by Stacey Jay
I try one more time—hoping sliding the glass down might be easier than smashing it—but still, nothing happens.
“My head’s messed up,” I pant. “You’ll have to break the glass.”
“I can’t,” Tucker says.
“Yes, you can, you—”
“I can’t,” he repeats. “I can move shit around, but smashing things isn’t in my bag of tricks. Can’t work up that much force. Already tried to work it down and got nothing.”
“Shit,” I say, then decide I’d rather shit not be my last word, and try to think of something else to say, something other than “I’m sorry.” Because the only thing shittier than shit is sorry. I’m tired of being sorry, I’m tired of other people being sorry. I just want something in my damned life to work the hell out for once! Argh!
The water level surges. Swamp water burns my nose and I taste mud and rotten things and choke on them. “Shit!” My face presses into the ceiling. I pull in my last gasp of air.
This is it.
Shit for a final word it is.
Big breath.” Tucker’s voice is strained from keeping his head tilted back far enough to breathe.
His hand curls under my armpit as he pulls me through the front seats into the back. There’s more room at the top here—the truck’s going down nose-first—but not much. I brace my foot against the floor, keeping my head above water when Tucker pulls away.
“I’ll kick out my window and push you through first,” he says. “Got it?”
“No. You should go—”
“Don’t argue with me!” He sucks in a breath and starts kicking the crap out of the back window. Even with water resistance working against him, it’s a manly display. The window creaks and jumps in its grooves and the truck dips on the right side, but no slivers break the smooth surface of the glass.
We’re over. We’ve got less than ten seconds to breathe; maybe two or three minutes of consciousness before we pass out from lack of oxygen.
No matter how hard he pounds, there’s no way Tucker’s going to bust through with his boot. He needs something sharp enough to shatter the glass, or at least a weak place in the—
“The back,” I gasp as the water closes over my head.
The back glass with the broken windshield wiper, where the acid from the pixie bodies lingered long enough to start burning holes. It might make it weak enough to break.
Too bad I’m not sure Tucker heard me. I open my eyes, but the water is so filthy I can’t see. Not like seeing is going to help much at this point. Neither will floating here with my lungs starting to burn, hoping Tucker was listening in that last second.
I squeeze my eyes shut, grab hold of the headrest, draw my knees to my chest, and drive them at the back window. I hit hard enough to jar my bones, but the glass holds strong. Water swirls around my legs as Tucker’s feet hit a second after mine, but there’s still no change in pressure in the cabin.
Maybe together, maybe if we—
I pull my knees in and wait until Tucker’s energy shifts before kicking my legs as hard as I can. We hit the glass at the same moment. The surface weakens, crumpling under our feet. Hope makes my heart beat faster, but I know we haven’t broken through yet. I pull in and kick out again.
And again. And again.
By the fifth kick, my pulse is racing and my body screaming for breath. I can’t keep up this level of physical activity without oxygen for long. I need to breathe, and sooner or later my nose and mouth are going to stop listening to logic and—
On the sixth kick, my feet smack the window and keep going, sending chunks of glass floating into the bayou. Tucker and I dive for the opening, knocking elbows and knees as we push through and kick toward the surface. Screw the pixies and their acid spit, I can’t stay under water for a second longer.
I break first, sucking in a desperate breath that makes my lungs feel the most wonderful kind of horrible. They ache and burn and tremble—but air! Sweet air! I pull in another breath, relishing the tingle as oxygen races through my blood before catching a blurry glimpse of bluish green bodies and frantic wings. I dive back under. Once I’m a few feet below the surface, I swim hard in what I hope is the right direction.
I’m disoriented after the near escape and still light-headed and panicked, but I force myself to take ten long underwater strokes with my arms and legs before floating back to the surface and sipping in a breath as quietly as I can. This plan isn’t going to work if I make a bunch of noise as I swim away. I peek to the right and left. This time there are no pixies in sight, and, as I slip back under, I’ve recovered enough to look for Tucker under the water.
