Hyper Lynx (The Lynx Series Book 6) by Fiona Quinn (ebook reader for pc and android TXT) 📗

walked, I could always be seen. When I thought of the process like painting a canvas, I was successful.

This was a honed skill that took years and years of practice. Master Wang said I was a stellar student, the best he’d seen. Learning as a child, shadow walking was one of my favorite things to do. I’ll admit that at that time, my whole goal was to win at the hide-and-seek games the kids from my apartment complex played in the park just up the road from our apartment building. Sometimes it even got me out of a punishment at home when disappearing meant I wasn’t at the scene of the crime of the missing cookies.

I always thought of it as a mental ghillie suit like the coverings snipers draped over themselves so they could lie unseen to the enemy.

To do this, I had to imagine the hues and shades of my surroundings dappling over my body.

My success had a great deal to do with my mother teaching me art skills. My eye perceived variants in colors that were missed by the untrained eye.

My mother’s art training blending with Master Wang’s martial art training.

Both were tools in my toolbox.

Useful, applicable tools, especially in situations like this one.

As I started training under Spyder’s mentorship, time refined my shadow walking goals.

Since then, too many times to count, shadow walking was the difference between my life or my death.

Now, using the technique, I rounded the dumpster to find three men triangulated around a waitress. A bag of restaurant trash in each hand, her back was to the dumpsters.

She was trapped.

Projecting the color of dumpster blue and rust patches out in front of me. Stilling my breath to observe, I watched the young woman trembling.

She was a tiny woman. Maybe five foot two. A hundred—a hundred and ten pounds.

The men, in comparison, were hulking. My guess was that these guys did construction or landscaping. Their muscles had the look of men who didn’t need to go to the gym because their jobs built their bodies up. While they dressed in clean jeans and T-shirts, their dusty boots with mud-caked along the edges made me wary. They’d have steel toe reinforcements. Lethal weapons if they knew how to kick.

I was wearing tennis shoes.

Realizing that I was assessing my own clothing choices for my ability to fight in them, I slipped behind the trash to drop my shadow walking concentration. There, I quickly texted Iniquus Operations Control a message that there was an emergency unfurling, send a police car with backup.

Iniquus monitored all of its operators when they were on task. The control room would have my location up on their map. As soon as the message dropped, they’d shift into go mode.

After I saw the “delivered” indicator on my phone, I turned off the volume. An ill-timed ping could endanger me further.

“Look, guys,” The woman was pleading. “I’ve been on my feet for the last eight hours earning the money. I need it to eat. I have kids.”

Robbery?

I took in a breath, calmed my system, and dropped back into my shadow walking mode, so I could observe.

If this was Modesty, her being hurt might create issues moving the mission forward. I had no idea if Modesty had children or not. Of course, this woman could be lying about the kids to garner sympathy.

If she handed them her money, and they went away, that was one thing. But now that I had my eyes on the men, I realized that was not their plan.

One of the men kept glancing over to a mustard-yellow car, the sides lacey with rust. No hubcaps. I read off the license plate to memorize it—in case that became important.

The man with the snicker, his lower lip distended with a plug of tobacco, reached out and gave the waitress a shove, sending her back two steps.

She slammed into the diner’s cement wall, her head making a stomach-churning crack.

“Please.” Her knees buckled. Sliding to the ground, she gripped the garbage bags, using them to form a barricade in front of her.

She looked young. Vulnerable. About the right age to be Modesty…

I wished Finley had given me something beyond a name.

I wished she’d let go of the garbage bags already to have her hands free. Instead, she was all but hugging them against her as if the restaurant waste was the buffer she needed to stay safe.

She eyed the kitchen door and licked her lips as if she could taste freedom on the other side. Her gaze bounced to each man and back to the door, quick glances as if she were trying to gauge if she took off running, could she make it inside?

But also telegraphing her intent to the men.

The guy with the white shirt and the lizard logo moved between her and her escape route.

There was really nowhere else to run. All of the other businesses in the strip mall stretched along the far side of the parking lot.

“Go ahead and hand over the money,” the guy with the turquoise blue shirt said, low and reasonable. “We need to eat, too. I’m hungry. You hungry, Benji?” His gaze shot to the smallest of the three.

“Starved.” He sent a lascivious lick of the lips the woman’s way. “I think good things are coming. A morning quicky and full belly after. You’re going to be nice to us, aren’t you?”

The waitress worked the disgust from her face. Manipulating her lips as if trying to remember how to form words. “If you come inside, I’ll buy you breakfast.”

I strained to hear her. She was barely audible as she put together the men’s intent.

Blue T-shirt sent his gaze first to one of his band and then the other.

It seemed to me that he was