by Kay Hooper
There was nothing easy about picking a door lock in pitch darkness, even with a lockpick. In fact, it was difficult as hell, especially with chilled, nearly numb fingers. Tucker had the feeling it was taking him too damned long to do it, but he gritted his teeth and kept working on it.
He was conscious of Sarah on the edge of his awareness, a spot of warmth he wanted to pull around him like a blanket, but kept his attention fiercely on what he was trying to do. He had no clear idea what Sarah had been through since he had left their bed at the hotel, but that brief glimpse into her mind told him that it had been rough for her, and he wasn’t about to add to her burdens.
So he had to get his ass out of this room before somebody came back here to check on him, and he had to make damned sure none of those bastards got their hands on him.
Simple enough.
But the reality made the odds against those simple goals rather high. He was still fighting his way out of the drug-induced haze, for one thing, so concentrating or even thinking clearly was a problem. He was also stiff from lying immobile for such a long time, and strength was only slowly returning to his muscles.
Dexterity was also a problem; he dropped the lockpick twice and had to feel around on the cold stone floor for it. It occurred to him that if he lost the thing he’d really be up a creek, so he tried to be more careful.
He didn’t realize what a strain the physical and mental effort was until the door finally opened and he had to hang on to the knob and just breathe for a few minutes.
It was as dark outside the room as in, though he could faintly discern a glow maybe two shades lighter than the darkness way down the corridor that stretched out straight ahead. The temptation to move toward the light was strong, but Tucker remembered his instructions and, after he’d closed and relocked the door behind him, turned right and plunged into more darkness instead.
He found the storage room on the left just where Sarah had said it would be, and for the first time wondered how on earth she knew that. Of course, she seemed to know a hell of a lot about many things, more with every day that passed, but he still wondered.
Life with Sarah was going to be very interesting.
He slipped into the room, his senses flaring out in an attempt to get some idea of what was in here with him, and closed the door softly behind him only when he was reasonably sure he was alone. From the door, he began moving very slowly along the wall clockwise. It was distinctly unsettling to be feeling his way around in pitch darkness, but it was better than just standing or sitting and waiting with no idea of what was around him.
He found out quickly enough that most of what was around him was boxes and trunks, and numerous piles of rotting furniture and apparently scrap wood.
The furniture was easy enough to identify by touch, and it cost him only one splinter and a bruise on his shin. It was much harder to make himself reach into trunks and boxes when he couldn’t see what he was about to touch, but he steeled himself and did it.
He had no intention of making things harder for Sarah, but he was also not used to feeling helpless—and he’d been helpless too long. If he could find anything that might help him get himself and Sarah out of here in one piece, then he intended to find it.
Most of the stuff in the boxes and trunks was unidentifiable; a couple of sharp, metallic edges made him glad his tetanus boosters were up to date, and he once encountered some squishy stuff he didn’t even want to think about, but mostly it seemed to be household objects and the like that might once have been packed away down here as charity contributions no one had been able to use.
Tucker agreed that most of the stuff was useless, to him anyway, and he was feeling very frustrated when he pried open a smaller box, earning himself another splinter and a jab from an undoubtedly rusty nail, and this time found bottles. Several of them.
It took him only a moment or two to realize what he’d found, and when he did, he knew he had two-thirds of a dandy weapon. If he could only find the other, necessary, third.
“My kingdom for a match,” he muttered.
“I think I can oblige,” said a voice out of the darkness.
The inside of the church was dim and dusty and very quiet. Sarah paused only a moment among the few remaining pews, then made her way to the back where she knew the stairs would be. She found them easily enough, the door waiting open for her, and again it took more courage than she thought she had to make herself walk down into that black maw.
She paused only long enough to light the kerosene lamp. It had been chosen with care, because it would give off plenty of soft light all around her rather than a beam of brilliance as a flashlight would. Even so, it threw as much shadow as light as she went down the narrow stairway, and those shadows made her skin crawl once more.
Shadows. You’re here. Close. But she thought there was only one or two of them beneath the church, which surprised her for only a moment. Of course I can’t get out of the trap. So two—one to grab me, and one to guard Tucker. And all the rest guarding the door.
The smells of musty age closed around her, damp and moldy and dank, and she found herself breathing through her mouth rather than her nose. It got colder with every step she took, and despite her warm sweater and jeans, she was chilled before she reached the bottom. At the bottom of the stairs, she found herself in the large, square room that was the original cellar of the church, her lamp showing her what she had felt her way through before. Numerous doorways and halls opened off this central room, some of them cut into the rock the building sat upon while others tunneled through earth.
Sarah made her way immediately across the central room to the narrow table holding all the pillar candles. Without so much as a glance toward any of the rooms or corridors around her, she set her lamp on the table, reached into her pocket for matches, and began lighting the cobwebbed candles.
She was nearly done when a gust of air from somewhere nearby caused the flames to waver wildly, then blew half the candles out. She dropped the match, and it sputtered out on the stone floor.
“Waauur.”
