by Joss Ware
Elliott’s breath caught in a silent whuff, as if he’d understood her plan. She could feel the anger fairly sparking from him. She wanted to reach back and touch him, for her comfort as well as for his own. But she dared not . . . she dared not let Raul and Ian know what he meant to her. Raul gave a short bark of laughter. “As I recall, last time you weren’t particularly eager to join me. But if you cooperate, there will be no need for you to ride with the gangas—and dressed in ropes this time.”
“I’ll never be eager to join you, Raul Marck,” Jade said, pleased that her voice remained haughty. Despite the increased tension rolling from Elliott in waves, she didn’t look at him. She could give nothing away. “But if you think to take me back to Preston, you had best be more accommodating than before. He wasn’t particularly pleased with the condition in which I arrived when you delivered me last time.”
Elliott made a sound, moved—and there was a loud retort, then the sharp ping of a bullet as it lodged into the concrete next to Jade’s foot.
“I won’t be so generous the next time he moves,” Ian said, his blue eyes even colder than before.
Elliott. Please. Trust me. Jade shivered and her mouth went dry. She swallowed, kept her face empty, and looked at Raul. “What are we waiting for? The sooner I’m rid of the foul presence of you and your son, the better.”
She actually stepped toward him, angling herself in front of Elliott.
“Ian,” Raul said with a meaningful jerk of his head, and reached for Jade.
She knew what that gesture meant, and reared back into Elliott, and felt his strong arms come around her from behind like desperate bands, starting to push her behind him. Holding herself still, she kept facing the Marcks. “No, you won’t shoot them,” she commanded, looking at Ian. Fury burned in his eyes, but he didn’t move. “They go free or I don’t go with you.”
Raul opened his mouth to respond, but Jade continued despite Elliott’s arms crushing her waist, “It would be terrible if I got caught in the crossfire. Very unfortunate for you, after just finding me. Preston wouldn’t pay as much for damaged goods. Or dead ones.”
Elliott’s arms tightened around her even more, but she had to get away from him. “Jade,” he said angrily, his fingers closing around one of her wrists, but she refused to look at him. This was hard enough as it was. He needed to let her do what had to be done.
“Jade? Is that what you’re calling yourself now?” sneered Raul.
She ignored his comment. “I think Preston would exact payment from the person who damaged me instead of offering it. Don’t you?”
Raul’s lips thinned to a thin bluish white line. “All right, then, Jade,” he said. “Your friends won’t be shot.”
“I said they must go free,” Jade said, trying to move away from Elliott. He was not releasing her wrist, and he was much too strong for her to break his hold. Let go. Please let go. This is hard enough.
At least if the two of them were set free, they would know about the slave shipment. They could find a way to stop it—and they could come after her and the slaves. They could try and get her back from Raul.
If they were shot, that hope was gone. And the hope that they could stop the cargo before tomorrow.
She had to make Elliott understand. He had to release her. But his grip was too tight, and she could feel the determination, the protectiveness in his stance and the vibration of
desperation beneath his skin. Oh God, she didn’t want to be the cause of more grief, more anguish in his eyes. In his life.
Especially after this morning. . . .
How could she make him understand?
“I’m going with them,” she said, turning to look at Elliott. Willing him to understand. Let me go, she said with her eyes. They won’t hurt me. But they’ll kill you.
“I’m getting impatient,” Ian said. That mercenary glint in his eyes told her he didn’t care if she got caught in the crossfire.
“Elliott. I’m going with them.” She pulled against his grip, hard, pleading silently. I have to.
At last Elliott released her, but not before she caught the expression in his eyes: blazing and intense. No.
“Now let them go,” she said to Raul, very calmly, still angling herself between the gun and Elliott.
He laughed. “I’ll let them go. Back in there. They can take their chances there.”
