by Rachel Caine
His hand was shaking, and he hadn’t let go.
“I’m going to pull over.”
“No.” His voice was hoarse, barely recognizable this time as his own. “No, we have to keep going. They were stopped. Two Highway Patrol cars on Highway 78, heading northwest toward I-10.”
She’d eased off the gas, but now she pressed down again, feeling a surge of exultation sweep through her like a strong breeze. “See?” She grinned. “I told you. Teamwork.”
“They’re dead,” he said, and closed his eyes to drop his head back against the headrest. “Oh my God, they’re dead. Three cops. The fourth—they left the fourth one dying. You have to get him help, Katie. I don’t know if they got a radio message out.”
Her joy turned to shock. “You’re sure?”
“I saw it.” He didn’t open his eyes. His thick, dark lashes were wet. “The ones in the van opened up on them point-blank. Two of the officers went down before they even knew what was happening. One of them got off a couple of shots, but—”
“Stefan, give me an exit number, a mile marker, anything!”
He was silent for a few seconds, then said, “I’ll try.” And then he was gone again. Katie waited tensely, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel, cursing the night and curving road that slowed her down.
“The van’s moving again,” Stefan said. “They just passed an exit, number seventy-three. I couldn’t see the mile markers…Shit!”
Katie looked at him, startled, as Stefan clapped both hands to his nose and fumbled for the box of tissues sitting in the floorboard. Nosebleed. A bad one. He tilted his head back and applied pressure, and Katie cursed silently and reached over to stroke his cheek again, then cupped her hand at the back of his neck. He felt cold again, and damp.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t try again. That’s enough.”
“I’m not leaving her alone,” he mumbled around the tissues pressed to his nose. They were soaking through with vivid red. “I can’t.”
“You’re killing yourself!”
“It’s a nosebleed, Katie. And you got shot today. Don’t talk to me about killing yourself.” He sounded shaken and furious and annoyingly stubborn. “They’re kids, and I’m not leaving them alone there if I can help it. I have to let her know—”
He was trying to communicate with Teal, not just observe. No wonder he was blowing blood vessels. “Stefan, do you think she can sense you now? When you’re there?”
He nodded, exhausted. “I can’t talk to her, but she can feel my presence. I’m sure she’s trying to send me messages, it’s just that I can’t—I’m not strong enough. I’m trying.”
No wonder they wanted to kill him, Katie thought. He wouldn’t give up. She’d known from the beginning that he was persistent, but now she was seeing the steel, and the steel went deep. He was as dangerous to himself as any hired killer, but she couldn’t fault him for that—she was too much like that herself.
“Rest for a while,” she said. “I’m calling it in.”
Cell coverage was patchy, at best, but she managed to get through to Menchaca, who sent word on down line. It was the best they could do. She took the Highway 78 turnoff and edged the FBI-issue sedan well past the legal limits, rocketing northwest toward I-10.
Stefan, whether he wanted to or not, had taken her advice; he’d fallen asleep by the time they came within sight of the flashing police lights. Ambulances were on the scene, and Katie coasted up to the barricades and rolled down her window to show her credentials to the uniformed officer on duty. The intersection was a crime scene, and they’d set up harsh arc lights for the forensic techs. Katie parked on the shoulder, trying to let Stefan sleep as she eased her door shut, and went in search of the on-scene commander. Please, God, give me some good news, she thought, and stopped, out of courtesy, at the edge of the brilliantly lit tableau. Two Highway Patrol cruisers, one with both doors open and a bullet-shattered windshield. Three still forms left uncovered to the night air while the crime-scene documenters and techs did their work.
“You’re Agent Rush?”
Katie turned to see a tiny dark-haired Hispanic woman standing at her elbow. She was dressed in a well-tailored uniform, had gleaming perfect skin. She extended a delicate hand, which Katie shook. She didn’t smile, but then, the situation hardly called for it. “I’m Lieutenant Arellano,” she said. “On-scene commander. Thanks for the heads-up. It may save Officer Warren’s life.”
