by Eva Chase
My chest clenched. “Bash,” I started.
He shook his head. “Maybe I’ve been angry too. Because you’re willing to trust yourself with them but not with me, even though I am the one who’s always had your back. Unless it’s really that you don’t trust me.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Part of me screamed to reach out to him, as if the feel of his skin against mine would somehow heal this rift, but the rest of me balked. I’d only end up complicating our relationship even more.
When he met my eyes again, his were less stormy. His voice came out quiet. “They still don’t really know you. The first chance they had, they jumped to the worse possible conclusions about you. They’re never going to appreciate how fucking brilliantly incredible you are. I do, so it’s hard for me to watch, but that’s my shit to handle. I’m sorry I let it affect our partnership.”
“Okay.” I dragged in a breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize this was hard for you.”
“You know that woman, and any others there’ve been like her, doesn’t matter, right? I’d rather it was you.”
I’d rather it’d been me too, but that didn’t seem like a helpful thing to say when I wasn’t going to follow it up by volunteering. “I don’t know exactly what’s different with Sherlock and the others,” I said. “But even if something is—as soon as we’re done here, I’m smashing this tracking bracelet and we’re moving on without them. We’ll cover our tracks even better. They’ll give up on trying to follow soon enough. They’re not going to matter either.”
His lips twitched into a shade of a smile. “I guess I can grit my teeth for another few days then. And—I promise you won’t have to see anything from that side of my life again.”
I inclined my head in acknowledgment. “I’m sure I can manage to be more discrete too.”
“It really isn’t— I know you already have—”
“I’ll do better,” I said firmly. “Are we good?”
Bash nodded. “I am if you are.”
“Then we’re good,” I said, willing that answer to be true. “And we still have work to do.”
Chapter Seventeen
John
Jemma crouched close to me and peered at the handheld screens I’d propped up in the back of the helicopter. “Are we getting any useful readings yet?” she asked over the roar of the blades.
“We might need to get a little closer,” I said. “Are you worried that these people will get suspicious?”
“I think it’ll be all right. They don’t know anyone’s looking for them.” She leaned over to give a few instructions to the pilot whose chopper we’d hired and turned back to the screens. One was lighting up with a blotchy rainbow of bright colors; the other showed undulating bands of gray broken by paler lines. “Quite the set-up your army friends arranged for you.”
I shifted against the padded but stiff seat to find an angle where I could study both images without my hip starting to ache. The helicopter dipped slightly, making my breath catch.
“I was lucky one of the fellows at the British embassy did time in Iraq,” I said. “Although it’s hard to say whether that got me the favor as much as the thought of being part of one of Sherlock’s investigations. He has become awfully famous even among the expats. I’m not sure what the Croatian army made of the equipment request, but I guess they figured we couldn’t do much harm with a couple of scanners.”
“Oh, they of little faith,” Jemma murmured.
My attention jerked to her face, but she was smiling in what looked like only amusement, nothing more malicious. Her gaze slipped away from the scanners to the landscape beyond the window, and even that faded. For a second, her brow knit. From the distance in her eyes, I didn’t think it was anything here that was bothering her. She’d seemed a little distracted ever since she’d come to meet me for this venture.
I couldn’t help looking at the bruise at the side of her throat, the previous purple now faded into a dull brown, where I’d smacked her with my walking stick just a few days ago.
It wasn’t as if I couldn’t do harm too.
“I got the impression you have some connections of your own, considering the haul you brought with you,” I said. I hadn’t gotten a close look at the contents of the van she’d driven down in with that associate of hers—Moran, he’d told us to call him in a brief exchange after we’d arrived in Split—but from a few of her comments since then, I’d gathered she expected to go into this commune well-equipped.
Jemma’s focus came back to me, and she shrugged. “Maybe, with enough lead time, we could have come up with something like this—but close-range scanners wouldn’t have done me much good before we had the location narrowed down. It’s easier to find the simpler stuff on the black market anyway. There isn’t a whole lot of demand for top-of-the-line infrared scanners among criminals like me.” She glanced at me as if daring me to be offended, still smiling. “Why do you think I kept you around?”
That intent gaze sent a nervous shiver through my pulse and a jolt of lust to my groin at the same time. I couldn’t forget that even if she’d spared our lives after we’d threatened to kill her, even if her intentions appeared to align with ours right now, she’d told me to my face how dangerous she was.
The trouble was, I also couldn’t deny that walking the risky line of being around her appealed to me at least as much as it unnerved me.
“And what will you do with me when I outlive my usefulness?” I asked, mostly joking but with maybe a little genuine curiosity.
Her smile widened, and she gave my shoulder a playful shove. “Don’t you worry about that. I’ve decided the world is better off with Dr. John Watson in it, so far be it from me to remove you.”
From what she’d said about the poison she needed the antidote to, she might find herself removed from this world if we couldn’t pull this mission off. It was becoming hard for me to imagine a world without Jemma Moriarty in it too, even if I wasn’t going to admit that right now. Even if it was driving me barmy that she’d refused my offers to look into alternate treatments.