Jade drew in her breath to argue, but Theo was already opening the door. She noticed he’d kept his face slightly averted and remained quiet, and she realized he shared her concern that he might be recognized; although as far as she knew, Raul or Ian had never had occasion to see or notice Theo. They weren’t usually this far north or east. But if there were Strangers in Envy, spying or otherwise watching, it was possible.
“Come on,” Theo said as he held the door open. Inside, there were no gangas in sight; likely they’d walked right past the door in their quest for human flesh and were, hopefully, somewhere else in the building. “No sense in getting ourselves shot over this crazy woman. If she wants to go with these guys, let her. I’ll take my chances inside.”
Jade dared a quick glance at Elliott and saw the way his jaw moved, his cheeks hollowed and shifting, his dark hair flat and plastered against his damp skin. His sapphire eyes nearly black, lit with wildness.
Her chest suddenly felt full and she tried to draw in a breath. It was impossible to let him go. To go from him.
“Get in there or I’ll change my mind, Preston be damned,” Raul said angrily.
Jade knew the words were an empty threat; if there was one person that Raul respected and feared, it was Preston. And with good reason.
And, oh God, she was going back to him.
No. She fingered her bracelets. I can do this. They’ll come for me. And by then, I’ll know how to save the kids. I’ll figure out a way.
Elliott turned and walked briskly back into the building, without a last glance at her.
The door clanged shut.
At least he and Theo would have the chance to escape the gangas. They were smart and fast and strong, even though Theo was injured. They’d find their way back out. They had the truck, and they’d get back to Envy sooner. They could even drive at night if they had to.
“Don’t get too excited, my dear,” Raul said. “There are more than two hundred gangas in there. The twenty of them that we just delivered are fresh . . . and hungry. Your friends will never find their way out.”
As he closed his cool, slender fingers around her upper arm, Jade saw Ian move sharply behind her.
Then . . . pain . . . and everything went black.
“Where is he taking her?” Elliott demanded as soon as the door clanged shut. “Where’s Preston?”
“I don’t know,” Theo said grimly.
Elliott heard the ruuu-uuuthhh in the distance, closer than he wanted to hear it, but he couldn’t move yet. He needed answers. He needed to know he’d done the right thing, letting her go without a fight. That he could get her back.
He stopped the next words on his tongue, for he heard a faint, familiar rumble. Touching the door, he felt the barest vibration through the metal, and then it stopped: the vibration and the rumble. “That sounded like a vehicle,” he muttered.
“They drive humvees,” Theo told him. “They’ve left.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve got a working vehicle out there; we can follow them.”
Elliott pushed against the door. Or, rather, tried to. It wouldn’t budge. “Son of a bitch. They’ve blocked us in”—he peered through the crack—“with an old, goddamn Mercedes.”
Giving the door a violent, frustrated kick, he left it open to allow for the sliver of sunlight to come in and better illuminate the place. A feeling of something like panic threatened to cloud his mind, but he didn’t let it. He pushed it away. Compartmentalized. Focused.
He could worry about what was happening to Jade when he had that luxury.
Right now, they had to find another way o
ut of here while avoiding a slew of gangas. And figure out how to find Preston and stop his shipment of slaves.
“They’ve smelled us.” Theo said needlessly, for Elliott had already noticed that the ganga moans had become louder.
“How mobile are you?” he asked, glancing at the metal clothes stand that Theo still clutched.
“Mobile enough. Sounds like they overshot the door after we went outside, but now they’re coming back.”
“The way we came,” Elliott said, fully aware that the groaning sounds were growing uncomfortably closer, and more quickly than he would have expected. “You first, I’ll follow behind.”
“You’ve got one bottle bomb left?” Theo said as he started off with a shaky step.
“Yep. And not much else. Any ideas which way?”
“Back out the way we came in. At least we won’t be trapped in these little halls.”
“Do you have any idea where they’re taking her?” he asked again.
