‘Where am I?! What is this place?! Who … who are you? Who are you?!’
Tears welled up in Lightning Bird’s eyes; no matter how many times he witnessed these episodes they never failed to stab their dagger blades deep into his heart.
‘Help me … help me … help me help me help me, help help help help help help!’
A stuttering mantra of disorientation, of confusion, of a shattered mind, the many brittle shards of which were held together only by the flimsiest strands of glue.
‘Let me handle this, Jun,’ he whispered to the teen. ‘Let me take her hands.’
Jun reluctantly released Parvati’s hands from his grasp. Lightning Bird then gripped one of her stiff claw-hands in his. He closed his eyes, honed his focus and sent slow, calming surges of energy from his hands into hers. After a while, the avalanche of panicked whisperings began to slow to an arrhythmic, irregular stuttering, and the fear started to leave her eyes. Eventually she stopped speaking and her eyelids closed; sleep had come over her. Lightning Bird wished he could allow her to sink for long hours into its soothing depths, but for the moment he simply could not. Their enemy was coming for them, and he would neither rest nor stop.
In fact, the enemy’s spies and informants were probably feeding him information at this very moment. Moving a one-hundred-and-eighty-kilogram motorised wheelchair, along with its legless occupant, was not something that could be done discreetly, and Sigurd had eyes and ears everywhere.
Their current location would be safe for a few hours at the most … or perhaps not even that long. And when dealing with an adversary as ruthless and powerful as Sigurd, it would not do to take risks.
Lightning Bird stared out of the window at the city of Albany, its urban jungle stretched out to where the horizon blurred the meeting of ground and sky into a long, dirty smudge. He had known that Sigurd would want to capture Parvati, now that her location had been revealed, but neither he nor anyone else had expected that the Viking would do this himself. They had all assumed that he would get his minions or perhaps his Huntsmen allies to do it, yet he had surprised them all. This was worse and more perplexing than he had previously thought. Something about the fact that Sigurd had come here himself to hunt them made things all the more sinister and foreboding, and more dangerous, of course, for himself, Jun, Daekwon and Parvati.
He had been counting on doing this on his own, with assistance from Jun, Daekwon and other trusted acquaintances who could help along the way, but now he was not so sure of that. Certainly, none of the people he knew would be able to help defend Parvati against a foe of Sigurd’s calibre. No, he, Daekwon and Jun would need additional assistance now, at least until they could get Parvati off of American soil, for the only refuge that would be truly safe for her would be somewhere extremely remote and inaccessible. Time, however, was needed to make plans and arrangements for such a thing, and time was not something they had very much of right now.
Just then there was a knock on the door, with the knuckles rapping out a distinctive rhythmic pattern. Lightning Bird recognised it at once, and walked over to peer through the peephole, his hand curled around the grip of the firearm inside his coat. Daekwon was standing outside, and Lightning Bird exhaled a sigh of relief when he saw that the young man was alone. He opened the multiple locks on the door and let him in, and then locked the place up again as soon as he was inside.
Daekwon was dressed in baggy jeans and an oversized hoodie, with the hood pulled over his head to cover as much of his face as he could. Despite the gloomy rain clouds that were bunched thick and grey in the sky overhead, he was wearing aviator sunglasses – again, for the purpose of disguise. He had grown a beard in the days since they had left Graeagle, and on the rare occasions he went out in public, he had to put makeup on to cover the distinctive vitiligo on his skin. Under his hoodie a Glock Seventeen pistol was secretly holstered; it went with him everywhere.
Paola’s passing had hit him hard. He had run the gamut of emotions, from intense grief to blinding rage to hopeless despair over the past few days, but the tragedy had neither paralysed him, nor induced in him a state of helplessness. Instead, it had galvanised his will, and given him a forge-tempered sense of determination and purpose. All he cared about now was exacting vengeance upon those who had taken from him the first girl he had ever loved.
Jun, on the other hand, had bottled his feelings up even tighter, shoving them ever deeper into his core. He had become even more reticent and withdrawn than he had been before. William had been the one person with whom he felt comfortable communicating, but now he was a continent away. He felt a strange, inexplicable closeness with Parvati, but he could not talk to her of his technology addiction, not in the way he could speak of it to William. He still had moments where he lusted ferociously after communion with a screen, a screen of any sort; it was a desire as ravenously desperate as any junkie’s for a fix. He knew, however, that to do such a thing would be to bring death upon not only himself, but all of these people, so in silence
