Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Read online

  Heretics, his ass. Maybe a quarter of the resistance claimed any sort of magical hijinks. The Mission just slapped that name on anyone they wanted.

  Amanda Green was at least a witch of some skill, but her team were all like Shawn. Normal.

  Resistance members. Protestors.

  He’d known her for years. Partied with her, fought by her side. He owed her more than just a try.

  Fine. He couldn’t get his hands on Laurence Lauderdale for a crime sixteen years old, but he sure as shit could get his daughter.

  She’d be worth more than a few resistance fighters. She’d be worth the whole damned lot.

  “Jonas says the system swap is going to happen soon,” Jennifer called. “We need to go.”

  His guts rolled. Fury. And fear.

  Would May understand?

  Shawn swallowed it down. Frowned as he asked, “How long do I have up there?”

  Eyes glinting, May turned back to the scarred lot at the foot of the tenement. Her mouth, a thin line, settled into a grim slash. “A few hours, maybe. You’re lacking real credentials, so you’ll have to move fast. We’ve prepared what little we know for you, including the location of her personal lab and what Parker remembers of the quad layout.” A beat, a ghost of a smile. “That girl remembers everything. Any questions?”

  Lots. Too many, and none of them with easy answers.

  Shawn didn’t turn; couldn’t bring himself to face out over that lot again and see what it used to be. The rooftop garden before the city had gotten too damned tall to let the sun through. The paint splashed on walls to hide the wear.

  His mother’s smile, when she was wrist-deep in washing.

  Fuck. His heart squeezed hard.

  “Go get her, Shawn,” May said quietly, turning up the collar on her coat. It hid half her profile, muffled her voice. “Bring her back. It’s imperative we get her intel.”

  “What intel?”

  “She’s the daughter of a Church director,” May said, no answer at all. “She’ll have intel.”

  “Intel that Mission director couldn’t give you?”

  “Ex-director,” May corrected, not for the first time. “And yes. Exactly that.”

  He narrowed his eyes, but she didn’t look at him.

  Grunting wordless annoyance, he spun, strode across the lot, and didn’t care that he kicked up gravel and sodden dirt in his wake.

  Jennifer frowned into the patchwork neon sky at whatever Stone said in her ear. As Shawn grabbed the ladder, turning to step down, he watched the woman approach May, touch her arm.

  May bent to listen.

  Her face a pale blur, the team lead gestured as she shaped words he couldn’t hear. When her eyebrows knitted, Shawn recognized the signs.

  May had just won a debate. Probably with her usual end-of-discussion say-so.

  With a glance toward him, Jennifer threw up her hands and stalked to the ladder.

  He didn’t bother to wait.

  This was where things had to change. For Amanda and her team; for him, and all his nebulous plans.

  For everyone.

  He had to put on his good little sheep face.

  Chapter Two

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  Dr. Kayleigh Lauderdale unfolded the lab coat laid out with the rest of her belongings, smoothing out the wrinkles seventy-two hours had creased into the starched fabric. It was easier to concentrate on that little detail than the embarrassment, the irritation, the harmless question caused.

  No. No, she wasn’t feeling all right. She hadn’t felt all right in days. Months, maybe.

  “I’m fine,” she said, not for the first, second, even third time. “Really, Dad, I feel much better.”

  Yet, like the first, second, and third time she’d said it, Laurence Lauderdale looked less than convinced. Worry lines bit deeply into his wizened features, his pale blue-gray eyes intent as he studied her from the hospital suite door.

  He didn’t help her pack what few things she’d needed for her too-long stay in the observation suite. She didn’t ask him to help.

  Her father had never been young, not in her memory. Always distinguished, even in her childhood, now he hovered on the brink of ancient. Deep trenches scored a face more often set to stern than gentle, carved brackets around a mouth whose lips had vanished over the years. His hair, once the same honey-toned blond as hers, had faded to pure white, thinned until the age spots mottling his pink scalp nearly overwhelmed what hair was left.

