by Audrey Faye
Carly shook me off and took off toward the van like a rocket. “Are you willing to gamble Lelo’s safety on him staying that way?”
No. Not for a second. “Slow down—we can’t just barge in there and drag her off.”
“Why the hell not?”
The sudden surge of adrenaline in my veins chased away some of the quivering. Right. Kidnap first, ask forgiveness later. I tossed her the keys. “You drive.” The cops would pull me over fifteen times for the speed we were about to be going. Carly had traffic-cop guardian angels. I could only hope they felt some kind of affection for Lelo too.
Turking wouldn’t hurt her himself—that would stain his lily-white hands. But if he’d found Danno, he could find others. A pissed-off husband or a deadbeat dad. Someone more willing to be a weapon. More willing to punish her for climbing into the gutter with us.
Carly peeled out of the parking lot with the kind of rubber that pretty much never happens at golf courses. Two staid men in plaid standing at the entrance gate jumped out of our way with dispatch. One even managed to wave a golf club at our taillights.
My partner dug into her bag one-handed and threw a cell phone and a napkin from the clubhouse into my lap. “Call the clubhouse. Tell them Turking took a free drop on the twelfth hole and faked his scorecard.”
I didn’t even know what that meant. “Will that delay him some?”
Her grin was vengeance with a side helping of nasty. “Oh, yeah. Golfers hate cheaters.”
And Turking would be appalled to be accused of cheating. I read the phone number off the embossed napkin and picked up the phone. “What are we accusing him of, exactly?” I dialed the number as I listened to my partner’s pithy explanation of golfing misdemeanors. And then marveled at how fast a little breathy concern about what some guy had done with a small white ball got the people on the other end of the phone frothing at the mouth.
Three recitals of my story later, I hung up. “The links manager is on it. I’m pretty sure Turking will be tarred and feathered within the hour.”
“We should only be so lucky.” My partner peered grimly through the windshield. “We need a pay phone.”
Those were rarer than psychedelic hen’s teeth—I had good reason to know. “Why?”
“Because it’s okay if he traces the call you just made. It’s not okay if he traces the next one.”
Reality landed hard back in my guts. “To Rosie.”
“Yeah.” Carly glanced at me and stepped on the gas a little harder.
I stared out the window, eyes peeled—and then spotted something way better than a pay phone. “Pull over. Diner on the right.”
“You’re hungry?” My partner wasn’t slowing down at all.
“No.” I waved a sharp hand in frustration. “Biker. Pull over.”
Carly yanked the steering wheel hard right. “You’re a genius.”
No, I was a panicked middle-aged woman in flannel trying to keep a friend safe.
The biker side-eyed me, hamburger in one hand, key in the other, as I ran up to the back of his wheels. I sucked in a breath and tried not to sound totally insane.
“Do you happen to know Rosie Linaro?” It was a wild long shot, but I had to try.
He scowled. “Maybe. Who’s asking?”
I didn’t have time for totally justified skepticism. “Someone who loves her.”
His eyes widened. “Yeah. I know her.”
Thank the sweet baby Jesus. “We need to get her a message. One that can’t be traced.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.”
I realized I was holding my breath and sucked in air. “I need you to find a phone, ideally one that’s hard to trace. Get a message to the bartender at Spike’s Pub in Lennotsville.” Spike would find Rosie, and he’d do it a lot faster than we could.
The guy’s eyebrows flew up. “You know Spike?”
Well enough to know he adored the ground Rosie walked on. “Yeah.” I threw a glance back at Carly over my shoulder, afraid she’d leave without me.
“Okay.” He was already reaching for his gloves. “Rosie’s good people. I know a guy down the road who’ll have a burner phone. I’ll call Spike. What’s the message?”
“Tell her to sit on the kid.” Short and sweet. “And that we’re on our way.”
“That’s all?”
I looked him dead in the eyes. “It matters, okay? I can’t tell you why, but it’s the biggest fucking deal you’ll probably help out with all year.”
