Landon cocked his head to the side, considering. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not a killer.”
“I’m glad.”
“That doesn’t solve our dilemma, though,” he said to me. “I still have your friend, and you want to arrest me.”
“I’m not the police, Landon,” I said. “And so far, the police don’t have your or Bethany’s name. Our investigation is completely internal.”
Landon stared. “Why?”
“Because Trance, my boss, isn’t fond of outing Metas to local authorities. Until we understood what was going on, the investigation was need-to-know.”
“Was?”
“One of ours was kidnapped. It’s hard to tell if she’s changed her mind yet.”
He looked pained. “These communities really do depend on us to survive. If we stop delivering food, they’ll starve.” He spoke with absolute conviction, and with a hint of fear. “They need us. I’ll give Ethan back if you promise to stop looking for us.”
“I can’t promise that, Landon.”
“What if I show you?”
“Show me?”
“I’ll take you both to one of the towns that I feed. You can see the people for yourself, see the difference we make to them. And you can see for yourself that Ethan is okay.”
Landon had just said the magic words. I couldn’t promise him that seeing this town would make us not report him and Bethany, but I could promise to look. To see his version of Sherwood Forest and pass along what I knew to Teresa. Landon and Bethany would probably still be hunted for their crimes, but I could play along for a while. And I knew Thatcher wouldn’t give up the chance to spend more time with his son.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll go.”
“I have two conditions,” Landon said.
“Name them.”
“First, you’ll be blindfolded for the trip. I can’t have you taking others back to the location.”
I glanced at Thatcher, who nodded. “Okay, agreed. The other?”
“You’ll have to leave your phones and coms here.”
That condition I didn’t like as much. “I can agree to leave our communication devices behind if I can send one message first.”
“What kind of message?”
“I want to tell Trance to not worry or look for us, and that I’ll be in contact when I can.”
Landon considered the request with a sour expression. “Fine. But I want to read the text before you send it.”
“Okay.”
I took out my phone and typed the message just as I’d said it, then showed the phone to Landon. After he hit send, he gave the phone a mighty toss toward the road. It cracked when it hit the ground. Our coms followed. Landon sent a haze of static electricity over each of us, probably checking for any other kind of trackers on our persons. He took my gun, too. He electrified the Sport and destroyed the tracker he found under the fender.
From the rear compartment of the Sport, he produced a spare blanket and used his telekinesis to tear it into wide strips, which he folded twice. Blindfolds. He had four strips, though, which meant—
“You aren’t tying us up,” I said with a fierceness that startled Landon. “No arm restraints. Blindfolds only.”
He opened his mouth as if to protest, then shut it. Nodded. Good, because if he’d insisted, I would have called the whole damned thing off. No one tied me up, not ever again. The pretzel job that Specter had done on me back in January had taken nearly a month to heal, and those long nights hopped up on muscle relaxants had brought back old nightmares. Nightmares of being tied up and tortured by people who were supposed to love me.
I ignored Thatcher’s speculative look as we both climbed into the backseat. Since Landon seemed to have no qualms about leaving his motorcycle behind, I assumed it was stolen, too, and I added motorcycle thief to his list of crimes. The kid was certainly filling out his rap sheet. And he seemed to like showing off, because instead of just using his hands, he used his powers to tie on Thatcher’s blindfold.
My stomach flipped when the swatch of fabric hovered toward my own eyes. I didn’t like this, being driven blindly to an unknown destination by someone whose mental state I didn’t quite trust. Landon said he wasn’t a killer, but his actions at the warehouse early Saturday morning said he wasn’t above getting violent.
I didn’t have a choice.
The gray cotton descended over my eyes. Phantom fingers cinched it tight and tied a knot, casting the world into darkness.
Nine
Even with the radio on and tuned to a classic rock station, the trip seemed interminable. I couldn’t guess how long we were actually on the road. At least three or four hours, though, because eventually I became aware of the need to pee. We moved straight, up, down, around, and in every other direction it was possible for a Sport to go except backward. I kept my eyes shut against the scratchiness of the blindfold’s cloth, and the rocking of the vehicle nearly sent me to sleep a few times.
Eventually the ride became slower, the turns more hairpin. Our elevation had changed, because my ears popped twice. At some point I got restless and began squirming in my seat, trying to wake up my sore butt and ward off the growing need to ask for a pit stop.
“Landon?” Thatcher asked, breaking the complete silence among the three of us that had existed for hours. “Any chance we can stop for a minute?”
“Why?”
“I need to water a tree.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Or I’m going to be watering the seat.”
Thatcher made a noise that might have been a chuckle.
“Fine, I’ll find a place to stop,” Landon said.
He kept driving until I was tempted to ask if he’d forgotten that we had to pee, and then the Sport slowed. Turned. Gravel crunched under the tires, and we hit a few ruts that spiraled out my equilibrium. I hated not being able to see. He stopped, shifted, turned off the engine.
“Blindfolds stay on.”
“Are you nuts?” I said. “How the hell do I know we’re not in the middle of a parking lot of people?”
“We’re in the mountains at the head of an old hiking trail. I haven’t passed another car in over thirty minutes. I will take you down a ways so you aren’t visible from the road, and then I promise I’ll give you privacy.”
I actively hated the idea. “And if I take off the blindfold anyway?”
“All I have to do is put pressure on your carotid artery and you’ll sleep until we get where we’re going. I honestly don’t care if you piss on the seat.”
Thatcher grunted.
“Fine,” I said.
Thus occurred one of the most humiliating experiences of my life—being led blindly down an uneven hiking trail, my hand on Landon’s shoulder and Thatcher’s hand on mine. Oh, did I forget to mention we had to pee together? Blindfolded or not, I was furious at being forced to do something so private in front of a near-stranger. And Landon seemed entirely too pleased with himself for our humiliation.
