Hiding the Moon

by Amy Lane

  He was reassured right up until that thunderhead of wrongness he’d been waiting for all day crashed down on his head and he almost passed out.

  ALBA PUT the Closed sign on the cashier’s station and helped Ernie into the house, clucking gently. “You magic guys, you get your panties in a twist and it’s no good.”

  “Something’s wrong,” he gasped. “Alba… I can… I mean, I think you need to go home!”

  She grunted. “No. Wait. Somebody’s gonna text you. Give it a minute.”

  Ernie glared at her. “How in the hell would you know that?”

  She shrugged. “I’m no bruja, but I got a feeling. Is Ace dead?”

  He examined that statement. “No.”

  “Sonny?”

  “No. How did you know?”

  “Because you’d be sad,” she said, like that was a given. “You don’t just come here and live and take care of us and give us presents and not be sad. You’re scared now—and that’s no good. But it’s not sad. Here. Take more deep breaths. Hold the dog. I’ll make you some tea.”

  It took fifteen minutes for him to calm down, and just when she set the tea in front of him (the tea that was there only so she could have something to drink when she visited—Ernie made Ace buy it himself) his phone buzzed.

  It was Sonny—Ace and Cramer had been taken, and Sonny and Rivers were on their way. Apparently Sonny had convinced Rivers they had a superhero on their side.

  Ernie looked Alba in the eye. “Honey, they’ll be here in half an hour.”

  “I’ll be gone before they pull up,” she promised. “Now text Burton. I think it’s time.”

  Burton, they got Ace and Cramer.

  THE HOLY FUCK!!!!

  You didn’t know it was going down?

  I know I’m in the middle of a bad guy civil war, that’s what I know. Where’s Rivers and Daye?

  On their way here. Sonny was freaking out—the only way he could keep Rivers from driving straight after Lacey’s men was to tell him about me.

  The next pause was interminable. When the text came back, Ernie had to read it three times.

  Okay. I’ve emailed you plans for the military base—they’re pretty standard. Text me when they’ve got a plan. I’ll do what’s needed.

  Wait. What in the hell?

  But aren’t you undercover?

  Not for long. Hang tight. Keep them calm if you can. When you send them to me, make sure they’re not insane.

  But… but… but….

  Lee, you’ll be in danger. YOU’LL ALL BE IN DANGER.

  Cramer and Ace most of all. I’ll stay here and keep them safe. Hopefully I can hand them off to Rivers when it’s time. Don’t worry about us, Ernie. Hold down the fort, okay?

  Burton, can’t we just call somebody?

  Ernie, if I’m the good guy, I’m who you call. Tell me, what did Sonny say?

  He said we needed you to be a superhero.

  Then I’m going to be a superhero. ’Cause that’s what you guys need. Love you, kid. Just stay safe.

  Ernie was never really sure how things went so south after that—or so north after they went south. But he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with his gift and everything to do with the three words Burton texted that he’d never texted and that he must have meant, but Ernie was going to have to look him in the eyes to see if he meant them.

  The key part being look him in the eyes.

  Shark in the Tank, Ace in the Hole

  BURTON ALMOST dropped his phone.

  His hands, abnormally cold and clammy in the bathroom, were shaking, and after he rescued the phone, he had to try twice to put the damned thing in his pocket.

  Then he realized he really did have to pee.

  They had Ace. And Cramer.

  Sonny and Rivers were on their way.

  Oh Jesus.

  Everything in his worst nightmare scenario and it was driving to the base, and he didn’t have a damned idea how it was going to play out.

  Anticipate the target?

  One of the first things he’d learned under Jason Constance. Anticipate where your target will be. Well, he wasn’t trying to take Ace and Cramer out, but he was trying to acquire them. If Lacey didn’t kill them right off, where would he put them?

  The obvious answer was the brig.

  Burton had been trying to bug Lacey’s office again—it had been locked during his absence, and picking the series of three locks, two of them electronic, had been taking a maddening amount of time. But he’d come prepared every day.

