Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2)

by Donna S. Frelick

  “You know they have someone watching the back of the house.”

  Gabriel nodded. Unless Kinnian is already inside. Unless it’s already over.

  “And you have a plan for getting close enough to confirm Asia and Jack are in this house without being seen?”

  “Yes. Be very careful.”

  Lana shot him a glare. She started stripping off her shirt. When she was down to her tank top, she got out of the car and wrapped the shirt around her waist, concealing the Glock she had stuck in the waistband of her jeans.

  “I have a better plan.”

  He scrambled out of the car after her. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “It’s a public alley. People must use it. I’m just another neighborhood girl.” She grinned at him. “When the man on the back door shows himself, you take him out. I’ll circle back around the block and meet you behind that shed.”

  Before he could tell her about Kinnian, she was ten paces up the alley. Christ! Telling her now would only lead to an argument—an argument that could get them killed. He ran after her, keeping to the shadows of the ramshackle garages and sheds that lined the alleyway. As Lana approached the back of 57 Meadowlark, a man stepped off the rear porch and ambled toward the fence line. There was a gate near the corner where the shed stood, a rear outlet to the alley from the driveway. As she passed, Lana flipped the catch and swung it open.

  “Hey, mister,” she called, pointing. “Your gate’s open.”

  From his position in the alley behind the shed, Gabriel heard the man curse, heard his footsteps approach, saw him step out into the alley to retrieve the swinging gate. Gabriel shot out, grabbed the man’s gun hand and wrenched it up behind his back, then covered the man’s mouth and eyes and took him to the ground. A strike to the throat and he was done. Gabriel dragged the body behind a line of garbage cans, swung the gate closed and retreated behind the shed where he could see the back porch of 57 Meadowlark without being seen. He lifted the flap along one thigh that concealed his stun gun and freed the weapon from its holster. Then he prayed he wouldn’t have to use it—or explain it.

  A minute later a warm breath kissed his ear. “I take it my plan worked?”

  “Like a charm.” And thank God, no complications. But they were still a long way from knowing what was inside the house.

  “Are you picking up any . . . what did you call them? . . . EM signatures?”

  He shook his head, frustrated. “I can’t just scan. The others . . .” He stopped, unwilling to give away too much. “They have ways of detecting it. I have to hide what I’m doing.”

  She looked at him, her eyes shining with what could be read as admiration even in the dark. “Jesus.”

  He bent his head in concentration and reached inward for the traps he’d set for Kinnian. They were vibrating wildly in response to his brother’s presence, receiving and sending constant pulses of false information in answer to the insistent requests for data. He’d let his brother believe he was one step behind him at all times, no further along now than Memphis. The traps were holding; there had been no breaches in his defenses.

  Now he went down another level in his mind and opened himself to the outside world. Information flooded his mind in a hot rush—emotion, sensation, thought and data streaming from uncounted sources threatening to overwhelm him. Then he began the filtering process, eliminating all artificial sources, all nonhuman sources, all sources from more than one hundred meters, and finally, all sources except the ones identified specifically as those of Asia and Jack. When the filtering process was done, there was nothing but silence in his mind.

  Carefully, with a touch no heavier than a butterfly’s wing, he sent out a scan, hoping for an answering echo in an EM range that matched Jack or Asia. Nothing.

  Gabriel came back to himself and turned to look at Lana. He shook his head.

  Then, from inside the house, gunfire erupted.

  With a curse Lana pulled her gun and started for the house, but he grabbed her arm. “No!”

  “What the hell?! Jack and Asia—”

  “They aren’t there.” He struggled to keep his grip on her.

  “Then what the fuck is going on?”

  Blue-white light flashed in the dark house—laser rifles. Kinnian had made his move. Gunfire answered as the fight went from room to room, but Gabriel knew the humans had no chance.

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “The hell you say.” Lana pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling for back up.”

  “Damn it, Lana!” He caught her arm and swung her to his side, picked her up off her feet and started running. They made it as far as the alley before she twisted out of his grip and dropped to her feet.

  “Son of a bitch!” She held out a hand toward him. “Stay the hell away from me or I’ll shoot your ass!”

  His lips curled upward. “That’s the cell phone, not your Glock.”

  “Lucky for you, asshole.” She looked down, started to key in the number she needed again, but a sound behind her made her drop the phone and turn. A man was clambering over the fence, his face white with terror. She pointed the gun at him. “FBI. Stop where you are!”

  The man looked over his shoulder at her, but hit the ground and started to run.

  She swore under her breath and took off after him.

  A sound, no more than a creak of hinges, and Gabriel felt the moment shatter like so much glass. The foundation of reality slipped, gravity failed and the world went spinning off its axis to collide with the sun. Two Thranes in the combat jumpsuits of a ship’s landing party stepped out onto the back porch of the house. One pointed a laser rifle at the fleeing man, at Lana, who almost had a hand on the man’s back. The other turned in Gabriel’s direction, his weapon rising.

  Gabriel fired as he ran. The man who had been aiming at him dropped.

  “Lana! Down!” He threw himself at Lana’s feet, caught her ankle and tripped her just as the blue-white arc of light flashed above them. She screamed, and he smelled the acrid tang of burning flesh.