“I hope so,” Katie said sincerely, and felt a breath of relief. He was still alive, at least. “I’m sorry for the loss of the other officers.”
Arellano looked even grimmer. “It was a duck shoot, and they shouldn’t have been caught like this. They knew they were doing a stop-and-search for extremely dangerous people. Our thoughts are that the captors used the girls for cover and shot from behind them. That would have made it nearly impossible for our guys to return fire.”
Sick, and effective. Katie nodded without speaking.
“Got another FBI team on the way,” Arellano said. “This isn’t just a small event anymore, it’s a major manhunt. I’ve been told to tell you that you’re officially relieved.”
Katie, who’d turned away, spun toward her, shocked. “That’s not possible!”
Arellano shrugged. “Take it up with your boss. I’m just the messenger, but Special Agent Evangelista says come home.”
She couldn’t do that. Couldn’t.
“Thank you for passing the message, Lieutenant,” she said. “You have the information about the van’s current location?”
“Not up to the minute, but we’ll head them off.”
Katie no longer had any confidence that would be true, but she shook the woman’s hand and went back to her car without protest. Protesting wouldn’t do any good, and she’d already made her decision.
It might mean her career, but she couldn’t explain to Evangelista why she needed to be here. To do this. These girls, they were family to her, and now she was responsible for even more.
Somehow, she’d become responsible for Stefan Blackman, too.
Stefan was awake again. His nose had stopped bleeding, thankfully, but he looked worse than before. His skin had a papery, translucent quality that made Katie even more worried. “Is he alive? The officer?” Stefan asked.
She buckled her seat belt. “Yes. It’s touch and go, but he’s alive. Stefan, when you saw the shootings—where were Teal and Lena?”
“Right in front,” he said. “They were in the doorway, and the kidnappers shot around them. They used them as shields, Katie.”
She didn’t say anything else, just eased the car into gear and drove on the shoulder around the crime scene, to the access road for the freeway. Traffic should have been light at this no-man’s-land hour, but she supposed traffic to and from Los Angeles never really stopped. It took concentration to merge into the sea of fast-moving cars and eighteen wheelers, heading west.
“You’re upset,” Stefan said.
“Of course I’m upset. There are three dead police officers—”
“Something else. Something personal.” He opened weary eyes. “Is it me?”
“No. It’s—They’re trying to pull me off the case. Send me back home.”
“Can’t do that,” Stefan murmured. “I’d have to train a whole new agent, and besides, I try to make love with only one incredible woman a day. Anything else just looks greedy.”
She snorted. “You’re unbelievable.”
“Bet you say that to all the psychics.” His smile faded. “Seriously, Katie, what are you going to do?”
“Take advantage of a loophole,” she said. “Even if I wanted to back off, I’d have to go to Los Angeles to get a flight out, right? And since I’m already heading that direction…”
“So staying on the case, that’s purely for efficiency.”
“Absolutely.” She paused for a second, listening to the hiss of tires, the humming vibration of the road. “Look, I can’t back off. If I do, they�
��ll never believe you, not in time, and you’re the key to keeping track of these perps. They’ll get lost fast once they hit the city, and I have to believe they have a way out. Unless they’re delivering the girls to a final destination here, they’ll be heading for some kind of transportation. I don’t think it would be a commercial flight—too hard to get them on board without somebody seeing something, and way too easy for the girls to raise a fuss. Same for any other kind of public transportation. Even a private plane might be tough.”
“So you think they’re going to hand the girls over to someone else? Why?”
“Let’s just say it’s a hunch,” she said. “And it’s a hope. The more hands the girls go through, the better our chances of finding them before they get to where they’re going. And the better our chances of catching who’s behind this.”
Stefan looked sober. “You could try telling your boss all this. Making him understand.”
“Stefan, I’m in the middle of it and I’m not sure I understand. And let’s just say I’m predisposed to believing crazy things are possible.”
