CHAPTER 21: LIBERATION
Mid-stride, frozen in the funniest positions, the deer in headlights, glazed-eyed look just wasn’t accurate enough in describing how we all appeared when the electricity came flaring back to life.
“Bathroom!” I pushed Andrew as hard as I could through the door that was only feet away from us. In doing this, they all fumbled through the tiny entrance into a one-stall bathroom. I turned the lock and slammed my back against the door.
“Good thinking.” Joseph nodded in approval. “There are no cameras in here.” Sheesh, I hoped not.
Lucia, looking at the toilet with mild apprehension, raised one eyebrow. “What’s a camera?”
I’d totally forgotten that she didn’t know these things. Because of Andrew and Ehno’s psychic link, I just assumed that Andrew shared the information he had learned with Ehno, but I had not even considered that Lucia would still be in the dark about this modern world. Regardless, she was in control of her emotions and showed no signs of distress. She had more guts than me.
Joseph opened his mouth to answer her.
“No time,” I interrupted. “If they haven’t realized we’re gone already, it won’t be long until they do. We need to get out of here quickly and quietly.” They all stared at me for the answer, and, for once, it just came to me. “Joseph, you need to leave. If anyone asks what happened—you don’t know. Go above ground and find us a car. Wait for us outside the building we entered. I have a feeling people won’t ask you questions, considering your clearance.”
He nodded.
“Go,” I ordered. After unlocking the door, Joseph peeled out of the bathroom as if he had wheels attached to the bottom of his shoes.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” I said while I bolted the door again. “We’re going to walk out of this bathroom like it’s no big deal. You three don’t say a word to anyone. If someone asks what’s going on, I’ll tell them that I’m taking you for testing. Hell.” I rubbed the back of my neck anxiously. “I don’t really know what I’ll tell them. Maybe I’ll tell them it’s none of their business, or maybe I’ll just shock them. We need to keep attention off us.”
“And what about the cameras?” Andrew asked.
“Keep your wrists together behind your backs at all times. They’ll think I’ve captured you and will never know the difference.” Or so I hoped. “Once we’re on the surface, I need you to fly Andrew. Just take off into the sky.”
“Not without you,” he argued resolutely.
“There’s no time for this. We have seconds before guards show up and start shooting us. We need you in the sky to let Ehno know if anyone is behind or in front of us once we get off this property. Plus, Ehno and Lucia will be with me.” The words were rushed. I had to stop to take a breath. “I’m not even sure how we’re going to get out of here. Please, Andrew, I need your help.”
He closed his eyes as if he were praying for patience. Then he looked at me in defeat. “Let’s go.”
“Okay.” I turned around and unbolted the lock. “Let me look, first.” Opening the door slowly, I had a moment of déjà vu. This was sort of how I felt when I was opening the bathroom door to my office right before the Shadow attacked me. I peeked out of the crack I made to see two armed men walking down the hall. I shut the door and put my back up against it again. “Crap, crap, crap,” I whispered furiously. I took a deep breath and slid the door open a little bit farther.
“Dr. Moretti?” A deep voice said.
“Oh, hi.” I slipped out of the bathroom, trying my best to keep the door shut as much as possible as I closed it behind me and put my back to it. “I’m sorry—”
“I’m Agent Kowski.” The agent was tall with a full head of gray hair. “We’re just down here checking on all the labs. You good?”
“Oh yeah—yeah. I’m fine,” I said nervously, hoping he couldn’t hear the unease in my voice as it rose.
Agent Kowski stared at me suspiciously for a few seconds before he gave a curt nod and walked into the bioengineering lab, which was only two feet from the bathroom.
I looked quickly around the corner and noticed that no one was in the supernatural department’s lab yet, before dashing back to the bathroom and flinging the door open. “Let’s go.”
The three angels flooded out into the hallway and sprinted toward the elevator. Their movements were fluid and sinuous, and surprisingly, so were mine. There was no time to think—I slid my keycard across the lock and put my palm against the screen as it read my print. The female voice greeted me, just like it had earlier. After a few seconds the doors opened to admit us.
“All aboard,” I ordered.
Ehno and Lucia entered, and Andrew grabbed me around my waist to push me forward with him. Warmth spread through me at his gentle touch. The doors shut, and I let out a breath of relief. Then the doors opened on the next floor. Superb. There was a man in a suit, roughly six-two with dark brown hair. He was facing away from us but turned around when he heard the ding of the elevator.
I breathed out a high sigh of relief when I recognized the dark brown eyes. The tension in Joseph’s shoulders deflated when he saw me. “Oh, thank God,” I exclaimed. “What are you still doing underground?”
