Powerless (Bird of Stone Book 3)

by Tracey Ward

  I run my hand over my eyes to clear them of the rain. To search the shore for Gwen.

  “I don’t see her!” I shout to Campbell.

  He takes several deep breathes before shaking his head. “Me either.”

  He is really sick. I yanked us here hard in a worried rush with no thought about making it a smooth ride for either of us. Even I feel a little lightheaded from it. I can’t imagine what he’s going through, but I don’t have time to try. We have to find Gwen. And, besides, it’s good for him. He thinks he’s a boss at anything and everything. He could use a little humility in his life.

  “I Slipped us right to her!” I insist, shouting over the sound of the storm. “She should be here!”

  “Try looking for her again! Maybe she—”

  Campbell’s voice breaks off, followed by a loud splash! I spin around to find myself alone on the dock and Campbell in the water. He’s not alone.

  Gwen’s body rises to the surface as Campbell’s head breaks out of the water right behind her. She sags his arms, her head rolling to the side at a painful angle as he adjusts her, wrapping one arm under her hers and across her chest. He swims with powerful, smooth strokes toward the shore, dragging her with him.

  I run down the dock after them. “Is she dead?!”

  Campbell doesn’t answer me. He keeps swimming, his face a mask of determination. When he can get his feet under him, he stands, hoisting her higher. “Pull her up on the dock!” he commands.

  I grab her under her arms to drag her up out of the water. She’s not a big girl but neither am I. She’s heavy, waterlogged, and not at all cooperative. She’s literally dead weight as I lift her limp body onto the wet boards.

  Campbell jumps up onto the dock after her. He rolls her over onto her back, pulling her arms down by her sides. Tilting her head back. Propping her mouth open. He brings his ear to her lips, listening for breathing. He’s still for three seconds, his face grim when he sits up to put his hands on her chest. That’s how I know he didn’t find anything.

  She’s not breathing. Her heart’s not beating. He’s going to have to beat it for her.

  I fall on my knees across from him, gently taking Gwen’s small hand in mine, and I think I’ve taken this position a lot lately. Too often. I’m always at someone’s side, watching them bleed. Watching them ache. Watching them die.

  “Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty,” Campbell counts with each chest compression. He moves to her face, repositioning her head and pinching her nose. He breathes into her mouth twice, long and slow, before going back to her heart. He starts the count again.

  I count with him.

  “One. Two. Three. Four.”

  We go through the cycle three times. Every time he breathes into her mouth, I wait with my own breath held for her to respond. For a cough or a gasp, the way you see in the movies. It doesn’t happen that way.

  As Campbell is pumping her chest for the fourth time, our voices in sync counting out the beats, Gwen opens her eyes. She opens them wide, staring unblinking into the driving rain. And she screams.

  “Ahhhh!!!”

  Campbell and I both fall away from her, landing on our butts on the dock, shocked.

  And freaked. Out.

  I stare at her in absolute terror while she yells one long note that rips from her throat, from her soul, and dies out slowly as the breath Campbell gave her disappears. Her eyes close slowly, her face sagging. Her body going limp again.

  Campbell gropes at her wrist, feeling for her pulse as she stills. He counts the beats in silence for a good thirty seconds before shaking his head and letting her arm drop to the dock. “She’s out but she’s alive,” he tells me, sounding as confused as I feel.

  “Was that normal? The screaming?”

  “I’ve never seen or heard of that before in my life.”

  “That was messed up.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  I look at the water around us. At the nearly naked, barefooted body of the girl between us, and I feel my heart sink heavily. “She did it on purpose, didn’t she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Yeah, he does. He just doesn’t want to say it. And, if I’m being honest, I don’t actually want to hear it. The thought of Gwen trying to kill herself is too much to bear right now.

  I put my hand out to Campbell over the top of her. “Let’s get her home.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  NICK

  The storm doesn’t break for another three hours. We’re late. Very late. I want to call the house but there’s no phone. Jonnie says there’s an emergency radio for calling out but it’s not turned on and she didn’t show Campbell and Beck where it is. She seems embarrassed by the slip up when she realizes it. But she wasn’t expecting a storm, and from what we’ve overheard all through town, no one else was either.

  Jonnie is embarrassed about the radio, but not ashamed to say no when I ask her to project to the house and tell them we’re okay. She’d have to leave her body alone with me to do it. She’d be vulnerable. Apparently, we’re not at that level of trust yet. Besides, where would we do it? She’ll be sitting there in a trance when it happens and there’s nowhere we can go in this town where that won’t look weird. Instead, we wait it out and we hope the people back at the house don’t freak too much.

  We kill time in a bar by the docks eating fish and chips and nursing flat beer, waiting for the rain to dry up. I smirk when I see Jonnie’s ID has a California address and the name ‘Camilla Bethel’ under her picture.

  “Where’d you get the name?” I ask, taking a sip of my brew.

  She blushes, stuffing it back in her small, black purse. “I made it up,” she answers quietly. Careful not to broadcast that it’s a fake. “I tried to pick something that sounded a little Hollywood. It helps with the backstory.”

  “Where are you really from?”

  “Tennessee.”

