Guardians of the Portals Read Online Free PDF Page A

know?”
    Eirik shouted, “Boy, what are you talking about?”
    “Think about it, Gothi. This is the one place in this dimension that we assumed was secure. How did they find out about it?”
    He poked the barrel against her skin and marvelled that she could keep the glamour going under such stress. “Where the hell is it? Tell me or I will blow your fucking head clean off. And then I will go after the rest of your family, their friends, neighbors, and their acquaintances.”
    “Boy, are you sure?” Eirik asked, unwilling to allow anyone to harm a gifted when so much rode on the woman’s special abilities. She was possibly the first and only shape-shifter they had encountered in over fifteen hundred years of monitoring human potential. They needed more than just her DNA sequence and tissue samples for further study, because a fully functional shifter was a prize beyond measure.
    Trey snarled, “Where is it?” The woman rubbed the back of her neck. “Gothi, watch her.” He slid the Sig Sauer into the waistband of his jeans and pulled a thin stiletto from a holster on his belt with his left hand. He wrapped the woman’s long black hair in his right hand and pulled it away from her neck. A pale splotch of red indicated where the microchip had been recently inserted. He flicked the tip of the blade along the axis of the small scar, ignoring the gasp of pain, and dug mercilessly until the blade contacted the chip. With a deft movement, he flicked it out and onto the floor, then stomped it into tiny shards.
    His uncle angled closer to the woman, his gun steady, face set in grim lines. Trey replaced the stiletto in the holster and walked over to the control panel and set the locking system manually, using an over-ride program he’d developed just in case the primaries were compromised. He had to assume that was the case.
    Recessed metal walls and a secondary secured door clicked into place. He punched a few more buttons and the room began to move sideways and then down. They would exit into a sub-basement that he prayed remained off their attackers’ radar, otherwise they were royally screwed. He was glad no one bothered to ask for further explanations. He was in the mood to kill something and right then it was a toss-up who it would be.
    When he turned back toward the woman he steeled himself, but still the shock of seeing her without the glamour shook him to the core. She was still attractive but her hair was now silver white and lines about her eyes and mouth etched deep into parchment-thin skin. She still towered over him and he feared she would be a liability for what he suspected they might face when they finally exited the building.
    Eirik interrupted his thoughts. “Ranulf? The others?”
    “Dead. They wouldn’t have gotten to us otherwise.”
    “Damn it, woman! You got men, good men, killed. I hope to hell you are worth it.” Eirik barked at his enforcer, “You know what to do, boy.”
    The elevator swished to a halt. Trey punched in the code and hung back as the inner safety door eased along its track. “Against the wall,” he ordered, then cautiously swung the outer door open and peered right, then left, into the dimly lit space. He heard nothing but the sound of his own lungs sucking air and the blood pounding in his ears. He waved his group forward.
    Trey motioned for his uncle to leave the woman with him, fully expecting an argument, but Eirik merely nodded and made his way to a hidden door leading to a staircase that exited through a small shopping mall on the ground floor of the apartment building. His uncle tipped a finger to his nose and disappeared through a door against the far wall, leaving Trey pondering what he was going to do with an old woman in tow. He doubted she was in shape to keep up if he took his planned escape route that involved, he hated to admit, a lot of running his ass off through the Upper East Side.
    “What are you going to do with me?”
    He admired her control but took