I open my eyes, though the water is murky and for all I know Tucker could be invisible again. It’s instinct, and I know I’m headed toward shore, so it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye out for tree roots and rocks and snakes and gators and . . .
And strange metal and rubber portal–type things set into the side of the bank.
My arms reverse their circle, stopping my forward motion. I’m not sure what I’m seeing, but I know I want a better look. I kick closer. The circular shape resembles a giant drain cover—at least four feet in diameter—but at the center, the metal gives way to black. Algae-covered rubber puckers in a circle with a swirl at the center, like a giant, menacing cervix waiting to give birth to anything brave enough to push through to its other side.
I have an idea.
A bizarre idea about the cave and why no one has found the entrance and why the people working here might not be worried about posting a guard on the road. The idea also involves heading straight for that thing and leaving Tucker behind. I didn’t ask him to join my mission, and I don’t believe for a second that he isn’t spying for the Big Man. I do, however, believe he thinks I’m a good woman.
And I’d kind of like to believe he’s right. And a good woman doesn’t swim off and leave a friend to find his way out of trouble alone, even an invisible, manly, immune-to-fairy-venom friend who’s equipped to take care of himself. I would have drowned without Tucker. I owe him the chance to play.
Play. As if this in any way resembles play.
But as I poke my head up and scan the surface of the water, I can’t deny that the electricity buzzing along my skin isn’t entirely unpleasant. Great. I’m becoming an adrenaline junkie. As if I don’t have enough dependencies.
A man-sized ripple appears in the water a few feet away, making my heart beat faster. “Tucker!” I hiss, not wanting to attract the attention of the pixies spreading out to scan the area around the truck.
Tucker doesn’t respond, but the circle ripples caused by his emergence are replaced by a double-V shape that cuts my way. He stops in front of me, treading water, brushing my leg with his a few times until we figure out where our bodies are in relation to each other.
“I think I found the entrance to the cave,” I whisper.
“Where?”
“There’s an underwater portal thing down there.” I jab a thumb over my shoulder. “Set into the bank.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says, becoming visible with another startling jump cut. “Creative bunch, aren’t they?”
“Very.”
“Think there are guards on the other side?”
I shake my head. “I couldn’t tell.”
“I’m bettin’ there are guards.”
“The lab might not even be here right now.”
“Might not matter. Could still be guards.”
My breath huffs out. “It looks like a big rubber cervix, I don’t think—”
“You seen a lot of cervixes?”
“I was in med school. I’ve seen my share,” I pant, falling silent when a pixie flies within whisper-hearing range. Tucker and I sink lower, until only our eyes are above the waterline.
I widen mine in a way that asks, Are we going to do this, or not?
He rolls his in a way that answers, Fine, let’s go, nutjob.
With a final nod, I sink below the surface. Once un
der, I turn back to Tucker—planning to point the way—but he’s already kicking toward the portal, determined to be born into danger before me. I swim after him, dodging his paddling feet, giving his butt a push when he has trouble getting his shoulders through the rubber seal. I stay close as his feet disappear—not wanting the hole to close again before I start through—and stick my fist through before his boot clears.
I shove my other fist inside and spread my arms. The rubber seal is tight, but the force of the water trying to push in behind me shoves me forward. I find slick handles on either side of the portal’s interior, and use them to pull my head—chin tucked for protection—through the hole. Like a newborn baby, the rest of my body spills out in a rush. My hips stick for a second, but a wiggle frees them and soon I’m lying on a cold metal platform next to a drenched Tucker.
He’s not lying down. He’s crouched like a cat about to spring, and he looks pissed. I flip onto my stomach, following his glare to the edge of the platform, where two men with rifles stand staring at us.
Guards. Check another point off for Tucker.
We’re facing armed opposition, but the pair—a lean black kid who doesn’t look a day over eighteen, and a thicker black man with a soft middle and pudgy cheeks that give testimony to how cushy this guarding-the-portal job must usually be—haven’t had time to use the walkie-talkies hanging on their belts. And their guns are still pointed at the floor. They’re thrown and the best thing we can do is take advantage of their confusion.
