“I could teach him,” Riley offered. “He’d need someone to start him off anyway, right? We can do a couple of trial runs.”
“Okay, then.” Gage nodded once, hard. “It’s decided.”
“It sure as hell is not.” Sam put his arm around Riley’s shoulders and glared at him. “Riley’s never done anything like that. I’m not—”
“Letting me?” she asked in a dangerous tone.
Sam clearly knew better than to follow up with that. “We need Quinn. She took all the power back from Anson. She’s the only one who knows enough about leeching to do this. And we could sure as hell use Nick in this, too.”
Gage nodded. “Then get them. Whatever you need to do. Get them. The sooner we can do this, the better.”
Sam returned to his laptop and Riley went to her phone on the kitchen counter. Marley had disappeared.
He found her in the bedroom, curled into a ball in the middle of the sagging bed.
“Marley.”
She sniffed and turned her face harder into the pillow. “Go away, Gage.”
“No.” He sat on the bed, bracing his feet so he didn’t slide off, and rubbed her back. “I’m sorry this is happening to you. Can you tell me what exactly is happening?” Maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought. How could she be objective when she was in the middle of it?
She rolled onto her back, her eyes swollen. The tears shimmering in them gave the white an opalescent sheen. He smoothed her hair back. She was so beautiful. He couldn’t let this happen to her.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Leave me alone.” She rolled back to her side.
“No.” He lay down on the bed behind her, curving his arm around her waist, pressing his face into her hair. “I’m not leaving you, Marley.”
“Why?” she cried out, trying to roll again, to push him away, but he held fast. “You barely know me. Cut your losses.”
“I can’t.” He tucked his chin over her shoulder and spoke softly but with a conviction that left him a little awed. “It makes no sense, but the last thing I want to do is ‘cut my losses.’ I haven’t known you long, Marley, but I know you. You have infused me with something that is alive and wonderful, and it’s not going to disappear just because you tell it to. So I’m not running.” The words were a commitment that he hadn’t expected to make, and fear tickled at the base of his spine. But what relationship was without fear?
Marley hadn’t moved, and he traced moisture on her cheek. “Please don’t cry.”
“Are you doing this because of your mother? Because you couldn’t save her? So you’ll save me?”
He thought about that through a few shared breaths—she deserved better than a knee-jerk reaction. “Maybe. I don’t know. I do know I want to save you. And I will if I can. But not because of her. Because of you.”
“Gage,” she whispered, his name as full of despair as her eyes had been in the living room.
“Tell me. What’s happening to you?”
It took a little more coaxing, but she told him about the hallucinations, the way her thoughts took her down unnatural roads, that she’d felt overheated all day when it was temperate outside. By the end, he wanted to cry into the pillow. But he hadn’t changed his mind.
He shifted to let her turn over. When he could see her face, he was struck again by her eyes, so filled with regret and somehow, still, slightly hopeful. And something more. He remembered comparing them to marble when she closed off her emotions from him in the motel room after he’d stitched her side. Now he couldn’t imagine them ever being cold and hard.
“You know,” he said, heart thumping hard enough she had to feel it against her shoulder. “You haven’t said you want me.” He threaded his fingers between hers and stroked his thumb over the back of her hand.
“I do,” she whispered. “I’ve been trying not to, but you make that very difficult.”
He chuckled, and his heart rate slowed. “Good. Then there’s nothing more to discuss.”
“Oh, yes, there is,” she protested. “There’s no happy riding off into the sunset for us. I’m not letting you lee—”
He bent to kiss her, but their lips had barely met when there was a hard knock on the door.
“Guys,” Sam called. “You’ve gotta come see this.”
Chapter Fifteen
Word is that Vanrose’s newest project is so awful, the man can’t get a meeting with craft services.
—Hollywood gossip blog
M
arley let Gage hold her hand as they emerged into the living room because she simply didn’t have the strength to pull away. Everything he’d said had weakened her, so even though the walls bowed in on her in the hallway and the floor felt squishy beneath her feet, she couldn’t muster the strength to refuse him.
If he could face fears that stemmed from childhood, from the worst event of his entire life, how could she be such a coward?
Sam and Riley sat watching the laptop, where a football player juked his way up emerald field turf. Marley squeezed her eyes shut automatically but then realized it was supposed to be that green.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Rewind it,” Riley told Sam. He slid the marker to the beginning of the video and made it full screen. Marley and Gage stood behind the couch to watch.
“Pettle was well on his way to blowing out the competition for Rookie of the Year,” a voice said over a clip of the running back bowling over two guys much bigger than him, fooling another to dart around him, and then soaring up the sideline and into the end zone. “He hadn’t had an off game all season. So what happened Monday night?”
The screen flashed to a new clip. Pettle went the wrong way and slammed first into a linebacker plugging the hole, then to his back on the ground. New clip, same result. Over and over, he hit the turf. Then he stood on the sidelines, helmet in hand, head bent as he listened to a coach, but he looked sick, breathing hard and gulping every few seconds.
