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  Chapter Eight

  Dryce wasn’t supposed to be able to calm her down. No, if anything, Peyton’s anxiety should have been skyrocketing as their helicopter lifted them into the sky and silently zoomed out over the city. But she kept her eyes glued to Dryce while they took off, watching the minute changes to his expression as they shifted from one gear to the next, going through the takeoff sequence like they’d done it a hundred times before.

  Peyton’s heartbeat threatened to kick into overdrive when she darted a glance out through the window beyond her partner’s head, but some sixth sense he had made him reach out and grab her hand, pulling her attention back to him. His skin was unexpectedly warm, and though it wasn’t the first time they’d touched, it was the first time he’d done it without the excuse of a training session.

  “You’re doing great,” Dryce assured her, giving her hand a squeeze.

  She squeezed back before pulling away. “How much longer?” she asked, proud that her voice didn’t tremble. She was flying in a helicopter, the sky stretching beyond them on all sides and only the power of technology keeping them airborne.

  That should have comforted Peyton. She could take the helicopter apart and put it back together without a manual and was confident that it would still fly. She knew exactly how a craft like this was meant to work. It was perfectly safe... as long as nothing went wrong. But flight had never been something she could reconcile her scientist’s mind to. She wasn’t going to climb into a space ship and trust the tech to ferry her through the vacuum of space, no matter how safe it was supposed to be, and trusting a helicopter now when she’d never even trusted a vehicle’s anti-grav was as far as she was willing to go.

  Ever.

  “A few hours,” Dryce replied. “We’ll be landing about four kilometers away from our target. Cloaking will keep our ride out of sight if there are any hostiles at the location, but we should be able to pick up on them long before we land.”

  Peyton took several controlled breaths. Hostiles. Cloaking. This wasn’t her life. “I belong in a lab,” she finally sighed. “I’m not some soldier. I know why I was chosen, but this is so beyond anything I’ve ever done that I’m not sure I’m going to make it.”

  Dryce was silent for a minute, just long enough that Peyton began to wonder if she should have said what she did. He couldn’t like that he’d been forced to bring a civilian with him. Maybe she should have been trying to prove to him that she was more than capable. But that wasn’t her, and if she was going to have a panic attack the moment they landed, it was probably better that he knew it was coming.

  “I will keep you safe,” Dryce promised. “But your brain is the most important tool we have on this mission. I know you can do this.” He said it with such sincerity that it blasted through all of the doubt she had when it came to him. His eyes met her, those unfathomably dark depths holding a promise of something that she was too afraid to look closely at. Who was this guy? Why was he like two different people? There was the playboy that everyone knew, and then also this competent soldier who looked at her like she held the world in her hand.

  Both of them were too sexy for her own good, but Peyton wasn’t going to tell that part to anyone. She could keep a hold of herself. Even if Dryce had just been the competent soldier and she wasn’t guaranteed to get her heart broken by the playboy, she wasn’t going to possibly fuck up their mission by letting feelings get involved.

  Even though she wasn’t going to let anything happen between them, Dryce’s confidence buoyed her. She’d been chosen for this mission because she was one of the few people in the SDA who they trusted to get close to an unfamiliar piece of tech that could destroy the planet and disarm it.

  “I can do this,” Peyton echoed. Her heart flipped when Dryce’s lips tipped up into a smile, but she wasn’t about to get attached. No, she had to be strong, had to be mature.

  Besides, she had a date with DF waiting for her when this was all done.

  Peyton darted a glance at Dryce and then looked away, her emotions swirling in confusion. Sure, she didn’t owe anything to DF. They hadn’t made any promises. Hell, she didn’t even know the man’s name. But it wasn’t like her to make plans with one man and start to develop feelings for another. Not that she was developing feelings for Dryce. That would be bad. Untenable. Certain to lead to heartbreak. She wasn’t dumb enough to do something like that.

