“Why the hell didn’t you say something before I dragged you hiking in the dark? If I had known, I would’ve—” He broke off because there wasn’t much he could’ve done different. They had needed to get moving before the cops arrived, and calling for a ’port pickup wasn’t an option. He had to stay the hell away from Skywatch until he’d dealt with Keban, or things could get seriously ugly.
“I didn’t tell you partly because my instincts are telling me that you’re right—we’re better off staying out and here following our noses. Or, rather, your nose.” That was the plan—if none of her inquiries yielded better options, they would return to the crash site in the morning to see if he could track the bastard’s scent trail.
“If that was ‘partly’ it, what was the rest?”
“Because I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” she snapped, eyes suddenly flaring. “I don’t need a man to tell me how to run my life.”
“Whoa.” He held up both hands. “Rewind. I wasn’t—”
“I’m not talking about you.” She glared at the phone she had tossed on the desk.
She hadn’t been arguing with a contact, he realized suddenly. It had been a man. Leave now, he told himself. Close the door. Instead, he bared his teeth. “Boyfriend back in LA giving you grief about being gone?”
She shot him an unreadable look. “He’s just a friend. And I’m in Denver now.”
“You moved back?” That shouldn’t have bothered him, just as it shouldn’t have bothered him that she had a “friend.” She had her own life, her own existence. And he didn’t have any fucking right to comment on either.
And if he kept telling himself that, maybe it would sink in.
“I flew back when I heard the VWs had gunned you down. Then, after . . .” She hesitated. “I stayed. Denver was home.” Or it had been once he was gone, he realized. And he couldn’t blame her for that. She continued: “It wasn’t hard to move the locator business. It’s mostly Internet searches and phone calls, with the occasional plane ride and face-to-face for variety.”
“When did you get hurt?” What she had described wasn’t sloppy, it was suicidal. And if he focused on that, it would keep him from going where he way didn’t belong.
“No.” She crossed her arms, shaking her head. “No more ‘remember when’ crap. I only told you about my getting hurt so you would know I’m not the ass kicker I used to be. Not to get sympathy points, or what-the-hell-ever. So just leave it alone.”
“You said a few years, which puts it right around the last time we saw each other.” He had been pissed off about getting convicted for a bunch of small shit that he knew had come from her, deep in withdrawal from the black artifact having been locked away with the rest of his effects, and about bursting with rage and self-pity. And he had been fucking ugly to her. Hateful. Worse, even, than Keban at his nastiest.
He should know. It was one of the two scenes Anntah had shown him, over and over again, using the guilt, shame, and pain to break him down to nothing, so he could be rebuilt tougher and stronger, and ready to be a good Nightkeeper.
Reese didn’t say anything, but although his instincts weren’t as uncannily accurate as hers, they were good enough, and right now they were telling him he had nailed it. After that last visit, when he’d pretty much blamed her for everything that had gone wrong in his life, she had headed home. And she had freaking decompressed.
Son of a bitch. “If I made you—” he began, but broke off when she practically exploded out of the chair.
She got right in his face, and poked him hard in the chest, eyes blazing. “You can cut the big brother shit right now, Mendez. It won’t play anymore. I’m responsible for my own choices, my own mistakes. Nobody makes me do anything.”
She drilled him again, and he had to stop himself from catching her hand, holding it, holding her. His blood heated, and in the back of his brain something dark and greedy whispered: Mine. Except she wasn’t his, hadn’t ever been. Couldn’t ever be, given the threat of the serpent bloodline.
And fuck it all, he should’ve knocked her out, called for a pickup, and left her with a note that if Rabbit didn’t wipe her memory and Strike didn’t’port her home and leave her alone, there would be hell to pay.
He took a step back, which put him in his own room, and raised his hands. “Reese, calm down. If you—”
“Don’t tell me what to do.” She shot him a look of pure venom. Then she slammed the door that connected their rooms. And locked it on her side.
