Flock of Wolves Read online

  Flock of Wolves

  A Sydney Rye Mystery, Book 10

  Emily Kimelman

  Contents

  Limited Time Offer

  Her

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Her

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Her

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Betray the Lie

  Limited Time Offer

  A Note From Emily

  About the Author

  Want More?

  Copyright © 2018 by Emily Kimelman

  * * *

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced 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.

  * * *

  Heading illustration by Autumn Whitehurst

  Limited Time Offer

  For Jamie and Toby; powerful women who have inspired and challenged me since I met them. I wouldn’t be the writer or businesswoman I am without you. Thank you.

  "I am time, the destroyer of all; I have come to consume the world."

  ― Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Bhagavad Gita

  Her

  Bleeding doesn't frighten me. I bleed every month. I am the fucking creator. You can take nothing from me because I am life. I am existence. I am you.

  I am Her.

  Chapter One

  I Will Survive

  Sydney

  The doctor flashed her penlight into my eyes, and I blinked against the bright ray. My dog Blue sat on the floor next to me, his head resting on my knee. My fingers curled around the edge of the exam table, gripping onto the seat, hoping I could hold onto reality.

  Robert Maxim stood by the door, his arms crossed and face shadowed. He watched us, reminding me of a simmering pot, one just on the cusp of a rolling boil.

  The sound of thunder rumbled in the back of my brain. The stringent scent of the hospital tickled my nose. My heart echoed in my chest, pounding out Mulberry's name.

  He'd changed my life, Mulberry—helped me when I needed it and when I didn't. Touched me when I asked and stayed away when I insisted. Now, if my mind was to be believed, his life teetered on the edge, his leg blown off, the veins opened, his blood spilled onto the battlefield, rushing away from him.

  I should be the one dying.

  I should be dead.

  The doctor stepped back, a woman in her early 40s with straight black hair and big glasses that slipped down her elegant little nose. "You've suffered major trauma."

  Thanks Captain Obvious.

  "I think…” She cocked her head, narrowing her eyes, inspecting me like a gardener might a plant that refused to grow toward the sun. “We need to get you back to the States." She turned to Robert.

  Thunder rumbled louder, crackling in my ears and blotting out her voice. Lightning sizzled across my vision, and I blinked against the bright, white light.

  A woman's voice whispered through the storm…You are a miracle.

  I shook my head, trying to shake free of the hallucinations, but they clung to me like fog hovering over a harbor—thick and dangerous, but intangible, impossible to touch or avoid. There and yet not.

  Had my worst nightmare really come true? Mulberry, the man I loved, in dire danger. Me, powerless to help.

  I stayed away to keep him safe.

  Everyone I love dies.

  Blue scooted closer, his weight warm and welcome against my leg. I rubbed one of his velvety ears.

  According to Robert Maxim, Blue had fathered puppies. I glanced up at the man, blinking away the shards of light still crisscrossing my pupils.

  Robert spoke to the doctor, his expression calm and controlled, like he owned the world. Like nothing in it could hurt him.

  I could.

  That's what that simmer was about—that anger bubbling just below the flat surface of Robert Maxim. It pissed him off that I existed, and he didn't own me.

  I looked at Blue. Did I own him? No. We were partners, connected in a way that left me tethered here. Attached to this world. As tall as a Great Dane, with the long, elegant snout of a collie and the thick coat and markings of a wolf, with one blue eye and one brown, Blue made this feel real.

  The doctor left, and Robert turned to me. He crossed his arms again. "Tell me what you remember.”

  I held his gaze, the blue-green of a gentle, yet dangerous sea…deceptively cold. The kind of water that, if you fell in, would freeze you so fast you'd hardly realize you were dying.

  Was I dying?

  "I need to speak with Dan or Merl."

  I trusted Dan and Merl. They didn't want anything from me…not like Maxim. They'd know what to do.

  Robert's lips thinned for a moment before he spoke. "So, you remember them?"

  "Of course I do," I frowned.

  "And you remember me."

  I held his gaze and let a small smile steal over my mouth. "You're awfully hard to forget." His lips pursed, not amused. I sighed and glanced down at Blue, soot and dust from the battle still coating his fur. I'd gotten a shower and a clean set of clothes—lightweight black canvas, the kind of stuff meant for hot weather and dangerous fights.

  "We captured Abu Mohammad al-Baghdadi." I glanced up at Robert, and he nodded. Working with the Peshmerga all-female fighting force, led by my friend Zerzan, we captured Abu Mohammad al-Baghdadi—one of the top theologians of Isis, the guy who found passages in the Quran that made it not only okay, but a moral imperative, to bring Sharia law to the world. "And I knew that someone on our team was going to try to kill me."

  "Yes." Robert had warned me that the CIA had contracted with one of the men on our team to take me out after we captured al-Baghdadi. "And you refused to listen."

