In sight of the enemy, p.8
In Sight of the Enemy, page 8
The sound of the shot would immediately pinpoint their location, as well. Both of them knew it. “Let’s see if we can avoid that,” he murmured. He took his eyes off the lion long enough to search the forest floor for a rock and found one a foot away lodged deeply in the soil. After dislodging it with a few solid kicks, he leaned his rifle against the tree trunk, reached back to shove the flashlight in his pack, then scooped up the rock in both hands.
“I think it’s stopping,” she whispered. “Maybe it thinks it’s scared us off.”
“I’m willing to let it go right on thinking that. Grab my rifle and let’s head over to the right. We’ll give it a real wide berth.”
There was a moment when he was convinced she was right. The lion had halted. Shane lowered his hands as they began moving away. Then he stiffened. The cat crouched, snarled again, then sprang.
Shoving himself in front of Cassie, he yelled, “Run.” Without looking to see if she’d obeyed, Shane raised his hands again, waited for the animal to get closer, then heaved the rock with all his strength in the mountain lion’s direction.
The stone hit the cat squarely on the head, and it screamed hideously. Something sailed by him and caught the animal in the shoulder. A flashlight. Cassie hadn’t run, after all. He grabbed his flashlight out of his pack and tossed that, too, catching the lion in the back. It screeched again, before wheeling around and leaping away. Shane took his eyes off it long enough to turn to look at Cassie.
She was just lowering the rifle from her shoulder. “Good aim.” Her voice was light, almost disguising the tremble in it. “It’ll have a heck of headache tomorrow.”
“Have you always been this poor at taking orders?” Relief mingled with irritation in his voice. It didn’t escape him that she had a bad habit of staying put when he wanted her far, far away.
“Always.” Tentatively, she reached down to retrieve her stick, then picked up the flashlight where it had landed. One was still on, its beam shining into the forest floor. Picking it up, she began to search for the other. “You must have been so dazzled by my charms before that you just overlooked some of my less admirable traits.”
Dazzled. Shane considered the word. It was a close enough description for the way he’d felt about her. She’d blurred his guard, confused his senses. There would have been very little that he wouldn’t have forgiven her. And yet somehow fate had conspired against him, giving her the one trait he couldn’t overlook.
“Here’s yours.” Her voice interrupted his thoughts. She held up his flashlight, clicked it on for him. Walking over to her, he reached for it, then for his rifle, which she’d set down next to her.
“Chances are it’ll be back. It’s not going to leave its dinner for long.”
“No problem,” he said grimly. “I plan for us to be far away from here by the time it does.” They veered to the right, keeping well away from the lion’s kill.
After a half hour, Shane said, “We can’t keep this up all night. Our bodies need to refuel. We’re well ahead of them, and they’ll have a heck of time following our trail in the dark, anyway. It won’t hurt to take an hour or two to refresh. We’ll be able to set a faster pace if we do.”
“By ‘we’ you mean me,” she snapped. “I can keep going as long as you can.”
Seamlessly, he switched tactics. “Okay, then I need to rest.” He knew intuitively that he’d get nowhere with her by pointing out that she was barely into her second trimester, a time when most pregnancies had women exhausted by the end of a normal day. This one had been anything but. “I’m jet-lagged and my shoulder is getting stiff.”
“Are you in much pain? I threw a first-aid kit in my pack. Does your dressing need to be changed?”
At the concern in her voice Shane shifted uncomfortably, feeling like a fraud for tugging on her guilt strings. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her the truth, to confess his worry for her, when her words belatedly registered and he stopped in his tracks. “How did you know about my dressing?”
Cassie halted too and gazed at him steadily. For a few moments the rest of the sounds of the forest faded away. “I ‘saw’ the whole thing, remember? I warned you before you left. You wouldn’t believe me then. Maybe you will now.”
A bat swooped low, right in front of them. Neither of them noticed. The last thing Shane wanted to discuss with her was the very thing that had driven them apart. He was willing to concede that perhaps manipulation hadn’t been her game back then. It was entirely possible that she actually believed in this psychic hocus-pocus she was spouting.
