THE RISK OF LOVE AND MAGIC

by Patricia Rice

  “Of course. I should be on your list. I’m running late, but he’s expecting me,” he lied glibly, with skills learned at his TV-producer brother’s right hand.

  “He ain’t here yet,” the guard confirmed. “I’ll call up to the house and see what they want me to do.”

  Crap. Magnus waved in agreement and studied the situation. If he knew the Librarian was actually here, he could return with storm troopers.

  He knew no such thing.

  He climbed out and leaned against the pillar next to the gate while checking his phone for messages. He sent a couple of photos to Conan, just in case. Electronic lock with manual backup on the gate. His car could open it.

  “They said to come up and wait in the lobby,” the guard yelled at him.

  Well, hell, that took all the fun out of it. He’d rather blow up gates than figure out how to get past whoever was in charge to look for someone he didn’t know. What had he been thinking?

  Oh, right, he hadn’t. As Diane had once told him, he acted instead of thinking. In his past life, that had often made a difference between life and death.

  In this case, it was likely to be more complicated. Magnus drove the power car to the parking lot and contemplated his next move, but he was no strategist. He needed a way of communicating with the Librarian to see if he was at least in the right place.

  Maybe if she were truly psychic, she’d know he was here. He mentally laughed all the way to the entrance.

  The double front doors were barred. He announced his arrival into an intercom and waited for a guard to slide back the bolt. He needed Oz here to feed him lines.

  The doors opened. Before Magnus could cross the threshold, a whirlwind in an aluminum foil hat, enormous black-framed glasses, and springy orange hair grabbed the Taser from a security guard. Shooting the guard with her one cartridge, she rapidly switched to stun and rammed the gun against a mean-looking nurse in her way. The nurse screamed in shock and toppled.

  Startled, Magnus stepped aside rather than risk being hit. Little Orphan Annie shoved past and flew down the sidewalk.

  He swung around to observe her progress, wondering if she planned to run right past the security gate and into the forest.

  “Nadine, get your ass back here!” thundered the buxom nurse in orange-stained shoes trying to scramble from the floor. The guard was still twitching. “Catch her, you idiots!” She gestured at a uniformed guard racing up and . . .

  Magnus looked around. Him? He and the bumpkin were the only protection for a mentally disabled patient against a mountain forest?

  The Oswin Zorro instinct kicked in. He was off and running without giving it a second thought. He was closer and more in shape than the stumbling guard. He dashed down the walk and caught up with the aluminum-foil lunatic just as she reached his car. His car. There was a parking lot full of cars. Why his?

  She barely came past his shoulder and was half his width, but she snatched the key from his hand as if he were a marshmallow. She opened the door with the key’s electronic switch, hopped in the driver’s seat, and had the car running before he could reach inside and yank her out.

  “No time,” she shouted. “Get in or I’ll run over you.”

  The stout guard tripped over his shoelaces and stumbled into Magnus’s back. “She’s a nutter,” the guy muttered. “Let me at her.”

  “I’m the Librarian and you found me,” she retorted, revving the engine.

  “You’re a librarian nutter,” Magnus concluded, thoughts racing along with his car engine.

  It would be just his luck that his key to the general would be insane. He didn’t like coincidence, but he wasn’t taking any chances of losing his only clue. He shoved her from under the steering wheel and across the bucket seat.

  With one hand, Magnus propelled the slow guard out of his way, He slammed the door and spun gravel backing out. “I’ll bring you right back if you’re lying.”

  “Not lying. Saw you with the Asian guy. Thirty-four, twenty-two, eleven, eighty, eight-hundred, right?”

  The code, the freaking code that had kept him up all night. “Not quite in that order,” he griped. “How did you see me with Bo?” Magnus asked warily, ramming the gas pedal before the gates could close. The Camaro hit warp speed in sixty seconds. Did they have cops on mountains?

  “Don’t know,” she said. “I see things. Your friend—Bo?—sends out powerful vibrations. You were here to get me, weren’t you? Which Oswin are you?”

