Free Renegade by Nancy Northcott

bed beckoned, its smooth sheets and soft, forest-green quilt a haven. The idea of a shower also felt tempting, but that would mean balm and clean bandages and a lot of fuss. She had work to do.
    She turned on the computer, which sat on its rosewood desk by the window, and let it boot while she started coffee.
    Rubbing her stinging, weary eyes, she fed the CD into the drive. She clicked on a file at random, enlarging the view to reduce the strain, and started to read.
    At first glance, it looked like just another report, a description of a raid on a ghoul breeding nest, the one that’d been mysteriously destroyed outside Jacksonville, Florida, last year. But this wasn’t the official report. And he had data on nests she didn’t know about.
    How did Dare know about these ghoul nests that weren’t on her maps? Why wasn’t the intel and recon division of the shire reeve’s office spotting them? She would check them out, of course, but his data looked solid.
    If he had detailed info, why the hell didn’t she?
    Her eyes burned. She should rest them, but she had to know what else was in his files. Scrolling down, she noticed Dare—or someone else—had inserted comments in red, notes detailing suspicions about a possible traitor, indicating where the various councilors had been, as well as how much they’d probably known. There were cross-matches of different data files on the ghoul nests, on mage raids that failed.
    He suspected a current councilor was the traitor. But how could that be? Councilors went through testing that made the CIA’s look like a college mixer. Yet his notes were too logical to dismiss.
    It could be a lie, a setup created to distract her. The sheer volume of the files argued against that, though. How had he gotten so much info on the councilors, anyway?
    He had to have help inside the Collegium. Under her nose. Damn it. If he’d spotted these inconsistencies, why hadn’t she?
    Feeling sick, Val pushed away from the table. Coffee wouldn’t help her aching body, but it would keep her brain going, at least for a while. Her vacation officially ended in two days. By then, she needed to cover everything on that disk.
      
    Early the next morning, the phone jolted her awake. She grabbed it. “Banning.”
    “Tia Corbett, ma’am, officer of the day. We have a situation.”
    “Go ahead.” If Corbett thought this was worth interrupting the last of Val’s official leave, the situation was grim.
    “Daniel Goodwin, son of the Northeast Shire high councilor, was kidnapped from a bar parking lot in Milledgeville by ghouls. He seems to have been intoxicated. His girlfriend, who’s also a mage, Lucy Jones, escaped but pursued in his vehicle. Ghouls drove a Ford F-150, green, didn’t get the tag. She lost them just west of Milledgeville, off Georgia 212, near Lake Sinclair, when her car skidded off the road. No serious injuries to her.”
    “Okay. Stand by a sec.” Val glanced at the map on the wall above her desk. There was no ghoul nest marked in that area, but Dare’s files had noted one. She used the search function to bring it up.
    Yep, there it was, near the Oconee National Forest and Milledgeville, a breeding center masked as a camp for recovering alcoholics. Addicted dark magic users, more like, but they’d probably taken the boy as a breeder. Well, not for long.
    Trusting untried intel was risky but better than searching blind for a young mage about to be violated or killed. To be on the safe side, she’d take superior numbers.
    “Corbett, scramble eight squads, full combat gear.” Forty mages should easily trump twenty-eight ghouls, especially with daylight on their side. Ghouls were weaker during the day. “Call up helos with a medical support team. I’ll be right down. I want us airborne in forty-five minutes.”
    Val hung up and yanked her gear from the closet. This rescue couldn’t be put off, but she could’ve used some time to think. She had to talk to Dare, find out more about