Page 19 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
Electric. Humming. Complete.
He held her gaze for a moment, then turned away, the corners of his lips tugged into a frown.
“Almost where?”
Either Magnus didn’t hear or didn’t want to respond, because he didn’t answer. He didn’t turn around again.
SIX
“A PHONE!” screamed the Grand Minister. “BRING ME A FUCKING PHONE!”
For the hundredth time since being dragged from the rubble of the Hospice and lifted to the gurney that had rushed him to the hospital where his badly burned body—what was left of it from all his previous entanglements with the Aberrants—was now being hurtled down a corridor on the way to a surgical suite, his screams were ignored.
Goddamned do-gooders.
He was going to ensure every one of these pieces of shit was strung up and hanged, their corpses left to rot until even the birds weren’t interested in their dried remains. The EMTs: hanged. The ambulance driver: hanged. The nurses in the ER: hanged. And every single worthless pile of good-for-nothing crap currently running alongside his squeaky-wheeled gurney: hanged. Or maybe publicly decapitated, then hanged from their ankles until their rotted legs separated from their bodies and their headless, legless torsos fell with the unholy thud of dead meat to the ground.
There would be hell to pay for ignoring his commands.
He’d been spared the total barbecuing suffered by a good portion of his men due to pure luck. The desk he’d been sitting behind in the Hospice Administrator’s office had been made of industrial-grade steel, and when the thing calling itself Lumina Bohn had turned the air to fire, a gust of heated wind had preceded the blaze. Fortune had been on his side; he was thrown against the wall, the desk was blown apart, the steel desktop had wedged itself between him and the she-devil, and he’d been saved.
Or at least not altogether roasted, as his men had been.
“PHOOOOOOONE!” the Grand Minister howled, eliciting a kindly cluck of comfort from one of the nurses running alongside his gurney. She patted his shoulder.
“Everything is going to be fine. You’re safe now. We’ll take care of you,” the nurse said gently, patting him again.
This one he’d kill himself.
He continued to scream and thrash all the way down the corridor and into the surgical suite. He screamed as the doctors lifted his body from the gurney to an operating table, screamed as they cut his melted suit from his flesh. Finally, just before someone leaned in to cover his face with an oxygen mask, one of his men burst into the room. He shoved the staff aside, toppling them like so many toy soldiers.
“Escaped!” Hans spat, ignoring the cries of outraged medical personnel around him. “Vanished near the waste treatment plant. She must’ve had help.”
The Grand Minister reached out and curled his hand around the lapel of Hans’s jacket, jerking him down with the strength of a much younger man. He’d been badly injured so many times before the pain was like a visit from an old friend, and he welcomed it. Pain kept the mind sharp. Pain reminded him what the stakes were.
Pain was a tool that could harden a man’s will, and the Grand Minister’s will had been honed to lethal solidity.
“Get me Thorne,” he hissed into Hans’s face. He was instantly obeyed as Hans withdrew a cell phone from his pocket. While the room fell into shocked silence and stillness at the mention of Thorne’s name, Hans hit a button, then held the phone to the Grand Minister’s ear.
It rang once. The call was answered, but no greeting came over the line. There was never a greeting. Only that heavy, ominous silence waited, its chill and darkness that of a tomb.
“We’ve been wrong all along!” he rasped, his throat raw from screaming. “It wasn’t that bitch of a Queen of theirs who brought us down in Manaus. It was her daughter.”
The silence on the other end of the phone throbbed. Then the man who ruled what remained of the world spoke only two words before he disconnected.
“Find her.”
His energy spent, his path now clear, the Grand Minister slumped against the operating table. Hans pocketed the phone, and just before the nurse he was soon going to kill lowered the oxygen mask to his face, he whispered hoarsely to Hans, “New directive. Divert all resources to finding the Aberrant Lumina Bohn. All resources!”
A hiss of pressurized air, a murmur of voices, the sensation of weightlessness, then sinking. Then Hans spoke, and the Grand Minister faded into unconsciousness with a savage, satisfied smile on his face.
Hans said, “Already on it, sir. We’re getting an intermittent signal from Ritter’s collar; he must have tagged her at the father’s house before she escaped. If the signal holds, we’ll have her in a matter of hours.”
SEVEN
“You’re saying she burned the house after she was collared? Is that possible?”
“It’s the only explanation. There’s no way the mog from Enforcement survived the fire long enough to tag her. The entire building was in flames in seconds. It was the same at the Hospice. He shot her, collared her, then she lit him up.”