  But when he caught her attention and pointed to a hawk flying in the distance, his face full of wonder at all of the life flourishing on Earth, her heart clenched and she wondered just how long she’d be able to tell herself that what she felt for Dryce didn’t constitute feelings.

  “So we’re landing four kilometers away,” Peyton prompted, trying to get everything back on track. They had a mission, and that was what they had to be dedicated to. “I assume we’re covering the rest of the distance on foot?”

  “Yes,” Dryce confirmed. “If our scans and our back up show that it’s safe enough to proceed, we go in on foot. We will do all of the recon we can, but we need to be on our way by nightfall. And we’ve been given strict orders not to engage with any hostiles.”

  “How am I supposed to disarm this bomb if we can’t engage?” Peyton didn’t need to be a soldier to know that didn’t make any sense.

  “We’ll come back with a bigger team. We don’t want to push them into using their weapon because one of the sites gets compromised.”

  And that meant that the mission was going to take even longer. Peyton leaned back in her seat, and not even the fact that she no longer seemed to be as nervous of flying could make her feel better.

  WHEN PEYTON LAPSED into silence, Dryce didn’t try to push. Something was bothering her, but whatever it was would have to wait until later. He’d fix it if he could, but first they had to deal with their recon mission. Scans of the area didn’t show any unexpected activity, but the enemy could easily be cloaked.

  Based on what they’d learned from Brakley Varrow, they knew that the Oscavians and Wreetans had access to short range teleporters. If they’d set up reception stations in the forest, they could have easily sneaked in the parts for their weapon without triggering any of the defenses that were meant to intercept ships breaking atmo.

  How long had they been preparing? If Yormas of Wreet had set himself on this path when he began his ambassadorship to Earth, the entire planet could be seeded with destructive devices and they would have no way of knowing.

  Dryce would need to trust that the SDA, SIA, and the Detyen Legion were doing everything they could to make sure that wasn’t true. They couldn’t fight an enemy they couldn’t see, but they could do their damnedest to destroy the weapons they discovered.

  He set the helicopter down and engaged the passive cloaking tech that would ensure the vehicle remained undetected. Their packs were already prepared, so when he and Peyton hopped out of the helicopter, they strapped up and were on their way. Peyton followed a few paces behind him and the only sounds beside birds and bugs were their footsteps. Dryce was not used to operating in a forested environment, as most of his missions had taken place on space stations or densely populated cities, and his survival training had been done at Detyen HQ where it was winter all year round. The forest around them teemed with life, but with the trees so dense around them, he felt like someone could be watching them from any angle and they’d never know it.

  But that was just his imagination. Or possibly their support team. He and Peyton would not be contacting his fellow warriors unless things went irrevocably bad, but they had to be near.

  “Is something wrong?” Peyton asked, her voice cutting through the doubt and banishing his thoughts of being observed.

  “No,” Dryce responded. “Everything is fine.” It was, he told himself. A warrior’s instincts were his most important weapon, but that weapon could misfire when placed in an unfamiliar environment. None of his recon tools suggested they were being watched and there was nothing other than the feeling at the back of hi
s neck that said otherwise.

  Peyton made a noise, but said nothing else. Four kilometers wasn’t a long walk, and though the forest was dense, they had no difficulty making a path. When they got close enough to see their target with their naked eyes, Dryce halted and Peyton followed suit.

  He took a set of binoculars out of his pack and took a look around. Drone footage had shown an old house that was more memory than structure, a few beams holding up an old roof and only one wall still intact. Heat maps hadn’t shown anything special about the location, but the coordinates had appeared on Brakley Varrow’s trigger and they couldn’t ignore it, even if the place looked like it had been abandoned more than a century ago.

  The grass came up to their knees, but the trees gave way, only young growth making up most of the clearing around the house.

  “As far as love nests go, it leaves a bit to be desired,” Peyton said, coming to stand next to him. “Honestly, I’d expect better from you.”