He swung a leg over his bike and reached for his helmet. “Got it.”
My legs nearly buckled with gratitude. “We owe you.”
He did up his chin strap and gunned his engine. “Nope. Not if you know Rosie, you don’t.”
Carly gunned the van behind me in response. We flew out of the gas station inches behind the guy on his bike and paced him until he swung off the road a couple miles later.
And then I learned just how much lead Carly had left in her foot.
-o0o-
Carly hit Lelo’s landing and started hammering on the door loud enough to wake the dead. Moments later, it swung open, Rosie’s sleep-befuddled face rapidly waking up. My partner shoved past her. “Where’s the kid?”
“In her bed.” Rosie grabbed Carly’s arm and dragged her to a stop. “What the hell is going on?”
Nobody had stopped me. “I’ll check.”
The gypsy’s cursing rang in my ears as I yanked open Lelo’s bedroom door—and saw the kid, passed out on her bed, cocooned under fifteen blankets and looking about five years old. The racket we were making hadn’t so much as twitched her.
Something in me finally exhaled, and I backed out a lot more slowly than I’d barged in. As quietly as I could, I pulled the door shut—and then leaned against it and let the tears stream down my cheeks.
Strong hands wrapped around my shoulders, gathering me in. “Sshhh. Ssshhh now.” Rosie steered me toward the couch as gently as she handled her hothouse flowers.
I sat down and swiped at the snot threatening to drip on her shirt—and then started up again as I saw the pot of slightly wilted bluebells sitting on the coffee table. “I’m okay.”
“Bullshit.” Rosie offered me a tissue, and another hug.
“Why are you here?” Carly’s words were clipped, hard.
I felt the arm around my shoulders tense. “Spike said I was supposed to sit on her. From the description, I assume the message came from you.”
Shit, I’d forgotten to add that little detail.
“No, I meant why are you guys here, instead of hiding out in Spike’s bar?” Carly’s voice was veering toward frantic.
“Because all the message said was to sit on her.” The sexy gypsy took a shaky breath. “You guys are scaring the crap out of me—what’s going on?”
Nothing worth causing this kind of fear. We were here now, and there was no way Turking or any minion he might create was ever going to get past the three of us. I reached a hand over to my partner’s arm. “We’re here. Lelo’s okay, and she’s going to stay that way.”
Now Rosie’s eyes filled with a different kind of fear. She gripped Carly’s shoulders, hard. “Are you okay? What the hell happened?”
It hadn’t really happened yet, and we needed to dial down the panic levels a whole flotilla of notches. “Sit down. I’ll make some tea, and we’ll fill you in.”
“Tea in a minute.” Carly took a deep breath and looked square at Rosie. “There’s an asshole who’s been stalking us for a long time, looking for a way to get at our underbelly. He found Lelo.”
Rosie was on her feet like a shot, crackling with menace.
I’d thought Carly was as scary as anyone could get. I’d been wrong. I held up my hands, trying to offer lullabies to a hurricane. “He’s an asshole who plays mind games. Really bad ones, but as far as we know, he’s never been violent.”
“As far as you know.” Rosie’s eyes searched the room, looking for phantom shadows to annihilate.
�
��We know a lot.”
“Not enough.” Carly’s eyes matched Rosie’s. Two feral hunter goddesses. “We need to get Lelo someplace safe.”
She didn’t have to say the rest. Protect the kid—and then she would hunt.
I wondered if she had any idea that Rosie would be at her side.
The sexy gypsy was already reaching for her coat. “I’ll take her. I have friends who will keep her off the grid and totally safe.”
We’d met some of her friends, of both the biker and florist varieties. If I ever found myself in need of protection, they’re who I’d want watching my back. I looked over at my partner, watching her wrestle—with trust, and letting go, and things far darker.
“She’s my little sister,” said Rosie quietly. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”
Carly let out a whooshing breath. “I know.”
For the first time in ten hours, something in my gut started to unknot a little. “I’ll go wake Lelo up.”
