Glass predator harmony b.., p.1
Glass Predator (Harmony Black Series Book 3), page 1
ALSO BY CRAIG SCHAEFER
The Daniel Faust Series
The Long Way Down
Redemption Song
The Living End
A Plain-Dealing Villain
The Killing Floor Blues
The Castle Doctrine
The Revanche Cycle
Winter’s Reach
The Instruments of Control
Terms of Surrender
Queen of the Night
The Harmony Black Series
Harmony Black
Red Knight Falling
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Craig Schaefer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by 47North, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477822982
ISBN-10: 1477822984
Cover design by David Drummond
Dedicated to the tireless staff of the McKittrick Hotel in New York City, who provided a wayward scribe with hospitality and inspiration on a particularly dark and stormy night.
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-NINE
FORTY
FORTY-ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY-THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
At the end of the hall, the elevator chimed. It wasn’t supposed to.
The sound jarred al-Farsi from his thoughts. A first edition of Wuthering Heights lay open before him. A warm fire was crackling in his office hearth, and his chubby white-and-beige cat was perched on the edge of his desk, happily purring. A perfect evening, until the rattling of the elevator heralded the arrival of an uninvited guest. She threw open his office doors and strode in like she owned the room. Her scarlet lips curled into a malicious smile, every strand of her blonde bob perfectly in place.
Al-Farsi sucked air between his teeth. “Najidanere,” he said. “I don’t believe you have an appointment.”
“I don’t believe I need one,” the woman replied. “And, please, no need for formalities, dear. You can call me Nadine. So this is where it all happens, hmm? The nerve center of your little . . . freelance intelligence operation.”
She looked around, taking in the shelves upon shelves of identical notebooks, thousands of them. All the way to the vaulted ceiling, where shadows squirmed and twisted in patterns that didn’t match the firelight.
“This is my home,” he told her.
“For the moment. You’ve been a naughty boy, al-Farsi. Running your business in the heart of my prince’s territory? You know who I am, and, yet, have you ever reached out to me? Have you ever offered me access to your records? Offered even a token gesture of respect? No. I’m very disappointed.”
She approached the desk, taking slow, sauntering steps. He lifted his chin and adjusted his silk cravat, squaring his shoulders against the high-backed leather chair.
“I have an understanding with the hound,” he said.
“You have an understanding with the current hound,” Nadine said. “He’s on his way down. I’m on my way up. If you want this adorable nightclub of yours to stay in business, you’d better get right with me. Otherwise, we’re going to have a problem.”
“Are we?” he asked, glancing upward. She followed his gaze.
Above their heads, a tarantula the size of a car clung to the ceiling. It stared down at her with beady, gossamer-purple eyes, its shadowy husk lined with rippling hairs of darkness. More shadows swarmed around Nadine’s feet, bristling black centipedes that rose up from the carpet and skittered on thousands of twitching legs. Nadine looked back to al-Farsi and slowly arched one perfectly groomed eyebrow.
“That’s adorable. Maybe you didn’t get the memo: I am the grand matriarch of the House of Dead Roses. I have seven assassins downstairs, seeded among your unsuspecting clientele and ready to start a bloodbath. Another thirteen outside, with enough military-grade firepower to level the building on my command. Now be a good boy and put your pets away, or I’ll make you eat them.”
Al-Farsi’s lips twitched. He broke eye contact, glancing down, as the shadows receded into the walls. “This is harassment,” he said. “I’m reporting this to the hound.”
“Good. Then you can tell him all about―what was it called? Oh, right. Operation Cold Spectrum.”
He froze. He slowly lifted his gaze, meeting Nadine’s smirk. She strolled around the desk and reached out to stroke the purring cat with her fingertips.
“That’s right,” she said. “I know. More important, I know that you know. You’ve had information on Cold Spectrum all this time, and you never volunteered it to my people. Never warned us. How much would your ‘understanding’ be worth if that got out, hmm? My prince would order this place burned to the ground and your soul offered up on a roasting spit.”
She shoved his chair back with a sudden burst of strength. Then, slowly, she swung one leg over and straddled his lap, facing him, fingertips of one hand brushing his cheek while the other toyed with the neatly groomed strands of his beard.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I can keep a secret. As long as you make it worth my while. You should be thankful, you know. I’m aware you had another couple of visitors recently. Harmony Black and Jessie Temple.”
“I don’t—” He paused, swallowing hard. “I don’t speak about my clients.”
Her fingertip ran along his bottom lip. “Even if I ask nicely?”
“I am . . . quite immune to your tricks. Your magic won’t work on me.”
