Not only had that amazed Annabelle Lee, but it thrilled her to know something about Pietr and me that my best friend didn’t.
I lay down in the bed beside Amy, gently resting my arm over her shoulder as she rested hers around Annabelle Lee. Amy flinched at the contact. “Shhh,” I soothed her, and recognizing her surroundings and friends, Amy fell quickly into a deep sleep.
And I did as Alexi instructed.
I slept.
Alexi
Everyone headed to bed like normal. Cat and I sat up a few minutes longer, I clicking through television channels with the remote while she clutched the popcorn bowl and picked at the kernels.
“They know to set the beds?”
“Da,” she said, staring straight ahead at the flickering screen.
I ran through the list of precautions we were taking. The clocks were set wrong. The mafiosos had loaded the presents into several different vehicles and had already left, going different ways to get to the same place at the right time. Jessie, Amy, and Annabelle Lee were curled together sleeping—a curious enough arrangement that a horny teen boy like Derek would want to peek in several times hoping to see something more intriguing than what reality offered. Our beds would be stuffed to give the appearance we still slept while we actually raided the bunker.
“And you have made arrangements with Sophia?”
“Da,” she said reluctantly. “It is difficult being a normal American mall-shopping girl while roping a fellow girl—with a fine appreciation of style—into assisting on a bunker raid. My social standing may suffer.”
I snatched the popcorn bowl away from her and turned it over on top of her head.
She squealed and shook her hair, flinging kernels everywhere. “You are the most awful brother!”
“That I can live with, Ekaterina,” I admitted as she stomped away, fuming. Da. The most awful brother was still a brother. And that I could most definitely live with.
Jessie
I woke in the Rusakovas’ car, squashed beside Max in the backseat, presents stacked around me and piled on my lap, a heavy vest—bulletproof—hanging on me, holster snug across my chest.
The car was already in motion.
Cat had hopefully gotten to Sophia. There was so much I was blind to for everyone else’s safety. So much I wouldn’t know until it happened.
“I need you to do something very strange,” Pietr said, leaning back from the passenger’s seat. “I’ll be slipping around the building to sneak in with Max and I need you to play decoy in case they have Derek doing the night shift.”
“He may believe you’re asleep,” Max rumbled beside me. “Might start prowling the house with his power.”
“The clocks are set to confuse him,” Alexi reminded us from the driver’s seat. “Hopefully, with nothing out of the ordinary appearing to be going on, he’ll start scanning for you.”
I nodded, my eyes still blurry.
“But,” Alexi said, “to give us a better chance, we need you to use your ability.”
He must have seen my expression grow puzzled in the rearview mirror. “That ability all competition shooters and writers have—to focus—visualize—give him something creative, detailed—”
“Intense—” Pietr specified.
“To watch.”
“You’ll want to close your eyes in a moment so you aren’t distracted,” Alexi suggested.
“Think about anything else?” I considered.
“Feel what you’re thinking strongly. It’ll send up an emotional flare he should latch onto.”
Max adjusted his position in the seat beside me, stretching his powerful legs. “As long as we haven’t already given him something better to watch.”
Alexi caught my gaze in the rearview mirror. “You’d better start now.”
“Something he won’t want to look away from,” Pietr whispered. “Something to remember us by.” His eyes glowed and I felt the smile twist across my lips as the car pulled to a stop and I undid my seat belt, leaning forward to catch Pietr’s mouth with mine. I kissed him hard, my body tightening at his breathless response.
My emotional flare shot sky high.
“The mirror,” I murmured against his lips, closing my eyes and pulling back. And with the experience that came from long hours of visualization practicing as a competition shooter and imagining as an aspiring author, I dropped into a memory Derek would be both fascinated and pissed off by.
Like watching a train wreck, he wouldn’t be able to look away. I shivered, realizing how trains excited him.
Layering back in the details of scent and sound and touch that too easily faded, I built on the memory.
