The Darkness Beyond Read online

  “Fine, but you better have some damn good answers.”

  He was glad they’d bought a sack full of cold drinks and snack food. After all the talking D.J. had been doing, his throat was dust dry and his stomach was growling.

  Right now Cody seemed content to mull everything over, but the questions would be starting up again soon. It had taken the kid awhile to get past the idea that D.J. wasn’t spinning some yarn straight out of an urban-fantasy novel.

  Once that had happened, his questions had been right on target. He now knew more about the world of the Paladins than anyone outside of the organization. All D.J. could do was wait to see what his companion would do with his newly acquired worldview.

  Cody polished his second sports drink and shoved the bottle back in the plastic bag. “So I’m really like you?”

  “Yeah, you are. I should’ve picked up on it that first night, but I had other things on my mind.”

  Like getting naked with Reggie, but he left that part unsaid.

  “That stack of papers you shredded was a history of the Paladins.”

  That answered one of D.J.’s own questions. He’d suspected that Reggie wasn’t the only one who’d read at least part of Brenna’s report.

  “Yeah. I’ll give you another copy when we get through all of this.”

  Now the hard part. “You’re not going to like what I say next, but believe me it’s for the best. When we reach the warehouse, I’m going in alone.”

  “But—”

  D.J. cut off Cody’s protest. “I won’t take an untrained Paladin into a situation like this. For Reggie’s sake, I can’t afford to divide my attention, but that doesn’t mean you won’t play an important role. Devlin has a couple of my buddies on the way. If all this goes south, I’ll need you there to bring them up to speed.”

  Cody nodded but was obviously not happy about it. “You think things have gotten worse, don’t you?”

  “She hasn’t called back. So either they found the phone or she’s somewhere the phones don’t work. Neither option is good.”

  D.J. signaled and moved to the right. “This is our exit. Once we’re off the highway, we’ll break out the weapons. Then I’ll scout out the place so I’m not going in blind. Once I’ve got the layout and the current status, I’ll put in another call to Devlin and the backup team.”

  “Those bastards better not have hurt her.”

  D.J. knew just how he felt. It was time to let Cody know how the game was played in the Paladin world.

  “Scaring her was enough. They’re already dead. They just don’t know it yet.”

  There was a new maturity in Cody’s eyes when he looked in D.J.’s direction. “Good. I can’t wait for you to tell them.”

  Chapter 9

  Reggie braced herself for another confrontation with her captors. She’d thought the guy was back to look for his cell phone, but he hadn’t mentioned it.

  “You’re coming with me. The man wants to see you.”

  She stayed seated. “Tell him I’m not interested. I’ve been pretty tied up today and don’t have time for idle chitchat.”

  Okay, smarting off probably wasn’t the brightest thing she could do, but it wasn’t in her to submit meekly to the whims of her unidentified kidnappers. She half-expected to be smacked for her impertinence, but instead he simply marched in, grabbed her arm, and jerked her to her feet.

  She’d have bruises from his grip, but she didn’t complain. He dragged Reggie across the warehouse toward the cluster of men standing near the bottom of the stairs. She recognized the two men who’d abducted her and the two long-haired strangers who’d prevented her escape.

  But it was the fifth man who really caught her attention. It was clear by the body language of his companions that he was the alpha dog in the group. He wasn’t particularly tall or handsome; in fact, at first glance he appeared to be perfectly ordinary. But then he turned his attention in her direction.

  Reptilian—that was the only word she could think of to adequately describe his gaze. In that one instant, she felt as if she’d been weighed, measured, and marked as a total disappointment. His lip curled slightly as he took in her disheveled appearance.

  She forced herself to stare back, refusing to look cowed or apologetic. Those tailored clothes he wore wouldn’t look so hot either if he’d been kidnapped, drugged, and thrown in the back of a truck. She jerked her arm free and threw her shoulders back.

  “Who the hell are you?” she demanded. “I want to make sure I give the police the right name when they get here.”

  The bastard laughed. “No one is coming for you, Reggie. You don’t mind if I call you Reggie, do you? We’re going to be spending so much time together, it’s only right that we use first names. You can call me—”

  He seemed to hesitate over what name to give her. “Ray. Just plain Ray.”

  “Your parents must have really hated you to call you that, Just Plain Ray, but then I can see why they felt that way.”

  One of the others made the mistake of laughing. She glanced back to see that it was the one whose phone she’d stolen. Ray glared at him.

  “Carl, you might want to remember who pays you.”

  Then Ray’s hand whipped out and smacked Reggie’s cheek with a loud crack. The pain was instantaneous. She couldn’t stop the tears from falling but stood her ground.

  Crossing her arms over her chest, she asked the question that had been bothering her since all this had started. “What could you possibly want with me? I’m nothing special. I’m not rich and I have no family to pay a ransom.”

  Ray studied her for a few seconds before answering. “I like your honesty, but I have it on good authority that you’re second to none when it comes to computers.”

  He edged closer. “In fact, you managed to breach the security of the organization I work for. If it hadn’t been for pure damn luck, we’d never have picked up on it at all.”

  “You work for the Regents?” she blurted out and immediately wished she hadn’t. Ray nodded as if she’d just confirmed something for him.

  “You slipped in and out, smooth as silk.”

  She didn’t appreciate the approval in his voice. “I didn’t do any damage. I was hunting for somebody. That’s my job.”

  “Well, you have a new job now. If you’re successful, eventually you’ll return home, alive and unharmed.”

  Ray pegged each of the other men with a hard stare as he said that last part, but that didn’t mean they would listen. Right now his men might nod like the dutiful little lackeys they were, but would they keep their hands to themselves when he wasn’t around to police their actions?

  “What’s the job?” Reggie asked.

  “You’ll find out soon enough. Suffice it to say that I have need of your finely honed computer skills to do a little recovery work for me.”

  He looked past her toward Carl. “Take her back. We leave in fifteen minutes.”

  She didn’t wait to be dragged back to that makeshift prison, instead walking there on her own. With luck, she’d have time to call D.J. again. She’d try to slip the phone in her pocket when they left, too, and hope her friends could use it to follow.

  God, she hoped so. If Ray and company had any intention of letting her live, they wouldn’t have let her see their faces. The man hadn’t bothered to deny who it was he worked for either. The Regents might be secretive, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be found again. She’d already done it once.

  “Get in there.”

  She did as she was told, mainly hoping he’d lock the door and take off again. As soon as he was out of sight, she pulled out the phone and dialed.

  D.J. answered on the first ring. “Thank God. Bring me up to speed.”

  She kept it succinct. “We’re leaving this warehouse in fifteen minutes. I don’t know where they’re taking me, but it’s to do some hacking for them. There’s a guy here who works for the Regents. His name is—”

  Before she could finish her sentence, the
door flew open and Carl stormed in. The first thing he did was knock the cell phone from her hand. Then he shoved her hard, sending her stumbling back into the rusty shelving.

  “Stupid bitch, are you trying to get us both killed? Who the hell were you talking to?”

  Reggie shot him a smug look, hoping it was convincing. “The police. They’re already on their way.”

  Of course, she had no idea where she was, so even if she had called them, they wouldn’t have located her that quickly.

  “Yeah, right.” He checked the phone to see the last number dialed. Luckily for her, it looked like the phone had broken when it hit the concrete floor.

  He cursed and threw it back at her. “Damn it, that bastard is going to kill me for this.”

  Carl took off at a dead run, yelling for his boss. Reggie straightened up, rubbing her arm where it had collided with the shelving. She checked the phone to see if it was completely dead. Hopefully the impact had only jarred a contact loose.

  Quickly prying the back off, she pulled out the battery and reinserted it. Then she checked the hinge. The break must be in there because as she wiggled it, the screen flashed on and off. She tried dialing again.

  “Reggie?”

  D.J. said more but she was only getting bits and pieces. She tried adjusting the fit of the broken hinge, but with only marginal success. The shouting out in the warehouse was growing louder. Time was definitely running short. Then a shot rang out. A scream was cut off midbreath when the gun fired a second time.

  “Oh, God!” Obviously Carl hadn’t been kidding.

  Reggie instinctively moved farther into the storeroom, trying to put some distance between herself and the horror outside the door. If Ray didn’t hesitate to kill one of his own men, she didn’t stand a chance.

  Ray’s voice rang out. “Get the bitch in the truck and take her to the lava caves. Haul ass or the rest of you will join Carl.”

  Lava caves? That didn’t even make sense. But she had mere seconds, at best, to convey the situation to D.J.

  “I hope you can hear this. They’re moving me now to some caves. The phone’s not working right, but I’ll keep trying.”

  Rather than risk losing the phone altogether, she hung up and shoved it in her pocket. Then she picked up a piece of scrap metal and used it to scrape the words “lava caves” in the wall to the left of the door where her captors wouldn’t immediately see it.

  Then there was nothing left to do but wait.

  D.J. slammed the phone down and drove like hell. They were minutes away from the site pinpointed by the GPS chip in the cell phone Reggie had used. At worst, the bastards were already on the run, leaving him no signal to follow.

  What the hell had happened? One minute Reggie had been coming in loud and clear. The next, he’d heard a man hollering and then a crash, as if the phone had been dropped, followed by silence. When the phone had rung again, the reception had been piss poor. All he’d caught was something about being on the move.

  Ignoring speed limits, he drove like a madman, trying to reach the warehouse in time.

  “Turn left at the next corner. The place should be on the right.”

  D.J. did as instructed, bringing the truck to a tire-squealing halt halfway down the block, near a run-down warehouse. There was no truck in sight. No sign of anyone at all, and the security gate was wide open. Either they were already gone or it was a trap. He was betting on the former, but he drove forward slowly, knowing appearances could be deceiving—and deadly.

  Cody crumpled up the map and tossed it behind the seat. “Looks like we missed them.”

  “Maybe.” D.J. considered their options. “Wait here while I scope out the place. I’ll wave you in if it’s safe. Otherwise, you keep the truck running and your finger on the speed dial on my phone. The first number listed is Devlin Bane. Tell him who you are and what’s happening. He won’t steer you wrong.”

