Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Abel sat in the back of a cramped unmarked van as his tactical team finished gearing up. They'd been there for the greater part of an hour and with their size, it was making for tight quarters.

It didn't help that he kept smelling rotting food, though he'd checked the van thoroughly for the source. Still, the scent lingered, clinging to his nose, making his stomach uneasy. Twice already he'd sniffed himself, wondering if it was him. Since it seemed to be coming from everywhere, he couldn't pinpoint exactly who or what it was.

But if he had to spend much longer in the van, he might just lose his shit.

Their target had only just arrived at the pickup location some twenty minutes earlier and they were waiting for the go signal to make their move. The mission was fairly cut and dry. Observe, oversee, and then extract the target.

In theory, it would require no show of strength or weapons, yet they'd been ordered to have both at the ready. Plus, it wasn't his first time around the block; he knew better than to leave anything to chance. He'd not come as far as he had by being careless.

And too many things had lined up perfectly, presenting this golden opportunity to seize the target, to leave anything to chance.

His team, six counting himself, was comprised of men who had found themselves in the same situation as him. They'd all had military training in their past and each had been serving on death row or had life sentences in maximum-security prisons with no chance of parole. The charges varied from person to person, but it all boiled down to them being a hardened lot. Nearly all of them had killed at least one person. Some many, many more than that. As such was the case with him.

Serial.

That's what they'd referred to him as.

Abel had been studied by doctors all through his trial and told he lacked empathy and the capacity to ever have any. They hadn't told him anything he hadn't already known.

Hearing his victims beg for their lives had given him something of a rush. And he missed that. Missed getting to test the limits of what a human body could sustain. Missed seeing the fear in their eyes and hearing them try to barter for more time—to be set free.

It was freedom he only granted in the form of death.

The Corporation knew of his past, knew of his crimes, and everything he'd done to his victims. They even knew of all the victims the prosecution had never linked to him. They knew of the ones he'd killed overseas while serving briefly in the military before receiving a dishonorable discharge.

Abel wasn't sure how they'd figured it all out or where they'd gotten their data, but it had been scarily accurate.

They knew of his upbringing. Of his father who had also been a murderer. He'd trained Abel, teaching him how to stalk his prey and what to do to get the most pleasure from the act of killing someone. The satisfaction came from the torture, not the final act. Prolonging it was like holding off an orgasm.

The Corporation had known that intimate detail as well. It had been unnerving at first to hear everything they knew of him. But then he'd grown curious about them and their end game. When a representative, who came in the form of an attorney whom Abel neither requested nor retained, had shown up at the prison to meet with him, Abel had known there was an angle.

Nothing good in life came without strings.

At first, he'd refused the assistance offered to him, thinking The Corporation was another of the bleeding-heart organizations filled with fools who thought a cold-blooded murderer such as himself could be reformed.

The idea was laughable.

He was and would always be a killer at heart.

And that was fine by him.

It wasn't until the attorney came back for another visit, this time with another person in tow, with additional information, that Abel began to truly listen to what they were offering him.

A chance at freedom.

The cost was simple.

Do their bidding.

Easy enough, especially since that included getting to torture and kill others.

And when they'd revealed that his father had been associated with them, having participated in a similar opportunity that had started before Abel's birth even, he'd gotten onboard.

Until his death when Abel was thirteen, his father had been in league with The Corporation. They had files upon files on him. Hell, they even had taped interviews with him discussing his crimes, taking great joy in what he'd done. His father had bragged to the person doing the interviewing that he was molding his son to follow in his footsteps.

And the interviewer had encouraged Abel's father. Telling him additional ways to better train Abel. That all of the money and time they'd invested into his father would pay off in the form of his son.

Watching the recorded footage had been surreal.

He'd never felt so connected to someone as he had his father when he was alive. That had been ripped from him when his father had died. Getting back a taste of it via the tapes had given Abel all the signs he needed to agree to whatever The Corporation wanted from him.

Once transferred to a new facility, Abel had been shown additional taped footage. This time of someone he'd never met before, yet felt an instant connection to. In fact, he felt a stronger bond to the man in the tapes than he had his own father.

