“Marcy?” Hitch echoes. “Are you—”
“I don’t go by that name anymore.” Her tone is a strange mix of the old firm-but-loving Marcy and chilly stranger. “Now I need you boys to put your guns on the floor and hand over the keys to the armored car outside. Should you refuse to do so, I’m afraid my colleague and I are going to have to kill you.”
My insides go cold and all my assorted gut parts cramp and squirm. Marcy just threatened to kill Cane and Hitch.
I honestly don’t know if I can take this.
How can this be real? How can the woman I’ve idolized be another wolf in sheep’s clothing? I’ve seen the real Marcy. I’ve eaten at her table a thousand times, I’ve worked in her garden, I’ve let her force me into the church and down to the old folks’ home to visit the shut-ins and stayed up until three in the morning cleaning up after her annual Mardi Gras party.
I’ve known her. I’ve loved her. A month ago I would have died for her, without a second thought. She’s been like a mother to me, and at times the only friend who made it worth sticking around to see how this whole “life” thing is going to work out.
When I had faith in nothing, I had faith in Marcy. And I’m not going to let anyone take Marcy away from me. Not even Marcy herself.
I have to stop this.
For a second, I desperately wish for a gun, but then I realize I wouldn’t know what to do with one. I don’t want to shoot Marcy, and I don’t want to shoot her accomplice and have Hitch or Cane shoot Marcy, either.
I need a distraction, not a gun, something to pull the focus off Cane and Hitch and—
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” I scream, as I turn and take off running back the way I came. “Fiiiiiiire!”
I hear a pair of sprightly footsteps I’m guessing don’t belong to Marcy—there’s no way she’s lost those last thirty pounds and made her own fitness plans a reality in barely a month—chasing after me and fight the insane urge to laugh. This is not funny. I am probably about to get my damned self killed, a truth brought home as the person behind me fires and a bullet whizzes by my left arm.
“Shit!” I hurl myself down the hallway leading to the back stairs, hoping a Really Great Idea comes to me sometime between now and—
Another gunshot, this time so close it zips between my arm and my hip and I smell burnt cloth. It grazed my belt loop. This person is shooting to kill, not to frighten or maim, and I’m an easy target in this long, white hall. I can’t keep running straight or one of those bullets is going to hit me before I reach the stairs.
I dive for the next door on my right, but when I push down, the handle won’t move. Locked. Locked!
Shit!
I fall to the floor just in time, seconds before another bullet buries itself in the door where I was standing.
My chin snaps up to see one of the skinniest men I’ve ever seen in real life prowling down the hall. His skin is dull obsidian and his one-piece jumpsuit the same faded black. He looks like a shadow come to life, the only spark of light in him coming from the whites of his eyes, which narrow as he takes aim at where I crouch on the floor.
I’m debating whether to make another break for the stairs or dive for skinny guy’s legs and hope I can knock him off balance—he looks strong, but I’m taller and outweigh him by at least twenty pounds—when Marcy appears in the hall behind him. She’s wearing a matching faded black jumpsuit in a much larger size. She’s still her round, huggable self, even if the rest of her looks very different.
Instead of the usual course, gray-streaked, carefully tended baby Afro, her jet black hair is slicked back tight to her head. She must have dyed it. She’s also wearing a touch of makeup—something the old Marcy would have laughed about having time for—combat boots, and a shoulder holster that boasts an impressive variety of weapons. I see another gun, two knives, and something in a round pouch that looks an awful lot like a grenade.
A grenade. The information skips across the surface of my brain, refusing to compute. Marcy plus Grenade equals error, error, error.
“Don’t shoot her, Billy.” Marcy’s own gun is held loosely at her side. “She’s immune. We’ll need someone to carry the supplies from the car to the cave if the swarm doesn’t clear out in the next few hours.”
I stand on shaking legs. “Where are Cane and Hitch?”
“I shot the men,” she says, turning my core to toxic jelly.
What? No. No, she couldn’t have. She wouldn’t!
