I heard Malone click the shells in, and I kept my head down, trying to give him as much clearance as I could to use the hatch as protection while shielding my hearing. I thought I’d covered all my bases, but I hadn’t counted on Malone
really
not knowing how to shoot. Especially since he didn’t seem to know the difference between a shotgun and a rifle.
Not until shotgun pellets peppered my ass and calf and Malone’s startled screams when I knocked the weapon away from my legs and cursed him out. There was blood, not a lot of it but enough for me to taste copper on my tongue. My jeans leg flapped, torn in places, and my skin was pebbled with dark holes, puckers forming over the heavy gauge blasted into my calf. My boot protected my ankle, but my knee creaked a bit, maybe taking a pellet or two, but I wasn’t sure.
Mostly because whatever Malone’d hit me with, it was like someone’d shoved firecrackers under my skin and lit the fuse with a flamethrower.
“
Diu nei ah seng
! Are you trying—” More gunfire and I dove down, dragging Malone with me. The shotgun tumbled out of his hands, and I resisted the urge to kick it under the drover so he couldn’t get his hands on it again. “Rifle! I said—
Kāne’s balls
—what did you load that with?”
My leg burned, and I wasn’t looking forward to the time spent digging each and every single bit of buckshot out from under my skin. The fire spread, turning to agony, and my leg muscles weren’t responding like they should have. Clamping my hand on the open hatch, I pulled myself up, hoping I was out of sight of the shooters.
Bullets pinged and bounced off of the drover, a piece of broken-off metal singing past my head. Malone scrambled to get to his feet, but I pushed him back down. An open shotgun shell box spilled orange cartridges over the hatch floor when I grabbed the rifle’s box. A step back sent biting pains up my back and down to my ankles, twisting my stomach around until I had to swallow back the coffee I’d drank an hour ago.
“Fucking iron rounds,” I muttered to myself. “He used the damned black dog rounds on me.”
A boom shook the air as I got the rifle loaded up and ready. There was a brief whistle, and then the hillside exploded in a shower of rocks and dirt. I couldn’t see who’d launched the round, but my guess was Sparky, especially when another short-range ball crackled over us and pummeled the spot where I’d seen the glint among the predawn-lit trees.
Dirt rained hard, splattering us, the chunks damp and ripe from the morning dew. Something struck my buckshot-filled leg, and I went down on my knees, biting back another curse for Malone’s nostrils to be infested with sucker lice. Battered by rocks and debris, the hatch door swung inward, slamming me on the side of the head and nearly taking the rifle out of my hand.
Pushing the stock against the ground, I heaved myself up, using the rifle for leverage and balance. There was some screaming, mostly coming from behind the ridge. Then the roar of a heavy engine being started up echoed down through the hills. Lodging the rifle on the hatch door, I sighted on the now smoldering tree line, catching a peek of a Jeep roof bouncing over the hill’s uneven ground. A head came into view, balding or shaved down to a dark circle near enormous ears, dancing in and out of my scope sight. I took the shot at nearly the exact same moment Sparky let loose her final volley.
The ground trembled beneath our feet, and the hillside gave, unleashing a tidal wave of boulders and broken tree trunks. I dropped the rifle and dove into the hatch. Grabbing Malone by his Ganesh-damned red shirt, I hauled him up, and the wave of rocky dirt slammed into the drover, snapping the hatch door off and taking it along for the ride. I lay there, covering Malone with my body until the grumbling earth settled, my pulse pounding away in my ears and my leg seizing up with pain from the iron-flecked embers burrowed under my skin.
We lay there in the quiet for a few minutes, and then Sparky called the all clear. Slapping Malone across the head, I got out of the hatch, leaving Malone to fend for himself. I didn’t care if he set up a taco stand in the drover’s back compartments, so long as I didn’t have to look at him for a few minutes—maybe even half a day.
“Asshole. Going to get me dead before I even leave the damned area.” My leg wasn’t good. Or at least not good enough to walk on.
Unable to walk straight, I used the side of the partially buried drover to balance on, doing short hops when the ache got too much for me to put my weight on my foot. The Landing looked more like a war zone than a refill station, and behind me, Malone groaned something about his neck and apologies.
“Kai!” Ryder shouted from the Landing’s office window. “Stay there! I’m coming!”