  I shrugged. "I listened, and I chose to continue anyway. It was important."

  Another flicker of emotion over his face. "Important enough to die for?"

  "I wanted to die."

  He grunted. "And now?" His voice sounded squeezed, almost like he didn't want to know the answer.

  "I don't know what I want. I don't know what happened to me. Robert, I thought I was dead. I was lying there on the ground, bleeding, pretty sure it was all over, and then this woman appeared." I closed my eyes, going back to that moment—it was almost hidden, blocked by pain and trauma, like words on a memorial nearly erased by rain and time. "She stood over me, she had on a burka…and then I was running down that hill, right into that battle."

  Robert paced away and then turned back to me, spearing me with a glare from across the room. "So, you don't remember being in a cave?"

  I shook my head.

  "You don't remember seeing me. Turning away from me?" he asked, his voice remaining flat—as placid as the sea behind his eyes. But I could hear the danger and feel the icy chill of those deep waters threatening to suck me under.

  I shook my head again. "What are you talking about?"

  "Sydney." He crossed the room quickly, grabbing my hands. His were warm and calloused, and I let him hold me. "I went looking for you." He held my gaze, emotion flickering over the surface of that calm sea, a breeze stirring its glassy surface.
r />   I smiled. "I'm not surprised. You aren't good at letting things go."

  "I found you."

  "Oh."

  "Blue was there, with a pregnant bitch…that's how I knew he had puppies." He looked down at our joined hands. "You turned away from me. And…I didn't go after you. I'm sorry." His voice lowered so that I almost didn't hear him. "I didn't realize that you were under someone else's control."

  Hot anger sliced through me. Under someone else's control? No fucking way.

  "We'll get you back to the States." He kept looking at our joined hands. "The doctors who worked with you in Miami can probably help you again." I shook my head, chasing away the heat of my rage, clearing a line of thinking. I wasn't going anywhere without speaking to Dan or Merl. I trusted them. Robert Maxim could never be trusted. Not entirely.

  "I need to speak to Dan."

  "You don't trust me?" His voice was the same deep rumble of the thunder that ricocheted inside my brain.

  "Nobody trusts you."

  His gaze flicked down to Blue, and Robert pulled out his phone, passing it over to me. "Call whoever you want. I'll wait outside."

  He gave up too easily.

  I took the slim, elegant handset from him, our fingers brushing for the barest of moments. The ghost of a smile curled at the edge of his lips before he gave a curt nod and turned to the door, leaving me alone with Blue.

  I looked down at my dog, who sighed and leaned against me. "What do you think?" I asked, but Blue didn't answer.

  A voice inside my head whispered…you can't ever leave me.

  A shiver ran over my body, and I stood up, testing my strength, needing to move, to free myself from the storm inside my mind.

  Lightning cracked and thunder rolled, but I held onto myself. I knew what was real. Didn't I?

  Anita

  Dan's black leather couch creaked as he leaned forward and hit play on the laptop.

  Through the tinted glass front wall of his office, high above the command center, we could see the giant screen covered in different operations and the operatives at their desks below, but they couldn't see us.

  We were in a secret cave.

  Dan sat back as the video began, his thigh brushing against mine and his shoulder depressing the back of the couch so that I tipped slightly into him, his body warming my entire side. I created space between us, leaning toward the screen as the video began.

  A huge man holding a machete stood on a wooden stage. Before him a crowd jostled. The camera was set up to the side of the stage so that we could see the man's profile. The Butcher.

  Dan reached forward and turned up the volume as a woman dressed in long black robes was pushed onto the stage from behind the camera.

  With the volume raised, I could make out the chanting of the crowd. "Infidel! Infidel! Butcher her!"

  The woman—her face swollen with bruises and hair matted with blood—was young, hardly more than a teenager. She stumbled, and the Butcher grabbed her, pulling her into the center of the platform.

  He leaned down and spoke to her, but it was impossible to hear him over the rowdy crowd.

  Nausea swirled in my gut. I knew where this was going. I'd seen other videos of the Butcher, a famous Isis executioner who specialized in women.

  The blade rose into the air and then swung down, whacking into the woman's thigh. The crowd erupted in applause and cheers, leaning toward the violence, the death…the murder.

  The young woman hung from the Butcher's hand. Her face turned toward the camera for a moment, possibly looking at someone behind it, a serene smile gracing her split lips.

  I cleared my throat, uncomfortable with the expression. Someone that close to death shouldn't look so calm. She should be fighting with every cell in her body to survive.

  Why was she so passive?

  Words from the Bhagavad Gita, the ancient Indian text vital to the Hindu tradition, drifted into my mind, as they often did.

  Just as the dweller in this body passes through childhood, youth and old age, so at death he merely passes into another kind of body.