  Dryce smiled, even if he wished that his denya wouldn’t bring up his past exploits so often. He hadn’t once mentioned anyone who’d come before her. He hadn’t even meant to mention their upcoming date, even if she didn’t know she’d invited him, but he’d been too ecstatic to hide his reaction when he received the message. But Dryce had a part to play here, and if this was how his mate wanted to joke, he’d play along. “I do try to provide at least two walls,” he said. “It’s no good if the roof comes crashing down in the middle of the main event.”

  Peyton laughed, the sound an intimate caress, one he was determined to hear more of from her, no matter what he had to do to elicit it. But that was later.

  “Stay close,” he cautioned. He had his blaster at the ready, but he doubted there were any hostiles to be found at this decrepit spot.

  “Do you think this is a decoy?” Peyton asked, her voice cautiously quiet as they crept around. “Or were they here and gone?”

  “I’m not sure. But we’ll find out.” A snap of the branches behind them had him swinging around, but it was only the wind that had him on edge. They continued on, carefully making their way closer to the old house, watchful for any traps or dangers on the floor.

  They found nothing except an old patch of road that was so cracked it looked like no vehicle could pass over it on wheels.

  “If anyone was here recently, they were using anti-grav,” Peyton observed. “I don’t see any tracks, and that mud over there,” she pointed to a brown patch near a trickle of a stream, “would definitely hold tracks.”

  Dryce had to agree. “Let’s check the house. There might be a basement, something hidden underground.”

  “I guess this isn’t a terrible location for a secret underground lair,” Peyton conceded. “You’d never guess from aerial shots.”

  “You could be right.” If the basement was protected well enough, few of their scans would be able to pick up anything, and any readings they got might have been anomalies. Dryce didn’t like it. “Keep behind me,” he warned. They were both wearing armor, but that would only help so far.

  The inside of the structure didn’t look like anything more than a ruin. Dryce’s foot almost went through a rotted floorboard in one place and Peyton tripped over some debris and would have fallen to her knees if she hadn’t been standing close enough to Dryce to use him to brake her fall.

  “Sorry,” she whispered.

  It was quieter in the house, the configuration of the remaining walls somehow blocking out all of the sounds from the forest around them. Eerie. That was the word for it. And that prickling at the back of his neck was there again, warning Dryce that they were being watched.

  “Something is off here,” he finally admitted. “I don’t like it.”

  “Off? Off how?” Peyton didn’t sound pleased by that, but she wasn’t panicking, which was all he could ask for. She had no experience with problems in the field, no experience with the field at all. Despite her fear of heights earlier, she was doing better than some green warriors he’d trained.

  “I’m worried we’re being watched,” he said.

  Peyton spun around to the nearest opening and peered out into the forest, right in the same direction that Dryce would have guessed their observer was coming from. If anything could convince him that the threat was real, it was that. “I don’t see anything. Do you think it’s... who we’re looking for?”

  “No.” The Oscavians and Wreetans would be shooting by now if they were out there. If they caught Dryce and Peyton, they had no reason to leave them alive. But he wasn’t going to say that just yet. “It might be an animal, or someone who lives in these woods. We’ll be cautious, but there’s nothing else we can do just yet.”

  Peyton looked back at him for a long minute before she nodded. “You’re the boss.”

  “Only until we find what we’re looking for.”

  The structure was bigger on the inside than it appeared from the clearing around it, but it was clear that nothing but wind and wild animals had crossed the threshold in a long time. Even if it had been disguised to look abandoned there would have been signs of use. The dust and dirt wouldn’t have been nearly as heavy, and the evidence of animal nests would have been easier to spot. As it was, Peyton shrieked when a pile of leaves started to move and a fat rat darted out of it.

  “Have we seen enough yet?” she asked, voice too high to pass for calm.

