Forbidden Stranger Read online

  The lights in this hall flickered and went dark, followed at once by the lighting of the emergency lamps set high along the ceiling. The fire alarms were still going off, but there was still no sign of any fire and no smoke, either. Just the smell. Most of the doors along the hall were open, but other than him and Nina, Ewan saw no-one.

  Nina disappeared around the corner.

  * * *

  Images of the person in front of her had haunted Nina for months, but this was no ghost. He looked more like a monster. Hollowed cheeks. The thin split of a smile, bloodless lips. Despite his emaciated frame, there was no question he was strong.

  “Jordie,” Nina called to him.

  “Nina Bronson.” Jordie inclined his head like they were meeting at a high tea.

  “You’re supposed to be locked up.”

  His laugh was razor-edged. “They let me out. Not for good behavior, no, no, I would not say that. But they let me out. Said I’m sane.”

  “You,” Nina said, “are nowhere near sane.”

  Jordie’s laughter faded. “None of us are sane.”

  “I am.”

  He shook his head. “No. Nope. All of you are like me now. All of you will see what it was like. What they did to me, how it feels . . . all of you are like me, now.”

  Nina hadn’t worn her harness of weapons in a long, long time, but she’d never yearned for it more furiously than she did in this moment. She had her hands, she reminded herself. Feet. Her head was hard and could be used as a battering ram. She had her teeth.

  “What did you do?” she demanded.

  “I always wanted to program the upgrades, you know that. Mr. Donahue, oh, well. He never wanted me to. I understand why, he had his convictions, but the truth is that he was wrong about everything and I was right, I was so, so right. I was right and he was wrong. I know it’s not polite to say so. But it’s true.”

  Jordie took a few mincing steps toward her. He looked like a scarecrow. Dangling arms, disjointed movements. Nina didn’t trust him for a second. He was enhanced, and even if he’d been implanted with substandard tech, he’d still be strong and fast and totally able to take her down if she wasn’t careful.

  Shadows coalesced at the end of the corridor behind him. One. Two. Three. Four. The figures stepped into the pool of light from the emergency lamp. Nina knew them all.

  Anatoly Nguyen still wore his hospital gown, but he gripped a piece of pipe in one fist. Next to him, Chioma Pagani was dressed in a set of scrubs with a bloody handprint on the shirt and across one thigh. She held up an array of hypodermic needles in each fist. Jewel Koolen, tiny and dainty and beautiful as her name described, took a step toward Nina. Her faded jeans dragged on the ground. She wore no shirt or bra, but tubes crisscrossed her bare chest, making a sort of harness into which she’d jammed what looked like a fire hatchet. When she grinned at Nina, blood grimed her teeth. The last familiar face, Haven Benedetti, wore nothing but gauze bandages wrapped around her wrists and throat.

  “Where’s Al?” Nina asked, glad to hear her voice was steady.

  Jordie snorted. “Allegra Chastain didn’t take the original set of upgrades to the tech. So she couldn’t get the new programming.”

  “But she’s here, in the hospital. She agreed to accept the new tech that’s supposed to eliminate the self-termination feature. She’s here,” Nina insisted, although Jordie hadn’t denied it.

  The kid looked angry. “She didn’t get the original upgrades. She refused. She isn’t the same as we are.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question. Where is she now?”

  “She isn’t one of us,” Jordie said in a tone so thick with disdain and disgust it was clear Nina shouldn’t bother to ask again.

  Al could take care of herself. Nina had to hold onto that thought. Because in front of her, shit was going down right here, right now, and she needed to pay attention to that.

  Assess, protect, eliminate. Assess, protect, eliminate. The thoughts pushed through Nina’s mind as her heart tried to pound too hard. She breathed. Getting ready for whatever it was the madman in front of her was going to do.

  “You should all thank me. Really you should. I figured it was a great, grand thing. Enhancement. I wanted it. Oh, Onegod, I wanted it.” Jordie barked out something that had perhaps been meant as a laugh, but sounded more like a cough. He stepped toward Nina. The others followed, each taking a single step forward. He didn’t look at any of them. He kept his attention fully on Nina. “Then I got it. And I knew, then, what hell meant. You all know, don’t you? The true and awful horror of it, of having someone being able to just . . . reach inside . . . and take.”

  Jordie snapped his fingers.

  “Like that,” he said. “Reach inside your mind and take it all away. I thought it was a good thing, I wanted it, but when I got it, oh, no, no, no, no, no!”

  The last “no” became a shriek. Spittle flew from Jordie’s lips. His fingers hooked into claws. He let his head tip back, back, showing the taut cords and tendons in his neck.

  “None of us should have to suffer this!” he screamed and snapped his head up. His voice lowered. “None of us will suffer it any longer. But first, we’re going to make all the rest of them pay, including your precious love, Ewan Donahue.”

  Nina had fought more than one opponent many times, but never one against five and never more than a single other enhanced soldier at a time. Without weapons, not even a pipe or a hatchet or a needle, she was going to have to be fast and strong from the start. She would have to get them down before they could use what they had in their hands. Everything slowed around her as she readied herself. This was going to hurt. She might not, she thought, come out alive.

  But Jordie had other plans for her.

  “S’dacha,” he said. The word rocked her backward, something like a door slamming in her head, but Jordie hadn’t finished. He waved a hand down the hallway. “Now. Go kill him.”

  * * *

  Ewan didn’t need to worry about Nina. She could take care of herself. He searched instead for signs of the nursing staff, the orderlies, the docs who’d been on this floor. Because of the confidential nature of the procedures the remaining six enhanced soldiers had been undergoing, the staff had been restricted. Still, there should be someone, somewhere.

  He found the charge nurse on the floor behind the desk, her arms and legs akimbo. Dark fluid spattered her scrubs. Coffee, he thought. Not blood. She was definitely dead, though, her eyes wide and staring and no pulse when he bent to press his fingertips to her wrist and then her throat.

  Other than the chair that had been knocked over and a folder of papers that had been soaked from the overturned mug on the counter, nothing else was out of place. Ewan went around the desk to the elevators. Both the up and down buttons were lit and the overhead sign showing what floor it was on blinked nothing but a row of X’s, but he wasn’t going to try to take either one. If there really was a fire on this floor, the doors weren’t likely to open anyway.

  On this end of the hall, a glass-fronted door opened to a small lounge. Empty. A set of heavy fire doors just beyond it remained closed. On the other side of the elevator was a janitorial closet. Inside he found the orderly who’d come to warn them. The orderly wasn’t dead, but the blood pouring from the wound on his head meant he might be soon. Ewan could not rouse him and without medical training, he didn’t dare even do more than wrap a towel from one of the “clean” bags on the shelf around the wound. The man on the ground didn’t so much as blink or make a noise.

  There should have been at least two more nurses and possibly a doc or two, but the floor remained empty. Ewan looked down the long corridor to the T junction where Nina had gone. No doors separated it from this hallway. A man’s voice, shouting but incoherent, startled him enough to head that way.

  Before he got halfway down the hall, Nina appeared in the doorway. He shouted out her name, his voice snapping off abruptly at the sight of her companions. All four of the remaining enhanced s