Every part of her seemed to tighten at once, but she relaxed a degree or two before answering. “Well there’s the obvious stuff. Where she went. Why she went. What she was up to. I used to have this fantasy that maybe someday I’d find out she was still alive, but … I don’t know. If she were still out there, she would have found me by now. I believe that much. If she was trying to stop the raknoth before the Catastrophe, though … I don’t know what I’d do with that, but I still wanna know.”
“I get it.”
“Maybe it’s stupid. It’s not like I’m the only one who lost family back then. Most of the goddamn world did. But I just need to know.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid at all,” he said softly. “Those kinds of open doors, they’ll eat at you until there’s nothing left.”
Rachel only bobbed her head in absentminded agreement.
Jarek weighed his next words carefully. “After she disappeared …” Tension was creeping back into Rachel’s shoulders, but he decided to push on. “What happened when those men came for your family?”
She looked down and studied her hands for a long stretch.
“They got them,” she finally said. “My dad. My grams. They made me watch while …” She shook her head. “And then they started on me.”
“How did you survive?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. The—whatever you wanna call it—the trauma, I guess, must have flipped the switch on my abilities. One minute I was there, terrified and about to die. I remember this feeling, like something had physically broken inside of me, and there was this sensation like I’d fallen into a whitewater rapid made of pure electricity. And then, next I knew, I was waking up in John’s house so hurt and exhausted that he had to spoon feed me for a week. It was only years later, once I’d come to realize that sensation had basically been channeling overload, that John told me about how he’d seen two men fleeing the house when he’d arrived, and how he’d found two more inside, so battered he wasn’t sure if they were dead or alive.”
“Jesus. And you?”
“Passed out like a light the moment he found me, apparently.” She shook her head. “I really don’t remember any of it after Dad and Grams were …”
She stayed there, head gently shaking back and forth and eyes staring through the floor and off to distant horrible memories that she couldn’t quite step away from now that she’d dredged them up.
Slowly, gently as he could, Jarek stood and crossed to her bed with tentative steps. Rachel’s distant gaze held fixed to that same spot, and she said nothing when he sank carefully to the edge of the bed.
It was only when he laid a hand on the soft skin of her thigh that she stirred and met his eyes.
“I’ve never told anyone about this. Besides Michael and John, I mean.”
“Us weary souls have to stick together, I guess.” He patted her leg and withdrew his hand, suddenly feeling like the contact was somehow inappropriate for the moment, which in turn made him wonder when the hell he’d started worrying about that kind of thing. “I’m, uh … I’m glad you’re telling me.”
When he looked back up, she was still watching him. “I was wrong, you know.”
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded, the beginnings of a soft smile in her eyes. “If someone had told me you were the guy I was going to be spilling my guts to back when I met you in that brig, I would have kicked them in the pants. But you’re not so terrible at the whole listening thing.”
He searched her face until her eyes inexorably drew him in. He couldn’t have looked away if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to.
“And how does that make you feel?” Somewhere beyond his thudding heart and his tunnel vision of those lovely hazel eyes, he recognized the voice as his own.
Then Rachel snorted and broke the spell of their gaze with a light push to his chest. “Like maybe we should get some sleep while we can if we’re gonna keep walking around with these big sticks of ours.”
“Yeah.” Jarek glanced out the window for a distraction and realized it was dark now. “Never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring, I guess.”
“Answers, hopefully.”
He gave a conciliatory tilt of his head and stood. “Hopefully.”
She studied him thoughtfully. “So you’re still in?”
“I came here, didn’t I? You think I’m just gonna fly off now that things are getting interesting?”
“I kind of thought flying off was always the plan once you had Fela back.”
Her and him both.
“Well, we know what happens to plans out there. I might have to sleep inside Fela with one eye open around the Resistance for, well, always, but we both saw that nest go off. We heard what few words Stumpy had to say about it, and then that thing with Alton … I’ve got a bad feeling about this, and I don’t think it’s going away until I get some real answers.” He shrugged. “Plus, you know, maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing to see you get what you want too.”
