“You’re going down,” Val said, staring at her.
Aurora felt on the verge of weeping or exploding. “I know, Val, you’ve already said...”
“No, I mean, you’re really going down.”
Lena was staring at her, too. “You are, Aurora.”
Aurora looked down at herself and felt a jolt of dismay. She really was sinking into the fog, as if she were going down in quicksand. Lena grabbed for her arm to steady her, and flinched.
“You feel different. Heavy.”
Aurora thought of everything she’d been eating. It wasn’t any wonder, really.
“You look different,” Val said. She seemed to have forgotten she was angry and was studying Aurora closely. “My gods... I think you’re turning human.”
Chapter 17
Back on the beach, Luke was unnerved to find himself on his knees and completely alone on the sand.
What the hell?
He jumped up and turned in a circle, looking around him. He could have sworn that he had been holding Aurora just two seconds ago, and now there was no sign of her.
How could that even be? Did I black out?
Granted, making love with her had been a total rush, and had left him more than a little dazed, but this was...odd.
He looked around him again, down the wet sand of the beach, even out over the water, banked with fog. Not a sign of anyone. The fog was drifting on the beach, rolling in from the water like the surf, obscuring everything. Luke felt a chill, not just from the cold.
He got to his feet, and was just pulling on his shirt when the sound of rock tumbling over rock came from behind him on the embankment. He spun, automatically grabbing for his Glock, and ducked behind the boulder, where he crouched, listening.
The tread he heard moving carefully on the rocks was stealthy, but heavy. Not Aurora. Almost surely male.
He waited until he heard the sound of feet hitting the ground with a crunch of sand, moving away from the boulder.
Then he barreled out from behind the rock with a gun leveled. “Police, don’t move!”
He was facing a man who had the draw on him with an identical Glock, who stared at him in consternation.
“Mars?”
Luke stared back at the familiar figure.
“Lieutenant,” he said.
The two men slowly lowered and holstered their guns. Luke’s boss shook his head in shock. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “You’re alive.”
Luke realized he had a lot of explaining to do. “Well, about that... I can explain.”
“An explanation would be a good start.” Duncan scowled, and made his way around the jagged rocks to stand in front of Luke.
He was focused on Luke’s shoulder, and Luke realized that his shirt was open and the bloody bandage was visible. “You’re wounded.”
“Shot. Last night.”
His boss looked torn between anger and concern. “Mars, are you aware that we were all afraid you were dead? What the hell were you doing not calling in? Were you in a hospital? What?”
The real explanation wasn’t something Luke could give his lieutenant in a million years. Fair he might be, but there were limits to an open mind. But Duncan’s question made Luke glimpse an out. He knew that he was going to have to present a highly edited version of the story. He tried to look weak and drained, just beyond death’s door.
“I got a call from my CI that a shipment was coming in at Pier 94. I went down there last night...about one in the morning.”
“I got your call,” the lieutenant said tersely. “By the time your backup got there the whole pier was deserted.”
“It went down fast,” Luke admitted. “Got out onto the pier and there was no one—no ship, no trucks, no loading. I guess I walked right into it, boss. I was down before I knew what hit me.”
Duncan nodded. “The team last night found a homeless guy who claimed he’d been rousted and threatened by a group of armed men when a man—” he paused, looking Luke over “—of your description, identifying himself as SFPD, intervened. Said he heard shots when he was hauling ass out of there. Says you saved him.”
“Good,” Luke said, relieved. “Glad he made it.”
“So then what?”
Luke paused just a moment as if for dramatic effect; really, he was scrambling for a plausible explanation. “I came to in a warehouse, feeling like I’d been run over by a steamroller. But I wasn’t as badly hurt as they must’ve thought.”
The lieutenant was looking at him in total...disbelief? Maybe. Amazement, for sure.
But so far he was still listening, so Luke kept going. “There was no one else there—whole place was completely empty. So I got the hell out of there. I had no phone, no wallet. No idea what had happened to me. No idea who grabbed me. No idea if someone would be back any second to kill me. I beat it through the warehouse and out. There was a shipment being unloaded and I was able to get out without being seen.” Luke paused, quickly debating whether to talk about the confrontation with Tomasson and the goons.
“They left you your weapon?” the lieutenant said in clear disbelief.
“I ran into a thug up there and disarmed one of them,” Luke improvised. He’d have to lose the gun before it could be ID’d as his.
“And you didn’t call in. Why?”
Luke paused, mindful that someone had set him up, and still reluctant to trust or to tip his hand. But at a certain point you had to take an action just to see where it would lead.
“Lieutenant, I was set up. Someone knew I was going to be there that night, and they were waiting for me.”
His boss stared at him with flint eyes. “Someone on the team, you mean.”
Luke didn’t back down. “I have to think so.”
“Okay.” While agitated, the lieutenant was at least not blowing a gasket, a good sign. “Okay, we’ll come back to that. Go on. What have you been doing all this time?”
