When she hit level ground, she clapped an arm across her mouth and breathed through the heavy jacket sleeve, hoping to filter out whatever had taken him down. He lay in a heap, motionless. Heart pounding, she dropped to her knees beside him; sharp gravel dug into her shins, but she barely felt the pain as she clamped her free hand around his wrist, right along the tattoo-covered scar.
His pulse throbbed beneath her thumb. Thank Christ. But then a strange, spicy musk filtered through her makeshift face mask, coating her throat and putting a foul taste on her tongue.
She went light-headed, and fear kicked, hard and hot—but she didn’t collapse, didn’t convulse. And after a moment, the symptoms passed, though the smell remained. Either the gas was dissipating or it was Nightkeeper- specific. Risking it, she dropped her arm and took a shallow breath. Nothing happened. But it was one thing for her to breathe the tainted air, another for him. She had to get him out of there, but how?
“Dez?” She shook him, but didn’t get a response, pulled off his sunglasses and cracked an eyelid, but didn’t see anything but rolled-back white.
The ground beneath her picked up a faint vibration, followed seconds later by an engine hum. Shit. Even if nobody connected her and Dez to last night’s accident and the untraceable Jeep, a trip to the ER would raise way too many questions. But if he’d been gassed, the ER might be the best place for him. Her throat tightened as she thought of Anna wandering the halls of Skywatch with her eyes unfocused, her mind far away.
She shook him harder, fingers digging into the heavy muscles of his upper arms. “Come on! Wake up. We’ve got to move.” The trucks were getting closer.
He stirred. Groaned.
Relief slashed through her. “Dez!”
White gleamed through cracked eyelids; his mouth worked. “Son of a . . . fuck.”
“That about covers it,” she said as the trucks rounded the corner and the first one did a wheel waggle of surprise and slowed down. There were forest service markings on the doors of all three, tools in the back of the first two and a big generator-compressor combo in the third.
“I told you to run,” Dez slurred, cracking an eye to glare at her.
“I did. Just not in the direction you meant.” She grinned at him. Logic said she should have been terrified, which she was. But suddenly, on another level she felt more alive than she had in a long, long time. Maybe she was reacting to the gas after all. Except that instead of being foggy, she suddenly felt functional.
The techno-magic armbands picked up some static of radio traffic, reminding her to strip them off. She snagged his gun, too, just as truck numero uno turned off and rolled in their direction. The other two rumbled past and accelerated away. Working quickly, she safetied her .38 and dumped it in one of the big inner pockets of Dez’s jacket, which was too warm now, making her sweat. The heavy weight of the weapon pulled the coat askew until she balanced it off with his .44 on the other side.
“Come on.” She crouched, grabbed him under one arm and around the back of his neck and helped him sit up. His body was heavy, his skin smooth and warm. “I need you to play pukingly hungover for me. Got it?”
“No problem,” he slurred. “Son of a bitch left a trip wire, and . . .” His eyes rolled again and his head lolled to rest between her breasts.
New fear spurted through her as she realized that whatever the winikin had used this time, it was hitting harder, lasting longer. Keban doesn’t want him dead, she reminded herself, just slowed down for a few days. Then again, the winikin had also spent nearly a decade in a mental hospital.
“Are you okay?” The guy who got out of the truck was in his late twenties, sandy haired and fine boned. Wearing a gray-buff uniform with black stripes at the shoulders and pockets, and with a quick, jerky way of moving, he looked like a sandpiper picking its way across a beach.
Thinking fast, she dropped into fluttery female mode and gave him a wide-eyed, you’re-my-hero look. “Oh, thank you so much for stopping!”
He puffed up. “I’ve got a first aid kit in the truck, or I could call for an—”
“He’s not hurt, just hungover,” she cut in before he called in more sirens and flashing lights. “He swore he’d be fine for a hike, but . . .” She trailed off, sending him a ‘please-won’t-you-save-me’ moue. “Could you help me get him to the car?”
“I tole you I’m fiiine,” Dez slurred. “You want to hike, lesss get going.”
“Right,” she said to him while shooting a conspiratorial eye roll at the sandpiper. “We’re going. Straight back to the hotel.”
“Oh.” Rescue fantasies deflating, the spindly ranger nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a counterweight. But then his expression went dubious as he scanned the empty shoulder, then looked up to the plateau. “Your car isn’t all the way up there, is it? He looks kind of, uh, big.”
Not to mention that the ranger probably only hit one fifty after a heavy meal, her neck was already sore, and Dez was leaning heavily against her like he was settling in to stay. “How about you wait here with him, and I’ll go get the car?”
The sandpiper?s face brightened. “I’ve got water.”
“Perfect.” Together, they got Dez the dozen or so feet to the shade of the truck and propped him up against a rear tire that smelled faintly of dog piss. As she headed up the trail, she got a parting image of big, badass Snake Mendez being force-fed bottled water.
Not willing to bet that Keban was long gone, she kept a sharp watch on her surroundings as she retrieved the car, helped load Dez into it, thanked the sandpiper profusely, and got them on the road. Once they were rolling, she reholstered her .38 and headed back toward Farmington in case it turned out that they needed that ER, after all.
Then the shakes hit.
“Oh, shit.” She gripped the steering wheel two-handed as her stomach rolled sickly and her muscles knotted in a series of whole-body shudders that left her feeling disconnected from the vehicle, from everything, really.
What the hell was she doing? This was way out of her league, way beyond the adventure she had been looking for when she boarded the plane for Cancun. She was sneaking away from the cops—or at least away from a government official—for the second time in two days, and that so wasn’t her. This whole deal wasn’t her. Where the Nightkeepers operated outside the system, she worked right smack in the middle of it. She had a Social Security number; she paid her taxes; she voted. She had a year-long lease on a third-floor apartment she rarely used, fifteen payments left on a spunky little Mazda, and an off-and-on lover who wanted to be much more. That was her world. This wasn’t.
Beside her, Dez’s breath rattled oddly in his chest.
Her hand shook as she reached for her armband.
“Don’t.” His eyes were still closed, his skin still gray, his voice a hard, painful-sounding rasp, but his words weren’t as slurred as before. “I’ll be fine in a few minutes. And if you call in the cavalry, this’ll turn into a clusterfuck.”
She told herself to ignore him and hit the panic button. Instead, she snapped, “You won’t be fine in a few minutes. This wasn’t the same as the powder.”
“It’s close enough, though stronger. Actually, it feels like a hell of a postmagic crash.” He cracked an eyelid; the whites had gone pink. “Just find me protein, carbs, and someplace to sleep it off. I’ll be fine once I recharge.”
“For all you know, your brain could be leaking inside that thick skull of yours.”
He reached across and touched her hand, brushing his fingertips across the inside of her wrist. “This isn’t like what happened to Anna.”
She could have held out against stubbornness. She had no defense against understanding. “Hands off,” she snapped.
He withdrew, lay back against the far door, and closed his eyes with a tired sigh. But his color was better, his voice stronger when he said, “Just find me some food and a bed. While I’m sawing logs, you can do your thing.”
Dump him on his people and go home, said her better sense. But beneath the fear was a thread of adrenaline, a stir of heat . . . and the knowledge that he needed her.
“You just don’t learn, do you, Montana?” she muttered. And she pulled into a Wendy’s drive-through and ordered one of everything.
With Dez snoring softly beside her, she got back on the road, called Lucius, got his voice mail, and left him a
