The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (29 page)

Ken shook his head.

“He’s not there,” Ken said.

Sara closed her eyes. She felt like such an idiot. She’d been right about Soren and the other pretender all along, but she’d done nothing. And now the monster impersonating her friend had silenced their only lead.

Soren spotted Alex’s blood-splattered body as he darted across the room in Rakev’s dungeon, and grabbed Lochlan by the throat.

“You want to know what it feels like to have your head ripped off?” he asked, holding him in midair.

Lochlan tried to talk, but Soren squeezed so hard the leprechaun couldn’t make a sound. Soren wrenched the knife out of the leprechaun’s hand and threw it away. Lochlan began frantically pointing at the ground.

“I don’t care what you say,” Soren said, speaking through gritted teeth. “There is no explanation that I would possibly want to hear. I’m going to kill you, and then hunt down your brother and kill him, too.”

Soren felt a tap on his shoulder.

“Stay out of this!” he hissed at Friday.

“The boy’s alive, Soren,” Friday said. “Look for yourself.”

Soren dropped Lochlan to the ground, and the leprechaun began coughing and gasping for breath. Soren turned to look at Alex, examining him head to toe. There was blood all over him and he wasn’t moving, but he wasn’t dead, either. Soren crouched down to feel his pulse. It was slow, but steady. He saw the boy’s chest rise and fall.

“What have you done to him, Lochlan?” Soren hissed.

Friday looked back and forth between them. “You two have met before?”

“I saved his miserable life once,” Soren said. “And believe me, I regret it now.”

The leprechaun scrambled back a few more paces under the heat of Soren’s stare. “Ya were a dumb fook then, too,” Lochlan snapped. “Look around ya, ya daft git. I saved that boy when you couldn’t.”

Soren tore his eyes away from the leprechaun and Alex to look around the room. They were standing in a square steel cage. The cage door hung open, which was how Soren had managed to enter it without noticing. Outside the cage were two shirkens and three gaunts. All of them were dead. The gaunts had their throats cut. The blood on Alex’s body wasn’t his own. It was from the carnage all around him. Soren turned to look back at Lochlan.

“You did this?” he asked.

The leprechaun nodded.

“You knew we were coming?”

Lochlan managed to stand up, and brushed himself off.

“Of course, I did, ya fookin eejit. If I learned anything last time, it was that you’ll never quit when it comes to that boy. I told Gregory the boss wanted him to kill whoever was looking up information on the
Cursed Dagger of the Tsars,
assuming that was you.”

“It wasn’t,” Friday snapped. “They nearly killed us.”

“And who might you be?”

“Detective Ken Sharpe, and you’re under arrest,” Friday replied.

The leprechaun just chuckled.

“I don’t understand,” Soren said. “Why help me?”

He caught a hint of movement out of one eye, and he turned to see a girl standing in the corner inside the cell. She was wearing a dress so stained and dirty that it made her blend into the concrete walls behind her. She looked to be six or seven years old, watching him with wide eyes. Gregory’s memory told him that she wasn’t one of the psychic children, but he didn’t know anything else.

“Who is she?” Soren asked.

The girl ran over to Lochlan and threw her arms around his side. “Not human,” Lochlan replied, as he put a protective arm around her. “That’s all ya need to know. She’ll be safe with me.”

“Soren, if you want Alex to live, we should get him to a hospital,” Friday broke in. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

“Right.” Soren looked again at the girl. Soren had never seen her before, and yet there was something familiar about her just the same. She reminded him of someone he’d met before.

Human or not, it didn’t seem right to leave a little girl with the leprechaun. But the way she was clinging to him . . . “Do you want to go with Lochlan?” Soren asked her.

She cocked her head to the side and in that instant, Soren could sense that what Lochlan was saying was true—she wasn’t human. There was something otherworldly in the way she regarded him. After a moment, she nodded.

“Okay, fine,” Soren said. He checked Alex over again. Physically, there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him, but he didn’t stir. “What did Rakev do to him?”

“The fookin dagger,” Lochlan replied. “It drains them, leaves them dead inside. I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it, Soren, I truly am.”

Soren’s heart sank. He thought of the other kids who’d been taken by Rakev. Their brains had been wrecked by what the dagger did to them.

