by Rebekah Blue
“Well then why—”
“Weren’t you listening? She doesn’t want me.” The scorn in Titch’s voice should have withered Art on the spot, but it wasn’t directed at him. “Nobody wants me. They’d palm me off on some crummy care home. They’d trot me out every time foster parents came ’round, and they’d look at me with these big, sad eyes, then take home some pretty blue-eyed baby who doesn’t have a smart mouth and is still young enough to fix.”
“Oh, Titch,” said Charlie. “You don’t need fixing.”
Charlie knew what it could be like in the system. For older kids – especially kids like Titch who’d developed a spiky protective shell – it didn’t offer many prospects. But what was the alternative?
They were silent for a long moment, then Titch sighed and said, “It’s okay. I know you probably don’t want some stupid kid hanging around and cramping your style either. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.” And she started to pick up her stuff.
Art grabbed her arm, gently but firmly. “Ah, but I’ve seen through your cunning disguise, remember? You’re not a kid at all, you’re a wolverine. You’d better stay with us for the time being, for safety.” He grinned. “For the safety of absolutely everyone else in the world, that is. Come on.”
As he got to his feet, his leg buckled and he stumbled and went down to one knee. He quickly regained his feet, brushing dust from the knees of his jeans, hoping Charlie wouldn’t make the connection. But she did.
Chapter Twelve
Charlie dabbed Art’s brow with a damp cloth and wrung it out. He tried, irritably, to knock her hand away, but he was clumsy.
It was frightening how quickly he’d deteriorated. Hard to believe this was the man who’d torn the door off an airplane with his bare hands and carried her to safety. That one telltale stumble had been the start, and now…
He insisted that he didn’t need to lie down, but he was hunched miserably in on himself, shivering. It was only the fact that he still had enough energy to be bad-tempered that kept her hoping. She had to believe there was still a chance to save him. Because if he died, it would be her fault.
Titch was pacing anxiously, and every so often she offered up a suggestion – Tylenol, water, calling the air ambulance, voodoo magic – or a question – Was he any cooler? Was he getting any worse? Was he going to die? If he died, could she have his stuff? After she’d kicked his ass for dying on her, that was. Her eyes never left him, and she all but vibrated with nervous tension.
“He’s going to be okay,” Charlie told her for the umpteenth time. “I won’t be gone for long. Just keep him in the shade and give him plenty of water.”
“He’s not a begonia!” Titch snapped. “He doesn’t need a botanist – he needs a doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor,” Art croaked. “I need Starweed.”
“You shouldn’t have burned it then!” Titch seethed. “I’d smack you upside the head, but I don’t want to damage your tiny brain.”
“Titch,” Charlie said finally. “Please sit down – you’re making me dizzy.”
The girl huffed and flumped down next to her. “Why did you let him burn the Starweed?” she asked Charlie. “He told you he needed it.”
“I know,” Charlie said miserably. “It was already on fire when I woke up.” She felt a pang of guilt. That was true, as far as it went, but even though she hadn’t asked him to – had been horrified and angry when she’d seen the bonfire – Art had burned the Starweed to convince her that he was a decent man. As if he hadn’t proved that already with his kindness to Titch; his patience with Charlie.
“I’ll be back,” she told Titch. “I won’t let him die.”
Titch studied her face for a long time, blinking solemnly. She suddenly looked very young. “I don’t know how to make him better,” she told Charlie. “I don’t know what to do.”
Charlie wrapped her arm around Titch’s skinny shoulders. Her bones felt fragile, like a bird’s. She tensed at first, but then relaxed against Charlie’s side. “This isn’t your responsibility,” Charlie told her. “It’s not your job to make him better. All you have to do is be here with him until I come back. Keep him safe. Keep yourself safe.”
Titch thought for a while. She took a deep, shuddering breath, then nodded briskly. Charlie could feel her pulling herself together. She marveled again at how much bloody-minded determination was contained in that skinny little frame.
