Michael leaped into the cabin, rifle held in one hand. He punched out the glass with the rifle’s butt. He barked, “There’s blood on your face. Are you hit again?”
She wiped the side of her wet face. There were three points of pain. Mentally she probed at the areas. They were all shallow cuts.
“Glass shards,” she said. She grabbed for the wheel. “I’m fine.”
He raced out, knelt at the railing again and fired off a few more shots. More windows shattered in the SUV. One of the drones had disappeared from sight, but the one with the rifle was still shooting.
Only this time the drone shot at Jerry and Jamie’s motorboat. She saw that they had begun to turn away from shore. Splashes of water arced around them.
“Come on,” she whispered, willing their boat to move faster.
How long would it take for them to get out of gunshot range? And where was the Deceiver? For Nicholas to be so panicked, he couldn’t be too far away, and he would be drawn by the gun battle.
We have to draw fire away from them, Michael said. Take us in a circle between their boat and shore.
She fit her foot to the boot-sized gas pedal and gunned it. The engine roared and the wind whipped her face as the boat leaped forward, while Michael kept up a steady spray of gunfire, pausing only to exchange his empty clip for a full one.
Nicholas had left her again. They came abreast of the other boat, which was headed in the opposite direction. She could only spare a worried glance for them. Jamie had slumped to one side, and Jerry had taken the seat at the helm. Red sprayed the open interior of their boat.
Oh, no.
Then they blew past Jerry and Jamie. She spun the wheel, feeling the tension as the boat turned in a wide arc, spraying a tall wave of water. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw another black SUV roar down the hill of the neighborhood street toward the dock.
Her stomach lurched, and she forgot to telepathize. She shouted, “Do you see them?”
I see them, said Michael. He didn’t lift his head from the rifle or stop shooting. Take us out again.
She kept the boat in a tight arc until they were headed away from shore. Then she aimed for the other boat. When she looked over her shoulder one last time, she saw the approaching SUV swerve sharply to the left and crash into a clump of trees and bushes.
After another few moments, Michael stopped shooting and ran into the cabin.
“We’re out of range,” he said. “I disabled as many boats on the pier as I could, but there were a couple toward the shore that I couldn’t draw a bead on. They could try to follow us.”
Her chest had tightened, and she forced herself to take in deeper breaths. She said through gritted teeth, “Tell me he was in that SUV that crashed.”
“I think he was, although they weren’t going fast enough to kill anybody. More’s the pity.” Michael gripped her by the back of the neck. She thought it was as much to steady him as it was to steady her.
“I could say that’s got to be the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced, but I’ve already been saying that for several days now.” She gave him an anguished look. “I think Jamie’s hurt.”
His expression tightened. “We need to get them transferred to this boat and leave the area as quick as we can.” He stepped behind her to place his hands beside hers on the wheel, and he nudged her foot off the gas pedal.
As he took control, she sagged back against him. He held the wheel with one hand, slipping another around her waist to hug her tight against his torso as his cheek came down on top of her head.
Leaning back against his strong, steady body felt so good. She cupped the hand that he flattened against her waist and tried not to think too far ahead to their next conversation. If this moment was all she would get, she was going to soak up as much of it as she could.
She squinted against the spray of wind and water, watching as they drew close to the others. “Do you think he’ll follow us?”
“I don’t know. It depends on how much reinforcement he has with him. He’ll weigh the risks just like Astra did. I can maintain the null space around us, which should discourage him. We’ll be a lot more difficult to track in the open water than we would be traveling down predefined highways on land.”
They had approached within hailing distance of the other boat. Jerry looked over his shoulder and waved at them. He shouted, “Jamie’s been shot!”
Michael eased them into a slower speed. He shouted back, “Cut your motor.”
Mary took the wheel again when he nudged her. The other boat slowed to a stop, rocking gently in the waves. “Just hold it steady,” he said. “Don’t use any gas. Let us coast up to them. I’ll get them on board, then take the helm again, while you help Jamie.”
“All right.”
She tried to hold them on a steady course. They came up alongside the others. Their hulls scraped as the waves rocked them together. Michael threw a rope to Jerry who caught and swiftly tied them together. Then he tossed a rope ladder to the older man.
“Can you climb aboard on your own?” he asked. “I’ll get Jamie.”
Jerry said, “Yes.”
Mary twisted to watch what was happening. She was in time to see Michael gather himself and leap like a great cat from their bigger boat to the smaller one.
Jerry’s head appeared as he climbed the ladder, his face scored with deep lines and his eyes stark. With the boats moored together, she let go of the steering wheel and rushed to help him climb the rest of the way aboard.
When he straightened, she put an arm around him and nudged him toward the galley. “Are you shot?”
“No.” The pain in his eyes was palpable. “The boy is bad off.”
“I understand.” She took a moment to scan his heart. The spike in stress hadn’t helped him at all, but her earlier handiwork held. She told him, “We had a rough trip last night, and things are a mess down below. Make a place where we can set Jamie when Michael gets him aboard, will you?”
