenth birthday. Bought me my first drink.”
A blanket of silence fell over the room, broken only by the quiet hum of the computers as they processed a trillion pieces of data at the speed of light.
This isn’t working.
“Maybe we should check the security feeds around the hospital,” Gabriel said after a few restless minutes had passed. “It would be a stupid move to return to the scene, but if they were dumb enough to go after Devon and Julian, they might be—”
“Did someone say my name?”
The friends whirled around in surprise, as Devon himself stepped out of the hall. He gave the doorframe a cursory knock, flashing a tight smile. The assassin had made a dedicated practice of refusing to give the fox any credit, but he could move like something of a ghost himself.
“Hey!” Luke exclaimed, springing immediately to his feet. He crossed the room in three quick strides, catching the fox in a lingering embrace. “I didn’t expect to find you anywhere outside the hospital. He must be doing better, huh?” He released him gently. “It’s good to see you, mate.”
Devon dropped his eyes to the ground, looking almost bashful. “Yeah, well...I figured I should probably help.”
Gabriel moved without thinking, placing a hand on his arm.
“You don’t need to be here,” he said quietly, eyes flickering over the scrapes and bruises littered across the fox’s skin. For as long as he continued his bedside vigil, he would need to keep up appearances as well. The nurses had seen him come in with injuries. Injuries didn’t just vanish.
“Not in the slightest,” Luke was quick to add. “We’re just running through satellite links, trying to locate the source of the tipoff. At this point, it’s only a waiting game—no end in sight.”
Devon glanced between them, looking slightly confused. “But I thought—” He pulled in a halting breath, forcing himself to continue. “I assumed you’d be combing through traffic feed, realizing the unforgivable extent to which I’ve exposed our powers. I thought the least I could do was help you track down a few of the eye-witnesses before they drag me off in chains.”
For a second, everything was quiet. Then Luke gestured to the screens.
“Dev...there’s no trace of you on the cameras.”
The fox stared at him, blank with shock.
“That’s impossible,” he finally replied, fingers twisting in his sleeves. Despite the fact that he was standing with two of his best friends in the world, a part of him seemed irreparably on edge. “I sprinted full-speed down the middle of the city. By the time I got to the hospital, I’d burned through the soles of my shoes. It’s absolutely impossible no one would have seen that. Pull up the feed.”
The others shared a quick look, then Luke typed in a few keystrokes.
In a flash, the swirling images on the monitors vanished—replaced with a birds-eye view of the same city streets the fox had sprinted just a short while before. While the intersection itself was obscured, it was easy to see the rest of it. There had been some distance to cover, but the route to the hospital was perfectly clear. Everything was exactly as it should be.
There wasn’t a fox in sight.
“What...?” Devon leaned forward, glancing down to check the time-stamp. A look of sheer bewilderment swept across his face, and he checked again. There was nothing, not a hint. Not on the cameras, not in the faces of the people who should have been watching. And there were lots of people. Not a single one of them glanced up. “I don’t understand,” he finally managed, casting a helpless look at the others. “How is that possible?”
He couldn’t believe he was asking the question. He couldn’t believe his own eyes.
His friends could believe it.
His friends weren’t looking at the screens. They had already checked the screens. They had checked them within sixty seconds of receiving the initial call. It was the only reason they were at the penthouse, instead of racing across the city—altering memories and putting out magical fires. It was the only reason they were able to make idle conversation, turning their attention to something else.
If Devon had been even slightly more himself, he would have already pieced that together.
Baby steps, you’ve had a shock.
And you performed a small miracle.
“You were running too fast,” Gabriel said quietly, waiting for it to register. “You outran the camera.” He tilted his head, catching the fox’s eyes. “So I guess you can do that, now.”
Luke stood beside him, watching with a little smile.
Devon was merely dazed. “I guess so,” he echoed faintly. His eyes drifted once more to the monitors, like he was daring the computer to refute it, before shoving it to the back of his mind, yet another revelation to be processed at a later date. “Okay, so it’s...it’s the intercept,” he stammered, trying to change course.
He was putting on a good show, but the man was clearly shaken. No matter where he happened to be oriented in the room, he kept glancing in the direction of the hospital. Like the place had been imprinted into him, like he was incapable of being away so long.
Gabriel stepped in front of the monitors, blocking them from view. “Real offer,” he urged softly. “I can handle this—go back to Jules.”
For a split second, he felt certain the fox was going to refuse. He was already starting to shake his head, leaning a bit to the side for a better view. But in the same instant, something abruptly changed. His eyes flew back to Gabriel, resting there with an emotion that was hard to define.