  I watch her for a second, waiting. She doesn’t ask where I’m from.

  I smile knowingly. “You know all about me, don’t you?”

  Jonnie hesitates. She looks caged. Trapped in a way I’d never let show. Then again, not everyone is a master of their emotions the way I am. “I know a lot, yeah,” she admits, adding a muted, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You were doing your job, right?”

  “I could have done better.”

  “For me or for Evans?”

  She looks me dead in the eyes. “For me. For my conscience.”

  “You feel guilty about spying on us?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  I shake my head, leaning back in my seat. “I was in the military. Spying is a big part of what we do.”

  “Do you miss it?” She grins hesitantly. “The military. Not the spying.”

  I pause, considering her question. I miss the structure. I miss the purpose. I miss the fraternity that I was building for the first time in my life with the men around me, unified under the same banner. The same drive. The same insanity that pushed us out into the fray, risking our lives for strangers. For the greater good. Of course I miss that. It’s what I worked for my entire life.

  But what would I miss out on if I still had that? I’d miss Alex, first and foremost, and that’s enough to shut down any regrets I might have about abandoning my military career. I was a good soldier and a good man for what I was doing as a PJ but I wasn’t fully formed. I didn’t feel fear and by extension, I never learned how to feel much of anything. It wasn’t until I found Alex that I found out how to live. How to love. How to hate. Dr. Evans wanted me to be a strong soldier, and I was. I was one of the best. But Alex, she showed me how to be a strong man, a fuller person, and that means more to me than anything else.

  Finally, I shrug at Jonnie, compacting my thoughts down to a simple, “Yes and no. You?”

  She looks taken aback by the question, but I asked it without judgement. My face completely at ease. “Yes and no,” she answers timidly.

  “What do yo
u miss?”

  “The people.”

  “The people you worked with?”

  “The people I watched. It wasn’t just Alex. He had me spying on everybody. Justin. Britta. Brody. I knew all of you before I met you. I got to know everyone, even if they didn’t know me, and when you’re trapped in a clinic without friends, you start to make them in your mind. Even if it is one-sided.”

  I run my thumb up and down the side of my glass, clearing the condensation slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I don’t want pity.”

  “What do you want?”

  She pinches her lips together, looking out the window at the rain washing down the window. “What everyone wants. To not be alone.”

  “Well, you definitely got that wish.”

  She chuckles, nodding her head emphatically. “I think I got more than I bargained for.”

  “Anytime you cross paths with Campbell, that’s inherently true.”

  “He’s really not so bad,” she protests quietly, her lips curving in a curious smile.

  I leave it alone because I don’t totally understand it, but I think Alex would. I think she probably said the same thing about me a time or two, back when she was calling me an ‘ass’ with a smile surprisingly similar to Jonnie’s.

  When the rain finally stops, we pay our bill and practically run for our raft. We get warnings from fisherman and dockworkers that the worst of it might not be over, cautioning us to wait a while, but we don’t listen. If things get ugly, I’ve got the stones in my pocket. All three of them.

  The boat with our supplies isn’t coming until tomorrow. The captain doesn’t want to risk a reprise from the storm, so when we hit the dock in Doubtful Sound, we don’t wait around. We load up the raft and hurry down the mud-slicked road back to the farm. They’re waiting for us when we pull up outside the house. They must have seen us coming through the cameras. I smile when I see Alex in the crowd.

  I frown when I see her expression.

  Her face is pale and drawn. She looks exhausted. Afraid.

  I leap out of the truck before Jonnie brings it to a complete stop. “What happened?” I ask Alex.

  “Gwen went missing,” Campbell answers matter-of-fact. “She drowned in Doubtful Sound before we found her.”

  “Jesus,” I mutter, stunned.

  Alex takes a step down the porch to be closer to me. “She’s alive,” she amends quickly. “Campbell did CPR on her until she came around, but she’s in a coma or something. She hasn’t opened her eyes since we brought her back to the house.”

  “You were with him when he found her?”

  Alex nods, her lips pinched together tightly. I can see it in her eyes that she’s trying not to cry. She saw something awful today. Two people she cares about died. Yeah, they’re back now, but dying isn’t something Alex is accustomed to. It’s something that’s probably going to haunt her, and I wish I could have kept her from it, but I wasn’t here. All I can do is be there for her now.

  I take the last step between us, reaching out to wrap my arms around her shoulders, pulling her body in against mine. She buries her face in my neck as she hugs me hard, gratefully taking what she needs from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumble into her hair.

  She chuckles shakily. “It’s been a rough day. Justin died again. He’s back up now and he’s resting. It was rough on him. He suffocated this time.”

  “But he’s okay?”

  “He says he is.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I am now,” she whispers, her breath warm against my neck.

  I look at Campbell over Alex’s shoulder. He’s looking back with blank eyes. “Debriefing?”

  “We have a lot to talk about,” he agrees meaningfully, and I know it’s going to be about more than Gwen. I worry what else happened while we were gone.

  “The delivery is coming tomorrow morning,” I tell the group behind him. “We’ll need a team ready to unload it here at the house once Jonnie brings it up from the Sound. Who’s supposed to be up in the morning?”

