Chase Me (2 page)

So much for
his
news. As Glynna chattered away, he winced, raising a hand to his stinging left eye. Was there any aspirin in the house? Because he could really—
Ouch.
He caught his breath as the sting became a stab. Something… snapped. “Shit.” Doubling over, he slapped his hand over the hot, lancing pain.

“Gabe?” He heard his mother’s worried voice.

He collapsed onto a nearby chair.
Jesus.
Someone was skewering his eye with a rusty blade.

“Gabe?” Gwen touched his wrist. “What is it?”

“Pain,” he gritted out. “In my eye.”

“Glynna, call the ambulance—”

“No ambulance.”

“Gabe—”

“Call Dr. Mueller.” Gabe rattled off his ophthalmologist’s phone number.

“What’s going on?” his mother demanded from half a world away.

Gingerly opening his eyes, Gabe peered at the screen and tried to shove down the panic. He could hear the worry in her voice, but he couldn’t see her mouth.

The black sinkhole in his field of vision swallowed her lower face whole.

***

Lorin Schlessinger stumbled into her chilly cabin, tracking clods of mud across the rough plank floor, entirely focused on the precious cargo she carried, swaddled in a large piece of treated chamois.

Shouldering the heavy door closed, she nudged the fabric aside to make sure she wasn’t hallucinating.
Nope. Still there.
She carefully set the luminescent silver metal box, about the size of a fisherman’s tackle box, on the wooden table next to her laptop. The box was unexpectedly light for its size, and accidentally hitting it with the stake she’d tried to hammer into the ground hadn’t scratched its surface.

She was late for her meeting, but… damn, what a reason for tardiness. After years of backbreaking work—hell,
generations
of backbreaking work—had the unforgiving ground finally surrendered not just concrete evidence of their ancestors, but the Holy Grail of concrete evidence?

Noah
Pritchard’s command box.
Knees suddenly wobbly, she lowered herself onto one of the table’s straight-backed chairs and scrubbed her fists against her numb cheekbones.
Breathe. In and out.

She gazed at the box, marveling at the serene, almost phosphorescent, glow. She wasn’t aware of any local metal possessing such properties, but she was no metallurgist. Someone back at Sebastiani Labs would have to help identify the composition—once she let the thing out of her sight.

It was sheer dumb luck she’d found the box at all. She’d driven up to the Isabella dig ahead of the rest of the crew to wake the northern Minnesota archaeological site up from its long winter nap, hauling canned goods to the cookhouse, turning on the electricity and such. After evicting some squirrels from the outhouse, she’d gotten that indescribable itch between her shoulder blades—
get
up
to
the
dig
site
—and hiked the third of a mile from base camp up to the swatch of unforgiving, iron-laced land where her parents had discovered the petroglyphs depicting their ancestors’ violent arrival on the planet, confirming their oral histories.

Remnants of last night’s late May snow still nestled in the shadowy northern lee of a few rocks and trees, but her experienced eye—and the mud on her boots—told her that the ground had thawed enough to start repairing the pit.

Her first sight of the protective tarp last year’s dig crew had laid over the hole made her adrenaline jump. As she expected, the soil underneath the tarp was a muddy, rocky mess. Frost heaves had shoved most of their carefully placed stakes right out of the ground, but other than that, it looked like the site had wintered well. Once school was out and this year’s crew arrived, the real work could begin, and the half-exposed hearth they’d uncovered in the southeast corner of the grid late last fall would once again get her personal attention. With a wistful look at the shallow hole, Lorin turned her back and made herself pick up her hammer. Repair first, explore later.

She had no idea how long she’d been pounding stakes when one of them simply shattered instead of slicing neatly into the ground. She picked up her trowel to dislodge what she was sure was a pesky piece of iron ore, but when the corner of the box emerged, glinting in the struggling sun, it was all she could do to remember her training, to not just claw the thing out of the muddy ground with her bare hands. Instead, she’d taken a deep, shaky breath, mentally and physically stepped back, and forced herself to place the measuring devices she carried in her backpack. She took pictures of the box
in
situ
as she excavated, finally lifting it from its sleeping place and stumbling back to the cabin.

Lorin shivered, rubbing her dirty hands together for warmth. The sun had set, taking the temperature down with it. She switched on several lanterns, throwing light into every corner of the rustic cabin, and then set a match to the kindling and newspapers she’d laid in the cabin’s potbellied stove earlier in the day. Before long, the kindling was crackling merrily, and she poured water into the battered blue iron basin to wash her hands and forearms.

She gazed at the box glowing on the table in its soft chamois nest, her eyes narrowing. She hadn’t wiped it down yet. Where was the dirt, the mud?

How odd.

She didn’t have time to analyze that now, or to sweep up the mess she’d made on the floor. She was late. Moving quickly to the small table serving as the cabin’s desk-cum-kitchen table, Lorin punched the power button on her laptop and swiped her now-clean fingertip across its biometric fingerprint pad. Sitting down, she looked to the ceiling, issued a quick but heartfelt plea to the tech gods, and engaged the Council’s proprietary conferencing software. Here in the Minnesota north woods, comm links and cell coverage were spotty at best. Lorin glanced at her battered watch.
Damn
it.
She should have tested the sat link before going up to the dig to repair stakes.

But if she’d done that, she wouldn’t have found the box.

Apparently the gods were in a benevolent mood. Her screen snapped to life, multiple windows popping open, reflecting the Council meeting agenda, a chat room, and video feeds providing views of the speaker and the entire boardroom table. On-screen, she watched her holographic body shimmer into her assigned seat next to her mother.

