Asia looked up. “That’s the second time you’ve called me that—Timewalker.”
“Is it not the truth?”
Geneva’s bright, birdlike stare demanded an answer. Asia couldn’t control the trembling that shook her thin, battered body. This Navajo woman she’d just met couldn’t possibly know what had happened to her, an episode of loss so horrific it had changed her life forever.
When Asia remained silent, Geneva went on. “The hawks told me in a vision: Evil ones took you far from your home; made you their slave. You were rescued and brought back, but your time was not your own. You earned your name in battle, Timewalker. You are a warrior, almost as much as your son.”
Tears slid down Asia’s face.
Jack rose from his seat at the table and went to her. Without a word, he put his arms around her and buried his head in her shoulder. She wrapped him up, her cheek on the top of his head.
“It’s okay, buddy,” she told him. “I’m okay.”
Geneva watched her, waiting, her gaze sympathetic, but stern. “You do not have much time. The boy is in danger.”
“No.” She straightened, struggling to regain control of her thoughts. “They don’t really know about Jack. They just want me. I have help waiting for me at home. I just need to get there. My husband and I—and Jack—we have allies. They can help us. This is not your fight, though I thank you for being willing to make it yours.”
Geneva’s hand smacked the table in frustration. “Foolish woman! The enemy you see is not the enemy who will defeat you! Those men in the truck? They are no threat to you. You saw what Jack did to them.”
Asia stared at her in shock. “You know . . .?”
“It is no matter.” Geneva dismissed it with a wave of her hand. “There are two others—brothers—who hunt you. They are not of this world. One is shadow, one is light, but is swallowed by the shadow. If they find you, here or in the Spirit World, they will kill you and use Jack to work a terrible wrong. Many people will die.”
“What?” It was what she had feared since the moment she had sensed the power in Jack. That kind of power could be a means to an end, and in the wrong hands—“They want Jack?”
“They have been sent from far away to find him. They can hunt even in the Spirit World. And they will not stop until they capture their prey.”
Asia licked at dry lips. Rescue had found Jack in a Minertsan processing center. Could the Grays want him back?
“How—no, don’t tell me—another vision?”
“I have been the hawks’ favorite since I was the boy’s age. Without them I would not be a singer for the tribe. Few women are called, or allowed, even if they feel the calling. But the hawks were very insistent.” Geneva smiled. “Eventually I even had to take their name before they would be satisfied.”
Asia blew out a breath. “I suppose the hawks told you what to do about these two brothers?”
“Yes.” Geneva got up to carry her dishes to the sink. She pointed out the window to a cloud of dust indicating the approach of a pickup on the road. “They said call a meeting of the elders and talk about it.”
Gabriel was beginning to wonder how long he could survive living in close proximity to Alana Matheson. He had thought it would get easier over time, that his body would stop responding to the stimulus of her scent or her nearness. He had thought that he’d tire of sifting through the secrets of her life and her personality, that he’d eventually find no delight in the nuances of her intelligence or memory, that she’d begin to bore him.
But instead, every day, every moment with her heightened the tension, refined the torture until he was a vibrating string ready to snap off its posts at the slightest tweak. They did nothing but argue and snarl at each other. She hated him with a bitterness that was almost palpable. She tried his patience beyond all endurance. Still, he wanted her. He could think of little else. God, she was driving him crazy!
They had finished cleaning up the mess in the desert and rolled into Winslow long past midnight. Some kind of big event had filled most of the decent motel rooms in town. They’d finally agreed—after considerable argument—to share the last room available at an independent on the edge of town. The motel was clean, at least, and didn’t appear to rent the rooms by the hour. The argument had bloomed again when they saw that there was a single, king-sized bed in the room, rather than the two doubles they had expected. The oversize shower made up for it, so they’d called a truce at last and collapsed onto the outer edges of the huge bed.
He’d awakened hard and hungry, shaking with the need to reach out and pull her into his arms. But she’d rolled away from him and out of bed without so much as a glance, padding off to the bathroom in the tee-shirt and soft little shorts she wore to bed, as if he was just another pillow on the mattress. He’d taken extra time in the shower later, but it hadn’t helped. The edge he’d been riding for days was just as sharp as ever.
