May Contain Spies: A Spy Thriller (Meet Abby Banks Book 1) (21 page)

Stephen’s eyes went wide, and he tried to sit up. He fell back against the bed, chest heaving.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Hang up,” he squeaked, voice barely audible.

I hung up and took a step toward him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Abby,” he said, voice strained as he tried to sit up again. “You need to get out of here right now.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked as the distant sound of sirens filled the air.

“Abby, they are coming for you.” He swallowed. “You need to run before they get here.”

“What do you mean?” I narrowed my eyes at him as I took a step toward him. “Is there something you’re not telling me? Is Gabriella still alive?”

“Yes and no,” he wheezed, “but we don’t have time for me to go into it now. Just get out of here.”

“You better make time,” I snapped, crossing my arms over my chest and fixing him with my best glare.

He stared at me for a long time before nodding his head at me. “Help me up,” he said.

“You can barely move, how am I going to help you?” I asked.

“Grab the wheel chair, put me in it, and get us out of here,” he said, pointing at the wheelchair in the corner of the room.

I stared at him for a long time as helicopter blades thrummed in the distance. “Fine,” I replied, glancing at the window, looking for the helicopter because it sounded like it was right on top of us. “I wonder if something happened…” I murmured to myself as I pulled him from the bed, one of his arms braced over my shoulders. He cried out in pain and bit his lip to keep from screaming.

“That’s why I’m trying to tell you, Abby,” he said, words stilted with pain as I dropped him into the wheel chair. “They’re coming here for you.”

“For me?” I asked, and for whatever reason, that same sense of calm I’d felt descend over me in the submarine fell over me now. “Who is coming for me? Please don’t tell me I should have gone back to make sure Gabriella was dead.”

“Enough about Gabriella,” he swallowed as I pushed him out the doors and toward the elevator. “We have to worry about my people now.”

“Your people are coming for me? I thought they were the good guys.”

He laughed for a moment before falling into a fit of coughs. “No,” he replied, shaking his head. “We’re the bad guys.”

“You’re the bad guys?” I asked, glancing around to make sure no one had noticed us as I hit the button on the elevator. “How can you be the bad guys? Your people saved me.”

“No, Abby,” he replied. “See…” he swallowed, and looked away. “I went rogue. Our people, they cut a deal… it’s why Donovan turned you over.”

I don’t know why exactly, but that news made me feel nothing. Like absolutely nothing. Like I was empty inside. It should have made the room spin, should have made me want to scream at him… but for some reason, right now, all I could do was file it away. That should have scared me because realistically he had just said, “my people were trading you to a homicidal maniac for…” For what?

“Why did they want to trade me to Gabriella?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.

“For a weapon, Abby. For an incredibly powerful weapon.” Great, now I needed to escape from people who had traded me for something I had no idea what it was. That seemed promising. I looked down at Stephen, unable to move in his wheelchair, and sighed.

“Should I just leave you here?” I asked, and the frankness of the question surprised me. “It will be easier to escape on my own.”

“I wouldn’t like that.” He smiled at me as he reached up and touched my hand. “But you might have to leave me to escape. I’ll understand if you do so.”

“If I do that, they will kill you, won’t they?” I looked down at his hand, staring at it.

“Probably,” he said.

“Something’s been bugging me for a while now,” I whispered, my voice so quiet that I wasn’t sure he could hear me.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Why didn’t you just blow up Gabriella’s base at the start of this mess? You guys were clearly capable of that…” I was about to say more when the elevator dinged and the doors opened to reveal two men dressed entirely in black holding machine guns.

“Abigail Banks,” the first one said, but that was all he got out as my fist slammed into his face. He crashed backward into the wall of the elevator. I pivoted, my knee lashing out as the other man started to bring his weapon around. I caught him in the stomach as my hands grabbed his weapon and smashed it into his face.

He crumpled to the ground as I spun, slamming the butt of the gun into the first man’s temple as he was getting to his feet.

I stood there between the two unconscious soldiers, my body humming with adrenaline as Stephen stared at me. Then he grinned and shook his head. “I guess it worked.”

