by Cherry Adair
“Lutao take you Doctor Straus. Inkosazana come quick-quick.”
“Where? Where are Doctor Straus and inkosazana Viljoen?”
“I take. We hurry. Bad man come.”
Kess met Simon’s gaze. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s part of the plan, but we’ll go with him and see what they want. Here.” He handed her the Taurus, grip first. “Keep alert, and shoot before you ask questions, got it? That goes for man, woman, or child.”
Kess took the gun from him. It fit quite well in her palm and was warm from his hand. “I’d rather you had this.”
Beside her, the little boy danced from foot to foot with impatience. “Inkosazana. Quick-quick. You come?”
“I have another gun,” Simon told her, his gaze lowering to the gun in her hand and back up to meet her eyes. “Let’s see what these people want.”
“I don’t care what they want,” she said as she hurried after the boy. “Whatever is on that SIM card isn’t important enough for me not to just hand it over. They can gladly have it if they release Konrad and Judy.”
“Look, I don’t want to burst your bubble,” Simon said, hustling her across the street. “But in situations like this it’s rare for the victims to still be alive. Especially here, where death is practically a way of life.”
“I know. But we have to be sure.”
A dusty, dark blue, antique of a car was parked across the street. “You take.” The boy handed the car key to Simon. “Lutao show where you go. Yes?”
“No.” Simon handed the key to Kess. “You drive. I want to sit in back.”
“Don’t shoot him, for God’s sake!” Kess whispered, concerned because he looked so grim.
Simon’s lips quirked. “I don’t make a habit of shooting kids, relax.”
He didn’t look in the least bit relaxed, Kess noticed as she climbed into the musty-smelling old car and coaxed the tired engine to life. Simon’s attention was everywhere. He was looking for the rest of the bad guys, she knew. Despite the wet heat, Kess felt something walk over her grave, and shivered.
“Okay, pal,” she said to the little boy as he climbed in and scooted his shorts-clad butt back on the rotted leather of the wide bench seat. His bare feet didn’t reach the floor. “Where to?”
He pointed straight ahead, and Kess aimed the enormous car the way he indicated. She could barely see over the gigantic hood, and the car felt as though it almost brushed the buildings as she drove slowly down the alley to avoid people and livestock. “How far?” The car smelled like stinky feet, only worse. She cranked open her window a bit to get some rainy air blowing through it.
“Kwame village.” Swinging his feet, the little guy looked at her with big, innocent brown eyes. “You know?”
“I think so. But will you warn me before I make a wrong turn?”
He grinned, showing three gaps in his front teeth. Two missing on top, one on the bottom. He was adorable. “I think so,” he mimicked like a little parrot. Kess shot him a grin.
The rain was coming down in buckets, and she fiddled with several knobs and levers. The lights cut through the wall of rain. Then her seat shifted. Finally the wipers slipped across the windshield, barely moving the sheets of water flooding the windows. At least they worked.
Thump-screech. Thump-screech. Thump-screech.
“God, this car brings back memories,” Simon said quietly from the backseat. “I haven’t thought about my grandfather in years. He had a 1960 Studebaker just like this. Same color. Used to drive me and my sister around on a Sunday afternoon. God—I’d forgotten how great he was.”
Kess had adored her maternal grandfather. Poppy had smelled of butterscotch candy, and done incredibly bad sleight-of-hand magic tricks to the great delight of her and her sister. “Is he still alive?”
“Doubt it,” Simon said shortly. “He’d be in his late nineties now.”
“He might still be,” Kess insisted, wanting him to have someone in his life who loved him unconditionally. Very Pollyanna of her, but damn it, everyone needed someone. “My Poppy died at the ripe old age of ninety-two.” He’d had a good life, but she missed him still.
“It’s not something I give much thought.”
Conversation closed. Kess glanced at him under her lashes. There’d been no masking the nostalgia in his voice when he’d mentioned his grandfather. Simon thought about him, she suspected, a lot.
