Somebody to Love

by Unknown

  “Wh-wh-what?” she stammered.

  “You really didn’t think I could let you leave after all this.”

  “I won’t tell anyone, I swear … I …” All she could think was I’ll never see Jericho again. Never touch his dear face. Never kiss those amazing lips. Never be able to tell him how very much I do love him.

  “I know you won’t,” he said, “because you aren’t going to leave this mountain alive. But just to show you I’m not a completely heartless bastard, I’ll give you a head start to the peak. Adrian is just now coming up the rope.”

  She glanced over her shoulder to see Adrian halfway up the rise. Should she call Winz-Smith’s bluff? He might not have the courage to pull the trigger but she had no doubt in her mind that Adrian did. Either way, if she turned and ran she knew she was going to get shot in the back. If she was going to make a move, it had to be now before his bodyguard topped that rise.

  “On your mark,” Winz-Smith said. “Get set—”

  Before he said “go,” Zoey rushed him, shoving Winz-Smith as hard as she could. He shrieked like a girl, stumbled, lost his grip on the gun, and teetered on the edge of the ledge.

  She didn’t wait around to see if he tumbled over or not. Shucking off her backpack as she ran, she took off up the mountain at a dead sprint.

  MINUTES LATER SHE stood quivering atop Widow’s Peak on private land, directly across from Mount Livermore, the very spot where her parents had died more than twenty years earlier.

  Not so lucky now, huh, McCleary. Looks like you’ve used up the last of your nine lives.

  In her hand she crushed the crumpled letter she’d written to Cupid the previous evening. Last night, she thought she’d smacked rock bottom; now she fully understood how much farther she had to fall.

  Her pulse beat a hot stampede across her eardrums; she was exposed and vulnerable, stiff with fear, tension strained muscles, sweat slicked skin, nicks and scratches oozed blood, lungs flapped with the excruciating pain of trying to draw in air after a dead run up the mountain.

  Heat from the setting summer sun warmed her cheeks. Desert wind whipped through the Davis Mountains, blowing sandy topsoil over her face. She licked her dry lips, tasted grit. On three sides of her yawned sheer drop-off. Overhead, a dozen buzzards circled.

  Waiting.

  Something tickled her cheek, feather-soft and startling as the sweet sensation of an unexpected midnight kiss. She gasped and brushed at her face, her work-roughened fingertips scratching her skin, and for one crazy moment she thought, Jericho.

  But of course it wasn’t Jericho. It was merely the caress of a passing cloud. He was still warm in their bed where she should be, but her impulsiveness had driven her here before she’d had a chance to tell him she loved him as more than just a friend, and now she’d never have that chance.

  She put her palm to her lips, kissed it, whispered, “Jericho,” and blew the kiss into the gathering mist. “I’ll love you throughout all eternity.”

  From behind her, she heard her pursuers crashing through the aspen and madrone trees, cursing black ugly threats. They were coming for her. This was it, the end of the trail, the end of the world, the end of her, and nowhere left to go but down.

  The thundering footsteps were nearer now, closing in. Soon, her trackers would emerge from the forest and join her on the skinned, igneous peak.

  Her heart took flight, faster than a hummingbird and thudding with jumpy brutality. Panic shuddered her bones. She could not stop trembling no matter how hard she willed it.

  Directly below her lay the burned remains of the Golden Flame, all that was left now was a patch of scorched earth. She imagined Little Wolf and Clarissa burying the seeds of the Golden Flame in that spot before they too had made the same futile rush up to the mountaintop. Such a tragedy, but at least they’d been together. She was completely alone.

  Oh Jericho, I sure screwed this up.

  Teeth chattered. Knees wobbled. Nostrils flared.

  Don’t just stand there. Do something! Do something!

  But what? There was only one solution, only one clear way out. Zoey gathered her courage, took her last deep breath, and jumped.

  Chapter 23

  Absolute dating: A dating method that attempts to determine an object’s exact age in calendar years or in years before present.

  “HURRY, hurry,” Jericho urged the helicopter pilot who’d agreed to fly him to the top of Widow’s Peak.