“...thank you.”
He was gone before it had a chance to register, bypassing the elevator and blurring down countless sets of stairs. By the time the door swung shut behind him, he was already sweeping across the lobby and back to the street. An engine started a second later, then he was gone.
A heavy silence struck the room behind him, louder than those bewildered questions had ever been. It hung there for a moment before Luke shook his head slowly.
“I can’t believe he actually left,” he murmured.
Gabriel stared at the open doorway, remembering the look on the fox’s face.
I can.
“Okay, so let’s handle this,” he said with a hint of frustration. They were better than these people. How did they keep managing to get away? “If we’re not going to find the source of the intercept, let’s go back to the accident itself. There might have been something I missed in the wreckage. Something about the truck itself.”
Luke typed a few more sequences, already shaking his head.
“These guys were knights,” he said grimly. “We’re not going to find anything, because they didn’t leave anything behind.” He enhanced the focus, pointing at the screen. “Look at where they angled the hit—precisely out of sight from the cameras. This is textbook field ops. They followed it to the letter. If we still had access to...” He lifted his head slowly, staring into space. “That’s it.”
Gabriel shook his head quickly, trying to follow along. “What—”
“Textbook field ops,” Luke interrupted in a rush, discarding the screens they’d been following and pulling up a simple map of the city. “Gabriel, if you were coordinating a tactical strike against two unarmed hostiles, where would you set up camp?”
The men were there—they knew it for certain. In order to open a portal, one needed to be close—and they’d never managed to track down the team that had been sent after the tambor. With the airports and roadways locked down by the council, it was highly unlikely they’d left the city.
They were hiding...hiding somewhere in plain sight.
Gabriel leaned forward, resting his arms on the counter. “They were heading west,” he murmured, “angling through the industrial district.”
Luke nodded, fingers flying across the keyboard. Half of the map fell away.
“Knowing we’d trace back the time stamp, I wouldn’t stray within a five mile radius of that area,” he continued. More typing, the map shrank again. “I’d want somewhere close to the river, but closer to an airport. Somewhere with a slow response time. Somewhere with height.”
The image grew smaller and smaller, as they bounced qualifications between them. An older building with outdated blueprints. Something with a dozen exits and entrances, with a clear view of the street. In only a few minutes, they were looking at a few square blocks of space.
“Look at the vantage point of that building.” Gabriel pointed to an old apartment complex, one that skirted the frontage roads, while having a sheltered entrance from the opposite street. It had caught his eye almost immediately, stirring to life all those old instincts it was impossible to ever truly forget. “You pick something on the north corner, you can monitor both directions at once.”
Luke stared without speaking, blue eyes fixed on the screen.
“There’s a parking garage across the street,” he finally replied.
The two exchanged a look, then Gabriel snatched up his keys.
“I’ll drive.”
* * *
WHY IS EVERYTHING SO close to home?
Gabriel shot across the streets of London like a bullet, fingers clenched white on the steering wheel. Only a few months before, he and Molly and stopped at a nearby ice cream parlor to stall on the way home from a debriefing. He’d taught Jason to drive a stick shift just a few blocks away.
“It feels strange, doesn’t it?” Luke asked quietly, riding in the passenger seat. “When they come to our city? Most of the time, it feels like we’re going to them.”
The house slippers had been removed, and the man was armed with enough munitions to invade a small country. As they crossed the train tracks, he snapped another round into place.
Gabriel veered abruptly, gliding into the parking garage.
“It used to be their city,” he answered bluntly. “Must feel like coming home.”
The closer they’d gotten to their destination, the more the images he’d seen earlier had started flickering through his mind—the blood-splattered windows, the spirals of steam rising up from the dash. By the time they’d sighted the building, a hard anger had settled behind his teeth.
This is when you lose perspective. This is when you give the assignment to someone else.
It was another old wisdom, flitting unbidden through his brain. There was a reason that agents didn’t customarily know the suspects they were send to apprehend—the targets they were sent to kill were perfect strangers. It was impossible to continue doing the job otherwise, to know the stories behind the faces on the other side of the gun. Unless it was some great villain, a particular kind of monster that touched them all, covert intelligent agents operated best through anonymity.
But there was nothing anonymous about this particular hit. He could still hear the violent impact, metal crushing into metal. The smell of hospital disinfectant was still clinging to his hair.
He threw a quick glance across the car, finding Luke’s stony face.
It must be even worse for him.