  He scrambled up and over her back, his skin crawling, anticipating the spearing burn of laser fire. It didn’t come, and he rolled the two of them into the shadow of a board fence in the yard next to Number 57. He couldn’t see around the fence, but he could hear the pounding of boots on the ground. The trooper was pursuing. He waited. One breath. Two. Movement showed at the edge of the fence line. Gabriel fired, and the trooper’s convulsing body pitched forward into the alley.

  Lana stared at him, eyes glassy, in shock. A scorched furrow ran across her right shoulder blade. He pulled her to her feet, wrapped an arm around her ribcage and steered her back down the alley.

  “What the hell, Gabriel?” Her voice was nothing more than a rasp.

  He had no intention of explaining anything before they got their asses out of there. What came after that was another problem.

  They came to the end of the alley. He paused, pressed against the rusting steel of a garage door, to scan the street beyond. Then a blast of fiery rage punched into his brain and obliterated all thought. He dropped to his knees, taking Lana with him. His mind exploded with pain, and Gabriel crashed into a black pit of unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “That’s a pretty bad burn, there, ma’am. You really need to let us transport you to the hospital.”

  Lana gritted her teeth as the EMT finished dressing the blistered skin across her right shoulder. “Much as I’d like to cut and run, I think the man headed in our direction is going to want to talk to me.”

  The kid turned to glance at the Little Rock FBI Bureau chief striding across the lawn towards them, a scowl darkening his features. “I could put you on a stretcher, take you out right now.” He slipped her a sympathetic grin. “That’d get you a few hours, anyway.”

  Lana shook her head. “Might as well face the music. Maybe the war wound will get me some sympathy, huh?”

  “I’d play it up big, if I were you. And I’d s
till recommend you check into the ER as soon as things die down. I don’t think a couple of Tylenol is going to keep you comfortable tonight.”

  “Sure thing. Thanks.”

  “You bet.”

  Lana stood as the EMT moved off and instantly regretted it. The burned patch on her shoulder flamed with miserable fury. But she needed to be on her feet when Supervisory Special Agent Wallace Trent lit into her. Her pride demanded no less.

  Trent started in as soon as he got close enough. “Agent Matheson, are you responsible for this monumental cluster fuck?”

  “No, sir.”

  The answer seemed to infuriate him even further. “No? Then how do you explain the fact that four people are dead in that house, the house itself is burned almost to the ground, along with whatever evidence it might have contained, and the kidnap victims we’re trying to rescue are nowhere to be found?”

  “The only explanation I can offer, sir, is that a rival gang attacked the house before we were able to confirm the presence of the victims and effect a rescue.”

  “A rival gang! What the fuck? You haven’t figured out who took these people in the first place and now you have a rival gang?” Trent’s jowly face hung like a blotchy red moon over his damp collar. “In my district? I don’t think so!”

  Lana stood at parade rest and let him pace in front of her. He didn’t think so? Then let him come up with an explanation, the dumb fuck.

  “You know what I think, Matheson?” He loomed over her as if he could threaten her with sheer bulk. “I think this is a surveillance gone horribly wrong. Instead of asking for help and setting this up right, you decided to go it alone and get all the glory. But you blew it. You got too close and spooked whoever was in that house. They started fighting amongst themselves, some of them took off with the vics and somebody else lit a torch. How you like that explanation, you stupid—”

  He caught himself just short of the one word that would have bought him a reprimand. He glared at her for a long minute, then gave her a twisted smile.

  “That’s what’s going in my report, along with anything that was in that van we found in the garage. You were found here where you shouldn’t have been when fire and rescue and local police arrived. You’re wounded, so you obviously engaged in a firefight with the perps. That’s all the evidence I need that you started this whole meltdown. You can forget about any more cooperation from my office, missy. Take your sorry ass on back to Nashville.” With that, he turned and stomped off toward the alley.

  Lana closed her eyes and endured the flush of anger and shame that washed through her battered body. As much as she knew Trent was ignorant, unfair and just plain wrong, a part of her agreed with him that this was her fault. Jack and Asia were gone, she’d missed them by a hair, and now she had no way to pick up the trail. Damn it! She turned the night over and over in her mind, but she just couldn’t see how it could have come out any differently. Like throwing a pair of loaded dice, things just kept coming up craps.

  She knew one thing though. She knew who had handed her those loaded dice. She stalked back to the car to find Gabriel, determined to get some answers. He was standing with one hip against the hood and his arms crossed over his chest, wearing a frown so deep it might have been carved into his face.

  She launched her attack before she even reached the car. “What the fuck happened back there?”

  “Do you mean the part where we just missed Asia and Jack and got caught in the middle of a firefight, or the part where you wouldn’t listen, and I almost got killed trying to save your mulaak ass?”

  Even though she knew it was a pose, his casual sprawl infuriated her. “How about the part where you curse at me in some strange Cuban dialect, you asshole! And I think we’re even on the life-saving thing. I just had to wake you up out of another coma.”

  “Let’s just call that sensory overload. Someone in the house was unhappy that Asia and Jack weren’t here.”