“Is there any way to reverse it?” Soren asked.

“It’s possible he might live. It might help, too, if the knife were destroyed. It has a lot of pent-up energy in it. Destroy it, and some of it may come back to young Alex.”

“Is it safe to move him?” he asked.

The leprechaun nodded. “What’s ailing him is in his mind and soul, not his body.”

Soren leaned down and gently scooped the boy up in his arms. He felt so light it broke Soren’s heart. The boy seemed so fragile. Soren nodded at Friday, and then turned back to Lochlan.

“One last thing: Where’s Rakev? Where’s he going?”

“Don’t know,” Lochlan said. “He took the dagger and he’s gone. I had orders to pack his workers into trucks, but I wasn’t told where they were headed.”

“Any guess?”

“It’s a big event, whatever it is,” Lochlan said. “That’s all I know. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have to get the hell away from here. Good luck, Soren.”

Soren turned to go, Alex still in his arms, but Lochlan called him back. “Almost forgot, Rakev has more than the knife with him. A few nights ago, he raided the Pentagon. He stole some kind of gun. I’ve never seen anything like it and from what he said, it packs a helluva lot of firepower. Ya might want to be careful of it.”

Soren and Friday shared a look. The leprechaun took the girl’s hand, and left the room.

Soren hurried out of the labyrinth behind him with Friday at his heels. He would take Alex to the hospital, but his hope was fading fast. In his heart, he knew they were out of time. For Alex, Sara, and the city itself.

Sara came rushing into the hospital room with Ken right behind. She saw Alex lying on the bed, and stifled a sob as she ran to his side.

The doctor who was standing next to the bed stepped out of her way as she hugged her son tightly, careful of his IV and the machines that beeped around him, not unlike what she had been on a day earlier. There was no response. She’d been told that there wouldn’t be, and yet she had hoped anyway.

She touched his face and it felt cold. But he was still breathing. He was still alive.

Ken came to stand beside her and grasped her hand. She squeezed it.

“Ms. Ignatius?” the doctor said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

She turned to find a handsome Hispanic doctor wearing a white lab coat and a stethoscope around his neck, looking every bit like he just walked off a TV show. His smile managed to be sad and warm at the same time.

“I’m Doctor Cortez,” he said, sticking out his hand. She released Ken and shook his hand absentmindedly, glancing back at Alex. “Your son is in stable condition. We’re doing everything we can for him.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Sara asked.

Cortez offered the same smile again.

“We don’t know yet, Ms. Ignatius,” he replied. “We’re still trying to understand what happened to him. His body isn’t in any distress, but he’s not responding to any stimuli. We’ll take him in for an MRI soon, and then we’ll have more information.”

“How did he end up here?” Ken asked.

The doctor looked up in surprise. “You brought him in, Detective Sharpe,” he said. “We met earlier.”

Sara and Ken looked at each other.

“That wasn’t me, doctor,” Ken replied. “That’s someone who . . . looked like me. Was there anyone else with him at the time?”

The doctor looked shocked.

“Two other people,” the doctor replied. “One was a younger man with red hair, the other was brown-haired and wearing sunglasses. I assumed he was another policeman. He seemed quite worried about the boy.”

Ken shook his head. “He’s a criminal,” he said. “If you see either of those two again, call me immediately. Don’t approach the one in sunglasses yourself. He’s extremely dangerous.”

Sara thought that was far too mild a description.

She didn’t know what game Soren was playing, but she no longer harbored any illusion he was on her side. He’d stopped them from finding Alex herself, and only delivered her son to her after he was a vegetable.

The pretender had taken John and Soren away from her—and now it had stolen Alex as well. She’d seen the police reports from the other kidnap victims; she knew what the MRI would show. She’d lost everything to the pretender.

Her hand touched Alex’s face. The doctor and Ken were talking, but she was barely listening. Doctor Cortez used a lot of words but they really all meant the same thing: he didn’t know what was wrong.

She knew there was more to do. Someone needed to stop Rakev–
and
Soren. If that didn’t happen, the whole city could be destroyed. But in that moment, she couldn’t bring herself to care. She grabbed a chair, pulled it up by Alex’s bedside, and held her son’s hand.

