From somewhere to my left I heard a low growl.
Moss sensed my sudden surge of fear.
Guard.
Easy, Moss.
Anya didn’t try to shoot him, though his growl would have given her a general idea of where he was. She knew as well as I that he stood no chance once the lights were on and was probably just biding her time.
We needed to disarm her. The problem was, it was too dark to see. Even Moss’s wolf-eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness.
If I could come up with the smallest amount of light, he could charge Anya and take out the arm holding the gun.
Bite. Moss knew what I was planning and was ready.
Steady, big guy. Wait till I say “Go.”
Guard. He protested my plan, but stayed silent.
How could I generate enough light to let Moss see and keep Anya blind?
Distantly, I sensed a surge of emotion from Cornelius. Restoring my connection to him didn’t take long.
Kai, help!
The monkey was hopping around Kai and making distressed clicking and whistling sounds.
“Cornelius?” I heard Kai say via Cornelius. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Cornelius continued to vocalize his need for help.
Unfortunately, Kai didn’t speak capuchin.
Hugh, on the other hand . . .
“He’s freaked out,” Hugh said.
Show them where you want to go, Cornelius. Go down.
Cornelius did as I asked. When the men didn’t follow, he climbed back to them.
Help!
“The machine is off,” Hugh said. “Do you think—”
Kai squinted at the monkey. “Grace?”
Yes! How to confirm I was sending them a message?
I did the first thing that came to mind.
Give him a kiss.
Cornelius hopped onto Kai’s shoulder and, just as he had done with his previous owner, kissed Kai on the cheek.
Still hanging on the rung, Kai glanced at Hugh. “It’s her.”
Cornelius hopped away and started down the tower.
Follow the monkey, Kai.
“Let’s go,” Kai said.
I wasted no time coming back to myself. But the head-hopping was taking its toll and it took me a couple of seconds to adjust and locate Moss.
I found him in the most unlikely place.
My dog had his front paws firmly planted on Anya’s chest, pinning her down.
I knew this not because I’d jumped into his head, but because I could see them. Or the silhouette of them, in any case.
On the floor a few feet away, a cell phone glowed softly. Anya tried to shift her weight.
Moss’s low growl intensified.
“I’d be still if I were you,” I told her as I got my feet under me.
She was cradling her arm.
Guard.
Good boy.
Using the table to keep me steady, I searched for the gun. It was near Anya’s foot.
I walked over to it. Rather than bend over and tempt my already pounding head to explode, I squatted and picked up the gun.
A second later, the lights blinked on. The hum of machines started as the power was restored.
I saw my stun gun sitting on one of the tables and picked it up. I really wanted to sink into the office chair but was afraid if I did I wouldn’t want to get back up.
“Call him off.” Anya grated out the words.
Holding a weapon in each hand I turned to look at her.
“No.”
“Please, call him off.”
“Why should I? I saw your cruelty, Anya,” I said. “I know what kind of person you are.”
“Oh, and what kind is that?”
“You believe animals are nothing more than property. Shells to be used however you deem necessary. But they can feel, Anya. Want to guess what he’s feeling now?”
Moss inched closer to her face. His lips peeled back from glistening, sharp teeth.
Her eyes went wide.
“You won’t let him kill me.”
“Let?” I scoffed. “He’s a sentient being. He makes his own choices.”
With that, I walked around her and headed for the door.
“Wait. Please!”
I kept going. I’d walked only a few feet into the hall when Moss caught up with me.
“See? You’re a better person than she is,” I said, and we continued on.
We reached a dark doorway and Moss stopped and pricked his ears.
I knew someone was standing inside, and after a moment I knew who it was—Logan.
I had a lot of questions for him, but only one mattered. “Is everyone safe?”
“Everyone but Barry.”
That worked for me.
Glancing over my shoulder at the room where I’d left Anya, I asked, “Did you really kill everyone she loved?”
No answer.
“She wants revenge.”
“I know.”
“She knows about Brooke.”
Leaving it at that, Moss and I walked out of that awful place into the cold night.
CHAPTER 18
Belinda was at the stove, wearing her colorful kimono, topped with her Hot Stuff apron.
Emma had tried to get her to sit and rest and let her do all the work, but Belinda wouldn’t hear of it.
What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?
Pancakes.
I hadn’t even bothered to argue when they’d decreed I was to sit and be waited on.
My headache was better, but my brain was not functioning at full power, which was normal for someone with a concussion.
Unfortunately for me, that meant I couldn’t shield my mind from the animals I came in contact with. Moss had saved me again. He’d somehow understood how sensitive I was and stayed by my side, maintaining a solid presence for me to connect to.
Staying linked to him helped keep other animal brains at bay.
Even so, sometimes I’d get a blast of telepathic energy so strong that I wished for Barry’s mini-anti-psychic contraption. Though neither it nor Barry had made it out of the amusement park in one piece.
“What’s the latest on Barry?” I asked Kai, who’d set a plate of pancakes in front of me before taking his seat.