The next morning not long after dawn, Reese opened her side of the connector and tapped on the other panel. Expecting the click of the lock, she jolted when the door swung open immediately to reveal Dez, wearing desert-camo pants and a tight, dark brown Under Armour shirt that zipped up to his throat and showed every ridge and bulge. His sleeves were pushed up on his forearms, baring not just the dark blue-green tattoo bands that hid his scars, but also the three stark black glyphs on his right forearm: the swirling ovals of the warrior′s mark; the plumed serpent’s head; and the stacked, intricately decorated circles that identified him as a lightning wielder. She had first seen the marks the day she had grabbed him out from underneath Strike’s nose. At the time, she had thought they were just affectations. Now, though, she knew they were real, understood what they meant.
He’s a new man, Strike had written of Dez. But if that was true, why had he gone off on his own? What wasn’t he telling the others? That’s what I’m trying to figure out, she told herself, ignoring the twist of unease that warned her motives weren’t so simple.
“Morning,” she said to him, holding out a Dunkin’ Donuts bag containing three egg sandwiches and a twenty-ounce Mountain Dew. “Here.”
He took the bag with a raised eyebrow. “Making sure I’ve got enough calories on board to do the bloodhound thing?”
Her face heated. “More like an apology for losing it last night. I’d like to blame the pain meds, but the truth is that I probably would have melted down regardless. Yesterday was . . .” She trailed off.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Yesterday definitely was.” He paused. “Feeling better?”
“Fine, thanks.” And she was, physically. Emotionally . . . well, she would deal.
“You ready to get on the road?”
She exhaled, then nodded. “Yeah.” The sooner they found Keban, the sooner she could get back to reality and away from a man who was simultaneously the boy she had loved, the guy who had broken her heart, and a stranger she didn’t trust in the slightest.
They drove up a winding pathway, to the top of a forty-some-foot cliff overlooking the S curve where Keban had abandoned his car the night before. Reese’s gut and basic logic said that the winikin had made his getaway in a second vehicle that he had stashed somewhere, and that the plateau would’ve made a good hiding spot. But Dez spent only a few minutes pacing back and forth along the flattened parking area before he shook his head. “I’m not sensing anything up here. You see anything down below?”
Lowering the binoculars she’d been using to scan the crash site, she said, “Nothing is jumping out at me.” With the wreckers apparently having come and gone the night before, there wasn’t much left of the crash beyond a crumpled section of guardrail, some skid marks, and scattered debris. “I keep thinking there should be more,” she said, remembering the jolt of impact and the wrench of going over the edge . . . and then his magic feathering over her skin, making her feel like she was inside a giant Fourth of July sparkler.
He came up beside her, standing close enough that his sleeve brushed against hers. “There probably is more. If not right here, then somewhere along the trail.”
“Booby traps, you mean.”
Nodding grimly, he said, “He needs to slow me down enough that meeting him on the twenty-first is my only option. He’ll want to call the shots and set the scene.”
“Do you know what kind of a spell he’s planning on casting?”
“He can’t do magic. That’s why he
needs me.” It was an answer of sorts, but she was keenly aware that he was avoiding her eyes.
Damn it. More disappointed than she should have been, she turned back to surveying the site. “If there’s a trap down there, I can’t see it.”
“I’ll keep my senses wide open.” He shrugged out of his desert-camo jacket and hooked it over her shoulders. His eyes were unreadable behind dark, frameless sunglasses. “Stay up here and watch my back.”
Until she was surrounded by his secondhand body heat, she hadn’t really realized she was cold—her jacket was fine for A-to-B-ing it in the city but not much else, which meant that the weight of his coat was a major improvement.
Not wanting to examine her sudden flush of warmth any further, she nodded. “Will do.”
As he headed down the narrow trail that led to the road, she folded back the sleeves and tried not to think that once upon a time, his simple gesture would have made her weak. Now it just made her hope they found Keban quickly, and that Dez’s secrets would turn out to be no big deal.