“Your dad wants us to take these guys alive, if it’s remotely possible.” He spoke quietly, taking a pair of heat-seeking binoculars from his bag. “He doesn’t want to paint them all with the same brush—he wants to save the people who can be saved. He wants to show mercy.”
He’s seeing the bigger picture. He’s thinking like a president.
“I don’t feel the same,” he concluded, throwing a swift glance across the car. “We’ve can keep them alive enough for an interrogation, but that’s where it ends. These people crossed a line.”
If that was going to be a problem, better he find that out right now. Luke had been training just as long anyone—he had all those old wisdoms himself. He was also able to set aside his personal feelings and compartmentalize better than maybe any of the rest of them. He was a stamp of his father in that regard, that long-sighted benevolence had been imprinted since birth.
He’d also spent the morning cleaning blood of his friend’s favorite shoes, having rescued them from police lock-up. He’d spent the afternoon holding the psychic’s daughter as she sobbed.
“Give me the binoculars,” he replied.
Gabriel passed them in silence, and the two got out of the car.
It was one of those freezing winter days that could only be felt in England, the kind that took the idea of jackets as a challenge and seared right into your bones. In a way, that made it more of a challenge. Everything inside the complex was a blurred mess of color. People had turned on their heaters, their fireplaces, their ovens. People were warming the space as best they could.
But the men had been doing this a long time.
“Skip the first six floors,” the assassin instructed, longing to take hold of the binoculars himself. “You can’t see the onramp until at least the seventh.”
Luke nodded in silence, he’d already adjusted the scope.
A few seconds passed, then his gaze sharpened. Then it sharpened some more. He began to triage in terms of probability, muttering under his breath.
“Twelve on the seventh floor, just five on the eighth. But they’re clustered into family-style living, multiple bedrooms and pets.” He continued scanning higher, focusing on the northern-facing walls. “There’s another pair above the mezzanine, right formation, but one of them is small...too small,” he concluded. “It has to be a child.” He drifted up a little higher, then paused. “There.”
He stared a moment longer, then passed Gabriel the scope.
“Tenth floor, third window from the left—overlooking the river.” He continued staring, like he could still see their shapes. “Two heat signatures, approximate size and shape.”
The assassin looked without blinking, as his friend pulled up the rental agreement, bypassing half a dozen federal privacy restrictions from the comfort of his phone.
He scanned through it quickly, nodding all the while.
“Two men, no criminal record. Paying with cash. Paid with cash,” he corrected, slipping it back into his pocket. “They rented it for a single month, paid everything up front.”
That has to be them.
Gabriel nodded swiftly, lowering the binoculars.
If it wasn’t—if it happened to be a pair of inexplicably suspicious civilians—they would still have time to correct their mistake. Not much time, but enough that no one would get maimed in the aftermath. At worst, they’d lose a front door. They’d lose their memories soon after that.
He glanced at the black duffel in the backseat—the one that stayed in the car at all times, filled to the brim with weapons and explosives. For a split second, he was tempted. For a split second, he envision blowing the entire apartment complex right off the face of the map.
But there were innocent people living inside, and a quick death was too good for the ones they were after. He would make it slow. He would do it with his bare hands.
Get your head right. Don’t lose perspective.
“Let’s do it right now,” he said abruptly, deliberately silencing that voice of caution in the back of his head, “before I start thinking clearly. We know at least one of them is capable of making portals, so we’re not going to have more than a few seconds. You can go up through the service entrance, while I’ll come down from the roof—”
A young man appeared suddenly in front of them, dropping out of the wintery air.
“Have you considered an aerial assault?” he asked brightly.
The others leapt back with simultaneous shouts.
“Bloody hell!”
“Careful, Jase!”
Before the boy could properly right himself, Gabriel had already seized him—dragging him away from the precarious ledge and into the shade of the garage. He was windswept and damp, carrying half the London mist with him. Strands of blond hair were plastered to his forehead, while his cheeks were flushed pink from the cold. He was smiling, though, pleased to have found them.
That smile faded under his father’s accusatory glare.
“Why aren’t you with the others?” Gabriel demanded, arms folded across his chest. “Why do you never stay with the others when I tell you? It’s like you enter some fugue state and drift away.”
“I don’t stay with the others because I’m not five years old anymore and my father doesn’t tell me where to go,” Jason replied patiently, delivering the same gentle answer he’d given a hundred times before. “It also really sucks, getting locked away at the abbey. No offense, Uncle Luke.”
Luke waved it off dismissively, having already gotten over the surprise.
