Page 31 of Anchor

Somehow, I made it all the way around the large fence of the IDD, and to the back gates. There were only four reporters there, whom I hoped had come for someone else, but I hoped in vain.

I didn’t hear anything, but I saw when the woman wearing a crème-colored suit pointed her hand toward me and then all four of them started running to my car just as I stopped in front of one of the three bar gates. A guard was coming to check my badge, which I did not have, and when he saw them, he actually looked afraid.

His eyes met mine through the windshield. The reporters were already at my window.

It was the longest two minutes of my life and I still couldn’t believe that this was actually happening to me. I kept my eyes ahead on the guy who’d called for more guards to help him keep those reporters off, and I froze every muscle on my face like that. I wouldn’t move an inch until I was inside.

Three other guards came out and had to basically pull the reporters off my car violently, and then the first one pulled up the bar with his hand to let me through without even asking for my badge becausemorereporters were coming from the front of the building, running like they were being chased by fucking dragons.

Then I was inside.

My ears whistled and I didn’t hear shit, but I saw the guard knock on my window, so I opened it. The sound of people screaming somewhere behind me shocked me for a moment.

“Badge,” the guard said, but I shook my head.

“I don’t have it on me.”

He flinched. “I can’t let you through without?—”

“I forgot to make sure my wallet was safe while I was being chained to a chair and tortured in a basement. My face is going to have to do, and if you really want to pretend you don’t know who I am, scan my fingers—but do it quickly because those people mean business.”

I pointed my thumb back as if he needed the reminder that more reporters were trying to basically break through the gates and the ramps, pushing the guards who’d gone out to keep them back harder by the second.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,”the guard said, reaching for the guns on his holsters. “Just go—get in there. They’ll scan you in the garage. Go, go, go!”

I didn’t hesitate.

My tires screeched when I took the car forward, closing the window because the sound of those people screaming my name was getting to me worse than I could have ever imagined.

Almost there,I whispered to myself, until the doors of the garage were in front of me, and the guards who were stationed nearby followed my car as I drove in to scan me, as if they, too, didn’t recognize my face.

It was going to be a long fucking day.

I found my phone just as I left it in my locker, the battery dead. But I also kept my charger in there, so I plugged it in right away while I put on the leather jacket and the leather pants of my uniform, the last clean pair I’d left here. The other? It had been basically torn off me and goddess knew where it had ended up now. I was going to need to put in a request for a new uniform. And a new badge, too. A new ID and a new credit card—all that stuff I’d carried with me in my small wallet that I no longer had.

The locker room was empty, thank goddess. I’d come straight here because I’d wanted to keep away from the people who were looking at me strangely, like they couldn’t quite figure out how to feel about me yet. The same people I’d worked with for over a year in this very place. The same people who’d smiled and saidhito me more often than not.

The same people who had just stood by and watched when I first turned Mud and I could barely stand on my good leg that day I escaped the interrogation room, too.

Those same people.

I just wanted to stay away from them, not to mention that I was borderline paranoid to be here because I knew somebody wanted me dead. Whether Madeline believed me or not, Michael, my own team leader, and Erid, whom I’d actually considered a friend, had tried to kill me in that forest. They’d shot me. Had turned me into Mud. And Michael said that he had orders from higher up to do it, so that meant whoever wanted me dead had come from here.

If I was going to be at ease in the IDD Headquarters again, I needed to find who that person was.

Was it Kristof Harlow, managing director of our division? Or maybe Ashley Cameron, his boss? Or maybe Gabriel Phu,herboss?

I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, feeling a little bit better now that I had a holster on—my old one, but I didn’t care. The leather was a little worn, but it held the knives that I had in my locker just fine. My custom-made M17s were gone, too, but I could always put in the request for new ones as soon as I walked out of this room.

And my leather jacket…

I grabbed it from the hanger and held it in my hands for a moment, sure that I’d feel something. I didn’t.

These jackets came to us with protective spells that made them extra sturdy and extra durable against magic and sharp objects—like claws. In my line of work, a week passing by without being face to face with some kind of creature who wanted to kill me was consideredlucky. But that day at the forest, the catfairie’s claws had torn through my leather jacket when he slammed his foot to my stomach with ease, something that shouldn’t have happened.

Unless somebody had deactivated the protective spells of my uniform without my noticing, and maybe they did the same tothispair of pants and jacket, too.

My magic, thisnewkind that didn’t feel like mine at all, sprung at the thought of whispering a protective spell of my own. Even knowing that it would hurt while it came out, even knowing that it would sting the way it did while I was in the Council’s chambers, I began to whisper the spell, this one third-degree, the most effective protection spell one could place on objects. It would last at least a couple of months before it began to weaken.

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