Betrayal by the Hour
BETRAYAL BY THE HOUR
By Kelly Meding
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This story has not been professionally edited [unless you count me], so any mistakes are mine. Feel free to link to this story, but please do not repost in its entirety anywhere else on the web. Thank you.)
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Gina Kismet cupped her hands beneath the faucet, allowed her palms to fill, then splashed the icy water on her face. It dripped down her cheeks, nose and jaw, and swirled into the stained porcelain basin, taking none of her anger with it. She stared at her reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror, as mad as she’d ever been in her life.
Strike that. Not quite as mad as she’d ever been. Three other events ranked higher than this, and all for good goddamned reasons. But this one definitely came in a strong fourth on the “Most Pissed-Off Ever” list. All four things had one common element that put them on the list, too—betrayal. Gina could stomach a lot of things from people, but not betrayal.
And not from Wyatt Truman.
She grabbed a wad of scratchy paper towels and blotted the cool water from her face. A few drops darkened the collar of her t-shirt. She dabbed at them, then snorted at herself. After she’d stormed out of the holding room in a snit of frustration, no one was going to care if she returned with water on her clothes.
For an hour Wyatt had sat in that chair like a statue, ignoring their questions. Ignoring everything around him, as if nothing he’d done in the last week mattered. As if he wasn’t a tenured and highly respected Handler who’d suffered a devastating loss when the three members of his Triad of Hunters was murdered—two of them by one nut-job Hunter who was later kidnapped by goblins and tortured to death herself. As if disappearing and severing ties with his fellow Handlers wasn’t completely out of character for a man that Gina had known for nine years and worked with as a Handler for seven.
As if Wyatt hadn’t kidnapped a fellow Handler and held him in an industrial refrigerator.
Gina heaved a sigh and lobbed the wadded paper towels into the trash can. The tiny bathroom reeked of disinfectant and floral air freshener. It was basic, like the bathrooms of most small businesses, more for function than comfort.
This particular Triad holding area was in the rear store room of a clothing boutique owned and run by a were-fox named Aspen. Unsurprisingly, the shop’s name was Aspen Designs & Gifts. The Triads—or rather their superiors—paid the shop’s rent in exchange for the store room, privacy and the occasional tidbit of Dreg information. As informants went, it was a decent arrangement.
Gina pulled the lock and left the tiny bathroom for a gray corridor. To her left was a doorway covered by a tie-dyed curtain, and the shop beyond. Immediately ahead of her was the small stock room Aspen used for her wares. Gina wheeled right and stopped in front of a reinforced door. She punched in a security code, then slipped through. The Triads had their own entrance to the holding area via the rear alley, but Aspen had been kind enough—cajoled into, more likely—to give them access to her facilities. Sometimes prisoner interrogations lasted for days. Gina had used this one before, but never for a Handler.
Never for a friend.
On the other side of the security door was a “lobby” roughly twenty feet squared. The door to the alley was on the far end, marked with an EXIT sign. It had a simple push handle on this side. On the outside, it had a keypad concealed behind a loose brick, and the door itself said “Maintenance.” The door she was most interested in was to her left, a plain wood slab that hid the holding area.
Three Hunters sat in hard metal folding chairs set up in one corner of the room. The two boys—David and Timothy, if she recalled correctly—were from Rhys Willemy’s Triad; the girl, Nadia, was one of Rufus’s. All three had been there for Wyatt’s arrest. All three were smart enough to stay out of the way until given orders. They were playing something with a deck of cards.
She considered (and not for the first time) sending them out to continue assisting with the search for the mystery brunette seem with Wyatt at the Burger Palace. Rufus had said he didn’t know who she was; Gina had no reason to question him. His other two Hunters were still out there, as well as Gina’s own Triad, looking for elusive answers to Wyatt’s bizarre behavior.
Everything was going to hell and Wyatt, damn him, was pushing the handcart.
And Gina was damned well going to find out why.
A cell phone chimed and Gina paused on her way to the holding room. Nadia folded her cards, then flipped open her phone with one hand. “Yes?” Her eyes went wide, then narrowed with sinister intent. “I will inform them. Good luck, Wormer.” She hung up; the entire call had lasted less than thirty seconds.
“Inform who of what?” Gina asked.
Nadia rose from her chair, back straight and arms stiff by her sides, as though formally addressing a dignitary. “Wormer and Tully have tracked the brunette to an apartment in Parkside East. They are sending me the location and assessing the situation.”
Good. She could use that. Gina strode to the wood door and opened it without knocking.
The holding cell was half the size of the first room, the walls and floor covered in soundproofing foam. A metal chair was bolted to the floor in the center, and Wyatt was cuffed to the chair. He didn’t look up when she entered. His gaze hadn’t wavered from a spot on the floor just past his knees.
Rhys Willemy glanced at her from his position against the far wall. He leaned on one shoulder, despite his smartly-pressed suit, looking for all the world like a man waiting for a bus. Only Gina knew better. He had a gun in his right hand, which was tucked out of sight beneath his left arm.