*****

Sara awoke suddenly, realizing she’d dozed off in her chair. Her hand was still gripping Alex’s, but nothing else had changed. Her son lay still, breathing quietly.

She glanced at her watch. She’d only been asleep a half hour. She looked around the room, which was now empty except for the two of them. A white, gauzy curtain had been drawn around the bed.

She felt woozy and light-headed. Sara realized she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink all day. She looked around Alex’s hospital room, but didn’t see a bathroom or a sink.

She hated to leave Alex, but stood up, brushed the curtain aside, and walked out of the room to find a policeman there. He nodded at her.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“Officer Sloan,” he said. “Detective Sharpe put me on post to make sure nobody but authorized personnel enters this hospital room.”

Sara briefly wondered if he was a pretender or even secretly Soren himself. But she couldn’t see why he would still be here. He’d done all the damage he was going to do to Alex; he was probably long gone by now.

“Do you mind if I see your badge?” she asked, just to be on the safe side.

He produced it from his back pocket and she inspected it carefully. It looked legitimate, but she had no idea if pretenders could magically make a fake ID. She handed it back to the officer, and shook her head. Paranoia wouldn’t help her now.

“I have to eat something,” she said. She could have ordered food from a delivery service, but she was desperate and feared it would take too long. “Will you watch my son and make sure nobody comes in here except for Detective Sharpe or myself?” she asked.

Sloan nodded at her and she half-walked, half-stumbled down the hall. The policeman caught her arm.

“You okay, ma’am?” he asked.

She wasn’t, but she lied so she could keep going. Her leg was still sore from the attack in the office. She limped down the hall, looking for a vending machine. When she finally found it tucked in a little alcove, she bought a Coke and a Hershey bar. It wasn’t much, but the sugar and caffeine would help keep her awake.

As she made her way back, she happened to glance into an office to see Doctor Cortez deep in conversation with someone she couldn’t see. She moved closer to the door, wanting to ask him more questions. Her mind was already clearing, and she wanted to find out if there was something they could do for her son.

But as she neared, she heard the voice of someone she recognized: Glen. Quickly, she ducked out of view of Doctor Cortez, and stood behind the wall by his office.

“It’s got to be something local,” Cortez said.

“Why?” Glen asked.

“Because you wouldn’t want trucks filled with monsters driving long distances,” Cortez replied. “God knows what would happen.”

Sara’s eyes widened. Ken had specifically told the doctor to watch out for the men who brought in Alex, but now he was freely talking about monsters with one of them. Which meant he wasn’t really Doctor Cortez. He was Soren. Or possibly Soren’s friend, the fake hypnotist.

“After the text from Alice, I started narrowing down a list of the most likely possibilities,” Glen said.

Sara heard a rustle of paper.

“Birchmere, what’s that?” Cortez asked.

“Concert spot in Alexandria,” Glen replied. “Seats about five hundred.”

“Too small,” Cortez said.

Glen named several other spots, including Ford’s Theater and the Warner Theatre.

“Ford’s is dark tonight, but Warner is showing a play. ‘Hot Tuna.’ I don’t think it’s about a sandwich, but I don’t know,” Glen said.

“Fuck,” Cortez said angrily. “I have no idea where Rakev could be.”

“We could warn the police about all of them,” Glen suggested.

“It’s too late,” Cortez said. “Look at the time. It’s past six. Whatever event he’s going to target should be starting soon. We won’t be able to stop people from arriving. Do we have any other clues?”

Sara heard the sound of snapping fingers.

“The cannon,” Glen said.

“What?” Cortez asked.

“Alex drew a picture of a knife and we know what that is,” he said. “He drew a picture of a gun, too. We don’t know about—”

“What kind of gun?” Cortez asked.

Glen described the spaceage gun that Alex had drawn right before he was kidnapped. Sara had almost forgotten about it.

“Shit,” Cortez said. “I bet I know what that is. Lochlan mentioned that Rakev stole a gun from the Pentagon.”

“Does it matter?” Glen asked. “He’s going to blow up the city. Why does he need a gun, too?”

“It’s a very special weapon,” Cortez said. “According to Friday, it works on some kind of quantum level, completely destroying a target right down to the molecule—and that apparently includes pretenders.”