Connor gave it a gentle shove. It swung closed with a thud. “That's one of the many reasons we're helping Seth,” he said. “The McClouds know how it feels to lose a brother.”
She stared at the bread browning in the toaster oven. Her mouth was dry, and her appetite gone. “I'm sorry,” she said.
“Sit down,” Connor said. “Eat something. You're awfully pale.”
She forced down some toast with peanut butter at his urging, and he gave her a flannel-lined denim jacket, the sleeves of which came down five inches past her fingertips.
“I'm going to work here in the office. I'd appreciate it if you'd stay right where I can see you,” he said briskly. “There's a couch, and an afghan if you're cold. Books in the bookcase. Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” She curled up on the couch and stared out the window. Connor was staring into the computer, absorbed, and she realized what he must be looking at.
“You've got X-Ray Specs software running on that computer, right? You're tracking the Corazon!” She leaped to her feet. “Can I—”
“Stay where you are and mind your business, please.” His eyes and voice were hard. “Try to relax.”
“Sure,” she whispered. Yeah, right. As if.
She dropped onto the couch, tucked her feet beneath her and stared out at the fog drifting through the pines. A rent in the clouds revealed a snowy mountain peak across the canyon, glowing a deep, sunrise pink. The shifting colors made her think of opals.
An ugly chill crawled up her spine. She thought of Seth's boat. Slipping the Dreamchaser into his inside jacket pocket. She had forgotten all about it. Seth had never known about it at all. He had no reason to think anyone had tampered with his jacket.
Oh, dear God. It was the necklace. It had to be. It was her fault that assassins had been chasing them, and finding them. She leaped up, her heart in her throat.
At that moment, gravel crunched under car tires in the driveway.
“Connor, I have to tell you something,” she began. “I—”
“Shhh.” He waved her down with a sharp motion of his hand and limped over to the window. 'This is weird,” he murmured. “I didn't know he knew about this place.”
“Who?”
“A guy I work with,” Connor peered out the window, perplexed. “Or work for, I should say, since he just got promoted. Go upstairs. Quick. He might come in for a cup of coffee. Stay up there until I tell you it's clear. And Raine?”
She turned back from the foot of the stairs. “Yes?”
“Do not make me regret letting you out of that room.”
She nodded and ran up the stairs for the attic. She edged towards the window that overlooked the porch roof. There was no curtain. Looking out meant risking being seen, and would infuriate Connor. The man was his colleague, for God's sake. His boss; surely not a threat to her.
But Ski Mask's bloodshot eyes and the blank, dead eyes of the motel assassin haunted her. She had learned to take nothing for granted in the past five days. Not looking out the window meant risking something decidedly worse than Connor McCloud's irritation.
She crept closer on tiptoe, keeping back in the shadows, but the men were too close to the porch. She had to get closer. The screen door slammed shut. Connor greeted the visitor. His voice was not particularly friendly, just neutral. Questioning. She could not hear what they said through the double-paned storm window.
The man responded, his voice deeper than Connor's baritone. Goose bumps rose up on her spine. She drew nearer. If he looked up, he would see her for sure. From this angle, she saw only that he was balding, somewhat heavy, bulked out in a black winter jacket. Glasses. Connor asked another inaudible question. He responded with a shrug.
Connor hesitated, then nodded. He said something else, probably inviting the man into the house, and turned around.
She choked off a useless scream of warning when the man's hand flashed out, snake-swift. The butt of his pistol connected with Connor's head, and he dropped to the ground without a sound. The man knelt beside him for a moment, touching his throat. He stood up, pressing against his belly with his hand. He looked around.
He looked up. Their eyes locked It was the man she had seen when she had gone to see Bill Haley. Her mother’s friend, Ed Riggs. Older and heavier, minus the mustache, but there was no mistaking him. He had tried to kill her seventeen years ago. He was back to finish the job.
He disappeared under the porch roof. She looked around the empty room with a sickening sense of deja vu. God, stuck again in a bedroom with no weapons. The lamp was useless, a fragile frame of dusty bamboo and muslin. There was the whiskey bottle on the dresser. She grabbed it, hefted it. Almost empty. Only slightly better than nothing.
He was not going to be taken in by her lurking behind a door with a bottle, and there was no point in cowering and waiting for him to come to her. She'd tried that approach, and could say with complete authority that the waiting-and-cowering option truly sucked the big one. Particularly since nobody was rushing to her rescue this time. Seth was off pursuing the Corazon. Connor was laid out cold on the gravel outside. She hoped to God he wasn't dead or seriously injured.
It was up to her. But then again, it always had been.
Raine gripped the neck of the whiskey bottle. Saw the heavy, palm-sized padlock lying next to it, and grabbed that, too. She hid the bottle behind her leg, dragged in a long, slow, hitching breath, and started for the head of the stairs. She was scared to death, but she would pretend not to be. Who knew better than she how to pretend? Her whole life was leading up to this moment. The grand, ultimate pretense. She did not bother to walk quietly. In fact, she stomped. As much as one could stomp, in a pair of floppy clown shoes.
“Hello, Ed.”
Riggs turned the corner at the landing. His jaw sagged.
It was a tableau from a cheap graphic novel. The girl poised at the top of the stairs, looking down her nose at him. Legs planted wide, chest stuck out. In that ragged, sexpot outfit with her hair frizzed out all over the place, he could see why Novak wanted her. Even the bruises under her eyes didn't detract from her allure. She looked like a whacked out fashion model on a cocaine binge, sexy and wild and completely unpredictable.
Eyes on the prize, he reminded himself. This was for Erin.
He lifted the gun and pointed it at her. “I don't want to hurt you.”
The contempt on her face did not change. “Then why are you pointing that gun at me, Ed?”
“You have to come with me now,” he told her. “If you don't do anything stupid, you won't get hurt.”
She took a step down. Before he realized what he was doing, he had retreated back a step, as if she were a threat to him.
“You killed my father.” Her voice vibrated with hatred.
He kept the gun trained on her, but she didn't seem to notice, or care. “Old news,” he said, sneering. “Besides, that was a mercy killing. Peter was a suicide waiting to happen. I just put him out of his misery. Come on down, nice and slow, Katie. Make this easy on yourself, OK?”
Her eyes were glowing oddly, like Victor's when the mood was on him. Her face was unearthly pale, like a vampire in a horror flick.
“Why should I?” she said. “You're just going to kill me anyway. Like you tried to do when I was a kid. Remember that, Ed? I sure do.”
“You were a snotty little bitch back then, too. I remember that,” he snarled. “Come on, Katie. Be a good girl. One foot after the other.”
“Fuck you. You killed my daddy, you pig.”
Her lips drew back from her teeth in a snarl, and her arm whipped out from behind her, where she'd been hiding the liquor bottle. She let out an ear-splitting shriek and hurled it at him.
He flung up his arm and took the goddamned thing on the same sore arm that had blocked the brass lamp last night. He roared with pain, yelped again at the shiny metal thing that spun out of nowhere right after it, clipping him on the jaw.
Then the crazy little bitch took a flying leap, right at him.