“Hi.” I pull my knees up and push onto my hands. “How y’all doing?”
The younger kid’s forehead furrows like an angry puppy’s, but the pudgy man only blinks and stares. I smile and flip my wet hair over my shoulder.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to surprise you. We’re here to see Bill?” I plop onto my bottom cross-legged, trying to look nonthreatening as I inch across the drain at the edge of the platform, closer to Pudge. Tucker tenses beside me. He’s going to go for the kid; I can feel it. Pudge is bigger, but the kid is smarter and he’s on his way through Surprise to Action.
“Who are you?” Pudge asks.
“Bill’s friends.” I bounce off the platform. The unruly boobs Fernando teased me about yesterday bounce with me and Pudge’s eyes shift. My moment has come.
I dive for him, grabbing his rifle at both ends, using it as leverage to pull him close enough for the knee I lift to connect with his groin. Hard. So hard I wince myself as he groans and crumples to the ground. Pudge’s hands spasm, and I rip the rifle away. Beside me, Tucker already has the kid on the ground with his own gun pressed tight to his throat.
“Knock him out,” he whispers. “Use the gun.”
I look down to where Pudge writhes on the floor. What if I hit him too hard? What if I kill him? I don’t want to die or be caught by whoever Pudge works for, but my entire reason for being here is to make sure people aren’t indiscriminately murdered, and Pudge hasn’t proved himself a person who has to be taken out.
I’m scanning the ground—looking for something to bind and gag the men with—when Tucker lets out a frustrated sigh. He hauls the kid beneath him to his feet like he’s pulling a baby out of a crib, and with much rippling of muscles, kneels on the platform and shoves the boy’s head through the portal. I gasp as the kid’s legs thrash, but then Tucker’s hand is on his rump and the boy is out in the water and Tucker is turning back for Pudge.
“Wait,” I hiss, as he lifts Pudge with only a bit more difficulty. “The pixies are still out there, what if—”
“Never seen pixies try to hurt anyone but you,” he grunts.
“But—”
“We’re trying to get people out of here before it blows, right?” Tucker plunks Pudge down on the platform. Despite being in obvious pain, Pudge doesn’t put up a fight and when Tucker shoves him forward, he pushes his arms through the tight rubber and slithers eagerly out into the bayou.
After he disappears, Tucker grabs a lever set into the upper right-hand side of the portal and gives it a tug. Like the cover of an old-fashioned peephole, a metal circle slides down to block the entrance, ensuring Pudge and Kid are trapped on the other side.
“How did you know that was there?” I ask.
“Figured there had to be some way to close it,” Tucker pants as he fetches Kid’s rifle from the ground. “There’s got to be another way in and out.”
“What makes you so sure?” I grab Pudge’s gun and hope I remember what to do with a rifle. I’ve been a handgun girl for a long time.
“Nobody’s running this way.” Tucker points down the narrow concrete hallway that curves darkly to our right.
“I don’t think they had time to call for help. I didn’t—”
“Listen.” Tucker puts a still damp finger to my lips.
I listen, straining my ears until I hear a faint blerngh, blerngh, blerngh echoing down the tunnel. “An alarm?” I ask, lips moving against his calloused skin.
“Sounds like it.” Tuckers drops his hand back to his side. “Guess your ex found what he was lookin’ for at his first stop.”
“It could be something else,” I say, but my gut tells me it’s not.
“What’s the plan now, Red?”
I pull in a breath. “Check this place out, try to get people to safety if they’re not already getting to safety on their own. Find Hitch and help him if we can.” I shrug. “Don’t get shot or blown up?”
“Sounds good.” He grins, then bends to press a kiss to my cheek.
It only lasts a second and is as chaste as Marcy’s hug, but it doesn’t make me feel like Marcy’s hug. It makes me dizzy. Must be the oxygen deprivation from all the time underwater.
“What was that for?” I whisper.