“Do I even need to use it? I have something even better: leverage. And you’ll do as you’re told. Do you know what they did to my little girl, back in Talbot Cove? They ruined her hunt. Humiliated her. Handed her rightful victory to a sniveling worm of a rival. Do you have any children, al-Farsi? It’s a sacred thing, the bond between a mother and her daughter. I’d do anything to protect her. And yet, even though you extended the hand of friendship to my enemies and snubbed me, I’m not angry. I’m even going to give you a choice.”
He stared at her, uncertain. “A choice?”
Her hand slipped down from his beard and closed around his throat. Her fingers curled, squeezing. Not hard enough to cut off his breath. Just enough to get his attention.
“A choice,” she said. “You can be a willing slave, or an unwilling one. One option is far less painful than the other, but I’m content to leave the decision up to you. We have a saying in the House of Dead Roses: In the end . . . all serve.”
Still as a statue, he held her gaze. Her fingers squeezed tighter.
“What do you want from me?” he whispered.
Nadine raised one hand and snapped her fingers, sharp as a drumbeat. She nodded to the desk. Now, in a spot that had been empty a moment ago, a plain brown folder awaited. To al-Farsi it felt like a bomb, primed and ready to explode.
“Sometime in the next couple of days,” Nadine said, “you’re going to get a call from Bobby Diehl. You know, Diehl Innovations? They make the smart refrigerators and the overpriced phones?”
“I know him,” al-Farsi replied.
“Then you probably know what he’s going to call about. He’s got his own score to settle with Temple and Black. He’s going to offer you an exorbitant amount of money for everything you have on them.”
“I never sell information about my clients. Under any circumstances.”
Nadine giggled. “And that’s what you’ll tell him. But you can give him the contents of that folder without breaking your rule. And you will.”
She shifted her weight on his lap, giving him room to reach toward the desk. His outstretched hand, faintly trembling, opened the folder. He read the paper inside in silence.
“I understand,” he said. “And then?”
“And then you’re going to call her.” Nadine leaned in close, the air awash in her honeysuckle
perfume, her hot breath gusting across his ear as she whispered. “Call Harmony Black, and warn her. I’ll tell you exactly what to say.”
“Why? What are you trying to accomplish?”
“You could call this a ‘target-rich environment.’ I’m going to destroy my enemies, win a boon for my court, and pave the way to the seat at my prince’s right hand, all without lifting a finger. And you’re going to help.”
She pulled away from his ear. Sitting on his lap, almost nose to nose, smiling. But now her eyes were orbs of molten copper, burning bright, and her teeth were curved and pointed like a great white shark’s.
“You’re going to help,” she repeated, “because if you don’t, I’ll expose you and that nasty little secret you’ve been sitting on all these years. And then I’ll drag you straight to hell.”
ONE
A life in the clandestine services means a new challenge every day. Sometimes it’s an endless stakeout, waiting hours for a suspect to make a move. Sometimes it’s combing through reams of accounting ledgers, looking for a single out-of-place digit that points toward the truth. And sometimes you find yourself in a burning building, ducking behind an overturned hospital gurney while the Phantom of the Opera throws bolts of fire at you.
The air boiled. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and my blouse clung to my clammy skin. My reflection in the stainless-steel gurney was a distorted fun-house ghoul, with flames roaring at my back and licking along the operating room’s wall. Just to my left, the gurney’s previous occupant sprawled out on the lime-green tile floor like a fallen puppet. He was naked, dead, with his scalp peeled back like a bad toupee, and his face cut away with surgical precision. He stared at me with lidless eyes, set into a perfect oval of wet, red muscle.
The woman in the doorway shrieked louder than the fire. Half of her face was concealed behind a white porcelain mask, twisted burn tissue peeking out along the edges, and her surgical scrubs were stained with enough blood to fill a slaughterhouse. Serpents of fire wreathed her hands, rippling in the air, curling figure eights around her clenched fists like a Möbius strip of raw magic. I smelled gasoline and tasted black smoke, the air wavering like a desert mirage.
“Just returning the favor, Agent Black!” She thrust out her fists and screamed.
One of the fire snakes lanced toward me like a burning arrow. It sizzled just over my head, hitting the back wall with a splash of Halloween orange and feeding the blaze.
“Just returning the favor!”
We’d first encountered Victoria Carnes—or Hostile Entity 138, according to her new target file—back in Detroit, where she and her partner were running a chop shop for human beings. She got away, but I’d left her with scars to remember me by. And apparently drove her from nutty to batshit psychotic in the process, too. When plastic-surgery patients started popping up in Nashville with their organs scooped out and their faces carved off, I had a pretty solid hunch that Dr. Carnes had gotten back into her old line of work.
Sometimes I hate being right.
A voice crackled over my earpiece. Calm, collected, tinged with a faint Irish brogue. “Harmony? Do you have eyes on the target?”
“Yeah,” I gasped, hunkering down behind my makeshift cover. “You could say that.”
“Is Jessie with you?”