  “I’m not going to be able to land up there, you understand,” the pilot said. “That mountain’s too craggy, and besides, it’s on private land.”

  “Just go, man!” After he’d found Catrina, he’d taken her to the Cupid police. She’d admitted taking the medicine bundle, but it had taken hours of interrogation before she confessed her full role as Marcus Winz-Smith’s spy in the camp. The police had backed off a bit then. Winz-Smith wielded a lot of power, and all they had was the word of a pretty foreign exchange student against a pharmaceutical CEO and native son.

  Frustrated and still unable to reach Zoey, Jericho had become more and more concerned. He went back to Triangle Mount and found the Cupid’s Rest van parked there. He’d known instantly something was wrong. He didn’t have the time to search for her on foot so he’d asked Lace to call the family and get them out searching foundation land while he arranged for a helicopter search of the area.

  “It’s almost sunset,” the pilot said. “I don’t like to be out in the dark.”

  “Fly, dammit!” A hundred horrible scenarios beat against his brain, but he brushed them off, determined not to borrow trouble. He had to stay calm and effective, for Zoey’s sake.

  The pilot zoomed over Triangle Mount dotted with search and rescue teams composed mainly of Zoey’s family. She was a lucky woman to have so many people who loved her. Then again, who wouldn’t love her? She was the most genuinely warm and open person he’d ever known.

  The pilot buzzed closer to Widow’s Peak. Jericho spied two men out in the open. One was Winz-Smith, the other his bodyguard, and they both held weapons.

  And at the very top of the peak stood Zoey, but only for a brief second. One minute she was there, the next she was gone.

  Stunned, Jericho could only stare.

  “She jumped!” the pilot cried. “She jumped off the mountain!”

  Every muscle in Jericho’s body turned to stone. He could not believe what his eyes had just seen. “No!” he said adamantly. “No!”

  “Those guys had guns!” The pilot gasped. “They were chasing her. I’m radioing law enforcement.”

  “She’s okay,” Jericho said. “Zoey is not gone.”

  “Man, are you blind? She jumped off the fucking cliff to get away from those sons of bitches.”

  He reminded himself of the time when she was fourteen and jumped off Telescope Cliff and into Tranquility Pool. He’d been so scared then, but he wasn’t scared now. She had to be okay. He could not—would not—lose her. If something happened to her, he’d purposely hunt down Winz-Smith and tear his limbs from his body with his bare hands.

  The pilot zoomed over the heads of Winz-Smith and his bodyguard who were now sliding down the hill for the cover of madrones and flew past the peak where Zoey had jumped.

  “Omigod,” the pilot yelled.

  “What is it?” Frantically, Jericho peered out his window trying to see what the pilot was talking about. What he saw turned his organs to liquid.

  There, in the golden glow from the setting sun, was Zoey, hanging on to a thin rope attached to a bent aspen, and dangling over a steep drop-off. She was alive, but for how long?

  “Can you land up here?”

  “I’ve never done it before—”

  “If we don’t try something, she’s going to die.”

  “Yeah, okay, let’s do it. I’ll see if I can set her down, but the wind from the blades could shake her loose.”

  “Just get me close enough to where I can jump out.”

  “What if you break a leg
?” Sweat poured down the pilot’s face.

  “I won’t,” Jericho said grimly and opened the door.

  The pilot nodded and angled the helicopter as close as he could to the top of Widow’s Peak. It was a good five-foot drop. “This is the best I’m going to do. Already that aspen she’s dangling from is shaking like a toothpick.”

  Jericho coiled his muscles, readied himself for the jump. “Here I go,” he yelled, and pushed himself through the door. He landed in a crouched position on top of the rock, let the shock of impact jar up his knees and into his hip, but he had no concern for his own pain. All he could think about was Zoey. He had to save her. She was barely clinging to life.

  The chopper spun away, leaving him to race as fast as he could to the edge of the cliff. He splayed out on his belly. Zoey was just out of arm’s reach.

  “Jericho!” she cried, her face turned up to his.