“In case I don’t get to do it later. But I don’t think a peck on the neck is going to be good enough.”
Before I can correct him—the “peck” was on my cheek not my neck—Tucker’s free arm is around me, pulling me into him. Our cold, wet clothes smash together, but the places where we touch warm up fast. He’s hard in all the places that I’m soft and something primal inside of me surges to the surface with a purr of approval. I wrap my arm around his shoulder, my free fingers threading through his long, damp hair, bracing myself as he leans down and our mouths finally meet.
And then he’s kissing me, rough and wild and abandoned, like we’re in a secret underground lab that could explode any minute and this might be the last kiss we ever share with anyone.
I kiss him the same way—lips open, heart open, every part of me reaching out to every part of him because, god, have I wanted to do this since the first minute I saw Tucker stretched out on my bed looking so bleeping pretty I couldn’t believe he was one of the bad guys.
Screw right and wrong and Cane and Hitch and should and shouldn’t and all the rules of relationships that I’ve never figured out how to live by. Tucker’s right, this might be our last chance, our final opportunity to see if we physically parry as well as we verbally thrust.
His hand moves down to cup my ass, my leg wraps around his waist, and we press even tighter together. I think about dropping my gun and going for this with both hands, but I don’t. Instead I mumble, “There’s something hot about kissing you while holding a rifle,” into his mouth.
“It’s not the rifle,” he says, fingers digging into my hips, pulling me closer to where he is—almost annoyingly—as ridiculously hung as I’d assumed he’d be. “I’m just a damn fine kisser.”
“Your ego is enormous.” I pull away, breath coming fast.
“That’s not my ego, sweetcheeks.” His dimple pops and one of those wicked blue eyes winks and I, quite unexpectedly, start to laugh.
I’m laughing hard enough to make my side hurt by the time he swacks one last kiss on my forehead and starts down the hall ahead of me. I bite my cheek and follow, trying to feel bad about wasting even a few seconds kissing. But I can’t seem to whip up a batch of shame.
“You realize we’re going t
o have to repeat the experiment,” I whisper as I draw even with him, my rifle pressed to my shoulder, eyes scanning the hall ahead. “To see if you’re that good when you’re not under pressure.”
“So you admit that I’m good.”
“I admit you’re better than good.”
I see him smile out of the corner of my eye. “Careful, Red,” he says, voice husky. “You keep talkin’ like that, and you’re going to make that ego you hate even bigger.”
“If that ego were any bigger, it would be obscene.”
He laughs. “I like it when you talk about my ego, and you’re not really talking about my ego.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “And I . . .”
My smile fades as the hall ahead opens up. Tucker and I press against the right wall, creeping forward, slowly bringing a locker room into view. Two long benches occupy the center of the space and shiny metal lockers line the walls. A labeled brown door on the left side leads the way to the showers, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is washing down and the rest of the area is deserted.
The blerngh, blerngh of the alarm is louder here, so loud that at first I can’t hear what Tucker whispers over his shoulder.
“What?” I hiss, pressing up onto tiptoe to get closer to his mouth.
He smiles down at me. “Uniforms.” He points to a row of hooks near the shower door I hadn’t noticed before. White hazmat suits hang limply against the wall, looking a little worse for wear, dribbling something greenish brown onto the concrete floor.
“They look used,” I say.
“Also looks like they’ve got hoods.” He steps farther into the room.
I catch his arm. “Do we really want to go in there looking like the bad guys?”
“Think your boyfriend might shoot us?” he asks, staring at something I can’t yet see.
“He might.” I can’t resist adding, “And he’s not my boyfriend.”
“Really?” Tucker grunts. “Looks like your boyfriend. Big, beefy detective-type without a sense of humor? Bald and—”
“What?” I push around Tucker, getting a clear view through the locker room to a larger space where flashing blue strobes cast rows of computers and monitor-covered walls in an eerie light. At the center of the room, with his gun drawn and his scariest expression on his face, stands the closest thing I have to a boyfriend.