Wyatt couldn’t be left alone, and his guard had to be armed. Wyatt’s unique Gift allowed him to summon inanimate objects. He couldn’t summon his own cuffs off before Willemy could shoot him in the leg, though. He also wasn’t strong enough to summon both the cuffs and the gun—he could not concentrate on two objects in two locations at the same time. He’d confessed that particular weakness to Gina once upon a time. Before he’d stopped trusting her enough to confide in her. In Rufus. In any of them.
Gina stopped an arm’s reach from Wyatt’s chair, then crouched until she was interrupting his line of sight. He didn’t look at her, but she had a pretty good view of his face—clenched jaw, flat mouth, coal black eyes devoid of emotion. It was those eyes she watched as she said, “Parkside East is a nice neighborhood, Wyatt. How’d you meet a girl from that side of the river?”
His jaw twitched; his nostrils flared. The reaction wasn’t much, but Gina knew she’d finally gotten to him.
“We don’t have her name yet,” she continued, “but it’s just a matter of time. Tully and Wormer are damned good trackers. Running from them was a waste of time.”
“They’ll never catch her,” he said, speaking up for the first time. Quiet assurance was in his voice—he had no doubt of his words.
Gina cursed herself for the lie she was about to tell to a friend who’d helped her through some of the worst moments of her life. “They already have.”
His head snapped up, eyes meeting hers, smoldering with fury. “You’re lying.”
“We’ll see. It’ll take them…what? Twenty or so minutes to get her back across town to our location?”
He turned his head, shut her out. Anger still radiated from him. Gina stood up, glad to have gotten some sort of reaction from him, but still annoyed at the lack of information. Wyatt could be single-minded and stubborn, and somehow he’d gotten it into his head that his fellow Handlers couldn’t be trusted. That he couldn’t rely on them to help him with whatever trouble he was in. He’d betrayed the people he worked with, the organization he’d helped build from the ground up, and Gina was torn between hating him with all of her heart and—goddammit!—still wanting to help.
Desperately, she tried one last tactic. “Wyatt, you told me once that no one Hunter’s sacrifice is worth more than the other.”
His shoulders visibly tensed, as though he’d recalled the cool drizzle of rain that day in the cemetery, thirteen months ago, when they stood over the grave of the only Hunter either of them had seen buried. Lucas Moore had died of natural causes at the too-young age of twenty-one; he’d gotten a coffin and a little stone marker. Gina had taken Lucas’s death hard. She had not, however, gone off the literal deep end, like Wyatt.
And he didn’t seem to like having his own platitudes tossed back in his face. He looked up, lips curled back, probably prepared to deliver a snarling retort.
The holding room door swung open, and Rufus St. James stepped inside. Willemy had tried insisting Rufus take a few hours to warm up and relax from his time in deep-freeze, and yet there he was. He’d changed his clothes, at least, into jeans and a fleece. He glanced at Gina and Willemy in turn, ignoring Wyatt.
“I want five minutes,” Rufus said, his tone cold. “Alone.”
Willemy grunted. Gina hesitated. Rufus and Wyatt had a long, strange history, but at the end of the day she’d always thought they were friends. But friends didn’t lock friends in industrial refrigerators.
“Hey!” someone outside shouted, seeming more surprised than alarmed. Then more shouting, followed by a flash of brilliant, blinding white. Gina closed her eyes and rubbed them, heart pounding. Something was wrong.
Gunshots. Two of them. She opened her eyes in time to see Rufus fall. He had blood on his back. Something was lobbed into the room. It hit the wall and rolled, then flashed another concussion of white that knocked her flat.
The room buzzed. Everything went black, then gray. Gina struggled to stay conscious, fought against the overwhelming desire to sleep and escape the insects screeching in her head. Voices rose over the din. She tried her eyes again. Colorful spots danced in psychedelic patterns. Her mouth was dry.
A brown shape blurred the dots, and she blinked until David’s face came into focus. He was pale, even with his dark complexion. “Kismet, you okay? You hear me?” he asked over and over, alternately squeezing her shoulder.
She grunted. “Wha…?”
“Flash bomb, I think. Door must not have shut when St. James came in, because they stormed in and tossed the bomb before we could stop them.”
“Who?”
His face soured. “Couldn’t tell, they were all bundled up, ski masks. Moved real fast, though, so maybe Halfies.”
Someone else was talking, and she heard the word “ambulance” spoken in a harsh Russian accent. Gina turned her head. A few feet away, Rufus was face-down on the floor with Nadia kneeling over him. One hand pressed her own shirt against his back; the other hand held her cell phone. Rufus wasn’t moving.
Blood pounded in Gina’s head. She sat up too fast and bile swept up into her throat. Her vision darkened a moment, then focused.
“He’s not dead,” David said. “We’re getting help.”
“What the hell?” That from Willemy, somewhere behind Gina. She was afraid of vomiting if she tried to turn and look at him.
Instead, she focused on crawling over to Rufus. A few shuffles forward on her hands and knees, and then she froze, suddenly comprehending the reason for Willemy’s exclamation. She’d seen it in her peripheral vision without actually understanding it, and now she twisted her body around to stare at the empty chair.
The empty chair with the broken handcuffs still hanging on the legs.
Wyatt was gone.