“Of course.” Jerry ducked his head and stepped through the hatch.
In the other boat, Michael had bent over Jamie’s sprawled form where she could also see that Nicholas’s presence hovered. Blood was everywhere, down Jamie’s head and all over his front. Michael gathered the boy in his arms, squatted and lunged into the air.
He cleared the railing with inches to spare, landed at a crouch and straightened. “It’s a head wound.”
“Take him below,” she said.
Jerry had cleared the tangle of blankets off the pile of mattresses by the time they got downstairs. He stood and flattened against the wall to give Michael enough room to ease Jamie’s body prone on a bare mattress. Mary wriggled between the two men and knelt by Jamie’s head. Nicholas knelt on the other side.
Jerry asked Michael, “How did you know to come for us?”
“Nicholas told us,” Michael said.
She ignored him and the others, and focused solely on Jamie. She parted his matted, wet hair, looking for the wound. Her fingers found it before her eyes did. Gently she probed at the area.
Her heart sank as she realized the bullet had penetrated his skull. Mortality rates for penetrating brain injuries were over ninety-two percent. Still, she tried to hold out hope as she sent her awareness into his body.
Jamie was brain-dead.
She saw that immediately. The gunshot wound was simple but fatal. The damage to his brain stem was too severe. She absorbed the details of the injury almost reflexively and knew that if it were only a matter of healing the flesh, she could cause the damage to heal.
The problem was his spirit had already departed, probably within a few moments of the bullet hitting him. There was no psychic scar, as she had seen in the drones that had their spirits ripped out of them. Jamie was a smooth, quiet blank. His body still functioned, but that wouldn’t last long without life support. H
is blood pressure had already plummeted. Within the next half hour, his organs would shut down.
She closed her eyes and bent her head as a storm of reaction overtook her.
Outrage, grief, guilt. Fury.
This is our fault, she thought. Her mouth worked.
As soon as any of us had heard that Nicholas had been killed, we should have thought of it, especially Astra and Michael but even me as well. He went after my family. Look at what he did to Justin. Of course he would think about looking into Nicholas’s family too.
We were too wrapped up in our own quarrels and dramas to even think about Nicholas’s family. So sad, too bad, you just got in our way, because we’ve always got to think of our greater goal.
She wiped her forehead on her forearm and realized that Michael and Jerry were still talking. Michael must have asked about any supplies on the other boat, because Jerry was talking about bottled water and packaged snacks.
“We’re low on fuel,” Jerry said.
“I don’t care about that,” Michael said. “We used hardly any fuel on the way over, and we have nearly a full tank.”
She said in a hoarse voice, “Would you please talk outside?”
They stopped immediately and stepped out on the deck, closing the door to the hatch softly. She looked down at Jamie’s handsome face. He looked so peaceful, as if he had just stepped out for a little while. It was maddening to know that she could heal his body and yet lose the fight to save his life.
The growl of the boat’s engine started, and they lurched into movement. She ignored it. At the moment nothing mattered outside of this small room.
She looked up at Nicholas, who remained, intent on her. His dark, transparent gaze was the most distinct thing about him. She said, I’m so sorry, Nicholas. He’s gone.
Pain blazed at her. Is there nothing that you can do?
There’s plenty that I can do, she said bitterly. But none of it will bring him back.
The ghost bowed his head.
Nicholas, we have to have a hard conversation, she said. Jamie’s body is beginning to shut down. I can stop it. I’m pretty sure that I can physically heal the damage done to him, but his spirit is already gone.
She already knew he was a clever man. He knew where she was going, and he shook his head against it. No. I will not take my sister’s boy.
She nodded. I thought you might say that. It’s a natural reaction, when family members face some kind of issue of organ donation. Usually in a hospital, there’s a little more time to talk about it, and people can work through their emotions with a counselor. But we don’t have that option here, and we don’t have life support to keep Jamie’s body viable.
No, he said again. This time he sounded almost pleading.
She couldn’t look at him. His pain was too hard to watch. She looked down at Jamie.
I can’t tell you what to do, and obviously there aren’t any rules of ethics to follow in this situation. I just know two things. One is that we face so many risks, we may not get another chance for you. Look at what happened just this afternoon. There’s no guarantee we’ll survive from one day to the next. She paused then said as gently as she could, The other thing is, it isn’t fair that your father and sister have to lose both of you.
That brought his head up. Moments trickled by as he struggled in silence.
Finally he said, How long before I have to make a decision?
She averted her face and concentrated on Jamie again. She said, Twenty minutes.
Nicholas vanished from sight. She lost all sense of his presence.
“Goddamn you,” she muttered.
She wasn’t even sure whom she was cursing. The Deceiver, certainly. Herself, Michael and Astra, yes.
And fate. She definitely cursed at fate.
She didn’t wait twenty minutes. There was no clock in the room, and she had no way of telling time. She had wanted to give Nicholas as long as she could, but she was afraid that she had cut things too close. She wasn’t sure she could wait twenty minutes and still repair the damage to Jamie in time to prevent major organ damage.