  Before he went back to the com room, he ran to the back of the nearly deserted administration building and hid the bug in the brig, up over the doorframe. Not the best hiding place in ordinary circumstances, no, but the whole place was about to go up like a wasp’s nest, and Burton figured it would be overlooked. He made it back to his com station and slid into his seat like his world wasn’t about to crash to the ground.

  “Where the hell you been?” Manetti hissed. “Gleeson, Adkins, and Leavins are about to get here with Rivers and Cramer. Lacey’s gonna be pissed you didn’t tell him they were coming down here.”

  Burton worked hard at being innocent. “I didn’t know—it’s not my fault they found the damned bugs!”

  It hadn’t been, either. In fact, it had been Lacey’s fault for trying to take Rivers out while he was running the investigation—but that wasn’t the important thing.

  “How in the hell did they get Rivers and Cramer anyway?” Burton asked, masking his stab of relief. Rivers and Cramer. Lacey didn’t know Ace wasn’t Rivers. Oh, thank God for bad intel.

  Manetti grunted. “Cramer activated his phone this morning. Lacey must have called in a favor with someone who’s got big bucks—they managed to track it even after he turned it off. I’m thinking it was a satellite or something.”

  Burton looked at his display and saw the same dead space he’d been seeing since they’d gone dark. “How do you know he activated it this morning?” Burton said, staring at him. “I didn’t even see that.”

  Manetti rolled his eyes. “Showed up before you reported in. It was just sort of blinking there—I alerted Lacey since he’s the one so all-fired excited about these guys.”

  Burton grunted. “How long have you worked for Hamblin?” he asked, wondering if he even owed Manetti the time of day at this point.

  “About three years, why?”

  “Would you say you’re loyal to him?”

  Manetti shrugged. “Like any other job, I guess. I’m gonna trade up.”

  “Great. A word of advice, though, from me to you. You can’t trade up to a sinking ship. Lacey’s people are cray-cray or incompetent, and Lacey’s a raving lunatic. You take that any way you want to and go ahead and tell anyone you feel like that I said that. But if you can, maybe avoid hitching your wagon to that particular star, you hear me?”

  Manetti gaped at him. “Wow. That’s… wow. Don’t burn any bridges or anything on your way out of here.”

  “Man, if bridges are gonna blow, I’m not the one who’s torching them. Shit.”

  At that moment there was the ring of boots on the tile. Nobody walked in front of the coms room, but Burton’s entire body was tingling—it was all hitting the fan. Manetti went to his own coms, and Burton pulled out his Jason phone.

  Shit’s going down. Have men and medivac on standby. They’ve got Cramer.

  Rivers?

  Cramer and a civilian they think is Rivers. Cramer’ll keep up the charade.

  Roger that.

  Burton expected Jason to ask him why later, but he was going to have a hard time answering how he knew that was the way it would go down.

  It’s just that he’d spent months monitoring these guys, and he felt like he knew them. If Lacey found out Ace was a bystander, he’d have him taken out. Cramer would cover for Ace because that would be the decent thing to do.

  God help them all when Ace’s life depended on the word of a decent man.

  Pain of the Shattered Bow
l

  RIVERS’S PAIN was going to unmake Ernie one silent howl at a time.

  He’d been almost excited when the car had pulled up the drive, right after Alba’s left—he really did want to meet the guys he and Burton had been watching for the past few months.

  But then Rivers had stepped foot over the threshold, and Ernie had almost doubled over.

  Sonny Daye was in a lot of pain—but he hid that pain down the well with the hurt child he had been.

  Rivers’s pain was entirely adult, entirely self-aware, and entirely running near the surface of his skin. They’d shaken hands, and Rivers had locked eyes with him and damned near disappeared.

  He was apparently stronger than Ernie, because he’d managed to surface when Ernie would just as soon he go under into a healing coma and let Ernie sing his psyche to sleep until it stopped screaming.

  But part of Jackson’s pain was fear over Ellery Cramer, and Ernie’s plan wasn’t going to work.

  Which sucked. Something needed to work.

