Thankfully, none of her STAT teammates had spilled his secret.
“About a week ago, our analysts learned that an officer with the French National Police filed a report from a tourist who claimed to see several men dragging some people from a van into a tunnel near the river,” Jake said. “The witness said he saw one of the victims toss his kidnapper ten feet through the air and into the side of a building.”
Sawyer nodded. “I can see how that might get your attention.”
“There’s more.” Jake leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “At the same time National Police were dealing with the kidnappings, they were also investigating the disappearance of two people from the club we were in last night. A few days later, they found both of those people floating in the river drained of blood. The medical examiner said they’d been stabbed, then dumped in the water where they bled out, but after running into that vampire last night, I think we all know that isn’t what happened.”
“You mean that thing with all the teeth Sawyer said he ran into,” Erin said.
The redhead might be on the fence when it came to this whole supernatural thing, but it was obvious her interest was piqued when it came to the idea of vampires. She might not think the same after coming face-to-face with one of the things. Harley was going to have nightmares about the creature she and Sawyer ran into.
Jake nodded. “Yeah, that thing.”
Sawyer looked at Harley. “Did you know that’s what we were chasing when we went after it?”
“No,” she said. “That was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. McKay mentioned they existed, but it’s one thing to hear about a vampire and another to deal with one in real life. I completely blanked on what that thing was even when Jake shouted over the radio about how to kill it.”
Harley left out the part about Jake being pissed at her afterward, saying how stupid it had been to go after that creature without any of her STAT teammates for backup. She couldn’t say much in her defense, especially since she wasn’t sure how to explain that she’d been completely comfortable with Sawyer—a man she’d never met before and didn’t know anything about—watching her back.
“So how do you kill a vampire?” Elliott asked. Of Sawyer’s teammates, he seemed the one most accepting of the possibility of them working together. Or maybe he was better at hiding his discomfort than the others. “Sawyer said he and Harley put at least eight bullets in the thing and it didn’t slow down at all.”
Jake snorted. “They could have shot him twenty more times and it still wouldn’t have stopped him. The only way to kill a vampire is to take off their heads or rip out their hearts. Though trapping them in a building and burning it to the ground also works.”
“If vampires are so tough to kill and they have all those damn teeth, why didn’t that one go after Sawyer and Harley last night, instead of turning tail and running away?” Erin asked.
“Because werewolf blood is like acid to a vampire,” Jake said, his gaze flicking to Sawyer. “The damn creatures are scared to death of getting our blood on them.”
Sawyer seemed as intrigued by that as the rest of his MI6 team and Harley wondered if he was replaying the fight from last night. Was he thinking they might have been able to take down the vampire if they’d known that?
“Okay, so that’s the deal with a vampire,” Elliott said. “What about the guy who could make himself disappear? What do you know about him?”
Jake sighed. “Our intel people back in DC are digging through everything they have as well as talking to an expert on the subject of supernatural creatures, but so far, we’ve got nothing. I have no idea how we’ll deal with him next time other than to suggest none of us go anywhere on our own. The guy is less likely to get the drop on you if there’s someone watching your back.”
Harley could vouch for that.
“What about MI6?” she asked, looking at each of them before settling on Sawyer. “How did you know about the trafficking ring?”
Erin and the other two British operatives looked at Sawyer, clearly waiting to see what their team leader would say. Harley got that. Management might want them to work together, but neither side wanted their closely guarded secrets getting out.
“We didn’t,” Sawyer said after a moment. “Three weeks ago, my team and I were in Mexico City chasing down a guy who broke into the MI6 classified records repository in Buckinghamshire. We were there to track him down and interrupt the information transfer with whoever hired him, then grab them both and get back what he took.”
“Do you know what kind of information he stole?” Harley asked.
Sawyer shook his head. “No. The archives hold everything MI6 has ever written down, recorded, videotaped, or collected. It could have been anything from files related to ongoing operations, old case reports, financial documents, even personnel records for retired operatives.”
Harley suddenly had a vision of the huge warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, except MI6’s was filled with mountains of paperwork.
“We followed our guy to the northern part of the city to what we assumed would be the site of the exchange, but when we got there, he was nowhere to be seen,” Sawyer said. “We split up to search the area and a little while later, I found him and several other men trying to kidnap a woman. I ran toward them, and by the time I got there, the guy we’d been chasing was dead and the other men escaped with their captive, who just so happens to be the same woman we rescued last night.”
Jake frowned. “What led you to the club?”
“Pure luck,” Sawyer said. “We got a tip that a man fitting the description of one of the kidnappers had been spotted there.”
From the way Sawyer glanced at his teammates, Harley got the feeling he was leaving a lot of the story out to keep from revealing he was a werewolf. Jake must have realized it, too, because he didn’t press for details.
“If the guy who broke into the MI6 repository was working for the traffickers, why kill him?” Caleb asked.
“I don’t think they did,” Sawyer said. “I think the woman they kidnapped did.”
Wait. What?
Harley glanced at her teammates to see that they looked as confused as she was.
“What makes you think that?” she asked.
“I was still a hundred meters away, so I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but as they were dragging her toward their vehicle, there was a bright flash of light. It blinded me, and by the time I could see normally again, our suspect’s body was smoldering on the ground.”
That wasn’t what Harley had expected. She’d assumed they’d struggled for a weapon and it had gone off. “Smoldering?”