Tris made a sound of disgust. “Lan will probably leave her the minute we get them out.”
“I would be so glad to have to deal with that,” Maggie muttered.
She was right. One problem at a time.
“Are we there, yet?” Kee asked, sighing.
“Very funny,” Kemble said, over his shoulder. “At least we’re more than halfway.”
Behind him, in the cargo area, Tris heard a rustle. They’d covered the guns and emergency kit back there with a tarp. No need for luggage. But guns didn’t usually rustle.
“Nobody freak out.”
What the fuck? Tris lurched around. Tammy?
Tammy pushed out from under the tarp. The vehicle erupted in protests. Good thing Michael was driving. The car didn’t swerve or slow as he checked the rear view mirror. The guy had nerves of steel.
“What the hell are you doing here, Tammy?” Kemble yelled from the front.
Tammy raised her chin in a way the happy child Tris had once known would never do. “I know I’m not going to be any help. But I promise not to get in the way.”
“We can’t protect you,” Kemble gritted out.
“Well, you can’t spare the time to take me back.” Tammy pushed into a sitting position.
Everybody in the car got that loud and clear.
“We can’t leave her somewhere, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Michael said to Kemble, his voice steely. “That’s like leaving a puppy by the side of a busy highway.”
“Goddamnit, Tammy.” Kemble was really pissed, probably because she had them where she wanted them and he knew it. “Why? Hungry for adventure? There are better ways.”
Tris saw a flicker of uncertainty cross Tammy’s determined expression. “I just have to be there, that’s all.”
“Great,” Kee said, rolling her eyes. “Now one of us has to keep an eye on you as well as on the Clan. You’ll probably get someone killed.”
“Shush, Kee,” Maggie said, elbowing her seatmate.
“Maybe we can leave her in the car,” Kemble muttered.
But Tris could tell he’d accepted that Tammy was in. What else was there to do? The feeling of doom just ramped up to eleven.
*
“Well, what is it? What is the Pentacle?” Morgan hissed into her cell phone. They’d land at McCarran Airport’s executive jet terminal in about two hours, but Morgan’s need to know wouldn’t wait that long.
She heard Jason let out a breath. “Reserve judgment, okay?”
“You think he lied to you?”
Jason chuckled. “Yes. The first time. But we figured that out and punished him for it. He won’t dare lie again. He’s too protective of his little lady friend.”
Morgan smiled. “I’m sorry I missed the process.” She adjusted herself in her seat, her eyes on Thomas. He had finally fallen asleep in the seat across the small aisle. No doubt that had something to do with the Ambien she’d had the cabin attendant put in his juice. His dark lashes fanned out over his cheek. His head was bent onto one shoulder. He really did look angelic, but she’d bet most angels didn’t have muscles like that. The soft curve of his biceps stretched the tee shirt he was wearing. “You think this confession is real?”
“I kinda do. But I warn you, it’s a little weird.” Jason cleared his throat. “There’s a comet. It was first seen in your namesake’s time. Its arc through the sky will make a five-sided constellation with the Big Dipper in about three weeks. Astronomers call it Galahad.”
Morgan was silent as her heart raced. “It makes sense,” she breathed. “The fourth Talisman sets the time for the ceremony to occur. It’s not an object of power like the others. It’s a moment of power.” Morgan felt the dominoes of her future falling in a perfect pattern of Destiny. She would finally get what she’d always wanted. And when she did, no one could stop her, whatever she might want after that…
Her gaze strayed again to Thomas. He was the last ingredient required.
“We’ll be there as soon as we can. We have much preparation in store for us.”
“What should I do with the Tremaine kid and the girl?”
“Does the girl have a power I might want?” Any actual member of the Tremaine family was useless. They were so devoted to each other they’d never turn, even if it meant death—which in this case, of course, it would. But that didn’t mean a girl who had only known them a week wouldn’t change sides, with the right inducement.
“They haven’t exhibited any powers, either of them.”
