by Jamie Davis
“How much cash do you have?” Jaz asked when he turned to leave the pumps to go inside the WaWa convenience store.
“Not much, but I have my debit card,” Dean replied.
“No credit or debit cards. It is just like keeping our phones off or in airplane mode,” Jaz said shaking her head. “We can’t afford to leave a trail behind us. Come around back of the Expedition.”
Dean and Joanna got out and followed her to the back where she opened the lift gate. There were three black Pelican cases lying in the cargo area, two large cases and one smaller case. Jaz looked around to make sure that no one else was around and then dialed in a combination on the embedded lock before opening the small case. Jo laughed as she saw the open case and turned away as if she wasn’t that surprised. Dean couldn’t take his eyes off the contents. The case was full of cash, stacks of it. The bills were all bundled up in bank wrappers and neatly arranged in rows.
“How much money is that?” Dean asked.
“It’s one hundred thousand dollars in various sized bills,” Jaz said, taking one of the stacks of fifty-dollar bills out of the case before she closed it and rolled the combination dials to lock it again. She peeled off a few of the fifties, handing them to him, before putting the rest into an inside pocket of her black leather jacket. “Use that to buy anything you want, I’ll take a coffee, one sugar and some half and half. Put the other fifty down on the gas here at pump number 2.”
“Ooo, I want a smoothie,” Jo chimed in. “I love WaWa smoothies.”
“Do you always drive around with that much cash in the back of your car? What if someone tries to rob you?” Dean asked.
Jo laughed aloud. “Rob her? That would be like committing suicide. Come on, I’m thirsty.” The teen headed towards the convenience store entrance.
Jaz shot a look at the teenager and then said, “It’s about being discreet and careful. I’m never as concerned about the cash as I am about the weapons. And, yes, all our Errington vehicles are prepped to go dark at any time. Since we have to be prepared to provide the best security for our clients, we have to be prepared for anything. That includes doing what we are doing right now, heading to a safe house to regroup. Go get my coffee. I’ll pump the gas.”
Dean shook his head as he wondered what was in the other cases in the back. She had mentioned weapons and he was sure there were other surprises as well. She certainly liked her mysteries. He walked into the convenience store just behind Jo. The teen Wiccan seemed to take everything in stride as if she was used to traveling around a lot. It made him wonder about her legal status again and he wished he could turn his phone on and make at least one call to ask Asha about her. If the coven really sent her to them, she would tell him.
Dean got Jaz her coffee while Jo used one of the touch screens to order herself a smoothie. He strolled up and down the aisles, looking for something to snack on while he waited for the smoothie to be finished. After all, his dinner had been rudely interrupted. He selected a bag of pretzels large enough for all of them and headed to the counter to pay. He handed the clerk one of the fifties and told him to put it on the SUV getting gas at pump 2. He used the other fifty to pay for their food and drinks. He noticed that the clerk was staring at the back of his right hand. It was where his UV ink tattoo was located that identified him as a Station U paramedic. Only Unusuals could see the mark. He let his eyes come up and met the clerk’s eyes. They had a slight yellow tint around the corners of the irises. He was some sort of lycan, an animal shapeshifter. The clerk just smiled at him and made an adjustment on the screen.
“Police and public safety don’t pay for coffee, sir,” the clerk said.
“I’m not on duty,” Dean said. “I don’t mind paying.” He knew that some places gave discounts and freebies to policemen, fire and EMS crews. He took advantage of them all the time while he was on duty. This was the first time someone had noticed who he was off duty.
“Not a problem, sir. Thank you for your service, I’ll just ring up the other items,” the clerk said.
Dean nodded in thanks and picked up the coffee cup and the bag with the pretzels and bottle of soda. Jo strolled over with the stamped receipt to pick up her smoothie at the deli counter. Once she had the fruity concoction the two of them went back to the SUV. Jaz was just finishing up filling the gas tank. He was surprised it had taken so long to fill up, even with an SUV the size of the Expedition. He mentioned as much to Jaz.
“It’s got dual custom gas tanks so we can go twice as far on a tankful,” the hunter explained. She took the coffee from Dean and took out her keys while she climbed in.
“I can drive,” Dean offered.
“No, I’ve got it,” Jaz said. “I don’t like it when other people drive my vehicle.”
Jo laughed from the back seat. “Some things never change.”
Dean shot her a glance at the strange comment, but didn’t argue with Jaz. If she wanted to drive, that was fine by him. He could get some rest. He was tired after working all day and getting up early.
“How’s the free coffee?” Jo asked. “Dean got comped a free cup when the clerk spotted his invisible ink.”
“He what?” Jaz said, concerned.
“It’s no big deal,” Dean said. “A lot of convenience stores offer free coffee and fountain soda to public safety officers. He spotted my Station U tattoo and said the coffee was free. He was some sort of lycan, if I were to guess.”
“He was kind of hot, too,” Jo said. “But most shifters have that vibe going for them.”
“Dean,” Jaz said. “I told you we have to stay under the radar and you go and expose us to the first convenience store clerk we run into. Are you crazy?”
“I told you that it is no big deal. I forget about this tattoo when I’m not working,” Dean explained.
