Free Dark Victory by Brenda Joyce

began—and occasionally, the surviving sub.
    She turned. “Do we know this one?”
    “I don’t think so,” Nick said.
    They exchanged a long and steady glance, and he didn’t have to read her mind to know she was thinking about the trip they’d made into the past.
    He turned and walked to the wall of windows that looked down on Hudson Street. Outside, it was dark, the streets icy andgleaming with patches of snow, sleet and slush. Winter in the city sucked for most people, but he actually liked it. His blood continued to rush.
    He did not like losing an agent in the vast expanse of time. Every agent at HCU had been handpicked by him for their respective jobs. He considered each and every one his responsibility, and when one went MIT, he went ballistic.
    And he also went back.
    The holy, time-traveling Masters of Time rarely surfaced in this city. They seemed to prefer medieval periods. CDA had sightings of them as early as the eleventh century, but the more contemporary the period got, the fewer the sightings.
    The Highlanders were not the only warrior society out there. CDA had evidence of two other secret sects dedicated to the war on evil, one ancient, one modern. From time to time he came across men who had some of the same extraordinary powers he had. These men lay low, revealing themselves only to vanquish the enemy, and then they vanished, like ghosts in the night. Pretty much the way he did.
    The Masters were an interesting bunch. They loved and warred like any other medieval Scot, but secretly worshipped pagan gods, most of whose names no historian had ever recorded. They defended a set of three holy books, and came out of the medieval woodwork to defend the good and the innocent and kick the ass of a demon honcho or two. Then they vanished back into the local population and their particular time. Only an experienced agent could identify a Master from the average Highlander, whether on paper in HCU’s immense database, or while in the field.
    He’d lost count long ago, but over the course of the two decades he’d been at HCU, he’d probably traveled into the past a dozen times, usually on the heels of a great demon. He’d had exactly three encounters with Masters in all that time.Maybe it wasn’t that odd—he’d chased demons into the past all over the world, as far back as the first century, when the Romans were about to rule the world. The closest he’d ever come to a Highlander was last September, right there in the city. The Highlander had been turned against the Masters, and he’d taken his own agent hostage, vanishing into the past with Brie Rose. Nick had gone back to find her because there was nothing worse than losing an agent in time.
    He’d found Sam’s cousin Brie and dragged her home before he could chat with her holy friends—and she’d gone back to her Highlander anyway. Her case file might have MIT stamped across it, but he knew she wasn’t really missing in time. She was just fine.
    He’d had the chance to debrief her extensively, and now he knew more about the Brotherhood than anyone at CDA had ever known. Of course, encounters between CDA agents and Masters—and civilians and Masters—were as old as the agency and maybe, for the latter, as old as time. But the Masters remained secretive. They refused to talk about what they did; they simply fought evil when they had to, and were devoted to the war on evil in Scotland.
    Except, a few hours ago, a Master had nailed a demon just a few blocks away from HCU.
    Were they coming out of the medieval closet? And if so, what did that mean?
    He refused to worry, but agency analysts were predicting the end of the world—literally. That was how dire the war had become. If it wasn’t turned around, every high government agency in the free world would be infiltrated by demons and controlled by evil within another decade.
    He’d taken Sam with him into the past to find her cousin. It was about the toughest test he could give any agent, new