Someone knocked on her door. "Bren, you back, too? Want some pizza?"
Tears pricked her eyes as she leaned against the metal bars of the headboard she'd fashioned using nineteenth-century patterns for inspiration. "What're you doing eating pizza at this hour, Andrew Liam Kincaid?" she said, forcing a smile.
Sure enough, Drew cracked open the door to throw her a grin. "I'm a growing boy."
"Well, I'm not, so don't tempt me." She opened the book. "Shoo."
"Your loss, baby sister." Sending her another grin, he pulled the door shut.
She squeezed her eyes closed and then took several deep breaths to think past the lump choking up her throat. But no matter how hard she concentrated, she was too emotionally torn up to focus on anything, much less the book in her hands. All she could think was that she needed Judd, needed him to hold her. She knew that to be a foolish, impossible wish, but the animal in her didn't care. Where was he? She tried calling him several more times, until finally, she could no longer fight the enveloping wings of sleep. What awaited her was anything but restful.
A jumble of sensory input, acrid fear on her tongue, a pulsating kind of panic. She'd made a mistake and now it had to be cleaned up -
Snatches of sound. A laughing child. Fear. Joy. Birthday cake -
He was so sexy, she wanted to -
Fear. A salty/wrong/bad scent. It was a mess. Had to be cleaned up -
Brenna moaned and turned onto her side. If someone had been in the room with her, they might've nudged her awake. But she was alone, and she was dreaming in inexplicable fragments, seeing broken snatches of thought. Her mind searched for an anchor and found the way blocked. It shouldn't have been.
A moment of clarity, of anger: He shouldn't have done that!
A second later, she was dreaming again.
Judd walked away as the first flames began to rise behind him, hands thrust into his pockets and head covered by the pulled-up hood of a black sweatshirt that turned him from Arrow to hoodlum. Even if he had been caught on surveillance equipment - highly unlikely, given his skills - his identity would be impossible to determine. To further muddy the waters, he'd gone to considerable trouble to ensure the blast bore no Psy fingerprint, using materials available to humans and changelings as well as Psy.
Alarms sounded behind him, followed by the hiss of sprinkler systems being deployed. That posed no threat. He'd designed the blast radius to take out a key section without reliance on the destructive powers of fire. Nothing inside that square should be salvageable if his explosives had functioned as they were meant to. And he had no doubts that they had - after all, he'd been trained by Councilor Ming LeBon himself.
Chapter 9
The guards didn't notice his telekinetically blurred body as he slid right past them and into the four a.m. darkness of the quiet street. The Council had made a cold calculation and located this lab in a suburban area, believing that here, among civilians, it would escape discovery and attack. They should've known better.
Fading into the shadows on the other side of the street, he checked the buildings on either side of the lab, ready to throw up a Tk shield to ensure their safety - because, unlike the Council, he didn't consider civilian casualties necessary collateral damage. His caution proved redundant. Not even a spark had escaped the confines of the target compound.
A perfect strike.
Lights began flicking on up and down the street as he watched. At the same instant, security personnel pounded out of the compound, searching for a trail that had gone cold the second after he'd walked out. It had taken them at least two minutes to respond. Sloppy. Whoever was running this op had become cocky after going undetected for over a year.
It was exactly the reaction Judd and the Ghost had planned on.
Satisfied, he took one last look at the rapidly dying flames and turned to cut through the middle-of-the-night black of a family's backyard. As he negotiated the garden and swingset, he found his eyes drawn to the still-dark window on the second floor. That room held a child, a small half-human, half-changeling boy with more energy than coordination. Judd had seen him several times during his trips to scout the area.
The child's presence had made the disguised lab across the road even more of an obscenity. Because what had been going on in that place was meant to destroy the minds and lives of children just like that boy. The room light finally came on as Judd scaled the back fence with grace even a cat might have envied, and landed in an even darker yard. No one was home here and wouldn't be for several days. He'd done his homework.
Deactivating the alarmed lock took him a quarter of a minute. Once inside, he stood with his back to the doorway, not going any farther. These people hadn't invited him in and he wouldn't violate their refuge. However, when he tried to relax his body and mind without falling asleep - a trick all soldiers learned early on - he found he couldn't. There was pressure on the back of his skull, a hard push he might've taken for an attempt to penetrate his shields had the pressure not seemed to come from inside his mind.
