She shrugged. “I was unaware that I could do it until Cass showed me how. I belong here, the way your Bri belongs to your home. We’re trapped by our need for the familiar.”
“That’s an odd way of putting it.” Keegan struggled to grasp the concept. “I belong wherever I am.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “If you’re a baker, you bake. It’s who you are, what you do, what you surround yourself with. If a baker tries to be a motorcycle mechanic, he’s out of his element. It might pay better, take him better places, but the kitchen is his home.” She removed another bottle of water from her pocket, edged closer, lifted his head, and helped him drink it.
Keegan swallowed gratefully. Her hands and thighs were as soft as a woman’s should be, belying the hard carapace she displayed to the world. “But a baker can bake for kings or the homeless. He has choices. He’s not trapped,” he argued.
“And what does a shaman do?” Her voice was harsh. “Looking through the eyes of a hawk is not generally useful. It’s not recognized as spirit-walking or even telepathy, which is the closest I can come to explaining what I do. Other than that, I remove blighted ectoplasm from this mortal plane, which is only slightly more useful, and only in Hillvale.”
“You said you’re a computer engineer. Is that not useful?” Keegan’s head rested against her thigh, and he willed her to run her hands through his hair. He ached in too many places and needed physical distraction.
She examined his wound instead. “So useful that I’m now hiding up here, out of public sight, so the world can’t hunt me down to perform more magic tricks, or rake me over the coals for being what I am. You really and truly do not want a shaman whose mind can leave her body messing with your computer. I know what I am now, and engineer is not it, no more than the baker can really be a mechanic.”
An SUV roared up the road at high speed. Keegan wasn’t conscious enough to decide if he was glad or not that she was forced to quit talking.
He’d been warned to keep Mariah out of his computer. She spoke of vengeance for her friend. He had painful reasons to remember the explosive news stories of the hacker who had uncovered the synthetic diamonds and worse. One of the corporations nearly destroyed by the Expoleaks info-dump had been an enormous computer company—one that only recently chose a female CEO to replace the arrested executives.
Passing out was the easiest thing to do as they loaded him into the back of the police chief’s car.
July 10: Tuesday, evening
“Dinah, come here and sit down,” Teddy commanded from a booth in the back of the café. “You can’t keep dithering. You need to talk to Kurt.”
Sitting on her stool in front of the register, knee raised in hopes the swelling would go down again, Mariah counted cash from one of the last lingering customers. Behind her, Sam and Susannah were repairing the tattered mural, arguing over colors. Samantha was an environmental scientist, not a painter, but that didn’t stop her from arguing. It was nice to see the newly-reunited pair acting like a family.
Fretting over Keegan’s injury, Mariah wondered if there were any way to connect the gunshot to whomever had trashed his room. Had someone not wanted Keegan in particular to see the crystals in the canyon? That seemed a little too organized for Hillvale inhabitants, but she kept an eye on strangers.
Walker had declared the canyon off limits until he’d sent the sheriff’s department down there. Kurt Kennedy had declared the land didn’t belong to the resort.
She was back to needing computers. Couldn’t at least one of her talents be useful? If only the effing ectoplasm would convey information the way computers did!
Maybe she could call the hospital to see if Keegan was all right. . .
At the jeweler’s command, Dinah took off her apron and hesitantly settled across from Teddy and the hunky resort owner. Kurt was still an aloof bastard, but at least he wasn’t wearing suits and ties since laughing Teddy came along. Maybe that was an outer sign of inner improvement.
Maybe people needed connections with each other to become better human beings.
Mariah had revealed more to Keegan today than she’d revealed to herself over the last years. She hadn’t realized that her means of survival had left her feeling trapped. Watching Sam with Walker, and Teddy with Kurt, she suspected she was only leading half a life, if that. Sam had found a family and a home and was expanding her gift for growing things. Teddy had saved her family, exorcised a ghost, given Kurt a new lease on life, and was learning how to use her gift for empowering crystal.