“Careful, mister. Any closer and you’re gonna go making me think you care.”
“Eh, we’re all entitled to our opinions, I guess.”
She gave him an indignant look and made a shooing motion toward the door.
He paused with his hand on the doorknob as something occurred to him. “So am I understanding correctly that John basically scooped you up and fled an active crime scene based solely on a pair of cryptic warnings from your mom? He doesn’t really seem like the law-breaking type.”
She gave a weak smile. “I guess my mom had sufficiently rattled his cage. He trusted her. I think he might have even loved her once upon a time, to listen to him talk … But yeah, if the Catastrophe hadn’t happened a week later, he probably would’ve had a lot of explaining to do to the authorities at some point.”
“Hmm. The shit hits in mysterious ways.”
She smiled. “There’s a bumper sticker if I ever heard one.”
He opened the door and held it as Al dutifully marched Fela out of the room.
Jarek lingered at the threshold. “We’ll find out what happened to her, Rache. Tomorrow. I’ll beat it out of them myself if I have to.”
She gave a slow nod, holding his gaze with a serious expression. “Thank you.”
“Goodnight, Goldilocks.”
When he pulled the door shut and turned for his room, Fela was waiting for him in the hallway with a hand raised high-five style.
“Seriously?” he whispered.
Al shrugged Fela’s shoulders and switched from high-five to fist bump.
Jarek shook his head and bumped the exosuit’s extended fist. “This is what you get excited for?”
“I can’t help it, sir. Forgive me if I’m excited to see my human growing up.”
Jarek huffed and started down the hallway. “Yeah, well, try not to get too excited until we find out what the hell we’re dealing with. This could all turn sideways real fast.”
“I believe that’s exactly when having a reliable partner at your side comes in handy, sir.”
Jarek didn’t argue with that.
He couldn’t decide what to think of the Resistance right now. If it turned out working alongside them was a good call, he might be able to stomach it. That being said, if HQ happened to go up in flames tomorrow, he wouldn’t be shedding tears either.
Having Rachel’s back, on the other hand … He didn’t think he could go wrong there.
So tomorrow, they’d find their answers. And after that …
Well, he’d just have to see.
Twelve
Rachel was surprised to see bright sunlight pouring into her room when she woke. As tired as she’d been when she’d laid down last night, it had seemed like a tall order to hope for anything resembling peaceful sleep with so much chaos going through her head. Apparently her brain had finally hit a tipping point and decided to say, “Fuck it,” for the night.
She wasn’t about to complain. As far as she could tell, she’d slept like a titan
ium brick, and she’d desperately needed it. Sleep hadn’t worked miracles, really only graduating her from feeling like death to feeling like shit, but it was better than she’d had for too long now.
Jarek’s visit had been unexpected. And unexpectedly not awful if she was being honest. The way he could slip from immature man-child one minute to caring, level-headed companion the next—not to mention the way he looked at her sometimes …
Whatever else she could say about Jarek Slater, he was always full of surprises—and not all of them bad. She was more than a little glad he’d stuck around and would have her back today when they met Haldin and Alton. Assuming those two actually showed at her mom’s old lab.
She woke her comm to call Pryce for an update on Michael and saw he’d already left a message a couple hours earlier: Still stable. No news is good news.
Was it really, though? After what had happened to Michael, who knew?
She got dressed and went to find Jarek and the others. They were all awake and already eating when she arrived at the dining hall, with Fela standing at attention behind Jarek.
Mumbled good mornings—even chipper, in Lea’s case—drifted her direction as she settled down to join them at one of the hall’s several tables. Rachel gave her own mumbled greeting and dug into a bowl of oatmeal with a contented sigh. Across the table, Jarek was watching her with an amused look.