  “Someone in the house. The safe house, the exact address of which you somehow pulled out of thin air. How does that work, Gabriel? More of your special skills, I suppose?”

  “You’ve benefitted from my special skills all along, Lana. Would you rather we hadn’t found the place?”

  “A lot of damn good it did us. The house is blown to hell—and us almost with it.”

  Gabriel’s dark eyes sparked with dangerous fire. “I tried to warn you.”

  Lana remembered the urgency with which he’d tried to get her to leave. He’d known what they were dealing with.

  And there was something else. “That EMT who patched me up thinks I got burned in the fire, but I was a long way from the house. I hit the ground, and when I looked up the guy I’d been chasing was nothing but smoke. I didn’t get caught in the tail end of an explosion, did I?”

  Gabriel looked for a moment as if he wouldn’t answer. Finally he glanced her way.

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  “You were tagged by a laser rifle. The guy you were chasing got hit center mass.”

  “Laser rifle.” The term bounced around in her skull, but found no definition slot to land in. “And what kind of space cowboy uses one of those?”

  “The kind that is after Jack and Asia.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Let’s just say these guys have access to stuff that makes the latest media mix look tame, okay?”

  “Media mix?”

  “Movie.”

  God, he made her head hurt sometimes. “So we’re talking black ops? Super secret shit? Regular weapons aren’t good enough for them?”

  Gabriel sighed. “Something like that.”

  “And what about that pistola you were using, amigo? Same deal?”

  “A glorified TASER. Wireless tech. A friend makes them special for me.”

  “Sure.” She couldn’t get past the feeling that he was hiding something from her. It was there in the set of his shoulders, the hard line of his jaw. “You’ve got a fucking answer for everything, but I know there’s more to all of this.”

  He shook his head. “None of that is important. We need to find Jack and Asia.”

  Lana’s simmering anger abruptly boiled over. “You think I don’t know that? We have nothing, Gabriel, nothing! Not even a vehicle description now. And I’ll be lucky if I have a job in the morning.”

  At last he turned to look at her. “Alana. None of this was your fault. Asia and Jack were gone before we got here, and thank God for that. If they had been here when those men arrived there would have been no way to save them. We might both be dead, and Asia and Jack lost forever. This way we still have a chance. We just have to find them before the others do.”

  “How? We don’t have the beginning of a clue.”

  “I have some resources. We might have something by morning.”

  Fatigue suddenly washed over her, and she swayed. He caught her. “Come on. I have something for that shoulder back at the motel.”

  “Please say it has a label that reads 80 proof.”

  He almost smiled. “That can also be arranged.”

  She started for the driver’s side of the car, but he steered her to the other side and dropped her into the passenger’s seat. “My turn to drive,” he said.

  For once, she didn’t give him an argument.

  Lana’s mind still buzzed with unanswered questions an hour later. She’d managed to clean up and wrap herself in a towel, despite the dressing on her shoulder, and she knew she should be thinking only of trying to get some sleep. But the things she had seen, the pieces of the puzzle that just wouldn’t fit, put her on edge. It would be a long time before she slept.

  Still, she didn’t welcome the knock on the door to the adjoining room. It was late; she wasn’t dressed. Whatever Gabriel had to tell her could wait until morning. She opened the door a hand’s breadth, and one look at him on the other side—his mouth curved upward in the barest smile, his body a temptation of coiled muscle under a soft tee-shirt and workout p
ants—and her resolve faltered.

  He held up a small jar in one hand and a bottle of rum in another. “Medicinal aids.”

  She wanted to make him work for it. “It’s late, Gabriel.”

  He nudged the door. “You need this. Trust me.”

  She exhaled and swung the door wide. He slipped past her without a word, crossing the room to find the glasses. He poured them each a healthy slug of the rum and handed her one.

  “Drink.”

  She tipped the glass in his direction. “Cheers.”

  “Salud.” He sipped, his eyes locked on hers.

  She let the liquor and the warmth in his dark gaze sink deep into her chest. “That’s good,” she breathed.

  He nodded. “It’s from Barbados. Very nice.” He set his rum down and took her hand to lead her toward the sink. “Now let me take a look.”

  “Is this really necessary?” She frowned at him in the mirror. “You could leave the stuff; I could take care of it.”

  “Yes, it’s necessary. No, I can’t leave the stuff, and no, you can’t.” He turned her toward the mirror with a sure touch. “Stop being stubborn, and let me help you.”

  He gently lifted her still-damp curls from her back and swept them to the left, baring the skin of her neck and right shoulder. She shivered. Despite her protests, she wanted to feel his hands, the stroke of his fingers. He stood just at her back, so close they were almost touching. She longed to lean against him, to feel the press of his hips against her buttocks, to feel his heat through the fabric of his pants and the single layer of the towel.

  He was focused on the dressing at her shoulder, carefully removing the tape and gauze pad. Lana watched him in the mirror as he worked, noting the small frown of concentration between his brows.

  The pain flared as air hit the damaged skin once he removed the dressing, and she sucked in a breath. She took another drink, welcoming the numbing alcoholic haze rising in her brain.