Hunted (Riley Cray) (14 page)

Living in the country meant my interactions with others were pretty damn limited. It had been a long time since I’d run across someone who was so obviously prejudiced against supes. Johnson’s outburst had reminded me all too sharply of the fact that I was no longer a member of the human race. I was one of the others; one of the creatures in the dark to be maligned, restricted, and feared.

“You coming?” Holbrook asked, drawing my gaze away from Johnson’s distant figure.

Straightening, I picked up Loki’s carrier, glad that no one mentioned the obvious tremor in my hand. “Sure.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

FILING INTO THE ELEVATOR with Holbrook and the other agents from the convoy, we stood in uncomfortable silence, avoiding making eye contact with our own reflections in the mirrored interior. Although Johnson wasn’t with us, the effects of his tirade lingered like a corporeal being in the confined space, making us all a bit jittery.

“So...” I drawled, rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet. “How ‘bout them Broncos?”

“You watch football?” Holbrook asked with a surprised tilt to his brows.

“No, but I figured it was better than asking if you’d had your prostate checked recently,” I replied with a shrug, and grinned at the uncomfortable look on his face.

Behind me the female agent let out a chuckle, breaking the tense atmosphere. In the mirrored surface of the elevator, I could see everyone’s shoulders visibly relax as they let some of the tension go. Amazing what a little ass humor can do to a crowd.

“Tillman, you ever muster up the courage to ask out Jenna in accounting?” Holbrook asked to change the subject, grinning as the young agent blushed crimson and shifted from one foot to the other.

Beside him, his partner laughed, shaking her head.

“Shut up, Myrom,” Tillman said, staring at the toes of his shoes while his blush crept up the sides of his neck. He looked like a mortified teenager who’d just been pantsed in the middle of gym class.

“Ignore them,” I said, taking pity on the poor kid. Leaning in conspiratorially I added in a stage whisper, “They’re just a couple of asshats.” Although he didn’t raise his head, he did lift his gaze to meet mine, gracing me with a faint smile.

“Holbrook’s just intimidated by my giant...gun,” Tillman said after a few moments of silence, puffing out his chest and waggling his eyebrows suggestively for emphasis.

Laughter erupted from all of us, the last of our collective anxiety dissipating like smoke. We were all wiping tears of laughter from our eyes and shaking our heads when the elevator dinged and the doors opened to reveal a large open room filled with cubicles and agents walking to and fro like busy little bees. Tillman and Myrom got out ahead of me, the younger agent flashing me a smile before ducking his head and jogging after his partner.

Holbrook’s hand on my arm kept me from exiting the elevator. Turning to face him, I arched my brows in an unspoken question.

“Thanks for that,” he said, his voice pitched low enough that it wouldn’t carry down the hallway towards the retreating agents.

“For what?”

“Tillman. He’s a good kid, a good agent, but he’s quiet and shy. You brought him out of his shell. You did a good thing there.”

“It was nothing,” I said with a shrug, though I smiled at the warm flutter in the pit of my stomach.

With all the crazy crap going on around me it had felt good – really good – to make someone smile, no matter how silly or inconsequential it may have seemed to anyone else. I knew all too well what it was like to be the awkward one in the room, and if cracking a few ass jokes could help lighten the mood and give a shy guy a little pep, well then, watch out folks because I’ve got a butt load more jokes where that one came from. Get it?
Butt
load. Yeah, I crack myself up too.

Holbrook led the way out of the elevator, weaving through the sea of cubicles until reaching one at the end of a row. A small shiny nameplate tacked to the outside of the cubicle bore the name J. Lloyd. It looked like a bomb of paperwork had gone off in there, every available surface, including large portions of the floor, covered in stacks of file folders, loose papers, hand written notes, and Post-Its. The cubicle’s occupant was a middle aged man with sandy blonde hair, blinking blue eyes and a ketchup stain on the front of his shirt.