Sarah nearly jumped out of her skin, and stared incredulously at the large black cat that had leaped onto the far end of the table and sat watching her with a slowly lashing tail.
“Pendragon?” Surely, it couldn’t be…
“Waauur.”
Despite her amazement, she didn’t have much doubt that this was the cat she had left behind in Richmond. He was just too distinctive looking, those eyes too blue and collar too individual for her to be mistaken. What she couldn’t begin to imagine was what he was doing here. And how he’d traveled so far.
Another brief gust of air made the candles waver again. Pendragon hissed softly, then leaped from the table and vanished into the shadows near the stairs. Before Sarah could do more than stare after him, a voice spoke mockingly no more than three feet away from her.
“Don’t like the dark, I see.”
She turned quickly and for an instant thought her eyes were playing tricks on her, because all she saw was a huge, hideous shadow looming toward her. But when she blinked, it was only a man.
A very average man. Average height and weight, average brown hair, and average blue eyes. Wearing a very average business suit.
Somehow, that made it worse.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Not Duran.”
That surprised him. “No. I’m Varden.”
“So this was your game.” She wasn’t really thinking about what she was saying, just talking to stall for time.
“It was.”
“Bucking for a promotion?”
He smiled thinly. “If so, you’ll help me get it, Sarah.”
“Pass. Where’s Tucker?”
“Safe. I just sent one of my men to…watch him. We’ll let him go, of course, as soon as you leave with me.”
She smiled. “Sure you will.”
Varden shrugged carelessly. “He’s of no interest to us.”
“But I am. Want to tell me w
hy?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I know it’s because I’m psychic. I don’t know how you mean to use that.”
“Come with me and find out.”
Sarah stared at him almost curiously. “It’d be a feather in your cap if I did, wouldn’t it? Why is a willing psychic better for you?”
His mouth tightened. “We’re wasting time. It’s over, Sarah. It’s time to go.”
Even though she had been expecting it, Sarah jumped just as he did when, high above their heads in the rotting building, the old church bells began a jangling, discordant song, accompanied by the sharp reports of gunfire.
“Your backup, I presume,” Varden drawled, his face calm even as his hand dived inside his jacket and produced a businesslike black automatic. “We were expecting them, Sarah.”
“You’re a very good shot,” Leigh said, looking admiringly toward the church and its swaying bells.
Murphy swore and aimed a shot at one of the broken windows, where a head had momentarily appeared. “I’d rather hit some of them instead of the damned bells. Just one, at least. Come on, Leigh—”
“No bodies, Murphy. We can’t afford them.”
“We can’t afford to leave our own here, either,” Murphy snapped. “Dammit, Leigh, will you get down? One lucky shot and—”
Leigh obeyed, ducking for a moment behind the pile of old lumber they were using for cover. When there was a lull in the gunfire coming from the church, she got off a few shots of her own. She hardly knew one end of a gun from the other, but the illusion of an army was needed, so periodically she aimed her pistol at the largest expanse of wood she could find on the church and fired.
“You’re a menace,” Murphy noted as what was left of a stained-glass window shattered under one of Leigh’s bullets.
Leigh winced. “Now, if that isn’t bad luck, I don’t know what is.”
“We make our own luck,” Murphy told her flatly.
“Um. Maybe so, but I think I’ll circle around and check on Nick. There’s less glass on his side. And I’ve got to take care of step two.”
“I wish you’d let me handle that,” Murphy said.
“You’re a much better shot than I am. You and Nick are needed for this.”
“Will you, for Christ’s sake, be careful?”
“You bet.”
“We were expecting them, Sarah.”
“Were you? Damn.”
His eyes narrowed at her mild tone. “What have you done?”
“Read my mind.” She knew that taunting him was a bad idea, but she couldn’t help herself. She had been getting angry for a long time, and Cait’s senseless death the night before had turned anger into rage.
He cocked the pistol and leveled it at her. “We’re going upstairs, Sarah. Now.”
The bells jangled above them, along with gunshots and, now, a crackling, whispery sound.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Varden! Get out of there!” The voice came echoing down the stairs, urgent and more than a little panicked. “They’re burning the place!”
Sarah had counted on a moment of surprise, and she got one as Varden’s gaze lifted instinctively toward the burning church above them. She moved instantly, leaping away from him and the light and toward the protection of a jumble of wooden crates.
A bullet splintered wood a heartbeat behind her, accompanied by a snarl from Varden.
Sarah didn’t waste a moment, moving as swiftly as she could toward the corridor she knew would lead her to the escape tunnel. She tried to keep the boxes and junk of the cellar between her and him, but she had to circle widely to pass by him. She counted on Varden to head toward the stairs and his own escape.
For once, her instincts and senses failed her.
He was there, in front of her, gun leveled and face savage, blocking her way to the tunnel. “Bitch. Where do you think you’re going? I haven’t come this far to let you get away now.”
For an instant, staring down the barrel of that gun and listening to the whispery “voices” of the fire spreading above them, Sarah felt an urge to just accept the inevitable.
I’m going to die here. The vision’s coming true.
