Chapter 25: Chapter 25

The silver handcuffs fit well around wrists. Not so much around ankles, but they’d made it work. It hadn’t done anything to stop the screaming and cursing though. Jo’d ridden back to the makeshift headquarters with her eyes focused out the window, wishing that the cuffs were on the right person, and the one screaming at them to let her go right now was the Red Queen and not her aunt.

At first, they’d thought Cassidy just needed a few moments, and then she’d regain the memory of at least who she was, if not everyone else right away. But after they’d forced her into one of the bedrooms at the house in the middle of Nowhere, Russia, she’d continued to scream that she’d been kidnapped for another hour until Scott had finally given her a shot of something to make her sleep. Brandon was hopeful that she’d be herself when she opened her eyes again, but Jo had her doubts. Whatever Holland had done to her, it was powerful.

Now, as she walked out of the large room where they’d held a debrief of sorts, she had no idea what her next move was. Lucas caught her arm as she started down the hallway. “We’re tailing her,” he reminded Jo. She nodded, thankful that he had thought to have his Souled army scouting out escape routes. When Dax had lost the car Holland had gotten into a few miles after it passed through the exit of a tunnel from beneath the mountains, Lucas’s folks had picked her up. No one could stick with her for long, though. Her driver was evasive, and since she was in an all-terrain vehicle, he wasn’t afraid of taking tight turns, ditches, and roads that didn’t exist. Still, Lucas was persistent, and his people always managed to pick her back up eventually. At the moment, she was headed deeper into Siberia toward a location no one could guess, not even Lucas. He seemed confident that she wouldn’t slip away this time, though, and Jo wanted to believe that he was right, even though she really didn’t think they’d catch her again.

“Thanks,” she said to him before tugging lightly to be released. He let her go, and she continued down the hall, not really having any idea where she was going but thinking it would be nice to be alone for a few moments. It was nearly impossible, despite the vast square footage of the house, since the team was so big.

They hadn’t lost anyone in the attack, mostly because the Vampires broke and ran at the sight of the Souleds moving in on them. Lucas had taken several of Holland’s guards into custody, but he wasn’t holding them at this location. Instead, Adrian had taken them to an actual old prison Lucas’s cohorts now laid claim to, thinking he could get some information out of them now that the queen was away, but as far as Jo knew, her shield could extend as far as she needed it to, and the Souled Vampires wouldn’t be able to force their way beyond it even to demand answers. They couldn’t read minds, but they could be persistent.

The possibility that Cassidy might’ve been strong enough to get behind the barrier now that these weak Vampires were out of Holland’s direct control was a moot point since her aunt was not herself.

Frustration overtook her as Jo wandered into a room in the back of the house that had a billiards table and a large fire roaring in the fireplace. The forest green walls were lined with shelves of books. She imagined this must’ve been someone’s study at one point.

The question of why there was a fire didn’t occur to her until after she’d sat down on a sofa away from it, facing a large window where the scene of snow falling as the sun rose caught her attention. The snowflakes danced in the glimmer of light as the white beams stretched across the vast ocean of snow. It was mesmerizing.

“So… it didn’t work then?”

Jo jumped, not expecting to hear another voice from inside the room. She hadn’t seen anyone when she’d walked in, but then, she hadn’t expected anyone to be here either since they’d just broken from the debrief, and everyone else was more or less in the large living room.

She’d completely forgotten about the human who sat down in a chair adjacent to her sofa, a tumbler of whiskey in his hand, despite the early hour. She looked around, wondering where the people assigned to watch him were and figured they’d decided he wouldn’t go anywhere in a snow storm. They didn’t know Ryker very well.

“No, it didn’t work,” she said, wishing she’d picked a different room. He didn’t seem judgy at the moment, though, only curious. “We got to her, but no one could get within ten feet of her.” She shook her head. “I have no idea how we’re ever going to bring her in alive.”

He took a sip of his drink, pressed his lips together, and made a noise like he was satisfied. With the drink or her failure, she couldn’t say, and she wasn’t asking. “You’ll have to nearly kill her if you want to bring her in alive.”