“Well, keep them secure. I’ll want to see them when I arrive.”
“Will do,” Jason said in that flat voice he had. “Shall I send a car to the airport?”
“Yes. I want to get Thomas secured as soon as possible.”
She flipped the phone shut, exultation churning through her like some kind of cleansing fountain. It was happening. It was finally all happening.
*
Greta pushed her glow out, expanding it as much as she could. Her stomach churned and her head ached with effort. But it just didn’t get any bigger. How much longer could she do this? Half of her was angry at getting embroiled in this against her will. Half of her was frustrated that she couldn’t do anything about the situation. Anxiety washed over her. She gritted her teeth and, well, growled. The glow collapsed. She was a waste here. Plus she ached in every cell of her body from what that creepy guy had done to her.
Tears rose to her eyes. She chanced a look over to where Lan hung. His face was turned away, but she knew what his expression would be. She’d been seeing it for the last few hours. Defeat. Incredible guilt. He felt like he’d betrayed his family, her, everybody, really.
But that was Greta’s fault, too.
Damn it! Why should it be her fault that he was too much of a gentleman to let her get tortured? Big shock, the bad boy had a core of integrity. That was the plot to every bad movie in the last hundred years. Some good ones, too, she had to admit. The guy was a beauty. No two ways about that. She’d been physically attracted to him from the first minute she’d seen him. The fact that he was a brilliant musician made her admire his talent. The fact that he was damaged made her sympathize. She was pretty damaged, too, if she admitted the truth. But he had been chafing at a destiny his whole family expected him to embrace a lot longer than she had. And now, to boot, he was kind. Hell, now that she thought about it, he’d even tried to keep her from having sex with him, just to spare the final bonding he knew they’d both hate.
Bonding. She was bonded to him. Looking at him made her heart clench even now.
There was another word for that. Was she falling in love with him?
No. It was genetic. Just science or something. Wasn’t it? He’d called it Destiny. But Jane and Kee had called it true love. Could it be all of that at once?
She rolled her head. She hated the fact that she had no say over whom she loved. Had she sued her mother for emancipation and made her own way in the cutthroat world of the movie business only to forfeit all control to some guy who shared a weird gene? Absolutely not.
So she had to start getting back some control right now. And the fact that she couldn’t bear to see him hurting like this was secondary, tertiary. It hardly counted at all. She wished she could go over and just shake him.
“Lan.”
He raised his head, but only to stare at the ceiling. “Yeah?”
“I appear to be the only one making an effort to get out of here.” She saw his lips thin. “And I am failing, big-time. I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Like I know?”
“Well, you’re the one who’s lived in a family with this gene all your life.” She couldn’t help but sound a little angry. She was angry. At the whole situation.
“Doesn’t mean jack until it activates inside you, and I’ve never felt that before.”
She hated that tone of defeat. “But now things have changed. So why don’t we give me a break and we work on you for a while?”
“What if it isn’t writing music? Maybe it’s music itself. Like mine is light, not stars.”
“So I’m going to be the Pied Piper and hypnotize the Clan into letting us go?”
“Don’t be sarcastic.” A glimmer of an idea shot through Greta’s brain, just a flicker. “Maybe your power is more basic than music,” she said slowly. “Maybe it’s sound.” She nodded. “Yeah. Music is just a specialized type of sound.”
“Not a useful weapon, Greta,” he said, as though to a child.
God, she hated that. She blew out through her lips. “You haven’t heard of sonar or ultrasound?”
“Great. I’ll locate submarines or tell you the sex of your baby.”
“Uh, give me a little help here, Lan.”
He hung his head. “Sorry,” he muttered. “You’re right. We have to try everything.”
“It would be nice to get out of here before your family tries to rescue us and maybe gets hurt.” Although she held out little hope of the cavalry riding in to the rescue. It seemed like they’d been here forever. Still, he was devoted to his family, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. She’d seen that in him. So it might just prod his ass to get busy.
