by Cameron, TR
He giggled. “I’d be famous.”
“You’d be dead, and me shortly after, since it would give away our location. As far as I know, you’re the only troll with wings.”
He nodded. “I’m special.”
Diana laughed. “In more ways than one, buddy.” The rest of his bag contained other older versions of his gear, including a vest with throwing knives that looked a little worn on the straps, a harness for Max that would allow Rath to ride him if appropriately configured, and boots. The boots weren’t old, but here in the snow, he’d need some heavy footwear. They would shred if he grew, but that was preferable to having him lose toes to frostbite. Assuming trolls can get frostbite. I don’t see why they couldn’t. I wonder if ice trolls are a thing. She laughed internally. Maybe they hang out with the abominable snowman.
Out loud, she said, “We’ll keep the gear with us on whatever floor we’re spending the most time on. So, during the day down here, at night up in the bedroom.”
He nodded. “Should’ve slept in full outfits.”
Diana chuckled. “Yeah, right? If only.” Shook her head. She had Fury because Hank had thrown it through from the armory, where she’d stupidly left it after her training session the night before the attack. That was only yesterday. Damn. She hoped everyone else had their most important gear as well. But they generally went unarmed in the vimana, so she didn’t have her favorite pistol or even her regular backup pistol.
Her bag contained a sheathed katana she set aside, three pairs of worn tactical clothes and a pair of boots, and two gun cases. She opened the first and found her old Glock. She popped the magazine, noting that it was loaded with anti-magic bullets, and slid it home.
The case held another magazine full of the specialty rounds and a cleaning kit nestled in the foam cut-outs along the top. It was a gun she’d used in the past, so she was fairly confident it would be sound and the sights properly aligned. She would still clean it thoroughly before she trusted it not to blow up in her hand.
The other gun case revealed a Ruger LCP II, her previous backup weapon. It only had six shots but fit neatly in a boot holster and carried anti-magic rounds as well. Several times in the recent past, she’d been forced to go without her backup pistol because the new model was a little too bulky for some outfits. She’d thought fondly of this one in those moments and was frankly glad to see it again.
In addition to the holster on her right boot, the left held a narrow knife tucked into the back. They also had steel toes and heels to make her kicks more impactful. Heh. Impact. Her equipment belt had its battery attached, and an old pair of stun gloves was the last thing in the bag. They took more power to deliver less shock than her usual ones, but they’d still give her a useful edge. “This stuff is enough to keep us reasonably safe for the moment, but it’s not nearly adequate for what lies ahead. We’ll need more gear.”
Rath nodded seriously. “Visit Nylotte?”
Diana shook her head. “Not right away. They’ll definitely be watching her. No, she and I have a protocol for when we’re out of contact, and we’ll have to wait for that to activate. It takes a few days of non-communication. In the meantime, though, we might need to hit up one of the stashes.”
Rath clapped. “Excellent. Shopping.”
Diana laughed. “Yeah, that. But for at least the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours, we’re not leaving this house except to take Max into the back yard.” The troll looked a little sad at her words but brightened as she said, “On the plus side, we have a DVD player, a ton of movies, and pizza, popcorn, and other snacks in the cupboard. Movie marathon?”
Rath leapt into a somersault off the chair, landing and running toward the television. Movie nights were something they used to do often in their first days together, and the troll loved it. “Okay. I pick the films.”
She groaned. “It’s going to be all Stallone, isn’t it?”
He slid to a stop and turned, pointing back at her. “I’ll be the judge of that. I am the law.”
Chapter Sixteen
Deacon had arrived at his hideaway spot and immediately gone on alert. Nothing was obviously out of place in the basement apartment, and he hadn’t lived in the small town for quite a long time, making it reasonable to think it might not show up in an initial search of his history. The space was reasonably clean, with no sign that anyone had been inside or disturbed it.
Maybe that’s the problem. Mrs. Carter, upstairs, wouldn’t have come down here on her own. So why is it so neat? Just lucky? Do things not get as dusty as I think they do?
He spent five minutes walking through the rooms, looking for evidence to push him to one side of the question or the other before deciding something was wrong. Someone had to have been inside and tried to clean up the signs of their presence. Which means they might be watching me right now or even have a capture team on the way.
He had no idea how they might’ve located this place unless they very successfully dug into his background going back to his college days. That would only have given them the town, nothing more.
How doesn’t matter. Only that they did. Probably. Or I’m paranoid. He opened a portal and stepped through it, emerging in the parking lot of a large shopping mall a hundred miles away. It was another town he’d lived in, but his residence had been on the far other side of it.
He entered the mall and walked for an hour, doing the surveillance checks the agents had taught him. When no sign of watchers appeared, he vectored into the taco restaurant at one end and ordered some food, paying in cash.
Deacon chose a table at the back where he could watch the door and kept his eyes peeled. After that turned up nothing, it was another hour spent wandering the mall, popping into shops that looked interesting to him, before he was confident enough that he didn’t have a tail to take the next step. Finally, he went into the restroom of one of the anchor department stores, opened a portal, and stepped through to Kayleigh's safe house.