Lutao touched her arm, and when he had her attention, pointed left. Kess slowed down to allow two women in bright soaked-through cotton dresses hauling filled produce baskets on their heads to cross before she turned. The car handled like a tank. Not that she’d ever driven a tank. “Did you lose touch?”
“My parents and twin sister were killed in a gas explosion at the house. I’d just started second grade. Theresa and my father both had the flu, and stayed home that day. Never went back to the house. Never saw Pops again.”
Kess’s heart squeezed empathetically. How terrifying and traumatic it must’ve been for a little boy to have his entire family taken away from him in one accident. “God, that’s terrible. Where did you go? Did you have family?”
“Foster care.”
“Was it awful? Sorry. That’s a stupid thing to say. Of course it was awful. You’d lost everyone you loved.” Where was Grandpa? Too old to take in a nine-year-old? My God. Simon hadn’t been much older than Lutao. A baby.
“Some of the families were pretty bad, some of them were okay.”
Okay was pretty bad to Kess. No child should ever have to tolerate an okay life. “I can’t imagine what I’d do if something happened to my parents or my sister.” She felt an overwhelming ache of love that squeezed her chest. “Elizabeth is a doctor, did I mention that? I’m very proud of her. She’s an amazing woman.”
“Are you alike?”
Kess laughed. The heavy car bounced and shimmied over the potholes and debris in the road she couldn’t avoid. “Not at all. Elizabeth is very serious, quiet, and introspective. And smart and gentle.” Kess felt a sharp pang of homesickness. She’d see Elizabeth and her mom and dad when she went back for her court date in six weeks. At least seeing them, having their support, would make the trip back to Atlanta worthwhile.
“Pretty much opposites then,” Simon said, sounding amused. “Does she have the red hair as well?”
“Lighter, more restrained. My father swears he had a full head of black hair before Elizabeth and I were born, but he’s pretty much bald now. Mom’s more blond than red, but we all have the redhead temperament. Me more than the other two, I’m afraid,” Kess said wryly. It took awhile for her to lose it, but when she did, watch out. She blew. Hence her day in court.
They were now on the potholed main drag leading out of town. Kwame was about thirty miles northeast. She glanced at her small copilot and he nodded to let her know she was on the right road.
“We had some pretty lively arguments growing up, especially since my mother’s a defense attorney.” Which of course made Kess’s assault charge embarrassing for her. Kess understood. She just wished her mother understood why she’d done what she’d done. Needless to say Carole Goodall would not be defending her daughter when she went to court “How’s your shoulder?”
“Fine.”
“Liar,” she said, catching his eyes in the cracked rearview mirror. He didn’t look as though he were about to pass out, but it must hurt like crazy. If Konrad and Judy were in the village, one of them could look at Simon’s shoulder. If they really were there. Kess was too scared to hope.
“Remember the guy you met the other night? The one you thought was my brother?” Simon said quietly from behind her.
“Ah…Sure.”
“He’s back.”
Kess’s gaze shot to the rearview mirror. Simon’s green eyes looked back at her. Simon, but not. Simon in reverse. Holy shit! Kess almost drove off the soupy dirt road. She wondered briefly, very briefly, if she had somehow ingested some sort of hallucinogenic—only she hadn
’t touched anything. “How—” She gave a fleeting look at the little boy sitting next to her. A little boy somehow involved in a kidnapping. A little boy with intelligent eyes, and big ears.
She dragged in a deep breath. Presumably there was a logical explanation for whatever Simon was doing. Curiosity ate at her. “You will explain—the similarity as soon as possible, ri—?”
His image in the mirror flickered for a second, then disappeared. He was gone.
Well, shit.
“Lutao,” Kess said a little desperately, hoping the child didn’t look in the backseat. She pointed to the left, his side of the car. “Look at the lions over there.”
The distraction worked. He kneeled up on the seat to look through the window at the pride—a male and three females taking shelter under an acacia at the side of the road. “Simba no happy big wet.”
Kess wasn’t thrilled with the big wet either. The road was a morass of red mud as it continued to pour, and the heavy car was having a hard time not bogging down. “Almost there, right?” A look in the mirror showed that Simon2 wasn’t back. Back from where, for God’s sake, Kess thought a little hysterically.