“Better you than me,” said Rosie, looking a touch less dangerous. “You’re a brave woman.”
It wasn’t bravery that had me gently opening the door to the kid’s room. It was love.
I paused for a moment, hand on the door, soaking in Lelo’s shiny, sleeping face. And then I moved in to do what had to be done—and to royally piss off one of the people I liked the very best in all the world.
She wouldn’t understand. But she would be safe.
7
I picked up my mug of hot chocolate, registering that it had gone stone cold. And managed, barely, not to hurl it at Lelo’s prized exposed-brick wall.
My partner was up on the roof, doing her katas with long, scary, very real blades in her hands. I wanted to be up there beside her, lethal and whirling and imagining James Turking sliced into very tiny pieces.
Instead, I was down here feeling maimed, terrified, and entirely useless.
I jumped as Lelo’s front door slammed. Rosie swung into the room, two hundred pounds of dangerous. “Where’s Carly?”
“Up on the roof.” I grabbed for the sexy gypsy. “With her knives.” My partner’s universal signal that she needed to be alone. “How’s Lelo?”
“Safe. And spitting mad, but my friends are big enough to sit on her until she promises not to run.”
There was nothing wrong with the kid’s courage. “Thanks.” The quiet tears in Lelo’s eyes as she’d left had nearly killed me.
Rosie took a swig of my hot chocolate and grimaced. “This is cold. You’re not going to ask me where I left her?”
That was one small thing I’d managed to get straight in the two hours she’d been gone. “No. I trust you—and it’s better that we don’t know.” Not by the slightest whisper of a tell did I want to accidentally leak anything to Turking. “You should have stayed with her. This guy is deadly.” I didn’t say the obvious—if he’d found Lelo, it wasn’t going to be a big reach to find her curvaceous best friend.
I also knew this line of argument was a lost cause.
“Not gonna happen.” Rosie put my mug in the microwave. “I can take care of myself, and the only way I convinced the kid to even consider staying put was to promise I won’t let the two of you out of my sight.”
I suspected we weren’t going to let her keep that promise. “That’s not going to help us. He’s looking for leverage, and he’s got the scent now. He’s tracking people we care about.”
“Yeah, I got that much.”
I pulled out my big guns. I was going to lose, but I needed to try. “You make Carly more vulnerable by sticking around, and we can’t afford to let that happen right now.” Vulnerability was Turking’s favorite condiment.
“There isn’t anyone in the world big enough to sit on me,” said Rosie quietly, turning to face me. The microwave beeped behind her head, and she utterly ignored it. “I’m sticking to the bitter end of whatever this is, so save your energy. It sounds like we’re going to need it.”
I took a deep breath and pulled out my biggest gun of all—I let the shields I’d been buttressing collapse so she could see the full extent of how scared I was. “James Turking is the most evil person I know.”
Her cheeks got a little pale, but her eyes didn’t waver at all. “Is he better with knives than Carly?”
“No.” Actually, we didn’t have any idea. “He doesn’t fight with those kinds of weapons. He gets inside people’s heads and sets fire to anything good he finds.”
“I’m not very flammable. Neither are you.” She watched me silently for a long time. “Carly is.”
She was half right. “He’ll get under your skin the same way he gets under mine—by going after the woman up on the roof throwing her knives around.”
Rosie turned to rescue the mug of hot chocolate from the microwave. I stared at her back as she paused, one hand wrapped around the mug, the other holding the door, her head bowed. And knew that Turking had already landed his first blows on her too.
Love makes anyone flammable.
I reached out a hand to touch her shoulder. And shied away as she turned back to me, eyes deep and fierce and tapped into a kind of violence I hadn’t known she possessed. “If it’s Carly he’s going after, then it’s up to you and me to settle this thing.”
I blinked, in total awe of the gypsy warrior who had just unfurled—and more than a little scared. “What the hell does that mean?”
She almost smiled. “It means his attention is on her, and he won’t realize we’re a threat.”
