The words lifted from her, heaving a great weight with them. Maybe she was just as nuts as the two witches behind her, but goddamn it felt good to share the load.
‘Oh no,’ Vail breathed.
‘Oh shit,’ Leona said.
‘Oh yes.’ Kira leaned on the windowsill watching the wind play with a brass chime hanging from the veranda. ‘You have no idea how much I wish I’d told Blake to fuck off –’
‘Kira, that’s not what we meant,’ Vail said.
The lizard barked again, little snaps of sound, like a chihuahua with a bad cold. Kira turned. Vail’s face had dropped a shade or two of pale. Leona glared at the laptop screen, hands on her hips.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘We keep tabs on the Facility, any newsfeeds about the place –’ Vail began.
Leona shoved past Kira as she raced back to the table.
‘And? What did you see?’
Vail spun the screen. The website was The Smoking Gun. Ironically, one of the same conspiracy-theory-loving sites that Blake had told her once the Facility kept tabs on, tracking how close to the truth anyone was getting about proving the existence of the Syranians. The nutters had been convinced for years the aliens were in the basement, luckily, no one paid much attention to a sad bunch of people who believed the moon landing was a fake.
But people might pay attention to an explosion at the Facility. One large enough to register low-level seismic activity at the nearest monitoring station.
‘Shit. Blake.’ Kira’s wine-laden stomach turned. ‘Fuck what she said, we have to go to the Facility.’
Glass clanged and cupboard doors thumped as Leona piled things into a wicker picnic basket that had seen better days. ‘I’m sure she’s fine. They say she’s a genius.’ Leona grunted, heaving a giant jar of pickles from an overhead cupboard. ‘You can’t go to the Facility. We have to go to the Rudiment. Now.’
‘Like hell –’
The laptop pinged again. Vail opened a new tab, and a headline blazed across the screen. Apparently Leona and Vail didn’t just keep an eye on the Facility.
‘You are fucking kidding me.’ Kira stared at her own face on the screen next to a headline that read ‘Kira Beckworth Linked to Casino Murder?’
The picture, one from a year ago on a beach in Greece, ran alongside a video of the two guys in the elevator, the drunk touchy-feely lovebirds, who were loving every second of their fifteen minutes of fame as a local news crew questioned them about the casino murders. Spouting off about how they’d chatted with Kira Beckworth in the elevator as she was headed to the penthouse floor. How certain they were that it was her, despite the wig and glasses, because they’d spotted her chest tattoo through her ludicrously expensive designer shirt. How concerned they were when they heard about the death, assuming one of her parties had gotten out of hand.
Miffed they hadn’t gotten an invite.
‘Oh, those two have very big mouths.’ Leona hustled in alongside her. There was no actual footage of Kira in the hotel. Whatever hoodoo-voodoo stuff Az had going on had buggered up every camera they’d gone near. The authorities were clutching at straws, but it was a big hotel, with an enormous wallet, and it wanted its reputation straightened out.
‘They want to question Kira about the . . . accident.’ Vail’s fingers shook over the keyboard.
‘Oh shit,’ Leona said.
Kira stared at her own smiling face. Tanned and high, and a lifetime away from all this. ‘All the shit, all the fans.’
‘What do we do?’ Vail said.
‘Plan A, we get wasted.’ Kira tapped her empty glass. ‘And pretend none of this is happening.’
Azrael pressed his hands against the table and rose to his feet. ‘We go to the Rudiment, where the Disciples of the Maiden can offer protection, and source my true identity.’
Kira reached for the cask of wine. 'I'm going to stick with Plan A. Anyone else with me?'
Without a word, Leona thrust out her half-empty coffee mug, and this time there was no doubt in Kira’s mind that the lizard nodded.
….CONTINUE - METAL ANGELS - PART TWO
Exclusive Sneak Peek!
METAL ANGELS - PART TWO
The thin silver needle guided thread in and out of Blake’s torn skin. Blood stained the tips of the nurse’s gloved fingers as he sutured the wound on her palm.
‘Are you all right?’ The man, Jeremy according to his high-security pass, did not lift his gaze from his work.
‘I’m fine.’ Dirty and exhausted. Body shaking as though she were still in the middle of the tremendous earth tremor that had wracked the level eleven chamber just on an hour ago. When the gallu had arrived during the Final Meld, her body had ignited, the toxins in her blood becoming a raging heat beneath her skin. But now, with the Waters settled once again, the hollow ache at her core began to spread, clawing up out of her diaphragm and reaching for her ribs. Distant whispers played in her ears. Jeremy could not help her with those injuries. ‘Are they taking Tamas somewhere?’
She nodded past the two armed guards – her escort Captain Nex’s mandatory condition if she were to be allowed from his sight – who waited outside her compartment. In another compartment on the far side of the level three medical ward, Cym leaned over an unconscious Tamas. Another nurse and a doctor were with him. Their nodding heads indicated they had all come to an agreement of some kind.
‘The director is going to be prepped for surgery up in the Zahra Centre,’ Jeremy said. ‘They need to reset his wrist.’
The Zahra Centre was a state-of-the-art on-site medical centre, built at the end of Tamas’s mother’s cancer battle and given her name. A staff perk that also removed the necessity for Tamas to leave the Facility when he was ill. Blake struggled to recall when she or Tamas had last left the high fences of their desert-bound workplace.
‘And the head wound?’ she said.
‘Sutured,
