Not here? Was he on his way to her? How did they miss each other? Oh God I want my phone. “How long ago did he leave?” She pushed past Cadence and moved inside. Did she knock the brute out for no good reason, other than a little house arrest between friends?
“Not here. Not been here, except for after the bonding ceremony.”
She pulled the door closed and leaned against it. “You’re sure?” Where would they have taken him? Hundreds of cabins, he could be anywhere. He knew every Foo Fighters song there was, why choose that one?
Cadence made a sound of annoyance. “Jeez, I’m sure. He hasn’t been here for nearly a month. It’s been great. What’s with the inquisition?”
Run. Zeke wanted her to Run. Stick together. The unease she’d felt since they parted turned into liquid fear and flooded her body, making her shiver. She knew with every breath he’d never run without her. “Zeke is in trouble.”
“Who’s Zeke?”
Oh shit. “Zack, I mean Zack.”
“Why did you call him Zeke?”
She put her hands to her still shower wet hair and smoothed it back. “Look, what if I told you 31,000 men lost $4.5 million on a scheme that promised they could retire to a paradise tended by nude angels?”
Cadence palmed her forehead. “How did you get drugs in here?”
Think, think, where would they take him? “I’m not on drugs. It’s true, it happened in 1987. If you had internet you could look it up. We haven’t gotten any smarter since then. Lonely, isolated people do desperate things. Every year there are millions lost in love scams.”
“You’re making no sense. I’ve heard gossip that they have DMT here. It’s scary stuff. Makes you see things. They say it can make you experience your own death. Not a fun trip.”
“Listen to me. It’s not like what they’re telling you outside. Hawaii is still there. There’s no global epidemic of Ebola.”
“New people say that. It’s why we give you time to adjust.”
“Cadence.” The urge to shake the woman, to make her see the truth so she could help find Zeke was overwhelming. “Abundance is a nude angel scheme. Zack and I screwed up and now I think he’s in trouble, I have to find him.”
“You’re scaring me. You should go.”
She shook her head. Cadence couldn’t help, and she didn’t deserve to be frightened because Rory was climbing out of her own skin. “If he comes home, tell him, tell him...”
“You’re really scaring me.”
“Tell him I’m in love with him.”
Cadence’s face flushed pink. “In, what?”
She didn’t wait to explain. “Tell him that.”
Back outside she paced. A jumble of thoughts crowding out logic. She was in love with Zeke. Hard core to the bone and back. She needed to see him right now. There was no reason to feel so scared. He was smart and strong. He could handle himself. But she couldn’t know that he was fine until he told her to her face. Stick together.
The only one who would know anything was Orrin.
She’d have to make him tell her what he’d done with Zeke. She about-faced and headed towards HQ.
“Not so fast.”
The voice from the shadows made her stop.
“You did a dumb thing getting pregnant. You made an enemy. Your brother did a dumb thing crossing Orrin.”
She peered into the darkness, recognizing the voice. “Beth, you got something to say, come out here and say it.”
The older woman stepped out from between two cabins. “They took Zack. Orrin wants him gone permanently. I thought you should know.”
The whole world went quiet. All of Rory’s thoughts fell to the dirt, her feelings turned to stone. A gear clicked inside her head. A partition dropped into place, separating her fear state from her need to act purposefully. “What does that mean?”
“They’ve done it before. People who cause trouble. They drug them, dump them. We get told they had an accident or they chose to leave. No one leaves here alive.”
No cemetery, no Abundance refugees. How many were killed this way? “Drug them with what?” But she knew. DMT.
“They’ll give him enough drugs to kill a horse, he’ll be sick, dehydrated. He’ll hallucinate. He’ll gouge his own eyes out, chew his own tongue off, fall and break a limb or be attacked by an animal, or wander out there for days and die of thirst.”
Bile in the back of her throat. Zeke was not dying. She’d run to him. Collect information. “Where?”
“I told you. I don’t know where. I already said too much. They drive for a few hours until they’re far enough out.”
Assess the situation. Is this a trap? “Why are you telling me?”
“I don’t like you, new girl, but you remind me of me before I started making bad choices. Everything about this place is a bad choice. I tried to stop things, the bad things, the lies, the stealing, so much hate, but I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”
Information checks out. Look for assets. “Which truck did they take?”
“Dark blue.”
“How long ago?”
“About an hour. They’re not back.”
She knew where they’d park the truck. She could be waiting. She’d need a weapon. Force them to take her back out there to find Zeke.
“They have a rule with the vehicles. They log the trip meter. If you can find the log and the pickup, you might be able to work out how far they drove, but they could’ve gone in any direction and stopped a dozen times.”
Eighty-eight-thousand acres. She could miss Zeke by miles. She could drive around all night and day and not find him. It was all she had. She wasn’t running without him.
From the time they called Tres to act, there was an eight-hour gap before she could mobilize the right forces to shut Abundance down. This was different to organizing a car service at the gate. There was no time to wait for help.
She was already moving when she thanked Beth. She needed the brute’s shotgun, the sat phone, food, water, medical supplies. A handful of places to visit to collect it all.