“What?” I asked, stepping out of the elevator and wheeling him into the elevator. “What just happened?” I added as the door slammed closed a second later. The whole thing had happened in the space it took for the doors to close automatically.

“You asked why I didn’t just blow up Gabriella? Well… we wanted to see what would happen if she tried to transfer herself into your body. Our people theorized that maybe, just maybe, if we interrupted it at the right time, you’d gain all her knowledge without actually becoming her. Those were Donovan’s orders, actually. To let her ‘take you’ then interrupt the process.”

I swallowed as the room swayed a little bit. I gripped the wheelchair for stability as I took a deep breath. “Are you being serious?” I asked, and as I stared at the unconscious form of two soldiers, the idea didn’t seem as ridiculous as it should.

“Yes,” he said, looking away from me. “I’ll understand if you want to leave me and escape on your own. You could do it if you put your mind to it.”

“Stephen,” I said, my throat closing up as I stared down at him, so helpless and injured. “Back there when you saved me… did you mean what you said? You know… when you said…” I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry, and I felt my cheeks burst into flames.

He looked up at me, a curious smile on his face. My heart started beating so hard that I was sure he could hear it, but that didn’t matter because I was drowning in oceans of sapphire. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but look into his eyes and know that I was about to be a very bad girl.

“When I said what?” he asked, his voice low and… I’m not really sure because I hadn’t ever heard someone sound like that before. Hungry, maybe?

“When you said…” I licked my lips. “When you said…”

“When I said what, Abby?” he asked again.

“When you said you loved me, Stephen.”

He looked at me for a long time before smiling at me. “Yes, Abby, I did.”

I put one hand on his arm, and the feel of him was like nothing I’d felt before. My knees started to shake as I leaned close to him.

“Abby? Say something,” he said, and instead of responding, I pressed my lips against his. Fireworks went off inside my brain and time seemed to stop as the doors opened on the roof of the building to reveal six men and a helicopter I desperately needed to escape.

Thank you for reading
May Contain Spies.
If you wouldn't mind, please leave a review. If you enjoyed it, you may want to check out the sequel
 
The Spy Within
. 
As a special bonus, the first chapter is included on the next page.

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Kill It With Magic
, 
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Chapter 1

Stephen kissed me like it was the last time he’d ever get to do it. He mashed his lips against mine, pressing my body against the passenger door of our beat up Ford as his hand slid around my waist, unbuckling my seatbelt and pulling me against him. His touch was like fire on my skin as his fingers trailed upward along my spine.

“Come on, Abby,” he whispered against my lips, his voice sending little tingles rippling across my flesh. “Let’s just go…”

“We need supplies,” I whispered back. Pushing him away was very nearly the hardest thing I’d ever done. My other hand slid to the door handle. “I’ll be quick…” I opened the door and shuffled out into the convenience store parking lot, my knees still shaking.

I threw one last glance at him. He was staring at me, and I had to tear my eyes away before his sapphire gaze pulled me back into the vehicle like a tractor beam. That wouldn’t do either of us any good because we were out of food. I steeled myself and turned back toward the store’s glass doors.

The lights flickered as I entered, and a chill scampered down my back. One quick look around the Ye Olde Kwik E Mart was enough to tell me there was no one else in here but the clerk. Still, the lights had given me the creeps. Stephen and I had been running for the better part of a week, and this was the first time I’d ventured into a place inhabited by, you know, people. Not that the clerk really counted as a person since he was way more interested in his cellphone than me. Which was good, I didn’t need him taking any special interest in me.

The lights flickered again, and I pulled my baseball cap down so it covered more of my face. I scanned the aisles one last time and had to force myself to calm down. Man, my nerves were really on edge.

“Get a grip, Abby,” I whispered, turning toward the glass refrigerators in the back and nearly cried out. The reflection of Donovan’s leering face stared back at me through the glass. He was wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans, and like usual, he was covered in blood that leaked perpetually from the hole in his head.