Jo had returned her gaze to the window, but now, with his statement of fact, she turned her head to look at him. “I can’t kill her,” she reminded him. “My dad wants her alive. If I shoot her--”

“You’ll weaken her. It’s the only way. You know that. You’ll have to get her to a point where she can’t use none of her fancy fuckin’ magic. It’s the only way you’ll ever get close enough to her.”

Jo considered his assessment. It did make sense. She hadn’t fired at Holland before for a number of reasons, the first one being she had decided not to kill her. The other being she wasn’t convinced bullets would have any effect on the bitch whatsoever. Couldn’t she just deflect them, the way that Cassidy did? Throw up a shield? But then, if Holland was paying attention to all of the bullets, maybe it would have made her weak enough so that Cassidy could slip past that shield and get what she needed. Or maybe Cassidy would’ve been strong enough to blast the shield out of the way.

It was hard to say what might’ve happened if she’d taken a more aggressive stance. He was right in one regard, though. Just because she didn’t intend to kill the monstress, that didn’t mean she couldn’t hurt her. If she ever got another opportunity to face off against the queen, she’d have to keep that in mind.

“Did she tell you anything at all about your mom?” Ryker asked, his tone sounding more understanding than any she’d ever heard him use before.

Jo looked at him for a moment before she shook her head. But then… that wasn’t exactly true, was it? “Only that she didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. She claims it wasn’t her, that she’s just a figurehead, and that she’s trying to stay out of it. I don’t believe her, though.”

“You don’t?” he asked, not necessarily implying that he thought she should believe her, only clarifying.

Wondering if there’d been something in her response that gave away that she did sort of believe Holland, she considered what Holland had said and how she’d felt about it at the time, how she felt about it now. “She said someone else was pulling the strings. Called him the puppet master.” Her mind went back to what Cassidy had said earlier. Could it really be Daunator?

“Who could that be?” Ryker asked. Why he suddenly felt like helping solve the mystery, she had no idea, but the fact that he was asking her about it made her wonder what exactly he did know. She had no idea about his true identity, his actual background. Was what Adrian had said true? About his family? What about his claim to be KGB? Was that actually a possibility?

She had plenty of questions but no answers. “I have no fucking idea,” she told him. “In order to find out, we either have to bring in Holland or get our hands on Crimson. The Australians are doing what they can, but they will be hard pressed to actually make it through his defenses.”

Ryker nodded. “It won’t be easy. Knowing Crimson, he’ll probably destroy what they’re after before they can get to it.”

Alarmed, Jo stared at him for a moment, her eyebrows arched. What they were after were their teammates. Scott’s dad and plenty of other LIGHTS members who were being held hostage and forced to work for the American government. “You can’t really think he’d do that?” She wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a statement or a question, but it came out as the later.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I do,” he said, taking a sip. “I’m not sure how to prevent it. I guess if Australian troops can somehow manage to sneak in and get your people out before it’s too late, he might not get the chance, but that seems difficult since he’s got layers upon layers of security detail, and no one knows exactly where he’s keeping his hostages.”

The thought of having to sneak in and free the prisoners before they could be executed made Jo’s head hurt. She could only handle one catastrophe at a time, and presently, the one at hand had just become even more complicated with Cassidy’s amnesia. She rubbed her temples, thinking that now might be a good time to take a nap, not that sleep would come easy.

Instead of moving from the couch, she studied him for a moment and then found herself asking the question she knew he would never answer. “What happened to your family?”

He stared at her blankly for several seconds, not even blinking. It was the sort of stare that made her think his next move might be to crush the glass in his fist or throw it at her. Instead, after he regained control of himself, he slowly turned to look out the window, not saying a word.

She wasn’t surprised that he said nothing. She didn’t expect an answer. She probably didn’t deserve an answer, even though she’d let slip more about her family to him than she wished she had.

“I don’t talk about that.”

It was a civil answer, an acknowledgment of the question, nothing abrasive about it. Just a statement of the fact. Something had, in fact, happened to his family, but he never repeated it to anyone. That was just the way of it. Asking about it again would get the same result.