  She saw things. He and Bo had been buried in an underground tunnel. No one had seen them except their captors. Magnus rolled his eyes. “I so do not need another psycho in my life. Please tell me you’re actually sane and you’re just a little rattled right now.”

  “I’m sane and just a little rattled right now, and you didn’t answer my questions. Maybe if I ask them one at a time—you did come for me, didn’t you?”

  Of average height and sturdy bone structure, she looked about sixteen wearing those ridiculously huge glasses to hide long-lashed green eyes. The foil hat over Orphan Annie orange curls wasn’t helping her case any. Dark shadows left her eyes haunted, and beneath the mop of hair, her almost elfin features seemed gray—like Tinkerbelle fading away because no one believed in her. Her lips were pale, bitten, and unadorned by cosmetics. Very definitely an inmate.

  “If you’re really the Librarian, we got your messages.” He was the one a little rattled. How could an inmate in an asylum possibly have known who he was? “We’ve been looking for you. You didn’t exactly make it easy.”

  “Good.” She took off her glasses, tucked them in a pocket beneath her Tweety-bird sweat shirt, and nodded her foil-wrapped head. “You have smart people working for you. I need your help. Could we please go to UC Irvine? You can drop me off at the park and be on your way. Better hide the Camaro later, though. They’ll have film of the plate.”

  “No registration yet. It’s a junk vehicle.” But it was very visible. He heeded the warning.

  He’d installed seat belts when he’d redone the interior. She actually put on hers, exhibiting some degree of sanity given the way he was taking the curves on the narrow road. “I’ll report the car stolen and leave it somewhere.” It hurt to abandon his prize project, but he could hope no one would steal a rusted out hulk before the police “found” it again.

  “Don’t ditch it near the campus,” she ordered in panic. “The general will know exactly where I went if you do. Can you have someone meet you in the desert or somewhere later?”

  He glanced at the elfin-featured redhead in a cartoon sweatshirt, readjusted his thinking, and took a left on the highway, sending the car climbing the mountain. “Hi, my name is Magnus Oswin. May I have the pleasure of knowing who just became my boss?”

  “Magnus Maximus!” she cried in delight, her mood instantly swinging. “It’s a pleasure, indeed. I’m Nadine Malcolm. You know me as the Librarian. How did you get the code? Your friend Bo again?”

  “Maximus?” he inquired warily, wondering if he ought to turn around and take her back right now.

  “Magnus the Great. Norwegian or Swedish. I don’t remember. I’ll just call you Max. Maggie doesn’t suit.”

  Maggie? He’d creamed the last moron to call him that—back in sixth grade.

  She leaned forward anxiously to study road signs. “Take the side road at the next intersection.”

  “You’re wearing aluminum foil. Don’t give me orders or call me Max,” he said grumpily, hitting his Bluetooth button and ordering it to call Conan.

  “Do you have a pen knife?” Instead of taking off the metallic hat, she held out her hand, palm up, as if expecting him to hand over a weapon.

  “You think I’d give it to you?” he asked incredulously, swinging down the side road and praying he wouldn’t end up in a bear cave.

  “Then I can’t take off the hat,” she said impatiently.

  Conan’s voice interrupted from the speaker. “Yo, bro.”

  “I’ve got the Librarian and sh
e’s whacko,” Magnus told the speaker. “I need to hide the Camaro. I’m heading for the desert.”

  “Desert later, Irvine, now!” she yelled at him, rummaging through his glove box.

  “Desert, first,” Magnus countered. He gave his location. “Play GPS and tell me the nearest town.”

  “Morongo Valley,” Conan replied, evidently calling up a map on his computer. “Bound to be a big facility like a school that you can find easily. We can meet there.”

  “That’s hours out of our way,” Nutty Nadine cried, emerging from the box with a screwdriver. “We don’t have hours to spare.”

  “Want me to meet you with the team or with butterfly nets?” Conan asked dryly.

  “Nobody! Don’t tell anybody!” she shouted frantically, practically bouncing in her seat. “Just drop me off and I’ll hitchhike.”

