In the Blood (Metahuman Files Book 4) Read online

  In The Blood

  Hailey Turner

  IN THE BLOOD

  Copyright © 2017 by Hailey Turner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover design by Kasmit Covers.

  Professional Beta Reading by Leslie Copeland: [email protected]

  Edited by Jersey Devil Editing.

  To get your free copy of the Metahuman Files short story A Distant Devotion featuring Jamie and Kyle, sign-up for Hailey Turner's newsletter over here!

  In the Blood is dedicated to

  Bear

  for your friendship, encouragement, help, and just plain awesomeness.

  You are a wonderful lady and an even better friend.

  Contents

  BEFORE

  Prologue

  AFTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  NOW

  Chapter 18

  INDEX

  Author’s Notes

  Connect With Hailey

  Other Works By Hailey Turner

  BEFORE

  2282

  ___________________

  Prologue

  A Life to Plea

  He still had the taste of apples on his tongue.

  The cloned fruit was sweet when he first tried a sample from the vendor. Now, only a hint of the flavor remained, buried beneath the acid bitterness of a chemical that made him gag.

  The ringing in his ears hadn’t stopped, the earlier blast close enough to harm in numerous ways. He shifted his leg as he leaned against the shaky metal vendor table, grimacing at the pain that lanced up to his hip from the hastily wrapped wound in his calf. Being on the edge of the blast, cushioned by other market customers and a metal pylon, meant the explosion hadn’t killed him.

  Yet.

  Makeshift bandages torn from his shirt and jacket had stopped the bleeding for now, but they did nothing to stop the sickening, burning pain beginning to afflict his nerves. No help was forthcoming, a fact the people still screaming and banging at the entrances to the St. George’s Market had yet to figure out.

  The explosion that ripped apart his life an hour ago came from a Splice chemical bomb. Standard operating procedure in any country was to contain the problem as quickly as possible to keep the spread of the chemical to an absolute minimum. The Police Service of Northern Ireland was brutally enforcing such a quarantine zone around the famous marketplace.

  The doors were locked, and would remain locked, until everyone was dead.

  He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the slowly growing agony creeping through his body that showed no signs of stopping.

  AFTER

  2285

  ___________________

  1

  Light ’em Up

  “We’re five minutes out from the target, Apollo.”

  Jamie Callahan, captain of the Metahuman Defense Force’s Alpha Team, looked up from the map he was studying on a holoscreen in the belly of an X-17 Hermes combat jet. Like his teammates, Jamie wore a combat uniform specially designed with his power in mind and top-of-the-line tactical body armor. With his blue eyes hidden behind opaque tactical goggles and the air filtration mask locked in place, the Mexican Special Forces officer couldn’t see his face. As a metahuman and the son of a prominent United States senator, Jamie’s identity was classified at the highest levels, even from foreign allies.

  “Thank you,” Jamie replied with a curt nod to the Mexican operative.

  Beside him, Sergeant Ekaterina “Katie” Ovechkina, code named Viper in the field and his second-in-command, sent a bright streak of data streaming through the air from the holoscreen to the rugged communications control fitted to her lower left arm.

  “Syncing to everyone’s HUDs, Apollo,” Katie said.

  “Copy that.”

  This mission into the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range within the Mexican state of Sonora was a joint operation between the MDF and the Mexican government’s Protectores Metahumanos Unidos. Supporting both agencies on this particular mission were operatives pulled from the Mexican Army’s Fuerzas Especiales del Alto Mando. Equivalent to the US Army’s Special Forces, Mexico’s SF Corps was a small, highly trained group of operatives who were best suited to follow Alpha Team and Jaguar One into battle.

  Earlier, under the guise of a joint training operation in eastern Texas, Mexico’s operatives were secretly relocated to the Joint Forces Training Base within the Los Angeles megacity limits. Alpha Team had been waiting for them on the tarmac, and the entire group was wheels up an hour later.

  Their trajectory had them flying southeast over the border. Their destination was a heavily guarded compound nestled in a valley controlled by the Federación Cartel. The MDF had pieced together evidence over the past few months that pointed to the cartel housing a black-market Splice lab at the compound. Getting the Mexican government to agree to green light a joint mission had taken some delicate diplomatic work on the MDF’s end through the State Department.

  In the end, both governments had a vested interest in destroying criminal-run Splice labs. Loosely allied criminal organizations across the world were working to create metahumans for their own gains. The genetics arms race between criminals and governments was nowhere close to cooling off. Splice, a lethal chemical weapon, was the catalyst needed to turn a normal human into a metahuman, but at great cost. Its kill-rate was dangerously high at 95 percent, and scientists the world over had yet to figure out a cure, a vaccine, or what enabled a small percentage to survive contamination and infection.