“There were a lot of thugs with guns there last night. A lot. But I thought I recognized one of them from my old high school. I had no idea if that was for real or just some gunshot hallucination. So I did some background checking this morning. And, boss, I know who it is. It’s all coming together.” He paced on the sand. “This is all about Bayside, the Tomasson corporation. They just received a major shipment of something, something they were willing to kill for.”
“Bayside,” the lieutenant repeated.
“Here’s how I think it’s going down. It’s all about time. They’re screwing with time. The companies are in it together, the pirate and the pirated. Meaning there’s no piracy, no heists—they’re transfers reported as heists. Bayside has that crane on their ship. What they do is pull up beside the ‘rival’ company ship and offload some targeted cargo. Then the rival company ship just hangs out there on the ocean for hours to give Bayside the time to make it to port. They don’t radio in the hijacking until Bayside is docked at the pier with all kinds of official witnesses and time stamps to prove they couldn’t possibly have been out there in the vicinity at the time of the hijacking. Bayside paints new serial numbers on the containers en route to the port, unloads the containers with whatever smuggled goods straight off the pier onto their trucks and takes them away. And we don’t get the report until after the goods are already gone.”
Duncan stared out to sea. Luke wasn’t sure from the look on his face whether he bought it or not. “It could work,” the lieutenant said slowly. “That might just be it.”
Something major suddenly occurred to Luke. “How did you find me?” he asked.
The lieutenant looked tense. “There was another hijack. Just got reported—the Transatlantic Company. I was with a team headed down to Pier 80 to meet the ship and when we drove by 94 someone spotted your car parked outside the gate. It wasn’t there last night. Every man I’ve got is searching the area.” He looked Luke over again, shook his head. “I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.”
Luke smiled warily. “Boss, I’ve been won
dering about that myself.” He thought back over what the lieutenant had just said. “Transatlantic,” he said aloud. And then something clicked into place. “The hijack was reported when?” he asked suddenly.
Duncan frowned. “Fifteen hundred hours. Ninety minutes ago, tops.”
“I think it just happened again,” Luke continued with building excitement. “By the time you got that call about Transatlantic, Bayside already had the cargo off the pier.”
“Then I know where they are,” the lieutenant said. His voice sounded far away. It was Luke’s turn to stare. “Nils Tomasson has a house north of the city, past Stinson, Highway 1. Not a house, really, more like a compound. It’s private, and it’s heavily guarded.”
The two men looked at each other.
“Let’s go,” the lieutenant said.
“Now?” Luke blinked, thrown.
Duncan frowned. “Any reason why not?”
Luke couldn’t exactly say that he was waiting for Aurora, and then have to explain her, which was not humanly possible. He had no idea where she’d gone, and in a rational universe she didn’t exist at all, anyway. She may well have been a hallucination brought on by the physical trauma of the past—not even—twenty-four hours. Standing now with his commanding officer he was hard-pressed to know if anything at all had actually happened the way he remembered.
And he was getting the strongest sense of a trap. He had never before suspected the lieutenant, and truthfully he didn’t now. But there was something off here; he knew that. Or maybe it was just that the strangeness of the past day was making everything seem strange. It all seemed too surreal to believe. Maybe what he really needed to do was check into a hospital.
“Just the two of us,” he said.
The lieutenant looked at him sharply. “Of course. You said someone set you up. We can’t take chances. We take a look and evaluate from there.”
“Right, boss,” Luke said. “Let’s go.”
Whatever this road was, he was going to follow it.
“I’ve got a vehicle up by Pier 80,” Duncan said, turning for the rock abutment. “We can go up through Pier 86 and around to get to it without being seen.”
As they started up over the rocks, Luke thought of Aurora. Some guardian angel. After everything she’d said and done—the whole urgency of it all, her insistence that she would always be with him, would do anything for him—she’d left him without a word and he didn’t know what to make of it. In fact, the thought made his brain hurt, and his heart a little, too, so Luke put the whole thing aside and followed his commanding officer. He was going to need every brain cell working.
* * *
Out in the fog on the bay, Aurora was suddenly aware of a pull on her heart, a sorrow so painful that she gasped and tears sprang into her eyes.
She doubled over and Lena was stepping over the fog and at her side in an instant. “Aurora, what? What happened?”
“Luke...” she said.
She looked toward the shore, but somehow the fog had taken them far out on the sea; she couldn’t see the sand at all, much less Luke, and it gave her a chill of dread.
“I have to go.”
Lena tightened her hand around Aurora’s arm. “Aurora, you can’t just take off in your...condition. Let us take you back to Asgard and sort this out. Maybe you’re being punished, and it’s not too late to avert...this.”
Suddenly even Val looked softer. “Lena’s right. We’ll go with you, stand by you. We can tell them that you’ve always been out of your mind as far as this mortal was concerned. They can’t say it’s entirely your fault. You should have been reassigned a long time ago. We won’t let the worst happen.”
Aurora looked at her, startled. It had been a long, long time since Val had said or did anything truly sisterly. She was touched...and then suspicious. It hit her almost immediately: Val just wanted to get her away from Luke. Aurora drew herself up, stood as firmly as she could in the fog.