In another part of my mind, the part that kept me breathing and kept my heart pumping, my lungs going, I felt someone pull the boxes off my lap, take my arm, and tug me to a standing position.
Alexi. My arm was tugged around his waist and he pulled me along, carefully guiding me, blind as I was as my mind reeled under the power of bringing a memory to life again.
In the foremost part of my mind Pietr and I were again in front of the mirror in his bedroom in the precious minutes before we tumbled into bed together. Opening my eyes, I willed the memory to play on.
The breeze brushed by us, snaring a single tendril of my hair and pulling it loose from both my ponytail and knit black hat. I tucked it back in and scurried forward with Alexi into the thick of the aromatic plants and hedges, things planted to help cover the company’s scent from the Rusakovas’ patrols as they searched for their mother. Rosemary and the curled and crunchy leaves of neglected basil snatched at our jackets, marking us with desperate final bursts of scent.
Dmitri crouched ahead of us, watching me with quiet curiosity, three of his men at our backs. Alexi looked at me and carefully unwrapped my arm from around him. Even with a Rusakova beside me, I doubted there would ever be a moment I felt safe with the Mafia nearby.
Alexi nodded sharply to Dmitri. I was back—aware—the time to go was now. Dmitri turned, pointed his fingers to his eyes, and then turned them to us, announcing a changing of the guard. Tapping the silencer on his gun, he reminded us all stealth mattered especially in this initial phase of our attack.
Two of the three men nodded understanding, looking at us.
Even in the dark I knew Alexi’s jaw twitched as we nodded grimly back. A deal with the devil. That’s what we’d all been thrown into.
Dmitri looked at the remaining man and signaled. The two of them moved forward, down the freshly broken path I guessed Pietr and Max had made.
Together we sprinted forward and Dmitri checked his watch. He nodded and he and his man raced around the house’s front as we ran with our two Mafia men toward the front door. We paused, hugging the shadows, and I peeked around the corner.
Dmitri’s man held an army blanket to the window and Dmitri whacked it with his arm as Alexi pulled me back around the corner. The sound of breaking glass was muffled, but the sound of shattered glass landing inside was still clear. Moments of difference—but we needed every moment we could get.
As Dmitri rolled inside to fire on the surprised agents, we heard the echo of more glass breaking all around the house. Dmitri flung the front door open and I felt people press in behind us.
“Jessie,” Sophia whispered, “tell me this is not my life.”
I ducked down, tugging Soph down with me and covering her head with my arms, Cat flanking us as our guards stepped around and, with Dmitri and his man, cleared out the first bunch of agents. The only cameras in the narrow hall of the Colonial farmhouse were pulled from their roosts high on the walls. “Don’t look,” I suggested to Sophie, and I wrapped my hands like blinders around her face to shield her vision from the agents lying dead on the floor.
On silent feet Max and Pietr raced to the second floor, quickly checking rooms and calling, “Clear!” The floorboards above creaked and I heard the distinct thump of a body hitting the floor.
Feet pounded up the stairs from the bun
ker below and I nudged one of the Mafiosos forward. “Latch that door.” I pointed to the one at the top of the bunker’s stairs. It wasn’t much, but hearing the latch fall into place, I felt a little better. It bought us a moment more, and with the Rusakovas, every moment mattered.
By the time Max and Pietr returned, we’d backed away from the door leading down, ducking and covering as agents on the other side sprayed the door with bullets. But even guns with big clips needed reloading and every few minutes the pitch would change and one or two guns would stop for a refill.
Wanda found me. “We’re going through the Grabbit Mart entrance,” she explained, nodding at Dad. “Things look covered here.” More bullets sprayed the door.
“Really? This is covered?”
She chuckled. “We’ll try and hunt down Derek and his new pet.” To my astonished expression she simply said, “Yeah, you’ve been replaced.”
There was no time for me to even wonder by whom.
Pietr and Max slipped behind us and I caught a quick glance as they peeled out of their clothing and dropped to all fours. Stretching, howling, and welcoming the change. For a moment the shooting stopped, the agents surely frozen for a heartbeat.