Then Titch got to her feet and brushed the dust from the baggy seat of her jeans with her palms. She unscrewed the lid off a bottle of water and crouched to hold it to Art’s lips. “Here,” she said. “Charlie says I have to water you or you’ll never win the blue ribbon in the prettiest blossom contest.”
Art smiled weakly. His eyelids were swollen, his eyes glittering and fever-bright. “Nice bedside manner, Florence Nightingale,” he husked. Then his head jerked, knocking the bottle of water from Titch’s hand. The water glugged out into the dust and sank into the thirsty ground.
At first Charlie didn’t know what had startled him, and wondered if perhaps he was seeing things that weren’t there again. But then she heard it. The thwap-thwap-thwap of rotor blades somewhere overhead. His shifter hearing must have picked up the sound before it was audible to her or Titch. A helicopter.
“It must be the team from Dynamic Earth,” Charlie said. “I think it would be best if you two weren’t here when they land.” She looked at Titch. “Can you get him to the cave where we spent that first night, after I crashed?”
Titch nodded, her face set in lines of determination. “Yep,” she said. “Just help me get him on his feet.”
“I can get myself on my feet,” Art grumbled.
Titch just rolled her eyes. “Okay, Mr. Big Strong Bear,” she said. “We get it. You don’t need help from a little girl.”
He was breathing hard by the time they had him upright, and Charlie could see the pain in his dark eyes, like shards of black glass. His jaw was clenched, a muscle twitching there, and his cheekbones looked sharper and higher than they had before. Titch put her arm around his waist, and he leaned heavily on her shoulder. His legs shook with every step, his feet scuffing clumsily over the ground. She could see only a shadow of his strength and his prowling, predatory grace in the ferocious willpower with which he put one foot in front of the other.
Charlie turned away from them, telling herself she wouldn’t look back. She squinted at the sky, shading her eyes with her hand, and started to walk, with a fast pace, towards the downed Cessna.
She wouldn’t look back.
The chopper touched down, its rotors kicking up dust. Immediately, three men in navy blue jumpsuits scrambled out, ran over to the Cessna and started an urgent triage, crawling underneath her belly, tinkering with things, taking notes and gesticulating urgently at each other. A fourth man, dressed the same, stood apart, burly arms folded across his chest. He was dressed as an engineer, but Charlie immediately marked him down as security.
Her skin prickled. This kind of urgency wasn’t natural for a project to wean junkies off a drug – and even if she’d still thought it could have some innocent purpose, what she saw next would have disabused her of the notion.
Striding towards her, ties blown back by the wind from the helicopter’s slowing rotors were two of Dynamic Earth’s major head honchos.
She broke her promise to herself and looked back towards the cave, hoping Art and Titch had made it safely inside. She thought she was going to throw up. Art had fallen to his knees in the dust. He was crawling painfully towards the cave, every movement slow and agonized. Titch was urging him along, alternately tugging ineffectually at his shirt, and crouching to whisper urgently in his ear.
Charlie turned quickly back to the approaching men, knowing her face was completely drained of color and hoping it might be masked by the sunburn on her nose and cheeks. She plastered a broad, manic grin on her face and prayed they wouldn’t glance past her and see the bear shifter and the teenage girl maki
ng their slow progress towards shelter.
The CEO of Dynamic Earth, Dr. Atkins, was a big man – not fat, just solid, like a granite block in a suit. She’d heard he was a jackal shifter. Should that have tipped her off that he might not be all he seemed? She supposed even jackals probably had mothers who loved them. He was smooth, projecting a balance of polished charm and bluff amiability that made him instantly appealing. His suit had probably cost more than she earned in a year. She was pretty sure his doctorate was honorary.
Professor Stanhope, on the other hand, was the real deal. He looked it, too. He’d almost certainly got more degrees than he’d had girlfriends. He was head of research for Dynamic Earth, overseeing half a dozen different projects. His personal pet project was something to do with DNA cloning, but he was involved in everything, and equally brilliant in every scientific field. He was skinny, bespectacled, and dressed in a labcoat. Next to Dr. Atkins, he almost faded into the background. He was a charisma pit, but a nice one. Charlie had always found his nerdy enthusiasm for science rather endearing.