“Because of the Athena Academy?”
He was way too close to the truth, and she didn’t answer him. After a few minutes he settled himself more comfortably, sighed, and drifted off into that strange trance state.
He was still gone when the premonition hit her—a hot tingle up her spine, a pressure coming at her from her left, on the driver’s side of the car. It was just a second’s warning, just enough. She gasped and instantly hit the brakes, twisting the wheel to the right and digging the tires into the gravel shoulder.
The other car almost overshot them, but the two vehicles still hit at a huge force, and Katie’s hands were knocked off the steering wheel. The air was full of flying glass, ripping metal. She felt her seat belt snap tight, locking her in place, and instinctively turned her face away from the shattering driver’s-side window. Something hit her head with stunning force, and a blip of a thought ran through her mind in the instant before everything went dark:
Not now!
Stefan came back to the world in slow, tortured seconds. He could feel cold air on his face, and then a second later heard the tinkle of shattered glass hitting concrete. In the next heartbeat he felt the hot spark of cuts and bruises, one or two burning especially hot.
He opened his eyes and looked dazedly into the muzzle of a gun.
There was a guy leaning in the window of the car, and he had a gun, and he was aiming it right between Stefan’s eyes, and Stefan believed, absolutely, that his life was over.
Time slowed down. He could see every flick of light passing over the other man’s face, every glittering spark reflected in his eyes. Every mote of dust in the air between them.
He thought he’d actually see the bullet when it left the chamber. Bullet catch, his speeding brain informed him, but the bullet catch was an illusion, it was a trick, it couldn’t possibly be done.
He was dead.
And then he wasn’t, because the gunman screamed, staggered and went down, out of sight below the frame of the door. Stefan blinked. None of this seemed to be making sense. Shouldn’t they be moving? Driving? How could they be parked on the side of the road…
He realized that the white haze of cracks in front of him was the shattered windshield, and put it slowly together. Oh. We crashed.
A bloodied face appeared in the window where the gunman had been, and it panted, “Christ, Stefan, you could at least duck!” The door creaked open with a dry shriek of bent metal, and she leaned in to unhook his restraints. “Guess those side air bags really work, eh?”
Katie. His lips shaped her name, but he couldn’t get it out past the lump in his throat. She grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him out of the car. He stumbled over the prone body of the man who’d held the gun—the gun was now in Katie’s right hand—and the body didn’t move. Still breathing, Stefan saw. But definitely not in the fight.
“What—”
“Shut up for now. Act dazed.”
It wasn’t an act. He sank down to a sitting position on the gravel, cradling his aching head. His nose was bloody again, and he sniffed and wiped at it ineffectually. Other cars were stopping, including some big-rig trucks, and a crowd was gathering. Someone—a pretty little redhead in shorts and a baby-doll T-shirt—handed him a wet washcloth wrapped around ice cubes, which he pressed to his flooding nose. She asked him if he had any broken bones, and he told her he didn’t know, which was perfectly true. Nothing hurt. Everything hurt. He was too confused to begin to diagnose how he felt.
And then he looked at Katie, standing nearby talking to two massive tattooed truckers, and how he felt came into sharp, merciless focus.
They tried to kill us. He knew that was true. Someone had run their car off the road, and when that didn’t finish them off, the driver had gotten out to put bullets in their heads.
He was getting kind of used to the idea that someone wanted him dead, but the idea that they had hurt Katie, would kill Katie, made something catch fire inside him, something slow burning and dark, thick with rage.
The two truckers finished their discussion with Katie and went around the car, picked up the unconscious trigger man as if he were a plastic bag and carried him off. Stefan didn’t wonder where because he was watching as Katie limped toward him. Not much of a limp, just a slight hesitation in her step, a little favoring of her left leg. She had cuts on the left side of her face, probably from broken glass, and a new set of bruises darkening all along the lovely skin of her left arm.