Ugh, she had mud all over her face. She might as well step away to wipe it off, because Krispin Woolf had the floor, and he was pontificating about—ah, who the hell cared? The WerePack Alpha’s opinions and perspectives, rarely reasonable to begin with, had veered more wildly out of synch with his fellow Council members ever since his daughter Andi had been assaulted the previous year.

It didn’t help that the perpetrator, a deeply disturbed off-planet incubus named Stephen, had escaped and hadn’t been recaptured yet.

“I’m sure that Dr. Tyson’s qualifications are stellar, but he’s… human.”

Even three hundred miles north of the Sebastiani Labs Chanhassen boardroom, Lorin heard the slur in Krispin Woolf’s voice. “No offense,” Woolf added with a glance at the Council’s sole human representative, Security and Technology Second Jack Kirkland.

“None taken,” Jack responded.

Lukas Sebastiani, the Security and Technology First, leaned into the table, his powerful incubus body coiled with tension.

Crap, what have I missed
? The meeting had barely started, and Lukas already looked ready to blow.

“Krispin, we’re evaluating candidates for the Humanity Chair. Hu-man-i-ty,” he emphasized between gritted teeth. “Every single one of the candidates will be human. That’s the point.”

As Krispin once again repeated his objection to filling the Humanity seat, which had been empty since Carl Sagan’s death, Lorin noticed Jack tap something on his mini. Probably urging Lukas to throttle back. The WerePack Alpha specialized in being a pain in everyone’s ass—especially Lukas’s. The tension between Lukas and Krispin had been escalating ever since Stephen had somehow escaped from their most secure holding cell.

It wasn’t as if Lukas had personally allowed Stephen to escape. Lorin looked at Claudette and Scarlett Fontaine sitting side by side on the other side of the table. The sirens had been impacted by Stephen’s crimes even more than the Woolfs had been. Stephen had killed Claudette’s daughter and Scarlett’s sister Annika on his rampage, but not only did the Fontaines not blame Lukas, Scarlett had become his bondmate.

On-screen, Lukas’s nostrils flared at a particularly bigoted comment. Jack’s face was rigid with distaste. Today, the two men seemed to share nothing in common except their oversized bodies. Lukas usually exuded a casual, rugged presence, but today his aura seemed dark and barely leashed. Jack, sitting next to him, was blond Armani elegance.

Beef
and
Cake.
Lorin knew that despite their nicknames, first impressions could be deceptive. She and Jack were occasional sparring partners, and any human who could hold his own against a Valkyrie was no pushover. Lukas, despite his size, was an absolute marshmallow with those he loved, and if anything, his recent bonding had simply softened his center even more.

Elliott Sebastiani finally tapped on the boardroom table with the unusual palm-sized rock that had served as the Council president’s gavel for as long as anyone could remember. “Order, please,” he said impatiently. The tension between Lukas and Krispin was long running, ongoing, and never ending, but even if he privately agreed with his son, Elliott was a stickler for procedure. “Ten minutes for the WerePack Alpha.”

If sticking to procedure put a time limit on Krispin Woolf’s remarks, all the better.

As Krispin expounded upon the apparent gaps in Dr. Tyson’s resume, Lorin watched the other Council members mentally push back from the boardroom table. Most of the Firsts had schooled their faces into expressions of polite neutrality, but the Seconds, several of them new to their positions, either weren’t as successful at it or simply didn’t care who saw their reaction. Sitting next to his father, WerePack Second Jacoby Woolf seemed frozen in place as he listened to his father’s frighteningly rational-sounding, yet bigoted, assessment. Scarlett Fontaine focused on Lukas, worry chasing over her pale redhead features. Teenaged Incubus Second Antonia Sebastiani’s expression simply said, “WTF, dude.”

Lorin opened a private message box.

[LSchlessinger]: Hi, Mom.

In the room view camera, Lorin saw her mother reach for her laptop. Her huge jade and bone bracelet clattered.

“Alka, do you mind?” Krispin Woolf shot her a dirty look.

Her mother removed the priceless bracelet and set it on the boardroom table with a polite smile. She then typed as noisily as she could.

[ASchlessinger]: Hello, dear. How was the drive up?

Lorin sighed. She was twenty-seven years old, and her mother still worried when she traveled by herself.

[LSchlessinger]: No ice on the roads, no freezing rain, no snow. No flat tires or blown radiator hoses. No marauding bears. No serial killers hiding in the bathroom at the rest stop.

[ASchlessinger]: No need to be nasty. How is the site?

[LSchlessinger]: Mud Bowl City. I… found something.

[ASchlessinger]: You started digging? Lorin. You know better.

[LSchlessinger]: Mom—

[ASchlessinger]: You know how important preparation is…

[LSchlessinger]: Mom—

[ASchlessinger]: You have to follow procedure, Lorin—

[LSchlessinger]: MOM. I found it WHILE I was repairing the grid.

Lorin watched her mother pause and purse her lips. She cursed under her breath and finally responded.

[ASchlessinger]: What’s “it”?

Lorin glanced at the box gleaming on the table.

[LSchlessinger]: Let me open a private cam session…

Lorin activated the supplemental webcam, opened a stream to her mother, and tried not to squirm in her chair as she waited.

“Despite what the younger Mr. Sebastiani says, filling the Humanity seat places us at more risk, not less.”

Lukas sat up. “Krispin, with today’s technology and social media saturation, it’s becoming more and more of a challenge to stay under humanity’s radar. It’s just a matter of time before our true origins are revealed,” he said. “We need to start preparing the way for—”

“We all know your assessment of risk isn’t exactly foolproof these days.”

Hoo
boy.
Did Krispin Woolf have a death wish?

Her mother abruptly straightened in her seat. Leaning in closer to her laptop screen, she raised her hand and tried to touch. “Oh, my. Oh, my stars.”