“The big one’s down.” She stands beside Billy, glancing at him as she speaks. As if I don’t even exist, as is she doesn’t know that she shot the man I love, the man she herself advised me to marry a few weeks ago. “The one in the suit is still awake, but he won’t be getting up for a while. I used the maximum setting on the Taser.”
Ohmygod. My knees nearly buckle. A Taser. Not a gun. Not dead. “I knew you wouldn’t kill them,” I breathe, voice shaking with relief.
“Keep your mouth shut, girl.” Marcy shoots me a look more deadly than the gun in her hand. I glance at it again. Definitely a real gun, not a Taser. Why did she pull that out before coming after Billy and me? She said she didn’t want me shot, so . . .
“Why are—”
“Shut your mouth,” she repeats, nipping my question in the bud. “Keep your peace and follow directions, and we might let you live.”
“You’re not going to kill me.”
“I will,” she says, in that chilly voice that makes me want to scream and shake her until the ice melts and the real Marcy floats to the surface. “I promise you that, princess. So don’t do anything stupid.”
Princess? What the . . .
“Impossible,” I spit. “I was born to do stupid things. Stupid fucking things. Like loving people who are liars!”
“Girl . . .”
I ignore Marcy’s warning tone and step forward, stopping only when Billy lifts his gun. “You’re the one who taught me that actions speak louder than words,” I say. “And none of your actions up to this point did jack to prepare me for this. You take care of people; you don’t threaten to kill them. You make homemade chicken and grits; you don’t buy black-market medical supplies and—”
“If you don’t want her dead, get out the stun gun. We have things to do.” Billy’s flat, emotionless words kick my anger up a notch. Or four.
I take another step forward, eyes on Marcy but my focus on Billy’s weapon. I’m going to rip it out of his hand and bash his skull in with it. I think I can do it with my mind, but if I can’t I’ll jump him and do it with my hands. And Marcy will let me. She’s not going to shoot me. She’s not one of the bad guys. I will never believe that. Never.
“If I stun her, she won’t be able to help with transport.” Marcy slips the gun into her holster and fetches the Taser from the other side. Like she’s going to do it. Stun me into silence, and risk killing me when she does it. Stun guns can kill. I know she knows that.
She was living in Donaldsonville when one of the Sweet Haven kids was killed trying to break into the Piggly Wiggly. The rent-a-cop on duty hit him with a stun gun, thinking he’d immobilize him long enough for the real cops to come handle the situation. Instead, we’d all gotten to skip class that Monday to attend Theodore’s funeral. He was fourteen.
“Can’t trust her, anyway,” Billy says. “Better to do it ourselves.”
“Except we don’t know about those fairies.” Marcy lifts the gun, aiming it at my chest. “They might be able to get through the suits.”
“Chance we got to take, I guess.”
“Chance you’ve got to take,” Marcy says. “That’s why you’re here, son. My back is shot. I’m not carrying anything anywhere.” Her finger tightens on the trigger and my entire body breaks out in a cold sweat. She’s going to do it. She’s going to shoot me.
I lash out with my mind, but I’m still focused on Billy’s gun, not Marcy’s. His weapon jerks from his hands and clatters onto the red tile. He cusses and goes for it and I take my own dive to the
floor, hoping to avoid Marcy’s Taser fire long enough to get Billy’s gun and figure out what to do with it.
Shoot Billy? Then Marcy? Marcy? Then Billy?
Can I shoot Marcy? I don’t think I can, I really don’t—
The Taser sizzles and a blast of electricity arcs across the hall, hitting Billy as he lunges for the gun. I’m close enough to feel the charge in the air, a sting that makes me pull my hand to my chest and lean back on my heels.
Billy moans and squirms. Marcy hits him with another blast of electricity and then a third. Finally, he lies still on the ground, looking like a crime-scene body drawing in his black suit. His weapon is only a foot from my knee. I could reach for it and be armed before Marcy tries to shoot me, but I don’t make a move.
Marcy didn’t Taser me. She Tasered her partner. And when I look up at her, all the chill has left her eyes.
“What the heck are you doing out here, Mess?” she asks, love and frustration and a hint of pride in her voice. Her normal Marcy voice, using her normal words.
“Mess” has never sounded so good.