I looked down at the mug in her hands, and to my eternal shame, felt the tears welling in my eyes. “We’re not a threat.” Nothing I had done had ever so much as scratched the man.
She laid a hand on my shoulder and steered me to Lelo’s couch none too gently. And then tucked my head into her shoulder and laid her chin on top of my hair. “That’s why you need me here.”
I leaned into the comfort, totally lost. “Why’s that?”
“Because if I were going to war,” she spoke softly into the top of my head, “you’re exactly the person I’d want beside me.”
I almost managed a laugh. “I’m a washed-up singer with snot about to drip out her nose.”
She chuckled and held up her abandoned sleep shirt. “Here. Blow.”
It was either that or drip snot on the clothes she was currently wearing. I blew. “Guess that means I’m on laundry duty.”
I could hear the smile in her voice. “Or I’m sleeping naked.”
I blew again and pushed myself up to sitting, meeting the eyes of the woman who had somehow helped me find my center again—or at least, vague traces of it. If she was going to ride with us on this one, she needed to know the whole score. “In the past, he’s always come after us looking for his wife back.”
Rosie snorted. “He’s a dumbass if he thinks you’d do that.”
It would have been a lot better if he stayed a dumbass. “He’s never been dumb, but he’s been fairly predictable. This time he’s given up on his wife and has a new demand. And he’s got his hooks in Lelo.” I shrugged, hating the fear that came flooding back into my ribs. “He seems to think that will make us dance on his meat hook.”
A long, steady look. “Will it?”
I shoveled my shoulders back. I was not going to cower, dammit. “It got us to pay attention.”
“Attention is good,” said Rosie quietly. “What’s his demand?”
My eyes fled, burrowing themselves in a dark corner of the couch. “He wants us to quit.”
The sexy gypsy’s exhale could have made the earth rumble.
I met her tough-as-nails, horrified eyes. “He wants us to go back to being the scared co-ed and the washed-up singer.”
“That will never happen.” Every line of Rosie’s body was fierce.
She had a lot more faith than I did. “Really? What do you think happens if Carly puts down her knives?”
Her eyes flashed sharp pain. “I don’t know.”
I winced—she’d probably been thinki
ng about that question long before James Turking climbed back on the menu. “I’m sorry.”
Rosie’s hand traced circles around the polka dots on her pajama pants. “She might need to hold on to them for the rest of her life. I just don’t know.”
I didn’t know either—it hurt to even try to imagine. My partner invested so much psychic energy into her knives and the power they gave her in the world.
“I do know one thing, though.” The body of the woman beside me shuddered, just once. “She’ll never give it up because someone threatened her.”
Carly had been forced once. She wouldn’t survive a second time. It would incinerate that beautiful, flammable heart of hers—and whatever might rise from the ashes after that, it would be a faint shadow of the woman we both loved.
I laid a hand on Rosie’s shoulder, trying to give back some of the comfort she’d handed to me. “I’m going to head up to the roof. Get some air.” And check on the woman trying to slice it to smithereens with her knives.
“Okay.” Sad, furious eyes met mine. “I’ll be right here. If she needs me. Or if you do.”
I turned away, not able to watch the flames behind the fury.
Turking was already setting fires.
-o0o-
The last thing I expected when I hit the roof was empty silence.
I looked around the railings and shook my head. As far as I knew, I’d come up the only way there was to go down.
“Over here.” Carly’s voice spoke from the darkest corner.
I made my way around planters and stunted trees and flowers that somehow managed to look cheerful even in the pitch black. They would have soothed me any other time. Tonight, I just wanted to yank up every last one of them by their roots.
I found my partner tucked in behind a tall, skinny trio of planters, her knees pulled up under her chin on a lonely patch of gravel. She looked about twelve—and absolutely desolate. “We have hot chocolate downstairs if you want some.”
She didn’t move. “Rosie’s back?”
“Yeah.” I sat on the edge of one of the planters—there wasn’t enough room to wedge in beside her. “Finished your katas?”
