The Quest (24 page)

Getting to my feet, I leaned out of the broken window. The telekinetic was lying facedown on the grass, alive but unable to move. My bullet had only nicked her arm, so if it weren’t for her body’s total reliance on her psionic power, she might still have been able to escape. Tough luck for her. Taking careful aim, I put a pair of bullets into the back of her head.

Pulling my head back through the window, I saw Merlin on all fours, panting heavily from overexertion.

“Stay here,” I said to him, cautiously returning to the open door, my pistol gripped tightly in both hands.

The telekinetic made three. Were the other two downstairs? Had the other Rabbit teams already finished? Rabbit Two was supposed to come up. Where the hell were they?!

Carefully stepping over the dead man’s chest, I was about to peek my head through the doorframe when the hallway lights suddenly came on. Squinting, I involuntarily took a step back, almost tripping over the corpse. I held my breath as I heard soft footsteps in the hall. I kept my pistol pointed at the doorway.

Then I heard James say on the radio, “This is Rabbit Two, the first floor is clear. We’re upstairs now. We’ve located Alia. She’s alive. Repeat, we’ve located Alia.”

I lowered my pistol as I realized that the footsteps had belonged to Rabbit Two. Properly trained Seraphim wouldn’t have turned on the hallway lights.

“Rabbit One, Rabbit One, are you there?” James said again. “We’re on the second floor. We’ve located Alia.”

“Rabbit Two, this is One,” I said into my microphone. “We’re in the room next door. Be advised, there may be more Angels up here.”

I quickly returned to the bedroom where we had entered from. James and the Richardsons were there with Alia, who was sitting on a cot that the Angels had prepared for her. Everyone appeared uninjured.

“You okay, Alia?” I asked, clicking my pistol’s safety on.

As soon as my sister saw that I wasn’t pointing a gun at her face, she pounced on me, wrapping her arms tightly around my waist. This wasn’t the time for a teary-eyed reunion, though. The house wasn’t officially cleared of threats yet.

Roughly disentangling myself from Alia, I asked James, “How many did your team kill?”

“One downstairs,” he replied. “We didn’t see the telekinetic, but I think Scott’s team got one too.”

“That makes five,” I said, breathing slightly easier. “We’ll need to double-check, though.”

“Where’s Merlin?” asked James.

“Catching his breath,” I said, grinning. “We got the scarecrow.”

Then I turned to my sister and said, “Go with James, Alia. He’ll take you to Terry.”

“Terry’s alive?”
Alia asked in a surprised telepathic voice. She was still too distressed to speak aloud.

“Not for long if you don’t help her. Go now.”

“But Addy, there’re people downstairs. Under the house. Lazlo showed me. He said he’d put me down there with them if I was noisy. Addy, they’re really hurt, and one of them
–
”

I assumed that Lazlo was the outpost leader currently lying dead on the bed, but I didn’t bother asking. Nor was I worried about the other captives in the basement. None of them could be in as dire need of Alia’s healing as Terry right now.

“Alia! Listen to me!” I said, crouching down and grabbing her shoulders. “Terry is in a house nearby. She’s dying. Go to her now. I’ll take care of the people in the basement.”

“But Addy, one of the men
–
”

“Go! James, take her now!”

James grabbed Alia’s hand, and Alia didn’t struggle too much as she was pulled out of the room. Watching them go, I hoped my Rabbits had done a thorough job of clearing the first floor. I suddenly realized that Scott hadn’t called in yet.

“Rabbit One to Rabbit Three, report,” I said into my microphone.

There was no immediate reply, and I repeated anxiously, “Rabbit Three, report! Where are you, Rabbit Three?!”

“Rabbit Three here,” Scott finally answered. “We’re all okay. We’ve finished checking the basement but we couldn’t find Alia.”

Apparently Scott hadn’t been listening to our radio communications.

“We have Alia,” I said. “She’s fine. She’s heading out to Terry now.”

“That’s good news, Adrian,” said Scott. “We also ran into Steven down here.”

“And?”

“He’s dead. He tried to burn us, but Candace shot him.”

“Roger that,” I replied, smiling a bit. “Hold your position. We’ll be down after one last check on the second floor.”