The only light moment was discovering Daniel was still out and Shavonne had risked a black mark to strip him to his underwear, tying him to the porch railing with a torn sheet and placing a plate of cookies out of his reach. She was the superhero.
Rory waited in the dark in a barn stacked full of vehicles she had keys to, but none of them would help her find Zeke. She, paced, trying to keep that partition in her brain holding, to not think about him, sick, scared, hurt, alone and a danger to himself. Trying to imagine the call she’d need to make if she couldn’t find him.
There will be an us. There’ll be an us. Tres will come get us.
At the one-hour mark, fighting rising frustration she tripped over her own feet and went to her knee and from there got a good look at the underside of a shipping container, loaded on a semitrailer. She’d searched every shipping container she’d come across, including this one, all of them unbolted and empty. But now this one was locked and looked like it was ready to go somewhere.
There was a lockbox protecting the bolt and her stolen keys didn’t fit it. She could shoot it out, but someone might hear. Picking it was as good a use of her time as anything else and focusing on something would keep her from the rising nausea.
Her lockpick tool kit was disguised as a pocket-size manicure set and she never went anywhere important without it. She went to work. That spreadsheet she’d taken from Orrin’s was dollars, maybe an estimate of the contributions from the new recruits due to arrive. Millions of dollars. He didn’t trust the outside world, and they’d never been able to put together a decent paper trail on him. Their own contribution had been paid in dozens of large cash drops. What if Orrin didn’t hide the contributions he collected from Continuers in an untraceable bank account. What if he kept them in a portable vault while he forced austerity on the settlement?
Fifteen minutes later, she had the bolt undone, the smell of money in her nose and the
truth in her hands. The container was stacked with plastic-wrapped bundles of money. The bank of Abundance. Money-laundering doomsday-prepper style. Orrin’s days of running his own world were fast decaying.
But nailing Orrin would mean nothing if she couldn’t get to Zeke in time.
If she’d been a nail biter she’d have been down to her wrists when she finally heard the truck approach. When the barn doors opened, she had a choice, use the shotgun and gamble on not having to shoot anybody or—yeah, that was the choice.
She stood in the shelter of the semi rig and braced. Six men climbed out of the truck.
“Home sweet home. Can’t wait to hit the sack.”
“Did you say hit Zack?” That got a hearty laugh. “We did that about four hours ago.” That was two hours out, two hours back. “Guy can sure take a punch. Do you think he’s still tripping?”
“I think his brain is probably damaged and he’s fallen into the canyon by now.” The canyon. A landmark.
Six on one, terrible odds. She couldn’t bluff this like poker. She wasn’t Jessica Jones and she didn’t have any supernatural powers. And if she failed to get away, Zeke had no one.
Along with the spruce forest and the mountain range, the canyon was a major feature of the land Orrin had bought up. She knew roughly what direction to head in. She made a decision that her chance of successfully taking a hostage with her was poor and stayed hidden.
The men cleared out quickly. She fueled up, checked the mileage log, loaded up. Made herself wait another twenty minutes sitting in the cab of the truck to make sure everyone who should be in bed was. She had a heading and timing, and halving what was on the trip meter, she had mileage.
She leaned out of the truck door and threw up, retching even when her stomach was empty. Zeke could already be dead, and she could drive all night and not find him. This was way outside of her comfort zone, calling for skills she had in theory but had never needed to use.
You can do this. You can find him. There will be an us. Reach out to him and he’ll reach out to you. He knows you won’t ever run without him.
Did he know that? She’d abandoned Cal in the middle of a job and left him deliberately exposed. She’d done it in anger to punish him. She’d rather die than make that kind of mistake again. Zeke felt like she’d turned from him over and over. There was no way he could trust she’d come for him after having told her to run.
That knowledge cut so deep, her eyes burned, and she tried to barf up a lung.
Hold on, Zeke, hold on. She got out of the truck and opened the barn doors. Once she cleared the territory around the settlement, she pointed the truck in the broad direction of the canyon and laid on the gas, driving into the middle of the night with no moon to speak of.
It got cold in the cab despite having the heat on. Zeke would be freezing but she’d packed a space blanket that would help warm him up. She had to keep thinking about what she would do when she found him because the idea of not finding him was shoved behind the remade partition in her brain.
If he was unconscious, check his airways, place him in recovery position, assess for broken bones and concussion. Call Tres for help.
If he was conscious, give him water, assess his injuries, get him the hell somewhere safe while they waited for the cavalry.
Touch him everywhere, his runner’s legs and dancer’s hips, his soft heart in his strong chest, his capable shoulders that never failed to support her. Tell him everything about how she felt, how it was real and right, and they were both ready to be together.
Put her cheek against his and breathe him in, say the words she should have always known to shout aloud. Love him and never let him doubt.
Never let him go.
An hour bled into ninety minutes at the wheel and her eyes were stinging from peering through the high beam, scanning for any sign of movement of life that wasn’t a part of the desert.
At the two-hour mark, with no mileage left on the clock and finally in sight of the canyon, after taking a wrong turn somewhere, she cut the engine and got out to scout on foot. If Zeke was injured, and on the ground, she might drive past him. Flashlight in hand she shouted for him, heart in mouth she yearned for him. If there was a way to locate him by the pull of their unspoken love alone, she’d find it.