  Dryce wanted to say yes. They’d spent over an hour looking for anything, but they weren’t quite done yet. “Soon,” he promised, and hoped he wasn’t lying.

  “Fate of the world, fate of the world...” She whispered the mantra to herself as if it could ward off further vermin. Dryce kept himself from grinning too broadly. His mate was doing well and he didn’t want to discourage her.

  He found a latch that led to the cellar under a small pile of debris that might have once been an internal wall. It took both him and Peyton to heave the door open, the wood too warped by water and time to pull away smoothly. In the end he had to kick it several times until the cracks gave way and he and Peyton were able to pull the door up in rotten strips of wood.

  Musty decay floated up from the dank hole where the house’s cellar used to be and when Dryce pulled out his torch and lit up the darkness it was only to see mud, rotten wood, and a puddle that hid things that neither of them wanted to see.

  “No one is hiding a secret lair down there,” Peyton said with an air of finality. “But feel free to check. I’ll just wait up here.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dryce was in agreement and the two of them backed away from the dank entrance to the cellar and gave one final look at the ruin before leaving it behind to return to the helicopter. It was only then that Peyton remembered they’d have to get back in the sky to continue on their mission and she wanted to curse. Stupid helicopter. What was so good about air travel anyway?

  “Any idea why they had this location marked?” she asked to try and distract herself. For some reason she’d expected Dryce to be chatty while they walked, but he’d been completely focused and nearly silent since they’d landed except for small bouts of conversation that she’d prompted.

  “Didn’t you suggest earlier that it could be a mistake?” Dryce shrugged. They had to move carefully down the path they’d taken to get to the house. It was barren enough to walk through the woods, but dense enough that branches brushed against them and they crushed the fallen twigs under their feet. “It might have been a place they scouted and discarded,” he suggested.

  “So you don’t think we were lured out here on the off chance we intercepted that information, right?” She knew that there were hostiles somewhere on the ground, but she didn’t want to think that they were waiting somewhere out there, obscured by leaves and branches, the sound of their movements hidden by the wind and animals who called this forest home.

  “Probably not. Waste of resources.” Dryce pushed aside a particularly large branch and waited for Peyton to pass before letting it go.

  “T
hen what do you think was watching us? Or are we just being paranoid?” She hoped it was paranoia. The woods were dense and had to be full of animals. The Preservation and Animal Reintroduction laws of the last century had ensured that all kinds of animal populations were nurtured in areas where they’d before gone extinct. Including mountain lions, bears, and wolves. Not what she wanted to think about when she could just imagine all of those clawed beasts waiting to attack.

  Dryce surveyed the land around them as if the trees could offer an answer. But finally he shrugged. “We remain on alert, but hopefully we make it to the helicopter without incident.”

  They walked. Peyton’s calves cramped as they made their way up the incline to the plateau where they’d landed. It hadn’t been so obvious on the way to the house that they’d been going downhill, but she could feel it now. She wanted to call for a rest when her leg seized up, but kept trudging on. Four kilometers was nothing to Dryce, who hadn’t even broken a sweat. She wasn’t going to be the weakling that held them back.

  She was so focused on the pain in her leg that she ran into Dryce, who’d frozen in front of her. “What—” she began to ask before a growl from somewhere beyond the trees reverberated through her bones. Her tongue darted out to lick her suddenly dry lips and she looked around carefully as her body recognized an ancient predator even if her mind had yet to catch up.

  “Keep moving,” Dryce whispered to her, his body so tense she feared it would snap. “Slowly, but purposefully. Do. Not. Run.”

  She knew that. Everyone knew that. But as they took careful steps, her heartbeat kicked into overdrive and she wanted to break formation and sprint up the hill to the safety of the helicopter. All her fears of flying evaporated in the face of the threat on the ground.

  A shaft of sunlight pierced the canopy of the forest and caught on a bit of gray fur. Wolves. A whole pack of them, if the rumbling growls growing closer and closer were anything to go by.