Merlin joined us in the hall. He, the Richardsons and I went back through each room to make sure no one else was hiding.

It was good that we did, too. We found one more Angel cowering in a closet. (Apparently Alia hadn’t included Steven in her count.) This Angel wasn’t a member of the Seraphim, but a psionic hider who had been drafted into concealing the outpost, or so he claimed. My first thought was to execute him on the spot, but seeing him looking up at us with terrified eyes, I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. My adrenaline had ebbed away, and I remembered my sister’s desperate plea not to kill anyone. Alia still believed in sparing our enemies. Though I no longer agreed, I nevertheless found some comfort in letting this man live, especially after killing three people in one night. I didn’t want to end up like Mr. Simms.

Leaving the adults to make sure that the Angel was properly tied up, I went downstairs to find Rabbit Three.

Scott was the only one in the living room, and I asked him what had happened on the first floor.

“Rabbit Two killed the sentry,” said Scott, nodding toward the charred body of a man lying on the carpet.

The window next to the front door was smashed and Mr. Richardson had used the blanket just like we planned, but I noticed that the fire extinguisher lying on the carpet still had its pin. With the sudden breach, James had probably panicked, but fortunately, so had the sentry. It looked as if James had shot the Seraph at the same time as his two spark teammates released a barrage of lightning. The blackened body was barely recognizable.

Scott continued, “It was Steven in the kitchen. He tried to burn us the moment we made entry. I was still holding my fire extinguisher, and Daniel was a bit panicked, but Candace saved us.”

“Where is she?” I asked. “And where is Daniel?”

“Daniel is outside, behind the house. He’ll be alright. Candace is with Steven, I think.”

In the kitchen, I found Candace staring blankly down at the motionless form of Steven, who was lying in a pool of his own blood on the kitchen floor.

As I stood next to her, Candace whispered dazedly, “I can’t believe I killed someone.”

“Better him than you,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

I looked down at Scott’s fire extinguisher lying on the kitchen floor and noticed that it still had its pin inside too. So much for the smoke-screen idea.

Scott had followed me into the kitchen. “I think we were really lucky, Adrian,” he said. “There’s some kind of alarm control box on the dining-room wall that looks like it connects to a series of motion sensors around the house. But for some reason, the thing was turned off. I guess the Angels forgot to activate it. I would have thought that after what they did to us this morning, they would’ve been more careful tonight.”

I shrugged. I was still too spent from the battle to find Scott’s information particularly interesting, and I didn’t share his curiosity about Angel psychology.

Outside, Daniel had been busy donating the contents of his stomach to Mother Nature. Upon returning to the kitchen, he rushed up to me and said frantically, “Adrian, I’m sorry! I’m really, really,
really
sorry!”

“For what?” I asked. Daniel’s breath reeked of vomit, but I doubted he was apologizing for that.

It turned out that Daniel was the one responsible for our botched entry. His nervous hands had pulled the trigger that released the gunshot that woke the house.

“It’s alright,” I said, calming him down. “You didn’t shoot yourself, or anyone else. We’re all still here.”

As I said that, it finally hit me that we had pulled off a near-perfect mission.

We hadn’t known how many Angels were in the house until after we breached, and though I had deliberately put Merlin and myself at the vanguard of the assault to keep our casualties to a minimum, I had spent much of the day wondering how many of my team would end up dying for Terry and Alia.

Perhaps luck did play a major role, but that didn’t change the fact that for a completely inexperienced team, we had done unbelievably well. True, I had almost put a bullet in Alia’s head, and the telekinetic had been a microsecond away from blasting a hole through mine, but not only had we avoided losing any of our members, not one of them had even received a scratch. Wait till Terry heard about this!

I wanted to go see how Alia was doing with Terry, but there was other work to be done here. I had promised my sister that I would see to the other captives.

I turned to Scott and said, “Alia said there were injured people in the basement.”

“Six men,” reported Scott. “Five in one room and one in another. They’ve all been beaten up, but the solitary one is worst off. I couldn’t get them out of their cells because the doors are padlocked.”

“If Alia has any strength left after taking care of Terry, she’ll be wanting to heal them too,” I said, knowing that my sister wouldn’t return to Walnut Lane leaving injured people here. “We’ll need something to pry the locks off with.”