“I thought I’d never get away from that guy.” He shook his head back and forth. “I ran into one of the scientists on the elevator, and he asked for my help.”
“Wait. That means you haven’t been on the surface yet.”
“No,” he confirmed. “I haven’t.”
“Dammit. What are we going to do now? We can’t just all hang out while you pull a car around,” I bellowed, frustrated.
He stared at me intently for several seconds as the elevator continued its ascent up the shaft before he groped in his pockets. He pulled out a tiny device that I recognized as an earpiece. He turned it on and put it in his ear.
“Agent Jackson?” Joseph said with authority. There was a pause. “Pull a car around building four, leave it running.” Another short pause. “No. Right now. Yes. Yes. Okay.” He turned the device off and shoved it in his pocket. “There will be a car waiting.”
“Good.” I sighed in relief. “Andrew’s going to take to the sky immediately. He’ll be able to communicate with Ehno in the car to let us know what’s going on ahead and behind us.” Andrew shot me a conspiratorial look.
“Are you sure you haven’t done this before?” Joseph smirked.
“No. But since the only thing you could come up with was a cool name, I had to act rashly when we had the chance to escape.” I scowled playfully. “Operation Liberate Angels . . . Ola,” I grumbled.
“Hey,” he said, raising his hands in defense, “we had only an hour here before we were shuffled back out to capture you. I still can’t believe you used your actual name at check-in.” He shook his head and tsked me. I was about to reply with some witty and funny comment when the doors popped open on the ground level. Susan was talking with Sue, the lab technician I had kicked out in the wee hours of the morning. They turned and looked at us as if they had been waiting.
“Ah-hah. I knew we’d find you trying to sneak out of here with the subjects,” Sue said triumphantly.
Shit, I shouted in my head, cursing myself up one side and down the other.
Susan held the radio to her mouth, about to call for backup. I panicked. Everyone else was still; their expressions were all frozen in a thinking stupor. The angels were protectors so they were probably struggling with what was right and what was wrong while Joseph did nothing—probably so he could say we captured him. I didn’t blame him if he didn’t want to fight back—just to save face. But who really knew what was going on through their heads? They could be thinking about the price of tea in China for all I knew. Plus, they were two women, and I knew that men had a hard time thinking about hurting women. Well, I wasn’t getting caught; I wasn’t going back down into that lab so they could experiment on my angels—the very creatures who saved my life and Joseph’s. I was the Illuminator,
here to save them all. Save them all. Hear the keyword?
I reached out and seized Susan’s wrist. The anger had boiled up inside me, and she was about to get shocked. Andrew grabbed my wrist gently, but didn’t pull me off Susan. I didn’t know what he was doing.
“Susan,” I said through gritted teeth. “Put the radio down.”
Her short stubby finger pressed down on the talk button as she looked at me with the smuggest look I had ever seen grace anyone’s face. She opened her mouth to talk. Though the voltage building up inside me wasn’t anywhere near what I had shocked the Soul Stalker with, it was definitely a dose that would knock a person to their knees. There was a tiny part of my brain that was screaming this was a bad idea, but the other part of it was shouting at me to do it, because freeing the angels was more important.
The current grew deep inside me, and for some reason I was able to control it this time. Andrew’s warm breath was at my ear, the whisper barely heard. “I’ve got you.”
A rush of emotions—anger, passion, desire, and outrage—all burst through me at once, like the past two days’ events jackhammered the wall of a dam until it cracked and burst open. The current raced to my fingertips, which were wrapped around Susan’s fat wrist, and discharged. Andrew yanked my hand back as soon as Susan went down. I felt horrible and dropped to my knees to check for a pulse. She was alive, just knocked out.
“You—you,” Sue spluttered. “What did you do?” Her hand was placed over her heart, a look of shock on her face.
I stood up quickly and reached out to grab Sue’s upper arm. She recoiled from my touch, so I leaned in until I snatched her in my grip. “You’re coming with me.”
“A hostage?” Joseph asked, eyebrows raised. The look on his face was merely amused. “This will be fun.”
“Ehno?” I called. His glowing red eyes shot to mine. “Can you see the outcome? Will we get out of here?” I should have asked him this before, but I was too busy thinking about how we were going to get out of there.
“I do not know what will happen,” he said calmly. “Andrew and you will be safe, but I can’t see if we will all get out of here.”
His words made fear dominate my system. My mind worked furiously toward an outcome where we would all get out of this. Plan after plan raced through my head. Though I’d always been a quick thinker, my brain seemed to be working at twice its normal speed. The layout that I’d seen of the property when I first arrived was burned in my memory, and it came up in my head as if I were playing a 3D game.