“The police aren’t sure they’ll be able to charge him, given his condition. The doctors say he’ll never recover from what that thing did to his head.”
When the power came back on after the reset, the tower had emitted some sort of pulse that had, because of the device implanted in Barry’s ear, pretty much fried his brain. It had also somehow short-circuited the monkeys’ psychic ability, if that’s what you want to call what had been done to them.
“Does that mean he’ll wind up drooling on himself in a psych ward somewhere?” Hugh asked as he spread butter over his pancakes.
“Yep.”
“Good.” Hugh punctuated the word by stabbing a piece of pancake with his fork. Instead of eating it, he lifted the fork into the air to hand off to my sister, who was buzzing around the kitchen like a bee.
She took the bite, handed the fork back to Hugh, and zoomed back to the stove.
A few seconds later Emma came back to the table to set a glass of orange juice next to my plate. She got another bite of pancake from Hugh and used the fork to point at my pancakes.
“Eat.”
She gave Kai a sharp look before heading to the refrigerator.
He cut off a piece of pancake for me and held it up.
I arched my brow at him.
“Do I need to make airplane noises?” he asked.
I smiled and opened my mouth.
“I talked to Jason,” he said. “He and Ronnie are sti
ll at the hospital with Hattie. She’s stable and should be released in the next couple of days.”
Hattie had been spared the horrors of Barry’s lab. As predicted, he’d wanted to use her to control Ronnie, so aside from injuries suffered from her kidnapping and some lingering psychic symptoms similar to the ones Belinda and Ronnie had been dealing with, she was okay.
“Any progress with the fire investigation?” I asked.
“No,” Kai said, forking another bite of pancake into my mouth. “I think they’re going to write it up as a secondary spark after the one that zapped Barry.”
Logan had taken care of most of the evidence of what was going on at Barry’s lab by torching both it and the tower, which was good, because now no one else could use his research to do something similar.
No bodies had been found in the charred wreckage. I didn’t know if that meant Anya was still running around or if Logan had simply covered his tracks and disposed of her elsewhere. I had the feeling the latter was the case.
I hadn’t heard from the Ghost, but figured he’d show up eventually to irritate me with his “help.”
Emma claimed to have put her birthday plans on hold until everyone was well enough to attend, but I’d heard her and Belinda whispering and was pretty sure a Mardi Gras ball was in my future.
Oh well, there were worse things, right?
I turned to Hugh. “You talked to Marisa?”
He nodded. “She has the capuchins in quarantine. The isolation has helped.”
All the capuchins but Cornelius had suffered what basically amounted to insanity due to the trauma caused to both their brains and their DNA, which Barry had also been playing around with.
The room they’d been kept in had been carefully shielded from the tower’s emissions. Which was why, though the device had still been on, I’d gotten a blast of psychic energy from the monkeys when I’d entered their room.
For now, the monkeys’ psychic insanity had been reversed, but no one knew how long it would last. Cornelius was the most balanced, and his presence seemed to help his friends.
The zoo was caring for them until their condition was stable. Hugh was already making arrangements to get them into a good, permanent home.
“Speaking of monkeys,” Kai said, “are you going to tell us what Cornelius showed you?”
“When?” I asked, though I knew perfectly well what he meant.
“In Bluebell before we went into the amusement park.”
“Oh, um . . . no.”
I felt a flash of anxiety. “I mean, I don’t really know what he was trying to tell me.”
“Not enough detail?” Kai asked.
I nodded.
“Maybe you’ll figure it out later.”
“Maybe.” I tried to mask my unease by taking a swig of orange juice and wound up draining the glass.
“Here, I’ll get you a refill.” Kai stood and walked to the fridge. I watched him for a few seconds and felt my mouth go dry. Something about the way he was standing, with his back turned, triggered the memory. It rose from the deep recesses of my mind like a ghost.
Kai’s back had been turned in the vision, too. I’d recognized him instantly, though nothing else was familiar.
After a moment he’d said, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.”
It had made me wonder who he was talking to and what they needed to figure out.
The first part of my question was answered a moment later when he turned and I could see that he held something in his arms.
The memory didn’t carry quite the impact as it had the first time but I still felt a wave of surprise roll through me.
Cradled in his arms, swaddled in a sage green blanket, was a baby.
Spending the first years of her life on a Costa Rican coffee farm blessed Laura Morrigan with a fertile imagination and a love for all things wild. Later she became a volunteer at a Florida zoo, helping out with everything from “waste management” to teaching an elephant how to paint. Drawing on her years of experience with both wild and domestic animals and her passion for detective novels, Laura created the Call of the Wilde Mysteries, including Horse of a Different Killer, A Tiger’s Tale, and Woof at the Door. She lives in Florida with too many cats, loves the Blue Angels, wearing flip-flops in November, and thunderstorms. She’s currently hard at work—writing the next Call of the Wilde Mystery. Visit lauramorrigan.com.
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Take the Monkey and Run Page 29