His father was less forgiving.
“You shouldn’t be flying around the city in the middle of the day,” Gabriel chided, not for the first time. “You shouldn’t be flying at night either, for that matter. How many times must I—”
“Who’s going to see me?” the boy interrupted, throwing out both hands to gesture to the thick fog rolling in from the river. “It’s impossible to see beyond the next traffic light.”
You made that fog yourself.
“How about someone with a pair of these?” his father countered, waving the binoculars angrily between them. “How about a sniper with a thermal-guided scope—”
“You’re about to launch a blind assault against a pair of heavily-armed suspects, with a single point of entry,” Jason replied evenly, folding his arms to mirror the man’s posture. As if that wasn’t infuriating enough, he was quoting verbatim from the PC handbook. “At minimum, that’s a three-man operation. You need a radio tech, and a response team. You guys literally drove from home.”
It was only then, Gabriel realized his son was wearing a tactical vest. It was only then, he realized what he intended to do. His eyes flitted over the Kevlar mesh, with a flicker of panic. There were still times, it looked ridiculous on him. Things were easier when he wore a backpack and jeans.
Not much easier...but still.
“I can’t have you with us on this one,” he said with quiet urgency, lowering his voice like it was for Jason’s ears alone. He was indulgent with his son’s ambitions, but only to a point. That point stopped well clear of bloodshed. “Not this one, Jase. Not after—”
“Yes, this one,” Jason replied calmly, checking his weapons as well. He was indulgent with his father’s protections, but only to a point. That point stopped well clear of bloodshed. “I saw the same footage as you, went through the same surveillance. If anything, I should be coming to replace you. You’re the president now, I’m an agent on active field duty.” He snapped a cartilage into place with a smile. “Fortunately, this mission requires at least three people.”
Gabriel’s eyes narrowed, but he could think of nothing to say in reply.
Screw the handbook. I should have never taught you to read.
“How did you find us?” Luke asked curiously, securing the last of his own firearms. “I didn’t log our location with the office. This was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Jason cast a swift look across the street, assessing the apartment complex.
“These guys are ex-knights, right? That’s a Draconian training regime, they follow things to the letter. It was either this place, or a seven-story office building on the other side of the river. But given the traffics cams and unpredictability of the bridges, I figured this was a safer bet.”
He cast an involuntary look over his shoulder towards the shipping yards beyond.
“Isn’t that where I crashed your McLaren?” he couldn’t help but add.
Luke smiled faintly and returned to his weapons while his father openly scowled.
“All right, you can come along,” he said begrudgingly, slamming the car door violently behind him. “But you’re going to stay behind me at every moment, and if I say to run, you’re going to drop whatever you’re doing and fly straight back home. Do you understand me? Are we clear?”
Jason nodded calmly, already poised to leave. “I will do none of those things.”
His father ignored this, turning again to the tenement building. The others stood on either side of him, staring across the frozen street. Inside were two volatile suspects, armed with any of a number of lethal magics. They didn’t hesitate to use them openly. They had already tried to kill.
“Devon might actually be sorry he missed this,” Luke murmured, keeping his eyes on the tenth floor. “We should record it for him—he can play it later to relax himself.”
“We can always bring him a souvenir,” Gabriel replied lightly, fingers curling into vengeful fists. “Maybe a handful of molars, a severed femur. Of course, given his present delusions, Jules might sharpen it into a shiv...”
Luke shot him a pained look, while Jason flashed a grin.
“I wouldn’t bother trying to deliver it to the hospital,” the boy replied. “Royal security has got the place locked down pretty tight. I had to fly in through an unsupervised heating grate just to make it past Alfie. Not the best idea in the middle of winter. The thing was like an oven.”
Not the best idea, but it was his favorite season—the only time of year when the clouds were thick enough, he could live a little piece of that magical dream and fly above the city unseen. Last year he’d been so taken with the idea, he’d made winter last a few days longer—creeping into spring.
“It was kind of a nightmare getting in, but I saw Uncle Jules through the window,” he added, replaying the image, as if to confirm it to himself. “He held up a ransom note and knocked over his juice.” He smiled a little, then lifted his eyes to the building. “That makes this next part easier.”
Yes, it does.
Without another word, the trio of men left the car behind and started pacing across the parking garage, hands dugs into their pockets, dark coats whipping around their feet. It wasn’t until they reached the sidewalk, that Luke threw his nephew a sudden look.
“A Draconian training regimen?” he repeated.
Jason flashed a quick smile. “I meant it as a compliment.”