“Joseph, grab the radio,” I commanded. “Give it to Sue.”
Sue’s eyes narrowed at my words, and her cheeks sucked in with anger. “I’ll call for help,” she threatened. Then she puffed out her sucked-in cheeks as if she was trying to make herself look bigger and braver than she really was. Almost like a blowfish.
“You’ll do no such thing,” I snapped. “Get on this radio and tell them that you and Susan saw us.” I tried to think of where, but I didn’t know this place any better than I knew the underground tunnels between Mexico and the U.S.
“Under building six, level four,” Joseph filled in for me. “We were trying to break into the atoms lab, and you have us trapped.”
“I won’t do it,” Sue said, glaring.
I stared up at the camera above our heads, knowing that they were capturing all of us on the screen. But then I noticed the little red light that indicates its power wasn’t on. Joseph waited for me to continue. He had a smile on his face. He was enjoying this much more than he should, like it was all a game to him. Lucia and Ehno waited patiently behind him with unreadable expressions. Andrew was at my back, his warmth radiating from his skin as he gripped my hips, ready to pull me away from possible danger. I tried to shake off the wave of desire, the longing for his lips. Focus, I had to tell myself. Focus! I nodded toward the camera and Joseph turned toward it.
“It’s not working. You must have done a number on their system,” he said fondly.
“Excellent.”
My plan was going to work better than I thought. My eyes came back around to land on Sue’s. Her upper arm was still in my grip. If she radioed in our false location before anyone noticed that the lab was a disaster scene, then we’d be alerting them to our presence, but if she didn’t and they did know, then they’d be heading this way any second. Also, if the Soul Stalker/Karen woke up she might come after me. She was the assassin meant to kill me. How long would Darren stay at her side before he went to go get help for her?
“Joseph, get on your little do-hickey thing, and see what’s going on. Find out if they’ve been down to the supernatural department.”
It only took him a second to understand everything I was just thinking. He popped the tiny earpiece into his ear, and we waited. “Most people are still in bed. There are a lot of guards and FBI agents unaware of the power-outage.” He paused for a few seconds. His eyes grew wide as he pressed the earpiece against his ear. “Run!” he shouted suddenly.
He didn’t have to tell me twice. Completely forgetting Sue, we all ran down the brightly lit hall. As we turned the corner, I noticed that Joseph was far behind us. We moved too quickly for him. “Andrew!” I gasped and slowed.
“Gabriella, he can take care of himself. You’re more important. We must get you out of here,” Andrew pleaded.
“Not without everyone,” I demanded, almost coming to a complete stop. Joseph rounded the corner and nearly ran into me. I started to run again, but I kept my pace steady for Joseph. As we came to the door that led outside, we all came to a shuddering stop. There was no window and no way to tell what was on the other side of that door.
“She’s coming,” Ehno hissed. “Karen.”
There were no questions asked, no one yelling at me not to open the door. I placed my palm on the scanner and slid my key across. There was a large boom underneath our feet, and the floor shuddered, making my whole body vibrate. That wasn’t good. The sound of metal being ripped apart echoed down the hall. Andrew yanked the door handle and grabbed my waist. I didn’t know if there were guards waiting outside or if there were unicorns prancing around—all I saw were pink clouds as Andrew yanked me into his arms and shot like a bottle rocket into the sky. The sun had almost fully risen, I noticed, as I clung on to him.
“The others,” I pleaded. “We can’t just leave them there.”
“Look down,” he said soothingly.
I did. Below was a black Cadillac moving swiftly toward the gate that surrounded the government installation. “What’s going on?” They had come to a stop at the guard’s station, and I wondered what in the hell Joseph was going to tell them so he could leave.
“There’s no one there. Joseph says that everyone has gone to stop the terrible creature that’s attacking.” He let out a long, bereaved sigh. “I’m so sorry. Karen said she was your Guardian. I just assumed she was tattooed since you’re the Illuminator. I should have demanded to see the Guardian’s mark considering there are few Guardian women. She could have killed you.”
“Shh,” I said soothingly this time. I placed both of my palms on his face. “I’m fine. I’m right here in your arms.”
He closed his eyes and nodded before opening them. “Thank the Ethereal Eternity for that.”
As we floated above the car, I almost went limp in his arms, finally relaxed. I should have known my tranquility wouldn’t last long. The sound of squealing tires pierced the air, followed by crunching glass and screeching metal. I knew what that sound entailed. I didn’t dare look at the scene below. My heart jumped in my chest, and slowly, I could feel it break.
Please, I begged whichever entity was listening. Let them be okay. Let them all survive.