  “Zoe-Eyes, whatever you do, don’t let go,” he gasped, trying to figure how he was going to get down the four feet of the sheer rock face to the narrow ledge where the weary aspen was bent almost completely over. He could jump, but if he landed wrong, he could knock her loose; he could turn, go down the mountain a bit, and find a place to come at this from a different angle, but there wasn’t enough time.

  “Jericho,” she whimpered.

  “I’m here.”

  “I don’t know if I can hold on.”

  “Of course you can hold on,” he said. “You’re the toughest woman I know.”

  He had to jump down. There was simply no other way. If she let go of that rope before he got to her, he was just going to go into the abyss right after her.

  Bracing himself, he dropped one leg over, then the other, and hit with an impact that made the first one seem like a game of hopscotch in comparison. His teeth jammed together and he bit his tongue. His knees buckled, but he shook it off. He’d made it. Granted, he was standing on about a two-foot chunk of crumbly rock, but at least he was beside the aspen. He went down on his belly again, ignoring the sharp stones and prickly thorns. He slapped one hand around her first wrist, one hand around the second.

  “I gotcha, babe.”

  “Jericho,” she said, looking so deeply into his eyes he knew she was seeing straight into his scared-stiff soul. “I love you.”

  “You sure you’re not just saying that ’cause I’m going to keep you from breaking every bone in that pretty little body of yours?”

  “Well,” she said, keeping her sense of humor in spite of everything. “There is that, but no, I loved you long before this.”

  “You say that now,” he said, hauling her up and over the rock. He heard her wince, felt the pain twist up her muscles. “But will you still love me tomorrow?”

  He toppled backward into the side of the mountain. Zoey tumbled atop him. They lay against each other, breathing heavily, both knowing it was nothing short of a miracle that they were breathing at all.

  “Jericho Hezekiah Chance, I’ll love you to the end of time.”

  GETTING DOWN FROM the mountain took some doing, and it was after midnight by the time they limped into the emergency room at Cupid General Hospital, surrounded by an army of family and friends. They were a mess, both of them, covered in dirt and grime, bearing bloody scratches and scrapes and rope burns.

  But they were alive and together and it felt glorious.

  Jericho caught a glimpse of his reflection in the glass doors. His hair stuck out in a hundred directions and Zoey reached up to pluck grass from the dark strands in the possessive way of a lover. She was his lover, after all. She had every right to groom him. He paid her back in kind, dusting grass off the seat of her pants.

  A nurse came in to separate them in different examining rooms, but they refused to be parted and she finally gave up. Jericho recognized her as the nurse Zoey had tried to fix him up with at Walker’s autographing party.

  The nurse sank her hands on her hips. “The least you can do is get on separate gurneys.”

  They agreed but as the nurse took the blood pressure in his left arm, Jericho reached out across the space between the gurneys to take Zoey’s hand. He never wanted to let her go ever again. He could not believe how close he’d come to losing her. The idea of it made him sick all over.

  “I need to take your temperature,” the nurse said. “You’re shivering.”

  “I’m fine,” he said brusquely. “Look after her.”

  “She’s got a nurse of her own,” his nurse said. “Now hold still.”

  For the first time, he noticed Zoey did have a nurse buzzing around her. He’d been so busy looking at her he hadn’t seen anything else.

  After what seemed an eternity, the nurses left them alone, still holding hands. Zoey ran an abraded thumb over his knuckles swathed with a dozen cuts.

  “You saved my life,” she whispered.

  “Correction. You saved mine.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “If you’d jumped off that cliff without a plan, I would have died right along with you.”

  “It was a damn thin one, but the only plan I had. It was either jump and try to reach the rope Winz-Smith’s bodyguard had tied to that aspen in order to rappel down and burn the Golden Flame, or let them fill me full of lead.”

  “I still can’t believe your cousin was willing to kill you.”

  “All for money,” she said. “He couldn’t afford to let me go and risk exposing the McCleary family’s ugly secret, and he couldn’t let people find out about the Golden Flame. If the agave could be cultivated and used to cure the influenza virus, Flugon would be worthless.”

  “It’s all over for the bastard now.”