“You go—” Lutao’s grubby little finger indicated the gently rolling grassland unbroken by civilization to the right of the slowly moving vehicle.
“There’s no road,” Kess pointed out mildly, battling the steering wheel as the tires spun in the mud before finding traction again. Driving on what felt like oatmeal wasn’t going to improve when she left the road.
“Okay,” he said cheerfully. “You go.” And when she didn’t respond as quickly as he apparently wanted her to, the boy grabbed the big steering wheel with both hands, put his weight into it, and turned the wheel for her.
The car bounced and rocked as the wheels went from mud to wet grass and slewed sideways. “Whoa! I’ve got it!” Kess tightened her grip on the wheel and steered into the spin to straighten out the car. This was insane. There wasn’t a sign of anyone as far as the eye could see. “Let’s just stay on the road, okay? It’ll take a bit longer, but this shortcut isn’t a good idea.” It was, in fact, a bad, bad idea.
If she got stuck on the road there was a chance—okay, a very, very small chance—that someone would drive by and be able to help her. If she drove over hill and dale and something happened, there wasn’t a hope in hell of anyone finding them. Maybe forever.
When Simon got back she was going to kill him for leaving her alone with an ancient car and a small child in the middle of nowhere. She couldn’t begin to think where he’d gone, because nothing she could imagine made any damned sense at all.
“Take the shortcut?” Simon’s voice seemed to echo inside the rain-pounded car.
Kess met his eyes in the rearview mirror, tightening her grip on the wheel. “You are a dead man, Simon Blackthorne with an e.” It was Simon. The original Simon. Back as if he’d never left. “You’ve got some ’splaining to do.”
Yeah, he did have some explaining to do. But Kess seemed to be taking his powers in her stride. He hadn’t planned on leaving at all. All he’d wanted to do was teleport Kess’s SIM card to HQ in Montana. Simple enough. But the damn thing, as small as it was, wouldn’t teleport. He’d discovered a new damned wrinkle in his outages. If he wanted to teleport something, not only didn’t he have enough juice to leave Nomis in his place, he had to go with it.
No harm, no foul. The SIM card was in the hands of T-FLAC’s tech department, and he was back. In the meantime, Kess was struggling to keep the heavy vehicle from sliding backward down a fairly steep hill. “Want me to drive?”
“I’m handling things just fine, thank you,” she said through gritted teeth.
“I see that.” He put his legs up on the bench seat and leaned back, arms under his head and propped against the window. “Wake me when we get there.” He closed his eyes.
The car jounced over the lumpy ground, causing all three of them to become airborne.
“Bastard,” Kess muttered without heat as she dropped back into her seat.
Simon grinned.
Lutao giggled.
Minutes later, Kess said, “I think we’re here.”
The small group of shanties looked like any other Third World village Simon had visited in his travels. The people were dirt-poor, eking out a hand-to-mouth existence. Mostly women and children of course, since the men who weren’t either too old or too young were off fighting the Hureni, and/or part of Mallaruza’s militia.
Off to the right a large military tent housed what looked like a temporary hospital. A line of about thirty women, some clutching babies and small children in their arms, huddled against the side of the wind-billowing tent. Seeking whatever shelter they could find as they waited to see a doctor.
Simon knew that many of these people would walk a hundred miles to seek medical help, especially if it was their child who was sick. This small village, no more than thirty ramshackle houses, was forty miles closer to help than the big city of Quinisela.
“Where are they holding Dr. Straus?” Kess slowed the car to a crawl, and turned to the kid. “Damn it to hell!” The car jerked as she slammed her foot on the break. “He can do it, too?”
“Shit.” Simon stared incredulously at the front seat where seconds before a small boy had sat kicking his feet. Lutao was gone. A wizard had lured them here. A wizard that Simon should have been able to sense. And hadn’t. A small, engaging child, and a replica of his grandfather’s old Studebaker, coupled with his malfunctioning powers.
“Simon? What the hell is going on? You are totally freaking me out with all this disappearing crap.”
