Keeping his arm around Tommy, Braden dug his phone out of his pocket and hit the speed dial button for MPD dispatch. He didn’t waste time with details, just giving them his name, badge number, the address of the warehouse, and that there was an officer down and in need of critical care. The dispatcher asked him something, but Braden ignored the woman.
Dropping the phone, he turned his attention to his partner. Blood flecked Tommy’s lips. Braden wasn’t an EMT, but he knew that was bad.
“Hold on, Tommy,” he told him. “I called for an ambulance. Just hold on.”
Tears stung Braden’s eyes. Since making detective, he’d spent more time with Tommy than he had his own family. The guy was more than his partner. He was like an older brother.
“Did we get them?” Tommy asked in a bubbly whisper that brought up even more blood.
Braden wanted to tell him that none of that shit was important, but he didn’t bother. Because it was important to Tommy. “Yeah. We got them.”
Tommy nodded. He opened his mouth to whisper something else, but the words were too soft for Braden to make out.
He leaned forward, putting his ear right next to Tommy’s mouth. “I’m right here, partner.”
Tommy didn’t say anything for a moment, and Braden thought perhaps it was too late.
“Don’t be scared…” Tommy finally whispered.
Then he stopped breathing.
Braden ground his teeth and leaned over his partner and friend, hugging his lifeless body. Lesson learned. He’d trust his gut and never break the fucking rules again.
Chapter 1
Washington, DC, Present Day
Dreya Clark climbed on the apartment’s balcony railing, then stood straight and tall in the warm night air for a moment to catch her balance before leaping up and out, twisting in the air and snagging the edge of the next floor above her with the curved claws at the ends of her fingers. The needle-sharp tips found the tiny crevices in the brickwork, and she hung there for a moment, her feet swaying slightly above the ten stories of open space below. She tightened her stomach to minimize her swing as much as possible, not wanting to put any more strain on her claws than necessary. She’d ripped out a few of them doing this very same thing when she was seventeen and just learning how to use them. Back when she was still trying to deal with the freak she’d turned into.
Seeing her fingernails turn into long, curved claws for the first time had been hard enough to handle back then. But the fangs, green glowing eyes, and the yowls that slipped out whenever she’d gotten angry, upset, or confused that came along with those claws had been even more disconcerting.
She relaxed the claws of her left hand and pulled them away from the wall, reaching up carefully and finding another set of almost invisible cracks ten inches higher on the wall. She dug in, then released her right hand, pulling her body weight up with her right arm and shoulder at the same time. She hadn’t done anything like this in a while and was happy to see her body hadn’t forgotten how. Her hands, claws, arms, and shoulders worked in perfect harmony, pulling her up the outside of the building as easily as most people would climb a ladder.
Dreya moved quickly, covering the four floors to the roof in a few minutes. By the time she reached the top, she was breathing a little harder, but it felt exhilarating.
How longhadit been since she’d done this?
She counted up the weeks as she crested the roof’s parapet wall and hopped atop it, then jogged casually along the three-inch-wide edging toward the next corner and realized that it had been more than two months since she’d climbed more than a set of stairs, much less broken into a building and stolen anything. That had to be a record for her.
There was a good reason she’d been out of the game for a while. The last time she’d broken into someone’s house and stolen something, Rory Keefe, her mentor and best friend, had died. She’d almost died, too, but that didn’t bother her nearly as much as the fact that Rory, the man who’d taught her how to accept her claws and fangs, how to make jewelry, and how to steal it, had been murdered trying to protect her. All because she’d been arrogant enough—and stupid enough—to steal from that rich ex-senator, Thomas Thorn.
Dreya stopped when she reached the corner of the condo and gazed at the apartment complex on the far side of the street. Compared to the dull, boxy concrete structure she stood on now, the other place looked more like a work of modern art than a residence for people with more money than they knew what to do with. It was all glass and steel with a series of arcs and wavy projections sticking out at random angles to break up the outline of the building. She imagined some people staring at the place for hours, wishing they lived there.
Not that Dreya ever did. She liked her small apartment in Foggy Bottom just fine, thank you. The only thing that mattered to her was that those fancy sweeping arches and dramatic exposed trusses required all kinds of structural cables to hold them up and that one of those cables just happened to be attached to the ugly, boxy building on which she stood.
The cable ran at a slight upward angle and was attached to the fourteenth floor of the far building. Being able to access the other apartment complex that far above the ground would allow her to bypass nearly all of the building’s security systems, as well as the guards who roamed the lower floors. Once she was across the cable, getting to her target would be almost too easy.
Dismissing the fact that the cable was more than one hundred and twenty feet above the ground and that there was a twenty-five-mile-an-hour wind whipping between the two apartment complexes, Dreya flipped her long, blond braid over her shoulder and hopped off the parapet and onto the cable. She ran up the slight incline at the same fast-paced speed she’d use on a treadmill. As she ran up the cable, her arms outstretched on either side of her to help keep her balance, she thought about Thorn and how lucky she was to be alive.
She’d been stealing stuff since she was eighteen, right after she’d figured out that being a freak with catlike agility, an affinity for climbing really high places, and perfect night vision would be considered a gift to some people. Rory had reluctantly taught her what she needed to know to be a good thief, more so she wouldn’t get caught than because he’d ever wanted her to be part of his world. But she’d been good at it—really good. And in time, she’d gained a reputation within their circle for hitting tall buildings, highly secured targets, and filthy-rich people.
Most of her fellow thieves thought she stole stuff for the same reasons they did. But Rory knew she did it for fun and for the thrill it gave to the part of her with claws and fangs. The truth was that most of the stuff she took ended up buried in a landfill somewhere—or in her very private and very well-hidden collection.
She’d been questioned a few dozen times by the cops, even threatened with arrest now and then, but mostly, it had all been a big game. Then she’d stolen that big diamond and the strange black box from Thorn, and her whole life had changed.
After torturing and killing Rory, Thorn’s goons had tracked her to a safe house where she’d been hiding until things cooled off. Some big bull of a man had appeared at the last minute to save her life, then a woman with a strangely familiar scent and a certain something that made Dreya instinctively want to trust her had shown up. When the woman told Dreya that she was there to help, Dreya had believed her.
She’d given the woman the diamond—and the strange black box—then took her advice about getting out of town, immediately heading north and crossing the border into Canada. She’d had money and fake identity papers stashed up there—another precaution Rory had insisted on—knowing that if she needed to, she could have disappeared and never come back.