A few minutes later, her armband gave a faint crackle on the short-range channel. “You reading me?” He was well back in the trees down at the base of the overlook.
“I’m here.”
“I’m not sensing anyone else, and I’m not seeing or smelling anything that screams ‘booby trap.’ How’s the traffic looking?” They had agreed it would be best for them to stay out of sight. Two totaled cars with no bodies or identifiable owners would have made local law enforcement curious, if not downright twitchy.
She scanned the road. “There are two cars coming toward you from the south and a smallish box truck coming the other way. Once they’ve gone past, you’ll have a gap.”
“Ten-four.” He waited out the traffic, his shadow-dappled body so motionless that he practically disappeared into the tree line, even though she knew exactly where to look.
When the box truck had lumbered past with a gear-jamming belch and rattle, he slipped out of concealment and ghosted over to where shattered glass glittered blue-white in the sun. From there, he walked careful parallel tracks back and forth, searching.
She kept up a constant scan, watching not just the road, but also the forest and the sky, because Keban wasn’t their only potential problem. The Nightkeepers were also fighting rearguard actions against Iago and his makol, and the missing villagers raised the gruesome possibility that a Banol Kax could already have slipped through the barrier. The sum total of it all made her feel very small.
Catching movement on the horizon, she straightened. “You’ve got company coming,” she told him. “Three pickup trucks, matching paint jobs, orange bubbles. DPW, maybe? They’re not cops, but it’d be a good idea for you to make yourself scarce.”
“Ten-four.” He headed for the trees, but stopped halfway there and crouched down near a small trio of stones at the edge of the parking area. “Wait. I’m getting something. I think he—Fuck. Reese, run!”
Vapor puffed up, and he went down hard.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Dez!” Reese screamed. Fear and adrenaline hammered through her in a terrifying fusillade as she raced down the trail, scrambling, stumbling, moving as fast as she could and deathly afraid of what she would find at the bottom.
When she hit level ground, she clapped an arm across her mouth and breathed through the heavy jacket sleeve, hoping to filter out whatever had taken him down. He lay in a heap, motionless. Heart pounding, she dropped to her knees beside him; sharp gravel dug into her shins, but she barely felt the pain as she clamped her free hand around his wrist, right along the tattoo-covered scar.
His pulse throbbed beneath her thumb. Thank Christ. But then a strange, spicy musk filtered through her makeshift face mask, coating her throat and putting a foul taste on her tongue.
She went light-headed, and fear kicked, hard and hot—but she didn’t collapse, didn’t convulse. And after a moment, the symptoms passed, though the smell remained. Either the gas was dissipating or it was Nightkeeper-specific. Risking it, she dropped her arm and took a shallow breath. Nothing happened. But it was one thing for her to breathe the tainted air, another for him. She had to get him out of there, but how?
“Dez?” She shook him, but didn’t get a response, pulled off his sunglasses and cracked an eyelid, but didn’t see anything but rolled-back white.
The ground beneath her picked up a faint vibration, followed seconds later by an engine hum. Shit. Even if nobody connected her and Dez to last night’s accident and the untraceable Jeep, a trip to the ER would raise way too many questions. But if he’d been gassed, the ER might be the best place for him. Her throat tightened as she thought of Anna wandering the halls of Skywatch with her eyes unfocused, her mind far away.
She shook him harder, fingers digging into the heavy muscles of his upper arms. “Come on! Wake up. We’ve got to move.” The trucks were getting closer.
He stirred. Groaned.
Relief slashed through her. “Dez!”
White gleamed through cracked eyelids; his mouth worked. “Son of a . . . fuck.”
“That about covers it,” she said as the trucks rounded the corner and the first one did a wheel waggle of surprise and slowed down. There were forest service markings on the doors of all three, tools in the back of the first two and a big generator-compressor combo in the third.
“I told you to run,” Dez slurred, cracking an eye to glare at her.