He managed to duck an instant before the baseball bat would’ve glanced off his head. She’d probably angled the blow away anyway, but it still might have caught him. He laughed at the expression on her face, which was somewhere in the middle of happy and furious. “Chill, slacker, it’s only me.”
She growled, “Don’t do that, you jerk,” dropped the bat, and wrapped him in a hug. He returned it gratefully, some of the tension of the past couple of hours leaving him.
Deacon asked, “Are you okay?”
Kayleigh took a step back and nodded, deftly brushing a hand across her face in a gesture that could have just as easily been moving her hair away as wiping tears. He guessed it was a bit of the latter if she felt anything akin to the relief he felt. “Fine. No sign of surveillance. Why are you here?”
He frowned. “Got a negative vibe at my place. Hopped over to the mall to make sure no one was watching me, then came here.”
“I have bad news.”
“The others?”
She shook her head and quickly replied, “No, we’re still a few hours away from check-in. Nothing from them yet. But, well, it’s easier to show you.”
He followed her into the office and saw what she meant. A window had broken, and snow had entered the room. Specifically, the snow had covered both of their computers, which, while loaded only with innocuous programs, were both high-powered models intended for use in this exact situation. “Bloody hell.”
Kayleigh nodded. “Yeah, that’s more or less what I said. Stupid happenstance.”
Deacon shrugged, initial annoyance transforming into problem-solving mode. “Stuff happens, even to the good guys like us. It’s no biggie.” He checked his watch. “We probably have time to hit our stash and a big box store.”
“Think it’s safe?”
“I’d guess that aside from Diana and Rath, they won’t look for any couples. While you do bear a slight resemblance to the troll, given your diminutive height, I look nothing like the boss.”
She kicked him in the shin. “Don’t
push it, mister, or you’re sleeping in the snow room. Without a blanket. In the nude.”
He laughed. “We’ll probably need to hit a grocery store for some supplies, too. I sense a lot of calorie-burning computer work in my future.”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
The garage held a motorcycle and a couple of helmets, plus a can full of gas. They fueled it and headed out, the bike fishtailing a little as they swerved onto the street through a patch of snow. He asked, “Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?”
Kayleigh replied, “Shut it. I’m an expert.”
He laughed. “That’s what you said about the first version of the web grenade.”
He could hear the scowl in her voice. “That was a defect in the canister.”
“Uh-huh, sure it was.” The fact that she’d had to spend hours cleaning up the mess ensured that particular incident remained a sore memory for the tech. He changed the subject. “Are we confident the stash is okay?”
Her helmet bobbed in a nod. “I dropped in on the nearby cameras a week or so ago. Through a series of cutouts, of course. No change.”
He shook his head. “Only you could convince me to do something as goofy as putting our vital gear in a bus station locker. It’s so stereotypical. Like we’re in an eighties spy movie.”
She laughed. Their helmets had microphones and earpieces physically connected through a cable, which allowed them to talk without fear of having their transmissions intercepted. “You’re jealous you didn’t think of it first.”
When they got to the bus station, they went in together and stopped to buy some coffee from the snack bar, trying to look the part of travelers heading out. The place was fairly large, a big blockhouse with benches, plastic seats, and stained concrete walls. A flatscreen television that was far too small for the room played sitcoms in the corner.
She gestured toward the back, and he followed her into the locker area. It was free of other people, so she hurried to unlock two of the larger ones. Each held a duffel bag, green canvas army surplus, completely unidentifiable as ARES gear. Either Kayleigh or Deacon moved the bags to different bus stations monthly, again in an abundance of caution. Or paranoia.
They took the duffels to the house, dropped them off, and headed out again, this time by portal. An hour later, they were back at home with brand-new computers. He shook his head at the loss of his beloved computer setup and looked balefully at the off-the-shelf model in the box in front of him.
Then he shrugged it off. “We’re alive, and we have gear and food. It’s all good. Let’s get this stuff organized. Hell, who knows, maybe we’ll be locked down long enough to climb back onto the leaderboards in our game.”
Kayleigh laughed. “Your skills have probably atrophied, what with all the work you’ve been doing.”
He countered, “I haven’t seen you put in much time, either. I’m still ten times as good as you are, even rusty.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Is that a challenge?”
He nodded. “Of course. Stakes?”
“Loser has to cook for a week.”
“Deal. Let’s get set up so I can kick your ass as soon as possible. I’m hungry.”
Chapter Seventeen
Cara’s refuge, where she’d arrived after portaling out of the vimana, had turned out not to be much of one. She hadn’t chosen a specific home like many of the others. Her life had mostly been rootless, a succession of bases and short-term rentals or long-term hotel stays as she moved around in the military. So it wasn’t a total shock when she materialized in the forest behind a small motel in an equally small town to find that while the trees still stood, the building no longer did.
Instead, its former spot was now part of the parking lot for a retail store that had gone in on the main street, a few hundred feet away from the tree line. She’d been out of sorts about it for almost a full minute, not processing the sudden changes in her life effectively. Then she’d risen from her instinctive crouch and slapped her thighs., “All right, Cara. Get your shapely ass in gear.”