He rechecked his basic armor against psychic attack. No cracks. He was about to go deeper when the pressure simply halted. Unable to follow it any longer, he put the problem down to a lack of sleep and sent his mind into rest-and-repair mode. His concentration was so tightly focused, it was no wonder he missed the telltale signature in that mental push, a harbinger of something far more dangerous than any Psy weapon.
Three hours later, he left the house to blend seamlessly into the steady stream of early morning joggers and walkers. More than one changeling had pointed out that he looked Psy even when dressed otherwise, so he'd spent time watching young human and changeling males, and now affected their careless swagger. But it wasn't natural for him - he was a soldier, with a soldier's bearing, and that would never change.
He passed several Psy patrols without incident, aware they were illegally mind-scanning everyone who passed. What they would read off him were the fuzzy thoughts of a hungover human male. Meanwhile, he noted everything about them. Their black uniforms were indistinguishable from other units in the Psy forces, but for the small gold insignia on the left shoulder - two snakes twisted in combat.
He recognized it at once. These men were part of Ming LeBon's private army. Which meant that Councilor LeBon had been placed in charge of this little enterprise. Not what he would've expected, given Nikita Duncan's proximity to the area. Ming's home base, on the other hand, was in Europe.
Unless Ming had decided to relocate...perhaps to track down a rebel Arrow.
Judd still wasn't back when Brenna went to find him after waking from nightmare-laced dreams that had left her sweaty and gritty-eyed. "Where are you?" She wanted to cry, she was that desperate for him.
Cry?
The reaction was so unlike her, it slapped her fully awake. Frowning, she made a conscious effort to pull herself together. She wasn't one of those females who was constantly in heat. Though if she were, she knew who she would choose to rub up against. That hard soldier's body made her want to do all sorts of deliciously erotic things - she wondered if he had enough spare flesh on him to bite or if her teeth would slide off.
"Hello...Earth to Brenna Shane." Indigo's curious face came into her line of sight. "Why are you standing zoned out in the middle of the corridor?"
Brenna hoped her cheeks weren't as red as they felt. What was going on? Sure, she was attracted to Judd, but this raw sexual hunger was like nothing she'd ever before experienced. "Ah..." Her disrupted night had made her a bit slow. Wait, that was the answer. "I wanted to talk to you."
Indigo jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "Walk with me. I'm off to a morning session with Her Majesty."
"Who?"
"Sienna 'I'm a cardinal Psy and don't need combat training' Lauren. Damn juveniles. They all think they're invincible." Indigo scowled. "So what's up?"
"The murder," she said, wondering if Judd knew about his niece's recalcitrance. "Do you have any more information?"
Indigo's face closed over. "That's on a need-to-know basis and last time I looked, you weren't part of Security."
"I qualify." Brenna set her jaw. "Was it a Psy?"
To her surprise, Indigo responded without further argument. "Inconclusive. No distinctive scent, but we all know not every Psy gives off that metallic smell."
None of the Laurens did. Indigo didn't have to point out which one of the family had the skill to commit the crime. Heart chilling, Brenna gripped the lieutenant's arm. "You don't seriously think it could've been Judd. He wouldn't - "
"How well do you know him, Brenna?" Indigo shook her head. "The man's a fucking shadow. No, I don't think it was him - if it had been, we would have never found a body - but you're kidding yourself if you think he isn't capable of executing someone."
Brenna's gut was a huge knot. "Could it have been one of us?"
"You didn't hear this from me." Indigo's namesake eyes narrowed. "Hell, I don't know why I'm telling you - maybe to piss off your brothers. Why do you let them get away with that overprotective shit?"
She didn't want to go there today. "You were telling me about Timothy."
The other woman snorted. "Charming son of a bitch. Had a talent for sweet-talking his way into beds he shouldn't have been in."
"That's not a motive." Wolf changelings were highly sexual and single packmates often hopped beds. As for mated pairs, they didn't cheat. Ever. "If someone was mad over a stolen lover, they would've just challenged him to prove dominance." A fight but not to the death.
"Yeah, I think so too, but it's a lead. And that wasn't the only mess he got himself into. Timmy had indications of drug use. If he, for whatever reason, threatened to expose the piece-of-shit dealer and it was one of us...well, everyone knows Hawke's view on drugs."
Brenna nodded. "He would've sliced the bastard open." That one of her own pack could be evil enough to deal drugs staggered her. "It wasn't Jax, was it?" she asked with a fresh wave of horror. "He wasn't messed up." The Psy drug had a devastating effect on changeling bodies, leaving them trapped midshift. Death followed in days if not hours.