“I did. Just not in the direction you meant.” She grinned at him. Logic said she should have been terrified, which she was. But suddenly, on another level she felt more alive than she had in a long, long time. Maybe she was reacting to the gas after all. Except that instead of being foggy, she suddenly felt functional.
The techno-magic armbands picked up some static of radio traffic, reminding her to strip them off. She snagged his gun, too, just as truck numero uno turned off and rolled in their direction. The other two rumbled past and accelerated away. Working quickly, she safetied her .38 and dumped it in one of the big inner pockets of Dez’s jacket, which was too warm now, making her sweat. The heavy weight of the weapon pulled the coat askew until she balanced it off with his .44 on the other side.
“Come on.” She crouched, grabbed him under one arm and around the back of his neck and helped him sit up. His body was heavy, his skin smooth and warm. “I need you to play pukingly hungover for me. Got it?”
“No problem,” he slurred. “Son of a bitch left a trip wire, and . . .” His eyes rolled again and his head lolled to rest between her breasts.
New fear spurted through her as she realized that whatever the winikin had used this time, it was hitting harder, lasting longer. Keban doesn’t want him dead, she reminded herself, just slowed down for a few days. Then again, the winikin had also spent nearly a decade in a mental hospital.
“Are you okay?” The guy who got out of the truck was in his late twenties, sandy haired and fine boned. Wearing a gray-buff uniform with black stripes at the shoulders and pockets, and with a quick, jerky way of moving, he looked like a sandpiper picking its way across a beach.
Thinking fast, she dropped into fluttery female mode and gave him a wide-eyed, you’re-my-hero look. “Oh, thank you so much for stopping!”
He puffed up. “I’ve got a first aid kit in the truck, or I could call for an—”
“He’s not hurt, just hungover,” she cut in before he called in more sirens and flashing lights. “He swore he’d be fine for a hike, but . . .” She trailed off, sending him a ‘please-won’t-you-save-me’ moue. “Could you help me get him to the car?”
“I tole you I’m fiiine,” Dez slurred. “You want to hike, lesss get going.”
“Right,” she said to him while shooting a conspiratorial eye roll at the sandpiper. “We’re going. Straight back to the hotel.”
“Oh.” Rescue fantasies deflating, the spindly ranger nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a counterweight. But then his expression went dubious as he scanned the empty shou
lder, then looked up to the plateau. “Your car isn’t all the way up there, is it? He looks kind of, uh, big.”
Not to mention that the ranger probably only hit one fifty after a heavy meal, her neck was already sore, and Dez was leaning heavily against her like he was settling in to stay. “How about you wait here with him, and I’ll go get the car?”
The sandpiper′s face brightened. “I’ve got water.”
“Perfect.” Together, they got Dez the dozen or so feet to the shade of the truck and propped him up against a rear tire that smelled faintly of dog piss. As she headed up the trail, she got a parting image of big, badass Snake Mendez being force-fed bottled water.
Not willing to bet that Keban was long gone, she kept a sharp watch on her surroundings as she retrieved the car, helped load Dez into it, thanked the sandpiper profusely, and got them on the road. Once they were rolling, she reholstered her .38 and headed back toward Farmington in case it turned out that they needed that ER, after all.
Then the shakes hit.
“Oh, shit.” She gripped the steering wheel two-handed as her stomach rolled sickly and her muscles knotted in a series of whole-body shudders that left her feeling disconnected from the vehicle, from everything, really.
What the hell was she doing? This was way out of her league, way beyond the adventure she had been looking for when she boarded the plane for Cancún. She was sneaking away from the cops—or at least away from a government official—for the second time in two days, and that so wasn’t her. This whole deal wasn’t her. Where the Nightkeepers operated outside the system, she worked right smack in the middle of it. She had a Social Security number; she paid her taxes; she voted. She had a year-long lease on a third-floor apartment she rarely used, fifteen payments left on a spunky little Mazda, and an off-and-on lover who wanted to be much more. That was her world. This wasn’t.
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