Marcus Pelegrimas - The Breaking

“Relax, Cole. This should only take another hour or two.” Once Waylon’s subject was completely tied down and surrounded by armed guards, he said, “Get the drills.”

A door opened at the back of the room and something was wheeled out. Cole spent the short amount of time preparing himself to stay awake and keep his fists clenched tightly enough to keep his palms secure. When he caught his first glimpse of the little handheld drills on the cart that was wheeled to his table, keeping his fists clenched wasn’t much of a concern. The motor of the first drill sounded like a smaller version of a hydraulic tool used to remove bolts from a car’s wheel.

“Someone get him a towel,” Waylon said.

Cole needed his hands to remain dirty until he got back to his cell. If that wasn’t allowed to happen and his palms were examined too carefully, all of the pain he’d suffered would count for squat.

When the tech stepped up to his side holding one of the prison’s threadbare towels, Waylon said, “Good, now stuff it in his mouth.”

As the tech pushed the towel in, he made sure he was still able to see Cole’s teeth. The drill gouged into his shoulder smoothly, but squealed when it hit bone. Agony shot through Cole’s entire body and he nearly bit all the way through the towel as he screamed into it. Waylon looked pleased as his subject thrashed against his restraints and the machines recorded every moment of Cole’s ordeal.

Paige hadn’t been eager to make the call to Prophet regarding the Amriany, but it proved to be a gamble worth taking. Not only had the European hunters agreed to extract her within hours after she contacted them, but they’d flown into a private strip at Buffalo-Niagara International Airport and took off before the engines of their Gulfstream G200 had a chance to cool.

The inside of the jet looked like a smaller version of the waiting room Paige had haunted while waiting for the Amriany to arrive. It was sparsely furnished, smelled of stale cigarette smoke, and vibrated with the hum of engines. Three of the ten seats in the cabin were occupied. She sat near one of the windows, angling her chair so she could watch the other passengers. Two of them had worked with Cole, Rico, and Prophet in Denver. The third was a short man plagued by a constant twitch in his right eye. His olive-colored skin was deeply tanned and marred by scars of all shapes and sizes, some of which were deep enough to interrupt the flow of a short, curly beard. The largest scar ran along his left cheek and down his chin. If Cole had been there, Paige thought, he’d make a comment about how the bush on the scarred man’s face would have looked more natural between the Gypsy’s legs. She laughed quietly, reminding herself to call the Amriany by their proper name.

“What is so funny?” the man with the bush on his face asked.

Paige shook her head. “Nothing. Just trying to pop my ears. We took off so fast that I barely had a chance to grab onto something.”

“You said you were in a hurry.”

“Right, but I didn’t expect you guys to come so quickly.”

“If you could have waited, you should have said something,” the man said impatiently. “There is a lot to do and we don’t need to waste time picking up Americans who are too cheap to pay for a goddamn ticket.”

Before the man could get any more riled up, he was shoved back into his seat by a firm hand that slapped his shoulder several times. The woman attached to that hand kept her short brown hair beneath a leather skullcap. Her pointy nose dominated an otherwise fragile-looking face. “We’re still on schedule, Milosh,” she said. “Paige will prove to be worth the diversion.”

“She’d better,” Milosh scowled through his beard. From there, he pulled a long blade from a scabbard at his waist and began polishing the gleaming steel with a cloth that reeked of oils smelling vaguely like the varnish used for Skinner weapons.

“Hi, Nadya,” Paige said in the cheeriest voice she could manage. “Prophet sends his best.”

The woman had a face that was pretty, but rough around the edges. Reflexively touching the spot where she’d been wounded during the ill-fated raid on the Nymar warehouse in Denver, Nadya sat down in the seat directly across from her and said, “We’re sorry about what happened to Cole. That was an unfortunate sacrifice, but it allowed most of us to escape.”

“He didn’t get brought in just to save you,” Paige said. “There’s more to it than that.”

“And he wasn’t the only one to sacrifice,” Milosh pointed out. “Tobar was captured as well.”

An athletic man wearing a tactical vest and brown fatigues stood up from a seat at the other end of the cabin. His vest looked to be the same make and design as the shell Paige used for body armor, but was modified by strands of silver woven into black mesh. Despite the graying hair on his head, his face still had a youthful smoothness that would get him carded at casinos for years to come.

The smooth-faced Gunari might have been one of the Amriany who had joined forces with the Skinners in Denver, but the fire in his eyes still reflected generations of mistrust between the two groups of hunters. Sometimes tradition was a real bitch. “We had to flee from that bloodbath,” he said to Paige, “but not before we saw you step out of a fancy helicopter. Tell me, did the Skinners win another lottery thanks to that psychic you work with?”

“No,” she replied. “Prophet’s been busy doing other stuff, like trying to stay out of jail and divert any attention that might come our way thanks to warrants issued after all of that Nymar business. Speaking of that, since he’s covering your asses too, maybe you should call him by name instead of ‘that psychic.’ Okay?”

Gunari nodded. “He was also supposed to find information from those Nymar about their communication network and pass it along to us in exchange for us helping you Skinners survive that massacre. We haven’t gotten anything from him or you.”

“And,” Milosh grunted, “if you think we’re gonna let you go so you can screw us over, you’re fucking wrong.”

“I told you I’ve got information you can use,” Paige said. “You can make a copy when you drop me off in Denver.”

“Not good enough,” Milosh grunted.

She extended her arm, flipped up one finger and panned it slowly back and forth so all of the Amriany could see it. “I’ll e-mail the rest to you. Until then, kiss my ass. Good enough now? My partner’s in a maximum security prison so the rest of you could get away. If I don’t hear from him soon, it means he’s probably dead and I made the worst mistake of my life. Prophet brokered an information exchange to repay you for this ride. You don’t like it? Either drop me at the next airport or hand me a parachute.”

“Cole can handle himself,” Nadya said. “I saw him wade through the worst moments in that warehouse.” Her voice trailed off as memories of that night flooded through her mind. Just when it seemed she might become lost in those images, she blinked them away. “If anything, the men in that prison should fear him. Since Tobar is also locked in a cage somewhere, we’re all working toward the same thing.”

“Are we?” Paige asked. “Why do you want that Nymar communication network so badly? I haven’t heard anything about an uprising overseas, so the network probably only covers the U.S. and Canada.”

“You know nothing about what the Nymar do in our country,” Tobar replied. “And you know nothing about reports of any policemen that may have been hurt or killed by those leeches.”