  The one thing everyone agreed on was this: dying by Splice was excruciatingly painful.

  The majority of the people brought to criminal-run Splice labs never survived the experience. The ones who did were at issue. Metahumans were monitored, if not outright owned, by the government of their native country. Rogue metahumans beholden to terrorist groups were a national security nightmare politicians never liked facing.

  That’s where Alpha Team came in.

  The eight, highly skilled members of the MDF’s top field team all came from military backgrounds. At thirty-one, it had been years since Jamie was last a Recon Marine, but what he’d learned in that branch of the military remained with him to this day.

  “Ready for the jump?” Staff Sergeant Kyle Brannigan asked as he approached.

  Jamie turned away from the computer terminal to face the team’s sniper. Kyle’s light-brown hair and green eyes were hidden beneath his hard helmet, tactical goggles, and air-filtration mask. A former Strike Force operative, Kyle had been with Alpha Team for almost a year and a half at this point. He’d been Jamie’s secret lover for nearly as long.

  MDF regulations prohibited relationships in the ranks within the direct chain of command. Jamie followed most of the rules set down by the MDF, but letting Kyle go last year wasn’t something he’d been willing to do. The thought of someone else being with Kyle had spurred Jamie into breaking the nonfraternization rule for once in his life. That they needed to hide their relationship was something they were both
still willing to do, because neither man was walking away from the connection they had forged.

  “Always,” Jamie replied.

  “Data sync complete,” Katie said from behind him.

  “Then let’s get ready.”

  Unlike back in June, with the attack on the Splice lab in southwestern Montana where Night Stalkers flew them inside the perimeter at low altitude, their current altitude was over 9,100 meters. This time around, the metahuman teams and human Special Forces operatives were being deployed into enemy territory by way of a HALO jump to bypass the cartel’s defense systems surrounding the out-of-the-way location.

  Since going wheels up in Los Angeles, everyone had been breathing pure oxygen through their masks to flush out nitrogen from their bloodstreams. The oxygen was stored in flexible tubes and pouches attached to their tactical vests and hooked to their filtration masks. Once they got boots on the ground, they’d discard the tubing and their parachutes.

  Kyle turned his back to Jamie, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the parachute in question. Like everyone else, his weapons were attached to the front of his body for the drop. “Check my gear, would you?”

  Jamie didn’t hesitate to double-check the straps and the parachute pack itself before turning around so Kyle could do the same for him. A Mexican soldier checked over Katie before giving her a hard pat on the shoulder and a thumbs-up to show she was secured.

  “You’re good,” Kyle said, slapping his hand on Jamie’s arm.

  Jamie tapped the side of his tactical goggles, the HUD coming alive across the shatter-resistant plas-glass. Katie’s sync had uploaded a map of the mountainous terrain they were heading into, as well as a rendering of the compound map taken from military satellites that could see through most energy screens people used to shield locations. After a few seconds of quick perusal, Jamie minimized the map before accessing the general encrypted comms to which all personnel were linked.

  “Remember, the majority of SF Corps will handle securing the perimeter. Leave the initial push into the compound to Alpha Team and Jaguar One. If Splice is on the premises like we believe, you don’t want to get caught in any chemical bomb explosions.”

  A multitude of voices responded in the affirmative. Jamie wasn’t worried about his team disobeying his order, but he hadn’t run joint operations with their equivalent in Mexico’s Protectors, not to mention the Mexican Armed Forces. Considering the multigenerational effort it had taken to push out cartel influence in Mexican politics and that country’s military, there was always a chance a sleeper agent might have been missed. The more sensitive the mission, the more risk there was of word leaking out about the oncoming raid.

  Because of that, the MDF had seeded false information that they’d be flying in at low altitude, when in fact, the HALO jump had been the approved infiltration method from the beginning.

  Jamie took up position at the rear of the jet, gripping the overhead line with one hand. Kyle and Katie lined up behind him while everyone else got situated. The red warning light switched on with a high-pitched squeal Jamie could barely hear over the screaming wind as the ramp opened up on a cold, eerily clear November night sky. Minimal cloud coverage over the region had been the catalyst for green lighting the mission tonight.

  The ground below was a black void before he switched on his night vision, while the sky was filled with stars more easily seen from far above the Earth than in a megacity covered by light pollution. The command windows on Jamie’s HUD changed over to a chrono that would count down the time, altitude drop, and oxygen levels as they fell.

  The airman manning the ramp gave the all clear signal and Jamie didn’t hesitate in racing forward and launching himself off the ramp into the black sky. He couldn’t hear the wind whipping around him through his sealed hard helmet, but he felt the cold even through his combat uniform. He pulled in his arms and legs to decrease drag as he fell, keeping both eyes on the ground below.

