Never Fade - Bracken Alexandra - Страница 23

When the porch light switched off and Rob bent over the gold door lock, I shrugged out of the League’s heavy black coat, pulling out a lighter and the Swiss Army knife I had stashed in one of the pockets and tucking them in my boots. Liam’s old leather jacket wouldn’t keep the cold out for long, but it didn’t have a tracking device in it.

I climbed up to the driver’s seat and popped the door open. My boots had just landed in the snow when Jude came around the back of the ambulance.

“What are you—?”

I bolted forward, clapping a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide in panic until I pressed a finger to my lips. Jude was too confused to process what was happening. I had to take his wrist and drag him behind me, letting the ambulance’s bulk block us from view.

“We’re inside,” came Rob’s rough voice in my ear. “Status, Leader?”

“On schedule, Minder.”

I glanced up at the street sign—Garfield Street—and tried to get my bearings. I had to put as much distance between Rob and us before he realized we were gone; I could outrun him on foot, but I couldn’t outrun a car…especially not with Jude. If we could make it back to the protest, we might be able to lose him and Reynolds in the crowd. Rob wouldn’t think to look for us in the one place we had a decent chance of being caught. He was a brute, and a vicious one at that, but he wasn’t very imaginative.

Jude panted beside me, looking slightly frazzled but otherwise all right. The wind was knocking around his hat and tugging at mine. I pulled the black knit cap down snug over my ears, trapping my loose long hair and muffling sounds from both prongs of the Op.

The cold was like nothing I had ever felt in Virginia. It was sharp, a persistent clawing at every bare inch of skin. I tried picking up my pace into a faster run, blinking back the tears and snow flurries, but Jude was struggling to keep up as it was. Patches of ice snapped underfoot, branches hidden beneath the old snow crushed as I trampled through the trees separating the houses and buildings. South, south, south—I just needed to keep heading south, and I’d find Harvard Yard, and the protesters, and escape.

“Target acquired. Tangerine, is the perimeter clear?”

Jude jerked toward me in wild fear, but I shook my head in warning.

Rob’s voice went down my spine like a match against a matchbook. The fire it lit was small, but it was burning through the tight control I had over my voice. “Oh yeah,” I said after I pressed a finger to my comm. “The coast is all clear.”

I knew the moment Rob opened the ambulance door, the very second he found us gone. His end of the line went silent, even as HQ and Barton were requesting status updates from him. I could see his face in my mind, white, rapidly turning purple with the effort to hold back his fury. A small smile curved the corners of my mouth. He couldn’t call out for me without revealing that he had lost me in the first place. A Minder’s job, above anything else, was to mind the freaks under his care.

“Tang—” Reynolds began to say, only to be sharply cut off.

“Hey, Rob,” I said in a low, even voice. I saw the light from the bonfire in the yard, the new orange hue of the sky. Jude caught the back of my jacket, his long fingers twisting in the leather as he struggled to keep up with me. Snow was falling harder now. I pulled the hood of the fleece I was wearing under my jacket up over my head, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and crossed the last street. “I got a question for you.”

“Roo,” Jude whispered. “What are we doing? Where are we going?”

“Tangerine, keep all non-Op transmissions off the line,” came Barton’s voice.

Good. I wanted him to hear. I wanted all of them to hear this.

The ring of police and National Guardsmen had been busted open, and the protesters gathered there were streaming past them, signs clutched in their hands, drums beating. A midnight march, I guess, though I had no idea for what. And judging by the variety of signs I saw, they weren’t really sure what they were protesting, either. The draft that forced them into PSF service? President Gray’s unwillingness to negotiate with the West Coast government? The general state of awfulness spreading like poison over the entire country, as the pollution had over Los Angeles?

Most of the faces around us were young but not teenagers. A good portion of the country’s universities and colleges had been temporarily shut down due to lack of funding, but if a few still had money left, I guess Harvard would have been one of them.

WE ARE YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES… read the sign next to me.

I let them get ahead of us, trailing far enough behind that the others had less of a chance of hearing the chanting over the comm. I waited until they had cleared out of the square before touching the comm again to activate the microphone.

“I just want to know—what were their names?”

“Tangerine.” Rob’s voice was tight, and he sounded slightly breathless. “I have no idea—”

“Tangerine, cease—” The woman at HQ didn’t sound particularly happy with me, either.

“What the hell is going on, Minder?” Barton was still listening, too.

“Those two kids you took out of that camp, the night before we met,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead on a young guy with dreadlocks waving us all forward. “The boy and the girl. I’m sure you remember them—it must have taken a lot of effort to get them out, never mind to tie their hands and feet that way.”

Jude stared at me, his dark brows drawn together in confusion.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me. You got them out, and then you killed them in that alley and left them there—why? What was the point? What did they say or do to make you so angry? That girl was begging you. She didn’t want to die, but you took her out of that camp, and you executed her. You didn’t even take that boy’s mask off.”

I clenched my fists to get them to stop shaking. And in that brief second, suddenly it was Alban’s voice crackling in my ear.

“What’s all this?” He took a deep breath. “I need you both to meet Leader. If you don’t want to return to HQ with Minder—”

“We’re not coming back to HQ,” I said, “until he’s gone forever.”

It was a dangerous play; if Alban took the bait and booted Rob, there was still a good chance that others in his bloodthirsty pack would retaliate against the kids at HQ. But—but—now that Alban knew Rob was hostile, he and the agents we could trust would be on the lookout for more of that attitude, at least for the next few weeks. Jarvin and the other conspirators would feel safer knowing that Jude was away and couldn’t rat them out. And I didn’t need forever—a few weeks and I would be back with all we needed to force them out.

“Rob, listen, I just want to know their names. I want to know if you even bothered to ask before you killed them.”

“Do you think this is a game? Stop lying, goddammit! When I find you—”

“You better hope you never find me,” I said, ice edging each word. I didn’t even have to close my eyes to see that girl’s face. I felt her walking beside me, her eyes open, forever fixed on the barrel of the gun and the hand that held it steady. “Because what I’ll do to you will be so much worse than a bullet in the skull.”

I didn’t wait to hear the response to that. I yanked the comm out and dropped it, letting the feet behind me smash it and scatter the pieces. I motioned for Jude to follow me as I jogged to catch up to the protesters. We were swept into the flood of people pouring down Massachusetts Avenue’s wide berth. I was being jostled from all sides—arms were being thrust around, people were yelling and screaming, and it was the safest I had been in months. I threw a glance behind me as I surged forward, looking for Jude’s pale face—there he was, eyes wide, cheeks and nose pink with the blistering cold. I was coasting on a wave of simmering power and control. I had gotten us away, and now no one was even looking at us.