Dr. Atkins extended a large, square hand with beautifully manicured fingernails and said, “Charlotte. We’re so pleased to see you safe and well.” His touch was warm, firm and reassuring, and Charlie found herself relaxing in his affable presence. He projected an aura of having everything under control.
And he did, she reminded herself with a brief chill. He was in charge of everything Dynamic Earth did, and that meant he was the one responsible for a plot to eliminate all the Starweed in the Badlands, leaving Art and others like him to die a slow, painful death. And all so they could harness that incredible strength and resilience, distill it into a pill or a shot, and use it to grab more power, more money; buy more designer suits and glossy manicures and hired muscle.
Professor Stanhope hung back a little. The pulsing wind from the rotor blades had mussed his sparse hair, and sweat patches bloomed under the arms of his labcoat. “I’m excited to hear about the data points you’ve generated—” he began.
“But there’ll be plenty of time for that,” Dr. Atkins interrupted smoothly. “Charlotte has been through quite an ordeal, and I’m sure she’d like the opportunity for a cool shower and some clean clothes before we interrogate her.”
He said it with a jovial twinkle in his eye, but knowing what she did, Charlie thought being hooked up to a polygraph would be child’s play compared to persuading Dr. Atkins she was still marching to Dynamic Earth’s rhythm. She’d do it, though, for the man she loved.
Dr. Atkins swept his arm out towards the helicopter in a courteous gesture that invited her to walk with them. Charlie didn’t miss the fact that this left her flanked by the two Dynamic Earth bosses. The large, muscular man she’d previously marked down as security walked behind her. She was being, very politely and without a lot of fuss, escorted to the helicopter.
She didn’t dare look over to where she’d last seen Art and Titch – she’d give them away.
Then her heart stuttered in her chest as she realized what she’d just thought.
The man she loved.
Art.
Chapter Thirteen
Charlie’s ears popped as the chopper climbed. Perhaps she should be nervous about flying after her recent brush with death, but she wasn’t. She had so many other worries tangling her guts into knots that she barely noticed her stomach lurching at the change in altitude.
She could probably persuade Dr. Atkins that she didn’t know his plans…because she didn’t. Not in detail. And she desperately needed to. Would she be given the access she’d need? Would she be capable of decoding the dense jargon if she was? Professor Stanhope tended to assume that everyone else was just as brilliant as he was, so most of his documents took a PhD and six months of study to decipher. She didn’t have that kind of time.
And that was her bigger problem. Judging by the speed with which Art had gone from tossing feral wolves around to being unable to support his own weight, she didn’t have much time at all. Maybe not enough. He might already be past the point where Starweed was enough to save him.
She forced down her worries. She couldn’t think like that.
Professor Stanhope was absorbed in his papers. Dr. Atkins was involved in some kind of loud, flamboyant conference call, and was studiously not looking at Charlie. She glanced across at the burly man sitting beside her. She wondered if she was supposed to confide in him, weep on his shoulder about everything she’d learned about Dr. Atkins’ megalomaniac streak so the CEO could shout “Aha!” and reveal that he’d been listening all along. If so, they should have picked a potential confidant who did a better impression of a human being.
She nudged him with her elbow. “You can relax, you know,” she said. “I’m reasonably unlikely to leap out of the window.”
He didn’t even spare her a glance, just kept staring straight ahead. “I’m here for your own protection, ma’am.”
“Well,” she conceded, “I can be kind of a klutz. I guess it’s always possible I might fall out.”
He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. The size of his biceps and his broad barrel chest made it an awkward maneuver. Was that the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth?
She sighed. “Come on,” she said. “In the last few days I’ve crashed a plane, been attacked by werewolves and completely messed up my moisturizer regimen. You’re my first contact with civilization. At least make a little small-talk.”