  The crowd turned, and the Butcher's eyes flicked up, something off screen drawing his attention.

  Dan sat forward, his elbow brushing mine as he rested it on his bent knee.

  "That must be…" He didn't say her name. We both knew the story. Zerzan, our contact in the Peshmerga fighting force, had sent the video, and although it was barely twelve hours old, the rumors were spreading like wildfire on a dry and windy night.

  The miracle woman took the city of Surama, then disappeared. Praise Allah. The prophet is showing her power to the world. The miracle woman is invincible. All women can rise up and change the world. Let the wolf out!

  It was a very recent history playing out on the screen in front of us. It wasn't the only footage from the fall of Samara—an Isis stronghold in Syria—but Zerzan had said in her message that the footage was powerful. That it proved Sydney Rye was alive and working with the prophet.

  The rumors of a miracle woman brought back to life by a female prophet—a messenger from God brought to earth to help women rise up against their male oppressors—started months earlier and had spread faster than anyone expected.

  The CIA and other intelligence agencies were scrambling to deal with this new development, while my organization—Joyful Justice, an international vigilante network inspired by the vengeful acts of one young woman in New York City—was inundated with new requests.

  The prophet claimed everyone decided their own value, and anyone who tried to stop a woman from expressing herself, living her life as a free and equal being, needed to be removed.

  It was the kind of rhetoric that spawned new Butchers.

  The crowd began to scramble, trying to escape the off-screen menace. The Butcher dropped his victim as an explosion sounded and dust and debris bloomed, instantly clouding a sunshine-filled day.

  Through the veil of destruction, I just made out the Butcher leaping off the stage, his blade catching a reflection of flames before disappearing into the dust.

  Another woman dressed in black robes, her blonde hair a tangled nest, climbed onto the stage and went to the fallen woman's side. Bent over the dying figure, the blonde head bobbed as her body shook. I recognize her from somewhere. She looked so damn familiar. Where had I seen her before?

  "That’s Sydney's mother, April Madden," Dan said, his voice low.

  I glanced over at him, my lips parting in surprise.

  Dan's green gaze stayed focused on the computer screen. The blue glow lit his skin, tan from his hours of surfing and running. He insisted that everyone exercised outdoors here. The island, the command center for Joyful Justice, was a former paranoid billionaire’s escape plan. He had built an entire fortress inside an extinct volcano, then died of cancer before the world could implode and leave him safely cocooned on his own private island.

  The fortress—with housing above ground level and the command center below, had enough room for a few hundred people. Who did the billionaire plan to bring? What did his utopia look like?

  Joyful Justice bought the island from his estate several years ago. Was there something about this hunk of rock, in the middle of a wild, untamable ocean, that drew dreams like ours— visions of a safe world? But our dream was bigger than the billionaire’s: we didn't want to save a few hundred people; we wanted to save everyone.

  Everyone.

  Dan found and purchased the island. Now, he was in charge of this headquarters of Joyful Justice, where all our missions were organized.

  His team of experts worked ten stories underground, so Dan insisted that everyone spend at least an hour outside daily, working out, feeling the sun on their faces…remembering why they did what they did. What made life worth living.

  Dan's sandy blond beard was streaked with the yellow of sunshine. His hair, grown out and still damp from a recent shower, was pushed back off his forehead. His brows were drawn together. "It's freaky how much they look alike. Like seeing
thirty years into the future of Sydney," Dan said, his gaze riveted to the screen.

  I turned back to the computer. Rye's mother, about Sydney's height and build but slower moving, not trained to kill like Sydney, held the dying woman in her arms, tears rolling down her cheeks. She glanced up at the camera for a moment, and those gray eyes—the color of sunlight blasting through a cloud cover to glint off a riled, windy sea—caught the lens for just a moment.

  She wasn't afraid of death.

  Just like the woman dying in her arms…but April looked like she wouldn't go down without a fight.

  "Why is she there?" I asked. Dan shook his head, his lips pressed tight.

  "We knew she was trying to find Sydney…I guess she did."

  A hiccup of a laugh escaped me, and Dan turned, his heavy focus falling onto my smiling lips.

  "What's so funny?" he asked. In my peripheral vision I saw the young woman go totally limp in April's arms.

  I shook my head. "Nothing. Just." My eyebrows rose of their own accord. "It's not totally surprising that Sydney's mom can do whatever she wants."

  Dan's mouth twitched into a small smile. "Must run in the family."

  On screen, April released the young woman, laying a hand over her eyes to close them.

  A black-clad figure, an Isis soldier, climbed onto the opposite side of the stage and aimed his weapon at April.

  She turned to run and fell forward onto her hands and knees; her face, tear-streaked and coated with dust, was so close to the lens I could see small flakes of debris caught in her eyelashes.