“Some have speculated that Pettle has the flu that’s been plaguing other teams, though not, reportedly, his own. Others blamed a bad game, inevitable for any player in the NFL at some point. But setting aside the extreme nature of this week’s failure—twenty-four carries for twenty yards—a review of the past few games shows a marked decline in his performance.”
They watched a few more examples of bad choices, weak moves, and big tackles.
“The flux obviously isn’t working for him anymore,” Riley said.
Marley could barely concentrate. She was struggling to come up with a way to keep Gage from having to leech Cressida. Even if it didn’t kill him, even if he discharged it and she nullified anything that was left, that much power could still have a prolonged effect on him. What it was doing to her was bad enough. But she couldn’t think logically. Her brain kept skittering down strange paths, concepts filled with impossible things like foggy scarabs chewing out the energy and even more disturbing images she flinched away from before they could be fully formed. Sound was fuzzy and distant, colors and lights dimming, her presence in the room drifting away.
It was like the moments before falling asleep. She yanked herself out of her head, relieved when voices resolved into intelligible speech, daylight returned, and Gage’s warm, grounding hand was tight on hers.
The three who were actually watching the computer gasped, and Riley whipped her hand over the back of the couch to grab Marley’s arm. Gage’s eyes were on her, but she didn’t turn to see what they looked like.
“Rewind it,” she said, hoping they thought she wanted to watch again, not that she hadn’t been paying attention. Or couldn’t pay attention.
Pettle stood outdoors, other players moving around on a field behind him. People crowded around him, holding microphones and recorders over each other’s heads and up close to his face.
He was responding to questions about his performance, his disappointment. “Some things can’t be explained with the usual reasons. But every player has people to help
him get better, help him get out of something that might be causing him problems.” He looked directly at the camera. “Sometimes you just need the right person to nullify the damaging energy, if you can find them.”
“Holy shit,” she said. “Does that mean what I think it means?”
“He wants you to help him!” Riley jumped up as the video came to an end. “There’s no other explanation.”
“He doesn’t know who I am.” Marley stood, stunned. “So he’s reaching out publicly. If Cressida sees this…”
“This could be it,” Gage said. “Why Aiden and his partners haven’t taken flux. They must know about this, even though my brother denied it.”
“We need to contact him. How?” Marley asked Sam.
“Wait a minute.” Gage tightened his hand and turned her to face him. “We have a plan. You don’t have to nullify anyone anymore. Once Cressida is leeched, Pettle and the others should be okay.”
“How are we even going to get close enough to Cressida to do that?” Marley pressed. “He might be able to help. He was her first client, the one she started with before this all escalated.” She was excited, her brain clearing, everything feeling like it was slipping into place, where it was supposed to be. It wouldn’t last—she had no illusions about that—but that just meant they had to act quickly. “Plus, you don’t know that he’ll be okay. We have to at least talk to him. He can give us another perspective on the whole thing.”
Her logic unassailable, Gage nodded, though with obvious reluctance.
“Contact?” she reminded Sam.
“Let’s see what I can get.” He sat at the computer for a minute, new tabs and browser windows popping up like crazy. “I can send a message through his charitable foundation and his agency. Those might take a while to filter to him, unless he’s monitoring them himself. I follow his page on Facebook and sent a message there, too. That might get to him faster. While we wait, I’ll see if I can track down a phone number. That’ll probably take time, though.”
They stood staring while Sam went to work. “When was that conference recorded?” Marley asked.
Sam looked at his watch. “After practice today, so probably no more than a couple of hours ago.”
“Well, we can’t just stand here with our thumbs up our you-know-whats.” Marley headed back to the bedroom. “If he comes through in the next half hour or so, we can set up a meeting. But we can’t stay here longer than that. I told you Cressida can tell where we are if she’s within half a mile, and if she sees Pettle’s conference, she might come after us now instead of following through on all her other threats first.”
Gage followed her, and they packed their things in silence. When Marley moved to leave the room to get her toiletries from the bathroom, he blocked her.
“I’m trying to keep myself from asking how you’re doing every few minutes.” He smiled and rubbed her arms. “But since I haven’t actually asked recently… How are you doing?”
She tried to smile back. “I’m hanging in there.” Her mouth was too heavy to keep curved. “It’s only going to get worse, Gage. I can’t let you watch it happen.”
“That’s too bad. I’m in this. I have a job to do now. And I can’t let you go through it alone.”
“He answered!” Sam called from the other room.
“Set it up!” Marley yelled back, not taking her eyes off Gage’s. His body was close, warm, achingly familiar. “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered, “to keep you from being hurt.”
Gage shook his head and drew her to him. “The only way to avoid being hurt is to not care, and it’s too late for that.” His mouth came down on hers, tender, hungry but gentle, everything he wanted to say obvious in the way he clung to her. His arms settled around her, trembling hands flat between her shoulder blades and at the small of her back. She closed her fist around his shirt, much as she had that first day while he’d stitched up her side.
When he broke the kiss, his whole body shook. “I love you, Marley,” he finally said. “I don’t care that it’s only been a week, that these are extreme circumstances, that you think a future is impossible. I love you.”
