Page 79 of Cruel Revenge
Everyone turned to her, the expectation in their eyes. She was supposed to control Jacky. That was her job. Keep the werecat where everyone could see her, get intel, but don’t give any.
Did all of them know the job was impossible as written? She was certain some of them did. The only reason Beth wasn’t fired multiple times over was the BSA wasn’t certain they could find someone to replace her. In the end, Beth accepted that her job wasn’t actually as written. It was to keep tensions down, to keep the peace, and to keep an eye on Jacky. To be the one person she was willing to communicate with. Jacky had never really broken the rules before this, never had a reason to need more handling. She was helpful, and things were resolved when they worked with her.
But Rhodes and the rest of them just had to be greedy for more this time. Thought with Carey missing, they could get more by being the heroes and not allowing Jacky to do it herself.
“Is there anything else you’d like to say?” Rhodes said, recovering from his shock.
“I feel if you have the tech guys come in, they’ll be able to tell us how much information was just taken in a hack,” Beth continued, her hands in front of her.
Rhodes hit the table, and the crack got a little bit bigger. He pointed at her.
“I’m going to finally have you replaced. This is unacceptable.”
“Certainly. Ignore the fact that I told you not to do this. I told you that playing games of information with Jacky would never go your way. She knows more than we do at every turn. She always has answers. She’s surrounded by powerful ancients willing to pull the strings in every situation, and we can’t even identify them. Multiple other agents and I met two of them tonight, and none of us is able to provide enough detail to even start a sketch to identify them. What we do remember is that one of them said we wouldn’t remember. Her mother, I think. Every minute that slips by, I forget more about them. She has multiple siblings we’ve never met. We know that we’ve been hacked before by someone near her.”
“Get to the point,” Rhodes said, a vein bursting on his forehead.
“You tried to play a game, not realizing you don’t make the rules!” Beth yelled, throwing her hands out. “None of us do! They do! She does! You’re the one who wanted to use Carey being kidnapped as a fucking bargaining chip, and you deserve everything you get for it! You lost the moral high ground against them the moment you did that, you piece of shit! They weren’t going to try with us at that point! Why would they?”
“Clear your desk and go home. Don’t come back. You won’t have a job when I’m done with you.” Rhodes looked around. “All of you get out. Agent Jan, you can stay. I might need you to get me back on task when I’m done with this.”
Beth was fine with that because Rhodes clearly forgot his place and the reach of his power. She waited for the room to clear and went in for another attack on the fucking asshole in front of her.
“Good luck with replacing me,” Beth said with a hard laugh. “The only people who can fire me are in Washington D.C. at the main office, and they won’t until they have already secured a replacement who Jacky will speak to. Then Jacky will ask why Igot fired, and if she doesn’t get the truth from the BSA, she’ll find it herself. Just like she just did. You know as well as I do that whatever hack just happened gave her everything she needed to beat you to Carey and the werewolf boys. Because once they get to Houston, they’ll be able to find them really quickly, I bet.”
Rhodes was beaten, and he knew it. Beth knew she had one chance to do something insane.
“Allow me to direct all actions concerning Jacky from here,” Beth said simply. “I can at least get us back on her good side. If we lose her, we lose the werewolves, too.”
“How?” Rhodes sat back down, his posture deflated.
“Jacky told me that Heath beat Callahan.” As she said those words, Rhodes reached up and began to rub his temples. “Heath is in charge of the NAWC now. He’s not a member; he’s above them. He’s the one who directed the packs to check in on witch businesses around the country. That’s why no one is talking to us. Jacky no longer trusts us. She told me that, so maybe we could attempt to speak with Heath instead. They want to find Carey, Benjamin, Arlo, and Kody. We’re just in their way. And she’s taking that badly.”
“Fuck.”
“You don’t get to just take over,” another agent snapped, and Beth turned on him, looking him up and down. It was Agent Jan, a known supernatural hater who worked in the BSA to push his own view of how supernaturals needed to be handled. He had liked Rhodes’ uncooperative, negative, and aggressive manipulation. Because of that, Rhodes had kept him close all night. Now it was failing.
Fucking office politics at its finest.
“Do you have a better suggestion?”
“We catch all of them and load them with silver for being out of control,” he snapped.
“She hasn’t done anything we can consider illegal for a supernatural,” Beth retorted.
“She killed someone, and we can’t prove he was another supernatural!”
“She killed someone actively kidnapping her daughter, and if we don’t like using ‘daughter’, she is still one of Carey’s legal guardians.” Rhodes was explaining now. He’d been all bluster to Jacky’s face, but Beth knew those threats had been empty. Everyone should know that. “It would never hold up. It was a high-stress situation, and Jacky was nearly killed. We’ve seen the blood. She should have died. You put that in front of a court of humans and there are any mothers on the jury, you’ll never get a guilty conviction. Other supernaturals think she’s justified, without a doubt.”
“And the police she injured?” the agent asked.
“That’s not worthy of the death penalty,” Beth hissed. She knew other agents could be stupid and corrupt, who just hated supernaturals and wanted to manage them, but this was an insane line of discussion. “Are you insane? Also, I’ve been told that at seven, Zuri, her older sister, will be live with the werecat statement on what happened. Jacky, obviously, isn’t in the best place to be giving a public statement about her daughter being kidnapped in a violent attack.”
“I bet there’s going to be a lot of money thrown at the problem and a story of Jacky and Carey paraded to the public in a PR wave that makes it all the more sympathetic,” Rhodes said, not looking at Beth or Agent Jan. “Every mom in the country will be rooting Jacky on once the whole story gets out there from the mouth of her sister. Zuri is… something else.”
Beth would have thought her boss had a crush for a minute.
“It won’t be perfect, but we’ve had major incidents with supernaturals before. They come and go. This one is big in shockvalue, but it’s… fairly minimal in damage aside from minor injuries to some of the local police.” Beth sat down near Rhodes.