  He was eighty-three to her thirty, but the generational gap had never bothered her so much as when he watched her with concern, with care. As now.

  He looked so frail. So much more brittle with every passing year. He needed less stress, not more. He needed her to do her part.

  She sighed, pausing with a comfortably worn sweater in one hand and her digital reader in the other. “I’m sorry for worrying you, Dad. The doctors assure me it was only a migraine.” A bad one, sure, and not the first of its kind. The first was enough to cause her to faint in her own lab.

  Subsequent episodes proved too intense to safely ignore.

  But two days of sedation and two more of observation, while mind-bogglingly dull, hadn’t offered any more insight than what Kayleigh already knew.

  She was exhausted, worn out by an ongoing bout of insomnia and an ulcer slowly eating through the lining of her stomach. When she closed her eyes, her mind repainted graphic images across the backs of her eyelids: a tiny, stifling room, screams reverberating in tandem with the crackle of an intercom.

  It had been only three weeks since the Holy Order agents had interrogated Parker Adams in her own Mission cells.

  More days than Kayleigh liked of her hospital stay were spent staring at the white ceiling, replaying the events of the Mission director’s betrayal over and over in her head.

  Parker, cold as ice in every previous meeting Kayleigh had ever had with her, lived up to the challenge. She’d screamed—God, she’d screamed—but Kayleigh remembered her accusations more.

  Your father is butchering people.

  Wild claims, anger and hatred and envy, for all Kayleigh knew. But they stuck. They echoed.

  On bad nights, she found herself back in that room, staring down the barrel of Simon Wells’s gun.

  Suffer the consequences with the rest of them.

  Simon was one of her Salem subjects. A man bred from witch and missionary DNA. He’d always been a wild card; an agent who skirted every rule she’d ever laid out.

  Her half brother, Parker had claimed. The first of her dead mother’s secrets.

  Exhaustion. Sure. It was as good a word as any.

  She hadn’t mentioned any of it to the doctors of the Magdalene Asylum. When it came to her health, she’d learned long ago that they reported to her father, and he had enough to worry about. Especially now, with the Mission in disarray and the Church demanding solutions.

  When Laurence smiled, he revealed teeth that had long since been replaced by dentures, but his eyes crinkled. “If you’re sure, I should go handle this press release.” And just like that, it was back to work.

  She winced. She’d been a late-in-life baby, but Kayleigh had never really felt unloved.

  Just . . . sometimes a little invisible. When she wasn’t being smothered.

  “Kayleigh?”

  Her stomach cramped. “Yes, absolutely.” She zipped the small overnight bag closed, adjusted her hair with a quick hand through it. She ran a critical eye over her small suite. Rumpled bed, machines no longer beeping at her with every heartbeat, a vase of expensive flowers her father had sent a day ago.

  That was it. A brief stay, inconclusive tests, and a bunch of hothouse blooms. Talk about wasted time.

  “I have a field trip, anyway,” she added briskly.

  “Oh?”

  She turned her back on the room. “I want to go down to the GeneCorp facility, see if there’s any—”

  His face clouded. “No.”
/>   Kayleigh frowned back at him. “Why not?”

  “That place is dangerous and near to collapsing.” He shook a gnarled finger at her, emphasizing his point. “You should have access to all the data the techs were able to pull. You don’t need to go yourself.”

  Except she did. Because techs knew only one language, and it wasn’t hers. They’d never know what they’d be looking at. Kayleigh would.

  “But I can—”

  “The answer is no, Kayleigh. Get it out of your mind.”

  Frustration gnawed at her.

  His worn, arthritic fingers curved over her shoulder. “You should go home, get some rest. You’ve earned it, sweetheart.”

  If only. “I can’t.” Especially not now that he’d taken away her one shot at a lead.

  He frowned at her, thick, wiry eyebrows knitting. “I haven’t looked over your charts yet. What did the doctors say?”

  For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, a smile worked its way to her lips. She touched his hand gently. “Same thing the doctors always tell you, Dad. Rest more, work less, eat better.”

