“I’ll try near the entrance,” Leo said, and splashed through to the circle of gray sky. He held his phone out through the hole and squinted. He shaded the screen. “Got one. We can get a text out. Now the question is who do we call?”
I was hysterical enough to want to answer with
Ghostbusters
. Somehow, I didn’t think Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray were going to be a lot of help.
“I can activate a tab. We’re close enough to the outside that my people can follow it. They’ll rescue us shortly,” Dalton said, and dug in a pocket and put his plan into action.
I had a different idea, and my idea might get us out of here faster.
“Gimme your phone,” I said, holding my hand out to Leo, who’d joined us back on dry land. He was dripping, and he’d clenched his jaw to keep it from chattering.
“Who are you calling?”
“Trouble,” I said. “Helpful trouble.” I punched in Price’s phone number and then typed out the text:
Need help. Stuck inside the mountain with no way out. Have your brother
travel
to us.
I eyed the screen and wondered if there was any way this was a sane move. We could wait for Dalton’s help to show up. It was coming from the same source in the end. I started to hit the delete key and hesitated. Touray could get Leo out right away instead of waiting for someone to follow Dalton’s tab. Leo was shivering. Even inside the cave, which was warmer than outside, it couldn’t have been more than thirty degrees. My breath plumed in the air. How long before he got hypothermia? If getting wet from the crotch down could do it . . . I didn’t know, but I sure as hell wasn’t about to gamble with my brother.
I handed Leo the phone. “Go send this,” I said.
He read it and flicked an eyebrow up at me, but didn’t ask any questions. He waded back to the cave entrance.
“I’ve got it covered,” Dalton said, not moving out of the way. He’d gone to the opening to send a message of his own.
“All the same,” Leo drawled, thrusting his phone up over the other man’s shoulder until he had bars. He thumbed the
Send
key. A few seconds later, he lowered his arm and returned to me, followed by Dalton, who managed to stomp through the water.
“Who did you send that message to?” he demanded, skewering me on his silver gaze. He still had his phone in his hand.
“Like you don’t know,” I said.
“Who?” His voice was a gunshot.
I sighed. He really wanted me to spell it out? “Your boss. One of them. Who else?”
He swore, then whirled away. “Come on. Let’s go. Double time. Full retreat.”
My other four bodyguards straightened at his whip-crack voice, spinning around and heading back the way we’d come.
What the fuck? “What are you doing?” I demanded, shock and sudden doubt crashing through me. I was putting two and two together fast and not liking results one bit.
Dalton looked over his shoulder as he followed his people up the passage. “You’ll see me again, Princess,” he said with a sharp grin, and vanished.
My mouth fell open, and I exchanged looks with Madison and Leo. “What just happened?”
“I don’t think they wanted to be here when your buddies showed up,” Madison said.
“But—” I stopped before I said something extremely stupid, like, for instance:
but Dalton works for Touray!
Because it was pretty obvious that that was not even close to the truth. Which meant I’d given that asshole and his team access to me, my friends, and my brother. I’d risked all of our lives. My stomach quaked as I imagined what they could have done, who could have been hurt. “Who are they? Who sent them?” Panic—way, way too late—made my voice rise.
“That is the twenty-four-dollar question,” Leo said, ice crusting his voice. “Didn’t you check them out?”
“I just—” What? I’d tried to follow their trace, but they’d nulled it out. I’d followed them, trying to find out where they lived, but they only went where I went. I had no idea where they slept or ate. I’d been recovering from my earlier injuries, then I’d been too swamped with new jobs, with worrying about who was out to get me, and the constant misery and heartache of missing Price. When a hacker friend hadn’t found anything, I’d let it go; I’d decided I knew who Dalton was working for and that I could live with it.
I’d been criminally stupid.
“Just what?” Leo demanded, shoving his fingers through his hair and looking like he wanted to strangle me. “Holy hell, Riley! How could you be so careless?”
Unable to meet his gaze, I covered my face with my hands and swung away. Tears burned in my eyes from emotional overload and exhaustion, plus hefty helpings of humiliation and self-recrimination. Dalton came and went from the diner when he wanted. He could have hurt Patti or Ben at any time. What if I’d relaxed my guard more than I had? Would I have led him to my family? He could have slaughtered them, or worse, taken them as hostages against my cooperation. Had that been his game? Or something else?