A heartbeat was all it took.
In their wolfskins Pietr and Max charged the door, splintering its pocked surface as they bowled the agents down the stairs, knocking them out of the way of their advance. Fast on their heels, the Mafiosos made quick work of the stunned agents.
I swallowed hard and counted the steps as I started Sophie down the stairs with me, careful of the blood slicking their surface. These agents wanted us dead—or as good as. I tried to keep that in mind, but it was almost impossible to keep a reason for the bloodshed in my head when I witnessed it all.
The path down into the bunker’s heart clear, Cat dodged back up the stairs and outside to do a perimeter sweep and I led Sophie the rest of the way down the stairs, careful of the bodies. “Don’t look down.” I glanced over my shoulder. “There,” I said, seeing Pietr, standing in human form at the bottom of the stairs. “Look at Pietr. Not at the stairs.”
Looking past me, I noticed her eyes widen. “Look at his face, Soph.” Despite the corpses we picked our way around, Sophie was still surprised enough to blush at Pietr’s naked body.
If only the blood streaking Pietr’s face and body was a primitive warpaint, I could believe him to be a fiercely beautiful warrior from some ancient tribe roaming Russia’s most distant steppes—or a grim god.
Gunfire snapped me back to the awful reality of our situation.
God, we were all so messed up—and this wasn’t going to help any of us overcome our trust issues or petty paranoias.
I stood her before the keypad. “Okay, work your magic,” I said, watching her lean over the keys.
She shoved her blond hair back and screwed her face up with concentration. “I’ll give it my best shot … but it’s no magic,” she muttered in her breathy way. “Just energy impressions. I see the colors of energy someone leaves behind like a slightly brighter fingerprint if it was more recent. Okay. The last one to touch this keypad had fast fingers. The difference in the traces are subtle. Huh. Backward we have…”
Pietr listened, waiting until she finished to tap the numbers into the keypad in the right order.
Nothing happened. “I need a hand,” Sophia called.
“What?”
“Like, literally. A hand,” she balked, but held up her palm.
Dmitri dragged a corpse forward, flattening his hand to the scanner’s surface, and Pietr swept us back from the doors as they slid apart and bullets rained out.
“Shiiit,” Pietr snarled, hit in the shoulder a moment before he wolfed again and bounded into the fray.
I thrust Sophie into a corner, blocking her with my body. She panted and snagged her lower lip in her teeth. “This is not my life,” she insisted.
I looked at her solemnly. “I’m afraid it is. But it doesn’t have to be for long. Let’s just get through this. Then things go back to normal for you.”
“Like they keep going back to normal for you?” Sophie hissed. “Ghost of your mother, psycho ex-best friend, company agent dating your dad, psychic vampire ex-boyfriend, werewolf current boyfriend—by the way, I can’t blame you for that one,” she confessed, eyes round as she mouthed the word whoa before continuing with her list, “Trip to the asylum, attempts against your life, vigilante father…”
“Hey, the last ones are brand new. And the vigilante father thing? He’ll revert.”
“Anyhow, I’m not so keen on your concept of normal.” I caught her staring at me. “Your aura’s all smudgy with a different color tonight,” she whispered. “Something’s changed.…” She craned her neck around to catch a glimpse of Pietr. “Pietr’s color … and his is all smudgy with your color, like his energy’s been smeared all over yours really vigorously.… Oh! Ew!” She covered her eyes.
I blushed for both of us.
“I just don’t know what to do with you, Jessie. Should I congratulate you or rail on you about the dangers of doing it?”
I just shook my head.
My normal.
In the room beyond us the shooting stopped and one final thud sounded as a body hit the floor. On the other side of the doorway, Alexi motioned to us.
“Clear,” Pietr proclaimed.
We stepped through the doorway and kept our heads up, still trying to ignore the worst of the casualties surrounding us. It was impossible as the blood continued to spread in slow, slippery puddles.