  He snorted. “Smart mouth. Like your mother.”

  Twenty-two years of coming to terms with Matilda Lauderdale’s death meant she no longer flinched at the reminder of her mother. Her rueful humor eased into something quietly sad, instead.

  Something slightly bitter.

  Her mother. Half the reason Kayleigh was even in this predicament. “Speaking of,” she said, frowning over her father’s stooped figure. The clock on the wall told her it was only just after one. Her techs would be leaving, an hour before the next shift change, but there was plenty of time to get some work done. “If I can’t go down to the old lab, I need to go to mine. The Eve sequence won’t patch itself.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to take the day off?”

  “To do what with?” she asked wryly. “You know I’d only work from home.”

  “I know.” His smile went crooked. “That’s my girl.” Laurence shifted, elbowing the door wider and gesturing a faintly trembling hand to the hall beyond. It was quiet in the recuperation floors, empty of personnel. “I knew you’d pull through.”

  She usually did. Anything else would only disappoint everyone counting on her. Kayleigh slung the bag over her shoulder as she matched her father’s halting steps down the pristine white hall. “Will the press conference be complicated?” she asked, looking down at his mottled head.

  Once upon a time, he’d stood taller than her. She couldn’t remember exactly when that had changed.

  If he felt his years, he didn’t show it. Dedication; that was the Lauderdale way. “Bishop Applegate and I are working out the details,” he replied. “That Adams woman left the Mission a mess. We’ve had to plug the holes with our own.”

  Our own. Once, the witch-hunting arm of the Holy Order of St. Dominic had been completely separate from Sector Three, the research and development division. The Mission had housed their headquarters in the Holy Order’s central quadplex, across from her father’s Sector Three and flanked by the Holy Cathedral and the New Seattle civics center on either end. At the peak of the metropolis, these four structures comprised the seat of power in the city.

  A seat Parker Adams had tipped over.

  With so many missionaries gone traitor or killed in the ensuing fighting, Kayleigh wasn’t surprised to learn her dad had filled in the missing agents with subjects from Sector Three’s ongoing Salem Project.

  Regardless of everything else, there was always the threat of witchcraft in New Seattle’s streets. The Coven of the Unbinding might have been dismantled, but that didn’t stop so-called resistances from causing trouble in the rest of the city. A full missionary force needed to be ready at all times.

  Still, it seemed wrong to her. The Salem witches weren’t a long-term solution, not as long as they kept breaking down. Dying.

  But that was her responsibility.

  Kayleigh nodded, but slowly. As her dad stabbed the elevator button, she stared sightlessly at the silver door and wondered how many of their “own” would make it through the transition phase.

  The project combined the best of witch DNA with the hardiest of missionary samples. The whole process had been started by Laurence and Matilda Lauderdale before the quakes that had crumbled the old city of Seattle five decades ago, continued through the rebuilding, through Matilda’s death, even through Kayleigh’s meteoric rise through the classified ranks of the research and development sector.

  They hadn’t made new subjects in twenty-five years, but time was ticking. The subjects were dying. Science demanded progress.

  Her father needed her to come through.

  “I need to meet with the planning committee before the conference,” her father said as the doors slid open on a faint hiss of compressed air. “You’ll be all right?”

  “I’ll be fine,” she promised, summoning as reassuring a smile as she could. She resisted the urge to rub her stomach. It wouldn’t help. “Will you be home for dinner?”

  His face clouded. “Not tonight, sweetheart.”

  He didn’t offer an excuse. She didn’t ask. The excuses all started to sound the same, anyway; work, work, and more work. She did it, too. “Okay. I’ll just have something delivered.”

  “Don’t work too hard.” He patted her hand, dry skin of his palms rasping against hers. “Oh, before I forget. I’ve arranged for someone to keep you company—”

  That got her attention. “What? Dad, no.”

