Invisible Duty: Invisible Recruits, #3

By Mary Buckham

The Second Alex Noziak Novella

The mission sounded easy for Alex Noziak, part witch/part shaman. And easy is what she needed. But in the heart of Africa, she finds something so deadly it will test her in ways she never expected.
When a fellow teammate is seriously injured at the hands of a North African djinn that escapes their ambush, Alex faces a hard choice. Go after this dangerous djinn, without the full support of her Invisible Recruit team, or allow this powerful creature of magic and darkness to continue to terrorize and kill more innocent humans.

With only twenty-four hours to find and destroy the djinn, she has to throw caution to the wind to face him in his own territory. If she wins, he dies.
Of course, there's the other side that if he wins, she dies, or if he escapes again, she'll have to leave her team and walk back into a prison.

Alex Noziak, My New Favorite Series Character! A Must Read! . . . In Alex, Buckham has created a character for us to care about, to root for, and to sometimes roll our eyes over. Alex Noziak is a strong-willed, sarcastically-bent, and impulsively-flawed young woman who cares deeply enough that the choices she faces will never be easy ones. You won't be disappointed with this read. Personally, I can't wait to see what Alex is up to next! ~~ DerbyGirl

A double WOW--Mary Buckham and her fascinating protagonist Alex Noziak! They've done it again! Alex's story grabs me from the first page and doesn't let me go until the end of the book.~~ Anne Norup

Mary Buckham's explosive new INVISIBLE RECRUIT series packs deep emotions and high adventure in a dynamic Urban Fantasy world. ~~NYT bestseller Dianna Love

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cantwell Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781939210104

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Some days you wake up glad to be alive. Some days you wake simply glad not to be dead. Today was still up for grabs.

I was prone on the ground at a frustrating stakeout in Rwanda for the IR Agency, as I shoved my waist-length braid out of my way and stretched against the powder-fine earth; the scent of dust, old death and charcoal-fueled fires layered over the early morning tang of eucalyptus trees.

I was Alexis better call me Alex Noziak, part witch, part shaman and a long way from home. Home being Mud Lake, Idaho.

How the hell had I ended up here?

The IR Agency—I for Invisible, R for Recruits—we were all new to the world of counter-intelligence, all committed to making a difference of sorts, plus we possessed talents and skills—some acknowledged, some unacceptable—that allowed us to work on a level apart from our all-human counterparts.

Our official job was to infiltrate an arms smuggling meeting and secure enough information to bring the smugglers, arms-dealer and insurgents before an International Tribunal. There was something about the individuals behind this meeting that gave Ling Mai, our director, the idea that this would be a great chance for us to stretch our wings.

By the Great Spirits, I knew we needed the experience.

It hadn’t been long since a few exceptional humans started recognizing how truly fragile their existence on earth was, or how many among us weren’t fully human. We deal with magic every day—electricity, flight, medical technology. We didn’t care how it worked, but only whether it could help or hinder us.

As a species though we’d mostly ignored that non-humans walked among us. Shifters, fairies, vamps and demons—and those were just the tip of the iceberg. Some were benign, if left alone, but many were pure predators. Evil disguised but active, and more and more active in some parts of the world.

So the Invisible Recruit Agency was born. Humans, and mostly humans like myself, against preternaturals and non-humans finding a way to co-exist in the world.

I possessed a dual gift, being both born to magic and shamanism. One of the ones willing to fight to hold the world together, and maybe even improve, our human condition.

This op was a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants mission inserted between the last one where I’d gone head-to-head with a certain sexy warlock and got his preternatural and nasty cousin killed, and the next mission, which involved tracking down my brother who’d been kidnapped and supposedly still held in Paris.

Sounds glamorous. It wasn’t; but the need to help my brother was driving me to get this current mission wrapped up. So here I was, with five teammates, isolated in the heartbeat of Africa, going after a gun-smuggling SOB.

It was that the smuggler—or one of his associates-—was doing more than simply selling guns to the highest bidder. He was pitting tribes and factions against each other, to the point that everyday people who were struggling just to survive were now tinder-primed, ready to resort to the genocide that rocked this part of Africa not all that long ago.

The only guy on our team—M.T. Stone, and the only member who didn’t appear to have any otherness about him unless it was his do-or-die approach to life—was the infiltrator into the core of the smugglers, while the rest of the team acted as backup. We didn’t have enough experience to do much more.

Stone, who was our Agency instructor and as scary a dude as you’ve ever met, my IR teammates, Vaughn, Jaylene, Mandy, Kelly and I, each of us came from an ordinary background, one that made it easy for us to blend in where other undercover operatives—trained in law enforcement or as federal agents—still stood out like cop cars in a parking lot.

We didn’t bring a lot of training as operatives, but what we did bring were abilities beyond the average human; Jaylene was a psychic, Kelly could turn invisible, Mandy was a spirit-walker and Vaughn, while being fully human was so drop-dead gorgeous it counted as a lethal weapon, especially around guys. We’d been brought together, mostly by coercion, to see if individuals like ourselves who had some extra abilities could go up against the truly nasty non-humans.

So far we’d survived. Mandy was still recovering from a small echo-demon mishap that happened when I’d been practicing calling forth demons for training purposes. She still hadn’t forgiven me for a broken arm.

Shaking myself back to my current mission, I focused on the ramshackle hut where Stone was embedded with the bad guys. I repositioned myself again, reminded that there was no way packed earth was going to feel like anything but hard. That was me, an incurable optimist. Not.

The Kagera River behind me cut us off from Tanzania, safely hidden by a hillock of dusty yellow grasses. The Akagera National Park, a swath of green on the eastern sleeve of war-recovering Rwanda, lay dead ahead. Giraffe heads bobbed like misshapen balloons twenty meters out. A hunter’s moon had given way to a blood-red sun, still creeping over the horizon.

You can show yourself any time, Stone, I mumbled under my breath. The sooner he reported in and we extracted him, the sooner we could leave to start hunting for my brother.

You say something? buzzed in my commset. Jaylene Smart, my only backup on the ground, helped focus me on why the hairs on the back of my neck were standing up.

You think the Yoruba witch doctor inside the hut is hinky? I asked.

Jaylene sounded only partially awake as she mumbled, As if a witch doctor wouldn’t be hinky? Then seemed to remember who she was talking to. I might not be a witch doctor, but I sure as hell was a witch. Didn’t see that much of him last night. Why?

Just a gut feeling. Something’s not right here. I shook my head, as if Jaylene could see the movement. Any motion from inside the hut?

Not yet. Jaylene perched on a limb in a stand of acacia trees across the lone dirt roadway leading into a compound of wood and mud-packed cottages, one of which held Stone. The others were too decrepit to count. She’d earned her position by losing the coin