Rapture (Fallen Angels #4)(75)
Author: J.R. Ward

In Hell. The blond girl is there—I was with her….

Jim cracked his knuckles. His vengeance was getting harder and harder to suck up, that fault line of fury threatening to break him in ways Devina’s physical torture couldn’t get close to. The bitch was smart—killing those other women. It kept Sissy right in the forefront, loud as a fire alarm, bright as a goddamn neon sign.

It was the most effective thing the demon had done so far to get under his cool—

Over to the right, a shadow moved—and it wasn’t the Devina kind. It was a man dressed in black from head to foot, a mask covering his face.

Jim observed from his superior position of not-fucking-there as the operative slipped from trunk to trunk. You had to admire the focus. In spite of the f**ked-up weather, the God-only-knows-what out back, and the relative lack of cover, the guy was a study in cold calculation, every footfall exactly where it needed to be. And he was well equipped, with a good-looking gun and silencer, and no doubt a bulletproof vest under the black fleece—after all, operatives were hard to find, difficult to train, and extremely expensive to support.

Not the kind of resources you squandered.

There was no backup, at least not that Jim could sense or see. Operatives did work in pairs from time to time, but that was rare and usually only when there were multiple targets.

And clearly, they were just coming for Matthias.

Which was not going to happen. Not under Jim’s watch.

Crossing the pea gravel, he zeroed in and didn’t waste time with any showboating or big reveal from out of thin air just to get a rise out of the f**ker.

In honor of the tradition he had been trained in, Jim simply let the other man pass by and then fell in step behind him, unnoticed even as he let himself become visible. Then, with quick coordination, he gripped both sides of the operative’s head and snapped the man’s neck with one vicious jerk. As the body went loose, Jim let it drop where it did, and stood his ground.

In the unlikely event there was another operative in the woods, that was going to flush him.

Heartbeat.

Heartbeat.

Heartbeat.

Jim stretched it a little longer and then was sure it had been a solo job again. Stepping over the newly dead, he fell into a jog around to the rear—

Talk about your melees.

Minions were swarming the back forty, going up against Adrian and— Shit, was that Matthias with a crystal dagger?

Sure as hell looked like it.

And he was holding his own.

The first impulse was to jump in there, but Jim stopped himself. This ambush bullshit was just too obvious. And he didn’t believe that the minions were going to kill Matthias—nope, not with Devina stepping in when she had back at the Marriott.

Narrowing his eyes on the fighting, he whistled once, the shrill sound cutting through the grunting and cursing. When Adrian glanced over, Jim popped up his palms—the universal sign for, You got this?

When Adrian nodded and returned to work, Jim gave Matthias another quick measure. The bastard was on fire, that broken body somehow working with enough deadly coordination to score some serious hits—and not because the minions were giving it to him easy once they engaged with him.

They were, however, focusing on Adrian, none of them singling Matthias out until the guy forced them to.

Devina had definitely given a no-kill order to those shadowy sons of bitches: Jim had squared off with them enough to know that they were capable of far greater offensive strategy—and the shit Adrian was dealing with was proof.

Time to go.

Jim hightailed it around to the front, threw some buffering over the corpse so that in the unlikely event someone got lost and made it all the way down the drive, they wouldn’t find a dead guy as a welcome mat.

Then he was out of there, going Angel Airlines to downtown Caldwell.

The reporter was the one exposed at the moment, and that was where Jim needed to be.

36

As far as Adrian could tell, the final minion showed up shortly after Jim disappeared.

The second that angel was gone, the seemingly endless supply of Devina’s PITAs dried up—proof that keeping the guy on site had been the reason for the attack.

Ten minutes later, the last shadow was dispatched, stabbed through the head by a crystal dagger wielded by Matthias.

As Adrian turned and looked at his wingman, he was breathing hard and steaming from the blood that had splattered on his shoulders.

That crippled SOB had sure as hell pulled it together in the nick of time.

“You okay?” Ad demanded between heaving gasps.

Matthias’s knees buckled and he gave himself over to gravity, letting his ass hit the ground—at least until the black blood that had been spilled on it ate its way through to his BVDs.

The man popped up off that grass like he’d been kicked in the can. “Fuck! This shit is—”

“Don’t rub your ass with your hand, idiot. Then your palm’ll get covered in it.”

Annnnnnd that was how Matthias ended up dropping trou in front of Ad.

The guy all but ripped open the front of those black slacks, and then his flat ass and thin legs let the rest happen.

“Better?” Ad said dryly as he looked around.

“Except for the stiff breeze on my ’nads, yeah.”

Ad’s eyes went back to the man’s lower body…and for some reason, his mind got stuck on the reporter in that hotel room the night before, the two of them all sexed up, but going nowhere.

That must really suck, he thought.

Clearing his throat, he nodded at the garage. “I got a change in there for you.”

“I’m ready for one.”

Matthias bent down, used the crystal dagger to slice open the pant legs, and then stepped free of them, leaving the burned-out remains smoldering on the ground like a car that had been bombed and abandoned at the side of the road.

Looking over, he tossed the dagger in a perfect end-over-end sequence at Adrian. “Thanks for the weapon—that was fun.”

Then the guy turned away and made like he was heading around the garage.

No questions. No demands of, “What the f**k?” Just, Hey, good party, my man.

Adrian hightailed it to catch up, thinking that Jim had been right about his old boss. Even half-naked, with some of his clothes still smoking, the f**ker was tight as a bank vault—and Ad’s kind of guy, apparently.

Matthias stopped as he came around the corner. “Looks like we had another kind of company.”

Sure enough.

The dead operative was lying like a doormat on the fringes of the forest, half on/half off the pea gravel of the drive. Talk about bad shape: the body was chest-down, but the head was owl-backward, those dead eyes focused on the skies above.