“How incredibly comforting,” I said instead.
“Stop worrying about that and focus on all this fancy monitoring equipment.” She motioned to the screens. “I get that ‘hotter’ colors means more heat. That’s pretty simple. You said we should be able to use the radar system to figure out where the caves are? Do you even know how to read it?”
I squinted at the screen with the undulating lines. “The tech guy walked me through the basics. I think I should be able to recognize when we pass over any significant underground crevices. Look, right there!”
I waved toward a sharper jump along some of the lines. Jemma cocked her head and then peered out the helicopter window toward the ground. “You can get exact coordinates from that, I assume?”
“Yes, naturally. And I can double-check with someone who has more experience.” I clicked a button on one of the controllers to take a screenshot, and another, and another as the helicopter eased up over the forested slope that Sherlock, Garrett, and I had climbed on foot not so long ago. “If I’m reading this right, the caves start pretty close to the foot of the mountain. I’m not sure we’ll be able to tell whether they’re wide enough to move through all the way up.”
“At least one woman managed to come down the mountain that way.” Jemma sucked her lower lip into her mouth, all her attention on the screens now. “If she could do that, I can figure out a way to go up. The most important question is where exactly the people she was running from have set down roots.”
“I’m surprised they could live this close to so many towns and tourist areas without anyone stumbling on them,” I said. “That one boy aside, they’ve hardly been murdering trespassers left and right.”
“It is a little odd.” She paused. “How did you feel when you got higher up the mountain? You said when Sherlock fell, he’d walked up ahead of you and Garrett—why weren’t the two of you right there with him?”
&nbs
p; I thought back to the moments before Sherlock’s tumble. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I just had the sense that we weren’t heading in the right direction—an instinct, I suppose. Maybe a wrong one, since Sherlock’s pointed him differently.”
Jemma made a soft humming sound. If she’d made something of that response, she didn’t share the significance with me. She took another look out the window and opened the topographical map we’d gotten of the area on her lap.
“The tree line is inconsistent,” she said. “You came out here, where there’s this secondary peak, but the forest spreads out around that and continues about another half a mile up the mountain before it falls away completely. They’ll probably be as high up as they could get while staying sheltered.”
“We’re coming up over that area now.”
“Keep a close eye on the infrared screen.” She eased over to say something else to the pilot—asking him to chart a path just below that tree line across the mountain, from the shift in the helicopter’s course.
I studied the fuzzy patches of yellows, greens, and blues. If we’d been closer, we might have picked up larger animals as speckles of orange or red, but at this distance the technician who’d prepped me had said we weren’t likely to see signs of life unless there were several large bodies in close proximity. These people had to have additional sources of heat too—fires or gas for cooking, battery-powered devices. If more than a couple of them were living together, we should be able to spot them.
Jemma hunkered down on the floor next to the row of seats, leaning her shoulder against my thigh in a companionable way as she watched the shifting colors. The warmth of her body sparked another flash of arousal, but one I could ignore.
For reasons I didn’t totally understand, the dynamic between us—between her and our whole group—had felt less fraught since the whole nearly-killing-each-other episode. Less a game of cat-and-mouse and more a simple collaboration.
We knew, in essence, what she was, what she did, and where she drew the line. She was offering enough trust to include us in her scheme rather than weaving it around us. It still left me slightly unbalanced when I considered that we were throwing our lot in with a self-proclaimed criminal who’d no doubt orchestrated plenty more schemes than the ones we were directly aware of, but I’d felt plenty off-balance when we’d been actively at odds too. I’d take this.
Her spine jerked a little straighter as a flutter of orange appeared on the right side of the screen. I inhaled slowly as the patch flowed across the image, dappled with bits of red. A picture—couldn’t forget to take a picture to fix the coordinates.
The edges of the shape trembled and blurred. For a second, it contracted, bleeding back into yellow. I hesitated. “Maybe that was just a glitch.”
Jemma shook her head. “No. That’s them. It has to be. I didn’t realize— They must have more ways of disguising themselves than occurred to me before. I wonder if… I found signs of their activity on another mountain across the country. It could be they traveled all the way over there for the event, or maybe there’s another settlement over there too, managing to stay hidden.” She sucked her lower lip under her teeth in thought, and then looked up at me. “You recorded it?”
“I got the screenshot.”
“All right. Let’s take a quick scan around to make sure we haven’t missed anything, and then we’ll head back to earth.” Her gray eyes sparkled. “We’ve got them now.”
I took shots of what I believed to be some more cave formations as the helicopter veered back down the mountain, but nothing particularly striking presented itself. Our pilot set down in the parking lot where we’d left my rented pick-up truck. Clouds were starting to roll across the sky overhead, a thicker dampness congealing in the salty air. I had the feeling it was going to be a wet night.
The pilot helped us detach the external scanners from the body of the chopper. I tucked the tarp wrapping that had come with them tightly around them in the truck’s bed and pulled the bed’s cover into place as well. Sherlock and I were never getting any more technological favors if we returned these pieces ruined.