Former Immortal Operative Wheeler Summerbee.

Apparently, they were distant relatives. Normally, that wouldn't mean much, but Abel and his family were special.

Different from others.

Their darkness wasn't simply a drive to kill. No, they had supernatural DNA in their bloodline. Minute traces but enough that it could be used and manipulated.

That was what The Corporation had done. They'd taken that base and built upon it.

They'd tried with his father, but ultimately failed. The result had been his father's passing, which had been made to look like natural causes. But they'd been candid with Abel, telling him the truth. They'd had a hand in his father's death. That his father hadn't been strong enough to withstand the brutal testing and procedures.

That he'd not been man enough.

But Abel was.

His death had been faked and the government thought he was no longer an issue. That the inmate who had been serving a life sentence was now dead, all traces of him wiped away from the records at a later date.

The Corporation had started first with plastic surgery on Abel and the others like him, altering their appearances enough that they couldn't be recognized while in public. Then they'd begun the in-depth testing. The painfully long and arduous procedures that resulted in the death of many of the candidates.

He'd been strapped down, in immeasurable pain, his body reacting violently to the introduction of foreign DNA manipulation, watching as others around him suffered as well. That had been what had gotten him through it all—the ability to see the pain inflicted upon the others around him. Many had died.

Abel saw it as weeding out the weak.

Those unfit for the gift The Corporation was bestowing upon them.

Immortality and the ability to be far more than a mundane human.

He was basically a god now.

Nearly unstoppable.

Except for one flaw—his body, which they'd sworn would go on for hundreds of years, was starting to reject the genetic engineering.

The introduced DNA from another supernatural had been exhilarating at first, giving him increased senses of smell, eyesight, and hearing. Then he'd developed strength the likes of which he'd never seen. That was followed quickly by the ability to sprout fangs, but that came at a price.

Blood.

He required it to survive.

They swore to him that he wasn't a vampire, which he saw as the weakest of the supernaturals, since daylight could do them in. But the need to survive depended greatly on him either drinking blood or receiving transfusions.

Without it, he grew weak and, worse yet, began to turn into something that was a cross between a lizard and a bat.

He'd seen his reflection once during an episode and the imagery had never left him. He'd been both horrified and fascinated. After all, it was as if he'd been stripped down to a baser form.

A raw killer.

He could have lived with that.

But recently, he'd started to have issues in the sun as well, making him no better than a vampire. His limbs would stiffen, and twice his arm had started to turn into something that could only be labeled stone.

Another side effect of the testing.

Apparently, it had all triggered the curse of his family line. The gargoyle in his system. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined gargoyles were real. That they existed.

But they did.

He was living proof.

And he wasn't alone.

When Abel had first learned he'd been cut from an existing cloth, that of Wheeler, he'd wanted to meet the man. Wanted to see for himself whose DNA had been used to alter him. He'd seen the footage of Wheeler being held and tested on. He'd read the files and copious amounts of information The Corporation had on the man.

He'd longed to have introductions, if for no other reason than to see who of them was the better predator.

Who was the best killer?

Over the past decade, since Abel had first undergone the testing and began serving The Corporation as a mercenary, he'd spent time searching for Wheeler, wanting to go head to head with the blueprint of his life.

But Wheeler had been a ghost.

Never staying in one place long.

The man was known as an Immortal Outcast. Something the government engineered during its Immortal Ops Program, fucked up in some fashion, and then tried to hide.

The Outcast Network was vast and deeply embedded in the paranormal underground. The men who had managed to survive the testing that had claimed the lives of most, and evade capture by their government, had gone to ground. But they still worked in secret, helping one another with issues that arose.

Within the last year or so, everything had changed.

The Corporation had begun to make its play.

They'd come out of the darkness and began positioning themselves to eventually take over the country and the world. They were doing a damn fine job of things as it was.

Peace was a notion that barely existed in the world. Starting a small war in a foreign country had a ripple effect that was felt around the globe. And then there was the fact they were embedded in nearly every government in every country there was. They had men and women working for them in every field one could think, loyal to the cause.