“Yeah, but you are one of, what, ten or twelve people in the world with that tattoo?” the hunter asked. “So if word gets around that one of you was here on the way out of town, how long do you think it will take our adversaries to put two and two together and figure out it was you?”
“Wow, paranoid much?” Dean asked. “What makes you think that anyone is going to go to those lengths to track me down? It was a chance encounter, that’s all.”
“I stay alive by being paranoid. If you let me, I’ll keep you alive, too,” Jaz cautioned him as she started up the SUV and drove back towards the highway ramp. “We know they are tracking you somehow. Until I figure out how they got to us at the diner, I will assume that any compromise is potentially fatal.”
“So if we weren’t in a hurry, you’d go back and kill that kid to cover our tracks?” Dean asked, only partially joking.
Jaz shot him a glance and then went back to paying attention to the road ahead. The glance turned his blood to ice. If she thought it would work, that is exactly what she would do. Dean had to remember that at the heart of it she was a killer. Maybe she did it for the right reasons, maybe not, but she was his opposite. If the situation called for it, she’d kill without a moment’s thought and without remorse. He shivered and wondered again about who he was teamed up with on this mission.
“How about some music?” Jo offered from the back seat. “It’s like riding in a hearse in here. Put the radio on and get us some tunes.”
Dean reached up to the dashboard and turned on the radio. When he switched it on, he caught a Baltimore news broadcast in progress.
“… Identified as Jaswinder Errington, a private security specialist. Ms. Errington is being sought in relation to a savage animal attack where shots were fired in Elk City earlier this evening. Her companion, Elk City paramedic Dean Flynn is also sought for questioning in the incident. They were last seen leaving the scene of the incident in a black SUV and should be considered armed and dangerous. Do not approach them yourself. Call 911, Elk City Police, or the Maryland State Police if you have information of their whereabouts. We’ll be back in a minute with tomorrow’s weather forecast after these messages from our sponsor
s.”
“I thought you called your father and told him what we were doing? He was going to square things away,” Dean said.
“I thought so, too,” Jaz replied. “It appears our adversaries have more resources than we thought.”
Jo chimed in, “At least they didn’t mention me.”
“Yeah, but you two are on the security cameras at the convenience store and if that lycan back there puts two and two together, he’s going to report us to the police. They are going to have descriptions of all three of us on the radio as soon as he does.”
“Well we’re only another hour from the cabin,” Dean said. “It is isolated and no one will look for us there. There is no connection to us.”
“I hope so, Dean, I hope so,” Jaz said. “Because isolated cabins make great places for a concerted attack, too, where no one can hear the noise and raise an alarm.”
The SUV’s occupants fell silent as they drove onward, thinking about that final statement. It did not bode well for them.
13
Dean paced the floor in the cabin’s open great room while he thought about the situation he was in. “I can’t believe I’m being chased by the police again,” he complained. “I just got murder charges against me dropped. I promised myself I would never be in that situation again.”
“You’re not charged with anything,” Jo said. “You’re a person of interest in an ongoing investigation. The police search is just our opponent’s way of getting help tracking us down.”
“She’s right,” Jaz said. She was seated on the sofa against the wall. She had her handgun broken down to its component parts, all laid out on the coffee table in front of her. She was wiping the barrel with a cloth coated with some sort of oil. “This is just a ploy to get the police to track us down for them. It keeps us on the run and not getting on with our task of tracking down the missing Eldara.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Dean quipped. “You’re used to living on the run and being tracked by demons.”
“This is a kill or be killed game you’re mixed up with, Dean,” she said. “And, no, I’m not used to being in trouble with the police. We usually try to work with them and not against them. It makes me wonder what my father is doing to get all of this worked out. Something must be keeping him from getting us off the police’s radar.”
“Maybe he’s got other things on his mind,” Jo said. She pointed to the TV she was watching. There was a video of a large building fire. The caption read, “Gas Explosion Destroys Elk City Building.”
“Turn that up,” Jaz and Dean said together.
“… Fire department investigators are making no statements as to the cause of the explosion, but bystanders claim they smelled gas just before the blast that leveled the Errington Security Building and damaged surrounding structures as well. There are no reports of the number of casualties in the blast and subsequent fires, though there are several reports of firefighter injuries while fighting the blaze.”
Dean looked at Jaz. She looked pale and lost all of a sudden. It was the first time he’d seen her with her guard down. He heard a sob from his left and looked over to see that Jo was crying. He didn’t know what she was crying about. It was Jaz’s father that might be missing after all. Maybe she was just shocked by the carnage.
“Jaz,” he said. “We don’t know that your father was in the building when the explosion happened. We have to hope for the best until we know for sure.”
“He was there, Dean,” she said. “He was staying in the clan apartments upstairs. We keep them there for when we are in town. My mom was there, too, along with most of my cousins. This mission was important. All hands were on deck to help out. Now we’re on our own.” Her shoulders sagged and she turned her head away, probably so he couldn’t see her crying.