“Hey Lloyd, do you have those case files I asked you to track down?” Holbrook asked.

“Sure, it’s around here somewhere,” he answered, sucking his bottom lip as he pushed his chair back from the desk and looked over the mountain of paperwork. “Now where did I put that box?” he muttered, shuffling random stacks of paper back and forth across the small space.

“Is that it?” I asked, spotting a bankers box in the only relatively clutter free corner of the cubicle.

“Ah ha!” Lloyd crowed in triumph, zeroing in on the box I had pointed out. “Well done!”

As Lloyd scooted his chair across the floor to retrieve the box I gave Holbrook a significant look, receiving a minute shrug in return.

“Should be everything you asked for,” Lloyd beamed, turning pale, watery eyes on us.

“Thanks, Jim,” Holbrook said, accepting the box. “Say hi to Tanya and the kids for me.”

Falling into step behind Holbrook, I followed him back through the maze of cubicles towards the elevators and then down a hallway leading off to the left.

“Here we are,” Holbrook said, pausing outside a darkened office, the small nameplate next to the door reading ‘Special Agent D. Holbrook.’

Juggling the banker’s box and his backpack he pushed open the door with his hip and flipped the light switch with his elbow, bathing the room in fluorescent light. The room was small and windowless, and smelled of spilled coffee and him. A plywood desk circa 1980 lurked in the center of the room, an equally ancient monitor sitting on top along with a desk calendar filled in with several notes written in a sharp, precise hand.

Either he’s a technophobe, or he really pissed someone off
, I thought, eyeing the monitor that had to be as old as I was.

The rest of his desk was devoid of clutter, not even a single pen out of place. It was the complete opposite of my work space at home which was covered in dozens of scribbled sticky notes, sketches, doodles and various scraps of paper. Briefly, I wondered if I’d ever see my cluttered desk, or get to sleep in my own bed, again.

Setting the box down on the edge of the desk, Holbrook dropped his backpack in the corner of the room and draped his jacket over his chair. Turning to face me, he took Loki’s carrier from my clasped hands and set it down gently beside the desk. Loki let out a single meow before turning around inside the crate and burying his nose beneath his tail, almost instantly falling asleep again. At least he didn’t seem too put out by all the shuffling around we’d been doing over the last couple of days.

Turning back to the box on his desk, Holbrook set the lid aside and began flipping through the folders.

“There’s a break room down the hall on the left. There should be some coffee, tea and maybe even some donuts if they haven’t all been scavenged yet,” he said, setting several files aside on the desk until he found the one he wanted. “I need to go check-in with my boss, but I shouldn’t be gone long,” he said, pausing long enough to notice that I was still standing in the doorway, my hands clenched at my sides. Moving to stand in front of me, he tucked the folder under his arm to lay both hands on my shoulders, the now familiar electricity arcing between his fingers to send tremors of sensation through my skin. “You’re safe here, Riley. I promise.”

Unable to say anything for fear that my emotions would overcome me, I just nodded and stepped aside to let him pass. I hadn’t realized just how much my little spat with Johnson had unsettled me until Holbrook’s behavior tugged at my heart strings. If the guys protecting me would just as soon see me dead in a ditch somewhere, what hope did I have of surviving Samson a second time?

And since when did I become such an emotional wreck?

“I’ll be back soon,” he said before turning to stride down the hall, his long and measured steps carrying him away. I watched his retreating back with a growing sense of unease, feeling as though he were taking a small piece of my safety away with him.

Huffing out a tense breath I wrapped my arms around my middle and turned to regard his office. The wall behind his desk was filled with filing cabinets and bookshelves that stretched up to the dingy ceiling tiles. The shelves held several volume sets, a cursory glance showing that most of them were about supernatural law and governmental regulations. A few personal items were tucked in amongst the volumes, and I found my feet carrying me across the room to investigate before the thought even crossed my mind.