“Your friends aren’t here, Kess,” he said grimly. “Move over. I’ll drive.”
Oh, how she wanted to say no, he could see it in her set jaw, but she scooted over to the passenger seat as Simon shimmered behind the wheel. “Brace yourself,” he warned, then changed the antiquated car into a military ATV Phoenix Prowler.
Kess stared at him, sodden strands of hair stuck to her skin. “Hell, if you can do this, why don’t you just conjure up a damn helicopter? Or at least get us a getaway car with a roof?”
“I tried for the chopper. No go. I seem to be experiencing technical difficulties at the moment. That’s a machine gun up there. If I walk you through the firing of it, think you can cover our flank?”
“Cover our flank? Which way is our flank?”
“God help us.”
“You don’t need the Almighty, you’ve got me—and I get to fire a machine gun? Hot damn.” Kess laughed. “Talk me through it. I’ve never fired a machine gun before.”
“I hope you won’t have to fire one now.” Ubiquitous vision showed no one following them. Yet.
“Oh, boy. I hope I do. This is amazingly cool. Whatever it is.”
The light tactical mobility platform of the Prowler was perfect for this uneven terrain. At the touch of his foot on the accelerator the powerful four-stroke liquid-cooled engine took off like a rocket, spewing clods of mud and vegetation at a ground-eating speed as Simon headed away from the rain-drenched village.
This wasn’t Pops’s car. Not by a long shot. This baby was stripped down to its sealed steel-frame, chrome-alloy ROPS, with a machine gun attached to the cargo rack. It wasn’t pretty, but it performed like a champ. The low center of gravity, tight turning radius, and high ground clearance made it seem as if they were flying. “I’m going to slow down over the next hill, then I want you to stand and strap yourself in.”
“Cool.”
What an incredible woman, Simon thought as Kess tilted her face up to the rain. Not only was she drenched to the skin and not complaining, she wasn’t asking a million questions. She would, of course. But for now she was in this—whatever this was—with him. One hundred percent present.
The concept staggered him.
“Where are we going?” she shouted over the wind and pounding rain as she held on to the dash with both hands.
The cave was too far, they’d be boxed in
there. Her hotel, his hotel, and Abi’s place were all out of the question. And T-FLAC didn’t have a safe house in Mallaruza. “Cape Town.”
She grinned at him, her beautiful gray eyes filled with excitement, her cheeks flushed peach and dewy with moisture. “Beautiful place.”
“You’re nuts, know that?” Simon shouted into the wind. He thought she was the bravest, most exciting woman he’d ever met. And just looking at her, hair wet and wild, T-shirt transparent and sticking to her skin, heavy orange boots braced against the floor, and grinning at him like a fool, he felt a strange double clutch in his chest.
Kess Goodall was all kinds of trouble.
Nine
They didn’t make it to Cape Town. Instead Simon found a room in a motel on the edge of town. To say it was a dump was giving the motel an enormous compliment. A row of nine rooms faced a deep valley, currently the local landfill, surrounded by chain-link fencing, scraggly trees, and a swarm of birds eager to scavenge a free meal. While the place didn’t stink, it looked as though it should. It was still pouring buckets and she and Simon weren’t just a little wet—they were drenched from top to toe. Other than being uncomfortable, being wet didn’t bother Kess much. Cold and wet would have made it worse, but it was warm and wet, so she was mildly out of joint instead of freaking miserable.
She pulled a face as Simon unlocked the door to room five. “The last time a guy took me to a hotel this bad I made him sorry.” Standing in front of her, Simon chuckled as he reached in a hand and turned on the light, blocking her view. “Hell—close your eyes a minute, don’t open until I tell you to. How old were you?”
“Seventeen.” Kess closed her eyes—almost. Peering through her lashes, she peeked around Simon’s arm. Ew! Unlike the outside rain-washed air, the room smelled of stale cigarette smoke, pot, and filth. It looked worse. The single bed had a crater-sized dip in the middle and gray-tinged sheets that hadn’t seen a washing machine since they were combed in wherever cotton was combed. She almost preferred the rat-infested alley. She swallowed back a complaint.
