He pushed himself up to a sitting position, letting out a low curse as every cell and fiber in his body complained in protest. “I’m telling you, I saw her. I was close enough to touch her.”
“I know what you said, son. And she says she wasn’t there.”
“Not physically, anyway,” added Lazaro Archer.
The leader of the Rome command center and Tegan had waited alone with Micah as he fed. The pair of Order elders were still grim-faced and sober, but neither one seemed to share his mistrust of the female. Were the two seasoned warriors actually going to give the immortal’s denial the benefit of the doubt?
Micah scowled. “I don’t care if she was there in the flesh or projecting herself into those woods using some kind of Atlantean magic. She was the only one there besides me and my team in the instant before the whole damn sky lit up. That demands an explanation. Hell, it demands a full interrogation.”
“Agreed,” his father acknowledged gravely. “Now that you’re back among the living, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. Maybe we should start with the reason you and your team went AWOL after the mission in Budapest?”
Micah felt his jaw tense, a tendon jerking in his cheek. He glanced away from the shrewd, gem-green hold of his father’s stare.
“That’s what it was, am I right? Not missing in action, as we’d all been left to assume. You were absent without leave.” When Micah glanced up, Tegan blew out a harsh breath. “Christ. It’s true. Where did you go? What happened out there that night?”
“I fucked up.”
As far as explanations went, it wasn’t much, but it summed up the situation succinctly enough. Still, he knew he owed his father—and the Order—more than that.
Exhaling, he recounted his team’s last movements. “We were on a covert assignment. For several weeks, we’d been surveilling the head of an emerging terror group that was stirring up trouble in the region. Real asshole. Seemed to get off on spilling as much innocent blood as he could.”
“Igor Nagy.” His father made the name sound like a curse. With good reason. It was rare that members of the Breed bothered with mass violence on their human neighbors, but every once in a while a sadistic piece of shit like Nagy decided to throw a grenade into the tentative, all too fragile, peace between man and Breed.
Under normal circumstances, it would be up to the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squads to round up Nagy and his followers, but the wheels of JUSTIS moved too slowly for the Order’s liking, and Nagy was proving to be more than a nuisance. Elusive, surprisingly well-funded, and apparently insatiable in his need for violence, the bastard had to go.
“He’d been next to impossible to track down, but our intel placed his hideout somewhere in the Siberian interior. We got the bastard, along with about a dozen of his soldiers.”
“We’re aware of the black ops mission to eliminate Nagy, and your team’s success,” Tegan said. “That’s why you were chosen to lead the operation.”
The flat statement of fact might have passed as praise from anyone else. Maybe it was. Either way, it should have felt welcome, coming from a warrior of his father’s renown. Instead, it only made Micah’s guilt weigh even heavier on his conscience. The men he’d served with, fought beside as brothers, deserved all the praise. Not him.
Not after he’d led some of the Order’s finest warriors straight to their deaths in the middle of a godforsaken stretch of wasteland.
And for what?
A sense of déjà vu. A curious and compelling vision he’d been unable to shake or explain. Not to his team, and sure as hell not to his scowling father or the equally disapproving chief of the Rome command center.
“What I want to know is what happened after you and your men cleared that bunker,” his father pressed. “Why didn’t your unit report back to base per your orders from Commander Reichen?”
Micah cleared his throat. “Because I issued different orders to my men . . . sir.”
The admission of insubordination was met with silence from the Order elders. They exchanged a grave look before Tegan’s eyes cut back to him. “I hope you’ve got a damn good reason. Especially when you’re the only one left standing. Barely, at that.”
He had never lied to his parents, not once.
He’d never lied to the Order’s leadership, either. As much as he might want to deny the stupid mistake that cost so heavily, he wasn’t about to offer anything other than the truth now. If it meant the end of his time as a warrior, so be it. God knew, he deserved that and more.
“I don’t have a good reason for taking my team deeper into the interior that night. All I had was . . . a sense that I had to go in. I felt as if . . . as if something was pulling me forward, deeper into the taiga. The farther we went, the more barren the terrain became. The foliage disappeared. The trees were black, the ground like loose rubble under our boots.”
“The Deadlands,” his father confirmed, his voice low. “That might explain why your communication links abruptly went silent. About ten years ago, some kind of incident decimated a large swath of land in that region.”
“Hundreds of thousands of acres,” Lazaro interjected. “As I recall, there was a lot of finger-pointing, but no one has ever accepted responsibility or offered a full explanation for what happened. All we know for certain is that someone either fumbled or deliberately deployed a massive chemical weapon in the region.”
“Possibly,” Tegan said, his expression skeptical. He swung that dubious look back to his son. “What happened when you reached the Deadlands?”
“I led the team deeper into the black trees. I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I knew something waited for me. Then, I saw the white doe.”
He stopped there, trying to decide how best to explain the most insane part of the story. Not that he should worry about that. The two commanders were already looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.
Tegan shook his head. “What white doe?”
“The one I’d been dreaming about for more than a week. Every time I slept, the same thing happened. The doe appeared and led me into a barren stretch of woods. It always ran ahead, just long enough for me to reach it, as if it wanted me to follow.”
A dark look stormed in his father’s eyes. “Are you telling me this dream is the reason you ignored mission procedure and a direct order from your commander to go trekking off on your own?”
Fuck. Although he spoke evenly, the incredulity and anger in that restrained tone were obvious. Micah understood it, but he was also fully cognizant of the fact that the two of them were cut from the same cloth. If the situation had been reversed and Tegan had felt the same inexplicable impulse to see what lurked in that forest wasteland, he wouldn’t have waited around for anyone’s blessing or permission, either.
Not that it excused Micah’s actions. Especially when those actions had come at such a steep cost to his friends and comrades.
“This time, the doe wasn’t a dream. It was real. And it wasn’t alone. That Atlantean female upstairs in the mansion was in the charred forest along with it. She ran as soon as she saw me. At first, I was concerned about her being in that place alone. But once I caught up to her and saw her palms glowing with Atlantean fire . . . by then, it was too late. The forest erupted. The light was searing. I heard my teammates scream in agony in the distance behind me as the sky lit up with the heat of a hundred suns. Then everything went black.”