Mariah had done no more than tie her hands behind her back—probably good for the world but not necessarily for her.
“I own the building, you own the café business,” Kurt was explaining to Dinah. “My lawyer has been looking into the liquor license laws, and I think we can get one in my name. You could expand your business into the building next door.”
Which he also owned, Mariah mused. But Dinah had a criminal record and couldn’t get a license. The town needed a decent restaurant that sold wine by the glass—besides the one at the resort. Kurt was setting up his own competition—
While wiggling out from under the burden of his family’s business. Interesting.
Cass sauntered in, looking regal in her floor-length linen dress roped with turquoise beads. She took a seat beside Dinah. Teddy shot Mariah a look of amusement to show all was well. This had been planned. Cass working with a Kennedy—would wonders never cease?
Mariah watched the door, trying not to gnaw her fingernails to the bone. Brenda had insisted that Keegan be taken to the hospital. He’d lost too much blood for her to trust her healing abilities. No one ever admitted that Brenda was more than a nurse practitioner, but Mariah had experienced her healing touch. Her knee would have required a lot more rest and ice if Brenda hadn’t looked at it. In Hillvale, it was easy to fool oneself into believing the impossible, but Mariah was jock enough to have sprained various body parts before. She knew she was doing far better than she deserved after overworking her knee today.
Glancing up at headlights flashing across the café’s big front window, Mariah saw a flatbed truck pull into the parking lot. With most of the tourists gone back to the lodge, the street was empty enough for it to park across the parking spaces. In the twilight, the one lamp over the lot hadn’t yet come on. Who would make deliveries at this hour?
Gradually sensing her interest, one-by-one, the other customers turned to watch. Outside, Walker pulled up in his SUV as if this meeting had been planned. He stepped out and walked over to consult with the truck’s driver.
Behind the counter, Sam climbed down from her ladder to watch.
Glumly, Mariah realized that this was what her life had become—watching trucks in the parking lot. Well, she supposed she hadn’t had much of a social life even before she’d blown up her career and her identity. But she’d liked computers, even if she’d hated the company.
Swinging her foot down from the shelf, she left Sam to manage the cash register and limped toward the door.
Outside, the truck’s passenger got out. Mariah would recognize Mountain Man’s silhouette in any dark alley. What the hell was he doing back here already? Shouldn’t he be in the hospital having drugs pumped into him? Brenda, of course.
Realizing how worried she’d been, Mariah slowed her pace and waited so as not to reveal her anxiety. The truck driver got out, and along with Walker, the three men lowered the back of the flatbed and pulled down a ramp. Keegan strode up it. She thought he had one arm in a sling, but that didn’t appear to slow him any.
A moment later, a motor rumbled.
Mariah had to snap her jaw closed when he roared down the ramp riding an enormous ATV and steering with one damned arm.
Half the café’s remaining customers followed her out.
“Helmet?” Walker shouted over the noise of the motor.
Balancing on the seat, Keegan gestured with his good arm at the ATV’s wide back. Walker rummaged inside and produced two h
elmets. Satisfied, he handed them to Keegan. Keegan chose one and held the other out.
It took Mariah a moment to understand he was handing it to her.
“We need to haul Val’s cart back,” Keegan shouted over the roar of the motor. “Walker will follow us as far as he can.”
He wanted to go back to the canyon? At night? Was he crazed?
Mariah grinned in delight and took the helmet. Now they were getting somewhere.
Seventeen
July 10: Tuesday, early evening
Keegan heaved a sigh of relief when Mariah took the rear seat and wrapped her arms around him. He had despised looking like a wet noodle today. He had hated worse that he’d had to disappoint her by leaving the job undone and any crystals unearthed.
To vent his frustration, he’d spent the afternoon with the blessed use of his cell phone while the hospital left him sitting around waiting for doctors and stitches. He’d called his family first—his father was being tested for heart trouble and had been unable to come to the phone. The upsetting news had him grinding his teeth in impatience to be home.