A man with a briefcase set it in one of the cubicles and opened it, displaying a bunch of wires and buttons.
Bomb, I realized distantly.
“Two more doors, Sophia,” Pietr called as he fell back into his wolf form.
“Actually three,” I said, pointing over the wolf’s thickly furred shoulder at the science lab’s door.
In his wolfskin Pietr shook his head. No.
“The Hell! Right now there are probably a dozen smaller than average scientists in there wetting themselves while you all take out their protectors. What were you going to do, leave them in there as the bunker falls down around their ears?”
The wolf blinked.
“Pietr!” I demanded. “They’ve only followed orders. Why should they die?”
With an impatient whine the wolf whipped into a very angry Pietr again. “Following orders?” he retorted. “You who love your history and research so much should know that was the excuse of every war criminal during the Nuremberg Trials. Every Nazi used that excuse,” he spat. “Following orders! When do they realize they’re doing something awful and stand up and say no, Jess?”
“I don’t know! But what if they just need a chance to realize and change? What if this could be their epiphany?”
“Stop trying to save everyone,” he ordered. “Some can’t be saved.”
I caught Dmitri smiling.
“And when is following orders ever a good enough excuse for not standing by your principles, for not having a moral code?”
“What moral code do you have, Pietr, if you just let people die—unable to even defend themselves?”
He looked at me, eyes flickering for a moment, and then he said, “Two doors, Sophia,” and was the wolf again, shifting as he dropped to all fours.
I crossed my arms and watched Sophie go to the door that would open on the final room before Mother’s cell. She leaned over the number pad and tapped in the appropriate digits in the appropriate order. “There should really be some other way I could use this new talent of mine,” she said.
A bullet zipped so close to her head her hair fluttered and Dmitri swung her back against the safety of the wall for a moment before releasing her to finish.
Eyes wide, she tapped in the rest of the code, deciding, “On second thought, I’ll just use it this once and never mention it again. Then back to normal, right, Jessie?”
“Sure thing, Soph,” I called. “Whatever normal is.”
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The door whispered open and one more firefight ensued, the werewolves rushing headlong into the broad room holding their mother’s strange clear cubicle of a cage. They raced into danger like life didn’t matter—like, in this moment, they were immortal.
Things changed when the last set of guards’ bullets tore into their flesh.
Pietr’s growl turned into a shout of pain as he flashed out of his wolfskin and skid across the concrete floor, human and bleeding.
“Dmitri!” I screamed, seeing the wisp of smoke wafting from Pietr’s side. “The bullets are spiked! Poisoned!”
Shoving Sophie back, I rushed across the open space to Pietr’s side. I heard Dad’s yell and Wanda’s reply as they gave me cover. Glad as I was they’d rejoined us, there was no time to focus on anything but Pietr. And survival.
Sitting in a pool of sizzling blood, Pietr thrashed and cursed, clawing at his side with shaking hands. I dug the Leatherman out of my pocket and unfolded it, looking at the knife and Pietr’s quickly healing flesh.
“Stay still,” I urged as I grabbed his arm and sliced into his side with an inaccuracy that had him cursing my name. “I almost have it—” There was a thud and the slug fell into the red puddle, spinning and spitting.
Wolf again, Pietr rushed forward, knocking an agent down and out.
In her shatterproof cell, Pietr’s mother howled her joy. She pounded on the clear wall and screamed her children’s names.
Grabbing Sophie I slipped back out the door and raced to the science lab. The man with the briefcase looked up at us doubtfully, rearranging the contents in his case with swift and sure hands.
“Pietr’s not going to be happy,” Sophie protested.
“I’m saving lives,” I reminded. “Pietr will get happy again later. Press the buttons.”
Sophie did and the door hissed open.
Inside, the whole staff of the lab gawked at me.
“Get out now!” I shouted. The lead scientist, Henry, reached for a box; another reached for some files. “Leave it all, or you won’t get out alive.”