She started to cry and buried her face in his shirt. He held her tight and rocked her, his mouth pressed to the top of her head. They couldn’t do this. He couldn’t leech Cressida. But he had to. Someone else could do it, but the only one they’d trust was Sam, and he’d already been through enough. And it was Gage’s choice, just like nullifying Darren Pettle was going to be hers, if that was what he wanted. They both had stakes in this, personal ones that went deeper than saving innocent strangers.
Was this how people with terminal illnesses felt? With so little time left and so much reason to want more?
She pulled back and raised her head, watching the silver swirl slowly through the blue in Gage’s eyes as his pupils made minute adjustments to accommodate the afternoon’s dimming light. He was waiting for her to say it back or maybe to deny it, and she didn’t know which to do. If they succeeded, and Cressida was leeched and Marley had nullified everyone and either died or wound up institutionalized, which would better allow Gage to move on? Knowing she loved him or doubting for the rest of his life?
How would she feel in the reverse, if she somehow overcame the insanity but lost him in the leeching?
Putting it that way eliminated the question entirely.
“I love you, too.”
They were deep in another powerful, painful kiss when Sam’s phone rang in the other room. From the way he answered it, the caller was clearly Pettle.
The kiss ended. They held on for another moment, but there wasn’t anything more to say. Not until this was done.
They stepped out into the main room as Sam hung up. “Half an hour. We’re meeting at his place.”
“Where’s his place?”
“Brentwood.”
Riley cast Marley and Gage a sympathetic glance. “I’ll get our stuff together.”
Sam could have drowned Marley in the empathy in his eyes. She didn’t want it.
“What if Cressida saw the press conference?” she asked. “She might try to intercept us there or target him.”
“Chance we have to take. She’s unlikely to blast down his gates and kill his guards to get inside his place.”
Marley wasn’t sure about that, but there wasn’t a safer alternative. “All right. Let’s go.”
Within minutes, they had the apartment cleared out and the rental car loaded, and twenty minutes after that, Sam drove them up a narrow driveway to a cobblestone circle and parked between a marble fountain and the wide, white stone steps fronting Darren Pettle’s Brentwood mansion.
Marley opened her door and stepped out, testing herself. The air was crisp and clean, scented with the flowers from vines curling up and around trellises bordering the steps and high front porch. Nothing was green or moving that shouldn’t be. Marley’s body was steady, her brain alert. For now. The rest of the group joined her, and they climbed the steps to where Darren waited for them.
He didn’t look very much like an athlete in person. He didn’t so much stand at the top of the steps as lean, both on a cane and on one of the towering pillars holding up the third-floor balconies. His Numina signature was one of the strongest she’d detected, though not as strong as Gage’s. The flux level was low, sluggish, similar to what had remained in the men Cressida called “receptacles.”
He straightened when Marley reached him but didn’t smile. “Thanks for coming.” He didn’t hold out a hand to shake but scrutinized her eyes. “I have to say, I didn’t really believe them. But they were right. Fascinating.”
“Believe who?” Marley asked.
“My brother and the other kids. He didn’t see you himself.” He motioned toward the front door, where a young woman in a pantsuit stood. They all made their way slowly across the porch to the entrance. “So I figured it was all exaggerated. But if that wasn’t, maybe the rest of it wasn’t, either.”
“Probably not.�
�� She glanced down at his legs. “What happened?”
He stepped up into the house, wincing when he pulled his bad leg behind him. The woman reached to help him, sleek and professional in her demeanor but affectionately concerned in her handling.
“Groin pull at the end of practice,” Pettle said. “Not bad at the time, but these things tend to stiffen up. I’ll be all right.”
“Gives you a reason to be out a few games.” Sam entered the dim foyer behind them. “I’m Sam Remington. We talked on the phone.”
“Yeah.” Pettle shook his hand. “Thanks for being so quick to contact me.”
“We were lucky.” Sam introduced everyone else. Pettle acknowledged each with a head nod.
“This is my personal manager, Divonne,” he said next. “You guys can all call me Darren. Come on in.”
They got settled in a violently scrumptious and comfortable living room and were served drinks from a rolling cart. Marley sank into plush cushions that made her think of five-star hotel bathrobes wrapped around memory foam. She could sleep here. She was so emotionally and physically exhausted now that given a few more minutes of stillness, she probably would.
The server made sure everyone had what they wanted and left the room, closing the pocket doors behind him. Darren’s pleasant-host demeanor disappeared, and he hunched forward in his chair, staring at Marley. “You can take the flux completely away? Sam called it nullification.”
She nodded slowly. “Yes, but why would you want me to?”
He snorted. “You saw the news, right? You know what’s happening to me.”
“I know you suck all of a sudden,” she said, “but not why.”
She’d earned a sharp look from the manager and reproving frowns from Sam and Gage. She had to be more careful about how she phrased things.
Darren didn’t seem to mind. “I’m not sure, exactly.”
“Is it addiction syndrome?” Sam asked him. “Has your tolerance risen and you need more to get the same result?”
The running back shook his head. “There’s been no sign of that, and I’ve been doing this for a year. Same amount of energy every time. Same response by my body and brain. But after the dose I got last, nothing’s worked right. I can’t explain it. It’s just…wrong.”
Sunroper (Goddesses Rising) Page 26