In the meantime, shooters in a crystal canyon needed investigation.
He started with finding an off-road vehicle to reach the canyon. He had some vague notion his action would clear a path to Mariah’s bed. That she willingly clung to him now went a long way toward boosting his hopes.
After the ATV, he’d hunted down news stories about the info-dump from a few years back. Like Wikileaks, the media had given the explosion of documents a name—Expoleaks, after the website where the information had been parked. He’d already read and studied the material stripping the secrets of his family corporation, so this afternoon, he’d hunted out the sections on Macro Computers.
If Mariah had been the hacker, Keegan couldn’t imagine how she’d ferreted out so many details without an army of help. She’d tracked bank accounts as well as inflammatory e-mails, insider corporate data, and embarrassingly personal information. She might as well have gone into every single hard drive in Macro and dumped the contents and entire lives on the internet. Didn’t the executive trolls she’d scorned use passwords? Security?
If Mariah was the Expoleaks hacker, he ought to dump her off a mountainside for what she’d done to his family.
But just the possibility that she’d blasted light on the despicable Macro trolls increased his admiration. Was that perverse?
Rather than think too hard, he stuck to enjoying the experience of having Mariah’s arms around his middle. She wasn’t shy about leaning against his back. He could feel her unfettered breasts pressed against his bandages. After a day of lying around, he apparently still had enough blood in him to be aroused. He’d spent a lot of time pondering her comment that she used sex to release tension like other women used wine. That had probably infected his brain.
He halted the ATV at the end of the paved road near the farm entrance. Walker parked his SUV and got out, shouldering a rifle.
“Mariah, you want to wait in my car while we go up to get the cart?” Walker asked.
Keegan snorted and waited in expectation.
“Tell you what, Chief,” she called back. “Why don’t you give me the rifle, and you can sit here and write love notes to Sam.”
Keegan smothered a laugh of appreciation.
“I ought to do just that,” Walker grumbled, heading up the trail on foot. “Give me a head start, at least.”
“He should have just given me the rifle,” she grumbled.
“He’s the cop, you’re not,” Keegan pointed out, starting up the engine again. He didn’t need to mention that she probably didn’t have a gun license—not under the name of Mariah, anyway.
The woman behind the Expoleaks website had been eventually identified as an engineer in Macro Computer’s head office, Zoe Ascension de Cervantes—a perfect name for this defiant princess who tilted at windmills and won.
Of course, she’d killed her career and future in the process. Zoe had disappeared after the info-dump, relentlessly hounded by journalists, lawyers, and government officials—which pretty much explained everything about Mariah except how she did it. He’d save his profound admiration for her courage and defiance until he’d learned that tricky piece of the puzzle.
Since he heard no argument, Keegan rumbled the ATV off the road and down the dirt rut that they’d taken that morning. Walker stayed to one side and waved as they drove on.
The golf cart was still sitting forlornly where they’d left it. With his one arm in a sling, Keegan climbed off more awkwardly than he liked. Equally hampered by her knee, Mariah swung off to examine the cart, presumably for a place to hitch it to the ATV. He had to remember she had an engineer’s mind, like his. That they were both slightly warped in different ways almost made sense.
“Do you think that machine of yours can go into the canyon?” she asked as he pulled the chains out of the storage container.
“You planning on wearing armor?” Together, they fastened the chain to the cart. “Men with guns aren’t as harmless as suits with keyboards.”
“Trolls don’t wear suits, although they’d swagger in armor if you gave it to them,” she said in scorn.
“Fine then, this isn’t a video game. This is real life. For all we know, those are armed pot growers down there. Let the professionals handle them.”
“I’ve been down in that canyon and no one has ever bothered me. There’s no water for growing anything. Weed just doesn’t make sense,” she argued.
“I admire your willingness to tackle monsters, but our expertise lies elsewhere.” He hooked the cable and carried the other end to the ATV.
