Airman Wells quickly shoved his way through the front door as the other members of the team entered through the back, the only sound coming from their boots softly impacting on the floor. Daniel felt a strangely eerie sensation as he followed behind them.
He immediately spotted the three men trussed up by the stairs. Pulling out his phone with his off-hand, he flipped it to the FBI file photos of Sydyk and his men and immediately recognized them as Sydyk's "high priests".
He showed the pictures to the colonel, who gave the signal for "hostiles" to his men.
Fortunately, the unconscious men showed no signs of waking up, and someone had thoughtfully already gift-wrapped them in a truly impressive amount of duct tape. They all sported some impressively lurid developing bruises in distinct black and blue on their heads, as well. Daniel grimly noted some drying blood and hair caught on the handle of a broom leaning against the wall next to them, no doubt the weapon used to render them into their current state.
With a Marine covering the prisoners, Wells silently led the way up the stairs, his P-90 raised at readiness and his face set like stone. Colonel Dixon stepped cautiously behind him, followed by Daniel and the others.
As the reached the first door, Wells paused and knelt. He pulled out a mirror, which he used to peek around the corner. One man down, he signaled, returning the mirror to his vest pocket.
A weak cough and a moan came from inside the room. Dixon signed for Wells and the rest of the team to check the other rooms. Daniel indicated that he would cover Dixon as he entered the room.
It was Janet's bedroom, Daniel realized with a chill. A vase had been knocked from the nightstand; its shards were carelessly scattered across the floor, along with the trampled flowers it had once contained. The spilled water mingled with the blood dripping from the fallen man, who now lay crumpled against the wall between the little girl's bed and the nightstand, which had been shoved to the side. His bloody hand prints stained the nightstand and Janet's bedspread.
He was weakly clutching a folded sheet to his abdomen, trying to staunch the blood oozing from whatever injury he had received. Barely conscious, he blinked blearily up at Daniel and Dixon with an expression of… was that relief?
"We're clear, Colonel. No one else here," reported Wells as he coldly eyed the fallen man. The younger airman swallowed in an anger that was only now starting to overcome the fear.
"Never thought I'd see him again," Daniel remarked, his gun not wavering an inch from its aim on Sydyk's host – a man he had recognized oh-so-quickly.
"I'd rather not have seen him at all," Dixon retorted. "Let's get him contained. Wouldn't want a snakehead jumping up and ruining my day."
Former Vice President, self-serving bastard, and finally Goa'uld host Robert Kinsey stared at them, his lips twitching. Even before he had been taken by a Goa'uld, he had very nearly succeeded in getting the world destroyed with his petty political games and power-mongering. Now, he was reduced to a sad, pathetic heap on floor.
"Gone," he rasped weakly.
"What was that? Didn't quite make that out." Colonel Dixon snorted in disgust. "Wells, get those SOBs downstairs rolled out to the trucks."
"With pleasure, sir," the airman acknowledged, turning on his heel and leaving the room. It was almost certainly for the best to send Wells off rather than leave him in the same room as the monster that threatened his little girl.
"It's gone," Kinsey repeated, his fingers spasming on the bloody sheet. A tear trickled slowly down his pale cheek. He locked eyes with Daniel.
Daniel blinked, finally realizing what the man was trying to say. It suddenly made sense. "Uh, Colonel, I think he's trying to say that the Goa'uld left him. It's gone."
"What?! Damn. McCaffrey! Get your favorite toy in here!" the colonel shouted over his shoulder without removing his eyes on the bleeding Kinsey. He certainly wasn't going to take Kinsey's word that the Goa'uld was gone.
"Right here, sir," Airman McCaffrey replied, his boots heavy on the floorboards as he rushed in. Reaching into his vest, he extracted what turned out to be an Ancient life signs detector, doubtless courtesy of Atlantis. McCaffrey held out the small device and frowned in concentration. "Only one life sign, sir. Snake's gone," he reported, staring at the readout on the screen.