“What?” she asked, figuring it had something to with their talk last night.
He shook his head, doing a poor job of containing his grin, then looked pointedly at her bowl. “Oh nothing. I just thought the oatmeal was a little cold”—he bumped Alaric with an elbow—“but Alaric swore it was too hot. What do you think?”
She frowned at him and took another bite. “It’s fine, what are you …”
Oh. Goldilocks. How hilarious.
She rolled her eyes. “Really?”
He shrugged and finally let that wolfish grin of his out in full. “You only get so many chances.”
Rachel finished her breakfast as quickly as she comfortably could and suggested they hit the road (or sky, as Jarek insisted on pointing out). As much as she would have loved to go find a quiet spot to curl up and relax for a year or two, they had a raknoth and a strange arcanist to find, and too many time-sensitive questions to answer.
John came and, despite her protests, insisted on walking them out to the ship to see them off. Silence stretched between them along the way, uncomfortable as it was unusual. They’d rarely fought since Rachel had made it past her mid-teens.
Yesterday, she’d been plenty pissed, but now, after having talked things through with Jarek and gotten a good night’s sleep, she wasn’t rightly sure she was angry with John so much as at her lack of answers when it came to her mom. That being said, she was also hesitant to admit that to John, or that maybe she understood why he’d done what he’d done.
Tense as it was, the silence didn’t stop John from taking one more crack at trying to smother her to death bear-hug style when they reached Jarek’s ship and the others piled inside to give them a moment.
“I’m sorry, Goldfish,” he said. “I know it doesn’t change anything, but I had to say it before you left. You be careful out there. Whatever you might learn, just remember … well, you can’t change the past, but you know you’ll always have family here, right?”
Her stubborn defensiveness softened at that. “I know,” she said quietly. She cocked her head. “And hey, if some of the other things we’ve been hearing have been even half true, we might have bigger things to worry about anyways.”
“That doesn’t make a father feel better about watching his girl fly off into the unknown.”
She gave him a sad smile. “Hey, I never wanted to be a part of this either.” She glanced at the ship. “But between Michael and all the doomsday talk, it’s not like I could walk away and just pretend like everything’s normal again.”
John nodded and kissed her on the forehead. “I know. And I’m proud of you. For everything. Now tell an old man what he wants to hear.”
Her lips pulled into a smile. “I’ll be careful. And I’ll see you again soon.”
She turned and boarded the ship before either of them had a chance to get too emotional.
Their flight to the northwestern area of Philadelphia was a short one, and their conversation consisted mostly of Lea finding a dozen different ways to ask, “Are we really sure about this, guys?”
It was a fair question. If Haldin and Alton were so inclined to set a trap for them, they would be walking straight into it. Then again, if those two had wanted them dead and gone, they could have just left Mosen to have at them along with his raknoth trio and their sizable contingent of armed men. She didn’t trust the raknoth and the arcanist—not by a long shot—but she didn’t think they were planning on trying to kill her and her friends. Not yet, at least.
More familiar sights began to stand out as they flew over what had once been the Main Line, up Route 1 and over the Schuylkill River. It had been a long time since she’d been up here, and she wasn’t used to seeing it all from an aerial view, but that didn’t stop waves of nostalgia and longing from rolling over her as she spotted an old restaurant here, or an old hiking trail there—reminders of the life that had been so violently taken from her.
Nostalgia morphed into cold dread and snaked its way around her gut as they soared over the rising hill of Midvale Avenue. She didn’t want to look down at the rooftops of all those once mighty, pristine houses. She didn’t want to spot the one that had been hers—the place where she’d lost everything.
An armored hand squeezed her shoulder, and she looked back to find Jarek behind her, having finished suiting up in the back cabin. He couldn’t have known exactly what was going through her head, but he must’ve seen that something was up.
Rachel tried to give him a smile then turned back to direct Al to their destination as Jarek dropped into the pilot’s seat beside her. Her directions weren’t necessary, as they’d already marked the location on the map, but she pointed the way nonetheless.