  “Morongo Valley,” Magnus said, ignoring her orders, “just you and Dorrie, if she’s bored. Butterfly nets might be good. Give me coordinates when you have them.” He punched off the phone.

  “You can’t drag anyone else into this! The more people who know, the easier it will be for the general to find me,” his partner in crime insisted frantically.

  Her big green eyes were even wider without the black-framed glasses, Magnus decided when she turned her pleading look in his direction. Pointed chin, high cheekbones, and radiating intensity like a neutron bomb.

  “If you don’t want the general to know where you’re going, then this is the way to do it. Take my word.” Magnus kept his internal compass on east and followed the narrow, nearly-dirt path past the timber line and down towards the rocky desert.

  “If you won’t take my word that the general will find us, why should I take yours?” she cried in frustration. “I have to find my sister, and I can’t afford to waste hours while you do things your way. Just let me out at the next intersection.”

  She looked ready to jump. The aluminum foil hat and screwdriver weren’t helping her case any.

  “When was the last time you hitchhiked?” he demanded. “Do you have any idea what kind of yahoos hide up in these hills?”

  “People hitchhike all the time,” she insisted. “I just have to avoid any rangers in case Nurse Wretched has called the law. But I’m betting she calls the general first, and it takes time to get through his shields.” She tugged down the car’s visor and made a face at the cracked, dull mirror on the other side.

  “Only crazy people hitchhike,” he retorted. “If you’re that crazy, I’ll take you back to Nurse Wretched where you’ll be safer.”

  “I’m not crazy. I’m just dangerous because I know too much. And see too much. And I quit drinking the Kool-Aid.” She flung the tinfoil hat into the back seat and started jimmying at her temple with the screwdriver.

  Appalled as she stabbed herself in the head, Magnus screeched the car to a halt. He reached over and jerked the tool out of her hand. In those few seconds, she’d managed to break through her luminous skin. Blood streamed down her fair cheek. “That’s it. You’re going back now. I didn’t break you out of there to watch you kill yourself.”

  He didn’t think he’d calm his pulse anytime soon. One suicide was one too many. A second would kill him. He flung the screwdriver out the window.

  Big green eyes framed in ridiculously long brown lashes glared at him from behind the sunburst of curls. “Microchip. I’m not the crazy. I’m starting to suspect the general is.” She turned back to the mirror and began prying at the nick with her fingernails.

  Microchip? Feeling sick to his stomach, Magnus caught her chin and turned her to look at him. His big hand practically encompassed the entire side of her face. In the sunlight, he could see a dark patch right beneath the hairline.

  “Tracking device,” she said defiantly. “Want me to put the foil back on?”

  Fighting back nausea, he produced a penknife, sterilized it with flame from his lighter, and with a quick slash, pried back the skin. Blood gushed. He grabbed tissues from the backseat. She pried the chip loose and flung it out the window.

  “Go,” she ordered. “I won’t bleed to death. I’ve done this before.”

  Magnus rubbed at the frown lines on his brow but kicked the engine in again. She’d shaken him to his not-easily shaken core. He needed explanations to ground him back in reality. “I haven’t slept all night, and I’m starving and apparently unable to translate Librarian-ese. What Kool-Aid and does it have anything to do with microchips?”

  “Yes, and I’m not explaining until I have my baby sister safe.” She held the tissues to her head to stanch the blood and refused to look at him.

  After what he’d just seen, he didn’t have the heart to argue. A madman had implanted a microchip in her head? Like one would a dog? Then leashed her to a mental institution. He’d seen some horrific sights in the service, but this took the crazy to new levels.

  “Does your time table allow for food?” he asked, almost politely. “It will take Conan time to travel over here.”

  She shrank further into the seat. “I’ve eaten. Please, just let me out somewhere. The general is my stepfather, and I know whereof I speak. He’ll seriously hunt us down. I can’t afford to lose any time.”

  Magnus processed that nugget of information. The general had planted a microchip in his own kid’s head? “Do you know where he is?” he asked, trying not to sound as if he’d like to grind the man’s bones.