“Sure, you do that,” I grumbled back. “Because I’m not sure I’m going to make it to the end of the damned transport much less the fricking office.”
He moved quicker than I expected, because I took another three steps and then Ryder was on me, grabbing at my waist and lifting me up. It would have been nice to lean on him, to use his strength to ease the stress on my leg and, stupidly, even help me forget about the pain working through me, but I knew better.
I knew Ryder better.
“Let me help you,
ainle
,” he cajoled, sliding his arm down to the small of my back and around my hips. “Is it so hard to accept—”
Another shift in the ground and we both tensed, waiting for another avalanche to hit, but the quiver was small—very small—and we stopped our hobble to the main cinder block building to watch a man’s head, his thick, springy hair awash in flames, bounce down the hill and roll across the Landing’s side yard. The fiery head continued its merry path, disappearing from view as it tumbled off between the buildings.
“Well, at least we got one of them,” I snapped, taking another step toward the office, where Sparky was coming out of the door with a first aid kit. “And once I get all the shot out of my leg, we’re going to have a little talk with your friend Crickets.”
AS MUCH
as I loved Sparky, she was the last person in the world I’d want to be lying down in front of and bent over an arm of an old beat-up sofa, stomach down with my jeans off and my teeth clenched into a pillow.
Sadly, as she was also the only one within thirty miles that I’d let dig ironshot out of my body, I was there, with my injured leg stretched out over an ancient couch and wishing I were anywhere else. There wasn’t enough whiskey in all of San Diego County to make it any less painful, and to make matters worse, I had Ryder and Crickets at ringside.
“Hold still, boy,” she grumbled at me, digging back down into a hole. “It went pretty deep. I’m having to chase down some of your jeans with the damned things.”
“This fricking hurts, Sparky.” I couldn’t look at Crickets. Not without wanting to murder him. “You try lying still while someone’s melon-balling your leg.”
Blood was running down my calf, hot and quick, soaking into the towels I’d tucked under my knee. The brindle bitch who’d take a bit of shrapnel across her ear licked at my face, a soft comfort between two injured veterans from the same battle. At least her war wound was justly earned. Mine was friendly fire—making me not so friendly anymore.
The stainless steel tools Sparky’d laid out on a sterile pad looked more like torture devices, but I’d been taken apart by the undisputed master of pain and agony, so the hooks, pincers, and tweezers were more flatware for a formal dinner party than anything else. Sparky wasn’t used to working on meat. Mostly everything she broke down was metal or plastic and didn’t complain when she dug in, and when someone was unfortunate enough to get shot on a run, Jonas or I were normally the ones who dealt with it.
Dempsey’d been useless. I’d sooner take five solid right hooks from Dempsey than have him dig a bullet out of me. Only thing worse than Tanic putting the iron bars in me was Dempsey trying to take them out. Luckily, Jonas had taken over then.
“Bite,” Sparky warned me, and I tasted feathers and dust as she cut deep into my skin. “Almost done, kiddo.”
“You never were a Stalker, were you, Mr. Malone?” Ryder said softly. “And that is why
my
Stalker is lying here injured instead of driving us to Nevada.”
There was steel in his voice, anger hammered hot and left to hang. Haughty and arrogant, Ryder’s regal bearing spoke of centuries of rule and power, a legacy of ruthlessness and manipulation normally kept gloved in a charming, velvety demeanor. The velvet lay in tatters at Malone’s feet, the edge of Ryder’s ire slicing across his throat and belly as neatly as a knife.
Malone shifted, the bar stool under him screeching on the office’s dusty floor, his eyes on everything but Ryder. He met my gaze once, didn’t like what he saw there, and let his attention wander off.
“Might as well talk to him, Malone,” Sparky warned him. “Because I’m about five minutes away from being done with picking iron shot of out Kai’s backside, and if Ryder doesn’t get his answers now, you’re not going to like how Kai’s going to get them out of you.”
My world became a sea of faded pink cabbage roses on hunter green and lots of pain. Sparky was going in deep, and my stomach churned with the taste of my own blood. I wanted to scream for her to stop pulling me open, promising her anything to make the anguish go away, but a part of me whispered,
What if she doesn’t stop? What if she does to you what Tanic did? Because you trusted her.