I glanced to my right. My partner found her own cover, crouched low behind a flame-seared cabinet, but she was miles away inside her own head. Her turquoise eyes, inhumanly bright, reflected the growing blaze as she clutched her knees and rocked back and forth. A faint, keening whine escaped her throat.
“Something’s wrong with her.” I waved my hand, snapping my fingers at her. “Hey, Jessie. Jessie. Damn it. Could really use some covering fire here!”
A torrent of flame washed over the gurney’s edge, pressing me flat to the floor while Victoria cackled at the top of her lungs. I made a mental note to choose my words more carefully.
A ceiling tile broke away and fell, hitting the floor at my back with a shower of sparks. On one side, a growing blaze inched closer by the second. On the other, a fire-tossing lunatic blocked the only way out. No time to wait for Jessie to snap out of it, no time for backup to get here. I took a deep breath—then coughed myself hoarse, sputtering and spitting smoke. Another, slower breath and I reached into my inner core, unfurling the heart of my power like the petals of a steel flower.
Earth, air, water, fire, sang the ritual trigger, whispering in my inner ear. Garb me in your raiment. Arm me with your weapons.
I called to my element, to the water, to the idea of water. I crooned a song of swift, icy rivers and bottomless ocean, of purity and flow, of the quiet, relentless strength that could carve through mountains. Tendrils of aquamarine shimmered around my right hand, driving back the smoke and the heat.
My left hand flipped back my jacket and pulled the Glock from my shoulder holster. I counted to three, braced myself, and made my move.
I leaped up from behind the gurney just as Victoria unleashed another burning serpent. I lashed out with my right hand and painted the air with water, a glistening diamond shield. The serpent hit the shield and burst in a screech of sparks and blue-hot light. I was already on the move, bringing up my gun and snapping off shots as fast as I could squeeze the trigger. One went wide, pounding into the wall and shattering tile. The second hit her in the shoulder. Victoria yelped, staggering back, clutching her wound. She turned and ran. I leaped over the gurney, dead set on bringing her down, but I froze in the doorway where she’d been standing a heartbeat ago.
The fire was still spreading, but Jessie didn’t move a muscle—hadn’t moved? She stared at the encroaching flames, unblinking, paralyzed. I cursed under my breath and holstered my gun. She snapped at me and growled as I put my arm around her shoulder, struggling to pull her to her feet.
“It’s me,” I said. “Come on, don’t fight me.”
Step by plodding step, I hauled her out of the operating room. “April,” I said, “Carnes is gone. We need extraction, right now.”
“On our way,” she replied. On the other end of the earpiece, an engine revved to life.
I pulled Jessie through the abandoned clinic, past surgical suites filled with the mad doctor’s recent handiwork—ragged red corpses and stacks of organ coolers under gore-spattered plastic—and through the dusty, empty waiting room. She started to come around once we made it out from the smoky haze and into the warm Nashville sun, and pulled away from me as she squinted and wobbled on unsteady legs.
“What happened back there?” she asked me.
I stared at her. It took a second to find my voice.
“You tell me.”
The clinic burned at our backs, black smoke rising in thin, rippling plumes to touch a cloudless blue sky. A van roared up to the curb. The livery shouted out an advertisement for a local plumbing company, but the side door rattled open to reveal banks of flickering screens and control panels. April Cassidy sat at the heart of the surveillance suite, leaning back in her wheelchair. The woman—in her sixties, with steel-wool hair and eyes like frozen sapphires—beckoned us on board with a nod. Behind the wheel of the van, Kevin leaned to one side and glanced over his shoulder at us. He pointed to the wide-band radio on the cluttered dashboard.
“Police and fire incoming, ETA two minutes,” the lanky teenager said. “We gotta go.”
I slammed the door behind us. “Hit it.”
April turned to the bank of screens. Whatever she was thinking, I couldn’t guess. Her cool, expressionless face was a poker player’s dream.
“Linder is waiting for a status report,” she said.
The van screeched away from the curb, making a beeline for the highway. I held on to a monitor to steady myself and thought about what to tell our boss. Between some ruined real estate and a scrubbed operation, I didn’t have any good news to share.
“Tell him we have positive confirmation that the Face Collector is Victoria Carnes, H. E. 138. She ambushed us and managed to escape. Tell him . . .” I shook my head. “Tell him the mission was a failure.”
An hour later I stood in a motel parking lot, watching the sun go down and the Nashville lights rise up, cherry neon shimmering against a dusty violet sky. I didn’t have anywhere particular to be.
Normally after a mission, the team would get together for a group meal. It didn’t have to be anything fancy; with our per diems, we spent a lot of time in greasy spoons and chain restaurants. Fancy wasn’t important. We just needed that time together to catch our breaths, to get our footing back, to quietly celebrate a job well done. Another target crossed off the Hostile Entities ledger, neutralized before any more civilians could get hurt.
