“Brielle…it’s…can…hear me?” Her brother’s voice came through the phone broken and barely recognizable, but it was Julian. She knew that for sure. “Need…help.”
They yelled back and forth at each other, trying to figure out what the other one was saying over the crappy connection. Misty was on her own phone, motioning for Brielle to keep talking. She prayed that meant Misty was trying to track the call.
“Julian, I’m having a hard time understanding you,” she said. “Can you move to someplace with better reception?”
“Can’t…underground,” he replied, the words getting harder to hear by the second. “We escaped through…tunnels…got lost down…here. Need…dark. Phone’s dying.”
Brielle’s head spun with all the questions she wanted to ask. Like where the hell her brother had been all this time, how he’d ended up in a dark tunnel with a nearly dead cell phone, and who else was with him to have him sayingwewhen he’d never cared about anyone but himself.
Then she felt Caleb take her hand, his gentle and reassuring as he tried to calm her down. She looked over at Misty, who shook her head.
Brielle took a deep breath, focusing on the most important issues. “Julian, you have to give me some idea where you are. Anything you got.”
“New…City.” Julian said, the words barely above a whisper now. “Old tunnel…subway…abandoned…sign…fourth street.” There might have been more, but her brother’s voice was really fading now. “Hurry. Something…down…here…us.”
The phone abruptly went dead, and when she tried to call the number back, the message said the line had no service. Brielle glanced at Misty, but her friend shook her head. Brielle’s heart dropped into her stomach.
Caleb gently turned her around to face him, his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, stop spinning, okay? I know we didn’t get a lock on where he is, but I could hear everything that Julian said while he was talking to you, and I know he was able to give you some clues. We’ll find him. I promise.”
Brielle knew there was no way Caleb could make that promise, but he had, and she started thinking that maybe everything really would be all right.
Chapter 16
“Why can’t we ever have a mission in a well-lit shopping mall?” Misty asked from somewhere behind Caleb as he led them down the long decrepit staircase, the light from his flashlight barely illuminating the darkness that was closing in around them. “Just once, I’d like to walk into a situation able to see what we’re dealing with.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” Forrest questioned, his voice coming from somewhere very close to Misty. As usual.
Forrest, Misty, Genevieve, and Hudson had come with him and Brielle to find her brother while Jake and the rest of their teammates were busy chasing down a lead on Xavier Harrington and the nukes that had come in a few minutes after Julian had called. Jake had hated splitting up the team, but the chance to find the nukes had been too good to pass up.
Having been in the middle of a rather erotic dream involving Brielle and a jar of peanut butter, Caleb had nearly missed the call from Julian. Things in dreamland had just gotten interesting when someone started playing the piano. Really hoping it would go away, he’d tried to ignore the music, but it hadn’t worked. He’d popped up in bed and realized that Brielle wasn’t in it with him and that it was her cell phone ringing. And that her ringtone was piano music.
Caleb still wasn’t sure why he’d answered other than the fact that if someone was calling her at that god-awful time of night, it must be important. When he’d heard a man’s voice coming through the horrible connection wanting to talk to Brielle and demanding to know why Caleb had her phone, he’d come damn close to hanging up. Because whoever the hell the d-bag might be, Caleb had no use for him.
But when the caller let slip that his name was Julian, Caleb figured he should probably find Brielle and bring her the phone even if he had already decided he didn’t like her brother.
Even though the jackass hadn’t given them much to go on, Misty had still come up with a possible location—the South Fourth Street Subway Station, located about thirty feet underneath the intersection of Broadway and Union Avenue in Brooklyn. Misty was supersmart and amazingly good at digging up stuff on the internet, but it still seemed like a long shot. Brielle was desperate to find her brother, though, and if she thought there was a chance he was down here, Caleb would help her.
“I’m guessing the street-level entrance to this station isn’t around anymore?” Hudson asked, his steps on the crumbling stairs amazingly soft for someone who wasn’t a werewolf. Caleb hadn’t liked the CIA agent when he’d first joined the team—and there were definitely moments when he would have gladly smashed his face in—but he had to admit, the guy was beginning to grow on him.
“Unfortunately, no. It was closed up and paved over decades ago,” Misty answered, reciting the information without even having to pause and think about it. “The station itself was abandoned before World War II and never reopened. Almost all of the other entrances have been sealed up. I found this service entrance in the basement of this old apartment by pure luck. If I hadn’t, we would have been wandering around the subway tunnels beneath Brooklyn for hours looking for a way in.”
“Which makes me wonder how Brielle’s brother ended up here,” Genevieve said. “We didn’t even have a clue he was in New York, and now he’s lost in the subway tunnels below the city, forcing us to split up the team to find him.”
Caleb couldn’t miss the accusation in Genevieve’s voice. She’d been openly against the plan to rescue Brielle’s brother. In fact, she’d been pretty adamant that Julian was nothing more than bait for a trap. The worst part? Caleb couldn’t say he disagreed. Using Brielle’s weakness for her brother to lure them down into these abandoned tunnels seemed exactly like something Harrington would do.
Behind him, Brielle sighed. “I know you think the only reason my brother called is to lead us into an ambush, but he’d never do anything to put me at risk. For all his faults, Julian loves me and would never let me get hurt.”
That announcement seemed to ease the tension a little bit, making the darkness around them seem at least a little less suffocating.
“It’s not that hard to believe Julian has been trapped inside Harrington’s organization since arriving in New York on the ship carrying those nukes, unable to get a message out,” Forrest said. “Maybe slipping into the subway tunnels was the only option he had to get away from Harrington, and without knowing where he was going, he got lost. Misty showed me the drawings of the NYC underground system. It’s a rat’s maze down here.”
Genevieve snorted, but Caleb appreciated Forrest sticking up for Brielle. It almost sounded like his teammate believed all of that stuff he’d just spouted. Almost.
“Where’s this service entrance supposed to be anyway?” Genevieve asked when they finally reached the lowest level of the building’s basement. “I can’t see anything down here.”
Caleb didn’t need the flashlight in his hand to see, but he swung the beam around mostly for everyone else’s benefit. The basement was jammed with what looked to be fifty years’ worth of dust, trash, furniture, and old packing crates. There was nothing that even suggested a door or passageway out of the place, and for a moment, he feared the entire trip had been a waste of time.
“Over here,” Hudson called out, shoving aside a huge armoire to reveal a chained and padlocked section of grating. The age of the lock and the amount of dust collected along the chain suggested that the gate hadn’t been opened in years. Decades, maybe.