I said to Daniel, “Find us a crowbar or something, please.”

Daniel seemed only too happy to be of use, and scampered out of the kitchen. Candace was still in a state of mild shock, so I escorted her to the living room where she could sit semi-comfortably on a couch. I unclipped my earpiece and plopped it onto the couch next to her. Then I asked Scott to show me the basement.

The entrance was by the kitchen door, and a flight of creaky wooden stairs led us down into a narrow, dimly lit concrete corridor.

There were three heavy steel doors, one on each side of the corridor and one at the far end. Each door had a small square window. Through the window of the door on my left, I saw the five men Scott had told me about. They were dressed in tattered shirts and pants, and had long beards and untidy hair. There was no way to tell if they were Guardians or from some lesser faction. I could sense no destroyer powers among them and guessed that this might be the reason they hadn’t been express-delivered to King Divine for conversion. I wondered how long they had been trapped down here.

The door was locked with a heavy-duty padlock on the outside, and I wasn’t sure a crowbar would be enough to break it off, but we’d try it before looking for something else.

“You guys alright?” I called through the window.

“Yeah,” one of them muttered. All of them were looking at me with utter distrust. I could hardly blame them after what they must have gone through down here.

“We’re going to get you out in a moment,” I told them. “Any of you guys psionic?”

They didn’t reply.

“You’re safe now,” I said reassuringly. “Just give us a moment to get this door open.”

The cell across from them was unoccupied, but the one at the end of the corridor contained the sixth man.

He was bound to a wooden straight-back chair by thin ropes, a black cloth tied around his eyes, his head slumped forward as if he was sleeping. His unkempt blond hair and long beard were matted with dried blood. Aside from the blindfold, he was wearing only a dirty pair of shorts, and there were black and purple bruises all over his body. I realized that he had been recently tortured. This was the man who Alia had been trying to tell me about earlier.

“I found a crowbar,” said Daniel’s voice from behind me. “There was a toolbox hidden in the storeroom.”

I didn’t reply, my eyes still fixed on the figure sitting in the center of the cell.

“Adrian?” said Scott, touching my shoulder.

I turned to him and said quietly, “I know this man.”

I pushed past Scott and Daniel and walked briskly back toward the stairs.

“Wait!” called Scott. “Aren’t we going to get them out?”

“No,” I said, not breaking step. “They’re Wolves.”

Chapter 11: Major Edward Regis

There was no mistaking him, even with the blindfold covering his eyes, even with the longer hair, the beard, the scars and the burns and bruises covering his body. He wasn’t just a Wolf. He was
the
Wolf. Alia had recognized him too. That’s what she had been trying to warn me about.

I barely made it up to the top of the stairs before I collapsed onto the floor, clutching my chest, hyperventilating and feeling so nauseous I was afraid I might throw up.

I didn’t even know his name. But I remembered his boot in my gut. I remembered the tiny metal room, and the excruciating electric shocks running through my body. And I remembered a filthy little girl wearing a tattered hospital gown, dark bruises on her arms and face, so completely lost in her pain and fear that she didn’t even recognize me anymore.

I heard Merlin’s voice say, “It’s alright. Just breathe, Adrian. What’s going on here?”

Scott said, “Adrian says the captives downstairs are Wolves. He says he knows one of them.”

“I see.”

Breathing slowly, I got to my feet and said to Merlin, “Give me your gun.”

I had left my pistol somewhere upstairs, and I didn’t have the energy left for six focused blasts.

Merlin shook his head. “Adrian, we can’t kill them yet. We should find out what they know. That’s why the Angels didn’t kill them either.”

“Give me your gun,” I said again, more severely.

“This isn’t…” began Merlin, but then we heard the sound of a car engine outside.

I followed Merlin and the others to the living room where, through the broken window, I saw Merlin’s van pulling up in front of the house.

The shock of seeing the Wolf who had tortured Alia and me had temporarily driven Terry from my mind, but suddenly I no longer cared about my revenge. That could wait.

We rushed outside where we found James helping Dr. Land get Terry’s stretcher out of the back of the van. Alia had come in the van too.