THE RISK OF LOVE AND MAGIC

by Patricia Rice

  “You don’t trust the entire armed forces of this country because of one crazed man? Is the general still in the military or retired?” Magnus had never asked anyone to trust him before. He was a loner, probably one of the reasons he was ex-military. And probably another reason she shouldn’t trust him.

  “Retired.” She sank back against the seat, looking exhausted. “I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. I can’t think straight. I just want a computer so I can find my sister. Do we have to make this difficult?”

  “You think I’ve slept since you started sending those damned ‘Help Me’ messages? I’ll find a motel, but I’m warning you now, I’m not letting you out of my sight, for your own good as well as my mental health.” He stood up, grabbed her arm, and hauled her to her feet.

  She stumbled, and he adjusted his frustrated grip as he escorted her out the door. She didn’t object to his manhandling. Magnus figured that meant she was completely wiped.

  Once he’d installed her in the rattletrap Taurus, he rang Conan. “I need fake ID. I’ve got the cash for one night in a cheap motel, but I don’t want anyone tracing my name on credit cards. The general has that ability, doesn’t he?” Magnus addressed that last at his weary passenger.

  “That and more if he puts his mind to it,” Nadine agreed. “Without me, he’s handicapped. His understanding of computers relies on hired help. His sons only pay attention when it benefits them.”

  “Not taking any chances,” Magnus said into the phone. “What have you got?”

  “I’ll drop off a card and ID in the morning at the surf shop up the street from my place” Conan said. “Ted knows you and will hand them over, unopened. Will that work?”

  “That works. We’ll find a motel between Irvine and your place. We need a computer, too. I can’t pay cash for that, and I think it needs to be completely wiped.”

  “That’s easy. I’ll clean a drive on one of my spares and give it to Ted with the cards. I take it you’ve found your runaway?”

  “Yeah, and we’re both beat. This line may not be safe much longer. May need to throw in a new phone while you’re at it.” Magnus didn’t worry about overburdening Conan’s bank account. His brother had just landed a lucrative contract, and Magnus could pay him back. Money wasn’t their problem. Security was.

  Conan agreed. When he signed off, Magnus started the engine, giving his passenger a surreptitious look. The Librarian had her head back and her eyes closed, but he didn’t fool himself into thinking she was asleep.

  “Aren’t fake IDs illegal?” she asked with her eyes still closed.

  “Conan has top dog security clearance and permission from authorities in cases like this. I don’t do illegal,” Magnus assured her, uncertain of her conversational direction.

  “I ought to give you credit at being good at what you do,” she said reluctantly. “I’m just not used to trusting anyone. I don’t want to be manipulated again.”

  “Given what little I know of your background so far, that’s understandable. We’ll simply have to work around our mutual distrust. It’s not as if I’m likely to trust someone who could be certifiably insane.” He was afraid to look up a cheap motel chain if the general had a chance of tracing his phone calls, even though he’d disconnected the GPS hours ago. Magnus simply steered toward the airport and hoped for the best.

  “By now, I probably am insane, or extremely neurotic.” Nadine produced a ragged pink stuffed toy from the jacket’s capacious pocket and rubbed it on her cheek. “Let’s just concentrate on Vera.”

  “Is that hers?” Magnus asked, trying not to imagine all the weird reasons she was stroking a toy.

  “Our mother gave it to her for her birthday when she was five. I don’t think she would have left it behind if she wasn’t planning on going back. Or unless she didn’t have time to go back for it. I was hoping it would help me reach her,” she said sadly.

  All right, another lunacy he’d let pass. “She may have outgrown it. She may have just gone to the beach with her boyfriend. We need to watch the apartment.”

  She shrugged and tucked the toy back in her pocket. “She was afraid. That’s all I know. She has no Malcolm abilities and can’t send me mental messages. She’s just a smart kid who wants to be a teacher. She’s a good actress but life in the public eye is hazardous for her health. The general won’t believe us. He swears she’s hiding her talents from him.”

