Hey, everyone!! Don’t know what to say, but please enjoy. This chapter’s kind of crappy, because it’s just a filler, and I apologize, but I hope it’ll get better from here on. Thanks for reading!! Please comment/vote/fan!!

Gracias <3 vb123321

Chapter Three



♣ Josh ♣



The first thing I felt on my face as I began to wake, ironically enough, was the soft pattering of rain. Slowly, my other senses came back, and I could hear voices reverberating around me in a dizzying cacophony of fluctuating emotions. While I was still attempting to engage enough neurons to open my eyes, I could make out sounds of frustration, anger, and worry, emotions that I was having trouble finding in myself. In fact, I could feel nothing.



Nothing except the rain.



And then, I realized that I was moving my hands. A tremor of pain shot through my shoulder as I flexed my arm, and my eyes flickered open for the first time. Taking a deep breath, I looked around me, wincing at the pain in my side as I did so. I was back in the valley near the barn, where we had set up our camp. People were moving around rapidly, the voices still sounding, and I didn’t recognize most of them; it seemed that Wulf had called in for help.



The rain continued to fall on me, but I made no move to try and get into a shelter of any sort. My arms hugged my body in an automatic gesture, and a few moments later, I became conscious of the fact that I was shivering violently. Still I did not seem to be able to move as my mind drifted towards other things. Was Pierre all right? Had I been able to get him out alive? I couldn’t remember much after finding him in the barn, except for the mad chase away from the flames and the pain in my shoulder as I crashed through the wall…



And Janice.



I raised my head, looking around me in a more intense search. Beneath me was a cot that had presumably once been white but was now looking a dingy grey. It was outside one of the tents, perched in the grass with me on top of it. I couldn’t see any other cots outside of the tents, and so I assumed that as one of the least wounded, I had been the one they had shunted away.



Swinging my legs over the side of my makeshift bed, I placed my feet on the ground and pulled myself unsteadily to my feet. My side became alight with pain as I involuntarily grabbed at the side of the cot for support, wrenching my shoulder back in an uncomfortable position. At least I hadn’t been burnt, I thought, as I straightened and tried to look as though I was all right. Two people were hurrying towards me – Wulf, and another that I didn’t recognize.



“Steiner!” Wulf sounded relieved, calling me by my name for the second time in a short while. “You okay?”



The man who was with him – he looked like a medic – grabbed my arm as I swayed on my feet. “He doesn’t look okay,” he said with a frown. “How do you feel, kid? Bit better?”



“Why don’t you get me a lollipop and a band-aid, too?” I asked him sardonically. “The ‘kid’ crap gets annoying. Real fast.”



Wulf was smiling. “You’re all right, then, huh?”



I shrugged my good shoulder. “Yeah, I suppose. Hungry as a bear, though.” It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten in a good twenty-four hours.



“We’ll see if we can get you something, then, but I’m not sure what shape our supplies are in. We had to make sure those agents that escaped hadn’t crashed through our site.”



Frowning, I repeated, “Agents?”



“Cloying’s,” explained Wulf, “the ones that survived the fire. Come on, then, we’ll get you somewhere drier. I take it you want to talk to LaPointe – or at least see him, because he’s still knocked out, I think.”



As I nodded, he brushed the medic away, coming to my side as we began to walk towards the biggest tent. I felt stiff and cold, most likely from lying out in the rain, but I could feel my muscles beginning to warm as I moved around. Wulf looked haggard, his face pale with dark circles under his eyes and his mouth a thin line of worry.



“Janice and LaPointe are in there,” he said, “and neither of them is conscious, as of right now.” He paused, a pained look on his face. I was almost afraid to ask him about Janice’s condition, but he was continuing: “She’ll be all right, but a bullet through the shoulder isn’t something to shrug off, if you’ll excuse the pun.”



I sighed inwardly with relief and then asked, “And Pierre?”



“Medic says he’ll be all right, too. Just a lot of shock and over-exhaustion, he’s thinking. They didn’t rough him up too badly, so he should be fine soon.”



“Good.”



Wulf stopped just outside of the tent door, looking me right in the eye. “Hey, kid, you sure you’re okay? I’m sorry about leaving you out in this rain like that, but there wasn’t any room inside…”



“It’s fine,” I assured him, even the ‘kid’ comment not irritating me. “I understand, and I’m not even that bad.” Even now my lungs were a little tight, my shoulder felt like it was swelling, fatigue was wearing me down faster than anything, and I was still shivering convulsively, but I knew that I was better off than Janice or Pierre, so I kept my mouth shut.



Wulf clapped me on my bad shoulder – I stopped myself from flinching with a massive effort – and pulled open the tent door for me. “That’s good, then. These medics came in very rapidly after we pulled you and Pierre out of the burning barn. They were flown in on one of Delta’s personal jet from nearby London – ah, I can see by your face that you didn’t even know we had them.”



I had stopped in the doorway, a surge of anger rising in me. “So why didn’t Young send you as quickly when I asked him to?” I demanded, my fingers clenching into a fist. “Maybe we could have found Pierre earlier!”



His face sympathetic but a little puzzled, Wulf shrugged. “I’m not the boss. I don’t know why he does what he does, and honestly, I don’t think I care to. Just the way it is.” And as the anger refused to recede from my face, “Oh, come on. Maybe he’s more concerned about you than you think. After all, it was you and your friend that were wounded when he sent in the medical team.”



My mind touched on something else. “Why were they in London?”



Another lift of the shoulder. “Am I the boss? Most likely stationed there for events like this. How am I supposed to know?”



I shrugged, pushing past him into the tent. It was smaller than it looked, the space taken up by two cots and a couple of medics bustling between them. There was a large trunk of medical supplies, from which an IV had been taken and hooked up to Janice’s unconscious figure on the first cot. I paused by her side, looking down at her still face and wishing Young hadn’t sent her in at all.



“They say she’ll be okay,” Wulf said quietly, but I caught the catch in his voice.



“I’m sure she will.” I looked away from her, turning instead to the agent as he made an effort to hold a stoic face. “How about the others?”



“Hannigan is dead, but I think I told you that. Madden and Davis are fine, just a bit bruised up. We didn’t expect Cloying’s men to put up such a fight.” He ran a hand over his fatigued face. “We didn’t expect a lot of things. I owe you another apology, kid. We should’ve planned more before we went in there – I wasn’t thinking – maybe you could’ve come out of there without half-killing yourself.”



“Not your fault.”



My voice sounded abrupt, but I was speaking the truth. I didn’t blame Wulf for any of it. All of us should have been more prepared. “I’m sorry about Hannigan. I didn’t know him very well, but – he seemed like a nice guy.”



I was lying through my teeth: I’d never talked to him because he saw me as a nuisance and was super condescending to me. I didn’t think now was the time to bring that up, though.



“Yeah…” Wulf was looking at Janice again. “I really owe you one. I don’t think she would’ve made it if you hadn’t forced me to take her out. Thanks for that.” I shrugged awkwardly and he went on. “You scared the crap out of me, though, falling from the barn like that. I thought you had been shot from behind or something, and then we had to drag Pierre from behind you as the fire came closer…”



“Thanks to you, too, then,” I said with a crooked grin. “You saved our lives from that fire; I was too unconscious to move away from it.”



He flashed me a smile. “Just don’t do it again, kid, you hear me? Disobey orders like that again, and I’ll have you court-martialed.”



“I wasn’t aware this was the military,” I retorted, but smiled as I forced myself to turn away from Janice’s still body. “Where’s Pierre?”



Wulf pushed aside the curtain that hung behind me, to show another cot holding Pierre, who seemed to have regained consciousness. He wasn’t hooked up to an IV, and his eyes flashed to look at me as I stepped into his makeshift hospital room. The rain was still drumming on the canvas roof, filling the awkward silence as we looked at each other for a long moment.



Wulf ducked back into Janice’s room, saying, “I’ll give you two some time.” I knew he wanted to be by Janice’s side as often as he could.



“They’re flying us out as soon as possible,” said Pierre, his voice a little hoarse as he looked at me with drained green eyes. “I owe all of you my life.” He hesitated a moment. “Especially you. Agent Wulf told me how you pulled me out of the fire like that. Thanks.”



“It was nothing,” I muttered in embarrassment, glancing around to avoid his eyes. Seeing a wooden chair against the back canvas of the tent, I pulled it up beside Pierre’s bed, straddling it as he coughed into his hand. “Hey, you okay?” I was pleased to note that there was at least a small level of concern in my voice.



He nodded. “I’m fine…what happened, though?”



“Um…you lost consciousness in the barn,” I replied, frowning. “Wulf had to pull you out, ‘cause I conked out soon afterwards. I’m not surprised you don’t remember that.”



Pierre looked frustrated. “No, I meant – to make Cloying clear out like he did. Did Astrid and Charlie get through to you, then? How much did they tell you? What happened after Cloying pulled me out of the room?” He had propped himself up on one elbow, looking at me with a sort of desperation in his eyes. The answers to these questions had obviously been bothering him.



And haunting me.



I put my head in my hands, running my fingers through my hair and staring at the floor as I tried to think of a way to explain to him. Astrid had told me everything that had occurred, all of Cloying’s story and his plans and what he had done to her and Charlie. But how could I put that into words?



“Pierre…Charlie’s dead.”



My voice sounded harsh even to my own ears, and Pierre’s eyes flew open wide as a look of horror passed over his face. “Cloying…he killed him?” he asked, his voice barely a rasp. “Is Astrid…?”



“Astrid’s okay. At least physically.” I couldn’t help the curtness in my tone, the bitterness that he hadn’t been able to take better care of her, kept her and Charlie away from the manor so that none of this would have happened. I knew I was being unfair, but that didn’t stop the resentment inside of me. “She was pretty torn up when I found her on the bridge.”



“The bridge?”



I sighed. “I better start at the beginning.”



My mind hadn’t put my experience into words yet, but my mouth opened and a torrent of words began to tumble forth. I wasn’t much of a storyteller, so I was constantly backtracking, adding bits too late, and stopping for thought. Pierre didn’t seem to care; he had sunk back against his pillow with a bleak expression on his face as he stared wordlessly at the ceiling. I could only tell him what I knew of what had happened to Astrid and Charlie – Astrid had been too much of a wreck to talk about it before we flew her back to the States, and during the times she had called me since then, she had been unwilling to go into detail.



“The purgatorium mali,” Pierre put in as I mentioned that Astrid had said Cloying had injected them with something. I gave him a quizzical look, and at first he made no move to elaborate. Then, “He was planning to rid the world of evil with it. I’m not sure how that would have worked.”



That didn’t make sense to me, but he wouldn’t say any more, so I continued. I spoke of the weeks following the catastrophe, tracking Cloying across France through so many cities that their names no longer registered in my mind. It was as if Pierre wasn’t there, and I was speaking to a wall, my thoughts just tumbling out. How sick I was of the French language. How exhausting the last few weeks had been, with as little as three hours of sleep in as many days, a moment to crash, and then back on the action-packed road again.



And then how we had reached the barn, our plans to get him out of it, and everything that had happened between that and the hospital bed he now was in. When I finished, a good quarter of an hour after I had started, we both were silent for a long moment. Pierre had closed his eyes, his muscles tense underneath the bed sheet, and all he said was a quick “I’m sorry” when I revealed that Hannigan had died and Janice had been injured.



“I’m sorry,” he said again, the words coming out through tightly gritted teeth. I wondered if he was holding back tears. “I put you through this – I should’ve found some way to escape, and then Hannigan and that girl wouldn’t have been hurt…”



“Not your fault.” My second time saying that in such a short period of time, and the second untruth as well. “It’s not you to blame for the manor, either,” I added when I saw the look on his face as he opened his eyes. “We all went in there willingly.”



“But if I had told you…” He stopped, clenching his jaw.



“Told us what?” My voice sharpened as I straightened in the chair, looking at him closely. “What didn’t you tell us?”



He shook his head, his eyes closing again. “It’s nothing.”



“It is not nothing,” I shot back furiously, feeling that anger surge up inside of me again. I didn’t like the feeling; it was unnatural for me. I usually wasn’t an angry person. It probably had something to do with over-exhaustion and stress, although I didn’t have a therapist to tell me so. “What are you talking about? Did you know something we didn’t? Something that Young –”



“You said that British guy that we met on the train helped you out?”



“–told us when he –” I stopped in my tracks. “What?”



Pierre had opened his eyes, looking at me with a curiously deadpan expression on his face that made a chill go through me for unknown reasons. “Stephen something? The one who you met in the police station. SIS or something, right?”



“I…” My brain was struggling to catch up with my ears. “Yeah. Stephen Mauser of the SIS – he came into the police station about an hour after I did, and he drove me to the manor to find Astrid. Wulf told him to leave when the Delta team arrived, no idea where he is now.” I frowned at Pierre. “You know him?”



He looked away from me again, resuming his inspection of the canvas ceiling. “I don’t know him,” he said after a moment. “I was just curious, is all.”