Colonel Dixon swore again, this time with enough color to make the Navy proud. "Okay, boys, let's get this bastard outta here before he bleeds to death. Let's move! And keep your eye out for a stray snake!"
Within minutes, Kinsey was loaded up for transport, tended by the hard-eyed SCG field medics sent on by General Landry immediately behind the initial team. Daniel stared thoughtfully after them as they drove away through a gap in the growing crowd of spectators.
"Colonel, you know that the Goa'uld jumped ship and is now in whoever overpowered Sydyk and his men," he said in a quiet aside, folding his arms across his chest.
"Yeah, I know," Dixon agreed, clearly unhappy. "Wish I knew who that person was."
"Well, we know it wasn't one of Sydyk's goons – all of them were duct-taped at the bottom of the stairs," Daniel observed. "Those three plus Kinsey makes all of them accounted for."
"Maybe someone followed him from Seattle. Took revenge for the mess there only to find out the hard way Sydyk was a body-snatching snake."
"Makes sense to me. In any case, we have to find out who Sydyk has now, and where he's gone," Daniel pointed out, running his hand through his hair. "He knows that we'll be looking for him."
Colonel Dixon grunted his agreement. "I'll talk with the cops. Maybe they saw something before we got here."
Everything had gone to hell in a handbasket.
Even with the immediate danger past, Methos felt far from secure driving his car with a Goa'uld sitting in the passenger seat. Especially since that Goa'uld was now controlling his friend.
Silently, he urged Amanda to keep fighting, to keep her memories out of the hands of the snake.
His first priority was getting somewhere safe, somewhere he could have the time to find a way to kill the Goa'uld or get it out of her, and without getting infested himself.
He suspected that knocking her unconscious and surgically removing the creature was out of the question. While he certainly had the medical skill to perform the task, he had no way of knowing if drugs would affect Amanda in her current condition, combining her Immortality with a Goa'uld parasite. Furthermore, he would have only one opportunity to knock her out, and if it didn't work he'd be in a world of trouble. A Goa'uld with an Immortal host... he didn't dare start worrying about the implications of that particular train of thought.
He could try killing her and hope that the parasite would die before she revived, but, again, he'd only have one shot at it. Its placement in her body was problematic, as he didn't want to cause her permanent damage if he could avoid it. He actually liked Amanda.
That being said, Methos would be more than willing to take his Ivanhoe to Amanda's lovely neck if he had to. He would not let the parasite escape, especially if it discovered the truth about its new host.
What was truly crippling him at the moment was his lack of concrete knowledge about the Goa'uld. Unfortunately, there was only one person he knew that might be able to supply that information: Daniel Jackson.
Knowing Amanda, she'd probably picked up his phone number in the hopes of a little romantic rendezvous when they were finished hunting down Sydyk, so contacting Daniel wasn't the problem.
No, no, no, the problems lay elsewhere.
Like, for instance, the fact that Methos was supposed to be dead. Given that Daniel had seen his corpse, it would be rather difficult to explain how he was still alive and kicking; this would naturally give rise to a whole slew of questions Methos was not going to answer.
Plus there was the minor little question about how Amanda came to be infested by the parasite in the first place.
No, the potential for disaster was just too great in that direction, and Methos certainly had no intention of letting agents of the American government know of the existence of Immortals.
And he still had to worry about Sydyk, as well. The creature hadn't exactly come with him willingly, and it could not be trusted. He could feel Amanda's eyes boring furious holes into the side of his head.
And even Methos needed to sleep at some point; it wasn't as if the past couple of nights had been particularly restful, and he was beginning to feel the toll. The snake would probably try to kill him and escape as soon as it saw the opportunity.
The signal ahead of him turned red. As he drew the car to a stop at the limitline, a new Buzz filled his mind, the tell-tale sign of yet another Immortal nearby.
Methos suppressed the numerous unhelpful curses that abruptly sprang to mind.