She did have a storage garage in the small town, which was hopefully still standing. It was a walk of several miles to reach it, and she stayed in the forest where she could. The trees and uneven terrain made it slow going, but time wasn’t really a pressure at the moment. Her priorities were to get to a new safe spot and secure a burner phone before the scheduled check-in, and her destination would help with both of those.
She climbed over the fence and dropped into the rear of the self-storage facility, laughing inwardly at how similar it was to the location of her team’s last mission. She slid up the door to the half-size garage and walked inside, pulling the barrier back down behind her. The push light was still where she’d left it, and its long-term batteries still functioned.
The dim illumination revealed a motorcycle with a dark helmet hanging from the handlebar. The space also held an air pump, oil, and gasoline to feed the machine. An old army friend of hers swapped out the fluids every three months to ensure they were fresh-ish. The other woman owed her from their time together in the field, and Cara trusted her with her life. Literally, I guess, since if she gave up this location, I could wind up dead.
She grabbed the pair of phones that lay on one of the shelves and cut them out of their packaging with a knife from the small toolkit inside the bike’s pannier. It wasn’t her favorite motorcycle ever, a used Kawasaki Vulcan touring model. It was the right choice for distance travel. One of her oldest leather jackets, frayed at the elbows and weather-beaten from its dark brown to more of a mottled tan, hung on a hook in the back, and she shoved the phones into its pockets.
Cara checked the pannier on the opposite side of the toolkit. It still contained her essential gear: a money belt filled with bills of all denominations and an unregistered pistol with no identifying marks. Her chosen weapon was a revolver because it had fewer points of failure than an automatic. She loaded it from the string of bullets inside its case and stuck it back in the compartment, reluctantly adding her daggers and weapons belt since they were too obvious to wear. She locked up the pannier with the key to the bike.
She checked the tire pressure, topped off the fluids, and hit the starter. It took a couple of tries, but the engine eventually caught, filling the room with its throaty rumble. She pulled on her helmet, then exited the garage, locked it, and rolled out onto the nearest road, headed for another town she knew well.
It took three hours to reach her destination, but when she rode into the small town of Cusseta, Georgia, it felt like she’d never left. She was taking a risk, going back to a place that figured so prominently in her history, but she hoped that it would seem too obvious, and no one would believe she’d go to ground there.
Her first stop was at the strip mall at the edge of town, which held a Goodwill thrift store. She wandered through, searching the racks until she found stuff that she could live with, then headed to the restroom in the back.
She pulled the tags off the clothes as she changed into them, then put the clothes she’d worn into the store—tactical pants, black tank, and a heavy button-down shirt—onto the hangers. They went back on the racks, and she brushed past the cashier without stopping. She dropped the tags and a couple of twenties, more than enough to cover it, on the counter as she breezed by.
The woman who’d entered had looked vaguely military. The one who exited was in tight acid-washed jeans, a bright crop top that showed off her muscled stomach, oversized sunglasses, and a baseball hat embroidered with the word Pink. It was nothing like what she would’ve worn normally, and she spent a moment thinking that it was good Hank wasn’t around to see it, or the jokes would never end.
She put a little extra bounce into her step. If I get some gum and chew it aggressively, I might be able to pass for one of the women in Grease. She laughed to herself. I bet Anik would appreciate this look, though.
Cara attached the helmet to the back of her bike, her current persona not likely to wear one despite
the state’s rule to the contrary. The girl in the hat probably wouldn’t ride this particular motorcycle either, so she’d have to get it under cover before too long. That didn’t pose a serious problem. This town, like the other she’d chosen, had most of what she’d need within walking distance of the hotel, including another self-storage space where she could rent a spot for her ride.
A couple of hours later, she closed the door to her hotel room. She’d paid for it in advance with cash—not an uncommon occurrence in this part of this particular town, which had military families coming in and out on a very regular basis—and walked toward another store she knew. She’d ridden by earlier in the day to make sure it was still there, taking a lesson from the disappearance of her first-choice motel, but it persevered.
She removed the hat and glasses as she entered Ray’s Discount Army-Navy Surplus and nodded at the owner. The man behind the counter was in his sixties but trim, muscular, and with the unique bearing of a drill sergeant. In fact, he’d been one. More specifically, he’d been hers.
Recognition blossomed in his eyes, but taking a cue from her outfit, he said, “Welcome to the shop, stranger. Anything I can do for you?”
She nodded. “Looking to pick up the essentials.”
He gestured toward the shop, which had a handful of other customers inside, some probably ex-military and others looking like teenagers shopping for ways to annoy their parents. “Whatever you need, I’m sure we have it. Anything you don’t find, ask.”
She nodded and moved through the store casually, not going directly to the items she sought but acutely aware of the passage of time and how long the diminishing interval between the current moment and their assigned check-in time was. Having only the clothes on her back and not planning to need the disguise she was in for much longer, she picked out classic stuff that wouldn’t attract attention in the military town.