That bastard could have killed her. No, that bastard almost certainly intended to kill her, and whether it happened before or after Stefan was dead probably was just tactics.
“Hey,” she said, and reached out to move the ice pack to inspect the state of his face. “Not so bad.”
He grabbed the second washcloth the redheaded good Samaritan was offering and pulled Katie down beside him, then began gently sponging the blood away from her face. The cuts weren’t as bad as they’d looked—mostly shallow. One came dangerously near her eye.
“Stefan.” She grabbed his wrist and took the washcloth from him gently. “I’m okay. We’re both okay. Look, the guy had a shot at us, but he didn’t get us, all right? We’re fine.”
He wanted to take her in his arms and protect her from all this, and he knew that was stupid; Katie was the protector, the one trained and ready to take on the bad guys. She’d probably call it male ego, but the impulse was so strong it made him ache.
“You were right,” she said suddenly, and looked him straight in the eyes. “I saw it coming. Sometimes, I can see it coming. I think you need to teach me about how to handle that better.”
He captured her hand back and kissed the soft skin of her palm, slightly damp from the washcloth. “I will,” he promised. “Katie, I have something new on Teal. We need to get moving.”
Katie, for answer, pointed to the car. The once-pristine sedan was a wreck, ready for the junkyard, still hissing steam and dripping fluids. “We’re not going anywhere without wheels.”
“Katie.” He held on to her hand and regained her full attention. “We need to get moving. They’re in Los Angeles. You said it yourself, by the time we get other people convinced that we know what we’re talking about, it’ll be too late. I think—I think they’re handing them off to someone else. Soon.”
“We need to wait for the police.”
“And if we do, we end up stuck here for another two hours, and they’ll be gone. Gone.”
She went very still, searching his eyes, communicating things that neither one of them needed words to understand. She nodded. “I’ll get us transportation.”
“Wait,” he said and reached out to pull the would-be assassin’s gun from her waistband. She blinked, but didn’t try to stop him. Stefan checked the clip, made sure the safety was engaged, and said, “You’re an FBI agent. Whatever you’ve done so far, you can probably talk your way out of it, but fleeing the scene of an acci
dent and stealing a car might be a career setback.” He stuck it in the waistband of his own pants, at the back.
“I wasn’t going to steal a car!”
“Commandeering? Same thing, only with a badge. Let me handle it. That way, you don’t need to explain it later.” He stood up, staggered, and braced himself on the redhead’s shoulder. She was looking as if she regretted the whole idea, and her big blue eyes were darting around, looking for a quick exit. He gave her an edgy smile. “So. Are you heading to Los Angeles?”
“Yeah…” She drew it out, frowning.
“How does an extra thousand dollars sound to take on two passengers?”
“Stefan!” Katie snapped. “She’s not involved in this!”
“Would you like to be?” he asked the redhead and opened his wallet. “I’ve got about five hundred cash with me, but if you take me to an ATM I’ll get the other five when we get to L.A.”
The redhead’s eyes had lit up like bonfires, but she was still frowning. “You’re not, like, killers or anything, are you?”
Would someone actually answer yes to that? “No,” he said. “FBI.” And he flashed Katie’s credentials, which he’d picked from her pocket during the showy removal of the gun.
The redhead looked awestruck. “Cool! I mean, yes, Officer, sure!”
Katie rolled her eyes—even though, with that bump on her forehead, it had to hurt—as the redhead bounced away. “You and women,” she said.
Stefan kissed her lightly on her bruised forehead. “One woman, from this day forward,” he said. “Come on. Let’s catch a ride.”
Chapter 10
K atie was acutely aware that she had just broken several laws, not the least of which was leaving the scene of an accident; she phoned Menchaca, whom she was surprised to find was still actually accepting her calls, and explained it as best she could without actually mentioning things like psychic visions.
“Agent.” He sighed. “This is not good. I’ll talk to the CHP and see what I can work out for you, but they’re not going to be happy.”
“I’m in hot pursuit of a kidnapper, Captain.”