“Hello, Abby,” he said. His words were like white fog on the glass, cold and unforgiving. “Miss me?”

I swallowed, shut my eyes, and counted to five in my head. Yeah, ever since I’d shot him, no… murdered him in cold blood, he’d been haunting me. At first, it made me hate him more, but since I had killed him, I was pretty sure this was my penance. Besides, did I really want to be the kind of girl who could kill without it bothering her?

When I opened my eyes, Donovan was gone. His ghostly specter had vanished like it’d never been there at all. Which, of course, it hadn’t been because I was a crazy person…

The glass door loomed in front of me like a frosty gate. I grabbed it by the black plastic handle and pulled it open. A blast of chilly air licked my skin as I reached in and seized a jug of orange juice that said ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ on it. For some reason, it sounded a lot better than the one proudly displaying it was “made from real juice.”

Why was I getting juice? Stephen still wasn’t feeling well after getting shot, which I guess was understandable. Orange juice was supposed to help with infections, right? Or was that just colds? Either way, he was drinking the damn juice. Besides, who knew when we’d be able to get some again?

I let out a slow breath and nearly leapt out of my skin when the clerk’s cellphone rang to the tune of Mandy by Barry Manilow. My heart hammered in my chest as I stared at the freckled, red-haired teenager as he tapped frantically at the device. Well, that was certainly an odd tune for someone my age…

I took another breath and made my way down the aisle, piling all sorts of junk food into my cloth bag. I didn’t want to risk using one of their baskets. It could have nano-machines embedded in the plastic that could track my location. Yeah, that was a thing. It was lame.

See, I was on the run from a powerful government agency. Apparently, when you steal helicopters from the government, they track you down. No. Matter. What.

So because I was paranoid about being found, I was using a lime green knapsack I’d purchased from a pot-smoking hippy a few days ago in a different state. He had been prattling on about aliens and government conspiracies so I figured his bag would be government tech free. Then again, I’d been wrong a lot since I found out my entire life was one big lie.

I turned back to the clerk as he put his phone down, green eyes strangely glassy. He wasn’t very tall, maybe five-foot-eight and built like a beanpole. I reached out to grab a candy bar still not taking my eyes off of him.

“Run!” Donovan’s voice mouse-whispered in my ear. “Run away! Now, Abby!”

The clerk reached down below the counter, his movements jerky and forced. I’m not sure what he was going to grab because I dropped my bag and sprinted back down the aisle. Which was dumb because the exit was in the opposite direction.

Should I have run for the exit doors? I guess so, but my first instinct was to create as much distance as possible between us. The lights flickered again. Only this time when they came back on, every fluorescent bulb in the ceiling shattered. Glass rained down around me as I dropped to the floor, covering my head and neck with my hands so that, hopefully, I wouldn’t be cut to ribbons.

The refrigerators behind me exploded in a blue fireball of flame and arcing electricity that pelted me with beer and soda. I threw myself down the nearest aisle, landing hard on my shoulders and rolling to my feet facing the busted freezers. Acrid black smoke filled the air and pooled against the ceiling. The smell, like burning ozone, filled my nostrils as Donovan’s ghostly form pointed behind me.

“Watch out.”

I spun just in time for the clerk’s shotgun fill my vision. I dropped as the gun went off, the sound exploded in my brain, blasting my hearing into a tiny pinprick of sound. Buckshot pinged off the back wall as my left elbow shot out, smashing into the twerp’s crotch. Only he didn’t budge, didn’t even act like it hurt. Instead, he cocked the gun and moved to point it at me. I popped to my feet, using the force to drive my shoulder into his wrists.

The gun fired again, tearing a hole in the ceiling above our heads as I slammed my forehead down into the clerk’s nose. His head whipped back in a spray of blood, but he didn’t lose his hold on the weapon. Hell, he didn’t even wobble, at least not like everything inside me told me he should have. He swung the gun at my head. It came so fast, I barely had time to dodge it. The super-heated metal skimmed by me so closely I could feel the warmth of it on my skin.