  “Let’s start there. Why would the general care what talents she has?” Spotting a sign for a low-end hotel chain, Magnus took the next exit. He hadn’t lived in California for years, but the John Wayne airport area was navigable.

  “Don’t you get it yet? We’re all human guinea pigs in his effort to memorialize the work of Feng Po-po, his first wife. He swears a Malcolm killed her with dim mak, and he’s determined to use us all as weapons in her name.”

  Magnus would have said certifiable, except he’d heard Conan’s fiancée swear she could kill with her mind. And according to Nadine, the general believed Dorrie could do it.

  Five

  Nadine wanted to empty her head and simply luxuriate in the motel’s tiled shower with all the pretty smelling products, but she nearly fell asleep on her feet. She’d been living on the edge for so long, she didn’t know how to relax.

  She didn’t even know who she was anymore.

  Drying her hair, wishing for a good pair of scissors or at least a round brush to straighten some of the kinks, she stared at her face in the foggy mirror. She hadn’t seen herself in months. The picture wasn’t pretty, even with her glasses off. She was fat and slovenly and looked like a Disney cartoon—not the kind of woman a hunk like Magnus would notice.

  She was smart. She didn’t need to be pretty. She didn’t need a man—much. Just because she was sharing a cheap motel room with a glorious specimen of masculinity didn’t mean she needed to have dirty thoughts. She was pretty damned certain Maximus Magnus would run in the opposite direction so fast his head would spin if he thought a butterball like her was interested.

  With her spongy mass of frizz almost dry, she donned the overlarge t-shirt he’d bought for her. Had he actually chosen the largest size he could find for a reason or because he’d just grabbed the first shirt he found? Mysterious Max intrigued her far more than she should allow—probably because she needed something else to think about besides all the things that could have happened to Vera.

  Warily, she entered the darkened bedroom. The big bully had moved one of the beds in front of both door and window to prevent her escape. Freaking control freak, just as she’d figured. He was sprawled on top of the covers, fully dressed, and snoring.

  With a sigh, she crawled between the sheets of the second bed. So much for any romantic thoughts. But one of these days . . . even a neurotic nutcase could dream.

  ***

  Having spent the night tossing and turning in the unfamiliar environment, Nadine didn’t feel particularly refreshed as they ate at the free breakfast bar the next morning. Magnus studied the muted news screen in the lobby while she scanned the day-old newspaper she’d found on one of the tables.

  Computers were her connection to reality. She was suffering from major electronic withdrawal. Impatiently, she scarfed up a bowl of nasty cereal, ate through an apple, and waited for Maximus to finish consuming half the buffet.

  “Are you planning on leaving food for the next person?” she inquired politely.

  “Three cars in the parking lot,” he responded, finishing off his apple.

  She refrained from rolling her eyes at his means of communication. Sadly, she actually understood him. “They all got up earlier than we did and left all this lovely food? Yeah, it would be a shame to waste it.” She stuffed two apples into her jacket pocket.

  He took two of the plastic-wrapped pastries.

  Since they had no luggage, it was just a matter of tucking Vera’s bunny into the army jacket, climbing into the Taurus, and heading out into rush hour traffic. Praying that all she needed was a
computer, Nadine clenched her hands in her lap and watched the tsunami of automobiles rushing toward L.A.

  She’d never owned a car. She’d hardly ever been out of her college dorm or home office enough to travel. The speeding flow of traffic terrified her. Magnus drove with one hand, as if they were on an empty highway and not traveling eighty miles an hour on a collision course with ten thousand other cars.

  She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to see the wall of semis they were about to hit. It didn’t help.

  She’d learned to keep her mouth shut at an early age, but gradually, it dawned on her that she might be free to speak her mind. She didn’t know how long this freedom would last, so she might as well experience it while she could.

