In the Blood

21 IN THE DIRT

Damascus, OR

March 23

ALEX FINISHED BURYING THE remains of Athena’s latest experiment, tamping the dirt in place with the back of the shovel. Sweat stung his eyes. He straightened, wiping his sleeve across his forehead and arching his back to work out the kinks. He sucked down pine-scented and river-cooled air to wash the stink of melted flesh out of his nostrils.

Leveling the shovel over his shoulder, he headed back to the cottage and the shower. After toweling his hair dry, he pulled on jeans and a black Inferno tee, one with flames licking up from the sleeve hems and the word BURN to the left of center on the chest. He laced his Rippers, shrugged on his hoodie, then followed the wind-through-the-trees rustle of Athena’s whispers.

She sat cross-legged on the sofa in the front room’s closed-curtained gloom, light from the laptop monitor flickering across her face, sparking in her eyes. Her lips moved as she whispered.

“I’m leaving for Seattle,” Alex said, stopping beside the sofa. Blue light flashed across Athena’s rapt face as she watched Dante unmake Johanna Moore yet again. He suspected she had that scene on a repeating loop.

“I’m leaving,” he repeated gently, crouching beside the sofa. “Can I trust you to stay here while I’m gone?”

Athena nodded and her hair tumbled into her eyes. She brushed it back with an absentminded sweep of her hand. Blue light danced in her eyes.

“Stay away from Father. Which means you can’t snuff Mother either. Promise.”

“Promise.”

“What do you see?” Alex asked.

“A night sky full of black and gold wings,” she murmured. “The Fallen descend, setting the sky afire with their song. I see a woman balanced on a tightrope.”

“What does this mean?”

“Ask Dante.”

Alex grasped his twin’s hand and squeezed. “Thena, will you be all right? You could always come with me.”

She looked at him then, the glare from the monitor vanishing from her eyes. “I’ll be fine, Xander.” A small smile brushed her lips. “And you’ll do much better in Seattle without me.” She squeezed his hand back, warm and quick.

The circuit closed again and, for a too-brief moment, Alex felt connected and whole. Then Athena released his hand. Her gaze returned to the monitor. She touched the keypad and light flashed across her face again. Danced in her eyes. Her lips moved, whispered.

He’d lost her. Again.

Alex rose to his feet, opened the front door and left the cottage. The misty rain had stopped. Pale and ragged streamers trailed from the gray clouds, combing across the tops of the trees. A breeze smelling of pine and moist earth rustled through the trees, a soft sighing whisper.

Call me Hades.

A chill swept over him, goose bumping his skin.

Time was running out. Faster than he wanted to imagine. Faster than he could imagine.

Alex sprinted across the yard to the gravel driveway and his Ram. Rain beaded on the truck’s ruby-red finish, glistened on the windows. Sliding in behind the wheel, Alex glanced at the floorboards.

The former shotgun satchel now contained everything he needed to restrain Dante. The iPod encoded with his father’s instructions to Dante and a small, slim trank gun were in his hoodie pockets. As was something Father didn’t know about and sure as hell wouldn’t approve, a flash drive containing all of Bad Seed’s history and Dante’s past.

Just in case everything went south.

“Amen, brother,” Alex murmured, starting up the truck.

DOWN IN THE DIRT, pine needles, and bugs, Caterina watched through binoculars as a tall, lean-muscled blond man in jeans and black hoodie climbed into a pickup. He backed the pickup down the driveway to the highway below and drove away.

Looked like Alexander Lyons had the day off, given the way he was dressed and the late afternoon hour. That left his twin in the cottage and his dying mother in the main house with his father.

“Wonder how long the son’ll be gone,” Beck said.

“Does it matter?” Caterina asked, keeping her attention focused on the expensive house nestled in the pines. “It’ll only take me a moment to finish Wells.”

“Yeah,” Beck sighed. “Little Ms. Bad Ass.”

“Keep your commentary to yourself.”

“Got it. Little Ms. Bad Ass is working.”

Caterina’s muscles tensed, and for a moment, she held in her mind a very clear picture of herself garroting Michael Beck with her binoculars strap, imagined twisting it tight, her knee in his broad-shouldered back. And, for some reason, that image cracked her up. It was like a scene from a retro action flick full of cheesy puns and stiff dialog.

Ah’ll be back…

The day she was reduced to strangling someone with a binoculars strap would be the day she resigned. And took up action flicks? Her resentment of Beck’s presence eased. A deep breath in, tension out. A brief, heated conversation with her handlers at the Portland airport had gotten her nowhere.

I don’t need a backup. Call him off.

Wells and Wallace are yours, Caterina, and yours alone. Beck is there if something should go wrong. Better to be prepared, than caught unaware.

Nothing will go wrong. Have I ever—

Beck stays.

And that had been that. Even though she usually worked alone and preferred it that way, her handlers sometimes saddled her with a backup on assignments with multiple targets. Like this one.

Calmer, her pulse slow and steady, Caterina reviewed what she knew of the house’s occupants:

Alexander Apollo Lyons: He’d taken his mother’s maiden name in an effort, an apparently successful one, to carve a career of his own without any juice from his father’s name. FBI agent, Special Agent in Charge of the Portland field office, thirty-five, six two and one-ninety, the younger twin by two minutes. His power climb through the Bureau had come to a screeching halt when his twin had become mentally ill and he’d transferred from D.C. in order to care for her.

Athena Artemis Wells: A noted clinical psychiatrist specializing in abnormal psychology, thirty-five, five ten and one-forty. She’d been overtaken by schizophrenia, or a form of it, at age twenty-five. She’d managed to function for five more years before her madness landed her in a lockdown ward, drugged and restrained.

