The soldiers nodded.
Good. Now he owed them, but he’d worry about that later. Right now, he had to figure out the Apollo drug and Cee Cee’s connection to it and the mines. Besides killing humans, the drug had been injected into darts and fired at witches, thus killing them. They’d learned that Seattle was just a test-drive for the drug, and soon it would be unleashed on his homeland. That simply couldn’t happen. “So no progress on Apollo tonight?”
“No.” Logan leaned back against the closed door. “It was a shitty night.”
A shitty night? Yeah, that about summed it up. But it was nothing compared to the night little Cee Cee was going to have when Daire caught up to her.
Chapter 3
Wind pierced Cee Cee’s thick clothing, digging with sharp blades right to her skin. She shivered, her gaze on the frozen landscape of Fryser Island in the Arctic Sea. The sun shone weakly down, glittering along the ice, failing to provide an ounce of warmth. The chill banished any hint of fog, leaving the arctic tundra in crisp focus.
She had taken three different private planes to arrive in the Arctic, and her eyes stung with the need to sleep. First she had a job to do, and at least the cold was keeping her awake.
“Begging your pardon, ma’am, but this is a very bad idea,” said her pilot, a local from the mainland and a barrel of a man with the thickest beard she’d ever seen. “Ms. Jones. Please come back to the plane with me, and I’ll return you to the mainland.” Concern, and an unwelcome note of duty, echoed in his tone.
She smiled. “I asked you to call me Cee Cee.” They’d spent hours together in the small plane to reach the island few people knew even existed in the Norwegian Sea. “Mr. Agard, I assure you, I have a guide meeting me any minute.”
They stood on an ice-covered wooden dock? facing away from the quiet sea and toward a series of abandoned buildings staring back at them. Barren and rugged, the fierce desolation of the area appealed to her on a primal level. Even the massive mountains piled so high and sharp held a beauty that stole her breath.
He cleared his throat. “We have another abandoned city called Pyramiden on Spitsbergen Island. It’s cold and desolate like this, but sometimes tourists go there, and graduate students study the environment. There are hotels not too far away, and more importantly, there are people. Please let me take you there.”
Pyramiden hadn’t been mined in years and was of little interest to her. This place? Yeah. It looked abandoned, but mines often went far into the mountains, and there were a hell of a lot of mountains behind the tiny entrance. More danger chased her than the man could imagine, but his instincts, like those of most humans, were spot-on. “I like abandoned,” she murmured.
He shook his head. “There’s nothin’ here but old buildings, cold, polar bears, rabbits, and arctic foxes.” Almost on cue, a white shaggy beast with horns loped across the landscape. “And Svalbard reindeer.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, her eyes tearing from the chill, even from behind protective contacts. Since the mine in her sight was obviously dead, she only needed to check on two other mines, because she’d already discovered the secrets of the third, and they would end tomorrow. The wind slapped her face, and she made a mental note to slather on face cream at first chance.
“You don’t understand. The polar bears are vicious and many just had cubs. If they scent you, they’ll attack.” He cast wide eyes around the desolate area and shivered.
A grating noise pinged against the mountains, rising in pitch, coming closer. Soon a figure in a thick white coat zoomed around a far building on a powerful black snowmobile. The man wore a knit cap, light-refracting glasses, and snow pants. His gloved hands rested easily on the handlebars, and even at the impressive speed, his body remained relaxed.