He nodded again, a bit convulsively and a few too many times. “Okay. Okay. Well, how about this? Maybe I can turn up the volume. You know, like a sonic boom.”
Greta smiled, slowly. “Ahhh. The Walls of Jericho.”
His eyes widened. “As in…’came tumbling down’?”
Greta nodded. “I think I read somewhere that sound waves from jet planes in an enclosed space can crack concrete.” Her eyes slid over to the flute and the leather holster in the corner of the meat locker.
“So close and yet so far,” he whispered.
“At least it’s something to try.” She tried to sound positive. But her confidence wavered. “Now if only I knew what to do with my glow.”
“Let’s think,” he said, biting his lip. “Maybe we’re going about this the wrong way. What could you do with light?”
Okay. She could brainstorm. It was like listing character traits at a script read-through. “Uh, lightning. Blinding light. Nuclear blast. Laser light show. Spotlight?”
“Whoa, whoa.” Lan stared at her. “Laser. That would be useful.”
Greta felt a tremor of fear shiver down her spine. “That sounds…dangerous.”
“Like sonic vibrations strong enough to bring down walls isn’t? Unfortunately, baby, dangerous is just what we need about now.” Lan was getting excited. “And lasers can be directed with pinpoint accuracy so you wouldn’t wipe us out, too. Unlike sound, maybe.”
“We don’t know I can produce lasers,” she protested. This was just too wild.
“We don’t know you can’t,” he said in that sexy voice he had when he was trying to be persuasive. He shrugged, which was difficult with his hands shackled above his head.
“Okay,” she said irritably. “I’ll try.” Then she stopped. “But I don’t know how. I mean, is it like lasers shoot out of my eyes? I always thought that was gross in the X-men movies.”
“Hmmmm. I see your point.” He rolled his gaze around the blank metal walls. “Well, Tris can draw energy with his hands, but…everybody else just kind of thinks about what they want to do and it happens. Tris, too, now that I think about it. He doesn’t have to touch the earth—it’s just stronger if he does.”
“This is totally useless,” she sighed. “But I’m going to think about light beams coming out of my hands. I’ll, uh, try to point them at the door.”
“Wait. Why don’t you turn your palms to the side wall there? Less obvious if Mutt and Jeff come back.”
“Side wall. Right.” Greta was already anticipating failure. But what the hell? What did they have to lose at this point? She turned herself away from Lan.
She closed her eyes.
“Do you feel that core of strength in yourself?” His sexy voice throbbed in places that had nothing to do with light or lasers. “You’re a strong person. I knew that from the first. Look for the strength.”
She was strong. She’d run her own life since she was fifteen. She’d known she wanted Lanyon Tremaine from the first moment she saw him, if she told herself the truth. And she was strong enough to tell the truth. That strength lived inside her like a thick metal rod in her spine. She tried to visualize the rod stretching from her pelvis up through her head. There it was. Her breathing slowed.
“Think about what you want to do,” he whispered in his throaty growl.
It seemed so natural when the rod of strength inside her began to glow. That was what she wanted, not an outside glow but an inner fire, a furnace of heat whose energy would transform into light. The rod went from the red of coals to the white of stars. Strength filled her body. Her mind exulted in it. She was full to bursting. And then the energy erupted out through her arms.
She was strong enough to open her eyes. Red and white beams of light crisscrossed over the metal of the freezer wall in wild abandon. The acrid smell of burning metal suffused her nostrils. The metal sizzled noisily.
She gasped. The beams snapped off.
Silence seemed to echo in the metal box that was their prison. Smoke filled the room. The sizzling sputtered and slowed. Black lines slashed across the metal, their edges turning from white to dull red.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
“I, uh, guess you got lasers.” Lan sounded almost reverent.
“No, no, no. This can’t be happening. I…I could hurt people.”
Lan looked wary. “Let’s take this one step at a time, baby. How about we work on enough control to cut us loose? Then I can get my flute. Hell, we’re on a roll. I might just be able to bring the house down without killing us after all.”