“Maybe I don’t care. Maybe I want to be human.”
Val gasped aloud and Lena looked alarmed. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Maybe I don’t. But I mean it.” And before either sister could say another word, Aurora was already gone, striding across the fog on the water toward the shore.
It was harder than she thought, though, harder than anything she’d ever done, each step becoming heavier and heavier. In normal circumstances she could have run across the mist as lightly as if she were made of air.
Am I really turning mortal? What does that even mean?
She was thrilled and terrified all at the same time. It might make her able to be with Luke, but at the moment it was massively inconvenient; she had no idea that mortal bodies were so heavy.
It seemed like ages before she got to the shore. She struggled onto the beach, soaked to the waist. She looked wildly around her and then stood still on the sand, in shock, bewilderment and a little terror. The strip of shore was deserted. The fog was thick and dark and cold, the sand stretched out, empty and silent.
Luke was gone.
Aurora’s thoughts were fast and frantic. Someone took him. And time is running out. Was it Loki? Would he? Why?
I need to go to him, she thought. And just as she always did when she wanted to be with him, she pictured him, and held him in her heart.
Luke.
Nothing happened.
She stood alone on the beach in utter bewilderment...and growing fear.
She tried again to picture him, to be with him.
Luke.
Again, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Being where Luke was had never been a problem. She was connected to him from birth, from the cradle; there was an invisible thread binding them. All his life she had only to think of him and she would be there.
But as she thought of him now...nothing happened. She stood on the beach, in the human world, in her almost-human body, and didn’t feel him.
Aurora had a moment of sheer terror when she was sure he was dead. A cry escaped her, terror, panic, agony. “Luke!”
The fog swallowed the sound. There was no answer, no feel of him at all.
But in spite of that, she was absolutely certain that she would know if he were dead. She would have felt her heart ripping in two. She might even have died herself...as far as it was possible for an Eternal to die. But how Eternal was she now? She had no idea.
Her next frantic thought was that Tomasson and his thugs had followed them and abducted him, that they were already driving him to his doom.
But that didn’t make sense.
It’s not possible, she thought as she strode down the beach, in the lengthening shadows, hoping to get a glimpse of where he had gone. Time was stopped; she’d made sure of that. He couldn’t have gone anywhere.
But clearly Time wasn’t stopped anymore; the waves were lapping and crashing on the shore, seagulls circled in the sky above and sandpipers skittered along the waterline.
Was this all because she was becoming mortal? She was losing all her powers as fast as she was taking on mortal weight? Maybe it was the price of being human.
She felt again the cold terror, and then steely resolve.
I’ll have to find a human way to get to him, that’s all. Be a detective like Luke. Fast.
So what would have induced Luke to leave her?
And the answer was so obvious. The case. It had to be something about the case.
Chapter 18
Luke was at the wheel of the fleet car with Lieutenant Duncan in the passenger seat beside him as they drove out of San Francisco, north on the coast highway, up the steep and winding road toward Mount Tamalpais. Luke had driven this way before, had even been hiking in Mount Tam, but he’d never seen the turnoff to the Tomasson estate.
At Duncan’s instructions, Luke drove past the access road, up the highway to a vantage point and pulled off the highway to look down on the estate.
Luke had lived in the Bay Area for all his life, and knew that the
re was serious wealth in San Francisco—old money, new money, dot-com money. But he wasn’t sure he had ever seen a mansion quite as impressive as the Tomasson fortress.
It clung to the cliff, a towering stone complex surrounded by a high wall. The grounds were extensive, many acres in size, and there were outbuildings as big as small apartment complexes; Tomasson could have a whole army housed back there and no one would ever know.
It was well-concealed, too; access was down a gated private road off the highway. At some distance from the house there was a guard station and a guard.
“It’s a freaking fortress,” Luke muttered to the lieutenant. The lieutenant was silent, staring at the grounds.
It was clear they would be insane to try to go in alone.
* * *
Detective Pepper paced the parking area outside the gate of Pier 94, staring out at the dark blue and roiling bay beyond, his phone to his ear as he listened to Luke’s voice-mail message yet again. When the message beeped he spoke shortly. “Serious, man, where are you? I need you to call me.”
He disconnected and turned back to Luke’s abandoned Cavalier, watching tensely as a crime scene tech used a UV light on the interior of the vehicle. The light picked up glowing splotches in the passenger seat.
“Definitely blood,” the tech said.
Pepper leaned into the car to study the luminous splotches, trying to keep calm. It was a relief to see there was not enough blood to be from a fatal wound, and Luke had said he’d been shot.
But what’s the car doing here now? With no Luke?
Pepper turned from the car...and jolted back in surprise. A gorgeous redhead stood right there in front of him. The one from the courthouse that Luke had said was with him.
“I know you,” he said warily.
“He needs our help,” she said.
* * *
As Luke and Lieutenant Duncan watched from the car, a midsize moving truck rumbled off Highway 1 and made the turnoff, heading down the access road toward the compound.
When the gate slid open, Luke could see two container trucks lined up in the driveway. Whatever was going down was going down right now.
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