  A long moment passed between them when they said nothing, just held hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “that I couldn’t tell you that I loved you when you needed to hear it. Don’t think it was because I wasn’t sure of my feelings for you. On that score I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life. It’s that I was unsure of my feelings about me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I didn’t know if I could be the kind of woman you deserved.”

  “I lied when I said I didn’t have any expectations, because I do have expectations of you, Zoey McCleary. I expect you to want to be with me the way I want to be with you.”

  “I do, Jericho, I do!”

  The door opened and Dr. Sinton walked in. Zoey tightened her grip on Jericho’s hand. Jericho’s gut tightened. What did the man want?

  “I’m glad to see that you two survived the ordeal you’ve been through,” the director said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry I jumped the gun and fired you, Jericho, and I hope you’ll consider taking your job back. No probation this time.”

  “I’ll consider it,” Jericho said. Not sure what he wanted to do about his career. Right now, just being here with Zoey was enough.

  “And Zoey.” The director turned to her. “I don’t accept your resignation from the dig. There’s a lot more work to be done out there.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

  “Heal quickly,” Dr. Sinton said. “We’ve got a lot to talk about when you’re up and about.”

  As soon as he left, Zoey’s cousin, Deputy Calvin Greenwood, came into the room to take their full statements. When they were done, he shut off his tablet computer. “We’ve arrested Winz-Smith and his bodyguard. They’ve both lawyered up. Admitted nothing. About what you’d expect. But Catrina did confirm she destroyed the medicine bundle at Winz-Smith’s behest. I’m sorry, but the artifact is gone.”

  “We still have the tomahawk,” Zoey told Jericho. “That’s something.”

  “Yeah, but any evidence of the Golden Flame is gone.”

  “Maybe there’s another plant out there somewhere. Just imagine if we really could wipe out influenza.”

  “It’s still a possibility,” Lace said from the doorway. “While my lab was broken into and the botanicals stolen, the thieves didn’t realize I had samples under t
he microscope. There’s enough there to clone.”

  “That would be amazing,” Zoey said. “You’re going to be famous.”

  “We’re all going to be famous,” Lace said. “This is a find of a lifetime.”

  Jericho turned his head and looked straight into Zoey’s eyes. “Yes, she is,” he said. “Yes, she is.”

  A WEEK LATER, Zoey and Jericho made plans to meet back up at the dig site. Their injuries were minor and they were recovering quickly. Dr. Sinton had sent out a crew to set up the camp. The old dig team had been reassembled and everyone, except for Catrina, who’d been sent back to Portugal, was returning after the upcoming Fourth of July holiday.

  Instead of picking her up, Jericho had told her to meet him on Triangle Mount at ten A.M. on the Fourth of July. She arrived, but did not see his pickup there. Restlessly, she walked up to the dig site.

  “Hello, Zoe-Eyes.” Jericho stood in the middle of the dig, a plethora of archaeological tools at the ready and a large cardboard box beside him. An irascible cowlick had escaped from under his battered straw cowboy hat and flopped devilishly over his forehead. The sleeves of his cream-colored shirt were rolled up and waterproof markers stuck out of the left front pocket. He was a devastating contrast of scholar and adventurer.

  She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run to him, throw her arms around his neck, hang on tight for dear life, and never let go, but she’d learned her lesson about curbing her impulsiveness. No more simply reacting. First, she’d fully think things through before she made a move.

  He took her breath, just as surely as if their pairing had been one of those love-at-first-sight lightning strikes her family loved to romanticize, except what they had was so much better. They knew each other inside and out. They’d started from a strong base of friendship and it had bloomed into the best kind of passionate love.

  Jericho looked at her with certain eyes, a lifetime of love in those dark depths. The sun glistened off his raven hair and high, proud cheekbones.

  All these years she’d feared being deprived or trapped in pain. Maybe it came from losing her parents or watching her sister, Natalie, go through so much struggle and pain to come back from the debilitating injuries she’d suffered in the plane crash. Maybe it was because her family had pampered and spoiled her and she’d grown too accustomed to that velvet royal treatment.