She swallowed. She could feel that her eyes were like saucers. All this stuff was real. And she had a power that was way bigger than just the ability to glow in the dark.
She could get them out of here.
She pulled in her lips to prevent the smile that wanted to come over her, but she knew Lan could still see it in her eyes. “I…I might be able to…”
“Yeah. You can. You got a power and it’s a doozy.”
She set her lips. “Okay. I’m going to try to carve a hole right through the side of this place. And if I can hold the laser still, then maybe—”
“You can cut me down.”
Could she? Could she ever feel confident enough to aim her light so close to Lan?
She must have looked stricken.
“My bad,” he said hastily. “Don’t think about that. Just cut the hole.”
*
“Tris, you’re up,” Michael said. They’d loaded guns and Kevlar vests into the delivery truck Kemble had produced for them by changing the logistics of a linen supply service computer. Tris still considered Kemble’s command of the byways of the Internet and coding of any system you could name nothing short of miraculous. Stacks of towels and white uniforms they’d thrown out of the truck littered the concrete floor.
“You got it,” Tris said shortly. The family had agreed he was the only one with the requisite skill to drive the truck. Tris was just glad to have something concrete to do.
Maggie stood over the two guys who had brought the truck to the empty warehouse. He hated taking Maggie into danger like this. But she’d calmed them within an inch of their life. They might look dead, but they’d wake in a couple of hours, feeling like they’d had a week in Acapulco and ready to rumble.
Tris helped her up into the truck. Kemble and Michael helped their women inside the back. “Okay, Tammy. Your turn.” Tris hoisted his little sister up and she scrambled in. She wasn’t so little these days. She’d grown into a woman while the family was fighting Clan and looking for Talismans. She was wearing an absurd, orangey-red dress with a flouncy skirt. It kinda matched her hair. Hardly an outfit for storming a casino, but what girl had camouflage fat
igues in her closet? It was a shame she’d been robbed of any normal teen years. They’d all given things up, but maybe Tammy most of all. No sleepovers, no dances, no boyfriends for Senior to frighten. Her life was more than sheltered; it was cut off just above the root.
Kemble and Dev hopped up into the dark of the delivery van and Tris pulled down the sliding door. He jumped into the cab. Michael climbed into the passenger seat. Showtime.
Tris started the engine, pulled off the break and slipped the truck into gear. “You getting a better read on them?”
Michael’s eyes flickered. The truck pulled out into the alley behind the warehouse. Sunset was coming on. They were a couple of miles from the Luxor, off the strip in the industrial district. “They’re on the southwest side of the hotel building. So definitely in that separate conference area that’s mostly below ground.”
“Hey, that’s good,” Kee exclaimed.
“Yeah, fits right in the plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
‡
Lan was so proud of Greta. She’d kept up her laser until she was nearly exhausted. And there was a neat square about three feet high in the wall of the abandoned freezer. Right now it was still filled with metal, but he was pretty sure the square could be kicked out. “Good job, Greta. You’ve really got the hang of this thing.”
“We don’t know where it goes,” she fretted. “It could lead nowhere. Or there could just be cement outside the metal.”
“And if there is, we know what to do about it.” He tried to sound confident, reassuring despite how he felt inside. He was so screwed. Six ways from Sunday, screwed. It was his fault Greta was in this mess. He’d gotten dragged into everything he’d tried so hard and so long to avoid. He had a power and so did Greta, even if he wasn’t sure exactly how to make his stupid power useful. Even now an urgently throbbing base and a trembling flute ran through his brain like a movie score. That meant that Destiny had landed on him like the house landing on the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz. No escape. Worse, he liked Greta. That was the nail in the coffin. If they got out of here, if there was a dawn on the far side of this black night, he’d try to do right by her, but she’d gotten a raw deal. She’d have to give up everything. And all she got in return was him. The whole thing gave him a sick feeling in his gut.
The Magic's in the Music (Magic Series Book 5) Page 26