I didn’t have time to contemplate much more. The air rippled and bent. Magic exploded outward in thundering waves. It rammed me up against the wall. I twisted so that my left shoulder and hip took the brunt of the impact. That, and the side of my head. It’s not like I was using it much, anyhow.
My vision went blurry, and my head spun. I slid down to my butt and yelped as I landed on a sharp rock. Brilliant. On top of everything else, I’d managed to bruise my ass. At least the water I was sitting in would numb the pain at some point.
I touched my hand to my cheek. I’d cut it. The wound on top of my head had begun to bleed again, as well. I tilted my head back against the wall and closed my eyes, bracing hands in the water on either side of myself, trying to keep to the right side of consciousness.
“What the hell is going on? Where’s Riley?”
Damn, but I’d missed that voice. Even full of brutal menace, it sent jolts of electricity sizzling over my skin. I lifted my hand and made a dying kitten sort of sound. It was enough. I heard splashing, and hot hands ran over my hair and gently cupped my face, then moved down to grip my shoulders. Price gave me a hard little shake.
“God dammit, Riley. I can’t trust you as far as I can throw you. What the hell was I thinking letting you out of my sight? Fuck your rules. You got that? I’m not leaving you alone again. Not if you’re going to go around trying to get yourself dead.” Price punctuated his little diatribe with more shakes, fury ratcheting up in his voice until he sounded like his head might pop.
“Can you stop shaking me?” I asked. Whined, really. “My head hurts.”
He swore and swept me up out of the water, clamping me tight to his chest. My head flopped onto his shoulder, and I whimpered as sharp metal pinwheels whirled through my brain. He growled in response. Seriously. Growled.
I rubbed my face against him. He smelled amazing. Like soap and heat and something delectably
him
. If I’d been standing up, my knees would probably have melted. God, but I’d missed him.
“Get us out of here,” he demanded.
“I’m not sure she can handle the trip,” came Gregg Touray’s low baritone. “She’s in rough shape. Again. I’m beginning to think your girlfriend is suicidal.”
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Leo said, and he grabbed me around my bicep like an anchor. “Not without us.”
His hand jerked away. No, all of him jerked away. I heard a grunt, and he crashed down into the water. “Don’t make me kill you,” Touray told him.
Fear gave me energy. I stiffened and struggled against Price’s iron hold, elbowing him in the neck and kicking my feet.
“Leave him alone! He’s my brother! Let go of me, you big rhinoceros,” I told Price. He was nothing more than a blurry shadow. His only response was to tighten his grip. I gave up trying to escape and turned my attention to Touray, who was a blocky shadow, his arm extended. I didn’t need to see well to know that he had a gun trained on Leo.
“Stop! He’s my brother!” I practically screamed it as I started struggling again.
“Gregg. Enough. Put it away.” Price’s chest rumbled against me.
Touray’s hand dropped to his side, but he didn’t holster his gun. I melted in on myself. Whatever strength I had had washed away with the adrenaline. I was too done even to shut my eyes or blink. I must have looked like roadkill.
“Riley?” Price’s voice roughened as he gently rocked me in his arms.
I didn’t move, didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I no longer had bones or muscles. I was rubber.
“
Now
, Gregg,” he snapped. He shifted his feet in the direction of Leo and Madison. “He’ll be back for the two of you. Then I want to know just what the hell happened.”
I didn’t know if Leo was going to try to stop them again or not. Didn’t matter. He had no time. Magic spun around us in a white cocoon. It
wrenched
us. We crossed into a between place—not the trace dimension, but somewhere else. It was full of morphing shapes and colors that made me go cross-eyed and feel seasick. The next thing I knew, I separate from my body. I swallowed—could I really swallow if I wasn’t in my body? My throat felt dry.
This is normal,
I told myself.
Touray told you how travelling works. Your mind and body split and get reconnected when you arrive.
It’s
normal. I didn’t remember him telling me it was like a hallucinogenic drug trip.
My mind hooked on something, and I felt myself wrenched in a new direction. I rocketed through the dreamspace, as Touray had called it, pulled on an invisible cord.