“Trying to help the FBI shut down a lab that’s making bioweapons and experimenting on unwilling captives,” I say in a rush. “What are you doing here?”
She sighs, thinks about it for a second, then says, “CIA.”
She’s got to be kidding. “What?”
“Central Intelligence Agency.”
“No way.”
“Way.” She nudges Billy with her boot. He doesn’t move. She slips her Taser back into her holster.
“You’re a spy.” My brain flashes the error message again. Marcy plus spy doesn’t compute much better than Marcy plus criminal. “For real.”
“Traynell and I have been working this area since the eighties, when the oil company first moved in. We were deep cover, long-term engagement.” She sighs again. “I knew it was a bad idea to have me back in the field so close to Donaldsonville. I’m too old for this running and shooting crap,” she says, rubbing the small of her back. “And I know too dang many people.”
“You left Donaldsonville to go undercover.” I think through my last conversation with Marcy before she left. “So you didn’t really help Kennedy’s dad kidnap her or—”
“No, I did. And I killed two people a few weeks after my fifteenth birthday,” she says. “I met my first boss in prison. He felt bad that I’d been tried as an adult, thought I deserved a chance to put my life to better use.”
Oh. Well. “I didn’t know the CIA recruited out of prisons.”
“There’s a lot people don’t know about the CIA.”
True that. At least I’m guessing.
“But you’re one of the good guys,” I clarify, easing back to my feet.
“I’m supposed to disable the lab,” she says. “But I didn’t realize the FBI had their own thing going on. Think they’d like to communicate that to—”
“It’s not an official FBI thing,” I confess. “Agent Rideau and I are investigating off the record. He thinks some of the higher-ups in the FBI might be involved with the lab. So if you could maybe not say anything about him being out here . . .”
Marcy nods. “Makes sense. I don’t see how this could have stayed secret all these years otherwise. Not without someone in the government working to keep it that way.”
“And Agent Rideau is Hitch, by the way,” I add, strangely compelled to overshare now that I have the real Marcy back. “You know Hitch? From-when-I-was-in-med-school Hitch?”
Marcy’s eyes get bigger. “Good lord.”
“Yeah. But it’s okay now. I think. Better, anyway.”
“You’re running around with him and Cane?”
“Not running around running around,” I say, “I’m working with them both. I guess. We were going to go look for the cave together before you shot them.” I suck in a panicked breath. How could I have forgotten? “You shot them!” I leap over the fallen Billy and start down the hall.
“They’ll be fine,” Marcy says, stopping me in my tracks. “I didn’t hit them as hard as I hit Billy. I wouldn’t have hit them at all, but I wasn’t sure I’d blown cover. I thought there was a chance . . . even though Cane recognized me.”
“He’s going to be very disturbed.”
“He and I are going to have a talk,” Marcy says. “I need that boy to keep his mouth shut. This isn’t something that can go through official channels. Not his official channels, anyway. He needs to learn being a good man doesn’t always mean following the rules.”
“You still think he’s a good man?”
Marcy lifts her brows, giving me her “How stupid are you?” look. “He’s a great man. And no man ever loved a woman more than he loves you.”
I nod, fighting the tears rising in my eyes. “And you . . . we . . . you and me . . .”
Marcy’s mouth softens and her arm comes around my waist, hugging me to her side. “I love you like my own flesh and blood. I wouldn’t break cover for just any fool who ran screaming fire.”
“Yeah?” I risk a look down at her beautiful eyes.
“Yes, baby.”
“I’m so glad you’re not a bad guy.” And then I burst into tears. Burst. My eyes go from zero to gushing in a finger snap and sobs shake my ribs and my stomach feels like it’s going to be sucked into a vortex of relief.
“Hush now. It’s all right.” Marcy pulls me in for a real hug. I fold over her shoulder, trying to ignore all the various weapons gouging into my chest. Grenade in the boob or not, this is still a Marcy hug.
“I’ve missed you so much,” I say.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“Come back home. Don’t leave us again.”
She pulls away, carefully, gently. “I can’t promise that, baby. It’s going to depend on what happens out here, and—”
“Freeze!” Cane’s voice echoes down the hall, deep and commanding and totally scary, but neither Marcy nor I flinch.