My fingers roved over the objects, a faint tingle buzzing in my fingertips like an echo of the electricity that passed through me every time we touched. A baseball with an indecipherable signature scrawled across the scarred surface sat safely nestled in a Plexiglas cube, a pair of dog tags coiled next to a folded American flag in a glass fronted frame, and a photograph of a younger Holbrook and an older man with similar features, both of them beaming at the camera as they held up their fishing poles, proudly displaying their catches.

A ghost of a smile drifted across my face as I touched the picture of the younger version of the agent, the bare skin of his chest and shoulders bronzed by the summer sun as he stood on an old wooden dock, a long arm draped around the older man’s shoulders.

My smile turned wistful as the memory of early summer mornings spent fishing with my grandfather rose faintly melancholy in my mind. It had been thirteen years since he passed away, ten since my grandmother had followed.

My recollections of my parents were limited to the slamming of a car door in the middle of the night as my mom slipped away, never to be heard from again, and a simple pine box carrying the body of my war casualty father who I’d never really known. It was my grandparents who had raised me. They were the ones who had helped me with my homework, taught me how to hook a fish, bake a cake, and drive a car. It was them that I missed desperately every day, their loss that was a gaping hole in my middle.

I felt like an intruder standing in Holbrook’s office, looking at the pieces of his life that I could never touch, pieces that didn’t include damaged women with psychotic werewolf ex-boyfriends. Frustration bloomed, hot and heavy, as I stared at the picture of the carefree and happily smiling youngster. I’d been like that once, young and blissfully ignorant, feeling chafed by the simple life I led. And then Samson had come along and torn my life to shreds. I mourned the naïve girl I had been, and cursed the fact that fate had taken that life from me. I had resented it at the time, but as I stood there, the weight of Samson and Johnson’s hatred weighing down on me like a ton of bricks, I would have traded anything to have that life back.

Swallowing hard against the sense of loss swelling in the back of my throat, I refused to let it overrun me again. I was not this weak and pathetic woman I had become in the last few days, I would not allow myself to become the victim again.

Closing my eyes I sucked in a deep breath, making myself hold it until my lungs began to burn with the need to exhale, before letting it slip out between pursed lips. I breathed in and out several times until I had regained some semblance of control.

I didn’t realize I had clenched my hands into frustrated fists until the wetness of blood oozed between my fingers. Slowly uncurling my fingers, I gazed down at my hands where my nails had cut four small crescents into each of my palms. I watched as the flow of blood slowed and then stopped, the tiny wounds fading to fine white scars before disappearing entirely. Even after eight years I was still struck by the miracle of lycanthrope healing, something as benign as a paper cut erased without a trace in a matter of seconds.

Although calm, I still felt like an interloper, as though I was peering into some private part of Holbrook’s life that I shouldn’t see. Wiping the traces of blood from my palms on the legs of my jeans I turned away from the picture of him and the older man. My gaze drifted over the rest of the room, passing over my shadowy reflection in the dark screen of his monitor. The woman that looked back at me from the dark glass was hollow-eyed and pale. I almost didn’t recognize myself. Had the last few days so transformed me? Or was it the years since Samson’s attack that had changed me so irrevocably? Would I end up as a deranged monster like him? After all, it was his power that had changed me. Did that mean that I carried a part of him with me?

The room suddenly felt hot and small, as though the walls were closing in, threatening to crush me. In the blink of an eye sweat covered me from head to toe and my hands trembled at my sides.

I had to get out. I had to get away.

Stepping out into the hallway I paused, retaining enough control to keep from bolting. Forcing my eyes closed I leaned against the wall, pressing my forehead against the cool surface and waited for my ragged breaths and the pounding in my temples to subside. I couldn’t remember the last time I had come so close to having a full blown panic attack. They’d been common enough during the trial and in the following months, every unexpected noise or foreign smell tearing at my fragile self-control. It had taken months of therapy to get a handle on my new situation and make it through the day without freaking out.