  Trina, Britta, Beck, and Stewart raise their hands.

  “Go to sleep now,” I tell them.

  Campbell raises his eyebrow at me, reminding me of our argument earlier.

  “Please,” I add awkwardly. “I think it’d be best if you guys got some sleep and were fresh in the morning to go get the delivery. The rest of us will sleep when you get back.”

  “Go to the barn with Justin and Gwen,” Campbell tells them. “There are extra blankets inside. It’s warm and dry up in the hay loft. Brody, if you could go with them and check on our Lazarus’. Make sure they’re comfortable?”

  “You got it,” he agrees eagerly, rushing down the porch stairs onto the lawn with the rest of the crew.

  I watch in amazement as no one questions being told to sleep with the pigs. “Seriously, what’s going on? Why are Gwen and Justin in the barn?”

  “I think I know why,” Jonnie answers ominously behind me.

  I release Alex, turning to find Jonnie standing on the grass several feet from the porch. Her face is turned upward, her eyes fixed on the side of the house.

  “What is it?”

  “Come see.”

  I go down the steps to stand next to her. I follow her eyeline up to the second story. To a window overlooking the farm. Naomi stands like an alabaster statue in the frame, her eyes focused somewhere in the distance over our heads. On the horizon.

  “What is she looking at?”

  Campbell shakes his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “We don’t know, but she’s been like that for hours. She’s not speaking.”

  “She never does.”

  “She did with me for a while earlier today. Now she’s ignoring everyone.”

  “Is Liam still in that room?”

  “Yeah, and he’s awake. He says he doesn’t want to be moved.”

  “Why would he?”

  Alex holds her hand out to me, her face as eerily blank as Campbell’s. “You’ll know when you get inside.”

  I let her lead me to the front door. Campbell and Jonnie fall in line right behind me, and I feel claustrophobic boxed in by all of them. It makes me anxious. Agitated to a degree I don’t understand. I’m frowning when Alex opens the door. I’m openly sneering when she pulls me inside behind her.

  The house is heavy. It’s encased in an invisible fog that makes it feel like I’m treading through pudding with every step I take. My chest feels tight. My lungs beg for air that they’re already getting but they don’t appreciate. And the anxiety. It nearly blows the roof off the place. Dread is in every corner. Under every beam of light. Every shadow. I nearly gag on it when I open my mouth to speak.

  “What’s happening here?” I demand angrily, lashing out for no discernible reason.

  That is very not like me.

  “It’s Naomi,” Alex whispers, like she’s afraid the girl will hear her. “She’s been getting worse.”

  “She’s not even trying to keep herself in check,” Campbell confirms.

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “Yeah, well, if this is her in check, I’m not sticking around to find out what unhinged feels like. We’ll all throw ourselves into the Sound at that point.”

  “You think Gwen went into the water on purpose?” I ask, my stomach clenching tightly.

  Campbell gestures to the room. “Wouldn’t you if you dealt with this non-stop for hours on end? With Liam laid out, she’s been nurse to both of them nearly ‘round the clock. Can any of us blame her for what she did?”

  I tug on Alex’s hand still holding mine, pulling her in close to my side protectively. “We can’t live like this.”

  “No kidding,” Campbell replies drolly.

  “I think we should talk outside,” Jonnie suggests. She’s already backing up, inching toward the door.

  We follow her quickly. Once we’re all outside, I shut the door with a hard thud, breathing in the fresh air with sta
rving lungs. The three of them do the same.

  “How long has she been like this?” I ask.

  Alex wrinkles her nose with distaste. “I think it’s been a while, but it’s been getting steadily worse. It’s why no one is sleeping. Why everyone is snapping at each other. Definitely since the clinic, even though it wasn’t this bad.”

  “She was a bummer before, but she’s straight up toxic now,” Campbell surmises.

  “No one should be in there with her,” I agree heartily. “We have to get Liam out.”

  “We’ll have to sedate him to remove him. He won’t leave her.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do. It’s for his own good.”

  “We have another idea,” Alex tells me, glancing at Campbell for support. It’s a weird gesture coming from her. She’s usually looking to me to get him off her back.

  “What kind of idea?”

  Campbell clears his throat. “What if instead of leaving Naomi inside and running us all out into the barn, we take her out of the house?”

  “She’ll freak the animals out. She’ll drive them insane.”

  “Not to the barn.” Alex turns her eyes to Jonnie. “What if we put her in the bunker?”

  I look at Jonnie with big eyes, rounded by surprise. “You have a bunker?”

  She’s glaring at Campbell mildly. “I never should have told you that.”

  He grins. “I hear ‘I never should have’ a lot from women, so that’s probably true. You can’t all be wrong, right?”

  “How big is this bunker?” I interrupt.

  Jonnie sighs slowly. “Big.”

  “How big?”

  “Like, the size of the house big.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep.” Jonnie trudges reluctantly past Alex and I, heading for the right side of the house. “Follow me. I’ll show you.”

  Campbell falls in step beside her, so close their arms brush against each other as they walk. He leans down to whisper something to her. Whatever it is, it makes her smile up at him, shaking her head indulgently. He straightens up, chuckling with a shrug.