And then there was Kinnian. The assault of his brother’s mind was like an ever-rising flood beating against the levees of his shields. A part of his consciousness was constantly devoted to patrolling his defenses, searching for and repairing the leaks that sprang up under the pressure of Kinnian’s attack. If Gabriel had let himself think about it—and he didn’t, not even for a second—he would have admitted to a healthy amount of . . . apprehension. Kinnian was strong and he was skilled—and he had the power of the Blood Legion behind him. It was only a matter of time before he found a way in. When that happened, Gabriel would need all his training and years of experience to defeat his sibling. If that was even still possible.
Gabriel stared at the map of Arizona spread out among the remains of breakfast on the table in front of him and considered that finding Asia and Jack might be the easier of the many problems facing him this morning.
“Why do you suppose we haven’t heard from them?” Lana’s hands were wrapped around a mug of coffee, her eyes on the desert outside the window. “It just doesn’t make sense. This wasn’t a transfer or a simple breakdown. We didn’t see any other vehicle tracks out there. You say Kinnian doesn’t have them. So where are they?”
“I would know if Kinnian had them.” Even he seemed to need the reassurance of hearing it out loud, but he knew in his gut that Kinnian would lose no opportunity to gloat if he had the boy. “Everything points to an escape attempt. Jamisky clearly was not working for the FBI last night. He was working for whoever took Asia and Jack in the first place. Something went wrong. He was there to clean up their mess and find the woman, if he could.”
Asia sighed and rubbed her eyes. A surge of protectiveness rose up to squeeze his heart as he watched her.
“Yeah, that was a pleasant surprise—Mark collecting two paychecks. But then he was ambitious, and he could be a devious sonofabitch, too. I’d always considered myself lucky to be on his good side. Guess my luck ran out, huh?”
“That’s not how I see it. He’s the one we buried in the desert.”
The way her jaw clenched made him want the insensitive words back. He reached out and touched her arm.
“He gave you no choice, Lana. From the moment he saw us there, he meant to kill us both. That’s the kind of organization we’re dealing with.”
She pulled her arm back. “I know.”
“Okay, so they may have escaped, but they haven’t checked in.” Not even with Ethan. Gabriel had confirmed as much with a quick conversation with Sam earlier. He didn’t want to consider why the boy had suddenly gone silent. His tone turned brisk. “They could be on foot, no access to a phone. They could still be in the hands of one or more of their captors, though it’s hard to maintain control of that kind of situation. It’s more probable they escaped and are in hiding with someone local, again, with no access to a phone.”
“Jeez, what is this, one of your desert planets, spaceman? Everybody has access to a phone.”
Gabriel was caught between amusement and irritation. “Obviously you don’t know your own planet very well. Look at this map. Lots of empty
space. That means no cell towers, no fiber optics, no cable. Just kilometers of wires. Phone service is not always reliable in areas like this.”
“Like you’re an expert.”
He shrugged. “Empty space is empty space, no matter what part of the galaxy you’re in.” A slow smile touched his lips. “Technology does make a difference, though.”
He could see her making the connections as she stared at him. “It’s Sam’s ship. That’s how you got all that great tracking data.”
“Yes, but it won’t do us a lot of good today. Too much area to cover, no known search parameters.”
Lana gave herself a little shake. “Right. So we’re left with a lot of plain, old-fashioned legwork, then, huh?”
“If by that you mean we have to use the vehicle to canvass these small towns and ask if anyone’s seen our people, then, yes, that’s what we’re left with.”
Lana sighed, gathering up the map. “Then I think we’re in for a long day.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Aboard the Bloodstalker, in Orbit, Earth, Sector Three
Commander Trevyn Dar prowled the bridge of the Bloodstalker, balanced in exquisite agony on the edge of a mortifying loss of control. His heart pounded, his blood raced, he ached, and no amount of shifting, pacing or distraction would ease him. It might cost him his life, but he was going to have to take the ship’s pilot off this deck soon and fuck her until neither of them could walk.