There would come a point when The Corporation stopped hiding the truth of what was out there—things that were more than human—and they'd turn humans into the cattle they were born to be.

It would be glorious.

Someone on the other side, the one that dared to call itself good, had already started laying the groundwork by releasing the truth about the Immortal Ops testing that had taken place. The information that eugenics wasn't just a Nazi thing during World War II. It had a rich, longstanding history with large ties to America. And it had never stopped.

From his understanding, it was still going on to this very day by both The Corporation and the side of good. Though the side of good went out of their way to keep it all under wraps and clean up the information leaked by someone among them.

The Corporation was well funded and secured in its place among the cogwheels of the world. They were positioned to take over at some point. They just needed to work out a few kinks.

Namely, many of their test subjects (who were also called hybrids), like Abel, were malfunctioning.

The Corporation claimed they could help fix what was going wrong with Abel. But they needed to study the source DNA closer. That meant they needed Wheeler back in their custody.

When Wheeler had suddenly surfaced in Georgia, Abel thought his problems had been solved. But then the Outcasts had begun working closely with their former counterparts from Paranormal Security and Intelligence (PSI) and the Paranormal Regulators (Para-Regs). And the government had stopped hunting the Outcasts to focus more on trying to combat The Corporation. That left the Outcasts coming out of the woodwork to aid one another.

It had made it far more difficult than Abel liked to get his hands on Wheeler. That was, until three days ago, when word reached The Corporation that Wheeler had been involved in an altercation with someone loyal to the cause and had been turned to stone. Even better than that, his own people had foolishly decided to ship him in statue form to one of their headquarters, rather than transport him themselves.

They'd apparently gone as far as to get him instated as a full-fledged PSI operative, under the Shadow Agents Division, to protect him should the government learn of his whereabouts and have a change of heart on hunting him.

Now, with the protection of PSI, he was in theory no longer a fugitive and considered a valuable asset rather than a liability.

Abel wasn't sure who in the hell Wheeler was friends with in PSI, but whoever it was, they were high up and had a lot of pull and clearance. Plus they had the balls to stand in direct opposition to their own government.

But they'd been arrogant, thinking that by having him brought on as a Shadow Agent, he'd somehow be protected from The Corporation and its reach.

The idea was laughable, especially since those loyal to the cause were intrenched deep within the PSI organization and most of its offshoots. Very little went on within the organizations that The Corporation wasn't aware of or didn't, in some fashion orchestrate.

Armed with the information about Wheeler's statue form being shipped by normal human means of transit, and by actual humans, The Corporation had set in motion a plan to retrieve him.

That was where Abel and his team of men came in. The Corporation had seen to it the statue was rerouted to a place of their choosing and delivered at a time they selected. They'd then scrubbed the records so that any who came looking for Wheeler who were with PSI would not be able to locate him.

The plan had gone over perfectly.

That was how Abel had come to be in a van outside of an art gallery in Savannah. And it was how he was going to get the answers he wanted and the help he required.

"Can we go now?" asked one of his men as he rocked in place, looking eager as they sat nearly shoulder to shoulder in the back of the van.

Abel shot him a hard look. "We go when they say we can."

"You think because you did a little time in the military that you're better than us," said the man, mouthing off from what he thought was the safety of the other end of the van.

Abel could and would kill the bastard with ease.

The rest of the team stared with wide eyes at Abel before quickly averting their gazes. They knew how volatile his temper was. And how willing he was to kill for both pleasure and to simply no longer have to listen to someone annoying speak.

Abel let his fangs distend from his gums as he permitted his darkness to rise. He knew then his eyes had filled with black. "I think I'm better than you because I am better than you. Care to see by how much?"

Wisely, the man shook his head and avoided direct eye contact.

"Now that we have that out of the way, where are we with the delivery men?" he asked. "Are they still there?"

The man nearest the back window gazed out. "They're almost gone. But we can take 'em."

"Why would we? They're on our payroll. And we go when we get the green light, and the people in charge want it to be just the female and the target," returned Abel.

"Why? What's so special about the human woman?" asked another.

Abel didn't bother to hide his smile. "I have no idea, but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough."