Department 19: The Rising Read Online Free Page A

tried to tell him, tried to will herself to open this last door to him, and to hell with what lay behind it. But she couldn’t. Her panic at the thought of driving him away before they had even had the chance to become something more than friends had been replaced by an overwhelming terror at the thought of losing him now that they had. She understood now that the chance had passed, that she should have told him at the beginning, and that she was now trapped. The memories of those two terrible years ate away at her, poisoning her sleep and her dreams, and she had rejected the chance to let someone help her, someone who wanted so badly to do so.
    He saw me when his dad was killed, she thought, as she floated in the cool air of her quarters. And he knows I was sent by Alexandru to kill him the night his mother was kidnapped. He knows both those things and he’s still with me. Why can’t I tell him the rest?
    But she knew the answer to her own question.
    Because it’s worse. Oh God, it’s so much worse. Because I don’t know if he or Kate could ever look at me the same way again. And because they’re all I’ve got.
    In the quiet of her quarters, her hair almost brushing the ceilingas she floated, Larissa fought back the rage that suddenly spilled through her, making her muscles vibrate and her fangs burst involuntarily into her mouth. She growled, a low rumble full of imminent violence, as she tried to control herself, tried not to swoop down and add a new dent to the collection by the door.
    Calm, she shouted at herself. Be calm. Without Alexandru you wouldn’t be here, would never have met Jamie, or Kate, never had the chance to make amends for what you did. Calm down, you stupid girl.
    She felt her fangs retract, and she slowly unclenched her fists. It was a source of constant amusement to Larissa, who possessed a jet black sense of humour, that she had come to fall for a boy she would never even have met had she not been the obedient servant of the monster that had tried to destroy his family. But there had been no way for her to know that as she flew with Alexandru and his followers towards the house that the unsuspecting Jamie Carpenter shared with his mother and the ghost of his father.
    No way for her to know that her new life, her real life, had been about to begin.
     
    Kate Randall closed her laptop, sat back in her chair and stared at the wall above the small desk in her quarters. She had showered and changed into a T-shirt and shorts, and her blonde hair was wet; she could feel water dripping down her neck and across her shoulders.
    It was her turn to write Squad G-17’s post-operation report, but she found herself unable to concentrate on it. She was tired, but that was not unusual; endless interrupted sleep patterns came with the territory of being a Department 19 Operator. What was distracting her, and preventing her from focusing on the report, was something that had become an almost constant source of annoyance to Kate.
    Jamie and Larissa.
    Kate had known about their relationship, or whatever they called it when they were alone, since the very beginning. The two things that annoyed her, that sometimes made her so frustrated that she wanted to scream “I KNOW!” in both their faces, was the fact that they seemed to genuinely believe she was unaware, and that they felt the need to keep it from her at all.
    The former was an insult to her intelligence, and she hated being thought of as stupid almost as much as she hated being patronised. The latter was even worse; she knew, with absolute certainty, that they both believed she had a crush on Jamie.
    Kate was a girl with a highly developed sense of self-awareness, and would have admitted, had anyone asked her, that there had been a tiny period of time during which she had possibly, just possibly , thought about Jamie in that way.
    During the madness of Lindisfarne and the days that followed it, days in which the shape and course of her life had been