She glared at him. “I’m not tackling monsters. I prefer to let them eat each other. I’m not admirable in any way.”
“Fine then. You’re a cuddly ball of feathers, and no one thought you were a danger when you were in the canyon on your own.”
He couldn’t see her glare but he felt it. They both knew she wasn’t cuddly.
“Wouldn’t it be a giant yawn if that’s all Daisy’s death meant? That she’d found an illegal weed patch?” she grumbled.
“If I’m to believe you and Cass, Daisy directed us to that sketch in the cart. It’s about more than narcotics if someone local is involved. But I agree. I still need to see the volcanic rock in that canyon.” He tested the connection between the two vehicles, then glanced down the hill. “No sign of Walker. It must be more than two miles. Let’s go down and relieve him of his duty.”
“And come back?” she proposed. “No one’s shot at us.”
“We’re not on the edge of the canyon either,” he said dryly, swinging back in the seat. “I want full use of my arm and an army before we come back. Maybe dogs and elephants.”
He waited for her to call him a gutless boffin. Bri had flung such epithets at him since childhood. He preferred to think he was too smart to do dumb things—which made him boring and non-heroic, he knew.
“Will a posse of Lucys with staffs and Daisy’s guardians suffice?” She climbed on behind him, not scoffing at his suggestion, to his relief.
So, maybe he had a chance?
“Invite me over tonight, and we’ll draw battle plans,” he suggested, preferring not to consider a posse of eccentrics carrying crystal staffs wandering these hills. He started the engine before she could answer. He’d give her time to think about it.
They waved at Walker as the ATV crawled down the hill tugging the golf cart. By jogging, the chief almost kept up with their slow pace back to the road.
Once they reached the ranch entrance and Walker’s car, Keegan turned off the ATV and called back to the chief, “Go on back to Sam. We should be good from here.”
Walker inspected the connection between the cart and their vehicle and nodded approval. “That should work. I’ve talked to the sheriff. He can’t provide a helicopter until next week. I’m asking a few of the locals to go in with me tomorrow. If we arrive with enough vehicles and weapons, anyone there should t
hink twice about shooting at us.”
“We’re going with you,” Mariah insisted. “The locals will want to ride in on horses. You need noise.”
“I can bring noise,” Walker said, his tone a reminder that he had men and money at his command. “But if I invite locals, I guess Lucys get included, don’t they?”
“You didn’t think you could keep them out?” Keegan asked with humor. “Give us a time and place.”
“Tomorrow, at dawn, in the parking lot. I’ve already lined up my posse. You’re on your own with the Lucys.” Walker swung into his vehicle and closed the door.
“Definitely a planning session tonight,” Mariah said with decision. “It’s early. Cass can call them.”
Keegan had been hoping for just the two of them to do the planning—stupid thought.
Mariah didn’t have to tackle Cass. By the time they returned to town, the Lucys were gathering in the meeting house where Kurt’s uncle Lance had been setting up an art gallery.
“Walker must have told Sam,” she murmured. They climbed off the ATV and watched the steady stream into the old steepled barn at the end of town. “If we’re not meeting at the vortex, Sam really is taking over Cass’s place.”
“And this means what in Lucy World?” Keegan asked, draping his good arm over her shoulder.
She’d allowed that when he was weak. He was obviously recovering rapidly, but Mariah still permitted the embrace, trying on companionship to see how it fit. It felt scarily good. She had never been a girly-girl who needed men, so maybe it was just having someone who understood, who didn’t run when she told horror stories. Plus animal magnetism, she had to admit.
“I can’t say what it means other than that there’s a pretty strong connection between Sam and Cass,” she said. “They share genetics, and they’ve shared the same brain. The weird part is that Cass has fought the Kennedys for decades, but Sam is as much Kennedy as she is Lucy. Choosing Lance’s gallery over the vortex may be her idea of finding a common ground.”
Crystal Vision Page 16