Something was probing at the corner of my mind, something that had been bothering me since Stephen had appeared at the station all those weeks ago. “Why was the SIS in France at the same time as us?” I wondered aloud. “Why did Alan Young seem so unconcerned about it when I called him? And what are they doing now? You would think Young would have told us something…”



“You say it like I’m supposed to know,” Pierre snapped, irritation flashing across his face as he glanced at me. “I’m not completely omniscient, you know.”



I gave him a surprised look that he didn’t catch. “I wasn’t saying that you were. I was just thinking out loud, sorry.” He shrugged, and I looked away from him, frowning in thought. “It’s just weird,” I murmured, pretending to be oblivious to Pierre’s annoyed looks in my direction. “I mean, we’ve never really run into the SIS before now…”



“It probably isn’t important,” Pierre cut in, his voice indifferent, but on closer inspection, it looked as if his jaw was tight. Tense, even. What was the matter with him? He caught me looking at him. “How’s Astrid now?” he asked abruptly. “Have you heard from her since – since the manor? Can I talk to her?”



Shaking my head slightly to clear my thoughts, I replied, “No, you can’t, because Wulf’s banned all phone calls for some reason. And I guess she’s okay, just a little torn up, naturally. Worried about you, too,” I added with an eye roll. “She’ll be pleased to know you’re all right. That’s all she asked about the couple times I’ve been able to call her.”



A smile slid over his face as he closed his eyes again. His face looked lined with fatigue and worry, and I felt a plunge of guilt for getting angry at him so quickly. He had obviously been through a lot. Getting to my feet, I stretched my arms above my head, wincing at the pain in my shoulder but convinced that it would help.



“You all right, there, kid?”



I spun around to see Wulf stooping through the curtain again, giving me a look that could was half-concerned, half-amused. “I thought you said you were okay,” he said critically as I tried my best to look annoyed. “What’s up with your shoulder, then?”



“Just pulled a muscle or something,” I muttered.



“Been lifting weights?” Wulf grinned. “What did you really do to it? Come on…you can tell us…Or were you messing around again?”



“Smashed it against the door getting Pierre out,” I said, finally getting fed up with everything. “Not to mention trying to break down the back wall to save his butt. Getting left out in the rain didn’t help it much, either – I feel like I have hypothermia.”



I was actually extremely cold in the damp t-shirt and jeans, and I knew my face was very pale, but I still felt like a jerk for complaining when Janice and Pierre were so much worse. I opened my mouth to apologize, but Wulf was speaking.



“Crap, kid, I had no idea.” His face looked stricken, which surprised me more than anything, as he rarely showed concern for me. “You should’ve said something when I asked you – here, sit down.”



“I’m fine,” I mumbled, feeling my face turn red, but he grabbed my uninjured shoulder, forcing me back into the chair next to Pierre’s bed. “You’re like my freaking mother,” I complained, and he laughed.



“I’m allowed to be, kid. Now, watch your language, sweetheart, while Mommy sees if you’re all right.” He came next to me, and I allowed him to grab the bottom of my t-shirt and tug it over my head. He whistled long and low as he probed my shoulder, and I craned my neck to take a look at it. It was mottled purple, blue, and black, looking much more swollen than the other; I winced at the sight.



“You really should’ve said something.” Wulf shook his head. “I’ll see if I can find you a dry t-shirt, but I don’t know what to do about your shoulder. I guess you’ll just have to deal with it.”



I nodded, rolling it back as Wulf disappeared again. Pierre gave me a funny look but said nothing. After a few more awkward moments of silence, Wulf returned with one of his t-shirts. After muttering a quick “thanks,” I pulled it over my head and turned to face the laughing agent. He was a lot larger than me, and broader, too, and so the shirt hung loosely on my torso in a way that I thought made me look stupid.



“Shut up,” I told him but couldn’t help grinning myself. “It’s a good thing this is an all-guys’ camp.”



“What about Georgie Madden?” Wulf teased, and I rolled my eyes.



“Don’t be stupid.”



Wulf grinned at me and then looked over at Pierre. “Well, I have some other news that I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear. Young says that we’ve gone after Pierre for long enough, and now that we’ve found him, it’s time to return home. We leave this afternoon – yes, kid, in the special jets.”



“Well, at least I’m priority now,” I said, still feeling a little resentful, but a huge sense of relief overrode that. After all the long weeks, I would finally be returning home, or at least to as much as a home I had in Delta. I looked over at Pierre, who had his eyes closed again. Who knew what he was thinking? He was probably even more fed up with this whole business than I was.



Wulf spoke again. “Anything you need before we start packing up?”

I thought a moment, getting my priorities straight. “Got any food?”