It just wasn’t possible that she’d get him to believe it. “I didn’t buy it then, I don’t now,” he said flatly. Brushing by her, he began to walk rapidly, expecting her to follow.
But the only thing that followed him was her voice, and her words brought him to a halt. “You were traveling at night, driving in a jeep or an open vehicle of some kind. The road you were on was primitive, more of a trail really. The country was rugged, with mountains in the distance. Someone was with you. I don’t know who. But a shot rang out, then blood poured from your left shoulder and you fell to the ground.”
The wound she mentioned throbbed at the quiet recital. And a vise in his chest squeezed hard. He swung around to meet her gaze, his mind circling frantically for an explanation. How could she have details of what had occurred halfway around the world? He hadn’t given that much information to anyone. Not even Simon. The only one who could have known all that was the woman in the jeep with him, a French nurse named Davida Regald. But as far as he knew, the woman was back in Paris.
“How do you know that?” he whispered hoarsely.
“You tell me, Shane.” Her voice was quiet, her gaze intense. “How could I know that? I wasn’t there. If you say you didn’t tell anyone here, then you have to believe what I tried to tell you months ago. I ‘saw’ it before it ever happened. That’s why I didn’t want you to go.”
Everything inside him rejected her words. His mind grappled for an answer, seized on one gratefully. Davida must have written a report, or told someone back at the base hospital who had sent details to the administration of Greenlaurel Community Hospital, where he worked. If the explanation raised further questions, he was able to quell them for the moment. Someone here had to have gotten those details and passed them on to Cassie.
In the face of his silence, her expression grew stony. “Forget it. It’s plain that you’ll never admit the existence of something you can’t prove scientifically.”
“If there’s no evidence, it doesn’t exist,” he said with more certainty than he was feeling at the moment. Science was soothing with its equations and solutions. Where life had been short on predictability, science had provided security. You couldn’t depend on people to be there for you, but gravity remained constant. He might have spent years wondering if his father would ever come home again, but through it all E always equaled mc squared. When his grandmother had turned his young life into a shambles, he’d learned to value the invariable.
He couldn’t explain all that to Cassie; he wouldn’t have had the words even if he wanted to. But she was already falling in step, with strides as long as if she hadn’t been on her feet for nearly twenty-four hours. And he knew she wouldn’t have heard him even if he’d been capable of offering an explanation.
After another twenty minutes he pointed his flashlight toward a large boulder. “We can rest there for a while. C’mon.” Silently, she followed him. Checking over the area carefully, he finally unrolled one of the blankets and made a mat for them to sit on. Cassie shrugged off her pack, setting it next to the rock. The way she practically collapsed on the blanket told him better than words how exhausted she was.
Now that they’d stopped moving, he was more aware than ever of the noises evident in the darkness. There was still the quiet chirp of insects, despite the fact that it was October. The call of the night hunters echoed in the shadows, eerie reminder of nature’s eternal struggle between predator and prey.
Given the events of the last couple hours, he felt a newfound affinity for the latter.
From his pack he took out a thermos and some food. They ate and drank in silence. While he packed things away again, she drew up her knees, rested her forehead against them. But she wouldn’t sleep. He knew that, even when he settled next to her, tucking the spare blanket around them both. Her body was too tense, her breathing too shallow. Somewhere in the distance an owl sounded.
“Do you think the world was always round, or not until Galileo convinced everyone it wasn’t flat?”
Frowning, he struggled to follow her meaning. “What? It was round, of course.”
“And it wasn’t so long ago that scientists thought atoms were the smallest form of matter, right?” She raised her head to look at him in the darkness. They’d turned off their flashlights to save the batteries. “But now they know there’s something smaller. Quarks, and those lep-thingees.”
He smiled in spite of his exhaustion. “Leptons, yes.”
“Do you think they’ll eventually discover particles even smaller?”