Destiny.
But the rage bubbling inside her was, finally, stronger. “I want my life back,” she snarled right back at him. “You can’t have it, you son of a bitch. You can’t have anything I am.”
Whatever he saw in her face, it was clear that Varden recognized a point of no return. And his own defeat. But his failure was mixed with thwarted fury. His free hand lifted, a walkie-talkie in it, and he snapped, “Braun! Kill Mackenzie!”
Murphy tried to keep Leigh in sight as the older woman put step two of their plan into action and torched the building. It was supposed to be a fairly simple action: toss a couple of incendiaries against the back of the church and set that end on fire, driving those inside out the front door.
Murphy had argued for a good, old-fashioned turkey shoot but was overruled. So it was with utter disgust and an itchy trigger finger that she watched several men stumble from the burning church within minutes and pile into two waiting long black cars.
The gunfire over, she eased the hammer back on her pistol but remained wary until the men had fled the scene.
“Not very loyal, are they?” Nick noted as he joined her. “They left at least two of their own behind.”
“They’re bastards, every last one,” Murphy said, more or less automatically. Her gaze was directed toward the church. Through one of the glassless windows, she could see inside the church. See flames and falling pieces of timber. And…
“Jesus. Is that—?”
Nick followed her gaze, and his thin face tightened. Very quietly, he said, “Oh, my God.”
“Braun! Kill Mackenzie!”
Sarah’s heart stopped for an instant. But then a voice she recognized as well as her own erupted from the walkie-talkie in a cheerful response.
“Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but Braun sort of fell down on the job.”
On the last syllable, a Molotov cocktail crashed against the wall just a few feet from Varden, and he flinched away from it instinctively, his gun hand lifting to shield his face from the heat.
Sarah wanted to kick him where it would hurt the most but still didn’t dare touch him, and it was with immense satisfaction that she saw Brodie step from the doorway behind Varden and bring a bottle of something crashing against the back of his head.
Varden dropped like a stone.
“Aw, gee, did that hurt?” Brodie stared down at him pitilessly.
Tucker came through the doorway to stand beside him and said reflectively, “Terrible waste of thirty-year-old scotch.”
“You wasted the first bottle,” Brodie reminded him.
Sarah threw herself into Tucker’s arms.
“Not wasted,” Tucker said a bit thickly, his arms tight around her. “Hey, let’s get the hell out of here. This place is on fire.”
Brodie set an unused Molotov cocktail aside with a sigh. “You two go on. I’ll drag him along. Guess we can’t leave him down here to roast, much as I’d love to.”
Sarah avoided the spreading fire and darted over to grab the kerosene lamp to light their way back through the tunnel; the two men had infrared goggles hanging around their necks, but she didn’t feel much like plunging back into the darkness.
There was a crash from above and the floor of the church shuddered beneath the weight of whatever had fallen, so they didn’t waste any more time. Sarah and Tucker led the way swiftly, while Brodie followed with an unconscious Varden slung over one shoulder.
“Where’s the other one?” Sarah asked breathlessly as they hurried along the tunnel. “The one Varden wanted to kill Tucker?”
“I found him long before he heard that order,” Brodie replied. “Knocked him cold and dragged him to the mouth of the tunnel. Any sign of Duran?”
“No. Varden said this was his game.”
&n
bsp; Brodie grunted. “That explains a few things.”
“Like what?” Tucker demanded as they emerged from the tunnel and into bright daylight.
“Like why he baited a trap. Not Duran’s style.” Brodie dumped Varden unceremoniously just outside the tunnel and looked around with a frown. “Now, where the hell—”
“No need to clean up the mess, Brodie. I’ll do that.”
It was a deep, pleasant voice, cool and oddly resonant, and Sarah knew who he was even before she jerked around to find him standing only a few feet away.
Duran.
SEVENTEEN
Not an average man.
He was tall, athletic; physical power was obvious even though he wore a dark trench coat open over a sober business suit. He was dark, his hair the true black of a raven’s wing, and strikingly pale and almost iridescent greenish eyes looked out of an extraordinarily handsome face.
Sarah was vaguely aware that both Brodie and Tucker had drawn guns and leveled them at the man, but he was looking at her. And she recognized him.
“I’ve seen your face,” she said slowly. “I’ve seen you. In my visions.”
He didn’t look surprised, merely nodding, and he stood relaxed and apparently at ease despite the guns pointed at him.
rodie said, “I’ve been waiting for you to turn up, Duran.”
Those pale eyes flickered toward him, then returned to Sarah’s face. “My apologies, Miss Gallagher.”
“Why?” she asked blankly.
“This has been badly handled from the beginning. There was no need for so much…trauma.”
“I suppose my dying in the house fire would have been much less traumatic for everybody involved?”
He smiled. “Exactly.”
She knew it wasn’t wise to try, but she let her senses reach out anyway, very carefully.
Immediately, she felt he was a dangerous man, yet that was only an intuitive judgment rather than something definite. She sensed no threat from him. In fact, she sensed…nothing. Not even shadows.