  Cody’s eyes were huge behind his glasses, but at least he didn’t argue. D.J. picked up the revolver he kept under the front seat and stepped out of the truck. There was no cover that would keep his approach hidden, so he took off at a ground-eating lope and hoped he’d make it to the door before being spotted.

  The warehouse was dark and empty-looking. He waved to Cody, who immediately drove into the parking lot, stopping just short of where D.J. stood.

  “The place looks deserted.”

  The kid looked sick. “Then how will we find her?”

  “We’ve managed to get this close. Don’t give up yet.”

  He grabbed two flashlights from the truck and handed one to the kid. “You go right. I’ll go left. Then we’ll both go upstairs.”

  Cody pulled himself together and followed D.J. inside the cavernous interior of the warehouse. Each of them swung the narrow beam from their flashlight in wide arcs, looking for any sign of what had gone down.

  There! In the back corner there was something too solid to be a shadow and the wrong shape to be part of the warehouse itself. His mind was telling him exactly what he was seeing, even though he wanted to deny it. He could already taste the scent of blood and death in the stale air.

  He forced himself to continue forward at a methodical pace. No use in drawing Cody’s attention to the problem until absolutely necessary.

  As D.J. drew closer, he realized the shape was too bulky to be Reggie sprawled on the floor in a pool of blood. Relief washed through him, but it was mixed with frustration. A live body might have been able to tell him where Reggie was now. A corpse was a complication.

  “Hey, over here!”

  The excitement in Cody’s voice had D.J. running toward the other side of the building.

  “What did you find?”

  Cody was standing in the glow of light coming from a small room. “I think maybe they kept Reggie in here. There’s a half-eaten hamburger and an empty soft-drink cup.”

  D.J. poked at the scraps from the sandwich. “The bread’s definitely fresh. Nice job, Cody.”

  The kid pushed his glasses up on his nose. “There’s more. Somebody scratched something in the paint on the wall behind the door. I’m thinking Reggie was trying to leave us a message where her captors might not see it.”

  Sure enough, there were two words scratched into the paint, the letters scrawled as if done in a hurry. He didn’t give a damn about Reggie’s penmanship though. What had him seeing red was the meaning behind the message written there.

  “Lava caves? What do you think she means by that?”

  D.J.’s blood ran cold and his temper hot. He knew exactly what she meant. He ignored Cody’s question as he punched in Devlin’s phone number. Son of a bitch, could this get any worse?

  “Dev, they’ve taken her to a lava cave. Check the files and see if we have any record of a crossing point in this area.”

  It didn’t take long. His friend read him the coordinates and then said, “Lonzo and Trahern should catch up with you soon. The chopper dropped them in Medford where they rented a car. I already texted them your location.”

  “Good. Have Cullen do a search on the ownership of this warehouse, too. Maybe that will tell us something. Let Lonzo know that Cody will be waiting for them here. They can catch up with me later.”

  Devlin immediately objected. “D.J., damn it, don’t go off half-cocked. Wait for them. No way you’re going in alone.”

  Like hell he’d wait. “And if they suddenly decide that Reggie has become a liability? They’ve got to suspect we’re coming after them.”

  “So you’ll be walking into a trap.”

  D.J. knew Devlin was right, but he didn’t care. He played his trump card. “Did you listen to orders when it was Laurel who’d been kidnapped? Seems like you broke a few rules back then.”

  “That was different. She was part of our organization.”

  They both knew Devlin was on the losing end of this particular argument. The Paladin leader would’ve done anything, no matter what, to save his woman.

  “Damn it, Devlin
, do you need me to spell it all out for you? You let Barak live, Trahern brought in an outsider without clearance, and then Cullen crossed into Kalithia to bring back Lusahn and the kids. I could go on, but listen to what I’m telling you. I’d go after any woman in this predicament, but Reggie’s important to me.”

  Devlin conceded the battle. “Watch your back. The guys will be right behind you. I’ll let them know what’s going on.”

  There was a brief pause. “And if you manage to get yourself killed, I’ll be waiting to kick your ass as soon as you start breathing again.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Cody was blocking the doorway when D.J. hung up. “You aren’t leaving me here.”

  “Yes, I am. We’ve already been over this. I might be willing to get myself killed, but not you. Besides, you’ll be coming with the second wave.”

  “But—”

  “No buts, kid. And every second you stand here and argue with me is delaying my getting to Reggie before they take her into that cave.”

  Cody let him pass but dogged his steps all the way back to the truck. He finally grabbed D.J. by the arm, trying to prevent him from getting into the truck.

  “What’s the big deal about a cave? Why would they take her there? Who are these guys?”

  This was not the time for long explanations. He jerked his arm free and turned the tables on the kid, slamming him up against the truck fender.

  “Weren’t you listening when I told you about what Paladins do for a living? Two of the bastards who have Reggie are from that other world. The cave must have a stretch of barrier in it. If I reach them before it all goes down, maybe I can get Reggie back before they have a chance to drag her across into Kalithia. She already knows too much for these guys to let her live. If you don’t believe we’re dealing with stone-cold killers, there’s a dead body back in the warehouse that should convince you.”