The godsdamned woman could not learn to keep her thoughts to herself. She was thinking of all the things she would like to do to him—some of which she had already tried to considerable effect—and she was broadcasting her most intimate ideas to the entire bridge. The Thrane members of the crew were too horrified to be amused. They expected to die for the bad luck of having witnessed their commander’s embarrassment. For his part, Trevyn just wanted her to stop thinking and start licking and nipping and squeezing and sucking. Gods, please, yes, sucking.
He didn’t consider for more than a moment that it was Lana’s face he saw in his fantasy, not the lieutenant’s.
The communications officer interrupted his obsessive thinking. “Commander, flags have appeared on several of the comm links you are monitoring. Would you like to see them now or should I bundle them for you to view later?”
Trevyn could have read them via the wetware in his brain, but the interference from his helm officer made concentration difficult. He strode from the conn to his usual bridge station.
“Send them to my personal comm screen now, Vran.”
He scanned the messages, communications traffic from within the organization STEELWALL. As he read he was forced to call upon every discipline he knew to maintain a neutral expression. The crew on the bridge would have expected him to scowl, or curse, at the news he’d received. But instead he felt like whooping in fierce joy, no matter that it was likely to cost him if not his life, then a good measure of his skin. Kinnian would certainly demand something in payment for his miscalculation.
The humans had lost their quarry. The boy and his mother had escaped into the desert. The team that had been with them had vanished; the team sent to retrieve them had not reported in. The boy was more powerful than the humans knew. In fact, none of their communications mentioned him at all. They were only interested in the woman and her “special knowledge.”
Trevyn finally did release a curse at the humans’ stupidity. The Minertsans had been using humanity as chattel for centuries and the best the human leaders could do was to brutalize or remain ignorant of the ones who could help them?
Still, this did not solve his immediate problem. The prey had slipped out of their grasp, and an easy catch at the confined facility of Groom Lake had now become a more time-consuming chase through the open territory of Arizona. Kinnian would be furious. And it was Trevyn’s next job to tell him.
He straightened from his compscreen and turned to his communications officer. “Vran, take the conn. I will be in the Captain’s cabin.”
His beautiful but indiscreet helm officer met his eyes as he passed her station on his way out. What she saw there was enough to shut down the constant stream of her amorous thoughts. He noticed the pilot returned her full attention to her instruments as quickly as possible. Even she could read what was in his mind and wanted no part of it.
He made his way to the captain’s cabin, knocked twice on the metal hatch and entered when he heard the bellow from inside. He took up a position in front of the desk and waited for Kinnian to turn from the compscreen to speak.
Kinnian gave him no chance. The captain spun with a snarl and laid a backhand across his face.
“Pultafa!” he cursed. “Shalssiti pultafa!”
Trevyn’s head snapped back as Kinnian’s fist connected with his cheek. His teeth rattled, and he tasted blood. And yet, stupidly, he stood his ground, his legs unable or unwilling to move. His brother struck him twice more in the face, knuckles smashing into his nose and mouth until the blood spurted over his chest. He staggered back, but he did not fall.
“You limp-dicked, bastard cast-off of a human whore!” Kinnian grasped him by the shoulders and kneed him hard enough to drive his balls up into his abdomen. Trevyn sank to his knees, fighting for breath, the contents of his stomach rising in his throat. Kinnian began to swear again and at the end of the string of curses, he aimed a kick at Trevyn’s exposed ribs. Agony exploded in Trevyn’s side as the ribs caved inward. On his hands and knees, Trevyn called on a lifetime of training to get him through the pain, to give him the strength to survive until he could pull in one more sustaining breath.
At last he looked up at his sibling. “If you had wanted me on your knees before you, my lord, you need only have asked.”
Kinnian’s fist slammed into the back of his head. “I told you. I warned you that this would happen. But no, you had a plan. And now the quarry is on the run again. What is the plan now, you worthless fmat?” The captain of the Bloodstalker loomed over him. “Tell me before I strip the flesh from your bones and bleed you to death.”