“It’s okay,” I say, motioning him over. “She’s on our side.”
Cane doesn’t respond. He moves smoothly down the hall, gun trained on Marcy’s forehead. “I need you to unstrap your holster and lay your weapons down.”
“Cane Cooper, get that gun off me,” she says. “Would I leave your gun by your hand if I was intending you real harm?”
That makes Cane hesitate. I take advantage of the moment to fill him in on what Marcy told me. I’ve gotten to the part about her looking for the cave when he interrupts with a grunt.
“Well, you’d better hurry.” Cane slides his gun back into his holster. “When I came to, Agent Rideau was gone. So was his map.”
“Dammit!” What the hell is Hitch thinking?
And why didn’t he come looking for me? He had to have heard the gunfire and the shouting. But he just . . . left me. Decided I was a necessary loss and moved forward with his true goal—doing whatever it takes to save Stephanie and the baby, with no regard for how much havoc he wreaks in the lives of others. Or how many people he kills.
“We have to go.” I lay a hand on Marcy’s arm. “Hitch is going to blow up the lab. Maybe with people inside if he thinks he has to.”
Marcy’s brow furrows. “Why would he—”
“He’s being blackmailed. But I saw the map and I remember the location of the first lab stop.” I start down the hall. “I’ll explain in the truck.” We’re going to have to take the Land Rover and hope we make it through the acid-spewing fairies still teeming outside.
“I think we should try the tunnel,” Cane says, making me turn back around. “I’m not sure we’ll make it through the swarm without armor.”
“What tunnel?” I ask.
“There’s a tunnel system under this building,” Cane says. “One arm leads to the old docks. That’s why I was here. The guy bringing Amity upriver said the FCC agents would take me through the tunnels for a price. He said it was safer than driving a cop car so close to the water. There’s been a lot of pirate activity the past few months. They sho
ot cops on sight. I found the tunnel entrance at the back of the kitchen. I was going in when I heard you and Hitch coming down the stairs.”
“But the first lab stop is on the other side of the river.” I hesitate. “All the way up by Donaldsonville. Do the tunnels—”
“According to the guy I talked to, they run up to Donaldsonville and on to Baton Rouge in one direction and New Orleans in the other.”
“But that’s hundreds of miles. Through marshland. How in the—”
“It makes sense,” Marcy says. “The people who designed the lab have been out here a long time. And they have the technology.”
“How long have they been here?” I wonder if Hitch’s hunch is correct, if Robusto Oil played a part in the fairy mutations. “You said the eighties?”
Marcy nods. “That’s when I was assigned to Donaldsonville.”
“Because of the oil company? Robusto Oil?” She nods again. “But Hitch’s information said the company only starting digging out here about sixteen years ago.”
“That’s when they started digging for oil,” Marcy says. “They started buying up land in 1984.”
“Plenty of time to dig tunnels,” Cane says.
Tunnels they might have thought they needed to survive. They must have known making the Fey larger would make them deadly, but they might not have known about the fairies’ allergy to iron. They might have thought going underground was the only way to protect themselves.
“Before the emergence, the company owned a good chunk of riverbank land.” Marcy starts down the hall behind Cane, giving me no choice but to follow. “The government came in and bought them out a few years later, but Robusto could have owned this parcel originally. I think it’s worth a try. We were waiting downriver when the swarm came in,” she says, tone sobering. “I’ve never seen so many fairies. And they look different, don’t they? I know my eyes aren’t what they—”
“They are different.” I drag my feet as Cane gets closer to the stairs. “They also spray a corrosive liquid. Hitch and I took out a few in the garage, but I couldn’t collect a sample. Their bodies disintegrate after death. Hey y’all, wait—” Marcy and Cane turn back to me with identical looks of frustration. I’m slowing things down, I get that. But I’m also attempting to be the voice of reason. A new role for me, but surely they can see this isn’t the best plan. “Even if we find a tunnel going in the right direction,” I say. “It’s going to take hours to walk back to Donaldson-ville. We’ll never make it to the first lab stop before Hitch.”