She could respect that. After all, she hated talking about what happened to her mom and only did so if someone dragged it out of her. Zane was probably the only person she’d ever retold the entire story to in a calm, non-confrontational fashion, with only tears of sorrow and not of anger at being provoked. Her reason for asking Ryker about his own family stemmed more from a place of wanting to know if he could help them more than morbid curiosity meant to bring up memories he’d rather have washed from his mind like every single thought her aunt had ever had up until a few hours ago.

“What about your work background?” Jo asked, hoping she wasn’t pushing it, hoping the civil wouldn’t quickly become the uncivil. There’d been a time when she’d been able to talk to Ryker without completely pissing him off or losing her cool herself, and she’d just as soon return to it. She had enough angry people on the other side of the battlefield to worry about without having one in her own camp. “Are you really KGB?”

He shrugged, not seeming to be offended by this question. “KGB, CIA, I am what I need to be when I need to be it.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she said, half laughing.

“I think you do,” he replied, finishing off his drink. She wouldn’t have minded having one herself, but then it was early in the morning, and she knew it would do nothing for her anyway.

Other questions came to mind, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t answer any of them, and a flurry of messages on her IAC told her something was going on at the front of the house. With a sigh and a smoothing of her braid, Jo pulled herself to her feet. “Duty calls,” she said, wishing she could just turn them all off for a few hours. But if they didn’t get her through her eye computer, they’d just come and find her and physically drag her back.

“Good luck,” Ryker said, an air of defeat settling around him like the dust on the bookshelves that probably hadn’t been touched for at least a couple of years.

“Thanks.” Jo gave him a meager smile and then headed off to the front of the house.

Everyone was in a flutter as they took positions by windows, weapons in hands, a nervous energy radiating through the main living room and the entryway. “What’s going on?” Jo asked Mikali, who was standing near the front door with a Glock in his hand.

“A strange car just pulled up out front. We don’t know who it is.”

She turned to scan the room for Lucas and found him standing over by one of the windows, not armed but staring out, the look on his face telling her that he didn’t know who it was either.

Jo felt out toward the vehicle, thinking, if it were full of Vampires, she should know it. But she didn’t get the sense that it was full of anything, and only a tiny fluttering in the bottom of her stomach registered the hint of a threat. Telling everyone to stand down seemed the practical thing to do, but she didn’t. Instead, she moved to the front door, pulling it open.

A white SUV sat directly in front of the walkway to the door. The driver’s side door opened, and one person got out. Dressed in a white coat, with a white, wide-brimmed hat on, she came around the end of the vehicle and up the steps, her white-blonde hair blowing out around her. The vague idea that, if an angel could drive, this might be how she would arrive, entered Jo’s mind as she stepped out onto the porch. “Can I help you?”

“Well, I’ll be! Ain’t you the spittin’ image of your mama!” the woman cooed, a huge smile on her pretty face.

“Excuse me?” Jo asked, wanting to place that face somewhere in her memories, fighting against her own limitations to find that smile in the back of her mind. Where had she seen this person before?

“You’re Jo, ain’t you?” she asked, folding her arms. “Jo McReynolds?”

“Yeah. And you are--”

“I knew it! I just knew it! Well, I reckon that must be your brother. Hi there, Cadon!”

Jo hadn’t even noticed her brother sneaking up behind her. She moved aside so he could come out of the house. “Who the hell are you?” he asked, as if her chipper attitude and the fact that she was dressed oddly gave him the right to judge her.

She just laughed. “I had a feelin’ y’all was in trouble. I wasn’t gonna do nothin’ about it, figured I’d already done my part. But damn it, when I realized Cass needed me, well... . Here I am.”

“Cass?” Jo echoed. For the first time, she looked directly into the girl’s eyes and realized one of them was blue and the other silver. “Are you….”

An ungloved hand was extended across the porch, and Jo took it as the woman proclaimed. “I’m the gal y’all have been lookin’ for. Heather McBride. At your service.”

Jo’s mouth fell open as Cadon said the phrase that would’ve come out of her mouth if she’d been capable of speaking. “Well, I’ll be damned.”