And to her surprise, he did. His name was Gary, he was an ex-cop, and he made the world’s best eggplant parm, though he’d never had any luck growing his own. Too many garden pests.
Charlie was explaining that slugs and snails were total party animals and could easily be trapped in a glass of beer, when the sprawling, shiny, glass-and-chrome Dynamic Earth facility came into view. The buildings spun beneath them as the helicopter circled, and Charlie had the sensation of a gravitational vortex sucking her down.
They landed with the gentlest of bumps, the chopper’s skids kissing the ground. It was certainly a stark contrast to the last landing she’d made. And yet, when she unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out, feeling the familiar asphalt beneath the soles of her shoes, their textbook-perfect landing at a corporate facility felt a great deal more dangerous than her headlong crash into lawless shifter territory.
Gary escorted her into the building, despite the fact that she knew the way, and she signed in at the front desk. A guy who could have been Gary’s clone waved a metal-detector rod over her to check for any weapons. It beeped when it passed over the underwire in her bra. The guard opened his mouth, but Charlie skewered him with a look that said, without a word being spoken, that he would not believe how rough the last few days had been, and how happy she’d be to share the pain. Gary gave the other guy the nod, and he waved them through.
The first step on her journey, to her profound relief, was a shower room. The staff here worked with all sorts of chemicals and radioactive materials, so the facility was set up with decontamination showers, isolation rooms for staff exposed to contagious pathogens – even a decompression chamber. More to the point, though, they also had the standard, old-fashioned soap-and-water type of shower. Sometimes there were harmless chemical spills in the labs, or tomato soup spills in the cafeteria, and when the lab rats had been working for thirty-six hours straight, things started to get a bit whiffy anyway.
She stripped off her clothes and stepped gratefully under the warm spray, lathering herself all over. Even the cheap, unscented, bulk-purchased soap supplied felt like decadent pampering. As she rinsed away the grime and the aching knots in her muscles, her mind drifted to Art. To the way he’d touched her. The way he’d gazed up at her, eyes clouded with lust as she’d straddled him. How he’d driven inside her, filling her, his strong body burnished by the firelight, his mouth moving on hers, his kiss like a drug.
A shiver of lust ran over her skin, followed by a wash of guilt as she thought of him crawling painfully through the dust
.
Hold on, Art. Hold on.
When she emerged from the shower, she saw that someone had taken away her clothes – presumably for a much-needed laundering, or possibly a much-needed burning. In their place, they had left a white jumpsuit of the kind the lab rats wore as well as, thoughtfully, some plain white cotton underwear.
She dressed quickly, relishing the feel of clean clothes against her skin, and opened the shower room door to find Gary waiting for her.
“You look better,” he told her.
“You mean I smell better,” she replied.
“I’m sure you smelled fine.” Gary’s face remained completely expressionless.
Charlie snorted. “Horse manure,” she said.
“Oh, that’s what it was.”
Charlie looked at him in complete astonishment. “Gary, you have a sense of humor!” she exclaimed.
“That’s classified information, ma’am,” he deadpanned, leading her in the direction of Professor Stanhope’s lab.
Chapter Fourteen
The lab was a bustle of activity, with lab rats scurrying to and fro, squeaking with excitement as if they’d just learned how to solve a maze. Professor Stanhope was deep in conversation with one of the techs – Jeremy? Gerald? When he spotted Charlie, he beckoned her over, and she joined the huddle.
“Perhaps you’ll have some input on this,” he said to Charlie. He never addressed any of the scientists by name. Charlie wondered if he saw them as interchangeable. He was a polymath, brilliant in every discipline, and just assumed everyone else was too. Once she’d been doing a run for sandwiches for the lab rats and the mention of chicken salad had got her embroiled in a half-hour-long conversation on avian DNA sequencing. After that, she’d decided on the tuna fish.
“The Starweed serum is achieving permanent genetic alterations in the areas indicated by the resequencing,” he explained, and he actually bunched up his hands into small fists and shook them in triumph.