  Especially because the plan they came up with to get the guys out was both dangerous and simple.

  And thanks to Jai, who Ernie had texted while he was waiting for Sonny, it involved the land mines around the military base and a shit-ton of C-4.

  “Uhm, Jai?” Ernie hissed while Rivers was studying the schematic on the computer.

  “What?”

  “You do know how to handle munitions, right?”

  Jai all but rolled his eyes. “I did many things for my former employer,” he said with dignity.

  “Don’t you still officially work for that guy?” Ernie wanted to know. His understanding was that Jai was out on loan to Ace and Sonny, and he had no idea how that worked.

  “He does not pay me unless I do jobs for him. I am usually busy with cars.” Jai didn’t need to shrug his massive shoulders, but Ernie got the picture.

  “Does he know you have his C-4?” Because God help them all if a Nevada-based Russian mob boss decided to come looking for it.

  “It’s not his,” Jai said, sounding defensive. “I have many things left over from those days. It’s not even all the C-4 I have. It doesn’t take much, really, to create a smoking crater out of a Toyota.”

  Ernie tried hard not to panic and remembered that Burton had faith. Then he heard Sonny on the phone to Alba, telling her to check in on Duke in case she didn’t hear from any of them, and realized Sonny assumed Ernie was going with them.

  Burton had told Ernie to stay put.

  Ernie was unprepared for the flare of anger in his chest. Goddammit. He cared about these people, and they were driving onto a fully loaded military base full of mercenaries with no better plan than to blow up the Toyota and grab their guys while the rest of the world went apeshit?

  And Burton? Where the hell was Burton anyway? Burton was sitting in the middle of the mercenaries, and he was going to fix this clusterfuck single-handedly? Bullshit! Just pure fucking bullshit.

  Rivers—dirty-blond hair sticking straight up, pretty green eyes bloodshot from worry—was trying not to implode at their kitchen table, and the only thing keeping Sonny from being equally as fucked up was the damned dog he wouldn’t let go of.

  They needed Ernie. If Burton thought of Ernie as a goddamned inconvenience, these guys needed him. Of course he was fucking going.

  The drive to the abandoned air base was as tense a thing as Ernie ever hoped to live through. He had to touch-calm Sonny down in the first ten minutes because Rivers was gonna pop, and every conversation he had with Rivers to calm him down, maybe just take some of his pain so he could freakin’ function, came to a dead end.

  They rolled up to the military base, taking a dirt frontage track to the main road before they were close enough to be spotted. Ernie could feel palpable waves of fear roll off the man—not for himself, but for everybody in the car, including Ernie.

  “You know what you’re doing?” Rivers asked one last time.

  “I’m taking the SUV and following Jai in the Toyota. When we get to the land mines, we’re rigging the Toyota with a brick and a bungee cord, and it’s going to drive over one of the mines so it can explode.” The land mines were an unpleasant surprise—and one of the things Burton had clued them in on that had probably saved all their lives. It was good to have the intel, and Rivers had spotted them off the dirt track as they’d ridden, but it had been even better that they could use the explosive devices for their own needs.

  The hope was when the Toyota went kaboom, all the people in the base would run toward it. Sonny would stay at the airstrip to serve as cover fire if they needed it, and Rivers would be free to run inside the camp itself and pull Ace and Cramer out.

  Simple and hopefully effective—Jai had confessed quietly to Ernie that he wasn’t sure if the land mines would actually set the C-4 off, but Ernie had hope they’d find something that could set it off by the time things got dire.

  Except here they were at the base, and so far all Ernie knew was that Jackson Rivers was so tightly wound, his entire intestinal system was probably coiled like a spring.

  He didn’t show it, though. He and Sonny got out of Rivers’s SUV, and after some discussion with Jai, they took off for the back of the hangar, Sonny trotting almost cheerfully next to Rivers’s fluid run. Ernie had to leave them to themselves and hope, while he and Jai made their way down the pitted jeep track toward the west side of the base.