  “Don’t argue with me,” he said over her. Old he might be, stooped and gnarled, but when he spoke like that, his faded eyes sharp as glass, even Kayleigh recognized a lost cause. “You work longer hours than your techs and I don’t want you alone until these migraines go away. The material you’re working on is too sensitive to risk another lapse, am I clear?”

  She gritted her teeth, forced herself to keep from flinching. “Yes, sir,” she said, because he wasn’t speaking to her as her father now. He spoke as Sector Three’s director, her superior in every way.

  “Security will meet you at your lab. I’ve pulled from Bishop Applegate’s complement, so don’t give them any lip.” Gesturing her inside the smooth, reflective elevator, he added, “Keep me apprised of the project.”

  “I will.”

  “And, Kayleigh?” He thrust a hand against the panel edge, glowering at her from beneath his protruding eyebrows. “Take care of yourself, sweetheart. I worry about you.”

  Her mouth drifted up in one corner. “I will,” she repeated. The doors slid shut on his nod, and Kayleigh allowed herself the luxury of leaning back against the paneled wall.

  The reflection staring back at her looked tired. Even taking the time she’d had—showering away four days of immobility, fixing her hair into loose waves, putting on a bit of makeup to offset the shadows under her eyes—didn’t wholly help. Her navy blazer, yellow sleeveless blouse, and khaki slacks looked both sunshiny and professional; her bright red flat shoes provided a flash of contrast that she’d hoped would cheer her up.

  It didn’t work. Her father’s concern, his obsession with his work, her own workaholic tendencies were catching up.

  As soon as she completed this project, she was going to take a vacation. A long, do-nothing vacation where she holed up in her suite, never got out of her pajamas, and slept for as long as she wanted.

  There were days when her job sucked.

  She’d followed in her parents’ footsteps, was good at it. She loved the challenge of mapping the witchcraft allele in human DNA, loved the puzzle of fitting the pieces together. But then, along came one she couldn’t solve.

  The Eve sequence.

  The one thing that could stop the catastrophic breakdown of the Salem subjects, the thing her mother had died before she could finish, became Kayleigh’s responsibility.

  Working on it made her feel closer to her mother. Talking about it made her feel closer to her dad, whose eyes would light with the challenge. Jus
t as hers had, once.

  It seemed a lifetime ago.

  She’d started banging her head against the problem only a few months ago, when her predecessor had unexpectedly died. Nadia Parrish had been one of her father’s contemporaries, but she was no Matilda Lauderdale in capability.

  Neither, for that matter, was Kayleigh.

  To have her father—to have the director of Sector Three trust Kayleigh with such a monumentally important task, to be thought of as not just an adequate replacement but even on equal terms with her mother before her . . .

  Kayleigh scrubbed her face with one hand.

  So much pressure.

  At least her vision was clear today, no low-key corona hanging over the lights or flickering wildly. Going back to work might just be enough to trigger another migraine, but at least she’d have a babysitter to catch her this time.

  Going home didn’t really appeal. She hadn’t slept much in months, anyway, and she’d long since learned there were no answers written on her bedroom ceiling.

  The elevator doors slid open. She strode into the hall that was like every other corridor in the Magdalene Asylum, faceless and marked only by indecipherable numbers. Though New Seattle’s premier hospital took up the first dozen or so floors, Sector Three claimed the rest. Labs filled the building, large to small, from the theoretical to the experimental.

  Lab Seventeen—her lab, specializing in whatever genetic projects she fancied—occupied a good portion of this hall, though she didn’t need that much space. Most of the time, the equipment remained dark and under protective wraps. Since being handed the Salem Project responsibilities, she hadn’t had any opportunity to play with her own endeavors.

  If all went well, if she could crack the anomaly cutting the lifespan of Salem subjects tragically short, she’d have more data for her own use. If she could get inside the single, tiny allele responsible for the abilities the rest of the world called witchcraft, she could have the foundation for the greatest scientific breakthrough in decades.

  If. Big if.

  So far, she was coming up empty with a whole lot of degenerated subjects fed to the incinerators. Just like Mrs. Parrish’s attempts before her. Her own father’s before that.