Theo shook his head, grimacing with discomfort. “There’s been talk of a compound, but no one has seen it—even Jade, when she was with Preston. If I had to guess, I suspect it’s the new landmass in the Pacific, far from the prying eyes of humans.” His breathing was rough as he struggled along as quickly as he could, but he managed to get the words out. “From what Jade has said, Preston had a sort of houseboat that he lived on. Where she was with him.”
“All right,” Elliott said, trying not to think about what the man with the whips and ropes and laced-up gowns would do once he got his hands back on Jade. “The shipment’s for Preston, right?’
“That’s what it sounded like. Nurmikko’s getting the kids and delivering them to him in some sort of shipment. Which implies a vehicle.” Theo’s words were as labored as his movements.
Elliott nodded. That gibed with what Jade had heard between the Stranger and Rob Nurmikko. The slaves had to be ready to leave by Friday. Tomorrow. “And Marck’s going to take Jade to Preston . . . so they’re going to the same place as the slaves. Same meeting place. That’s her plan. It’s got to be. She’s going to try and help them.”
Theo nodded. “So when we find the slaves, we find Preston.”
“And Jade.” But how the hell would they find them? Elliott glanced back. Theo wasn’t moving fast enough.
“Would it really piss you off if I picked you up and carried you a bit?” The hair on the back of his neck prickled, and he knew they had to get their asses moving.
“Don’t fucking carry me,” Theo retorted. “Sling my arm around your shoulders.”
Elliott did that and they were able to move much faster with him taking on the bulk of Theo’s weight and setting the pace. “I gotta know . . . is she in imminent danger before she reaches this Preston?”
“Do you think I would have let her go if I thought she were?” Theo ground out. Elliott could feel him struggling to make his legs move to keep up with him, and knew he had to be in pain. Theo added, “Either way, he’ll pay Raul Marck handsomely for her. So the good news is, Marck won’t let anything happen to her till he gets to Preston.”
They’d reached the entrance that had been the Guess backroom door, and Elliott hesitated. They could go in and out the same way they’d come, or they could go farther down the hall.
As if reading his mind, Theo said, “Let’s keep going. At least to the next door. They’re dumb enough to assume we’d go back the same way.”
“Well, we did, didn’t we?” Elliott grumbled. But there were lots of possible ways to get out of a mall. They just had to evade the gangas long enough to find another one—or get back to the entrance through which they’d originally come in. At the other end of the building. No sweat. Marck would have no clue that Elliott was familiar with this type of building.
They hurried back through the store next to Guess and out through its mall side. Orange eyes glowed in pockets to the left, on the floor above, and to the right.
“If we can make it across . . . we’ll be on the other side of the mall,” Theo whispered.
Elliott looked at him and nodded. Across the mall meant different service doors, and another chance for escape. “Let’s go.”
They were quick, and silent, and smooth, Elliott helping Theo as they boldly slipped from dark corner to dark corner as they crossed the mall.
At one point Elliott brushed no more than three feet away from, and then on past, a confused-looking ganga before the orange-eyed creep realized it. If he hadn’t been so worried about Jade, and conscious of the fact that every moment lost she was that much farther away, he would have found it amusing. It reminded him of playing Blind Man’s Bluff, for each time they passed a ganga, the monster would turn as the human scent touched his nose . . . but by then, they’d be long past, concealed by the darkness and shadows.
Yes, the monsters were strong and frightful. No, he didn’t want to be cornered by them, or mauled by their long-nailed hands and torn apart by their feral teeth. No, he wouldn’t be stupid enough to move around at night like the teens had done. But it was possible to use speed and agility to evade them if one wasn’t too outnumbered, or trapped in a small space.
“What’s that?” he whispered to Theo as they crouched behind a large slab of marble that had once been some decorative sculpture. He pointed to the store closest to them, about twenty feet away.
TR P T N.
“I dunno.” But it didn’t matter—it was the closest place and the orange eyes were closing in on them.