A minute later, they were crawling over one last block of houses to look down at the open grounds and the large, C-shaped body of the Drexel College of Medicine.
Somehow, despite the Catastrophe and the fifteen years that had passed, the old building looked just as she remembered. Aside from the big alien ship sitting out in the front lawn, that is.
Al pulled the ship to a resting hover.
“Welp,” Jarek said, “guess it’s about time for strange encounters part two.”
Rachel couldn’t do much more than stare at her mom’s old workplace. “I never thought I’d come back here,” she finally said.
She felt Jarek’s gaze linger on her.
“Not even to meet some weirdo arcanist pretty boy and his blood-sucking alien sidekick by their spaceship?”
The ghost of a smile pulled at her lips as she met his eyes. “So you think he’s pretty?”
Jarek grinned. “Touché, Goldilocks … Touché.”
“And spaceship?” she added.
“I mean”—Jarek waved in the ship’s direction—“if the space shoe fits …”
“Yeah,” Rachel said slowly, staring at the strange ship. “What kind of shit decisions did we all make to end up here?”
“Peyote,” Jarek said. “Not even once.”
He moved into the back cabin and reappeared shortly with guns and sword strapped on. “Everyone ready?”
Nods all around.
“Right,” Jarek said. “Take us down, Al.”
No one was in sight around the alien ship as they descended. Once Al dropped the boarding ramp and swiveled the ship around to face them toward the other ship, though, Haldin was sitting at the bottom of a slender staircase that had descended from the side of their ship.
He watched them from across the twenty yards that separated them and slowly raised a hand in greeting.
Alton appeared at the top of the ship’s steps and desce
nded behind Haldin as Rachel and the others deboarded and Al locked Jarek’s ship up behind them. Haldin stood and stepped down to the patchy grass to clear the way for Alton, and the slender staircase folded in on itself behind them, moving with a kind of organic grace, until it merged smoothly with the ship’s hull.
A few seconds later, the alien ship lifted silently from the ground.
At first, its movements seemed more clunky and awkward than the smooth flight they’d witnessed the day before when the ship had lured Mosen and his squad of assholes away from Unity. As it rose above Drexel, though, the ship stabilized and shot off northward.
“Guess there’s more than two of them, then,” Jarek mumbled beside her.
It seemed that way. As Alton and Haldin approached, though, the thought was quickly lost in a sea of more pressing questions.
“Oh hey, guys,” Jarek called. “Fancy seeing you here. Long time and all that.” He pointed skyward after the departing ship. “Didn’t wanna introduce us to the fam?”
“Al’Krogoth and his ilk would have a much easier time finding us here with that ship sitting out front,” Alton said. “The precaution seemed prudent.”
“Right, yeah,” Jarek said. “Good call. Al-who now?”
“Al’Krogoth,” Alton said. “Zar’Golga’s second-in-command, and the leader of the raiding party you confronted back at Unity.”
“The brownish one,” Haldin said.
“Ahh,” Jarek said. “Rusty. Gotcha. Yeah, that guy was a dick.”
Alton didn’t seem to disagree. Haldin looked a bit amused.
“Why did you bring us here?” Rachel asked.
“You know at least part of the answer to that,” Alton said, studying her curiously.
“My mom was a professor here, yeah. What does that have to do with anything?”
Alton gave her the kind of smile that was normally reserved for children who’d asked adorable but ultimately ridiculous questions. “Everything.” He looked over his shoulder at the old building. “This is where it all started.”
“Yeah,” Jarek said, “which is drama-queen speak for …?”
Alton gave Jarek an amused look. “For ‘this is where her mother started the infection that nearly wiped my people from the face of the Earth’.” Alton turned his smile on Rachel. “So maybe we should all step inside to chat.”
Hell to Pay: Book Two of the Harvesters Series Page 11