Jo walked over, wiping tears from her eyes and sat down on the sofa next to Jaz. She put one arm around Jaz’s shoulders to comfort her. The hunter started to pull away and then she gave in and the two of them shared a tearful embrace. Dean wasn’t sure why Jo was so upset, too, but he supposed it was good she was able to give Jaz a shoulder to cry on, given the circumstances. He had never known his own father and had only the vaguest memories of him. His mother had never talked about him, no matter how many times Dean had asked. He moved over and picked up the remote from on top of the TV and turned the TV off. He looked around for something to do. With all that had happened to Jaz this evening, his troubles didn’t seem so important.
He looked at the cabin. Ashley had made a few upgrades to the place since they’d been here. He had come here once when she had borrowed the key from an ER nurse friend of hers. Since she had bought the place, he found that she had put in a small satellite dish and added a generator to power the place if the main power went out. The pantry shelves were stocked with canned goods and it looked like someone came in periodically and cleaned and dusted the place.
He wondered if the caretakers were members of the nearby Unusual community. He and Ashley had helped a family of Dryads living in the forest nearby when they had been here before. They had saved the oldest daughter from a life-threatening infection and he was sure that family would have felt obligated to help the Eldara again if they knew she bought the cabin. He might want to try and contact them. He thought he could find their place through the woods again if he tried. He looked at his watch. It was nearing midnight. Would that be too late, or should he wait for morning?
“I’m going to go for a walk. I’ve got to connect with someone who might be able to help us out,” Dean said.
“No, we can’t afford to let anyone know where we are,” Jaz cautioned.
“These are friends of Ashley’s and they owe her a debt,” Dean explained. “You understand how that works. We need some help, at least in the short term. They could be of service to help us stay supplied and informed about what is going on in the outside world. Trust me. These people can help us.”
The huntress just looked at him for a moment with her red-rimmed eyes, the pain showing in her expression, even though she tried to appear in control. She nodded, almost imperceptibly, and he grabbed a flashlight from where he had left it on the counter and left to go and find some Dryads in the dark.
Dean stepped outside the cabin and shined the flashlight’s beam into the woods. It had been a while since he had been here, but he thought he could find the path that led to the Dryads’ house in the woods. If he could connect with Enric, the head of the family and one of the leaders of the Unusuals in the mountain valley, they could hide here in the cabin for a while before anyone found them. Playing the flashlight’s illumination on the ground in front of him, Dean started to look along the edge of the trees for where the path began.
It didn’t take him too long, no more than fifteen minutes to find where he thought the path began and he walked into the dark woods, following the trail. It was probably a bad idea, he thought. Dean was a child of the city. He had grown up in and around Elk City all his life and had not spent any appreciable time in anything approaching a wilderness setting. The forest here was alien to him in many ways. In daylight, the paramedic might have been able to keep his bearings while walking, but with the darkness, even with the help of a flashlight, he soon became lost.
The first clue was when he stumbled through an opening in the trees and found himself on the edge of the mountain lake that filled the center of the valley. He had started on a path that led away from the lake. The fact that he had gotten turned around and ended up next to the water meant that he had no idea where he was. He checked his watch and realized he had been gone for almost an hour. The walk to the dryad’s cabin, when he had taken the trip before with Ashley, had only taken about twenty minutes.
Dean looked around in the darkness. It was cloudy, so there was no help from the moon or stars to lend light to the landscape. He played the light from his flashlight on the dark waters of the lake and then turned in a circle, shining the light into the woods behind him. Dean supposed he could
just walk along the lake’s bank until he got back to the cabin, but the cabin was not right on the lake and he was not sure he would see it in the dark. He was still contemplating his options when there was a sound behind him. It was a ripping snarl, like that of a large cat. Spinning around, the light’s beam showed the tawny form of a mountain lion, eyes glowing in the light’s illumination.
Dean started to panic. His chances of fending off a mountain lion on his own without even as much as a knife were slim. He held out the flashlight in his left hand, keeping the beam on the lion, which stood watching him from the edge of the tree line. He extended his right hand in a calming gesture, palm extended, fingers wide. Dean didn’t know what he was doing, or why, but he knew that if he tried to turn and run, the big cat would catch him without any trouble at all.
Then the lion did something he didn’t expect. It sat down and extended its right fore paw. If Dean didn’t know better, he would think it was copying his movements. The cat’s head tilted as if puzzled by something and it let out a low rumble from its throat. It wasn’t a growl exactly, but it did send chills up Dean’s spine. He had a sudden thought and turned his right hand from palm out to show the mountain lion the back of his hand. He wasn’t sure if the hidden tattoo there glowed in the UV spectrum in the dark so he shined the edge of the flashlight’s beam on it briefly, just to illuminate it.
The lion looked from meeting his eyes, to his outstretched hand and then nodded. At least that was the way he would describe it. It looked like a nod. He decided to try something else.
“I’m Dean Flynn, I’m a paramedic and a companion of the Eldara, Ashley Moore. Do you understand me?” His voice sounded loud in the darkness amid the chirps and buzzing of the nighttime insects.
The mountain lion nodded again, and Dean felt his shoulders relax a bit. This wasn’t a mountain lion. It was a lycan of some sort who had shifted to lion form. He decided to keep talking since that seemed to be working.