A trio of gangas had scented them, and were bearing down on them. And just then, seven or eight came stumbling down the escalator right behind them. “Let’s go,” Elliott said, praying there’d be a way to get to the security hall behind whatever the store was.
They ran.
But the moment they shot through and into the main part of the shop, he realized where they were. “It’s a freaking tanning salon,” he said. “TropiTan.”
“A tanning salon,” Theo said, his voice bright and enthusiastic as they brushed past a closed tanning bed, and he paused for an instant. “Oh, man, do I have an idea.”
Elliott looked back at him and nodded. “I bet we’re thinking the same thing.”
The groans were louder and they moved quickly through the long, narrow space of the tanning shop. The generator still hummed, leaving that dirty yellow glow roughly lighting the piles of debris in the corners. Since it was a simple setup, it was easy to navigate without tripping or bumping into anything: straight down the hall lined with tanning beds and into the backroom.
Elliott could see back through the long, narrow shop out into the mall. The escalator hummed and orange eyes burned, scattered about the area, closing in on the store. There were enough gangas converging that Elliott knew they weren’t going back out that way.
This has to work.
“Give me a hand,” Theo called softly. Somehow, despite his injury, he’d managed to pull a full-sized tanning bed back into the storage room.
“How the hell are we going to get this to work? The generator’s not strong enough—and what about a cord?”
“I can handle that part. I just need help standing it on end,” Theo replied.
The two of them opened the clamlike steel metal bed and upended it so that it stood tall, and open.
The groans were closer now, just outside the—Holy shit! The backroom door! “Fuck. How the hell’d they get in the back hall too?” Elliott said. For the first time, real fear threatened to stop him. They were trapped in the tanning salon, between the service hall and the main mall.
He hoped to hell they could get the tanning bed to work, or they were going to be toast.
“I need my pack,” Theo said, pulling it off his shoulder. Clanks and clunks ensued as he dug in, and Elliott was aware of the prickles on his neck growing stronger.
Listening at the backroom door, he could hear the gangas pass by the door, bumping it, obviously wandering and looking around for them. More had begun to stream into the tanning salon, havi
ng scented them from his quick dash across the way.
“What the hell,” he said tensely. “We’ve got to plug this thing in now or we’re going to be ganga meat.”
“Bite me,” Theo muttered, and then he shoved the bag back at Elliott. He was holding a metal object about the size of a large brick. “Let’s go.”
“Do you see an outlet or something?” Elliott demanded, then cracked open the service door that led to the narrow corridor. Was there enough energy coming from the generator to power up the tanning bed?
The gangas were right the fuck there and he slammed the door shut. Christ. They began to pound on the door. The smell of gangas wafted clearly to his nose, washing into the shop behind them. They were bearing down, stumbling into the store, trying to make their ungainly way down the main passageway of tanning-bed rooms.
“I’ve got it,” Theo said, picking up the electrical cord. He moved behind the open clamshell of the tanning bed. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Elliott said, maneuvering the tanning bed so it faced the door, which was shaking from the force of the gangas’ blows.
Theo was moving next to him, and suddenly there was a soft pop, then a buzz . . . and then the room filled with brilliant blue-white light.
How the hell . . .?
“Fast,” Theo gasped. “Hurry.”
Elliott didn’t know what was going on; the electrical cord seemed to be plugged into the brick Theo was holding. But his hand was inside the brick.
Whatever it was, it was working.
The blast of light had stopped the impending gangas, and the two men were protected by the tanning bed. When they opened the door the gangas stumbled back, crying out in deep, guttural voices.
“Turn it!” Theo shouted, his voice weak.
Elliott didn’t need to be told; he’d already positioned it so that the ultraviolet beams caught the monsters coming in from the mall direction, and also blared toward the ones in the hall.
The creatures fell into and on top of each other, scrambling to get out of the way, groaning and tearing into each other as if in pain and desperate to get away from the light.