I didn’t think
this
was normal. I scrabbled to remember what else Touray had told me about travelling. He’d said that the body and spirit separated on the journey and sometimes had trouble melding back together on the other side. I had had no idea what he meant. As my mind raced farther and farther away from my body, I had a sinking feeling I was about to find out.
Chapter 11
I tried to stop myself, to return to my body, but I was like a fish hooked on a line. No matter how I wriggled or fought, I couldn’t free myself.
Abruptly, I stopped. Something that looked like a soap bubble swallowed me. Inside it was still. Outside of it, shapes continued to morph and change, twisting and bubbling and splashing and rippling. There was no place to look that wasn’t moving. My absent stomach lurched. It really wasn’t fair that I had no body and still felt nauseous.
The bubble drifted and spun slowly, but seemed immune to the speeding currents beyond its walls. I lifted what passed for a hand—a crooked branch of pale blue energy—and touched the walls of the bubble. It sizzled, and little red flakes spun out around my hand. They settled and absorbed into me. As if I’d opened a mental dam, images rushed at me. They battered my mind, making no sense, even though they felt familiar. I thought I recognized something, and it melded with something else and something else again, and my head whirled with overload. It was like an acid trip gone way out of hand. I started to panic.
I pressed blue twig hands to what might have been my head and called on my null power. As depleted as I was, I expected nothing. Instead, it roared up inside me like a forest fire.
Calling up power with no place to put it wasn’t entirely wise. It swelled inside me, looking for an outlet. I had no good place to send it. I pressed my twig hands against the bubble and let it go. White light burst into stars, and the influx of images stopped. I pulled my magic back and held still as shock waves rocketed back through me. It felt like I’d thrown a massive rock into a small tank and the water was crashing back into me, except it was magic.
After a while, or maybe only a few seconds—I had no sense of time—the waves subsided, and I was sitting in stillness.
I tried to figure out a plan. Could I tear the bubble walls apart with my magic? If I did, could I find my way back to my body? Though I figured Touray was looking for me, I didn’t know if he would find me inside the bubble, or be able to save me if he did. I wasn’t going to wait to find out.
I pushed my twig fingers against the bubble’s wall again. The skin of my prison felt warm. I pressed harder. It stretched like a balloon, but sprang back as I pulled away. I did it again, this time trying to absorb its magical energy. Nothing happened.
More time passed as I tried to get my head to focus. The seventies lava lamp lights outside kept distracting me. They were hypnotic as well as sickening.
I would have closed my eyes, but I didn’t seem to be able to. So in spirit form, I could get nauseous
and
get a full-on down-to-the-bones body ache, but I couldn’t blink. Where was the sense in that?
I did appreciate the silence. Either my ears weren’t working, or dreamspace was dead silent. After a while, though, the lack of sound started wearing on me. I got twitchy. I kept jerking around to see if something was sneaking up on me. I looked up and down and all around. Pretty soon paranoia set in, and I began a counterclockwise rotation, twisting to scan every quadrant of the hypnotic churn outside the bubble.
That went on for a while until I got bored with the constant fear. I couldn’t maintain that level of vigilance. I let myself slow to a halt, pulling myself into a ball. I wished I knew how to meditate. Then I could while away the next centuries or however long I was trapped.
I was settling in for a massive pity party when I noticed a droplet forming in the top of the bubble. When it was about the size of a softball, it broke free and dropped lazily down. When it got to eye-level, it stopped and hovered, spinning slowly. White mist swirled inside, turning it opaque and reminding me of those crystals balls you see gypsies use in
Scooby-Doo
cartoons.
Color seeped into the mist and slowly resolved into shapes. I gasped. The first was of my mom, my dad, and me when I was maybe three. I was in the middle, with each of my parents holding my hands. We stood in front of some pine trees on what looked like a hiking trail. I didn’t remember. My throat swelled, and tears burned my eyes. My mom smiled at me from the image, looking radiant with life and health. My dad was looking at her, over my toddler head, his expression full of love. I reached out to touch them, and the image faded.
“No,” I said brokenly, and was startled when the sound bounced around the bubble walls, making them vibrate.