He shrugged, leaned his head against the rock and closed his eyes. “Entirely possible.”
“But there’s no scientific proof that there’s anything smaller. Not yet.”
His eyes snapped open again as he started to see where this conversation was going. “There’s precedent—”
“Just because something hasn’t been scientifically established doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If man had believed that, the Wright brothers would never have attempted a flying machine. Space would never have been conquered.” There was a thread of stubbornness in her voice that almost covered the hurt. “Don’t dismiss what can’t be proved, Shane. Why can’t you accept that maybe, just maybe, there are some phenomena that science can’t explain yet?”
His mind rejected her argument even as his heart recognized her plea. Responded to it. He stared into the darkness, thoughts of rest fleeing as memories crowded in. Unwelcome memories, the lot of them. He’d become adept over the years at avoiding thinking about them at all.
Long after Cassie had given up, had put her head down again, he finally spoke, surprising them both. “When I was nine, my dad took off. Went out for a carton of cigarettes and never came back.” He smiled without humor. “Must have been a hell of a smoke. It was tough on my mom. Even working two jobs she never seemed to be able to make ends meet. I can see now that it was desperation that drove her back to find her mother. My grandmother. But it was awhile before I understood why she’d left in the first place.”
Absently, he reached over, rubbed his shoulder, trying to loosen the tightness there. “Gran is intelligent. Could have been anything, done anything she wanted. But what she enjoys most is running scams.” Cassie hadn’t lifted her head, but he could tell from the stillness of her body that she was listening. “She’s not too particular about which cons she runs, but she leans toward the mystical. The spiritual. The psychic. There doesn’t seem to be any lack of people gullible enough to part with a twenty to have their fortune told. Have their aura read. Summon loved ones dead and buried.” He gave a short laugh. “God knows she finds them all.”
He’d been excited when she’d asked him to help her, he remembered derisively. The old woman had always known just what buttons to push, and she’d been a master at the controls. He could earn some extra money, help his mom out. It would give him and his grandmother more time to spend together, too. They could make up for all the time she’d missed getting to know her only grandson. He’d fallen for all the excuses. In the end, he’d been as easily duped as the rest of her marks.
“We’d play it different ways. If they came to have their fortune told, I’d go through a purse, lift a wallet. Look for pictures or any other clues about their lifestyle, feed the information to her. I actually enjoyed the spirit-summoning best. I got to run the tapes and a special projector she had. Flashed a damn good impression of a ghost up on the wall. Used to scare even me some of the time.”
But he’d known it was wrong, despite his grandmother’s assurances that they were making people happy. They were giving them what they wanted. He liked making people happy, didn’t he?
“She used you like that?” Cassie’s tone was horrified. “Her own grandchild?”
“I don’t think she believes to this day that she did anything wrong.” He’d failed to find even a hint of a conscience in the woman over the years. “In the end, it caught up with her. When the police came for her, they snatched me up, too.” He could still see the small room the detectives had taken him to. Could hear the pointed questions, designed to elicit the most damning information about his grandmother. “They used what they got from me to solidify their case against her. She went away that time, for about a year, more or less. Long enough for my mother to get us far away from her again.”
“She… Where is she now?”
“County lockup in Boston.” He was tired of the whole story. “Trying to scrape up bail money.”
“Being a fake isn’t her worst crime, Shane,” Cassie whispered. “What she did to you, teaching you not to trust…that was far worse.”
He closed his eyes again, suddenly weary. “Go to sleep, Cass.” He wished he could follow his own advice, but doubted he would. There were too many specters of the past that refused to be silenced.
Chapter 6
“I can’t believe this!”
Hawk Donovan glared out the window of the Raleigh motel as the wind whipped sheets of rain against the glass. Letting the curtain slip out of his fingers, he stalked back to the small table to address the man calmly sipping coffee there. “You’re telling me we can’t get a charter out of here? The Bureau doesn’t even have that much pull?”