  “Is there any way we could take a slower route?” she asked, trying not to sound frightened. He glanced at her in surprise, and she nearly expired of fear. “Watch the road!”

  “You don’t get out much, got it.” With nail-biting rapidity, he zigzagged across the lanes to the next ramp and pulled off the freeway. “Better?” he asked as he merged into bumper-to-bumper traffic on a six-lane.

  “Probably not, but I can breathe again,” she admitted, releasing the pink bunny in her pocket. “I was not designed for the fast lane.”

  “Could you have even driven the Camaro you intended to steal from me?” he asked in amusement.

  “I’d have figured it out. I’m very good with machines.” She tried to sound casual but feared it came out stiff and just a little defensive. The freedom to speak came with a lot of pitfalls.

  Now that the adrenalin rush of escape was over, she felt lost and incapable of planning beyond the next step. She hated that.

  “You might be good with machines,” he agreed, “but driving is about second-guessing the other drivers and knowing when to get out of their way. I don’t think you’re that good a mind-reader.” He turned down a side road and began navigating increasingly narrower streets, crossing major ones and leaving the traffic behind.

  “I’d need a lot more experience,” she said, studying the quieter streets they passed. “I’d like to learn to drive, should I get out of this alive.”

  “You think the general will kill you?” he asked in amazement, darting her another of those nerve-racking looks. His light gray eyes against his dark, weathered face seemed to cut through her like laser beams.

  “If he can’t capture me again, yes, of course. I know too much.” She’d accepted her fate the moment she’d decided to run. “He tolerated me as long as I believed in his purpose and followed his orders. I became a traitor to his cause the instant I rebelled.”

  “And you thought your purpose was . . . ?”

  “Protecting the country from terrorists, of course. I saw it as a non-violent shield of psychics who could penetrate the enemies’ thoughts, see potential targets without drones, and develop machinery that the enemy couldn’t possibly duplicate. The general already has an entire industry of technicians at work. He’s not a poor man, just obsessive.”

  “He’s searching for psychics even though he believes Malcolms killed his wife? I thought he married a Malcolm?”

  “He married Mom because of me and Vera.” Nadine compressed her childhood hurt deep inside and wrapped it up tightly before speaking. “Once I figured out where to look, I learned that he and Feng Po-po tracked our weird family tree for years. They hired a few Malcolms to work in their labs. I think they blackmailed a few more. They weren’t above kidnapping when necessary. He helped your brother’s nanny steal his kid, planning on keeping an eye on him to see if he developed any particular genius he could use. That’s when I broke.”

  Magnus cursed, stopped for a red light, and turned to study her. “How could he possibly know who has any kind of genius?”

  She shrugged. “With kids, it’s a simple matter of sending in a psychologist with a series of tests that Feng Po-po designed. School administrators love tests. She’d feed them some relevant information about student behavior from the tests—and come away with charts on the kids she was really interested in. That’s how the general found me and Vera—at school—after tracing our dad’s genealogy and reading Po-po’s tests.”

  “And he struck gold in you but not your sister?”

  “Yep. Our dad died in the service when we were little, and we were thrilled to have a dad again. Mom had been working her fingers to the bone trying to balance her career and us on a teacher’s salary. In that last year, she was doing it on unemployment checks. Then the general came along, and suddenly, we were rich. We had a swimming pool and nice clothes and a kindly old man who spoke fondly of our dad. I bent over backward to please him.”

  Nadine supposed she owed Mad Max some sort of explanation, but she didn’t owe him enough to slice open her soul and bleed over the heartbreak of treachery and deception. By now, she was pretty sure the general had lied about everything, including knowing her father. She hadn’t totally processed the treachery yet. One crisis at a time was all she could manage.

  “When did you learn that he actually hated Malcolms?”

  Of all the obvious questions he could have asked, he had to go for the difficult. “You’re creepy, you know that?” She leaned her head back against the seat, not wanting to deal with the vat of fear seething inside.

