Free One of Them (Vigil #2) by Arvin Loudermilk Page A

couple of steps forward would cinch it—so I tried my luck, trudging ahead and puttering around the bed once, then twice. The relief I felt was monumental.
    But euphoria tends to ebb, and those ridiculously blank walls continued to make no sense whatsoever. I crossed away from the bed and pressed my palm against the patch of wall that was closest to me. I didn’t find it to be as cold as the floor, but it was not exactly hot either. Just more blah. The metal had some grain to it, however, which I never would’ve been able to notice through the calloused soles of my feet.
    I turned back around and got a better look at the bed I’d woken up on. The wide, circular base supporting it was embedded into the floor, plain and extremely low tech. I proceeded to walk every square inch of the room and confirmed that my eyeball search was correct—there was no way in or out.
    I was fucked. Whatever this place was, and whoever built it, the answers to both of those excellent questions would only reveal themselves in ways I could not control or hasten. I needed to remain patient, because patience was the only play I had left.
    I placed my back against the wall and slid all the way down to the floor. My ass ended up being as cold as my feet were, but there was no way I was getting on that bed again. That was what someone obviously wanted, and I was never giving anyone what they wanted ever again. I folded my legs into the lotus position and tried my hand at the breathing exercises I’d routinely mocked with every sensei who had ever attempted to instruct me. In, then out.
    Possibilities rattled around in my head. Issue numero uno was my sudden comprehension that all of this had to have been a part of a group effort. The stainless steel prison I was in could not have been managed or maintained by a single person, so an organization of some significance would need to be involved. When Jessup went to town on me, I was supposedly being protected by the Detail—by Mac, Racine, Castellano, and the hundred or so other officers who were scattered in and around the complex. That was the plan at least. But were they ever even there? Nobody answered the door when Beth and I knocked, that was part of the plan, too. Had something happened beforehand which caused the team to hold back? Not likely. If something had occurred, Beth and I would have been warned off. The focus of everything we had been over the previous week centered on keeping the two of us safe—and that was the one thing that did not happen. Beth was killed and Jessup did his number on me. This would not have gone down if the Detail had wanted to stop it; the firepower they had was overwhelming. I didn’t like it, but the only conclusion I could come to was the bitter truth that someone had wanted the attack to happen, or maybe more to the point, didn’t mind that it happened. Were Beth and I sacrificial goats? Or had whatever restored me also restored Beth? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know.
    But knowing or not knowing was irrelevant. The Detail was all that I could think about. They were the only ones who knew what I had been up to and where I was going to be at the precise moment I was attacked. I suppose the LAPD proper could have been called out and found me inadvertently, but then I would have been taken to a hospital or a morgue, not to some undisclosed location.
    No. The cell I had been tossed into had all the makings of something covert and quiet. Only a federal organization could pull something like that off. And if the Detail were what they said they were, a joint LAPD-FBI field team, they would have unlimited resources. But that was the problem. I had no way of knowing if the Detail was telling the truth, about anything. Were they truly keeping the city safe from a bunch of unheard, unseen bloodsuckers? As far as I knew, the bloodsuckers were invisible, literally so. The only one I had ever seen with my own two eyes was Jessup. I read about a couple of others in