  Ernie had all his senses on high alert or he would have plowed into the back of Jai’s Toyota when it came to an abrupt halt just as they cleared the last building of the base.

  He sat for a moment, heart hammering in his ears, and Jai got out of the Toyota, leaving it to idle while he came to talk to Ernie.

  “What?” Ernie asked as the window was still rolling down.

  “I’m pretty sure there is a land mine in my way,” Jai said casually. “I’d like a second opinion before I decide to drive the car over it.”

  Ernie gaped at him and backed the Infiniti up damned quick. When he had about twenty yards between him and the Toyo, he put the car in Park and trotted back to look.

  The lump of ground looked like the land mines they’d seen coming in—like a hump of land, newly unearthed, that had been left undisturbed for the green of January to cover it. Ernie stared at it in confusion.

  “But why would you put a land mine right here?” he asked. “It’s right in the middle of the path—how would you transport back here?”

  “Maybe there is something they don’t want people to see on this section of land?” Jai suggested tentatively. It was not like the big guy to show curiosity—this really must be an anomaly.

  “You know”—and he hated to do this—“I’m going to have to ask Burton.”

  “Yes. Why haven’t you done so already?”

  “Because he doesn’t know I’m here?”

  Jai’s rolled eyes were a thing of beauty. “Children. He tells you to stay safe so he doesn’t need to worry, and you get upset because you think you are a burden. He is a very smart man and so are you, but together you are tremendously stupid. By all means, have a text war about how much you don’t love and need each other. We only have, what? How much time did Rivers give us?”

  Ernie looked at his phone. “Thirty minutes?”

  Jai let out a sigh. “There needs to be a way. Here—I’ve got something in my car that might work.”

  Ernie looked at his phone again and took the coward’s way out.

  Jai found a land mine on the service road, south side of the base heading west. He wants to know if it’s the only one and why it’s there.

  He waited a moment, watching as Jai rummaged through the trunk of his car, which proved surprisingly full of camping gear.

  “You go camping?”

  “Da.”

  “Where?”

  “Tehachapi Mountains, by the lake. It’s not a forest, but it’s not a garage in the fucking desert either.”

  For a moment the time crunch they were in was co
mpletely forgotten. “But… but… when? And you don’t say anything to Ace or Sonny!”

  “On my days off, once a month or so. And I say nothing because then there’s confusion. Do I want them to go, do I want company—they don’t want to come camping with me, any more than I want to go to Disneyland.”

  Ernie almost bought it—stoic Russian bastard. But there was a faint whine in his voice, a disclaimer. “Do you get laid in the Tehachapi Mountains?” he hazarded.

  Jai grunted. “Often and well. But he is married and I don’t really like him. What can I say—a man has needs. Yes! I knew it was here!”

  He held a small electronic device aloft in triumph, and Ernie blinked. “What the hell is that?”

  “I used to work construction. It’s a stud finder. Let us see what it finds, yes?”

  Ernie couldn’t help it. “You point your penis at it and see if it lights up.”

  A terrible sound came out of Jai’s mouth, a cross between an elephant choking and a donkey dying of asthma. Ernie gaped at him for a moment, unsure if he needed to run for his life or start the Heimlich maneuver, and then he realized what that sound was.

  Jai was laughing.

  “Oh my God! You are very funny!”

  Ernie felt a weak smile at the corner of his mouth. “I do my best. Do you want me to—”

  “Stay there and talk to Burton,” Jai ordered summarily. “It’s not that I don’t trust you not to walk on a land mine because you suddenly see a bird, but I don’t trust you not to walk on a land mine because you suddenly see anything not a land mine.”

  Ernie grimaced. “Very on point,” he admitted. “Just don’t blow yourself up or anything.”

  “You want to help?” Jai asked, as though considering something.

  “No, Jai, I just defied my sort-of boyfriend and risked my life to drive out to a military base and watch you blow shit up.”

  Jai held out his hands in placation. “Yes, yes, you’re very fierce. Hiss, kitten, hiss. And when you are done ruffling your fur, look through the car you are driving. I need a detonator.”