And all the while that partition in her brain threatened to shatter. All that separated rational Aurora Rae working a search and rescue scene from freaking the fuck out because she might’ve lost the love of her life before she’d had the chance to be honestly, completely with him, was her professionalism—and it was cracked and split, stretched veneer thin.
She took a deep breath, pulled the night air into her lungs and let it mix with all the longing and lust and need she felt and then she shouted at the moonless sky and the mocking stars.
“Zeke Riley Vasic Aden Sherwood. Quit fooling around and show yourself. Yeah, I got your message, but I didn’t run. Suck it up. If you don’t come rocking out of the black center of this foul place, this second, you stubborn pretender, I’ll...I’ll. I’ll think of something, because I’m never letting you go another day, another hour, without telling you how much you mean to me.
“I’m in love with you. I know it now. It’s a roar inside me and it’s changed who I am. Made me who I’m supposed to be without always playing a part. And that means you can’t die. Because you’re in love with me and this is our time. It’s finally our time. You come back to me, right now. You hear me, Zeke. You come back to me now.”
The only thing that heard her was the craven stillness of a crystal cold night, and parts of her partition exploding into dust.
She wiped her eyes and got back in the truck. The phone was on the seat beside her. She should call Tres. The knowledge she’d have to admit to fucking up and losing Zeke was a worse betrayal than the crime she’d come here to prove herself against. She would never recover from it. She bounced her palm on the horn, let it blare for the hundredth time. She’d wake the whole state of New Mexico if she had to.
It changed nothing.
And the sat phone had no signal, something out here blocking it.
It would be lighter soon, easier to search. She started the truck. She kept the canyon on her right. There was no way Zeke could cross it. But drugged up, not knowing up from down, he could walk straight into it. It was what Orrin was banking on.
Another hour ticked past in an agony of indecision, the sat phone signal blinking on and off again. To get a signal and call for help, to double back, to pick a different line, to broaden the search, to lay on the horn.
To despair, to scream and cry and curl up in a ball and let her panic overwhelm her.
To push forward, to keep trying, because it was what her heart called on her to do.
She doubted it when she saw it. A shape on the ground, a flash of color other than the desert sand. She altered her course and stamped on the gas. The figure moved, lengthened, wavered, an arm up to shield against the headlights.
She was already shouting his name before she got out of the truck.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Zeke saw the pickup coming miles off. It was the first real thing other than earth and sky, the state of his body and the inside of his own fears he’d seen and heard in a while.
They were coming back to finish off what the drugs had come close to doing. They were coming back to make sure he never did.
There was nowhere to hide out here. He’d come to his senses within stumbling distance of a canyon steep enough it was labeled death. He was thirsty enough to want to drink his own blood, sore, cold, cramped. His teeth hurt, his jaw. His socks were shredded, his feet cut up. He had a headache that made him feel unsteady, but he was sober, the effects of the drug fading to a bruise of jumbled memories. He’d meet this new threat standing tall.
He knew the moment the pickup spotted him. Its speed jacked up, the trail of dust it raised got thicker. He didn’t know how long he’d been out here, how long the drug put him in a fifth dime
nsion of weirdness. If it was even the same night. The sky was starting to lighten at the edges, but dawn was still a long way off. It’d been maybe six or seven when they pushed him off the pickup.
Rory would have hidden away somewhere until Tres could come get her. He couldn’t bear to think about what might’ve happened to her if she hadn’t.
He couldn’t bear to think about never seeing her again. Never holding her, never telling her the truth. Maybe it was better this way, less tangled. Less of a burden to her.
Fuck that. Fuck, everything hurt, and most of all his snap-frozen heart. His shirt was torn and so was the skin on his chest, as if he’d been trying to claw it open and massage his own heart back to life. If there was any way to talk his way onto that truck and back to Rory, he’d find it, pay any price or die trying.
He planted his feet wide, let the pickup come to him, headlights blinding him. He braced to leap aside, hoping his reflexes were up to it. The truck stopped, the warmth of the engine coming at him in a wave of diesel fumes. There was a moment of stillness where he squinted at the cab, and his breathing stalled, then the driver’s door swung open and a pair of booted feet went to the ground; the rest was a blur as the figure stepped into the light, shouting, and made for him at a run.
He let go an agonized groan, called Rory’s name and flung his arms wide to catch her, to be fucking reborn in the shape and the sound of her.
Her momentum made him stumble, almost lose his footing. She held him up, her hands a fury of pats and strokes, making him feel solid again by her touch alone. Words he couldn’t process flooding from her mouth.
“Stop, Aurora Rae, stop.” He coughed, cleared his throat. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
“You scared the shit out of me.” She quit fussing and hugged her warm body close to his. He could feel her trembling, or maybe that was him. It might be the ground shaking for all he knew; his grasp on reality was a fragile thing. How the fuck did she find him?
“Yeah, this was extra,” he said.
She laughed, a hiccup, half sob, half outrage. “Did they hurt you? Are you all right?”
The Mysterious Stranger (The Confidence Game Book 3) Page 22