  Freefalling at night was intense. Even with the green-tinged clarity of night vision to show him the mountains below, Jamie needed to focus all his attention on the numbers counting down and his placement in the sky. He kept his breathing steady as he fell, trying to stay on target. His ears popped as the chrono counted down the meters. Some distance away, on either side of him, Jamie could see Kyle and Katie falling through the air.

  Jamie kept an eye on the chrono, watching the numbers. When he could see more ground than sky, mountains rising up to meet them, and the chrono hit six hundred meters, only then did he hit the release button on his harness. The parachute ripping free of its pack yanked him backward with a teeth-snapping pull. His momentum drastically slowed, body bowing a little beneath the pressure. All around him, the sky filled up with the black curve of parachutes that stood out in his green-tinged night vision.

  The combat jets had been ordered to drop everyone in a rough circle, making it easier for them to surround the compound. Their insertion point was located behind the sentries, but outside the internal cartel security. Taking out the enemy would hopefully be easy.

  Landing in the dark was the difficult part.

  The valley the Federación Cartel had built its compound in was difficult to access, even by ground. Finding a flat spot to land was like finding the holy grail, but everyone chosen for this mission had the skills necessary to land swiftly and silently.

  The one thing the compound did lack was a defensive energy shield, which meant breaching it would be easier all around. Jamie adjusted the angle of his parachute, aiming for the slope of the mountain near the road and an outcropping of rocks protruding from the mountainside. It looked stable enough to hold his weight, and had enough space to handle the forward momentum of his landing.

  He hit the ground already moving, knees taking the brunt of the landing. Jamie swiftly forced himself to a halt. He removed his parachute before lying down on the ground to get out of sight. Gripping his AKR-75 assault rifle, Jamie tapped into the comms.

  “Confirm positions.” Everyone rapidly checked in from their designated attack positions, and when he had the count, Jamie issued his order. “Go.”

  Those handling the night sentries worked to eliminate the threat as silently as possible within the one-minute timeframe. The chrono on Jamie’s HUD counted down the time as he worked his way off the mountainside and to the dark road below. Forty seconds later, the sound of gunfire going off had him sprinting for the gate Madison Chan was in the process of blowing up now that their presence was known.

  Alpha Team’s demolitions specialist was one of their heavy hitters on the team. The energy bombs Madison could toss from her hands made her a formidable adversary, and the person best suited to breaking through barriers.

  The gate exploded in a burst of metal and concrete, Jamie and Madison remaining safe from the blast behind Trevor Sanchez’s telekinetic shield. Jamie didn’t have eyes on the team’s medic, but Trevor had eyes on his and Madison’s position, and that was all that mattered.

  Floodlights turned on, Jamie’s HUD immediately adjusting for the change in brightness, and were promptly shot out by the snipers in the attacking group. Jamie blinked spots out of his eyes as he put his back to the outside wall next to the gate.

  “Apollo, Nova, hold your position,” Kyle said over the comms.

  Jamie readjusted his grip on his weapon while Kyle took out several people beyond the compound’s wall from his overwatch position on the mountainside. Less than a minute later, Kyle came back on the line.

  “Clear!”

  Jamie ducked around the corner, sighting down his gun as he cased the area. Madison was right beside him while SF Corps operatives fanned out around them. Jamie advanced toward the main entrance, picking off targets with clean shots as the enemy attempted to stop them.

  Jamie glanced up as someone flew overhead, mentally tagging Annabelle Brown’s flight path. The former Night Stalker pilot was the only flier on the team, her anti-gravity power useful in removing the enemy’s weapons from thei
r grip while she targeted them with grenades.

  Jamie reached the heavy metal door first and discovered it was locked. Madison put her back to him, guarding his six, and said, “Want me to take it out, Apollo?”

  Jamie pressed one hand against the seam where the two sliding doors met in the middle. “I got this.”

  They didn’t know what might be contained on the other side, and an explosion wasn’t a good way to find out. Drawing back his arm, Jamie punched one of the doors off its skids and onto the cement floor with his enhanced strength. The crash echoed in the corridor beyond. Jamie immediately brought up his rifle as he stepped inside the compound. Madison followed after him, the sound of gunfire outside dulled behind the thick cement walls.

  The comms clicked in his ear, Staff Sergeant Alexei Dvorkin’s voice coming through loud and clear. “Am in. Not find heavy security so far. Is odd.”

  “Here’s hoping they didn’t set charges like back in Montana,” Donovan Williams replied. Those two were leading the push into the compound from the south in a flank maneuver.

  “Here’s hoping the cartel left their victims alive if they knew we were coming and made a run for it,” Jamie said.

  “You really think they wouldn’t kill their test subjects?”