A new image rose to replace the first. This time it moved, like I was watching a movie. A horror movie. My stomach knotted. I hadn’t been there that day. I’d been out with my dad. I remember how someone said after that we’d have been killed, too, if we’d been home.
She was in the kitchen at the sink. In the middle of the window hung a purple glass heart. The same one that I thought had been burned up in a fire, but later turned up in our investigation to find Josh. Mom’s fiery hair hung loose around her shoulders. She wore a purple sweater and jeans. From the back, she almost looked like me.
I made a little squeaking sound as she shut off the water in the sink. She turned around and said something. She frowned, looking more angry than scared. Was this real? Had it happened this way? Then someone moved. A big man wearing a black knitted cap stepped into view. I could only see his back. I didn’t recognize anything about him.
My mom grabbed a plate off the drying rack and threw it at him. He knocked it aside and lunged for her. He had a knife.
I pressed my twig fingers against my mouth.
No, no, no!
I wanted to scream, to tell her to run, to fight, but my throat squeezed the sound into a tiny squeak.
My mom fought. She kicked and hammered at the man with a dirty pot. She smashed his head, and he dropped his knife. Then she kicked him and ran for the doorway. He caught her, driving his knife into her stomach. I saw his face. It was . . . Gregg Touray.
For a moment hate filled me, pressing out everything else. I wanted to kill him. I
would
kill him. I shook with the emotions crashing through me. I couldn’t breathe.
Touray’s arm rose again and again as he stabbed my mom. Thirteen wounds altogether. I’d found that out later when reading the police report. I watched every one, horror twisting my stomach and knotting my lungs.
The image faded to white. I sat gasping, trying to understand what I’d just seen. But before I could put any of the puzzle pieces together, a new image appeared.
Dalton. At the diner. I was there, too. My forehead was bloody and bruised, and I was wearing the same clothes I had been in the mines, the clothes I was still wearing, somewhere. Patti threw her arms around me and then around Dalton. She was smiling and crying. Then I saw Dalton hold out his hand to me. I took it, and he pulled me out the door. The picture honed in on our linked hands, then faded. The bubble swirled white, and then melted away into smoke. It rose and melded back with the walls of my prison.
I couldn’t say how long I sat just replaying my mom’s murder in my head. Each time I felt sicker and sicker. I could almost hear the sounds of the knife pulling out of her flesh.
I was so wrapped in misery and rage that it took a while for reason to return. I focused on the last scene. It bothered me. Or maybe I just wanted to stop reliving my mother’s murder. For one thing, though it had looked incredibly real, I couldn’t imagine Dalton and me ever holding hands. Or Patti hugging him. That the scenario was a message to me, was obvious. It told me I could trust Dalton, that I should go to him for safety. Of course, that implied I could trust whoever was sending me the message, and I wasn’t so eager to jump off that cliff.
Another thought struck me—as real as that scene had looked, it obviously wasn’t. So how much of the murder scene was made up to manipulate me? A lot, if they expected me to believe Touray had been the killer. That was more than twenty years ago. He’d have just been hitting puberty, maybe.
I made myself consider the images of my mother’s murder. The scenario had got the kitchen right, down to the paint on the walls and the glass heart in the window. It all looked perfectly plausible, and of course, my mom
had
been stabbed. Of course, somebody could have picked all that information out of crime-scene photos, and I didn’t trust my four-year-old-kid memory enough to believe I’d spot any minor differences. Besides, I’d already been burned by stupidly trusting Dalton without asking enough questions. I wasn’t about to swallow this performance without verification. But even if I did believe it, I couldn’t get around the question of just who was doing the sending. If this scene, minus Touray, was accurate, then the sender of the image could very well be the murderer. Who else could get the details right? There didn’t seem to be even one logical runner-up for the Oz behind the curtain.
And that raised another big question. What did they want from me? Clearly, they wanted something, because they wanted me to go to the diner, and then from there, go off with Dalton. Maybe they thought the promise of knowing who murdered my mom would be enough to lure me. They were wrong. That sort of gift had to have strings attached. Or maybe I was supposed to believe that whoever murdered my mom was out to get me and this Good Samaritan wanted to save my life. Maybe I was supposed to knee-jerk freak out about Touray being the killer and immediately run away from him.