Ryder’s hand pressed down on my back, his fingers stroking at the keloid dragon my father left there. I soaked in his vanilla and green tea scent, his sidhe blood perfuming his skin, and my lungs loosened. His strength poured into my spine, muting the spiderweb of liquid fire Sparky wove through my nerves. I felt better and mostly hated how much I loved having his touch on me.
“Don’t get in the way, Your Princeship,” Sparky snarled. “I’m trying to work here.”
“And I can see where Kai learned his impeccable manners,” Ryder drawled, but his fingers remained, resting on the jut of my right shoulder blade. “But as for you, Mr. Malone, I need a few answers.”
“First off, I’m not
your
Stalker, Ryder. You rent me. Just like everyone else.” I was going to hate myself in the morning, or perhaps even sooner, but I cleared my throat and croaked, “And you two are scaring the kid stupid. Yeah, he almost got us both killed and shot up my leg, but I’m sure he had a really good reason for lying through his teeth. Don’t you, Malone?”
“I didn’t think I’d actually… have to shoot someone.” His Adam’s apple dove when he spoke, his words crackling and sharp. “I didn’t even know you’d brought a Stalker with you. I thought he was another sidhe! Who the hell brings Kai Gracen with them to talk about a pre-Merge dig? It just all went…
wrong
.”
“Shit! Sparky! Leg!” My leg twitched at her next dig. Twisting my head around to avoid the dog’s furiously licking tongue, I grunted at Malone. “Did you know the guys who were shooting at us? Did Marshall piss somebody off? Or was she hiding something about Groom Lake?”
“Are you sure it’s connected to Professor Marshall?” Malone worried his teeth against his upper lip. “She was murdered… but we don’t know why.”
“It’s got to be connected to her. The guy I was trying to snag between the trees looked like the same man I’d seen driving the armed scooter, and none of us here recognized the rolling head. They had to have followed us up here somehow, because the only thing connecting you to Sparky’s is this trip,” I explained. “So we’re sniffing around something someone else doesn’t want us to find… something Marshall’s already died for. Since people don’t try to kill me unless I’m about to stumble on their take, I think someone’s hiding something and doesn’t want us to get to it.”
“My grandmother had nothing to gain by trying to kill you,” Ryder mumbled.
“Your grandmother isn’t people, Ryder,” I sneered. “And she had everything to gain. For what it’s worth, I’m a resource for you. Getting rid of me takes me off the board in that Parcheesi game you’ve got going with her. Someone wants us removed from the game, a game Marshall started. Then you went and became Player Two. Probably not what they were expecting, but if they’ve already killed Marshall for sticking her nose into things, they’re not going to look at us and say oh, sorry, you we’ll let go traipsing off into the Emerald City with your pet Stalker.”
“I only understood half of what you said to me right now.” Ryder’s fingers stilled on my shoulder. “But enough to ask Malone here about what Professor Marshall was hiding. What is it she expected to find up there? Do you know? Is the elfin Court verified, or was it merely something to lure me into funding her expedition?”
“The photos were real. I was there when the courier brought them in, and she was excited. Yes, she knew it would convince you to fund the trip. She’d been excited to go but….” He pushed his sweat-knotted fine hair from his face, stress tightening his cheeks and lips. “It was supposed to be an easy, simple trip. Nothing dangerous.”
“And the former Stalker story?” I cocked my head. “You didn’t think
that
was going to turn out to be dangerous?”
“That was….” He swallowed, his throat working hard. “Someone asked me if I was a Stalker because they found out I used to work at the Post. I just didn’t…
deny
… it because I thought it would make me look cool. You know how it is, right? I mean, okay, not
you
but—”
“So you did it to pick up
girls
? Or boys, not going to discriminate.” Sparky stopped in her excavation and looked up at Malone’s mumbled agreement. “That’s got to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard. How did you think someone wasn’t going to find out?”
“I didn’t think about it. I almost swallowed my tongue when Ryder told me who
he
was.” Malone gestured at me. “I should have said something then. I just didn’t know
how
to.”
Humans were funny things. I’d seen a few go through puberty and hit adulthood, a short sprint of bone growth, chaotic behavior, and raging hormones. I’d watched Cari learn to walk, struggle with her clairvoyance, grow breasts, and take up a gun all in the time it took me to age another minute. Both Dempsey and Sparky shrank and grayed while the lines on Jonas’s face deepened into grooves.