Page 40 of Legacy of Chaos

Stryke nodded. “A new sensor is on its way.”

“Yeah, well, weird shit has been happening ever since. One of my boys swears an oil slick climbed up a support beam and came after him. He burned it into a stain on the deck. Cameras didn’t catch jack shit. Two days ago, another guy claimed he saw a merman holding a trident with a man’s head stuck on its tines. He didn’t recognize the face, seeing how it had been bitten off, but Rich Newland hasn’t been seen since.”

Shit. “Do you think the patch we installed over the breach is leaking near the broken sensor?”

“Yeah, but we didn’t detect any activity onanysensor, so I don’t believe any demons came through – at least, not then. I think we were experiencing leaked evil itself. It affected sea creatures that entered the bubble of leaked material. We’ve had sharks attacking the rig, and we had to spear an octopus that got inside the galley and tried to kill three people.” He shook his head. “But today…”

“Today what?”

Taran’s gray eyes turned grim. “Something else got onto the rig. Fucking forty-foot-long alligator-shark-demon thing. Never seen anything like it. Killed two of my men and wounded eight more before we put a flamethrower down its throat. Turned it into fucking sashimi.”

“Sashimi is raw,” Stryke said absently, his mind still trying to wrap itself around a potential disaster. “And you have aflame thrower?On an oil rig?”

“We ain’t here to pump oil, boss.” Taran adjusted his hat. “We’re here to repair an opening from the hell realm and capture the demons that escaped during the initial breach. You’re lucky we didn’t bring nukes.”

Stryke swore. Taran had a point, but flame throwers on oil rigs sounded like a future documentary waiting to happen. He could practically watch it unfold, news reports about how StryTech caused an ecological and demonological disaster with a massive explosion.

“Just…be careful,” Stryke said, and Taran nodded. “I’ll have a team on its way within the hour. What do you need?”

“We could definitely use a couple of medics. An engineer. Magic user. Maybe some extra muscle and weapons. And hurry. We’re starting to pick up a lot of heat and movement down there. I’m not sure the seal will hold much longer.”

Stryke clicked off the screen and started to call DART’s senior technomancer, a Cyberis demon like Cyan, but his finger froze over the button. The guy was on leave. Shit.

That left Cyan, who didn’t even work for him.

This day just kept getting worse and worse.

Cyan loved being in a laboratory. Even if it was at StryTech. And honestly, although she hated to admit it, shelovedbeing in the StryTech facility. Her lab at DART was modern and well-equipped, but it had nothing on the high-techequipment available to her here. From the newest-generation thermal cyclers and confocal microscopes to a Next-Generation Sequencer she was pretty sure wasn’t even available to the rest of the world yet, she had the best of the best to work with.

Who needed sleep? Especially now that she was doing little more than tossing and turning in her apartment. She hated being there, but it would have been too weird to go to DART just to snooze on a cot, and she definitely wasn’t sleeping at StryTech.

Today, she’d even been given access to StryTech’s genetic library, which contained biologics from thousands of demon species. The technician on duty had been processing a new sample for inclusion in the company’s DeTecht demon-detection software when she arrived.

“Where does the DNA come from?” she’d asked.

“Some is sent to us by various law enforcement agencies” the technician had explained. “But most comes directly from Stryke. No idea where he gets it.”

Stryke probably paid thugs to hunt down demons and steal their genetic material. The jerk.

She’d thought about that on the way back to her workstation, but it didn’t take long for her work to make her forget about Stryke and his mysterious method of collecting DNA.

“Cyan?”

She turned to see Parker walking toward her, his hands tucked into his white lab coat’s pockets.

“Hey, Parker. I’m sorry I ditched you at the party last night. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went home.” It wasn’t a complete lie. Even though she’d considered going back for champagne, she’d ultimately found herself at her apartment, drowning her sorrows in salted caramel gelato.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m just happy you took the hint when I said I’ve always wanted to see DART headquarters.”

She laughed. He had practically begged for an invitation to the party.

She liked the good-looking, good-natured male who, despite the fact that he’d been bitten by a werewolf and lost his military career, managed to always be cheerful. He came closer, pausing to peer at the flasks of simmering ectoplasm another researcher was working with.

“Stryke is here to see you,” he said.

“Send him in. It’s not like he doesn’t usually barge inside on a whim,” she muttered.

“He wants to speak to you outside. In private.”

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