“All flights have been grounded because of numerous tornado sightings.” FBI agent Liam Brooks sipped, then set the mug back on the table. “Guess the FAA trumps the FBI in cases like this.”
They’d been so close. Hawk’s fist clenched at his side. If they’d been able to catch that plane Liam had arranged for prior to leaving Wyatt, they’d be in Texas right now. Instead they’d had to hole up in this place to wait out the series of storms plaguing the area, and agonize over what might be happening at the ranch. And the not knowing was driving him crazy.
He shot another look at Brooks. Despite the man’s outwardly calm air, he had to be chafing at the wait, as well. The agent was hoping Sheridan would eventually lead him to her boss, Benedict Payne.
Titan.
Just thinking of the man’s name was enough to spread a chill through him. And the thought of what Titan would do to Cassie if Sheridan successfully delivered her to him made him break out into an ice-cold sweat.
Sheryl Eldanis picked up Hawk’s hand, shoved a mug of coffee in it. “Sit,” she said firmly, nudging him toward a chair next to Liam.
Hawk obeyed, but only for a moment. Then he was up pacing again, his coffee forgotten. “We’ve wasted too much time already. Let’s drive. We can take Sheryl’s truck, right?”
The petite blonde came up, slipped her arms around him and squeezed. For a moment, worry for his sister gave way to another emotion, instant and compelling. He covered Sheryl’s hands with one of his. He hadn’t expected to find love when he’d gone looking for his birth parents. She was by far the best discovery he’d made on this journey.
“I know you’re half out of your mind with worry,” Liam said soberly. “I don’t blame you. But we alerted the sheriff’s department in Greenlaurel, and we should be hearing from them anytime. In the meantime, waiting isn’t something I do well either, but one tornado has already touched down right outside of town. There’s supposed to be a string of them hitting all over the state. With the damage they’re causing, the roads are likely to be treacherous.”
“Liam said they had an APB out on Sheridan, right?” Sheryl looked at the agent for confirmation. At his nod, she added, “She might already have been picked up that way.”
Hawk knew what the two of them were trying to do and he appreciated the attempt. But he was a pragmatic man, one who dealt with reality, no matter how unpleasant it got. With one last absent pat to Sheryl’s hand, he broke away to prowl again. “What happens if Cassie gets injected?” He noted the way Liam’s gaze slid away from his, felt his heart sink in response. “The Bureau has its own scientists, right? Couldn’t they come up with an antidote?”
“Let’s not think of the worst-case scenario.” The agent’s lack of a straight response was its own answer. “We can’t be sure the person Cassie described was even Sheridan. She and her friend could be safe in town right now.”
But Hawk knew better. He didn’t have his sister’s psychic ability, but the cold lump of foreboding sitting in the pit of his stomach was its own warning. After they’d been cut off, he’d tried several times to call the ranch, and Cassie’s cell, to no avail. And if the sheriff had found everyone all right there, they’d have gotten word by now.
“Remember, Cassie isn’t alone.”
Sheryl’s reminder eased a tiny sliver of Hawk’s worry. It was ironic that just a few short weeks ago, Shane Farhold would have been the last man he’d have wanted anywhere near his sister. Hawk had never seen Cassie as desolate as she’d been after the two had broken up. But now the doctor was the only one standing between her and Sheridan. They’d already attributed at least one death to the chemist. Given her relationship with Benedict, there was no telling how many other victims she’d left behind. Given the gravity of the situation, even Farhold’s presence was welcome.
He walked to the window again, looked out at the driving rain and tried to send silent strength to his sister.
Hang on, Cassie. I’m coming. Just hang on.
Shane’s eyes opened, his body coming instantly alert. Checking his watch, he calculated he’d slept an hour. Maybe less. He’d sat awake long after he’d felt Cassie’s body relax next to his. Once her breathing had gone slow and even, he’d given in to the temptation to reach out and position her head against his shoulder. She’d curled up against him so trustingly, so relaxed, that some of the tension inside him had seeped away, a fraction at a time. Finally, he’d slept, too.