The helicopter took off with a gust of wind. Jemma helped me snap the cover securely on and then moved toward the passenger door. I was halfway around the driver’s side when there was a pained gasp and the thump of knees hitting pavement.
“Jemma?” I hustled around to the other side of the truck with a lurch of my weak hip.
Jemma was crouched on her hands and knees, her fingers tensed against the asphalt, a tremor rippling through her as she got her rasps of breath under control. I knelt down to help her up—or whatever she needed—and my body stiffened.
Her hands were fading away. Literally fading, the black of the pavement showing through her pale skin and the flesh beneath. In that moment, in the space of several heartbeats, only the outlines of them and the wan shadows of bones shimmered visibly against the dark surface, all the way up to her wrists.
I blinked and blinked again, but the sight in front of me didn’t change. Jemma yanked her hands closer to her, managing to sit up on her knees. She pushed her hair back from her now sallow face and drew in a lungful of air. When she gripped the side of the truck to heave herself upright, her fingers looked solid again.
“Jemma,” I started.
She motioned me away. “Don’t. There’s no point in going there.”
“I think there is. What the hell just happened to you? There isn’t any toxin in the world that could affect your hands like that.”
“You don’t think there are things in this world beyond what you know?”
“I don’t think basic human biology and physics could suddenly turn on their heads.”
I stared at her, and all the other eerie moments of the last two months came back to me. The invisible shove that had propelled Sherlock down the mountainside. The ghostly figure we’d seen hovering over Jemma in London, and the strange lights that had dogged her before that.
“What are you really mixed up in?” I said. “Who are these people we’re after? And don’t tell me the same story you already gave us.”
Her mouth set in a pained line. “What’s the point when there’s no way you’d believe me? What I told you was accurate enough. I need something there that’ll save my life. Why do you need to know more than that?”
“How about because we’re staking our careers and maybe our lives on this scheme too?” I swiveled my walking stick restlessly. “I know something unnatural is going on. I’ve seen enough strangeness to be convinced it’s beyond the realms of science. I can’t promise I’ll believe everything, but I’ll listen with an open mind. Also, we’re not leaving this parking lot until you explain something.”
She looked at me balefully, and the awareness prickled over me that if she really wanted to leave, there wasn’t much I’d have been able to do to stop her. On the other hand, if I told Sherlock and Garrett to call off any arrangements we’d made to help her, they’d almost definitely agree. I did have some leverage.
“I told you this commune is part of a larger cult,” she said. “They serve beings that live in their own realm alongside ours, but with the right impetus, they can cross over and have their fun here. Like vicious demonic faerie creatures… It sounds crazy. That’s why I skipped that part. But you’ve pretty much seen one—that day in the park in London.”
Demonic faerie creatures. The idea sounded so ridiculous I wanted to laugh, but Jemma looked deathly serious, and we never had been able to explain the strange glowing figure we’d all witnessed.
“And one of those things is hurting you?” I ventured.
“In a roundabout way.” She swept up her hair with one hand and turned to show me the back of her neck as she lifted it. A jagged white blotch stood out against her skin at the base of her scalp. “I made a contract with one a long time ago. A sort of deal with the devil, if you like.”
She dropped her hair and faced me again, hugging herself. “That cuff I made with the gold artif
acts—it’s the only thing stopping the thing from collecting me, but apparently it wasn’t meant to be used for long periods of time. Now the cure is starting to kill me. What I can get in that commune, it’ll help me arrange a more permanent solution.”
“What happened just now, you think it’s because of the gold band around your leg.” Poisoning by percutaneous absorption wasn’t unheard of. If I thought of it in those terms and didn’t focus on the supernatural elements, I felt steadier. “Would you let me examine you? Just your leg? Maybe there’s some way I can help.”
Jemma’s lips quirked upward. “You really want to play doctor, don’t you, John?”
“I am a doctor, practicing or not. Come on, get in the truck for a little privacy and let me have a look.”
She chuckled under her breath, but she took her seat and pushed it as far back as it would go so she had plenty of space. As I slid in on the driver’s side, she tugged her loose pantleg up to mid-thigh.
The gold band and the gems imbedded in it gleamed in the dwindling sunlight. The skin around its edges did have an odd pearly quality to it, the blood vessels showing more starkly than they naturally should.
I reached to touch the spot, and Jemma tensed. I remembered how she’d reacted when Sherlock had put his hands on the band the other day.
“I’m not going to take it off,” I said. “I just want to check your leg. All right?”
“All right.” She tipped her head back against the seat and managed a grin, even if this one was tight. “Have your way with me, Dr. Watson.”
I ran my thumb gently over the thigh muscle below and then above the gold band. For a second, when I applied a little more pressure, I thought I could see straight through to her femur. Nausea pinched at my stomach. This thing was definitely affecting her body in some bizarre way.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
“Not really. Most of the time I don’t even think about how it’s there. But every now and then—more often, recently—it sets off this overpowering chill… It’s supposed to wipe all trace of me from the creatures’ senses. I think it’s decided to wipe me out completely.”