Below, the house and the guest cottage beside it were quiet. Two more cars were parked in the driveway, a Saturn and a tarp-covered vehicle. The covered car was most likely Athena’s.

Caterina’s research had revealed that Wells’s wife, Gloria, had been diagnosed with uterine cancer five years ago. She’d undergone surgery and radiation treatments. A year ago, Wells’s receipts revealed purchases of chemotherapy drugs and morphine and other medical supplies, so it would seem that the cancer had returned.

Scanning the yard, Caterina saw no sign of a dog, or pets of any kind. Perhaps the Wellses weren’t a cuddly kind of family. The smell of pine and wet grass filled her nostrils.

Had Bronlee sent the med-unit footage to Wells? Caterina planned to find out as soon as it was dark. Her mission that day was twofold: Clip Wells. Retrieve the missing footage—if it was in Wells’s possession.

Several quiet hours later, the cottage door swung open and a figure stepped out. Caterina focused the binoculars on Athena Wells. Dressed in a stained lab coat and brown cords, she walked barefoot into the yard, leaving the door open behind her. She headed toward the main house, then stopped abruptly. She swiveled.

And looked directly into Caterina’s binoculars.

Athena touched a finger to her lips. Shhhh.

“Christ,” Caterina breathed. Her skin prickled. “She knows we’re here.”

“Impossible,” Beck said. “She’s a basket case. She doesn’t know shit.”

Caterina had the distinct feeling that they were the ones who didn’t know shit.

Athena Wells looked away, then skipped the rest of the way to the main house. Opening the front door, she slipped inside. It closed behind her. A moment later, Caterina’s handheld scanner beeped an all-clear on the alarm system.

It was down. Off or disabled.

Caterina watched the house for another half hour, feeling the tightrope stretch taut beneath her feet. “I’m going in.”

“Roger that,” Beck replied, finally in work mode. He touched the com bud tucked into his ear. “I’ll signal you if the son returns.”

Caterina packed up her binoculars and other gear, and started down the hillside, gun in hand.

WELLS SAT DOWN BEHIND his desk, resting the shotgun against it. A slide show of family pictures flashed across his computer monitor: Gloria in the surf on the beach at Lincoln City, the twins as towheaded toddlers, Gloria laughing. The deep ache in his chest eased for the first time in months.

Soon Gloria would be laughing again. In a matter of hours, Alex would ensure that S listened to the message on the iPod. Then S, beautiful and deadly, would spin into action and his assigned target, SAC Alberto Rodriguez, would die. Hopefully in great agony. And looking into S’s pale, merciless face, Rodriguez would know who had sent him and why.

Once Alex brought S home, Dante Prejean would disappear forever. Wells would direct S to heal Gloria, to steal his beautiful Persephone from Hades’s heated grasp once more, and restore to Wells his laughing bride.

A dark excitement uncoiled within Wells. He tapped his keyboard and the slide show disappeared. Scrolling through his files, he clicked on the one marked S and opened it. He relaxed into his chair as images filled the monitor.

Locked inside a rabbit hutch, the toddler, black hair curling at the nape of his pale neck, watches as his few toys are tossed into a debris fire one by one. Following Wells’s instructions, the boozed-up foster parents tell the child that it’s his fault his toys are being burned.

“You was a bad boy, you. Bad, bad, evil boy. All your fault, you.”

A small plastic guitar melts in the flames. A ball joins it. But when the last toy, a ragged, chewed-up turtle plushie, is dangled above the blaze, the toddler tears his way free of the cage. Firelight glints on his tiny fangs as he snatches the turtle from his foster mother’s hand.

“Shit and hellfire!” The foster father cries, then recovering from his shock, he grabs the toddler. The toddler’s hand and the turtle clutched in the little fingers are shoved into the flames.

Let someone try that now, Wells mused. He scrolled forward through the file seeking other choice bits, other fond memories, then paused. Had he heard the front door open? An alarm beep-beep-beeped in a rapid cycle and Wells’s heart slammed into his throat. His pulse drummed so fast his vision grayed. He lowered his head, gasping for air, thinking, Lovely. All your preparations and you get caught gasping for air like a land-drowning goldfish.

As he reached a shaking hand for the shotgun, the frantic beeping stopped. Locking his fingers around the gun, Wells grabbed it and strained to listen past his thundering pulse. After a moment, he became aware of a soft sound, like the whisper of the wind through the trees.

He exhaled in relief. Only Athena. He drew a still trembling hand across his sweat-damp brow. The whispers preceded his daughter down the hall, the words she was repeating over and over, becoming clear.

“Threeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeintoonethreeinto one…”

But then a chilling question occurred to him—how had Athena silenced the alarm? Not even Alexander knew that he’d changed the codes, not yet.

Still whispering, Athena walked into his office, her dirty, bare feet tracking mud across the pale carpet. She shuffled past his desk, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her spattered and stained lab coat.

“Athena,” Wells said, tucking the shotgun under his arm and reaching for the psi blocker in his pants pocket. The whispers stopped. “What are you doing here?” He swiveled around in his chair.

Athena stood in front of his collection of Hellenic spears, shields, and breastplates. She plucked a spear free and spun around on the balls of her feet. Her Aegean eyes gleamed, a sunlit tide. Smiling, she yanked from her pocket the Taser he’d hidden.

The prongs pierced his chest. Electricity jolted through his body. Pain wiped all thought from his mind. His body twitched and convulsed and flopped onto the floor.

Through a haze of thrumming, heated pain, he heard his daughter’s voice.

“I’m breaking a promise, Daddy,” she said.