  “No one ever knows where he is. I’ve always known he was paranoid. Now I’m convinced he’s delusional. He keeps track of everyone and lets no one know where to find him. He could be in Irvine right now, tying my sister up and hauling her off. I just can’t wait any longer.”

  “Tell me where to find your sister, and I’ll send Conan’s team to protect her. What the hell do you think you can do to save her from a maniac?”

  “I can read his mind,” she said simply.

  Three

  Nadine waited for the explosion of disbelief. She hadn’t told very many people about the mind reading gig. She wasn’t good at it, and it wasn’t a credible topic except among the general’s inner circles. Mostly, it produced severe headaches and confusion—like she would admit that to a man who thought her insane.

  She waited for her driver to turn around and take her back to the funny farm.

  Instead, Marvelous Max silently digested her statement and followed the directional signs to Morongo.

  She had expected this Oswin brother to be ruthlessly efficient, and he’d proved that. She really hadn’t expected him to be . . . so very large. This was one of those huge old muscle cars, but his broad shoulders still seemed to take up all the space. The hands deftly guiding the vehicle around curves and over potholes were large enough to throttle her, which he would probably like to do.

  “You’re a mind reader?” he finally said as they joined the sparse flow of traffic on the state route.

  He had a marvelous deep bass voice that ought to hide any inflection, but she read voices too. His disbelief came through loud and clear. “No, I said I could read my stepfather’s mind. I cannot read yours, most of the time, anyway. You advertised your presence pretty clearly when you reached the Villa, thank you. I did sort of read Bo’s, but he was projecting wildly, and I’d been keeping my mind open, just in case. It’s not as if I had a lot to fill it.”

  Mad Max rubbed his hand over his crew cut dark hair. She hated short hair. It reminded her too much of the military, which reminded her too much of the general. Of course, her stepbrothers wore their hair long, so she ought to hate long hair too.

  “Maybe I am insane,” she said with a sigh, littering the countryside by flinging the bloody tissue out the window. “But you must have picked up my code somehow. I haven’t been able to send it to my message center, so I’ve just been repeating it in my head, hoping someone would hear.”

  “If you were hoping someone would hear your head, you could have been a little more clear and just used the address,” he said dryly.

  �
��I tried that. It didn’t work. I think we have too many words in our brains which get mixed up with mental messages. Images and numbers are different, but not as easy to translate.” Surreptitiously, she studied his profile. Like all the Oswins she’d seen in photos, he had strong, square features and a cleft chin, not precisely handsome but rugged. His nose had a bump in it, as if it had been broken at some time. His eyebrows were thick and sat on a masculine ridge that kept his long lashes from being indecently feminine.

  “You knew how to reach us,” he argued without giving her a second look. “Why didn’t you just text?”

  “Since they caught me sending those texts to Oz, everything I type into the computer gets recorded. I had to use code to physically send anything. I cut and pasted the ‘help me’ message from another document and sent it from a cloud cache that the doofuses are too ignorant to know about, but I don’t luck out and come across useful phrases very often. My days of easy access to computers ended when your brother found his kid. The general really went off the radar then.”

  Maximus didn’t look happy. He radiated disbelief. Nadine didn’t care. She had one purpose and one purpose only at this moment—save Vera.

  Conan rang back. At the punch of a button, his voice emerged from the car’s speakers. “I’ve got a man who lives near Morongo. He can meet you at the schoolyard when you get there and provide you with a new vehicle.” He gave driving instructions to a street that should be easily visible. “Do we need to send a protection squad?” he asked.

  The Maximator glanced in her direction. Nadine shook her head negatively. “I don’t want to meet anyone,” she said as insistently as she knew how.

  “I can respect that,” he said gravely. “Negative, good buddy,” he told his brother. “We’re staying off the radar.”

  “Conan is the one who’s trying to find my computer, isn’t he?” Nadine asked when Magnus turned off the phone. She hoped to prevent him asking the questions she could hear bouncing inside his skull. This Oswin had very noisy thought processes.

  “That’s what Conan does. If you could give him clues that might lead to your stepfather, we’d be appreciative.”