  “Interrogation was part of my military training,” he told her. “Go ahead and hate me, if you like. But I know men like the general. I can help better if I know more about him.”

  “Get two computers, and I’ll give you access to any files I can still find while I hunt Vera. I really don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Your call.” He drove down a street that offered a view of the ocean. “Conan’s in Santa Monica. We’ll stop, pick up the credit cards and a computer. Any preferences to where we go from there?”

  “A park bench works for me if your new phone has a hot spot we can use. Otherwise, we need a place with Wi-Fi.” Nadine relaxed a little at the thought of having the world under her fingers again—and this time, with more freedom than she’d known in her life. Kind of scary, actually, but she would only take that thought one step at a time. “I’d love to be able to watch the ocean a bit. I’ve never more than glimpsed it.”

  “If you’re accessing the general’s files, we’ll probably need to stay on the move. Conan will make certain we have what we need.” He shot her another unfathomable look. “You’ve lived in California all your life and have never walked in the surf?”

  “We lived inland. I was only fourteen when I graduated high school. I wasn’t exactly old enough to go carousing with the seniors on weekends. And I got my masters in a little over three years. No time for partying then, either. I was too young and too nerdy for frat boy parties anyway.”

  He whistled and eyed her with new respect and just a hint of interest—for her mind if not her body. “How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-three. Want to make something of it?” She really wasn’t interested in fighting with him, but she wanted to test her new-found freedom to say what she liked.

  “It explains a lot. A masters? In what, am I allowed to ask?” He took the coast highway north.

  The traffic was abominable but the glimpses of surf and sand kept her entertained better than the conversation. She’d never even seen the Santa Monica pier. “I want to ride the Ferris wheel,” she said as they drove past. She’d heard of all the fun possibilities in the world outside her sheltered one. She’d studied those that interested her. But it was hard to know where to start without any experience to guide her.

  “When this is all over, I’ll take you on every ride your heart desires. Are you avoiding my question?”

  She didn’t believe his promise. But she could do it on her own—if she survived.

  “No, I’m not avoiding anything. My degree just isn’t very relevant. I’m a computer engineer with enough courses for a masters in psychology. I’d have gone for a doctorate except the general insisted I had enough education, and he needed me at
home. He was paying my tuition, so I couldn’t argue.”

  “Way out of my league,” he said in admiration, turning up a hilly side street that led to jaw-droppingly gorgeous mansions. “I earned a BS in mechanical engineering by the skin of my teeth.”

  “Because you’re better at doing than at taking tests,” she suggested. “School isn’t for everyone.”

  “Books are a dead bore,” he agreed. He pointed at a two-story contemporary beach home. “That’s Conan’s place where I’m currently staying. If you ever need us, go there.”

  Nadine already knew the address, but she memorized the looks of the location, and the streets he drove down as he steered toward the surf store. “You’re lucky to live in such a lovely place. Did Bo get back together with his wife and kids?”

  He was busy looking for parking and didn’t glance her way. “They’re working at it. He still has some time left in the service before he can get out and help his dad. How much do you know about all of us?”

  She shrugged. “Only bits and pieces after they started monitoring my computer time. I know the general heavily investigated Dorothea’s family since they knew Feng Po-po, so I know more about them from before my incarceration.”

  “Dorrie’s marrying Conan next week. We’ve been ordered to solve your problem before then so we can attend the wedding. You can meet everyone there. They’re dying to meet the Librarian who helped them. Dorrie’s family would love to know more about you. Her grandmother knew Po-po, and Dorrie knows a little about the general’s sons since two of them and his grandson tried to murder her.”

  He shot her a quizzical look, evidently unwilling to pry but wanting to know. Nadine shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “Let’s not put a polite face on it. My step-family killed Dorrie’s mother. I doubt she’ll want me present, but thanks for the offer. Am I coming in with you?” she asked as he found a space near the surf shop and shut off the engine.