“I know where they escaped.” His split lip made forming each syllable a struggle. “A STEELWALL team should be arriving there soon to start its own search. It should give you some pleasure to question them. Meanwhile, the boy cannot hide for long. He will be trying to get home. I will find him.”
Kinnian regarded him. “Very well. We’ll go now and see what we will see. Organize a landing party.”
“Yes, my lord.” His pride demanded he stand upright. He used the last of his courage to push himself to his feet.
“It is well that you remain useful, Commander.” Kinnian lifted his lip in a sneer. “You have no idea how close you came to death today.”
Trevyn spit blood from his mouth and tried to pull in a breath around his wounded ribs. His brother was wrong. Only he knew just how close he lived to that black pit and how little it would take to step over the edge.
“I serve at your will, my lord.” He bowed and took leave of his murderous sibling.
Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, Arizona, Earth, Sector Three
Visitors had been arriving at Geneva Twohawks’s place all morning in their dusty pickups and ten-year-old Jeeps. The old woman had sent out the call, and the elders of her community had answered, leaving their homes and their personal obligations to do what was needed for the benefit of their people. They’d gathered under an open-sided shelter in the shade of a twisted piñon pine behind Geneva’s trailer. Some of the women had brought food to be shared, and a tall, steel enamel coffeepot was kept boiling on a small fire to keep everyone supplied with coffee. People stood in quiet groups and talked or sat on rough wooden benches and mismatched folding chairs, throwing an occasional glance in the direction of the outsider who was the cause of all the fuss.
Asia had nodded in polite response to the greetings each person extended as he or she arrived. She’d smiled at the shopkeeper from the night before, who had offered her a cheery wave as he joined the throng. Beneath her
smile she was anything but comfortable. Just how many people was Geneva going to bring into this? How much was she going to tell them? And what the hell was the point of all this anyway?
Jack was frozen in place beside her, his face blank and unresponsive. He had gone to the Spirit World again, Geneva said, “hiding from us.” She didn’t seem concerned, and the elders simply nodded when they saw him. But Asia was worried. If the brothers that Geneva spoke of could find him there, he wasn’t safe. And God knew she couldn’t help him if they attacked him in a dimension she didn’t even understand.
By some unspoken agreement it was finally determined everyone was in place. An ancient, nut-brown man, his silver hair hanging in a long braid, made as if to stand. The two younger men on either side of him each took an elbow to help him, and the gathering came to attention.
Geneva, sitting at Asia’s side, explained: “Jeremiah Nakai is the eldest hata’lii of the tribe. He’s gonna ask the Yei—the Holy Ones—and the ancestors for a blessing so we don’t screw up today.”
Asia thought that was probably a good idea, no matter what else happened.
The old man’s thin, high crooning was more song than speech, full of entreaty and well-worn ritual. Asia looked down as Nakai prayed and saw Jack watching him, transfixed and fully present.
Nakai tottered to his place and sat down again. Geneva Twohawks stood.
“Elders. Thank you for coming here today. What I have to tell you is very important to all the people, though some of you will doubt me. All of you know that the hawks speak to me. They have chosen me as their voice, and I have always tried to speak as they have told it to me.”
Asia scanned those assembled. There were nods of assent from many in Geneva’s audience, but one man watched her with open hostility. He sat on the edge of his seat, as if he couldn’t wait to speak.
“For a while the hawks have been speaking to me about these two outsiders.” She inclined her head in Asia’s direction. “The woman they named Timewalker, because she was stolen from this world by evil beings, forced to walk in a different place and time before returning to find her home and her family were lost. The boy they call the Striking Stone, because others would use him to start a fire to end the world. He has the power to walk both in this world and in the Spirit World, and he can use this power to see and to speak over great distances. But he is just a boy, and there are evil ones hunting him who threaten us all. I am asking that we use our knowledge of the Spirit World to protect him in the battle to come.”
Trouble In Mind (Interstellar Rescue Series Book 2) Page 24