It irritated me that anyone could think I’d fall for that. Like I was an idiot. Like I was Little Red Riding Hood, unable to see past some pajamas and spectacles to notice that her grandmother was really a wolf.
My, but don’t your teeth look big, Granny,
I thought sourly. I wasn’t falling for it. I wasn’t going to let the wolf get me that easy. This smelled like a trap.
At that point I lost it just a little bit and let go a primal scream of absolute and total frustration. A sound erupted from me, ricocheting through the bubble. I could see it—a harpoon of ice and fire. Everywhere its tip touched, cracks appeared in the bubble. I held still, hope wrapping me in barbed wire.
The power of the scream faded, and soon the harpoon vanished, but not before a spiderweb of cracks ran through the entire sphere. I collected myself, not even thinking before punching my twig fingers into the side of the bubble.
It shattered. Fragments flew off in all directions. I was left drifting in the dizzying shift of colors and shapes.
Now what?
I kicked my legs and swam with my arms. Nothing.
I was just starting to consider panicking when something enveloped me in a hot, sticky net. It dug spiny hooks into me, then dragged me in sharp yanks through the dreamspace. My panic went to DEFCON twelve, and I twisted against it. The more I fought, the more tangled inside it I got, until I could no longer move.
At some point, I checked out. I don’t know if it was the pain, or something else altogether. All I know is the black curtain dropped, and I was gone
“RILEY? RILEY! C’MON, baby, wake up for me. You can do it. Just open your eyes.”
Price’s hands stroked over my hair. He cupped my face between broad, rough palms. He sounded belligerent. I’d have thought he was totally pissed at me, except that the fear lacing his frantic words suggested he might be more than a little worried about me. Until I’d texted him however many days ago, I’d been half afraid he’d forgotten me. Another thing I’d gotten wrong.
I made myself open my eyes. My shoulders and neck ached, and my head throbbed. Of course, I’d banged myself up a bit in the tunnels, so it was only to be expected.
I stared straight into Price’s brilliant sapphire eyes. Long black lashes framed them, and his silky black hair fell over his forehead. His skin was porcelain white stretched over chiseled cheekbones. His nose was a stone wedge above a square chin. He hadn’t shaved in a while. At least a couple days. Dark circles bruised his eyes.
“Riley?” he whispered when I said nothing. One hand smoothed over my hair again. It might have been shaking just a little bit. “Tell me you’re here.”
Duh
. But I suppose half of me had been here awhile when the other half was lost in psychedelic drug land. I guess he deserved some slack.
I gave a faint nod. “I’m here.”
“Thank God.”
He kissed me. His lips brushed mine, opening an unexpected flood of emotion. His touch was delicate, like I might shatter. I wanted more. He drew away.
I made a wistful noise in my throat. “You can do better than that.”
At my words, his fingers curved into hooks around the back of my head, but he held himself back, much to my eternal disappointment.
He let go of me and straightened out of his crouch. He turned to look at someone. “Tell her you’re okay, and then get out. She needs to rest.”
Turns out he was talking to Leo, who dropped down in front of me, taking one of my hands in his and squeezing. “You scared the hell out of me, Riley. What happened?”
“I’d like to know that, too,” Touray growled from somewhere down by my feet.
I lifted my head to look at him. It weighed a thousand pounds. He looked bad. His face was gaunt, and his skin was gray. His short hair stuck up in spiky clumps. His black eyes were sunk deep into their sockets. They skewered me, demanding answers. “I know you didn’t kill my mom.” I dropped my head back onto the pillow.
“Your mother?”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Why would you think he killed your mom?”
The three men responded together. I don’t even know why I said it. I knew it wasn’t true—except for the first few seconds before I’d had a chance to think it through—and for whatever reason, I felt guilty about that. Especially given that he rescued me and looked like he’d gone through hell doing it.
I sighed. “Long story.”
Silence. Clearly that answer wasn’t going to cut it. I sighed again. “Something grabbed me in the dreamspace and dragged me off.” My voice scraped thin through my vocal chords. Before I could say more, Touray pounced on that.
“Something grabbed you?” He repeated, and now he loomed above Leo. “How? What? Explain,” he demanded. Magic swelled around him, driving the air out of the room.