So, sick at heart, she sank into Jamie’s body, stabilized his blood pressure, stopped the bleeding and began to work on repairing his brain stem.
God help her, if Nicholas came back and said no again, she was either going to have to stop Jamie’s heart herself, or ask Michael to help her. Otherwise his body would continue to function until it starved to death.
She finished sending basic commands to his brain stem and started repairing the rest of the wound. She worked on the skull next. There was so much damage she plunged into an entirely new area of healing as she tried to coax the bone into regenerating.
And it did.
Slowly, very slowly, the bone began to grow back over the jagged holes left by the bullet. Tears blurred her eyes. She didn’t know if she cried from gratitude or grief. She wiped her face on the rough sleeve of the poncho.
The last thing she did was focus on the skin at his scalp, both entry and exit. She didn’t take a real breath until the wound had sealed over. Then she slumped.
Nicholas formed in front of her again. She looked up at the ghost, her eyes raw.
Yes, he said.
Chapter Twenty-one
AFTER RETRIEVING JERRY and Jamie’s blue and white cooler of water bottles and packaged snacks, Michael untied the cords that held the two boats together and pushed away from the smaller one. He shoved a water bottle at Jerry, who looked shell-shocked.
“Drink,” he said.
The older man obeyed. His hands shook.
Taking the helm again, Michael accelerated away. In the back of his mind, where he kept a tally of estimates, he guessed they probably had been stationary for around five minutes. “The simplest thing will be if you and Jamie come back to the island with us.”
“No,” said Jerry. “Thank you, but we need to get to Sara and make sure that she’s all right.”
Sara, Jamie’s mother, lived and worked in Muskegon. Michael’s jaw tightened. Jerry was right to be concerned. He thought through their options, came to a decision and turned toward Charlevoix. Jerry lived roughly twenty minutes outside of the city, traveling by car, but they could reach it a lot quicker by boat.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “We’ll get close enough to Charlevoix that I can swim the rest of the distance into the docks. You’ll pilot out to deep water. I’ll get my boat and meet up with you. Then you and Jamie can take this one. I have weapons, money and a sat phone.” He nodded to the black canvas bag that he had set in the corner. “You can go to one of our safe houses and wait there until you hear from us. You’re not his main focus. He’s too busy to spend too much time searching, if we make it difficult enough to find you. And in a week or two, we can hope that it won’t matter anymore.”
Jerry’s gaze focused on the bag. “Sara’s probably on her way home from work at the bank. I need to call and tell her not to go home.”
“Keep the call brief. Don’t explain or identify yourself by name. She’ll recognize your voice. Just set a place to meet. Make sure it’s somewhere that you are both familiar with, but don’t mention it by name or talk about directions. Then hang up.”
Jerry knelt and dug through the bag until he found the phone. Then he paused as he held it. “What about Charlevoix? Won’t they be watching the ports?”
“They are,” said Michael. “But they should be focused on watching the shore. They won’t be expecting me to swim in alone underwater. I’ll slip onto the boat and take it out before anybody notices.”
Probably. Projecting the null space would help with his chances. It was always a matter of weighing risks.
Jerry called his daughter. Michael tuned out of the brief, frantic conversation. Instead he thought about what was happening below. Mary hadn’t contacted him or surfaced, whi
ch meant that Jamie was in a bad way but hopefully salvageable. With luck, she would be done with healing him by the time they had to split up.
If he were a kind and generous man, he would give Jerry and Jamie his sleek, fast cigarette boat.
He wasn’t a kind and generous man. He had helped to rescue them from certain death, and he would give them a fighting chance. That would have to be good enough.
The late afternoon was beautiful on the lake. The silver-topped sapphire water looked limitless, as did the sky. Violence and gun battles seemed a lifetime away, whereas he knew better. They were never a lifetime away. They were always in this lifetime. He carried them with him wherever he went.
When they were about a third of a mile out from the city, he said, “This is as close as we should get. Take the wheel and head out exactly due west. Keep the speed steady, but don’t go too fast or do anything else that might call attention to you. If I don’t catch up with you in a half an hour, go straight to the island. Understand?”
Jerry nodded, his craggy face determined. “Just get back to us in a half an hour.”
“I will.” He unlaced his combat boots and toed them off. Then he took several deep, rapid breaths, held the last one and dove over the side.
The water was bitingly cold. He ignored it and swam hard, keeping the null space firmly around him. After a few minutes, his body temperature spiked from the exertion, which made the cold swim much easier to tolerate.
The psychic realm felt as unsettled as it had yesterday. Things ghosted along the periphery of his senses, and he felt creatures roaming up ahead. After swimming roughly half the distance, he eased to the surface for a fresh breath of air and a quick look around. He adjusted his course to aim straight for the docks and slipped underwater again.
He rented a slip for the boat in the Charlevoix City Marina under a fictitious name. The slip lay close to the marina exit. While he was certain that watchers had been stationed at Charlevoix, their job was made more challenging by the fact that the day was so sunny and beautiful.
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