Page 81 of Blue Embers
“She’s still missing,” Draven said, grinding his teeth. “As for her vessel, I’m personally taking her to a facility overseas where none of this rebellion has reached yet. Merik Oland has agreed to keep her concealed in a holding cell in case she wakes up. The facility was built to imprison Shayde Mordefek after he massacred London. If it could keep the telepathic abilities a Red like him had at bay, it should be able to keep Haera from finding her vessel if she comes to. At the moment, she’s still unconscious.”
“Perhaps she doesn’t have a consciousness without Haera,” I suggested. “For all we know, she won’t wake up without her.”
“Either way, we can’t risk her being in the world. Everly is keeping her tranquilized until I get her to that holding facility.”
“So what now?” Lukan asked.
“Now we start treating this as if it’s a war. We’re the biggest targets. We all know what Haera’s after and why. We need to keep her from getting it and right now, Saxon is our best chance. Has anyone spoken to him?”
I shook my head. “He won’t contact us until he has the girl,” I said. “Every bit of interaction we have is a bread crumb to Haera. He knows that.”
“The vessel,” Persephone spoke up again, looking around the room at all of the eyes that had turned on her. “What is she?”
I looked to Draven for that answer. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her during the quarrel, but I knew he had. Curious, I waited for his response, but by the subtle grinding of his teeth, he wasn’t happy about the answer he was about to give. He stepped further into the room, taking in a long breath before he spoke.
“From what I can tell,” he said on a sigh. “She’s a Pike.”
“What?” I said, trying to let the words sink in fully. I leaned forward on my knees, looking at Draven with concern. “A female Pike is unheard of. Could she be some kind of experiment? I’d imagine Haera needed a strong body to house her consciousness when she was facing us.”
“Zephyre aren’t immune to fire,” Lukan chimed in once more. “Pikes are. That has to be why she chose that body.”
“It has to be,” Draven agreed. “As far as how she exists in the first place, we won’t know until we get her to Merik. He has a lab there. He’ll do blood tests to try and figure out exactly what she is.”
“What do we do until then?” Malice asked, looking more alert now.
Just then, my cell began to vibrate on the coffee table in front of me. All eyes slid toward it and I could feel the whole room holding its breath. I let it ring twice before reaching forward and sliding my thumb across the screen to answer, putting it on speaker for the others.
“You know,” a familiar man’s voice said from the other end. “When I trigger a perimeter sweep, it scrambles guard posts to make it easier to infiltrate an underground bunker. Imagine my surprise when you two just fly off and leave me hanging.”
“Leave you hanging?” I answered with a scoff. “We were unaware you’d even be there.”
“Yeah, well I got curious and decided to stay. So? I didn’t take you guys to be chicken. What gives?”
“Something came up. Important matters. We were forced to leave.”
“Important matters, huh? It wouldn’t happen to be the shit that’s going down in the sectors would it? Phyre Glass weapons in civilian hands? Sounds like you’ve got your hands full.”
“Among other things,” I sighed. “But yes, that is one of many pressing situations.”
I took a moment to look around the room at the others, all of them intently listening to the conversation in search of answers.
“So,” I continued. “There must be a reason you called besides letting us know we’d botched the plans we didn’t know you had.”
“Right, right,” the stranger spoke. “There is. I mean, when you guys fled the scene, I thought about high tailing it out of there, too, but my curiosity outweighs pretty much everything else in my life. So I snuck in. That fancy system you’ve got set up in your impenetrable bunker should be receiving some lovely photos pretty soon. And by lovely I mean that place is seriously set up to do some damage.”
“You went inside?” Draven asked, stepping toward me and the phone.
“Ah ha! I knew I was on speaker. Hello, everyone. Let’s see, who have we got? I’m guessing by that low, serious tone just now that you’ve got Mr. Tempest himself next to you. No doubt his little champion is with him. Everly, right? And where Draven goes, Lukan follows, and he wouldn’t let his family out of his sight when the sectors are so tense. Hello Keera and...what was the kid’s name? Oh! Ronan. And no, I didn’t forget about you, Persephone. Really sorry the museum thing didn’t work out. You worked hard off the books to get that exhibit going for Mr. Valentyne. I saw some of your dealings floating around.”
The room fell completely still as everyone realized what this man had just done. Keera pulled Ronan close, looking around timidly as if she thought he was there somewhere, watching. Draven’s gaze just became more rigid like he was ready to rip someone apart with his teeth.
“Hey,” Malice spoke up. “You forget about me?”
“I have no idea who this is,” the stranger said.
Malice stood, his eyes wide with offense. “Malice Wulf. You can name all these people and notMalice Wulf?”
“I’m sure you’re a prominent member of the team. If you could just sit down, that’d make everyone more comfortable.”
